A Ramble of Stuff. 02

Tree in Ireland

BLACK is Toc-ward.
GREEN is AreBear's words.
RED is quoted.
BLUE is the dated who-what-when-where

Here is a little back and forth between Brother Arebear and Toc about a small piece of the conversation with Dave Sim. It centers around Karma < Irie < Luck, and the gamble of art. (4/25/04) part of Letter #11 of the Sim/Fetch Dialogue. Toc's response to Dave's letter of 4/15/04 (Letter #9)

"What do you think 'the unwavering principle' is? I mean you obviously don't think of it as a dissociated natural and unthinking function like gravity." -DaveSim-

Yes… I think the "unwavering principle" is a kind of function like gravity. And no, not a thinking awareness but yes; a responsive equation. (I think that what we think of as rational thinking is a protective function of our overly large brains that keeps us from being crushed by the very size of Reality). I think the 'unwavering principle' (which is just a term I souped-up to put a top-hat on a naked feeling) is a kind of equation of momentum which will show up someday, in the logical life of numbers, as a kissing cousin of the "Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle". I think the 'unwavering principle' draws luck from its ambiance. Because luck is the feeling that you project out onto all of perceiving reality that then reflects back at you (to the degree that the perceiver can reflect it [and to trick this image up a notch; the reflector can reflects also to the degree that you can enliven that reflector, ho-ho. Love-conquers-all]). It is more like Irie then Karma, (Karma reads like it has been tampered with by moralists, some eon along the way, and thus it has become far too premeditated. Karma is too human to be Real, and doesn't read-into its equation the random mutations of virtual photons and such. My observations tell me that Reality is too big to stoop to being human [petty and vindictive]). My sense of Reality is that It is steeped in awareness with just a lawful amount of matter thrown in. Each "Thing" (perceivable) forms an eddy of awareness, a Self, and from there each Self poses as its self. You can catch sight of It in the periphery of quiet or feel it like a white noise of whispers. But you have to let the Image speak the way it will without putting words in Its mouth, and that takes a quantum of silence. How much is a quantum? The-fuck-if-I-know. But I know it's beautiful …if… your body can support the feeling (and there's the rub).

*Karma reads like it has been tampered with by moralists, some eon along the way, and thus it has become far too premeditated. Karma is too human to be Real, and doesn't read-into its equation the random mutations of virtual photons and such. My observations tell me that Reality is too big to stoop to being human [petty and vindictive].* - Toc

The thing is: karma is "petty and vindictive" precisely because it's the reflection of and reflection onto the ego/jiva. The ego/jiva "produces" karma and "experiences" the results of karma all on its own level (the level of individuation and limitation). Karma doesn't exist for the witness/atma because (on that ground of appreciation) nothing has ever happened anyway in which other stuff can happen as a result. No creation, no things, no other. What is the body or personality or karma of a whirlpool? It's all water, nothing but water; always was and always will be. It's just movement of water. We see the "whole" as this universe of "ourselves plus stuff" and as a result accept and expect a whole lot of discrete experiences. Ego is karma.

Excellent! The Bear's in the house!
So… are you telling me that there is moral force acting towards humans alone (that exists in an ether like space permeating everything [a space where Schrödinger's cat is living …dead]) a force making moral judgments to the Nth degree, who then pays back every morally equated act its perfect measure, up to the last universal quanta of pain and pleasure, is this an image you believe in?

I know this image is not yours but I know this is a necessary belief for some … because it is too frightening an idea to live in a world where morality is just a civil choice. Where Hannibal Lecter's culling and eating of "the free-range rude" can not coexist with "The Good" (despite that we perpetuate this same horror on all other animals). It is why Christianity pretends that humans are the only creatures with souls. Since animals refuse to be good consumers how could they buy Jesus. And the way animals kill so eagerly so matter-of-fact happily, so blithe towards suffering, how could they have souls? To Christians you have to be able to think to abstraction to have a soul? The goofy complexion of all this, makes it seem almost exactly backwards to me, as if it were carefully made backwards [Yeeeah, I'm looking at you Paul… what-a-fucking-mess!]). (You see how I take every opportunity to piss at Christianity for fucking with the most perfect idea of love by adding all their ugly old baggage).
But this isn't what you're talking about (you old schooled Jesuit) you are equating Karma as ego…basically. Positives and negatives only plays as it is perceived in the player, and the played, yes?

