Rant 175
The Greatest Magic

"It doesn't matter whether these exist or not."
-Aleister Crowley (paraphrased)

"How many occultists does it take to change a light bulb?
Three. One to claim to have done it. One to argue about what 'change' really means. One to say that it wasn't done the right way."

[My chaoist monastic practice phase ended today. I ( Read more... )

Odysseus
66% Extroversion, 46% Intuition, 72% Emotiveness, 28% Perceptiveness You are a generous entertainer, an observer of tradition, and you are an enthusiastic leader. You are most like Odysseus. You meet transgressions with swift retribution but you are, in the end, just and fair. You're ( Read more... )

Rant 174
Lunacy

"puthujjanahi ummattaka"
[ordinary persons are lunatics]
-Pali Buddhist saying

"The belief in magic is the denial that delusion is possible."

"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night."
-Edgar Allen Poe

"To experience emptiness is not a descent into an abyss of nothingness nor an ( Read more... )

Buddhism without the goal of enlightenment is nothing more than spiritual materialism.

Buddhism's ultimate goal is the awakening into enlightenment. The Buddha did it. Many hundreds of thousands throughout the history of the enlightenment movement have done it. You can do it too. The question is "do you want to?" Can you even think about it as a ( Read more... )

Emptiness: A Spiritual Urgency
(Wherein a practitioner tries to relate his own confrontation with the direct experience of emptiness, but stumbles around a bit.)

Contingency is the center of our existence. Our lives, too often clouded by a fixation with the fantasy of a solid and enduring self, are the results of conditions. They are conditions, and ( Read more... )

Rant 173
The Great Deception

"To believe that our selves are fixated and either will be snuffed out into nothing at death or will be eternally able to survive is the great deception leading us away from maturity and into noble sounding ideals which are nothing more than self subjugation."
-Paraphrase from the teaching of a mentor

"If you don't know ( Read more... )

Our society and much of what passes for rationality or realism is really nothing but denial of reality. On the one hand we have the nihilists or scientific materialists who say that we should do all we can now and fuck all the rest since death is oblivion. On the other hand we have the spiritual absolutists who think that some GAWD or other will ( Read more... )

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© 2006. For free distribution. This work may be republished, reformatted, reprinted, and redistributed in any medium, provided this notice is left intact and the author is credited.

It is the author's wish, however, that any such republication and redistribution be made ( Read more... )

Tibet is not a part of China, nor has it ever been a part of China, conquering armies be damned! Though looking at how much territory historical Tibet encompasses, I can see why China wants to hold onto it. (If China gave it up, they would lose 25% of their claimed territory.) But never mind all that and genocides and people being beaten by bully ( Read more... )

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