GENIUS FORUMS

Bob Michael wrote:But then what can one expect in these last, dark days?

Bob M.

These last, dark days before what, do you reckon?

The vast majority of it being on a shallow and meaningless intellectual, rational, or logical level, rather than on a deep and meaningful heartfelt or mystical one. But then what can one expect in these last, dark days?

Well, Bob, the answer to that is quite easy: A Talking Ass.® Stick near me, because I as an ass will get to the Pomised Land!

Seems then you're alluding that we need to get more and more in touch with our true human instincts. Our true and proper unadulterated human nature. And then fully LIVE it out. Which I agree.

I take someone's idea and let it act on me, and see what rises to the surface. Since I don't know his work---not that I am not interested it is just that I have a full feed-bag at this time (the expression you bipedals use is 'full plate' if memory serves). I was relying on you for a fill-in.

Truthfully, I think you might have a little bit of difficulty defining 'human instincts'. Getting a hard-on and jacking off is the main preoccupation of human males, and the females are all obsessed with putting long objects up their---well, you know where. Are these the sorts of instincts you speak of? Another instinct is defense. To ruthlessly defend territory, food supplies, and those naughty ape-women. Surely you cannot mean those instincts? A true and proper 'unadulterated human nature'. That's when I said you had Rousseau-esque leanings, and I DIDN'T mean that in the sense that 'everywhere men are in chains'. I meant the longing for a romantic naturalist past, like in some Tahitian proto-porno flick. Half-naked beach bombshells with coy laughter and hearty sexual appetites (and no uptight cultural statutes that prohibit foreign sailors from boning the bonny babes). Oh, the instinctual life! Is that what you're in to?

No, Bob. To be quite truthful I am very very far from such a romantic camp (romantic campiness). In that sense I have come under the sway of my pimply-faced and medicated brethren of the GF: (Whether they'd in fact say this I have no solid idea): I personally believe that we owe everything to this marvellous 'psyche' of ours, but especially to our intellectualizing, conceptualizing mind.

We need, I suppose, to strike an accord with instincts but, between now and infinity, between what was and what shall be, there is no turning back.

We are going to basically re-engineer ourselves! Yes, the moment in history has come when we have the skill! What counts is this tripped-out brain we have, the body is a mere detail! This marvellous hopped-up dreamer brain that conceptualizes vast worlds! that is a rebel and laughs in the face of what fate doled out through Nature! We shall successfully re-engineer ourselves into a marvellous, compact little brain in a hard, impenetrable shell and voyage, dreaming great dreams, on magnificent space craft past the stellar eruptions where universes are born! Who knows? Maybe we'll all be packed together on the same ship, me, you, Diebert, Nick, Anna, Jason, Tomas, Elizabeth, Pie, The Mad Turkey, Brokenbed (in honor of his nuptials)---oh just ALL of us! One happy, bickering, ever-arguing family! Jew and Gentile united at long last!

Seriously though, can you tell me a little more of what you mean by human instincts?

Carl G wrote:These last, dark days before what, do you reckon?

Hi Carl,

Before the Light of Love and Truth finally comes into the world and sets it ablaze with the glory of the Infinite. Perhaps you might wish to check it out further in the very back of the good book.

Bob M.

Talking Ass wrote:Well, Bob, the answer to that is quite easy: A Talking Ass.® Stick near me, because I as an ass will get to the Pomised Land!

Ah yes, an ass and a wretch (for us humans). Both of us Kingdom bound. Yet I wonder if you're not there already, as I am a good deal of the time. Though I still long for the far greater one that's soon on the horizon. Hope to get to see you there TA.

Bob M.

Talking Ass wrote:Seriously though, can you tell me a little more of what you mean by human instincts?

I'm not so sure you really need to be told anything further on the matter, my friend. Though I'll get back with you a little later.

Bob M.

Hi Bob,

Some of the people here on this list---I am not one of them---seem to think or to imply that they are 'enlightened', whatever that means, and sometimes give me the impression they are beyond human concerns. I don't feel that is all the case with me.

