DEEPSIX OF NOTES FROM W03 NOTES TO W03 {W03-1} [ I do find this odd -- I mean, one always assumed that resurrection is entirely a non-physical matter, that the physical notion of resurrection is at best no more than a simplistic metaphor -- so all this fundamentalism about burying the body intact is merely populist nonsense -- I mean, even in prehistoric times they conducted second burials after all but the bones had decomposed -- and even the best-embalmed mummy, if he was resurrected physically, would have to call a celebrity limo to his pyramid and make a quick discreet trip to the blood-bank if they take rather old Egyptian credit cards . Pass me a tangerine. ] [ And anyhow, it's a few degrees below freezing, or was, and such a strong wind blowing down from Lucamagno Pass that when I step outside to piss I get complaints from Olivone. I was going to walk down to Olivone at daybreak and go to Andermatt to upload, but wind-chill is too high, so I take the day off and stay inside -- rather a sense of luxury, like a rainy day when one is a child in a warm house, with things to play with. A snowy no-school day was fun too, but not quite so snug, since one should go outside and see the snow and shovel the steps and maybe sidewalk. That was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I grew up in an old Victorian house with a nice yard. We had 4 pear trees and two grape vines. It must be gusting to gale force or more here now. One never quite recovers one's childhood.] {W03-2} [ It was just after the end of Bush Sr.'s First Gulf War, when I had flipped out in Hamburg and taken a boat to Harwich -- or am I muddling the details of my flipouts -- so anyhow, PVK was giving a seminar in London in some big hall near the elegant parks -- and there he spoke on the Temple of Light -- and Aziz Dikeleous remarked to me in passing that PVK had remarked to him that he was amazed at what was "coming through " -- that is, on the high quality of what he had been inspired to say -- for PVK often spoke from spontaneous inspiration, which was one reason that he, like R. Shlomo Carlebach who similarly conveyed what was "coming through" -- could not accept interruptions by questioners, since that would break the flow of the inspiration. So why I'm saying this is to point out that one shouild recover the tapes of those lectures from Nigel Hamilton, who hosted the event, or Aziz, who is maybe the most responsible person associated with the London chapter, or maybe Jennifer Leighton, for whom I bought a set of those tapes. ] [ I got cold polenta to eat today -- might be ok with butter and honey when I reheat it on the hotplate -- until of course the ski- bunnies come back in front of the roaring fire at this nicely paneled Swiss Alps ski-lodge with the roast suckling pig -- the entree, I mean -- and the Jameson whiskey I ordered last week of course -- "Oh babe it ain't no lie -- this life I am leading is a mighty high." "Or something." I miss Agnieska. A person of exceptional qualities and refinement, who has not had an easy life -- I reckon her immune system was weakenedd from being born in the Stalinist industrialized zone of Poland. Such a capacity to carry on in good form despite physical affliction -- I freak out and get in bed under the blankets with comic book if I have even a toothache -- and also swallow one of everything on the pharmacy shelf until some young woman in a starched white bib walks in and says "Can I help you, Sir." And I don't even dare say, Yes, please go to bed with me, for fear she'll go there only to tuck in the starched sheets and I'll look up and see the window looking out upon the apple tree is barred. Like I say, it's a cold windy stay-at-home day, and I'm waiting to get hungry enoough to reheat the the polenta, even if that does turn this office-in-exile -- and I don't even quite know from where I'm exiled -- into an ice-cold sauna. Oh well. "There's whiskey in the jar." Until Pesach anyhow, and then I get get a fifth of Chruter. A good herbal drink, they should only add a dash of marijuana to the mix. I reckon ZIK will undo PVK's ban on drugs -- Ag says that the West Coast crew are coming back -- and that was really the only reason they split, for all their nonsense about regarding Sufi Sam as a Murshid -- well, it was Carolyn who told me that PVK put in the ban on drugs when he gave darshan to someone who used to do psychedelics, and was appalled at the gaps in his subtle bodies -- a nice enough guy, worked down on the farm and never said a cutting thing to anyone -- so anyhow, I alwas thought that PVK had failed to distinguish pot from acid -- of course pot was milder in those days -- and also, PVK immediately said that he regretted having to enact a rule, and hoped and intended that this would be the only rule he enacted -- I do think he was right, that even pot distracts one from the cleaner path of straight meditation -- but I guess it's better to leave that to individual self-discipline -- and anyhow, it's barely adhered to at Zenith -- I once went up to ZR, after delaying and dithering on the matter for a year or two, and said, the Chief Butler smokes pot, and ZR said back to me, didn't we all. End discussion. I mean, in the good old days at Abode Camps, they wouldn't even serve coffee until Departure Day, because coffee keeps you from getting high -- into the higher of the higher spheres, that is -- which is why i drink it it the morning -- keeps a man grounded -- me and the Israelis. Beduin too, as a matter of fact. Israelis