What Kind of Man Am I? Pt 2
A Short Panegyric Lists With Absolutely No Mimetic Animus and, Because This Time It Favours§ Me, I Snoopy Dance to the Babeldee-Good!
Yay! A Panegyric!
§ And I am cautioned immediately! Very shortly after I cited the following words of praise for my presence here in this life — with just one reference to my writing — I was called by my intuition to open my actual book copy of the Tao Te Ching. I have included what I read in it after the praise. See the ‘§§’ below. When you read it you will see that the Tao Te Ching (or maybe the ghost of Lao Tzu?) seriously laughed at my including praise for me — even in this limited way on a synchronistic day. [Music: Paul Simon— I Know What I Know.]
Can the bone-head I, that I that I think that I am, be list-less regardless the length of a feel-good list? Is it possible to be verbally virile at the same time? And what about all those words, these words, the words that I love to dance with? Just Babel Babel, everywhere, and not a drop of compassion to share? Sincerely, the ’sincere’ words of compassion expressed by our moral authorities more correctly, more often than not, are simply their means to morally by-pass compassion. Word-spells.
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Is this praise, me? A quasi-random word Babeler, looking for praise for arrogantly wording it out there? Or is it of me, an expression that reaches inwardly to that which resides before the birth of Babel?
“I feel that talking to you is a very good exercise for healing myself and also for learning to love life. ...and as I've said, if there's someone that loves life that's definitely you. I thank life and the universe for letting [me] connect with you” (M).
Or is this praise, me? A lovely celebratory source or that deluded and confused someone in need of being celebrated?
i may get another chance to write to you tomorrow, / but right now i am celebrating you! (Sh.)
Or is this praise, me? Or a ghostly reflection of a version of me that was — before I neared death again?
I was shocked to read [about your near death with bradycardia]† … selfishly glad that it wasn't your time to be called onward. Love to you (Sa).
And the last one! Is this me? A summary to conclude that my existence is a four part harmonium blowing wind without notes.
You have always been very generous to me in other ways by sharing your time and knowledge and BIG words. I am happy to help any way that I can (H).
§§ Now For The Antithesis, The Caution Given To Me From Some Wacky Words Written by a Nobody Important Who Died ~2500 Years Ago. Ch 13 of the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu.
As noted above, almost immediately after I began to put these praise-words to screen, I was drawn to my small personal library here in México. From it my fingers moved to and opened the Tao Te Ching to Ch 13. And it was like I was reading it for the first time, despite having read it many many times in different translations in the span of forty years. (Pre-convid I had a dozen copies or more in my pre-aperigraha library. (See
for a description of when and how I went from a 1200+ book library to about 50 in the early days of the convid lockdowns. And how that eventually kicked me in my spiritual ass in order to unknowingly initiate me into a yogic pilgrimage.)
As I read it, the feeling was extraordinary! I felt that the ideas hiding in or beneath or beyond Lao Tzu’s words settled into my body and perhaps even heart (soul?) in a way I don’t remember it having done before. And a significant part of the feeling I got was that The Tao Te Ching and/or Lao Tzu were kindly laughing at my having begun this essay with sincere, simple, favourable words.
Favour and disgrace cause one to be dismayed; What we value and what we fear are as if within our Self. What does this mean: "Favour and disgrace cause one to be dismayed?” Those who receive a favour from above are dismayed when they receive it, and dismayed when they lose it. What does it mean: "What we value and what we fear are as if within our Self?" We have fears because we have a self. When we do not regard that self as Self, What have we to fear? Therefore people who value the world as being their Self may then be entrusted with the governance of the world; And people who love the world as being their Self — the world may then be entrusted to their care. Hence those who value their body more than dominion over the empire can be entrusted with the empire. Those who love their body more than dominion over the empire can be given the custody of the empire. (Tao Te Ching, Ch 13, translated by Lin Yutang, from The Wisdom of China and India. New York: Random House. My emphasis and adaptation. Available in an on-line pdf Lao Tzu's Tao-Teh-Ching: A Parallel Translation Collection compiled by B. Boisen. And other translations can be found here: “Ripening Peaches: Taoist Studies and Practices”, Research by Michael P. Garofalo. Chapter 13.
