Shana Tova u'Metuka

The management would like to apologize for the two caw birds of the Goose Wranglers aging face that you have to deal with in a row in the these previous/following posts (depending on your perspective). We're lost in the wilderness, certainly did not anticipate this clawful craw. So be it. all the very best from the guilty conscious of the wrangler in his sludge pit. PS... be reminded that in the following video, should you weather it, Kingston is whining in the background because he wants to go out.

Good Evening...

Good evening crew. If there has not been much posting, or if it has been drivelific, we do apologize. This has been an interesting summer. Thick sludge has been slivering through our brain stem holding us deep below the surface of the sand. The Mad Professor is spinning on the record player downstairs. Tomorrow we return to the schooling sandwich of seminary. Tomorrow the Goose Wrangler has his first preaching class. To put an end to this third person silliness, I'll say I'm nervous. I am nervous. HM-2244-01 (545) Preaching: Theology and Praxis. Here we go. Embarking on the great adventure, walking in the footsteps of Crawdad, getting shoved into the sveld nibs. Here comes Mindhead little twiddly winks. Are the seminarians ready!!?? This is going to be a trip.

Who is G-d... What is the Zord? What does it not want?

Out here witnessing creation is a pretty amazing experience.
Don't you think?
Look around Kemo Sabe.
What do you see?
If you have eyes that see, do you see colors?
Light.
You have eyes made of molecules.
Bodies of nuclei.
Popping and Jiving DNA.
You know what Zord is?
Emptiness, Void, Everything, the Great Creator, The ONE, ABSOLUTE, ONE?
The whole enchilada?
What's that?
Everything.
And you are looking at it.
Out from those two eyes made of molecules.
Wow.
Right?
What are those molecules made of?
Empty space, inside empty space, inside empty space,
little circles of energy popping in and out of existence, and spiraling perfectly,
and you can see, and it all just looks still.
Blink.
Open.
It's all there.
Close your eyes.

Know how long it took G-d to create the ability to see, to witness Its own creation?
It took forever.
The first thought.
The birth of the entire Ultraverse.
The primordial ooze.
Now.
Here we are.
Creators.
As the eyes of Creation, WE have the power of creation.
We've been around a long time.
We are descendants of the primordial ooze.
We are the dinosaurs who survived.
We are that we are.
SEE.
Where are we going?
What are we doing?
Who are we?
WE.
Creators.
Ultranet.
Mindhead.
Here.
We don't want to destroy this creation.
We don't want this to end.
Creators.
We manifest IDEAS.
What are WE thinking?
Any good ideas?
Any bad ideas?
What do WE not want to do?
What does MotherFather G-d not want to do?
Stop seeing its creation?
We have to be mortal to witness creation.
Death is the price of life.
Here we are.
Open your eyes.

March 11, 1999, Wat Umong, Northern Thailand (from the journal)

Love is a flower garden watered by tears (quote written on a tree)

Look at everything and find nothing
Look at nothing and find everything

Here I sit,
Beside a peaceful paradise
Thinking thoughts already pondered.
Wanting to bring pictures home to prove something
I cannot let my minds knowledge suffice.
Lone Ant marching in the shadow
Inches away another individual in the sun
Over leaves and over stones
stepping softly in their home.
I object and do deny
their right of passage by and by
And why?
For moments of whistling sadness do I sit and watch the rooster
sounding his royal screech?
Now rooster watch me watch the fly eat me.
Why stop it, though I want to so badly,
Is it not true that I am only being my best, even if only to give life to a fly?
It's OK

I am food
I am self
I am nothing
I am food
I am self
I am everything
Life is life
Life is food
Life is sex
I am sex
I am life
I am
I am full
I am empty
As is life
There is no beginning and there is no end
but there is.
There is no plot
There is no climax
but there is.
So I am what is
where I am
So I should know what is
where I am
But there is what is without self
and this is where one can find peace
For when there is no self
there is peace
and there is.

America

Another day

Sitting at Bleu Sky hotel Indian restaurant

Overeating chicken biryani and drinking chai

The freshman class has arrived

Really packing it in

Twice as much as i needed

There really isnt much to worry about

All luxury problems

In the midst of illusion

Test it out and figure it out for yourself.

Really think you know whats going on here?

Keep thinking

Well

moving on

I'm feeling better this afternoon

And chai really does taste better with sugar

All these students cruising around

and it's just life

And it does not make sense

No matter how much sense they try and make of it

This is a miracle

Floating around in the midst of madness

In the midst of existence

In the midst of Nothing

Doctor Who?

Making circles in the solar system
Hanging Christmas lights with spaceships
Building space stations
and talking to God on a cellular phone
Suddenly looks up
and sees Doctor Who on the shelf
in red letters
A Journey Through Time
on a bright yellow sign
Drink some tea Goose Stranger
and eat your weight in slime
The gelatin is in the hen house
and there's lipstick on the vine

Drunk (from October of 2004)

The thrown book spins through the air
and slides off the dark wooden table
onto a chair made of pine branches
The faces are soft
feelings jagged
Here
watching the rose petals darken and shrink
The lonesome flower drips tears
petal after petal
falling into the darkness beneath
The dying petals leave nothing
but emptiness that wants to be a flower

sober is the hardest drug I've ever done.

Brief Poem Break (Sweat Brain)

Sveld Nib tree man
Walking into the apple store
behind all his friends
Forgotten in a foreign country amidst everyone
Trying to find success
Rushing toward inevitability
Rushing nowhere
Busy on the move
Diamonds
Diamonds forever
Rings and smoke
wafting through the ether
in the soft crusade
All the little Jewish Children
cut us up into pieces
Drowning our tidbits in wine
Sucking out our nutriment
We're all Jews now
Velge Nilge
Transvictumtorium
Does that make sense to you Glench Ditch?
If not wee haw, then fledge nidge and slime
Have a nice time.

29 July Year of our Zord 2010

Sitting on San Pablo outside Casa Latina
Reading "The Shape of Suffering" by Thanissaro Bhikkhu (Geoffrey DeGraff)
Slowing the mind down
With the music filling my ears
Inside my skull processor
Through little plastic ear phones
Everything is moving and everything is still
It's all happening and nothing is happening
Suddenly there is a bottle of wine and a little bag of weed at my house
Not in my body
But right there waiting
Cocaine in Chico
Time to move to another house
Thinking with ignorance
Craving arising

I mainly relate to crazy people
The true bums
These are my people
Like nameless man
But my pockets are bulging with money and possessions and they have nothing
This illusion looks a lot different for them
And it's all perspective
They are the Jesuses
They are the Buddhas
These people
The poor we have a war on
They are the Masters
Not the Dalai Llama flying around in first class

The clouds are parting
Pushed quickly East by the wind
And the sun is behind them
And the clouds are running East
Across blue sky
Above a dilapidated Svennson Volvo specialist shop
With a girl walking by toward Siva Devananda Yoga hidden on Delaware
And a little old black man riding by on his red scooter in front of scaffolding
In the midst of Pattica Samuppada, dependent co-arising
In the midst of Nothing
In the midst of Void
Somewhere in the midst of the Big Bang
Here we are
Riding the Ether

A Tea Party

Hey crazy heads! You see this picture? Tea party? What this picture proves is what a free ass country we live in, and how completely different the two men on the sides are from the man in the middle. Now I'm not saying Barack Obama is some kindof saint. He is not. He is at the helm of a dangerous government, engaged in two unjust wars in the middle east, where we are bombing human beings with unmanned drones and claiming some sort of legitimacy. Our own citizens are preyed upon by private corporations which enjoy the rights of individuals. These corporations have the protected right to brain wash the population in a rabid consumption driven ideology. No, Obama is no saint. But if we were living in a state half as psychotic and sick as either Soviet Russia under Lenin after the Red Terror began, or Germany under Hitler, that sign would not only be quickly taken down, but the people responsible for making it would be arrested and quickly put to death. Instead, in this waste of freedom called America, the sign will be put on the news, and probably a good half of the media will applaud the sentiment of the Tea Party movement. Live Free or Die! Hah. This is some weird ass freedom my friends. This is a fallacy of freedom. You are free to obey the laws of the State of America, you are free to do as you are told, you are free to be a competitive individualistic automaton. You are free to reap the benefits of the oppression and poverty that people in the third world endure so that we can walk into a coffee shop and pay three dollars for a coffee, where somebody only made three dollars working all day to grow it. We are damn lucky to be free to drink the American cool aid, and we are damn lucky to be free enough to talk about how free or not free we are. Obama is no Hitler or Stalin, if he was, you can bet that the sign would never have been put up. All those people carrying signs or wearing shirts with that Obama Joker face would just disappear, never to be seen again. Bye bye. If the tea party thinks Obama is a Hitler or Stalin, they should prepare themselves for the Gas Chamber, the Gulag, or the firing range, but instead Obama is trying to give them health care. What kind of tea are these people drinking?

