Do No Harm

This past week's community slanderfest is probably not over, just in remission until someone else picks it up.  Therefore, the following lesson is particularly appropriate when considering New World Thug Behavior and Carelessness.  Much gratitude goes to Scrapwood for sending in the 59 Lojongs.  It will go on the left sidebar in the Free NeverOverdue Library shortly so you will have immediate access to all 59 teachings and the preliminaries.


"... The Mind-Training Slogans, #31 

Each Friday, Acharya Judy Lief, teacher in the Shambhala tradition of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, comments on one of Atisha's 59 mind-training (Tib. lojong) slogans, which serve as the basis for a complete practice. 

Atisha (980-1052 CE) was an Indian adept who brought to Tibet a systematized approach to bodhicitta (the desire to awaken for the sake of all sentient beings) and loving-kindness, through working with these slogans. Judy edited Chogyam Trungpa's Training the Mind (Shambhala, 1993), which contains Trungpa Rinpoche's commentaries on the lojong ("mind-training") teachings.

#31. Don't malign others

When we malign someone, our intention is to cause harm. Our words are spiteful and ill-spirited. There is a saying that “sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” But in fact words do have power and they certainly can hurt.

In working with the slogans, we are working not only with our actions, but with what is behind them. For instance, when we say something, we should ask ourselves why we are saying it, and for what purpose. Will what we say help the situation or not? Are we trying to connect with someone or get rid of them? Are we trying to help them or to destroy them? Or maybe we are talking just to talk, to fill the space because we are uneasy with the silence.

If we need to malign others to make us feel good about ourselves by comparison, we will never feel all that great. And at the other extreme, when we encounter people who are exceptional, that approach will make us feel pathetic in comparison. According to this slogan we should stop that whole destructive approach.

Not maligning does not mean that we do not notice differences in people. It does not mean that we should not recognize people’s hateful or destructive attitudes and weaknesses when we encounter them or that we should not speak up. Everything does not just become a mush. But when we see other people’s problems without encumbering our perception by the need to prop up our own insecure ego, we can respond more directly and appropriately. By stopping the habit of maligning, not only will we do less harm to others, but we will also begin to free ourselves from the need for such props.

Today’s practice
Pay attention to your speech and to how you talk about and to other people.  What is the difference between speaking critically and using speech to harm or to destroy? ..."


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I  would rather, any day, be thought naive rather than publicly slander another, especially when that person is already down, battling demons no one can dispel but themselves.  I wish I were naive sometimes, ignorant of the viciousness that can arise when expectation and motive are shredded in the bright light of reality.  Naive to the increasing overtone of violence rocking our world off its axis every single day, every hour, somewhere, blind to the immediate flare of tempers feeling wronged by whomever, wanting whatever.  If you look at these situations closely, you would find there are always two elements at the root of conflict, one is of course, money, the other, credibility. The belief systems accompanying our existence in western culture encourages the value of those two elements exponentially to the point that all most people are exposed to is violent in its nature and always disastrous in result.  It does not have to be this way, it never did.  As Ran Prieur quoted on the idiocy of property ownership and John of Survival Acres presented in his essay on food production being at the root of all civilizations, both break down the walls of perception of why vicious conflict, bloodletting, enslavement, abject penury, injustice and arsenals of weaponry never had to be the roadmap to food security, peace, satisfaction and freedom.  In fact, we should be aware by now, our quickly depleting world seems to be composed of frivolous thug-appeal, violent "advancements" against humanity at large principally for the expansion of wealth among the already wealthy, i.e.; more food and property than can possibly be consumed by offspring of offspring.  In the present, it is trusted more than ever, violence is the only means to continue the atrocious, hideous charade.  As it stands now, this ongoing tragedy ends only when we die.  There has always been a better way for mankind to survive.  The reason Thug World thrives is violence is expedient, lacking clarity of thought and convenient, whereas exercising  intelligence and compassion for all beings requires love, that inconvenient marvel that always gets in the way of false desire.


We who seek awareness are on the right track for the most part, but it is evident the violence all around us is a highly contagious disease which is immunized against and blown away entirely with LOVE.

