On Julius' Shantaram review, I posted several comments including other quotes I think that readers will enjoy. Thanks to Rae for going there and liking them, reminding me of the excerpts and impressions from me and from Julius in going through the book: https://juliusskoolafish.substack.com/p/shantaram-by-gregory-david-roberts/comments.
Well put, Philip! And I don't have any simple answers on how to practice it. It's a daily thing. Glad to be comparing notes with you Here in the Infinite Now ;-)
Quote: "So that’s why it’s righteous and good to kill these kinsmen, who are not subjugating the women, so that you don’t end up in hell. Does anyone else see a strong correlation to the Torah, with its condoning of violence and condemnation of love? The ‘sin’ that can never be forgiven by Yahweh is intermarriage with the Canaanites. All the killing in revenge for that is a-okay with God."
>> WOW! What insight… I have read about the similarity in racism of these ideologies and the strategic relationship established between Hindu fanatic Modi and the Zionists.
Quote: Curiously, no one thinks their dharma is to shovel shit in India like the lowest caste."
>> lol
Quote: "After the men left with their weapons, the IDF descended on the camp and slaughtered up to 3500 defenseless people. They then hid the bodies, knowing it was a war crime. Wikipedia lies and says that Lebanese forces did it and the IDF ‘failed to protect.’"
>> It was an Ariel Sharon planned and enabled crime, Lebanese fascists were props. (by the way I was one of the very very few who were kidnapped by these fascists and escaped death by torture)
Quote: "Money isn’t the root of all evil. Evil is the root of all money. There’s no such thing as clean money. All the money in the world is dirty, in some way, because there’s no clean way to make it. If you get paid in money, somebody, somewhere, is suffering for it."
>>A lot of substance, but too much of a generalization.
Quote: "the most important thing is the amount of sin that is in the crime."
>> Nice
Quote: "Selling children as sex slaves could contribute to the complexity of the universe, I think. It would certainly make their own lives more complicated."
>> lol… don’t mess with Tereza!
Quote: "And did the massacre of the Shatila refugee camp enhance or impede the Ultimate Complexity? Yahweh is certainly a complex god, full of contradictions. For those who do the bidding of his ventriloquists, there’s no complexity too fraught with moral hazard to deter them."
>> These are the ultimate evil. Actually if you research the sin “businesses” you will find that “they” have a leading if not a monopoly.
I didn't know that others had drawn the parallel between the ideologies of Hinduism and the Torah! An important difference is that Hinduism satisfies itself with subjugating 1/7th of the world's population, a mere billion+, with a fairly substantial upper class. Of course, that makes it more robust as an imperial system and also easier to subsume as a whole under a One World Government.
If Zion is seen as the ruling class of the 'Noahide Covenant', it's one dynasty with one chosen heir as patri-archon over the whole world. This has been done, I think, by making bands of itinerant men into a diaspora nation, with loyalty to it that supersedes any moral code.
Zion coming from the word scion makes sense, because they take the strong stock root of integral cultures and graft the 'nation' of Zion onto them, so that it feeds parasitically, replacing that culture with their own. It's an 'infiltration nation.'
Let's continue that thread when you get to The Petropocalypse. There are some parallels that were occurring to me when I read it again that I wanted to run past you.
Oh Fadi, you were kidnapped by the Lebanese Zionists and escaped death by torture? There's a whole book in that one line. Can you tell me the trailer for it?
I'm now reading the last part of Shantaram where he goes with Khader to fight with the mujahideen against the Russians, posting as an American because they've promised weapons. I don't think this part is from his personal history and he's hinted that factions are waiting until the fighting is over to then take over the mujahideen. I'd read that they were the US-proxy terrorists who the Taliban was created to defeat.
It made me realize how little I know about Afghanistan as the 'graveyard of empires,' notably for Russia. Was this an offensive war by Russia or defensive because hostile forces were being aligned along its borders, as they were in Ukraine? He talks about the bloodthirsty brutality of the Russians, which sounded like the tactics of the Habiru, Scythians, later Bolsheviks. Were these from the Talmudic Pale of Settlement in Russia, Ukraine, Poland? I figure you're the right person to ask these questions.
