Category: Karma

Glowing Skelton – Third Universe – Dream 17-11-2012

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Here are some excerpts from what was a lengthy dreaming sequence.

Against a dark backdrop I see an image of myself. I am superimposed upon a glowing skeleton which has pink, fluorescent blood vessels. It is living. The two images or my normal body and the skeleton pulse back and forth in precedence. I am become death the destroyer of worlds.

In the dream I wonder if this is a harbinger of my own death. It is not it has only symbolic value…

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I know that the world of this dream in an intermediate world between life and death.

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I am shown three worlds as three circles / spheres and written upon each world in vivid dripping pink lettering are the following:

The world of starving Spirits

The world of the Hungry Ghosts

The world of the in between.

I know in the dream that this current universe is the third manifested universe and to understand the true nature of Bardo and karma I will need to expand my consciousness so that it can stretch backwards to the times of previous universal manifestations. This will be a part of my training.

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  • Sometimes the nagal or spirit is seen as a luminous pinks shade.

This from 18th May 2012 was more of a vision and seems related to this so I have appended it here:

I see a scene with four “men” dressed in different pastel-coloured robes breaking through into consciousness. They are “pastel” blue, pink, yellow and white, which are mildly and softly radiant.

They are waiting for me on the beach. Their facial features are not easily discernible. They are the four Lords of Karma, the Lipika Lords.

Renunciation or Self-Sabotage?

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The human ability to kid oneself is well known though for those kidding, difficult to accept. At the moment there are many who deem the slaughter in Gaza justifiable and apt. They do not imagine any karmic consequences because that notion would be very inconvenient. Irrespective of how things are temporarily brought to a close, there will be consequences ongoing.

The normal idea of success in the “West” might be to have a good career, make progress, climb the housing ladder and perhaps have a relationship or marriage and thence to propagate the species. One might like a nice car and pleasant foreign holidays. Perhaps gaining some measure of societal kudos along the way. One would not sulkily throw one’s toys out of the cot; one would comply more or less to the norm. Psychology might point you in this direction.

If for example you are a bodhisattva called Siddartha Gautama, it would be OK to run out on a young wife and child, leave the palace of your father the King and renounce the kingdom to which you are heir. But for normal people this would be wrong.

Viewed from one angle this is an ungrateful act of wanton self-sabotage. Siddhartha shot himself in the foot and abandoned a pleasant life, one which many might aspire to. To the starving, the poor and the unshod this makes no sense. Yet according to legend this subsequently facilitated his teaching and his completion of the career goal of any bodhisattva, namely enlightenment and Buddhahood.

In the post previous I pointed at something that many would not understand. I shelved a high value job at a prestigious space agency. The successful completion of which could have opened the way for senior positions and a way back from the “wilderness”. We would have had plenty of cash.

There were a number of warning omens when we were viewing properties in and near Leiden. Retrospect suggests that the job was a temptation of sorts.

Earlier I walked out of a marriage with a very young child which caused the sale of a house in London now worth £ 1 million. I left a new age group which I gave heart and soul to establish. I “gave” my shares back to a start-up company the vision for which was to a fair extent mine. I quit a then tenured academic job at a top university, something to which many aspired. I had no other job lined up just a few training courses. One of these went pear shaped so I gave them up too. To move from a highly timetabled job into near nothing was a bit of a shock to the system. I resigned from another short lived university teaching post. I cut contact with my aged mother. I forwent relations with family.

None of these were easy. I am not a prince.

One could say that I am simply a loser who could not hack it.

One could say that these were acts of stepwise renunciation. The integral over micro-renunciations has a similar effect to sudden departure.

 Or one could call deem them all the INFJ door slam, a fault in my character.

What is it that seeks success? It is the self and not the Soul. In this logic renunciation is indeed an act of self-sabotage. The ambitions of the self are stymied in stepwise succession. I know that I can live without any of these accoutrements. If you like I have physical plane proof by experience. I am not bound by the fear of missing out on a normal successful life.

I could be kidding myself. Trying to find an excuse for my squandering of opportunity. Or maybe I have simply thrown my toys out of my cot because things did not go my way.