Parades of hope against the backdrop of fear

While I read the blogs linked in the blog list, I read a lot more that there isn't room left to link here.  That's a given experience, a daily occurrence, facts and fiction of life in the internet age of which we are all doing the same thing more or less at varying times.  What is not an ordinary experience is visiting these "stories" in real life which is why I went along with the group to a candidate's rally.  I'll synthesize it for you briefly: the appearance of this candidate was exactly as we've seen him on TV with the exception of the crowds, crowds numerically rivaling a Stones concert at Madison Square Garden, for example.  What was originally presented as a speech, likely under an hour or less, turned out to be an all day affair in order to get a "good" seat which meant a faraway glimpse of what it was you agreed to attend at all.  Actually, I agreed to go because it was something I would normally never do, such as ride in a giant Cat garbage compactor gliding over the L.A. city dump.  Further, if I was going to continue to blog about our bizarre lives on Planet Earth in 2012, seeing up close in 3D just how the appointed Earth leaders do whatever it is they do, in person, seemed worthwhile. 

From where we connived our seats, connived because only a mere hundred or so people were able to occupy them, thousands upon thousands stood, the angle of the setting sun made photography impossible.  After dark it remained impossible as the stage lights (think Woodstock-style scaffolding) acted as more Suns.  The real show was sneaking peeks at the well-armed, military uniformed security squad on the roof of the adjacent building.  If there was anything to walk away with after such a show, it was the demographics of the crowd on the ground and the roars of approval.  The content was nothing we have not heard before.  The sad part was seeing the sheer numbers of true believers, the shabby and rundown, the confused and uncomfortable, the disabled and the aisle dancing, placard holding families with strollers, the obvious poverty of beleaguered persons and congregational fellowship of unbridled patriotism under the media spell that their immediate future will change everything wrong with today for a better tomorrow if one just manages to climb aboard the magic Diebold bus.  I liken it to a tent revival, the cultists, having lost everything, still filled with worship and couch change as if nothing, no matter how goofy, can shake that faith in the snake handlers' snake oil cure-all.  Too bad the show organizers overlooked the inspirational Bondo of a good gospel choir.

Thus, the first of the candidates' debates was a rehash of the same impossible shuck 'n jive we know all too well because we've read it, seen it and we live with it in one fashion or another every day, like it or not.  Nowhere present in any of these "entertainments" was there discussion of any real plan to survive climate change or what we are going to do when our own municipalities declare States of Emergency (emerge and see), leading to full bankruptcy which means contractual obligations will not be met.  Who will fight the wildfires then?  Will it all become so unweildy they will eventually sit back and let it just burn until there is nothing left to fuel the flames?  And don't even think about calling 911.  It seems as if all the candidates are doing at their meetups and globally televised "debates" is to trade inaccurate statistics on how the health insurance industry will continue to gorge on whomever's version of healthcare is forced down our throats, mandated under a tax penalty - a penalty tax actually of which those very funds could have been paid, and in many cases probably will, to see your doctor.  Now tell me, is it not stupid that one must pay just about the same amount of money to the IRS, if that money were available to the individual, to receive immediate medical attention?  Imagine how it works - law abiding citizen, churchgoing, college educated, but unemployed, deeply in debt, children and more on the way, home in foreclosure, suddenly notes tax scofflaw on his lifetime list of unplanned mile markers.  You better believe these folk were also in attendance at the rally, cheering.


And then the day came last week, at some point, there was yet another negative Monsanto mention on some site out of the hundreds visited so that nothing really stuck, but the thought, which according to all we know about what it is they do, came together in such a way it overwhelmed the latest evil reports and took on the solid form of the answer we've sought for how many years now?  Everything since that insightful moment unfortunately fits.  The birthrate in the US is down for the fourth year.   We are to think this is because of the economy, the 2nd Great Depression, ah, the recent recession which we are also to think is well along the road to recovery. Maybe we're not thinking too well, maybe the steady diet of pesticides in GMO seeds, the massive romance with convenience foods pushed at low prices or free with ubiquitous government food stamps, maybe this has something more to the point to do with low birth rates?  And maybe Monsanto is in league with a certain global agenda and everyone including the suicided farmers and new moms, even the journalists offering implausible justifications are oblivious?  They want us to think an under-performing economy does not translate into something as basic as increased sexual activity.  Hey, when you have no money to go out, what are your plans for the evening?  And what do we know for sure anyway, maybe legitimate rape is on the rise and women's bodies just sort of magically shut down all those mysterious female secretions that make babies?  My friends, I will not insult your intelligence, you and I know the global population needs to be lowered asap, there simply is not enough of anything to go around. All the media's trending growth reports are growth only in their clever manipulation of tragic facts.


