Saturday 11 September 2010
Brothers Fitzpatrick
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| Lawrence William, James Edward, Robert Charles & John Arhur. Four reasons that the world is a beautiful place |
Friday 10 September 2010
A Thought
"God is Immaterial". A wonderful place to pray is at the Erawan Shrine in Bangkok CBD. It's beautiful and so full of human intensity and meaning. It's a shrine to Brahma but is also well known as the Buddha of the Four Directions and it is a deeply spiritual place; and, importantly, for the hugely-rising number of Chinese visitors, who are fundamentally atheistic, it is a Lucky Place. I love to kneel there on the old concrete (all the street-concrete in Bangkok is always cracking because the city is sinking into the marsh beneath it. Sometimes in the wide concrete expanses, you can see the slow waves of the underlying formal tides) with the business men and the office girls and the general fluid mass of people that is Bangkok. This remarkable Krung Thep Mahanakorn. This is an amazing human city, fully dedicated to the real abiding deity of itself. All my life I will only pray in this place. I love the noise of the traffic, the smell of carbon and incense, the music of human movement, the boring chants, the beautiful flowers, the burning eyes, the raspy throat, the dance, the orange candle flames, and the depth of this astounding place. It is just near the Louis Vuitton shop and some bright and shiny massage parlours, and not far from the weapons-dealers, as it well should be, to come to terms at all with real human meaning.
I recall being in a prayer-garden in Singapore and noting that of all the Buddhas there, it was the marble head of the Buddha of Prosperity that was worn down the most through the decades of ardent human touch in total supplication.
I recall being in a prayer-garden in Singapore and noting that of all the Buddhas there, it was the marble head of the Buddha of Prosperity that was worn down the most through the decades of ardent human touch in total supplication.
Deleting the Koran
Burning Korans, and Bibles, and a variety of books is nothing new. People and governments have been doing this kind of thing for a long, long time for a variety of reasons and will continue to not only burn them but also to find other ways to seek to symbolically excise thought and philosophy as they see fit as the world changes. Look what has happened to Shinto, a damn good and deep human philosophy in its time; but now deemed somewhat 'inappropriate' because one lousy war was lost.(Oh, how the ghost of it clings).
I guess I'm a bit surprised that the American pastor had a hard-copy of the Koran. I have one on my hard-drive along with many other religious works and can, whenever it suits me, simply delete it. It's something I don't really need to inform the world media about.
I've already deleted every word of the Dalai Lama because he, disproportional to his meaning, takes up far too much space and he's mostly a troublemaker anyway. I was inducted into the Kalachakra Tantric Legacy by Dali Lama but I still know that he's a divisive clown. You don't have to be much of a 'rocket surgeon' to know that.
As for all the great religious texts, I'd prefer stuff by real fiction writers rather than by apologist wannabe God-Kings, whether they be Muslim, Christian, Jewish or Buddhist self-marketeers, seeking proprietary ownership of this real, radically changing, un-owned, and mortally meaningful World.
I guess I'm a bit surprised that the American pastor had a hard-copy of the Koran. I have one on my hard-drive along with many other religious works and can, whenever it suits me, simply delete it. It's something I don't really need to inform the world media about.
I've already deleted every word of the Dalai Lama because he, disproportional to his meaning, takes up far too much space and he's mostly a troublemaker anyway. I was inducted into the Kalachakra Tantric Legacy by Dali Lama but I still know that he's a divisive clown. You don't have to be much of a 'rocket surgeon' to know that.
As for all the great religious texts, I'd prefer stuff by real fiction writers rather than by apologist wannabe God-Kings, whether they be Muslim, Christian, Jewish or Buddhist self-marketeers, seeking proprietary ownership of this real, radically changing, un-owned, and mortally meaningful World.
International Students
Teacher at international school asked the students in class: "Share your individual opinions regarding other countries' lack of food."
Student from Africa replied : "What is food?"
Student from Europe said: "What is 'lack of'?"
Student from America asked "What is 'other countries'?"
Student from China "What is 'individual opinion'?"
Student from Singapore: "Will the question be in the examination?"
Student from Africa replied : "What is food?"
Student from Europe said: "What is 'lack of'?"
Student from America asked "What is 'other countries'?"
Student from China "What is 'individual opinion'?"
Student from Singapore: "Will the question be in the examination?"
Thursday 9 September 2010
Personal Philosophy & Mai Pen Rai Krab
If you spend enough time in traffic jams in Bangkok you realise that the road isn't necessarily long, simply impassable, and yet, at the same time, that life is quite short. I've been thinking, in the back of taxis, about life and about building up a bit of a personal philosophy. I think it will form around the ideas of Michel de Montaigne who, in 1580, seemed to have a lot of things worked out. I think he died at about 45 which was a good long life in those days; so I have easily outlived him already.
I was thinking that we are born into all this: family, traditions, races, religions, nations, rights, obligations, ideologies, the times, even personality, etc without really having much of a say. We were born simply because our parents had sex. That was that and this is us. The rest: the rights and wrongs of societies, of human endeavour, of, well, everything as it is, is all totally arbitrary and based on the fact that people had sex.
If one is born into a Catholic system, the idea was that people had sex to somehow form a special marriage with God. I expect islam is much the same. Buddhism is a bit whackier but less torturous but all three of these, ahum, Great Religions do seem intent on controlling sex so that it complies with someone's righteous vision. The Real Terrorist is Uncontrolled, Unmanipulated Sex between adult consensual people who really like it; who, for a time, find themselves in each other's stream of being.