On 'evil is the root of all money,' let's look at that. By my definition, evil is causing others to cause suffering. There are, I think, only two categories of ways to do this on a widespread basis: stories and systems. The story of evil in the Torah, justifying rule by the good, the chosen of God, is the root ideology of all evil actions, I think. It makes us judge the people as good or bad, us or them, and not the words or actions as wrong or right, no matter who says them or does them.
But the system that usurps our labor into causing suffering--whether firsthand or 100X removed--is money, and I think it comes from the same source. I think these were the Kenites or metalsmiths, the ones represented as Cain's clan. They implemented coinage for the high priests of Set/ Yahweh, as a way of ingratiating themselves and infiltrating every royal dynasty. And continued to do this as the merchants of Venice or the City of London. Without money, there could be no monopoly on evil, no easy way to cause others to cause suffering. Your thoughts?
>> Parasitic… a parasite needs a body to live off…
Quote: Can you tell me the trailer for it?
>> Will by email
>> On Afghanistan and the Soviet Union:
Afghanistan was a beautiful peaceful secular country. Socialists were in power. The US had been defeated in Vietnam, Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Adviser to President Carter wanted to give the USSR “its own Vietnam”. So the US started collecting, training, financing and arming terrorists with Saudi petrodollar and the heretic Islamic ideology of Wahabism. The Afghani government asks for Soviet support, and the Soviet military enters Afghanistan and defeats the terrorists. However with continued financing and supply of unemployed from all over the Islamic world the troubles never ended. A bit similar to Ukraine now, except in Ukraine most of the casualties are Ukrainians, so now they are dipping into the pool of teenage kids and women.
Anyhow, when the situation was stabilized, the Soviet army left with honor not in a debacle between 15 May 1988 and 15 February 1989. The Afghani government did not fall on Soviet withdrawal, it fell on April 28, 1992, after the breakup of the USSR and Yeltsin cutting economic support to the government. Afghanistan fell into a civil war not unlike what happened in Libya after Gaddafi was overthrown by the NATO controlled, Qatar funded terrorists.
Afghanistan remained in turmoil, until Taliban kicked out the US. Since then it has been developing slowly, despite the US having stolen all the gold and foreign reserves of Afghanistan. In a few years they have developed a steel industry and now are exporters of steel.
Where some complete my sentences, you complete my research, Fadi.
Nefahotep's formula for what they do is 'ingratiate, infiltrate, usurp,' although we've debated the order of the first two. The goal is always to usurp, a parasite, as you say.
So it sounds like it was the opposite of how it's presented in Shantaram: the mujahideen Wahabists were the foreign-funded terrorists and the Russians were defending Afghan civilians. The pattern is the same from the Habiru in Egypt to the Wahabists in Afghanistan--find bands of itinerant men without family ties and make them internal terrorists, so there's no need to invade from the outside.
"If any one of us were able to fully forgive themselves, it would zip along the neural synapses of the OneMind at the speed of the eternal now. We would be healed in a holy instant, wholly here, wholly now."
I love this, and you know, even though I couldn't say how or explain it at all, somewhere inside I believe this or some version of this instantaneous healing.
And then I wonder, would we get quickly bored and cook up some other world-ending shit-show to play in?
It was another part of Khader's Ultimate Complexity that I didn't agree with. He says that it will take a very long time--tens of thousands, maybe millions of years to get there, and we as a species might not make it but the universe will. Fuck that. If I were God, I sure as hell wouldn't design something so inefficient.
Although the author's been foreshadowing a betrayal by Khader, so the main character may come to reject his theory too, since I'm 'only' in the 700 pages.
In the Course, as soon as God recognized the problem--that 'we' were hiding from him in shame for something we never did--he solved it by creating a bubble of time and space inside the Infinite Here and Eternal Now, where we could bounce off the walls and come to our senses.
