08/10/97 1:46 PM Then I found myself asking the question - what to do with freedom? Meditate? Meditate upon what?

Emptiness - Sunyata? What is that anyway? What about the most enlightened states of consciousness Ive experienced? Could that be anything like emptiness? What are those states of consciousness and how would I experience them with this freedom to perceive? I can say that those states had something to do with integration and wholeness. There is an awareness of spiritual being. Awareness that includes and transcends the body awareness. Could that be why they used the word transcendental meditation in the years of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and the Beatles? Transcending what? Could it be a transcendence of the sensory state of consciousness. The Buddhists use the word emptiness - the Mahayana Buddhists at least. That which is empty is different from the full. The full is more like the finite and the empty more like the infinite. Unbounded is necessarilly empty. Something occurs when we become conscious that what we are is consciousness. Yet this realization is rather a beginning than and end. It brings an awareness of great mystery. So I am really infinite consciousness with no beginning and no end. A sense of vastness. Conjures up memories of the statement of Bodhidharma to the Emperor of China or was it a province of what is now China? Vast emptiness with nothing - no holiness in it? As one reads on into Buddhist literature there are many references to the original nature and the natural state of consciousness as pure and tranquil; empty. Like the peacefulness and tranquility of the wilderness. Wilderness then has a resemblance to the original nature - to spirit. Thats a first time realization right there - that wilderness experience by its likeness to spirit has the capability of awakening spiritual consciousness and of nurturing consciousness. Perhaps this is why so many awakening beings of India travel into the high wilderness of the Himalaya.

From this chair I can see accross the back deck to the south east the high rocky peaks of the Blood of Christ Mountains. Through the branches and green needles of the pinyon pines. Around the room are works of art. Very colorful. Pieces of pottery. Some crafted by Jodi Kukura. Some by Mary Wickham. A bunch of sage. Simmering pot pourri. Music from the radio in New Mexico. Dried Indian Paintbrush flowers. A Sonoran Desert calendar photograph . Painted rocks. Books in a bookcase. In the corner is a what used to be a fireplace. There is a quarter circle of flat flagstones on the floor and rocks from the yard have been mortared together to form a hearth like structure on the lower parts of the walls at the corner. This encloses a sort of altar or holy and sacred place. It didnt start out that way but it is now. That word sacred reminds me. Whatever is - is sacred. Even the noise and distraction of the cards being collided with the floor above my room. I think of the problems people have to endure. Violence and abuse from other humans seems to be about the worst of it. Psychological and physical torture. From one generation to another. By parents to children. By fathers in particular to sons in particular. Rape and beatings. All experience is sacred and perfect and how difficult that is to accept when such horrors go on. It points to the possibility that we human beings, we spiritual beings are heroic beings (Ayn Rand said it -how strange) who endure the most excrutiating experiences and survive since that is our nature. Beings who transmigrate from one physical form to another and who are in fact timeless - existing simultaneously in all incarnations. Although consciousnes seems fixed to one particular incarnation and to a very finite now moment in one incarnation, the fixation is a skill - a talent - the nature of sentient beings. We have the ability to fixate our consciousness - even though we are simultaneously all that we are. One thing about the Mahayanists and particularly the Chinese Mahayanists of the East - Chan and Zen - is that they reject all

aspects of the intellect or at least seriously question everything intellectual in recognition of the fact that it is the intellect that must be eroded in order for prajna-dhyana to emerge in full strength. What all this means is that erosion of intellect requires less emphasis on what is written in texts even the ancient Buddhist text and even less emphasis on the spoken words of Zen masters. Perhaps thats why the early and later Zen masters exhibit what appears to be bizarre, erratic and even irrational behavior. Yet there is something concealled here. It is the wisdom of spirit. Hui-Neng the Chinese patriarch of Chan, an illiterate person is said ironically (what we this champion of prajna and eroder of intellect have felt about a book named after him) in The Sutra of Hui-Neng to have encouraged his students to abandon solitary and secluded meditation or at least to de-emphasize it and rather to play a role in daily affaits - presumeably the daily affairs of the collective effort - the liberation of sentient beings from illusion. Hui-Neng makes statements to the effect that one can actually be meditating while engaged in daily affairs such as cooking and washing and eating and working. What I see in this teaching of Hui-Neng is the idea that it is possible to be conscious and to experience enlightened consciousness while going about the usual tasks of daily living. Food no longer just arrives from nature. Food must be cultivated. It must aslo be cooked and the dishes washed. The body must occassionally be washed also. Then there is time left for assisting in the process of enlightenment liberation of consciousness.

