The Bar(do) of Last Resort

The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/21/20 8:10 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Papa Che Dusko 4/21/20 8:23 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/21/20 8:42 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Papa Che Dusko 4/21/20 8:51 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/21/20 12:19 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/26/20 5:54 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort A. Dietrich Ringle 4/21/20 8:44 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/21/20 8:49 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort A. Dietrich Ringle 4/21/20 8:52 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/21/20 12:22 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/21/20 12:24 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/21/20 12:32 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Papa Che Dusko 4/21/20 2:43 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/21/20 4:53 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Papa Che Dusko 4/21/20 5:26 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/22/20 6:27 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/22/20 7:01 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/22/20 8:05 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/22/20 9:49 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Papa Che Dusko 4/22/20 8:24 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/22/20 8:09 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/22/20 2:00 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/22/20 3:08 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/22/20 3:32 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/22/20 3:49 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/22/20 4:29 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/22/20 4:59 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort sarah elizabeth 4/22/20 5:13 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/22/20 5:23 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/22/20 5:10 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/22/20 5:36 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort sarah elizabeth 4/22/20 5:58 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/22/20 6:03 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/22/20 6:24 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Smiling Stone 4/22/20 8:15 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/22/20 8:21 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/22/20 8:14 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/22/20 8:48 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/22/20 9:05 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö 4/22/20 9:58 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/22/20 10:46 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/22/20 10:49 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö 4/22/20 11:52 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/22/20 11:59 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö 4/22/20 12:03 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/22/20 12:03 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/22/20 12:03 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/22/20 10:18 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/22/20 10:50 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/22/20 10:59 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/22/20 11:07 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/22/20 12:00 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/22/20 12:08 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/22/20 12:10 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/22/20 12:27 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/22/20 12:55 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort T 4/22/20 2:27 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/22/20 4:45 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/22/20 6:52 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/23/20 9:26 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/23/20 9:58 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/23/20 10:06 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/23/20 10:05 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/23/20 10:15 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/23/20 11:49 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/23/20 11:50 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/23/20 11:52 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/23/20 11:53 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/22/20 11:42 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/22/20 12:46 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/22/20 6:43 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/23/20 3:21 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/23/20 4:34 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/23/20 5:08 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/23/20 6:54 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/23/20 8:15 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/23/20 6:01 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö 4/23/20 6:39 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/23/20 6:48 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö 4/24/20 2:13 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/24/20 2:35 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö 4/24/20 4:31 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/23/20 6:50 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/24/20 3:27 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/24/20 4:12 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/24/20 4:51 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö 4/24/20 5:09 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/24/20 5:20 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/24/20 5:21 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/24/20 5:58 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Papa Che Dusko 4/24/20 6:42 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/24/20 6:48 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Papa Che Dusko 4/24/20 7:41 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/24/20 8:03 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/24/20 8:44 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/24/20 10:02 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Siavash ' 4/24/20 10:09 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö 4/24/20 10:20 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Siavash ' 4/24/20 10:32 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/24/20 10:24 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Siavash ' 4/24/20 10:30 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/24/20 10:35 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Siavash ' 4/24/20 10:47 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/24/20 1:17 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/24/20 10:55 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/24/20 12:00 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Shari Tresky 4/24/20 7:15 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/24/20 8:43 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Not two, not one 4/25/20 3:05 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 3:08 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Not two, not one 4/25/20 3:19 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö 4/25/20 3:25 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 3:25 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö 4/25/20 3:31 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 3:38 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö 4/25/20 4:00 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 4:06 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/24/20 9:37 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 1:01 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 4:17 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Not two, not one 4/25/20 4:39 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 4:45 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Not two, not one 4/25/20 4:53 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 5:16 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 5:57 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 7:46 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Papa Che Dusko 4/25/20 8:01 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 8:30 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Siavash ' 4/25/20 8:32 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/25/20 8:40 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Siavash ' 4/25/20 8:45 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/25/20 8:51 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Siavash ' 4/25/20 8:56 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 9:04 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/25/20 9:06 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 9:07 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/25/20 9:08 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 9:09 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/25/20 9:10 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 9:11 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 8:52 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 8:59 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Siavash ' 4/25/20 9:03 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 8:56 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 8:55 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/25/20 8:58 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 9:02 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Siavash ' 4/25/20 8:59 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 9:06 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Siavash ' 4/25/20 9:11 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 9:15 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Siavash ' 4/25/20 9:17 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/25/20 9:23 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 9:29 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/25/20 9:28 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Siavash ' 4/25/20 9:32 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/25/20 9:36 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Siavash ' 4/25/20 9:43 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/25/20 9:46 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Siavash ' 4/25/20 10:03 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/25/20 10:08 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Siavash ' 4/25/20 10:29 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/25/20 10:27 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 10:39 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Siavash ' 4/25/20 10:43 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 10:44 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/25/20 10:54 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Siavash ' 4/25/20 11:02 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/25/20 11:45 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 12:57 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Smiling Stone 4/25/20 4:43 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/25/20 4:51 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 5:07 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Steph S 4/25/20 5:11 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 7:10 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort David S 4/25/20 7:26 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 7:35 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort David S 4/25/20 7:37 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 7:44 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort David S 4/25/20 7:47 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 7:51 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort David S 4/25/20 7:53 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö 4/26/20 2:10 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Steph S 4/25/20 8:04 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 10:11 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 10:02 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 5:58 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/25/20 11:02 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/26/20 7:31 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/26/20 7:35 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/26/20 7:54 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/26/20 8:00 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/26/20 8:04 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/26/20 8:07 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/26/20 8:57 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/26/20 8:59 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/26/20 9:07 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/26/20 9:16 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/26/20 9:19 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/26/20 9:21 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/26/20 10:07 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/26/20 10:33 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/26/20 10:45 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/26/20 10:54 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/26/20 11:00 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/26/20 11:01 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/26/20 11:05 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/26/20 11:02 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Papa Che Dusko 4/26/20 11:46 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/26/20 11:57 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/26/20 12:03 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Papa Che Dusko 4/27/20 2:49 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/27/20 3:01 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/26/20 12:02 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/26/20 12:05 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Siavash ' 4/26/20 8:15 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort George S 4/26/20 11:07 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/26/20 11:11 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort George S 4/26/20 8:26 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/27/20 12:50 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/27/20 3:10 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort George S 4/27/20 8:47 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/27/20 9:53 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort George S 4/27/20 10:10 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/27/20 10:29 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort George S 4/27/20 12:34 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/27/20 1:44 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort George S 4/27/20 3:11 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort George S 4/27/20 3:33 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Papa Che Dusko 4/27/20 3:51 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/27/20 10:37 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Papa Che Dusko 4/27/20 3:55 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/27/20 1:39 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/27/20 4:16 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Papa Che Dusko 4/27/20 5:19 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/27/20 6:06 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Smiling Stone 4/27/20 3:22 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/27/20 6:28 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort sarah elizabeth 4/27/20 7:36 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/27/20 8:19 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/27/20 10:28 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/27/20 10:32 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö 4/27/20 11:47 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/28/20 12:44 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/28/20 3:42 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö 4/28/20 3:48 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/28/20 4:07 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/28/20 5:54 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort George S 4/28/20 10:36 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/28/20 11:21 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/28/20 11:47 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/28/20 8:21 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Siavash ' 4/28/20 9:57 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/28/20 8:38 PM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Papa Che Dusko 4/29/20 2:19 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/29/20 3:13 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Siavash ' 4/30/20 12:11 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/29/20 3:34 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Siavash ' 4/29/20 3:38 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/29/20 4:01 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Siavash ' 4/29/20 4:47 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/29/20 5:25 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/29/20 6:26 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/29/20 7:26 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/30/20 2:35 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/30/20 3:10 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Tim Farrington 4/30/20 4:49 AM
RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort Chris M 4/30/20 6:18 AM
Thread Split Chris M 4/30/20 6:23 AM
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/21/20 8:10 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/21/20 8:09 AM

The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Live in the nowhere that you came from, even though you
have an address here.
Rumi, in Coleman Barks's rendering

Welcome to the Bar(do) of Last Resort. It it is located in a bad neighborhood---the Dark Night category of DhO--- on purpose, because so much of my learning curve (just corrected a funny typo here: "my learning curse," lol, was tempted to leave it in (sic)) (did, lol) has come in the dukha nanas territory, and John of the Cross and Daniel Ingram's MCBT (1 and 2, going back to 2011) have been my best teachers and greatest helps. In that same vein, Rumi said, "Live in the nowhere that you can from, even though you have an address here." I think the practice logs are as close as the sangha of people living in the various linguistic variations on the nowhere we came from have on DhO to a local address, with the implicit invitation to welcome visitors, and, in my case, as a good red herring for cops arriving to serve warrants. So welcome to this thread, and to tell you the truth, Officer, it seems possible to me that some people just don't get my humor.
 
 If you have found your way here by accident, my advice is to run for the exit door, where you will be given a complimentary beverage of your choice for the wisdom of Not Starting. 
If you have unfortunately Started, for whatever misguided reasons, then better by far to finish, and drinks are on the house until all sentient beings are saved, because as the obviously slowest sentient boat afloat, i am doomed to be the last one out of this bar, and will be tending bar at various points, or at least taking the occasional dishwashing and janitorial shifts throughout, and will be available to serve drinks at any time if i can figure out how to pour them into a receptable that doesn't leak too much, and also not poison the person through unskillful means. I personally recommend getting someone else to make your drinks, as any patron of the Bar of Last Resort is cleared to bartend, merely by being in the place, and a number of these people pour with a very slow four-count, if you know what i mean, and i think you do, wink-wink. If you don't know what i mean, i mean that some of the drinks these fuckers pour . . . well, let's just say a little dab will do ya.

Our present primary bartender is Ludwig Wittgenstein, so take your language games directly to him. 
If you have come here from a purely morbid or personally-skin-in-the-game interest in spiritual carnage and meditation-related difficulties, the free drinks are two for one.
If you have been invited here, that was irresponsible on my part, and I apologize. Have a drink. All exit doors remain wide open at all times, by order of the Fire Marshall.

If you have come here because we are in a giant fight on another thread and i have asked you to take it outside, please identify yourself to the doorman as you enter. He or she will give you as many free drinks as you are willing to drink before sending you out into the alley behind the bar, where i will continue to do my best to tear you a new asshole.

This is also my “literary” practice log, from 4/21/20--- i will note distinct practice log posts with a first line heading, for those who hate this other shit. For my even more scrupous "PF---practice-focused, Papa-friendly--- practice log", which is a real attempt to approach DhO vipassana style phenomenology practice notes, see that here:

https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/20234930

If you're here, really, for any reason at all, truly, God help you.

Namaste,
tim
 
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Papa Che Dusko, modified 3 Years ago at 4/21/20 8:23 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/21/20 8:23 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2680 Join Date: 3/1/20 Recent Posts
Nice to see you here Tim! emoticon Much prefer this forum format! I'll have a glass of water! Thank you. 
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/21/20 8:42 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/21/20 8:41 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
On the house, amigo!
I made a separate page for stuff that might be less likely to make you throw up in the long run--- https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/20234930

nothing new on it yet, for you. The construction dust is still settling. But i intend to pursue the thread we're been working of V-BBW noting aloud in at least one of two sits per day. And you know how i can power through that state of the art 2 minutes.

Also, hile i've got you here drunk--- how's this for a siddi, Master of Smileys? Using a music piece as the emoji! like so ---

https://soundcloud.com/papa-dusko/sets/che-guebuddha-sound

emoticon
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Papa Che Dusko, modified 3 Years ago at 4/21/20 8:51 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/21/20 8:51 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2680 Join Date: 3/1/20 Recent Posts
No reason to split practice into two threads. I need no papa friendly thread here mate. I only needed that in the email format as I would get lost there in all those replies emoticon 

I really feel it's best to keep it all in ONLY one thread. 
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/21/20 12:19 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/21/20 12:19 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Papa Che Dusko:
No reason to split practice into two threads. I need no papa friendly thread here mate. I only needed that in the email format as I would get lost there in all those replies emoticon 

I really feel it's best to keep it all in ONLY one thread. 

Okay. I will bring it here, then. Practice log posts should be easy to find, i will just have the obvious title on the top line, and look for the "therrre isss . . ." for my, uh, there-is-ing.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 5:54 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 5:18 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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practice log/April 26, 2020/ sesshin day 14/sit 1/0:06:43/bbw/end 2:09am/ortho/with/anicca, anatta doors
 
practice log/April 26, 2020/ sesshin day 14/sit 2/0:07:01/bbw/end 5:13am/sinistral/withthi-s/ anicca, anatta doors
note: phone zendo w/ JohnX

interesting twist one this one. An old friend has recently returned to his meditation practice, and we were on the phone in the wee hours talking shit, and joking that during this round of mania for me I had gotten as low as a 3 second meditation sit (admittedly out of ornery and perverse pride, to have the Guinness World Record for that, beating out Chris Fucking Marti's previous record of 5 seconds, eat my smoke, Marti).

Then it occured to me that we could just fucking meditate RIGHT THEN AND THERE!!!! He was up for that. He is the one sitting longer than me at this point, so i bumped up to 0:07:01 for the sit, seven minutes, 1 seond, and he bumped way down from his current state of the art 20 minutes to hold my hand. I was the jikijitsu (that is, we used my timer), and it was great. 
 
practice log/April 26, 2020/ sesshin day 14/sit 3/0:07:02/bbw-4/end 5:55am/sinistral (oops)/ and not i-2/ anicca, anatta doors
 
bbw-4=one bead per word, lead mudra only, through whole prayer and on.
 

note: phone zendo sit w/ John X.

afterward, i put $1000 into his paypal account, per our agreement beforehand, @$500 per sit.Feel like i came out sort of ridiculously  ahead on the deal (he gave me his friends and family reduced fee), but John X has always been a fucking sucker and sap about money, wouldn't know what to do with the stuff if it wrapped itself around his neck and started strangling him like a boa constrictor.
A Dietrich Ringle, modified 3 Years ago at 4/21/20 8:44 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/21/20 8:44 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Tim Farrington:
 So welcome to this thread, and to tell you the truth, Officer, it seems possible to me that some people just don't get my humor....

...If you're here, really, for any reason at all, truly, God help you.

Namaste,
tim
 
I think I get your sense of humor and am wondering why I need God's help in dissecting it> == lol
This post reminded me of another, in which some guy or gal (I don't rememeber the name of the poster) told me that they knew how my death would play out. It turned out to be very interesting (and could still be interesting if I have any flashbacks or flash forwards!)
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/21/20 8:49 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/21/20 8:49 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Sleeping Buddha Syndrome:
This post reminded me of another, in which some guy or gal (I don't rememeber the name of the poster) told me that they knew how my death would play out. It turned out to be very interesting (and could still be interesting if I have any flashbacks or flash forwards!)


Wow. Did he mean he had planned your murder, or was it more a gift of a head's-up?
A Dietrich Ringle, modified 3 Years ago at 4/21/20 8:52 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/21/20 8:52 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 881 Join Date: 12/4/11 Recent Posts
The latter presumably =
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/21/20 12:22 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/21/20 12:22 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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lovely walk, sun not yet up, but the cloudless eastern sky
silver and bright, shading off into darker blues and purples to the west. 

Practice log/sesshin day 9/sit 10/0:05:52/BBW/end 6:31am 

Practice log/sesshin day 9/sit 11/0:05:53/BBW/end 7:03am

 a bit of breakfast, and reincarnation on DhO! I’m have acquired the new siddi of using music from YouTube as an emoji! Honors ever to
the Master of Smileys, Sri Papa Che. ;D 

 Practice log/sesshin day 9/sit 12/0:05:54/bbw/end 8:46am 

Practice log/sesshin day 9/sit 13/0:05:55/bbw/end 9:35am

 Practice log/sesshin day 9/sit 14/0:05:56/bbw/end 10:06am

 Practice log/sesshin day 9/sit 15/0:05:57/bbw/end 10:26am

 Practice log/sesshin day 9/sit 17/0:05:59/bbw/end 12:31pm
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/21/20 12:24 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/21/20 12:24 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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PF Practice log/sesshin day 9/sit 18/0:02:01/”theerre isss”/ end 1:06 pm
 
note: working with left thumb against right forefinger. re-watched the video first, ready for this short shower.
 
Theeerrrre isss . . . sinking, sinking, curiousity, alertness, there is PIA, overwhelming sensate . . .Therrrrre isss . . .in-breath, rising . . . there is sinking, looking, therrre is hearing, a heartbeat, not feeling it, hearing it . . .  in my ears, i left the headphones on after watching the video, lol . . . there iss . . . looking, sinking, looking for where the thumb and finger meet, a slight jerk as the thumb moves to generate sensation . . . there is . . . FUCKING THUNDER, IT’S THE TIMER CHIME IN THE HEADPHONES.
 
there is deafness, lol.
 
i could go three next time.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/21/20 12:32 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/21/20 12:32 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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recent logs for working toward vispassana noting. This is actually a history of how complicated i can make shit that is simple. but this vipassana is such strong shit in even the smallest does for me, that i'm just doing my best to taste it at all, not because it scares me so much as last time it ENERGIZED me, in practically homeopathic tiny doses. so i've gone as tine as possible. Meanwhile: a ton of security oriented crap spewed before getting to it properly.
 
Practice log/April 19, 2020/sesshin day 7/sit 1/0:05:18
 
Practice log/April 19, 202/sesshin day 7/sit 2, ended 4:16am/0:05:19
 
this Practice log, rated "P" for practice-oriented, Papa-friendly, until otherwise noted
 
okay, preliminary notes: it is my intent in these PF-rated practice logs to attempt to report them in the evolving language of the emerging pidgin drawn from the cultural interaction between vipassana-noting-aloud-style meditation i had been using in my work with Papa Che and my own established practice with my body-breath-word technique of prayer, which i had gone back to for its grounding effect during this, um, high energy period prior to my eventual incarceration.
 
to do so, i am going to have to begin by lay out some specifics, to facilitate not having to footnote every fucking metaphorical flight on my part, for one thing. Pidgin terms, seriously, da kine.
 
So: i will refer to my basic prayer as BBW, body, breath, word. The “word” part is the weirdly specific fire-tested mantra, which is as follows, broken up traditionally into thirteen distinct phrases:
 
with this gift of breath, let me first love You--- no hurry--- no fear--- patiently--- gratefully--- humbly--- attend--- abide--- accept--- embrace--- and not i--- You breath--- Thy will be done.
 
in traditional practice (TP, in pidgin, as it is as necessary and shit smeared as toilet-paper), and also because, as recent events have shown, everyone needs a lot of it, it is jumping off the shelves), i work with a rosary, re-purposed for this particular prayer, so more of a mala-type usage in practice, possibly heretical. I always begin with both mudra- hands on the rosary, thumb and forefinger of each on the medallion of the Mother of God, before any decades, and i say the whole prayer through once without any movement of the bead touching mudra-ponts, right and left, R and L, maybe, because they have distinct functions.
 
Also, i alternate direction from sit to sit, clockwise, and counterclockwise. In Catholicism, the left hand-leading direction is, literally, “sinister,” and so is along the lines of certain tantric practices, as opposed to the orthodox R, right-hand-leading, clockwise direction.
 
I begin the BBW prayer with B1, body, the more obvious sensate, usually tactile/feeling element that presents itself, the obvious blip, which is most often some qualitative variation of the simple pang/pain in my ass (PIA, in pidgin). I let that resonate and by procedure, technique, am intentionally alert for the second B, breath, B2, and usually it presents on the in-breath. step 3 is the word, which is as much of the prayer as presents itself easily. Often that is simply “With,” but it is seldom more than “with this gift,” on the first iteration.
 
This constitutes a complete iteration of the technique. Second iteration is the same, and when i get to W, if i can even remember easily where the fuck i lost the thread, i pick it up there. Say i did manage to get “with this gift”, i would then pray on “of breath,” third iteration, “let me first love You.” and so on BBW by BBW, until, “Thy will be done.”
 
This completes phase one of the BBW-rosary prayer. If i make it through the whole prayer, during any given sit, with often is so roiled that i am only able do do so one word at a time, i then begin, still on the medallion at the end of phase 1, with letters. W, word, is now is one letter. The letter prayer sequence is a shortened version of the whole prayer: with this gift of breath let me first love You--- and not i--- You breathe--- Thy will be done.
 
so in practice two, on a clockwise sit, it goes: B1 (PIA, e.g.), B2 (in-breath, e.g.), “w” (first letters of “with”). Still no movement, but with clockwise movement, that is the R mudra, aware of itself on the medallion. Next iteration is the L mudra, B1, B2, “w”, aware of itself on the medallion. next iteration begins movement proper: B1, B2, “i” with the R mudra moving to the first bead. Next iteration, B1, B2, i, with the l mudra joing the R on the first bead. B1, B2, t, R mudra to second bead. Apply, lather, rinse, repeat.
 
There are 67 letters in the entire short and sweet version of the BBW prayer, 6.7 decades, in Catholic. It is rare that i get through the entire sequence, even in the hour-plus sits of the old regimen, much less during this mania. I actually can tell, from what bead i am on, where i am at any point/letter during the entire 67 bead journey of a full round, or at least in principle i can, as it would take a word very math-like to actually calculate my location. But i could do it if asked, and i actually do have certain very well-established tactile landmarks that i know instantly, the our Father bead between the first few decades being the t from “with” on round 1, and the t from “let” on round 2, for instance, stuff like that. And, especially in the first decade, often when i go both mudras to the s on this, i quickly count the beads ahead. if there are three left before the our Father break of decade bead, i’m actually oriented and didn’t lose a step somehow along the way. If there are more or less than three beads, i may simply reorder myself to the “correct” sequence of traditionally correlated beads and letters, or i may just well, well i’m fucking lost, forget the rest of that shit, and look for the next letter without concern for overall oriention on the rosary as a whole. One bead at a time is deep fucking practice in darkness and secure.
 
I won’t do a phenomenological report for this last sit, but i intend to cut my next sit back to one minute, given my past experiences with the volatility of really trying hard to mix the “There is” noting aloud technique with my prayer/meditation, and see how that looks in a full on PF sit report.
 
Practice log
April 19, 2020
sesshin day 7
sit 3/0:01:00/V-BBW/ended 5:20am
 
note: bold-highlighted words and terms are tentative entries in the emerging vipassana-there-is-noting-technique/body-breath-word --- V-BBS--- pidgin. I will try to keep a glossary/dictionary, but feel free to stop me cold if you don’t understand a word as i am using it.
 
so:
a little shaky at the start, like a car engine not entirely turning over the first time, after setting up a distinct new timer set for (V-BBS) at 0: 01:00, leaving the old (lol) BBW timer at its current state of the art 0:05:20. There is in-breath . . . There is with this gift of breath, an easy one . . . there is sacral pang (PIA =pang/pain in ass, with degrees of qualitative nuance sometimes) . . . there in in-breath (this could, loosely, by called B2, in fast and loose pidgin, but in-breath is more specific, wink at Papa Che) . . . there is let me first love You, always an easy word run in prayer . . . there is PIA . . . there is no hurry . . .and thank God there is no hurry, because there is timer chime.
 
notes: so this is the first V-BBS PF sit, a little seed of practice, emerging pidgin practice language. It is so fucking exciting i can hardly stand it.
 
note also: Papa Che’s latest video gift to the world of practice is astounding.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKZkvLkG-EI
 
I haven’t gotten through it all the way yet, after two tries. First time i had to leap from my chair and go smoke at 0:00:21, just from the intro. Then, a couple of sits later, tried again and got to 0:01:35, really FUCKING ASTOUNDED IN A MILLION FUCKING WAYS.
 
That fucker is singing his meditation!!!!!!!!!!!! How can I keep from singing!!!!!!! even if i’m quite sure that Enya would make Papa-ji puke!

 
Practice log
April 19, 2020
sesshin day 7
sit 4/0:01:01/V-BBW/counterclockwise/ended 6:13am
 
note: counterclockwise indicates the alternating direction on the rosary, with the previous sit’s clockwise. Counterclockwise movement leads with left mudra, L-mudra, then right mudra, R-mudra, bead by bead, if the session gets far enough in the prayer for movement of the mudras to be in place.
 
much better oriented this time, there is PIA, warm and friendly, there is in-breath, and recognizing B2, there is with this gift of breath, there is joy, there is in-breath, there is let me first love You,  there is joy there is gratitude, there is PIA, warm, almost gentle, there is in-breath, and simultaneous with the recognition of B2, there is no hurry, there is sinking, sinking, on the out-breath, there is PIA, there there is joy, there is in-breath, and simultaneous with recognition of B2, there is no fear, there is out-breath, sinking to find there is PIA, there is in breath, there is patiently, there is timer chiming.
 
note: discovered what had been there all along, which is the natural out-breath sink toward the sensate base, and the natural  in-breath trigger for the word.

 
Practice log/April 19, 2020/sesshin day 7/ sit 5/0:01:02/V-BBW/clockwise/ended 7:06am
 
there is in-breath, there is with this gift, there is curiousity, after the last sit, trying to see the out-breath descent toward sensation, there is in-breath, there is with this breath, the repetition typical of getting really absorbed in something and losing where i was, there is sinking this time, yes, there is out-breath , there is PIA, just registering, sensate, qualities lost in there is excitement, delight, there is with this breath, same out-breath, there is in-breath and a blip too excited there is PIA, there is in-breath, with this gift of breath, there is timer chiming this one flew.
 
Nice!
 
Since you are keeping this on the safe short session side of things there is no harm to have more interest and enquire more into the sensate experience of anything that is MOST prominent. Im talking about bodily snesations and care litte about mind states at this stage.
 
Lets say its PIA that’s most prominent and clear to investigate ... there is ... theeeerr isss ... slower ... theeeeeer iiiisssss ... (there is this almost Listening during the theeeeere iiiiissss wording as you are sinkingthe attention towrds the PIA or outbreath connected with falling of the abdomen, your choice here).
 
So short session but paying more attaention to the sensate experience of the most obvious and investigate those preassures, sharp pains, pleasant tingelings, pins and needles, warmth, bubbly warmth , etc...
 
Here there REALLY is no rush at all. You are willingly letting many objects pass away without being noticed and that is fine but you do pay close attention to your favorite guest, that PIA or that preassure on the fingers from the ptayer beds or else.
 
What say you?
 

 
Practice log/April 19, 2020/seshin day 7/ sit 6/0:02:00/V-BBW/counterclockwise/end 8:04
 
notes: a bit of feedback from Papa Che, a suggestion or two--- fruits should be evident, for the most part in the report. Decided to bump the timer to 2 minutes, for this, as one of his most salient points was slowing the whole thing down to allow more room for sensate noting, and breath witnessing.
 
theeeerrreee iiissss iiiiin-breath, theeerrrre is a surprise of PIA on the same in-breath, warm and easy, like a hello, there is delight, there is excitement, there is with this gift of breath let me first love You, still on the in-breath, not in a hurry, it’s the world’s longest in-breath, time very slow and sort of irrelevant there major simultaneity, an extremely rapid if not chordal-simultaneity among the body, breath, and word elements of prayer, there is a bit of almost looking at the bottom of the breath, there is PIA, lovely and actually quite sharp, heightening with attention, playfully, flirting with pain even, but very very playful sense, there is no hurry, there is joy at the truth of that, theeerrre is iiiiinnnnn-breath, there is PIA and also, fleetingly, a sense of L-mudra touching the medallion, just a hint, but noticeable, notable, there is no fear, there is the breath at the bottom, therrrre is almost looking, there is an attention bounce into seeing, there is thrilling, a sense of thrill at the sense-mode shift, there is interest, there is PIA, attention still in seeing, the sensate element “distant,” somehow, like a bilocation, simultaneous but separate, if that makes sense, there is in-breath, there is patiently, there is the timer chiming.

 
 
 
Practice log/April 18, 2020/sesshin day 6/sit 5/0:05:08
 
notes: so i always begin with both mudra- hands on the rosary, thumb and forefinger of each on the medallion of the Mother of God, before any decades, on my rosary, and say the whole prayer through once. If i make it through the whole prayer, during any given sit, i then begin with single words: “with” first bead, first hand, repeated, “with”, first bead, second hand; “this,” second bead, first hand (i alternate directions on alternate sits, on a working hypothesis that it may work different sides of the brain depending on which hand leads.
 
So the farthest i’ve gotten so far this morning is 1) body (oh sacred PIA), 2) breath (still alive, by all signs), 3) word:“with this,” in my opening full prayer, at which time it’s off to the fucking races until i either remember, right i’m fucking WORKING HERE, this IS GOD SHIT, at which point it is 1) body (PIA feeling better, now that you mention it), 2) breath (i know it was there somewhere), 3) word, “with this, uh . . . now THERE’S AN INTERESTING INSIGHT YOU FUCKING GENIUS YOU!!! . . .
 
