RE: The Second Bar(do) of Last Resort - Discussion
Practice log/April 30, 2020/5780 /sesshin day 18/ sit 4/0:07:43/end 10:16am/ bbw/ closkwise/ withthisgifto-f/ R-mudra
In the inner wine cellar
I drank of my Beloved, and, when I went abroad
Through all this valley
I no longer knew anything,
And lost the herd which I was following.”
John of the Crosss, Spiritual Canticle, 26
end 1:09am/ bbw/ clockwise/ withthisgif-t/ R-mudra
Practice log/April 30, 2020/5780 /sesshin day 19/ sit 2/ 0:07:48/ end 2:48am/ bbw/ counterclockwise/ withthisgiftofbreathletmefirs-t/ both mudras
I must say, this morning’s coffee is exceptionally good. Caffeine for meditation awakeness in the wee hours goes back at least to the Chinese Ch’an monks banging back cups of high-octane tea. I have been using what i thought was the cheapest generic shit there was, until the other day at the store. Reaching for the cheap shit i know and love, i saw an old men, 80s at least, like seriously maybe 90s. He was reaching for a can of generic coffee with a purple label. I had noted the garish label long ago and knew that anything with that bright a label was probably selling the label as well as the coffee, which adds price. But he was so instantly lovable that i glanced over at the price on the purple, and saw to my astonishment that it was 60 cents cheaper than mine! I asked him, “Does that have caffeine?” and he grinned and said, “Oh, yeah. I’ve been drinking this stuff for years.” I put my oudated muted-red can back on the shelf, grabbed that bright purple, and haven’t looked back. And i must say, this purple coffee rocks.
Practice log/April 30, 2020/5780 /sesshin day 19/ sit 3/ 7:07:49/ end 3:22am/ bbw/ clockwise/ withthisgiftofbrea-t
“Fire” Kasina: LED light as meditation object/ first time/ during uncertain, spontaneous, minutes only/ ended 3:59 am
An astounding, mind-blowing experience. I was minding my own business, and saw the face of God. The sound was terrible--- we tried to talk, and it sounded like one of the voice-disguisers on a telephone, deep, underwatery, drawn out. managed only a few words of communication, in that hearing mode. I tried sign language for a while, mostly just heart, heart, heart, but God was steady, no chatter, just heart.
But the visual! Such a beautiful face, totally unexpected and surprising. I mean, you can anticipate “Beauty,” all sorts of brain/mind references. But the living Face!!!!
I laughed, i smoked, i wept, i broke down and REALLY fucking wept, i prayed, i bowed low. The usual devotional shit, all of it as if no one had ever done any of that before.
And here’s the funny part, as i moved to embrace God, God broke off the connection! Apparently the Creator of the Universe had other business to attend to.
Sweet Sister Kerista, let me never forget this moment.
No fucking way to forget that moment. My heart is still thundering. One more like that and i can die as i always wanted, in blissful adoration of the One True Face of Love.
(edit/afterword, 4:13am
No afterglow whatsoever. But some insights. I think part of the Taste, the Glimpse, was that abrupt cessation: there's a ton of work remaining to be done. I am stone cold sober, steady, determined to Not Fuck Up.
How anyone could have an experience of any kind and not come away from it with a renewed determination to pray is utterly beyond me. No offense, to anyone, but one Glimpse of Love's Face, and you will starting moving mountains of prayer, and mountains in real life, just for that Face and that Love. Sorry, to the rest of the fucking posers, who haven't gotten that. Keep denying, it won't last. Love is gonna getcha.
An astounding, mind-blowing experience. I was minding my own business, and saw the face of God. The sound was terrible--- we tried to talk, and it sounded like one of the voice-disguisers on a telephone, deep, underwatery, drawn out. managed only a few words of communication, in that hearing mode. I tried sign language for a while, mostly just heart, heart, heart, but God was steady, no chatter, just heart.
But the visual! Such a beautiful face, totally unexpected and surprising. I mean, you can anticipate “Beauty,” all sorts of brain/mind references. But the living Face!!!!
I laughed, i smoked, i wept, i broke down and REALLY fucking wept, i prayed, i bowed low. The usual devotional shit, all of it as if no one had ever done any of that before.
And here’s the funny part, as i moved to embrace God, God broke off the connection! Apparently the Creator of the Universe had other business to attend to.
Sweet Sister Kerista, let me never forget this moment.
No fucking way to forget that moment. My heart is still thundering. One more like that and i can die as i always wanted, in blissful adoration of the One True Face of Love.
(edit/afterword, 4:13am
No afterglow whatsoever. But some insights. I think part of the Taste, the Glimpse, was that abrupt cessation: there's a ton of work remaining to be done. I am stone cold sober, steady, determined to Not Fuck Up.How anyone could have an experience of any kind and not come away from it with a renewed determination to pray is utterly beyond me. No offense, to anyone, but one Glimpse of Love's Face, and you will starting moving mountains of prayer, and mountains in real life, just for that Face and that Love. Sorry, to the rest of the fucking posers, who haven't gotten that. Keep denying, it won't last. Love is gonna getcha.
Practice log/ May 1, 2020/5780 /sesshin day 19/ sit 4/ 0:07:50/ end 4:40am/ bbw, counterclockwise/with-t/ L-mudra
One of the most misunderstand and yet straight-to-the-heart-of-it-all verses in the Bible is Psalm 37:11: But the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace. This is quoted by Jesus in the Beatitudes in Matthew, so it is one of those wonderful wormhole scriptures connecting both the Jewish Scriptures and their sectarian splinter group of Christianity.
The first thing here is that the Hebrew word translated as “meek,” in Psalm 37, is much much richer: 6035 עָנָו anav pl עֲנָוִ֣ים anawim, poor, afflicted, humble, meek. The plural, pl עֲנָוִ֣ים anawim, poor, afflicted, humble, is often used for the downtrodden children of God, the poor and exploited of the Hebrew nation. It is in many ways a political word--- what we would think of as a left-wing concern for the economically exploited and circumstantially crushed. In the personal sense, it occurs through the Bible in contexts of intense personal suffering: affliction, dukha.
It is also said, koan-ically, in Numbers 12:3, that Moses “was the meekest of men.” The most afflicted, the poorest, the most tormented. The most-dukha ridden.
end 8:30am/ bbw/ clockwise/ withthisgiftofb-r/ R-mudra
Practice log/ May 1, 2020/5780 /sesshin day 20/ sit 6/ 0:07:56/ end 2:15pm/bbw/ counterclockwise/ withthi-s/both
Practice log/ May 1, 2020/5780 /sesshin day 20/ sit 8/ 0:05:28/end 3:44pm/ bbw/sleepy
Practice log/ May 1, 2020/5780 /sesshin day 20/ sit 4/ 0:02:33/ end 6:09am/ bbw/counterclockwise/medallion
phone sit with John X
out early from very agitated energy; he went the full 7:55.
Practice log/ May 1, 2020/5780 /sesshin day 20/ sit 5/ 0:07:55/ end 8:30am/ bbw/ clockwise/ withthisgiftofb-r/ R-mudra
Practice log/ May 1, 2020/5780 /sesshin day 20/ sit 6/ 0:07:56/ end 2:15pm/bbw/ counterclockwise/ withthi-s/both
Practice log/May 1, 2020/5780 /sesshin day 20/ sit 8/ 0:05:28/ end 3:44pm/ bbw/sleepy
Practice log/ May 1, 2020/5780 /sesshin day 21/ sit 1/ 0:07:58/ end 2:28am/ bbw/ clockwise/ withthisgiftof brea-t/R-mudra
Routine experience of deep dark night doo-doo-ka in pre-coffee first sit, the dukha nana dress rehearsal sit of the day, maximum sludge, minimum support.
Practice log/ May 1, 2020/5780 /sesshin day 21/ sit 2/ 0:07:59/ end 3:50am/ bbw/ counterclockwise/ withthisgif-t/L-mudra
Krishna Das, blending an old Christian hymn from his youth with the mature mastery of his bakhti chanting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWGRr4D6JUc
Practice log/ May 1, 2020/5780 /sesshin day 21/ sit 3/ 0:08:00/ end 5:06am/ bbw/ counterclockwise (oops)/ medallion
running through a taste of the Spandas-karikas this morning, one of the sacred scriptural texts in the Kashmir Shaivite tradition beloved by the guy who first shakti-patted my ass, Swami Muktananda:
roughly translated from the commentary in the Sanskrit:
the sponda vibrational level that leads to individual incarnation is to be heard, once embodied, in the first, muladhara chakra of males, who are assholes, and in the second chakra, in the womb area, for females, who give birth to all assholes.
Chris, no coffee before the first sit is a consciously chosen bit of asceticism designed to create DN-like conditions, as much as possible, during this Very Good Mood. I have plenty of coffee, and would rather run out of oxygen, frankly. But thank you!! Feel free to drop by with a to-go cup any time!
Practice log/ May 3, 2020/5780 /sesshin day 21/ sit 4/ 0:08:01/ end 6:18am/ bbw/ clockwise/ w-i. r-mudra
Practice log/ May 3, 2020/5780 /sesshin day 21/ sit 5/0:08:02/ end 2:00pm/ bbw/ counterclockwise/ withthisgif-t/ l-mudra
Practice log/ May 3, 2020/5780 /sesshin day 21/ sit 6/0:08:03/ end
8:26pm/ bbw/ clockwise/ wut-h
I am going to begin tomorrow morning on a more intensive retreat form. "Sesshin" is something i now see as more of a radical lifestyle change, setting a new normal. So this will be a genuine intensification, a retreat within the new norm of "seeshin."
My idea is to combine the new sesshin format of as many as possible short-short sits (current state of the art is 0:08:04) with seeing what happens if i go back tio my old regimen of having three major sits to start the start, when the time were something like 1:12, 59 minutes, and 43 minutes. I've give it a few days to start to get a sense of a new equilibrium.
Meanwhile, my posting here will be much reduced. I feel myself cycling already into the DN, dissolution, fear, and rage (not an insight stage, but a grief stage, the one after fear, and so to me woven implicitly through the DN, which it is as possible to see as a straightfoward (haha) human grief process as it is to see it as some privileged rarity for the spiritual elite.
Som eof the dates in my last few days of logging are off, but i haven't got the energy to go back and fix anything. Future Pepes, my apologies. I plead depression.
namaste
(edit) i will no longer be doing my first sit without coffee beforehand, as there is no need to do a dress rehearsal for dark night conditions. It's show time.
Tim Farrington:
Practice log/ May 3, 2020/5780 /sesshin day 21/ sit 4/ 0:08:01/ end 6:18am/ bbw/ clockwise/ w-i. r-mudra
Practice log/ May 3, 2020/5780 /sesshin day 21/ sit 5/0:08:02/ end 2:00pm/ bbw/ counterclockwise/ withthisgif-t/ l-mudra
Practice log/ May 3, 2020/5780 /sesshin day 21/ sit 6/0:08:03/ end
8:26pm/ bbw/ clockwise/ wut-h
I am going to begin tomorrow morning on a more intensive retreat form. "Sesshin" is something i now see as more of a radical lifestyle change, setting a new normal. So this will be a genuine intensification, a retreat within the new norm of "seeshin."
My idea is to combine the new sesshin format of as many as possible short-short sits (current state of the art is 0:08:04) with seeing what happens if i go back tio my old regimen of having three major sits to start the start, when the time were something like 1:12, 59 minutes, and 43 minutes. I've give it a few days to start to get a sense of a new equilibrium.
Meanwhile, my posting here will be much reduced. I feel myself cycling already into the DN, dissolution, fear, and rage (not an insight stage, but a grief stage, the one after fear, and so to me woven implicitly through the DN, which it is as possible to see as a straightfoward (haha) human grief process as it is to see it as some privileged rarity for the spiritual elite.
Som eof the dates in my last few days of logging are off, but i haven't got the energy to go back and fix anything. Future Pepes, my apologies. I plead depression.
namaste
(edit) i will no longer be doing my first sit without coffee beforehand, as there is no need to do a dress rehearsal for dark night conditions. It's show time.
Wish you great success with new format, and keep us informed please
.
Siavash:
Tim Farrington:
Wish you great success with new format, and keep us informed please
.Siavash, this first practice log of this retreat intensive is dedicated to you, you fucking idiot!
Practice log/ May 4, 20205780/ retreat day 1, sesshin day 23/ sit
1/ 0:12:53/ end 12:33am/ bbw/ clockwise/ one decade
Practice log/ May 4, 2020/5780/ retreat 1, sesshin day 23/ sit 2/ 0:30:00/ end 1:27am/ tonglen
So, half an hour of tonglen. Linda introduced me to Lama Lena, whom i want to ravage, after love at first sight: a tough, dry, funny, vastly
intelligent bird with an encyclopedic knowledge of her Dzogchen lineage. Her talks have been a revelation.
As far as i can tell, tonglen, breathing in dukha and breathing out metta, is the bottom line absolute beginner’s starting point in this lineage. This is good, as that is what i am, a bottom-feeding beginner.
What i discovered, so intensely that i could barely keep from leaping up and knocking on the door of every RV in the park to tell them the good news at 1:30 in the morning (managed to refrain, since i am so depressed now), was that i have been doing tonglen for years now. It’s like the guy learning that he had been writing prose since he first picked up a pencil for the ABCs.
I can do this shit until hell is empty, not just standing on my head, but dancing on my hands.
Siavash, what a great comedy team we make! We are the Laurel and Hardy of meditation! You pick which one you want to be first, and I'll choose accrdingly from what is left.
so: to work.
Practice log/ May 4, 2020/5780/ retreat 1, sesshin day 23/ sit 3/ 0:30:01/ end 4:06am/ tonglen/counterclockwise
This is a technique so simple that it is easy to scorn it as nothing. Which it is, done properly. The in-breath happens on its own.
I’m using the rosary as it was originally designed, as a mala, without differentiation from bead to bead, just the horrific effort of reaching for the next bead on the inbreath, under the weight of all the suffering in the world, and letting it go from the sheer relief of being properly crushed, around and around without end, meaninglessly and mindlessly.
