================================================================= THIth IS THE DEEP6 OF NOTES TO =scaa3*. aka =sc_aa3 CAVEAT TABBYCAT, CAVEAT BLACKHAT. (Snias Alert, Heresy Alert) "Don't say I didn't warn you, if your train gets lost." (Bob Dylan) "I would meet with you upon this honestly." (T.S. Eliot, "that superficial facile Anglophile hicktown bigot, upmobile" (sa)) ------------------------------------------------------------------- (aa3-1) (( I am suspicious of this. It seems to me to have maybe the ring of heresy, whatever heresy is. CAVEAT TABBYCAT: Shrager once qwoted a queer who said, "If you can't face up to it -- back into it." Some queers are "cute and sweet" and some even noble -- Dave McReynolds, Bayard Rustin, Barney Frank in his brilliant irony -- but some are evil, "killerfruits" as Terry Southern put it. Eg J. Edgar Hoover, and Rumsfeld. With Bushie waiting in the wings. I fear that's the real option. If you stand up to do good, of course you risk attack. But I think that if you try to keep a low profile, evil will find you out and undermine you without even giving you the dignity of a fair fight. Executioners do that all the time, they have no mercy on a humble man, no matter how much he try to abase himself. Once again: I doubt that Reb Nachman is a reliable guide above treeline. Maybe he ate some ergot, as_it_is_said, "I don't want any of your weevily wheat, I don't want any of your barley. It takes good flour and a half an hour to bake a cake for Charlie." (( PVK notes thast there are risks in anthropomorphizing Supreme Being -- though it seems to be that PVK failed to notice the various advantages in it, eg facilitating petitionary prayer, in particular healing prayer. Likewise, as HIK notes, there are risks in personifying evil-- Whitehead's Fallay of Misplaced Concretion for starters . (And that pretty well describes my steel_reinforced concrete bungalow by the side of the Modi'in 6_lane highway, especially now that the Vaad cut down all the eucalyptus trees by the highway, to build a boondoggle porkbarrel rakeoff Security Road . ) )) (aa3-2) (( So I suppose this is Jesus maxim, Resist ye not evil. Walia Cometi (Hofstadler) said something similar in her first book, or such is my impression. Its more a matter of jiu-jitsu than of collaboration. But sometimes one does have to stand up for what one believes in, even at the risk of getting 'knocked off' as RSC would often say of all who opposed his liberalization of the forms, though not the content, of orthodox Judaism. )) (aa3-3) (( It's David, not Dovid -- like, if he comes back it will be to the lands and heights of modern Israel, not to the New York neo_ghettos of the haredim .)) I once went to David's Tomb, but he wasn't there. I think he was maybe up on the Golan ("the toilsome heights"), or down by his cve in Ein Gedi, or both. Ein Gedi is great in the winter. (aa3-4) (( And RSC once remarked, at Modi'in, you can't go around saying, as the baal tchuvas do, 'B'ruch HaShm ' to everything. And also he said something about saying it big or saying it little, but I don't recall what he said.)) (( You see, a large part of what RSC says is really in opposition to the machmere frumies. Not to the innocent lost sheep who came to hear him, Jewish kids with no Jewish education who had a longing they barely were aware of, to return to religious Judaism. RSC was trying to let them find him, and to draw them back, before they bumped into the frumies and got caught with a gluey glutten challah and an exploding condensed olive of cough_syrkup kidish wine, and then got indigestion and quit it all and took off the talit katan and the black frock_coat and the Blighters Green dry_cleaned Derby, and went back to the Sufis and all those pagan bathings in the hot springs, Cows Defend Us, speedily in our times but do remember to leer discretely, or else you can't come to our wine_and_cheese parties, you have to go back to wearing a polyester leisure suit and drinking Budweiser tap while you scarf as much of the free lunch as you can see through the cigarette smoke, as_it_is_said , "There is no such thing as a free lunch" (Vonnegut9 My compliments to last years's Zenith El Cheapo coffee, it should only be sweetened with a bit of last years dried cowpies. (aa3-5) (( And that was really R. Shlomo's creed. And so we see that this really was his lineage. And