Papa Che, you may stop reading here. Go watch butterflies and ants with that four-year-old of yours, i’m going to ramble, speculate, preen, and gossip now, telling takes and spinning strands of horseshit like a web to catch the unwary and the lazy and the innocent for my ultimate engrandisement.
 
notes: before my abrupt forcing of the hand of the Lord to send me to purgatory, I had as most of you know been working with Papa Che on a vipassana style noting aloud technique, with close attention to easy pace, curiousity--- pure no hurry, no fear wonder--- combined with the most accurate phenomenological reporting possible in my primitive but growing vocabulary, working out a common vocabulary with anyone who could relate to what I was doing at all, and so evolving both the technique and the language in a sort of helix spiral, two strands developing in mutual feedback. I know he hates this shit, but working with Papa Che was really an experience of grace, and a taste of salvation. "Working with" is the key. It is beyond guru/teacher vocabulary. He made the first slowed-down noting aloud video with me in mind, out of what i could only recognize as love, and it revolutionized my practice at that point to such an intensity that I went WAY THE FUCK OFF THE DEEP END, and so had what we psychotics like to call "a learning experience." Which landed me, not in hell, according to all my established expectations, and for which I was actually as well-prepared for hell as I can be, by the ongoing fear of God and knowledge of His justice as well as His mercy, but in purgatory. “Purgatory” is Chris’s word, from yesterday to characterize my current status, which gave me unspeakable joy to hear: purgatory is not hell! I provoked justice time, and actually in a weird way welcomed it.
 
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Papa Che Dusko, modified 3 Years ago at 4/21/20 2:43 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/21/20 2:42 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Let me just mention that "There is" is Kenneth Folks method, or at least where I've hear it from first time and I liked it. Lots of stuff I suggest is basically from Kenneth. 

The latest stuff that Im mentioning is something more of what Im discovering, the matra-like noting aloud or coupling jhanic absorption and freestyle noting vipassana at the very same time. This I have experienced last year too during Dissolution only but now I see it with fresh eyes and something to develop further as it seems that both vipassana and jhana have their place on this Path. Striking balance between the two depending on the terrain.

Im glad those vids are of benefit mate!
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/21/20 4:53 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/21/20 4:51 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Papa Che Dusko:
Let me just mention that "There is" is Kenneth Folks method, or at least where I've hear it from first time and I liked it. Lots of stuff I suggest is basically from Kenneth. 


Do you think I've seemed to slight Kenneth, at this point? Through ignorance, obviously. But I feel like a bull in the china shop right now, and i would so appreciate more feedback. I may very well be deaf to things that I'm breaking. I don't want to break anything. I'm worried enough about this that i really am considering the hospital on a voluntary basis right now. Too many vague warnings, or maybe paranoias on my part. Be straight with me, mate.

The latest stuff that Im mentioning is something more of what Im discovering, the matra-like noting aloud or coupling jhanic absorption and freestyle noting vipassana at the very same time. This I have experienced last year too during Dissolution only but now I see it with fresh eyes and something to develop further as it seems that both vipassana and jhana have their place on this Path. Striking balance between the two depending on the terrain.

I am really trying for balance. Anything vipassana just really seems so volatile right now, but i have a sprouted seed in working with you and i am so grateful. I beg you, Papa, as an elder and as a friend, as a DhO vet and as a real vet, as a human being. How am i fucking up right now?


Im glad those vids are of benefit mate!

they help every time i watch them. they are just beautiful, a gift. Forgive me if i seem, uh, is "overgrateful" something?
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Papa Che Dusko, modified 3 Years ago at 4/21/20 5:26 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/21/20 5:25 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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My apologies Tim. I mentioned this not for you but for those who might think that I'm the one behind this approach/method. I don't want to take credit for it. Its Kenneth's. That's all. As this is a public forum many come here to read. 

Sorry for not being more specific. What I wrote was not really meant for you but for the public that might read this thread. emoticon 

I hope you are ok mate. It's all good. 
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 6:27 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 6:27 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Let me just mention that "There is" is Kenneth Folks method, or at least where I've hear it from first time and I liked it. Lots of stuff I suggest is basically from Kenneth. 

Kenneth Folk has taught, offered, and even created more meditation methods and theories than you can imagine. Some were great, some nonsensical, others somewhere in between. How long did you work with Kenneth, Papa? 
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 7:01 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Tim --

Are you still doing the exercise we talked about last week? "No" is a perfectly good answer. It's completely up to you.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 8:05 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Chris Marti:
Tim --

Are you still doing the exercise we talked about last week? "No" is a perfectly good answer. It's completely up to you.
I have a mixed practice right now, tilted conservatively toward staying off a locked ward if possible. In my practice log reports, "bbw" indicates my go-to time-tested body-breath-word prayer, which is probably 90% right now. The risky is that risky, highly energizing new-fangled "vipassana stuff.

My current vipassana-ish technique is exactly what you first prescribed me, i use left thumb against right forefinger, and blast through two minutes of what Papa Che and I are calling "Theeerrrrrreeee Iiiiissssss . . ." noting, realy really slow with plenty of time to sink into the depths of curiousity.

So, uhh, yes, to your question? Pretty much, and so far i can do it for about 2 minutes and 1 second WITHOUT COMPLETELY FUCKING CRACKING UP. Much. Kind of.
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 9:49 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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So, uhh, yes, to your question? Pretty much, and so far i can do it for about 2 minutes and 1 second WITHOUT COMPLETELY FUCKING CRACKING UP. Much. Kind of.

No expectations here, no pressure.
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Papa Che Dusko, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 8:24 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Worked with KF very short period from February to July last year. As I was unemployed for almost a decade I could only afford to pay 125 US Dollars once per month. 
Im really grateful for his presence and teaching during this time. It meant a world to me. It kept me going and the freestyle noting aloud paid off. 

We are all different personalities. You can find a perfect teaching and yet you meet that very teacher and you don't click with her/him. Then you find a teaching you don't really respect much but you click really well with that teacher and this brings fruit. 

Kenneth did throw at me some visualizations also but I ignored those and remained firm with noting aloud and loosely keeping eye off the cushion to the 6 Realms (urges leading towards certain realm). He suggested it's of great benefit to keep an eye on the mind and notice which realm is manifesting during the off cushion time. See it and decide not to commit to any other realm but Human (the 4 immeasurables). 
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 8:09 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Papa Che, welcome to the bar, and could you please see that Mr. Marti has some assistance getting home. He had about ten drinks before you got here--- all courtesy of that woman over there, by the way, the one eyeing you both like a hungry lioness--- and he is simply not fit to drive that earthly vehicle of his. He has been nailing the cessations in the formless realms nicely, however, and kept blurting out incomprehensible stuff about someone named NS. A lost love perhaps.
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Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 2:00 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 1:59 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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This incoherent mass of manic shit storm is simply for the akashic record. Like: there is . . . in-breath, there is . . . tweak in neck, lower and left, there is . . . manic shit storm. . . there is next thing.

so:


 
This may be the only place i ever do this, but since it all comes down to this single prayer right now, and this asshole with its gift and pain, and this breath which could stop at any moment and solve every problem, i wanted to be explicit about my prayer, my specific, evolutionary state of the art prayer, which had its seed in 1985, when i was banished from the most powerful deep-all-in community experience i’ve had until DhO. “Left the commune,” as they say. I ended up dark nighting something awful, and on days when i couldn’t conceive of a sentence or write a meaningful word, i used to sit for the whole designated four morning hours first thing of my writing time at stare at the blinking cursor on the screen of my word processing program (Word Perfect 4, i think, for techo-history wonk geeks in the audience; the commune used Apple stuff then and i was pissed at them). Being also the slave of the writerly puritan work ethic, as well as clearly Called by the Lord, on a Mission from God, like the Blues Brothers---
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mz9F_YmD6MU
 
--- to WRITE GREAT FUCKING NOVELS, it was clear that to write those great fucking novels i would have to get down words down first. So from the depths of dissolution or fear or misery or disgust, i would lift one finger on a journal page and type, one letter at a time, with whatever interval between letters proved necessary, usually finding a pace along the way---“and so, begin again--- with this breath”. (I had already done my zen rounds and my ashram rounds, and most of my mat time at that point was variations on watching my breath.) Over the years, this technique held up after cycles and cycles had pretty much obliterated everything else several time. Eventually i started adding the occasional praise to the mantra--- “no hurry,” was the first, “no fear,” came next: self-talk within the prayer on faith and what it took to type the next letter. Eventually, over the decades, through a tangled evolutionary bush of variants and periods and shit hitting fans and fans charging in to beat the shit out of shit, i arrived at a very stable prayer of thirteen distinct phrase/beats, which in times when i actually wrote it out in my journal at the worst of writer’s block/dark nighting, would look like this: “with this gift of prayer, let me first love You--- no hurry--- no fear--- patiently--- gratefully--- humbly--- attend--- abide--- accept--- embrace--- and not i--- You breathe--- Thy will be done.” I didn’t say amen, that fucked me up somehow. I think because i just went through so many times of hating every fucking syllable of every fucking thing, and those last two syllables just didn’t hold up through those, though the others did. Don’t get me wrong: this is not a I Never Wavered in MY Prayer thing. I’m just saying that as the dust settles around my now from this Most Recent Major Fuck-iup, So Much Like a Death, Except Still Painful, that is the prayer i find myself with, and to me it feels like it was first inscribed on a cave wall somewhere in Africa maybe 50 or 60,000 years ago and has been handed down from inscriber to inscriber unchanged every since.
 

 
Practice log/April 18, 2020/sesshin day 6/sit 3/0:05:06
 
third sit would “normally” be my last sit of the day, and at the point of The Fissure, it would have aiming at 0:43:21, after sit 1 (1:12:19) and 2 (0:58:58). Since over the last four years meditation and God shit and scripture shit have pretty much taken up the entirety of my consecrated over decades, fought for in every manner of circumstance again all possible odds, often defeated never stopped fighting, four or so hour sacred “Writing Time” ( i hear the groaning of a host of past lovers, friends, mentors, and merely curious people and innocent bystanders, as i write those words, which, to most of them, was a synonym for “We are about to have a fight to the death and this conversation may well end our relationship”)
 
manic sentence protocol, no reader is going to make it through that last one--- and so, begin again, with this breath---
 
usually by the third sit, when i go out for the cigarette afterward, the sky is lightening or even the sun is up, depending on the time of year, usually still dark after #3 until the spring time change). And here i am, at 5:27 local time, in deep deep atemporal doo-doo.

 
Practice log/April 17, 2020/sesshin day 6/sit 4/0:05:07
 
state of the art technical details, as best i’ve got it yet:
A. Apply: the proper email to respond to by best measures in any swamped in box will be 1) the most recent 2) email without either “re:” or “FW”.
B. Lather: if everyone could use “reply-all” for any input on this thread, it would be a great help to me, since i am trying to keep my full working burden of 50-plus-pounds-and-multiplying-exponentially of shit in one durable 25-pound sack.
C Rinse.
Repeat.
 
agnostic, Linda, i am delighted to introduce Sarah Elizabeth, a DoH newbie, but an old friend of mine from my days as a writing teacher. She knows all the dirt on why i no longer teach writing. I invited her to join the neurodivergent sesshin posse, and she was foolish enough to except. the rest, clearly, is her karma. Her sense of humor is slightly better than mine, and since her career is on the upslope, while mine long since zeroed out of its vertical dive in a pile of flaming rubble, now burned down to those ashes they bless and use to make crosses on the foreheads of Catholics on Ash Wednesday, she is also a better and more promising writer.
 
Sarah, agnostic does not actually exist as a self anymore, but he is willing to play along here. Linda is, just for openers, a well-known seeress and generally eerie new age witch/warlock/witchlock non-binary-gendered
 
(state of the art, direct from the uh, uh’s mouth: “any pronoun will do. I think a variation would delight me, but I don't know. I still haven't quite gotten used to "they", although that would probably be most correct (I sometimes refer to myself jokingly as the Polly Ester continuum). Thanks for caring! I don't have dysphoria. I just feel like the idea of me as a woman is incorrect, and it gets really awkward when people assign gendered expectations to me. In cases when people insist that I am a woman, or basically anything that I know I'm not, I sometimes feel gaslighted, and I really don't like that. 
There is a category called gendervague that was coined by neurodivergent non-binary people who did not fit into the available labels at the time. When I have to specify, I use that one. It is described as being at the intersection of neurodivergence and transgender. )”
 
autism spectrum neurodivergent who has Tourette’s syndrom and other conditions and has struggled her entire life to live in a world where simply saying one word about who s/he/they is/are results generally in a swift plunge into horror. She is thus a blessing on all people trying to reconcile themselves with a degree of self-knowledge that makes it clear to them that they really and truly ARE something(s) that pretty much everyone they meet will, upon hearing about it, tell them they are, to use the most common technical term, “fucked up.”
 
beverages are available at the free bar.
 
oh yeah, the meditation. It was lovely, thanks.
 
From: Polly-Ester Dessie-Belle Motvall <dessiebelle@hotmail.se>
Sent: Saturday, April 18, 2020 5:45 AM
To: Timothy F. Farrington <tim_farrington@msn.com>; agnostic <agnostic123@yahoo.com>
Subject: Sv: Practice log/April 18, 2020/sesshin day 6/sit 3/0:05:06
 
About that PIA... Have you ever tried sitting on a swimming ring? You know those who are filled with air and has a whole in the middle? That worked miracles for me whenever I had to sit up after giving birth. Just sayin’. Unless you really want to make the pain your meditation object; that could be fruitful too, of course. But there are alternatives, you know. 
 
I made it through that sentence, but then again, consider the source...
 
From: Polly-Ester Dessie-Belle Motvall <dessiebelle@hotmail.se>
Sent: Saturday, April 18, 2020 5:38 AM
To: Timothy F. Farrington <tim_farrington@msn.com>; agnostic <agnostic123@yahoo.com>
Subject: Sv: Practice log/April 18, 2020/sesshin day 6/sit 2/0:05:05
 
I like that. No hurry, no fear. I needed that. I have a writer’s block. I’m supposed to be writing a book about my research, and I keep falling back into avoidance behavior. It all seems so huge and endless, and it just keeps branching off. I have a tendency to think in many different directions rather than in a linear way, and language doesn’t quite resonate with that. Maybe this can help me. I really need to take it just one step at a time. 

 
Practice log/April 18, 2020/sesshin day 6/sit 5/0:05:08
 
since by the grace of God i appear to have fried everyone around me to a crisp and thus am ensconced in a feedback free realm of what i like to think of as “that completely quiet moment before i hear the sirens approaching from multiple directions and wonder if they are coming for me” a few notes on fine points of my peculiar prayer.
 
so in always begin on the medallion of the Mother of God, before any decades, on my rosary, and say the whole prayer through once. If i make it through the whole prayer, during any given sit, i then begin with single words: “with” first bead, first hand, repeated, “with”, first bead, second hand; “this,” second bead, first hand (i alternate directions on alternate sits, on a working hypothesis that it may work different sides of the brain depending on which hand leads.
 
So the farthest i’ve gotten so far this morning is 1) body (oh sacred PIA), 2) breath (still alive, by all signs), 3) word:“with this,” in my opening full prayer, at which time it’s off to the fucking races until i either remember, right i’m fucking WORKING HERE, this IS GOD SHIT, at which point it is 1) body (PIA feeling better, now that you mention it), 2) breath (i know it was there somewhere), 3) word, “with this, uh . . . now THERE’S AN INTERESTING INSIGHT YOU FUCKING GENIUS YOU!!! . . .
 
oops this just in---
 
Practice log/April 18, 2020/sesshin day 6/sit 6/0:05:09
 
since the silence before the cops is holding up well, and agnostic is at last report off making kissy-face with Papa Che on my tombstone thread in the DhO bardo, where i am a ghost by the grace of God and my sad early demise, or be assured i would be giving both those guys shit, a few more thoughts on the intricacies of this, the prayer that no one else will ever pray.
 
aside: i may actually have to stick with it, since when i do take people’s advice and try to apply it, and they witness the meditation-related-difficulties of my earnest efforts, they eventually are forced by simple prudence true senses of responsibility to all learning beings, and the natural desire to not get bomb splattered seeker’s-guys all over themselves, to tell me, that’s okay, man, just do what the fuck you want and stop giving me any credit whatsoever for this shit yhow you’ve got in progress here. . .
 
anyway, this last sit i realized: 1) i was wrong in my last post, i don’t know how to talk about this prayer after all, and may have been getting it wrong FOR AT LEAST TEN YEARS, since the actual prayer, as my body and fingers know perfectly well, is to run through the whole prayer first on the shield of the Mother of God, and then begin the letter decades with “w,” NOT ON THE FIRST BEAD BUT ON THE FUCKING MEDALLION< YOU FUCKING IDIOT.
 
I mean, thank God no one else will ever get that far with this technique, is what i meant to say.

 
 
will answer technical questions for cigarettes.
 
Practice log/April 18, 2020/sesshin day 6/sit 11/0:05:14
 
Funny story, with a nod toward how this big mania is playing out locally--- i went for a walk after the last round, out into a lovely rain, and i took with me a beautiful big fat bag of primo salt water taffy that DD, my youngest sister, had sent me from Florida for my birthday last march. It had just been sitting there, i can’t eat that stuff. So i grabbed the taffy and slipped by my neighbors’ place, Don and Selena, and they spotted me coming, and opened the dooor, Don Shirtless and seedy, Selena looking fine, a couple of mid-sixies-ish ex cops just retired (Don) or on the cusp of retirement (selena). I held up the bag and said either of you like this stuff? Selena said yes, i handed her the bag, we all waved, and i walked on done deal, no more fucking taffy guilt. 100 yards down the road, i had walked past the little communal general store/office, and Ray, one of the owners of the land here (i am technically a serf), came and and called me back and handed me a big bottle of mouthwash. I had gone in there a couple days ago looking for mouthwash, i’m out of the stuff and i don’t want four-year-old Hartley to be, uh, less than impressed by my breath when we violate the social distancing interval while playing. No mouthwash in the store, though; Ray had said he could order some and i said, naw, no big deal, i’ll get to the store soon enough. Then i blew my go-to-the-store window by getting myself time-outed, so no DhO AND no mouthwash, worst of all worlds. Rays hands me the stuff and I said, wow, thank you, put it on my tab (not a joke, i actually have a tab at the store). He said no, no, i just grabbed it on my way in to work this morning, with a couple other things. I said, So are you, a guy wearing a face mask and standing six feet away, trying to tell me i have bad breath, gently? We laughed. Up walks Davy, the grounds and maintenance guy. we all shoot the shit for a few minutes, then Davy grabs me and drags me off to his “office,” this little shack of a room full of equipment and such, where he takes his breaks and eats his meals. And he pulls out his fucking wallet--- he does this once in a while, he is a sweet young Christian kid, earneest and loving and good as gold at heart, and he doesn’t want me to be unable to buy cigarettes, which i apparently either joked about or bitched about at some time in the distant past. So now, he is unstoppable every so often, every month or two, maybe, and i try to accept the gifts with as good a grace as i can muster and not further embarrass either of us. Then we say love ya, love, and go on about our business. So i leave the house for a brief still to get rid of that fucking taffy and get a little wet air, and trudge home burdened with gifts.
Mania Mastery-Tim 2 Public Nuisance-Tim 0.
context, context, context, kids. Papa Che knows that my radio call sign is Whiskey Tango Foxtrot 1, aka WTF, after a former love of my life who used to say “WTF, TF?” My name is Timothy Fucking Farrington, so people sometimes call me TFF, except for those who know me only by my alias Tim Trouble-is-my-middle-name Farrington.
 
practice log/April 18, 2020/sesshin day 6/sit 12/0:05:15
 
practice log/April 18, 2020/sesshin day 6/sit 13/0:05:16
 
Practice log/April 18, 2020/sesshin day 6/sit 14/0:05:17

 
Practice log, rated "P" for practice-oriented, safe for even Papa Che to read
 
Practice log/April 19, 2020/sesshin day 7/sit 1/0:05:18
 
 
Practice log/April 19, 2020/sesshin day 7/ sit 7/0:05:20/BBW/clockwise/end 9:28pm
 
Papa Che, I am leaving you on this message even though the practice report is not rated PF. You know I love you, I know you are a grown-up and won’t read something you think it useless. Dog don’t eat what dog don’t like, as a writer friend of mine put it long ago. So no harm, no foul, if this is not your cup of tea for a while.
 
The bizarrely coded paractice log line may be roughly translated into a couple of salient facts: after a series of sits working with a blended technique with Papa Che, I have fallen back to the kind of pure body-breath-word prayer that just doesn’t much care about remembering details of the sit in any fine scale. It’s my native language prayer, not for Enlightenment or stream entry or anything, just because i am an embodied sense overwhelmed by my helplessness and Need God Bad, or at least need to get deep enough in my dukha to be gate, gate, gate, paragate, parasamghate, as close to annihilated as i can get, just to minimize the horror.
 
Second thing of note is the time stamp: i had a two hour nap earlier in the day, and went to bed at about 5pm local time to boot, early even for me, but pleased that i was so tired, as you sleep when you can get it in a mania. woke for the last time about an hour ago from a nasty vivid dream about a fraternity/sorority house, that fell apart after i saved the life of one of the members and walked her home, and they blamed the fall apart on me, and started trying to kill me. For four or five wakes, continuous action in the dream, before i finally got out of bed and basically treated this as a new morning, practice time, time to get to work..
 
 i had actually done a lot of grounding stuff through the afternoon. I had thought i would get to the store today, but finally remembered it was sunday. no bus, no trip. Instead, I called my sister Kati, my brother Danno, and and my Aunt Mary Ann, aka Sister Martine Ann, JMJ, a nun in her eighties who is my John of the Cross blood comrade (hellamercy is dedicated to her) and family gossip center, in a several hour sequence while sitting out of earshot of the community on the common gazebo by the waterwheel and fish pool, and not one of them worried a bit, they just thought I was loving and funny, calling appropriately on a sunday afternoon. Mania Mastery 3, Tim as Public Spectacle Leading to Homelessness and Incarceration, 0.
 
And even when i got up, 8:30ish maybe here, and went out for my first smoke, my neighbor Don happened to be out there, and we chatted. He gave me a sackful of plastic razors, and a towel--- he and his wife are going to move in a month or so and are clearing out there storage, and so i get first offer on everything that would go to the thrift store, which saves me a later trip to the thrift store to but it. They are fucking showering me with gifts, most of which i don’t need or want and am able to cheerfully no no thank you, but i few which really are sort of great. Sarah knows this about giving me gifts, what a pissant i can be, and how every once in a while i am prostrate with gratitude. What a wanker i am. Still, considering i was in a near panic about this sleep shit, i rate the exchange in the dark with don a win: Mania Mastery 4, Taving Maniac Running Through the Night Screaming Warnings, 0.
 
So that’s the status, a new day in the sesshin, but this weird morning-in the-late-night-of-the-last damned day is fucking up my OCD meditation journaling. If that is my worst problem in what is now an official “mixed episode” of depression and mania, with the DK elements coming in strong, i can do this thing in sirsasana.
 
love, t
 

 
Practice log/April 19, 2020/sesshin day 7/ sit 8/0:05:21/end 10:26pm
 
Practice log/April 19, 2020/sesshin day 7/ sit 9/0:05:22/end 10:56pm
 
fear stage of dark night, and realizing that while the Psalms hold up: “What time I am afraid, I will trust in Thee,” and “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” for me, there is also the fear of those i love and those who love me. Mania and depression scare people, not just the strangers who call the cops eventually, but the loved ones wondering whether they should call the cops, or an ambulance. So two jobs, here in the fear bardo: trust God for me, and don’t scare anyone if i can help it. Since everyone on this posse here is in Europe except Sarah, this is actually a pretty safe place to be as nuts as i actually am right now. The Atlantic Ocean is a nice margin for error.
 
Practice log/April 19, 2020/sesshin day 7/ sit 10/0:05:23/end 11:15pm
 
going to the Psalms now, at crunch time, i realize that one aspect of “fruition” within a given tradition is when the all-in practicioner comes to see that every word--- in Judeo-Christianity, every letter, even, every serif and comma and accent mark--- every word of Scripture is true, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. That’s how Daniel did it: he took his scriptures absolutely literally and worked his ass off to understand what they really meant, to him, the pragmatic Dharma in our time and in his experience. It’s how everyone does it; no one does this in a vacuum. And if they do, God bless them. But then who can they quote to make a point to their comrades? As I said, before I was no more . . . Agnostic, could be a good gig for you, actually, lol.
 
Practice log/April 19. 2020/sesshin day 7/sit 11/0:05:24/end 11:45pm
 
Practice log/April 19. 2020/sesshin day 7/ sit 12/0:05:25/end 11:58pm
 
“I call to remembrance my song in the night: I commune with mine own heart: and my spirit made diligent search.” Ps 77:6
 
“He hath led me, and brought me into darkness, but not into light.”
Lamentations 3:2
 
Practice log/sesshin day 8/ sit 1/0:05:27/end 12:17am
 
body beat to shit; mania is a bitch. breath rises, breath falls, and not i, but You breathe.
 
“And Thou hast removed my soul far off from peace: I forgot the good*.”
Lamentations 3:17
 
* the hebrew here for “good” is: טוֹב , towb. The word makes it’s first appearance in the Bible at Genesis 1:4: “And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.” 
 
 
Practice log/sesshin day 8/ sit 2/0:05:28/end 12:49am
 
“And I said, ‘My strength and my hope is perished from the Lord.”
Lamentations 3:18
 
Practice log/sesshin day 8sit 3/0:05:29/end 1:15am
 
“remembering mine affliction and my misery, the wormwood and the gall.
My Soul hath them still in remembrance, and is humbled in me.”
Lamentations 3:19-20
 
Practice log/sesshin day 8/ sit 4/0:05:30/end 1:54am
 
 
 
Practice log/sesshin day 8/ sit 5/0:05:31/end 2:09am
 
“This I recall to my mind*, there for have I hope**.”
Lamentations 3:21
 
* the hebrew here is לִבִּ֖י leb, which is actually “heart,” in the vast Biblical sense of the word.
** יָחַל yachal, which means both “to hope” and “to wait”: to wait on the Lord is to hope in the Lord, and to hope in God is to wait patiently on God.
 
 
 
Practice log/sesshin day 8/ sit 6/0:05:32/end 2:33am
 
“It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not.”
Lamentations 3:22
 
 
 
Practice log/sesshin day 8/ sit 7/0:05:33/end 5:25am
 
the key to a genuine dark night is the skin-in-the-game element of total danger: danger of loss of faith, loss of sanity, loss of life (suicide). Nothing else counts, in my view, and anyone claiming otherwise just cheapens the term. I think the use of “dark night” by anyone beyond stream entry is bullshit-false, linguistically. You may cycle through the dukha nanas, fine, papa che did it a few days ago, we saw him, literally in reobservation. but he was not in a dark night. THIS is a dark night, you enightened, language-devaluing motherfucking enlightened shit sacks. I am in serious fucking danger to my sanity, to my freedom, i am risking homelessness, etc. You fuckers in your “dark nights” are rich people in a poor person’s shirt, as The Boss sang somewhere.
Fuck you, fuck your advice. This prayer I pray is what keeps me alive, my faith, my sanity, and my life.
 
6:ooam [[The mania watch party Administrator has determined that Tim Farrington's last post violated the letter and spirit of the party, and constitutes a grievous "pooping of the party." He is therefore now in a time-out, duration to be determined by the brilliance of his peers.]]
 
Practice log/sesshin day 8/ sit 8/0:05:34/end 6:17am
 
Practice log/sesshin day 8/ sit 9/0:05:35/end 6:54am
 
Practice log/sesshin day 8/sit 10/0:05:36/end 7:24am
 
Practice log/sesshin day 8/sit 11/0:05:37/end 7:46am
 
Practice log/sesshin day 8/sit 12/0:05:38/end 8:14am
 
i had a good day, went out into the rain and onto the bus and finally got a big round of errands and shopping done, came home and did a few rounds of more sits,
 
Practice log/sesshin day 8/sit 13/0:05:39/end 12:20pm
 
Practice log/sesshin day 8/sit 14/0:05:40/end 12:38pm
 
ate a supper circa 3pm ( actually very normal for me, though it felt bizarre to do something at the "usual" time), and fell asleep by 4pm, which is crazy early by any standard. Popped up just now, 8pm-ish, U.S. east coast time, and am sort of hoping I can fall back asleep. If not, i'll try a round by round of sits. Eat when hungry, sleep when tired, right? Isn't that a zen thing? Sit when in danger of wandering the streets foaming at the mouth. Also a zen thing, I believe. It's been so long, with that stuff, it's a little hazy.
 
Practice log/sesshin day 8/sit 15/0:05:41/end 9:04pm*
 
 
*a funny one, my volume control had gotten muted somehow, and i probably actually went about 10 or 15 minutes before i snuck a peek at the silenced timer and discovered it at 0.
 
Practice log/sesshin day 8/sit 16/0:05:42/end 9:29pm
 
and so, to sleep.
 