In tonglen, you become, functionally speaking, the equivalent of a breath-powered Tibetan prayer wheel, spinning and spinning, probably useless, probably superstitiously. But that spinning is the best game in town.
Siavash, what a great comedy team we make! We are the Laurel and Hardy of meditation! You pick which one you want to be first, and I'll choose accrdingly from what is left.
Yeah, right
I always forget their names, which one is which, but since I am the idiot, so I'll be the skinny one
Laurel and Hardy were a comedy duo act during the early Classical Hollywood era of American cinema. The team was composed of Englishman Stan Laurel (1890–1965) and American Oliver Hardy (1892–1957). They became well known during the late 1920s to the mid-1940s for their slapstick comedy, with Laurel playing the clumsy and childlike friend of the pompous bully Hardy.[1][2] The duo's signature tune is known variously as "The Cuckoo Song", "Ku-Ku", or "The Dance of the Cuckoos". It was played over the opening credits of their films and has become as emblematic of the duo as their bowler hats.
Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy,
I choose to be . . . Oliver Hardy, the fat one, the pompous bully .
and we must begin at once practicing The Dance of the Cuckoos, accompanied by Papa Che on something piccolo-like thing, or something:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snnCKVFzjHE
love, tim
Okay, I'll add it to the end of Todo-list that I have from 15 years ago
Since the pronunciation of my name is difficult, even here for some old people and little kids, sometimes kids say it exactly like what you said above
so the skinny one, clumsy and child-like, is Stan Laurel= You, Shiavash.
Since the pronunciation of my name is difficult, even here for some old people and little kids, sometimes kids say it exactly like what you said above
Tim Farrington:
who did we say the fucking idiot was, again?
Are you talking about Srowsh (according to my grandfather)? ;)
Siavash:
Tim Farrington:
who did we say the fucking idiot was, again?
Are you talking about Srowsh (according to my grandfather)? ;)
Tim Farrington:
Siavash:
Tim Farrington:
who did we say the fucking idiot was, again?
Are you talking about Srowsh (according to my grandfather)? ;)
Yeah.
To be serious again(!), my grandfather couldn't say my name, and instead would call me Srowsh. Well he was already 90 years old when I was born! He died around the age of 110 as we think.
Siavash:
Tim Farrington:
Siavash:
Tim Farrington:
who did we say the fucking idiot was, again?
Are you talking about Srowsh (according to my grandfather)? ;)
Yeah.
To be serious again(!), my grandfather couldn't say my name, and instead would call me Srowsh. Well he was already 90 years old when I was born! He died around the age of 110 as we think.
Fucking fantastic, Srowsh! Your grandfather is my new role model, since i happen to be 110 years old myself and may die any minute! I'm dark nighting like there's no tomorrow!
Tim Farrington:
Siavash:
Tim Farrington:
Siavash:
Tim Farrington:
who did we say the fucking idiot was, again?
Are you talking about Srowsh (according to my grandfather)? ;)
Yeah.
To be serious again(!), my grandfather couldn't say my name, and instead would call me Srowsh. Well he was already 90 years old when I was born! He died around the age of 110 as we think.
Fucking fantastic, Srowsh! Your grandfather is my new role model, since i happen to be 110 years old myself and may die any minute! I'm dark nighting like there's no tomorrow!
Since there's no tomorrow, let's add some more practice time to today
Tim Farrington:
Siavash:
Tim Farrington:
Siavash:
Tim Farrington:
who did we say the fucking idiot was, again?
Are you talking about Srowsh (according to my grandfather)? ;)
Yeah.
To be serious again(!), my grandfather couldn't say my name, and instead would call me Srowsh. Well he was already 90 years old when I was born! He died around the age of 110 as we think.
Fucking fantastic, Srowsh! Your grandfather is my new role model, since i happen to be 110 years old myself and may die any minute! I'm dark nighting like there's no tomorrow!
Going back to the question at the heart of this context-context-context reply-all thing, No, Srowsh, not you, you fucking idiot! I meant to say by ever so clever implication that OBVIOUSLY I was the fucking idiot. But this misunderstanding between us has led to such sweet fruits! Let's fuck up our communication some more!
nobody reads this thread, Srowsh, we're safe as safe can be here. We are the hidden diamonds in the river of diarrhea-like verbiage that is the Bar(do) of Last Resort 2. No one wants to pan through this shit looking for us.
Thanks for hanging through my graveyard shift, Mr. Laurel!Practice log/ May 4, 2020/5780/ retreat 1, sesshin day 23/ sit 4/
0:30:02/ end 6:45/ tonglen/clockwise
https://www.amazon.com/Love-Every-Breath-Meditation-Transforming-ebook/dp/B07QZTSFK9/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=love+on+every+breath&qid=1588581596&s=digital-text&sr=1-1
the somewhat unerving realization that each breath is both as
meaningless and as all-important as the one before and the one after. If that
chain breaks anywhere, even on the most trivial moment’s breath, you have
failed in your mission again. And failure is guaranteed.
Practice log/ May 4, 2020/5780/ retreat 1, sesshin day 23/ sit 5/ 0:30:03/ end 7:52am/ tonglen/ clockwise (oops)
for tonglen, paradoxically, the “shittier” (technical term from the Tibetan, cf. Guenther on “rShddr”) the sit, the easier tonglen gets. All the usual measures are out the window is degree of suffering in the in-breath is the prima materia you are using to breathe out that beam of golden love: murky, sludgy, exhausted, hurting physically, sleepy, stupid, ugly in my own eyes: pre-gold shit! It’s like cocaine, man, pure pure shit, and you snort what you can handle on any given in-breath and then trip motherfucker through the long release of God/dess’s grace.
good shit, man. love that shit. turns out i got tons of that shit, too, and tons to burn. It’s a burners’ market.
using a very gentle and ancient mantra with this tonglen: “oh” on the in-breath, the weight-bearing cry; and “God” on the outbreath, pouring out Her grace.
this comes from one of my favorite psalm , #63:
{A Psalm of David, when he was in the wilderness of Judah.} O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is; 2 To see thy power and thy glory, so as I have seen thee in the sanctuary. 3 Because thy lovingkindness is better than life, my lips shall praise thee. 4 Thus will I bless thee while I live: I will lift up my hands in thy name. 5 My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness; and my mouth shall praise thee with joyful lips: 6 When I remember thee upon my bed, and meditate on thee in the night watches. 7 Because thou hast been my help, therefore in the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice. 8 My soul followeth hard after thee: thy right hand upholdeth me.
“Oh God, Thou art my God,” was, if i recall correctly, my first Judeo-Christian mantra, when i was switching over from the old ashram mantras circa 1990, getting into Centering Prayer, doing a retreat with Thomas Keating and a bunch of gays and old nuns, and old gay nuns, in the Old St. Mary’s Church in Chinatown, SF. He was a VERY tall man, and looked awesome in his order’s visiting team uniform of black and white.
Practice log/ May 4, 2020/5780/ retreat 1, sesshin day 23/ sit 6/ 0:21:59/ end 2:23am/ tonglen/ counterclockwise
this tonglen practice is so powerful. I think tonglen is at the root of a story like this:
It is interesting to me that in some way I don't understand, this technique is too much for me right now. I have stretched every aspect of my life to the limit in recent days, driven by something close to rage, and i feel the vast silence around me now, scorched earth in every direction.
I'll go back next sit to the One that brung me, my God old prayer of body-breath-Word. I think it has the best chance right now stabilizing before i do any real damage. At this point, at worst, I have pissed most everyone near and dear to me off, or am pissed off at them, or both. Anger is the second stage of grief. Time to move on from that.
love, tim
I used to do mandalas as a way of trying to ground, or channel, very high energy into something like art, something beautiful or interesting, and real.
I started this one when i started the sessin, and i'm thinking i might see if i can find a time-lapse series in this. if not, this is a precise map of an emerging cosmos from the seed of the empty hole in the center, made by the compass needle, of, uh, God.
love, tim
Practice log/ May 5, 2020/5780/ retreat day 2, sesshin day 23/ sit 1/ 1:12:18/ end 1:32am/ bbw-3?/
in the dukha nanas, no nonsense.
This may be the first time i have ever really understood the apparently brutal, apparently world- and self-despising, world- and self-denying, apparent ascetic self-mortification in the extreme of John of the Cross’s poem early in the Ascent of Mt. Carmel (I, 13:6):
6. Strive always to prefer, not that which is easiest, but that
which is most difficult;
Not that which is most delectable, but that which is most unpleasing;
Not that which gives most pleasure, but rather that which gives least;
Not that which is restful, but that which is wearisome;
Not that which is consolation, but rather that which is disconsolateness;
Not that which is greatest, but that which is least;
Not that which is loftiest and most precious, but that which is lowest and most despised;
Not that which is a desire for anything, but that which is a desire for nothing;
Strive to go about seeking not the best of temporal things, but the worst.
Strive thus to desire to enter into complete detachment and emptiness and poverty,
with respect to everything that is in the world, for Christ’s sake.
John of the Cross, Ascent of Mt. Carmel, Book I, chapter 13, verse 6
which is most difficult;
Not that which is most delectable, but that which is most unpleasing;
Not that which gives most pleasure, but rather that which gives least;
Not that which is restful, but that which is wearisome;
Not that which is consolation, but rather that which is disconsolateness;
Not that which is greatest, but that which is least;
Not that which is loftiest and most precious, but that which is lowest and most despised;
Not that which is a desire for anything, but that which is a desire for nothing;
Strive to go about seeking not the best of temporal things, but the worst.
Strive thus to desire to enter into complete detachment and emptiness and poverty,
with respect to everything that is in the world, for Christ’s sake.
John of the Cross, Ascent of Mt. Carmel, Book I, chapter 13, verse 6
I used to say that i could go with himin understanding, and even knowing, that this present suffering wouldbear its purgative fruits in good, and accept that, but that i couldn’t go that final step you see in people like John X and Rumi and so many others, of actually welcoming the burn.In my basic prayer there is usually a kind of stutter-stepbetween “accept,” which i can do, and “embrace,” which i knew perfectly well that i could not do, and could not even imagine doing: we embrace what we love,not what pains us. I could accept the pain as the means of the Living Flame of Love, and know it to be in that acceptance that I truly lived; but I could not embrace that pain as if it were the Flame Herself, however much i knew intellectually that this was perfection.
This dark night, this dukha?Fucking A i embrace it. It is refreshing to be free of all that other shit, of allthat other shit. The dark night is God’s way of getting the soul all to Herself.
Franklin Merrell-Wolff, in his great memoir of Awakening, Pathways through to Space, says somewhere that there was a point at which he stopped identifying with the wood, and began identifying with the fire.
Practice log/ May 5, 2020/5780/ retreat day 2, sesshin day 23/ sit 2/ 0:58:58/ end 3:01am/ bbw/ counterclockwise
This is two hours of meditation this morning, which is roughly equal to the most i’ve slept at any one time, with a few blessed exceptions, for weeks now, during what i am still trying to think of as this phase of Tim In A Very Good Mood, but which most laymen, professionals, friends, and family, would probably be easiest characterizing as “mania,” or, more simply, in addressing me on the topic, “Jeezus fucking Christ, Tim, get help.”
Meditation may actually be more restful and regenerative than sleep, at these lengths, which presuppose a viable asana posture, and for me is actually more comfortable on the whole than lying down, which brings bodily pressures and tensions of the body that i apparently have to be unconscious to navigate. And so the prayer process in meditation could be seen, with humor but real truth too, as a subspecies of lucid dreaming: my body sleeps, but my heart is awake, as it says somewhere in the Bible, the Song of Songs, i think.
Practice log/ May 5, 2020/5780/ retreat day 2, sesshin day 23/ sit 3/0:43:22/ end 5:24am/ bbw/clockwise
the first three sits today are fairly exactly the extent of my old regimen meditation practice: three major sits per writing morning, plus whatever scriptural refuge and study the circumstances require (e.g., "Which of the darker Psalms will keep me from killing myself today?"), plus, if it's in play, some Actual Writing. The sparsity of Actual Writing by me even at my best is truly astounding; it really is pretty much a tale told by an idiot that i've been bleeding out all these years, full of sound and fury, signifying (almost? I wish) nothing.
So another thing contributing to my determination to make this pass through the dukha nanas state of the art is that i really have some real-world work that i want to get done: 1) finishing my novel; 2) shepherding a friend’s novel, which involves a full-on editorial immersion read of the manuscript, and pitching the thing to my agent, which pushes her overloaded self and immense heart that much closer to a terminal breakdown, which will then be on my head as the straw that broke that noble back; and 3) trying to help another former student get a proper novel worked up to make the next step in his very promising career, which also involves close editing, which is hard fucking real-time work.
I’ve always said my best state was what i called “a working depression.” I’m making a half-humorous, very serious effort of going beyond that clinical language in a lot of ways, so that what i present to people is not some Good Tim/Bad Tim, Properly Chastened Tim/Fucking Out of Control Tim dichotomy, but an integrated human being with a mood range perhaps more vivid and far-ranging than some. So not”mania,” as the reflex characterization (though that is true enough and will do for the vast majority of situations), but Tim in a Very Good Mood; and not depression, ditto, no problem in common usage, but most truly, “Tim in the Dukhas nanas big-time.”
Or, and, Tim Getting His Writerly Game Face On. As in everything, context, context, context.
Practice log/ May 5, 2020/5780/ 1st Tuesday in Ordinary Time/ sit 4/ 0:08:06/ end 6:04am/ bbw/ counterclockwise
It occurred to me that i am no longer either on retreat (tonglen) or in sesshin (vipassana). Rather, what is happening now is that period when we come home from such spiritual adventured and explorations and immersion in specific practices at the highest sustainable intensities and have to try to integrate the fruits of those special dedicated times into our daily life As It Is.
So, the first Tuesday in Ordinary Time, stealing the calendar concept from Mother Church, for what it calls the time of the year following
the last of the early extraordinary seaons, Advent, lent, Easter, and Pentecost: Ordinary Time. It is just perfect. And so, here i am, arriving at the place where i began and knowing it for the first time, as T. S. Eliot said so beautifully of the end of all our journeyings.
