Vivekananda By Vivekananda | Full Movie | Life History | English | official

Be damned. I always think of Vivekananda as my own personal discovery.

I was twenty-three years and three months old.  Walking home from work (my first job--export documentations) along First Avenue in Seattle, I came across an inviting little bookstore.  I went in, feeling myself unaccountably at home, walked mid-way into the interior, put out my hand and laid it on Vivekananda's Four Yogas, which I picked up, paid for, and took home with me. I had never heard of Vivekananda and had no idea what I was buying, but the Raja Yoga, Aphorisms of Patanjali, became my meat and drink for the next year or so. And of course it still is, though I have long since lost my copy of it.

Apparently, Vivekananda was the personal discovery of a lot of people. There always will be remembered that smasheroo speech at the Parliament of Religions (1893) which, I confess, when I learned about it and the huge éclat it had made in then-contemporary Methodist and Presbyterian America, strangely gratified me: I congratulated myself on my religious good taste.

But, as you know if you are a reader of this  humble blog, I pride myself on both my voluntary, for-fun theism, and on my but-of-course atheism, in a fashion which I hope to be Lucretian. I gotta say, heterosexuals have a winner in the Goddess department with Dea Magna (Aphrodite, Hestia, Hera, Demeter); the thing about Zeus, however, is he's sexy, and, for a top god, clever.

The horror for me, still, is Vivekananda's (and Ramakrishna's before him) worship of Durga. And their acceptance of Shaivism (which, so far as I could ever tell. is grotesque bullshit).

Dunno about Vishnuism. Seems a little abstract.  But blessedly calm, rational, non-fanatic.

Truth to tell though, none of the Hindu deities seems to pass my Heian sniff-test (Be amusing, not vulgar, as authentic as you like, but [c'mon] not violent or disgusting. Please?). So, but were we talking about powers, metaphors and symbols? C'mon. ¿What powers? And here we are, over in Vajrayana-land, looking speculatively at "thunderbolts." Instant Enlightenment. Indeed.

Talking with Richard

It just so happens that Richard, too, lately, quite independently, has been puzzling over the possible meaning and significance of Dependent (or Interdependent) Origination. Liked me, Richard has no difficulty in understanding "Indra's Net," or, indeed, Karma, but is perplexed by (whatever the Buddha might have meant) by "Cause and Effect." That is, indeed, two of us.

Teaching | New Delhi, 2017 | Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche

I am, by nature, an Essentialist:  who believes in the psychic, or "ideal" pre-existence of masculinity (and, therefore, perforce, of femininity in which we are of course, however, much less interested)--and I gotta say (in my capacity as a relentless macho judge): this dude is butch. As was the Dalai Lama (in a different, distinctly personal way of course) when he was the same age and younger than Dzongar Jam....I would say that  the difference in their masculinities is, that Dzongar is a tad more patiently avuncular, and that the young Dalai Lama was more acidly brusque.

"Dependent Origination"?

I confess, I have not a clue--and nobody's explanation of it makes the least goddamned sense to me. "Indra's Net" I have no problem with, but Cause and Effect, thanks to David Hume, for me, is just bullshit.  Bad Science. Bad Phenomenology.

I'm tempted sometimes to be a little self-congraulatory about my sensible and well-worn Belief System--

I'm nobody's fool, and I can smell bullshit in infinitesimal parts-per-billion concentrations.

But the knowledge that I choose to believe in Karma, and in Cause and Effect, nags and haunts me.

Democrats ALREADY Signaling Their Willingness to Fold on a Public Option

And who the bloody fuck are these "Democrats"?

Police Shoot Black Man In Front Of His Kids

And what, if anything, has this to do with the recent atrocious murder by a twenty-five-year-old black man of the five-year-old white boy, Cannon Hinnton? Nothing, I hope. But what if these disparate, horrific events were (if not perpetrated) orchestrated by the same infernal powers-that-are? What then?

US Attempted Coup In Venezuela Collapses More Every Day (Web Exclusive)

Oregon State Police pull out of Portland after prosecutors refuse to pro...

The fascist (American Conservative) point of view has its clarity and insight, funny/weird as it is to hear it articulated.