so he really did fulfill his obligation as, according to his family's tradition as he remarks in something I input from a commerical tape -- Torah Times maybe - - that he was a geneologic descendent of KKing David, as well as, obviously, a spiritual descendent. For King David was a real king, and his weapon was the Harp. And only the Irish seem to honor harpists, as Ann McGaffrey notes in her elevating science-fiction world of Dragon-mounted Guardians. And Robert Graves, in The White Goddess, argues with complex analogies for a conceptual and maybe historic similarity between Irish Druid religion, and ancient Israelite, Jewish I guess, religion. )) (aa3-6) (( And this too is the story of R. Shlomo's life. But I would say, not from the orthodox nor even ultra_orthodox establishment, but only from what would be regarded as the most machmere fringe. And with many exceptions even within that. I want to say, only the Philistine Haredim opposed him. And at his passing, then Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi Rav Lau spoke a most moving apology for having failed to accord him the honor he meritted. And I once heard him a Mimoumna, in Sacher Park, welcomed like a Prince of Torah. Mordechai haLevi, zl'b, was there, playing his trumpet on "v_Bnei -- Yerushelayim". And to this day, all the common people of Israel, the salt of the earth, types you would not wish to bump into in an alleyway without 3 gold hand_of_Fatima's around you neck and enough red thread to wrap a mummy -- speak of him with respect, honor, and affection. For he recognized and honored their inherent Jewish religiosity, however hidden it was from the eyes of the Ashkenazi haredim who have come to set the norms for Israeli religious Judaism, so that even the Sephardi Gaonim, with the inentionally noticeable exception of Rav Ovadya Josef, who was the one who reognized the Judaism of the Ethiopian Jews, and so enable them to come to Israel -- a great people, I have found only the American Indians as deep -- even the Sephardi Leaders now wear those ridiculous black suits of Eastern European orthodoxy, heavy winter garb, so you see mink strimele from a Hungarian blizzard (I once heard the Bostoner Rebbe, on Simchat tora most likely, refer to some strimele as 'from a Hungarian Beauty Shop' -- I have no idea why) in a chamsin -- There is a tendency, both from his fans and his opponents, to pack RSC away on the shelf as an obsolete idol. I found particularly offensive the introduction to that -- editted, I think -- edition of Holy Beggars Gazette -- from some guy who had the chutzpa to supposedly buy copyrights to it -- like me buying up all the copyrights to commentaries on Parshat Pinchas, because I do not like Parshat Pinchas -- "damning with faint praise" as the saying goes. )) (aa3-7) And what is an arrogant person -- one who arrogates to himself a position to which he is not entitled. In Sufi terms, one who pretends -- as an ambitious prince may pretend to the kingship -- to a maqam that he has not achieved. In Hebrew terms, to which he as insufficient zhut -- not enough credit in his spiritual_bank_balance The Sufis say -- one who claims a position he has not earned, will not long hold it. Either he will get "knocked off" (to use RSC's term) or he will fall off -- ("and this is: Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall / Humpty Dumpty had a great fall / All the King's horses and all the King's men / could not put Humpty together again.") (aa3-8) (( ok. One of the first things I learned, or had to learn and so I learned it, when I took LSD was: how do you defend ourself against getting locked up as a looney by the squares. Because if they catch you they will not merely lock you away from the trees so they can cut them all down, but also they will brainwash you and turn you into a robot like them , because like Marcuse said, this is "civilization and its discontes" (Freud's phrase) with a vengeance. And also the little people, the rosh katanj's , are always trying to "knock off" , in R. Shlomo's phrase, the rosh gadols, the one's who try to stand up and stand out from the crowd. So this was , as I phrased it them for convenience -- one has to "earmark" an intution to remember it, to use PVK's metaphor, as a rancher earmarks a particular cow to keep it from disappearing back into the herd -- "the Portable Paranoid's