Nobody else has experienced these things like I did. Nobody else has felt the tearing, the ripping. I am alone in my moccasins which I may not loan to another.

People might have opinions.

I cannot return to the trajectory my life was once on. Any attempt has gone badly awry. The dramatic might say that I am not meant to. Or one could argue that it is the karma of wanton squandering. I made the bed and now I must sleep in it.

There remains one question concerning what if anything I do with the remainder of earthly sojourn.

Hmnn…

The Dream of Sanat Kumara

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For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, for we are also his offspring.

Acts 17:28

Esoteric thought suggests that our entire planetary schema is the effect of the thought from or dream of the Sanat Kumara, the lord of the world. He holds this thought form for billions of years and it is this which currently sustains our beingness. It is in this manifest thought form where we have our existence. There is only The One Life though many consider themselves separate entities. We are each of us a part of a whole. His meditation evolves.

To imagine a being capable of sustaining such a complex and dynamic thought form is extremely difficult and certainly beyond my ken. I cannot envisage a consciousness or awareness so vast and comprehensive. We might call this created manifest thought form Gaia or earth. The interconnectedness is thorough and complete though our separative minds struggle to accept this. What happens in Kabul has an impact in Edinburgh. That awareness holds together quarks and gives rise to what we call the strong and the weak forces. It makes electrons and mountains. It is responsible for the properties of water and the miracle of new birth. It contains evil and good. And it makes flowers so beautiful for our upliftment.

A being capable of this is beyond our comprehension. He could envisage Atlantis so that it existed and then wipe it from his rāja yoga meditation so that no traces are found, there is no evidence of the capital city and not a single skeleton. We as humans map the evolution of thought form, trace evidence of plate tectonics floating on the fiery inner core. We imagine ourselves omniscient and “homo sapiens” when our intellect can in no way encompass even a tiny fraction of that of the Sanat Kumara.

If he chose to alter his held image, his meditation, a continent might sink.

The thought form materialises the dream onto the physical plane so that you can drink coffee and take a shower. Your consciousness is a tiny spark in a magnificent whole. It seeks its journey back to the source from whence it came. To be one again, all-one.

Anthropogenic change brought about by the karma, the cause and effect, inherent in the world and the sparks of free will in each being impacts on his meditation. His great experiment plays out and he observes and adjusts…

And yet we bomb and kill our brothers and sisters our fellow human beings…we demand and are very ungrateful. Like a plague of locusts, we deplete and render barren. We waste and despoil. And we feel oh so justified in our greed…and we imagine that we are entitled so to do, that we have “rights”.

The dream of the Sanat Kumara can sometimes be a nightmare…

Agenda for the 2025 Council Meeting

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Thanks to modern technology there would be no need for the council to use telepathy, there are Teams and Zoom etc.

I’ll speculate on some agenda items, prompted by the previous post.

In the news recently has been the devastating boxing day tsunami in which ~200,000 people disincarnated. This is a reminder that humans are puny on a planetary scale. With advanced nuclear weapons humanity could further destroy the planet. There may not be impunity from planetary process. It is clear to me that those enamoured of/by acquisitional materialism are slowly eroding the effort to mitigate climate change. The effort is being undermined by self-interested parties for various motives.

The most obvious mitigation for planetary heating is a nuclear winter. This would be a planetary response to nuclear war. We are not far off nuclear war. The impact would be global and of a scale not seen since a putative asteroid impact 65 million years ago.

Climate change must be an agenda item.

Humanity has never before been so immersed in illusion and glamour. This is largely due to social media and the petabytes of high definition images and video. This has a massive environmental impact. This is perhaps the biggest problem for the incoming New Age. Humanity is also wanking itself stupid to porn. The first initiation is about getting this kind of obsession under control. There is much work to be done to figure out how to address this.

Gigabytes are peddled alongside fentanyl.

Fear of missing out, FOMO, has perhaps surpassed fear of death.

The United Nations has been severely undermined of late most notably by the USA and Israel. But others like Russia have had a hand too. Responsible intelligent world citizenship has been replaced by partisan interest. An institution forged in the fire of war is losing its teeth. The lead provided by the USA is not an enlightened one.

America is therefore a problem and an agenda item. WTF happened to the USA?