even drink coffee before going to bed. Maybe it keeps them from having weird dreams. Bet the Beduin have some great conversations over coffee, and maybe a bit of pot, around the campfire, under the stars. Alev can sing a few Bedouin campfire songs. I used to have some great conversations over pot with Cave Dave in the kitchen of New Buffalo -- we made certain improvements of the Gneral Theory of Relativity, which of course neither of us had read. ] {W03-3} [ You know, this is the first time I've noticed PVK make much explicit mention of the Knight -- in his old clunky sligtly rusted armour he seems to have gotten rather lost in the throng of all those courtiers, with their twelve orders of la-de-dah -- so in the SO the Knight is just something one ordains on children -- PVK would say, do you pledge to defend people against bullies -- well, NIK, zicharon l'bracha, was surely a Knight -- PVK once at an Abode Camp seemed clearly to have hinted that she was a re- incarnation of Joan of Arc -- and in the introduction to Toward the One, at least the original edition prodcued at Lama Foundation, he does state that she is hereby ordained as the first Sufi Saint -- tho it turns out, the only one that he so named, as far as I know -- well, one can't deny that PVK was empowered to do so -- {W03-4} [ as far as I know, "the Never-Never" is a modern Israeli phrase, referring to purchasing the luxuries if not the necessities of life with post-dated cheques -- even Netanyahu, when he was Prime Minister, and someone asked him how he was coping with personal finances, replied, "Oh, living on overdraft like everyone else." ] Well, I ain't seen that book, and hope to do so. And even more, all the unpublished manuscript etc. that go with it -- As to "The Message in Our Time2 -- a beautifully produced book, published by Harper and Row, but not reprinted -- essentially PVK's spiritual biography of HIK, but very much with PVK's -- extention, raally -- of HIK's teachings. As I've said elsewhere, in the "pvkinv*.* docs I suppose -- PVK notes, with his characteristic understatement and tact, that what was published was a relatively small part -- maybe about a third -- of what he had submitted . So I had long hoped to see the original manuscript republished. Someone once raised that question with PVK at Zenith -- he had asked me to ask him, but I was too shy -- and came back with the answer that PVK had said it was too full of errors -- whatever that means. Aziz was there, and brought back that response, as I recall. But maybe it was just that it was the wrong guy to ask PVK the question. Anyhow, there are certain advantages to one's teacher being dead. With R. Shlomo one of the main advantages was that one no longer had to stay up past midnight on Shabat evenings, falling asleep into the lukewarm chicken soup. (Like I've said, once at an army basse, where I was a volunteer dishwasher -- ah, Israeli militarism -- I complimented Mike, who worked in the kitchen because he was too fat not to, on the chicken soup -- all that soup with just one chicken -- and he said, yup, and it didn't even get wet -- ran so fast through the soup that it didn't even get wet. ) But I digress. ] {w03-5} [ I mean, remember Kayla Thorpe, one of the last women put to death under Governor George Junior Bush the Connecticut Carpebagger of Texas -- who maybe died in as close to as state of grace as most may hope for -- it was not that she helped her boyfriend butcher some poor citizen, but that she admitted to having had an orgasm doing so -- otherwise she might have pled the victim and gone to a center for abused women, but penitents don't have orgasms in the USA -- if ever there was a religious hypocrite, it is George Junior -- ] {w03-6e} [it may even have been lost on the customer copies, which were often made on El Cheapo tapes -- all 90 minute tapes are 90 minutes, but Aziz pointed out to me that the good tapes, namebrand Type II's in particular, give you a few extra minutes, where the El Cheapo's do not. Even my TDK Type I's stop about half a minute before the namebrand Type II Master's, which tend to run past 47 minutes. I do however catch all the text on the Master's on my TDK Type I's that I use for the G2 backup set which I make while inputting. And of course the input catches all the text on the master.] {w03-7} [ For all PVK's talk of how Sufism is an in-the-world path, not a renunciate path, and not a path for merely personal self- improvement or merely personal self-fulfillment, it does seem to me that most folks who come to zenith, and even some at the Abode -- not to mention the various chapters -- are really just looking -- not to renounce the world, I think, butt surely to renounce hoi polloi -- -- well, so am I, and have done pretty darrned good at it too -- I ain't shaken hands in a while, except at shul where it's a gesture of respect, and with Honest George who sort of -- and I ain't warn a necktie in a decade, except when my zipper broke -- so for most, it really just is personal self-improvement -- and group courtesy is just one more hippie oddity with which they put up -- I mean, a German will patiently wait in line, and then when he gets to mess-board will take everything he can, in complete disregard of whoever is behind him -- and will demand you defer to his feelings, in disregard of your own. Well, that's Consumer Ethics. But at Zenith Camp you almost never hear talk of new social concern nor even intellectual concern projects -- all that potentiality for synergy disregaded -- because most folks ain't working on anything that benefits much of anyone but themselves, and maybe the customers who pay them for psychotheerapy or whateve.r ] {w03-8] [ N.B. -- At New Buffalo , sometimes the Roadman would have us walk around the tipi once before sitting down -- as I recall, it was clockwise -- ] {w03-9} [ It is not clear to me that Hebrew is an offshoot of Aramaic rather than a parallel development -- in recorded Jewish history, Aramaic comes in only as a consequence of the Babylonian exile, apparently accompanied by a cultural genocide in the land of Israel -- for only 2 names of months survive, the rest were brought back from the Babylonian exile --] {w03-10} [ I suppose this is in the interests of purification -- first you sweep the floor, then you set the table -- but in academic circles, one first states what is, then denies what ain't -- often anyhow -- ] {w03-11} [ So anyhow, Devi says, you sure act young for an old man, so I says back, That's because I don't take no bullshit from nobody -- I've gotten myself fired from more jobs than the rest of you will ever have -- combined. Not even that I try to get myself fired -- mostly amyhow , it's just that there's some place a good donkey can't go.] {w03-12} (PVK is here concerend with those who don't like to do the zikr because it's A-rab -- but you can't pin that on me, I don't like to do the zikr because, speaking as a philosopher, I do not see what anyone should have to say anything more than once or twice -- -- tho I usually don't say 'Christe eleisoon' [ If you want to decrypt this mystery, reverse however I unintentionally shifted my right hand -- probably one space to the left, but maybe one space to the right -- and retype it. I really don't think Chico d'Oro coffee is all that great ] {w03-13} [ I don't see it that way -- I see the altar for universal worship as more nearly a polygon -- and indeed, building an array of pretty rocks, many crystalline, with flowers about the ccenterpole of the meditation tent, rather than a chopping block at the head of the tent, it is many-sided (Nu, you find 'chopping block' a bit too gross for 'altar' -- but the altar in the Temple was for animal sacrifice -- the barbrous Hebrews or Yehudim or both not having experienced the redeeming civilization of McDonalds -- Inexplicably, although we regained control of Temple Mount in 1967, we have not yet reinstituted the Temple ritual, although we pray daily that we will do so. I suppose there are still questions of the proper protocol for CNN. And anyhow we got us McDonald's now. There's a McDonald's davka in Jerusalem, on the Midrahov. He had to build it like a fortress, with windows thick enough to stop a tank shell, because he serves cheeseburgers. There was once a place on the Midrahov that served American style breakfasts, with pancakes and bacon_amd_eggs, and all the religious and ultra_religious would walk right passed it with giving a hoot. But cheeseburgers -- this is heavy_duty heresy I don't doubt. You know, even the Israel Center, home of the pointy-headed kippa sruga frumies from America, used to give occasional lectures on Why We Don't Eat Cheeseburgers. Like, intuitively obvious it ain't. But I digress. ] {w03-14} [ Well, I don't see how we could take Christianity as a phase in the development of Judaism -- first of all, of Judaism it is clearly said, +"you shall neither add nor subtract" -- Moses said that, but that just means taht we take it as an integral part of Judaism -- Moses per se is nobody, and never was -- "the humblest man who ever lived" and also, when he died, all it said was "sleep with your people" -- I mean, he might have said, hey, I'm Moses, don't I get to at least be a Nebula -- "Where was Moses when the lights went out " "In the cellar eating sauerkraut" That was from my father's childhood. ] {w03-15} [ I suppose this applies especially if one does it kneeling, but I suppose it could apply if one does it seated too -- PVK elsewhere says, the reason yogi's sit cross-legged is so they won't topple over if they get into samadhi -- Cave Dave said, Weymos was once sitting in the tipi after a meeting, and he got into satoria or samdhi or somethting, and fell over insensate, and the Indians were real concerned -- ] {w03-16} [ Why should I bother, as_it_is_said "My face I don't mind it, because I'm behind it; it's the people in front that I jar." (USA 1940's; I heard it from Mrs. Schenk, so it may go back to New England 1800's) If it's all that important, I'll buy three new neckties. Judy said, you've got to get a set of teeth. I said, no problem, I'll see what's on Internet. Well, I'm down to one lower and stub now, and still eating ok, last I noticed when I had something to eat besides boiled corn grits with butter and honey. I had a removeable denture once. With effort and annoyance of hosting a foreign body, I could do everything almost as well with it as I could without it, except eat. So I gave it back to my dentist, who put it in his Museum of Returned Dentures. I mean, if human beings had to have teeth, evolution would not have given us McDonald's. ] You know, I really don't see anything wrong with marijuana, used in moderation. Like, I think maybe I try a hit to see if helps me to polish my poems. I ain't toked since long before PVK ruled no drugs. As a matter of fact, it was because the Indians said, Don't mix them. ("And this is sufficient for those who know", as R. Hayim Heikel of Amdur says in breaking off his explanations, in his book Hayim