[Simon V.]

The story of Reid’s connection to Blofeld:

http://www.danreid.org/daniel-reid-articles-john-blofeld-the-wheel-of-life.htm

[Simon V.]

He is running a detox program in Australia with his wife. His latest book is called the Tao of Detox.

Simon

[Simon V.]

[Simon V.]

Thanks for the this, and I checked out Russln’s link.
I hadn’t heard of him. I’ve just been looking into “The Keely Motor” as well…
I’m particularly interestned in his “Heimkraftwerk” idea. We really, really need this kind of thing in the world, and the more people there are working on such ideas independently and enmasse the better, to pull the carpet from underneath the psychopathic oil junky trillionaire vanity bullies.

Simon

[Simon V.]

I was also interested then (it was late eighties and nineties I guess) by Robert Anton Wilson–you find what you’re looking for in your ‘reality tunnel’ kind of thing. But there IS an order to things on the other hand, and there are discarnate entities, but that’s a pretty big grab bag.
Taking into consideration the idea of ‘elementals’ (relatively amorphous, elementary, simple intelligences) seeking angels could literally conjure them up. See Blavatksky, Isis Unveiled (it’s a hard slog but well worth it). You’re probably already familiar with what I’m saying.
Simon

[Simon V.]

First time I heard anyone else having that quirk!
I am not sure I buy the material on that website though, but it certainly is curious to me that others have had the thing of looking at the clock at 111 or 1111, as I had never heard of it being a ‘thing’ en masse.
In my case I chalked it up to preconscious association to my birthday (11 Jan), but that was after noticing the phenomenon and looking for an explanation, as I recall. I have since suggested to myself (successfully) not to do it as it became kind of irritating!
Simon

[Simon V.]

I couldn’t help but interject this ambiguous but beautiful Leonard Cohen poem on the topic of love:

Dance me to the End of Love

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic ’til I’m gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love
Yeah dance me to the end of love

Let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone
Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon
Show me slowly what I only know the limits of
And dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the wedding now, dance me on and on
Dance me very tenderly and dance me very long
We’re both of us beneath our love, both of us above
And dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the children who are asking to be born
Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn
Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn
And dance me to the end of love

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic till I’m gathered safely in
Touch me with your naked hand, touch me with your glove
Dance me to the end of love

[Simon V.]

[Simon V.]

Well, I can relate to that from my own life.
My philosophy is to maintain friendship if at all possible, over and above any changes in the ‘offical status’ of relationships. It’s always great to see when that is possible.

[Simon V.]

Sorry I forgot to answer your question–yes I’m in Canada, in Halifax.

[Simon V.]

There again it’s hard not to be affected by the person lying right next to you, who’ve you’ve just made love with, and will wake up with.
Pros and cons. Naturally it depends on each other’s mutual stage, each other’s trajectory.
I recall experiences sleeping with women where the dreams were really quite odd, where I found myself feeling like I was on some kind of peculiar subtle drug in the morning; a deep mixing of two different styles of being. Both glorious and dangerous I guess.

Simon

[Simon V.]

I see your point about Cohen. But I have a lot of sympathy for that guy, his poetry, his wisdom. It’s a different path he’s on, not really strictly a meditation oriented–it’s an aesthetic path mainly. He’s reaping the fruit he’s sewn and I find what I glimpse of it both grounding and mind expanding. He doesn’t actually consider himself a buddhist.

I also have mixed feelings about sleeping alone. It can be awfully nice to drift off together. I’m thinking of having the discussed option and wherewithal to sleep alone easily makes sense, you know, not fixing anything in stone but having options. Sounds like you and your wife have worked that out well.

Simon

[Simon V.]

When I was living in Germany (Stuttgart area) I was once approached by a woman who was a refugee from the eastern european crisis (around 2000). I simply don’t remember what nationality she was in that mix–nor do I care.

I was riding on the train home to the town I was living in with my now ex wife (who is still a great friend I’m happy to say), from teaching English in Stuggart. I noticed that a woman was taking interest in me, an interest I at first took to be that kind of interest vanity would always like it to be. But then I began to pick up on a deep, existential intensity to her manner of regarding me, something beyond the bourgois everyday world most everyone else including me was floating in.