How long does a bubble take to pop? This would take less. In Reality, God hasn't been without us for a moment. We fell into the dream and woke up in Our Right Mind ages ago, if ages existed.
But that fear of boredom, and desire to sabotage, is real in our dream. And that's why it's important to imagine what we want and create it here. 'Heaven' as a golf course with long-haired winged people in white, singing, never held much appeal for me.
So I have to remind myself that we're not just God's creation--we're God's creativity. The Course says that, in Reality, our children are waiting for us. That made all the difference for me. If my children are there, there's nowhere else I want to be. And imagine that relationship without fear, guilt or [self]blame!
And I get to be with your kids in Reality, and see all the things you love about them just like you do. And you get to be with mine. And somehow that's going to be complex so that it's interesting and simple at the same time. But don't ask me how!
"Fuck that. If I were God, I sure as hell wouldn't design something so inefficient."
lol! There's that audacity we've come to know and expect as your readers! Love it.
Yes to dreaming up what we want to create. We're 'God's creativity' feels right to me too.
I don't have the 'how' either but there is something Real we are collectively moving towards I can feel into, I can trust more and more. There's a miracle in that.
Thank you, Tereza. For being that fractal bit that only you can be. XOX
OMG: a month ago a dear lady and Secretary of the Glamorgannwyg Indigenous People scratched out a note and handed it to me. It says 'Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts'!!!
You and I have been experiencing an eerie synchron-i-city, Sue! I'm very happy that we're in contact and that I get to have my words reflected back in your astute voice.
As I said to Kathleen on her stack, we're always talking to our Self. Thank you for being my best Self!
Indeed, Tereza, and may the 'ultimate complexity' continue unhindered!
Ps. Re '...doing the wrong thing for the right reasons'. I am reading Ayn Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged' (which for some reason - lol - was not on our uk school curriculum). I am only +/- 100pp in but it seems to be describing this, rather well.
haha, do I have a Taurus Stellium? I do reeeaaallly like my alone time.
I've had the little bear in the tin foil hat on my desktop and he makes me so happy. Although AI really didn't know what to do with his back paws. I guess bears sitting criss-cross applesauce hasn't been a common AI request ...
Wait, is that a bear or a wombat? The round ears and black nose seem bear-ish, along with two of the three back paws. But your blog is not titled 'back to the bear cave,' so I wonder if I'm not up on the nuances of wombats sitting in lotus position.
I ordered a copy of Shantaram and eagerly await it.
I continue to remind myself of your reversal of the Golden Rule, and how much sense it makes in so many situations.
"By my definition of good and evil, to do good is to alleviate suffering but to do better is to enable others to alleviate their own suffering."
The second half of this is the difficult one. I'm not sure how to do it. I certainly couldn't do it with my friend Joan; her suffering was too great at the end.
I certainly thought of you when I wrote that definition this time. And it tempered my statement that do-gooders need evil-doers and actually abet them by putting the responsibility on society to mitigate the damage rather than identify the cause.
When I'm talking about doing good or bad, both of those are individual actions. Our nature is to comfort suffering, it's not a virtue. I don't know anyone else who embodies that more than you, Mark, who deflects any praise for your actions by pointing out that you're in a position in your life, being retired, where it's possible for you. You assume that others would do the same if they had the ability. And I agree.
I think the same is true for those who do harmful actions, in reverse. Any of us would do the same if we were put into the twisted and conflicted ideology and circumstances that had brought that person there. Doing harm directly comes at a terrible cost, the person's mind needs to be injured first and it creates a cognitive dissonance with ever believing again that they're a good person.
Doing evil is always a social act--it relies on a pre-existing structure that gives ideological AND economic ability to control others who do the harm.
Those I'm characterizing as do-gooders are not those who do good acts themselves but those who inflict guilt on society to pay the price to fix the damage. What are liberals liberal with? Other people's money. What do conservatives conserve? Their own money.