Synchronicity is The Word’s Green Laughter
After I finished shaking my head and laughing at this body’s new feeling-awareness of these words of no self Self as indifferent to praise or censure, I also became aware that, so far, my verbalising a response to this question has been, again, drawn to looking outwards to see what kind of man am I. Can it be that all that I am is that which others can see of me? Look look look, look over there, anywhere but here, here the me that is sitting cross-legged on a makeshift zafu on the floor in front of this computer with a book, a coffee, mechanically assisted heartbeat, and a smartphone-as-still-camera (turned off after receiving from the book its digitised image). Somewhere other than me. Someone over than me. And I’ll not forget, what about that someone below me, too?
In the last essay I asked the I Ching to answer the question and… Well, the nuanced answer was fascinating and suggestive, perhaps, of how that essay turned out: with steely mountain resolve and the penetrating gaze of a heron I investigated some of the pernicious aspects of a psycho-somatic experience of life that fed me the psychological toxins hidden in our unseen misandristic hegemony. That hegemony we call feminism, aka, is the active and mostly invisible to us ‘devouring mother’ archetype of the disrespected animus. (Video here.) (And it has now become clear, with almost three years of exploring the depths of Rockefeller’s allopathy as controlled toxification using food and drugs, I was also fed and injected with physical, neural and endocrine toxins during that time.)
In one of those odd synchronicities that seem to accompany me while writing, I came to read Janice Fiamengo’s substack essay “The Curious Case of the Self-Objectifying Feminist: If The Male Gaze Demeans And Dehumanizes, Why Do So Many Women Court It?”
It is an engaged astute critique of the obvious innate hypocrisy of feminist misandry embodied in the many feminists who spend their effort, time and money to make themselves attractive to men in order to gleefully maliciously call out male eye-rape for the horror of having a man look at them. And it seems to me that, except to the ideologues supporting it, the hypocrisy is blatant, common and readily seen. (In a similar line, a couple of weeks ago, I saw a video of a woman who had an exercise ‘outfit’ body-painted onto her body in order to go naked into a gym. What was the point? Her claim on the video that she posted was “Can we just stop commenting on women's bodies? At all? Ever?” And by chance(?), today I came to Amala Ekpunobi’s year old ‘Don’t Sexualize Yourself and Then Complain about Being Sexualized’.)
The synchronicity that Fiemengo generated was of an incredibly clear image of the devouring mother energy in action, a woman, or perhaps a clique of women, possessed by debased animuses:
I Ching, Be-Ching, Ka-Ching, Still Looking Outwards to the Quest-Ching!
It is with a rueful smile, now, that I ask myself (Self?) was my having asked the I Ching really a method to help me see my Self more clearly? Was it in reality a form of me, looking outward yet again, for validation of what that form of me hopes to perceive as another me? The real Me, findable somewhere under someone else’s moral truth-words that, heavy and hard as rocks, have weighed down the many-coloured coats of my personas? That ineffable elusive something that is somehow magically or schismogenetically ‘hidden’ somewhere intangible inside this tangible form of a human of the male sex who might be reducing the number of his personas? Was I looking to authority, the authority of another’s words, yet again, to validate my own existence as an inner ineffable yet somehow essential Self with those words?
Inner Essence? A Capital ’S’ Self? Really? What If Our Understanding of ‘Traditional’ Buddhism Got It Wrong and Ego-Killing New Agism Even More Wrong?
