October Leaves
October is my favourite month. Not because of Halloween. Because autumn is my favourite season, and because of an inner Feeling that is in the October air. The temperature is perfect. There is a solemn feel to the atmosphere. In Khmer I hear my grandma say about the autumn atmosphere that it “P’doh [change] Tiat [element] Agass [air/atmospher]. Tiat in Sanskrit is Tatva and Agass is Akasha. I’m not really sure how to translate what Tiat as it is used in Khmer. It’s like a “charge” or a “substance” or an Essence in the atmosphere that changes which can be Felt/Empathed inside. Solemn is the feel.
In Theravada culture this season of Autumn is when one of the most Sacred ceremonial things happen in our cultural lunar calender. It’s commonly called Celebration of Pchum Ben. I don’t know what the word Ben means, but its a 15 day observance of the Dead and our Ancestors. Pchum is a word which is derived from the word Pachum [pachoom] which means a Meeting or Gathering. The observance goes by the old people’s Lunar Calender and begins on the full moon of the Autumn season, which can fall either in September or October.
The mythos goes that once a year during this season, on the full moon King Yama, the Guardian of the realm of Hell, opens his gates to let the spirits of the Ancestors walk around to go find their relatives. So the monks will gather in their temples and chant Pali spells over night in preparation for the opening of the Gates of Hell. Of course it’s all a living animist culture’s mythic and rhetorical “bending” of Buddhism to support their very ancient animist tradition of paying homage to their dead ancestors.
During the 15 days you go visit the temples, donate lots of stuff, hold the 5 Precepts all 15 days. Which means no cussing, stealing, sex, alcohol, killing, and no meat or eating during the day. But just for the 15 days. Then on the last day its like a family reunion where the living and the dead family members gather to eat a big feast. This is one reason why I greatly dislike books written on some living subject like Buddhism. Because in such books you only get the superficial words and ideas of some author look in from the outside. If you honestly desire to Understand Theravada, then you must Stand Under [Among/Between] its living culture and peoples. The actual Sasana is very, very different than what has been written.
Usually we bring out framed pictures of the old people in our family that have died. Most I don’t know. All the women folk are together in the kitchen cooking the food to be “Saen” [sounds like the word 'sign' and means “offering to the dead spirits”]. We also buy items like clothes, coffee, or whatever the ancestors once liked and offer it to them. The food and items are placed in front of the pictures and you call the ancestor’s names to come and eat and talk to them like they were in front of you. This is also the time to introduce your dead ancestors to any new babies born into the family. You’ll here the old grandmothers and grandfathers talk to their parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and such telling them about the new babies, how some kids look like them, and even share family gossip. Then you ask them to remember you and follow you around to keep you safe. Later when the monks have come and done their stuff, you take all those items you “Saened” to the Ancestors and give them to the monks. The monks in turn take it to the temple and hand them out for free to people in the community who need the stuff.
While we cook the food and the ancestors’ favourite dishes, when each dish is done my grandma will tell me to take a small platter and fill a little bowl with some of the food, then place a small cup of water and other beverages on the platter. She tells me and my cousins to bring the platter outside and offer it to the “Nikta Tuk-Dey” which are the spirits that live and guard the house and land. You burn 3 sticks of incense by their platter and call the spirits to come and eat. We can only speak English. We asked grandma once because of this: “We don’t speak full Khmer grandma, do the spirits understand English?” My grandma told us something like: “Ignorant children. Think it in your Jed [chitta/Heart]. Doesn’t matter what sounds come out of the mouth. The Feeling and Knowing is in the Heart. When you speak with the Heart, everything understands.”
We offer food and drinks to the spirits and demons at every celebration or significant get together. Even during Thanksgiving and Christmas. Usually we cut the heads, wings, and ass of the ducks and turkeys and put them on a big dish. A little of whatever others food being eaten that day is place in the dish with cups of drinks and eggnog even. And you place the dish outside, burn incense, and quietly call the random spirits and the guardian of the house and land to eat the food. This appeases the spirits so you’ll have good fortune and luck.
Our grandma also has what I always thought was a bird house growing up in a peach tree in her back yard right near the house placed at her arm level. It’s actually a little house with no front, and inside is a little toy table with two very small toy tea cups on it. She fills the cups with fresh water every day and burns a stick of incense, sometimes leaving candy. It’s like a little “spirit house” I guess. During the ceremony the back yard spirits get a lot of platters of food, fruits, and drinks. Physically, all me and my cousins see eat the food are ants and flies. We figure that maybe the bugs eat the food for the back yard spirits?
Then we do this thing we get from our Chan Chinese Folk Buddhist ancestors where we burn lost of toy money called Ghost Money or Hell Notes. You get them at China Town. The idea is that I guess your ancestors after 15 days are going back to Hell so you want to send them off with some spending cash? It’s not really hell. They call the place where the ancestors go either the “Under Realm,” or the “Original Place.” The ghost money comes in really big denominations, up to a billion I saw once. You just sit there and slowly burn the ghost money while calling the name of whoever you’re offering the money to and tell them you’re giving them money.
I was watching my aunt-mom burn her ghost money and praying or talking to the ancestors, and I once asked her when she was done: “What do they buy wherever they are at? Are there shops there? Is there an economy?” She laughs. My uncle-dad laughs really loud at the questions and he says back in English: “Yeah, I hear there’s a WalMart there now. Talk about a dead market huh?” My aunt-mom was more serious and explained to me that she really doesn’t know anything. All she knows is that its Tradition she got from her old people and she just does what they once did because she is Chinese after all. I burn my money too, and my uncle-dad does too. I asked my uncle-dad why he does it if he makes fun of it. He said chuckling: “Because I don’t want them haunting me,” and laughs.
My uncle-dad is a hardcore rationalist. He’s really into science, politics, and computers, so he’s not the type to believe anything that can’t be somehow proven or verified in some way. He’s not a devout Buddhist. He denies the Buddha ever existed and believes that Buddhism is man made, but he is a Buddhist because he thinks that it has good teaching to live by. He hates superstitious and he said that he never used to believe in all this spirit stuff until things happened to him on two different occasions which he can’t explain to himself.
He told me that both times happened before he met my aunt-mom. The Khmer Rouge has already taken over and he was living in a labour camp. But this labour camp was run by nice Khmer Rouge people who actually were out in the field working alongside everybody else since they really did believe in creating their Angkorian utopia. My uncle-dad said that during that time there was a cute girl in the came he was interested in whom he was chit chatting with from time to time. He said his Khmer Rouge friends [most of whom he went to school with] saw him talking with the girl and warned him that the girl’s mother was a witch that knew really bad magic and that even they were scared to mess with her. But my uncle-dad laughed and didn’t listen to their warning.