So a do-gooder response to 'Covid' would be Universal Health Care. You have always 'done better' because your social efforts are to expose the cause and give people control over their own healthcare choices. Joan's suffering was a result, quite likely, of evil--those who inflicted the vaccine--not the individual healthcare worker who administered it. Your response was to do good with mitigating her suffering and to do better by drawing attention to the cause and the perpetrators.
And I'll take credit also that my book is the best way I can figure to 'do better' and enable all communities, families and individuals to NOT be subjected to rule by others over their bodies and minds. If I saw your work in putting it in e-book format (and all the corrections and improvements as part of that) as doing good for me, it would be too much to accept. But you are ethically consistent in deflecting thanks, and making me feel like I'm doing you as much of a favor, by giving you this way to 'do better' that aligns with your considerable skills and available time. So I see it as more of a mutual benefit than a favor.
The kicker of the Buffalo Bills recommended "Shantaram" to me a decade ago and I absolutely adored it. Fell into it happily and dreaded finishing it. You take it in so many fascinating directions, T! So well done!! xox
Isn't that just like you to toss in "The kicker of the Buffalo Bills recommended ..." Hobnobbing with the stars! Way to explode the myth of the dumb jock.
I don't know if I dread finishing it. I'm currently mired in Afghanistan, although I think the worst is over. It makes the chapters where he's being tortured in prison seem light. Such an interesting observation, though, that 'at the end, cleverness doesn't serve you.'
You'll enjoy the quotes and observations on Julius' review, if you've come up for air. I see you're catching up on posts, so I'm guessing you've been productive. I've been wanting to make a deal with my steady readers that I'll never make them feel guilty about not reading me if they don't make me feel guilty for writing too much ;-) I just can't help it.
But now I've found the right person to add this observation--I thought that Gregory was the exception to men not writing good romance, based on his description of Karla's eyes and the witty lines he puts in her mouth. But I now take that back--he sucks at writing a good sex scene!
So after 400 pp of buildup, and the delightful first kiss with the happy dance, they finally have sex and we get four paragraphs of poetic allusions with this single descriptive line: 'she took my body into hers.' For those four paragraphs, we pay with four months and 40 pp of prison, beatings, lice, starvation.
After 65 more pp, he finds her again and we get this: "She kissed me, and our bodies settled together on the yielding sand. She clasped her hands in mine, and with our arms outstretched about our heads we made love while the praying moon seduced the sea, luring waves to crash and crumble on the charmed, unfailing shore." And with that flowery bit of fluff, he sends us into killings, the deaths of his best friends, a relapse into heroin, and war in Afghanistan--where he learns it was her job to seduce him.
My daughters differ on the ratio of violence to romance they're willing to tolerate in their fiction. But Gregory is now batting five paragraphs to 800 pp. So I'm back to my original premise that men can't write romance. Am I wrong?
A well-written sex scene is in the eye of the beholder/reader, imho. I needed nothing more than what Gregory provided, primarily because I had zero expectation that the book was a romance, but also because I prefer -- in general -- poetic allusions to blatant descriptions. But I understand your disappointment!
It seems that your premise might be amended to: "men can't write romance for me." 😉
It was featured here with commentary by Daniel Kristos – from 1:01:45 after a lengthy preamble reading from his own book “Priestcraft: Beyond Babylon” (and some earlier rant that I think he handled poorly)
• Restoring Manners plus Kabbalists and Kebabalists (1) – Daniel Kristos – Ba’al Busters
On Julius' Shantaram review, I posted several comments including other quotes I think that readers will enjoy. Thanks to Rae for going there and liking them, reminding me of the excerpts and impressions from me and from Julius in going through the book: https://juliusskoolafish.substack.com/p/shantaram-by-gregory-david-roberts/comments.
If a word's length was indicative of its importance, then "Acceptance" would be the longest word in the dictionary.