v'Hesed ). I mean also, without PVK on earth, I surely don't have someone from whom to study in person -- I do not see ZIK as a continuity, but as more nearly a go-back-to-2nd-grade and restart -- so to a large extent, I'm holding at whatever maqam I reached, and consolidating whatever I've learned -- I mean any good poker player knows there's a time to hold and bet. All that said, I am talking of only little hits of pot -- even in the good old days, which is even pre-Mishrekan, when it was not nearly as strong as it must be nowadays, I would roll only exceptionally thin joints. And now they are selling pot tea in the railway station vending machine at Goeshcnen. {w03-17} (Comment sa: I'm not so clear about this. I do find it useful to try to get into the consciousness of PVK, to ask how he would handle the situations I find myself in. Eg, whenever I imagine a dialogue with a fellow-camper, which reverie usually concludes with my imagining punching him in the nose -- but then I conclude that PVK would no doubt deem that infra-dig', and so I resolve to instead buy a couderoy sports coat with those leather elbow patches that one finds in better common rooms, and even to take a shower and change whatever undergarments I am wearing -- one does tend to forget just which they were -- just as soon as the snows melt. ) {w03-18} (Then what precisely is the difference between identifying with one's Pir, which one should not do, and getting into his consciousness. ) [ Alev said, that her father would never come to Zenith, because in his traditional Sufi tradition, one has only one Pir, and does not attend teachings of another. Well, I shall have had only one, bli neder. I mean, if all one is supposed to do is get into his consciousness, what differnece does it make if the body one day went away without an aeroplane. ] {w03-19} [ well, that is good news, because what PVK said in the 70s was -- Christ would not be a Christian, Avraham would not have a beard, Muhammed would be director of an organization for non-violence, and Buddha would be a psychoterhapist. So I gather that now Abraham can still have a beard. I'll take that for a validation or vindication or whatever. ] {w03-20} [ So ok, I won't say it until after I file my U.S. Income Tax Return -- Once in a state of rather confused purity I went down to Taos and applied for food stamps, as usual, and told them the truth. I came back to the place on the outskirts of the reservation, and told Adrian that I did not get them. She said, "Steve -- an old pro like you?" ] {w03-21} [ Well, this won't quite do as a statement against smoking. The haredim, in Israel anyhow and probably everywhere, do not smoke on Shabat, but light up as soon as Shabat is over. It does suggest astounding power of will -- I have heard of no other group of smokers who could go a full day without smoking, much less do it once a week. ] {w03-22] ('Freir' is a modern Yiddish term, used in Israel, meaning, someone whom anyone can exploit. "Ba-ba Black Sheep, have you any wool -- Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full. One for my master and one for his dame. And one for the little man who lives down the lane." That's one of those old English bits of occult wisdom, disguised as a children's jingle.) {w03-23} (PVK terms the breakdown schizophrenia, but I think it's merely a nervous breakdown -- Buridan's ass being pulled in opposite directions by two goals, neither of which he will renounce -- ) -- {w03-24} [I once overheard Shahabudin telling a story of a dervish or Sufi or some such who seems to be reading the thought of the guy who's talking to, and the guy says, how can you assume I'm thinking that, and the dervish etc. says, well, I know I'm not thinking it, so it must be you. The same principle as attribuing a fart to its former owner, I suppose.] [ Well, I guess I don't want to become a Sufi Leader -- I mean, who could bare to feel all that mishigas, I can't even stand to have my own trash in the house. But I mean also, why bother -- I mean, I always thought us Sufis see only the good in people -- like there was this turkey hanging about Zenith who fancied himself a sort of half-ass black magician -- his evil didn't get much farther than ssitting on the dining room table, tho it seems that he did lead a few folks off the edge of a cliff, and we ain't heard form them since -- as_it_is_said, 'they who are kind to the cruel end up being cruel to the kind' (Talmud, they tell me) -- so anyhow, Shatiya says to me, 'But he sees things' and I says back to her, 'Anyone can see things, the trick is not to.' I mean, I can tell some pale-skinned tenderfoot to go for a wlak in the mountainins without having to know the state of hsi pancreas or love affaair -- whatever a pancras is -- like, the weakness of PVK's SO is that it really was atheistic, at least from the perspective of us plebians -- like, a simple anthropomorphism was beneath them -- and a simple petitionary prayer too, tho that's what we used for healing in New Mexico -- none of this convoluted intuiting the person, and feeling their pain, and then feeling within oneself how to fix it -- I mean, what did Moses do -- -"Ana HaShem Rofea Na." -- and like we say on Sukot -- the same -- Hoshea Na -- and the Indians always said, when you pray, pray quick. ] {w03-25} [ You know the Bach Tocatta and Fugue that Adil would always play when the let him near a pedal-pusher -- there's that passage near the beginning, in the upper register, after the declaration of intent in the lower