Thursday, November 13, 2008

Zen Field Poet for Hire

_GATHA_ (poem announcing _satori_)
KNOCK-KNOCK
(who's there?)
BOOTA!
(boota? boota who?)
KNOW! BUDDHA YOU!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bertha-lewis/acorns-4-day-plan-to-turn_b_139885.html

KNOCK-KNOCK [opportunities for Enlightenment knock on the doors of our senses day and night]

(who's there?) [Thinking our selves isolated, we fear and question them]

AMERICA! [Some opportunities make themselves hard to ignore ;-]
(um, erica who?) [Cellf-imprisoned, we question those who come to our aid]

KNOW! AMERICA YOU!

BIO
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bertha-lewis/acorns-4-day-plan-to-turn_b_139885.html

DAVE "KNOWBUDDHAU" PARKER (I prefer to write by my nom de plume, knowbuddhau)
OAK HARBOR, WA

Born: Oak Knoll Naval Air Station, Alameda, CA March 19, 1964
Location
Samsara (Oak Harbor), Nirvana (Washington) USA (Whatever that means)

PURPOSE: ZEN FIELD POET FOR HIRE
I have something I hope to share with the world.. Back in 1973, I was selected into an experiment in public education, along with about a dozen of my peers. My school district called it, the Challenge Program.

As a result of that year's standardization of the Stanford-Binet IQ Test, we were told we were geniuses. That's right, they really did. We were allowed to indulge our innermost curiosities. Aside from saddling us with that misnomer, I think it was brilliant. Ever since, I've been trying to figure out how brains work. I'm ready with my answer.

My high school creative writing teacher sent me to Centrum, the location in Pt. Townsend, WA where An Officer And A Gentleman was filmed the year before, for a week in March, 1982. She had submitted my poem, The Well of My Brain, unbeknownst to me, to the National Honor Society, and it won Poem of the Year.

I narrowly avoided the Academies, rising to #30something on the Annapolis waiting list, despite giving the appearance of an ardent supplicant. I ended up at University of Washington by default.

I study psychology as a naturalistic science at University of Washington from 1982-1989. I went on to study research psychology at Western Washington University Graduate School of Psychology in Bellingham, WA from 1989-1995, when I dropped out, having run out the clock without finishing my thesis.

In 1997, I began reading the online Journal of Buddhist Ethics. In the last week of January and the first week of February, 2000, I had an epiphany of mythic proportions, what Alan Watts called "cosmic consciousness."

Next thing I know, I'm sitting on a cushion at One Drop Tahoma Zendo (Freeland, WA), enjoying tea and cookies with the head monk and guests, when, in answer to a woman's question about poetry, Yu-san said, "Dave here is quite the Zen poet." The bastard outed me just like that!

http://onedropzendo.org/

A WORLD OF PURE IMAGINATION
In mathing the night sky, we wrote our symbols on the inside of Mother's womb. Nowadays, too many of us see only our dots and lines and constellations, not their unifying field.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-ducat/democrats-dont-move-to-th_b_142680.html?page=2&show_comment_id=17870164#comment_17870164

Obviously, there is intelligibility to being; mathematics are true. Our tragic mistake is to allow a dysfunctional myth to dominate modern thinking.

Myth of cosmos as Newtonian mechanism:

--dualistic assumption that creation is a construct of a creator that is absolutely and eternally Other than the cosmos; observer and observed are absolutely other.

--creator is imaged as cosmic engineer.

--Science reveals laws of the cosmic engineer.

Here's our hubris: we think we master the cosmic machine with our Baconian-Caretesian-Newtonian science.

We learned to math (as in map) Being. We learned to think of Mother as an absolute Other. We learned to install our war gods permanently at the controls of the Great Cosmic Machine.

I've been calling this, the Myth-Jacking and Gang-Raping of the {(Vessel) + (Flow) = (Bam!!bino)} Fund of Life. But what's in a name?

HOW THESE WORDS RIGHT HERE ARE WORKING RIGHT NOW
Glad I asked. How do words work, anyway?

As self-emptying vessels.

Into the inchoate ocean of my intentions, I dip these words like cups. I pass them over to you. As you pass your eyes over them, they self-empty into *your* ocean of inchoate meaning, as rain falling into the sea.

Without their ever being spoken, o reader my Reader, you now hear them within you.

Explain THIS with reductive mechanism!

THE POWER OF MYTHS AND NARRATIVES
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-clemons/what-barack-obama-should_b_143247.html?page=5&show_comment_id=17923121#comment_17923121

Steve Clemons emphasizes the meteoric rise of PNAC. Philip Zelikow knows the *power* of myths and narratives; his remarks tipped me off.