Practice log/sesshin day 9/sit 1/0:05:43/end 12:21am
 
i wrote 0:05:43 on the time of sit, but i actually did an experiment and just let my own sit # 1 timer run, set at the now hilarious 1:12:19, out of curiousity, kind of taking my meditation blood pressure. And i went 0:06:20 and Had To Leap Up Due To the Excitement of It All. Close enough for government work, as my father used to say, with the implicit combat Marine’s contempt for the efficacy of and efficiency of what he thought of as federally organized cluster fucks. This cluster fuck is well within the margin for error.
 
this was a normal wake-up for me, in the sense of happening in the wee hours and being characterized by a strong desire to Just Get To Work, my mind active and me knowing how bad my active mind can kick my ass and get me in trouble unless it receives it strong dosage of attention. People asking “why bother to meditate if it takes forever to become a Buddha?”, take note: it just takes getting out of bed and getting to practice to more or less immediately become less of a danger to yourself or others.
 
One very funny thing: i’ve been in sleep when tired, wake when woke for several days now more radically than “usual”, and one thing i do right now is check my email immediately for fun and love coming in. And in several of the most unlikely hours, there have been very simple messages from agnostic, like “You ok?” in the subject line, so message. The first time it happened i was awake at a freakishly weird hour for me (it was around 10pm--- i go to sleep normally at around 6pm and wake normally around 2 am, so 10pm is basically the only time i am more or less certain of being asleep). And agnostic’s message had come in just minutes earlier. i may have joked him that it woke me up. It has happened like that at least one other time since, coming out of a nap. His message from last night came in around 10pm too, and he said something like “I won’t send this in case it wakes you up. woops,” acknowledging the slightly uncanny phenomenon. This one didn’t wake me up though, so he’s off the hook, i slept right through it for two full hours. This wake-up is just within the old norm’s plus or minus. Therefore i made the pot of coffee, smoked the cigarette, and Just Got To It.
 
 
Practice log/sesshin day 9/sit 2/0:05:45/end 12:54
 
i tried to log in to DhO both immediately after midnight, east coast US time, and just now, just after 1am, midnight in the time zone the site seems to use. Still blocked. Chris said “tomorrow morning,” but it IS tomorrow morning now everyhwre relvant, and i am still banished and jesus fucking christ have i got a lot to say to agnostic, for starters, and and and and. Am surrendered to the apparent fact that what Chris may have meant was “on the morning of 4/21/2020, after i get up and have a sit and make sure the site hasn’t burned down overnight and take care of the normal pressing business, i have your reincarnation on my to-do list, or at least on a post-it note stuck here near my to-do list.” Love, you, Moderator, Sir. Law is our main defense as a society against the rule of force and violence. Whenever you get to it, it’s close enough for government work.
 
 
Practice log/sesshin day 9/sit 3/0:05:45/end 1:20am
 
Smiling Stone: Hey Tim, I forgot to say I love your prayer. It's really got that far out twisted feel of the Esychasm (if I remember right, the Jesus prayer as mantra on the orthodox side of the catholics. I think the jesuits use it as well...
 
TF: I LOVE the heyschasts, and have spent a hilarious amount of time on them. "Word" is anatta, in my practice, as I work to speak Buddhist on DhO, the necessity of not-self, but it is more deeply for me the rock that is higher than "I", the teknos of technique, the logos of the spiritual logic, in all its forms. In my native tradition, it is the word of God, and i use it in a fashion that is frankly mantra-like, despite the handwringing of many in the theistic traditions. (cf. the godawful assaults on the Centering Prayer movement for practicing something like the kind of heyschasm that goes back to the desert monks in the centuries after Jesus and lives on in robust fashion in the Eastern Orthodoxy.)
 
fun side note: I've been reading lately about the history of a quasi-heretical use of the simplest repetition of the Name of the Lord in classic heyschast fashion, among the monks on Mt. Athos. At some point, some well-meaning devotee wrote a little tract that said the technique was so great that he saw it that the Name of God WAS God, so simply to invoke the Name was to be present to the Highest. Complications ensued, "the Name is God" proved to be a real fire-starter technique for a bunch of monks, to such a point that the monks who thought it was heresy, in that formulation, started fighting with the ones who were lit up with the technique's success in their own practice. It got to the point at which the Greek government felt they couldn't let it go on without intervention on Mt. Athos, an island left alone to its own monastic devices for hundreds of years at that point. The Tsar';s government, to forestall Greece taking over what was viewed as actually Russian territory, forestalled the Greek intervention and sent destroyers. The "Name of God is God" monks barricaded themselves in several monastaries, troops landed and blew them all out into the open with fire hoses, and scattered the heretics to various corners of Russia to scatter the problem, while the Metropole worked out whether that Name shit was a heresy or not. WW 1 broke out before the issue was settled, and the occasional Name fight still breaks out today, though no destroyers have had to be sent in recently.
 
[[some shameless wiki-lifting here, The origin of the term hesychasmos, and of the related terms hesychastes, hesychia and hesychazo, is not entirely certain. According to the entries in Lampe's A Patristic Greek Lexicon, the basic terms hesychia and hesychazo appear as early as the 4th century in such fathers as St John Chrysostom and the Cappadocians. The terms also appear in the same period in Evagrius Pontikos (c. 345 – 399), who although he is writing in Egypt is out of the circle of the Cappadocians, and in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers.]]
 
and me now, again, steeped in: Gregory of Nyssa (Life of Moses is awesome, your mind will blow), Gregory of Nazianzus, Evagrius, St. Isaac of Syria, St. Simeon the New Theologian, the Orthodox anthology from the Philokalia, “The Art of Prayer,” which has a Jesus Prayer section and lots of fiery gems from the Abbas of the desert, John of Sinai’s Ladder of Divine Ascent, which our DhO map-happy crowd would love if i could correlate it with the stages of insight (any minute now, it’s on my to-do list and before the Bar(do) closes down, i will get to it)
 
I mean, i had bets down, i was all in with Gregory Palamos during the fourteenth-century fights about heyschasm. I was rooting for the home team. I love this shit.
 
 thanks for setting off another round of mania by the way, Stoner. I bow at your drunken lotus-puffing feet.
 
Practice log/sesshin day 9/sit 4/0:05:46/end 2:03am
 
“Nothing is so strong as desperation. It knows no defeat at the hand of any, whether on the right hand or the left. When someone has cut off in his mind all hope of life, no one is more daring than he/she; no foe can face him/her, no rumors of affliction can weaken her/his pirpose, for every affliction which may come is less than death, for she/he has resolved to accept death for her/himself.”
St. Isaac of Syria (7th century)
 
Those who speak stages of insight will easily recognize Desire for Deliverance in this quote from a 7th century Syrian, from the silence of his reclusive monastic cell: 3rd vipassana jhana, ṅ9, DfD. This is a place that i think every tradition will recognize, the point of the zen story of the roshi holding the student’s dead under water after he asked about enlightenment (not until you want it as bad as you wanted to breath) (Roshi-san, I bow to your strong wisdom, but I am afraid you have given me meditation-related difficulties and spiritual PTSD).
 
I’ve sometimes thought this goes down to information theory--- nothing, nada, zip, zilch desire for anyfuckingthing, better zero than the shit i know and am and ever will be. 0 0 0 0 . . . and 1, somehow, something: something “noatble,” something noting, in spite of all that 0, as 1. That’s all it takes to make a universe: as much 0 as any sunyata junkie could want, and the occasional, every eon or so, say, 1 that a noting meditation will see or feel. So you generate a number of increasing precision, in DfD: 000000000010000000000000001000000001. . . There’s a snippet of the whole fucking code in one glorious universal binary number, the basis of physics, the solution to quantum gravity. Apply, lather into 1, rinse into 0, repeat. We don’t need your stinkin atom-crashers and your billion dollar budgets, we’re working here in the void from which arises the quantum foam, pre-Planck length, pre-Planck-constant intervals of “time.” All I want for Christmas is real zero. That 1, though, is just undeniable.
 
Practice log/sesshin day 9/sit 5/0:05/47/end 2:43am
 
Lamentations 3:19-20=Knowledge of Re-observation=(n10, Re-obs), 3rd vipassana jhana
 
“Remebering mine affliction and my misery, the wormwood and the gall.
“My soul hath them still in remembrance, and is humbled in me.”
Lamentations 3: 19-20
 
I mean, DUH! Humbled, motherfucker.
 
The Hebrew here is  שׁ֫וּחַ shuach, to sink, literally or figuratively, and so to bow down, incline, humble My soul is sunk, literally, and i know it, by the grace of God.
 
 
Practice log/sesshin day 9/sit 6/0:05:48/end 3:29am
 
Bernadette Roberts + a fatal dose of John of the Cross=Equanimity=EQ=4th vipassana jhana, n11
 
and this, from St. Bernadette Roberts, a contemporary Christian contemplative and one ornery woman, who died just a few years ago, God bless her, and who once, in a letter, tore me a giant new asshole on the issue of meditation and medication, dark night and depression. But that’s another story.
 
This, from her Path to No-Self:
 
When all aspects of the self are in silence, but before reaching the full unitive state, we may come upon a mysterious plateau of silence, a plateau that may be cause for aome concern. Once we have been lured into silence by the infusion of joy and love, all such infusions come to an end, and we are left in silence, wherein there seems to be No God, no self--- nothing but silence itself. After abandoning all to God, we seem abandoned by God, and although there is no anxiety or pain, there is the temptation to move out of this silence, which means moving back into our old frustrations. Right here we seem to have come to a dead end,; we are trapped because we cannot go backward and do not see the way forward. This is a crucial point in the unitive movement. But it becomes a problem only if we make it one, which we can do from sheer ignorance. I know, because I did. Nevertheless, we are standing at the gateway to the very peak of the unitive life.
 
. . . This plateau is actually our time of becoming rooted in silence, rooted until this silence becomes the deeoest, most stable habit of the soul, the deepest aspect of our existence. This plateau is the test of passivity, abandonment, and trust, and it may be a helpful deterrent to look back on the pain and frustration [[editor/translator’s note: cf. Re-observation!]] we encountered when moving out of this silence. We have been too burnt to move, learned too well the lesson: of ourselves, we can do nothing. The only choice is to remain patient, silent, and to be resigned to this state as long as God wills.
 
and this, from John of the Cross, The Living Flame of Love, stanza 3, 33-37:
 
[[FDA note: It has been determined that excessive doses of John of the Cross may be harmful to pretty much anyway. The following passages exceed the RDA by an amount that is beyond measure. DhO is not responsible for any side effects, should anyone chose to read on beyond the first sentence, which is a strong, but safe dose.]]
 
33. Hence persons at this time should be guided in a manner entirely contrary to the former. If, prior to this, directors suggested matter for meditation and these individuals meditated, now this matter should instead be withheld and they should not meditate. For, as I say, they are unable to do so even though they may want to; and were they to try they would be distracted instead of recollected. If previously they sought satisfaction, love, and devotion, and found it, now they should neither desire nor seek it; for not only do they fail to procure it through their own diligence but, on the contrary, they procure dryness. Through the activity they desire to carry on with the senses, they divert themselves from the peaceful and quiet good secretly being given to their spirit. In losing one good they do not gain the other, for these goods are no longer accorded through the senses as before.
Therefore directors should not impose meditation on persons in this state, nor should they oblige them to make acts or strive for satisfaction and fervor. Such activity would place an obstacle in the path of the principal agent who, as I say, is God, who secretly and quietly inserts in the soul loving wisdom and knowledge, without specified acts; although sometimes he makes specific ones in the soul for a certain length of time. Thus individuals also should proceed only with a loving attention to God, without making specific acts. They should conduct themselves passively, as we have said, without efforts of their own but with the simple, loving awareness, as when opening one's eyes with loving attention.
34. Since God, then, as the giver communes with individuals through a simple, loving knowledge, they also, as the receivers, commune with God through a simple and loving knowledge or attention, so knowledge is thus joined with knowledge and love with love. The receiver should act according to the mode of what is received, and not otherwise, in order to receive and keep it in the way it is given. For as the philosophers say: Whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver.
It is obvious that if persons do not lay aside their natural active mode, they will not receive that good except in a natural mode; thus they will not receive it, but will remain only with their natural act. For the supernatural does not fit into the natural mode, nor does it have anything to do with it. If individuals should, then, desire to act on their own through an attitude different from the passive loving attention we mentioned, in which they would remain very passive and tranquil without making any act unless God would unite himself with them in some act, they would utterly hinder the goods God communicates supernaturally to them in the loving knowledge. This loving knowledge is communicated in the beginning through the exercise of interior purgation, in which the individual suffers, as we said, and afterward in the delight of love.
If as I say - and it is true - this loving knowledge is received passively in the soul according to the supernatural mode of God, and not according to the natural mode of the soul, individuals, if they want to receive it, should be very annihilated in their natural operations, unhampered, idle, quiet, peaceful, and serene, according to the mode of God. The more the air is cleansed of vapors and the quieter and more simple it is, the more the sun illumines and warms it. A person should not bear attachment to anything, neither to the practice of meditation nor to any savor, whether sensory or spiritual, nor to any other apprehensions. Individuals should be very free and annihilated regarding all things, because any thought or discursive reflection or satisfaction on which they may want to lean would impede and disquiet them and make noise in the profound silence of their senses and their spirit, which they possess for the sake of this deep and delicate listening. God speaks to the heart in this solitude, which he mentioned in Hosea [Hos. 2:14], in supreme peace and tranquility while the soul listens, like David, to what the Lord God speaks to it [Ps. 85:8], for he speaks this peace in this solitude.
 
35. When it happens, therefore, that souls are conscious in this manner of being placed in solitude and in the state of listening, they should even forget the practice of loving attentiveness I mentioned so as to remain free for what the Lord then desires of them. They should make use of that loving awareness only when they do not feel themselves placed in this solitude or inner idleness or oblivion or spiritual listening. So they may recognize it, it always comes to pass with a certain peace and calm and inward absorption.
36. Once individuals have begun to enter this simple and idle state of contemplation that comes about when they can no longer meditate, they should not at any time or season engage in meditations or look for support in spiritual savor or satisfaction, but stand upright on their own feet with their spirit completely detached from everything, as Habakkuk declared he was obliged to do in order to hear what God spoke to him: I will stand on my watch and fix my foot upon my fortress, and I will contemplate what is said to me [Hb. 2:1]. This is like saying: I will raise my mind above all activity and knowledge belonging to my senses and what they can retain, leaving all below, and will fix the foot of the fortress (my faculties), not allowing these faculties to advance a step as regards their own operation that they may receive through contemplation what God communicates to me; for we have already asserted that pure contemplation lies in receiving.
37. It is impossible for this highest wisdom and language of God, which is contemplation, to be received in anything less than a spirit that is silent and detached from discursive knowledge and gratification. Isaiah speaks of it in these words: Whom will he teach knowledge and whom will God make understand the hearing? And Isaiah replies: Those that are weaned from the milk (that is from satisfaction) and drawn away from the breasts (from particular knowledge and apprehensions) [Is. 28:9].
 
 
Practice log/sesshin day 9/sit 7/0:05:49/end 4:00am
 
Practice log/sesshin day 9/sit 8/0:05:50/end 4:42am
 
Bernadette Roberts and John of the Cross=Knowledge of Conformity (n 12), Change of Lineage (n13), and Path (n14), 4th vipassana jhana
 
Daniel says, in MCBT2, “Conformity means that we suddenly flash onto a way of perceiving the whole of our experiential reality completely, directly, and perfectly clearly. This stage lasts only one moment and never recurs until we attain the next stage of enlightenment. The same is true of the following two stages. Stages 12 through fourteen (Conformity, Change of Lineage, and Path) are the three moments of the first entrance to transcendent ultimate reality (stage 15, or Fruition) through one of the three doors.”
 
Bernadette Roberts, in Path to No-self, is also very clear on this moment, and she uses John of the Cross’s Spiritual Canticle to make her points here. This phase here corresponds to stanzas 38-39, of which she says, “Stanzas 38 and 39, which i have been referring to, are descriptions of transient experiences. In part, their importance is to set off by sheer contrast those elements in the unitive life that are still wanting and imperfect; also, they act as indicators of a future state.”
 
 
Roberts’s entire discussion of union is done, for the map-happy among us, very nicely through a progression of the stanzas of John’s poem “The Spiritual Canticle” and his exegesis of the stanzas, as his method is. I’ve been working on mapping that poem into DoH vernacular for 9 years now
 
cf. https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/16761328
and https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/19272318
 
and never got farther than stanza 22, but Roberts takes it all the way. And then beyond, but that is also a story for another time.
 
Anyway: She says, in Path to No-self:
“This new direction is verified in stanza 38, where we are told that the soul’s two great desires at this time are: to receive “essential glory”--- that is, to see God face-to-face--- and to give love. He explains why, at this point, the desire to give is greater than the desire to receive:
 
John X, here:
Just as the untimate reason for everything is love (which is seated in the will), whose property is to give and not to receive, whereas the property of the intellect (which is the subject of the essential glory) lies in receiving and not giving, the soul in the inebriation of love does not put first the glory she will receive from God, but rather puts first the surrender of herself to Him through true love, without concern for her own profit.
 
Roberts goes on: Since the vision, which presupposes the fullness of love, can be received only in the next life, the soul’s first desire is to give love. Thus giving, or love, takes precedence in the unitive state, just as vision or receiving takes precedence in the next state--- the state beyond union.
 
So Bernadette says 2 stages/stanzas here, Daniel says three. I don’t know anything except that it took me three sits and a mania just to transcribe the sheer minimum of the roughest draft of a correlation between these two spiritual masters, each the state of the art in their tradition, each using the scriptures they have digested into bodily reality and the new notes of their personal styles, and so in turn becoming scripture for those after them (I consider Bernadette Roberts and John of the CRoss, even more than the Bible, which i only really went o because of them, to be my primary scriptures for the past 35 years, and Daniel’s MCBT2 to be the scripture that has allowed me a toe in the water of Buddhism and given me the courage to putter around with these translations, renderings, attempts at cross-mapping, etc.
 
 
Practice log/sesshin day 9/sit 9/0:05:51/end 5:27am
 
John X and B Roberts=Fruition, n15, 4th vipassana jhana
 
D`aniel, briefly: Fruition (phala in Pali) is the fruit of all the meditator’s hard work, the first attainment of ultimate reality, emptiness, nirvana, nibbana, ultimate potential, or whatever extrapolative and relatively inaccurate name you wish to call something utterly non-sensate.
 
Roberts’s discussion of what the John X lineage would call, speaking in perfect Orthodoxy “union with God by participation,”
 
[parenthetical aside that threatened to get way out of hand:] ---“by participation” to avoid being imprisoned or killed for the “I am God” heresy, which got any numbers of less cautious or more defiant or just plain fucking nuts (think agnostic; think me, on a bad day) burned at the stake or thrown into dungeons to die in the rat-infested dark. Hallaj, a sufi, is revered by Islamic mystics for insisting “I am God,” and being executed for heresy, but the Sufis who cite him---Rumi, frequently does--- do usually say it in a finely nuanced way that will keep them just short of that, as Meister Eckhart lived to argue his case for God’s nothingness before the heresy judges, the canny SOB, while his contemporary Margreet Porete, a merely crazy Beguine laywoman with more balls than the whole bunch, insisted on not just saying the same damn thing, but publishing a book about it, and so had to be burned at the stake in downtown Paris. But don’t get me started here on politics, w’re here about Conformity--- where was i, oh yeah---
 
which I will risk the stake by usually using the shorthand of “union,” in Judeo-Christian-Islamic language,
 
is in her remarks on stanza 40 of John X’s Spiritual Canticle. She also points the way beyond John X here, at which every person on DhO would go, Well, yeah, DUH, but SHE IS THE ONLY CREDIBLE (to me, obviously, goes without saying) PERSON IN THE ENTIRE CHRISTIAN MYSTICAL TRADITION WHO HAS THE BALLS, CHOPS, AND ACTUAL LIVED EXPERIENCE TO DO THIS.
 
here’s her stuff, using my cut-precious-books-to-pieces-rather-than-type-all-that-shit siddi:
 
Path, pp. 109-111
 
lovely walk, sun not yet up, but the cloudless eastern sky silver and bright, shading off into darker blues and purples to the west.
 
Practice log/sesshin day 9/sit 10/0:05:52/end 6:31am
 
Practice log/sesshin day 9/sit 11/0:05:53/end 7:03am
 
a bit of breakfast, and reincarnation on DhO! I’m have acquired the new siddi of using music from YouTube as an emoji! Honors ever to the Master of Smileys, Sri Papa Che. ;D
 
 
Practice log/sesshin day 9/sit 12/0:05:54/end 8:46am
 
Practice log/sesshin day 9/sit 13/0:05:55/end 9:35am
 
Practice log/sesshin day 9/sit 14/0:05:56/end 10:06am
 
Practice log/sesshin day 9/sit 15/0:05:57/end 10:26am
 
Practice log/sesshin day 9/sit 17/0:05:59/end 12:31pm
 
PF Practice log/sesshin day 9/sit 18/0:02:01/”theeers isss”/ end 1:06 pm
 
note: working with left thumb against right forefinger. re-watched the video first, ready for this short shower.
 
Theeerrrre isss . . . sinking, sinking, curiousity, alertness, there is PIA, overwhelming sensate . . .Therrrrre isss . . .in-breath, rising . . . there is sinking, looking, therrre is hearing, a heartbeat, not feeling it, hearing it . . .  in my ears, i left the headphones on after watching the video, lol . . . there iss . . . looking, sinking, looking for where the thumb and finger meet, a slight jerk as the thumb moves to generate sensation . . . there is . . . FUCKING THUNDER, IT’S THE TIMER CHIME IN THE HEADPHONES.
 
there is deafness, lol.
 
i could go three next time.
 
Practice log/sesshin day 9/ sit 18/0:02:01/”theeers isss”/ end 1:06 pm
 
Practice log/sesshin day 9/ sit 19/0:06:00/bbw/end 7:11pm
 
that’s it, this shit is up to date in the Bar(do). thank you, and we’ll be here all wekk. Tip your bartenders and waietpeople. love, t
 
 
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 3:08 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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April 22, 2020/sesshin day 10/sit 1/0:04:19/bbw/end 3:55am

first sit of the day, and i didn’t make it to the full time, so still very manic-energy. This is probably a re-start point, in a lot of ways: here in
the Bar of Last Resort, where i can labor in near perfect obscurity until all beings are saved, “me” last. and do my utmost to not be a danger, or even an annoyance, to myself or others. Being in DhO keeps me off the real streets, where my previous manias have culminated in involuntary psychiatric confinement. Being in the Bar keeps me “off the streets” of DhO, where i have been a fucking brass band at every zendo in town. but here, i can just bury my own priceless bullshit beneath more piles of worthless wisdom, and until the moderator feels that i am a festering sore on the body of DhO, no harm, no foul.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 3:32 AM
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April 22, 2020/sesshin day 10/sit 2/0:04:26/bbw/end 4:17am

 I have been treating DhO, during this mania, as a beautiful
alternative to hospitalization or muffling antipsychotic drugs. It has been my
online version of a locked ward. But now i understand that even locked wards online
have their own ethos and etiquette. I learned that early, in the real wards
too.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 3:49 AM
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April 22, 2020/sesshin day 10/sit 3/0:03:41/bbw/end 4:40am

How anyone can question the efficacy of meditative practice is beyond me.

But of course,  i
am, quite literally, insane. My three minute and 40 second sit keeps me off the street right now, for the whole 3:41. That is better that stream entry. That is survival.

 I talked to my nephew via IM tonight--- he is a blues musician and did a live show from his garage on facebook, and it is a benefit of mania
that i was up at an hour to watch it live. We talked afterward, and he was telling me a deeper level on the story of his first-born child, a boy, who died of SIDS, in his arms, while he was asleep, years ago. He said to me tonight, “The last thing he heard was my heartbeat.” 

How can anyone live, without meditation, when your heart can explode like that in a second?
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 4:29 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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April 22, 2020/sesshin day 10/sit 4/0:03:41/bbw/end 4:56am

 don’t bring your gems here, kids.
they’ll settle on the sawdust floor
of the Bar of Last Resort,
with everything elsethat is made to become dust. 

April 22, 2020/sesshin day 10/sit 5/0:02:44/bbw/end 5:17am

 Apologies in full and heartfelt thanks
to all my teachers now.
You could have taken me all the way
to where the arhants play
without rebirth.
I coulda been a contenduh.
I could been Somebody,
Nobody, four paths on.
Instead i’m just another drunk,
here at the Bar of Last Resort,
where only the jukeboxplays without suffering.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 4:59 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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And fuck that guy you never were
and fuck the horse he never had to ride.
I’m walking all the way
carrying this flaming cross
up the hill and past the ones i grieve

to the toilet in the Bar of Last Resort
to piss away yet another drink of shame. 

* * *

It’s just a matter of time
before some upright citizen
concerned for the good of all
calls the cops on me
for one good reason or another.

It’s just a matter of time
before i gently tryto explain again
that it’s all a joke
and the joke’s on me.

It’s just a matter of time
before some beautiful cop
has to tell me yet again,
that shit’s not funny, man.
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sarah elizabeth, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 5:13 AM
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Oh, that shit's funny. They just have never, ever  gotten your humor.  
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 5:23 AM
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Sarah Elizabeth, what's a sweetheart like you doin' in a dump like this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpRKstHl7Y0
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 5:10 AM
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April 22, 2020/sesshin day 10/sit 6/0:02:18/bbw/end 5:44am

Right now somewhere
some poor kid
sees a giant eye
open out of a fight
between strangers
and yanks away in fear
that he has sat his way
into insanity.

What can I say?
I was insane by birth
before i ever sat a moment.

Have one on me, beloved soul.
I’m crazier than you will ever know.

* * *

When i left my clothes
in separate heaps
on the path of stone
in the killing heat
that led to the empty cross
i filled,
to the horror of the pilgrims
gathered there below,
it still had not occurred to me,
feeling then that there could be no possible return
from this,
that there had never
been any getting away.

Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 5:36 AM
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April 22, 2020/sesshin day 10/sit 7/0:02:37/bbw/ end 6:31am

Enough of the earnest warnings
of pain to come and imminent decay,
Enough of the magic pills
and interventions
that will save the day.
The night has had its way
with me, and tomorrow
is another day
in which the God without relent
will shower mercy
into this horrific flame.
The sun will rise again
and they will say,
It's Wednesday, here
where no one has their way.
.
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sarah elizabeth, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 5:58 AM
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I'm here for the cut glass & fireproof floors.  Obv. 
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 6:03 AM
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aisle 3, ma'am.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 6:24 AM
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they serve the drinks like rosary beads,
and prayer by prayer
i drink my way
through the countless days
and the single night.
 
This drink is the prayer
\i begged You for
when I screamed
 from the Arizona desert sand.
 
And even then You heard my cry:
I recognized You at once
in the headlight glare
of the Sheriff of Pima County.


April 22, 2020/sesshin day 10/sit 8/0:05:08/bbw/end 7:18am
 
I don’t care how bad i pray
it don’t bother me no way
 
i don’t care if i’m never heard
and my voice proceeds without a word
 
i don’t care if it don’t mean shit
and if this mustard seed won’t grow
and all i know is You are it
which don't mean shit
and that’s just so.
 
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Smiling Stone, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 8:15 AM
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Hey Tim,
first visit, just saying hi. Nice poetry, I can connect some of the dots..
Cherish your sanity. Don't give up the fight...

Love and metta
smiling stone
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 8:21 AM
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Smiling Stone:
Hey Tim,
first visit, just saying hi. 
Welcome to the Bar of Last Resort. I would suggest starting with  the Bodhisattva Express, a nifty little backbreaker of a drink guaranteed to send you to hell until all beings are saved. We're having a two-for-one sale on them today.

Nice poetry, I can connect some of the dots..


Them's a lotta dots, any you can connect would be a great help here.

Cherish your sanity. Don't give up the fight...

Love and metta

smiling stone

as our mutual selfless friend agnostic assured me early on, I got this, Stoner. Thanks for the eye on the shaky stagger as I fight on.

love, tim
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 8:14 AM
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April 22, 2020/sesshin day 10/sit 10/0:03:16/bbw/end 8:13am 

There is a natural break in my day when I run out of coffee, and I went for a lovely little walk in the bright sunshine. As I walked past
the commons building, I saw Davey, our young grounds guy, and we started toward each other to shoot the usual bit of shit. I was about fifteen feet away when suddenly a bird fluttered out of the eaves of the building overhang, circled very briefly in a downward arc, and flopped down on the cement. We both hurried toward it, it was a baby, and had fallen out of a nest up there. Davey, an animal soft heart who rescues squirrels and assorted broken-winged avians of all kind, bent and tenderly cupped the bird in his hands, then reached up and laid it back in the next, which was just within reach in the corner of theunder-eave. It settled right back in with its two siblings.

Davey and I looked at each other and laughed. I said, nice move, Dr. Doolittle, and he said, “There’s been three of them in that nest
since i spotted it yesterday.” I said, well there still three, thanks to you, and we went on with our days, him to work and me strolling my lazy ass along in the sunlight. 

There is a touch of irony in Davey’s beautiful love for vulnerable animals. Last year, a coyote took one of his cats, and Davey went out in a forty-degree rain and hunted the thing for twelve hours, then blew it away with some kind of Very Good Rifle. I asked him if he was sure he shot the right coyote, and he shrugged and said, “If not that one, the next one.”