Defense Kit" One has to identify the roles that are available in one's society, and then spot and pick a role that is considering unthreatening by that society. Like John the Baptist said, don't play the Prophet, might lose your head . One an usually get away with playing the fool -- "You don't want to eat me, I'm too silly." Ciel hid a full bosom behind loose clothes, a very short Afro, and the manner of a Newark street kid. Agnieska, who is brighter, more aware, and far moe developed spiritually and psychedlically than I may ever be, sometimes pretends to be a dumb Pole. When I was flipping out on Rodos, so desperate to attend PVK at the Millenium that I could not even walk a kilometer to the Port and get onto a boat, I took the part of a bum. Greece is a very class_ist society, but within that prejudice the lower class are let alone, and even fed well. On the old Greek ferries, the only place to get a solid meal for a fair price was the Deck class buffet. The bourgois and would_be__upper classes can be cruelly intolerant and repressive toward would_be mystics, they'll lock you up, burn out your soul with chemicals and maybe electricity, make you jump through a hundred conceptual hoops like one of those damned captive animals in a circus, so far from the African grassland -- and call it all psychotherapy and say its for your own good, so aren't you greatful and please pay at the Cahsier's with any convenient credit card. And instead of the surf and the stars and the cold and the warmth of a cast-off rug or too and the stones rolled all across the seabed from an ancient volcanoe, and distant snow on the mountainpeaks of Turkey -- instead you have the cold glow of flourescent electric devices all night long, and all the little noices of a place where people are being cut up and dying, and interminable TV, and scarcely enough quiet time even to think your own thoughrs, let along tune into your inner guidance, much good it could not do you in a goddamned place like that -- as_it_is_said, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". So the contemporary notion of a mental ward is as repressive as anything from the days of the real withhunts. Will Jonson once looked at my bare chest and said, you have ancillary nipples. In the middle ages you would have been burned as a witch for that. He said, all my friends have that, including Ricky ( Ricky (Erica Reed) Sherover, zl'b) . Cocteau had it. But if you don't have any money and no-one to pay it for you, they will say, to hell with him, he's just a bum, let him sleep out on the beach in the cold instead of in a nice clean hospital bed with the sheets tucked so tight he can't move all night. And then they will maybe bring you a ham and cheese sandwich, and even some fried potatoes. And so I survived, pretty much, until "time heals all wounds", even those we don't know we have. Or had.} (aa3-9) I don't wear a kippa, it makes one look just too Jewish. Besides which a kippa is hetzi_hetzi. 'Half_and_half__Man' as Bill Helbing used to term himself. 't'ain't a hat but ain't not neither. Won't keep off the sun nor the rain nor the cold, but won't stay on without glue. Or a barrette, but only girls wear barrettes. They ought to make them with little screw-on fastners. You could mount the other half on your cranium. Chrome plaited of course, so it look fashionable. So my point is: This is precisely what the haredim do, and precisely what all of us normal Jewish people from galutz go out of our way not to do. Well, it's good and brave of the haredim to walk around like instant bulletin boards for Judaism. I saw this guy in black and white plus kippa -- so he is not an off-duty Swiss waiter -- outside the Chur Bahnhof, so I asked him, what day is Purim, and he confirmed that for me, and also told me, there is a Kosher Hotel, the METROPOL in ARRAU. Secular Israelis even more so. Not merely clean shaven and bare- headed, and dressed in international standard, but they have a way of talking Hebrew that is in such an undertone that only the person they're talking to can even tell what language it is. You can walk right past them and not be sure. But for all that, they are really Israeli, and really Jewish. A very sharply defined culture. (aa3-10) -- I'm away from my books, and away from Israel, nearest Judaica is the Zurich Hauptbahnhof, where at at the main