The debate of my dreams will come on the day these Charlie McCarthys lay out realistic repairs granting every man the right to choose and construct plans of his own making wherever his vision of survival appears most possible.  That the candidates admit to being powerless over Nature and throw off the reins of the personhoods that train them, promote them, pay them and mold their agenda and allegiances. The candidates are their spokespeople, testing consumer enthusiasm, allowing them to statisticize response and thus reach further.  As long as there are so many populations stuck inside ridiculous beliefs they are free, better, smarter humans than all other humans existing outside their country's borders and and will always be safe and prosperous thanks to the benevolent all-seeing government, everything is heading on a perfectly linear course towards cruel, unnecessary and absolute chaos worsened by the accelerating effects of climate change and its revolving disasters.  We know how that came around too, don't we.

Truly, posting on this subject is not pleasant, nor particularly deep.  In between the rare moments when we are not under the cloud of the enforcers, I have many other things to be said here.  Perhaps the pain of life itself is on hiatus in those hours of system anguish in which case there are too many who welcome the intellectual exercise.  However, the epidemic of re-election fever, simply in its overabundance, is making us ill, queasy and becomes cause for strange and unlikely interactions pitting us against our fellows as if the clock was turned back to the Civil Rights Movement.  In reference to our last post on Fear of Being Real, it appears no one is willing to experience the consumerless lead-up to authentic change.  As Charles Hugh Smith says  Crisis is a Positive Force, I've said as much myself, for it brings out the innate compassion and self-reliance of every human being, but to get there we have to be fully willing to rely on our own creativity in survival and that requires we put fear on the far back burner.  Of course we have that creativity in our makeup, its just been dulled like the useless appendix so that we live inoffensively on the chain gang.  Few escape successfully, no one apparently has ever been successful enough to live to tell about it.

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Last but definitely not least, somehow I missed this on Property from Ran Prieur last April and today is a good time to bring it into your thought process. 

"April 24. I've written before that we could define the "owner" of a place as whoever lives there, and factor out the whole concept of "property". Last month I discovered that Pierre-Joseph Proudhon had the same idea in 1840, in his book What Is Property? Specifically, Proudhon noticed that our word "property" blurs together two opposite concepts: the rights of someone who actually works with a piece of land, a house, a sum of money, a tool; and the rights of someone who does not work with it, who might never see it, but who is said to "own" it because, well, the rules say so, and we don't question them.

Looking just at land, where do pieces of "bought" land originally come from? Usually they are violently stolen from indigenous people, or in the case of unoccupied wilderness, some central authority simply declares "ownership" out of thin air. Tribal people have the concept of territory, but they would think it's insane for one tribe to "own" the land that another tribe occupies. Even neolithic farmers, who have already carved fields out of the forest, would not understand how one family could work a field "owned" by another -- unless they were slaves.

The concept of non-occupying ownership is like a magic spell that makes violent conquest and near-slavery seem natural. It enables ecological destruction, because people actually living on land, seeing the effects of their actions, are less willing to cut down forests and deplete topsoil than remote commanders seeing only numbers. And it enables positive feedback in wealth distribution: the two big ways the rich get richer are rent and interest, one where you pay a fee to the "owner" of land you're occupying, and the other where you pay a fee to the "owner" of money you're using...."