My uncle-dad said that one late morning this girl brought him a fresh fish and told him that her mother caught and it had asked her to give it to him as a gift to eat. So he cooked it and ate it for lunch. He said after he ate the fish he started to have really bad pain in is stomach and thought that the witch poisoned the fish or something. So he took a walk to relieve himself behind a bush somewhere since he was at the time out in the field working. He said nothing came out, bewildered he got up to go back to work. He said that when he got up he saw a shadow figure from the side of his eye move at him very fast and went into his body. Next thing he said he knew, he was on the ground convulsing uncontrollably. He was fully conscious, but he said he had no control of his body.
The other field workers noticed he was convulsing and had found the Khmer Rouge guys to tell them. The Khmer Rouge guys ran to get an old man out in the field they call Grandpa Chin who knew magic also. My uncle-dad said that he was fully conscious, and had no control of his body or voice box, but he said something was making him scream profanities and try to grab people to strangle them. He said that some of the Khmer Rouge guys he knew had pinned him down to keep him from either hurting himself or others. Grandpa Chin got red string and tied the red string around my uncle-dad’s wrists, ankles, and neck, and chanted Pali, while my uncle-dad said something inside of him was screaming at the old man to go away. Grandpa Chin after chanting, sprayed water out of his mouth over my uncle-dad and he said that he stopped moving and saw a shadow figure move fast out of his body. He woke up the next day exhausted, but fully remembering the whole incident. Being a rationalist, my uncle-dad told himself that the fish was poisoned and denied that anything crazy had happened, but he never talked to the girl again after that.
The second time was when my uncle-dad said he was out hunting with his Khmer Rouge friends in the jungle just a ways from the camp. He said that before going deep into the jungle his Khmer Rouge friends went to a odd shaped tree and prostrated themselves three times before it leaving gifts at the base of the tree and asking for permission to have some food to eat. He was asked to do likewise and pay homage to the spirit guardian of that part of the forest, but my uncle-dad refused to saying that such things were not real. His Khmer Rouge friends told him that he wasn’t leaving the forest alive, and it won’t be them that kills him. They were angry at him and said to him that some people are too ignorant for their own good. Everybody knows the forest was protected and not even their commanders and general dares go through it without asking for permission.
As my uncle-dad was walking with his friends, he said that out of the corner of his eye he saw shadows near some of the trunks of the trees. Just shadow things, that can’t be seen if you turn your head to try and look at them. He said they can only be seen sometimes with the corner of the eye. He told himself that its the light effect of the leaves in the trees and kept walking. Then he said he fell over to the ground in a horrible pain in his stomach screaming like knives were inside of his guts. He said his friends dragged him as he was screaming and clutching his abdomen to the base of a big tree near by. His Khmer Rouge friends pointed their riffles at him and were yelling at him to clasp his hands three times and ask the guardian spirits for permission to walk through their forest or they will shoot him out of his misery. He said he tried as hard as he could to clasp his hands and ask, and as soon as he did the pain started to go away. He had to lay there resting for a few minutes while his friends were giving him a lecture and laughing at him.
Today my uncle-dad is still a hardcore rationalist, he still believes all religions are man made scams, but he doesn’t mess with the traditional animist stuff of our culture. He is what you might call a myopic materialist who can’t logically or scientifically fit “spirits” into his paradigm of reality. But he says that after those two experiences he had which he can’t explain, he’ll follow the traditions and pay his respects anyways.
I’ve always thought it was very interesting that every indigenous culture that lives in tune to nature and its rhythms universally ends up believing in “spirits” and ancestors and universally share common ways of paying homage to whatever they are. I have also found it very interesting that Autumn for some reason in many cultures around the world has a holiday for the Dead and/or Ancestor. You have Halloween for the Europeans, Day of the Dead for the Mexicans, and the 15 days of the Dead and Ancestors in Theravada countries all happening at roughly the same period and for the same things, and the essence of the season is the same, where the living give offerings of food to the dead or simulate it in some way. I’m not saying that the Gates of Hell actually opens up during this season unleashing the denizens of the Pit. But it is what it is around the world. This season is also significant to the ONA.
The essence of my so called by Westerner, “Anamism” and so called “Ancestor worship,” is not only universal, it’s also found in the core of the ONA. In ONA, it is known as Rounwytha. Rounwytha does not sound “the same thing.” But it shares common “universal” themes in common with most other ancient indigenous animistic cultural traditions. One of the core themes is the idea of Empathy and Empathing things that can’t be seen with the eyes or known with the brain-mind. The powerhouse of this faculty of Empathy in the Theravada-Asian cultures is called Chitta or its various forms such as Jed and Jai in Khmer and Thai. Another common theme are “things” referred to as “spirits.” Another common theme is the offering of food and gifts to these spirit things. Another common theme which is universal is the ancestors, and offering them food and gifts. One common theme that can be found across most – if not all – anciently rooted indigenous cultures is the belief in “guardian spirits” who watch over houses, land, rivers, and forests.
I briefly read that the ancient Romans had a word for the spirits that guard their houses, but I can remember what it was. I had always believed that it was an indigenous Asian thing until I read the Romans had the same beliefs. In our culture, there is a ceremony or rite we have to perform when we buy or move into a new house. The first part of the rite is that a girl or the head female of the family that will be living in the new house must be the first person to set her feet inside. She’ll ask the guardian spirit for permission for her family to enter and live in the house. If a boy or a man steps inside a new house, it’s considered to be extremely heinous and will cause misfortune in the family. The same day you move into a new house, the girls of the family either cook food or buy food and fruits and drinks, for the guardian spirit. These are placed on a table and incense are burned. Each person in the family burns 3 sticks of incense and asks the guardian spirit of the house and land to allow them to live in the house peacefully, for the spirit to not disturb the happiness of the family, and for them to bless the family with peace, happiness, and prosperity. In return the family promises to remember to include the guardian spirits at family events and special days.