Newsstand they have, or had through at least last March, the February 4, '05 edition of the Jerusalem Post (International Edition). (aa3-11) Sally Schreiber from Jamaica Plain once, in the context of the Sufi Order, gave me similar advice: Spent some time with your soul. Hang out a bit with your soul. ( Or at least try to recogniuze -- her, the Muslims would say -- enough to say a polie hello. ) (aa3-12) Well yes, the whole world depends on me, but also on Joe Shmoe down the block who's fixing his lawnmower just now. And yes, I can fix the whole world a little bit, but to fix it altogether it does take the other 4 billion world citizens too. (aa3-12a) ((This is the hasidic teaching that when a disciple, a mureed, a hosid wants to go the Rebbe, all sorts of obstacles pop up in his way. And it is especially a teaching that one should recognize these as coming from the force of opposition (which of course is usually almost entirely within oneself, so it can often be bought off) -- and are not signs of Divine Displeasure Hatzkala told me, R. Shlomo once said, or used to say: You think when the devil comes he won't be wearing a streimela? That is, that the Adversary often disguies itself as one's super_ego, saying , in effect, I do not oppose your doing this, but you must realize, you are not good enough to do it. So don't make trouble for all those nice people, go out bowling a buy yourself a nice adult comic book on the way home. (aa3-13) Reb Nachman, at least in =sc_a4 and now here, is repeatedly making the point that one should do things whole-heartedly -- a good enough point, though Jesus said it first -- and that if one fails to do so , it's nothing. ("It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing" -- USA pop jazz, 1930s maybe.) Which is unhelpful nonsense. All that bit of jive does is define an extremist position -- in this case religious zealotry, and in this case, hasidism. I rant and rave on this point in =scsaaa4 (aa3-14) Wrong. Wrong again, to be precise. I sat on the Rodos beach, watching all those pink dugongs for 3 years. In my mind I was so vividly at Zenith, the first year anyhow, that I didn't need to get up and go there. Wouldn't have been half as good anyhow. The same with going to bed with a woman. Often much better when she's not there, with all those questions and complaints and trips to the bathroom and all that. Someone once asked PVK at Zenith, I dream so much of coming here, and it means so much to me, and then when I get here and sit down in the meditation tent, I just fall asleep. Gedalya Persky once said to me, I think he was speaking of a time when he had flipped out, at least to whatever minor extent he flips out -- he said, I kept imagining all these deep conversations with PVK , and then when I finally saw him all he said was, [ I don't recall Gedalya's words here ] Oh, hello, how are you. This is just not my year or spring to be very sympathetic to the notion of romantic love. Or romantic anything. All those ptit bourgeois kids jumping off a few Bavarian cliffs clutching a copy of The Sorrows of Young Werther. Someone once said something like, Rather than dying gloriously for a cause, live humbly for it. Ezer Weizmann once said: Don't be so quick to give your life for your country; let the other son_of_a_bitch give HIS life for HIS country. Professor Paul Wienpah , UCSB, once said: Yes, but did you ever see a Zen Master. Meaning, we have all these images in our head, but have you seen the reality of them. That's what marriage is all about. Or so I read. This is my poem, set at Lama Foundation: "The valleys are filled with mist. From each rise I find myself, surprised, still climbing the distant mountain." And I think this is the difference between the introdcution and and main part of the Bach B-Minor Mass Kyrie. The first presents a desperately intense longing for the divine, a cri de coeur. And the second part, the main part, presents the long, step by step working_out of that progress toward salvation, or Englightenment, or Meshiach, or whatever you do or don't call it. (aa3-15) The Sheik was known by a last name which a foremother must have acquired, 8 centuries previous, from Spanish Crusaders. Real. As in: El Camino Real. As for his first name , Ratelan, it was perhaps a corruption of the knightly European name, Roland. Sitting at his encampment, under the