The two Sides of Spiritual Mercantilism

In his review of Brad Warner's book "Sex Sin and Zen" John L Murphy (Fionnchu) says, "[Brad Warner] reminds us how “mystical serenity” has nothing to do with true wisdom..."
So true, but it seems to me - from reading the review - that Warner's (shall we say?) “banal bashing” also has very little to do with it!
I suggest that Warner's “demystifying banality” is just the other side of the same coin that is expected to be dropped into the donation boxes at the market stalls in that illusive and deluded world of spiritual mercantilism.

Come to think of it:

• What if Warner, Osho, Allan Watts and the like all have something in common: that they are (were) somehow unable (disabled perhaps?) to have their genuine (yes!) enlightened insights help them to actually and factually realize & apply them - that is making them tangibly real!
• What if they were somehow prevented from realizing their authentic and genuine existential/essential liberation (freedom, moksha)? 

It may well be that their letting it all hang only lead them into no more than a pseudo-realization, a fake liberation or freedom... or, if not that, than at least an incomplete form of it.
It seems to me that what they have in common is that they are (were) not able (yet?) to detach themselves from the compulsiveness of their compulsions while they unfortunately assumed that their giving up and giving in, their letting go and letting it all hang is the real thing... not suspecting it to be as deluded as (indeed) the “mystical serenity” of their more hallowed new age competitors, the spiritual mystical strivers, the ones they so seem to detest...

Myers-Briggs Personality Test (Wim's)

Result for The LONG Scientific Personality Test... (1/31/10)

Wim,
You scored 36% I to E, 42% N to S, 33% F to T,  and 37% J to P!
Your type is best summed up by the word "counselor", which belongs to the larger group of idealists.  Only 2% of the population share your type.  You are so empathic that you often know what others need before they know themselves.  You are a complex person who can deal with complicated issues and people, almost prefer to, as you love problem solving.  You can be something of an idealist or perfectionist, and should try to take yourself a little less seriously.
You are a supportive and insightful romantic partner, encouraging your mate to have dreams and work hard to make those dreams come true.  Because you are so creative, you have a wealth of ideas to help them toward those goals.  You need harmony so much that you are driven to resolve conflict quickly, as long as the terms don't violate your ethics.  You feel the most appreciated when your partner admires your creativity, trusts your inspirations, and respects your values.  It is also vitally important that your partner be open and emotionally available - in other words, that they be willing to share themselves completely. 

Your group summary: Idealists (NF)
Your type summary:   INFJ - David Keirsey's "Counselor"

Take The LONG Scientific Personality Test at HelloQuizzy

Culture Shock in India?

Or Culture Shock in USA?

Problem with Westerners visiting India, especially visitors from the USA, is that they get lost in the culture shock they tend to experience.
In that shock (their very own shock really) they have no unblinkered eyes through which they could see the characteristics of what they tend to call poverty and backwardness. Nor do their blinkered eyes allow them to remember and review the characteristics of poverty and backwardness and its origins in their native USA. What to them may look like abject poverty in India (I mean at this point the poverty away from the larger cities) is quite likely not that... at least not 'abject'. The poverty they see in the cities in India is indeed abject but... no different from the abject poverty found on the city streets, the city ghettoes and in the back country ghettoes in the USA.
In fact poverty found in the USA away from the big cities (which I have seen enough of while traveling through countryside USA) is of a different kind than the way of life characterized as 'poor' away from the big cities in India.
In the USA one actually finds - and that might be a surprise to many USA citizens themselves - state supported poverty which enables disenfranchised people to have access to moneyed resources and assistance but... that assistance comes all too often without the life-restructuring tools that would enable them to elevate themselves out of their state of inadequacy and discovery of being short changed.
Their state of inadequacy is actually created by unwholesome non-integer wealth schemes, designed to concentrate money in heaps - so to speak - banks, trusts and even socially good looking foundations. All these being institutions that enable only those to peruse them, who can make the heaps of richness larger and those who could but don't benefit from them, more dispersed (divided and 'smeared away') - no egalitarian-ness in those scheme.
These schemes actually, artificially and deliberately, craft inadequacy through purposefully created unemployment caused by premature and post mature belt-tightening and the application of premature and post mature schemes of industrialized efficiency. All this coming from an unwillingness to use time, patience, compassion, sharing abundance, gregariousness, etc. - the original ideas behind "common wealth" - as tools to advance natural progress and evolution.
(The idea of survival of the fittest is a flawed view on evolution, a view that became popular by those who found themselves the fittest to manipulate the ones they could trick into becoming less fit.)
Anyway - returning to 'state supported poverty' - the moneyed aid to the disenfranchised goes either directly or obliquely to alcoholism, drug and... media addiction, giving the disenfranchised USA citizens drink, drugs and media (the "bread and games" ploy of the times of classical imperial Rome) that keeps them occupied with and in their own lost minds, thus becoming even more disenfranchised... as this lostness does not readily and easily help them to speak up for themselves during political or other re-organizational undertakings.
Well then... still the oligarchy of the richest (them getting richer, the poorer not so) benefiting from their own invention of 'state supported poverty', keeping themselves well established in their seats of power and pulling even more away from underneath those who could use and would benefit from wholesome support.

Maybe I got a bit carried away, but then I know more of the USA than of India.

"Love thy neighbor as thyself"

Every time I see that quote I remember that in the time of Jesus... ... ...