It says a lot about the sixth mega-extinction event our biosphere finds itself in. We are ourselves a force of natural selection at this point, with the weight of selective pressure from many of our most humane and good-hearted people tilting the balance firmly in favor of our pets. God help us all, and the birds and beasts and the air and seas themselves.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 8:48 AM
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April 22, 2020/sesshin day 10/sit 11/0:05:51/bbw-1/ end 9:35am

 “bbw-1” in the practice log refers to my basic body-breath-word prayer with a high-scatteredness-situation tweak #1. My usual practice is, rosary in hands, L- and R-mudras on the medallion of the Mother of God, to go through the whole prayer once before beginning the circuit of decades bead by bead. But I haven’t gotten off the medallion today, very high wild energy, so this time I just started moving on the beads right away, one bead per phrase of the prayer (13, then). At the thirteenth prayer, i thought “nana 13! A winner!” I couldn’t remember which one 13 was, but i knew that 15 was fruition. I mean, i can hardly ever articulate shit in the Dukha nanas anyway, so who's counting, right? In any case, the actual logarithmic protocol on this bbw-1 variant of the technique is to go back to the medallion once the prayer is completed by phrases, and then start from zero by letters. I know the total was more than fifteen, though, i was, like, seven letters in when the timer sounded. Better mathematicians than me may have an opinion on this, but I believe that may qualify as a fruition.

I did get through the entire timed sit for the first time today, anyway. Better than fruition, really, almost six minutes not out somewhere scaring someone. Tell me meditation isn't immediately beneficial! 
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 9:05 AM
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break in practice for narrative theology:

So my friend and mentor in (heretical, he insists, but really smart and funny) Cabala, Rebbe Massimo Melli of Sicily, has a discussion going on Academia.com around his latest paper, a little koan-like parable/question cutting to the heart of "why something, and not nothing? Why is there movement and not , uh, stillness?" And one of his crazed chums (not me, another one), weighed in recently with this:
 
“I have proved that the universe is an elastic continuum. And all matter, light, quanta, neutrinos are wave vortices. Not vortices of matter like tornadoes, but vortices of waves circling around an axis. The whole universe obeys a three-dimensional wave equation. An attempt to quantify the elasticity of the continuum of the universe failed. Only a certain estimate is obtained. According to this estimate, the elasticity of the universe can be very large. This means that the amplitudes of wave oscillations in the universal continuum can be very small. And in the limit, the elasticity of the universal continuum can be infinite. That is, the universal continuum is absolutely rigid. But in this case, the amplitudes of the wave oscillations in the wave vortices are equal to zero. That is, everything that we observe in the universe is a game of zeros. That is, there really is no movement. There is no mass movement. And the mass itself is not. Only one zeros. Only a game of zeros. It may be that the universe is mathematics itself.”
 Alexandr I Dubinyansky a chemical physicist at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, specializing currently in search engine science.
 
Buy that man a drink at the Bar of Last Resort. Dr. Dubinvansky, we have been holding your chair.
 
Seriously, i’m crazy as fuck, but Massimo is crazier, and sane as they come. And this Russian, still scoping him out. Definitely crazy as fuck, the first qualifier. I couldn't make this shit up. I think Massimo does. But, uh, there it is.
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Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 9:58 AM
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You know, in a crazy contest, there is absolutely no way of beating reality itself. 
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 10:46 AM
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Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö:
You know, in a crazy contest, there is absolutely no way of beating reality itself. 


emoticon amen, amen!
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 10:49 AM
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Just look at the hell we find ourselves in right now.
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Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 11:52 AM
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Chris Marti:
Just look at the hell we find ourselves in right now.

This sort of comment can mean a ton of different things to me, depending on whether there is a humorous framework or a serious one or both, and depending on what is meant by "we" and "right now"... and "find". Could you please narrow it down for me? emoticon
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 11:59 AM
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This sort of comment can mean a ton of different things to me, depending on whether there is a humorous framework or a serious one or both, and depending on what is meant by "we" and "right now"... and "find". Could you please narrow it down for me? emoticon

The best way for me to narrow this down is to tell you I live in the U.S. You can figure things from there.
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Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 12:03 PM
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Okay, so gallows humor then. Gotcha. Thanks! 
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 12:03 PM
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Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö:
Okay, so gallows humor then. Gotcha. Thanks! 


oops.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 12:03 PM
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Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö:
Chris Marti:
Just look at the hell we find ourselves in right now.

This sort of comment can mean a ton of different things to me, depending on whether there is a humorous framework or a serious one or both, and depending on what is meant by "we" and "right now"... and "find". Could you please narrow it down for me? emoticon

i think he was referring to the human-induced mega-extinction event i referenced, and in a larger sense to a real sense of ecological planetary crisis, as manifested, for instance, in our present pandemic, which David Quammen makes a good case is an inevitable result of our encroachment into wild places and the inevitable transmission of diseases and viruses that have for thousands of years been adaptively balanced in their host species, but which can prove fatal when making the leap to humans. The corona virus is just the latest example of this. 

But i would never presume to speak for Chris. emoticon
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 10:18 AM
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Some designers and software people think they have cogent input into every other domain. They're almost always full of shit about that, of course, but they plow on through anyway, with their endemic lack of self-awareness. Peter Thiel comes to mind here, but not Bill Gates, who seems to have developed a very realistic approach to what he's doing with the Gates Foundation, He actually will tell you he doesn't know what he doesn't know.

Also, a good example of a software-type (and physics/math whiz) person who adds real value is Stephen Wolfram. I recommend his book, A New Kind of Science
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 10:50 AM
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Chris Marti:

Also, a good example of a software-type (and physics/math whiz) person who adds real value is Stephen Wolfram. I recommend his book, A New Kind of Science

Yeah, he looks like someone i would love, i eat that stuff up, in season. You know i've got a folder full of notes and a couple of draft-starts on a time travel novel, in which i fully intend to distort the beautiful, sober, realistic work of people like Wolfram on the actual frontiers of real knowledge into cheesy crap. This is how i make a living, man. Baby needs a new pair of shoes.

emoticon
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 10:59 AM
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So we do have stuff in common!

emoticon
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 11:07 AM
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Ever read any Neal Stephenson?
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 12:00 PM
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Ever read any Neal Stephenson?

Stephenson books I've read:  Snowcrash, Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age

Due mainly to my age and my grade school interest in sci-fi, I'm a huge fan of Asimov, Heinlein, Herbert, Van Gogt, Clarke, Bradbury, Niven, Pohl, and Adams. Also Vonnegut, Dick, Le Guin, and Sterling.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 12:08 PM
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Chris Marti:
Ever read any Neal Stephenson?

Stephenson books I've read:  Snowcrash, Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age


You might, for the sheer info-astoundingness of it, try Dodge in Hell, a sort of AI-bardos tour de force.

Due mainly to my age and my grade school interest in sci-fi, I'm a huge fan of Asimov, Heinlein, Herbert, Van Gogt, Clarke, Bradbury, Niven, Pohl, and Adams. Also Vonnegut, Dick, Le Guin, and Sterling.

I was weaned on Kurt Vonnegut. There's your black humor. Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the best novels ever written, and--- wait for it--- or, anticipate it--- it is a time travel thing, along with cosmic absurdity and the heartbreak of that, of course. Kurt Vonnegut put his blessing on my own writing routine, by the way, when someone asked him why he had such a "short" work day, and he said that he could only be smart four hours a day.And Le Guin is a saint or something, honestly.

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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 12:10 PM
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Have you read Vonnegut's Ice Nine?
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 12:27 PM
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Chris Marti:
Have you read Vonnegut's Ice Nine?


Yeah, i actually had a taste of that recently. It made my blood run cold.

(edit) what was that one where he said, "So it goes" everytime someone died? Like, a lot.

and the one where he informed the reader that Kilgore Trout (i think) had started using the * sign to signify ass-hole? (useful, that, come to think of it, you *)

But Moderator, Sir, it was just punctuation. 
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 12:55 PM
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 what was that one where he said, "So it goes" everytime someone died? Like, a lot.

I'm pretty sure that was Slaughterhouse Five.

T, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 2:27 PM
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Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 4:45 PM
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T:
Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt


what's that from, you *?

emoticon
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 6:52 PM
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Chris Marti:
 what was that one where he said, "So it goes" everytime someone died? Like, a lot.

I'm pretty sure that was Slaughterhouse Five.



Billy Pilgrim had come unstuck in time.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/23/20 9:26 AM
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Chris Marti:
Ever read any Neal Stephenson?

Stephenson books I've read:  Snowcrash, Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age

Another Stephenson book that comes to mind is Anathem. I don't actually recommend reading it unless you have a serious case of NS love, because the first big chunk of the big fat book is dry as very well-dried shit, very technical stuff, with a whole new invented language to boot. I mean, dry as shit technical stuff in a whole new language--- you know, like MCTB2 and most of DhO) emoticon--- is an acquired taste.

He is setting up a marvelous ultimately transtemporal story of cosmic vastness and import, but you gotta work. The start is all in a monastery thousands of years in the future, and i just want to tell you about one aspect of the society. They are closed off from the secular world, and only open the gates and mingle with the outside once a year. There are a number of levels to the monks: oners, who are only there from 1-10 years, and so go out every year when the gates open, for three days, before retiring for another year with no contact.

be patient, you will love this, really.

Then there are "tenner" monks--- they only go out once every decade. They are isolated on a different level from the oners (all the categories of monks are in their own bubble), so ten years pass between them getting any news of the outside world at all. And then hundreders, thousanders, and ten thousanders. The thousanders are essentially rumors, though they are known to exist; ditto exponentially for the ten thousanders. Everyone from the hundreds up can go an entire normal human lifetime without ever having any contact with the world outside the monastery. Em[ires rise and fall, planetary catastrophes sweep through and pass, before these guys get their next headline.

Do you see why i am so struck by it? (hint: how often do certain DhO denizens show up at the oner level?)
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/23/20 9:58 AM
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That's great stuff! I need to order that book.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/23/20 10:06 AM
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well, don't say i didn't warn you, 100 pages in. But i just read it for the third time, an incredibly rare thing. NS is that perfect storm of reading for me, entertaining enough to qualify as what i variously think of as "spaghetti reading," "potato reading," veg-out reading," and trash. Comfort food, basically: if the pages turn, good neough for me. The pages fly in NS.

But he is also substantial, thrilling, intellectually challenging and exciting, and i learn stuff every page, not just about pure story-telling craft, but about the world--- AI, logic, math, history, psychology, space flight, communications theory--- you name it, the guy has a genius new angle on it. He makes everything fresh.


and so it goes!
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/23/20 10:05 AM
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Practice log/April 23, 2020/sesshin day 11/sit 8/0:06:06/bbw/ortho/ end 9:28am/embrace

Practice log/April 23, 2020/sesshin day 11/sit9/0:06:07/bbw/sinistral/ end 10:10am/ this 

Practice log/April 23, 2020/sesshin day 11/sit 10/0:06:08/bbw/ortho/end 10:38am/You breathe 
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/23/20 10:15 AM
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well, don't say i didn't warn you, 100 pages in.

I'll be fine, probably better than fine - maybe like a pig in shit. I like that kind of material.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/23/20 11:49 AM
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Chris, continuing to mull the monastic levels in Anathem:

 10 (0-power) = oners= those prior to stream entry.
10 (1st power) = tenners= Sotapanna
10 (2nd power)  = hundreders= 
Sakadagamin, once-returner to “the world,” matches neatly: no hundreder could live a normal human life span and return more than once.
10 (3rd power) = thousanders= Anagami, none ever see the world outside the monastery gate at all.
10 (4th power) =ten-thousanders=  Arahant, inconceivable relation to world? but real.

I  think the novel ends up implying that even the ten-thousanders, outliving many civilizations, may still have their on on some higher, more inclusive dot. 

Tell me NS didn’t have this in mind, with this monastic notion!
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/23/20 11:50 AM
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Practice log/April 23, 2020/sesshin day 11/sit 11/0:06:09/bbw/sinistral/end 11:35am/gift

Practice log/ April 23, 2020/sesshin day 11/sit 12/0:06:10/bbw/ortho/end 12:29pm/no fear
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/23/20 11:52 AM
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It's certainly geometric in design. But I dunno, I'll just have to read it.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/23/20 11:53 AM
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Empiricist!

love, mandala drawer
emoticon
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 11:42 AM
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April 22, 2020/sesshin day 10/sit 13/0:05:53/v-bbw/end 10:44am

 An interesting one. “v-bbw” is my shorthand for a mixture of mindset going in--- rather than using my normal bodily/sensate PIA (pang/pain
in ass) as my basic go-to, almost entirely default body ping, i spontaneously switched to an intermediate technique i had tried with Papa Che in which i would be more alert and untethered and intentionally curious, slowing down and allowing simply sinking to make the body aspect of bbw more up for grabs, more open to other sensate blips on the broader band radar, as it were. So it was just a spontaneous switch of horses, not mid-stream but very early in the sit, and fun to witness, LIKE A FUCKING VIPASSANA VIRUS IS FUN?! THIS SHIT IS DEADLY, a lovely interesting sit, aware toward the end, for instance, of my rosary, not at the mudra points on the counting beads, but where the beads were draped over the pinkies of both hands. I never realized my pinkies were carrying such a load, and have given them a pay raise.

  April 22, 2020/sesshin day 10/sit 14/0:05:54/bbw/end 12:29pm 

Another interesting infiltration of vipassana type noting, a sudden high pitched note in my left ear, an itch (i hardly ever notice itches) beside my nose, and, weirdest of all, hearing the birds singing in the bushes outside. I live about 50 yards from the main railroad line down the Peninsula to the Newport News shipyard and port, and we get a lot of trains going by in both directions. I wouldn’t even note the noise of them in vipassana, i think; i just don’t bother to hear them, although i am often aware of a kind of stress in my body that turns out to be vibrational from the passing loaded cars. But birds? fuggedaboutit.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 12:46 PM
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April 22, 2020/sesshin day 10/sit 15/0:02:01/therrrre isss/end 1:32pm

 “therrrre issss” is my state-of-the art approach-to-noting technique, which i do under Papa Che’s close eye, using the Kenneth Folke technique of noting-aloud in a way by a strong internal vocalization in practice, and the Chris Marti-given technique of attending to two fingers, where they touch (a finger and a thumb, for me) as my meditation object, while remaining alive to sinking toward that with curiousity in a slow exploring way.

 Therrre is . . . hearing a strong high-pitched tone in both ears, there is . . . in-breath, there is . . . sinking along with the out-breath, gently, there is the bass note, PIA, there is in-breath, a sense of drawing back and circling, like a wrestler looking for a hold, there is . . . a confusion, a blank, there is in-breath, again a sense of circling withdrawal, there is a tightness in, uh, my teeth? in my mouth, somehow, not grinding, like jaw, but like something is somehow acting inertially on the teeth themselves, both sides of the mouth, there is thinking, there is in-breath, there is sinking, there is feeling the thumb-finger connect-point, a sense of the hands somehow ever so gently creating enough friction for a taste of touch, there is PIA, the bass note, there is another take on the subtle tactile tug at the thumb-finger simultaneous with awareness of the big bass PIA, like a soft flute playing, almost overwhelmed by the bass and brass, there is that tug in the toothlines again, there is hearing the timer.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/22/20 6:43 PM
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Practice log April 22, 2020/sesshin day 10/sit 16/0:05:55/bbw/end 2:38 

more "V-leakthrough," noticing the mouth tensions, giving way to a sort of zappy, heated crackle, around the top of the right eye orbital region and down to the top of the cheek, and the axis of the mouth tensions, running from behind just below the nose, to the right and up diagonally toward the far corner of the right eye.

April 22, 2020/sesshin day 10/sit 17/0:05:56/bbw-1/end 6:35pm

April 22, 2020/sesshin day 10/sit 18/0:05:57/bbw-1/end 7:15pm

The “bbw-1,” again, is a specific variation on my basic prayer, which rather than spending a full run-through of the entire prayer with the mudras on the medallion before beginning with letters to move through the beads, is used in situations where mental energy, agitation, and distraction is high, and uses starts right off with bead movement, one bead for each of the 13 distinct phrases of the prayer. (People do this with a lot of Catholic prayers; the variations on the “Our Father” and “Hail Maria”, broken down into phrases, are subject to endless variations). After the lead mudra, clockwise or counterclockwise, depending on the set-up, is at the twelfth bead, it returns to the medallion, where the other mudra has remained anchored, and begins the second phase of the prayer as usual from there, one letter per bead. 

I also use the technique in what I think of as Sisyphean circumstances, where the simple technique of putting one empty movement up after another is critical, usually for dark night-related reasons of near-total nihilism and despair. It can be mathematical in flavor, simple construction infinity number theory, n+1 in practice. And it can be like the stations of the Cross, x number of steps up the hill (which itself can transform into a Sisyphean type meditation if the cross rolls back down after the burial in the tomb, but the metaphors get trickier in this over extension.)
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Practice log/April 22, 2020/sesshin day 10/sit 19/0:05:59/bbw-1/end 8:21pm

 Practice log/April 22, 2020/sesshin day 10/sit 20/0:06:00/bbw-1/end11:14pm

 Practice log/April 23, 2020/sesshin day 11/sit 1/0:06;01/bbw-1/end 3:49am

 I heard an owl, while I was out smoking in the very dark night before the first sit this morning, somewhere east in the taller trees. I don’t think I’ve heard that particular call before, it may be a different kind of owl that the ones i’ve seen and heard. There is a novel i vaguely remember called “I Heard the Owl Call My Name” about a young priest sent to work among some Canadian tribe in British Columbia. He has a fatal disease, but doesn’t know it--- his wily old (horrifically unethical, in my view) bishop, who sends him, does know the guy is terminal, and is supposedly wise for giving him his life lessons just in time. I was so pissed at the bishop, i don’t remember much more of the book, but i do remember that toward the end of the book, when the priest has bonded with the tribe and gotten a proper dose of earth wisdom and poignant human beauty and community lore, he hears an owl call his name, which in tribal lore means he will die soon, and so he becomes aware of and is at peace with his terminal condition. So the owl was more humane than the bishop, basically, is the moral. 

The owl this morning was, as i said, probably a new species to me, and i could not make out its accent, so not sure if that was my name I heard. Am working under the assumption that it was.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/23/20 4:34 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Practice log/April 23, 2020/sesshin day 11/sit 2/0:06:02/bbw/ortho/end 4:41am
 
Practice log/April 23, 2020/sesshin day 11/sit 3/0:03:02/bbw/sinistral/end 5:13am/this
 
One interesting thing about this mania so far is that as a result of my need to communicate without being a danger to myself and/or others, and using DhO as a relatively safe space for that, and so formulating my practice logs for public consumption, plus working with various people giving me tips and suggestions on techniques, my basic encoded practice log intro line has evolved at a spectacular rate to convey more information. Up til now, it was basically just date, and time of sit, three sits per day, each with their developing amount of time set. Now i am also noting what type of meditation is practiced, since i am using multiple techniques, and realizing that even within my basic bbw i have several variations, the end time of the sit (very interesting during the manic blow-out of normal diurnal rhythms),
 
 and in these entries, two new elements, first the direction of the movement on the rosary (ortho=clockwise and sinistral (in a sort of joking way on my Catholic vocabulary, where left-hand things are “sinister”, in the Latin sense)=counterclockwise. I considered Tantric Left-hand Path for “sinistral,” then decided the joke was too complicated. Muktananda, whose ashram in Oakland i lived in for a couple years during the early 1980s, was among the devotees notorious for having a left-hand tantric side, which was whispered about quite a bit. But i decided that joke required even MORE explaining, and was certainly wide open to way more misinterpretation and offense, and so stuck with keeping my offense Catholic.
 
The second new bit of data in these entries is where i finish the prayer, which will be either a word, if i never get off the medallion in the first place, or a letter, if i have actually gotten to phase 2 and gone bead by bead with letters. Thus, this first entry above noting the “Tim got this far” data point (big story behind that, which i will forego telling for the moment), is “this”, which is the second word of the prayer, and which indicates that i was agitated enough during the sit that most of the word element was a simple mantric return to the prayer’s first word “with”. This is actually a fascinating indicator of a lot of things, and can mean a lot of different things, which is why there are notes on sits as well as just the line of data, but introducing that data element was so exciting that as soon as the thought occurred to me in thi sit I LEAPT THE FUCK up.
 
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/23/20 5:08 AM
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Practice log/ April 23, 2020/sesshin day 11/sit 4/0:06:02/bbw//ortho/end 5:49am/withthisg-i


Outside after this sit for my reward cigarette (“Will meditate for smokes”), the sky is already a dilute dark blue-gray under a complete but apparently thin overcast, which explains the lack of stars earlier. I thought it might be kundalini or something, an anti-siddhi, sudden inability to see small points of light. But that sky was dead black for straightforward reasons. 

Once during the end phase of a chant/meditation at the ashram, my entire closed eye field was lit up by a brilliant flash of white light. It was a kundalini pentecostal scene and i was very pleased with myself for the experience, this gift from Mama Shakti. Outside at the shoe racks, slipping back into my Birkenstocks, i heard one person say to another, “Wow, did you notice that flashbulb going off, when that guy took the  photograph?” 

Sarah Elizabeth, an early riser in my same time zone, noted my owl audition earlier and sent me a link with owl calls. I heard a great horned owl this morning, it turns out. I hadn’t heard one since i lived in Pungo, the southern, agricultural part of Virginia Beach, circa 1997-2001, and so didn’t recognize it. Around here, it seems, the most common owl is either an eastern screech owl or a barn owl, which i hear very occasionally. Owl newbies often mistake the low throaty coo of a mourning dove for an owl, but i am a birdwatcher from way back and sorted that one out long ago.

 I don’t think that owl called my name after all. Damn. I was ready to say, like Isaiah before the Throne in Isaiah 6, “Here am I, Lord: send Me." But He ain't sendin' me nowhere but here.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/23/20 6:54 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Practice log/April 23, 2020/sesshin day 11/sit 5/0:06:03/
bbw/sinistral/end 6:31am/wi-t, left-mudra

Practice log/April 23, 2020/sesshin day 11/sit 6/0:06:04/
bbw/ortho/ end 7:06am/wi-t, right-mudra

Practice log/April 23, 2020/sesshin day 11/sit 7/0:06:05/
bbw/sinistral/end 7:48am/withthisgiftofbre-a, left-mudra
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/23/20 8:15 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Practice log/April 23, 2020/sesshin day 11/sit 5/0:06:03/bbw/sinistral/end 6:31am/wi-t, left-mudra

Practice log/April 23, 2020/sesshin day 11/sit 6/0:06:04/bbw/ortho/ end 7:06am/wi-t, right-mudra

Practice log/April 23, 2020/sesshin day 11/sit 7/0:06:05/bbw/sinistral/end 7:48am/withthisgiftofbre-a, left mudra

 i ran out of my ritualized dose of morning coffee, thank God, and took my ritual pause to let the dust settle, walking over to the bathhouse and taking a shower. I was starting to smell like Lazarus, in the gospel of John, after his four days in the grave. When Jesus showed up late for the funeral, Lazarus’s sister Martha (of Martha the active and Mary the contemplative fame in Luke 10) said to him, “But Lord, my brother stinketh.” Mary, the contemplative one, had presumably noted the smell long since, in silence, and moved on to a deeper curiousity, sinking into
her vipassana  practice.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/23/20 6:01 PM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Practice log/ April 23, 2020/sesshin day 11/sit 13/0:06:11/bbw/sinistral/end 1:23pm/ withth-i 

Practice log/ April 23, 2020/sesshin day 11/sit 14/0:06:12/bbw/ortho/end 2:24pm/this 

Practice log/April 23, 2020/sesshin day 11/sit 15/0:06:13/bbw-1/sinistral/end 6:19pm/withthisg-i,L-mudra 

PF Practice log/ April 23, 2020/sesshin day 11/sit 16/0:02:03/”therrrrre iiiisss”/end 6:52pm 

Therrrrrre issssss . . . realizing i have a band aid on the
part of my right index finger touching the left thumb . . . therrrrre issss smothness
. . . therrrre isss in-breath . . . there is basic PIA, there is looking for
the thumb-finger, there is a shift to seeing, attention bounce to the eyes in
play . . . there isss in-breath . . . there is seeing, looking, there is a
crackling within the head, a sort of crisp electric arc, like the blade of a
scythe, but charged, sharply defining its arc like electric barbed wire . . .
there isss hearing the internal verbalization, “Therrrre issss,” there is
smiling inwardly, it’s like my mantra-like security blanket after all . . .
there is hearing the timer, shocked at the swiftness, i’m getting more
accustomed again to the slightly longer sits. But i am taking something smaller
than baby steps here. I am not even a toddler, i am in a crib, still trying to
figure out whether these arms and legs have anything to do with me, feeling
toward the connection.
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Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö, modified 3 Years ago at 4/23/20 6:39 PM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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I get that electricity crackling too. 
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/23/20 6:48 PM
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Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö:
I get that electricity crackling too. 


I think it has something to do with my sense of vision somehow trying to control my body, through some kind of magic movements; there's a kind of holding in it that releases once it dead ends behind eye and toward the upper skull, like it runs out of room for its tricks. It feels like a bind and i anticipate pain, but usually it solves itself somehow on a good out breath, and the whole things drops backl below the shoulders, where 90% of the action is.

(edit, p.s.) hey, Chris has started telling those stories he promised us right before he threw my ass off the forum! Check it out and egg him on!
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Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö, modified 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 2:13 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Tim Farrington:
Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö:
I get that electricity crackling too. 


I think it has something to do with my sense of vision somehow trying to control my body, through some kind of magic movements; there's a kind of holding in it that releases once it dead ends behind eye and toward the upper skull, like it runs out of room for its tricks. It feels like a bind and i anticipate pain, but usually it solves itself somehow on a good out breath, and the whole things drops backl below the shoulders, where 90% of the action is.

(edit, p.s.) hey, Chris has started telling those stories he promised us right before he threw my ass off the forum! Check it out and egg him on!

Then I don't think it's the same crackling.

Yeah, I saw that. Wasn't much to go on for further questioning, though. 
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 2:35 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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[quote=
]T:
hey, Chris has started telling those stories he promised us right before he threw my ass off the forum! Check it out and egg him on!

Linda:
Yeah, I saw that. Wasn't much to go on for further questioning, though. 


I'm working on it, one snippet at a time. He is pragmatic, as soon as he sees the value of his story-telling, he will bite the bullet and get to it. He has always been like this--- Kenneth Folke told him he should put his journals on-line, in 2009, which is why we are able to ask these questions on that thread at all, but Chris hated that at the time. He was probably the first one--- seriously, i've looked around, and if anyone corrects me on this, then it's just truer history, but as far as i can tell, Chris was the first one to hang his naked emperor's ass out on-line, for all the world to ponder, savage, and carp at. And here we all are on DhO now, each with our own priceless practice log, and the priceless attention and feedback of this sophisticated sangha. We owe him a lot.

So let me take the lead with that fucking Sphinx, if you wish. Willing to be embarrassed, chagrinned, and feel like a bit of an annoyance, often, by that Marti aloofnesss and dry wit and drier silence, for stories. He's a fucking whatever the fuck he is, he can handle my gnat's wings buzz a little.
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Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö, modified 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 4:31 AM
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Tim Farrington:


I'm working on it, one snippet at a time. He is pragmatic, as soon as he sees the value of his story-telling, he will bite the bullet and get to it. He has always been like this--- Kenneth Folke told him he should put his journals on-line, in 2009, which is why we are able to ask these questions on that thread at all, but Chris hated that at the time. He was probably the first one--- seriously, i've looked around, and if anyone corrects me on this, then it's just truer history, but as far as i can tell, Chris was the first one to hang his naked emperor's ass out on-line, for all the world to ponder, savage, and carp at. And here we all are on DhO now, each with our own priceless practice log, and the priceless attention and feedback of this sophisticated sangha. We owe him a lot.

So let me take the lead with that fucking Sphinx, if you wish. Willing to be embarrassed, chagrinned, and feel like a bit of an annoyance, often, by that Marti aloofnesss and dry wit and drier silence, for stories. He's a fucking whatever the fuck he is, he can handle my gnat's wings buzz a little.



Wow. Yeah, that’s a story worth telling. Go get that Sphinx!
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/23/20 6:50 PM
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Practice log/April 23, 2020/sesshin day 11/sit 17/bbw-2/ortho/end 7:36pm/embrace, l-mudra
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 3:27 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Practice log/ April 24, 2020/sesshinday 12/sit 1/0:06:15/bbw-3/ended 2:20am/ortho/love You, T-mudra
 
I have started doing my first wee-hours sit every morning BEFORE COFFEE, whic allows me to set up conditions of deep mental sludge, fog, and dullness, a sort of depresso-mimetic mode, in anticipation of the Big Crash to come.
 
Practice log/ April 24, 2020/sesshin day 12/sit/0:06:16/bbw/end 3:23am/sinistral/with-t, L-mudra
 
Daniel says that any of the three doors can open into stream entry. Likewise, i think we can find ourselves knocking on a particular door, in any given sit.

