AGAINST FORGETTING

"SHOW ME THE  FACE YOU HAD BEFORE YOU WERE BORN!

DOES A DOG HAVE BUDDHA NATURE?"
2 famous Zen Koans, the second a double pub in english as Dog is God backwards...

aloha 2u
in the 70s when i was dating Tall Girl she sent me an urgent mssg from Seattle about two bopoks i HAD to read so that we could talk about them later, of course i found book books acrsoos the street in frisco at City Lights bookstore then wadded thru the ponderous tomes and when she arrive in frisco weeks later, her reply was
"Oh ,i'm so over that now."
that was my intro to the writings of Gurdjieff (sp?) and his disciple P.D.Ouspensky and the book IN SEARCH OF THE MIRACULOUS.now Gurdjieff's main enemy was Madame (sic) Helnena Blatvatsky THE SECRET DOCTRINE (founder of Theosophy) and the reason is simple both formed secular cults (still extant today to my knowledge) based on their own garbled interpretations of Eastern Wisdom traditions.
IMHO neither one is the saint or seer they claim to be, reading the intercine sniping in their writings shows exactly how petty both were.. the basic idiom of Gurdjieff is SELF REMEMBERING and one of the books had a chapter headed Against Forgetting, now Ouspensky, being a mathematician, wrote these long incomprehensible (to Me) formulas for findimg your true self. even The Bible comments about 'wisdom spun too fine'  SIGH.

anyway the premise of SLEEPWALKERS is also basic to Zen , which is no B.S.IMHO.
now Gurdjieff and Blavatksy stole liberally from the Sufi seer Nasrudin and some of his parables but they stole the sizzle but not the steak which is why i found their blatherings empty and non nourishing.

now the book that turned me towards Zen, i found ion the grass at Griffith Park in LA about a week after i found STEPPENWOLF BY HERMAN HESSE... the book is ZEN FLESH,ZEN BONES by PAUL REPS which i found critical at the time ,as i was suicidally depressed..IMHO Reps is a well meaning soul and tho i often disagreed with his interpretations i found it helpful...
later as i got deeper into Zen and studied Japanese i found the context that he was missing..i found gems amidst the misguded dross..

the koan i studied..

When you understand, you belong to the family;
When you do not understand,  you are a stranger.

Those who do not understand belong to the family,
And when they understand they are strangers.

its simple,right??? 

HINT.

wisdom of isis, child of O Wise Howard, and our friend ....

"Damn well-meaning academics... I swear, I rarely like people who got any
college degrees above a bachelors. It's like they all got brain-washed and
can't speak normally with the rest of the masses. Their expertise is taking
up too much space in their brains to take in any new information that
contradicts their expertise. I'm one exhausted uneducated, poor white trash
crip, banging my head into a wall of middle class activists."


BTW @Katrina +5

this week MSNBC announced that of the $15 billion promised in aid by W. to restore the economy and infastructructure to New Orleans..oven  $7Bn went to restore and expand,mostly undamaged, oil refineries and the City of N"Awlins got maybe ONE PERCENT OF THE AID and the Lower Ninth Ward got zip, bupkiss,goose eggs,zippo etc. HUGE SIGH
."this is what democracy looks like?"
SHOULD READ "this is what HYPOCRISY looks like!"

---

BTW 2  the "liberal" 9th Circuit Court (Federal) sez it's perfectly OK for cops to sneak into your driveway and plant a GPS tracking device on your car, was this in response to terrorists baby rapers?NO,merely a routine rural Oregon pot grower.SIGH, 4TH AMENDMENT MUCH?

 namaste
mega