All Talk is Like an Echo

Confessions of a Lifeguard: a treatise on practical magick in the poolside life assurance industry

2006-06-27T01:12:00.000-07:00

From my fellow Sol Ducian inmate, Eureka Pink House inmate, pure-as-white magickal accomplice and Prime Master in the Subtle Brotherhood of Lifeguarding, Chance Kaye. You can view the blog original at: http://chancekaye.blogspot.com/

Lifeguarding as a practice of magick is an ancient art with roots dating back to the early Mayans. The goal, essentially, is to create an injury-free atmosphere in every respect while appearing to exert little or no influence upon the pool deck. "Appearing" is the kicker here, as the Initiate well knows. It is in fact a very active and laborious process, not fit for your average wiccan dabbler or uninspired Crowleytian. Obviously, this is a white magick, one of the few philanthropic arts left on the planet.
The Will is directed to avoid the occurrence of injury. At the same time, one is interfering with the Will of the pool deck at large and over-riding it with one's own Will. This is the manifestation of Abraxas. Can guarding someone's life in fact be guarding them from life? Perhaps that child had to run and do a flip into the pool. Perhaps his karmic alignment depended on it. Could he now be doomed to another thirty-seven lifetimes on this planet because of the Lifeguard's kind admonitions? Questions like these are a staple of the novice Lifeguard's formative and unestablished concept of Authority.
The Lifeguard is Always Right.

As with any instance of ceremonial direction of will-power, attire is crucial. The first step is a good set of Shades. The Shades are an imperative feature of the lifeguards ensemble, and the easiest to acquire. The foremost role of the Shades is the most holy form of white magick known to modern man. Bringing out the Sun! Come rain or clouds, dawn the Shades. By the simple act of wearing the Shades when there is no apparent reason for them, aka Sun, a Probability Vaccume spontaneously opens up in the immediate area, sucking the clouds into a self-imploding singularity and exposing the glorious Sun for all to bask beneath. Aha! Never under-estimate the power of blind optimism. The next level of Sun invocation involves the Big Straw Hat. Slightly more difficult to master, the Big Straw Hat is an excellent conductor for the Probability Vaccume. The ultimate mastery of this avenue of Lifeguard magick is the White Stripe of sunscreen on the nose. The White Stripe is highly effective, however, very difficult to contain. Whole rain forests have been reduced to arid wasteland by the careless misuse of White Stripe on the part of the over-ambitious Novice. Leave White Stripe alone until the time is right...you will know!

There is a darker side to the Shades. It is in the nature of big mirrored aviator Shades to imply Authority. I.E. Cool Hand Luke, The Terminator, etc. A good pair of one-way shades acts in a similar fashion to the mirrored domes on the ceiling at your local K-mart, which conceal the direction in which the security camera is looking. They create Uncertainty, and thus, Fear. Again, the Novice may find this a dirty trick, but the Novice knows not. Suddenly, Everybody is suspect! Running incidents are immediately reduced to half when the Shades go on. Nobody would dare sit on the fountain when Shades are on patrol! The power of Shades also gives rise to a very important skill on the deck. Tractor Beam Eye. This happens after one notices all children reducing that giddy run to an inspired walk, even if you aren't looking at them...they don't know that! Tractor Beam Eye is the inverse phenomena. Just by looking at the careless poolside runner, their run immediately becomes a trot, even if they don't know you're watching. Of course, this can be quite a startling realization to the unknowing Lifeguard that considers his work nothing more than Mundane and Degrading. In fact, Tractor Beam Eye is usually the first thing to spark the Lifeguard's intrigue at the potential of poolside magick. As effective if not more so than Accusation Finger, Tractor Beam Eye lacks any logical explanation what-so-ever, and thus illuminiates the Novice Lifeguard with the knowledge of his own powers.

To go any further into the inner-workings of Lifeguard magick would be a breach of the Ordero Templi Lifeguardus oath that all Initiates have sworn upon themselves.

A parting word of advice; Avoid the whistle!
Not only is it crass and uncouth, but it is a crutch that will keep the potential Initiate from progressing even as far as Accusation Finger. Lord knows where I would be today had I not cast off my own whistle long ago.

Go forth now.

