Nudes of the Week!

Welcome back philosophy fans, it’s your Met-Art Nudes of the Week!

The Tarot is an instruction manual in alchemical metaprogramming

The real origins of the picture book known as Tarot are shrouded in the mists of time. The earliest direct pieces of evidence of a tarot as we know it are from the 14^th and 15^th centuries in Europe, but the knowledge represented by the book is far older. It is a fair mystery how such knowledge could come to be encoded over the last six hundred years by independent artists and researchers. At one time there may have been communication between monks of the church, who wanted to use the cards to inculcate church virtues, and the mystics and occultists, who were hiding information in the card symbols that the church would have preferred to keep secret. Some authors through that time were revealing more and deeper information as society grew more accepting and the dangers of the rack or stake receded. Others felt it their mission to bury the teachings deeper, obscuring and hiding the keys, and misdirecting the curious. Another main stream in the development of the cards is that they were concurrently being developed into a parlor card game still played in Europe under various regional names such as Tarrochi. Given the various streams of development it is nothing short of miraculous that such a sublime and Universal structure has been constructed to carry and teach the most important of the Mysteries…

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On Ethics

I thought I’d delve into the topic of Ethics in this essay, as that seems to be traditional ground for Western philosophy, unlike the eastern metaphysics I steep my mind in and usually share here. By way of definitions, to my mind  Morals are separate from Ethics, in that Morality is defined by a set of proscriptions issuing from an otherworldly authority, or are at least presented to the populace as such. In contrast Ethics are guiding principles, determined by reason. Let me state that, though I may slip in conversation occasionally, I in no way support the use of morals to guide behavior. If humanity’s gods can run the gamut from Cthulu to Dick York, I see no reason to elevate one over the other as the moral lawgiver…

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The Imposition of Order is Destroying Us All

The authority based model of social organization we have chosen to submit to arises from a neurotic fear. That fear is a fundamental aversion to chaos. Humanity as a whole, despite some opposing tribal models, has chosen to regularize and repress wild Nature in straight line regimentation and chemical sanitization in direct conflict with the life principal. This repressive stance to free pulsating life is causing the chaotic half of reality to act with increasing destructive force. Witness the exploding cancer rate, environmental degradation, the rise of organized crime, and increased reliance on terror/surveillance narrative as a chaotic, entropic result of repression…

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Nudes of the Week!

Blond buxom and in the buff, it’s your Met-Art Nudes of the Week!

Free your mind by removing the adjectives

I little while back, I came across a quote, which I have subsequently lost, but purported to be advice from someone’s journalist father. It went something like, if you want to know the facts, remove all the adjectives, what you have left is closer to the truth. This is pretty sound advice, and got me thinking about the way certain words are used to direct our feelings, thus misdirecting our ability to consider the facts, or interfering with our perception of reality. This appears to be the Modus Operandi of political speech, advertisers, and drug addicts, and probably the main tool of the con-artist.

Some of these techniques are recognized in academia as “weasel words,” often used to prop up weak arguments. I think this type of use of language, is actually a component inherent in the use of language itself, maintained by it’s function of obscuring large parts of reality…

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Nudes of the Week!

Returning with a new slant on eroticism and philosophy it’s your Met-Art Nudes of the Week!

 

Nudes of the Week!

Curious and wise, it’s your Met-Art Nudes of the Week!

 

Pranayama and Pratyahara

 

Whew, just returned from a few days of intense experiences from practice and thought I would share a few insights on these limbs or stages of yoga practice.

1. Pranayama is very useful to meditation even before mastering prana to the point of control.

A current technique I am using is deep breathing to induce a trance state during seated meditation. This creates a sort of drunkenness of mind and body that slows the mental processes and allows for inward observation. This has been remarkably useful because of…

 

2. Pratyahara.

This is described by Patanjali as “removal of the senses from their objects.” My current understanding of this is that pratayahara refers to turning the perceptions into the interior universe. This is a deeper plunge inward than the passive observation of thoughts and feelings and uses the center of consciousness to observe the energetic and metaphysical realities within. It does not appear possible to me to perceive in this manner unless a trance state can be induced at will. Many types of experiences of higher realms are available in these states, and perceptual contact with the immortal center allows for a dis-identification of self with mind and body.

And…

3. Having observed some of these areas, it appears to me that we are living in a projection. It is holographic in the sense that it is projected into many dimensions, but it is not an illusion in the sense of meaningless trickery. It is that everything we experience outside ourselves has it’s genesis in a certain area that we would consider inside ourselves, and is projected outward into the mundane actuality by the power of a light that is also somewhat within us.

 

Having most likely confused the reader in trying to make a clear elucidation, I will leave my statements at that. Interpret how you will.

Raja Yoga is the “real” yoga

When dedicating oneself to the spiritual practices of yoga, especially in the west, there seems to be a proliferation of styles and schools offering one thing or another for the earnest student. Most of these, no matter what they call themselves are Hatha yoga. Hatha yoga is useful for strengthening the body and healing injury and disease, but it is only a preliminary to Raja yoga. Other yogas, like Tantra, Jnana, or Bhakti yoga may be useful in any individual’s practice but the real yoga is Raja yoga. This is the yoga Patanjali wrote of as having eight limbs, or ashtanga. Starting with Patanjali however, we are already confronted with yoga techniques which have been corrupted by the ethics of Buddhism.
Patanjali lists two of the early steps, possibly the first two steps of Yoga as Yama and Niyama, this leads to all sorts of problems for the serious practitioner. Yama and Niyama are moral and ethical commandments and proscriptions, adopted from Buddhist ethics, and introduce religion into what was previously a system of effective techniques. Essentially the system that Patanjali reccommmends is that first one should live the life of a monk, and then go about your spiritual practices. For most of us, currently required to live in the actual world, you can see the difficulties this would cause. Also there are difficulties in interpretation of these moral commandments such as: How should I interpret Ahimsa? Does non-harm, mean I have to be vegetarian? What about killing bugs? What about self-defense? Should I die rather than strike another? Dealing with issues like these, before making any actual progress in practice, will be an unsolvable dilemma.
Luckily there remain some fragments of texts, that pre-date Patanjali giving the actual preliminary practices. The ancient sages, rather than moral codes gave practices for purification. That is, they thought that a short period of physical and energetic cleansing was the preliminary for Asana and Pranayama. These, like all good Yoga, are purely practical techniques. Anything one could change in their lifestyle to purify mentally and physically would fall under this practice, but a few techniques were highly recommended. Neti, or cleansing the sinuses with water. Eating purer food and drinking clean water. Enema to cleanse the digestive tract. Kapalbhati breathing to tone and cleanse the breathing apparatus and cleanse the blood. These techniques were grouped under the label shatkarmas, and these techniques have been preserved in Hatha yoga. There are many good resources available on the web for instructions in shatkarma, make use of them if you wish to begin a serious yoga practice, and ignore Yama and Niyama for the time being. The only reason in yoga for a moral and ethical code is to foster a lifestyle conducive to practice. It is not a religion and it needs no commandments, the practitioner must experiment with what works for them. Success is the only measure of any technique.