registers -- like streamlets running down a watercourse in springtime -- ] {w03-26} ["From Bindu to Ojas / from Vishnu to Ram Dass / I come back to you" [ The title of Ram Dass first book, produced by Lama Foundation maybe 1969, was "From Bindu to Ojas" -- Ojas is the folks what lives in Ojai California, far's I know, but anyhow now I now what Bindu is. So anyhow, the format of PVK's first book, produced by Lama Foundation, "Toward the One", copies the format of Ram Dass' book, but that format was ill-suited to PVK's writing, or recorded/transcribed talks, I don't which -- because where Ram Dass is simple and almost aphoristic, PVK is discursive.] {w03-27} [which is no doubt worth my holding this input at 44100 Hz and 32 bits, tho I would like to cut down to about half of each.] {w03-28} a sort of Mozarella garnish which, if upended into one's Minestrone at Honest George's Restorante supplies the MDR for protein, if you get a few herring -- no seriously folks, Ekagrata means one-pontedness -- {w03-29} [ But -- is nidra yoga awareness of REM sleep (the dream phase of sleep) or of deep sleep (the non-REM, dreamless phase)] {w03-30} [ Well, it ain't a path of no return, thank heaven, though heaven help you if you fall into the hands of the shrinks and the drug doctors. And it ain't schizophrenia in general. PVK seems to use schiuophrenia for any mental beakdown. ] {w03-31} I man mazaltov, "as above so below" but davka alchemy as the model? Really. {w03-32} (if only as scapegoats -- sa) -- eg, as a dinosaur, I find that I rarely have need of a psychotherapist -- and as a bear I find I rarely need to wait in line for supper -- {w03-33} [Gvalt, so can the human in you, chum. I mean you call George Bush Jr. evolution? ] {w03-34} [ what a wealth of spiritual culture was lost in the Chinese occupation of Tibet -- a cultural destruction like that of Eastern European Judasim in the Shoa ] {w03-35} [ sure sounds like an after-death purgatory experience ] {w03-36} [ Well, as long as it don't happen for a while -- like, why not change wives as you change maquams -- {w03-37} { Considering Zahir as a name: PVK once defined it as 'the one who makes manifest the ligh (or ?splendour?)t' -- that was when he initiated me with that name -- Saphira Linden was present, and said she would remember what he said even if I didn't -- as I say, I sometimes wonder if that really was my real name -- this was one of the last times PVK gave names, mid 70s at an Abode Campground Camp -- he had asked that anyone who wanted a name first meet with him -- that announcement must have come as a postscript to his lecture, because I missed it -- I had run down the hill with the intention of doing a bit of transcribing -- so when I came next day to get a name, he said he was sorry, but he just couldn't recall me -- he apologized with a remark like "so many people" -- but someone said, he once said, he met someone, the large cook who cooked for Zenith workcamp for a year or two in the mid or late 90s -- and he said to her, you seem familiar, "I never forget a soul" -- not a face, a soul -- So anyhow then I went back to the end of line, and Latifa Amdur was there to get initiation as a Healer, and I told her to go ahead of me, and when she came back, she said, Steve, go ahead, PVK will see you now -- when I first met her I said, "I think we are distant relatives" and she said of the Abode, "this is my family" -- when Latifa Amdur gave someone her attention, it was her full attention -- she was a Naturepath, and had been a Barefoot Doctor, in Guatamala if I recall -- so anyhow, that was when I got that name -- I never really wanted an Islamic name, I had been hoping for something Atlantean -- something seafaring -- so at one point, as I was crossing the street to the Old City Wall, to go through Jaffa Gate, it occurred to me that Zevulon might do -- and sometimes I think, David -- in the Isreali pronounciation, DaVEED -- well, it's a drizzly day at Campra -- Shabat -- like I say, it's past time for me to stop pretending I'm orhtodox -- heck, I'm even typing without a hat on at the moment - - I meam. put the Golden Calif on a Flatbeed and truck in on up -- and while we're wwiting call Central Casting -- that's Leary's phrase -- and tell them send over the leftover Cecil B. DeMille dancing girls -- But I digress. ] {w03-38} [ And Jewish tradition too speaks of the Temple Above and the (historical= Temple below; and of Jerusalem Above and Jerusalem below -- Jerusalem Avoe is spiritual, Jerusalem Below is physical and historical -- and so I advise those who visit Isreal, especially anyone Jewish, "do not physically ascend Temple Mount" -- and that is why almost no-one, not evenn the literalists, regaards the Islamic occupation of Temple Mount as a sacrelige, since we do not go there anyhow (although strictly speaking it is only the place of the Kdosh Kdoshim upon which one can not stand - - though by that argument, there are largeer areas to which non_Jews, and areas to which women, should not be allowed. ) {w03-39} [ DOESN'T ANYONE GO TO BASEBALL GAMES ANYMORE -- I used to watch the Red Sox -- So there was -- I forget his name now, I recall him as a short, rather intense chap, brilliant no doubt, he said that wherever he went, everyone wanted to sign him up -- including the Haredim in Brooklyn -- very promising but maybe he burnt out early -- worked at Camp on Sound, if I recall -- and so anyhow, he's saying, doen't anybody play pool So anyhow, there I am at the Boston Center for the Arts and