Sixth ray personality at its polarised worst. Luckily the sixth ray is on its way out.

Which is worse antisemitism or islamophobia?

There seems to be an increasing problem with mental health. In the grand scheme of things minds are rejecting modern ways of living. This is probably a good and necessary phase.

People do not realise that debt is bad. Money supply is finite. In the “West” the demographic time bomb is starting to explode. There are not enough people in work to tax to pay for the care of the elderly.

Humanity needs to learn that it cannot have its cake AND eat it. Sooner or later some stark choices will have to be made.

The USA is making a strategic mistake in forbidding sale of high technology to China. It is literally forcing China to develop its own technology. If China invades Taiwan and TSMC stops production the world economy will go into free fall. I don’t think attempts at bullying China are wise.

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There are a number of pinch points which could spark planetary crisis.

The problem of insurance.

People buy insurance in order to get recompense when something goes wrong, when they fail to have life on their own terms. People feel entitled to recompense, to compensation. With increased climate “disasters” insurance costs will mount perhaps exponentially. Some places are already uninsurable and there is not enough money for governments to endlessly rebuild after planetary havoc. I suspect that perhaps it is only the Dutch who are taking flood defence sufficiently seriously.

This mind-set of compensation needs to go. Karma is karma.

There needs to be a massive paradigmatic shift away from hedonistic acquisitional materialism. It is consumption and economic growth which is directly casual of planetary heating. Such a change is unlikely unless there is a major crisis. There needs to be a whopping great wake up call. Cancer is a growth too. The paradigm of economic growth needs to change to one of genuine and affordable sustainability. This growth mantra needs to be replaced.

Seems to me there will be plenty to discuss…

Beyond Your/our Ken?

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When Israel launched its revenge attack on Gaza last year, I predicted that maybe 2% of the Gazan population would be killed and this figure has already been surpassed. There have been more that 5% injured. Apparently, this kind of slaughter is “allowable” without much adverse comment to the contrary by western leaders. 7% of the population killed or injured does not meet the criterion of genocide, according to some.

If not, what does?

If you would have asked me five years ago if this kind of slaughter could happen in our times, I would have said no because it was beyond my ken that a highly armed power would be allowed to kick the living shit out of an impoverished and nearly defenceless neighbour. The giant kills the minnow, the bully beats up the unpopular geek who dared to answer back.

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It looks like Putin is winning the war of attrition in Ukraine. They are running out of men to draft. The Russians know attrition better than any – Stalingrad.

As the year draws to a close, I am not optimistic for 2025.

The paradigm of governmental borrowing to finance public expenditure is looking ever shakier. Living on tick is not a great idea. Several countries like Zambia, Argentina, Bhutan, Japan, Greece, Sudan, USA and UK have national debt in excess of GDP. {IMF sourced} France too.

The populations in Europe and parts of Asia age and the demographic time bomb of too few children per woman is ticking ominously. There simply is not enough money to sustain our current ways of life.

People want popular policies to get into power, but there ain’t the dosh. Harsh decisions are avoided and put off. It seems humanity is very blinkered.

Orange-boi is mooting a trade war, his credit rating is probably worse than China’s. He has caused several of his own businesses to fail, six bankruptcies. I am not sure that these wars are a good idea and I do not trust his judgement. I understand that he may like chaos.

USA GDP is ~30,000 billion, current account balance is about 1000 billion in the red. There could be a cash flow problem for them. It is paying around 3% of GDP in interest close to 1000 billion dollars. Government revenue is ~ 10,000 billion dollars per year, government expenditure ~ 11,000 billion dollars. That is a 1000 billion overspend.

UK GDP is about 3500 billion dollars and current account balance is overdrawn by ~ 100 billion dollars.

These figures are beyond my ken. 100 billion in aid to Ukraine from USA does not seem to much but it is ~1% of revenue.

I am not sure that loan financing for vanity projects is a good idea.

Cash flow problems are difficult to solve and markets are very jittery.

When things move too far from equilibrium anharmonic behaviour sets in and some non-linearities come into effect. What these may be is beyond our ken. A downgrade in credit rating means more expensive borrowing which if funded by more borrowing is not a virtuous circle.