Gedun Choepel

2006-06-26T01:59:00.000-07:00

Examining through one's own experience how much attitudes change from childhood through to the decrepitude of old age, how could confidence be put in current conceptions! Sometimes even looking at a goddess, one is disgusted; sometimes even looking at an old woman, passion is generated. Something exists now, but later it will not be, and something else will come. Number cannot encompass the deceptions of the mind.

--Gedun Choepel

I read recently today in the fascinating work Tibet, Tibet by Patrick French about the iconoclastic Gelugpa monk Gedun Choepel, reknowned for his radical perspectives on Tibetan Buddhism, his works on sexuality, opium-smoking, and other eccentricities. I am, of course, intrigued by such strange and unconventional characters. In the Tibetan Arts of Love , translated by Jeffrey Hopkins, we read about his early brilliance and unswervingingly curious nature:

At age thirteen he demonstrated his brilliance by composing two complicated poetic structures within rectangles that can be read from many directions. He was ordained at Re-gong Monastery where he received the name Gedün Chöpel.

[...]He became famed for his abilities at debate, and during a major test he refuted to an overweening degree his college's own textbooks (by the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century renowned religious figure Jam-yang-shay-ba) to the point where the scholars of Jam-ba-ling were frozen into silence.

[...]He was fond of provoking other scholars in debate. Once he came to the debating courtyard dressed up as an illiterate monk-policeman, challenging and defeating the Mongolian scholar Ngak-wang-lek-den, who later became abbot of Go-mang. On another occasion he took such an unusual position against the chief scholar of Go-mang's rival college within Dre-bung Monastic University, called Lo-sel-ling, that his opponent was reduced to silence.

He even challenged the very foundations of Buddhism, by taking the position that

Buddhahood does not exist, with the result that an irate group of monks beat him up and with brute force made him agree that indeed Buddhahood does exist. The story says a great deal about the power of group-control that set limits on the analytical probings, in Ge-luk-ba colleges. Gedün Chöpel appears not to have always employed the usual facades through which Tibetan scholars pretend that their highly critical analyses are only clarifications, and not revisions or refutations, of famous figures' opinions. He apparently paid little attention to his studies while at Go-mang and left just before he was to take exams for the ge-shay degree, eschewing the vanity of high position.

He was also deeply involved in art, and had his own theories, based on meditational principles:

Heather Stoddard relates a story from the expedition photographer, Fany Mukerjee:

We used to talk about art a lot. I was educated in the western tradition in which art is one activity that can be picked up at a moment's notice and put down again, but Gedün Chöpel said the most important thing is concentration. The mind must be totally absorbed in the subject. One day for a joke he said that he would show me what he meant. He went to the market and bought a bottle of arak [liquor], he started to drink. He drank and drank and kept asking whether this face had gone red yet. By the last drop he was quite inebriated. He stripped off stark naked and sat down and started to draw; he drew a perfect figure of a man starting off at one fingertip and going all round in one continuous line until he ended back up at the fingertip again.

He was highly critical of the way his own tradition, the Gelugpas, interpreted the Madhyamaka philosophy, which seeks to establish the final nature of phenomena and reality-as-such:

An Inner Mongolian scholar, Ge-shay Gel-den, who took up residence in New Jersey, told me that he met a drunken Gedün Chöpel once on the streets of Hla-sa. Gedün Chöpel took him inside a house and with great lucidity laid out his interpretation of Madhyamika. Ge-shay Gel-den was amazed at his clarity despite being inebriated, a feat similar to the earlier demonstration of his powers of concentration by drawing when intoxicated.

Gedün Chöpel's basic criticism of Dzong-ka-ba's intricate analysis of Madhyamika is of being over-subtle. Specifically, he found Dzong-ka-ba's distinction between existence and inherent existence and the claim that only inherent existence is refuted in emptiness is too abstruse. Indeed, Dzong-ka-ba holds that until one realizes emptiness, one cannot validly distinguish between existence and inherent existence, and yet he insists that the first step in meditation on emptiness is to get a clear idea of what inherent existence is and how it appears to the mind. Dzong-ka-ba's followers attempt to explain away the apparent discrepancy by holding that the initial identification of inherent existence is with a mere correct assumption and not with valid cognition.