Still, I am quite interested to know what this issue of instincts means to you. I just don't know where U.G. is coming from and since you included the quote I figured it was important for you, relevant to your path, etc.

About Revelations: I am not at all sure that this refers to the future of the world in concrete sense, or whether it should be understood strictly allegorically.

You are quite involved with the Bible narratives but you also universalize it and seem to extend it beyond what it is. Could it be that doing that, the will to do that, is simply your choice? Your emphasis? (Just a question).

The vast majority of it being on a shallow and meaningless intellectual, rational, or logical level, rather than on a deep and meaningful heartfelt or mystical one. But then what can one expect in these last, dark days?

I do understand you. Sometimes the over-intellectuals frustrate me a great deal. But what corresponds to that, what is a far-pole of that, is a vague, ill-defined 'belief' in something-or-other that is not necessarily 'real'.

Curious what you think about this.

The Foreign Legion thing was cool I suppose. Lots of kids, lots of candy. I got a bad BAD case of the runs which was both popular and unpopular with the crowds. It was a little embarrassing to say the least. It's not tre kind of image I want to present to the world about my kind, but my lust for sweets always gets the best of me, so I get what I deserve, and I am what I am.

Talking Ass wrote:Truthfully, I think you might have a little bit of difficulty defining 'human instincts'. Getting a hard-on and jacking off is the main preoccupation of human males, and the females are all obsessed with putting long objects up their---well, you know where. Are these the sorts of instincts you speak of? Another instinct is defense. To ruthlessly defend territory, food supplies, and those naughty ape-women. Surely you cannot mean those instincts? A true and proper 'unadulterated human nature'. That's when I said you had Rousseau-esque leanings, and I DIDN'T mean that in the sense that 'everywhere men are in chains'. I meant the longing for a romantic naturalist past, like in some Tahitian proto-porno flick. Half-naked beach bombshells with coy laughter and hearty sexual appetites (and no uptight cultural statutes that prohibit foreign sailors from boning the bonny babes). Oh, the instinctual life! Is that what you're in to?

I'm going to keep this reply short and sweet TA, and save my time and energies for your latest post. And I'll first say here that I feel I'm no longer on the same ship with anyone. Rather, I'm searching for fit mates to come aboard mine, as I feel it's really going places. Though I don't yet know exactly where. But the journey can only be good. As it is now, though it does get quite lonesome at times.

I think when man someday attains to collective sanity, fullness of human maturity and being, or makes the return to Eden again, masturbation will become pretty much extinct, as will a lot of his other sexual hang-ups or idiosyncrasies. It will become something out of mankind's dark past. But another of the many necessary evils he's picked up over the many years due to his 'fall'. Love making (I won't vulgarize things here with the word sex) will then be much like enjoying a casual refreshment or two. Since men and women will have finally learned the lost art of making love, and not only in this area, but in all facets of life.

Bob M.

Bob, 'love-making' is a cultural invention. It arises directly from the psyche of man. All that nature (instinct) wants is open, vulgar fucking, and lots of it. The game that nature plays with us is as brutal as can be, and it cares not one jot if it is ugly, brutal, cruel or any of that. Nature is wonderfully efficient in that way. I am still trying to work on the idea that you presented, that of instincts and the return to an instinctual Eden. I am trying to find a way to converse with you.

I think when man someday attains to collective sanity, fullness of human maturity and being, or makes the return to Eden again

I feel that these ideals are not unattainable, or it profits a man to strive after them even if they are never fully attained, and I sincerely doubt they are. That is where the Art of life comes into play, which is a cultural project, a project of the human heart and mind, and again that is to say the human psyche and not the instincts. There is, I feel, an eternal opposition and conflict between Nature and Psyche. Oddly enough, if we take the psyche as female and associate it with 'the Bride', this mysterious Other is the Bridegroom trying to condition the Bride to be ready and appropriate for 'marriage'.

What do you think of that?

Talking Ass wrote:Bob, 'love-making' is a cultural invention. It arises directly from the psyche of man. All that nature (instinct) wants is open, vulgar fucking, and lots of it. The game that nature plays with us is as brutal as can be, and it cares not one jot if it is ugly, brutal, cruel or any of that.