Early this month I listened to yogi-Buddhist scholar-teacher Michael Stone suggest that we are not born with an inner ‘Buddha’ essence, that so-called ‘Buddha Nature’. Why did Stone suggest that? Well, it turns out words carry a power independent of accuracy or, perhaps, veracity. Stone looked into the etymological roots of ‘Buddha Nature’ and learned that DT Suzuki translated it from the Chinese into English in the 1940s. And that his translation was correct although the Chinese he was translating it from was incorrect. The Pali, tathagatagarbha, means ‘womb’. I found that it could also mean ‘embryo’, from another translation.
This infers that Gautama’s teachings were directed more to the potential to grow that so-called Buddha Nature, not that we are born with it! So, does that mean for 1500 years, Buddhism got it wrong? Hmmmmm. And the New Age version of that idea — which I implanted into my brain when I was young — had twisted it into the directive of disembodiment as a prerequisite for ‘enlightenment’ as a-somatic inner essence co-mingled with spirit. It was wrong, too? Hmmmm.
Although, perhaps even more to the point, even if that is true that Buddhism got it wrong, how do we know we can trust what Gautama taught? To what extent is his light so bright that it will keep us blind to our having received light-blindness which keeps our own darkness from being discerned? The ninth-century Chinese Buddhist monk Linji Yixuan recognised this problem and addressed it tersely in a now famous koan: ‘If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!’ (Which likely would have Linji put into prison for hate speech at this time.)
And with this conception of an inception of self, then there is no need for me, or anyone, to put the capital ’S’ in front of ‘-elf’. And if that is true, then my fractalised movement between a self and Self while looking to be me has been far different and likely an ineffective approach to that ostensibly important be-coming into self actualisation, realisation or even verbal expressions. Hmmmmm. Does this, in part, explain just how ineffective all these enlightenment teachers have been? Stuck in the fall of a misplaced beacon? That that bejewelled key ‘Self’ I’ve been been looking for has been, yet again, outside the comfortable glow of a yet another (word)spell mistaken for a truth torch I loved to live within, snoopy dancing in oblivion to the darkness around me!
For Stone’s take on this: Lotus Sutra, Part 11: A Jewel in Your Coat
Or on Soundcloud:
It seems that the Buddhist community has done a nice job of reframing this misconception with a reasonable sounding elide or verbal sleight of hand. For example:
Some schools teach that buddhanature is a seed or potentiality that must be developed. In others, buddhanature is understood to be completely present but obscured by our delusions. Either way, buddhanature can become actualised and experienced through practice (‘What is Buddhanature?’ Buddhism for Beginners at Tricycle.)
And, it would seem others have perceived this misapplication of truth as light too. Again, via Stone: Dogen, the 13th century Japanese Buddhist monk attributed with birthing Sōtō Zen:
Another take on Dogen’s perception of the corrupted nature of Buddhism is described in ‘Purifying Zen: Watsuji Tetsuro's Shamon Dogen’ by Tetsuro Watsuji.)
Where Do I Go After That? Perhaps the Eighth of the Ten Ox Herding Pictures? Or, Do I Keep the Lao Tzu Theme with More Tao Te Ching, The Master-Book of Less Words Being More?
[Headshake.] And with that I see that I had unthinkingly listed the demand from my well-programmed unconscious to restrict my agency into simple dualism! Now that I see that I was blindly beholden to that cast of dualism as true light, I have the option to take my agency to speak for my self as an -elf-made man. Or not! I’ll go for the double Tertium Quid, and use Bull and Tzu and keep myself understated, as if that was possible.)
My words are easy to understand and easy to express, Yet no man under heaven knows them or practices them. My words have ancient beginnings. My actions are disciplined. Because men do not understand, they have no knowledge of me. Those that know me are few; And it is the many who abuse me that are honoured. Therefore I wear rough clothing and hold the jewel in my heart. (Tao Te Ching Ch 70 by Lao Tzu, a New Translation By Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English. Adapted by me with my emphasis. Available in an on-line pdf Lao Tzu's Tao-Teh-Ching: A Parallel Translation Collection compiled by B. Boisen. And other translations can be found here: “Ripening Peaches: Taoist Studies and Practices”, Research by Michael P. Garofalo. Chapter 70.