(crypto southern evangelist Bible-thumping Bible-spouting Catholic mole on DhS working in apparent idiocy and cluelessnes to the lingo that allows everyone to not take him seriously, while setting up the sucker punch of JESUS, that Jew, burrowing through the ground of the Overground with his ortho-sinistral agenda hidden in plain sight, slipping in Bible quotes, like: 
Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you:
Matthew 7:7
until all beings are SAVED, possibly BY JESUS, possibly by some other Bodhisattva, most likely by a team effort that includes Smiling Stone.)

so in this sit, clearly knocking at the breath door, following each breath with clear vision, letting word happen natural on the in breath, sinking into body on the out-breath.
 
Practice log/ April 24, 2020/sesshin day 12/sit 3/0:06:17/bbw-3/ended 3:55am/ortho/let, L-mudra
 
 (edit) breath door=transience door

(edit squared) transience door=impermance door
"The impermanence door relates to counteracting fundamental ignorance." MCBT2, p. 261-262
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 4:12 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Practice log/April 24, 2020/sesshin day 12/sit 4/0:06:18/bbw-2/ended 4:38am/sinistral/ embrace, L-mudra/anicca, anatta doors 

adding a new data bit to the basic practice log line here: if i am aware of particular doors at play, which doors i am knocking on, in a given sit.

In the previous sit, woke up to knocking on the breath door; this sit noticed that full attendance to the breath/transience/anicca door all the way through the cycle from in-breath to out-breath leads, in the variation on my technique that i call bbw-2, very naturally to a knocking on the anatta door as well, as i tend to move to the next mantric intonation of the next word (word=not self, the rock that is higher than I=anatta)  in the prayer in this one-word-at-a-time on one-roasry-bead-at-a-time mode. Having the word intoning at whatever frequency during the entire cycle of breath, first on the lead mudra reaching the new bead/new word, and repeating for the trail mudra, both on the same bead, allows me to have a chance at a sort of transient orientation point. It is like building as much of a sand castle as possible in the wet sand between waves: you won’t get much of a castle, on any given round, but you will get something more than flat wet sand. Then the next wave, the next breath takes it down to zero again. Apply the breath, lather with the word, rinse with the wave, repeat, the shampoo technique. 

Another thought: it is ironic to me, in the light of my
conversation with fabrice tom on another thread---

here https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/20239836 ---

where he is sort of making a case that Daniel is a hide-bound, style-cramped by-the-book lame-ass slave to the uncreative letter of Buddhist scripture, that terrible thing, a “traditionalist.”

I have begged to differ, there, and here i say agin, it is fucking IRONIC how hard it is to get the right sanskrit/pali words out of that fucking lame-ass traditionalist’s hopelessly rote commentary on Buddhist scripture throughout MCBT2. I had to go to wikipedia for my fucking lame-ass traditional scholarship, for this:
In Buddhism, the three marks of existence are three characteristics (Pali: tilakkhaṇa; Sanskrit: त्रिलक्षण, trilakṣaṇa) of all
existence and beings, namely impermanence (aniccā), unsatisfactoriness or suffering (duḥkha), and non-self (anattā). These three characteristics are mentioned in verses 277, 278 and 279 of the Dhammapada. That humans are subject to delusion about the three marks, that this delusionresults in suffering, and that removal of that delusion results in the end of suffering, is a central theme in the Buddhist Four
Noble Truths
and Noble Eightfold Path 

I mean, SHIT. It’s hard enough work being a lameass drone traditionalist, without having to bust your ass just trying to get to the words in the holy fucking language whose letters give rise to the fucking cosmos through their mere vibration.

Whether that language is Sanskrit, Pali, or Hebrew, by the way, is giving me fits right now.

Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 4:51 AM
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Practice log/April 24, 2020/sesshin day 12/sit 5/0:06:19/bbw-2/end 5:31am/ortho/You breathe, R-mudra/anicca, anatta doors

interesting side effect, with a two-doors-foregrounded sit, is that when the sit ended, i wasn’t able to finish simply jotting down the data notes for it before i realized that i had EXPLODING BLADDER SYNDROME, as a result of the body/dukha door being backgrounded during the sit. I just hadn’t noticed how bad i had to pee, it was all breath and mantra.
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Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö, modified 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 5:09 AM
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As your sits are getting longer it might be a good idea to cultivate the habit of taking a leak before the session just in case. That's dharma street smartness. emoticon
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 5:20 AM
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Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö:
As your sits are getting longer it might be a good idea to cultivate the habit of taking a leak before the session just in case. That's dharma street smartness. emoticon


It did sort of creep up on me there! In the prior age of hour + sits, i was street smart to an extreme on that. But this was a one-two punch of new streets and fascination with nuances that were not Of the Body. Blind-sided by bladder dukha!

emoticon
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 5:21 AM
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ps Linda your English is wonderfully idiomatic!
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 5:58 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Practice log/April 24, 2020/sesshin day 12/sit 6/0:06:20/bbw/end 6:01am/sinistral/wit-h, L-mudra/anicca, anatta doors
 
Practice log/April 24, 2020/sesshin day 12/sit 7/0:06:21/bbw/end 6:36am/ortho/Thy will be done/ anicca, anatta doors
 
it seems to me this morning that which doors i am working with in a given sit are much more fundamental thatn whether it is “vipassana” or “concentrative” or “prayer of this or that” or what have you.
 
The thing is, at a given point in practice, certain doors present themselves to be knocked on. I began with the breath.transience/anicca door, in 1975 during my first meditations as a senior in high school in Honolulu--- i would drive up the Pali, the mountain road over the chain of heights that divides the leeward and windward sides of the island, to this little Buddhist temple, and do my sits in these intro classes, sitting around a big conference room-type table with a monk and a bunch of other clueless haoles and locals. So i’ve been banging on that door for 45 years. I got into serious mantra work, word/anatta door,  in the ashram in 1982-84, and always combined that with breath, in matras like so-ham, working one syllable on the in-breath, one on the out.
 
funny story: when i went nuts in my Haight Ashbury commune scene on two hits of Very Good Dope, in 1984, post-ashram, and started praying aloud to the goddess (the main goddess, we were polytheistic) of the new religion we were making up then, and got tossed out and sent up to Harbin Hot Springs, in the thermal leak hills of Lake County north of SF, i got stashed in their state of the art Spiritual Emergency hut (Grof was in his heyday then, driving every body nuts), the guy who ran the place, a skinny intense motherfuck named Ishvara, interviewed me when i got there. He was a KUNDALINI YOGI of the highest order, and when he heard that i had done my time in the kundalini saturated Siddha Yoga Dham in Oakland, he was delighted. He asked me what my practice was, no doubt expecting collegial intricacies, chakra spins and swoops and sophisticated nadi electricity manipulation of the highest order. I told him, “I watch my breath.” His face fell into scorn and disappointment; i was clearly another pedestrian/civilian to him. “Okay, well enjoy the Spiritual Emergency hut,” he said, and sent me on my way, and that was the last he ever spoke with me.
 
What i think of as “vipassana” is characterized by its relentless attention to the dukha door, what i call “body.” It was only in the worst of my dark night cycles that i was reduced to the body/dukha door, because at that point I was, like, Fuck this fucking breathing, I would so prefer to STOP THAT SHIT, and fuck this word shit, it’s all empty noise. What i found at that point was 1) the fucking breathing does itself, and 2) so does the fucking body/dukha. So i would sit there wanting nothing more than to die in this materialist void-of-meaning piece of shit universe, and be done, stuck with the anicca of breath and the dukha of body, a perfect two-door meditation if ever there was one, and entirely against my will.
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Papa Che Dusko, modified 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 6:42 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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I find that change in perception changes that Dukkha of Body. Also, any perception is dependent on being conscious, comprehending. 

The more I observe the annoying itch or PIA the more these sharp pains turn into vibrating bubbling pleasantries. Just like a jacuzzi bath emoticon 

So where is this changing perception taking place? What's it made of? Where do I look for it? 
I don't know. Let me see ... Therrrre iiiiss emoticon gentle curiosity, a la naïveté' as you are seeing this for the very first time. This prayer as herd for the very first time, those prayer beads touched for the very first time, PIA experiences for the very first time ...
Ah that wonder emoticon 
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 6:48 AM
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Papa Che Dusko:
I find that change in perception changes that Dukkha of Body. Also, any perception is dependent on being conscious, comprehending. 

The more I observe the annoying itch or PIA the more these sharp pains turn into vibrating bubbling pleasantries. Just like a jacuzzi bath emoticon 

So where is this changing perception taking place? What's it made of? Where do I look for it? 
I don't know. Let me see ... Therrrre iiiiss emoticon gentle curiosity, a la naïveté' as you are seeing this for the very first time. This prayer as herd for the very first time, those prayer beads touched for the very first time, PIA experiences for the very first time ...
Ah that wonder emoticon 

I was writing up my practice log while Papa Che was polluting the Bar of Last Resort with his smiley-face bait-and-switch noting bullshit, and lo and behold, therrrrre issss my fucking reply already written:

April 24, 2020/sesshin day 12/sit 8/0:06:22/bbw/end
7:38am/sinistral/w-i, L-mudra/anicca, anatta doors,glimpses of dukha
door in toothline and jaw at points 

Yeah, see this door approach is like a crystalling agent in a saturated solution right now. Why is “vipassana” so hard? Because it goes straight to the door that nobody can possibly prefer, the dukha door of committed sensory based attention to what, inevitably, hurts. It is basically a technique consciously designed to induce and maximize dark nights. All the rest of that shit, before and after, is carrots on sticks, and bait-and-switch con jobs. The heart of vipassna is the conscious intention to face the dukha nanas on not bail out on the body. It is the Bodhisattva technique par excellence, there is no escape to it, properly practiced. It is a first class ticket to hell on the Hell Express.

Thank you, Daniel Fucking Ingram, and all your fucking cronies (edit, Papa Che, if the shoe fits, wear it), for this marvelous gift to all suffering beings, increased consciousness of suffering.

(edit) emoticon (emoji for Vipassana Warning Label).
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Papa Che Dusko, modified 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 7:41 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Actually! emoticon you know what really helped me for a while grieving the dark night?! 

Ive downloaded the album of Deva Premal where she chants together with Gyuto monks of Tibet. 
"Tibetan Mantras for Turbulent Times" it's called. I even chanted with them while abiding in Not-Hell (Purgatory you fool). 
I really think you should let them reach your body through the Sense Door of Hearing! See what happens! 
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 8:03 AM
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Papa Che Dusko:
Actually! emoticon you know what really helped me for a while grieving the dark night?! 

Ive downloaded the album of Deva Premal where she chants together with Gyuto monks of Tibet. 
"Tibetan Mantras for Turbulent Times" it's called. I even chanted with them while abiding in Not-Hell (Purgatory you fool). 
I really think you should let them reach your body through the Sense Door of Hearing! See what happens! 

I LOVE Deva Premal, she is pure soul therapy. I got addicted to chanting in the Siddha Yoga Dham, way back in the day. It is the sweetest sadhana there is. Krishna Das is also awesome. If you don't hear from me for an eon or two, i've got the headphones on and am chanting call-and-response with one of those two Masters. Or to that singing/chant video you made! Or to one of Che Guebuddha's hit's, it's closing time, baby, two a.m. in the Bar of Last Resort, and we;re all singing along to that apocalyptic blues chant.

https://soundcloud.com/papa-dusko/sets/che-guebuddha-sound
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 8:44 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 8:44 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Practice log/April 24, 2020/sesshin day 12/sit 9/0:06:23/bbw/end 9:19am/ortho/gift/anicca, dukha doors 

Practice log/ April 24, 2020/sesshin day 12/sit 9/0:02:47/”vipassana-wink-wink”/end
9:37am/ anicca, dukha doors

Oh, you “vipassana” vipers, woe unto you! I’ve got your number and it is two, as in TWO FUCKING DOORS, as in follow the in-breath up out of sunyata, noticing what hurts the most the whole way up, and sink with the out-breath all the way back down, noting what hurts most as you go down into the abyss of suffering. Great fucking deal, you [immensely creative obscene rant, deleted per DhO forum rules, even though it was technically not directed at any specific person, it’s just real potty mouth stuff and really it just seems wrong somehow]
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 10:02 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 10:02 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Practice log/April 24, 202/sesshin day 12/sit 10/0:06:23/”v-w-w”/end 10:50am/anicca, dukha doors 

Seriously, couldn’t someone simply mention that “vipassana” is just following the breath on its pilgrimage through pain? Would that have fucking killed you?  

My back has gone wild, lower right, waves of spasming, pain like knives and spears, any damn time Mama S wants. It’s all those years as a housecleaner, kneeling and standing, bending at weird angles and straightening, for a few bucks to supprt my writing habit. I’m paying for that shit now. I have had to warn my neighbors on either side that i may let out the occasional grunt or sharp yelp, but it’s just my back.

Dan, on my east side, said, “Oh, yeah, we heard that a little earlier, just figured you were finally getting what you deserved, somehow.” He actually went to the store today and asked me if he could pick anything for me while he was there. I told him Little Debbies brownies and canned chicken are the only rice supplements I require, sir, and sure enough, those staples arrived on my doorstep. I walked over to give him a twenty, grunting and ugh-ing and youching all the way, and he actually took the cash, thank God. He said, “you sure you don’t need this?” I said, “I don’t need shit, thanks to you, I’m all set.”

Except that i can’t move without making godawful shrieks of pain. I may have to go back to the ashram, where they call this stuff kriyas, and they are accounted a high achievement and propitious sign of good sadhana.
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Siavash ', modified 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 10:09 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 10:09 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 1679 Join Date: 5/5/19 Recent Posts
"It's an achievement"

I have lots of those achievements on my back too! Probably a result of many years of silk carpet weaving for just a few bucks or less for 12 hours day. And lots of achievements in my eyes too! You are not alone in that shit.
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Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö, modified 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 10:20 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 10:20 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 7134 Join Date: 12/8/18 Recent Posts
Siavash:
I have lots of those achievements on my back too! Probably a result of many years of silk carpet weaving for just a few bucks or less for 12 hours day. And lots of achievements in my eyes too! You are not alone in that shit.

Wow, that put the loss of my dream job into perspective... That's some horrible working conditions.
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Siavash ', modified 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 10:32 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 10:27 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 1679 Join Date: 5/5/19 Recent Posts
Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö:
Siavash:
I have lots of those achievements on my back too! Probably a result of many years of silk carpet weaving for just a few bucks or less for 12 hours day. And lots of achievements in my eyes too! You are not alone in that shit.

Wow, that put the loss of my dream job into perspective... That's some horrible working conditions.


Yes. I think you can gain great freedom from that loss.

--
In that 12 hours, we had 10 minutes break for breakfast, and 50-55 minutes break for lunch. In that 55 minutes, we woulk walk to home, as fast as possibly we could, to get there in 15 minutes, had 20-25 minutes for lunch and tea and going to bathroom at house, then walk back again, or run as fast as we could, to get back in the other 15 minutes. And no other breaks at all for the rest of the time. I was 9 years old when I started that job. Unfortunately it didn't have any insurance, otherwise I could retire happily now.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 10:24 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 10:23 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Siavash:
"It's an achievement"

I have lots of those achievements on my back too! Probably a result of many years of silk carpet weaving for just a few bucks or less for 12 hours day. And lots of achievements in my eyes too! You are not alone in that shit.


All those years of silk carpet weaving in twelve hour shifts for pennies, and now here you are on DhO, spinning dukha threads for free!!

emoticon

so sorry your emoji mechanism is fucked up! I couldn't live now without mine. I am, as they say, "attached." I cling to it like a barnacle to a sinking ship.

emoticon

Papa Che taught me everthing i know about emoji use, except when to stop.

emoticon
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Siavash ', modified 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 10:30 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 10:30 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 1679 Join Date: 5/5/19 Recent Posts
Yeah, it's good to have dukkha for free. It's more dukkha it you have to pay for it!!!

I can enjoy your emojis emoticon No big deal emoticon
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 10:35 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 10:35 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Siavash:
Yeah, it's good to have dukkha for free. It's more dukkha it you have to pay for it!!!

There a Dire Straits song about that, I think, "MTV"?, something about "your dukha for nothing and your chicks for free."

I can enjoy your emojis emoticonNo big deal emoticon


You are an inspiration, Sir, admirable and free of envy and covetousness.

emoticon
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Siavash ', modified 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 10:47 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 10:47 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 1679 Join Date: 5/5/19 Recent Posts
Thanks, but I am not free of envy and covetousness at all. As Will said in Unforgiven, Kid is full of shit.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 1:17 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 1:17 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Siavash:
Thanks, but I am not free of envy and covetousness at all. As Will said in Unforgiven, Kid is full of shit.
emoticon
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 10:55 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 10:54 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Practice log/April 24, 202/sesshin day 12/sit 11/0:03:04/ “v”-w-w/end 11:48am, anicca, dukha doors 

Again, all you fucking vipassana scam artists with all the fucking books since the beginning of time in multiple sacred languages, a tower of Babel of wisdom, would it have killed you to just put out a haiku or something, short and sweet, to summarize your crazed path? Like so: 

Just this fucking breath

pilgrimage through this body

up and down, all pain. 
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 12:00 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 12:00 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Practice log/April 24, 2020/sesshin day 12/sit 12/0:06:23/ “v”-w-w/end 2:17pm/anicca, dukha doors

all this fuss, you see,
because breath goes up and down
while the body hurts.


 Practice log/April 24, 202/sesshin day 12/sit 13/0:02:55/ “v”-w-w/ end 12:54pm/ anicca, dukha doors 

Three burning Hebrews
lucid in the inferno
smiling at the king. 

(cf Daniel 3:25, ignoring the form of the mysterious fourth, for the moment)
Shari Tresky, modified 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 7:15 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 7:15 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 10 Join Date: 4/9/20 Recent Posts
Hi Tim,

Thank you for inviting me here. Its a bit overwhelming, so many interesting discussions. For now,

keeping it simple
setting up a practice log
welcoming input 

See ya around!

s
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 8:43 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 8:42 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Shari Tresky:
Hi Tim,

Thank you for inviting me here. Its a bit overwhelming, so many interesting discussions. For now,

keeping it simple
setting up a practice log
welcoming input 

See ya around!

s
Awesome. Welcome to the Bar of Last Resort. Why don't we started you off with this cocktail. It's a mixed drink, equal parts sutrayana, tantrayana, and partyana. We like to call it Hell in a Martini Glass. On the house, of course, and that gentleman over there, the monk sitting in the street in Hue in full lotus position, on fire, in 1968, says your next one is on him.

keeping it simple

setting up a practice log

welcoming input 

You really came to the right low place.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvCgSqPZ4EM

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Not two, not one, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 3:05 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 3:05 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 1038 Join Date: 7/13/17 Recent Posts
[quote=Tim Farrington

Awesome. Welcome to the Bar of Last Resort. Why don&#039;t we started you off with this cocktail. It&#039;s a mixed drink, equal parts sutrayana, tantrayana, and partyana. We like to call it Hell in a Martini Glass. On the house, of course, and that gentleman over there, the monk sitting in the street in Hue in full lotus position, on fire, in 1968, says your next one is on him.]

We are all on fire Tim, we just pretend not to be.  emoticon
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 3:08 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 3:08 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Not two, not one:
[quote=Tim Farrington

Awesome. Welcome to the Bar of Last Resort. Why don&#039;t we started you off with this cocktail. It&#039;s a mixed drink, equal parts sutrayana, tantrayana, and partyana. We like to call it Hell in a Martini Glass. On the house, of course, and that gentleman over there, the monk sitting in the street in Hue in full lotus position, on fire, in 1968, says your next one is on him.]
Not Two, Not One
We are all on fire Tim, we just pretend not to be.  emoticon
 well, i'm trying to keep a good flimsy front on it just like the next guy, but i just can't help SCREAMING ONCE IN A WHILE.

i'm curious about your name. I heard it in a really good joke recently.

emoticon
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Not two, not one, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 3:19 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 3:16 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 1038 Join Date: 7/13/17 Recent Posts
I'm just trying to upgrade my communication. The constant arising and passing away of our rainbow experience is driven by the heart.  We are not two.  But we are also not one.

emoticon



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Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 3:25 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 3:25 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 7134 Join Date: 12/8/18 Recent Posts
That's a perfect name for you, albeit somewhat lengthy. 
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 3:25 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 3:25 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Not two, not one:
I'm just trying to upgrade my communication. The constant arising and passing away of our rainbow experience is driven by the heart.  We are not two.  But we are also not one.

emoticon




oh jesus, you just shaktipatted my ass with that image. I'm fucked now. Thanks a lot, you [horrific string of utterly astounding yet strangely complelling expletives deleted, per DhO forum rules].
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Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 3:31 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 3:31 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 7134 Join Date: 12/8/18 Recent Posts
That image actually captures my current experience of the existence quite well.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 3:38 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 3:36 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö:
That image actually captures my current experience of the existence quite well.

I know.

(edit) that's one more reason it scares the fuck out of me, to be lit up like that.
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Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 4:00 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 4:00 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 7134 Join Date: 12/8/18 Recent Posts
It doesn't flash around like that for me. When there are strong colors, they usually swirl in a much gentler way and match much more esthetically satisfactory. The experience of coming in and out of existence in the lovemaking between empty space and awareness tends to be in white light and more in slow motion, as if time is drawn out. 
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 4:06 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 4:06 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö:
It doesn't flash around like that for me. When there are strong colors, they usually swirl in a much gentler way and match much more esthetically satisfactory. The experience of coming in and out of existence in the lovemaking between empty space and awareness tends to be in white light and more in slow motion, as if time is drawn out. 

This erotic universe of yours is a lovely place.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 9:37 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/24/20 9:37 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Practice log/April 24, 202/sesshin day 12/sit 14/0:06:24/bbw-2/
end 2:26pm/ortho/ withth-i, R-mudra/anicca, anatta doors 

April 24, 2020/sesshin day 12/sit 15/0:06:25/bbw/end 10:25pm/ortho/w-i,
R-mudra/anicca, anatta doors

Back to grounding and stabilizing practice with body-breath-word, dancing with the One that brung me. Had a godawful back seizure pretty much all afternoon, after stopping at the gazebo for a smoke and apparently sitting very wrong against the railing. Couldn’t move without agonizing pain, and the hundred yard walk to my hut was slow and loud, yelping and grunting with every step. Eventually my neighbor Dan spotted me in distress, came out and supported me home, turned on my air conditioner for me, and brought me the lovely remnants of a painkiller prescription of his own, and his phone number. The drugs worked somewhat, enough for me to have some supper and get some sleep, but i am going to take it easy on the “vipassana”-wink-wink technique for a spell. This back dukha suffices for misery, without looking for more trouble.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 1:01 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 1:00 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
April 24, 2020/sesshin day 12/sit 16/0:06:26/bbw-2/end 10:58pm/sinistral/ w-i, R-mudra/anicca, anatta doors

 and some sleep, back tender but bearable, partly due to some excellent drugs from my neighbor Dan.

 April 25, 2020; sesshin day 13; sit 1/0:06:27/bbw/ended 1:46am/sinistral/witht-h, L-mudra/anicca, anatta doors

 Traditional manic sesshin first sit without coffee, as a cup of depresso-mimetic meditation. Not bad, as pain-wracked breath and mantra work in a deep fog goes. Bearable, certainly. I didn’t even take any more of Dan’s great drugs. And I didn’t cry out with pain and wake anyone up as i went out for my smoke. These are all good things, relatively speaking.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 4:17 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 4:14 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Practice log/April 25, 2020; sesshin day 13/2/0:06:28/bbw-2/ended 2:45am/ortho/no fear, L-mudra/ anicca, anatta doors 

Practice log/April 25, 2020; sesshin day 13/sit 3/0:06:29/bbw/ended 3:09am/sinistral/wit-h, L-mudra/ anicca, anatta doors 

Practice log/April 25, 2020; sesshin day 13/sit 4/0:06:30/bbw/ended m3:45am/ortho/attend/annica, anatta doors 

Practice log/April 25, 2020; sesshin day 13/sit 5/0:06:31/bbw/end 4:33am/sinistral/withth-i/anicca, anatta doors////back is feeling great as long as i ooze along like a dancing snail, sliming out to smoke with my sacred walking stick like an old pro at being ancient and lame. I remember reading zen stories at age 17--- think Alan Watts' Way of Zen here--- and wanting to get enlightened and just wander around with a stick for a staff, banging on the trunks of trees and stuff. Be careful what you wish for, I guess! At least I got the stick,emoticon

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Not two, not one, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 4:39 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 4:39 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 1038 Join Date: 7/13/17 Recent Posts
Tim - not to interfere or disrupt too much.  But I wonder if Mahayana is the right frame of reference for your practice?  I'm not suggesting Vajrayana (tantric visualisations might be a bit over the top for you) ... but I almost get a Zen vibe from the way you interadt with the joyful absurdity of reality. And, I think you are more about deeply grokking that joyful absurdity, than you are about running soup kitchens and founding meditation centres. What do you think?  I'm not suggesting any great change, just wondering whether you are fully appreciating who you already are? 

Love

Malcolm.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 4:45 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 4:45 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Not two, not one:
Tim - I wonder if Mahayana is the right frame of reference for your practice?  I'm not suggesting Vajrayana (tantric visualisations might be a bit over the top for you) ... but I almost get a Zen vibe from the way you interadt with the joyful absurdity of reality. And, I think you are more about deeply grokking that joyful absurdity, than you are about running soup kitchens and founding meditation centres. What do you think?  I'm not suggesting any great change, just wondering whether you are fully appreciating who you already are? 

Love

Malcolm.

The thing is, my friend, it's too late--- all the coolest people are on DhO. This is my sangha, my ecclesia, the choir i want to do stand-up for. When the saints go marching in, however it happens, i want to be covering the DhO six, last in line, playing my kazoo.

not to interfere or disrupt too much. 


Well, you fucked up my whole morning, and made me deeply question every step i've taken on the path, and doubt that there's any possible coherence to this brutal existence beyond my own pathetic ephemeral eddies of mind-constructions, but shit, no harm, no foul
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Not two, not one, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 4:53 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 4:52 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 1038 Join Date: 7/13/17 Recent Posts
[quote=Tim Farrington
]
Well, you fucked up my whole morning, and made me deeply question every step i've taken on the path, and doubt that there's any possible coherence to this brutal existence beyond my own pathetic ephemeral eddies of mind-constructions, but shit, no harm, no foul


Oh!  Sounds like progress then.  emoticon

But I didn't mean leavin the DhO.  Just enjoying the absurdity and not feeling any obligation.

P.S. The liferay quote editing sure is unintuitive .. 
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 5:16 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 5:16 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Not two, not one:
[quote=Tim Farrington
]
Well, you fucked up my whole morning, and made me deeply question every step i've taken on the path, and doubt that there's any possible coherence to this brutal existence beyond my own pathetic ephemeral eddies of mind-constructions, but shit, no harm, no foul


Oh!  Sounds like progress then.  emoticon

But I didn't mean leavin the DhO.  Just enjoying the absurdity and not feeling any obligation.

P.S. The liferay quote editing sure is unintuitive .. 

and now you have plunged me into a dark night. I mean, consider that word, "enjoying"? Do our pleasures not flicker and flee as the lightning flash? And the obligations of karma--- are they not in fact beyond measure? Thus the wheel of samsara goes round and round, round and round, round and round, all about the town.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 5:57 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 5:56 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Practice log/ April 25, 2020/sesshin day 13/sit 6/0:06:32/bbw/ end 5:33am/sinistral (oops)/ wi-t. R-mudra/annica. anatta doors 

April 25, 2020/sesshin day 13/sit 7/0:06:33/bbw/end 5:59am/ortho/with/anicca door 

April 25, 2020/sesshin day 13/sit 8/0:06:34/bbw/end 6:28am/sinistral/with/anicca door


 I’ve been really loving this anicca door since it sort of opened a crack for me, a glimpse like the character in Kafka at the end of that inspiring story where he sits in front of a baffling door to beyond his whole life, and only learns it was his door when the gatekeeper tells him it was as he closes it.

 The whole thing really happens on one breath, basically. The universe, and every nested fractal level down through all the hierarchies of existence, you can do the whole shebang on one breath. I mean, think of jazz or blues guys jamming, those incredible flights of casual genius by masters. How the fuck do they DO that? For jazz, go find Daniel or something, but the blues is my business and business is good.

So in door terms, how do these blues guys stay coordinated with each other when they’re out there in a riff so far beyond any rememberable structure that it might very well be noise, for all anyone can tell? Three doors to that.

door 2 is dukha: they fucking HEAR it, inconceivably, with ears like bats.

door three is anatta, the cosmic beat, independent of any self--- in a twelve bar blues, as long as you know by the beat what bar you’re in, and what key the song is in, and you’re not the one supposed to be keeping the beat, it’s your solo, your riff, you can pretty much do anything your genius fucking fingers or lips on the instrument “want” to do, as long as you bring it home to the right chord at the last beat of the measured bar.