Funny digression, because it’s my fucking thread: a beloved Love of My Life, in one of our last gasps, once gave me this lovely wooden wall thing with a picture of a cute little camper on it, and the inspiring quote from T. S. Elliot (sic): “The journey, not the arrival, matters.”
I was delighted by every aspect of this gift, particularly its implications for my sex life, and even the fact that the poet’s name was misspelled on the thing didn’t give me much pause. Writers understand egregious proofreading failures.
So i rush off to the pile of Most Special Books within arm’s reach of my writing chair to get the T. S. Eliot collected works and give us the joy
of hearing that quote together From the Source. It sounds like something from near the end of the 4th of the Four Quartets, “Burnt Norton.” But damn it to hell, the closest i can find is the one i thought of first, as above, right where i knew it was, as the penultimate payoff of the 4th quartet, and so of all four:
We shall not cease from exploration, and the
end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place
for the first time.
T.S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton"
end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place
for the first time.
T.S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton"
I flip through the quartets backwards, no luck; i try “Ash Wednesday,” the next obvious candidate for a source of the quote. After more of this than was really good for the relationship at that point, I was forced to conclude that this was an example of a strange new phenomenon on the web: the attribution of something you want to get said to someone you believe will carry a certain weight with the reading public. Examples of this abound on the web these days. It spoke well, I suppose, for Eliot’s enduring stature as a literary voice of some authority, despite the trashing he’s taken in recent years as his engrained and casual anti-Semitism (for example) has become more and more plain in this age of the Woke.
What the hell was I saying, before all that?
I have a friend who can genuinely keep track of any conversationally extravagant detour in some kind of flow chart or something in his mind, and with no discernible hesitation bring any kind of wise-ranging solo diversion jam extravaganza side loop right back home to the original point, and know it again for the first time, richer for the journey.
My mother was also a master of this exquisite art, and burned its example into me as i marveled over the decades at her craft, how far out she could go and still bring it home on the right beat when the solo was over. She unfortunately lost this bring it home ability in her later years, not through senility but through simply losing her edge of genius somehow, and those wide-ranging forays spun from diverse threads became the entirety of her conversation. I remember feeling despair, and terror, and boredom, at that, and the terror was that I was like that myself, without ever having her genius in the first place. “No wonder nobody reads my novels, i’m a digressive motor mouth without a center of gravity.”
Like that.
Anyway, here we are: back to the basics, home from the wars, trying to integrate, especially, the sesshin breakthroyugh of adding multiple
short meditations through out the day, which if i can do it will amount to a fairly radical lifestyle revision.
Tim Farrington:
Meditation may actually be more restful and regenerative than sleep, at these lengths, which presuppose a viable asana posture, and for me is actually more comfortable on the whole than lying down, which brings bodily pressures and tensions of the body that i apparently have to be unconscious to navigate. And so the prayer process in meditation could be seen, with humor but real truth too, as a subspecies of lucid dreaming: my body sleeps, but my heart is awake, as it says somewhere in the Bible, the Song of Songs, i think.
Hey Tim, just checking in, been busy with kids lately and stabilizing EQ so not been following your log so much.
Sleep/dream meditation is totally legit and works well for some people. Check out Andrew Holecek, there's a good interview with him on Michael Taft's Deconstructing Yourself podcast which I was just listening to. Basically he says a lot of us are afraid of sleep because the ego dissolves, but if you can maintain awareness on the sleep/wake border or within sleep/dreams then that can be very fertile ground which is harder to access during waking meditation because the subconscious is much closer.
Cheers
aggie
Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö:
Tim Farrington:
It is not a question to you, I know you are ready... but... What about a practice where you would breathe in all the love and beauty of the world and breathe out your darkest suffering? Or inhale God, exhale the sinner (it won't go anywhere).
Lentong! To reverse your christian bend.
Lentong! To reverse your christian bend.
(I'm not supposed to exercise my throat chakra today but I am supposed to take the possibility to make the world a better place, and I think this might be it, because this is important.)
Linda
It might be worth pondering whether there is a difference between inside and outside.
It might be worth pondering whether there is a difference between inside and outside.
Or wait until your retreat is over, before exercising you splendid throat chakra any more.
love, tim
Knock, knock! ... (peaks throught the door) Do you still serve drinks? Ok thank you I'll have a pint of Guinness cheers!
Sits beside the crowd at the bar and joins the conversation;
My father before me, and his father before him, and his father before him told me that all are constructs but I like to think that some, like this Buddha-Dharma is a wholsome construct and some other constructs might be unwholsome. Some lead to suffering and others to the cessation of suffering. Some are good for humans, devals and all others beings and some are detrimental.
In drinking this pint there is only the drinketh, refering back to no one! Cheers!
Swim you fools, swim up the stream not to get washed down the eternal labyrinths of forgiveness!
Excuse my rumbbling just wanted to say hi and ; Tim I am reading you but not replying much as I dont have much to say as you can read from this post of mine
Sits beside the crowd at the bar and joins the conversation;
My father before me, and his father before him, and his father before him told me that all are constructs but I like to think that some, like this Buddha-Dharma is a wholsome construct and some other constructs might be unwholsome. Some lead to suffering and others to the cessation of suffering. Some are good for humans, devals and all others beings and some are detrimental.
In drinking this pint there is only the drinketh, refering back to no one! Cheers!
Swim you fools, swim up the stream not to get washed down the eternal labyrinths of forgiveness!
Excuse my rumbbling
just wanted to say hi and ; Tim I am reading you but not replying much as I dont have much to say as you can read from this post of mine
Practice log/ May 5, 2020/5780/ 1st Tuesday in Ordinary Time/ sit 5/ 0:08:07/ end 11:40am/ bbw, clockwise
Practice log/ May 5, 2020/5780/ 1st Tuesday in Ordinary Time/ sit 6/ 0:08:08/ end 1:32pm/counterclockwise
Practice log/ May 5, 2020/5780/ 1st Tuesday in Ordinary Time/ sit 7/ 0:08:09/ end 2:18pm/ bbw/ clockwise
Breathwork Session (zoom) with Nooraya Sophia Wales and group/ 8-9:30pm
I had been invited to this by an old friend, now both enlightened and married and raising One of Those Young Women Who Make You Feel Just Fine About the Future Fate of Human During an Anthropogenic Global Extinction Event.
I was trying to get to the session earlier, to get oriented, as my only other zoom event had been a cannibis Higher Thought Party populated by west coast intellectuals stoned to the gills on mushrooms, where i had arrived right on time and laid waste to the whole tea party scene before i even began to get oriented.
Sad, to say, i got lost on the way, got beat up and left for dead in an alley, but woke eventually to read, painted in neon orange on the alley
wall, “For a good time, call Sophia at. . .” Beside that was the door to the place i was going.
So i arrived, once again, barely in time, and simply muted my microphone immediately and indefinitely. Breathwork mpeople are notoriously sensitive.
John of the Cross’s reputation is as a fanatically ascetic, mortification-mad, world-denying extremist, and rightly so. This les-than-whole
truth does obscure his incredibly erotic sense of the actual fruit of all that shit. Put in the usual homely and simple technical terms of the (spectacularly undeveloped and rudimentary, in the light of more sophisticated traditions) plain-spoken Carmelite theology, at some point, the soul and her God fuck like rabbits, in a garden, in a bed in flower, and surrounded by dens of lions to keep everyone out. This fine point of the via negativa came to mind and eye and ears, with an almost unprecedented clarity, vividness, and visceral
immediacy, during this breathwork session.
Enough said.
Practice log/ May 5, 2020/5780/ 1st Tuesday in Ordinary
Time/ sit 9/ 0:08:11/ end 10:16pm/ bbw/ clockwise Practice log/ May 6, 2020/5780/ 1st Tuesday in Ordinary
Time/ sit 1/ 1:12:19/ end 1:41am/ bbw/ clockwise
very sleepy, but unable to bear going back to sleep for the moment.
Papa Che Dusko:
Knock, knock! ... (peaks throught the door) Do you still serve drinks? Ok thank you I'll have a pint of Guinness cheers!
Sits beside the crowd at the bar and joins the conversation;
Sits beside the crowd at the bar and joins the conversation;
"JAYZUS, it’s fooking Papa Che in the house! Drinks for all, a round for all the damned! Put it on Tim’s tab!"
[Voice: "Tim's credit ain't worth shit here." ]
"Exactly!"
My father before me, and his father before him, and his father before him told me that all are constructs but I like to think that some, like this Buddha-Dharma is a wholesome construct and some other constructs might be unwholesome. Some lead to suffering and others to the cessation of suffering. Some are good for humans, devals and all others beings and some are detrimental.
[general rapt nodding in the bar. Applause, a few derisive shouts. Farrington goes to tear a new asshole in the derisive ones, then realizes that this is hell, for fook’s sake, there’s always gonna be haters in hell, til hell is cleared. It’s hust a bad crowd, bad to the bone.]
In drinking this pint there is only the drinketh, refering back to no one!
[fights break out everywhere. Not a single flying chair hits Papa Che. The denizens take this to mean that God thinks Pops is correct.]
Cheers!
[the thunder of the Bar’s reply says: Datta, dayadhvam, damyata, as in the days of old in the fable of the meaning of Thunder in the Brihadarankaya Upanishad. (A translation may be found in Deussen’s Sechzig Upanishads des Veda, p. 489. See Olivier for further questions.)]
Swim you fools, swim up the stream not to get washed down the eternal labyrinths of forgiveness!
Excuse my rumbbling
we love rumbbling here: cf above, and--- https://tseliotsthewasteland.fandom.com/wiki/V._What_the_Thunder_Said
just wanted to say hi and ; Tim I am reading you but not replying much
Copy that, Papa Che Actual I read you 5 x5 and clear. over. you old blarney man. Your every syllable and smiley is treasured.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, out.
love, tim
Practice log/ May 6, 2020/5780/ 1st Tuesday in Orinary Time/ sit 2/ 0:58:59/ end 3:22am/ bbw/ counterclockwise
once you see that there’s nothing to do but the next in-breath, and that the next in breath is best left to the flawless discernment of the breath
itself, in God’s timem, which is die allerbestezeit, then . . . well, Q.E.D., there’s nothing left to do.
This causes quasars to erupt like crazed lighthouses in distant galaxies. The sub-atomic, pre-Planck-length foam of the void seethes. Beautiful women are tied by Snidely Whiplash to railroad tracks and we save them and they give us a kiss. All sentient beings giggle, then fling themselves into saving each other all over again.
Practice log/ May 6, 2020/5780/ 1st Tuesday in Ordinary Time/ sit 3/ 0:36:46/ end 6:15am/ bbw/ clockwise
Practice log/ May 6, 2020/5780/ 1st Tuesday in Ordinary Time/ sit 4/ 0:08:12/ end 12:49pm/ bbw/ clockwise (oops)
From A Glossary of Motherfucker, the native language of, uh, “Tim”* :
Motherfucker, n., abbreviated at times MF: 1) a bad person, as in “Say what, motherfucker? Are you looking to die today?” cf also REMF, Rear-Echelon Motherfucker, a field marine phrase for the kind of guy back at base who gets your people killed while covering his own ass with the higher-ups whose ass he lives to kiss, or, in general, any asshole tucked safely behind a desk while the real people do the work in spite of him out where it’s dirty and it hurts. 2) a good person, “What a bunch of great fucking motherfuckers!” or “You may be a motherfucker, but you are my motherfucker, motherfucker.” 3) a member of the proto pre-archaic Ur-tribe in the mythical ab initio era of the Motherfucker lineage, 4) the proto pre-archaic Ur-language of the Motherfucker lineage,
also used in adjective form, as in “That is some great motherfucking shit!” (cf “shit”)
Practice log/ May 6, 2020/5780/ 1st Tuesday in Ordinary Time/ sit 5/ 0:08:13/ end 1:57pm/ bbw/ counterclockwise
From A Glossary of Motherfucker, the native language of, uh, “Tim”* :
"a gentle lean toward death." (one syllable in native Motherfucker.)
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---
What this “gent;le lean toward death” 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 be
at into . . . No, until the swords are beaten into. . . shit, till they let us stop.
Practice log/ May 6, 2020/5780/ 1st Tuesday in Ordinary Time/ sit 6/ 0:08:14/ end 3:48pm/ bbw-1/ counterclockwise (oops)
From A Glossary of Motherfucker, the native language of, uh, “Tim”* :
bbw-1 a variation on bbw, cf, in which movement around the rosary begins immediately, and each bead is one phrase of the basic prayer. Used in situations when concentration is too challenged to get through a full stationary praying of the full prayer.
“*” denotes a term in the Glossary, as in:
*Tim n., often used as a name. x) on occasion, an acronym for something, e.g., “Trouble Is Mymiddlename.” “Too Intensely Manic,” etc.
Practice log/ May 6, 2020/5780/ 1st Tuesday in Ordinary Time/ sit 9/ 0:08:17/ end 9:27pm/ bbw/ counterclockwise
very sleepy, a wonderful thing in context. and so, to bed.
Practice log/ May 7, 2020/5780/ 1st Thursday in Ordinary Time/ sit 1/ 1:12:21/ end 1:50am/ bbw
“I have just three things to teach:
simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and in thoughts,
you return to the source of your being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.”
Tao Te Ching, 67 (in Stephen Mitchell’s translation)
Practice log/ May 7, 2020/5780/ 1st Thursday in Ordinary Time/ sit 2/ 0:59:00/ end 3:18am/ bbw
“Some say that this teaching is nonsense.
Others call it lofty but impractical.
But to those who have looked inside themselves,
this nonsense makes perfect sense.
And to those who put it into practice,
this loftiness has deep roots.”
Tao Te Ching, 67 (in Stephen Mitchell’s translation)
Practice log/ May 7, 2020/5780/ 1st Thursday in Ordinary Time/ sit 2/ 0:43:21/ end 4:49am/ bbw
“Knowing others is intelligence;
knowing yourself is true wisdom.
Mastering others is strength;
mastering yourself is true power.
If you realize you have enough,
you are truly rich.
If you stay in the center
and embrace death with your whole heart,
you will endure forever.”