La-d- dah -- though that's not so fair to Saphira, who was quite a tough enough cookie -- she had been B'nei B'rith Woman of the Year back in Detroit, before she found the True Way -- so anyhow, there's Shahabudin at Zenith saying he might go to Israel, and I say, some folks there might fear that you want to take folks away from Jewish religius practice , and he says back, I do -- but only from the -- he said something like 'inauthentic' -- practices, not the -- something like, 'real' ones -- Mazaltov, a week of Sundays, as_it_is_said, be as careful with a light mitzva as with a heavy-duty one, for you know the reward reserved for each -- So anyhow, I says to Shahabudin, if you come to Israel, don't come in and out like a Rock Star -- Wham Bam Thank you M'am as it were -- but like, first go as a visitor, and diig the attunement -- like, in the good old days, whenver I went back to New Buffalo commune from grad school in the pothead division of the philosophy department of the University of California at Santa Barbara, I would try to just sit there for at least a month before going back into the Tipi -- One of the first things Ram Dass aaid was, No need to forget your Zip Code. That's in Be Here Now. But I digress. ] {w03-40} [ I'm descended, through my father's mother, whose maternal granfather (I think it was) was Reb Nochum Jaffe of Grodno, from the Levush -- Levush means garments, as in , celestial graments ] {w03-41} I did miss the 1989 and 1991 Camps -- Flipped out in Israel, after failing to follow Amy back to the USA; and flipped out in Hamburg because they were having a war without me while Claudia pretending to be pregnant just in case her back-door man had knocked her up I suppose marriage does have certain advantages. So anyhow, 'tis to 1989 and 1991 that I should turn next. I see ow that that's quite a big job -- Viz: --------------- Viz:: PVK 1991 is Carton 1, Boxes W14 through W19, with 2 other tapes as noted, viz: EM12 in Box W22, and EM6 in Box W24. For 1989 I find: Box W35P89 6 tapes only, English/German In Box W36P89 , 31 July '89--2 Aug '89, We have PVK Tapes F1--F10. I assume F stands for French, that would be a French/English week. PVK gave German-only weeks, but never that I recall a French-only week, there are simply not enough Frenchpersons. W38P89, PVK Tapes 17--25, 20--25 July '89 W39P89 seems to be a full week, 5--13 July '89, but I left it in Ligornetto so cannot check in detail. W40P89 Is Tapes F11--F20, 3--5 Aug '89. So that follows Box W36P89, and seems to give us the full PVK French Week. W41P89 Is PVK Tapes 7--16, 17--19 July '89 So that seems to follow W35P89, and seems to give us the full English/German PVK 1989 Week, but I can't account for 16 July '89. END VIZ BIZ CHIZ (Chiz was the name of Bill and Jane Helbing's cat, meaning, Cheese. That was Santa Barbara 1967 . A Philosophical Cat. {w03-42} [ Why should I -- they seem to be doing quite all right without me -- and might not appreciate, and might eveen resent my kibutzing -- I'd rather not think about my body until I get another chick, or at least an old hen. ] {w03-43} [ But why not just pray, and let Them take care of it. I want to say, PVK takes an agnostic or atheistic point of view, but he does explicitly affirm the existence of Deity -- though on PVK's level of perception, that is scarcely a (level of) Being to which one can relate anthropomorphically -- So I will retreat and would then want to say -- what PVK disregards is Faith -- that one may be sustained, and properly so, by a very simplistic notion of Deity -- just as a baby may wake in the dark night and cry for his mother's breast without havint to know what she majored in in College -- ] {w03-44} [ like Woody Allen says, in Heaven you can't walk out toe dinder for a 2 AM hotdog with sauerkraut, ] {w03--45} The cat is on the mat but I don't believe it. {w03-46} [ the Mastic East is a neighborhood of Charlestown, Massachusetts known for its excellent Guiness and a suprisingly large number of holymen from India, some of whom have been unable to establish Chapate shops and so must teach yoga etc.] {w03-47} [ Hermann, who is maybe long under the hill by now -- a potter from the Netherlands, who pitched his tent at Lake Hermon on the Zenith path back toward the road -- the place where rainwater always collected in a little lake, so somehow his tent was anchored to either side of it, and supended above the water -- anyhow, he was much drawn to Chamonix, and once made me a map of how to get there -- a very gentle person, used to wash dishes -- well, evil greedy people with little brains poison our world, and attack those who would stop them -- we should all go back to the Stone Age and take our chances with the real hyenas ] {w03--49} [ Heck, in Israel the Modi'inniks are often blessing people with things for which they have little if any desire -- a kosher Pesach -- like, eating nothing but white cardboarrd and macaroons for a week -- , a wife when most of us can't even keep a mistress or two happy -- to do more an more mitzvot when half of Israel is trying to do less and less -- I mean ritual mitzvot, like walking around wearing a cardboard box so you can tie tzitzit on it -- I mean, it takes a lot of energy to fend off the prayers of one's friends -- the SO Healing Order strictly speaking doesn't even offer healing prayers for people unless they ask for it -- although there are workarounds for that when need be -- ] {w03-50} [ Well, for Jewish guru's we got the Lubavitch Rebbe -- sending people here