The late Alan Watts, in a series of podcasts entitled "The Relevance of Oriental Thinking," points out the jarring contrast between our dominant mythology and genuine democracy. We worship a King of Kings, Lord of Lords (titles borrowed from Persia), yet American democracy requires that we govern ourselves as sovereign citizens.

(http://alanwatts.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=401115# Latest series: "The Religion of No Religion.")

Joseph Campbell called it "mythic dissociation:" mistaken belief that we are forever apart from the divine. In that world, the best you can hope for is to stand in the proper relation to the proper authorities. :-]

Christ preached the greatest heresy of all: "I and the Father are One." Campbell called this "mythic identification." Christ's good news, Watts says, still hasn't gotten out.

Compare the following graphic illustrations of the feudal world view and our new worldview.

[[[Supremacy / Common Weal///[[[{{{Subjugation}}}]]]]]

As we can all plainly see, a dominant group asserts privileged access to our Common Weal, simultaneously denying access to a subjugated group. We can see all the illusory walls that divide Us, the indivisible. The original wall is the illusory self / other divide. From there, it's just a matter of density.

beloved/UNION/Beloved

As we can also plainly see, this is our more perfect Union; the basis for a genuinely American America.

OUR HUBRIS EXPLAINED
The late Stephen Jay Gould beautifully described
our hubris over 8 years ago.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/19/opinion/19GOUL.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5070&en=f7655ce4049eba50&ex=1226466000

"From its late 17th century inception in modern form, science has strongly privileged the reductionist mode of thought that breaks overt complexity into constituent parts and then tries to explain the totality by the properties of these parts and simple interactions fully predictable from the parts... The reductionist method works triumphantly for simple systems -- predicting eclipses or the motion of planets (but not the histories of their complex surfaces)... [But] we fell victim to hubris, as we imagined that, in discovering how to unlock some systems, we had found the key for ***the conquest of all natural phenomena.***" (emphasis added)

Propagandists use words in only a mechanical fashion, shooting message pellets with the violent intention of forcing changes in behavior in the direction they dictate.

Compare MFMP to deploying snipers. Hide intentions; shoot mouths off; and kill just as directly as pulling a trigger, dropping a bomb or launching a rocket-propelled grenade.

Or is "command responsibility" no longer operative?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-mitchell/media-in-the-tank-for-oba_b_142969.html?page=7&show_comment_id=17893145#comment_17893145

It has been my intention, for 34 years now, to solve the problem of how brains, and to apply that to "solving" the problem of racism. We don't fix Mom, She heals Herself when we stop abusing Her.

Neuronal Models of Stimuli are the Self-Emptying Vessels of Mind, into which experience is flowing; from which awareness is arising like steam; and out of which we are flowing like water.

{(Vessel) + (Flow) = (Bam!!bino)}

We scientists, I'm saying, just like everybody else does. are making mythical projections of our own unexamined fundamental assumptions and calling them "observations."

CELLF-IMPRISONED IN CELLVES OF OUR OWN MISTAKEN MAKING
This process, of substituting mechanics for organics, has at least 3 tragic effects. The most fundamental of these is a psychic implosion into a quantum singularity of pain I call not a self, but a "cellf."

By turning us into Newtonian billiard balls in absolutely empty space, we implode our Beings into perfect cosmic pinheads of pain. Torture by isolation is no aberration for the APA, it's what we do!

We've been jacked by the exact same 'fake election' ploy that we've used all over the world. We're now experiencing 'economic shock therapy.'

Unexamined Newtonian Mechanism has completely overtaken our modern thinking. But no less a scientific eminence than the late Stephen Jay Gould, almost 8 years ago, declared reductionism dead, and its attendant Newtonian Mechanism--sire of our demonic economics--along with it. So what gives, academia?

Gould's announcement, Klein's Shock Doctrine, Perkinsian Economic Hit Men, and the Bush-APA Torture Doctrine (isolation and psycho-religio attacks) have forever changed how I see our political economy. And their absence from contemporary analyses is my greatest frustration.

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/6/19/as_senate_confirms_psychologists_helped_devise

http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/blog/2007/11/17/leaked-guantanamo-document-confirms-routine-use-of-isolation-as-psychological-torture/#comments

"We get fooled, again and again, by being [deceived]... into thinking we are only part things that must relate to the Whole via bachelor fathers with terrible tempers and unspoken habits. Our science, psychology, has midwifed this monstrous abuse of being human."

It is abundantly obvious to me, a non-matriculating grad student of psychology, that McCain/Palin and Liddy Dole both used that abhorrent method.

"America is center-right" is the new myth with which the Right is trying to jack us one more time.

"There [they] go again."