Smells like it sounds

Are you insane Kemo Sabe? Does the pope eat chicken wings? How pure and true and lovely are the intentions of Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck? I can’t answer any of these questions. I’m still knee deep in sludge and we’re two years from the apocalypse, although I’m not convinced that the calendar isn’t off and 2012 actually happened in 1945, and the four horsemen actually rode into Hiroshima and Nagasaki snuggled up in twos on atomic bombs like bats swooping down from Hell. Well I’d like to think that was a bad enough horror show. Everyone needs an optimist once in awhile. Hi.

So what is the clawmeister up to? Well, I have ceased all ingestion of placebos, greens, blues, whites, liquids, etc. etc. The lamotrigine is all dried up in my shriveling brain stem and the nothing is crawling all over me like a thick damp blanket of sand. This haw. I could consume it with melancholy rage. When was the festival? Witnessing our foolishness head on and unmedicated is like sticking my face on a treadmill made of asphalt and napalm. Wee. This is so much fun. Reality. Eat a dead rat and suck a claw horn saith the swine herd.

Motivation? What’s the point? Why am I doing this? Why am I playing the fool? What am I doing trying to save the world and battling seminary? Why am I not just getting an MBA and trying to siphon the last bit of life off the planet and the rest of our souls like a normal person, a nice, well trained, little humanoid coddling the balls of the Master dollar and drinking my individualism cocktail through my me mouth thinking this is it? (as if my me mouth isn't individualistic enough, which it certainly is... as I worry about hair loss.) Why do I worship the nothing? There is no I; see? Just this felch experiencing this, trying to keep his mouth shut between the blinks of birth and death. Poof. I’m gone. I was never even here. I wouldn’t even know if I’d been here the whole time. Just like you, and you and you and you and you and the rest of us experiencing I AM. What? Nothing.

These are all just letters. Words on a page. Or a digital page now. These are all just ideas. None of this even exists. It’s all upside down and inside out and symbols for a thing that can’t be understood. It’s right here. In between the symbols. See the empty space, inside the empty space, between the spaces between the shapes. Ain’t no time like now. This is the end times as soon as we start the beginning.

Aug. 5 2002

I’ve seen these things before.
The war, the discothèques, the Jews and the Indians.
I’ve seen before me on the giant screen, the sickest prejudice of all.
So I put on my hat.
But I threw away the poems, forgot the dreams.
Awake.
Without cool moon pools twinkling along the earth plain.
I’ve forgotten them all, and in turn they’ve disappeared.
I put on my hat.
Innocence, pure paradise.
What prejudice could be the worst?
So much worse than human killing human in the middle east?
Worse than the murder, rape and kidnapping of Africa?
The worst prejudice is that which prevents the answer from landing on our doorstep.
What if there is no enemy?
I put on my hat.

Late summer or fall 2002

Teardrops
Soul crackers
Crumbling brick chimneys
The silence

I saw the inside of a microwave
Through a tinted windowpane
Folded bath towel on the kitchen counter
Huge rocks hurled through my windshield
Someone stole my skychair
And the world is ending

2012 right around the corner
Hold on to me
There is nowhere to go
Hold each other on this spaceship

I shimmied along the ground like a drugged lizard
Hidden behind a two foot wall of cement
I flat crawled along the ground
A speeding maniac
Pursued by an unknown monster
2012 coming round the corner
Comfortable in the shadows of the darkness in which we live
Behind the wall light is moving closer
I am the reptile running along the ground
Hiding from the light
Ever stronger behind the barrier
The hesitation
Murder, ceaseless slaughter, rape, sickness, storms, fire, conflict, anger, hatred, envy, Business

2012 coming round the corner
Better watch out
Slipping filler whiskers
Busy talk, busy time, world on the move
Problem time
The treadmill of busyness
Keep it moving on the track
Terrorism
You know
We better bomb Iraq

Evening drive to Oakland and the City

Some sunsets from Hawaii.

That brings us back to God

So I was closing my eyes in this darkness and saw the skull and heard the people talking about evil, and where is God because of death, and we were back to fear and blah, blah, blah. So they were asking what is God, and who is in control, and the scientists were smashing particles together looking for the missing link, the smallest invisible particle of them all, and we were all afraid of dying, and thought there was evil, and, and, and- Wait. Where is God in all this confusion?
If we are temporary and beneath this flesh on my face is a bone dry skull someday, and then dust a few days later, isn't God still infinite? The God which encompasses all existence, the Big One, which is behind all the universes, planets, stars, cells, particles, and atoms, behind even ourselves; isn't that One infinite?
If that God is infinite, the Big One, the Great Creator, it not only encompasses the entire universe, but we also, therefor, all exist within God, as we are part of the same universe which God encompasses. The infinite God must encompass all the manifest realm if this is all the manifestation of the God of Creation.
So despite the skull that awaits my face, I am more than impermanent, for like the universe, I am also a manifestation of God.
Remember, all the universes of universes are Its creation, Its manifestation, and so also are all the molecules.
In the darkness I saw the spinning helix of DNA in all the lovely colors we draw it in our pictures. Complex as the universe and infinitely creative, that DNA molecule is another manifestation of God. The more complex it makes itself, the more complex we become. Here we are, big complex conglomerations of molecules, considering ourselves, and existence, worrying about our temporary skulls, which are like hermit shells for the DNA of God.

Paw breath of infinity

Aloha.
Not much to report. Squelch in the blender in Hawaii. Debating peyote. I'm so utterly sane, I can't stand it. I long for madness. This sludge brain quieted by lamotrigine, longs to move at the fast pace of old. But alas, the race car brain ever ends in sanitary splendor in a comfy psychiatric ward playing ping pong.
Smoke my claw horn wee haw! And we'll all sing songs like Ding Dong Daddies from Dumas.

Leave that girl alone.

Is anyone else out there feeling a little dissatisfied, a little lonely, a little strange? I keep checking Facebook, browsing Google News, The New York Times, the Huffington Post, and I'm coming up short. Maybe it's just because I can't seem to stay in one place long enough to keep a close group of intimate friends, but I'm just always looking out there, searching, seeking, running. The news is terrible. War, oil spill, patriarchy, oppression, politics, criminal governments, unemployment, rape and murder. Not so nice. Facebook is empty, there is everybody looking happy, all the time. Here is what we did. Here is me looking pretty on a beach, out drinking with friends, at this great concert, at a wedding, etc. etc. etc. Does anyone get depressed anymore? Judging from the Facebook updates it wouldn't seem so. If there is any depression going on it is usually cloaked in some vague cynicism. "I'm depressed." Then someone writes "LMAO." yea. hah. hah. hah. It's no wonder there is so much drug and alcohol abuse, at least that is something you can do socially which usually involves turning off the computer. "Hey pass that joint..." hah. "LMAO." I wonder how many people use their little computer video camera to film their suicide. A sad thought. And someone would laugh.
I'm not considering suicide or anything. But drugs and alcohol, I sure consider those sometimes. I bought a packet of Samson rolling tobacco today. A little fresh brown death to keep me rooted to the ground for a change. Nothing special. The Grouse defriended me on Facebook. LMAO. I was actually going to defriend her after she really laid down the law and made it clear that I need to move on. I think it was something to the extent of "Nothing is ever going to happen between us, you're not Jewish, I'm looking for someone who is Jewish and who will fit into my family. Quit living in a fairy tale, life is not a novel." This may have been a gentle way of saying LMTFA (leave me the fuck alone), and I have to admit that I've put enough nails in the coffin of our non-existent relationship to feel compelled to respect her request. But I still think life is a fairy tale, and who is she to say that this isn't all a novel? I mean it makes about as much sense as, say, walking around on a planet orbiting the sun in a vast universe of mostly empty space. But who am I to say?
Well who am I. I am the nothing that creeps in the night. I am a manifestation of the void, just another lunatic, another fool, another dreamer. But I love you. The Big You. The holy family of our human race. I even love Glenn Beck. What a guy! Each and every one. Starting with the one who started the whole damn show of opening my wounded heart, and her name was Jenn. The universe in my novel has been unfolding ever since. But she did tell me to LHTFA. So I guess that means i'm getting another chance to walk into the unknown. OK then. I'll just see if there is anything new on Huffington post, check for some interesting Facebook status updates, and maybe write one of my own that says something like: freedom from the known.