Indeed the stone age is becoming history, TA. Evolution is marching on. One can only step in line with it if he expects to get much real enjoyment out of this go-a-round.

Talking Ass wrote:That is where the Art of life comes into play, which is a cultural project, a project of the human heart and mind, and again that is to say the human psyche and not the instincts. There is, I feel, an eternal opposition and conflict between Nature and Psyche. Oddly enough, if we take the psyche as female and associate it with 'the Bride', this mysterious Other is the Bridegroom trying to condition the Bride to be ready and appropriate for 'marriage'. What do you think of that?

I think we're tripping on words here. Human psyche, instincts, one's true heart's desires, God's will, love's dictates, etc., etc., etc. The goal in life eternally remains to discover and fully be all that we can possibly humanly be. That is again if one is to have a life that's truly worth living.

I'm working on another reply to you. Later!

Bob M.

I think we're tripping on words here. Human psyche, instincts, one's true heart's desires, God's will, love's dictates, etc., etc., etc. The goal in life eternally remains to discover and fully be all that we can possibly humanly be. That is again if one is to have a life that's truly worth living.

I don't think we are tripping on words (or over words), it is perhaps more trying to establish definitions, which is the basis of communication. I am still trying to suss out your opinions on the UG quote you posted. Instincts are instincts, 'heart's desires', God's will, and love's dictates are radically different things. Am I being too philosophical in wanting to get clear about what precisely we are talking about?

Indeed the stone age is becoming history, TA. Evolution is marching on. One can only step in line with it if he expects to get much real enjoyment out of this go-a-round.

I feel bad that I seem to think differently. Maybe one problem is that you speak in terms of universals but your own realizations and growth-experience is particular. All facets of biology and instinct are still as operative and insistent in all humankind, I think it is maybe 90% of what drives people: the biological, instinctual imperative.

I am still trying to understand what UG meant by instincts, and also what you meant, and why you posted it.

Talking Ass wrote:Instincts are instincts, 'heart's desires', God's will, and love's dictates are radically different things. Am I being too philosophical in wanting to get clear about what precisely we are talking about?

Call them what you will, men still remain essentially cold, calculating machines, as per Gurdjieff. And as such they are totally out of touch with their full and authentic human nature (BTW, we forgot 'feelings' here, which I think are quite important).

Still busy working on that reply and running to libraries and meetings. Which helps keep me healthy and in touch with life. If you want to call it that. But someday.....

Bob M.

See, I would say it is siginficantly, no wait--significantaly? Shit! It is significantly---(whew! I was worried there for a sec)---our instinctive, biological selves that is the engine that drives these 'machines'.

That 'cold, calculating machine' is an untransformed man, a man who is driven by his base appetites. Put another way, if this man had no base instincts, what would drive him as a cold, calculating machine?

Also, even in a culture that has transformed men through social cookery---history as a long stewing process with all sorts of delicious juices, yum-yum I'm getting hungry just thinking about the end-process---still, at the base, all those appetites still function. They still demand that a culture, it's corporations and military---act ruthlessly, mechanically, to secure the needed raw materials, etc. Civilization is a facade covering the violent, mechanical man.

We're really going to have to work out some of this terminology, Bob. Otherwise, we are going to have no way to plot out the salvation of man (and beast).

Certainly there are dimensions of depravity where perversions of the human person get compounded by culture, say in an authoritarian, totalitarian society, or in hyper-stimulated, over-processed Western culture. But still, it seems that the core material that is perverted is instinctual.

Diebert, you silencified hominid, what do you have to say about this?