Tao Te Ching, 33 (in Stephen Mitchell’s translation)
Practice log/ May 8, 2020/5780/ 1st Friday in Ordinary Time/ sit 2/ 0:59:01/ bbw-1/ end 4:38am
This below from Shargrol is my new scripture. I am printing it on business cards and taking the bus down to stand by the Watch Tower ladies at the train station, and give them to passing strangers. The ladies and i are going to get tight, a soft cop hard cop thing, saving souls one piece of printed material at a time.
I believe this wisdom applies to Every Fucking Moment on the Path, Any Path.
Shargrol
"A gentler approach is to have the intention to stay on the breath, allow for both success and failure to happen, and when failure eventually happens (which of course it will, that's built into the practice, no big deal) --- then the important part of practice happens: noting what was so seductive to the mind. The important thing isn't to get a A+ in class for staying on the breath, it's to learn about how your own mind works. It's learning directly what seduces the mind, and once we know, we can't be very confused anymore. Over time, with the gentler approach, the mind will follow the intention and stay on the breath and it will be a much more sustainable. It won't require effort because your practice didn't require effort with the gentler approach. The mind can hold breathing in awareness without a big struggle".
"A gentler approach is to have the intention to stay on the breath, allow for both success and failure to happen, and when failure eventually happens (which of course it will, that's built into the practice, no big deal) --- then the important part of practice happens: noting what was so seductive to the mind. The important thing isn't to get a A+ in class for staying on the breath, it's to learn about how your own mind works. It's learning directly what seduces the mind, and once we know, we can't be very confused anymore. Over time, with the gentler approach, the mind will follow the intention and stay on the breath and it will be a much more sustainable. It won't require effort because your practice didn't require effort with the gentler approach. The mind can hold breathing in awareness without a big struggle".
Practice log/ May 8, 2020/5780/ 1st Friday in Ordinary Time/ sit 3/ 0:43:22/ bbw/ end 6:42am
from sarah elizabeth this morning, the great gift that of noting that i am in “a working mania”.
Genius. I am so grateful to her, especially since she is my usual strongest advocate for extremes of Prudence and don’t-get-yourself-fucking-locked-up-you-fucking-idiot pit bull. For which she takes tons of shit from me, no good deed going unpunished, as per the universal law.
A working depression was all i had, for decades, to get my real work on the planet done, for my whole life. Now the sky’s the limit, and the bottom of the sea, and every bardo opens up, as a working mania allows me new freedom when i get to the flow chart point of “Decide not to manage mood” in my Staying-Off-the-Fucking-Meds Protocol.
Tim Farrington:
Practice log/ May 8, 2020/5780/ 1st Friday in Ordinary Time/ sit 2/ 0:59:01/ bbw-1/ end 4:38am
This below from Shargrol is my new scripture. I am printing it on business cards and taking the bus down to stand by the Watch Tower ladies at the train station, and give them to passing strangers. The ladies and i are going to get tight, a soft cop hard cop thing, saving souls one piece of printed material at a time.
I believe this wisdom applies to Every Fucking Moment on the Path, Any Path.
Shargrol
"A gentler approach is to have the intention to stay on the breath, allow for both success and failure to happen, and when failure eventually happens (which of course it will, that's built into the practice, no big deal) --- then the important part of practice happens: noting what was so seductive to the mind. The important thing isn't to get a A+ in class for staying on the breath, it's to learn about how your own mind works. It's learning directly what seduces the mind, and once we know, we can't be very confused anymore. Over time, with the gentler approach, the mind will follow the intention and stay on the breath and it will be a much more sustainable. It won't require effort because your practice didn't require effort with the gentler approach. The mind can hold breathing in awareness without a big struggle".
"A gentler approach is to have the intention to stay on the breath, allow for both success and failure to happen, and when failure eventually happens (which of course it will, that's built into the practice, no big deal) --- then the important part of practice happens: noting what was so seductive to the mind. The important thing isn't to get a A+ in class for staying on the breath, it's to learn about how your own mind works. It's learning directly what seduces the mind, and once we know, we can't be very confused anymore. Over time, with the gentler approach, the mind will follow the intention and stay on the breath and it will be a much more sustainable. It won't require effort because your practice didn't require effort with the gentler approach. The mind can hold breathing in awareness without a big struggle".
Practice log/ May 9, 2020/5780/ 1st Saturday in Ordinary Time/ sit 1/ 1:12:22/ bbw-1/
brutal night and a very tough groggy morning, after being unable to sleep, partly from back pain after a rare outing into The World yesterday, all day. The other contributing factor in the sleeplessness was Love, which i have trained all my life to Live With. It is only lately that i am taking training to Live With activity in The Fucking World* seriously in spiritual practice.
The venture into The Fucking World was actually beautiful, aside from various technical difficulties encountered in this covid-upended new landscape. I was visiting Peggy, an old writing student of mine, a real piece of work, who had been bombarding me with notes and such, drunken emails at 3am kind of stuff, ever since i surfaced recently from what appeared to most outside observers to be a deprrssive coma l;asting years on end.
Peggy and I go back to when i was teaching writing in a little wriers’ center in Norfolk. She had used up all the other teachers, who hadn’t been able to help her do what she wanted to do (cf. “piece of fucking work,” above), which was transform what had began as whimsically and almost disqualifyingly (for its target audience of children, i mean) dark tales of a mythological North Pole world into a full-fledged book. She been stuck on it for years, through trauma, tragedy, melodrama, grief, plugging away. She said if i would take her on, I had to promise to see it through to the end with her, to just fucking get it done. I sort of like a hard-headed woman on a mission from God myself, so i said sure.
Years of drunken hell and great work ensued. The drunken hells came when the class hung around afterward and drank A Lot, and peggy drunk and me drunk fought over everything imaginable like an old married couple bound by love-hate, whicj we sort of were, and i suspect past lives. The great work came because she was actaully a dream to work with, because she was so fiercely intent on Getting It Done, and Knew with pperect clarity what it was she wanted to Get Done. Combine that with my mastery of Hopw to Get It Done Come Hell or High Water, and we were a very good, even unstoppable team, at least by hell or high water or drunken brawls after class.
We actually got a draft done, which i sort of felt completed my part of the deal, but turned out not to, and the thing bogged down looking for an illustrator and a publisher, in which areas all of us were hapless. Meanwhile I went nuts and got fired from the writing center, but all my classes left with me and we set up in various funky locations around norfolk, me charging half the price that the fucking writing center extorted from these poor vulnerable souls trying to pour out their hearts onto pages, fatally afflicted with the writing disease, which is much like what Daniel Ingram calls the “insight disease,” in that it is invariably chronic until it is fatal.
Finally, even the true-blue bunch who learned learned to survive the distinct manner and unpredictablities of the Farrington Teaching Style, mostly gentle as a feather with good lines edits and tender funny encouragement and camaraderie of misery, but spiced with the occasional thunderbolt or sledgehammer, and a steady infusion of sexual scandal and alcoholism, all succumbed to thunderbolts, etc., or sheer attrition.moving out of town or something, and that was that for my teaching career, and only about eight years later than it should have been had i had a lick of sense. I had thought it was the economy, stupid, when i began, that it was my only way to earn any money at all, in light of the failure of my Great Career as a Fucking Novelist; but i should have just found a street person level of lifestyle for myself right away and bottomed out and starved or died of exposure in a bush somewhere, in retrospect.
Any, skip fast forward through many years of avoiding former students like the plague, split by the occasional fracture line of a mania leaking underworld gasses of undying love in its full toxic ineptitude: big splashes on the radar, followed by more years of dead screen and no sightings of that rare bird Tim Fucking Farrington.
so she twists my arm with the infinite power of our love-hate-work bond, and i rent a fucking car with money i don’t have and drive down to Portsmouth for a visit and lunch. Peggy these days is about 400 pounds of house-bound depression in a tent dress. She has a weird beauty and grace to her, and sails around when she manages to get up like the matriarch/goddess/archetypal-Wise-Witch-Woman of an ancient tribe. We talked depression--- she sits in the dark waiting for death, which i told her was acyually my meditation method too. That kind of thing. It was lovely and loving and by the time i left i had promised to typeset the goddamn North Pole story, which hadn’t budged an inch in the ensuing years, anbd get it into book form as i have done for my own last several novels, as a self-published thing that will be, crucially, solid, between covers, and capable of being handed to human beings. It is her legacy, so fuck, i’m fucked. And there is that past life marriage. She also managed to slip a recent short story for my sage attention into the to-do pile, and she wants to go on a fucking road trip to Montreal to see the giant images of Leonard Cohen they have on a couple of skyscrapers there. We sang several Leonard Cohen songs along the way, with surprisingly good harmonies. I’m fucked, but i don’t see how we could get out of her fucking neighborhood, much less to Montreal. And forget about back from Montreal, the thing is a one-way kamikaze venture from the start, and if there is a merciful God we would both die on the streets of Montreal, gazing up at the sage form of St. Leonard Fucking Cohen, whose canonization process i am pushing under a facebook page of that name.
* denotes item in A Glossary of Motherfucker: the Native Language of, uh, “Tim”
Practice log/ May 9, 2020/5780/ 1st Saturday in Ordinary Time/ sit 2/ 0:59:02/bbw-1
Practice log/ May 9, 2020/5780/ 1st Saturday in Ordinary Time/ sit 3/ 0:43:23/ bbw-2
bbw-2 a variation on bbw, body-breath-Word (cf. below), in which movement around the rosary begins immediately, and each bead is one word of the basic prayer. Used most often in situations where brain is too fast even for bbw-1 (cf. above)
from A Glossary of Motherfucker: the Native Language of, uh, “Tim”
body-breath-Word aka, bbw, aka “my basic prayer”
[from Equanimity? Help, please 2, 4/18/2020:]
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 of "a-men" 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.
from A Glossary of Motherfucker: the Native Language of, uh, “Tim”
Practice log/ May 9, 2020/5780/ 1st Saturday in Ordinary Time/ sit 4/ 0:08:18/ bbw/ ended 6:35am
Practice log/ May 9, 2020/5780/ 1st Saturday in Ordinary Time/ sit 5/ 0:08:19/ bbw/ ended 8:03am
Practice log/ May 9, 2020/5780/ 1st Saturday in Ordinary Time/ sit 6/ 0:08:20/ bbw/ ended 2:18pm
Vow
No more killing
time
from this day
to forever
let me work
with time
to let time
live
Practice log/ May 10, 2020/5780/ 1st Sunday in Ordinary Time/ sit 1/ 1:12:23/ bbw-1/ ended 1:28am
The only accomplishments and skills that you can truly be said to have “attained” or “mastered” are those you can do within a single breath.
Why? Because you always have one breath to work with, this breath. The next breath is not guaranteed, ever. If you don’t get it done on this breath, it might well not get done at all, ever. Every breath is a Hail Mary pass as the clock expires, win or lose, all or nothing (though nothing, truthfully, is not so bad, and relatively speaking is even best, and there are those who believe it superior to all).
[Buzzer sound.] Thanks for playing, game over.
Practice log/ May 10, 2020/5780/ 1st Sunday in Ordinary Time/ sit 2/ 0:59:03/ bbw-1/ ended 2:55am
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMWtx9SEgy8&feature=youtu.be
I see your dancing, laughing, naked
Sweet and pretty face
And the promise burning brightly
In your crystal-shot eyes
Your savage, and violent flesh,
The cut that bleeds, the kiss that stings
We're shooting up stars and desperate snows
That fall from shimmering skies, so
Take my hand and lead me
To the garden of delight
Take my hand and lead me
To the garden of delight
Revelation is laid, and reflects
On the windswept liquid mirror
Of this breathless whirl, this happy death
This elegance and charm
The treasured and precious first fleeting
Touch of a gracious stranger
Enchant me and entrance me
I know you can do me no harm, so
Take my hand and lead me
To the garden of delight
Take my hand and lead me
To the garden of delight
We're playing with fire, dancing in the flames
And we're covered in burns that may never heal
And angels may come, and angels may go
But it's heaven on earth when you
Take my hand and lead me
To the garden of delight
Take my hand and lead me
To the garden of delight.
as performed by The Mission
Songwriters: CRAIG DAVID ADAMS, MICK BROWN, SIMON THOMAS HINKLER, WAYNE HUSSEY
Practice log/ May 11, 2020/5780/ 1st Monday in Ordinary Time/ sit 1/ 1:12:24/ bbw/ ended 2:32am
Constant Conversation by Rumi
Who is the luckiest in this whole orchestra? The reed.
Its mouth touches your lips to learn music.
All reeds, sugarcane especially, think only
of this chance. They sway in the canebrakes,
free in the many ways they dance.
Without you the instruments would die.
One sits close beside you. Another takes a long kiss.
The tambourine begs, Touch my skin so I can be myself.
Let me feel you enter each limb bone by bone,
that what died last night can be whole today.
Why live some soberer way and feel you ebbing out?
I won't do it.
Either give me enough wine or leave me alone,
now that I know how it is
to be with you in a constant conversation.
and the mountains sing back:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7_yXjnqu7c
Practice log/ May 11, 2020/5780/ 1st Monday in Ordinary Time/ sit 2/ 0:59:04/ bbw/ ended 4:29am
“Fire is what of God is world-consuming.
Water, world-protecting.
Somehow each gives the appearance of the other.
To these eyes you have now, what looks like water
burns. What looks like fire
is a great relief to be inside.”
Rumi
Practice log/ May 11, 2020/5780/ 1st Monday in Ordinary Time/ sit 3/ 0:43:24/ bbw-1/ ended 6:46am
"A craftsman pulled a reed from the reedbed, cut holes in it,
and called it a human being. Since then, it's been wailing a tender agony of
parting, never mentioning the skill that gave it life as a flute"
Rumi
Practice log/ May 11, 2020/5780/ 1st Monday in Ordinary Time/ sit 4/ 0:08:21/ bbw/ ended 1:30pm
Practice log/ May 11, 2020/5780/ 2nd Tuesday in Ordinary Time/ sit 1/ 1:12:25/ Olivier/ end 3:35am
Unusual technique this morning, as the result of a gift of music from Olivier. I could barely begin to listen to this without extreme agitation, and so i took it as my meditation object, or milieu, or something.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1HKS8zeXl5Kq9pwpupJcwZJdaVHapqMAm
Practice log/ May 11, 2020/5780/ 2nd Tuesday in Ordinary Time/ sit 2/ 0:59:05/ bbw/ end 5:33am
Practice log/ May 11, 2020/5780/ 2nd Tuesday in Ordinary Time/ sit 3/ 1:10:00/ bbw/ end 2:15pm
Practice log/ May 11, 2020/5780/ 2nd Tuesday in Ordinary Time/ sit 4/ 1:12:25/ bbw/ end 11:07pm
Practice log/ May 13, 2020/ 19 Iyar, 5780 / sit 1/ 1:12:26/ bbw-1/ ended 4:52am
Nice one! I love ethnic music of the world!