A number of key figures are exhibiting flakiness Yoon Sook Yeol and Macron with his unneeded elections. There are a lot of instabilities. Where is Merkel when you need her?

My pet theory is that because of increased climate change induced “disasters” household and auto insurance will increase substantially and may become prohibitively expensive. Ours has gone up by governmental decree! Because of insurance costs, places will become inhabitable which will raise house prices elsewhere. People have already mooted that the French might move North to places with a milder oceanic climate like Brittany.

Governments already straining financially will increasingly struggle to mitigate and clean up. The blame game will be played when everyone is not ready to take responsibility and make the necessary adjustments to their life “style”. It might impede their Instagram story.

My gut feeling is that the shit must really hit the fan before people will even begin to countenance radical change.

The scale of what may lie ahead is beyond our ken. What people are doing is crossing their fingers and hoping for the best. There are climate change deniers who like the sound of their own voice.

The rule of thumb is that when you are in a hole it is best to stop digging. Hoping for the fairy godmother whilst buying some more semi-automatic assault rifles will not stop tornadoes or floods.

My guess is that humanity is heading for a really profound wake up call which will be beyond our current ken.

spukhafte Fernwirkung Telepathy and Teleportation

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“Quantum entanglement is the phenomenon of a group of particles being generated, interacting, or sharing spatial proximity in such a way that the quantum state of each particle of the group cannot be described independently of the state of the others, including when the particles are separated by a large distance. The topic of quantum entanglement is at the heart of the disparity between classical and quantum physics: entanglement is a primary feature of quantum mechanics not present in classical mechanics.

Measurements of physical properties such as position, momentum, spin, and polarization performed on entangled particles can, in some cases, be found to be perfectly correlated. For example, if a pair of entangled particles is generated such that their total spin is known to be zero, and one particle is found to have clockwise spin on a first axis, then the spin of the other particle, measured on the same axis, is found to be anticlockwise. However, this behavior gives rise to seemingly paradoxical effects: any measurement of a particle’s properties results in an apparent and irreversible wave function collapse of that particle and changes the original quantum state. With entangled particles, such measurements affect the entangled system as a whole.”

Excerpted from Wikipedia

We could say that the karma of two photons in an entangled photon pair is also entangled. Measurement of one photon collapses the wave function and establishes its karma, its fate which determines also the karma, the fate of the other photon. One of the pair photo-excites an electron in some material or other, when detected, the properties of the other photon such as polarisation are then fixed by the measurement. The entangled wave functions can be very nonlocal. The photons can have widely differing energies yet remain entangled at birth. They can be different colours. At annihilation or death of one photon the characteristics are created in the pair photon. The wave function collapse of the entangled state produces a phoenix like wave function no longer entangled in the surviving photon, an eigen function.

In principle something entangled here could have one half sent to a planet in the solar system of Sirius and remain entangled on the journey with its earthly twin. However, no one has managed to maintain a qubit coherence of 8.6 years the time needed to get there.

One can teleport the state of a part of an entangled pair, one can herald the arrival. There is all sorts of funky stuff. But people still like to invoke hidden variables to explain. There could be teleportation even heralding between here and the putative Sirian planet.

I don’t think I am overegging what physics suggests here. That is some quite far-fetched stuff.

If teleportation is possible then why not telepathy?

The generated thought form in one being read at a distance by another being. Experiments in this field are seen as pseudoscience.  People can look down their noses and go, “bah humbug”. The establishment is snooty and self-congratulatory. It is a club which has “rules” and peer pressure.

Psychiatry

The notion of telepathy is not dissimilar to three clinical concepts: delusions of thought insertion/removal and thought broadcasting. This similarity might explain how an individual might come to the conclusion that he or she were experiencing telepathy. Thought insertion/removal is a symptom of psychosis, particularly of schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder or substance-induced psychosis. Psychiatric patients who experience this symptom falsely believe that some of their thoughts are not their own and that others (e.g., other people, aliens, demons or fallen angels, or conspiring intelligence agencies, or artificial intelligences) are putting thoughts into their minds (thought insertion). Some patients feel as if thoughts are being taken out of their minds or deleted (thought removal). Schizophrenic patients suffering from the form of alleged telepathy known as thought broadcasting believe that their private thoughts are being broadcast to other people against their informed consent. Along with other symptoms of psychosis, delusions of thought insertion may be reduced by antipsychotic medication. Psychiatrists and clinical psychologists believe and empirical findings support the idea that people with schizotypy and schizotypal personality disorder are particularly likely to believe in telepathy.