RJ Eskow's Halloween '08 article, 100 Million Suspects, speaks directly to this point.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/100-million-suspects_b_139689.html
"One candidate represents collaboration, optimism... and yes, "change." The other represents fear and greed, and his campaign reflects the lower-order impulses that have guided his party and given it success. ***They've triggered fear in us so effectively for so long that they can't believe it's not working this time. They're still frantically sending memo after memo to our lizard brains: Khalidi, Ayers, redistribution... be afraid! And the more this old strategem fails, the harder they try."*** (emphasis added)

But how much change does Obama really represent? How much influence will be given those who "work the 'dark side,' if you will," as Cheney chillingly said? Is that even an option--are they already out of our control? I say, the answer is a resounding "duh!"

The national security state is out of our control by definition.

We cannot abide this state-within-a-state, not if we want to determine our path forward for ourselves. Isn't this what the Revolution was all about, the definition of our true nature: subjects of an absolute divine-right monarch? or sovereign citizens of a democratic republic?

Who were the State Department and NSA "super-delegates" on Obama's campaign? Nobody gets into the White House without some help from hidden hands.

Let's face it, America: we are being treated like subjects of experiments in the manufacture of consent. What have the APA members at Gitmo ***really*** been up to?

Hacking human psyches as if they were mere machines, that's what.

Are we machines, controlled and programmed and forced into order by external masters? or are we sharing Being aware of our shared Becoming ***from within***?

In our answering, right here and now, lies our fate.

What do I recommend?

http://www.buddhistethics.org/6/hershock991.html#Change

OBAMA'S A POET WHO'S NOW IT
Thankfully, as Cathleen Falsani reveal in her just-released interview with the president-elect, Obama's a poet who knows it.

Joseph Campbell, too, emphasized the importance of the distinction that Obama makes in his interview with Falsani:

OBAMA: It's interesting, the most powerful political moments for me come when I feel like my actions are aligned with a certain truth. I can feel it. When I'm talking to a group and I'm saying something truthful, I can feel a power that comes out of those statements that is different than when I'm just being glib or clever.

FALSANI: What's that power? Is it the holy spirit? God?

OBAMA: Well, I think it's the power of the recognition of God, or the recognition of a larger truth that is being shared between me and an audience. [Obama's Faith: Fascinating Interview Unearthed, retrieved November 12, 2008 from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/12/obamas-faith-fascinating_n_143223.html]

Eureka! This is topic I’m always on about. Here’s Joseph Campbell, from the first in his four volume work, Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, on the very same subject:

[BEGIN CAMPBELL (1968)]
[T]he images not only of poetry and love but also of religion and patriotism, when effective, are apprehended with actual physical responses: tears, sighs, interior aches, spontaneous groans, cries, bursts of laughter, wrath, and impulsive deeds. Human experience and human art, that is to say, have succeeded in creating for the human species an environment of sign stimuli that release physical responses and direct them to ends no less effectively than do the signs of nature the instincts of the beasts....

[T]he radical distinction here made by the poet Housman between images that act upon our nervous structure as energy releasers and those that serve, rather, for the transmission of thought."

[Houseman says,] ‘some ideas do, while others do not, lend themselves kindly to poetical expression; and that these receive from poetry an enhancement which glorifies and almost transfigures them, and which is not perceived to be a separate thing except by analysis.

Campbell continues:

"[This is] the first axiom of all creative art--whether it be in poetry, music, dance, architecture, painting, or sculpture--which is, namely, that art is not, like science, a logic of references but a release from reference and rendition of immediate experience: a presentation of forms, images, or ideas in such a way that they will communicate, not primarily a thought or even a feeling, but an impact." [Joseph Campbell. Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, pp.40-42. New York: Penguin.) [END CAMPBELL (1968)]

Thanks to a tip from a reader of the article published this morning by Steve Clemons on The Huffington Post, I found this gem of a quote by Amos Tivelow in his doctoral dissertation in 2005.

"The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit public policy organizations constituted by section 501c3 of the U.S. Tax Code ("think tanks", TTs or "tanks") monitor and adjust governance norms and networks by using research, analysis, and advocacy to structure discourse about social problems and solutions among multiple elites and in the popular imagination." [Amos Tevelow. From Corporate Liberalism To Neoliberalism: A History Of American Think Tanks, PhD dissertation, April 20, 2005; retrieved November 12, 2008 from http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-08192005-162045/]

This is the very definition of myth-making, the proper provenance of Art and religion.

But we cannot manufacture a stairway to Heaven, for as it is said, the Kingdom of Heaven is to be found within. Here again, our hubris has led us into catastrophe.

WHAT AM I DOING HERE NOW?
http://washingtonpoets.org/owas/view.php?a=1116

Smart ass that I am, I've been writing comments on blogs. Just the other day, maybe you felt a stirring in the Flow: I declared Bastille Day for all cellf-imprisoned souls.

Again and again, we drop the Ring in the Fire that forged it, eh, Sisters and Brothers?

Indivisible, with cellf-release for all, like so many of us seek to bring, I am

know! buddha u ;-]

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