A recent photo of my fine self while tripping on local field mushrooms

Hi TA,

Enlightenment? 'What is Enlightenment'? Which happened to be the name of a quarterly 'spiritual' magazine which bursts from the seems with articles and ads by innumerable 'enlightened' souls. Though I think its name has recently been changed to something with more pizzazz. Or more likely better selling. Whereby its founder and his cohort I would place in the class of being perhaps brilliantly insightful and aware individuals who I suppose consider themselves enlightened. However they don't fit my description of enlightenment. Which would be to be a well-rounded and wholesome living embodiment of truth and love while also having the mind of the 'Infinite'. And let's add having ultimate self-critical awareness and absolute wisdom, knowledge, and perfect understanding of both oneself, life, and the human condition. Which is absolutely necessary if one is to be at all effective in the enlightenment of some of his fellows. And which I feel Cohen and Wilber do not possess. Again, while being considerably insightful, spiritually knowledgeable, and keen psychologists so far as looking into others, they're not self-transparent and thereby neither pure spirit or all-knowing. They would fall more or less into the category of being primarily intellectually, rationally or logically 'minded' rather than being deeply intuitively, spiritedly, or mystically grounded. It's rather easy to know, like they do, that man is lost and to be critical of him and his fallen nature and condition, but to know the way out and then be effective in the liberation of a few others is the real goal and challenge. But the bottom line remains that enlightenment cannot be packaged and sold on a wholesale basis. Since one must be built for it, and only a few really are. Though only those genuinely enlightened ones know this. The rest continue to speak of enlightenment while essentially serving themselves and the world and its ways. Hence they only continue to add to the darkness of our fallen world. I think here too how easily and quickly the lust for greed, power, and prestige (which is the great American plague) along with it's accompanying fear twists and warps men's thinking and actions. Both the 'enlightened' and the unenlightened.

David Quinn states in his biographical sketch that: "my aim in life is to awaken as many people as possible to the nature of reality." Which is my aim also. Yet I wonder how successful he feels he has been in this greatest of challenges. I feel I'm still very largely a failure here. And I've been sharing with others for many years. And while many people have told me I'm very inspiring, I know of no one who ever 'ran' with that inspiration and genuinely broke through to becoming a totally new and transformed (or enlightened if you will) being. J. Krishnamurti spoke to thousands and thousands of people for more than 60 years and remarked on his death bed that no one he knew of anywhere understood him (or had attained to the liberation that he had found). Virtually all awakened or enlightened men I've studied felt pretty much like failures towards the end of their lives. I'm beginning to seriously wonder whether the encultured psychophysiological conditioning here in the U.S. anyway is so corrupt, and thereby brain damaging, that there are no candidates at all here in this country who are capable of complete and total self-overcoming. On the other hand perhaps no teacher has yet appeared on the scene with the right teaching or method.

U. G. Krishnamurti? I like his observation that we are all caught up in self-protective though. That it's conditioned or encultured into us from our earliest days by our parents and society at large. Who are generally like-minded. And that we can't get out of it through effort, but rather it (awakening or enlightenment) happens of itself to a few of us. Those with finely-formed neurological constructs. Though U. G. rejects such terms as awakening, enlightenment, etc. in favor of saying one returns to his natural mind or natural state. Though my view is that most of us have been so deeply conditioned into self-protective thought that our brains and neurological makeup develop improperly and are thereby irreparably damaged. One could say that the innate intuitive mechanism that we are all born with rather than being finely and sensitively developed is destroyed. As a result the vast majority of people live self-centered rather than God or other-centered lives. Which is really no life at all. And with no way out for the multitude. Hence the species continues to blindly, or we could say Godlessly, trudge onward towards Armageddon. Yet I feel U. G., insightful as he was, lacked total self-understanding and thereby was of very little, if any, real value in the enlightenment of his fellows. As was the case with virtually all enlightened, real or imagined, men and women.

I find the Bible contains a wealth of wisdom, of course along with some errors.Yet I don't think it is specific enough anywhere so far as laying out a workable plan of 'salvation'. Nor is it understood by many at all. Along with the fact that Christendom has lost its original radiance long ago and is today but another arm of our fallen and decaying world. And which is where I feel AA's 12 Steps, which were derived from Biblical principles, may, with the right leadership, come to someday be mankind's saving grace. Its founding principles, like Christ's teachings, stressed the need for rebirth or a complete and total psychic change if one is to find the new being. Or that "New and Wonderful World" as it's stated in AA's textbook. Which I equate with Christ's kingdom of God or Heaven. But, just as is the case with Christianlty, this vital need for rebirth (which has nothing to do with water, but rather a radical shift of consciousness or brain functioning) has become misunderstood, ignored, and totally forgotten. And the reason no one is genuinely breaking through anywhere. "Except a man be born again he cannot......" Remember? And speaking of the Bible, some time ago I ran across David Quinn's article entitled 'The Horror of Jesus'. I found it quite interesting or enlightening, studied it, printed it out, made some additions to it, copied it, and passed out about 4 copies (probably in vain) to some friends. But it (the action) helped me in my never ending psychic or soul purification.