Here is one ethnic flute player I can share and is from Macedonia.
https://youtu.be/agm3IrTnK9o
I love ethnic music of the world! Here is one ethnic flute player I can share and is from Macedonia.
https://youtu.be/agm3IrTnK9o
Papa Che Dusko:
Nice one! I love ethnic music of the world!
Here is one ethnic flute player I can share and is from Macedonia.
https://youtu.be/agm3IrTnK9o
I love ethnic music of the world! Here is one ethnic flute player I can share and is from Macedonia.
https://youtu.be/agm3IrTnK9o
Thanks.
This is very similar to the one I shared. Probably the same instrument, or one similar to it.
Before this guy (Hasan Kasaei), this instrument (Ney) sounded pretty much like the one you shared. As we call it shepherd flue, or ney, since specially in the past shepherds would play it. But Kasaei made a revolution in it, and brought a new level of quality, that its sound is clear as a clear and transparent glass.
Indeed shepherds would play this instruments often when minding the sheep. I guess it would also keep wolves at bay
shepherds would play this instruments often when minding the sheep. I guess it would also keep wolves at bay
Siavash:
Papa Che Dusko:
Nice one! I love ethnic music of the world!
Here is one ethnic flute player I can share and is from Macedonia.
https://youtu.be/agm3IrTnK9o
I love ethnic music of the world! Here is one ethnic flute player I can share and is from Macedonia.
https://youtu.be/agm3IrTnK9o
Thanks.
This is very similar to the one I shared. Probably the same instrument, or one similar to it.
Before this guy (Hasan Kasaei), this instrument (Ney) sounded pretty much like the one you shared. As we call it shepherd flue, or ney, since specially in the past shepherds would play it. But Kasaei made a revolution in it, and brought a new level of quality, that its sound is clear as a clear and transparent glass.
Papa Che, this is fookin gorgeous. Beware of Greeks blowing shepherd flutes, though.
19 Iyar, 5780 / sit 2/ 0:59:06/ bbw/ ended 6:20am
استاد بنان -- بخت بیدارhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GHyjiAdeaE
Banan, performing “Bakhte Bidar.” The composer had composed it for his daughter, Siavash tells me, and in Siavash’s lovely translation, the devotional song goes:
You are my beautiful flower,
My wine, my chalice,
You bright Moon, I swear to God you are the light of my nights,
You are my dawn of hope, my Moon, my Sun,
You manifestation of being, are my eternal life...
Practice log/ May 13, 2020/ 19 Iyar, 5780 / sit 3/ 0:43:25/ bbw-1/ ended 11:15am
adele doing an exquisite cover of an old Bob Dylan song that he just snarled his beautiful way through, as always:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0put0_a--Ng
When the rain is blowing in your face
And the whole world is on your case
I could offer you a warm embrace
To make you feel my love
When the evening shadows and the stars appear
And there is no one there to dry your tears
Oh, I hold you for a million years
To make you feel my love
I know you haven't made your mind up yet
But I will never do you wrong
I've known it from the moment that we met
No doubt in my mind where you belong
I'd go hungry; I'd go black and blue
And I'd go crawling down the avenue
No, there's nothing that I wouldn't do
To make you feel my love
The storms are raging on the rolling sea
And on the highway of regret
The winds of change are blowing wild and free
You ain't seen nothing like me yet
I could make you happy, make your dreams come true
There's nothing that I wouldn't do
Go to the ends of this Earth for you
To make you feel my love, oh yes
To make you feel my love
Tim Farrington:
Siavash:
Papa Che Dusko:
Nice one! I love ethnic music of the world!
Here is one ethnic flute player I can share and is from Macedonia.
https://youtu.be/agm3IrTnK9o
I love ethnic music of the world! Here is one ethnic flute player I can share and is from Macedonia.
https://youtu.be/agm3IrTnK9o
Thanks.
This is very similar to the one I shared. Probably the same instrument, or one similar to it.
Before this guy (Hasan Kasaei), this instrument (Ney) sounded pretty much like the one you shared. As we call it shepherd flue, or ney, since specially in the past shepherds would play it. But Kasaei made a revolution in it, and brought a new level of quality, that its sound is clear as a clear and transparent glass.
Papa Che, this is fookin gorgeous. Beware of Greeks blowing shepherd flutes, though.
Tim, I was drowning in that music back in my worst of Dark Night! It would rip my chest right open and then sew it up roughly just to rip it up again, and again, and again ... and the alcohol was flowing strongly too at that time. This music really depicts all those troubles and suffering these folks had back in those olden days. Be careful not to overuse it though
Papa Che Dusko:
Tim Farrington:
Siavash:
Papa Che Dusko:
Nice one! I love ethnic music of the world!
Here is one ethnic flute player I can share and is from Macedonia.
https://youtu.be/agm3IrTnK9o
I love ethnic music of the world! Here is one ethnic flute player I can share and is from Macedonia.
https://youtu.be/agm3IrTnK9o
Thanks.
This is very similar to the one I shared. Probably the same instrument, or one similar to it.
Before this guy (Hasan Kasaei), this instrument (Ney) sounded pretty much like the one you shared. As we call it shepherd flue, or ney, since specially in the past shepherds would play it. But Kasaei made a revolution in it, and brought a new level of quality, that its sound is clear as a clear and transparent glass.
Papa Che, this is fookin gorgeous. Beware of Greeks blowing shepherd flutes, though.
Tim, I was drowning in that music back in my worst of Dark Night! It would rip my chest right open and then sew it up roughly just to rip it up again, and again, and again ... and the alcohol was flowing strongly too at that time. This music really depicts all those troubles and suffering these folks had back in those olden days. Be careful not to overuse it though
Hector:
Rumi has several nice poems about the reed flute IIRC
Hector, sorry about that, Papa Che and i apparently had a little steam to blow off. it's not like that all the time around here. Often it's worse.
I love Rumi's flute poems:
Practice log/ Wednesday, May 13, 2020/ 20 Iyar, 5780/ 2nd Wednesday in Ordinary Time/ sit 1/ 1:12:27/ bbw-1/ ended 1:24am
On the 20th of Iyar 2449 (1312 BCE)--nearly a year after the Giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai--the Children of Israel departed their encampment near the Mountain. They resumed their journey when the pillar of cloud rose for the first time from over the "Tabernacle--the divine sign that would signal the resumption of their travels throughout their encampments and journeys over the next 38 years, until they reached the eastern bank of the Jordan River on the eve of their entry into the Holy Land.
https://www.chabad.org/calendar/view/day.asp?tdate=5/14/2020
https://www.chabad.org/calendar/view/day.asp?tdate=5/14/2020
cf Exodus 13:20-22:
“And they took their journey from Succoth, and encamped in Etham, in the edge of the wilderness. And the LORD went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night: He took not away the pillar of the cloud by day, nor the pillar of fire by night, from before the people.”
“And they took their journey from Succoth, and encamped in Etham, in the edge of the wilderness. And the LORD went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night: He took not away the pillar of the cloud by day, nor the pillar of fire by night, from before the people.”
love, tim
Smiling Stone:
The teachings of Kabbalah explain that there are seven "Divine Attributes" -- Sefirot -- that G-d assumes through which to relate to our existence: Chessed, Gevurah, Tifferet, Netzach, Hod, Yesod and Malchut ("Love", "Strength", "Beauty", "Victory", "Splendor", "Foundation" and "Sovereignty"). In the human being, created in the "image of G-d," the seven sefirot are mirrored in the seven "emotional attributes" of the human soul: Kindness, Restraint, Harmony, Ambition, Humility, Connection and Receptiveness. Each of the seven attributes contain elements of all seven--i.e., "Kindness in Kindness", "Restraint in Kindness", "Harmony in Kindness", etc.--making for a total of forty-nine traits. The 49-day Omer Count is thus a 49-step process of self-refinement, with each day devoted to the "rectification" and perfection of one the forty-nine "sefirot."
On the 20th of Iyar 2449 (1312 BCE)--nearly a year after the Giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai--the Children of Israel departed their encampment near the Mountain. They resumed their journey when the pillar of cloud rose for the first time from over the "Tabernacle--the divine sign that would signal the resumption of their travels throughout their encampments and journeys over the next 38 years, until they reached the eastern bank of the Jordan River on the eve of their entry into the Holy Land.
which leads to stuff like:
“And they took their journey from Succoth, and encamped in Etham, in the edge of the wilderness. 21 And the LORD went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night.” (Exodus 13:20-21)
and The edge of the wilderness--- wilderness--- מִדְבָּר midbar, desert, wilderness--- is where the action is with God a lot of the time, as in Exodus 3:1, where Moses is tending his father-in-law’s sheep in the wilderness, where he encounters the burning bush and has the moment that defines the renewed relationship between Moses and his people and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who now reveals His new name: I AM THAT I AM, the unpronounceable unfathomable tetragrammaton, transliterated in four letters as YHWH or JHVH and articulated as Yahweh or Jehovah, spoken aloud in Jewish tradition only once a year by the high priest in the Holy of Holies of the Jerusalem temple.
Isaiah speaks of the one that crieth from the same midbar, in 40:3, calling on God’s people to prepare the way of the Lord, a call echoed by John the Baptist in the Gospels, in Koine Greek, ἔρημος Mt 3:1, 3 (=Is 40:3), etc.
now before we get to the pillar of cloud, one more point to note, for Ex 13:21: “The Lord went before them. . .” Two great words here. “Went” is actually הָלַך halak, to walk, go, from which comes the Halakhah, the mainstay of Jewish law, literally the hundreds of specific commandments, each a mitzva, by which Israel may walk in the way of the Lord. And “before” is a heavy weight echo on a casual adverb: פָּנֶה paneh, in front of, basically, is the same word used for the face of God, as in, “When thou saidst, Seek ye My Face, my heart, O Lord, replied, Thy Face, Lord, will I seek.” (Ps 27:8)
I mean, trip the fuck out, yeah?
Now, at least, the pillar of cloud, which they follow to walk in the way of the Lord. עַמּוּדamud, pillar, is from the verb 5975 עָמַד amad, lit. to stand; abide, endure, continue: thus, man standing before God, in Gen 18:8, 22 (Abraham) and Ex 3:5 (Moses, on holy ground); and the Lord’s marvelous word through the prophet Jeremiah, Jer 6:16: “Thus saith the LORD, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk [same halakh here] therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls.”
Best for last: the cloud, 6051 עָנָן anan, cloud is found in Gen 9:13-16; Ex 13:21-22, 14:19-20, 24, 16:10, 24:15-16, 18, 33:9-10, 34:5, 40:35-38; Lev 16:2, 13(incense); Num 9:15-22, 10:11-12, 34, 11:25, 12:10, 14:14, 16:42; Dt 1:33, 4:11, 5:22, 31:15; 1 Kgs 8:10:11 (=2 Chr 5:13-14); Neh 9:12, 19; all before the first “secular” use of the word as what we today would think of as a cloud, a simple weather phenomenon, in Job 7:9. ALL those other clouds are clouds of God, one way or another, filling the Tabernacle, guidng the Israelites by day before yielding to the pillar of flame at night, and enveloping Sinai. Moses disppears into that cloud for forty days and forty nights, and comes out with the Law, the Torah, graven with the finger of God on the smiling stones.
Same with the “New Testament” νεφέλη cloud, from which the Vice of God emanates at the mountaintop Transfiguration of Jesus in Matthew 17:5: “While he was still speaking, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them; and suddenly a voice came out of the cloud, saying, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Hear Him!”
Don’t even get me started on The Cloud of Unknowing. I wrote the intro to a HarperSF edition of that beautiful book on contemplation, sometime in the early 2000s, and still consider it one of the sweetest bits of writing i ever did.
Uh, what were we talking about?
Nothing can hold you back—not your childhood, not the history of a lifetime, not even the very last moment before now. In a moment you can abandon your past. And once abandoned, you can redefine it.
ah, right.
love, tim
Practice log/ Wednesday May, 14, 2020/ 20 Iyar, 5780/ 2nd Wednesday in Ordinary Time/ sit 2/ 0:59:07/ bbw-2/ ended 3:48am
This is love:
to fly toward a secret sky,
to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment.
First, to let go of life.
In the end, to take a step without feet;
to regard this world as invisible,
and to disregard what appears to be the self.
rumi
Practice log/ Wednesday May 14, 2020/ 20 Iyar, 5780/ 2nd Wednesday in Ordinary Time/ sit 3/ 0:43:25/ bbw-5/ ended 5:11am
Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.
You are covered with thick cloud.
Slide out the side. Die,
and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign
that you have died.
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence.
The speechless full moon
comes out now.
rumi
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.
You are covered with thick cloud.
Slide out the side. Die,
and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign
that you have died.
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence.
The speechless full moon
comes out now.
rumi
Friday, May 15, 2020/ 21 Iyar, 5780/ 2nd Friday in Ordinary Time/ sit 1; 1:12:28/ bbw-1 Friday, May 15, 2020/ 21 Iyar, 5780/ 2nd Friday in Ordinary Time/ sit 1; 1:12:28/ bbw-1
Kfar Chabad Established (1949)
The Chabad-Lubavitch village in Israel, Kfar Chabad, was founded by the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, on Iyar 21 of 1949. The first settlers were mostly recent immigrants from the Soviet Union, survivors of the terrors of World War II and Stalinist oppression. Kfar Chabad, which is located about five miles south of Tel Aviv and includes agricultural lands as well as numerous educational institutions, serves as the headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch Chassidic movement in the Holy Land.
cf. https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1765/jewish/The-Rebbe-Who-Saved-a-Village.htm
Friday, May 15, 2020/ 21 Iyar, 5780/ 2nd Friday in Ordinary Time/ sit 2/ 0:59:08/ bbw/ ended 10:18am
Saturday, May 16, 2020/ 22 Iyar, 5780/ 2nd Saturday in Ordinary Time/ sit 1/ 1:12:29/ bbw/ ended 2:26am
Shabbat Commanded (1313 BCE)
Following the descent of the manna (the miraculous "Bread from Heaven" that sustained the Israelites in the desert), G-d commanded the Children of Israel to keep the Shabbat. This Shabbat was the 22nd of Iyar, of the year 2448 from Creation (1313 BCE) (see "Today in Jewish History" for Iyar 15).