scanty shade of one of the myriad date-palsms of Jericho, the Sheik was doing his best to ignore the repeated complaints of his wife, who was declaiming: "I said, Sheik Retelan Real ----- " She was working on recoering the bottom of one of the Sheik's sandals. She had set the work down, the better to deliver her tireade, when one of their mangy watchdogs sidled up, grabbed the leather in his mouth, and quickly did slink away, disappering amidst some brush known only to desert dogs, while the Sheik watched impassively. That had happened many times before. The Sheik saw in it the Unseen Hand of Kismet, ordering the petty affairs of mankind. But his wife, representing womankind, was infuriated, and cried out; "And you never do nothing to save your dog-gone sole." ----------- Most people the moment thay have whag they have they stop having a soul, right. (aa3-16) (aa3-16) Wrong again. I mean, let us strive to be briefly real. (aa3-17) Personally I prefer a more conventional sort of date. The first thing you have to know about psychic powers is, don't use them. Generally speaking, it's not decent. As U.S. Secretary of the Navy Cordell Hull said shortly before Pearl Harbour, Gentlemen do not open each others' mail. And HIK says, Do not try co uncover the secret of another. (aa3-18) That merely shows that in extreme situations, including acute (but not chronic) deprivation (eg Yom Kippur), the soul may become more visible, to oneself if not others. But it does not mean that the soul becomes stronger. A summer vacation at a nice hotel with good meals and nice lawn chairs in the sun, and if possible a horeshoe pit, is apt to do a heck of a lot more for the soul. I recommend the Trailing Yew on Monhegan Island (which is off Port Clyde, in Maine.) They serve clam chowder once a week, but you can ask for the Minestrone. In Praha there is was looks like a good Glatt Kosher restaurante. Most likely the only one in the world. Jesus can take his camel through the eye of a needle and go look for a nice Jewish girl who likes camel-rides. (aa3-19) This is not about strenghtening the soul, it is merely about strengthening astral impulse. PVK gives a how_to_do_it guide to astral travel. Take a glass of water and put it on a high shelf. Don't drink anything all day. Shortly before going to sleep, take 3 tablespoons of freshly ground sea-salt , chew slowly, and swallow. As you sleep, your astral body will run like hell to that glass of water. (aa13-19g) [ GLOSSARY: Yalmukah -- An economy-size yarmuke, shaped like a waning moon. ] (aa3-20) Sounds more like spirit than soul. Spirit is what gets broken by "Hector, tamer of horses." (Homer, Iliad) This clown made his rep breaking the spirit of horses. So plant him with a pot of petunias and turn Troy back to the wild horses. (aa3-21) HIK says that the soul is highly suggestible, and tends to identify itself with whatever situation it is in. (aa3-22) Well, nowadays around here it takes about darned near 5 dollars, not 5 cents, to buy a sandwich. ((aa3-21)-1) So there's more holiness in 5 dollars than in 5 centes, because if I buy a sandwich I can bless you after I eat it, but if you give me 5 cents and I am a hungry bum I am quite likely to tell you what you can do with your five cents. And with all your good intentions too. ((aa3-21)-1) Fact is it does take 5 dollars, which is SF 6 this week, because its SF 5.50 for a sandwich, and you need one half_SF left over for Schiessengeld. Like I say, for the Swiss money is not merely a medium of exchange, its their lingua franca. (aa3-23) Here's a folk song I made up in the 70s: Life is like an American roadmap and your body is your corps. Your beating heart, it is your engine that only stops to start no more. You may ride the straight and boring turnpikes 'till you ride no more. Those are the roads of limited access, they'll take you quick to the farther shore. (aa3-24) Well, PVK did repeatedly teach breathing practices where the consciousness rose to its greatest heights while one is holding the breath. That is, after the inahle. But there is no practice between exahle and the next inhale. PVK taught, concentrate on the exhalation, and then inhale naturally. However often he taught, inhale for a certain number of seconds, or of heartbeats. (aa3-25) Abba Eban once remarked on a tendency, in modern Israeli rhetoric, to superlative hysteria.