and there -- I mean, maybe they wanted him to tell them what to do, and went to him to be told -- {w03-51} [ Well, maybe not -- my own guess is that he died of cancer, and went to India when he knew he was about to die -- My hunch is based on just a few remarks in Collected Sayings, "pain my constant companion" for one. And as for sleeping only 4 hours a night -- big deal, I'm getting close to that sometimes -- like PVK says, you can 'sleep quick' -- direct your consciousness to a place where you can get the refreshment you need with maximum efficiency -- heck, soldiers learn to sleep wheneer they can, and to carry on with little sleep -- like Shahabudin is doing it nowadays, jjust because he's an elephant "or something" -- ] {w03-52} [ which seems to imply that, contrary to a simplistic view of spirituality, one needs the body in order to get higher spiritually -- so maybe that is meaning of the Greek myth, ofen cited by PVK, of Belephron riding Pegasus higher and hgher - though also Pegasus would seem to be the ego -- which suggests, reasonably enough, that the ego is an aspect of the body -- ] {w0353} [ So I would have thought that folks would have seen me at the Zenith workcamp in 2000, and also 2001 and maybe 2002, when, for 3 hot summers, I was on the beach at Rodos, barely able to cross the street, let alone walk down to the harbour and take a boat -- and I must say, though I think that echos an early childhood trauma, that I think someone should have come to get me -- and so of course any other member of the Abode__Zenith__Family who falls into a similar swamp -- it is not fair to dismiss this as the mureed's responsibility, since on much of the Sufi path the pilgrim is called upon to loosen his/her ego -- even in the realworld army ("Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war" -- USA 1800's ) if you send a soldier out on a risky reconoiter, you are obliged to support him, and send another patrol out to get him if he is wounded. And it won't do to say, well, if he is seeking self- improvement, he must be responsible for himself. For it is essential to the SO that we seek self-improvement, not for our own sakes -- I mean, for that I can go to the horseraces or put in overtime at my job with the Comodemonic Telegraph Company (Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn if I recall ) -- or better yet, take a long lunh hour, drink a few beers and have a couple of hot-dogs with mustard and with sauerkraut and a waitress with cleveage -- I know a very nice one in Andermatt, she's from Berlin where they do such things because they want to go to heaven in Bavaria -- or I can have a champagne breakfast with lox and bagels in Las Vegas -- we did that once driving cross-country, hit Las Vegas in the early morning and followed the signs -- I mean mamash, that's self- improvement -- from hotdogs to lox, who could imagine greater spiritual advancement -- from beer to champagne -- I'm not talking Guiness, or even BerlinerWeise, I mean just good old made-in-the- USA fizz_and_piss pop_top -- When the children left the flesh_pot enslavement of Mitzrayim, they left in such haste that the hippies could not put the whole- wheat bread that was just starting to rise overnight, and worase yet, the frat boys could not even steal a donkey to carry the keg of beer they'd just tapped -- I mean, I guess I can go without bread for a week, though some in Israel regard that as enslavement -- but to go without beer -- I mean, surely Reform has something to say about that -- homage to Babylon or some such -- I mean, how can you read the Babylonian Talmud without a Babylonian Beer -- But I digress ] ADDITIONAL NOTES, STARTING WITH W03-53A {w03-53a} [ So I would have thought that folks would have seen me at the Zenith workcamp in 2000, and also 2001 and maybe 2002, when, for 3 hot summers, I was on the beach at Rodos, barely able to cross the street, let alone walk down to the harbour and take a boat -- and I must say, though I think that echos an early childhood trauma, that I think someone should have come to get me -- and so of course any other member of the Abode__Zenith__Family who falls into a similar swamp -- it is not fair to dismiss this as the mureed's responsibility, since on much of the Sufi path the pilgrim is called upon to loosen his/her ego -- even in the realworld army ("Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war" -- USA 1800's ) if you send a soldier out on a risky reconoiter, you are obliged to support him, and send another patrol out to get him if he is wounded. And it won't do to say, well, if he is seeking self- improvement, he must be responsible for himself. For it is essential to the SO that we seek self-improvement, not for our own sakes -- I mean, for that I can go to the horseraces or put in overtime at my job with the Comodemonic Telegraph Company (Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn if I recall ) -- or better yet, take a long lunh hour, drink a few beers and have a couple of hot-dogs with mustard and with sauerkraut and a waitress with cleveage -- I know a very nice one in Andermatt, she's from Berlin where they do such things because they want to go to heaven in Bavaria -- or I can have a champagne breakfast with lox and bagels in Las Vegas -- we did that once driving cross-country, hit Las Vegas in the early morning and followed the signs -- I mean mamash, that's self- improvement -- from hotdogs to lox, who could imagine greater spiritual advancement -- from beer to champagne -- I'm