Did I tell you that? That I remember that?
I remember so much of Jesus, but mostly from the viewpoint of that young kid John (the apostle). Not that I read some kind of 'past life' stuff into that as I don't consider reincarnation the way it is so often and so popularly explained... no-one really owns any individual past life at the exclusion of anyone else.

Remembering being John, I also remember at the same time being one of the soldiers on the mountain when J died. Gosh I even remember being on that same cross when J died, but... was I ever personally J or John or that soldier?
Of course not... and of course... all of the above... at least!!!
I like the Akashic records explanation: whatever help one needs to reclaim oneself - restoring one's authenticity - one can glean assistance from anybody's life, anybody who at some point lived in the 'past' and whose life experiences resonate with you (except for not being so messed up) is available to help you out. Nobody's experiences ever disappear, even after one leaves so to speak the physical realm, everyone and everything still lives on... still somehow in us and we in them... simultaneously, syntopically, synchronistically.

What I found so amazing - gosh I must have needed quite a few strong jolts, I must have really been lost to myself to be so miraculously kicked back into myself – what was so astounding was the time and space switching, the personality switching especially on that hill when J died. I remember switching from the cross to being John, then I switched to being that soldier and then being John again, saying to one of the other guys - Andrew it was - "Boy, we never understood Jesus, we never even understood a word of what he meant! But my..., I love him so, I... so loved him... "And then I wept, I wept for days... "
When I specifically remembered this, some ten years ago now, and told my wife, I was in the thralls of kundalini's self-reclamation process, I also wept for days, and days...
Fortunately I had some other memories as well, one especially good one! It was from that time when J came down the mountain with us after what we now call J's transfiguration.

I remember walking backwards facing J and Peter and James, and as we were turning a corner, the hill cropping out on my left, me still walking backwards, quite confident of my steps on the pebbly path, still so admiringly looking at J, I'm asking him, "Where's Elijah gone, where's he now?"
Not that I got an answer... not that I remember... but a few days after I recounted this to my wife, I met Elijah in a vision, he was still with me, he had never gone. That man could be one with someone, that's how he made you whole, that's how he healed you.

J has never gone either, I love the guy, love him like I love myself...

"Love thy neighbor as thyself"

Ah..., now I'll get to what I originally wanted to say when I started writing this.

In the time of J, it was still natural to love yourself, for most it went without saying. It was not so much like it is now when most everyone has a hard time appreciating themselves or when so many of us have to first prove themselves before they can like themselves enough.
In those days, I actually understood very well what J meant when he said to love your neighbor like you love yourself. I did love myself, and if anything, J's love made me never lose it. That's why 'loving my neighbor' was just a matter of projecting it out... No sweat for me really... not in those days.
Oh sure, some of the others had some trouble with it, quite a bit actually, but I felt so strongly how J mirrored himself into me, that it was no problem to copy that towards others, anybody, anything actually.
Nowadays though, I don't think J could as easily say, "Love your neighbor as much as you love yourself."
Come to think of it, maybe most of us cannot love our neighbors so easily because we have been entrained and conditioned to believe and identify with our(?)... shortcomings and thus we learned not to love ourselves because of those assumed deficiencies.

Our own shortcomings? They are actually externally acquired only, we are really not stuck with them or inseparably stuck to them. We have only been forced to identify with them - under duress and stress we have been forced, sometimes even tricked to adopt them as our own, as we have been identified by them. But how we are labeled, how we are identified, that is not necessarily who or what we are. How easy is it not to label something incorrectly, could that not also have happened to us?

A few years ago in New York City, I said to a lady friend of mine when we were crossing Fifth Avenue to buy some very expensive bread in a posh 'designer bread' bakery ($7 a loaf!), "There is absolutely no reason for you to love yourself..." She suddenly looked quite perplexed and as the traffic stopped - came to a stand-still - I added, "You don't need a reason!" She then - clearing all up - broke out in a broad smile and... traffic resumed. We bought the bread, and as we - some other friends joined in a little later - broke the loaf up into pieces, she said, "Wim I love you so, you love me so... I guess I have no choice but to love myself... unless (smiling) unless I call your love a lie and God - who, I now so strongly feel, loves me - a liar also! Well, if I did, that would be a lie! Oh Wim!"
We then found our car and drove to another avenue, where we found in a side street a place with the best deserts ever...

If we had bread here right now, to disperse crumb by tiny crumb, every byte sent bit by bit across the world's wireless webbing, we would do it... But ah...
You know what, what I'll do - my son left me some good Triple Trappist beer - I'll drink it to...

to love

to us and all

and everyone of all of us...

singing (Jeez, that's good beer!):

No reason to love... Why need a reason?!

PS
For almost two weeks now, right through Christmas and New Year 2006, I have been here on a tiny island (three miles long, one and a half mile across) off the coast of British Columbia, cloistered in solitude with a dog and a cat...
Soulitude that is...
No star of Bethlehem though..., even without the overcast skies!
No fireworks, even with the gales and blackouts!
But I have some very good bread with me, Emmy always makes sure that I have enough bread and butter.
The reason I'm here is, Emanuel and Alexis, the ones who actually live here, had to go to funeral in Kansas City, and Emmy couldn't come with me as we had visitors from Holland...
Me nevertheless... never alone...
but, you guessed it... all one!