One more thing I have found to be “universal” in anciently rooted “animist” cultures is the knowing and belief that certain places, areas, objects, and things have “something” about them that is “sacred” or “divine” in Essence. This knowing is a feeling you empath. I also thought this was just an Asian thing, until I read that the ancient Romans actually had a word for it: Numen. In Khmer the word is “Preah” which is pronounced as “Prih” which sounds like the first syllable in the word Principle, but with the H sound at the end. In Thai it is Prah. It’s really hard to translate that word into English, since I know of no single word that is the same. The Roman word Numen and the Sanskrit word “Sri” is the closest two words I know that feels very similar to the word Preah. It doesn’t really mean “divine.” It means a Sacred Presence. By itself it can mean a god, or gods [Khmer has no plural suffix]. To denote a deity or monk or king you say Preahang [Ang as in Ankar]. But Preah is most often a prefix used to describe just about everything as being sacred. Preahchan means the Moon. Preahpita means Father. Preahbotrey means daughter. Preahvayu means the Wind. Preahniang Gaheeng means the Mother Earth Goddess. The Earth [dirt/ground] is called Niang [lady] Gaheeng or Niang Toranny. Toranny is my phonetic spelling of how the Sacerdotal [Sanskrit] is said. It’s related to the word Terrain.
When I was small my aunt-mom told me a mythical story once about the Earth. The story goes that a very long time ago the Earth Mother – Niang Gaheeng – had 7 children: the Sun, the Moon, the Wind, the Rain, and three other things I can’t remember. One day the Earth Mother had a muscle cramp and her body was aching, so she needed a massage. She asked her 7 children to come and help massage her aching body. But all of her children told the Earth Mother that they were busy doing their own thing. Each of her children made up excuses. The Sun said that he’s far too busy and important to stop his job, otherwise people would freeze to death. The Rain said that he couldn’t stop raining or the trees would die and the people and animals would not have anything to drink. I can’t remember what the Wind’s excuse was. Of the 7 children, only the Moon stopped what she was doing to come and massage the Earth. So because of this the Earth Mother placed a curse on the 6 of her children who thought of themselves first by saying that from then on, for as long as there will be people living on her, the humans will forever Curse them. But because the Moon came to her aid, nobody will have anything bad to say about the Moon. That’s why when it gets too hot we curse the sun saying: “Damn that sun is hot!” Or if the wind blows, we curse at it for messing up our hair. Or if it rains we curse at it for ruining our day. But every time we look up at Preah chandra, we always praise her beauty.
There is another story about Niang Toranny I hear very often. The people that share this story with me are survivors of the Khmer Rouge revolution. The common story I hear from them is about them escaping and fleeing on foot out of the country. If you get caught, you are killed. This one young lady I talked to said she was carrying her little baby with a group of others fleeing. They were all hiding in a shallow ditch by the road as a troop of Khmer Rouge soldiers walked by. The elders in the group had told the young lady to take a piece of earth and place it on her head and her child’s head and pray to the Earth Mother to hide with her dirt so the soldiers can’t see them. I’ve heard lot of people tell their stories of their escape, and almost always, I find it fascinating that they all swear that the Earth Mother hide them from sight. I also find it fascinating that during such extreme moments the trappings of religion all falls apart and the people revert back to simple beliefs in their older animist traditions. Only in times of peace, in the safety and comfort of a modern industrialized decadent city can a person afford to give credence and pay mind to goofy things as philosophy, religion, and so on. When extreme conditions arises where Shiva’s destructive eye destroys the facade of our human arrogance, such goody pass times lose their meaning. We are confronted with our very humanness. Our life is a struggle to survive.
Death & Life
Death is the one thing in life that is my biggest fascination. I like being a ive and stuff, and I want to live a full 90 years, but I can’t wait to die. I want to see what happens to “me” and my consciousness as I am dying. If I dissolve into nothing, I want to experience the whole thing as it happens. If I see a bright all embracing goofy light I’d be disappointed, but I’d like to experience it anyways.
Have you ever read that stupid book “Embraced by the Light” and the retardation it spawned? I have unfortunately. So there is this god-force or all embracing light at the end of some tunnel you see when you die. And when you enter this light you feel some sort of unconditional love giving you a big spirit hug welcoming you home. Which makes no sense to me. It’s the same reason that Christianity makes no sense to me. An all loving godthing who makes hell, a fucked up world, the rawness of nature? Why? Why did this big light bulb at the end of a tunnel make the world, if it made it? Especially considering the nature of Nature. That’s like a father who sends his children to prison for 50 years and he gives them a big warm hug when they come out. What’s the prison doing in the scene in the first place?
I’m not sure what I’d say or do if I met the big light bulb when I die. I’d be extremely disappointed. Because of it is there and is real, then it causes me to ask the question: “And then what?” What’s the rest of Eternity literally for? Okay, if life goes on forever, what will I be doing with this light bulb forever? That’s the Big Question in my mind. If I die and I am still alive, then the Big Question is: Okay, what am I possibly gunna be doing forever? How far does this life thing go?
I usually think about death when I wake up in the middle of the night half asleep to go pee. I try to stay as asleep as I can and I leave the light off. In that state of mind as I sit there and pee, I usually tell myself: “This is probably what death is like. Dark. Quiet. Sleepy. And when I go back to sleep on the bed I just drift off to unconscious non-existence. For a long while I thought I had the answer. It was easy. Until the ONA ruined it for me with its word “Causal.” One night while I was peeing and telling myself that death is like falling to sleep in the dark and not waking up, I suddenly realized that everything about my experience of sleep and night is all a causal phenomena. It’s night because the sun is on the other side of the earth. I sleep because I’m an animal which evolved on the same earth. I go unconscious because being conscious while you sleep would be really boring. I realized I was thinking of death in causal terms. Of earth, sun, and moon terms. Of experiential phenomena within the realness of mortal existence. If death happens outside the reality of the solar system, then it can’t be “dark,” or “sleepy,” or the unconsciousness of deep sleep. But I was too sleepy to philosophize about the nature of death to go on, and I was sitting there for a while thinking.
I try to figure out the meaning to life, but I notice myself ascribing human words and human terms to the stuffness of life. So what I usually do is every now and then do some exercising by walking 5-10 miles, which is something I do once or twice a month. But I incorporate a minimalist Zen-Theravada practice in the long walk. What I do is I clear my mind and make it go blank. I have a bead bracelet I bought at a Buddhist temple, and I’ll consciously say a chant while counting the beads with my thumb. This keeps my conscious mind busy. Then I try to hold Mindfulness of the stuff around me for all 10 miles. I try to feel life, in a wordless and thoughtless way as best as I can. This way I don’t superimpose my human ideas and opinions onto life, but I train myself to feel that Life with chitta/Heart. With my walking meditation I can’t see a “purpose” or “meaning” to Life, but I Feel that it is not Pointless, or that “something” beyond the veil or facade of reality is “there” which can be felt. It’s not a meaning or a purpose, or a god, or a reason to live. It’s just “there.” On my way back from such a walk I intellectualized to myself that maybe Life was as meaningless and meaningful as pond scum. Life just happens. But there is much more to that.