I got out off the train. She followed and came up beside me. She offered to give me a tarot reading, offered in a way that was very serious emotionally. The kind of energy I got from her was like that from an intelligent friend in need. She was fairly young, maybe early twenties, attractive.

I thanked her but no, I didn’t want a tarot reading. She kept following me; I had not rejected her as a person, just her tarot reading; I knew something heavy was going down with her. I noticed another detail: her German was very polished, grammatically correct, well pronounced. Here was someone who in her native situation had gotten a good education, who’d probably come from a relatively ‘well-placed’ family.

She opened up. She was a refugee who indeed had had a good situation originally, but now she had used up her resources, didn’t know if her husband or parents were alive or dead and couldn’t get any leads on them, and her landlord was going to kick her and her kids out in a few weeks if she didn’t come up with the rent. She had approached other men, men who looked like they had money, who had alluded that if certain favours were granted, they would give her lots of money… She had refused. She was resisting the spiral into prostitution. She was trusting me with her true situation, which was mortally serious, terrifying for her and her kids.

I walked to the bank machine of my local bank as we walked and talked. I could only really rationally afford about two thirds of her rent–otherwise I would no longer have been able to pull my weight in my household for that month. She asked once for more, but I refused. She would have to find others, or use the money to change her circumstances in another way apart from placating a slum landlord. She accepted that, and was grateful for what was given. My feeling is that that was enough, and she was already helped by a human gesture. You have to pick and choose in a world that has few easy answers–if another such individual had come along ten minutes later, I would have had to say no, etc. I wish I’d been then in a position to offer her some work (she was obviously competent–but had no work visa), but wasn’t.

When I was a kid part of how my single mom mother made a living for us was as a lifeguard. I asked her to tell me about that one time. One of the things she said was part of the training, was that when a person is desperate, drowning, you need to take care that you don’t let them take you down with them in the intensity of their panic–that would apply to even someone you love dearly–because that doesn’t serve either of you. Help out without sacrificing your own balance. Actually, that is a lesson I still find hard–certainly I have partially learned it the hard way, and have the heart-wounds to show for it. (But shall we live never getting our hands dirty?)

Still, the above doesn’t necessarily provide an answer to your situation, which has a different character to it, but I thought I’d share it as it is along the same lines of weighing the needs of ‘me’ versus ‘you’, where we’re all swimming in the same pond, and if one goes down, drowning in dark, poisonous despair, the whole pond is leeched of some light.

Simon

[Simon V.]

Actually I saw a show on this on tv at the gym a while back. I was sitting on the couch at the gym eating Doritos, happy as a clam. No, of course it was one of those screens that blare at you from the wall, meant to distract you from paying attention to your body as you work out.
But it was interesting and I followed along. I also found that it made me uneasy though. It made me think of that whole ‘brain machine’ thing, which always calls to mind for me that machine in Phillip K. Dick’s ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’, the ‘mood organ’, which could be used to program your moods… I can imagine some very creepy future scenarios combining brain machines, lucid dreaming ‘tech’, drugs, and ‘commercial interests’…
It’s a little too pat and subject to unsavoury manipulations by all-too-human motives (not that the happy monk and his scientist admirers are people with fishy motives).
Indeed, suffering has it’s place–regret for instance…
Yeah, and there’s being happy, finding your Zen, and then there’s ‘craft’, which you either acquire, or not. But first I do think people could use plenty of clever non-dual magic escape hatches into happy states, as much as possible, to make space for further refinements.
Simon

[Simon V.]

“are there both men and women who tire of this “game” and instead seek connections on deeper levels (levels which become accessible through cultivation)?”

Well, of course there are. But people also go through stages; the game may come up and get shelved several times over.

I think DNA is being given more credit than it’s due here, frankly, though obviously there is some truth to what people have observed as part of their actual experience.

What I can tell you from experience is, don’t underestimate the power of the maternal instinct to trump all other considerations. Even women who have really decided to not have children seem to be really haunted by it, like there are potential babies whispering sweetly in their ears…

Also relevant here I think is the idea of men and women just being friends, irregardless of sexual politics and of whether they are married or not; this is more important to me than the other considerations.

Simon

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