From Fall 2002

7 years of childhood
Never did grow up
Old coffee syrup in an empty cup
I was never understood
I’m an old kid in a wrinkled suit
Life’s voice is dull and quiet
The news a gentle riot
In the kitchen eating fruit
Monuments in kitchen doors
Everybody getting laid
Mommies pimps and daddies whores
As candles burn the soft crusade
It seems like life is a bit less real
Death wanders across the plain
And a very dull pain that I can’t quite feel
Here I’m staring in the mirror again

A Poem from August 2002

Here is the ceremony
Nights full clear sky moon
Twinkle twinkle sparkling leaves
Aroused by the gentle wind

The full moon whispers
and the slow fools wander now as the gray hallucinations pass
The August warm midnight acrobatic climax
Only a light shiver of cool crispation touches my skin
To signal the coming of another seasons change

Everything is tingling in the melonish wetness of life
as the time approaches when life drys out
grows brittle with age
falls
and is taken by the earth

Tonight we are all together in the light midnight sky
The glowing white magic circus moon
The cloud illuminator
Fantastic white sky beacon
Master of the evening that is not death

Gray hallucinations on the ground.

Into New York 2009 the Jelly Version

The madman on parade. Driving through the night on a mission, questioning his own dedication.

A Brainstorming Session

I had just arrived in New York chasing the Grouse in May of 2009... Trying to tie it all together. I'm probably better off just writing. But for those who can power through 7 minutes of blathering, this is one step on my way of getting to articulate this deep stuff without the help of substances... calmer and calmer on the way to the Nothing.

Done for.

Lost inside the fools spaceship
Head wrapped round the orange rind
Slope eared
Drowning in phlegm

The sickness licks the eggplants
Caressing the sharp quills
Pulling them softly
Preparing for the operation

The King tortures what he loves the most
Loves it so much he tortures it with no intention but love

Man.

The Man-beast
Inventing himself upside down
The terror-show
With Claws
The Television

Longing for insanity because it makes more sense
To be sane is to be totally lost
So we sit softly after anonymous meetings and talk about wanting to drink
They just look at me

What goes on in these heads?
I can't very well go telling them who I am
Start ranting and raving about how we need to start the revolution
Giving orders
Starting the show
No

Or is it time?
The clock is ticking down

Do we all lack the same balls?
Are we all sitting around waiting for ourselves to look at ourselves and say
"Hey, isn't it about time we saved the world?"

Isn't it about time we woke up
opened our eyes
and admitted that we're all crazy?

We're all gonna die
We're all alive
This isn't really happening

But wait

This is really happening

What are we going to do about it?

Keep our heads stuck firmly in the ground
Comfortably numb
Slump faced and glazy?

Where are you Ubermensch?

I need help
I could really use some encouragement
I could really use some help

My dog is hurt
I'm tired and insane
I don't know how much time is left
My heart is bigger than the universe
It's killing me

The Wrangler on the Way to Louisville, KY...

This was on the way to NYC chasing the Grouse (That's the girl)... we told everyone we knew the story about going there to find her, but we didn't tell her. Then we moved into her neighborhood. Well, it didn't go as planned, as you might imagine. But more on that later. Here is a video of our approach into Louisville, and a short pit stop there... more on that later.

Sitting down and Wasting time

Listening to Robert Hunter "Aim at the heart"
Singing "Here I am,"
I'm right here
Alone in the midst of us all
I'm right here
Waiting
Singing the nothing rainbows
while the sheep dance in the fog breath
Listening to the universal song
We've been singing since the beginning of time
I'm right here
Waiting
Alone in a digital cave
Whispering a silent song of sad dilapidation
To the sky tops
I'm right here
Yet you jabberwalk in the meaninglessness
Busying yourself with slime
Bury me in the rose bush
Fool
I'm already dead
Watch me while you waste my time
Leave me whispering to the rainbows
While the petals droop
and decay
Hunched over and worthless
Wasted away
Another savior washed downstream
While the silver crested star beam
Turns darkness
In the slivers of time

Dude this internet is killing me. Where is the real world? I'm addicted to Facebook. I'm taking a month off. No more. That's it. I'm never going to write a book with all these outlets for my blatherings. I just blah blah blah on this blahg, or a nice little 120 character intellectual fart on facebook... blah blah blah. This is ridiculous. We are trapped in front of these screens. Slaves to this digital world. Aren't we going to have enough time out in eternity... disembodied spirits? Do we really need to be entering this ethereal realm when we have nature, paradise outside. People to meet. Places to go? No it's just this online trap. I'm tired of it.

Humans have this amazing capacity to just say "this is normal" to just about anything. Take, packing ourselves onto planes and just taking off into the sky. Wee. Here we go.

The atom is enlightenment itself. Man is ignorance himself. If through humility we can at least come to see that we are no "greater" than atoms then maybe we can transcend our ignorance. We are made of atoms, but have, through our ignorance, separated ourselves from nature and are destroying life and the perfection of the gifts we were given by the creator. Follow the trail of our "enlightenment," trying to be more than we are, and you will find the road to hell. When we were One with the gifts of life, living and dying in harmony with creation, it was already paradise. The only thing that is not enlightenment is man and his ignorance and separation. It's all harmony but we are raping it by thinking we can transcend it. Trying to become more than man is unconsciously striving for hell, thinking you are looking for heaven. Heaven is all around you, you can't get any higher than right now. It's an illusion. Think about 7 generations from now, our descendants, and all our striving on this earth, cars, planes, plunging metal tubes into the earth to suck out oil to burn into smoke in the atmosphere, starving the top soil by monocrop farming and killing the forests, all to try and become more than man. Are we creating heaven or hell for them? You aren't going to be born anywhere else. We are just sperm and egg, made of atoms, unions of dancing DNA. Trust me, ground your spaceships. You don't want to be born on mars. There is nowhere else to go. It's all right here. And you can't get any higher than right now. You can't become more than man. You can only become yourself. And who we really are will rebel against the savage rapists we have been taught to be.

Call me white and hang me from a tree. Just some things for us to think about.

As I sit here procrastinating on all the papers I have to write, all the studying I need to do, I can't help but think about how much work our species has to do here on earth. My friend Dan was just telling me how modern clinical psychology (he's studying to be a psychologist) doesn't match up with his spirituality. Psychologically speaking the ego is a healthy thing, he said, something that keeps us sane by being able to compare ourselves with others. His spirituality focuses on how everything is an illusion and we are really just One. Now I am all with him there, but even though none of this is happening and this is all an illusion (spirituality) this is also really happening (psychology). As the saying goes: before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. So we're all connected, we are all one, this is all an illusion. Yep. So what, we are also destroying the life giving properties of our planet, we are teaching selfishness, greed, and ideologies of separation and disharmony between our fellow brothers and sisters. This is really happening. We can know that we are all ONE, and that we are going to die, and this is all an illusion. Great. OK, it's true. But then what? We have to see things as they are. We are really here, conscious creators in the midst of creation, totally fucking things up. It's all connected, it's all perfect on some higher realm, yea, that's all true, but so what!? We have work to do. We are being fools. We are serving selfishness, delusion, greed. We are slaves to darkness. We have to get to work returning our people to the land, developing harmony once again, cleaning the water, living simply, destroying the corporations which are keeping us enslaved. Sitting and meditating on how perfect everything is, is not the answer. It's nice, it feels good, but there is work to be done. You have realized that everything is perfect and it's all connected, and we're all ONE, and life is impermanence, good, nice, fine, well done. Now take the next step and see things as they are. Foolish, insane, WE, as ONE, are being terrible creators. We have to work to do. We have to unite to stop this savage beast of darkness and delusion, selfishness and greed. So you know we are ONE. Good. Now go and tell someone about it. Don't sit in your meditation chamber and do yoga. That's just more selfishness, although, I could probably do with some more yoga and meditation, and these can be constructive things, but we have to be engaged). If we just isolate in the emptiness and bliss of meditation or yoga, we let delusion continue to do its work. Chop wood (not literally, at this point with all the deforestation, it's probably a better idea to replace this adage with "plant tree") and carry water. We have work to do. Let's save the world (boy that sounds cheesy). Let's save ourselves (WE ALL OF US) not me myself or you yourself. We are meaningless. We are nothing. We as individuals are temporary. The individual is the illusion, we don't need to sit and meditate all day because we don't even exist. True. But actually we do exist, and this is really happening, so what do you want to do with your time, sit and meditate to experience non-existence (you'll have eternity for that) or do you want to step out the door, open a book, think, learn, act, and engage in this trip that IS REALLY HAPPENING!?