Excerpted from Wikipedia

Question: read the tone of this, is there any bias? What do you reckon? Pole up the bum?

Scepticism is largely self-fulfilling. If you believe something is not possible before experimenting you already have confirmation bias. Just as some people are overly wishful and want to believe, others are as biased in not wanting to believe. One could argue that neither is objective.

Unless you have meditated extensively it is likely that the background noise in your perceptual instrument “mind” is high. Synapses will be firing and your internal dialogue chuntering away. The signal to noise ratio of your mind will be poor. Tiny signals will get lost in the noise. If you cool your mind to 77K or below the dark current will dramatically reduce and you will be able to detect tinier signals.

Even were I still employed at a university I will speculate that the chances of getting a research grant funded to look into telepathy would be vanishingly small. I would have better luck, perhaps with the CIA or FSB. Think for a moment.

Were one to discover and enable telepathy it would be an utter game changer. The impact would be more far reaching than smartphones in time. The mobile phone manufacturers would want it suppressed ASAP.

It is my opinion that research in telepathy might be aimed at advanced meditators.

It is suggested that the many of the blue books opus is the result of telepathic interplay. Nobody can verify post hoc. Even if you don’t believe them one has to accept that it is an opus a big internally self-consistent body of work.

Telepathic rapport is mooted as being a faculty of the evolving humanity in the incoming new age. People might have to get used to spukhafte Fernwirkung or spooky long distance effects.

The Superpower of Patience

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I’ll speculate that immediacy and the immediacy of gratification are part of the modern way of life for many. People do not like to wait and many suffer badly from premature conclusion which can be messy. The concluding kangaroo can be found easily on all sides and people jump great distances to form dodgy yet firm conclusions without real basis. Many rely on what “they” say and are unwilling or too lazy to look into things themselves.

Śāntideva in the Bodhicharyâvatâra has a whole chapter on the virtues of forbearance which is a close ally of patience. The jewel of awareness forbearance is depicted by tarot 12.

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Sometimes you are required by karma to bear whatever life brings and to do so in as cheerful a manner as possible without pissing and moaning or whingeing like a stuck record. Often there is light at the end of the tunnel and it is not a TGV train oncoming.

This urge for immediacy means that long term policy making is neglected and life is governed by knee jerk reactions and sticking plaster temporary “solutions”. If it can’t be “sorted” quickly people lose interest. This condemns life to the shallows and the profound depths are never plumbed. It is a natural law that depth needs time and application. Concentration without distraction for extended periods brings insights more meaningful than a short flashy TikTok video. If you wait long enough an insight might come along and then just like with busses you may get several.

Humanity is in a rush like never before in some senses.

This means that the superpower of patience is fading and heading towards a mass extinction event. Being patient is not fashionable, nor is it good clickbait. Being patient is for losers. Gimme, gimme, gimme.

Aligning a complicated dye laser to give the best balance of laser power output and narrowness of spectral linewidth is nearly an art form. I refer to it as Zen and the Art of Laser Alignment. If you get twitchy and impatient it can go badly wrong and you are returned back to the start. All the good work can be undone by one or two impatient tweaks of a mirror positioning knob. If you note that you are losing patience, best to stop go out of the room and then come back calm to start again. In the past I could work at laser alignment in four hour sessions.

This loss of patience and hasty reaction is fairly prevalent. If gratification is not immediate interest is lost.

In Buddhism theory even after one has entered the stream it takes several lifetimes to complete liberation. Patience then is a scale. If one can work over many lifetimes that is patient. If one gets annoyed by the slow loading of a Netflix film, that is less patient. We boomers had ~50 kilobyte per second modems, we were initiated into patience thereby.

Pavlovian society is now conditioned to immediacy, buying in a click and getting food delivered to the doorstep in many places.