I hate the word 'appropriate'. It is used so often now and not only in talk, speeches, schools etc but also within the self-chat of a person. 'Appropriate' is simply the new 'god-fearing righteousness' of a secular world.
I'm very fond of the secular world and I think all churches, synagogues and mosques and temples and stupas would make great coffee-shop/book stores/bars (with very luxurious smoking areas) and the world would be far better if they were; but at the same time I think we need to get rid of the word 'appropriate'. Why? Because it's just another attempt at control of the human mind and heart, and is based upon the exact same illusion as the religions and the political ideologies that still run rampant around here there and everywhere.
Human life is not 'appropriate', nor is it righteous, moral or full of god-granted grace; it's just part of this flow, for now. This flow is just what Michel de Montaigne noted it as being in 1580.
The thing that was so remarkable about Monsieur de Montaigne was that he was a strong intellectual pillar of French Catholicism in the Renaissance yet he thought and wrote with a remarkably open mind. Some would say a modern, eclectic mind free of bullshit and pretty well honed the tool that is functionally atheistic Existentialism. His most famous question "How do I know?" When I think of Michel de Montaigne I picture him as the stuck-up bright French Prince that he most certainly was in paintings of him but I also see him, in the words of the songwriter Roy Harper, as 'a white dove, with a hawk's head, and an Open Mind before me'. I particularly like Montaigne because he was the first person to formally write anything Against Human Torture...and in 1580 when torture was all the rage and was seen as both righteous, godly, and appropriate. Just like Guantanamo Bay.
I don't really think generations learn much at all, ever. There's no 'progress'. I think it's all new with every life, with every flow. A new Hitler or Pol Pot etc is always at the gate and often loved and believed in. He/She is often inside the gate and sometimes in the lounge room, and is just as likely to be cooking in your kitchen or buying you dinner from time to time. Little Hitler takes his lunch to school in the same kind of brown bag that we all do. We just have advances in gadgets and weapons, but that's it. Apart from that, we don't learn anything that can be passed on except perhaps the capacity to be curious and to sometimes love, blinking from our little well at the sky.
This is my own thinking as best as I can make it out, from time spent in taxis in massive traffic jams in Bangkok where no one honks their horn, where ambulances can't possibly get through, where no one can be on time, where no one gets too angry or worried simply because...it doesn't matter. Mai pen rai, krab. Sabai sabai.
I was thinking that we are born into all this: family, traditions, races, religions, nations, rights, obligations, ideologies, the times, even personality, etc without really having much of a say. We were born simply because our parents had sex. That was that and this is us. The rest: the rights and wrongs of societies, of human endeavour, of, well, everything as it is, is all totally arbitrary and based on the fact that people had sex.
If one is born into a Catholic system, the idea was that people had sex to somehow form a special marriage with God. I expect islam is much the same. Buddhism is a bit whackier but less torturous but all three of these, ahum, Great Religions do seem intent on controlling sex so that it complies with someone's righteous vision. The Real Terrorist is Uncontrolled, Unmanipulated Sex between adult consensual people who really like it; who, for a time, find themselves in each other's stream of being.
I hate the word 'appropriate'. It is used so often now and not only in talk, speeches, schools etc but also within the self-chat of a person. 'Appropriate' is simply the new 'god-fearing righteousness' of a secular world.
I'm very fond of the secular world and I think all churches, synagogues and mosques and temples and stupas would make great coffee-shop/book stores/bars (with very luxurious smoking areas) and the world would be far better if they were; but at the same time I think we need to get rid of the word 'appropriate'. Why? Because it's just another attempt at control of the human mind and heart, and is based upon the exact same illusion as the religions and the political ideologies that still run rampant around here there and everywhere.
Human life is not 'appropriate', nor is it righteous, moral or full of god-granted grace; it's just part of this flow, for now. This flow is just what Michel de Montaigne noted it as being in 1580.
The thing that was so remarkable about Monsieur de Montaigne was that he was a strong intellectual pillar of French Catholicism in the Renaissance yet he thought and wrote with a remarkably open mind. Some would say a modern, eclectic mind free of bullshit and pretty well honed the tool that is functionally atheistic Existentialism. His most famous question "How do I know?" When I think of Michel de Montaigne I picture him as the stuck-up bright French Prince that he most certainly was in paintings of him but I also see him, in the words of the songwriter Roy Harper, as 'a white dove, with a hawk's head, and an Open Mind before me'. I particularly like Montaigne because he was the first person to formally write anything Against Human Torture...and in 1580 when torture was all the rage and was seen as both righteous, godly, and appropriate. Just like Guantanamo Bay.
I don't really think generations learn much at all, ever. There's no 'progress'. I think it's all new with every life, with every flow. A new Hitler or Pol Pot etc is always at the gate and often loved and believed in. He/She is often inside the gate and sometimes in the lounge room, and is just as likely to be cooking in your kitchen or buying you dinner from time to time. Little Hitler takes his lunch to school in the same kind of brown bag that we all do. We just have advances in gadgets and weapons, but that's it. Apart from that, we don't learn anything that can be passed on except perhaps the capacity to be curious and to sometimes love, blinking from our little well at the sky.
This is my own thinking as best as I can make it out, from time spent in taxis in massive traffic jams in Bangkok where no one honks their horn, where ambulances can't possibly get through, where no one can be on time, where no one gets too angry or worried simply because...it doesn't matter. Mai pen rai, krab. Sabai sabai.
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