And, it is "simple" to imagine it, but "complex" to practice it. 😉
Well put, Philip! And I don't have any simple answers on how to practice it. It's a daily thing. Glad to be comparing notes with you Here in the Infinite Now ;-)
A lot of comments
Quote: "So that’s why it’s righteous and good to kill these kinsmen, who are not subjugating the women, so that you don’t end up in hell. Does anyone else see a strong correlation to the Torah, with its condoning of violence and condemnation of love? The ‘sin’ that can never be forgiven by Yahweh is intermarriage with the Canaanites. All the killing in revenge for that is a-okay with God."
>> WOW! What insight… I have read about the similarity in racism of these ideologies and the strategic relationship established between Hindu fanatic Modi and the Zionists.
Quote: Curiously, no one thinks their dharma is to shovel shit in India like the lowest caste."
>> lol
Quote: "After the men left with their weapons, the IDF descended on the camp and slaughtered up to 3500 defenseless people. They then hid the bodies, knowing it was a war crime. Wikipedia lies and says that Lebanese forces did it and the IDF ‘failed to protect.’"
>> It was an Ariel Sharon planned and enabled crime, Lebanese fascists were props. (by the way I was one of the very very few who were kidnapped by these fascists and escaped death by torture)
Quote: "Money isn’t the root of all evil. Evil is the root of all money. There’s no such thing as clean money. All the money in the world is dirty, in some way, because there’s no clean way to make it. If you get paid in money, somebody, somewhere, is suffering for it."
>>A lot of substance, but too much of a generalization.
Quote: "the most important thing is the amount of sin that is in the crime."
>> Nice
Quote: "Selling children as sex slaves could contribute to the complexity of the universe, I think. It would certainly make their own lives more complicated."
>> lol… don’t mess with Tereza!
Quote: "And did the massacre of the Shatila refugee camp enhance or impede the Ultimate Complexity? Yahweh is certainly a complex god, full of contradictions. For those who do the bidding of his ventriloquists, there’s no complexity too fraught with moral hazard to deter them."
>> These are the ultimate evil. Actually if you research the sin “businesses” you will find that “they” have a leading if not a monopoly.
I didn't know that others had drawn the parallel between the ideologies of Hinduism and the Torah! An important difference is that Hinduism satisfies itself with subjugating 1/7th of the world's population, a mere billion+, with a fairly substantial upper class. Of course, that makes it more robust as an imperial system and also easier to subsume as a whole under a One World Government.
If Zion is seen as the ruling class of the 'Noahide Covenant', it's one dynasty with one chosen heir as patri-archon over the whole world. This has been done, I think, by making bands of itinerant men into a diaspora nation, with loyalty to it that supersedes any moral code.
Zion coming from the word scion makes sense, because they take the strong stock root of integral cultures and graft the 'nation' of Zion onto them, so that it feeds parasitically, replacing that culture with their own. It's an 'infiltration nation.'
Let's continue that thread when you get to The Petropocalypse. There are some parallels that were occurring to me when I read it again that I wanted to run past you.
Oh Fadi, you were kidnapped by the Lebanese Zionists and escaped death by torture? There's a whole book in that one line. Can you tell me the trailer for it?
I'm now reading the last part of Shantaram where he goes with Khader to fight with the mujahideen against the Russians, posting as an American because they've promised weapons. I don't think this part is from his personal history and he's hinted that factions are waiting until the fighting is over to then take over the mujahideen. I'd read that they were the US-proxy terrorists who the Taliban was created to defeat.
It made me realize how little I know about Afghanistan as the 'graveyard of empires,' notably for Russia. Was this an offensive war by Russia or defensive because hostile forces were being aligned along its borders, as they were in Ukraine? He talks about the bloodthirsty brutality of the Russians, which sounded like the tactics of the Habiru, Scythians, later Bolsheviks. Were these from the Talmudic Pale of Settlement in Russia, Ukraine, Poland? I figure you're the right person to ask these questions.
On 'evil is the root of all money,' let's look at that. By my definition, evil is causing others to cause suffering. There are, I think, only two categories of ways to do this on a widespread basis: stories and systems. The story of evil in the Torah, justifying rule by the good, the chosen of God, is the root ideology of all evil actions, I think. It makes us judge the people as good or bad, us or them, and not the words or actions as wrong or right, no matter who says them or does them.