I have an aquarium with a blue lobster and feeder fish I take care of. I like to watch the fish and lobster live out their boring lives in a 10 gallon thing. There lives seem so meaningless, but yet there is a simple point inherent in their organic make up: live and thrive. I also have an artificial life game called “Darwin Pond,” which I really like. It’s a real artificial life program, but it’s old. It’s the only computer game I can play and not die after a minute. It’s not really a game and you don’t really play it. You just watch, and sometime tweak a few things and sit back an watch what happens later on because of the changes you have made. I’ve had Darwin Pond for about 5 years, and it’s still fascinating to me where that I can still today run the program and watch a simulation during my breaks all day. It uses real time in the simulations, and it lets you freeze a session and save it, to start up later. You can still google “Darwin Pond” and download a free “updated” version – which is many years out of date – and have endless boring fun like me.
Darwin Pond is pretty simple with primitive graphics. On screen you have a pond and inside this pond you have artificial life things called “swimmers.” The swimmers start off looking like eels or worms. There are green dots in the pond which is the food the swimmers eat and swim around finding. The more food the more they breed. Less food means decrease in population. From time to time genetic mutations will arise in the swimmers which will make them look and swim in different ways. To the left of the screen is your science lab with test tubes and genetic engineering buttons. With the buttons you can change everything about a swimmer’s DNA. Instead of having one leg/tail you can give them 4, you can alter the way each tail/leg flaps and moves thus changing the way they swim. You can also erase food from anywhere in the pond or add food anywhere. The food are simulations of random appearing algae, so you don’t have to manually add food in the pond. You can change the coloration of the swimmers too.
I use to like taking a swimmer specimen to tweak him so he has 3-4 tails that makes him swim fast. This way he can out perform the native swimmers with one tail. Then I let the game play out in real time by leaving the game running at night when I sleep. There is no meaning to life in this pond, but if you watch long enough, you can feel out a point to the artificial pond life: live and thrive or die. Sometimes in the morning my swimmer I genetically tweaked didn’t make it. Other times I’ll wake up and find that my Genetically Manipulated [GM] swimmers ended up populating the pond with a small population of their own kind. Then if my GM swimmers were made well, I wake up and see that the whole pond is thriving with my GM swimmers and the native ones had gone extinct.
It’s a really cool game, to me at least. What is fascinating about it to me is that you actually get to see the Causal changes happening within a simulation of Time Flow. In my current language I can say that the game is like a mini simulation of Aeonics; but 5-6 years ago I had no word to call what I was looking at that captured my fascination so much. You would think that I may have gained insights into Life from playing a game that simulates pond life, but I didn’t. Instead I gained a deeper understanding of something I once called the Two Certainties or Constants of life: Time & Causality.
From the game I learned to see that Time Flow and Causal Change are traveling buddies that flow together like maybe a double helix. But as I looked closer at this Darwin Pond, I learned to see that the causal changes happening weren’t exactly linear. After many years of staring at this game, I had trained my mind to see life in a certain way, and so I used that way of seeing with real life. In real life, Causality – cause and fruit – is not linear. It goes in any and all directions unpredictably at times. Like hitting a group of balls on a pool table, where you can never be sure where every ball will fly to and end up being when they come to rest.
Seeing causation as being nonlinear gave me a problem in my Mind. Now Causation and Time weren’t traveling friends anymore. Time went in one direction and while causal change can go in any direction. But then looking deeper I noticed that every causal line/chain of event materialized inside its own flow of Time. Which caused me to revise the way I understood Time flow. It wasn’t linear perhaps, but like causality was nonlinear. This then caused me to see Time Flow and Causal Impermanence or Change as being the same thing. Because what do I mean to myself when I say “in Time?” I mean inside a matrix of change and impermanence where that some changes will have taken place. But then I remembered that Space and Time were the same thing: Space-Time. Which in my Mind ended up looking like this: Space-Time-Causality. Or ONA makes it all easier for me by just referring to that Space-Time-Causality as being “The Causal.” In my Mind, this meant that id causality was nonlinear and went in every direction, then whatever we exist in also happens in the same manner. Reality in my Mind just might happen like fractal patterns.
But this still did not give me an insight into the big question I had: Where is it all going? What is the end point? Is there a place we are moving towards as some divinely established destination a billion trillion years from now? If the Cosmos is alive, then where is it taking us? From staring at my pond game trying find an answer to staring at real pond life near my house, I later learned that I was anthropomorphizing the Cosmos as some sentient being with some premeditated purpose and “direction,” which was causing my confusion.
I learned to see pond life as a whole single organism. Meaning that the pond water, the algae, and animal life, along with dead matter was all one systematic Whole-Thing, just like our human body is a systematic whole thing made of of cells, blood, and inert molecule. Which was my problem, because my body has a conscious Mind with a will that can by volition determine direction and premeditate a place to be in the future. A lake near my house was “alive” and thriving, but as a Whole-Thing it lacked a will, conscious volition, and mind. A Lake as a Whole-Thing was just reactive on a collective level. Where that if you pour toxic waste in one section, the lake reacts to that causal input by dying in that area. And if you input food in another area, the Lake reacts by its life [organisms] moving towards the food where it can thrive for a while. So from taking meditative walks around this lake by my house I one day had the insight or realization that the a lake was just like a Tree!
Trees are alive, but not conscious like we humans are. Inside the tree is water and cells. That got me thinking that maybe the Cosmos was “alive” like a lake or tree and not like a person, where it did not have a conscious mind or volition, but was reactive to causal stimuli like a lake or tree. This would mean to me – in my own Mind and understanding of things – that there really is no true point or purpose to the Cosmos, as if there was an evolution towards a certain distant divine goal operating on some divine plan. Life just somehow happened, and as long at that life is in the living Cosmic Matrix, it will just try to live and thrive. This seen of the Cosmos as a Tree reminded me of a documentary I watched on a tribe living in Borneo called the Dyacks. I can’t remember how they spell it. The doc was actually about a tattoo enthusiast who was traveling in deep jungles to live with real tribes and get their ancient indigenous tattoos. After living with the Dyacks in the jungle and passing their rites of passage the American guy is honoured with a real Dyack tattoo of something the call Ahping. Ahping is the supreme deity of the Dyacks. As a tattoo Ahping is drawn to look like a black octopoidal tree design of different shapes. The Dyacks say that Ahping is a big Tree and that all life grows on Ahping. Later when I found the Tree of Wyrd in the ONA, I saw Ahping in it. To me it’s an aptly names discriptor, because this Cosmic Tree is in Time shaped by the wyrdful threads of causation we all weave.