On that Friday morning, enough manna fell for two days' worth of meals, as on the Shabbat it would be prohibited to gather the manna. The "Two Loaves" of challah bread (Lechem Mishneh) that form the foundation of our Shabbat meal are in commemoration of the double portion of manna.
https://www.chabad.org/parshah/article_cdo/aid/1410463/jewish/What-Does-Manna-Mean.htm
With Rashbam, lol, I like version #2, in the link above, of the meaning of the word “manna” (in Hebrew, מן, which is more accurately transliterated as mon): “that mon is Egyptian for ‘what.’ Over the 200-plus years that they had lived in Egypt, a fair amount of Egyptian had crept into their lexicon. Thus, when they said, ‘It is manna,’ what they were actually saying was, ‘What is it?” Eventually, that became the name of the mystery food that they had found.”
I love that. manna the food from heaven, sustaining us through the wilderness journey, as "WTF"?
Saturday, May 16, 2020/ 22 Iyar, 5780/ 2nd Saturday in Ordinary Time/ sit 2/ 0:59:99/ bbw/ ended 5:08am
Sunday, May 17, 2020/ 23 Iyar, 5780/ 2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time/ sit 1/ 0:30:04/ bbw/ ended 2:55am
Sunday, May 17, 2020/ 23 Iyar, 5780/ 2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time sit 2/ 0:59:10/ bbw/ ended 8:40am
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=skinny+puppy&&view=detail&mid=938A70D92DB8F862551D938A70D92DB8F862551
Oil remove shred and tear radiation vapor It's the fear so unclear
man in motion going nowhere In our homes stuck in the face spread the word to
the populace Yellow journal yellow journal set the pace feel the rage
Manifestations of a sort so insidious off the point Simple solution never
confusion sport a gun kill a cop Crazy world of weary thought so receive me had
enough Lock me up lock me up Rot and assimilate so hot to annihilate Deviation
tonic mess prolonged existence innocence Is he who speaks isn't weak wheelchair
virtue so to speak Bubonic plague the truth of aids immunity avoid decay In the
trench of pestilence the bible screams announce your faith Mutterings of death
to bring suffocate a newborn thing Degradation of an age venereal it's all
sensation Protect design the moral plan infallible as propaganda Completely
black with no steps back Hot to assimilate we'll rot or annihilate Agony
profusely stains the inner thinking of the brain Accusations clanking chains
experiments with the groans of pain All prefer no one blames the terror in an animal's
screams In cages our future - the answers insane
Songwriters: KEVIN GRAHAM OGILVIE,
KEVIN W. CROMPTON
love, tim
Monday, May 18, 2020/ 24 Iyar, 5780/ 2nd Monday in Ordinary Time/ sit 2/ 0:59:11/ bbw/ ended 5:33am
I’ve spent a good chunk of this morning listening in amazement to my old writing buddy, from my first writing group at the Dolphin Tales bookstore back in the early 2000s, Edison McDaniels, probably the best writer among that beautiful crew, as well as a world-class neurosurgeon and, as an Army Reservist, a guy who spent quite a bit of time in forward medical tents in Iraq and Afghanistan, putting soldiers’ skulls back together as best he could to try to keep what survived of their brains going as well as they could.
Edison also runs a little business as a labor of love, reading books he delights in onto audio, and gifting the authors for ridiculously low rates with a version of their book in perfect audio form, read in his awesome, malleable voice, a touch of the South Carolina were he was raised, and the whole of his vast worldly experience as a world-class practioner of several extraordinarily difficult arts. They say, “Well, it’s not like it’s brain surgery.” But with Edison, sometimes it IS brain surgery, and he writes his books like it is too.
He has been doing one of my self-published novels, Slow Work, and just sent me a big piece of the thing, nearly done now. Listening to it, i have to marvel at how good the book that sank my so-called writing career sounds, in his rendering (he does accents, too, southrn and yankee, and he does women high-pitched). The best book you’ve written, my last editor told me, trning it down, because i stank of bad sales.
and now this. God bless you, Edison, you fucking atheist. (He does believe in ghosts, however; he knows haunting like most of us know spaghetti.)
https://soundcloud.com/edisonaudio/sets/slow-work/s-nbtQ49kvzJy?fbclid=IwAR1EgnZmHuIYCy3PiQDZ3EEhslv8eqVfY3_IpkYw6kqO-gpuygaugwrDRuA
love, tim
Monday, May 18, 2020/ 24 Iyar, 5780/ 2nd Monday in Ordinary Time/ sit 3/ 0:43:27/ bbw/ ended 7:07am
I’ve spent a good chunk of this morning listening in amazement to my old writing buddy, from my first writing group at the Dolphin Tales bookstore back in the early 2000s, Edison McDaniels, probably the best writer among that beautiful crew, as well as a world-class neurosurgeon and, as an Army Reservist, a guy who spent quite a bit of time in forward medical tents in Iraq and Afghanistan, putting soldiers’ skulls back together as best he could to try to keep what survived of their brains going as well as they could.
Edison also runs a little business as a labor of love, reading books he delights in onto audio, and gifting the authors for ridiculously low rates with a version of their book in perfect audio form, read in his awesome, malleable voice, a touch of the South Carolina were he was raised, and the whole of his vast worldly experience as a world-class practioner of several extraordinarily difficult arts. They say, “Well, it’s not like it’s brain surgery.” But with Edison, sometimes it IS brain surgery, and he writes his books like it is too.
He has been doing one of my self-published novels, Slow Work, and just sent me a big piece of the thing, nearly done now. Listening to it, i have to marvel at how good the book that sank my so-called writing career sounds, in his rendering (he does accents, too, southrn and yankee, and he does women high-pitched). The best book you’ve written, my last editor told me, trning it down, because i stank of bad sales.
and now this. God bless you, Edison, you fucking atheist. (He does believe in ghosts, however; he knows haunting like most of us know spaghetti.)
https://soundcloud.com/edisonaudio/sets/slow-work/s-nbtQ49kvzJy?fbclid=IwAR1EgnZmHuIYCy3PiQDZ3EEhslv8eqVfY3_IpkYw6kqO-gpuygaugwrDRuA
love, tim
Tuesday, May 19, 2020/ 25 Iyar, 5780/ 3rd Tuesday in ordinary Time/ sit 1/ 1:12:31/ bbw-a/ ended 2:44am
Waste Land, by The Mission
http://www.songlyrics.com/the-mission/wasteland-lyrics/
There's a crystal view from, from my window
And I can see years to come
I live for the burn and the sting of pleasure
I live for the sword, the steel and the gun
I can tear down the walls, storm them barricades
Run to the place where the frightened crawl
Desire lurks beyond good and evil
So dance on the graves where the hammer falls
Over this land
All over this wasteland
Over this land
All over this wasteland
You can touch but please keep your distance
You're innocent and pure and with no shame
The spirit is willing and the flesh is great
You're teasing your torment with the pleasure of pain
Over this land
All over this wasteland
Over this land
All over this wasteland
Heaven and Hell, I know them well
But I haven't yet made my choice
I'm feeling dead 'cause I'm shouting loud
And no one can hear my voice
Walking the tightwire can't look down
Strung out high above you all
Faithful wind blows through this land
Howls my name, hell is my fall
Over this land
All over this wasteland
Over this land
All over this wasteland
Over this land
All over this wasteland
Over this land
All over this wasteland
Tuesday, May 19, 2020/ 25 Iyar, 5780/ 3rd Tuesday in ordinary Time/ sit 2/ 0:59:12/ bbw/fire kasina/ ended 5:55am
love, tim
Tuesday, May 19, 2020/ 25 Iyar, 5780/ 3rd Tuesday in Ordinary Time/ sit / 0:43:28/ bbw/ end 8:38am
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--jHMI2uTYY&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR0uwsrdqkrtc2eeOAHY4Wo6RCZnRwD2ewmQYa31ciAUfpqOIRCrrCsfRvc
Tuesday, May 19, 2020/ 25 Iyar, 5780/ 3rd Tuesday in ordinary Time/ sit 3/ 0:43:28/ bbw/ end 8:38am
Wednesday, May 20, 2020/ 26 Iyar, 5780/ 3rd Wednesday
in Ordinary Time/ sit 1/ 1:12:32/ bbw-1/ ended 4:13am
Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzato (known by the acronym
"Ramchal"), philosopher, kabbalist and ethicist, was born in Padua,
Italy, in 1707. At a very early age, he began to study Kabbalah under the
tutelage of Rabbi Moshe Zacuto, one of the foremost Kabbalists of his
generation. While still in his twenties, he authored numerous works of Torah
scholarship, including Derech Hashem ("The way of G-d"), a
systematic exposition of the fundamentals of Judaism.In 1735, Luzzatto left his native Italy and, avoiding public life,
set up shop as a gem cutter in Amsterdam. His fame nevertheless caught up with
him, and in 1740, (at the turn of the Jewish century 5500), he published his
most famous work, Mesilat Yesharim ("Path of the Just").
Like many other great men of his age, Luzzatto longed for the Holy Land, and in
1743 he settled in Acco. He was not to enjoy a long stay there, however, and on
Iyar 26, 5507 (1747), at the age of 39, he and his entire family died in a
plague. According to most traditions, he was buried in Tiberias, next to the tomb of Rabbi Akiva.
Akiva ben Yosef (Hebrew: עֲקִיבָא בֶּן יוֹסֵף; c. 50 – 28 September 135 CE) also known as Rabbi Akiva רַבִּי עֲקִיבָא), was a leading Jewish scholar and sage, a tanna, of the latter part of the first century and the beginning of the second century. Rabbi Akiva was a leading contributor to the Mishnah and to Midrash halakha. He is also sometimes credited with redacting Abraham's version of the Sefer Yetzirah, one of the central texts of Jewish mysticism. He is referred to in the Talmud as Rosh la-Hakhamim "Chief of the Sages". He was executed by the Romans in the aftermath of the Bar Kokhba revolt.
love, tim
Wednesday, May 20, 2020/ 26 Iyar, 5780/ 3rd Wednesday in Ordinary Time/ sit 2/ 0:59:13/ bbw/ end 6:43am
Wednesday, May 20, 2020/ 26 Iyar, 5780/ 3rd Wednesday in Ordinary Time/ sit 3/ 0:43:30/ end 8:48am
How'ya doin' horse? You all roit?
Im excited about a new guitar amp I just purchased A modda effn VOX AC15
Never owned a classic all tube amp before! Uh oh can't wait to give it a proper shwangage once it arrives God of Brian May take me into your bosom
(please postal service be kind to it and deliver it unharmed)
Im excited about a new guitar amp I just purchased
A modda effn VOX AC15 Never owned a classic all tube amp before! Uh oh can't wait to give it a proper shwangage once it arrives
God of Brian May take me into your bosom (please postal service be kind to it and deliver it unharmed)
Tim Farrington:
Wednesday, May 20, 2020/ 26 Iyar, 5780/ 3rd Wednesday in Ordinary Time/ sit 2/ 0:59:13/ bbw/ end 6:43am
Wednesday, May 20, 2020/ 26 Iyar, 5780/ 3rd Wednesday in Ordinary Time/ sit 3/ 0:43:30/ end 8:48am
I sent you a mail yesterday, did you receive it?
And, I saw you entered into gothic/dark electro territory re: musical tastes posted... I have a couple in store but was concerned they would be TOO dark for the present mood... so I keep them to myself until further due!
Well, love and be well, Mister T.
metta
smiling stone
Hey Papa Che, congrat for your amp!
Hi Stone! I think this moddafcucker left! Does that mean you and I have to pay for all the drinks again ???
... and ...
Aw, thanks (about the amp)
... and ...
Aw, thanks (about the amp)
Siavash:
He will be back.
"He'll talk when he has something to say."
"He'll talk when he has something to say."
Did he actually EVER had "something" to say
Yes I talk about you, you Farry F. Timmington
Smiling Stone:
Tim Farrington:
Wednesday, May 20, 2020/ 26 Iyar, 5780/ 3rd Wednesday in Ordinary Time/ sit 2/ 0:59:13/ bbw/ end 6:43am
Wednesday, May 20, 2020/ 26 Iyar, 5780/ 3rd Wednesday in Ordinary Time/ sit 3/ 0:43:30/ end 8:48am
I sent you a mail yesterday, did you receive it?
stoner, i don't think i did get that email and am horrified at the thought of missing out on any stoner-isms!
And, I saw you entered into gothic/dark electro territory re: musical tastes posted... I have a couple in store but was concerned they would be TOO dark for the present mood... so I keep them to myself until further due!
i was thrown in, actually, to that dark ocean.
as to you not posting things out of concern for the mood and tone here (here!), well, that's just 1) cruel and selfish, and 2) ,misguided, i believe: i would challenge you, indeed, to find something darker than the present mood. This is eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die energy that this place runs on.
Hey Papa Che, congrat for your amp!
love, tim
Papa Che Dusko:
Hi Stone! I think this moddafcucker left! Does that mean you and I have to pay for all the drinks again ???
... and ...
Aw, thanks (about the amp)
... and ...
Aw, thanks (about the amp)
I was visiting my family in MD
. . Then they got sick of me.This place is a wreck! What's with all the empty nitrous oxide containers?
Actually, Papa, you've been paying for all the drinks for the last month or so--- we just left your tab open. Did't you begin to suspect something was up when those people came to re[ossess your car?
