...650,000 Iraqi dead I think was the title of this

[whimsicaldeb]

I have never had anyone shoot at me, but I had two guys in california try to push me off a dock in california because I told them I was a Jew.

One day I will get over the Jew thing, I suppose if I lived in Israel it would not be so important. But to tell you the truth I have never had any desire what so ever to live in Israel. Just another country and another government to me. My nationality is american, I wish some Palestinian refugee could use my right of return.

Good luck with your demons Deb. YOu can pull my daisy anytime.

inFriendship
jack tilles

So your name is Jack! Nice to know, I'll remember.

I chase my demons around all the time, with a grin, and success.

I'm sorry someone tried to push you off the dock because you told them you were jewish. That was shitty of them.

And, I hope you don't "get over" being Jewish ... instead I hope you reach that place where you’ve incorporated it, integrated it into your whole being – so it’s no more, but no less of you – and then can live being no longer troubled, embarrassed, pained, apologizing, or explaining why/how/that it’s a part of yourself … and just be Jack (again).

(... and no religion too. - John Lennon, "Imagine")

Nice name, Jack.
And ~ Nice to meet you.

[stilltrucking]

They were speaking Polish, it reminded me of my grandmother. I mentioned that my grandmother was from Poland but she was not really Polish because she was a Jew. We were standing on a freight dock around Oxnard. As we were talking they kept crowding closer and closer, I kept backing away, they were smiling all the time. Then I had tingling sensation down my spine, I looked behind me and realized that I was standing right on the edge of the dock, one more inch and I would fall off and it was a hell of a drop. I ducked around them and we had a moment where we stared at each other.


Most eastern European Jews can trace their lineage back to four women who lived in Europe about a thousand years ago. Being a Jew is all about the women for me. Those powerful women who owned my ass when I was just a little Jackster. Have you ever wondered how they can trace "Eve" back to Africa? It is all about the the mitochondrial DNA. Nobody knows where Adam is from, because that mitochodrial DNA is passed on u from mother to daughter in an unbroken chain. What did those old timers know about that. I know nothing about Judaism, just what I picked up from my family. It makes no difference who the father is, if your mother is A jewess you are a jew. Not so sure if I am a jew I never had a bar mitzvah. My father a stone cold atheist would not let us go to Hebrew school. I suppose I am just a boy after all these years.

. How the women of my family loved that mighty smighty patriarchial god of their fathers. Me I don't want no part of it no more. Not that I don't believe in god, just not in that god of vengence.

I like this bit from Ammons poem a lot. It is about as theological as I can get these days.

"I know / there is / perfection in the being / of my being, / that I am / holy in amness / as stars or / paperclips,"

The elegiac strain in Ammons's poetry is surpassed only by the countermining impulse to say yes to the universe. "I know / there is / perfection in the being / of my being, / that I am / holy in amness / as stars or / paperclips," he writes in "Come Prima."

The knowledge coexists with the recognition that the universe moves "from void to void" and that void and being are indistinguishable. Yet the poet's elation survives. Determined to convert fear into praise, and anxiety into poetry, Ammons balances his scientist's skepticism with the Romantic conception of the imagination as redemptive of, or compensatory for, the bitterness of actuality.

http://www.poems.com/essaleh2.htm

Friendship is my religion these days.

Being a Jew is about my family. Not religion, politics, or anything else. Just family. A tribal thing I suppose.


This is a long way from 655,000 dead in Iraq.
This is spontaneous gibberish. Hope it makes some sense.

[whimsicaldeb]

This thread sure did take a turn from the 655,000 (and rising) dead in Iraq. But none of it is gibberish, and yes it makes - and you tied it all back up again with the Ammon poem ....for, the bitterness of actuality.

War brings death, can't have one any other way. Death, on the other hand comes whether there is war or not hench ... the bitterness of actuality. Or resignation.

.How the women of my family loved that mighty smighty patriarchial god of their fathers. Me I don't want no part of it no more. Not that I don't believe in god, just not in that god of vengence.

Being a Jew is about my family. Not religion, politics, or anything else. Just family. A tribal thing I suppose.

Ahhh... thank you for explaining.

Hard then for anyone to talk about anything Jewish/Israel related, without it seeming (feeling?) as if someone is poking at your family. ? Okay for you to poke at your own scab (perhaps) but not others, "outsiders." ?

?