The Loon in the Coop.

Oh this savage beast should be writing a paper right now! Well, instead, old swine herds, claws of infinity, slouchers and preachers, and magicians, I thought I would write to you. Enough with these weak little response papers I've been posting, here is something straight from the monkeys mouth, and on out to you my darlings. So craw breath, haw flair, slew drab, and lench. Many blessings. Here is a song.

Question Response About Racism for Seminary Class.

Hello Class,

Racism is a terrible consequence of ignorance and the hatred that it can create. While we are still dealing with racism today in many forms, I think it is still important to remember how far we have come. It is remarkable how humankind can change when they are given new information and new education. The biggest problem with racism, at its root, in its earlier manifestations, and in its lingering effects today, is that people are taught to see themselves as different from people who look, or talk, or act different than themselves. I do not believe that people are born racist. They are brought up and are taught racism by the ignorance of their society or their culture, or on a smaller scale by their family group or general community. As we have come far as a world, with an almost universal consensus against sanctioned slavery or segregation, we still have a long way to go to eradicate the roots of these terrors. It is an amazing thing to think that only 50 years ago people of color could not have lunch in certain restaurants, sit in certain seats on buses, or could not even drink out of the same water fountains as people with a light enough skin color, and today there is a person of color in the White House. Yet there are groups of white supremacists, many who even call themselves Christians out there in this country training with guns and ranting and raving about racial purity.

I went to the Museum of the African Diaspora today in San Francisco with a group from PSR and one of the first things that the lady who took us on a tour made clear was that every one of us, every human being on earth no longer in Africa, is a member of the African Diaspora. She asked where the human race began, and pointed out the Great Rift valley to us on the map. That is where our entire race is from. It was pointed out that there is more genetic diversity among human beings in Africa than there is between human beings (the rest of us) outside Africa, because there was such a small group that first left and those of us who have covered the earth outside of the home continent are all descended from them. There is more genetic diversity between two neighboring groups of chimpanzees than there is between any two human beings on earth. Every single one of us human beings on earth are 99.99(and probably a few more 9's) genetically identical. Race is a social construction. We are one human race, and depending on how far our later ancestors moved from the equator, how far north or south they went, what they ate, what sort of climate they lived in, and who they were mating with, determined their shade of color. If we want to eliminate racism as people of faith, in religions, and to foster social justice, we simply need to teach this truth. So long as we look to history we will find someone to blame. They did that, they did this, and the truth is, we are they. We are all relatives if you go back far enough, and nobody is from anywhere, we have been so busy identifying with the illusions of society and culture, we are so habituated to a tribal mentality, that we have become addicted to the ignorance of the fact that we are all one tribe. If racism continues we will destroy ourselves, because we will continue to act out of ignorance if we are incapable of acting on the new information we have at hand. Can we transcend an addiction to thousands of years of ignorance which has kept the truth hidden from us? If religion and people of faith will update their ideology with the information we have at hand, that we are one human race, one people, living on one small fragile planet that we are highly interdependent with, then we will make great headway in eliminating racism. To combat racism and racist groups, we must teach, preach, and spread this new knowledge with every ounce of energy we have, to become free from the fetters of a history of ignorance.
As Paul wrote:
You, my brothers [and sisters], were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful [we might replace this word with ignorant] nature; rather, serve one another in love. The entire law is summed up in a single command: "Love your neighbor as yourself." If you keep on biting and devouring each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other." Gal. 5:13-15

all the best and many blessings,

Andrew Scott

One day after another and nothing remains the same
sitting quietly as the little tear drop soldiers
rise slowly from the ashes
and march down memory lane

What is this some sort of flying colony of ants?!!

Response to question of violence in society in relation to Gandhi for Religious Autobiography class

Well,
In regard to this question... I think we are still at about the point MLK described when he said:
"This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed nonconformists. Our planet teeters on the brink of atomic annihilation; dangerous passions of pride, hatred, and selfishness are enthroned in our lives; truth lies prostrate on the rugged hills of nameless calvaries; and men do reverence before false gods of nationalism and materialism." MLK

That was in 1963. Violence, non-violence. It almost seems impossible to imagine a world without violence, because ever since our species learned to write things down it appears we've been murdering each other. Maybe ever since we got booted from the "garden of eden" we've been acting like a bunch of savages. At least that appears to be the story we have told ourselves. The story of mankind, written by mankind, is a violent bloody affair, interspersed with love and beauty.

We are all going to die. Is death itself violent? If it is, then we are by our very nature violent. If death is something we are taught to fight against, then we are trained for violence to combat the ultimate inevitable violence.

From birth, here in Western patriarchal Christiancentric universe, we are raised from birth with the implicit idea that we are violent by nature, that we are born sinful, and that a man had to die to get our sins forgiven. And yet as a people, we have not stopped sinning. So it seems his death was in vain.

To be transformed non-conformists in the words of Rev. MLK, maybe we need to radically alter even our basis for ideological understanding. If we want to create peace, maybe we need to tell ourselves a different story. Instead of teaching ourselves that we are inherently violent and that we need to resist our true natures and ask some higher being to help us not be violent, maybe we should begin teaching ourselves that we are by nature perfect, loving, divine, glorious creations of God, who at our core are non-violent. It would actually be closer to the truth. because if we actually look at the world, especially considering 70,000+ nuclear weapons sitting around out there, the millions of guns, bombs, fighter jets, racism, sexism, hatred, you have to admit, we are surprisingly non-violent as a species, at least to each other. If that wasn't true, if we really were such savage murderers, how can we explain that the human population doubles on earth at this moment every 50 some years. In 1950 there were 2.55 billion people on earth. Today there are 6.84. So we really aren't that violent. At least to each other, especially considering that the overwhelming ideology in the west is that people are not inherently good. We worship "the perfect man" as if He was really so different from ourselves. I'm just not sure that's what he was telling us. But if we look at Considering that by 2067 we'll have over 13 billion people on earth. Maybe true non-violence, at least to our mother earth and fellow species, will be for us to figure out a way to cut our population down and reduce our numbers, which some might argue is violence.

If I see every other human being on earth as a reflection of myself, as another manifestation of God, it becomes difficult for me to legitimate killing them. Maybe non-violence as articulated by Gandhi can be understood in terms of offering himself as a sacrifice for the greater good, like Jesus, he could not defend his life with violence because he had so much love for his fellow man.
he said: "non-violence implies as complete self-purification as is humanly possible [which suggests that he understands our pure being as non-violent] Man for man the strength of non-violence is in exact proportion to the ability, if not the will, of the non-violent person to inflict violence."

So maybe it comes down to, "love each other, or else..." "be nice, or prepare to be thrown into the volcano."

Sorry I went on so damn long. Interesting exercise. I guess I fall into the non-violent category. But we may have to drink the cool-aid to be ultimately non-violent.

Happy Easter... Good Friday, Crucifixion day, and the people go to Church.

Everyone is walking around bewildered, because we don't know what we're doing here, what we are teaching here. We don't know if we are part of the problem or part of the solution. So we want to hide. So we seek pleasures of the mundane, and we try and worship something outside us to get relief as we have been taught to do. Are we teaching that Jesus is sitting at the right hand of God, separate from us? If we are teaching what so many religions, especially Christian Religion has taught us, we are really teaching a blasphemy of what Jesus really taught.

He was an enlightened master who tried to wake everyone around him up, tried to challenge institutional religion, which kept man in bondage by making God something separate from him, separate from Mother Earth. They raped and killed the Goddess, to subjugate spiritual man and fortify institutional religions, governments, nations. This is the Devil, darkness incarnate. Jesus came to teach that God is within you, that you are the spirit, that you have every potentiality of the universe within you. He told us to love each other.