Nevertheless, Gedün Chöpel's criticism emphasizes the need to realize emptiness in meditation and not be content with verbal manipulation of terminology the meaning of which has not been experienced. He therefore concludes that no matter what verbal distinctions are made, one has in fact to refute pot, pillar, existence, non-existence, and so forth themselves—not making the mistake of leaving the basic object as it is and seeking to refute some separate inherent existence. He identifies this as the system of both the Nying-ma-bas and of experientially based Ge-luk-ba scholars such as Jang-gya Röl-bay-dor-jay Gung-tang Gön-chok-den-bay-drön-may and the First Pan-chen Lama Lo-sang-chö-gyi-gyel-tsen. As Jang-gya says:

It seems that leaving these concrete appearances as they are, they are searching for some hornlike thing to refute.

Hence, Gedün Chöpel was objecting not to Ge-luk-ba scholarship in general but to a prevalent tradition that shows—by how it treats conceptual distinctions—that it is not rooted in experience.

Eternal youth in a kingdom without space

2006-06-23T00:45:00.000-07:00

Something my brother posted on his MySpace blog recently; I know knot the author but hopefully that will be reviled soon enough.

I found it quite beautiful.

OM.

The title is:

Eternal youth in a kingdom without space

Fo

When the dark cloud
Withdrew not from the sky
And from all the world
The sun was hid,

Out of the depths
A new light neared,
and in our sleep we knew
That thou were there.

O the suns that come
From the depths of thine eyes,
And from thy lips
The flowing streams of love

Across the waves of an ethereal sea
The splendor of thy limbs
Entices us
To flaming courage.

Eternal youth,
Encircled by the music of the stars,
Giver of comfort,
Sparkling, free, and beautiful.

Men and women
Dance in thy glory,
Driving into death
For sight of thee.

Forever into light
Thy white form calls
Wave after wave,
And never do we age.

Right in the I

2006-06-17T21:43:00.000-07:00

"And how's the I?" as the random white Rastafarian revivalist might suddenly ask you in the midst of your daily business. In both of the homophonic I/Eye's meanings would imply, the answer, in my case today, might be something less than a cheerful burst of glibly-uttered rastaman vibration. The day was taken up mostly with the various phases of an eye infection resembling something out one of the more mild hell-realms. Having forgotten to clean my contacts for several weeks, I was appropriately enough bestowed with the glorious bounty of an insistent and demanding irration in my eyes today, controlling their every movement, hindering their natural clarity of vision and being an overall pain in the ass, which now but lingers in the form of a nasty stinger of a headache right smack dab in the Third Eye. Perhaps my third eye was strained beyond what it's normally accustomed to, having to compensate for the lack of that more gross form of vision that i usually rely upon. Jake Fiolek was my caretaker today, much to my appreciation and gratitude. The hospital wait was long, the doctor's sported the hopefully soon-to-be-reknowned name of Lulu. LULU. Love Up Love Under.

in shining and beaming and radiance

2006-03-29T19:50:00.000-08:00

"Bhikkhus, whatever kinds of worldly merit there are, all are not worth one sixteenth part of the heart-deliverance of loving-kindness; in shining and beaming and radiance the heart-deliverance of loving-kindness far excels them.

Just as whatever light there is of stars, all is not worth one sixteenth part of the moon's; in shining and beaming and radiance the moon's light far excels it; and just as in the last month of the Rains, in the Autumn when the heavens are clear, the sun as it climbs the heavens drives all darkness from the sky with its shining and beaming and radiance; and just as, when night is turning to dawn, the morning star is shining and beaming and radiating; so too, whatever kinds of worldly merit there are, all are not worth one sixteenth part of the heart-deliverance of loving-kindness; in shining and beaming and radiance the heart-deliverance of loving-kindness far excels them."

--The Buddha, Shakyamuni
From the Itivuttaka, Sutta 27
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/nanamoli/wheel007.html

arousing

2006-03-29T19:39:00.000-08:00

"Who among human beings would not wish to enter the mountains and cultivate the path? But fettered by lust and desires, no one proceeds."

"Although talented and wise, if a person dwells in the village, all the buddhas feel pity and sadness for him. Though a person does not practise the path, if he dwells in a mountain hut, all the saints are happy with him."

--Wonhyo (617-689), Korean monk
from 'Arouse Your Mind and Practise!' (Palsim suhaeng chang!)