History of Mahayana Buddhism: Innovation and Perfection

Into which, like the stiff-beaten egg whites of a soufflé batter, gingerly, I fold my own American Transcendentalist's concept of the Kami of things, phenomena and people; which, baked briefly in a hot oven, yields my notion of Personality and Individual Conscience (identical with Brahma and the Oversoul). Yum.

Amongst my never-reads: A Streetcar Named Desire

for playing Blanche DuBois in which Vivian Leigh won her second Oscar. I just now had the curious experience of trying to read the synopsis of this play ("the most important of the 20th century") in Wikipedia--which sets the matter forth, probably, as clearly as it can be laid out--and failing to understand it, basically because I can not, willingly or no, suspend my disbelief: What are these people on about?  Exactly the same baffled revulsion (or nauseated bafflement) that comes over me when I try to listen to Pagliacci. I am, I fully realize, hopelessly vanilla. And Vivian Leigh, exquisite creature and consummate actress that she was, was bat-shit.

Video Of Kamala Harris Threatening Parents With Jail Over Truant Childre...

The word, ladies and gentlemen, is "pig," or "pig wearing lipstick," as you will.

Women don't, perhaps cannot, understand how unproblematic, mutually pleasurable and non-abusive is male sex (with other males)--

It can't be so easy, they wrongly suppose, or so utterly without consequence. Or maybe it is, but it shouldn't be.

Even the butt-fucking which women rightly fear, excruciate and abominate--having no prostate gland, nor any other physiological reason to find it enjoyable when practiced on themselves--is [between males (who flush out, with enemas, the feces in their lower intestines, before engaging in anal sex, and) who naturally possess, in their prostate glands, substantial orgasmic reason and purpose in submitting to being penetrated anally], compared to what women know of and expect from anal intercourse, an inhumanly light-hearted and irresponsible affair among men--even, and perhaps especially, so among males of differing ages. Male sex, specifically "vanilla" male sex--unlike sex involving women or girls--is normally without further purpose or implication than itself, or than its own immediate enjoyment, and its practice is ordinarily both friendly and polite.

Islam's Vast Contribution to Art (Art Documentary) | Perspective

Ah. The reason I'm not a Muslim is the savage absurdity of the Qur'an; while the reason I can't be anything else, really, is the Qur'anic vision of Paradise, which, as it happens, is the same as mine.

The Impressionists Volume 2

Jesus. These are my saints, my exemplars--myself and my friends. Degas the Difficult, probably, is most like me. 

Just a damned minute--The supposedly universal American practice of voicing unvoiced dental consonants, making "d"s of "t"s, is a fucking calumnious Anglophile Fiction, and is certainly not a Feature of the Standard American English that I speak and espouse:

I, for one, never have the least difficulty in distinguishing "water" from "wadder." I admit that I do not hear such a distinction in the odious New York dialect; but I deny that that hateful parlance of nauseous Jewish girls is, in my same sense, American. Or Standard.

Honorifics, Terms which show or confer Respect,

Are matters of life and breath to three sorts of people: Aristocrats, Snobs and Transsexuals. Aristocrats, of course, actually deserve, or have inherited, the honors we accord them. Snobs pretend or wrongly claim to deserve them. While transsexuals are pretending, or wrongly claiming, simply to be something they're not and never can be.

But the question is ¿How does one get on, socially, with all these real, and spurious, claimants on our respect (the respect we normally grant persons and things)? And the answer is, the same as we get on socially even with our less demanding acquaintances: Smiling, in the first place, a polite smile (which is not a smirk, and more with the eyes than the lips), and looking whomsoever we are conversing with firmly in the eye--and keeping to the matter at hand, whatever that matter might be--we use the polite, neutral "you" when addressing someone in the second person singular, and "you guys" in the plural.

Meantime, I will ask all you trans people, of whatever gender you consider yourself to be, please to use the stalls, in whichever of the sexes' designated restrooms you deign to relieve yourself, and not the stand-up urinals. And keep your head down and don't talk to anybody.

Understanding Cannabinoids: Your Complete Cannabis Guide / Samantha Mill...