He came to teach that what we have been taught by our religious leaders is a lie, and that they are just as lost as the rest of us. Isn't that what you are discovering here? So he spoke out, rejected the lie all around him, and he was crucified for it. Then the Church told a story about how Jesus was God, the god who was separate from us, from Mother Earth, who was judgmental, part of something angry, who had been punishing us for thousands of years for eating the fruit of knowledge. But this was the lie. Because this is still the Garden of Eden.

This is what Jesus taught, that this is the Kingdom of God. Here and now. God loves us and gave us life, and death is part of life, not some punishment we receive from an angry God. So they killed Jesus, the enlightened one, the Messiah of the Jewish faith. They did not want to be forgiven.

The darkness, the "devil" delusion, was too powerful, so we killed Jesus. Then we were told a story about how he is part of that God who he was trying to liberate us from. I and the Father AM ONE. They set Jesus up on the most High to judge us. They put him in a position he would never take, because Jesus forgives! He would not punish. He would die before he killed. And even when we killed him, he begged for our forgiveness.

So we were told this story, and 2000 years later we are still in bondage, still unconscious of our divinity, the divinity and the love of our Mother the Earth, and the infinite love of our Father in Heaven, manifest in the SUN. 2000 years later and we are still killing each other, still lost in thousands of years of the lie that we are separate from God, that God is not all around us, our very nature, that which made us, and that which we are made of.

Science is just as lost. They are looking for the smallest particle, they too are searching for God. But they will destroy us all in the process, because the power they are searching for, in their ignorant, spiritless hands, will destroy the very gift of God, our mother earth, our life giver, our sustenance. They work also at the dark power of ignorance, just like the Church itself. Nietzsche tried to tell us this in the Anti-Christ, which simply illuminates the Church built up in Jesus name, the false teachers using his name to continue our bondage and make us weak.

We must free ourselves. We must ask ourselves what we are teaching here? We must search for our own divinity, free ourselves from mental slavery. The Kingdom of God is within you, as it is also all around you. This is the great self we have to realize. There is nothing to fear.

The underlying message of Christianity, the implicit teaching, is that if you confront the institutions which subjugate you and lie to you, you will be killed. But we need not be afraid, we are already dead, and eternal life is not something that can be taken away. You are made of infinite material. You are a creature of the Light. Stop killing each other, love each other. Stop hiding from yourselves. And if you go to Church to find yourself, stand up in that Church and refuse to celebrate the murder of the innocent man who came to save you, not with his death, but with his life.

The Goose Wrangler Speaks about the Particle Accelerator at CERN

Interesting 3 part series with a different point of view.

911 Jones Street, Berkeley CA. 1:18 AM 2010

Well, this mindstem, rough shod and tragic
lifts its clod face knife wise once again
A rejection of the soft leash hanging round my neck
with smoky vine and branches
Another day of sludge
waiting for the crispy vegetables
to ripen

A Short Note

In regard to my previous post, offensive as it is, while I am sitting here not studying for my New Testament exam tomorrow, I wanted to say that God (DAO) (The Great Is) (Allah) (The True ONE) is a glorious, wonderful, IS. And all those names are of course trying to, as we all are, get at the Great Being that is the source of this life and consciousness that we are down here experiencing. I can't fault all the religions for trying, and I can't take away from the truth which lies in all of their articulations, yet, as can be noted in my previous post, I have a hard time accepting the totality of their books because they seem to have led us to this present moment, and I think we all agree that we could be doing a better job getting along as a human race and taking care of our Mother earth, so I do admittedly get a little over enthusiastic in my desire for us to move forward and leave some of the limited beliefs of the past where they belong, in the past. In the future may we find light, love, hope, faith, honesty, joy, and truth. Iwachupa. Wetaha.

What Are You Doing In Seminary Mr. Scott?

Well, I guess one way to think about it, would be to say that I'm a missionary for the Church of the Open Mind, trying to convert Christians to the ONO-Truth faith... We are all on the same boat here ladies and gentlemen, there are more than 7 billion of us. Half way through my first semester in seminary, I'm only getting a firmer conviction that these "Christians" (not to say that they are any crazier than any of the other groups who profess faith to some outdated "truth") are running around trying to get everyone to believe, along with them, that the murder of an innocent man (or the sacrifice of the lamb of god as they would prefer we call it) somehow got us all off the hook, even though 2000 years since we crucified Jesus Christ (who told us to love each other, to not be angry with each other, who told us to turn the other cheek) we are still murdering each other, still acting like bloody fools, serving the master of the Old Testament who JC was trying to liberate us from...
Just to make sure nobody thinks I'm getting converted here.
I have an open mind people.
I know that I am human, I am finite man living in the realm of infinite spirit, I'll never be able to articulate the whole truth. But I can tell you, and let me tell you, it's time for us to stop believing these lies we've been told for thousands of years. It's time for us to move toward the light, to stop murdering each other and serving the demons of selfishness, self-centeredness, fear, and guilt which are shoved down our throats the minute we are born into this hegemonic patriarchal reality, so very apparent in the Tanakh (Old Testament) which Jesus Christ may very well have been trying to liberate us from (I don't think they killed him for nothing, he must have been saying some radical things), but we killed him, we who are still under the yoke of that Satanic book, the Bible, and once we murdered Christ, the Messiah, the King who had come to set his people free (we're all Jews here in this scenario in case you didn't notice), well once he was dead, just fast forward and see that everything that he preached against sandwiches the story of his "resurrection," you have that judgmental, angry, juvenile, petty little God, a real brat in the world of Gods, who shows up over and over again in the Tanakh playing little games on earth and trying to control people with less effect than a truly omnipotent God would have, and then you get Jesus coming and saying something so radically new that it got him killed, and then you get the "Bible," which is mostly Old Testament, followed by some stories about Jesus, and finally closed out with The Revelation which sticks Jesus (mr. forgiveness himself) up there next to Asshole God #1, ready to Judge people at the end times, and blah blah blah. Anyways, my point is that my point has not changed, GET OVER IT EVERYBODY! STOP KILLING EACH OTHER! STOP KILLING ME! LOVE EACH OTHER! LOVE EACH OTHER! LOVE EACH OTHER!

Jesus Christ. Is it really so complicated? www.openmindchurch.com.

lots of love,

The Goose Wrangler

A Little Response for one of the classes, I'm a little afraid it might offend the Episcopal Minister who teaches the class.

"Do you feel these bodies should continue this practice of female exclusion from ordained ministry? If yes, explain why. If no, what can be done to effect change in these bodies that refuse full inclusion of women in the life of the Church?"

"Then I saw an angel coming down from Heaven, holding in his hand the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain. He seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and locked and sealed it over him, so that he would deceive the nations no more, until the thousand years were ended. After that he must be let out for a little while." (Revelation 20:1-4)

Unfortunately I'm not sure he was ever put away. If women are called to preach, I say preach. I'm a feminist, which is to say that I believe in equality of the sexes, and beyond that, I am a radical feminist, which is to say I believe that we aren't going to solve the problems of the patriarchy by making small adjustments in the patriarchal system, such as allowing women to become CEO's or Bishops or Pope's, as a liberal feminist (according to the common definitions I learned about feminism studying Women's Studies from 2003-04) would suggest. Giving women access to the already warped structures of patriarchal capitalism just forces women to take on roles of unhealthy socially constructed patriarchal masculinity. You want access to the rat race? Have at it, and welcome to hell. Women are entering the competitive, emotionless world of power and control which dominates patriarchy. It used to be just men competing with men, and women were capital in the game, but now women are entering the game and competing just the same, sacrificing their emotions, their, humanity, as men have been doing now for hundreds of years, pitting themselves against each other in a selfish, individualistic, reality, right out of the Bible.

And that's really the problem. The god of the Bible created each one of us, and judges each one of us, separately, and when we are rewarded, it is often at the expense of someone else, or they are being punished for being bad, and we are being rewarded for being good. It's a competition, and it is fear based, and it's about power and control, control of a destiny after death based on actions in life. We try to control our behavior, not because we care about our fellow man, our tribe of mankind, and our mother earth, but because we want the individualistic rewards of God for ourselves. So we think that we, the individual, matter, and very often our benefit it is at the expense of someone else. And BANG, welcome to present day reality, as we rape Mother Earth, and try to keep her performing like some drugged up baby momma, popping out oil and food just as fast as we damn well expect her too, hence depleted oceans, overpopulation, completely exhausted top soil, drought, starvation and lack of potable water in huge portions of the world population, while we buy Evian bottles over here in the "1st world" at a higher price per weight than we pay for gasoline.