08/10/97 3:40 PM Just a few minutes ago I was sitting on the back deck, sipping tea in a china cup, smoking a camel light and marvelling at how very quiet it is this (afternoon) morning. No card collision noises and the other noises from the upstairs quarters which are under forceful occupation - no sliding doors and no flushing. Almost

immediately after coming back inside from the warm sun the noises have begun again. It rained this morning and early afternoon so there is a wetness outside. Saw two blue jays flying about squawking. While outside, my attention drawn to the unusual quiteness, it occured to me. Are you going to San Francisco. Be sure to wear some flour in your hair. A significant date. A Jacko sting ray. Now writing about it attention is drawn to how consciousness is drawn to that which is different. Like the quietness this (afternoon) morning. Its a little like the realization that sameness diminishes. As in a marriage. When first married and fresh to one another, ones beloved just sucks up all our attention. Then with time and familiarity we lose interest. Its in the nature of consciousness for the familiar to disappear into the unconscious. Is the Unconscious that is written about by Freud, Jung, Fromme and the rest, similar to Cosmic Consciousness. The present day view of Freuds meaning of the Unconscious is that it is that aspect of our psyche which harbours horrors and demons have repressed by conditioning. That repressed part of psyche that is responsible for the demonic events that emerged in Germany during and after World War I. Freud, they say, lived in Vienna, Austria and this is where he practiced as a psychiatrist and the first psychoanalyst. There was at about the same time a man who was a painter who lived in Vienna,Austria. The man is said to have been involved in fighting as a soldier for the Austrian-German side. The history books tell us that a member of the royal family of Austria-Hungary was shot dead with his wife in the present day Bosnian city of Sarajevo. At that time, the Balkans (presumably including the present day states of Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzogovina, Albania, Dalmatia and maybe even Macedonia, were under occupation by military forces directed from Austria-Hungary. Its likely from my limited knowledge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that the capital city of that empire was Vienna where Freud and

Hitler both apparently lived during the first few decades of this century. Historians seem to generally agree that it was the assasination of Arch-Duke Ferdinand and his wife, the Duchess that was the spark that started the inferno that was World War I. They also seem to agree that Europe was so dry and flammable that all it took was a spark and the spark would have come from some other event if it hadnt come from the revolutionary act of that Balkan rebel assasin. We can speculate that technology had something to do with what was happenning in Europe. Going back a few centuries, all or most of Europe was controlled by monarchist structures. The historians teach us that that the erosion of the monarchist form of government began in the British Isles in the early years of the second millenium. The Magna Carta, they say was where the idea of popular-democratic structures of government emerged again for the first time since their original emergence in the city states of ancient Greece. It was in England at the time of King Henry VIII, that the first serious departures from centuries of Roman dominated control of the peoples of Europe began. Henry VIII started the Church of England. Soon there were other Christian movements in Europe which were based on resistance to Roman authority. We have to remember that the Graeco-Roman rulers had occupied European lands since before the time of Christ and that the peoples of western Europe had resisted Roman occupation with armed force that lead to the sack of Rome and the fall of the (western) Roman empire. What followed in western Europe was several hundred years of what is now called the dark ages or medaeval era. In time Roman occupation of western Europe was re-asserted. The second time it took a different form. The first time it was military dictatorship with its head-quarters in the city of Rome. The second time it was a covert operation and structure directed through the Roman Catholic Church which masqueraded as a religious and spiritual movement founded on the teachings of the jew Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus was clearly not a