I wonder if I could survive the massed impatience and accompanying ire / agitation of London these days. For a long time, I was immersed therein. I doubt I could hack it now.

I think it fair to speculate that I am more patient than average. I can sit in a hospital waiting room without my comfort beads, by smartphone. I do not have to scroll frantically.

The need, it seems, for constant distraction is having a detrimental effect on mental health. The data dealers keep pushing more deal baggies of gigabytes at us, encouraging us to use high definition cameras like junkies to make huge files and selling ever more data to satisfy this addiction.

If people could go cold turkey on the taking and publication of all that imagery, the climate would not get so hot.

I think that were we all to better develop our superpower of patience, the world would be a better and perhaps more tolerant place. It would stop being so knee jerk reactive and it might even try to understand differing views and perspectives. It might ease the pervasive malady of premature conclusion.

False Monks – Karmic Stones – Car Park Dream – 16-11-2024

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Here is this morning’s dream had after seeing the full moon light up the garden through our glass back door.

I am at some kind of a modern retreat centre. It is in a grand European style mansion. I leave my room and head downstairs into the atrium and start of the dining area. I run into a number of people dressed as Buddhist monks. The colours of their robes are vibrant and the quality of the cloth luxurious. Although they have shaved heads they are heavily made up with lipstick, eyeliner, eyeshadow and face powder. They greet me good morning. It is more than a tad bizarre.

They ask me if I remember Antoine. (A Russian I once met). Yes, a little. He comes into the atrium dressed as a monk with very short dark black hair. I do not recognise him. He too is made up.

They ask me what I want for breakfast. I only want to have some water for coffee. They say that they can’t allow that. I should join the other guests in the new dining block which is their pride and joy. It is the latest addition to the centre. They gesture towards an orangery type of out building the other side of a small canal or river. There I can see well heeled and expensively dressed men and women enjoying a hearty breakfast with fresh juices. These are paying guests.

I say that I only need coffee because I have work to do. Reluctantly they let me help myself to only a large mug of strong black coffee.

I head out and up a nearby hill. I find a pile of large stones there which I have previously placed. These are my rocks of karma which I have carried up the hill. It is time to take them down, put them in my car and dispose of them. I start to roll the stones down the hill. Some of them roll easily and accumulate near the edge of the retreat car park. Others take more effort to budge and roll in a more haphazard manner. These ones after rolling a while vanish into thin air. I do not need to take them home.

I get to the bottom of the hill and start to load the stones into the boot of my car. My car is small and light coloured. The car park is jammed with very little space between the cars. All the cars are pointing up hill except mine. Many are black and like 1960s style American sedans. My car is at the far side of the car park nearer the exit. There are only two rows of cars between me and the exit. I am blocked in. There is a young woman dressed in 1960s style clothes with a VW beetle which is pink. She moves her car to unblock my path. She then gets into another big black car blocking and manoeuvres that so that I can leave the car park.

I drive off out of the car park.

I know that all the cars, cheek and jowl, pointing the wrong way is a wider metaphor for humanity and its glamour and gluttony. I know that that the made up monks are trying to be popular and because of that set a bad example. They are also glamoured.

Dream ends

Impermanence and Complacency

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I have had eight decent length dreams in October so far this year. I haven’t published them because recognisable individuals are in them. These are out of the blue as I haven’t spoken to/with them for well over a decade. I don’t really know what to make of them. They may be pointing at something going on in the “real” world.

In the Toltec tradition the “place” of dreams is the South. I spent quite a bit of my early life in the Southern Hemisphere and can get on well with Kiwis, Aussies and South Africans. I was a part of the itinerant barman subculture in London for a number of years. In the Toltec tradition people have a predilection for stalking of dreaming. I am the latter. Dreams can re-present possibilities in the web of life, a kind of aperture in space-time where events might manifest. These apertures do not stay open forever. They close and what once might have been possible ceases to be. Failure to act on the appropriate time scale makes things no longer possible.

I’ll make a statement, there is a tendency for arrogant people to be complacent and get caught napping.

One could argue we have seen this take place recently in the middle east, at 9/11 and Pearl Harbour. People who think themselves invulnerable, important and powerful can get surprises.

