I would like some help with an experiment

[~greg]

If I don't control myself, who does, and how can I kill him?
Golly, I never knew I was so creepy

I believe this was in response to my big posts.

I believe that because I wrote them,
and still have some memory of them.

(However, that memory is fading fast,
and I am certainly not going to read them again!)

Anyway, my impression is that Manna's response
is a very good response. And I was really surprised by it.


Like I said, for those of you who happen to be on acid
(--"LSD", to the young 'uns : ) --this Gurdjieffian
4th way of thinking does in fact make a solid foundation
for a "bad trip".

People have to feel exactly the way Manna said,
really bad, or they will never be motivated to do anything
about it (--ie, "kill him", - stop the machine)

[Manna]

Anyway, my impression is that Manna's response
is a very good response. And I was really surprised by it.

Thanks, mate. I've never done acid, but I'd like to, somedaysomedaysomeday. Though I hear shrooms are more reliably enjoyable and acid does a lousy number on your liver.

[Diane]

OK, I just tried to read Greg's essays. Greg, you are funny. And you say you are amiable and 'middle of the road'. You sound like a nice chap. You are also fiendishly well-read and clever. But I surrender. I can't read all that. It doesn't help me.

You said:

Alan Watts.

Alan Watts is a favourite of mine. A couple of decades ago I first read The Wisdom of Insecurity, and I am very attached to that book. This is from the final two pages:

Goethe says,

"The highest to which man can attain is wonder. (..and if he can wonder) let him be content; nothing higher can it give him, and nothing further should he seek for behind it; here is the limit."

Or there are words of St. John of the Cross, one of the greatest seers of the Christian tradition:

"One of the greatest favours bestowed on the soul transiently in this life is to enable it to see so distinctly and feel so profoundly that it cannot comprehend God at all..."

In such wonder there is not hunger but fulfilment. Almost everyone has known it...

Eddington, the physicist, is nearest to the mystics when he says, "Something unknown is doing we don't know what." In such a confession thought has moved full circle, and we are again as children. To those still feverishly intent upon explaining all things...this confession says nothing and means nothing but defeat. To others, the fact that thought has completed a circle is a revelation of what man has been doing, not only in philosophy, religion, and speculative science, but also in psychology and morals, and in everyday feeling and living. His mind has been in a whirl to be away from itself and to catch itself.

Ye suffer from yourselves.
None else compels.
None other holds you that ye live and die,
And whirl upon the wheel,
And hug and kiss
Its spokes of agony,
Its tire of tears,
Its nave of nothingness.
(Buddha)

Discovering this the mind becomes whole: the split between I and me, man and the world, the ideal and the real, comes to an end. Paranoia, the mind beside itself, becomes metanoia, the mind with itself and so free from itself. Free from clutching at themselves the hands can handle; free from looking after themselves the eyes can see; free from trying to understand itself thought can think. In such feeling, seeing, and thinking, life requires no future to complete itself nor explanation to justify itself. In this moment it is finished.

The machine dies in silence, and silently it dies.

And yes, we are cool as ice cubes in a glass of whiskey in a vast baking desert.

Diane

[Manna]

Thank you for not saying cucumbers. If you'd said cucumbers, I may have had to cut off your hands. Oh, there I go again.

We're cool.

[~greg]

Leonard Cohen >
"The notion of cool has been destroying the heart for years.
I remember when I came to New York for the first time in the early '50s,
when cool was starting to be developed as an important position.
I remember sitting in a coffee shop in the Village, and I'd heard about a new spirit,
a sweet spirit and I remember sitting there taking my paper placemat and writing
in big letters 'KILL COOL!' "


Leonard Cohen and the Death of Cool, - David Sprague,
-- http://www.webheights.net/speakingcohen/flesh92.htm

[Manna]

Hey, ~Greg, that's cool!

[Diane]

I am not so keen on cucumber. It's only cool when it's part of a salad.

Leonard Cohen and the Death of Cool, - David Sprague,
-- http://www.webheights.net/speakingcohen/flesh92.htm

That is cool, Manna. Did you guys read that excerpt at the top from 2.18 BoM!! With that bottle of whiskey too. How cool is that! I join you in your incomprehensible affirmation, whatever that means.

Just after Leonard says what you quote him as saying, Greg, he says:

Something has crossed the threshold that we never thought would. It's inside, in us. The wind isn't howling out there anymore, it's howling within us, and everyone understands the beast has been unleashed. Extreme caution is advised.

Cool does need to be killed. Cool means detached and in control. The first step towards silence is allowing yourself to know what you are afraid of, and letting your mind be loud about it. Let it through, let it be, let it go. You'll never let it go into silence if you don't let through. Leonard said that silence is closer to peace than poetry. The denied content of your mind is closer to silence than is its usual cacophony of thoughts. Or, at least, mine is.

Diane

[lazariuk]

Manna, you are well on your way to killing cool.

[Manna]

Nah, I'm cooling kill.

I climbed the cool and cooled the tip of cool there. Man, it was cool. But then this big cool cool cool got all cool on me, and I had to cool or be cooled. I couldn't cool it, try as I may, so I got a cool and I cooled it right through his cool. It was his own cool. He started it. Sorry.

[lazariuk]

Well I guess he is well on his way to killing cool too. You can't kill cool all by yourself.

[Diane]

You can't kill cool all by yourself.

That is the coolest thing anyone has written in this thread so far.

[lazariuk]

Well if anyone wants to practice, they can practice on me. I have a lot of cool

[Manna]

I'm reminded of something June Carter once said. I think it was, "Hah!"

[lazariuk]

I'm reminded of something June Carter once said. I think it was, "Hah!"

When I read that I was listening to Rodney Crowell singing "You can't stop a woman when she is out of control" Probably June was out of control when she said that.

[lazariuk]

I don't know why my eyes separated when I was young. The doctor called it a lazy eye. When the threshold was reached and time stopped it had an interesting effect. With one eye eyerything was waves. Everything! There are no things other than waves and waves are not things. With the other eye light was moving slowly toward my eye. Later I thought "If time had stopped then why was light coming toward your eye?" Then it occured to me that I was seeing the light out there and out there is in the past and in the past the light comes toward you. The light that I was looking at with that eye was not waves but rather particles. I guess that is the way waves look when you look at the past.

Sound though is all waves and so it is leading me to think that maybe we can't hear the past and so if Leonard sings "I'm all ears" maybe it is because for him the past is over with.