Wherever power is, the corrupt will be drawn to it by an irresistible magnetic force. So the only answer is to reduce the scope of power everywhere. That’s why I’m drawn to anarchism.
Precisely this. I see anarchism as necessary for our survival. The only way to a truce in our political and cultural wars is to lower the stakes by spreading power so thinly that no one can gain enough to blow up the world.
Aesop Rock has announced a new album and it looks like he’ll be doing some tech critique. The first release “Mindful Solutionism” indicates that we’re looking at another great album.
Landmines, Agent Orange, leaded gas, cigarettes
Cameras in your favorite corners, plastic in the wilderness
We can not be trusted with the stuff that we come up with
The machinery could eat us, we just really love our buttons
Sometime it really pays off to be a perpetual student of religion and the occult. Travel, especially, can be unexpectedly transfigured if you equip yourself with a well-honed sacred radar, especially one tuned to animist and esoteric frequencies. With this sort of spirit-tech in hand, or in mind, even banal and hyper-touristy environments can pack a spectral punch.
[… T]he sacred is in the eye of the beholder. I’ve also had convulsive epiphanies at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, the gritty bare-bones ruins of Eleusis, and a James Turrell Skyspace in Seattle. There is a lesson in this for the sacred tourist: the entire earth is filled with portals.
Martin Shaw, Bardskull:
They say the best way to die is to let go of everything. To lack a centre. To lack self-centre. That if you spent a life putting others first then it’s easier to go. I’m not sure I qualify for that sort of ease, but I think I believe the suggestion. And that’s hard for a pagan romantic. I love attachment, I adore it, I sink my fangs into the rump of attachment. I am sensualist, I am driven, I reach out to the world. And one day I will have to reverse that behaviour.
I liked this section but the book was too opaque for me and I didn’t finish it. Which isn’t to say it’s a bad book; it’s just not for me.
Master Hsueh, as quoted in Road to Heaven by Bill Porter:
You can learn the basics anywhere. There are books. As to learning the inner secrets, when your practice reaches a certain level, you’ll meet a teacher. But you can’t be in a hurry. You have to be prepared to devote your whole life to your practice. This is what is meant by religion. It’s not a matter of spending money. You have to spend your life. Not many people are willing to do this. If you’re ready to learn, you don’t have to look for a teacher. A teacher will find you. Taoism is very deep. There’s a great deal to learn, and you can’t do it quickly. The Tao isn’t something that can be put into words. You have to practice before you can understand. Lao-tzu teaches us to be natural. You can’t force things, including practice. Understanding is something that happens naturally. It’s different for everyone. The main thing is to reduce your desires and quiet your mind. Practice takes a long time, and you have to stay healthy. If you have a lot of thoughts and desires, you won’t live long enough to reach the end.
Be patient. Be natural. Reduce your desires. Quiet your mind. Stay healthy.
Master Hsieh, as quoted in Road to Heaven by Bill Porter:
Lao-tzu said to cultivate tranquillity and detachment. To be natural. To be natural means not to force things. When you act natural, you get what you need. But to know what’s natural, you have to cultivate tranquillity. Huashan has long been famous as a center of Taoism because it’s quiet. There used to be a lot of hermits here But now the mountain has been developed for tourism. The tranquility is gone, and so are the hermits.
In a recent essay, Bob Turner (local Presbyterian pastor) quotes Gordon Hempton (acoustic ecologist) on the difference between silence and quiet:
Real quiet is not the absence of sound [which is the definition of silence] but the absence of noise.
Whew, this is good. So much here to think about.
I wrote a denunciation of apps.
Bill Porter, Road to Heaven (1993):
One of the mountains we visited was Tailaoshan just inside the northwest tip of Fukien Province. A Buddhist layman we met on the trail led us to a cave where an eighty-five-year-old monk had been living for the past fifty years. In the course of our conversation, the monk asked me who this Chairman Mao was whom I kept mentioning. He said he had moved into the cave in 1939 after the spirits of the mountain appeared to him in a dream and asked him to become the mountain’s protector. He hadn’t been down the mountain since then. Disciples and local villagers brought him the few things he needed. And he didn’t need much: flour, cooking oil, salt, and once every five years or so a new blanket or set of robes. His practice was the name of the Buddha: Amitabha, Buddha of the Infinite.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North:
Finally, I sold my house, moving to the cottage of Sampū for a temporary stay. Upon the threshold of my old home, however, I wrote a linked verse of eight pieces and hung it on a wooden pillar. The starting piece was:
Behind this door
Now buried in deep grass,
A different generation will celebrate
The Festival of Dolls.
What did the next homeowner do with the paper containing a handwritten verse of Bashō?
Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less:
“This is the same fire that burned with the blast from Hiroshima,” Masanori Oe says to me, pointing to a small brass lantern on a table in front of us with a tiny flame burning inside.
“This very flame?” I ask, taken aback somewhat.
“Yes. It has been kept burning, passed on from person to person to help us each remember what happened that day, and how it must not happen again.” He explains that in August of 1945, a woman who lost her son in the bombing went to the city while it was still burning and, believing that the spirit of her son was inside that flame, captured a bit of fire and brought it to her home a hundred miles away. She kept it burning for more than twenty years, and then passed it on to a Buddhist priest, who decided to make it a symbol of peace, and took the flame on a walking pilgrimage across Japan, burning in a lantern, and passed it on to others, lighting new lanterns for those who would take the flame. “We have it here for some time before we pass it on,” Masanori says.