I was on one of my meditative walks to the lake trying to figure out why the Cosmos – being so old and alive as it should be – was not a conscious being with a mind, self awareness, and personality. I was thinking about the lake and the trees around it. And I figured that whatever we call “life force” or acausal energy must be like the water in the lake and trees. It’s just a “fluid” conducive to or for life to manifest, which is life itself. Then like a lake and trees, maybe the Cosmos is so big a thing that it can only manifest inside of itself. Just like how fish and amoebas can only grow and exist inside their lake and not actually outside of it. Then with the lake and trees, we can say that each living cell/organism is an expression of its lake or tree matrix. Not an expression of the lake’s water itself, but of the lake as a Whole Systematic Thing. On a Cosmic level, this would mean in my Mind that each living thing in the Cosmos is an expression of the Cosmos as a Whole Systematic Thing. In other words, basically Life manifests inside its matrix.
This concept that Life manifests inside the Cosmos, led me to a small realization. That if we say that such Life in the Cosmos is an actualization of the Cosmic Matrix as a Systematic Whole Ting, then Conscious Awareness in the human is an evolutionary sense or tool which happens inside this Cosmic Lake. Which to me ends up meaning that The Cosmos “out there” has indeed evolved to be aware and sentient and conscious with will and volition, but that such awareness and volition is Us. In the same way where we can say that a big fish in a lake is the lake’s potential for awareness/volition in causal manifestation. In other words, that the Cosmos is like a lake, which it gradually evolves causally and nonlinearly towards more refines/acute states of sensory awareness of its environment simply to better survive and thrive by out competing. Consciousness – the ability to focus your awareness on things – like binocular and color vision, I think is merely a evolutionary upgrade of sensory information gathering. It just helps when you are a cheetah to be able to focus your “proactive” awareness and volition onto a single prey, as opposed to perhaps a bacteria that may have a simple reactive awareness just drift and react to external stimuli.
All this speculation led me to an amusing possible answer to my big question that for now makes things make some sense in my mind. The big question is: How did this [Life] come to be and where is it going? The answer for me at the moment is that when I look out into the universe and ask this question, I am literally the Cosmos looking out to itself and asking those same questions. But of course, there could be another planet with a people on it who have asked these same questions a million years before us. It’s as if we were to place a Tree in the middle of Nothing for an eternity so that one day all of the Tree’s cells developed an acute form of awareness and consciousness and those cells asked: How did this come to be and where is it all going? I think there is something very, very beautiful and revealing about this big question in human children. Doesn’t matter where we are born, as children we come out completely ignorant of where we came from and how we came to be. Almost universally, there will come a time when as children we will ask somebody: Where did I come from, how was I made? I really to think/theorize that the living Cosmos has expressed its potential for awareness in us and other conscious beings, and that with that self awareness, it is asking itself where it came from and how it came to be.
Struggle
I see “Struggle” as being a key factor in evolution. But I see struggle in a very different way then the old notion of Darwinian Struggle, because I see the world that I live in as being a symbiotic system, just like my own body is. This symbiotic struggle can’t have it so that its organisms exists in some isolated vacuum where each species just struggles to be the toughest and baddest creature. We really don’t live in isolated vacuums.
Struggle in a symbiotic system in my Mind is like when the ice age has ended on the earth, and all the plants say: “Shit, there goes the ice age! It’s gunna get hotter. I gotta change my thickness and ways of retaining moisture or die!” Then the herbivores end up saying: “Ah shit! All the plants are changing. I gotta change too so I can chew this shit and digest it or die!” Then all the carnivores end up saying: “Great, the kangaroos are hopping so they can get to the new grass faster than the wombats! How the hell do I catch them now! Man I gotta lose all this ice age weather armour, and get faster myself or die!”
So each group of things proactively responds/reacts to stimuli of its immediate environment. But as a whole the ecosystem eventually evolves as a working system. Many species that can’t adapt may dies out, but at the same time, new organisms arise to take their niche in the system. There was a time in the system or environment of America when Irish immigrants were very disliked and they could only get deplorable jobs. But slavery was a causal input in this system that changed the functional landscape of this environment. The Irish White People gradually found their way to a new niche place, and African slaves took their deplorable niche in this system. The Industrial revolution came and changed the functionality and landscape again where now machines took the place of slaves. The Blacks then adapted to take menial labour the machines could do. The freedom the African-Americans now had plus a thriving economy changed the landscape a bit even more so that many of them elevated to better niches. Now the Mexican immigrant has taken their place picking strawberries and such. So, although America as a whole systematic entity has greatly changed since its early days, it evolves together as a whole, such that if and when its parts and pieces shifts or evolves, there is a replacement to take over important niches to keep the system going. For example the niche in a system that Horse Power filled never went anywhere and is still needed. It’s just that today, that niche is filled with a more refined source/means of power: engines and fuel.
On a localized level of parts existing within the matrix of a given functioning system, Struggle to keep up with the system is a very real matter of life and death if the system is an ecosystem. If the system is a civilization or economy, then Struggle becomes a matter of freedom. But this type of Struggle is a primitive way to see and understand struggle which is myopic in regard to the Whole System we humans as a functioning indivisible part of. This is where I disagree with both Marx and Hitler when they state in a primitive perspective that history is a struggle of either class or race. Maybe so within context to a Nation-State, it’s system, its economy, and social environment. But we know no Kingdom or State lasts very long, so what class or race struggle for dominance in such a “predoomed” system feels like people struggling, fighting, and warring with each other to have a go at the wheel of the Titanic just after it hit the iceberg causing fear and panic on board. Take the former USSR for example. How long did that last? Say 100 years. So all the war and class struggle and uprooting of people from their ancestral history, and the millions of millions who dies happened just so that Party can take a country for a 100 joy ride before the country collapsed?
There is something that will always outlive a country and organized religion: Humanity. Considering that humanity has been around in our current form for about 150,000 it would seem as if the 100 year joy ride communism has was a pitiful waste of time. What’s worse is that those 100 years didn’t produce anything lasting. Humanity outlives empires and religion. Empires and religion in fact are causal expression of collections of humanity. Because of this, I believe that human history – and our future – is shaped not by a Struggle of class or race; but a Struggle of Culture. If we genuinely understand Aeonics and the basic idea that humanity will go on for a very long time and will always express itself in the causal world, then you’ll eventually come to understand the value and power of Culture Struggle.