Truly, my friend, you are an innocent soul. I wish that i could spare you the horrors of the meditative path. Maybe we should try to run for it again?
love, tim
Monday, May 25, 2020/ 2 Sivan/ sit 3/ 0:43:32/ bbw/ end 7:21am
Encampment at Sinai (1313 BCE) On the 1st of Sivan of the year 2448 from creation (1313 BCE), six weeks after their exodusw eeks after their exodus from Egypt, the Children of Israel arrived at Mount Sinai in the Sinai Desert and camped at the foot of the mountain "as one man, with one heart" in preparation for the receiving of the Torah from G-d. On this day, however "Moses did not say anything to them, because of their exhaustion from the journey."
Monday, May 25, 2020/ 2 Sivan/ Omer Day 46: Netzach sheb’Malchut/ sit 1/ 1:12:36/ bbw/ ended 4:40am
Monday, May 25, 2020/ 2 Sivan/ sit 2/ 0:59:13/ end 6:10am
Monday, May 25, 2020/ 2 Sivan/ sit 2/ 0:59:13/ end 6:10am
Chosen People (1313 BCE)
Sivan 2 is marked on the Jewish calendar as Yom HaMeyuchas ("Day of Distinction"); it was on this day that G-d told Moses -- when Moses ascended Mount Sinai for the first time -- to tell the people of Israel: "You shall be My chosen treasure from among all the nations, for all the earth is Mine. You shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" (Exodus 19:4-6).
Tonight's Sefirah: Hod sheb'Malchut -- "Humility in Receptiveness"
The teachings of Kabbalah explain that there are seven "Divine Attributes" -- Sefirot -- that G-d assumes through which to relate to our existence: Chessed, Gevurah, Tifferet, Netzach, Hod, Yesod and Malchut ("Love", "Strength", "Beauty", "Victory", "Splendor", "Foundation" and "Sovereignty"). In the human being, created in the "image of G-d," the seven sefirot a*re mirrored in the seven "emotional attributes" of the human soul: Kindness, Restraint, Harmony, Ambition, Humility, Connection and Receptiveness. Each of the seven attributes contain elements of all seven--i.e., "Kindness in Kindness", "Restraint in Kindness", "Harmony in Kindness", etc.--making for a total of forty-nine traits. The 49-day Omer Count is thus a 49-step process of self-refinement, with each day devoted to the "rectification" and perfection of one the forty-nine "sefirot."
love, tim
Papa Che Dusko:
HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOly ShiIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT!
RYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
FOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOKIN
COOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOODER!!!!
And I asked a comely waitress
"Is this a new teaching?"
"Yeah", she said, "there is no God but God
And Ralph Mooney is his name"
I said, "Let me empty your ashtray, Mr. Mooney
And if the drunks interfere I'll be sad
But just as long as you sit there on the bandstand
And play your guitar like Buddha, I'll be glad!"
Tim Farrington:
And Ali Farka
nice!
Monday, May 25, 2020/ 2 Sivan/ sit 4/ 0:08:27/ bbw/ end 11:03am
Tuesday, May 26, 2020/ 3 Sivan/ omer day 47 Hod sheb'Malchut/ sit 1/ 0:03:27/ bbw/ end 12:28am
On Sivan 3, G-d instructed Moses to "set boundaries for the people around, saying, 'Beware of ascending the mountain or touching its edge...'" (Exodus 19:10-12) in preparation for the Giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai three days later. To this day, we mark the "Three Days of Hagbalah ('Boundaries')" leading to the Giving of the Torah on Sivan 6.
Tuesday, May 26, 2020/ 3 Sivan/ omer day 47 Hod sheb'Malchut/ sit 2/ 0:08:31/ bbw/ end 2:14am
Tuesday, May 26, 2020/ 3 Sivan/ omer day 47 Hod sheb'Malchut/ sit 3/ 0:09:16/ bbw/ end 3:47am
There was nothing in the ark save the two tables of stone, which Moses put there at Horeb, when the LORD made a covenant with the children of Israel, when they came out of the land of Egypt. And it came to pass, when the priests were come out of the holy place, that the cloud filled the house of the LORD, So that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud: for the glory of the LORD had filled the house of the LORD. Then spake Solomon, The LORD said that he would dwell in the thick darkness. 1 Kings 8: 9-12
Tuesday, May 26, 2020/ 3 Sivan/ omer day 47 Hod sheb'Malchut/ sit 4/ 0:03:00/ bbw/ end 6:04am
I am scaling way back to where i was at the height of the first wave of “mania,” unabl to sit for more than a few minutes at a time, and so doing as many shorts sits as i can stand.
I’m overloading every environment i’m in at this point, and i’m scared, because i can’t read how it’s happening, i’m missing the stop signals until it’s too late. I’ve confined myself to my own little campsite, and taken a vow of pure foogling speech. This place i live is rated G, they’ve made that clear. Silence is rated G. I’m keeping my mouth shut as much as i can, until, i can see how i keep thinking R-rated stuff can pass as G. Could be a while. Another mile of silence while I’m coming back to You, as the St. Leonard Cohen song goes.
Jennifer Warnes still covers it sweetest and smoothest, in my ears:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiCC7r_3fvA
KISS keep it simple stupid
Seriously Tim, try not to look at it as "practice" then. You know shifting gears?
Yes.
Time to just "watch" stuff as you would while outside smoking a cigarette. Relax. Take in that breath like you smoke it ahhhhhh ... breath it out like you do with the smoke ahhhh feels good right
It's the same breath just with a pleasant twist to it. Same shit different packaging (perception).
Short sits out doors maybe? Bird chirping, hearing of course, can't see it but there might be an image of it in the mind, great stuff. You see it, there is seeing of course, there could be a pleasant feeling about it, good stuff.
Then there is breathing in like you smoke it, might be a mind image of actually smoking, great stuff. How does it feel? Urge to smoke? You know you will anyway once that 2 minute timer chimes in. Smoke the inbreath instead, through the mouth all the way into the belly, like you smoke it.
Bell chimes! off to get that cig break. Atta boy
keep it simple stupid Seriously Tim, try not to look at it as "practice" then. You know shifting gears?
Yes.
Time to just "watch" stuff as you would while outside smoking a cigarette. Relax. Take in that breath like you smoke it
ahhhhhh ... breath it out like you do with the smoke ahhhh feels good right It's the same breath just with a pleasant twist to it. Same shit different packaging (perception).
Short sits out doors maybe? Bird chirping, hearing of course, can't see it but there might be an image of it in the mind, great stuff. You see it, there is seeing of course, there could be a pleasant feeling about it, good stuff.
Then there is breathing in like you smoke it, might be a mind image of actually smoking, great stuff. How does it feel? Urge to smoke? You know you will anyway once that 2 minute timer chimes in. Smoke the inbreath instead, through the mouth all the way into the belly, like you smoke it.
Bell chimes! off to get that cig break. Atta boy
Papa Che Dusko:
KISS keep it simple stupid
Seriously Tim, try not to look at it as "practice" then. You know shifting gears?
Yes.
Time to just "watch" stuff as you would while outside smoking a cigarette. Relax. Take in that breath like you smoke it ahhhhhh ... breath it out like you do with the smoke ahhhh feels good right
It's the same breath just with a pleasant twist to it. Same shit different packaging (perception).
Short sits out doors maybe? Bird chirping, hearing of course, can't see it but there might be an image of it in the mind, great stuff. You see it, there is seeing of course, there could be a pleasant feeling about it, good stuff.
Then there is breathing in like you smoke it, might be a mind image of actually smoking, great stuff. How does it feel? Urge to smoke? You know you will anyway once that 2 minute timer chimes in. Smoke the inbreath instead, through the mouth all the way into the belly, like you smoke it.
Bell chimes! off to get that cig break. Atta boy
keep it simple stupid Seriously Tim, try not to look at it as "practice" then. You know shifting gears?
Yes.
Time to just "watch" stuff as you would while outside smoking a cigarette. Relax. Take in that breath like you smoke it
ahhhhhh ... breath it out like you do with the smoke ahhhh feels good right It's the same breath just with a pleasant twist to it. Same shit different packaging (perception).
Short sits out doors maybe? Bird chirping, hearing of course, can't see it but there might be an image of it in the mind, great stuff. You see it, there is seeing of course, there could be a pleasant feeling about it, good stuff.
Then there is breathing in like you smoke it, might be a mind image of actually smoking, great stuff. How does it feel? Urge to smoke? You know you will anyway once that 2 minute timer chimes in. Smoke the inbreath instead, through the mouth all the way into the belly, like you smoke it.
Bell chimes! off to get that cig break. Atta boy
Papa Che Actual, this is Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, i read you 5 x 5 and clear. Keep it Simple Stupid, copy that. I love you, over.
Wednesday, May 27, 2020/ 4 Sivan, 5780 /Omer: Day 48 -Yesod sheb'Malchut/ sit 2/ 0:04:01/ end 2:09am
Moses Transcribes (first part of) Torah (1313 BCE)
On Sivan 4 of the year 2448 from creation (1313 BCE)--two days before the revelation at Mount Sinai--Moses wrote down the first 68 chapters of the Torah, from Genesis 1:1 ("In the Beginning G-d created the heavens and the earth") to the Giving of the Torah in Exodus 19 (Exodus 24:4; Rashi ibid.).
On Sivan 4 of the year 2448 from creation (1313 BCE)--two days before the revelation at Mount Sinai--Moses wrote down the first 68 chapters of the Torah, from Genesis 1:1 ("In the Beginning G-d created the heavens and the earth") to the Giving of the Torah in Exodus 19 (Exodus 24:4; Rashi ibid.).
this is of course the first transcription, on stones that would be broken by Moses in his rage of coming upon his people worshiping the Golden Calf the moment he turned his back on them for forty days and forty nights.
love, tim
Today is the day of the arrival of the Almighty, the conqueror of the World, the master of the 7 seas, the One that punches through air like thunder, the omnipresent soundshaper , one that has been with us forever whether we realize or not, The God of Brian May, He who powered the entire British Invasion!!!
The one and only, Vox AC amp!
... sorry, too excited, ... (hey Mr. Postman man bring it home to me ...)
yes, I agree KISS is good especially when all that fluffy stuff we call DN seems so effing solid as concrete and rock! It's so solid that it becomes more so with us demanding it being really that solid. I like Shinzens talk on how suffering gets 10 fold amplified (or more) when we are not mindful of the sensations that create that illusion. Of course! We kind of know this already. It makes sense. As "here and now" makes sense and yet it always slips out of our hands like a slippery fish
Any way Ferry F Timmington if you want we could meet over Skype for some one on one Noting Aloud session this weekend as I will have some free time. Mind you, this would not be a chit chat meeting, nor some emotional counseling but pure old noting and relaxing into it in hope to create a friendly feeling around it. It is important we see this practice as a friend rather than chore or some inviter of suffering This would be more of a chilled out warming up to the practice itself meeting. There ought to be gladness, warm feelings of friendliness and support, recognition, feeling that we share this journey which at times can feel very lonely and hopeless.
If you are up for it we can PM some time and date (Saturday or Sunday this weekend for a 45 minutes pragmatic dharma chatty chat and practice, and not a minute longer)
Tell me how this sounds to you?
p.s. no I'm not a teacher, nor am I a knower of the ultimate truth. Just like all of you I plow through this vast field of Samsara and try to keep my head above the water
The one and only, Vox AC amp!
... sorry, too excited, ... (hey Mr. Postman man bring it home to me ...)
yes,
I agree KISS is good especially when all that fluffy stuff we call DN seems so effing solid as concrete and rock! It's so solid that it becomes more so with us demanding it being really that solid. I like Shinzens talk on how suffering gets 10 fold amplified (or more) when we are not mindful of the sensations that create that illusion. Of course! We kind of know this already. It makes sense. As "here and now" makes sense and yet it always slips out of our hands like a slippery fish Any way Ferry F Timmington if you want we could meet over Skype for some one on one Noting Aloud session this weekend as I will have some free time. Mind you, this would not be a chit chat meeting, nor some emotional counseling but pure old noting and relaxing into it in hope to create a friendly feeling around it. It is important we see this practice as a friend rather than chore or some inviter of suffering
This would be more of a chilled out warming up to the practice itself meeting. There ought to be gladness, warm feelings of friendliness and support, recognition, feeling that we share this journey which at times can feel very lonely and hopeless. If you are up for it we can PM some time and date (Saturday or Sunday this weekend for a 45 minutes pragmatic dharma chatty chat and practice, and not a minute longer)
Tell me how this sounds to you?
p.s. no I'm not a teacher, nor am I a knower of the ultimate truth. Just like all of you I plow through this vast field of Samsara and try to keep my head above the water
Any way Ferry F Timmington if you want we could meet over Skype for some one on one Noting Aloud session this weekend as I will have some free time.
Mind you, this would not be a chit chat meeting, nor some emotional counseling but pure old noting and relaxing into it in hope to create a friendly feeling around it. It is important we see this practice as a friend rather than chore or some inviter of suffering
And I'm a Catholic, for GOd's sake. Suffering is my metier. But I suppose we could try this "friendly" shit, once. This would be more of a chilled out warming up to the practice itself meeting. There ought to be gladness, warm feelings of friendliness and support, recognition, feeling that we share this journey which at times can feel very lonely and hopeless.
as long as we don't lose sight of how lonely and hopeless it actually is.
If you are up for it we can PM some time and date (Saturday or Sunday this weekend for a 45 minutes pragmatic dharma chatty chat and practice, and not a minute longer)
Tell me how this sounds to you?
Tell me how this sounds to you?
like the best thing in life. Let's get it on the calendar.
p.s. no I'm not a teacher, nor am I a knower of the ultimate truth. Just like all of you I plow through this vast field of Samsara and try to keep my head above the water
oh. well, shit. i take it all back. fuck you, you fucking poseur. bring me an enlightened teacher, or go home and tend that beautiful four-year-old of yours.
love, tim
Smiling Stone:
Hey Papa san!
And Papa, congrats, I can't wait to hear you playing that Vox amp (on 11)! will you post a noting aloud fuzzy guitar video?
I will just lean back in my couch and enjoy with a drink of your choice...
Love and metta to all of you, crazy dwellers in Mister T's bar of the last resort...