So good to know.

So "O Mistress Mine," which I've been playing for sheer love of its prettiness for a couple of decades now, out of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book,--

turns out to be a much bigger deal than I'd thought. I had forgot: It's from Twelfth Night (one of the four or five Absolutely Magical Shakespeare plays); the lyrics (which, for their rank heterosexuality, I have always, wrongly, personally, disliked) are Shakespeare's own, and the tune (probably on commission from Shakespeare himself) is by none other than my own favourite tune-smith in all the world, Thos. Morley, not by Byrd as I had thought, who actually only just wrote the exquisite variations on it which are in the F.V.B.  Ah. Live and learn.

Orphaned elephant Khanyisa's first official swim in the dam

Nothing could be more pleasant than a whole lot of elephants having a mud bath. The Mahout in me wants to dive right in with them.

Police dog bites child

Dogs that bite should be destroyed. Dogs that are trained to bite should be destroyed before they bite someone.

The Demon Tobacco?

When I quit smoking tobacco, having been long addicted, I was bemused to discover that a part of my brain-centered self had been sequestered during the period of my addiction, and turned into a sort of sub-self, with the defining taking-care-of-Anatole duty and purpose of making sure that I had a sufficiency of nicotine in my blood, for the immediate and the extended future. I was startled to discover, that this happenstantial sub-set of my own persona had its own personality, and that this personality was feminine. Startled and horrified actually. I called her "the Scheduler," and I allowed her to talk, like Axis Sally or Tokyo Rose, so that I could gauge the depth of demonic perversity.

But it occurs to me, that the shape-shifting toxin of tobacco that, along with sugar and rum (and, maybe, tea, coffee and chocolate), has obsessed the world for the past 500 years is,  after all, more formidable, more disgusting, and more terrifying, than I, as a private person, had thought.

I'm pleased to note that I don't believe any of the things that White Supremacists are said to believe--

But I still like the idea that tall, blond people might be naturally gifted ceramicists, contrapuntists, and pastry chefs.

Joe Rogan Thinks We Shouldn't Have A President | Netflix Is A Joke

Yes.

Interesting Insight from the late Olivia de Havilland:

Co-starring in swashbuckler movies, as the female, romantic lead thereof--even with the divine Errol Flynn as chief swashbuckler--doesn't give a young actress much to do. This is true of most sorts of adventure tales written about, basically, the exploits of men, by men and for men. It is pluperfectly so, and in spades, about the "histories, real or feigned" written by an ex-soldier for the delight and edification of his growing and grown sons--which was, of course, the LOTR.

Proxima B: The Pale Red Dot

By my calculations (one light-year = six trillion miles) about 26 trillion miles from here. There are two ways to figure out how to traverse such a vast distance within one's lifetime: (1) Figure out how to do it oneself; or (2) be apprised of how to do it by someone else who has already figured it out.

What I sense (in these muted, orderly, and deliberate revelations [of which this is just one]--like gradated pearls on a string--of the existence of a larger, perhaps Galactic, Imperium of those who travel, somehow, faster than the speed of light, to which we seem to be asking admission as participant equals) is confrontation. Somebody doesn't want us to go nuts and demand it all at once. 

Trump Staffer Flaunts RACIST Stance

HOW is this a racist stance? Say again?

I am told that, in the appalling video of  George Floyd's endless murder by pressing, what we are seeing is the slow, deliberate murder of a black man by a white cop--

But what I am seeing, my conscience tells me, is something far worse: the protracted, sadistic murder of a fellow citizen of mine, by a renegade thug whose first duty had actually been to protect and serve the man whom  he is so callously and carefully murdering. And fuck you, if you think that the skin color of either man in this instance is at all important.

Talking with Walter,

who is sending me money. We waxed merry over the decline of meaning, grammar and vocabulary; and the utter funniness of young Turkish barbers giving everybody a frisson.

America Has Changed Me

Hats off, Gentlemen, a Genius! The epigone of American Undress.

John Iadarola TRASHES the US Government

Too true.