Impermanence as a concept is logical, nothing lasts forever. But people do not get it. To truly attain impermanence is to understand the eternal now. Impermanence lessens the manacles of clinging and attachment; it exemplifies the preciousness of time. Many imagine they have all the time in the world and are slow to get around to things which they prefer not to do. Timely action delayed reduces likelihood of positive outcome. Impermanence teaches appreciation and the fact we only borrow things for at most a lifetime.

People who work in universities need to be seen and heard in order to get promoted. They need to have measures of esteem; they need a web presence and various public metrics. They have a semi-permanent web footprint. Several ex-students of mine have commented to me that I am now hard to find on the internet. I was on Research Gate. They won’t give me an account now. I was on LinkedIn. I have no need to be seen, to be present. So, I can build up a profile, write a blog and then bin it. They are impermanent things. I do not cling; I have back-ups of text on the off chance I might need it again. People can imagine that one will want to remain in touch and contactable. They may be complacent about this. The nature of academia is that it is a large heavy slow moving object with momentum, it is not fluid nor are research funding mechanisms, the turn around time is quarterly at best. There are institutional and annual rhythms. If one is institutionalised life dances {slowly} to that beat. There is assumed a quasi-permanence.

It is perhaps non-standard to suggest that attainment of impermanence gives one a sense of urgency at the same time as detachment from outcome, specifically desired outcome. The land of “there is always tomorrow” runs out. The world of mañana means possibility and opportunity lost.

Carpe diem is interred in a mausoleum.

There is a saying attributed to Buddha; “The trouble is you think you have time.”

People spend their time unwisely and there is a lot of wasted time, escapism and avoidance.  Complacency about time is brought about by the illusion of permanence. “It will always be there tomorrow.”

There is vast global complacency about climate change because of the illusion of permanence. People do not get that our mode of living is subject to change and over the next decade it will become obvious. Instead of cooperating to reduce consumption the mantra of economic growth underpins jaded economic dogma. People indulge in petty vengeance games where hundreds of thousands of tonnes of high explosive munitions are detonated to get revenge by obliteration. How much energy and carbon dioxide has been released in Gaza, in Ukraine?

Has that cooled the climate?

I suspect that humanity could well be on its way to being shaken violently out of its complacency as the weather patterns get ever more extreme and chaotic. Humanity, especially in the rapacious West, has taken so very much for granted and for a long time.

Pride often comes before a fall.

Before long the aperture in space-time in which to meaningfully act on climate change will close. It has already started.

Karmic Snakes and Ladders

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In Buddhism we have the notion of stream enterer which if entered leads to, in the fullness of time, liberation or nirvana. This does not mean that the subsequent lives of a sotāpanna are easy rather ultimate “success” is assured. The challenges scale with the capability of the being.

One can think of the lives leading up to a possibility of stream entrance as a game of snakes and ladders. In some lives great karmic progress is made, a ladder. In other lives normal steady progress is made, the roll of the dice. Then there are lives in which arrogance and poor choices loads on extra karma. These lives are the snakes where one starts off again in a worse position. There is a snake on square 99 {97 here}. Just when success looks possible the chance is squandered. The problem is that progress and illumination can often stimulate arrogance and poor attitude. By accumulating personal power, one might get wealth, greed and clinging. What looks shiny could be retrograde.

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As one gets close to the fleeting moment of chance for stream entry the challenges get ever larger and sometimes way more subtle.

Imagine if you encountered Siddartha and failed to learn from him. Your “omniscience” somehow got in the way. That fleeting moment of chance which led you to the presence of a Buddha was missed. That is one massive Burmese python or anaconda of a snake! A Buddha could be the key to stream entry.

You missed a huge possibility for progress and were sent way back to learn all over again. A potential fate was forfeited.

Because of dependent origination or dependent arising, no fate is 100% fixed. But the general trends of karma and fate hold true. You have to cooperate with your fate in order to progress smoothly. If you are sulky and “do I have to” you won’t get ladders you will get snakes. If you are stubborn and pig-headed you will get many snakes. If you are light and easy, you will get ladders and people who help you on your way.

Some people really make bad choices, and in my experience, this is to do with them being glamoured in one way or another, by things or people. Those fond of short cuts, can find that they are anything but.