And
Ox Herding Picture Eight: [Where’s the Bull?] Whip, rope, person [as self or Self or -elf] and bull – all merge in No Thing. This heaven is so vast, no words of ink can stain it. How may a snowflake remain crystalline as it falls into a raging fire? It is here that are to be found the footprints of the Ancestors. (Ox Herding Picture 8, slightly adapted. A good version of the 10 pictures can be accessed via “Annual Teaching Series at Seattle Insight”. Another translation can be found at ’Ten Oxherding Pictures 十牛圖 Shiniu tu [Jūgyūzu]; Verses by 廓庵師遠 Kuoan Shiyuan [Kakuan Shien], 12th century, Ox Herding' text translations by Victor Sogen Hori’ at Ordinary Zen.)
It Seems I Love Words So Much That I’ll Quote People’s Words Telling Me That Words Are Problematic or ‘No Thing’! I’m Sideways Again, Undermining my Preferred Tool of Expression: Words.
In the last essay almost as soon as I got started to address this question — does it even have an answer? — I / ‘it’ went sideways. And again, clearly now, too.
So, I chose to look back to see what I might see in those previous words. Would these eyes, with a week more maturity, glean from them a glimmer of what I am? Or am I, in deed and in word, an oxen / -elfin ‘No Thing’?
And even as I reflect on that now, I feel like I’m the person who, when walking at night, lost my key with the bejewelled chain. And I accepted the passerby’s help, the strangers’ help. After our extended search did not find the key, the good samaritan asked: ‘Are you sure you lost it here?’ ‘Oh no,’ I answered, with some surprise ‘I lost it over there.’ And I pointed into the dark shadows outside the fall of the lamp’s light. ‘Why are you looking for it here, then?’ ‘Because this is where the light is. And I have been well schooled and well read so that I know that looking in the light is the only place where I can find it.’
Is it even possible for me to read or write words as the means to come to know what kind of man I am? [Head shake. Shrug shoulders.] ‘Judge not people by the quality of their words, for the quality of their actions speak louder than words.’ My paraphrase. For the curious, here is someone who appears to be an ardent Christian who passionately refutes that trope with the help of the Bible: “Words Speak Louder Than Actions” January 31, 2023 by Jay Lickey.) Of course, this came from someone whose book of meaning states that ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ John 1. (These days I question the source of this argument because I’ve been getting a detailed history lesson of the Old Testament that paints a bleak story of family dysfunction, treachery and murder. See the series of arguments by Tereza Coraggio, that include “What is a Jew? More Importantly, What Is Not A Jew?”)
More interesting to me, is this ardent Christian seems to be one of us staring where the light falls and hoping, expecting or perhaps knowing, that only that which falls within the light of his book can provide the key to his understanding. And that is what creates the deepest anxiety, the dukha, one that will not go away with truth-distractions. (‘Dukha’ is from the Pali language and means deep dissatisfaction with what is that is difficult to see within ourselves. It is usually translated as ‘suffering’.) Dukha is the anxiety of being dissatisfied and disengaged from somatic truth using (word)spell truths instead, and that that is, I suspect, what we project into the fear of death.
After Sleeping the Night Some Clarity Strikes Me Under the Light
And somehow, I realised that moralists frequently get stuck within the fall of their particular lamp standards’ light. And that often they are unable to see that that light is a manufactured construct, an artificial even temporal glow. And within its brilliance they have become blind as a consequence of their zealous polishing of the light’s crystal-face and so no longer have eyes to see that the ‘truth’ that they do see is in reality surrounded by a darkness that is bigger and deeper than the light under which they toil.
This is the power of words, to (word)spell into invisibility the tangible darkness that we can discern when our concentration stops seeing only the light or what it shines on. The (word)spells help us to avoid the experience of how that light is actually delimiting the perceived and/or understood as the only place where the known is allowed to be known. The unknown has been disallowed as other.