The way I see Culture Struggle is also like pond life. In our pond we have organisms. Each living organism has one common basic function we never really pay any attention to. Each organism from the bacteria on up to a big fish processes Information. You have an lake seething with information, and what we call “living organisms” which acts as microchips that process this information. Then they react to such information. The more primitive the organism, the more primitive its ability to process the information and react. The more sophisticated the organism the more acute its ability to process the information and react with volition and intent either in a reactive or proactive manner. Each organism also is made up of genetic information which basically allows each organism to replicate more such organisms that inherit their respective ability/capability of information process.
So no the struggle in our pond takes on a different picture. It is a war of information. Single celled organisms that can’t pick up information of a threat may die. Bacteria that can pick up the information of a threat and react by producing toxin may live. Organisms that can’t process the information of light, might not do so well as organisms that have adapted cells to process the information of light. The more an animal is able to process huge amounts of information and acutely react to such information, the more successful its species becomes.
We leave the pond for the jungle to study more evolved animals like chimps and we see a new layer of information is present. Something we might call “Social Information.” Which is a complex interaction of a society of chimps sending and picking up information from and to each other. If you’re a chimp that can’t process the social information an alpha male is giving you with teeth telling you not to copulate his females, you’re ass is grass. If you are a little chimp and you are too stupid to learn to acquire the social information your mother is trying to give to you by sticking a twig in a ant hill to fish for ants, you won’t be eating ants like everyone else. If you’re an alpha male and something is wrong with you where you can’t process the information females are giving you by sticking their ass in your face, then you’re not gunna get any action and pass your genes down to the next generation.
Then we come to the human arena. Here “social information” becomes more sophisticated and we call it Culture, Traditions, and Customs. Cultures are like monkeys. They are bodies of coherent information with a number of humans as their cells. In the human area these cultures – just like monkeys – struggle to sire the next generation with their social information [cultural memes]. The most coherent and systematically functioning Culture become the most dominate and influential. The Culture of the Roman Empire and its people still influences us today. If you count all of Europe, all of the Americas, and the British Commonwealth whose people were/are in some way descendents of or influenced by this ancient Roman Culture, you have over 2 billion humans. That’s not counting Africa. 1 Billion humans are influenced by Islam, which is based on ancient Meccan Culture. The empire Sinosphere is dominated and influenced by Chinese Culture for 4000 years. Another Billion humans in India are influenced by the Culture of the Brahmins. This ancient Brahmin Cultural memeplex also would include 500 million Buddhists around the world.
We see now on the human scale of 7 Billion humans, that there are literally only a handful of ancient Cultures which still wields informational influence on the whole of humanity. And in our modern age we are beginning to see the emergence of one specific Cultural set of information grow into a globally monstrous influence: English. Never before in the history of our species has anything like this ever happened. English – the language – has shaped and still shapes our entire world, our worldviews, our science, our politics, our nations, our economy, our technology. Nothing today really happens in our human sphere of existence and causal expression which is not touched by English in some way. English even dominates our vision of a future via our science fiction novels, movies, and television shows. English is easy to use to show that a Cultural memeplex does out live empires, kingdoms, and nations. The English language came into existence just before England was a big kingdoms. That language saw England grow into the British Empire that covered the world. It out lived that massive empire and is now a tool wielded by the sole super power on Earth: America. It will out live America as a political entity. Just like Russian outlived the USSR.
Culture tends to stay intact over long periods of time. Despite the thousands of years that rolled across India, with all the different religious culture, kingdoms, and empires that arose and died in India, Brahminical Culture today still exists relatively in intact with some evolutionary changes. Same goes for Chinese Culture. The Cultural Revolution only killed an empire, but could not kill the actual Culture of the Chinese people, which has existed relatively unchanged for 4000 years.
We see that Culture expresses itself causally. In Catholic Europe in the past we see the Christianized Culture shared by Europe gave rise to causal manifestations such as the Crusades, the Gothic cathedrals, kingdoms, political systems, etc. Over in India Brahminical Culture via its ancient Brahmanism and then its hodge-podge Hinduism manifested as thousands of stone temples, little kingdoms that dotted the subcontinent, the magnificent artwork. In Southeast Asia we see that the indigenous Culture after absorbing Brahmanism and Buddhism expressed themselves in the world as whole empires [Khmer & Javanese Empire], kingdoms, the largest religious temple complex on earth [Angkor Wat], and so on. Likewise in China, whose Cultural influence helped shape Japan and Korea, as well as the wardrobe and attire of the world with its silk hanfu. This doesn’t include the enduring influence of a Culture’s weltanchauung and philosophies. Our modern world is still influenced by a mere handful of ancient philosophies or worldviews of the Cultures of Greece, Rome, India, China, and England as of the modern world.
The Prize of the top cultures is massive and long lasting: the influence of billions of human lives. The power to steer huge portions of humanity into a direction. The end result of a weak culture is cultural liquidation and enslavement of its people who will serve the cultural destiny of the dominating culture. You have but to look at the unfortunate race of African-Americans to understand what I am trying to mean here. They were stolen from one land and brought to another, their indigenous and ancestral culture was beaten out of them. Now they exist to serve the interests of a system and State. They literally exist only as pawns to help manifest the collective destiny of a political party, an economy, and so on. I mean “destiny” in a poetic sense here. As in would Shakespeare have ever known that the English he helped form, would one day give birth to a nation whose destiny was to set a human foot on the moon?
I would agree with the Numinous Way and Reichsfolk when it says that Culture is a living manifestation and expression of Nature. I would also say that the Numinous Way has it accurate when it admonishes us to stay away from abstractions and live in the numinous immediacy of the moment. It may seem that the Culture millions of people is abstract and distant, and therefore immoral in the Numinous sense, but I’ll explain.
In my own Mind what is “Abstract” is if we had a painter who painted a mountain. The painting is the Abstract of the numinous mountain. The painting is an abstraction of that mountain. It becomes immoral in the numinous sense to be oblivious of the actual mountain and to speak of, debate, philosophize, and make a belief system with and out of the the painting. Abstraction is also like when I will be giving a lecture on a subject, and just to give my potential audience the gist of what I will be speaking on I give them a summary of my lecture which is called an “Abstract.” It is stupid to read that abstract I handed out and oblivious – unaware – of my actual lecture you pass your judgments and and critique my knowledge on the subject based on that abstract. Abstraction is like you were standing in a line at the movie theater figuring out which movie to watch and I come out and tell you: “Damn nigga, the Matrix was da bomb! Keanu was in there, this one girl that looked like a lesbian, robots, they were flying everywhere, that agent was everybody! Bullets flying in slow motion! It was awesome!” Then you say to me: “Damn, it sounds awesome! Hey thanks!” And you walk off. I stop you and say: “Where’re you going?” You say: “Girl, your abstract narration of the Matrix was so real, I don’t even have to see the actual movie. Ima go tell my friends how cool it was!”