the inevitability of limited vision

The thing I like the most about the west is not something usually listed in travel advertisements such as accommodations and exclusivity.  It is the Cecil B. Demille skies at just about any given moment on any given day.  They appear unusually panoramic in comparison to skies in other geographies, with heightened cloud activity and weather complexities you would see elsewhere only over the open ocean where on the brightest sunny day, running wing on wing, you can study a distant squall off the port bow or rains falling from one cloud bank into another below it.  At this moment, a dark thunder storm is approaching from the southwest while overhead it is clear blue with Old Masters-style Cumulonimbus bordered with watercolor blends of soft Ultramarine graduating to crisp Titanium White.  You would think standing on the coast of say, Florida, you would see the same things, but it isn't so.  The Eastern Coast of this continent, especially in flat Florida, the adventures of Cowboy Clouds Gone Wild does not present itself in Cinerama, being quickly battened down by low lying landscapes: uninterrupted stretches of Mangroves and Sawgrass, beauties in themselves, but nothing like the lost fogs who become trapped in the passes and canyons hugging the California Transmontane as they also do in the Nevada Sheep's Range.  It is the appearance of white wool-like fluff that gathers through the striated peaks and crags that gives that region its name. This phenomena shows up often after rainstorms and on high humidity winter mornings.

What is peculiar about the cities of the western territories is the overkill to sell every man his castle.  In doing so, most homes built after the middle of the last century have high walls dividing them from their neighbors' houses.  Even strip malls employ a sort of semi permanent fencing arrangement utilizing metal posts and barbed wire.  It appears the McMansion development communities, squeezed by the thousands into formerly trash riddled vacant lots, each dwelling erected on individual tiny parcels, as small as the builder can get away with, are especially subject to high walls and ostentatious iron gates.  The walls are made of painted cinder blocks in multitudes of varieties of beige aka sand tones as if tight enclosure of the castle was something natural.  Is it natural to exit the kitchen door and meet with a wall extending to the second story?  These walls dividing homes from one another are typically fourteen or more cinder blocks tall. Even in ungated residential neighborhoods, the homes are walled off from passersby and sidewalks as if the presence of human habitation must be a secret kept far from tourists.  Existing behind walls limits sky viewing in the same way the web is seen on cell phones or news on TV with too many banners and blinking gadgets.  Who are these dickwads anyway,  blocking out our views?  Is anybody home there?  It is difficult to know what they're doing overhead, you can hear a lot of noise, seemingly close, but you don't know what it is.  It brings an air of gnawing mystery to whatever you are doing.  Naturally, it doesn't bother the locals at all.  Have they never lain in the grass with a friend watching clouds?  Actually, there is very little grass and grasses used for energy- intensive landscaping are poisoned.

There's more.  Most of the intrusive alerts and crackling static warnings that I mentioned in the last post are centered around flash floods.  They caution you to stay indoors, go nowhere, lay low until the all clear is given by "your" TV weather forecaster.   Do we have primary care weather-people now?    I have visited this same location off and on throughout the years, mostly seasonal layovers, mostly during this same season when these freak flash floods were definitely not happening, at least not happening to the extent they are this time.  Nature had not yet caught up with what the city planning board had in mind. Certainly, uninhabitable desert regions have always had flash floods since dry grit and creosote making up the floor of western deserts are not porous enough to soak up heavy water flow, in many foothhill regions you will see evidence of man's hand in redirecting the flow for human use.  But here, in the city, what seems to have happened is in the overbuilding, they covered the valley floor with wall to wall cement and asphalt, there is no other place for the water to go except into various dips of road and unfortunate properties cheaply bought and sold in less unpredictable seasons which we know are becoming more rare by the day.   It is exactly in those places flash floods take take their worst toll.  They have aqueducts, but not nearly enough and were never built to reign in the increasing summer overflow which always claimed victims even before superstorms.  This same situation also occurs in the high desert suburbs bordering the Mojave northwest of Los Angeles.  It happens where there are heavily traveled, ground level, high speed multilane asphalt highways bordered on both sides with non-porous ground and subject to increasingly extreme rainfall.  Of course, in the urban planning room, surely there are solutions to eliminate the fallout of flash floods, but the general story goes something like lack of funding, which is not the real story.  The real story is funding has been funneled into the show-off channel, an American Idol of the tallest, most absurd architectural atrocities designed specifically to lure huge convention crowds and international families bored with Disneyland.  Local citizens attempting survival in a state with the nation's highest foreclosure rate are actually a population of servicers to the illusion, working round the clock, racing over the curbs of flash flooded roadways to maintain the playground of a non-local 1% to whom the most important feature and most desirable and memorable adventure is blowing wads of dough at the altars of the Backjack gods.  Whatever weird, inexplicable interactions one may encounter in this city always have a common root.   It may take a lot of standing back and mental synthesis to make it out, but it never fails to arrive at the same vainglorious destination.  It is the same root for every destination mankind has worked over.  It is always all about the money.

