One Last Hurrah From the Aquarian Way

Where are we going Walt Whitman? Our country has gridlocked itself in a civil war. Four and a half years after we invaded Iraq, we have one hundred and thirty thousand troops in the country at a cost of three hundred million dollars a day. The 2008 budget will alot 200 billion for the war, at over half a billion a day. The war has lasted longer than the Civil War and our involvement in Vietnam. We could have funded universal health care many times over with what we have spent on this war.

The administration is declaring the situation improved, citing once tumultuous neighborhoods in Anbar and Baghdad to be improved. The new found quiet of these neighborhoods is the result of ethnic cleansing.

We are sitting in the middle of a civil war that seems destined to continue until there is a massive population relocation or a change of heart. Iraqi politicians seem incapable of bringing peace. As American soldiers die, they go on vacation rather than create a solution to bring a solution that would hasten our departure.

Iraq was nothing more than a flimsy colonial drawing with a strong man holding things together. A vacuum was created, with violence reigning until a new power emerges. And our guy Maliki seems incapable of being that entity. Radical Chia cleric Muktada al Sadr is a stronger figure, as he already controls much of the health infrastructure.

Not only does a three state partition seem inevitable, but infighting within the new entitites is also a very real possibility. Currently three Shia militias are fighting amongst each other in the Southern coastal area of Basra.

Leaving Iraq could initiate bloodshed. But the same people who said that the Iraqis would greet us in the streets are warning against genocide. Should we still be listening to them? Perhaps retreating and rebuilding our reputation from scratch is our only way to progress.

Life in Venice Beach

Across the street there are 6 cop cars parked back to back, blocking an alley. One cop went running back to his car for a moment, wearing a face mask indicative of a siege.

Venice retains its rough edge amidst the endless affluence of West Los Angeles. Once known as "the slum by the sea," Venice saw gang warfare for decades. The Shoreline Crips and the Venice Trece were the ruling parties. No one without a death wish ventured onto the boardwalk at night.

The eighties saw the Hollywood area reach capacity. With the film industry growing, people continued to move to LA in search of work. Santa Monica was the first beach town to be revitalized. Venice followed, as fresh money renovated the former slums. Crack houses were renovated into million dollar homes. Drab streets were filled with freshly landscaped palms and birds of paradise.

I live in the last frontier of Venice. Drug dealers spend the afternoons on a corner four blocks away. Police helicopters periodically circle the area in pursuit of some drug dealer or gangster. Gangs still periodically war for control of certain blocks. I have woken up to find blacked out drunk homeless people sleeping on my doorstep. A colony of seeming drug addicts living in dilapidated trailers has parked itself on the opposite corner. They frequent the Big Lots and 99 Cent Store along with the working class Mexican and black families.

It is rumored that Whole Foods is buying the aforementioned shopping center. And perhaps the arrival of the ever expanding bourgoise temple will transform the last remanants of "the slum by the sea" into the territory of the hip entertainment crowd.

Perhaps I am getting older and losing my love of grit, but the beautifciation of the area does not seem like a bad thing.

SDS

Office Life

My office supplies two things in the kitchen. Coffee, and painkillers. 4 big boxes of 4 different brands of pain killers. There is no fruit, no snacks, nothing to nourish one's day. Stimulants to keep one moving against the natural tendency to run from feeding data into a machine all day. Pain killers to numb the aches from staring into a throbbing neon radiation machine all day long.

There is an obvious disconnect in many employees here. People walk down the halls with their heads down, providing no acknowledgemnt of the passing person. I have been here since January. Is it possible that people pass each other every day for years, never acknowledging their unknown colleauge with even a small smile?

I am happy that my life goals will not include this anonymous office life of neverending purgatorial projects.

"This stillness to which all returns, this is reality, and soul and sanity have no -more meaning here than a gust of snow; such transcience and insignifance are exalting, terrifying, all at once, like the sudden discovery, in meditation, of one's own transparence. Snow mountains, more than sea or sky, serve as a mirror to one's own true being, utterly still, utterly clear, a void, an Emptiness with out life or sound that carries in Itself all life, all sound. Yet as long as I remain an "I" who is conscious of the void and stands apart from it, there will remain a snow mist on the mirror." - Peter Matthiesson, from "The Snow Leopard."

Where I Am Now, How I Got Here, And How I Can Move Forward

The past weeks have seen me negotiating this reality in haze. I was walking tall and proud, doing Sat Kriya for 62 minutes, manifesting beauty. And then I slowly crashed, tumbling into a nether realm of muddled thoughts, angry moods.

I guess this is what St. John of the Cross refers to as “the dark night of the soul.” For much of my meditation career, mystical apparitions have danced across my eyelids. And now much of that has stopped, and I am faced with the task of being an overwhelmed security guard in charge of protecting the void. Subconscious thoughts overwhelm my capacity to keep them out, and I am stuck.

But this is a stage that many encounter on the quest, the dark night of the soul. The confetti stops flying, and the practices that once presented us with joy become another drudgery task.

So I ask my teacher what to do. The answer is to stop operating on an emotional basis. Feelings come and go, and in reality we have little control over them. Continue to walk the path even when everything around has gone pitch black. Sometimes I made my most miles on the Appalachian Trail while it was rainy. When there were no views to stop and marvel at, I could push through.

It is at this point where experience comes to a dead end that faith comes into play. The teachings say that the dark night of the soul is a transitory faze a final march through the swamp before the light is reached.

Having already begun this journey, I am faced with two choices. Continue on in faith and grace, or sink into sludge. The answer seems self-evident.

I am in the tail end of a two month creative block. Conversations and writing are labored.

Perhaps my five months working in a windowless office doing glorified data entry sparked it. The phosphorescent cave dulled my drive. My interests away from the experiential world and its intricacies to conversations about NBA basketball and Lindsay Lohan's latest legal trouble.

My most creativity peaks while traveling, hiking up Andean peaks with my mouth filled with coca leaves and learning indigenous phrases from my guides. Seeing the world, the energy of moving, fuel me.

The question is how to remain grounded in an income producing reality while spending several months a year traveling.

SDS

News From The Sporting World

Michael Vick, the quarterback from the Atlanta Falcons, is being investigated for holding dog fights at his house in Chesepeake, VA. There is a national uproar over the issue, and it is likely that the Falcons will cut him.

I find it interesting that people are outraged over dogfights, while they are eating the flesh of animals that were tortured every moment of their incarnation. But eating meat is acceptable because of the systematic routinization of it. I think of Hannah Arendt's discussion of "the banality of evil" in her account of Adolf Eichmann's trial. Eichmann performed the bureaucratic work of arranging the transportation of European Jews to concentraion camps. The Moussaud found him in Buenos Aires and brought him to Israel for trial. To his last day he could not see his mistake, as he was physically removed from the acts of violence.

We are conditioned to ignore the negativity of some undeniably negative acts, while we explode in the face of what we have not been conditioned to accept.