"Thus the LORD said to me: Make yourself a yoke of straps and bars, and put them on your neck." (Jeremiah 27:2)

We've kept that yoke on far too long. The Bible is full of it, from Genesis 3:16, when God curses woman for her little forbidden meal, "in pain shall you bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you," all the way to Paul's words on the matter which classmates have discussed.

What I don't understand is why women would want anything to do with representing any church which calls the Bible their sacred book. As Adam and Eve were forced "by God" to leave the garden and toil the fields and eat bread, so have we continued over the past few thousand years murdering and forcing native people's who still lived in the Garden, in harmony with their Mother Earth, off of their land, and into the same curse we have been living out, all for a little snack and becoming "like one of us" (Gen 3:22). Maybe it's time to close Pandora's box. Jesus had some great things to say, but me thinks he was trying to liberate people from the curse, but instead what once was only the curse of the Jews, has become, through a whole lot of missionary work, the curse of mankind. You could cut down the teachings of Jesus to a nice small pamphlet, and ladies and gentlemen who want their humanity back could preach that.

But hey, I'm for equal rights, so if women want to join "the church," have at it, and may God have mercy on our souls.

best,

Andrew

the hawbag strikes again

No rough draft on this old friends. I'm just shooting from the hip and decided to jump right in this blog and start writing. Now I should be studying mind you. Scottypants is engaged in graduate school and all, studying religion (HAH!) at the GTU, but i'm not studying, nor have I been studying lately, at least not as much as I should be. I have barely been exercising either. I have been feeling like my feet are stuck in thick weighty jello, and I can't move. This has been going on for awhile now. I go and go, like moving across the country two months ago from New York City to Berkeley California, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, cutting across the country in my trusty car Blondie like a genius on fire, and sober to boot; and so long as I'm running, I seem to have enough energy, but as soon as I stop for a second, boom, the sludge returns.

So here I am in Berkeley, knee deep in sludge, hawk jawed and fooled. I really want to drink some wine to boost my spirits. That's what it does. Wine or herb to my trusty gullet or lungs and right to the brain and I'm right as rain. But it's a lonely mans game. See I'm trying to do it differently. I'm trying to make the decisions which will lead me down a more deep and meaningful road, like finding a good wife, and having kids and being a good dad, and maybe sharing some holy emptiness with a crowd outside of drunkenness, but my loneliness just wants me to take a sip, pack the pipe, and relax. That feels better. Maybe not in the long run, but don't they say to just live in the present? Well, my favorite way (maybe the only way I know how) to get into the present is to take a drink from the glass of timelessness, or a smoke from the Green Goddess home. Earth, a crisp fresh death, a return to the ground, a delicious sip from the grave. The liquid or smoky infinite, the illusion breaking potion of Now. Hard work and meditation in a glass. Comfort all alone.

For the moment all I have is this sobriety, (well I give myself caffeine and a touch of nicotine, but give me a break, they are very ineffective drugs. I guess that's why they don't get you drunk or stoned). So here I am. Empty. Empty. Empty. I am the emptiness, but this world doesn't seem to want to be saved. I'm already dead, should I just take a break in the meantime and inhale myself in time? The drug is the drug is the drug. Where is the love? I am the drug, drink of me, drink this mystery, stop me wasting time. Who is the fool? I can tell you all about nothing. It means everything, nah. Just tell me to shut up and give me a glass of wine. Another line. And we'll all wake up in Hell. Aloha.

I Blew it on Posting this USS New York Post when it was more timely

The USS New York, made with steel from remnants of the World Trade Center, launched a few months ago, and is an amphibious assault dock (sounds menacing).

7.5 tons of WTC steel. It's like a phoenix of war rising from the ashes of terrorism; a giant steel bastion of potential violence floating on the seas. The lesson we failed to learn from the Sept. 11th attacks is that having huge weapons doesn't always keep a center of the American Capitalist universe from getting flown into and blown up by a bunch of terrorists who are willing to blow themselves up in a battle against our greed.

They may be mislead, just like our own young soldiers, into thinking that there is justice in killing. The terrorists are also trained, like us, to believe that their war and its means are just. They are often mislead by leaders who use religious zealotry to feed their power. Some are motivated by genuine spiritual seeking, but in their violence they are completely off track.

To us they are terrorists. To them, we are terrorists. Until one of us gives up fighting, there will always be war. They may never give up, so we have to. The righteous turn the other cheek. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

The USS New York is a floating bastion of violence and represents our history of violence, and the slavery on which our capitalism was built. The boat represents our righteousness no more than it represents our violence, fear and greed.

What are we so afraid of that we need such a big army to protect us from? Have we built up this force to protect the greedheads more than ourselves? Is the average American, sitting at a desk in an office building, laboring for the profits of some huge corporation, or the man in uniform who is defending this nation which defends those corporations, victims of a savage individualism, inculcated greed, violence, and licentiousness, propped up and called freedom?

Suffering on a Thursday or Another One For Jenn

Everything and nothing exist concurrently
Nothing is true at the same time as everything
The middle way is just as true as all the way and no way
It's all nothing and everything
Emptiness and form
Finite and infinite
It is what it is and it is what we make it

I'm so tired sitting at my desk
I get in bed and I can't sleep
Stacy was so right
I could have stayed in New York and got a firmer foundation
Now I'm all the way here
and there is no turning back

Forward Ho said the Goose faced bandit
sliding burnt from an ungreased pan

Oh well, I had a paradise apt. in NYC
and I ran like hell
Now I have a train honking every few hours making sure I never really sleep
and no good delivery and no real heating
and no Donaldo sitting in his wheelchair
outside 245 West 25th street smoking cigarettes and singing about the Kingston Baby

Too many realities all existing at the same time
Everywhere and nowhere
The Madman on parade
Listening for God and studying Buddhism and trying to save the world
Where am I going? Nowhere
Endlessly rushing nowhere
It's all right here.
Everywhere and now.

I'm wide awake
Just as soon as I get in bed

Oh fool

Empty glass of dilapidation.
Wet meat.
A sliver of decay.

I am crab.
Flem shnort
plus rag
flor hound
Glaz drop
yep. that about sums it up.

Eat my taco
Flag heads
Eat shrimp

Can't you see?
Zarathustra mouths
Eyes covered over with throat grass
stump eared and glazy
Tie tongued and easy
Drunk on steam.

Flesh eaters at the greed trough
munching in the weeds
Skinning naked Children on your motorcycles
flame broiled with lazy breath

Oh wrench people
Hot bed wetting video games
Sucking on TV
Jessica Simpson Tits
floating on a spewing vagina coughing lava from the depths of the Earth

Eat my flea house.
It's just me and my dog.

He wears a tuxedo and his name is Kingston.
We live on Jones street next to black people
who are the same race as me,
color of my dog,
born real tan while I get my worthy skin cancers removed and reconcile death.

This ship shrinks every day
and we all same tribe
See the Mezuzah on my blue door frame
We are all to blame.

Inverted Nonsense

Hey plow horse
What gravy you belching from your glazed fags?
Hot butter in your fireplace, monkey man?

Go shovel worms you foul mouthed sucker
I'll eat your fresh caught trout on a french BBQ
In Colorado mountains riding horses by the lake

Suck my train horn you savage!
You bunch of gay fags with your women sex and multicultural affinities!
Aha, now I caught you in your queer theory class
when I had sex with self-identified lesbian on my couch
studying white lesbian feminist womens studies
Only to get cock jabbed in Christian Education class by a womanist mujerista
rejecting gay whitey as a rag doll racist
unperspectivized with generalizations

Oh, they are all so wrong

We are all so trapped in our own lenses
With our ME MOUTHS
Pushing steam with our butt cheeks

Suck my Craw felch fuckers
We're all the same.
Take your PC pussy dicks and yank them inclusivity
invert revert poopy heads-

I know Green Man-
Suffering weehaw cause his rich girl stole his smoking children from his Rasta mouth
Everybody's suffering in this claw horse beast called Bank of America run by nobody getting dumber by the day

Somebody tell the physicists at CERN that their job is already done... leave the Higgs Boson (GOD) alone, its already a part of us, don't blow us up.