"Intellectuals", or those who live primarliy in their heads rather than their hearts, I find are those who are bound up in "self-protective thought". Those whose "intuitive mechanisms" are either damaged or not yet re-awakened or considerably along in their purification process.

Sugar? Sugar, if I remember correctly, is a substance that's very close in hydrocarbon composition to alcohol. Both are mood-altering substances which can help one better tolerate wrongful living or living in a mad, mad world. Both used in excess especially can lead to many negative consequences. One will wreck the liver, the other the pancreas.

I shall end here as I've wracked my brain and rambled on enough for now. And besides I'm heading off to a meeting.

Bob M.

"There is no fear in love; but perfect love castheth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love." (1 John 4:18)

"In the flame of Love all fear is consumed." (J. Krishnamurti)

Talking Ass wrote:Certainly there are dimensions of depravity where perversions of the human person get compounded by culture, say in an authoritarian, totalitarian society, or in hyper-stimulated, over-processed Western culture. But still, it seems that the core material that is perverted is instinctual.

Since you asked: you're merely burping up Nietzschean thoughts on this here, playing as it were with its tastes but have you ever swallowed? I wouldn't use the word 'perverted' though, not before you can lay out an ideal, a morality of what is right. It could just as well be a Bonsai type of cultivation. What's deformity anyway, only for those married to form?

A recent photo of my fine self while tripping on local field mushrooms.

Funny thing, I'm really enjoying mushrooms on my plate last week, Shiitake!

Funny thing, I'm really enjoying mushrooms on my plate last week, Shiitake!

The non-hallucinatory variety, right? Still, it is pretty obvious they have effected your brain on a serious level.

I wasn't thinking at all about Nietzsche, I was thinking about Freud, old chum. You always come prancing in with shiny little dancing shoes trying to upstage me. They're fine Mary Janes, I admit it, put your pirouettes are a little clunky still.

Anyway, unbeknownst to you, you are my Ideal Man. You are the form as against all others are measured. Sitting as you do, like a Spinoza, on your back stoop, noshing shaiitakes. You've 'swallowed' so much there's no danger of your floating away on a gust of wind anytime soon.

Thanks for that, Bob. Am still thinking about it.

Talking Ass wrote:I wasn't thinking at all about Nietzsche, I was thinking about Freud, old chum.

It's no secret on this topic they were exploring in very similar directions, even leading to speculation about Freud building on Nietzsche's fundamentals - which Freud always denied. Perhaps they were just fishing in the same timely/timeless pond?

You are the form as against all others are measured. Sitting as you do, like a Spinoza, on your back stoop, noshing shaiitakes.

It's true, Spinoza lived here for a while two blocks down the road. When funding is there I'll restore the property so it can serve as philosophical retreat for the few. For now it's in a bad state after a century of neglect.

Diebert van Rhijn wrote:It's no secret on this topic they were exploring in very similar directions, even leading to speculation about Freud building on Nietzsche's fundamentals - which Freud always denied. Perhaps they were just fishing in the same timely/timeless pond?

Freud and Nietzsche?

Sigmund Freud once said that he felt Nietzsche had a more deeply penetrating insight into himself than any man who ever lived or perhaps ever will live.

I have always found this observation of Freud's interesting and challenging. And I feel that someday soon there will come a man who will have looked more deeply than Nietzsche did into both himself and the abyss. And was then able to maintain his sanity.

Bob M.

And I feel that someday soon there will come a man who will have looked more deeply than Nietzsche did into both himself and the abyss. And was then able to maintain his sanity.