But the system that usurps our labor into causing suffering--whether firsthand or 100X removed--is money, and I think it comes from the same source. I think these were the Kenites or metalsmiths, the ones represented as Cain's clan. They implemented coinage for the high priests of Set/ Yahweh, as a way of ingratiating themselves and infiltrating every royal dynasty. And continued to do this as the merchants of Venice or the City of London. Without money, there could be no monopoly on evil, no easy way to cause others to cause suffering. Your thoughts?
Quote: It's an 'infiltration nation.'
>> Parasitic… a parasite needs a body to live off…
Quote: Can you tell me the trailer for it?
>> Will by email
>> On Afghanistan and the Soviet Union:
Afghanistan was a beautiful peaceful secular country. Socialists were in power. The US had been defeated in Vietnam, Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Adviser to President Carter wanted to give the USSR “its own Vietnam”. So the US started collecting, training, financing and arming terrorists with Saudi petrodollar and the heretic Islamic ideology of Wahabism. The Afghani government asks for Soviet support, and the Soviet military enters Afghanistan and defeats the terrorists. However with continued financing and supply of unemployed from all over the Islamic world the troubles never ended. A bit similar to Ukraine now, except in Ukraine most of the casualties are Ukrainians, so now they are dipping into the pool of teenage kids and women.
Anyhow, when the situation was stabilized, the Soviet army left with honor not in a debacle between 15 May 1988 and 15 February 1989. The Afghani government did not fall on Soviet withdrawal, it fell on April 28, 1992, after the breakup of the USSR and Yeltsin cutting economic support to the government. Afghanistan fell into a civil war not unlike what happened in Libya after Gaddafi was overthrown by the NATO controlled, Qatar funded terrorists.
Afghanistan remained in turmoil, until Taliban kicked out the US. Since then it has been developing slowly, despite the US having stolen all the gold and foreign reserves of Afghanistan. In a few years they have developed a steel industry and now are exporters of steel.
Where some complete my sentences, you complete my research, Fadi.
Nefahotep's formula for what they do is 'ingratiate, infiltrate, usurp,' although we've debated the order of the first two. The goal is always to usurp, a parasite, as you say.
So it sounds like it was the opposite of how it's presented in Shantaram: the mujahideen Wahabists were the foreign-funded terrorists and the Russians were defending Afghan civilians. The pattern is the same from the Habiru in Egypt to the Wahabists in Afghanistan--find bands of itinerant men without family ties and make them internal terrorists, so there's no need to invade from the outside.
Thanks for this background.
I have to start with how you ended this piece:
"If any one of us were able to fully forgive themselves, it would zip along the neural synapses of the OneMind at the speed of the eternal now. We would be healed in a holy instant, wholly here, wholly now."
I love this, and you know, even though I couldn't say how or explain it at all, somewhere inside I believe this or some version of this instantaneous healing.
And then I wonder, would we get quickly bored and cook up some other world-ending shit-show to play in?
Maybe.
Thanks T. XOX
It was another part of Khader's Ultimate Complexity that I didn't agree with. He says that it will take a very long time--tens of thousands, maybe millions of years to get there, and we as a species might not make it but the universe will. Fuck that. If I were God, I sure as hell wouldn't design something so inefficient.
Although the author's been foreshadowing a betrayal by Khader, so the main character may come to reject his theory too, since I'm 'only' in the 700 pages.
In the Course, as soon as God recognized the problem--that 'we' were hiding from him in shame for something we never did--he solved it by creating a bubble of time and space inside the Infinite Here and Eternal Now, where we could bounce off the walls and come to our senses.
How long does a bubble take to pop? This would take less. In Reality, God hasn't been without us for a moment. We fell into the dream and woke up in Our Right Mind ages ago, if ages existed.
But that fear of boredom, and desire to sabotage, is real in our dream. And that's why it's important to imagine what we want and create it here. 'Heaven' as a golf course with long-haired winged people in white, singing, never held much appeal for me.