With the known well lit, it is easy to deaden our eyes to what is in the shadow, to rationally and with fervid moralism, deny both the shadow’s and the key’s existence. This split, or lack of vision is the birth of dukha, the anxiety that gets created invisibly within ourselves, in the shadow, while we carefully catalogue with detail all that we imagine is villainy around us. Because the threat from the shadow is vague, even intangible to the clarifying power of words, we turn and castigate or demonise anything or anyone who questions the illuminator and its illumination of the (word)truths we are bound to and bounded by. We have forgotten our key and its jewelled key chain and that it fell from our hearts into the darkness, for whatever reason. We have become blinded to its reality by the empty promise of enlightenment where no darkness dares be allowed presence.
A part of this awareness came after I continued to more-or-less binge-watch a series of the so-called ‘traditional conservatives’ breathtakingly ‘destroying’ the helpless progressive ideologues. This time, however, my eyes and ears began to see and hear their words differently, see their body language more clearly. I began to recognise that the most highly respected ones, at least as per YouTube’s questionable algorithm, are Christian in some way. And it took me a bit longer to get the ‘aha’, that despite some pleasant faces, they are mostly humourless moralists. Very intelligent, well spoken and use logic and language as the razor sharp sword separating the true from the false.
This became crystal clear when I pursued the interesting, ie ‘controversial’ Catholic anti-feminist, Pearl Davis. One of Davis’s clear-eyed observations is that, in the ‘real’ world, the traditional conservatives preaching marriage from the Bible hasn’t worked to restore the family as something central to sustaining humanity in much of the so-called ‘western’ world. Her argument is that the morality-defying reality is that the efforts of feminism to vilify men has been so successful that marriage is often a brutal and poisoned trap that frequently kills men figuratively and literally. Following early divorce initiated by women 70-80% of the time, the current plethora of misandrist laws and accepted sex-hatred attitudes sees fathers restricted or barred from access to their children, their financial viability destroyed and then that destruction being used as a weapon against them, their reputations frequently trammelled and their lives turned to a social hell. Men kill themselves a lot following divorce, and that information is no longer being successfully suppressed. Preaching the Bible-value of wife and husband and children as an ideal of God’s ‘natural’ law doesn’t stand against what is happening to the body in real world experience.
With my curiosity and intuition moving me along I came to attend two of perhaps the most highly respected of the traditional conservatives in the USA. And I was actually surprised at how similar their anti-Davis rants were and how similar they felt, to me, to the so-called progressive liberal ideologues rants. And, in the case of Michael Knowles — image above — that includes their inability to not over-talk the other in a ‘debate’.
My realisation, or perception, was that Knowles and Matt Walsh are both enamoured of the light they see of God through the Bible. For example, from the Knowles’ Davis confrontation — although it was labeled as a ‘debate’ and yet it wasn’t that for me: it was a frustrating example of an ideologue — Knowles — looking to out talk/fact/bluster Catholic ideology to debase Davis, also a Catholic. At one point he stated, in response to the question of his authority to tell men what to do as their judge, he affirmed without hesitation that his Catholic mores and intellect acuity, gives him that authority. That is my paraphrase of the following:
pd: do you think every man should make the same decision? mk: in many matters, yes. it's not between chocolate and vanilla ice cream. pd: do you feel like you can tell them what to do? mk: in as much as i correctly perceive moral order, yes. pd: you think you know what's right for every man? mk: i think that i can, i think that i have a relatively reliable faculty of reason and moral conscience and in as much as it is reliable, i can articulate the truth as i see it. which is all anyone does. it's what you're doing. (“Michael Knowles Debates Pearl Davis | "Men Should Bow Out”.) Video at the time of citation here. From the beginning, here.)