supporter of the authority of the Roman colonial regime that controlled his native land of what is today Israel and what was before that Palestine. The Christian movement can be viewed as not a purely spiritual movement but a movement with the expressed goal of liberation of the Roman occupied lands of the people of Israel and perhaps all the descendants of Abraham. These lands had been occupied by Macedonian/Greek invaders since the time of Alexander the Great three hundred years before the birth of Jesus. It makes one wonder if perhaps the Roman authorities who made the decisions to re-occupy western Europe after the dark ages may not have looked back upon the Christian movement in the eastern lands of their empire and the armed resistance in western Europe and decided to borrow from the Christian movement - to masquerade their strategy to dominate western Europe in the form of a spiritual-religious authority - sanctioned by God - with the authority of God. We might even view what happenned in the following way. The wealthy and powerful elite rulers of post medaeval Rome, wanted to re-establish the former domination of their ancestors empire and needed resources in western Europe to do so. Perhaps it was the tin resources of southern England. Bronze needed both tin and copper and bronze was essential for military power at that time in history. The island of Cyprus had long been known for its copper resources. The word cyprus and the word copper are in fact related. We can speculate that there were a group of greedy meglamaniacs who banded together and assembled a common vision in which they saw themselves as accumulating a huge treasure chest of possessions by using military force to steal as much as they could fromas many people as they could and that they decided that the way to do this was to first put together an army of people to take possession of the the most important tin and copper resources within their immediate vicinity and that meant that they sent out their soldiers to southern England and to Cyprus. It would appear that the core of their strategy involved the establishment of missions in these andadjacent lands. Christian missionaries were sent out to set up monasteries and churches that were to serve in reality as what

we would today name safe houses for Roman intelligence operatives. The agents of the Roman intelligence agency were perhaps instructed to masquerade as priests and to get to know the people in their areas and to figure out who was in charge and who had popular support. If we can draw analogies from more modern modes of operation when greedy people set out to amass great wealth by theft on a grand scale, we might expect that a Roman oligarchy, using the church of Rome, took control of the lands of western Europe by setting up puppet governments which took the form of monarchies - based upon a myth that members of these families have been appointed by God to rule their people. It begins to take on the form of one of the biggest and most invasive hoaxes in human history. At its heart and essence however, it is very similar to what happened to the American Indian people when the European invaders arrived. In time there were those who saw through the lies and propaganda and recognized clearly that the peoples of western Europe had been manipulated and enslaved and stolen from by a greedy, corrupt, murderous oligarchic clique in the city of Rome. In Europe, particularly in north eastern Europe - the British Isles, Germany, the low countries, where the people had a common heritage, Roman authority as it existed in the form of the coalition of the Roman Church and their native allies, was vigorously resisted and displaced especially in Brittain and Germany. One of the most significant results of this was the recognition that monarchical forms of government must be limited in order to limit foreign domination from the corrupt cliques of the east. Or, for that matter, any fucking corrupt and greedy, bloodthirsty, parasitic, murderous, sadistic clique. It seems entirely likely that the emergence of popular forms of government in Brittain (and subsequently in other neighboring European countries) was designed as a national liberation

movement for native peoples seeking freedom from foreign domination in Rome or anywhere. The struggle for freedom from foreign domination in Brittain predictably involved the development of military and particularly of Naval force and marine transportation technology. The British Isles were surrounded by ocean and any foreign occupation force had to control the coastlines. The British navy was a first line of defense of the coasts and particlualry the south eastern coasts closest to Europe. So it was that in Brittain, a national liberation movement and the illumination of liberation and freedom gave rise to creative vision that took the form of a strategy that involved both a struggled to establish new and non-monarchist forms of government as well as the full embrace of technology and science aimed military resistance to Roman directed military force via the European monarchist alliance manipulated by the church of Rome - the Roman intellience service - directed in turn by the corrupt clique. Marine transportation technology eventually lead to the discovery of the Americas by Europeans who found there native peoples with relatively simple technologies and weak military technology. They were quickly overcome with the military technologies that had been developed for the domination of native peoples in Europe and then for resistance by the occupied peoples. Its natural that in response to threat to Roman domination of Europe due to British resistance, that the bastards found it neccesary to establish access to the oceans. Gibraltar is now recognized as a key to control of the Med. Even though the British defeated the Roman controlled Spanish Armada, it was Spanish ships that first made land fall in the Americas. The English, Dutch and French were not far behind them. The fight for freedom of European peoples was quickly exported from Europe to the Americas.