When you take something living and just there in Nature, like a flower and you describe it in words, thoughts, and ideas, what words, thoughts, and ideas you have is an Abstraction of the wordless and thoughtless flower. There is a difference. And so what we do is we take our abstractions of Nature, Life, of the World, and with those abstractions of words, thoughts, ideas, opinions, we make religions out of them. Which are nothing more than word games, idea games, opinion games. We make philosophies out of them. We in essence juggle ideas in our own heads that have nothing to do with prehending what is Real, Raw, Alive World. We think such Abstractions are real, and we are oblivious to that which is actually raw reality. We lose ourselves in our abstractions of words, thoughts, opinions, semantics, etc, and are disconnected and cut off from the actual real world of human experience. We go off up into idealistic directions fueled by our samsara of abstractions. And the more we lose ourselves in such abstractions and their idealisms, the less of any understanding we have of the real world, and ourselves. It gets to the point where you end up playing make believe like children. You tell stories and play pretends with other people oblivious to reality. Remember when we played make believe when we were small? Where we make up things as we go along. It’s like somebody says: “Let’s pretend we’re walking a special path called the left hand path.” And somebody adds to that: “Okay, and then let’s pretend we’re becoming gods, and we’ll call it a big word like apotheosis because we’re grown ups!”
Anything I can write or say or intimate, or ideate about a Chinese culture is an abstraction of the actual Living Culture happening between a billion Chinese people in China. My own indigenous culture is not “over there” somewhere in some country or in some textbook in some college. Its here with me as a living thing I do with my fingers and toes by myself and also with those who are around and in front of me. The only way for you to realistically understand – knowing from experience – my culture is my sticking your face right in between me and what I do. That’s what I mean by “my culture.” I mean the stuff I do and the way I live through myself and for those around me within my immediate sphere of life. And so in a community of people who share the same culture, you have a collocation or mingling of many people expressing the same culture in the community. The culture as a living “thing” is still rooted in the person’s cultivated actions and deeds. It’s just that now around this person there are others who share that culture. In a nation who all share a common culture, that culture Still is rooted in each individual and their actions. On a national level, my culture is not “out there” somewhere, it is right here with me and expressed in between the people I live with. In fact I actually take my culture with me everywhere I go. That should tell you where a person’s culture actually is. On a real and numinous level the culture is rooted in the individual person, those they live with, and such culture develops from such person or small group of people living together in a certain area for a while. Once it develops, the culture is portable, and transmittable.
The Abstraction of a living numinous culture is what is removed from the cultivation of such culture by an individual and those within their immediate sphere. Speaking of a culture beyond that circle of immediacy is only an approximate abstract of a living culture. The social information that makes a living culture travels from groups of people to groups of people within a given area. So that over time a large number practice, express, and cultivate, the same culture, or versions of the same culture. In a way it is the same as with language. Language happens with you. It is rooted in your brain and mouth. You use it with those immediate around you. That is where language happens as a living thing. Any talk, idea, thought, conception, opinionation, ideation, of English or language beyond that immediate sphere around you is an abstraction of the living language you use. In any given area the lingual information that makes up your language you use spreads and travels to other people and groups of people around you. As it is used by others, it will develop regional variations called dialects.
Each group of people will also develop their own version of the Language. You should know that speaking of an English language is dealing with something abstract and not living because on the living level of group of users on the ground such as in England, you have a different variation every other mile you go. Which English are you referring to? Culture works the same way. If you understand this much, you’ll understand that there really is no such thing as a “Asian Culture,” or a “Chinese Culture,” or a “European Culture.” Just like I can say there is no such thing as a “Khmer Language,” because that term points to something so vacuous and generalized, that no living variant of Khmer would fit the generalized ideated thoughts. So there is a big difference between a numinous culture and an abstraction of a culture. A numinous culture is what is living in between a small group of people living together and next to each other. And what is rooted in each individual of such small group of people. The abstraction of that culture is when you gloss over an entire nation of people and produce a generalization or approximation. The immoral problem arises when we take that abstraction and make it into an idol and standard by which we judge what is on the living level. Or when that abstraction prevents us from coming to know the Real.
Culture Struggle happens for two reasons. The first reason is that we don’t live in a vacuum bubble. Second reason is that social information moves and travels from person to person, and group to group. So when you have two cultures in close proximity to each others the social information of each culture will flow into the other. A visible example of two cultures influencing each other can be seen here in Southern California. The Mexican population here is huge which means that locally Mexican culture is big and a coherent phenomena. This causes their social information to influence everybody in the area. It doesn’t matter what race you are here, you’re gunna eat salsa and tacos, have a barbeque on Cinco de Mayo, talk their variant of English which will have many words in Mexican-Spanish, and so on. But the size of a culture does not always equal its memes being influential. There is also the factor of receptivity of foreign elements. For example there are not a lot of Black people anywhere in my area, but I hang out with a handful of Black guys I look up too that are very street oriented. There are certain elements my Black friends have which neither my own culture does not have. Such as the expressive street grade English they use, the real-raw street based worldviews that have, the tight gang style bond they have for their friends. All these have no strong equivalent in my own Culture, so gradually those elements grafted into my own culture. Meaning how I personally express my culture, not as in my grandma and all of my relatives talking like Black gangbangers, hating on “the Man.”
Over time two neighboring cultures can end up sharing so much in common that they are very similar and hard to distinguish. Personally I find it almost impossible to differentiate Khmer, Thai, and Lao culture apart. This happened because in the past the old Khmer Empire was a huge coherent national and cultural entity. In this case the Thai-Lao people in ancient times were feral tribes from Southern China. Compared to China and the Khmer Empire, those feral tribes had a very underdeveloped culture. So it’s like taking a 10 year old boy and having the boy being adopted by adults. What will happen is that as the boy develops with age, he will absorb the adult’s culture who raised him. This is an example of one type of Culture Struggle where a coherent developed culture influences an underdeveloped incoherent one. The other example of Culture Struggle is “Cultural Liquidation.”