In reference to the saying sex and money make the world go round, sex is only included in the partnership as the offspring of money, not the well spring.

I respect your right to debate, indeed there are millions of examples why this just isn't so.  Look at all the wonderful foundations that assist humankind ... the money that is diverted to charity would otherwise be taxable income.  This is how our system operates.  Regardless of who receives the funds, be it government or charitable foundation, the gaping flaw is owned by the earmarks directing the contribution. Do you read me?  So that developers of gated properties, in order to market the concept of One Man's Castle,  an updated version of retirees purchasing unseen sandlots in Arizona, get rollercoaster bangs for their buck as sponsoring members of the razor's edge fraternity, lobby for permissions to build and lobby against building codes they can legally ignore and those lobbies have been very successful, as you can see for yourself, but those lobbies and lobbyists are serving whom?  Not the clueless end-user who has been raked over the coals by the mortgage mills and employment classifieds and their children locked into lifetimes of education debt-servitude.  Not the women who were electrocuted in fire hydrant water spilling over a downed power line while attempting to rescue victims of the car accident that ended up on their sidewalk causing a chain of horrific events in the San Fernando Valley this week. Development is often a give and take business, they must contractually agree to include something for humanity at large such as public access to park benches and shade trees, but only if they are given free reign to short the construction codes.

Enough of that, all of THAT which now appears to be one long, curcuitous, converging zenith of mythical progress.  Much of which we all bear some small measure of guilt for some distantly related participation during the journey, even if that participation was nothing more than checking it out for the sheer curiosity or perhaps just going along for the ride.  The interesting part is how some of us have NOT become enured, none of what I am saying is new to you, I don't have stupid readers, Praise Jah, we keep on looking and keep on finding more interesting wonders daily, nightly and in those thoughtful hours inbetween, to fill our visual field and broaden spiritual development in spite of the many who give up and cave due to lack of encouragement, inspiration or example, life is so much more than what mankind has made of it.  It would be amusing if so many lives were not lost because of intentionally misdirected over-achievement and its coatail disciples.  Amusing in the similarity to standing on the beach watching the foam lap away your sandcastle, wave by wave, ever so gradually diminishing the dams, moats, towers, bridges and walls until there is nothing left but a clean smooth expanse, beautiful and perfect just as it always was.  Amusing as in building with toy blocks which fall and have to be put away in the blocksbox.  It seems it is inevitable, the persuasions of mankind always fall apart.

There is no good to be had from comparisons of your dream of lifestyle from that of childhood memory.  It only makes it worse.  Better for your personal well-being through which your own positive existence adds to the Overall Well Being, we ask what else is out there that can capture our compassion and expand our awareness in the Universal community?

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Department of extracurricular observations and interpretations:

How long have we been reading Visible Origami?  Maybe forever.  All those years where Visible writes "Everything is under control" somehow entered the perceptive brain differently while reading a recent essay.  We've been under the mis-impression the phrase meant the Divine wouldn't actually take our beloved Earth away from us, that planetary calamity is unholy, extreme and intensifying, but ultimately a passing problem and we would be wise to not take it too seriously because change for the better is guaranteed regardless of Humanity's survival.  However, re-reading the phrase again a few days ago, in a somewhat different context, I realized and perhaps you did too, what he has been saying all along is that the ENTIRE show, journey, lifetime, dream, appearance/s, events, non-events, is controlled.  And as always, he backs it up with the qualifying statement, "for the purposes of demonstration".  This is much clearer now and I agree completely.