Door 1, anicca. is the wildest and most mysterious of all, in a way: you are just somewhere so far out there, no ears, no time, that all you really have to do is wait until your instrument wakes you up with the surprise of what it is the ripe time to play. This is the lazy man’s blues, and i think it’s how certain very very stoned artists produced improv riffs of such astounding, bewildering, even counter-intuitional grace: they were basically just chilling somewhere in between synapse firings. The guitar or whatever instrument was in play did what it wanted at the right moment, but they didn’t give a shit one way or the other, it was all as good as silence to them throughout.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 7:46 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 7:45 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Practice log/April 25, 2020/sesshin day 13/sit 9/0:06:35/bbw/end 8:26am/ortho/with/anicca door 


I have discovered that growling relieves the back pain, replaces it, essentially: instead of a shooting pain at movement, a growl. I have been
experimenting as i move around inside my hut, risking some volume, now that it’s daylight, because i don't think it can be heard outside, and my neighbors know i’m hurting anyway, and are cool. And it seems as simple as that: as I move and sense the pain close, i growl, and move right through it. 

Out on a walk earlier, with my stick/cane, it was pain as it came and i took it slow, realizing how hard it was to keep from making noise. But that’s the whole thing about this tiny, close-knit community here: there’s an eye and an ear at every window, looking out for the security of this place. I have been here going on 4-1/2 years because i haven’t scared anyone, hurt anyone, messed with anyone in any way. That is my learning curve, my state of the art. But walking my walk route growling instead of hurting is shitting in the nest, plain and simple.

But it’s cool to see it so clearly. I think this pain wants me to know that thing at the heart of the growl energy, that scary fucking i-mean-busines-here-motherfucker part, the tone that in my father my friends called "The Major voice," and I was the Marine Corps brat whose father had taught him three ways to kill someone before he was six, and where to go after killing someone for the best beer and talk. 

If I were in a spiritual emergency hut somewhere secluded, I could work this whole back thing through by growling when it was time to growl. This situation may actually be better, though: knowing when a growl would stop my pain but cause someone else’s fear unnecessarily. When I scare someone, I want to do it because it is time for that motherfucker to be scared. So learning discrimination, with the pain and the growl--- fire control, my Dad would have called it, the discipline of shoot/don’t-shoot, foe/friendly, yes/no.
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Papa Che Dusko, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 8:01 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 8:01 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2680 Join Date: 3/1/20 Recent Posts
Next time you chat to your neighbor maybe good idea to say that you sometimes get real sharp pain in the lower back and you growl and that they shall not worry if they hear such noise. This way all can just relax around it including you. 

I know self control is valuable also. 

Just to say that I'm reading you here even though I don't reply much. 
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 8:30 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 8:18 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Papa Che Dusko:
Next time you chat to your neighbor maybe good idea to say that you sometimes get real sharp pain in the lower back and you growl and that they shall not worry if they hear such noise. This way all can just relax around it including you. 

I know self control is valuable also. 

Just to say that I'm reading you here even though I don't reply much. 

lol, Dan and I may literally have been having that conversation as you posted this. We were both laughing. He says he hasn't heard a thing, that's his story and he's sticking to it, but i told him what i was doing, pacing around in here in the hut and growling my way through every weird bak angle. Dan is just plain awesome, a retired cop, and a Harley rider. One of the first things he said to me when we met last mmonth was that i looked like a Harley guy! Little old me! I guess I was dressed a bit rough and i haven't been shaving much, taking the lock-down as a razor-free zone of great joy for the most part. I told him that might be the nicest thing anyone had every said to me, and we've been good as gold from there.

emoticon


(edit) I still can't move around much, even using the growl siddhi, because my voice would give out. But the neighbors are all in, at this point, and all cool.

emoticon
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Siavash ', modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 8:32 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 8:32 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Yeah, growling and wailing (I don't know the right words, anyway) help with pain. I notice that if I have to be aware of the body, having awareness of whole body helps with pain too. As Shinzen says, it makes pain spread to whole body and be less of a problem.

Wish you a painless body.
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 8:40 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 8:40 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Grunting. Every time I grope my way out of my car, I grunt. I think it's a combination of age and some kind of automatic reflex.
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Siavash ', modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 8:45 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 8:45 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Yeah, thanks.
What I was in my mind, which I do sometimes and helps: When someone is sick and is in bed, and makes noise while exhaling. That would be Grunting?
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 8:51 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 8:50 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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That might be grunting but it sounds more like moaning. I'd type a grunt like this:  "Oof!" I'd type a moan something like this: "Oooh, Uhhhh, Ohhh."
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Siavash ', modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 8:56 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 8:52 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Thanks.
Yeah, moaning is the right word I guess.

-- Edit:
"Oooh, Uhhhh, Ohhh."

Exactly. For years, I would do that in bed while sleeping, and a lot of times it would continue after falling asleep, and that was the best thing for getting rest, since I would be very tired (mentally).
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:04 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:04 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Siavash:
Thanks.
Yeah, moaning is the right word I guess.

-- Edit:
"Oooh, Uhhhh, Ohhh."

Exactly. For years, I would do that in bed while sleeping, and a lot of times it would continue after falling asleep, and that was the best thing for getting rest, since I would be very tired (mentally).
Keep it clean with the sound effects, guys, we're trying to keep away from an NC-17 rating here.
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:06 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:06 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Thank you, Tim, for keeping this on the up and up, and for doing it on the down-low.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:07 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:07 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Chris Marti:
Thank you, Tim, for keeping this on the up and up, and for doing it on the down-low.

Now i'm completely fucking disoriented.
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:08 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:08 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Katz!
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:09 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:09 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Chris Marti:


Katz!


. . . and at that instant, Tim Farrington achieved Enlightenment.
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:10 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:10 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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My work here is done.

See ya'll.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:11 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:11 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Chris Marti:
My work here is done.

See ya'll.

[Marti drops the mike, and vanishes as mysteriously as he came.]
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 8:52 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 8:52 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Chris Marti:
That might be grunting but it sounds more like moaning.


Everybody's a fucking critic. That moaning is FIERCE AS SHIT.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 8:59 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 8:59 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Siavash:
Yeah, thanks.
What I was in my mind, which I do sometimes and helps: When someone is sick and is in bed, and makes noise while exhaling. That would be Grunting?

I think that might be sighing, a breath noise. Moaning is more vocalized and sort ofminor key, like a ghost. Grunting is energetic, a short sharp bit of energy.
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Siavash ', modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:03 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:03 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Tim Farrington:
Siavash:
Yeah, thanks.
What I was in my mind, which I do sometimes and helps: When someone is sick and is in bed, and makes noise while exhaling. That would be Grunting?

I think that might be sighing, a breath noise. Moaning is more vocalized and sort ofminor key, like a ghost. Grunting is energetic, a short sharp bit of energy.


Hmm, now I am remembering these damn words one by one! You are right.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 8:56 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 8:56 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Chris Marti:
Grunting. Every time I grope my way out of my car, I grunt. I think it's a combination of age and some kind of automatic reflex.

You may grunt you old fart (well, i do old fart grunts too). But I am talking here about a fucking GRRRRRROWL.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 8:55 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 8:55 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Siavash:
Yeah, growling and wailing (I don't know the right words, anyway) help with pain. I notice that if I have to be aware of the body, having awareness of whole body helps with pain too. As Shinzen says, it makes pain spread to whole body and be less of a problem.

Wish you a painless body.

I think the growling is akin to the energy that allows wounded Marines to keep fighting until the battle is over, then realize how badly they've been hit all along, and just fucking drop.

wishing me a painless body?! Who are you, Jesus? Super Santa Claus? I have not been that good a boy. No one ever has.
emoticon But thanks for the thought, my friend.
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 8:58 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 8:58 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Did the vipassana stuff I offered up to you cause this painful back? Is it tension or injury, or what happens to me - mysterious universal forces aligned and acting in concert to make my life suck?
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:02 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:02 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Chris Marti:
Did the vipassana stuff I offered up to you cause this painful back? Is it tension or injury, or what happens to me - mysterious universal forces aligned and acting in concert to make my life suck?


Well, empirically speaking, the closest potent agent here is that fucking vipassana, yes. This is a traditional stress thing with me, too, historically it has hit me while sometime is dying. But nobody seems to be dying, and the stress comes from knowing a loved one is dying, and i hope i'm not getting into some kind of subconscious tapped-into-the-dying siddhi anyway.

Mysterious universal forces aligned and acting in concert to make my life suck is always in good taste. The Tao fucked up my back.
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Siavash ', modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 8:59 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 8:59 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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I think the growling is akin to the energy that allows wounded Marines to keep fighting until the battle is over, then realize how badly they've been hit all along, and just fucking drop.
Yes, that's how it works.

wishing me a painless body?! Who are you, Jesus? Super Santa Claus? I have not been that good a boy. No one ever has.
I am the one who wishes you a painless body emoticon . You'll get that, I am sure emoticon
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:06 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:06 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Siavash:
I think the growling is akin to the energy that allows wounded Marines to keep fighting until the battle is over, then realize how badly they've been hit all along, and just fucking drop.
Yes, that's how it works.

wishing me a painless body?! Who are you, Jesus? Super Santa Claus? I have not been that good a boy. No one ever has.
I am the one who wishes you a painless body emoticon . You'll get that, I am sure emoticon
Well shit, man, if you can really pull this off, let's get our marketing campaign set up and make a fucking FORTUNE!

emoticon

Wait a minute . . . [throws away his cane] OH Hallelujah, i am HEALED, HEALED BY THE POWER OF SIAVASH!!!!!
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Siavash ', modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:11 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:11 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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throws away his cane

Like John Locke when he first met the Island! Or like Ben after John visited him (Lost). Ok, I've polluted this log too much. Sorry.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:15 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:15 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Siavash:
throws away his cane

Like John Locke when he first met the Island! Or like Ben after John visited him (Lost). 
Exactly! or like jesus with the lame and the halt. You're a miracle worker, man. And this shit is marketing gold!

Ok, I've polluted this log too much. Sorry.


Siavash, you are a wonderful saddhu and a very smart and funny guy, but you just don't get it: this log IS the pollution. The Bar of Last Resort is the septic tank of DhO; all the shit flows downhill to here. It's what we DO here.
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Siavash ', modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:17 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:17 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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this log IS the pollution.

I know, and I knew. But I have a fucking obsession, if you hadn't noticed ;)
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:23 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:22 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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I'm a long-time member of an online system called The Well. There are several threads like this one there. One is called "Weird", one "Obsess" and another "Flame." I'm betting, Tim, that you've heard of the place. If not, then you should have. It was made with you in mind. It's a bunch of old(ish) farts, writers, journos, and sciency people rambling on about shit they like and shit they don't.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:29 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:24 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Chris Marti:
I'm a long-time member of an online system called The Well. There are several threads like this one there. One is called "Weird", one "Obsess" and another "Flame." I'm betting, Tim, that you've heard of the place. If not, then you should have. It was made with you in mind. It's a bunch of old(ish) farts, writers, journos, and sciency people rambling on about shit they like and shit they don't.

Yeah, I was in SF when they invented it, and a bunch of my friends were in big-time. But I never really took the plunge down the Well.

. . .  Hey, wait a minute. Are you suggesting very tactfully that I take this shit of mine ELSEWHERE?
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:28 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:28 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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I'm not suggesting anything of the sort. I'm just helping Saivash understand your thread here.
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Siavash ', modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:32 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:30 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Chris Marti:
I'm not suggesting anything of the sort. I'm just helping Siavash understand your thread here.


Thanks. Yeah, I got that from your post emoticon
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:36 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:36 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Siavash, do you have a jib? If you do, I like the cut of it  emoticon
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Siavash ', modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:43 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:43 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Chris Marti:
Siavash, do you have a jib? If you do, I like the cut of it  emoticon


Oh, my bad english. I couldn't get what that means! so I just say Yes emoticon
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:46 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 9:46 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Siavash ', modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 10:03 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 10:03 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Chris Marti:


Thanks.
I read from two dictionaries, but they were not clear enough, and my mind is not sharp enough now.

Thank you emoticon , same here man, I like YOU. And I like the cut of yours, back emoticon
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 10:08 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 10:07 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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... my mind is not sharp enough now.

Allow me to introduce you to another American idiom - Hogwash!
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Siavash ', modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 10:29 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 10:17 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Chris Marti:
... my mind is not sharp enough now.

Allow me to introduce you to another American idiom - Hogwash!


Thanks.

Fair enough, and thanks for the hint (If I got it right ;) )!
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 10:27 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 10:27 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 10:39 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 10:39 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Chris Marti:

You got some serious techno siddhi chops, man.

I am reduced to trying to figure out how to transcribe a mournful sea lion moan/grun/howl/growl/sigh. Don't tease Siavash too hard, the guy is tender. Tender as nails, yes. But tender.
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Siavash ', modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 10:43 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 10:43 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Tim Farrington:
Chris Marti:

You got some serious techno siddhi chops, man.

I am reduced to trying to figure out how to transcribe a mournful sea lion moan/grun/howl/growl/sigh. Don't tease Siavash too hard, the guy is tender. Tender as nails, yes. But tender.


I am still trying to understant and relate the video, and the title of it emoticon
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 10:44 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 10:44 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Siavash:
Chris Marti:
... my mind is not sharp enough now.

Allow me to introduce you to another American idiom - Hogwash!


Thanks.

Fair enough, and thanks for the hint (If I got it right ;) )!

Siavash, Chris is, uh, yanking your chain here. (Damn this idiom trap we've fallen into.) He is, uh, teasing you with great fondness and good humor. There are no fucking hints beyond the hint to laugh along with him, and us, and all the world of dukha.

And Chris, allow me to introduce you to another American idiom, this one courtesy of your United Staes Marine Corps: [stream of invective of Mozartian complexity and grace, using all of the words George Carlin was not allowed to say on tv, and mating them and producing little hybrid variations of increasingly mutant abuse of the foulest sort, deleted, as per DhO forum rules, though we almost let this one through from sheer esthetic awe, it was clearly the height of a Master Working Blue.]
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 10:54 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 10:54 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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And Chris, allow me to introduce you to another American idiom, this one courtesy of your United Staes Marine Corps: [stream of invective of Mozartian complexity and grace...

You may not know this about me but I have work at the U.S. Military Academy and I know a lot of, uh, people there, and they tell me that the Marine Corps ain't got nuthin' on the United States Army. I believe these fine people.
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Siavash ', modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 11:02 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 11:02 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Siavash, Chris is, uh, yanking your chain here. (Damn this idiom trap we've fallen into.) He is, uh, teasing you with great fondness and good humor. There are no fucking hints beyond the hint to laugh along with him, and us, and all the world of dukha.

I got that partly.

The thing is, when it comes to humor and jokes.., I am very very poor in getting them, and it seems that it's getting worse as I get older! I tend to read everything as if it has been said very seriously in a court -- that is the default -- and it depends on how much I can keep distance from that default!

What I said about my mind not being sharp enough, the thing that happens these days when reading something, is that I see a paragraph, and instead of reading in the usual way, I scan it for some keywords to get the meaning of the whole thing, and if I don't find them in 1 second or 2, I just ignore it and move on, otherwise I go back and read it, but a lot of times these days I just can't make myself to stop and read something. It becomes boring/annoying. And it's not just about English, it's the same with my native languages too. But I appreciate your kindness and Chris's kindness deeply emoticon
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 12:57 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 12:57 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Chris Marti:

A present indeed! Thank you, thank you. 

Fuck, i can't grab quotes out of it, it wants me to take all or nothing.

It's thrilling, honestly. The parallels to practice fascinate me too--- looking for these few simple rules, techniques, that generate all this vast complexity. Wolfram excitement really comes through on this. He feels like he's closing in on his algorithmic-type simple rules that will generate a model of our specific universe with a degree of unprecedented exactitude. It's a shame I'm just going to lift and warp all his beautiful ideas to fit into a time travel story or something. I am humbled here. These physicists, so many of them love Beauty! Einstein, this guy, Feynman--- so many of the great ones, they just wanted this exquisite elegant simplicity. Thanks again for the link.  
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Smiling Stone, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 4:43 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 4:43 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Hey Bartender,

A Bodh-weiser for me, please... Oh wait, what do I see here?
it seems to me this morning that which doors i am working with in a given sit are much more fundamental thatn whether it is “vipassana” or “concentrative” or “prayer of this or that” or what have you.
 
The thing is, at a given point in practice, certain doors present themselves to be knocked on. I began with the breath.transience/anicca door, in 1975 during my first meditations as a senior in high school in Honolulu--- i would drive up the Pali, the mountain road over the chain of heights that divides the leeward and windward sides of the island, to this little Buddhist temple, and do my sits in these intro classes, sitting around a big conference room-type table with a monk and a bunch of other clueless haoles and locals. So i’ve been banging on that door for 45 years. I got into serious mantra work, word/anatta door,  in the ashram in 1982-84, and always combined that with breath, in matras like so-ham, working one syllable on the in-breath, one on the out.
 
funny story: when i went nuts in my Haight Ashbury commune scene on two hits of Very Good Dope, in 1984, post-ashram, and started praying aloud to the goddess (the main goddess, we were polytheistic) of the new religion we were making up then, and got tossed out and sent up to Harbin Hot Springs, in the thermal leak hills of Lake County north of SF, i got stashed in their state of the art Spiritual Emergency hut (Grof was in his heyday then, driving every body nuts), the guy who ran the place, a skinny intense motherfuck named Ishvara, interviewed me when i got there. He was a KUNDALINI YOGI of the highest order, and when he heard that i had done my time in the kundalini saturated Siddha Yoga Dham in Oakland, he was delighted. He asked me what my practice was, no doubt expecting collegial intricacies, chakra spins and swoops and sophisticated nadi electricity manipulation of the highest order. I told him, “I watch my breath.” His face fell into scorn and disappointment; i was clearly another pedestrian/civilian to him. “Okay, well enjoy the Spiritual Emergency hut,” he said, and sent me on my way, and that was the last he ever spoke with me.
 
What i think of as “vipassana” is characterized by its relentless attention to the dukha door, what i call “body.” It was only in the worst of my dark night cycles that i was reduced to the body/dukha door, because at that point I was, like, Fuck this fucking breathing, I would so prefer to STOP THAT SHIT, and fuck this word shit, it’s all empty noise. What i found at that point was 1) the fucking breathing does itself, and 2) so does the fucking body/dukha. So i would sit there wanting nothing more than to die in this materialist void-of-meaning piece of shit universe, and be done, stuck with the anicca of breath and the dukha of body, a perfect two-door meditation if ever there was one, and entirely against my will.

Make it a Bloody Mary instead. A Bloody Mary with a bush of thorns stuck in the middle... will look like a Prayer to the bloody Goddess to drink that one!
After a couple of PTBGs, I read this again and think : What's the need for Chris's tedious memories when we have a shiny diamond here, an epic of love and loss that will keep us awake until the wee hours... What happened with the goddess? The Spiritual Emergency Hut ??? Grof ? We want more !!!

And I love your three doors framework for making sense of all these... sits. Could have come from my log!
Well, I did not go any further in your day's adventures... It's a gargantuan task to keep up with your output!
Thanks for the visit, by the way, I know you mean it.

with a nice heap of metta to help you go through the night (whatever your evening was about, I stopped at 6.36 am, pardon me...)
smiling stone

And sorry for not answering at the right place, I lost it!
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 4:51 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 4:51 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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What's the need for Chris's tedious memories...

The very question I've been asking myself lately.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 5:07 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 5:06 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Chris Marti:
What's the need for Chris's tedious memories...

The very question I've been asking myself lately.

Have another one of these, Chris--- its a house speciality we call a "Prayer to the bloody Goddess" (PTBG)--- and this round for the whole bar is on Mr. Metta himself, the ever smiling ever stoned 100,000er known at one point in his infinite spiral arc of rebirths as the Bodhisattva of Swing (cf the Dire Straits song about his band, badly translated there as, the Sultan). And have some patience, please, if you would, these questions will all be answered in time, und in Gotteszet, Gotteszeit,  which as Saint Johann Back tells us, ist Die Aller Beste Zeite.
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Steph S, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 5:11 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 5:11 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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I'm super late to this party, but I just wanted to jump in and say:

Where is this letter from Bernadette Roberts?

That is legendary. I think you mentioned it in some other thread recently and I forgot which one, so I'm asking about it here cuz I did a Command + F for Bernadette in this thread and you mentioned the letter here too.

Srsly, though. Tell me to shut up or knock it off it's too personal. But man, if you ever felt like sharing it, hell yes.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 7:10 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 6:19 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Steph S:
I'm super late to this party, 
Hi Steph, welcome to one of the seediest of the hell bardos, despite some of these new age buddhists around here trying to paint over the sign and call it "purgatory" or something similarly wimpy and user-friendlier. Here we try to put into action what you so brilliantly called "fun with boredom." There is no late to this party, except in the general sense of the later your arrival at the party in hell, the better for you; ditto on the earliness of your departure.

Where is this letter from Bernadette Roberts?

I believe this letter came up on the BR "memorial thread posted by Derek 2 when she died in 2017--- https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/7049212--- I was trying to impress Stirling Campbell, as far as i can determine looking back over it, and he expressed interest in seeing it.The letter also came up on--- 
https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/20237859 

--a snappy little number i like to call "stages of insight 9-15 (DfD-Fruition) mapped to Christian path to union,
" where agnostic, bless his pot-stirring heart, picked up on the scent of the letter immediately and also expressed, uh, interest in seeing it:

Tim Farrington:

Cross=Equanimity=EQ=4th vipassana jhana, n11

 and this, from St. Bernadette Roberts, a contemporary
Christian contemplative and one ornery woman, who died just a few years ago,
God bless her, and who once, in a letter, tore me a giant new asshole on the
issue of meditation and medication, dark night and depression. But that’s
another story.


agnostic

Post the letter

Post the letter

Post the letter

Being the conscientious fellow that i am, and always eager to please my fellow [borderline obscene, slanderous, and insulting characterization deleted here, per DhO forum rules] practitioners, I looked in all the obvious places here in my book-and-manila-file-folder crammed archive box of a hut, that is to say, the last book's notes, and the next book's notes, and came up short, which meant that if a was serious, i was going to have to get out of my chair. Since i try to only get out of my chair to smoke (outside, because i hate the smell of smoke, don't you?) or to have sex (which i haven't done for years, as i am practicing the double whammy neo-monastic lifestyle of So Bad at Relationships That Sex Just Doesn't Ever Come Up combined with the ancient ascetic practice known as Involuntary But Utterly Complete Celibacy De Facto), it took me several more days to get bored enough to have some fun looking for the damned letter, which i knew i had seen recently, because it was even more infuriating last time i read it, when i felt secure in my love for the dearly departed BR, that it had been on earlier readings when the question of interacting with her further was till in play, and so couldn't really face just how much the woman had pissed me off.You may think I digress. You would be right.Anyway, jesusfuckingchrist what a cluster fuck of a dusty archeology expedition, a sort of Kamikaze mission into depths of folders inside boxes inside other boxes, a vast, scattered, sprawling, really incoherent series of stratified piles of shit and field notes, drafts and re-drafts and notes for shit and drafts, etc., countless gems of lost wisdom buried, like everything here on the Bar of Last Resort thread, and indeed like most of my writing career's best work, beneath and through the landslide debris of Tons of Shit.Are you sorry you asked yet, or is that too much to hope for?So, no fucking letter. And some days later, pissed at myself by this time for apparently losing a treasure in the history of American Catholic contemplation controversies, failures, and relentless defeats, i looked through Every Fucking Folder I Could Find, and no joy.To make a long story a little longer, and for the record, pending the letter surfacing as a surprise from wherever i carefully and thoughtfu and ingeniously stashed it so that i wold never lose it, the letter's basic context and contents were as follows:I wrote the essay that would eventually become the little book A Hell of Mercy in the early 2000s, and it was first published as an essay in a marvelous magazine in Chapel Hill called The Sun. At around that time, I sent a copy of the essay to Bernadette Roberts, who lived in Santa Monica. The essay was subtitled, "a meditation on depression and the dark night of the soul," a topic that has only grown more relevant in the years since. I told her how much i loved and admired her work, and how she had been a mainstay for me, along with John of the Cross, during my years and years of being a dark night yogi (a term i did not have at the time, as i didn't read MCTB until 2011. I just thought i was fucked).She wrote back with surprising promptness, a 15-page letter typed single-spaced. I think she had a sort of support team of quasi-devotees by then; i have met at least one of them, and corresponded with several others briefly on practical matters. So maybe a minion typed it. I don't knew which horrifies me more: BR sitting down and pounding out that fucking long-ass piece of type-work herself, or her having pious cronies willing to do it for her. The last 12 or 13 pages of the letter were what looked like a boilerplate run-out of the true path of John of the Cross, and were, as everything BR herself said about John X, the state of the art. She had eaten John X whole, and had him down pat, and she was right about him pretty much on all points. So that little sub-treatise is a treasure in itself.In the first few pages of the letter, she addressed my essay and dismissed its thesis that the discussion of the dark night and the discussion of depression had any commin ground whatsoever. I have never been depressed a moment in my life, she said, but I do know that no depressed person could be called to the high spiritual demands of the dark night. God would not be that cruel. Depressed people are like crippled work horses, or gimpy burros (okay, that's my paraphrasing), while those with a true calling to the dark night are "like thoroughbred race horses," her actual words, and only those elite ones are capable of running the whole race. Any association of mental illness and an actual calling to the dark night of contemplation is an utter fallacy. She also criticized me for using some quotes from her works, with an implication that she was sorry to be besmirched by any association with such a work as mine. She told me i had misquoted her and cited the wrong book, which made me feel like such a shit until i went back and checked and found that it was she who was mistaken, that i had in fact cited her correctly both as to source and substance. She accused me of falling into a series of cliched misunderstandings about the dark night and depression, all of which i had explicitly addressed in the esay and explicitly dismissed as, uh, cliched misunderstandings. So she hadn't read it for shit, basically. She didn't hear a word I said, and she dumped on me magisterially and with almost comic lack of comprehension of what i had been actually saying. Still, I was sort of honored, to have been so thoroughly trashed by a person i still consider one of the peaks of the Christian contemplative life. I knew she was a piece of work just from reading her books, and pieces of work are no problem, if they've got the goods, which she did.So that's the lurid tale as best i can convey it in the absence of the source material. If you're interested in BR beyond the legendary lost letter tearing Farrington a new one, i recently found this great--- i mean, exquisitely representative--- article on Richard Rohr in a mega-conservative Catholic theological-political magazine that accuses BR of being off the deep end, as so many have. I am also trying to find a forum on Christian shit where I spent a certain amount of time defending BR's legitimacy and depth and genius against a coterie of rabid neo-inquisitionalists and assorted snotballs, one of whom, funnily enough, preferred Jung.Thanks for visiting the Bar, Steph, it's always a joy to see you. Here's the boredom, then--- hope you are able to find the fun in it.love, tim

oops: p.s.

Srsly, though. Tell me to shut up or knock it off it's too personal. But man, if you ever felt like sharing it, hell yes.


I would love to see you try to get too personal with me, lol. And it will be a very cold day here in hell before i ever thought of telling you to shut up. I love it when you talk.
David S, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 7:26 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 7:26 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 66 Join Date: 6/13/16 Recent Posts
"...on earlier readings when the question of interacting with her further was till in play, and so couldn't really face just how much the woman had pissed me off.You may think I digress. You would be right.Anyway, jesusfuckingchrist what a cluster fuck of a dusty archeology expedition, a sort of Kamikaze mission into depths of folders inside boxes inside other boxes, a vast, scattered, sprawling, really incoherent series of stratified piles of shit and field notes, drafts and re-drafts and notes for shit and drafts, etc., countless gems of lost wisdom buried, like everything here on the Bar of Last Resort thread, and indeed like most of my writing career's best work, beneath and through the landslide debris of Tons of Shit.Are you sorry you asked yet, or is that too much to hope for?So, no fucking letter. And some days later, pissed at myself by this time for apparently losing a treasure in the history of American Catholic contemplation controversies, failures, and relentless defeats, i looked through Every Fucking Folder I Could Find, and no joy.To make a long story a little longer, and for the record, pending the letter surfacing as a surprise from wherever i carefully and thoughtfu and ingeniously stashed it so that i wold never lose it, the letter's basic context and contents were as follows:I wrote the essay that would eventually become the little book A Hell of Mercy in the early 2000s, and it was first published as an essay in a marvelous magazine in Chapel Hill called The Sun. At around that time, I sent a copy of the essay to Bernadette Roberts, who lived in Santa Monica. The essay was subtitled, "a meditation on depression and the dark night of the soul," a topic that has only grown more relevant in the years since. I told her how much i loved and admired her work, and how she had been a mainstay for me, along..."
"

Is this really anything to behold, retold, written down?
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 7:35 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 7:35 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
David S:

Is this really anything to behold, retold, written down?


Hi David, and welcome to the Bar of Last Resort, which doubles as my practice log and preening center. Have a few cold ones of your choice on me, and forgive the unholy din.

"is this really anything. . ." to be retold? Well, for the re-teller, apparently, de facto, yes.

"is this really anything. . ." to be written down? well, for the writer, cf. above.