"Science is nothing but the finding of unity. As soon as science would reach perfect unity, it would stop from further progress, because it would reach the goal. Thus Chemistry could not progress farther when it would discover one element out of which all others could be made. Physics would stop when it would be able to fulfill its services in discovering one energy of which all others are but manifestations ... All science is bound to come to this conclusion in the long run. Manifestation, and not creation, is the word of science today, and the Hindu is only glad that what he has been cherishing in his bosom for ages is going to be taught in more forcible language, and with further light from the latest conclusions of science." Swami Vivekananda (1893)

Class Discussion Response on Question of Free Will and Judas' Necessitated Betrayal of Jesus for One of Scotty Pants Seminary Classes.

Boy oh boy,
isn't this a tough one?! Free will is a real conundrum. First I have to ask myself, who is the I whose will could be free? Is the soul, which would choose a body to be born into and a life to lead, as Shannon's position suggests, a free enough being in the first place to be able to choose its destiny? This suggests that there is some higher realm with higher beings of our selves who act something like humans in our disconnected earthly reality, up there somewhere still separate from each other, and from God, making free will decisions about being born, lives to live, parents to raise them. And then we become those beings down here in the flesh, and still live separately, still make free will decisions, still determine our own destiny?

My mom has frequently shared this view with me, that no matter how miserable she is, she knows that she chose this life, chose these situations, and is sort of stuck down here, by her own choice. This always struck me as a fairly depressing way to look at things. I mean, I do tend to love my life, but when I don't, I rather like having something other than myself to blame for my circumstances. Choosing to think that I or some higher form of myself has chosen every idiosyncratic little detail of my reality really puts things in an oddly self-centered perspective in the first place. Putting myself as the determinator of both my physical birth circumstances and my life choices brings up some odd questions, and seems to me to lead to a very dark opinion of our species. If we are all in charge of everything, individually, we sure have screwed things up royally, not just for ourselves, but for everybody else, and for many of the life forms we share this planet with. But in such a broad world, with so many infinite possibilities, and billions of years behind us, and billions of years before us, with our physical homo-sapien-sapien present realities as just a blip on the radar of physical existence in this infinite universe of non-physical energy, we really aren't such a big deal, and seems to me, we really don't have quite as much control as we think, or as much power as our free-will dogmas might lead us to believe.

Free will, in these temporary bodies, in this world of instantaneous limitations, of time, gravity, and bathroom stops, is true, but only so far as it goes. It's like saying you have free will within a prison, you can do what you will, but only within these parameters. Someone can go out and kill someone else, but there are consequences. Hitler was responsible for the murder of millions of human beings, but in the end he really just ended up killing himself, literally. We can kill each other in these bodies, but our bodies are going to die even if we don't. Choosing love, life, and hope, using our free wills to their highest potential, does not change the fact that we are going to die. What happens when we die is all just speculation, no matter how convenient we may find putting our faith in some story written at the hands of man. Divinely inspired or not, it is still limited by the hands of authors in the midst of dilapidation.

In regard to Horace' question on the perspective that God needed Jesus' mission fulfilled by Judas' betrayal of him, I can only wonder, did He? What kind of God would send his most beloved son down to earth as a human sacrifice, to pay for the sins of His own creations? I have to admit, it is the kind of thing an Old Testament God would do. It fits in the context of many of his Acts as documented in the Tanakh. He liked sacrifices and could be a ruthless killer, even His own. But I wonder, did the authors of the Book, telling the story the way they did, really have a choice? I think maybe the guilt of having the blood of such a perfect and innocent Man on our own hands had something to do with Judas' betrayal. We say that Judas did it. It was part of greater plan, it wasn't even his fault, it was part of God's plan. It takes some of the responsibility off ourselves. Maybe we had to tell the story that way, to keep from killing ourselves like Hitler. Maybe all this responsibility, in relation to our own ignorance and our potential, was just too much to bear. Nietzsche, one of the fathers of existentialism, certainly went nuts thinking about it.

Blessings,

Andrew S.

Berkeley Smells Like Flowers

Or gad flen mare
the right glenn flee rag
righ crow nee mad
flen mare ree shaw
I saw mee dad
not on righ schmee
not in my life
all lone slad fair
so crow haw
go nigh flee shmay
folk a don rad in your belay
ars felch
my graw heart slime
makes earth wise full rage
see heart crime wee shaw
float down right head cheese
dawns eye
and saves the world

Hey Craw

My psychiatrist is a loony bird
if I can rant and rave when I'm crazy on this bloog
well then dammit all if I can't rant and rave as a sober graduate student at the Pacific School of Religion
yep
that's right folks
your Goose Wrangler is getting a higher education, and he's not even getting high anymore!
But my fellow students
Stoned
Drunk
and they call themselves Christians...
and still sucking on the lie of separation from GOD
Well they must be High
because this place is a JOKE
Seminary!?
It's Kindergarten
I'm taking a New Testament Class from a Franciscan at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific (an Episcopal Seminary next door), and we don't even have to read the Gospels beginning to end! IT'S a JOKE! ARE they afraid that if they make the students read the whole document the students might realize what a bunch of BULLSHIT it is?! I've been reading it now, over and over, and Scottypants has been making notes...
and here is what it looks like:

The Old Testament just goes downhill after Genesis 1. After the 6th day God looks down and sees his creation and it was most excellent. That about sums it up. Why didn't they just leave it alone? Well instead we got hundreds upon hundreds more pages of a jealous, racist, angry, insane God, perpetrating atrocities, punishing the innocent, ordering the deaths of women and children, swallowing his own chosen up in floods and chasms, and just being an ordinary average prick.

Well, there is your God, and you can have him. Then this Rabbi Jesus came along to liberate his people from their sin, he came to forgive them in the name of a kinder version of God, but his people really didn't want to hear what he had to say so they had him hammered up on a cross to die. So the real lesson of the New Testament is don't question authority, don't knock over the money changers in the temple, don't challenge the higher ups, unless you want to get killed. So there is your story, but somehow this forgiving guy, by the time we get to the end of the New Testament, has been set up next to God in Heaven ready to Judge people and send some to everlasting condemnation, and some to eternal salvation. Well what the hell were they thinking? The Church survived. Judaism survived to keep it's people in the bondage of separation, in the illusion of separation from their fellow man by way of their supposed chosen status, even though we all know that we are all of us human beings god's chosen, Abraham was supposedly a direct descendant of Adam and Eve, just like the rest of us. There were only two to begin with right? Well that makes us all one big, discombobulated, and terribly confused family. And that big Jewish text (the Tanakh, AKA the Old Testament) survived with a tiny little addition called the New Testament, so the rest of the world could inherit this wonderful message of an angry, punishing, insane God, who needed to send his own son as a sacrifice, to die for the sins of his own creations. Thanks.

Once again, we are all Jews. Mislead, entrapped, fooled. God still wants us to stop killing each other. You can put any label on us you want. We are ONE HUMAN RACE.

Aloha.

Haiku for Feb. 17, 2010

Heart shaped water breath
In a bright empty stillness
We're already dead

We all have the same ancestors. Every single human being on earth. Why don't they teach us that in Kindergarten? You practically have to get into college and take Anthropology to get that simple little nugget, and even then you often have to read between the lines. One human race. Ain't that a novel concept.

discussion response for one of the classes... on question about God's presence in relation to Dietrich Bonhoeffer's WWII situation

I have enjoyed reading the conversation thus far; very thought provoking. I have to be another voice of agreement that God is present even in war and atrocity. This Autotheism Kent brings to the conversation is also interesting, especially from the perspective of Jesus's comments on being one with the Father. If we are living in the creation of a Creator, and are therefor part of it, then mustn't we be of the Creator? Jesus may not have been separating himself from us with his description of his relationship with his Father, but rather, as I think Kent is indicating, have been pointing us toward a new understanding of our own relationship with that Father. In being conscious beings in the midst of our own limited perception of creation, we may be little eye balls of creation itself, looking at a limited form of the image manifested by the great Creator. As actors in the manifest realm, we may be the ones we are calling on when we pray for God's intervention. Bonhoeffer chose one path of resistance to engage a dark power he saw acting in the world around him. He saw suffering and he acted in the best way he saw fit to stop Hitler, a figurehead of wrathful violence, cruelty and horror of his time. Where is God in death and dying, cruelty, rape and murder? God is infinite, but we are temporary. Yet we have eyes to see and bodies to experience creation with (and we use them to all these terrible ends sometimes). God, as far as we can see, is not of this world, flesh may be no more his, than ours. So God can be present in death, as God is in life, in that death is the portal to infinity (immortality, heaven, call it what we will), but death is also the price of playing the game. To physically witness infinite creation we have to be separate from it, we have to become temporary to catch a momentary glimpse of timelessness (maybe). To live in the physical realm could be the greatest gift, but death is the price we have to pay for receiving it. Can we stop killing each other and be more God like? Damn good question.

best,

Andrew S

well...