Well, that rules out Quinn, Rowden and Solway (great name for a law-firm BTW).

I had contact with Andrew Cohen, oddly enough. At the time when he'd first come back to the US I think he was sort of the hot item for awhile. He and his devoted sangha'd roll into town and turn things on their head. When you read of his experiences in India with Poonja-ji, and when you saw the pictures of the two of them, it was not hard to see a certain freedom, a 'lightness of being', realization. He equated death of self with enlightenment and described contact with self as being the source of bliss. I didn't necessarily doubt his experience, whatever it was, and the death of self (his experience of realizing the 'he' he knew was and had been all along a fiction) made intuitive sense, I could feel it. But, the people in his sangha, with a few exceptions, seemed strange to me---power-tripping. Things like that always seem to happen in the sanghas imitating the Indian model. Later, it was said that he realized it was not possible to teach enlightenment as he previously thought, and (they told me) he modified the teaching, broadened the question, and started up a magazine which brought in money. Later, people I knew (of) who'd joined his sangha with eager-beaver zeal, described him as a power-hungry psychological abuser. (You can find this stuff out there on the web, he even appears on some guru-watch websites).

Personally, after that little stint, I realized that the whole trip was p0polluted and I didn't want to have anything to do with it. And by that I mean the whole Eastern scene: gurus male and female. mantras, fire ceremonies, Vedic ritualism, Gods, Goddesses---it all began to look like a bunch of useless bullshit.

They would fall more or less into the category of being primarily intellectually, rationally or logically 'minded' rather than being deeply intuitively, spiritedly, or mystically grounded. It's rather easy to know, like they do, that man is lost and to be critical of him and his fallen nature and condition, but to know the way out and then be effective in the liberation of a few others is the real goal and challenge. But the bottom line remains that enlightenment cannot be packaged and sold on a wholesale basis. Since one must be built for it, and only a few really are. Though only those genuinely enlightened ones know this. The rest continue to speak of enlightenment while essentially serving themselves and the world and its ways. Hence they only continue to add to the darkness of our fallen world. I think here too how easily and quickly the lust for greed, power, and prestige (which is the great American plague) along with it's accompanying fear twists and warps men's thinking and actions. Both the 'enlightened' and the unenlightened.

I pretty much agree, except I don't see the Indians as any less corrupt, and many of these gurus and guru-esses come to the US on religious entry visas and basically run a road-show that moves from one coast to the other. It is a money-making gig, but what do you expect? It's set up and run like a touring rock-band, a guru super-star. And people drink it down and clamor for more.

The way I understand all this, is that no one really has a clear idea what enlightenment is, or what its supposed to do, or exactly how any of us is supposed to live in this place and make sense of things. In my own case, what I personally believe, is that the whole wide world is a theatrical creation, a fantasy that is dreamed-up in apparent rock-solid terms, and we 'incarnated beings' appear in this theatre and, by overwhelming force of circumstances, come to believe that what happens here is an 'absolute fact'. Ah, but outside of the theatre, from what appear to be another dimension, there is a plane of consciousness and a level of 'deathless being' from which what we know as ourselves, springs. In fact, we are there, eternally. Ha ha ha, there is no time anyway, it is a crazy construct. But (and for reasons I don't understand) we need to have certain experiences, we need to experience and eventually to master a physical realm of existence whose principal attraction, or whose principal magnet, is sexuality. It is sexuality that draws of the the 'flame' of material life, and through this attraction we incarnate into this stuff, and get covered in it. Then, we identify with it, and we cannot see beyond it. Indeed, any imagining of anything beyond the material realm in which we find ourselves is like a dull memory, a fading memory we can't recover. It can never constellate as a solid idea, and as knowledge, and so we remain in a morass: unable to advance but (in the best of cases) unwilling to retreat or give ourselves over to the 'material energy'. In that state there is endless and constant spiritual suffering, suffering that occurs in a strange subjective 'space' that is our consciousness. And yet, the miraculous and wonderful things is that, for so many, the beings who inhabit this 'upper' realm of consciousness are continually beckoning to us. Meaning, they send down into the material stuff (that is, into our material hallucination) concentrated signs and symbols, that are really living metaphors. From time to time we encounter one---they take oh so many different and strange forms!---and if we manage to get our hands on one, the metaphor 'explodes', and what comes out of it is 'meaning', and the meaning reveals hidden secrets about the nature of the place.