not talking Guiness, or even BerlinerWeise, I mean just good old made-in-the- USA fizz_and_piss pop_top -- When the children left the flesh_pot enslavement of Mitzrayim, they left in such haste that the hippies could not put the whole- wheat bread that was just starting to rise overnight, and worase yet, the frat boys could not even steal a donkey to carry the keg of beer they'd just tapped -- I mean, I guess I can go without bread for a week, though some in Israel regard that as enslavement -- but to go without beer -- I mean, surely Reform has something to say about that -- homage to Babylon or some such -- I mean, how can you read the Babylonian Talmud without a Babylonian Beer -- But I digress ] {W03-54} [ And so I suppose this is all those nice wet dreams -- and Saphira Linden once said, I suppose mostly to the ladies in the class, if you are having a romantic dream, let it proceed to completion -- well, eeryone needs enough Vitamin F to stay healthy -- Reich said that -- so this is the Incubbus and Sucubus and all that -- suff for which they burnt people -- I mean, for which dried up old men burnt juicy young women -- in the Middle Ages, before Laundramats were invented -- I mean, once of the first things one learns on LSD is that sex is here to stay -- or so it seemed then -- ] {W03-55} [everyone knows, PVK was well over 60 when he taught he sons to hang-glide -- maybe that was up on Mt. Greylock --- I walked up there once, and saw people doing it -- though it does take a bit of nerve to run off the edge of a cliff -- Icarus tried it, with home-made equipment -- I'm sitting on Rodos flipping out, and this flipped-out Danish chick comes by with the stolen laptop of my dreams, this is summer '00 I think, and says, she can just about see them flying from hilltop to hilltop -- in the time of Atlantis I suppose -- and this is "it is forbidden to depend upon a miracle", for if you let go of your ego, miracles will come, but without an ego you can't reach out to take the life-lines they throw you -- and this is the other side of that poor chap who falls into the water, and everyone is throwing him lifelines, and he keeps saying, are you my guru, and hwen they say no, he says, thanks a lot, it's most kind of you, but I'd really shouild wait for the lifeline from my guru after toing to all this trouble to fall in the water -- and PVK used to tell this story of the time he was taking his mid-day nap, and this chick comes by his trailer or tent or whatever, and starts crying, and so PVK wakes up and comes out and says why are you disturbing me, and she says, it was the only way I could get your attention, and PVK says, "Thanks a lot." ÿ(I do recall his saying that last phrase -- most American it is, quite unlkike his usual English English. -- so anyhow, about that guy we left in the dirty waters of the Stroudsburg Flood while we were discussing higher matters -- so just about the time he is thinking, this is getting to be a bit of a bore, I'd really rather go back in to lunch, I just heard the first bell, and maybe I get cut in close to the front of the line if I pray close to the door -- and then he drowns, because floodwater is floodwater even your are "higher than a kite can fly" -- so then he gets up to the Pearly Gates -- I'm knowingly if not deliberately mixing the metaphors of different subcultures -- and there's his guru or murshid or whateve, and he says, -- this is back to Suhrwardi's telling of the tale -- why didn't you come to rescue me, and the murshid says, didn't you see me in all those people -- so Suhwardi ends there but I'll take it one more lap around the old track -- so the acolyte or mureed or would-be altar-boy says, Oh, it really was you, I'm most relieved and quite touched, and then -- this is my hit, midnight heresy no doubt -- the Teacher says, pity you didn't grab the rope at the right time (and this is "beloved is a mitzva in its proper time"), Go to hell.' I reckon 'tough love' is a contradiction in terms, but one sometimes seems in PVK the coldness of truth. But I digress. ] {W03-56} [ Behind Kibutz HaOn, on the shore of the Sea of Galillee -- a see in the dry land of Israel, but just an average lake or less in Swiss terms -- they would jump off the On Cliffs of the Golan Heights and float down to the Kibutz fields, bananna or mango or watermelon -- And all those liberals with their comic-book politics, who say, but you have occupied it by an act of war, you must give it back - - sure, the Syrians have a deep spiritual need to sit on their ancestral land and lob pot-shot artillery shells down on the farmers -- I mean, we're talking ethnic nationalistic self- determination here, so buy a hard-hat at Walmart and carry on Farmer -- and do stop whinging please, you knew the risks of getting bonked on the cupaloe by a bit of Ordinance or slipping on the cowshit when you left the Treacle Factory in Birmingham to come be a Pioneer, as if the Dudley Public Library weren't adventure enough for anyone with elastic in their knickers -- But I digress. ] {w03-57} (ie, most people can't see the Dearly Departed while they stop over on a flyby -- not that they much cared to see them when they were in the parlour spilling beer and shag on the rug -- [Gad. it it weren't for the Brits one might manage to remeber how to write English -- ] ------------------------------------------------------------------ THESE NOTES WILL BE NAMED =W03N0157 THEY WILL BE CONCLUDED WITH =W03N5373 ================================================================