A current example of Cultural Liquidation that is fascinating for me is the case with China and what used to be Tibet. It’s only been about 60ish years since China re-annexed the Tibetan Plateau. Over the years Chinese culture has relentlessly assaulted the indigenous culture of the Tibetan people. Everything from Chinese writing, Chinese music, Chinese martial arts, to Chinese politics has been flooding Tibet. With this the Chinese government suppresses aspects of Tibetan cultural observances. Liquidation in this real context happens within the flow of Time. Why and how it happens is because as humans we die. It doesn’t matter if in 1940 you were a hardcore 30 year old Tibetan sworn to forever hate the Chinese and everything Chinese. You will die soon. And when you die, you leave your children behind. The cultural erosion happens with each dying generation where that each newly emerged generation is like that little boy adopted by adults. The boy not being fully developed will absorb their adult’s culture. Each new generation of Tibetans absorbs a little more social information from Chinese Culture. It’s been only 60 years and the Tibetan people inside China are fighting to maintain their cultural integrity. Unfortunately they are up against a monstrous 4000 year old cultural memeplex which has liquidated and absorbed many nations and tribes.
The key points to think about is that the weaker cultures dissolves, and the Alpha Cultures gets to influence and lead a massive portion of humanity into a direction. That direction might not always be the most positive and constructive of direction. Case in point would be the the spiritless soul of Western Secular-Capitalism. It is a cheap substitute faux-culture [Cult-ture] that is now ubiquitous and eating away at living cultures around the world. It spreads like a desert first killing the young trees, and then finally strangling the ancient old growth forest. It is a memetic war on Culture between those the zombies who have no real living culture and those with living culture. If there is any struggle worth fighting and struggling for, it’s the Struggle of Culture.
But that war of cultures can only be won – or just survived – if we learn to understand what a culture is and where it happens. Culture is a Way of Life which has developed overtime between a people and their association with each other and the environment. That culture happens through each of us and our individual cultivation and praxis. The important point to consider is if we as individual people have a strong Mind where we are proud of our respective cultures, have the resolve and integrity to hold onto that culture, to strengthen it, and lastly to pass that culture down to our next generation. Liquidation of culture happens at the newly emerged end of children and young people. We can be as resolved in Mind as we want, but we will die and leave our children and grand children behind. It is in the minds and hearts of those who are “next in line” that the corrosion and liquidation happens.
And so for me, Culture has become an increasingly important thing, now taking central stage in the arena of human existence. On a living level culture is a vehicle of ancestral information compiled and developed since ancient times by long one people. On an aeonic level [of thousands of years], culture has the power to guide and drive humanity either towards a constructive destiny or to our own destruction. It’s too early right now for me to formulate some thesis or spectacular thing on the concept of Culture Stuggle, as the idea is just newly crystallized. I think in time, I’ll work on this. I think at the moment, when I say struggle I in no ways mean to suggest some tiny half formed culture struggle to dominate the world and guide humanity. I mean on a numinous level of the intimate moment, there is a struggling of small living cultures, against the great big empty faux-culture. It is a struggle to survive in one piece.
A struggle to somehow have my grandchildren one day know their roots and culture of their ancestors. Even if such cultural observances today seem weird and unscientific. I would like them to know their ancient ancestral “animism.” About how everything in nature is alive and has a life force. That everything living empaths/understands when the Heart speaks. That their life force is rooted in the Cosmos itself. That when I die and they die, it is not the “end of life.”
In my Buddhist culture, we still believe in rebirth. I’m not interesting in arguing with a Westerner who is a know it all. Anatta [anatma] is virtually meaningless. In the same way as when I say I believe in Anti-Self. The problem with the English of today is that the word “Self” can mean almost anything depending on the group of people using the world. Is Self the Ego? The Soul? The Personality? Persona? Spirit? Mind? Life Force? Awareness? Atman 2500 years ago was the same way. Different groups of philosophers had their own meaning of Atman. If a Buddhist monk in Theravada did not believe in a self, then why is the sacerdotal word for “Me and I” in Theravada “Atma?”
The Buddha basically said that he believes the “self” to be an aggregation of many different things and factors. At death all those things and factors separates and dissolves into their respective elements and things. But he says that after everything dissolves what is left is Chitta {Heartmind] which then flows like a stream: chittasantana [Mindstream]. It is the Heart that is like a Seed planted in a new Time, which grows into a new person. And so when most living creatures are newly born, we come into the world with a fully working Heartmind that feels and empaths even in the womb. It is only much later that a new mind/self develops.
I would like my own future children to inherit and have their own living culture. To know and understand that they exist in inside a war on culture. The most important aspect of any culture is the family bond it creates and the clans it gives rise to. And so it becomes that here in the West, losing one’s culture, means one’s children loses connection with family and clan and becomes an individualized prey to a lifeless faux culture and its cultureless people. To me, things like the ONA and Numinous Way have become valuable accessories to my own culture which helps me retain, maintain, and preserve what culture I have. For my future children such things as the ONA and Numinous Way will provide them a means to add-on and build up what culture they may have inherited to fortify it from Magian erosion.
End Remarks
This is a short essay which might not flow or fit together very well. I had a few ideas bubbling up and had to write them down before they were lost. The essay is about the things I think about often. Culture, Life, death, ONA. At it’s core, ONA does share a lot in common with indigenous cultures, and ancient living traditions the world over. These commonly shared things are things your average Westerner is alien to. I’ll hold onto my indigenous culture, traditions, and way of life with a death grip. This is one reason why I like Reichsfolk National-Socialism. I reserve the right to have a culture, to be proud of it, and to preserve it. Even if to the Mundane, Homo Hubris, and Magian aspects of my culture and way of life are unscientific and does not conform to materialist paradigms. In the end, it is the individualized one without a culture that will suffer. I’ve written in many other essays about the many aspects of ONA that can be found in every ancient indigenous people and their cultures and traditions. This is one reason why I like ONA. It has useful forms to use on the outside. But on the inside is a Core that houses something alive and old. Something forgotten by the West, which is still a living part of the rest of the world. It is something simple which grows and unfolds from Heartmind and Acausal Empathy. That ability to feel the life force in things, its living pulse which is all around us and in everything. From my own cultural understanding of things, it is the Heart which is the beginning of Life, which Feels, which learns to Understand it; and which always beats with the pulsations of the Numinous Acausal. And human Culture is one Sacred expression of that Numinous Acausal. Expressed through each of us as living nexions of that sacred essence.
Chloe 352
Order of Nine Angles
122 yf