So water has no Karma, does Karma belongs to humans alone?
Once upon a time the ocean had a persona with an ego.
("No-man did it, Papa! No-man blinded me!")
Why doesn't Ocean have a persona now? Is it a perception of its self it now lacks, and you are telling me it has no perception of its self (speaking ocean?), and yet a forest knows on one side of its self what is happening on the other, says even the high priests of science. They tell us that broccoli doesn't like to be eaten, does that response not create a personal Karma.

Either karma is really an early universal verb about the three laws of thermal dynamics or it is a human construct for accepting your lot of suffering… quietly… like a good little "Untouchable". Because if Karma applies to the ocean, then the ocean alone so totally out weighs humanity in tote, that humanities force of karma would have to be near to insignificant as a power of influence on The Now. Near insignificant even against, let's say someone fairly small like …Hurricane Bob!

Reason is a survival politic of the mind that reduces everything to be dominated, thus Reason made humanity the center of the universe. Reason doctored Karma so that the scale of Reality didn't crush us into insignificance, because the sum of humanity is less then even a pawn.
"At whose door the whole galaxy of gods pray for perfection day and night" (GGita)
…Oh please… it's a lovely image but …what an ego! Yeah …here comes Hurricane Bob to pray at the door. "Hey watch out Bob! Watch where you're throwing those cows. Hey, aren't those holy cows!"

When you measure by a truth relative your life, by feeling, then …Ocean lives, despite thinking (reason), knowing (knowledge), and believing (faith). So much of what I have been told doesn't feel like anything. So much of what I feel doesn't fit knowing. Karma puts humanity at the center of the universe, I know by way of overwhelming feelings that it is not true, and that that is ego. I know that the ocean is aware and has always scared me …"or so I feel".

Whereas Tree-girl says It's a life of multiple choices
A. A life where a rock is a rock (says Dave)
B. A life where a rock has no ego therefore no karma (says Arebear)
C. A life where a rock is an ancestor (say the Ojibwa people of Turtle Island)
D. A life where a rock has a responsive Heart that you can feel compared to love.

I get mail from young comic makers, I thought you would find the heaviness of my answers to this one to be funny …in its no-holds-bared brotherhood.

From your letter you are not dim …you are maybe under the wrong belief that knowledge, because it is old it is somehow sacred and beyond you, when in fact knowledge is just some other guys image of the same things that you experience everyday. Eecummings once said, "Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not yet buried imagination." If you allow your imagination its full authority when looking at the world, your ability to read visually will begin a dialogue with you to test the honesty of your voice. Be true and you can measure your evolution by the awe-some quirking of the world. Your life will become surreal because the awe of the surreal is a natural response to the sentient independence of your Heart.
I think you also believe that your perception is linear (plodding along in a tedious cafeteria line) and that you are alone and in control of your life. These concepts are parodies of the driest-mock. Meet your subconscious …like a particle of dust meeting the planet it lives in. I myself am an atheist (no common God but what we invent), and I do not believe in therapy (no one can know your Self but you) but it is important to begin a direct and honest relationship with your Self while you are still young … by this it will begin to carry you. It is You that is watches you, that dreams you, that inspires you, it is You that fills all the back holes of your perception with a virtual anticipation, and remembers intelligently everything that you have forgotten. This is your Subconscious. So that gap between understandings that we call imagination (the image nation) is full of a potential leaping, full of a nonlinear understanding. It is the Grock, the deep drink. What the old fellows called enlightenment were just fractured glimpses full-on through the eyes of the subconscious.
"God" is the name for the fear …of the enviable event of dieing forever. You are alone …with your subconscious, you are alone within your subconscious, which is what you think-of as your real Self when you check into your feelings, it is more you …then you are.
We share elemental patterns, archetypes old and new, that influence our subconscious, but we do not share our very subconscious. Your subconscious rules your life through feeling…not that you don't have a choice of what to do (…and there …is your independence), but if you ignore the voice of your subconscious your creative energy will decrease, and you will lose the luck inherent in direct observation, you will become duller and less awake … (don't you see this all around you). Your ability to feel esthetic ecstasy is held in your subconscious. I am saying this shit to you because I am assuming that you are going to make art (comics?) for your life, if I am wrong then this is just an exercise in stretching your ability to accept people different from you. And… no offense intended, but my time is just too precious to my work to play without use.