"is this really anything. . ." to behold? That's in the eye of the beholder, I think.

Thanks again for dropping by.

David S, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 7:37 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 7:37 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 66 Join Date: 6/13/16 Recent Posts
Hi Tim.
May I ask why is all this important to write down?
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 7:44 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 7:44 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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David S:
Hi Tim.
May I ask why is all this important to write down?


Hey, David,

Of course. Ask anything you want.
David S, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 7:47 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 7:47 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 66 Join Date: 6/13/16 Recent Posts
Hi Tim.

I think I did ask already why is this important to write down. Do you know why?
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 7:51 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 7:51 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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David S:
Hi Tim.

I think I did ask already why is this important to write down. Do you know why?

I said "ask anything you want." And I in turn will answer anything I want.
David S, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 7:53 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 7:53 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Ok Tim.

So you will not reflect upon my question at all. Said and done I guess.
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Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö, modified 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 2:10 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 1:19 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 7134 Join Date: 12/8/18 Recent Posts
David S:
Hi Tim.
May I ask why is all this important to write down?


Because there are poeple here who love to read it and others who know how to scroll.



Ok Tim.

So you will not reflect upon my question at all. Said and done I guess.


Have you pondered why it is important for you to shove your advice (?) down someone's throat?
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Steph S, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 8:04 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 8:04 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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I read through your reply once. Being that this is the Bar, I'm going to pour myself a bourbon and read it again. I somehow never got around to reading BR's source material, but have been curious, so maybe now's a good time to check it out. What's a good one to start with? I'll add it to the running list of approximately 1.87 kajillion books or articles or posts I'm reading at a time.

Where's the Richard Rohr article, also? Mega-conservative Catholicisim. What a hoot. I'm not Catholic, nor was I raised so. I was raised Greek Orthodox, so can recognize many of the aesthetics and such of the Catholics. That ol' Byzantine split didn't kill off all the relics after all now, did it? I stopped going to church when I was a teenager, when my parents told my sister and I that we didn't have to keep going if we didn't want to. They were never that hardcore about church & religion in the first place. Just the standard, let's go to church because it's Sunday type of thing. Either way, I still find some of that stuff fascinating, mostly the aesthetics and some of the metaphor of it all. I have memories even today and can recall the extravagance and flamboyance of the Greek Orthodox services surrounding Easter, even though I haven't been to one in who knows how long. Those processionals, with all the palm fronds, deacons & altar boys carrying "the body of Christ" on a bed of flowers, the incense, the satin brocade & velvet robes, the chanting, the singing choir on the balcony above, the gold everywhere. Us Greeks truly put on a show.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 10:11 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 10:10 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Steph S:
I read through your reply once. Being that this is the Bar, I'm going to pour myself a bourbon and read it again. I somehow never got around to reading BR's source material, but have been curious, so maybe now's a good time to check it out. What's a good one to start with? I'll add it to the running list of approximately 1.87 kajillion books or articles or posts I'm reading at a time.

The Path to No-Self. Then The Experience of No-Self.

Where's the Richard Rohr article, also?

https://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/richard-rohr-a-field-guide/

Mega-conservative Catholicisim. What a hoot. I'm not Catholic, nor was I raised so. I was raised Greek Orthodox, so can recognize many of the aesthetics and such of the Catholics. That ol' Byzantine split didn't kill off all the relics after all now, did it?

There is a beautiful Greek Orthodox church within walking distance down the road i live on. Right between the bus stops, i go by it every time i go to the library (so not for a while, lol). Greek Orthodoxy and Judaism are the only two religions I ever formally considered converting to. I love those Orthodox maniacs, a lot of them. Gregory Palamas? My knees go weak. Especially when you consider where the Roman Catholics were mired at the time. Thomas Fucking Aquinas, who is still the state of the art to so many of these fuckers. We eleected the long-time head of the Inquisition office as the Pope before this one! Ratzinger. Don't get me started, here. Catholicism is a beautiful deep ongoing embarrassment to be associated with in so many ways. If I'm lucky, they'll excommunicate me.

I stopped going to church when I was a teenager, when my parents told my sister and I that we didn't have to keep going if we didn't want to. They were never that hardcore about church & religion in the first place. Just the standard, let's go to church because it's Sunday type of thing. Either way, I still find some of that stuff fascinating, mostly the aesthetics and some of the metaphor of it all. I have memories even today and can recall the extravagance and flamboyance of the Greek Orthodox services surrounding Easter, even though I haven't been to one in who knows how long. Those processionals, with all the palm fronds, deacons & altar boys carrying "the body of Christ" on a bed of flowers, the incense, the satin brocade & velvet robes, the chanting, the singing choir on the balcony above, the gold everywhere. Us Greeks truly put on a show.

Exactly, smells and bells and prayers in weird archaic languages. I am old enough to have learned the Latin Mass as an altar boy, starting out. Then had to relearn the whole fucking thing in English after Vatican II. I was PISSED.

Plus, we Catholic are like Jews, not just in that we are technically speaking two Jewish sects, but also because both these are the kind of religions where if you're born into them, you're sort of one way or another always going to be Catholic, just as you're always going to be Jewish if you never eat a single bitter herb at a single Seder. If Hitler had prevailed and the death camps ran out of Jews, the Catholics of all sorts would have been next, and rightfully so. (Ever read Constantine's Sword, by the way? A horrific account of 2000 years of fratricidal anti-semitism by Christians, written by the great Catholic writer James Carroll.)

well, on that cheerful note--

love, tim
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 10:02 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 10:02 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Siavash:
Chris Marti:
Siavash, do you have a jib? If you do, I like the cut of it  emoticon


Oh, my bad english. I couldn't get what that means! so I just say Yes emoticon

Oh, he's got a jib, all right. And it really is so finely and nicely cut. I like it too.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 5:58 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 5:57 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Practice log/April 25, 2020/sesshin day 13/sit 13/0:06:39/bbw/end 2:43pm/ortho/wi-t, r-mudra/anicca, anatta doors 

Practice log/April 25, 2020/sesshin day 13/sit 14/0:06:40/bbw/end 6:32pm/sinsistral/and not i

Finding it surprisingly easy to sit despite the general level of hilarity here at the Bar of Last Resort. Perhaps my years of training in a small aluminum/plastic hut on wheels 50 yards from a rail line has something to do with this. I often find myself in meditation vaguely aware of a kind of general stress, and then realize that half a train of fully loaded coals cars is thundering by. So the Bar din is like a library to me.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 11:02 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/25/20 11:02 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Practice log/April 25, 2020/sesshin day 13/sit 13/0:06:39/bbw/end 2:43pm/ortho/wi-t, r-mudra/anicca, anatta doors

Practice log/April 25, 2020/sesshin day 13/sit 14/0:06:40/bbw/end 6:32pm/sinsistral/and not i/ anicca, anatta doors 

Practice log/April 25, 2020/sesshin day 13/sit 15/0:06:41/bbw/end 8:26pm/ortho/ofb-r, R-mudra/anicca, anatta doors 


Practice log/April 25, 2020/sesshin day 13/sit 16/0:06:42/bbw/end 11:57pm/ortho(oops)/with/anicca, anatta doors 

Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 7:31 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 7:31 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
practice log/April 26, 2020/ sesshin day 14/sit 4/0:07:03/bbw-4/end 7:06am/ortho/love You-2/ anicca, anatta doors

notes: gentle lean is the key

 practice log/April 26, 2020/ sesshin day 14/sit 5/0:07:04/bbw-4/end 8:10am/ortho (oops)/embrace/ anicca, anatta doors

notes: two-way breath traffic?
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 7:35 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 7:33 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Following the pink thread through mania:

thanks to shari tresky, who gave me this flow chart for The Big One of 2018. She bears no legal responsibilites in this matter whatsoever, her hands are clean here. But thanks, Tye.


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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 7:54 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 7:54 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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That's a very bright pink marker, er, highlighter. Nice!
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 8:00 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 8:00 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Chris Marti:
That's a very bright pink marker, er, highlighter. Nice!

I realized this morning, the mania is over. That pink line is simply one protocol of "Tim Farrington," high energy protocol. Will be working out the low-energy (the art disease formerly known as depression) protocol shortly, on similarly empirical and pragmatic grounds. That path should be in blue. (Blues, get it? See what I did there? Wasn't that clever? Chris! Chris! Steph! Wasn't that clever?)

image of: [dog panting, wagging tail. Shitting on carpet.]

my bad, said high-energy protocol Tim.
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 8:04 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 8:04 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Tim, you're amazing, whatever's happening. Pink or blue.

<I'm having trouble resisting typing in another Dr. Seuss thing now>
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 8:07 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 8:07 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Chris Marti:
Tim, you're amazing, whatever's happening. Pink or blue.

<I'm having trouble resisting typing in another Dr. Seuss thing now>


don't worry, you'll recognize blue when you see it.

Oh and the blues he'll be choosing to use! Oh how he'll work in those blacks?
low protocol is a different thing, like a big car falling off jacks!
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 8:57 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 8:57 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Tim Farrington:
Chris Marti:
Tim, you're amazing, whatever's happening. Pink or blue.

<I'm having trouble resisting typing in another Dr. Seuss thing now>


don't worry, you'll recognize blue when you see it.

Oh and the blues he'll be choosing to use! Oh how he'll work in those blacks?
low protocol is a different thing, like a big car falling off jacks!

Okay, i've hacked it. I was carrying the pink thread piece of paper around with me, so that if i did get taken into custtody, i could be polite with the cops, and then politely show it to the intake nurse and say as calmly and lucidly as possible, "I am choosing this pink line approach, and choose to have no medication," so no haldol.

Now, the BLUE is mapped in advance! same deal, different drugs, and all-purpose mandala on one all-purpose portable document for officialdom!

gotta go now, off to the Luray Caverns to refresh some work the tourists have rubbed off.

9kY5COz-dLdng3x_T5Y-PW2qo7xq12WHfoLWV9WizXN-YkbCzxp1y0IQdIn22gwUPPva4vvDqjFykUY1jyOPhkjE0Vird3CG3jkYcy5dykXy3Jc4dGKjP8Y0c0CngK2QggdlRG5BgMS5C5YOHwgFTwi4eQsAHw?width=1700&height=2211&cropmode=none">
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 8:59 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 8:59 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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God speed!
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 9:07 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 9:07 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Chris Marti:
God speed!


You fucking hypocrite atheist, taking the Lord's name in vain like that! You'll burn in hell almost as long as i will, for that.

also, re: speed: with my back condition, i am currently walking three-legged with a priceless shamanic carved totem stick given to me by my neighbor, St. Dan. So i am in the second to last stage (?) in that old riddle that can't be hacked.
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 9:16 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 9:16 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Turns out wishing you well is a dicey proposition.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 9:19 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 9:19 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Chris Marti:
Turns out wishing you well is a dicey proposition.

I may be a little, uh, quick on the trigger. I was kidding about everything, except hell.
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 9:21 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 9:21 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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And I was just joking.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 10:07 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 10:07 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Chris Marti:
And I was just joking.


You could get yourself arrested, man, you're gonna scare people, wielding a wit that fine and dry and dead-pan.

I myself was scared shitless. I almost flagged that post. But then . . . I forgave you, Chris, as i hope you will continue to forgive me.

Now that I know you were just joking, for sure, well  [interesting variation on the standard profane stream of Marine Corps-accented abuse, with a twist, a subtle yet distinct trace of accent pointing to time spent somewhere along the Hudson River . . . yes, yes, that's it, hear it? that note, there, of the United States Military Academy.].

I never told you i was supposed to go to West Point, did I? I mean, I was in. It broke my father's heart, he would have of course preferred the Naval Academy. But my best friend in high school, a year ahead of me, had gone to WP, and so i was going to follow him

And then came Buddhism. Oops. Sorry Congressman, you're going to have to find a last-minute replacement for that slot of yours.
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 10:33 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 10:33 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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I never told you i was supposed to go to West Point, did I? I mean, I was in. It broke my father's heart, he would have of course preferred the Naval Academy. But my best friend in high school, a year ahead of me, had gone to WP, and so i was going to follow him

Nope, I had no idea. That means you were a very good student and you gave back to your community in significant ways. What year would that have been?
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 10:45 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 10:43 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Chris Marti:
I never told you i was supposed to go to West Point, did I? I mean, I was in. It broke my father's heart, he would have of course preferred the Naval Academy. But my best friend in high school, a year ahead of me, had gone to WP, and so i was going to follow him

Nope, I had no idea. That means you were a very good student and you gave back to your community in significant ways. What year would that have been?
High school class of 1975. Yeah, I was a National Merit Finalist test-taking prodigy wonk, saved only by cross-country from being a total ficking nerd. #1 chess player in my year. that kind of shit. Made it all the more brutal when i went off the fucking rails. When I dropped out of college that fall, and was hitching down highway 395 in eastern California (heading toward Franklin Merrell Wolff's house in Lone Pine, though i didn't know that at the time, i was actually going to check out some crazy little unique college in Deep Springs, way the fuck out into the drier desert to the east of 395, through the mountains to north of Death Valley, i called my parents from a pay phone in Big Pine (not to be confused with Lone Pine) and told them what was up. My mom on the phone, lonng, long, heart-breaking pause, a sigh, and then she said, "All I can think of right now is when Mrs. Butler (my fourth grade teacher, one of THOSE teachers, the good ones) said, 'I see nothing but glory ahead for little Timmy.'" Heartless bastard that i was, I said something like, well, oops. I hated hurting her. But it was time to jump that fucking train.
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 10:54 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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... heading toward Franklin Merrell Wolff's house in Lone Pine,

Damn this is amazing. I've read his book!
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 11:00 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 10:59 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Chris Marti:
... heading toward Franklin Merrell Wolff's house in Lone Pine,

Damn this is amazing. I've read his book!

Pathways through to space, or that bone breaking thing on the philosophy of consciousness without an object?

Yeah, I was a big F M-Wolff guy, loved his memoir/journal of his breakthrough. I tried several times along through the years to get to his house up in the hills above Lone Pine, but never quite made it. I did get to know Margie's Restaurant on the main drag in town quite well though. Another guy who took F M-W as a teacher was Richard Moss, whom I later studied under for a few years. Moss did make it to F M-W's house, and had some great fucking stories about that crotchety olf eccentric American Vedantist. He smoked, for one thing--- years later, someone was giving me tons o shit about smoking on meditation breaks, and Richard conceded, with obvious reluctance, "Well, Franklin Merrell-Wolff smoked."
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 11:01 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 11:01 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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The one you described as "that bone breaking thing on the philosophy of consciousness without an object"
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 11:05 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Chris Marti:
The one you described as "that bone breaking thing on the philosophy of consciousness without an object"


lol, why am i not surprised, you [bleeping] wonk.
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 11:02 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 10:57 AM

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My money is on the bet that you would have made a seriously good officer, but you may not have been willing to put up with all the shit thrown at the plebes back then. You have heart. All the best generals I meet have a heart. Big, honest, tough, caring hearts.
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Papa Che Dusko, modified 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 11:46 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 11:46 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Chris Marti:
My money is on the bet that you would have made a seriously good officer, but you may not have been willing to put up with all the shit thrown at the plebes back then. You have heart. All the best generals I meet have a heart. Big, honest, tough, caring hearts.

I doubt they have much of caring hearts for the opposing side! Pffftt! 

Big hearts my ars emoticon I hated officers and punched a couple of them, got me self a military prison and all that. Boy do I hate autorities, those with matcho "above all" attitudes! Ohh ohh come here ya lil ... whmm emoticon 
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 11:57 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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I hated officers and punched a couple of them...

Of course you did!
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 12:03 PM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Chris Marti:
I hated officers and punched a couple of them...

Of course you did!


Only a couple? And you told me you had no discipline. A couple? I've known Marine NCOs who would have called punching a couple of officers "breakfast."
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Papa Che Dusko, modified 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 2:49 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 2:49 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Tim Farrington:
Chris Marti:
I hated officers and punched a couple of them...

Of course you did!


Only a couple? And you told me you had no discipline. A couple? I've known Marine NCOs who would have called punching a couple of officers "breakfast."
Nah, I was not that bad. These two were low officers, sergeants, against the 3 of us. Too much alcohol involved and the rest is history. 
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 3:01 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 3:01 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Papa Che Dusko:
Tim Farrington:
Chris Marti:
I hated officers and punched a couple of them...

Of course you did!


Only a couple? And you told me you had no discipline. A couple? I've known Marine NCOs who would have called punching a couple of officers "breakfast."
Nah, I was not that bad. These two were low officers, sergeants, against the 3 of us. Too much alcohol involved and the rest is history. 
So for you, punching officers was more like cocktail hour.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 12:02 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 12:02 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Papa Che Dusko:
Chris Marti:
My money is on the bet that you would have made a seriously good officer, but you may not have been willing to put up with all the shit thrown at the plebes back then. You have heart. All the best generals I meet have a heart. Big, honest, tough, caring hearts.

I doubt they have much of caring hearts for the opposing side! Pffftt! 

Big hearts my ars emoticon I hated officers and punched a couple of them, got me self a military prison and all that. Boy do I hate autorities, those with matcho "above all" attitudes! Ohh ohh come here ya lil ... whmm emoticon 

Everybody knows it's the fucking sergeants who actually make the military work.

But Papa Che, my dad was what is called a "mustang." He enlisted at 17 for Korea, and worked his way up to ergeant, came home and went to college (the deal he'd had to cut with his father to get him to sign off on the underage-age enlistment), tried journalism for a couple years, then went back into the USMC as a 2nd lieutenant. His NCOs all loved him. He had a big heart, but you generally would never have known it.

And he DID love his enemies, man! He loved killing them!
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 12:05 PM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Chris Marti:
My money is on the bet that you would have made a seriously good officer, but you may not have been willing to put up with all the shit thrown at the plebes back then. You have heart. All the best generals I meet have a heart. Big, honest, tough, caring hearts.
Well, i would have made a great officer, but I would have been KIA long before they gave me a company. I'm just that kind of guy, FILO.
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Siavash ', modified 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 8:15 PM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Hey Tim,
How's your back?
George S, modified 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 11:07 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 11:07 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Tim Farrington:
Following the pink thread through mania:

thanks to shari tresky, who gave me this flow chart for The Big One of 2018. She bears no legal responsibilites in this matter whatsoever, her hands are clean here. But thanks, Tye.

That flow chart is just incredible. I mean you would have to be totally crazy to think that anyone could ever navigate their way through something like that. It is however missing one thing .... A BRIGHT ORANGE VIPASSANA WORMHOLE right in the middle which points backwards out of the page into the next dimension.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 11:11 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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agnostic:
Tim Farrington:
Following the pink thread through mania:

thanks to shari tresky, who gave me this flow chart for The Big One of 2018. She bears no legal responsibilites in this matter whatsoever, her hands are clean here. But thanks, Tye.

That flow chart is just incredible. I mean you would have to be totally crazy to think that anyone could ever navigate their way through something like that. It is however missing one thing .... A BRIGHT ORANGE VIPASSANA WORMHOLE right in the middle which points backwards out of the page into the next dimension.
1) i AM totally crazy, I thought we had established that to everyone's satisfaction. Am willing to stipluate that up front and save time.

2) That, my friend, is the best map i've got for dealing with lay law enfocement and medical professionals.

3) You FUCKING MISSED it, Roger, the wormhole is there , just turn the thing over:

George S, modified 3 Years ago at 4/26/20 8:26 PM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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This thing here, whatever it is (pointlilliste star of david mandala), I feel like it is important for you, like it's like a map of your soul or something.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 12:50 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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practice log/April 26, 2020/ sesshin day 14/sit 6/0:07:05/bbw-4/end 9:32am/sinistral/abide-2/anicca, anatta doors.

 as a rule of the thumbless, if the prayer is recognizable from one bead to the next, you are probably in the same body you started in. 



practice log/April 26, 2020/ sesshin day 14/sit 7/0:07:06/bbw-4/end 8:08pm/ortho/patiently-2/anicca, anatta doors. 


practice log/April 26, 2020/ sesshin day 14/sit 8/0:07:08/bbw-4/end 8:58pm/sinistral/humbly-3/ anicca and annatta doors

it all happens on one round of breath, basically--- non-existence, existence, down to the bottom again and out.

Gotta love whoever’s Doing that.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 3:10 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 3:10 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Practice log/April 27, 2020/sesshin day 15/sit 1/0:07:08/end 2:02am/bbw-4/ortho/abide/anicca, anatta doors 

Practice log/April 27, 2020/sesshin day 15/sit 2/0:07:09/end 2:46am/bbw-4/sinistral/no fear-2/anicca, anatta doors. 

Practice log/April 27, 2020/sesshin day 15/sit 3/0:07:10/end 3:07am/bbw-4/ortho/Thy will be done/anicca, anatta doors 

Practice log/April 27, 2020/sesshin day 15/sit 4/0:07:11/end 3:26am/bbw-4/sinistral/no hurry-2/anicca, anatta doors 

Practice log/April 27, 2020/sesshin day 15/sit 5/0:07:12/end 3:53am/bbw-r/ortho/Thy will be done/ anicca, anatta doors 

noticing a real reluctance to do the work of inner verbalizing of the prayer, like it’s just too much trouble and noise, as i follow the breath
from in to bottom, and vanish there, before the next in-breath draws me up. The sinking is so sweet, and blah blah blah, the laborious noise. I think for the next sit i am going to try a variation on the pre-vipassana technique Chris first gave me, using the pang/pain in my ass (Pia), at the sitzpoint, as the meditation object (it is just so damn graciously offered first and foremost on pretty much every body scan). From the inbreath, aware of the breath sinking in Papa Che fashion, interested all the way until that disappearance at the depth, the pivot of zero.
George S, modified 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 8:47 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 8:47 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Tim Farrington:


noticing a real reluctance to do the work of inner verbalizing of the prayer, like it’s just too much trouble and noise

Can you sit with that reluctance for a bit and tell us more about what it feels like? Any specific sensations you can see in there?
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 9:53 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 9:53 AM

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agnostic:
Tim Farrington:


noticing a real reluctance to do the work of inner verbalizing of the prayer, like it’s just too much trouble and noise

Can you sit with that reluctance for a bit and tell us more about what it feels like? Any specific sensations you can see in there?
I speak with my forehead on the ground and my face in the dust, oh One, when I say I truly am not worthy of Your attention.

Also, from everything I have heard, I could not afford more than 15 seconds of Your attention at Your normal hourly rate.
George S, modified 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 10:10 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Seriously, I'm interested what it feels like
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 10:29 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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agnostic:
Seriously, I'm interested what it feels like


seriously, who are you and what have you done with agnostic?
George S, modified 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 12:34 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 12:34 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Tim Farrington:
agnostic:
Seriously, I'm interested what it feels like


seriously, who are you and what have you done with agnostic?

Still the same obnoxious wanker. It's just the bit that jumped out of your practice log at me, that's all.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 1:44 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 1:43 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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agnostic:
Tim Farrington:
agnostic:
Seriously, I'm interested what it feels like


seriously, who are you and what have you done with agnostic?

Still the same obnoxious wanker. It's just the bit that jumped out of your practice log at me, that's all.
Oh, I recognize you now!

It really is a striking little turn, and all the more so in that in the past, pretty much exactly this same configuration has seemed to me to be the nadir of everything. It may even BE the nadir of everything! So thank God it's so easy. 

I addressed your serious question seriously in the other post, just wanted to say here that i, uh, love you,

and am, as ever, your
same old obnoxious twit
George S, modified 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 3:11 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 3:11 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Oh that's good, really good! Dropping technology, just the breath, that can take you all the way! I see now I was  being lazy and didn't read your posts properly. I skipped from the resistance bit to Mozart and thought you were going off on a tangent. I totally missed that you are really watching the breath closely now. Excellent! Good progress. As you were. Ignore me, got everything the wrong way round. But thanks for clarifying, that's some might fine breath description. 
George S, modified 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 3:33 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 3:33 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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I'm sorry about criticizing your practice just when you are making real progress. I was distracted and jumped to conclusions. I got hold of a stick with two wrong ends it seems, possibly three!
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Papa Che Dusko, modified 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 3:51 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 3:51 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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agnostic:
I'm sorry about criticizing your practice just when you are making real progress. I was distracted and jumped to conclusions. I got hold of a stick with two wrong ends it seems, possibly three!
Tim no more drinks for this guy! I think he had enough! Call him a cab! emoticon 


And for the rest of you one more for the road! See you tomorrow! 


I will sleep better now knowing Tim is composing some fine concerto for two violins in D-minor (my absolute favorite by Jehudi Menuhin and Oistrakh) It just always kills me and then I live again.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 10:37 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 6:15 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Papa Che Dusko:
agnostic:
I'm sorry about criticizing your practice just when you are making real progress. I was distracted and jumped to conclusions. I got hold of a stick with two wrong ends it seems, possibly three!
Tim no more drinks for this guy! I think he had enough! Call him a cab! emoticon 


And for the rest of you one more for the road! See you tomorrow! 



Unfortunately, for people like agnostic, the Bar delivers as well. There is no cutting him off.

Plus, he's one of our best bartenders. We need him. We write off everything he drinks during his shift on our taxes as "spillage."

I will sleep better now knowing Tim is composing some fine concerto for two violins in D-minor (my absolute favorite by Jehudi Menuhin and Oistrakh) It just always kills me and then I live again.

Pape Che's sacred Bach that leaves him bound to the wheel of death and rebirth, listen with caution:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=14&v=CmmpjziKcFU&feature=emb_logo
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Papa Che Dusko, modified 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 3:55 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 3:55 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Tim Farrington:
agnostic:
Seriously, I'm interested what it feels like


seriously, who are you and what have you done with agnostic?
He is just trying to let go of the Maps. Its not a pretty sight. Give the man some time. Im sure he will be back with us soon emoticon Compassion Tim, Compassion and Patience of the Ages, ... or was it Sages ... hm ... dunno. I'm off to listen to that concerto for two violins in d-minor and die yet again just to live again. 


Cheers! (its water I drink sorry)
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 1:39 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 1:39 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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agnostic:
Tim Farrington:


noticing a real reluctance to do the work of inner verbalizing of the prayer, like it’s just too much trouble and noise

Can you sit with that reluctance for a bit and tell us more about what it feels like? Any specific sensations you can see in there?
It just seem laborious. Like, too much tecnology, like maintaining this array of solar panels and batteries for storage, when the job can be done on regular sunlight. When i talked about the nihilism of this mode before, that was in the past; what i am experiencing now in the technique is ease, relief. It's like i've got it dwn to one event, like the in-breath is the only thing that is any kind of real reference point at all, and everything else can do what it wants, when it wants. And every in-breath comes as its own spontaneous surprise of of this deep simple absorption in wherever the last one took me as it disappeared. It's hypnogagic at times, that kind of sudden vidic imagery, vices, disjointed scenes and snippets of this and that that comes before real sleep, just as you're beginning to doze.

By using the word "reluctance," i didn't mean that i was avoiding doing some necessary work. I simply meant that i could no longer see any sense right now in doing something with effort when it could do itself without my effort whatsoever. The body breathes and hurts and feels and sees all by itself just fine, and actually better, without me back-seat driving and grabbing the wheel.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 4:16 AM
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Practice log/April 27, 2020/sesshin day 15/sit 6/0:07:13/end 4:23am/b-PIA/anicca, dukha doors

so the technique entry, “b-PIA,” indicates following the breath, and letting it very gently dance with the PIA. It is lovely, really, at this point, like a free form dance with each partner wholly aware of the other, sometimes touching, sometimes not, but always touching again, in a very fluid pas de deux. 

Practice log/April 27, 2020/sesshin day 15/sit 7/0:07:14/end 5:03am/b-PIA/anicca, dukha doors


 I love this technique, because there is nothing to remember, it’s all given right there. It’s like the breath’s movement is the caress of a bow on the string of the sensory string, evoking this note, in all its richness and nuance. And next breath, same string, but a different note, as if some invisible hand is fretting the string somehow, in a way that can only be discovered by actually playing the note, letting the breath draw the bow across the same string to reveal the fresh sound, as the new note evolves in suppleness and nuance through every instant of the bow’s stroke. The beat is as simple as the bow being drawn all the way through, and the re-gathering of the breath in the silence of that pause is the bow, lifted by that same invisible Player, repositioning itself for the surprise of the next stroke, on the in-breath, the same easy caress of the same string with the same brand new surprise of this, just this, sound.
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Papa Che Dusko, modified 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 5:19 AM
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I like that player analogy emoticon strings, fretting and bow, body movements ... this symphony unfolding. emoticon 
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 6:06 AM
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Practice log/April 27, 2020/sesshin day 15/sit 9/0:07:16/end 6:36am/b-PIA/anicca, dukha doors 

One very interesting thing to me about the musical angle on this interplay of breath and sensation is the transformation of the basic dukha
inherent in sensation per se, the promise of inevitable suffering and pain, into the sensate equivalent of qualitative musical tone. What in vipassana noting is a series of sense impressions registering and evaporating here acquires a kind of implied musical continuity within the measure of each breath. Fast noting along a single breath would be like seeing more notes, and knowing how to transcribe them to a musical score.