Here is a story that illustrates. This was handed down from one aged ass to another in a long, long succession beginning from an ancient ancestor of mine who had the great good fortune to serve as terrestrial transport for the Master---blessed be his name--- Judas Thomas, desert wizard and card sharp. (You didn't know what an illustrious ass you were talking to, and I am really too humble to toot my own horn, obviously).

Harken a story told by a Talking Ass (a miracle in itself, really):

Once there was a king in an Eastern kingdom who sent his son down to a kingdom in the West. The prince was given a mission, he had to go to a certain cave guarded by a dragon and steal back a pearl. Then, he was to make his way back up to his father and to the kingdom of his birth to receive all his royal robes of light, his shimmering, opalescent original body, true knowledge of his own self.

But when he got down to the earthly kingdom in the West, he was lured away from his mission by a power peculiar to the place, a power that captivated his attention and stole his discrimination. Slowly, he began to forget his mission and with each passing day, eating the rich, heavy food and enjoying the earthly pleasures of the place, his mind got more and more dense until finally he fell into a trance and forgot all that he was supposed to do. He even forgot that he forgot. He forgot he was the son of a King and he became enslaved to the dark power of the place.

But though he forgot his mission, his father did not forget about him, thank heavens. He sent cryptic messages to him, down, down through the thick layers into this material kingdom. One of the messengers took the form of a strange bird, and when the bird came along beside the hypnotized prince the movement of his wings woke him from his trance, shattering for a moment the captivating power of the place, and when he looked at the mysterious bird with flashing black eyes, the bird screamed and transformed into audible words composed by his father and encrypted in this form to remind him of his mission. Click here to hear the mysterious bird's scream!

When the prince came to his senses, he remembered everything. He used mystical prayers given by his father to lull the dragon to sleep, snatched the pearl and began his return journey home. All along the way he found other encrypted messages, metaphors that opened up like flowers, that inspired and guided him, and when before it was words that he heard, now it was visible light, a guiding star. Click here to see Guiding Star!

Hi TA,

I really enjoy and appreciate your correspondence. Though I must be brief here for now.

Talking Ass wrote: And people drink it down and clamor for more.

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." (Einstein)

I'm starting to believe I'm the first man to fully understand the reason for man's gross and universal ignorance or blindness to himself and Reality.

Talking Ass wrote: From what appears to be another dimension, there is a plane of consciousness and a level of 'deathless being' from which what we know as ourselves, springs.

I can't help but wondering here whether you dwell in that state or dimension of being. Perhaps a better photo of you might help here a little, but I'm starting to think just maybe you're my kind of an ass.

Bob M.

Hi TA,

I really enjoy and appreciate your correspondence. Though I must be brief here for now.

Talking Ass wrote: And people drink it down and clamor for more.

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." (Einstein)

I'm starting to believe I'm the first man to fully understand the reason for man's gross and universal ignorance or blindness to himself and Reality.

Talking Ass wrote: From what appears to be another dimension, there is a plane of consciousness and a level of 'deathless being' from which what we know as ourselves, springs.

I can't help but wondering here whether you dwell in that state or dimension of being. Perhaps a better photo of you might help here a little, but I'm starting to think just maybe you're my kind of an ass.

Bob M.

A picture of yours truly, not exactly walking on water, but doing the best I can with what I got...

Here's another, suitable for framing. You can see why my mother loves me...

Every picture tells a story.

Talking Ass wrote:A picture of yours truly, not exactly walking on water, but doing the best I can with what I got...

Here's another, suitable for framing. You can see why my mother loves me...

Every picture tells a story.

Hmmm.....Was it Moses whose mother set him adrift in some sort of a mini-boat? In any case float on TA, perhaps some Theosophical ass may discover you someday and you'll go on to really amount to something. In any case, I shall keep rootin' for ya.

Bob M.