By Apuleius Charlton
Special guest blogger
This is both a great time to be reading this chapter and a difficult time to successfully perform some of the more optimistic exercizes at the end. Today is a strange holiday; I imagine that there are always groups/individuals in our country who are discomforted on this day, who feel that the country we’re supposed to be celebrating isn’t “their” country- I would wager that more people feel like this today than even in the dark ages of 1922. We are surrounded by the SNAFU principle, or as Oz commented on my last post, the AFU principle as things don’t really seem normal right now. It would seem to be obvious that there is a conspiracy in our country to limit our rights and enforce minority rule- but is it still a conspiracy when it is so out in the open?
Attempting the sixth exercize, after recent events, quickly became distressing. Again, this could be said at any point in history, depending on your position on the globe/in society/in your personal life. When my eyes have been glued to the news, it instead became a meditation on what I chose to “notice.” If my day as god gives me any insight to the positive realities, it would be that they are to be found in the pages of fiction and with people you love, not in the wider world. Happily the fourth exercize is relatively easy during the summer, when I am out of the classroom and away from the headaches of the year; most people are perfectly pleasant when I run errands. There’s a lot to be said for common decency and politeness.
So that’s what I’m wishing for all of us on today’s Glorious Fourth, common decency and politeness. Just don’t look for it at the top of the pyramid.
2 comments:
I find much common decency and politeness amongst every day people in this neck of the woods. Even the non-domesticated primate animals around here seem decent, happily going about their business, or so I project,
Exercizes 3 & 4 seem paradoxical when attempted simultaneously. Re #6, if God plays me as a human and I create every reality I notice, then I/God have a problem. The genesis of a solution begins by correctly stating the problem. The one who lives me know, who writes these words = a problem solver - perhaps an aspirational observation. More along those lines in my forthcoming Maybe Day piece in progress.
I've been attempting #7 since I first read PR in the 80's. Mostly, not always successful, in my personal life. The collapse of the music industry and the great difficulty of independent artists and mostly all non-mainstream artists to monetize their recordings seems an example of things not working out as planned. So far, it does work out to earn enough to support my ability to do the things I want in a good and beautiful home environment.
Exercize 5 appears another one I've done on and off for years. Training my attention to lift it off of one area and intentionally place it on another helps with the awareness of choosing particular realities.
I did not know of Private Snafu, thank you Apuleius. I see that the pic you aptly chose is from the episode 'Rumors'.
"...and baloney is flying all over the place!"
The 'Spies'episode also fit with our current PR chapter.
Not knowing much about Da Free John, I decided to look him up a bit.
Here we find him explaining that God is neither within nor without:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWcAhoCW9H8
For around a decade from 1973 on, he apparently used a method of 'crazy widsom' that puts him in the long-running tradition of figures such as Taoist and Discordian saint Hung Mung, some Zen masters, our old friend the highly esteemed Mullah Nasruddin, or even Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back.
"Adi Da [Free John] initiated a period of teachings and activities that came to be known as the "Garbage and the Goddess". He directed his followers in "sexual theater", a form of psychodrama that often involved public and group sex, the making of pornographic movies, and other intensified sexual practices. Drug and alcohol use were often encouraged, and earlier proscriptions against meat and "junk food" were no longer adhered to." (Wikipedia)
My kind of garbage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0N2-jV189Zs
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