Then later Walsh did a so-called ‘reaction’ videocast rant against Davis that felt almost identical to Knowles’ ‘debate’. “The Red Pill View On Marriage Is Just As Toxic As Feminism”. I wasn’t able to finish this because it seemed to me that he was tilting at windmills and hadn’t actually heard or understood what Davis said. He was, like Knowles, stuck under a light that was keeping him blind. I was curious how others reacted to his cant so I read a large number of the comments. Most disagreed with his basic screed.
It is possible that Walsh and Knowles have put her into a category, that of the so-called ‘Red-Pilled’ manosphere where all things female are, I’ve been told and seen a hint of, debased. (I’ve not seen enough this new-to-me ‘world’ of the red-pilled manosphere to make a judgment on my own of that.)
With both of them and with Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk, there appears to be razor sharp intelligence, huge depths of knowledge, and a humourlessness that often comes out as a kind of condescending arrogance. The initial taste of that was somewhat muted, for me, because when I first started watching them the absolute ideological lunacy they were confronted with was new to me and astounding in its asinine stupidity. And that noise muffled their humourlessness. All under a light that they may have used to convinced themselves that they have found, in that light, the key to their God in some manner.
Who Am I?
Somehow that big circular loop through feminism-bad, moralism-bad, I came to understand that what I am is a seeker. Curious. For the longest time I wanted to know that gold-encrusted key to me, perhaps the elusive ‘Buddha Nature’ or the New Age exalted Self of the Authentic me-dom, the me that likely doesn’t actually exist as anything definable as self, or Self or -elf.
With recent twists and turns of awareness of the likelhood of the No Thing thing, that what I now seek is the tangible: and that is the reduction of suffering. And that begins with me. And from me, moves outwards, fractal like undoubtedly, into my spheres of contact as opposed to mental constructs.
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To close. More Lao Tzu. Music: Penguin Cafe Orchestra — Now Nothing.
Sincere words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not sincere. Good men are not argumentative, the argumentative are not good. One who knows is not erudite; the erudite one does not know. The sage does not take to hoarding. The more he lives for others, the fuller is his life. The more he gives, the more he abounds. The Way of Tao benefits others and does not compete with them. The Way of the Sage is compassion Which does not compete with anyone. (Tao Te Ching, Ch 81 Tr by Tien Cong Tran, my adaptation. Available on-line at “Ripening Peaches: Taoist Studies and Practices”, Research by Michael P. Garofalo. And other translations can be found in an on-line pdf Lao Tzu's Tao-Teh-Ching: A Parallel Translation Collection compiled by B. Boisen.
† Before I go, in July I experienced another near death experience. The first was when I was an infant at my mother’s hands. This time it was attributed to ‘bradycardia’, very slow heart beat. That required surgery to install a pacemaker. The surgery and associated costs have cleared our my savings. And my residential status as a (convid) refugee from Canada is still under review, during which I’m disallowed to work.
If you would like to help and/or get more details, see:
Spiritual Rebirth After a Surgery Bottoms Me Out in Two Ways
Shadow Work and a Surgery to Pace the Heart; Where Did the Memories Go?
All the best with what is changing. Everything Changes! With peace, respect, love and exuberant joy.
Wow, you really got into a lot there. I do think there has been a lot of twisting of eastern philosophy by the New Age crowd and from my very limited study of Buddhism as interpreted by Thich Nhat Hahn our being exists only in relation to everyone and everything else, the nature of interbeing. Have you ever read anything by Spinoza, I have a little in the past couple of years and his vision is very broad, does not deny the ego but sees us as part of nature and that preserving and expanding our being is virtuous as long as we do not hurt others. A vast simplification of a brilliant philosopher but maybe you would like him.
The feminist/ liberal/ conservative debates all seem a bit staged and like they are just talking in circles to get people rilled up. Any of these folks that push any, and I mean any divide and conquer narrative are part of the problem in my humble opinion. We need empathetic peace makers, people who create and love beauty and truth. Love and peace to you. ☀️🧘🌸