So I have to remind myself that we're not just God's creation--we're God's creativity. The Course says that, in Reality, our children are waiting for us. That made all the difference for me. If my children are there, there's nowhere else I want to be. And imagine that relationship without fear, guilt or [self]blame!
And I get to be with your kids in Reality, and see all the things you love about them just like you do. And you get to be with mine. And somehow that's going to be complex so that it's interesting and simple at the same time. But don't ask me how!
"Fuck that. If I were God, I sure as hell wouldn't design something so inefficient."
lol! There's that audacity we've come to know and expect as your readers! Love it.
Yes to dreaming up what we want to create. We're 'God's creativity' feels right to me too.
I don't have the 'how' either but there is something Real we are collectively moving towards I can feel into, I can trust more and more. There's a miracle in that.
Thank you, Tereza. For being that fractal bit that only you can be. XOX
"For being that fractal bit that only you can be." Love it. ❤️😂
Me too! I'll think of myself as a fractal for ever more.
OMG: a month ago a dear lady and Secretary of the Glamorgannwyg Indigenous People scratched out a note and handed it to me. It says 'Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts'!!!
Now I will listen to/read your post.
You and I have been experiencing an eerie synchron-i-city, Sue! I'm very happy that we're in contact and that I get to have my words reflected back in your astute voice.
As I said to Kathleen on her stack, we're always talking to our Self. Thank you for being my best Self!
Indeed, Tereza, and may the 'ultimate complexity' continue unhindered!
Ps. Re '...doing the wrong thing for the right reasons'. I am reading Ayn Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged' (which for some reason - lol - was not on our uk school curriculum). I am only +/- 100pp in but it seems to be describing this, rather well.
"Why am I so stubborn?"
Taurus Stellium says hello 😄
haha, do I have a Taurus Stellium? I do reeeaaallly like my alone time.
I've had the little bear in the tin foil hat on my desktop and he makes me so happy. Although AI really didn't know what to do with his back paws. I guess bears sitting criss-cross applesauce hasn't been a common AI request ...
Wait, is that a bear or a wombat? The round ears and black nose seem bear-ish, along with two of the three back paws. But your blog is not titled 'back to the bear cave,' so I wonder if I'm not up on the nuances of wombats sitting in lotus position.
Well I admit the extra limbs are a bit of a trip. But as far as I am aware there are no conspiratorial stargazing bears able to sit in lotus position
😂
I ordered a copy of Shantaram and eagerly await it.
I continue to remind myself of your reversal of the Golden Rule, and how much sense it makes in so many situations.
"By my definition of good and evil, to do good is to alleviate suffering but to do better is to enable others to alleviate their own suffering."
The second half of this is the difficult one. I'm not sure how to do it. I certainly couldn't do it with my friend Joan; her suffering was too great at the end.
I certainly thought of you when I wrote that definition this time. And it tempered my statement that do-gooders need evil-doers and actually abet them by putting the responsibility on society to mitigate the damage rather than identify the cause.
When I'm talking about doing good or bad, both of those are individual actions. Our nature is to comfort suffering, it's not a virtue. I don't know anyone else who embodies that more than you, Mark, who deflects any praise for your actions by pointing out that you're in a position in your life, being retired, where it's possible for you. You assume that others would do the same if they had the ability. And I agree.
I think the same is true for those who do harmful actions, in reverse. Any of us would do the same if we were put into the twisted and conflicted ideology and circumstances that had brought that person there. Doing harm directly comes at a terrible cost, the person's mind needs to be injured first and it creates a cognitive dissonance with ever believing again that they're a good person.
Doing evil is always a social act--it relies on a pre-existing structure that gives ideological AND economic ability to control others who do the harm.
Those I'm characterizing as do-gooders are not those who do good acts themselves but those who inflict guilt on society to pay the price to fix the damage. What are liberals liberal with? Other people's money. What do conservatives conserve? Their own money.