Mozart was astonishing in how many notes he could work into a measure, and the complexity and the skill and decades of practice required for musicians to reproduce the music indicated on that score speaks for itself. But any note will do, at any pace, if the point is the precise music arising from a particular attention in the set and setting of a breath of a particular and specific mind-body complex attending as closely as joy allows. The beauty of meditation is that Twinkle Twinkle Little Star is just as interesting as . . . well, for example this Back organist on his most challenging piece:

 “On Bach organ, the Passacaglia in C Minor (to me).  Never one to make ease of fingering trump musical quality, the Passacaglia has been a goal for forty-five years for me -- to make the bass motive really lead the treble variations, and not just be there as an afterthought.  I've been through a million registrations (sound colors), and never once been totally satisfied (I often change my mind before seven variations).  The double fugue -- it's not hard to approximate the notes, but to make the second subject sing out (more than sing, it seems to want to shout, "I'm taking over now!!!) and keep all the parts building to an inevitable climax (ad is the climax at the dominant turn of direction about forty bars from the end, or at the Neapolitan chord -- and what sort of cadenza can I create that increases upon what he has already written?  Just a few of the problems with this magnificent-obsession problem of Bach interpretation.” 

To my naive ear, that sounds a lot like Daniel Ingram riffing on his latest meditative insights.

Meanwhile, i toot on, as happy as a clam, one bleat at a time, marveling.
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Smiling Stone, modified 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 3:22 PM
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What Tim,

You thought I would not notice you going into music as a creative framework for practice?... Or that I would not find out that you revived the music thread?
But yes, I did, bravo to you, dear friend, even if I struggle to follow the never ending outpour of this log in my free time, that's how precious you are to me!
Unfortunately, I am short these days, when it comes to elaborate a crafted answer to your and Olivier's crazy philosophical philological wandering (and I saw a nice incursion by Steph as well). I will join in ASAP with my meager tools.

In the meanwhile, another PTBG, por favor!
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 6:28 AM
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For Everything Else, There’s MasterCard

“Quick now, here, now, always-

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything) 

T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton” 

and here i am
at this late date
beginning again
finding myself
growling
throughan old man’s
back pain, buying
my own damn books
on amazon
just to replace
the ones i’ve cut to bits
or just plain given away.
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sarah elizabeth, modified 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 7:36 AM
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Did you know that "your_online_bookstore" (via eBay) wants forty eight bucks for Hell of Mercy, though a cheaper copy can be found for four.(you're a collecter's item, is my point!) I don't understand why this book isn't a staple, available at any bookstore. I know parts of it by heart and have bought Idon'tknowhowmany copies for friends. It makes me happy that it's having a kind of resurgence here on DhO. It's a treasure, by any standard.  
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 8:19 AM
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sarah elizabeth sky:
Did you know that "your_online_bookstore" (via eBay) wants forty eight bucks for Hell of Mercy, though a cheaper copy can be found for four.(you're a collecter's item, is my point!) I don't understand why this book isn't a staple, available at any bookstore. I know parts of it by heart and have bought Idon'tknowhowmany copies for friends. It makes me happy that it's having a kind of resurgence here on DhO. It's a treasure, by any standard.  
lol. Linda told me something similar, when she was searching out some of my books from Sweden. Someone was actually offering one of them for something like $900 U.S.! I told her they probably just thought I was already dead. And in general, my books are all freely available at very normal used book prices. Blues for Hannah, which never had a paperback, is probably the toughest one to come by, and there was a period of time before more used copies began tricking back into circulation that it was hard to get for a sane price. There are a surprising number of book buyers who see it as an investment, like betting that a newborn colt will eventually win the Kentucky Derby--- a litle ten dollar bet here, ten dollars there, and if one hits, i.e., the author makes it big, or dies spectaculary or otherwise comes into demand, and bingo, a winner. But i never made it anything but tiny, and will die in perfect obscurity after years of practice. So really, it's sweet of you to say such generous and kind things, but being a collector's item wouldn't do me any fucking good anyway, it's all other people giving other people money, in that loop. 

i actually do think that what i call hellamercy is still very much going to be close the the state of the art and possibly even occasionally a lifesaver for a certain kind of person (spiritual psych cases close to suicide, basically). 

Thank you again for your generous heart. You may well be my best reader. I'll ask the other one about that.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 10:28 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 10:28 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Practice log/April 27, 2020/sesshin day 15/sit 10/0:07:17/end
7:57am/b-PIA/anicca, dukha doors 

Practice log/April 27, 2020/sesshin day 15/sit 11/0:07:18/end
11:21am/b-PIA/anicca, dukha doors 

I love this technique.

In the past, i have only “used” it only at the point of utter nihilism and despair, when any word or notion or hope seems like pure poison. The breath that happens in spite of me, and the root of my sentient materiality, the place capable of mediating all agony, the things that don't go away even if "i" do. It’s what I have done to kill time when i didn’t want my suicide to leave a mess for people i care about to have to clean up, and so had to just sit here and wait for meaningless circumstance to snuff this little flame and end it.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 10:32 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 10:32 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Practice log/April 27, 2020/sesshin day 15/sit 12/0:07:19/end 12:18pm/b-PIA/anicca, dukha doors 

Practice log/April 27, 2020/sesshin day 15/sit 1/0:07:20/end 7:37pm/b-PIA/anicca, dukha doors 

Practice log/April 27, 2020/sesshin day 15/sit 14/0:07:21/end 11:12pm/b-PIA/anicca, dukha doors

very revved up. I feel like running out into the streets telling everyone i meet about the glories of the in-breath, and that it only takes one. One breath salvation, people! Take it . . . Now! No? Try the next one!

Sticking to my fresh view of this as Tim-in-a-very-very-good-mood, rather than Tim-on-the-brink-of-hospitalization-for-manic-psychosis. 

agnostic called it some time ago: I got this. He was right.
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Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö, modified 3 Years ago at 4/27/20 11:47 PM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Sounds great. I may be a bit backwards but I have always preferred the outbreath.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/28/20 12:44 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/28/20 12:44 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö:
Sounds great. I may be a bit backwards but I have always preferred the outbreath.
Well, there you go, we make a great yin-yang team. You know the old scottish song---

The water is wide, I cannot cross over.
And neither have I wings to fly.
Give me a boat that can carry two.
And both shall row, my love and I.

Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/28/20 3:42 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/28/20 3:41 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Practice log/April 27, 2020/sesshin day 16/sit 1/:07:22/end dukha doors 

Practice log/April 27, 2020/sesshin day 16/sit 2/0:07:23/end 3:40am/b-PIA/anicca-dukha doors 

The in-breath seems to me to be the only real gold standard of temporality. Everything else can be hacked somewhere in the feedback loop.

These people talking about how many times they note per second are either

1) assuming a standard six second round between in-breaths, and dividing by six, or;

2) know something i don’t know (likely enough); or

3) Trippin.
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Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö, modified 3 Years ago at 4/28/20 3:48 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/28/20 3:48 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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My inbreath is up to 20 seconds long, so maybe that's why I have no idea how many notes per second I do. 
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/28/20 4:07 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/28/20 4:07 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö:
My inbreath is up to 20 seconds long, so maybe that's why I have no idea how many notes per second I do. 

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Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/28/20 5:54 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/28/20 5:54 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Practice log/April 27, 2020/sesshin day 16/sit 3/0:07:24/ end 5:42am/b-PIA/ anicca-dukha doors

note: phone call meditation with John X This was another great cross-country sit with John X in California.

Interesting in that i experienced real meditation hall dynamics--- i realized two minutes in that i had to pee, as they say, like a Russian racehorse, for instance (linda told me recently that i had obviously lost my street smarts, not peeing before a sit, and she’s right). And, just as in a
real meditation hall, i resolved to pee in my pants before i disturbed the sit. 

Afterward, I told John X that, for a laugh, and he said, oh, my technique takes all that stuff in stride, you idiot.

Same with stifling coughs.

So next sit with him, i intend to look up the train schedule for the tracks fifty yards behind my house, and bribe the engineer to blow the horn right as he goes by. This will be a test:

T: Take THAT in stride, motherfucker. Oh, you did? I stand humbled, my friend. It scared the shit out of ME.
George S, modified 3 Years ago at 4/28/20 10:36 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/28/20 10:35 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2722 Join Date: 2/26/19 Recent Posts
The real trippin' bit is when you breathe out and the next in-breath doesn't happen :-)

I don't want to throw you off your stride, but at some point you might want to look at buteyko breathing. It messed me up for a while because it was all I could think about, but my breath rate went way down and started correlating strongly with depth of samedhi. I actually had to buy an oximeter because I was worried I couldn't be getting enough oxygen on 1-2 breaths per minute!

Oh, and while we are sharing favorite Bach clips ...
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/28/20 11:21 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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agnostic:
The real trippin' bit is when you breathe out and the next in-breath doesn't happen :-)

well, this is where I introduce a little notion that in my tradition, loosely translated from my native tongue into what is called by The Rest of Them in English, The Crazy Motherfuckers You Really Just Best Leave Alone, although in our tongue it is only one syllable---

"a gentle lean toward death." (also one syllable in native Motherfucker.)

What this means is, we all go into situations, every situation, really, and the dreaded boredom between Situations, worse of all, we all go in sort of mildly hoping that the next in-breath DOESN'T come. Then we're done with this shit for a while. The R & R in the hell bardos is exceptional, just primo stuff. You see Motherfuckers in the Bar of Last Resort all the time, swapping tall tales, drinking what there is to drink, grabbing people's butts, any people, really, we just like grabbing butts, i don't know why. We know that next in-breath will come, but we milk every eon we can; an eon out of action here, an eon there, pretty soon you skipped some real time. But we all know that the Motherfuckers are in until the ploughs are beat into . . . No, until the swords are beaten into. . . shit, till they let us stop.

I don't want to throw you off your stride, 

your dry humor delights me. As IF.

but at some point you might want to look at buteyko breathing. It messed me up for a while because it was all I could think about, but my breath rate went way down and started correlating strongly with depth of samedhi. I actually had to buy an oximeter because I was worried I couldn't be getting enough oxygen on 1-2 breaths per minute!

Try 1-2 per eon, and get back to me,


Oh, and while we are

sharing

favorite Bach clips ...

Isaac Stern playing Bach's Chaconne in D minor for solo violin is pretty much the only time you'll see certain MOtherfuckers stop laughing and just plain weep. and then smile.


We all love grabbing Isaac Stern's butt, whatever form he shows up in.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/28/20 11:47 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/28/20 11:47 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Practice log/April 27, 2020/sesshin day 16/sit 3/0:07:24/ end 5:42am/b-PIA/ anicca-dukha doors

note: phone call meditation with John X 

This was another great cross-country sit with John X in California.  Interesting in that i experienced real meditation hall dynamics---i realized two minutes in that i had to pee, as they say, like a Russian racehorse, for instance (linda told me recently that i had obviously lost my street smarts, not peeing before a sit, and she’s right). And, just as in a real meditation hall, i resolved to pee in my pants before i disturbed the sit. Afterward, I told John X that, for a laugh, and he said, oh, my technique takes all that stuff in stride, you idiot. 

Same with stifling coughs.

So next sit with him, i intend to look up the train schedule for the tracks fifty yards behind my house, and bribe the engineer to blow the horn right as he goes by. This will be a test: Take THAT in stride, motherfucker. Oh, you did? I stand humbled, my friend. It scared the shit out of ME. 

Practice log/April 27, 2020/sesshin day 16/sit 4/0:07:25/ end 7:30am/b-PIA/ anicca, dukha doors

 Practice log/April 27, 2020/sesshin day 16/sit 5/0:07:26/end 11:57am/b-PIA/end 11:57am/b-PIA/ anicca, dukha doors
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/28/20 8:21 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/28/20 8:21 PM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Practice log/April 27, 2020/sesshin day 16/sit 6/end 1:59pm/b-PIA/anicca, dukha doors
 
Practice log/April 27, 2020/sesshin day 16/sit 7/0:07:28/end 7:58pm/b-PIA/anicca, dukha doors

Practice log/April 27, 2020/sesshin day 16/sit 8/0:07:29/end 8:40pm/b-rosary?/anicca?-breath
 
i just can’t lie still in the bed. I just don’t want to sleep, though i am clearly physically exhausted, and my body needs to be still, no question, i’m beat to shit. Too much physical activity, back agony all today, and even with a ride from neighbor Dan, the post office/shopping run was obviously too much for me to be doing physically.
 
I am going back to the One that brung me to this dance, and doing the dance that One taught me the hard way, the only way i could ever have learned it, the priceless prayer that accepts it all forever one bead at a time.
 
“I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels.”
Psalm 22:14
 
The breath is given; every in-breath tells me that. The body’s pain is easy, given, the bait-and-switch at the heart of Buddhism, Gautama’s magic trick, now you see it, now you don’t: sickness, bodily agony, aging, and death. He didn’t do a damn thing about any of those, the very things that made him set out on the path.
 
I will just say it: there are  moments when i pray just because prayer makes it stop hurting. This vipassana discpline, locking the attention to bodily sensation, is just senseless to me at such  moments, painful effort to make pain more painful. I already know how much i’m hurting right now. Old men are notorious for talking ad nauseum about the nuance of every ache and affliction, every new symptom, every way the body is succumbing, in pain, to wear and tear, to aging. Vipassana is a path for very old men. But to someone ones beat-to-shit unto death, there is no point to the fine print on the headlines of pain. The dukha door, the pain door, maybe it’s even two different doors. I could not give less of a shit about either, right now. There is a prayer beyond the reach of hurt. Call me an escapist, fine; but if i can be a successful escapist, however briefly, i'm taking that shot. What’s the worst thing that could happen? The thing that scared the buddha onto his path, the ongoing human outrage at this shit-sack full of pain. There’s the black humor side of your Cosmic Joke. Laugh until you get sick, hurt, wounded, older and older, if you’re “lucky,” until finally you realize how lucky it is to die.
 
The notions of the Three Characteristics, and the notions of the doors, just aren’t working for me at this point: noise, and busy-work. It is as simple as the given of each in-breath, that new waking, and the single necessity of shub, the Hebrew word of God’s constant imperative to “re-turn” to Him, the single action of the whole heart/mind, the whole soul, the whole body, the re-turn, in no direction but that of God, seeking refuge in nothing but the God of mercy and justice, of the peace that surpasseth understanding, and, the word that covers all of that and more, of love.
 
I don’t even care about whether i get the Cosmic Joke or not. Love is joyous, not necessarily funny. Love is grateful, not merely funny. It is no joke, though lovers’ senses of humor are exquisite and tender. So many people say something like it: the joke is that there is no joke, getting it is getting that there was never anything to get. True enough, as far as it goes. But anything short of love, which is not gotten but given, is nonsense. Judge by that standard, by the sweetness of that fruit: anything short of love is sour fruit at best. Without love, don’t none of it mean shit.
 
Well, yeah, see, that IS the joke! Don’t none of it mean shit! After all that!
 
Yeah, you go with that, amigo.
 
It is faith that allows us to love. The best Buddhists i know all have vast hearts, however they want to talk about that. They are loving, whatever they want to call it. That’s the Big Door Prize, as a song i can’t quite summon up now puts it*. The Big Door prize is the faith that grows and yields its fruit in a heart of capable of love.

Let me ripen, then, in You, until that ripeness pleases You, then do with me as You wish, and Your loving will be done, on earth as it is in heaven, in hell, as it is in heaven.
 
* actually, it is “In Spite of Ourselves,” sung by John Prine and Iris Dement:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-YzlbgEOOA&feature=emb_logo
 
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Siavash ', modified 3 Years ago at 4/28/20 9:57 PM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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I will just say it: there are  moments when i pray just because prayer makes it stop hurting. This vipassana discpline, locking the attention to bodily sensation, is just senseless to me at such  moments, painful effort to make pain more painful. I already know how much i’m hurting right now. Old men are notorious for talking ad nauseum about the nuance of every ache and affliction, every new symptom, every way the body is succumbing, in pain, to wear and tear, to aging. Vipassana is a path for very old men. But to someone ones beat-to-shit unto death, there is no point to the fine print on the headlines of pain. The dukha door, the pain door, maybe it’s even two different doors. I could not give less of a shit about either, right now. There is a prayer beyond the reach of hurt. Call me an escapist, fine; but if i can be a successful escapist, however briefly, i'm taking that shot. What’s the worst thing that could happen? The thing that scared the buddha onto his path, the ongoing human outrage at this shit-sack full of pain. There’s the black humor side of your Cosmic Joke. Laugh until you get sick, hurt, wounded, older and older, if you’re “lucky,” until finally you realize how lucky it is to die.


May the space you are in, turn into a healing space, entirety of it filled with healing energy, and this healing energy penetrate all cells of your body, and tranform its pain into a calm quiet joy.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/28/20 8:38 PM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Practice log/April 27, 2020/ sesshin day 16/sit 9/ 0:07:30/end 9:39pm/breath-rosary? breath, ?
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Papa Che Dusko, modified 3 Years ago at 4/29/20 2:19 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Tim Farrington:
Practice log/April 27, 2020/ sesshin day 16/sit 9/ 0:07:30/end 9:39pm/breath-rosary? breath, ?

What are these question marks? 
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/29/20 3:13 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Practice log/April 29, 2020/5780 /sesshin day 17/ sit 1/0:07:32/end 2:00am/breath-?/?

pre-coffee, first wee hours sit, groggy and stupified, in darkness and secure, and working under the blessing of St. Siavash, the Turkish Bodhisattva:
Siavash: May the space you are in, turn into a healing space, entirety of it filled with healing energy, and this healing energy penetrate all cells of your body, and tranform its pain into a calm quiet joy.
 
Practice log/April 29, 2020/5780 /sesshin day 17/ sit 2/0:07:33/end 3:53am/bbw

        note IM co-sit w/ Mark Polonsky, in Portland, on hape (him on hape, me on first cuppa coffee: a wash, neurochemically). The fucker walked out right in the middle of the sit to pee! Fortunately, a train was going by, so i didn't even notice. The jikijitsu took a swing at him with the virtual stick, but Polonsky is a wily motherfucker (a poet, you know, and also author of the sometimes literally life-saving (for at least one reader in the amazon reviews) dharma book

 https://www.amazon.com/Poetry-Readers-Toolkit-Reading-Understanding/dp/0844259888/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Marc+Polonsky&qid=1588147692&s=digital-text&sr=1-1-catcorr

like so, the lifesaving:

I am so pleased that this book is still in print and that it is still being read. I was given what my high school poetry teacher affectionately called "Our Toolkit" when I was 17 and insecure and intimidated, pretty much by everything, but I thought that literature could be one place--perhaps the only place--where I might feel safe.

We read and used "The Poetry Reader's Toolkit" throughout the year. Never had I experienced a class where such intimacy was shared. The book is approachable but never trite, deep but never condescending. I found that I came to agree with the author that "Poetry is just about essential as air." The straight forward progression of understanding, the patient urge to "unearth" the poems through basic questioning, the direct and beautifully exemplified use of poetic terms, and above all the great variety of poetry included didn't just make me feel more safe--it made me feel, I think, less alone. I loved our toolkit so much that I asked if I could buy it and keep it. I did.

Ten years later, I'm toiling over an intensive 4-week-semester required Introduction to Literature course that begins tomorrow at a community college where I teach in Manhattan. I've been procrastinating like a pro all summer, and especially in the Poetry department, for since my high school days I've shrunk from poetry and veered toward fiction. I was going through my books all weekend for some semblance of thought about how to teach poetry when I feel so far from it myself. Past semesters have not proved easy, and students approach poetry with even less enthusiasm than they approach the first day of my class. I was just about to give up, when there it was: Our Toolkit with its bright cover, somehow barely scarred by the 9 times I've packed up books in boxes to move around the country for ten years. It survived. I read the first chapter and just knew that this book would see me through my fears about teaching poetry and maybe even see my students through their fears and reservations about reading it. I guess we'll see. The toolkit will be my guide and their guide, and maybe just one student will end up feeling as safe as I did at 17 when I was given this book.


 not bad, for a fucking stoner poet, whose real income, clearly, is as a drug dealer:

https://higherthoughtcannabisgame.com/?fbclid=IwAR2DMvtWpRZE-dLVV7bfy0_ec_kBPF0N43w5NAm5rNsMN0YcK0s-FwHe1oo
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Siavash ', modified 3 Years ago at 4/30/20 12:11 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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...the Turkish Bodhisattva...
I got confused by this Turkish, I don't know who you mean here. If by any chance you meant Siavash, well he is not Turkish, he is Iranian, but born in the north west part of Iran, that has Azerbaijani language as that region' language (There are many many languages in that country, and Azerbaijani is his first native language, and Farsi the second native language, as the official language of the country), and Azerbaijani and Turkish are very close to each other, have same roots as two of the Turkic languages. Azerbaijani is the language that is spoken in the Azerbaijan Republic (The country which got separated from Iran after Russia's invasion more than a hundred years ago), although there are small differences between their Aerbaijani and the one spoken in Iran.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/29/20 3:34 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Siavash:
...the Turkish Bodhisattva...
I got confused by this Turkish, I don't know who you mean here. If by any chance you meant Siavash, well he is not Turkish, he is Iranian, but born in the north west part of Iran, that has Azerbaijani language as that region' language (There are many many languages in that country, and Azerbaijani is his first native language, and Farsi the second native language, as the formal language of the country), and Azerbaijani and Turkish are very close to each other, have same roots as two of the Turkic languages. Azerbaijani is the language that is spoken in the Azerbaijan Republic (The country which got separated from Iran after Russia's invasion more than a hundred years ago), although there are small differences between their Aerbaijani and the one spoken in Iran.
my bad! Forgive my tin ear in the Turkic tongues!

The Azerbaijan Bodhisattva, then? The Azerbaijani Bodhisattva? The Persian Bodhisattva? That piece of shit Siavash? Your call, my friend.
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Siavash ', modified 3 Years ago at 4/29/20 3:38 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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The Azerbaijan Bodhisattva, then? The Azerbaijani Bodhisattva? The Persian Bodhisattva? That piece of shit Siavash? Your call, my friend.


Fucking idiot Siavash, or just fucking idiot sounds better to my fucking ear emoticon , your call my friend emoticon
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/29/20 4:01 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/29/20 4:01 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Siavash:
The Azerbaijan Bodhisattva, then? The Azerbaijani Bodhisattva? The Persian Bodhisattva? That piece of shit Siavash? Your call, my friend.


Fucking idiot Siavash, or just fucking idiot sounds better to my fucking ear emoticon , your call my friend emoticon
I will use my best judgment in every particular circumstance as it arises, then, you piece of shit.

emoticon
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Siavash ', modified 3 Years ago at 4/29/20 4:47 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Tim Farrington:
Siavash:
The Azerbaijan Bodhisattva, then? The Azerbaijani Bodhisattva? The Persian Bodhisattva? That piece of shit Siavash? Your call, my friend.


Fucking idiot Siavash, or just fucking idiot sounds better to my fucking ear emoticon , your call my friend emoticon
I will use my best judgment in every particular circumstance as it arises, then, you piece of shit.

emoticon


Good emoticon
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/29/20 5:25 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/29/20 5:25 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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Practice log/April 29, 2020/5780 /sesshin day 17/ sit 3/0:07:34/end 4:46am/ counterclockwise/ bbw 


Practice log/April 29, 2020/5780 /sesshin day 17/ sit 4/ 0:07:35/ end 6:10am/ bbw/ clockwise/ medallion

So back to the basic body-breath-word prayer here. The three characteristics are as ever in full play here--- body’s dukha, the anicca of breath, and the anatta of the Word of God, the rock that is higher than “i”,

but the doors are gone. It was a fun exercise, but i really can’t think in door terms, when the chips are really down. I mean, door to what? Somewhere else, not here. No need for doors, here. anyone who wants in can stroll right up, and i ain’t goin nowhere. we don’t need no stinkin’ doors, senor. we are open air and nowhere to go.
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/29/20 6:26 AM
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RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

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end 6:40am/ clockwise/bbw/ medallion 

Practice log/April 29, 2020/5780 /sesshin day 17/ sit 6/ 0:07:37/ end 7:05am/ bbw/ clockwise (oops)/ medallion 

good old loneliness of the long distance runner basics, for me. My father was a marathon runner, a natural spin-off of the kind of lifelong aerobic training involved in staying capable of forty-mile forced double-time marches over hill and dale in all weathers while weather an eighty-pound pack, carrying a rifle and various grenades, and occasionally enlivening the outing by getting shot at, in Korea, Vietnam, and certain counties in North Carolina. 

I was initiated by this master to distance running in sixth grade, and eventually ran a couple marathons myself, though my best event during my most active phase, high school, was the mile, in which i was fifth in the state meet in Hawaii (held, i recall, at the ever so hoity-toitiest of Hawaiian private academies, Punahou, in Honolulu) at my career apex. 

So this is my marathon runner’s prayer, body-breath-Word, designed to get me from the battlesite in Marathon to Athens with just enough left  in me to blurt out the good news on my last breath. I’ve been training for this since i was 13.

Vipassana is a marathon at a sprint pace. These Buddhists are badass motherfuckers and crazy as shit.


below, the wily ancient marathoner, call sign Cougar Fox 3, lacing up his Onitsuka Tigers state of the art shoes, circa mid-to-late 1970s, in Kapiolani Park, Honolulu, for a road race---- (not a marathon, obviously, the people all look too cheerful)---

Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/29/20 7:26 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/29/20 7:25 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Practice log/April 29, 2020/5780 /sesshin day 17/ sit 7/ 0:07:38/  end 7:58am/ bbw/ counterclockwise/ w-i, R-mudra 

some of the homies here have been talking about nada, the divine hum-pitch in the ears, aka, the sound of cosmic background radiation, or
tapping into the frequency of Papa Che’s noting aloud practice.

I’m getting my nada today nicely syncopated, a perfect drum-beat, time-keeping pulse, like Jimi Hendrix’s drummer (or my nephew Shane’s drummer, for that matter: keeping the beat while those fuckers skyrocket on guitar in no immediately discernible pattern). The pace today is slow semi liquid fluidity, a quiet quiet ooze.

Healing pace.

I am going to seep through the day at a pace that requires no growls, grunts, yips, or other siddhis. I am going to stay slow, warm, and well
fed. I am going to sleep as much as possible (lol). (as if)no seriously, sleep as much as possible. (lol, as if) 


Practice log/April 29, 2020/5780 /sesshin day 17/ sit 8/ 0:07:39/
end 8:21am/ bbw/ clockwise/ w-i-t
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/30/20 2:35 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/30/20 2:35 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Practice log/April 29, 2020/5780 /sesshin day 17/ sit 9/ 0:07:40/ end 9:00am/ bbw/ counterclockwise/ with-t, L-mudra 


Practice log/April 29, 2020/5780 /sesshin day 17/ sit 10/ 0:07:41/ end 9:38am/ bbw/ clockwise/ wi-t, R-mudra 


Practice log/April 29, 2020/5780 /sesshin day 17/ sit 11/ 0:07:42/
end 4:13pm/ bbw/ clockwise (oops)/ withthisgif-t,
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/30/20 3:10 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/30/20 3:06 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Practice log/April 29, 2020/5780 /sesshin day 18/ sit 1/ 0:02:43/
end 4:02/ bbw 

Dukha-nanas dress rehearsal first sit of the day without coffee: a shitty sit, everything one could ask for from a dark night, or possibly hungover, sit: ridiculously short, early bailout from vague surge of delusory dissipative energy, groggy, headachey, disoriented. 

Now this is more like it! This little taste of hell is exquisite, with a slight nose of sulfur, an acid bite, coming and going, and a rotten-fruity aftertaste. This 4-star vintage at the Bar of Last Resort, on sale this week, first bottle free!
Tim Farrington, modified 3 Years ago at 4/30/20 4:49 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/30/20 4:49 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 2464 Join Date: 6/13/11 Recent Posts
Practice log/April 30, 2020/5780 /sesshin day 18/ sit 1/ 0:02:43/ end 4:02/ bbw 

Dukha-nanas dress rehearsal first sit of the day everything one could ask for from a sit: ridiculously short (five minutes short on a seven minute sit? fugggeddabout it!), early bailout from vague surge of delusory ideation, groggy, headachey, disoriented. 

Now this is more like it! This is my old gal, Bitch Shakti of the Blackness.


Practice log/April 30, 2020/5780 /sesshin day 18/ sit 2/ 0:07:41/ end 5:09am/ bbw/ clockwise/ withthisgift-o/ L-mudra


“The bride has entered
The sweet garden of her desire,
And she rests in delight,
Laying her neck
On the gentle arms of her beloved.”
 
John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle, 22
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/30/20 6:18 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/30/20 6:18 AM

RE: The Bar(do) of Last Resort

Posts: 5117 Join Date: 1/26/13 Recent Posts
Tim, you're going to need to start a new thread soon. These things get too long and then they don't load fast enough. 
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Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 4/30/20 6:23 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 4/30/20 6:23 AM

Thread Split

Posts: 5117 Join Date: 1/26/13 Recent Posts
This thread has been split as it's getting to be too long to load fast enough. The new thread can be found at https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/view_message/20440077.

See you on the next one...