Post Vajrayana in Kampuchea

Once you’re a veteran expat languages replace national identity. You realize the need to belong to a country is just more bigotry—in fact, ‘chauvinism.’ Whether you’re formally a Vajrayanaist or not, the intensification and increased centrality of language ripens you into ways of the  vaka  (voice) vajra with its powers of dematerialization and discriminating wisdom. Metaphor, hermeneutics, mantric transformation readily replace grosser ‘my, me, mine’ fixations so that one, being a ‘national’ attached to a flag pole, doesn’t also have to be a tethered ball batted around during an over-the-fence tête-à-tête with a ‘turncoat’ neighbor. Freed from that hell, internal energies may just finally arrest one’s attention. The body, its feelings, phenomena and finally ‘Mind’ emerge. Then, “what’s this new heat?” you might exclaim. “Sex, or something more extraordinarily self-related?” Ontological investigation ensues. All this because a national identity with its cocoon of customs and c...

8/6/27 Dreamed I was dead last night and standing next to my lifeless form. A voice was telling me to get back into that form so I could really die. This because my conscious form still contained all the necessary elements for a real death to occur. This sounded odd to me because I was outside my body observing only that which could die but was being told by an omniscient voice that it was precisely that consciousness of death that needed to be inside the lifeless form to lose what was most important about the dying process. So I got back into my dead body and waited to lose that same consciousness in order for it to become real. Given I’d just been reading and researching Aryadeva’s 400 Verses, what does it say about his teachings and my understanding of them?  20/6 Thoughts about the harmful effects of early marijuana usage came to mind during puja this morning. A voice said, ‘it isolates the sweetness from memory.’ I later interpreted this as ‘one becomes less inclined to rememb...

In Generations (1991), the archetypes are identified as Idealist, Reactive, Civic, and Adaptive. In The Fourth Turning (1997), the terminology shifted to Prophet, Nomad, Hero, and Artist. Steve Bannon’s high-profile promotion of The Fourth Turning brought renewed attention to the whole framework — especially around the topic of Crisis. Crisis, analysed from a reformist position far to the left of Bannon’s, Klein’s Shock Doctrine argument, stripped to its mechanism, is this: crisis — whether natural disaster, financial collapse, or war — creates a window of political unconsciousness in the affected population. People are disoriented, institutional memory is disrupted, normal democratic resistance is suspended. Into that window, prepared actors move with pre-written legislation, pre-positioned contracts, pre-selected beneficiaries. The crisis doesn’t have to be manufactured to be exploited — but manufacturing it is simply the logical refinement of the technique. Her examples: Pinochet’s ...