So a do-gooder response to 'Covid' would be Universal Health Care. You have always 'done better' because your social efforts are to expose the cause and give people control over their own healthcare choices. Joan's suffering was a result, quite likely, of evil--those who inflicted the vaccine--not the individual healthcare worker who administered it. Your response was to do good with mitigating her suffering and to do better by drawing attention to the cause and the perpetrators.
And I'll take credit also that my book is the best way I can figure to 'do better' and enable all communities, families and individuals to NOT be subjected to rule by others over their bodies and minds. If I saw your work in putting it in e-book format (and all the corrections and improvements as part of that) as doing good for me, it would be too much to accept. But you are ethically consistent in deflecting thanks, and making me feel like I'm doing you as much of a favor, by giving you this way to 'do better' that aligns with your considerable skills and available time. So I see it as more of a mutual benefit than a favor.
"Our nature is to comfort suffering, it's not a virtue."
Thanks for this. It clarifies things for me.
The kicker of the Buffalo Bills recommended "Shantaram" to me a decade ago and I absolutely adored it. Fell into it happily and dreaded finishing it. You take it in so many fascinating directions, T! So well done!! xox
Isn't that just like you to toss in "The kicker of the Buffalo Bills recommended ..." Hobnobbing with the stars! Way to explode the myth of the dumb jock.
I don't know if I dread finishing it. I'm currently mired in Afghanistan, although I think the worst is over. It makes the chapters where he's being tortured in prison seem light. Such an interesting observation, though, that 'at the end, cleverness doesn't serve you.'
You'll enjoy the quotes and observations on Julius' review, if you've come up for air. I see you're catching up on posts, so I'm guessing you've been productive. I've been wanting to make a deal with my steady readers that I'll never make them feel guilty about not reading me if they don't make me feel guilty for writing too much ;-) I just can't help it.
But now I've found the right person to add this observation--I thought that Gregory was the exception to men not writing good romance, based on his description of Karla's eyes and the witty lines he puts in her mouth. But I now take that back--he sucks at writing a good sex scene!
So after 400 pp of buildup, and the delightful first kiss with the happy dance, they finally have sex and we get four paragraphs of poetic allusions with this single descriptive line: 'she took my body into hers.' For those four paragraphs, we pay with four months and 40 pp of prison, beatings, lice, starvation.
After 65 more pp, he finds her again and we get this: "She kissed me, and our bodies settled together on the yielding sand. She clasped her hands in mine, and with our arms outstretched about our heads we made love while the praying moon seduced the sea, luring waves to crash and crumble on the charmed, unfailing shore." And with that flowery bit of fluff, he sends us into killings, the deaths of his best friends, a relapse into heroin, and war in Afghanistan--where he learns it was her job to seduce him.
My daughters differ on the ratio of violence to romance they're willing to tolerate in their fiction. But Gregory is now batting five paragraphs to 800 pp. So I'm back to my original premise that men can't write romance. Am I wrong?
A well-written sex scene is in the eye of the beholder/reader, imho. I needed nothing more than what Gregory provided, primarily because I had zero expectation that the book was a romance, but also because I prefer -- in general -- poetic allusions to blatant descriptions. But I understand your disappointment!
It seems that your premise might be amended to: "men can't write romance for me." 😉
Thank you for the huge shoutout, Tereza, and I am so glad you missed that connecting flight (well, you know what I mean …)
Speaking of Good versus Evil, I watched this the other day (and will have to watch again to take it all in):
• The Tree of DEATH and the Qliphoth - The DARK Side of Kabbalah - Esoteric Guardian
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIpruSQaABs
It was featured here with commentary by Daniel Kristos – from 1:01:45 after a lengthy preamble reading from his own book “Priestcraft: Beyond Babylon” (and some earlier rant that I think he handled poorly)
• Restoring Manners plus Kabbalists and Kebabalists (1) – Daniel Kristos – Ba’al Busters
https://ftjmedia.com/channel/BaalBusters/video/.7XLTTexX7BB5pcSXyphPgw/restoring-manners-plus-kabbalists-and-kebabalists