OK, well after two days of orientation at seminary I have to admit I'm pretty exited about my schedule and this upcoming insanity. My big problem at present is that I'm torn between this Life and Teaching of Buddha course at the Institute for Buddhist Studies taught by this awesome old monk Seelawimala, and this RAST-2332-01 (12091) DEATH/JUDGEMENT/HEAVEN/HELL class with this awesome Dominican professor who also teaches way cool film classes, and also fills one of the requirements I need. They are both at the same time. I'll inform you which I choose and of the other one's I'm taking, looks like 12 hours is the normal course load here, but I may just go nuts and take 15 since it looks like it's the same price.

Know what BS stands for in the course schedule at seminary? Here's a hint, there are a whole lotta BS classes. Like BS 1025, Patrisic greek, or BS 1128, biblical Hebrew, or how bout BS-2740-01 (13382) SWEDENBORGIAN EXEGESIS. BS, can you guess?

much love,

Goose Wrangler

Off to see the wizard

Well today I go to orientation at the Pacific School of Religion at the Graduate Theological Union to begin my 3 year master of divinity program, embarking on a subversive journey that God only knows where will lead. I woke up agitated, already anticipating being at intellectual and spiritual war with my contemporaries. Probably the wrong attitude to begin with for a guy who started the Church of the Open Mind. But I woke up thinking about how religion is so often sacrilege.

If God is perfect and all loving, would he send Satan to test Job? Thinking about this confused and lost old book called the Bible that is followed by so many confused and lost people, I felt lost myself. My school is a hub of Gay and Lesbian Christianity, which itself doesn't make much sense, because even the New Testament has plenty declaring homosexuality somehow morally wrong. I don't believe that to be true, as I'm of the it is what it is opinion; but I do believe in commitment, love, and ideals of purity and truth, (falling short plenty myself to be sure), but if you are attracted to the same sex, then great, God loves you just the same, but anyway, I digress.

To say that God sent Satan is to make Satan part of God, which He is, but only so much as we are part of God, because we Created Satan, not God. We fell from the Garden, we wrote the story, not God. We, creatures of infinite potentiality, got lost, we chose the low road. God is ever present, ever loving, ever true and universal. We are the ones who have limited God, not the other way around. We defined God, like perfect little egotistical imbeciles, when we had even begun by saying that God created everything, including us mortals. But how can mortal define infinite?

They assigned me a young adviser, a professor of art and religion who has only been at the school since the fall. How exactly is she going to advise me through an MDIV program if she has never even been through one? My ego is insulted, but I'm just another mortal, what do I know? How quickly I forget my IT'S GOING TO BE OK rule.

Well, here I go, entering the Matrix. Let's see if I can break it, and crush these limited belief systems and help us escape from all this delusion (of course it's all just in my mind), with my perfect imperfection, street found St. Francis pendant, my two and a half months resistance to a strong taste for wine and herb, my dreams and love for the Jew, my mad love for humanity, and all my own insanity. The lunatic on parade. Welcome to Mindhead, it's a brand new show.

lots of love and aloha,

Goose Wrangler

If God Could Talk.

Guys listen I’m sorry. Sometimes it seems like I’ve forgotten about you, but I haven’t. Listen, it’s hard to be everywhere at once. Try to imagine what my job is like, OK. Like try juggling 7 billion lost angels run amok on earth. I mean, it’s not easy. Let me introduce myself. This is I Am. When I introduced myself in Exodus, I was talking to Moses, at the time talking to the Jews. So I was like yea, I’m the God of Abraham, Jacob, and Isaac. The thing is, and this is why it seems like I forget about you sometimes. So the thing is, well, I’m actually everybodys God. I hate to burst any bubbles. But come on. Seriously. I gave you guys Buddha, Jesus, Mohamed, Bob Marley, Krishnamurti. What do you want? Some folk see me as twos and threes, some conceive me as nothing, some even worship me as the devil, but they’re really just worshipping themselves. Truth be told, I’m all over the place. I’m Nothing. Like emptiness. So forgive me if I’m not around all the time to save the day. I’m nowhere. But if you look, you will also find that I am now here. I’m everywhere. But the big decisions are always left up to Mom.

Here are a few updates:

Stop Killing each other! (Jesus Christ, how many times do I have to say this?)

Find the Light within you. Say a prayer. Thank G-d you’re alive.

And I have to get a little serious here. Because it really bums me out when my children don’t play nicely with each other.

I want to talk about Israel, and this idea of a chosen people. Seems to me that somewhere along the line somebody missed the point, and this topic speaks to the broader issue of a divine humanity dividing themselves, and falling into ignorance. This just makes me crazy. In the first place, Israel means “he who wrestles with God.” Jacob was given the name Israel by an “angel of God” who he wrestled with in the night. Why was he wrestling with an angel, you might ask. Well God only knows, and I’m coming up blank at the moment. According to the book, the angel told Jacob to let him go because it was getting to be daytime. Jacob said he wouldn’t let him go till he got his blessing, so the angel gave him his blessing and the name. Why you want a name and a blessing of an angel who is afraid of daylight is beyond me, and Jesus Christ, I’m God. So get real! Now seriously. It’s over now.

I Am loves Jews, but it’s time you started marrying and uniting with your Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Atheist, Agnostic, and Rastafarian brothers and sisters, because you seem to be missing the point. The tribe of Israel is the tribe of Mankind. All people are your brothers and sisters, may all these limited beliefs be damned! All people are the children of God. And you all seem to wrestle with God. Nobody is perfect. Let it go. You guys got the spot at the appropriate time, after the Egyptian affair, and that’s all she wrote. Now share it with your neighbors, and share yourselves. Everyone wants to be the chosen people, and telling them that you are chosen while they are not has not exactly served your tribe well, people pick on the one they are jealous of. But listen ya’ll, they have nothing to be jealous of, I love them just as much as I love you, because they are all your brothers and sisters, they are you, and you are them. This goes for Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Zoroastrians and the rest, none of you are better than anyone else. You are all just trying to articulate the same thing. There is ONE TRUTH, and it is infinite, just like my love for all of you. But you are finite, in these human bodies at least, so you cannot articulate infinite truth, try as you might. So easy does it. Take it easy on yourselves, and on each other. Love each other.

You are all forgiven. The light of God is in your heart. There is only one tribe now. Mankind. All people are my children. I have no name. I AM each one of you. Within you, is Everything and Nothing. I AM BOTH.

The Tanakh is Old News. It’s out of date. As are most all of your books. It’s time for the literature of the ONE. You are all one, and you have figured it out for yourselves with your own science, limited as it is. The people of Israel are my chosen people, and so is everybody else. Israel is not a state on a map. Israel is a state of mind. You are all Israel, and you don’t have to keep wrestling. Just believe. You can’t separate the holy land from the holy land. The whole planet is holy. Get a new name. And if you are going to let an angel name you, let it be an angel who is not afraid of the light. Names are unimportant anyway. The infinite cannot be fully articulated by the finite. Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Rastas and the rest, you are all one. You are all on the same boat. Open your eyes.

soft landings

Antonio Banderas writing poetry in the sun
Curled black hair and wires coming out his ears
This was the end of poetic art
Singing reggae music.
The fool had found his stump
Walked up and crunched in
On a blind wagon train
Looking at an orange parking cone on top of a mobile home
It was a miracle.
He breathed in a yellow bicycle helmet and sat alone
A live tree reached out to him
Leafless and kind
Alien lampposts watched over him
And little purple flowers said hello from January California ground
There really is nothing wrong
Banderas thought
It's not my job to save the world.
I'll just stare into this computer screen
And exhale the universe