"A man's life is nothing but a slow trek to rediscover through the detours of art those one or two images in whose presence his heart first opened." - A. Camus

The internal process of art is interchangeable within its disciplines the following advise by Eecummings applied to all arts.

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feeling through words.
This may sound easy. It isn't.
A lot of people think or believe or know they feel-but that's thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling-not knowing or believing or thinking.
Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself-in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else-means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn't a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time-and whenever we do it, we're not poets.
If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you've written one line of one poem, you'll be very lucky indeed.
And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world-unless you're not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.
Does this sound dismal? It isn't It's the most wonderful life on earth.
Or so I feel.

Pal, nothing I have said to you is attempting to be wack or mere intellectual jargon the things I have said are like door guardians to direct observation which I've tried to shortcut into words … good luck, "-in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else-."

Cultivating my positive psychosis which is the just prerogative of any other religion.

Nothing but "still-points." I'm just going to the exact place a film would lead you to and waiting there gathering silence.

Learn the difference between Observation of the story, and the animal heart of living it.

Owning my own Heart, mortal and insular, so as to be very carefully irresponsible for my actions.

What am I doing? If a simple cup that is conscious is…The Grail, then a Heart awake is ______, (filling in the blank, that is what I am doing).

I'm working my fears and love together, and then telling of my adventures in fear.

Listening for my Self. (PapaWolf says, "The sound of the Self grows accurate as you listen.")

I have lost my reping-rap, my green skin sling for words. I put it down in the dark, and fuckin lost it, again. Maybe it's just me, I don't know but I might be listening for something. It might be the ripples of early epiphanies swelling out from the last dip. Or maybe it is the pivot of an undulation, whose head, lifting above the otherwise-plain of the sky's surface with glossy eye, eyes wide, restrains a blink. I guess I am listening for that blink that double clapping slap of wet lids readying for the next sight. I know I am equipped to feel it, but to hold a sight, the Sight must see you as worthy. And so I am always redefining who is listening and must leave off of big voices, favoring the inhale over the x.

That just popped out of me, just for you brother, and a voice kept whispering to me to not look at the words till it was done, make of it what you can, it makes utter sense to me, but maybe it should have gone without saying. And there's another useful faculty I've lost.

"I'm no fucking Buddhist but this is enlightenment.
The less room you give me the more space I've got.
This is an alarm-call so wake-up wake-up now.
Today has never happened and it doesn't fright me."

Ha ha. I kept whispering to my self(s) that I would call you at seven o'clock on November 17 and prove the diligence of my love, but of course I haven't a bloody clue what day of the week it is much less number in the month! So you have to remind me, Damn! I feel like Peter asleep in the garden. "Oh aah sorry Jesus, I'm just so beat."

Big kiss to you brother! See me hold the laurels above your head as we ride through the streets over bright petals of red and white with two great black gelding before you, (and one behind), and I am, as required, whispering, behind your left ear, that life is so very…brief.

Comrade-X continues in subcategory A of eec's first 33 Jottings: A13.
"The point of a pencil is to not abbreviate."