When the Emperor Commodus was strangled in his Bath, by the muscular Male Prostitute hired by his Sister, who he thought was just going to fuck him--I'm sorry, but these are the Historical Facts, and there's no getting round them--

I think we can safely say that the Easy Retirement days for Roman Emperors were over. But what, besides, is it about Commodus' rather surprising fate that naggingly reminds us of Geoffrey Epstein's? The unspeakable sleaze? The broken hyoid bone? The lowness of the level of things at the very top?

I discovered Paresthesia, as a pleasant consequence of smoking pot, a long time ago.

Bill Weaver once asked me, rather hostilely, what the elaborate swooping gestures that I made sometimes around my body when I was stoned meant--and I didn't get a chance to say so then, but I started to say, "pleasant tingles." Of which the Dark Side, it seems, is Diabetic Neuropathy. And which is all being talked about these days under the rubric of 'videos which give you a frisson.' Ha, the Modern Age.

Elon Musk says SpaceX rocket launch is "a dream come true"

How profoundly I am bored by this. Much as I love his pretty little electric car, I just can't make anything Elon Musk says or does important to me, or, in fact, at all interesting. And this launching of private persons "into orbit" is not, goddamit--not by a long shot--the massive lift-off capacity that is so desperately needed just at this moment in world history, to transform us and to save us.

Senator Casually Confirms Democrats Helped Trump Stage a Coup in Venezuela

The utter fuckedness of the rules we play by, and the utter silly-ass misinformation that we begin with, make U.S. Foreign Policy a truly contemptible enterprise. "The World knows that Maduro was elected fraudulently." The world knows nothing of the goddamned sort. Jesus, I miss Hugo Chavez; indeed, I loved him while he lived. What a Light he was.

Rainy evening walk, Morrison St to University District Portland, OR Bina...

Civiltà. Behold people at ease in their environment. Though it's mostly raining, raining intermittently and lightly, few people are carrying umbrellas; they do accelerate their pace to get in out of the wet, but they are not seriously discomfited by it.  It'd be good now to sit in a warm Strip Club and see some ass, whilst I sip my favorite, ice-cold IPA. Weird, lusty, beer-drinking, pot-head Portlanders.

Cai Thomas (12y) sings Lascia ch’io pianga | live in church

This just happens to be as much sonic beauty as a human organism is capable of.

J.R.R. Tolkien's Narrative Prose in 'The Lord of the Rings,' thank you, is Perfect.

And not at all like the Book of Mormon.  The interpolated poetry of the author's own invention, is, however, alas, it must be allowed, gratingly and distractingly pedestrian.

Note: Thomas Love Peacock is the only English author I know of, really, besides Shakespeare, whose poetry, sometimes interspersed through his prose narratives, is every bit as good as the prose in which it is imbedded, and not a tiresome blemish on it--and whose prose is yet, withal, of course, perfect. Come to think of it though, Dr. Sam. Johnson also could, when put to it, write excellent verses, as well as prose you could take to the bank--and I think Congreve, and Dryden, and several of the Jacobean playwrights might have had the knack. But what is singular is how god-awful poetry can get to be before its partial, doting authors will admit its god-awfulness (and they never will): Tom Bombadil. And there's no way to tell, apparently, if one's own muse is abortive. Think, for example, of the Cardinal de Richelieu, who did everything and knew everything, and held the keys of power in Heaven and Earth, and founded the Académie Française--and was a painfully bad, amateur writer, of verse tragedies, as I recall.

Right-Wing Star Sides With Black Lives Matter, Slams Police

Stop calling this man a Right Wing Terrorist--He's the next Governor of Oregon.

Transphobia: An Analysis | Philosophy Tube

Clever cis-sophist does not, however, use or understand the meaning of the term "Trap," in his, quite correct abhorrence of violence done these pathetic delusionals; but he does very well in exampling TERF's.

Joe Rogan Wanted Bernie, Now He Prefers Biden Lose

Rogan's is the decentest and most balanced and  civilized point of view, along with Nina Turner's immortal "Biden is a half a bowl of shit."

Talking with Walter (phonecall)--

He thanks me for recommending Farnaby's "Loth to Depart," and promises to send Phil, via email, Byrd's "O Mistress Mine."