Ranting @ The Blur

A persistent question I get these days is:

What are you going to school for?
To which I usually reply, good question.

It is, when considered carefully, a damn fine question. One I keep asking myself, never finding a totally satisfactory answer to. Certainly I am there to learn, as that's the university's trade. I could answer, I am correcting the blur of my painful and persistent ignorance, but most folk would scoff at the unnecessary poetics involved here, so usually I just reply my standard refrain, good question.

I, like many people in this postmodern-hypersyntheticized on-the-cusp-of-it culture, am staring up into the gilded eyes of the ancestors, and asking them why. While I'm finding answers to that question by going to school, it (my hypothetical trial by jury of past civilizations or my simple question why) remains painfully obscured by my own personal involvement in the the same social strand, and thus is difficult to chart.

Imagine your reading a book, but you want to be closer to the words, to be more involved, so you put your nose up to the page, and suddenly realize that you can read very little, if anything at all; that is the blur which I am seeking to correct. But I can't step out of my life and observe the universal dance from some third party position, like the dark side of the moon, so the question then is how does one really correct that blur. I can talk about detaching my nose from the pages of life, of becoming more impartial and less specific, but the process of that means destroying (or transmuting in some way) the litany of meme's I've inherited, the very ones even now surging through my nervous system determining action without my total conscious involvement.

So don't stick your nose too close to life, that's a good start. Remain somewhat detached, but not too detached. If you push the book out too far, it has the reverse effect, again detachment. There is that perfect zone of distance when reading a book that allows for an almost otherworldly experience, when the words themselves are not just scribbles on white but animated images in their own right. That same distance is what I think I mean when I say correcting the blur.

The parable of the book reader closely charts my own life. Starting from a correct distance, I moved closer to an idea, an ideology if you will, and found myself not being able to understand anything except the small-print of that message, which was about nothing special in particular, just something that a lot of other people were also focusing on. I lost my innate position of equanimity, that perfect distance from life had been channeled into some thing, some particular, and judgement of the rest of the universe was impaired because of it.

And then I retreated, away from the book entirely, considering it a waste of time because it had tricked me into narrowing my gaze so far that it blurred in the first place; detachment was the only choice at the time. School then, to round out my point (not that rants need points), is bringing me back into equanimity with the world, helping me find some moral equivalence to my own experience, showing me that its been much better, but also much worse in past times, and those who were the happiest were the ones who learned to keep their distance only enough so as to not get burned when the fires started.

Maybe that's just fence-sitting, I don't know. I think of it more like being a pragmatist, a scientist, a rationalist. Don't become too emotionally wedded to one position, because that is the threshold to the wonderland of ideology, an exclusive and very dangerous place. But don't throw it all out either, as a lot of work has gone into to trying to figure out what exactly is going on here.

The middle path. The Buddha had it right, and it took 3000 years to successfully obscure that simple message behind the words of ten thousand books.

Ultraculture Journal One

Era Vulgaris and editor Jason Louv have published Ultraculture Journal One, what many of us in the marginal community hope will be the first in a long series of journals devoted to some of the most important esoteric ramblings presently available. From the authors...

Ultraculture Journal One collects under one cover the most volatile
and direct magickal writing currently available in the English language. It will change you at the cellular level. You have been forewarned.

Bold assertions, to be sure. I have been perusing the articles, and with my limited understanding about this material must say that much of it is highly advanced, hence the above warning that it "will change you on a cellular level."

Check out the review section toward the end, where Louv covers some recently published books. He gives a good overview of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl by Daniel Pinchbeck. For those who haven't heard of his work, you can see an amusing interview of Pinchbeck by the illustrious Colbert here. Colbert gets his grill on, as usual, but Pinchbeck dodges the fire well enough. Be sure to check out part two of the interview here.

Also in the review section is a fascinating look at Victor & Victoria Trimondi's detailed exposé of the Myth of Shambhala and the politics of Tibetan Tantra, as seen in the life and times of the current Dalai Lama. The work is titled The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic, and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism", and was published in Germany in 1999 by Patmos Verlag. Though not yet published in book form in the English language, it is available in English online. I must say, beware the writing, as it might shake your faith in Tibetan Buddhism (being a acolyte historian, I am still trying to independently check some of their sources). From the introduction...

The practice and philosophy of Buddhism has spread so rapidly throughout the Western world in the past 30 years and has so often been a topic in the media that by now anybody who is interested in cultural affairs has formed some sort of concept of Buddhism. In the conventional “Western” notion of Buddhism, the teachings of Buddha Gautama are regarded as a positive Eastern countermodel to the decadent civilization and culture of the West: where the Western world has introduced war and exploitation into world history, Buddhism stands for peace and freedom; whilst Western rationalism is destructive of life and the environment, the Eastern teachings of wisdom preserve and safeguard them. The meditation, compassion, composure, understanding, nonviolence, modesty, and spirituality of Asia stand in contrast to the actionism, egomania, unrest, indoctrination, violence, arrogance, and materialism of Europe and North America. Ex oriente lux—“light comes from the East”; in occidente nox—“darkness prevails in the West”.

We regard this juxtaposition of the Eastern and Western hemispheres as not just the “business” of naive believers and zealous Tibetan lamas. On the contrary, this comparison of values has become distributed among Western intelligentsia as a popular philosophical speculation in which they flirt with their own demise.

You can find the Trimondi's resume here. As the authors were saying, this stuff might start morphing your nerves, so beware the words, as they have a tendency to become swords. Here is Louv's assessment of the book...

1. The entire PR campaign of Lamaism in the West masks, and furthers, the goal of the fourteenth Dalai Lama to become the Adi Buddha, the totalitarian ruler in which all secular and spiritual power is concentrated.
2. The Kalachakra Tantra (the central practice of Vajrayana) focuses on the concentration of the universe (both sexes, all planets, time and space) within the androgynous body of the Adi Buddha, so that literally all internal processes of the Dalai Lama thereby effect world events (as above, so below—and how!).
3. Sexual and ecological politics in Tibet have always been far away from what is publicly presented (Mahayana “peace love tolerance” public mask, Vajrayana “dominate the world” reality). Sexual politics have been the systematic oppression and hatred of women and their continual use as power batteries, with their energy being farmed and alchemized into political power via sexual magick. Ecological politics have been the same—the suppression and violation of the mother earth goddess (srinmo).
4. Tibet and Nazi Germany, or Esoteric Hitlerism as it is today, were and still are bedfellows. (Hitler as Kalki as Kalachakra.)
5. The Kalachakra is a process by which the entire world (especially Islam) will be purified by fire and transformed into a Buddhocracy by the twenty-fourth century. (Same old scheme that Christianity, Islam, etc. are running and that the Dalai Lama pretends to be above.)

Yes, beware, but also be amused. You can download the entire 419 page Ultraculture journal from the like above. Happy reading!

Namaste.