…

There are people (Jewish people as well) without such deep emotional attachments, or all the baggage that comes with those hurts, or they choose to unload their baggage in different manner ... hence jewlicious

I thought you'd appreciate their art from; their fresh sassiness... I had no idea it would trigger a different kind of response. Not that there is anything wrong with your response. There isn’t. You’re working through things … I can relate. My mom died in 1985 and it wasn't until this year 2006 that I can say I finally reached peace with everything. So I know how hard it is, how much inner work is involved, how long it can take.

And 655,000 (and counting) dead in Iraq – and the bitterness of actualities all have their parts.

It’s okay.

But because I've gone through what I’ve gone through and have come out the other side, I also you know people can get there (through things) - and when we do - we see things differently because we're no longer looking at things through the eyes/emotions/thoughts of pain(s).

That makes a tremendous amount of difference – not the least of which is when it’s time to talk of solutions, it’s this place we need to be talking from – not our hurt sides, our victim hoods.

It's not god, it's ego - and religion/god/all that other crap is simply one of the things the ego will grab hold of to give justification for it’s actions. If ego wants to be 'mighty smighty' then 'by god' it will do so, whether god takes the form of religion (in your case Judaism), or science, or politics, or even something as simple as being a different sex, a stronger physique.

And who and what gets hurt in the process be damned!

The desire to be mighty smighty and the god that got created from those desires is not true Judaism (or any religion) and the more we can separate the two … the more peaceful inside we will become.

But now I ramble, and am aware I'm talking to someone who already knows this quite well indeed.

[stilltrucking]

Nice link, very attractive people.
.

A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple...
www.commentarymagazine.com/Summaries/V87I6P26-1.htm - 28k -

Speaking of Demons, I have seen those demons from the tibetan book of the dead, or at least something that looked a lot like them. But the were red, blood red. Nice dream, at first I was scared but then I just said, bring it on, come enlighten me. I would not make a pimple on a Zen Buddhist's ass, but I am drawn to it, I am too lazy to meditate. But I like walking, that is about as close to a practice as I have. I remember reading that someone asked the Dalai Lama how long he meditated each day. He said, "I don't have to meditate." Who do I think I am, a quaker zen judist?

thanks for reading and writing.

[jimboloco]

Jesus
I thought this was the fireplace
so why would you delete your posts
I mean
don't doubt yourself
run it out, man
I mean you can edit but hey
I occasionally delete as well
but not an entire rant
gone forever
Christ Saddamn killed a lotta shi hites
an we killed a lot of both clans
and they now killing each other
what goes around comnes around
an we gettin killed toooo

fuck
a stand in th sand

[stilltrucking]

I even delete my deletions
We see each other's hman foibles
our idols have feet of clay or more like sand
shifting with a greedy wind

nothing to do with you jimboloco
I can't enlighten you
I only endarken myself

reading about F Scott Fitzgeral, and the Empty Cloud.

A Buddhist's Analysis of "The Great Gatsby" :
While the Still Eyes of the Witness Watch

http://www.zenunbound.com/gatsby.html

Here, Nick/Fitzgerald approaches reaching a condition of "seeing the vista," to use the phrase of Seiju Bob Mammoser – except that Nick/Fitzgerald acts as a witness, not in fully non-selfconscious detachment from the activity.

Insightful are these words from a biography posted at the website of Brandeis University: “… Fitzgerald had the gift of double vision. Like Walt Whitman or his own Nick Carraway, he was simultaneously within and without, at once immersed in his times and able to view them and himself with striking objectivity. This rare ability, along with this rhetorical brilliance, has established Fitzgerald as one of the major novelists and story writers of the twentieth century.” Of course, what this website's short biography calls “double vision” is a sibling of transcendent insight, an ability to see oneself in everybody else and everybody else within oneself. It is [to use a familiar Buddhist metaphor] to see the moon reflected in a hundred dewdrops. It is interesting that critics/interpreters of the novel do something slavishly that is wrong: They follow Fitzgerald's seeming lead and identify the billboard eyes as belonging to Dr. Eckleburg, when, in fact, we know it is the doctor's billboard, with a surreal (noseless) depiction of a patient of his (not the doctor, himself) in glasses. Confusion of identity is a part of the novel that underscores its true theme: The within and without; the ability of be both the watcher and the watched – the rapture (and shock, sometimes) of being both yourself and any other person. Indeed, it is the answer to the Firesign Theatre ditty, “How can you be in two places at once when you're not anywhere at all?”