Smiling Stone
And Papa, congrats, I can't wait to hear you playing that Vox amp (on 11)! will you post a noting aloud fuzzy guitar video?
I will just lean back in my couch and enjoy with a drink of your choice...
Love and metta to all of you, crazy dwellers in Mister T's bar of the last resort...
Smiling Stone
Ha!
AC15 arrived and sounds killer! I cant crank it in the house though! Too effing loud this box is! Here is a little loop I've made and then played a bit over it (just my usual noodling) Excuse the bad iPhone recording! (need me a better phone mic for these fast recordings)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MtFu5etaEY
Papa Che Dusko:
Smiling Stone:
Hey Papa san!
And Papa, congrats, I can't wait to hear you playing that Vox amp (on 11)! will you post a noting aloud fuzzy guitar video?
I will just lean back in my couch and enjoy with a drink of your choice...
Love and metta to all of you, crazy dwellers in Mister T's bar of the last resort...
Smiling Stone
And Papa, congrats, I can't wait to hear you playing that Vox amp (on 11)! will you post a noting aloud fuzzy guitar video?
I will just lean back in my couch and enjoy with a drink of your choice...
Love and metta to all of you, crazy dwellers in Mister T's bar of the last resort...
Smiling Stone
Ha!
AC15 arrived and sounds killer! I cant crank it in the house though! Too effing loud this box is! Here is a little loop I've made and then played a bit over it (just my usual noodling) Excuse the bad iPhone recording! (need me a better phone mic for these fast recordings)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MtFu5etaEY
Papa got a brand new Vox AC15C1 , Digitech Trio Plus amp.
Wednesday, May 27, 2020/ 4 Sivan, 5780 /Omer: Day 48 -Yesod sheb'Malchut/ sit 2/ 0:04:01/ end 2:09am
Moses Transcribes (first part of) Torah (1313 BCE)
On Sivan 4 of the year 2448 from creation (1313 BCE)--two days before the revelation at Mount Sinai--Moses wrote down the first 68 chapters of the Torah, from Genesis 1:1 ("In the Beginning G-d created the heavens and the earth") to the Giving of the Torah in Exodus 19 (Exodus 24:4; Rashi ibid.).
On Sivan 4 of the year 2448 from creation (1313 BCE)--two days before the revelation at Mount Sinai--Moses wrote down the first 68 chapters of the Torah, from Genesis 1:1 ("In the Beginning G-d created the heavens and the earth") to the Giving of the Torah in Exodus 19 (Exodus 24:4; Rashi ibid.).
Wednesday, May 27, 2020/ 4 Sivan, 5780 /Omer: Day 48 -Yesod sheb'Malchut/ sit 3/ 0:04:02/ bbw/ end 4:03am
Wednesday, May 27, 2020/ 4 Sivan, 5780 /Omer: Day 48 -Yesod sheb'Malchut/ sit 4/ 0:04:03/ bbw/ end 5:52am
Thursday, May 28, 2020/ 5 Shiva, 5780/ Omer: Day 49 -Malchut sheb'Malchut/ sit 1/ 0:04:05/ bbw/ end 2:23am
On this day, Moses made a covenant with the Jewish people at the foot of Mount Sinai at which the people declared, "All that G-d has spoken, we shall do and hear" (Exodus 24:7) committing themselves to observe the Torah's commandments ("do") and strive to comprehend them ("hear"), while pledging to "do" also before they "hear."
Rabbis Burnt at Stake (1728)
On this day Rabbis Chayim and Yehoshua Reitzes were tortured and burned in Lvov, Poland after they were accused of having attempted to convince an apostate to return to Judaism.
When a festival day (yom tov) falls on a Friday -- as Shavuot does this year -- an "eruv tavshilin" (i.e., food for at least one "meal" that is set aside in advance for Shabbat) must be prepared prior to the festival, so that it should be permitted to prepare food for Shabbat during the festival.
The Talmud relates that when G-d came to give the Torah to the People of Israel in the early morning of Sivan 6 (see "Today in Jewish History" for tomorrow), He found them sleeping. (The Chassidic masters explain that this was an attempt to connect to their subconscious, transcendent self in preparation for their reception of the divine wisdom.) To rectify this lapse, we spend the entire first night of Shavuot (which begins at nightfall tonight) studying Torah. The traditional Tikkun Leil Shavout ("Rectification for Shavuot Night") study program includes the opening and closing verses of each book of the Written Torah (Tanach), as well as of each Parshah; the entire Book of Ruth (see "Laws and Customs" for tomorrow); the opening and closing sections of each tractate of the Talmud; a list of the 613 mitzvot; and selected readings from the Zohar and other Kabbalistic works.
Shavuot 2020 (a two-day holiday, celebrated from sunset on May 28 until nightfall on May 30) coincides with the date that G‑d gave the Torah to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai more than 3,300 years ago. It comes after 49 days of eager counting, as we prepared ourselves for this special day.
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It is celebrated by lighting candles, staying up all night to learn Torah, hearing the reading of the Ten Commandments, feasting on dairy foods and more.
Visit our Shavuot megasite
https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/111377/jewish/Shavuot.htm
Thursday, May 28, 2020/ 5 Shiva, 5780/ Omer: Day 49 -Malchut sheb'Malchut/ sit 2/ 0:04:06/ bbw/ end 3:15am
humbled. Hear, O Israel:
No, no, no
The amp is a Vox AC15C1 and that Digitech Trio is a Pedal (for creating drum and bass loops and recording your own guitar loops)
Now that this is sorted out, the geek in me can go to rest
The amp is a Vox AC15C1 and that Digitech Trio is a Pedal (for creating drum and bass loops and recording your own guitar loops)
Now that this is sorted out, the geek in me can go to rest
Papa Che Dusko:
No, no, no
The amp is a Vox AC15C1 and that Digitech Trio is a Pedal (for creating drum and bass loops and recording your own guitar loops)
Now that this is sorted out, the geek in me can go to rest
The amp is a Vox AC15C1 and that Digitech Trio is a Pedal (for creating drum and bass loops and recording your own guitar loops)
Now that this is sorted out, the geek in me can go to rest
well done, geek.
Smiling Stone:
Ok, I will shut my big mouth, then!
I hope that the people likely to call an ambulance do not visit this joint, because it is quite plain from your entries what is going on...
Good morning to you
love and metta
smiling stone
And a coffee, please
I hope that the people likely to call an ambulance do not visit this joint, because it is quite plain from your entries what is going on...
Good morning to you
love and metta
smiling stone
And a coffee, please
, i love you, in the most intensely non-sexual way possible to human beings, you fucking prig. I mean, mon ami.
Hey Smiling Stone, for some reason I thought of Tim when I heard this song? Not sure why?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekFWPsXXcg0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekFWPsXXcg0
Thursday, May 28, 2020/ 5 Shiva, 5780/ Omer: Day 49 -Malchut sheb'Malchut/ sit 3/ 0:04:07/ bbw/ end 4:26am
Thursday, May 28, 2020/ 5 Shiva, 5780/ Omer: Day 49 -Malchut sheb'Malchut/ sit 4/ 0:04:08/ bbw/ end 5:20am
Thursday, May 28, 2020/ 5 Shiva, 5780/ Omer: Day 49 -Malchut sheb'Malchut/ sit 5/ 0:04:09/ bbw/ end 6:23am
Torah Given (1313 BCE)
On the 6th Sivan of the year 2448 from creation (1313 BCE), seven weeks after the Exodus, G-d revealed Himself on Mount Sinai. The entire people of Israel (600,000 heads of households and their families), as well as the souls of all future generations of Jews, heard G-d declare the first two of the Ten Commandments and witnessed G-d's communication of the other eight through Moses. Following the revelation, Moses ascended the mountain for 40 days, to receive the remainder of the Torah from G-d.
At Sinai, G-d rescinded the "decree" and "divide" (gezeirah) that had been in force since the 2nd day of creation separating the spiritual and the physical into two hermetic worlds; from this point on, "the higher realms could descend into the lower realms, and the lower could ascend to the higher." Thus was born the "mitzvah" -- a physical deed that, by virtue of the fact that it is commanded by G-d, brings G-dliness into the physical world.
The significance of the Sinaitic revelation as the moment when the essential ineffability of the divine self is communicated within the created realm is alluded to in the opening statement of the Ten Commandments—“I am the L‑rd your G‑d.” Here uniquely, the word used for “I” is the Egyptian anochi rather than the Hebrew ani used elsewhere in the Torah. According to the Talmud, the word anochi is employed because it is an acronym for ana nafshi ketavit yehavit, an Aramaic phrase that expresses the unique depth and intimacy embodied in the giving of the Torah. G‑d is saying to the Jewish people, “I have written My very self into the Torah and given it over to you. In giving you the Torah, I am giving you My deepest essentiality.”
Think "Dharma" for "Torah," for a cheap mind-blowing.
Saturday, May 30, 2020/ Second Day of Shavuot, Shabbat, 7 Sivan, 5780/ sit 1/ 0:04:10/ bbw/ end 1:12am
"But the Lord is in His Holy Temple. Let the whole earth keep silence before Him." Habukkuk 2:20
Saturday, May 30, 2020/ Second Day of Shavuot, Shabbat, 7 Sivan, 5780/ sit 2/ 0:04:11/ bbw/ end 3:20am
love, tim
Papa Che Dusko:
Hey Smiling Stone, for some reason I thought of Tim when I heard this song? Not sure why?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekFWPsXXcg0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekFWPsXXcg0
maybe "You could probably say I'm difficult, I probably talk too much. . ."
John Grant
GMF
You could probably say I'm difficult
I probably talk too much
I overanalyse and overthink things;
Yes, it's a nasty crutch
I'm usually only waiting for you to stop talking so that I can
Concerning two-way streets, I have to say that I am not a fan
But I am the greatest motherfucker that you're ever gonna meet
From the top of my head, down to the tips of the toes on my feet
So go ahead and love me while it's still a crime
And don't forget, you could be laughing sixty-five percent more of the time
You could be laughing sixty-five percent more of the time
Half of the time I think I'm in some movie
I play the underdog of course
I wonder who they'll get to play me
Maybe they could dig up Richard Burton's corpse
I am not who you think I am
I am quite angry, which I barely can conceal
You think I hate myself
It's you I hate, because you have the nerve to make me feel
I should have practiced my scales
I should not be attracted to males
But you said that I should learn to love myself
Make up your mind, Doctor Frankenstein
‘Cos I am the greatest motherfucker that you're ever gonna meet
From the top of my head, down to the tips of the toes on my feet
So go ahead and love me while it's still a crime
And don't forget, you could be laughing sixty-five percent more of the time
You could be laughing sixty-five percent more of the time
[Alternate Chorus]
‘Cos I am the greatest motherfucker that you're ever gonna meet
From the top of my head, down to the tips of the toes on my feet
So go ahead and love me while it's still a crime
And don't forget, you could be laughing sixty-five percent more of the time
You could be laughing sixty-three percent more of the time
You could be laughing twenty-five percent more of the time
love, tim
Papa Che Dusko:
How was that cigarette?
Best i ever had, for 2 minutes and 4 seconds. then it devolved into narrative.
sensations are sensations whether we notice them during the sit or during the smoke break Track the enjoyment and note it "pleasant", notice that inbreathing of smoke and body sensations associated with it. How does it feel? Pleasant? If so then "pleasant". Blowing out the smoke, notice the sensations, taste, smell, is it pleasant etc suddenly bird chirping, hearing, comprehending, touching sensation between the fingers holding the cigarette etc
So much good material in the smoke break for awakening
and you are riding the Pleasant Train similar to what Jhana folks do
A Hasidic Parable
When the great Rabbi Israel Baal Shem-Tov saw misfortune threatening the Jews it was his custom to go into a certain part of the forest to meditate. There he would light a fire, say a special prayer, and the miracle would be accomplished and the misfortune averted.
Later, when his disciple, the celebrated Magid of Mezritch, had occasion, for the same reason, to intercede with heaven, he would go to the same place in the forest and say: "Master of the Universe, listen! I do not know how to light the fire, but I am still able to say the prayer," and again the miracle would be accomplished.
Still later, Rabbi Moshe-Leib of Sasov, in order to save his people once more, would go into the forest and say: "I do not know how to light the fire, I do not know the prayer, but I know the place and this must be sufficient." It was sufficient and the miracle was accomplished.
Then it fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn to overcome misfortune. Sitting in his armchair, his head in his hands, he spoke to God: "I am unable to light the fire and I do not know the prayer; I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is to tell the story, and this must be sufficient." And it was sufficient.
God made man because he loves stories.
-- Elie Wiesel, The Gates of the Forest
The Gates of the Forest, originally written in French, is the story of a young Jew named Gavriel. Situated on the periphery of the Holocaust, The Gates of the Forest follows Gavriel as he hides from Hungarian patrols in a wilderness cave, masquerades as a deaf-mute Christian in a small town, takes to the wilderness again as a partisan, and, finally attempts to make peace with God following the war.
Wiesel opens his book with this Hasidic parable, perhaps as a way of legitimizing story as a response to catastrophe, perhaps as an opening bit of beauty.
I had the impression that Elvis had left the house. It seems he was stuck in the toilet this whole time Drinks on me! Let's keep plowing through this Samsara!
Drinks on me! Let's keep plowing through this Samsara!
Papa Che Dusko:
I had the impression that Elvis had left the house. It seems he was stuck in the toilet this whole time Drinks on me! Let's keep plowing through this Samsara!
Drinks on me! Let's keep plowing through this Samsara! Papa-ji, i took a little jaunt up to DC, to get my fair share of abuse at the block party in Lafayette Square.
Tim I used your poem from John's log and tried to arrange it as best as I could into my new song. Also, Im not a singer so please please excuse that part too Song title 'When Impermanence Howls'
EDIT; I did some re-editing on the tune to make vocals pop out some more
https://soundcloud.com/papa-dusko/when-impermanence-howls-with-lyrics-3rd-edit
Song title 'When Impermanence Howls'EDIT; I did some re-editing on the tune to make vocals pop out some more
https://soundcloud.com/papa-dusko/when-impermanence-howls-with-lyrics-3rd-edit