In an early biography, Fitzgerald is quoted as having said to his secretary, “I take people to me and change my conception of them and then write them out again. My characters are all Scott Fitzgerald. Even my feminine characters are feminine Scott Fitzgeralds.”

While Fitzgerald cannot have been “empty of self” in the full-throttle Buddhist sense, a careful reading of “Gatsby” indicates that, with his fiction, he moved beyond a simple projection of his identity. Jy Din Shakya explains the difference in his online article “Empty Cloud: the Teaching of Xu Yun”:

Every where I go a poet or an artist on studio eight has been there first. But even so it is only me, as I imagine myself from inside your skull.

sorry about the deletions, if it annoys you I will put them back. It was all about Jewcentricity.

nothing to do with you jimboloco
can you let me slide on the deletions
can you shine it on
if it annoys you I will put them back even if I don't want to

But most of all
I want to move on
drive on
cause it don't mean nothing
just everything.

[mnaz]

life constitutes exchange. and richness in the opportunity is sacred. and conflict in the exchange is mutually assured. i write down truth whenever i have time, and resolve nothing of the sort in the effort. seems to be the way.

[stilltrucking]

"Godd is not mocked except by believers." Anne Sexton

I could put it back mnaz, but it really had not much to do with Israel, it was more about "You & Your Folks, Me & My Folks" Funkadelic.

We exchange, not mock. Where is the Zen in that?

I don't mind if she does, hell I got it coming.

But it is easy to move on

that is the way of peace

drive on

[jimboloco]

oh mercy what a post
i got a big anthology of fitz's stories
mercy i read one
dragged in from the jewel mines
hasta la mañana
finkadelik
more ghastly news
i want syria and iran to follow up
do what the usa can't retore order
cuz we did what they couldn't
get rid of saddamn
but i will not demonize either of those countries
mercy
we are on a demonizing rolll

[stilltrucking]

Deb you have convinced me, now can we talk about raccoons?


Lets just talk about Zen
Lets talk about student drivers
Racoons or elephants
I love elephants
even if I did hit one over the head with a six foot piece of two by four.
Karma such a weird thing, years later someone snuck up behind me and hit me upside the the head with a two by four, and I thought "why me lord?" than l figured it was because of that elephant I hit.

Such beautiful brown eyes, the alpha cow took a fancy to me, sometimes when I walked by she would wrap her trunk around my waist and pull me to her. Then she would take my hand in the end of her her trunk and put it in her mouth. I felt like I was a priest in a Hindu temple

in friendship deb
That is my religion
But I may be a worse quaker than I am a jew
but even so
I would like to die a Friend
"a friend is someone you can say any tom fool thing to and still remain friends"


mnaz thank you for understanding

I hardly remember what I had deleted, your quote refreshed my memory, going to try and repost as much as I can.

I am done

Going to leave it up to you deb
Earth Day is coming up
I am thinking about it a lot.
Obama so green but he voted for the coal liguification to diesel bill. Not sure what his reasons for that was. Well I hope I see ya next earth day if not sooner. Deb what you see as me stalking you maybe just be autism on my part, I get fixated on what interests me.

[stilltrucking]

Whimsical Deb wrote:

Again ~ If you need me to do anything, remove anything, get lost ... whatever ~ let me know, and it'll be done.

I tell you what you can do
just keep on keeping on
Okay?

Going to miss you if you don't
in Friendship
jackie
lets move on

[Doreen Peri]

lets move on

Looks like this was a conversation that took place back in November and it's now February.

Appears everyone has moved on, Jack.

Good to see you.

Let's do something new, ok?

[stilltrucking]

[Doreen Peri]

sorry jack.. just trying to help 'cause seems to me would be better to move on rather than continuing a conversation from several months ago

i'm thinking of you, that's all

wondering why you even came back to this

[Diana Moon Glampers]

Thank you for your concern.

I am sorry that I seem to be a challenge for you.

It is probably just my vanity that makes me think so.

I like miss moon very much

She is a character in a Vonnegut ovel called God Bless you Mr Rosewater. And everyone in rosewater county thought she was to dumb to live.

That is me doreen, I don't get it
I never will
there is a Zen method called "the way of not getting it" It just comes natural to me

Once again I thank you for taking an interest
inFriend ship
jt