oldephebe_knows_the_truth Inspector Him Because The_Truth is within him. 031010 ... Lemon_Soda Well, he has a handle on something worth knowing, anyway. And hes good with words. 031010 ... pipedream phebes is, as they'd say in my part of the world, jigar. you pronounce it 'jigger' and it technically means liver, but what is REALLY means is good buddy :) 031011 ... oldephebe IH, LS, mah gurl pd!, thank you so much but I will only acknowledge this..that this ragged life beyond the borders of the blue..is like Lemon Soda hinted at..just begining to glean a or the Truth that I have been evading since I was 14. Long long time..back..yep when frogs was just legless pond dross suckers..yeah its a truth that i am still too stubborn to acknowledge and allow it to wear its wheight in me..so then is like truth an albatross or something? no. By years of neglect..i have fashioned it into one..I am fed by the Truth you guys reveal in your posts..really.. ... 031011 ... beatific the truth that can be told is not the eternal truth. 031011 ... Dafremen Tsk tsk. Of course the eternal truth can be told. We just haven't found the words yet. Perhaps the closest approximation might be: Forever one. 031011 ... oE well..i won't argue against the authenticity of your beliefs..but I think timeless truths can be gleaned from just about anything as the buddhist tradition teaches..of course i know didly about Buhdism or spelling..so.. beatific..nice word..er..name..does anyone of us flleeting flames truly hold THE TRUTH within them?..who knows..your words are worthy of rumination ... 031011 ... oldephebe yeah beatific scroll through some of what daf, or misstree, pipedream, realistic optimist, Death of a Rose, crimson, Stork, Lemon Soda, Unhinged, endles desire, Magicforest, ChrisH, and many many many others..there's so much authenticity here it could feed a blighted soul for years...in this realm i will not assert the arrogant or pompous aspects of my personality...i'm too ashamed to display it here..so check out what some of these beautiful souls have wrung out of their pain and experieces.. ... 031011 ... tao jones who cares about eternal names anyways? 031011 ... Dafremen sez a guy named tao..heheh And yes phebe...you belong on that list too. Damn you could use a good dose of Venus in the first house! Then you'd LOVE yer stuff shamelessly and publicly like I do. (Damned ego..still working on that..but I KICKED the WEED!!) 031012 ... oldephebe ah weed..man its been a really long time since i been obliteratingly high..but..well..i gotta be an example to my young sprout so no alcholhol or pot or any kind of legal or illicit reality altering agent.. later 031012 ... pipedream wonderful! that's really rather wonderful; your young sprout will have appropriate scads of respect for his ole tree then, which is massively important. 031012 ... oldephebe yeah it's been about 9 years for the alchohol 9even beer and wine coolers..I barely drink any thing stronger than a really tepid soda..as for the pot.. i was only an occassional puffer..several times a year..social things and all that..ah its at least nine years as well when i finally realized my predisposition to addictive chemical and or emotional attachments and psychological dependancy..i kind of acknowledged my weakness in these areas and let that respect for my weakness be my strength ..in that when a man knows his susceptability to temptation..it's not such a bad thing if you make sure you are not exposed to it..and if you are then just honor your weakness by acknowledging it and its deleterious, insidious progression and the potential it has to slowly unwind your life..if you reinforce that ethose enough times..every day..the urges weaken..over time..it's tedious..but if you replace one habit with an equally powerful habit..you can reach a place of equilibrium..I've never gone to a 12 step program or anything but I imagine the wisdom of its ethos is ..yeah pretty valid..10 20 100 times a day at first if you need to..answer that itch with something equally powerful..and soon it begins to fade..but it never goes away..my weaknesses though are a path to humility and a conscious choice to be strong in my weakness..hmm..don't know if i'm adequately conveying my hearts intent here... ... 031012 ... realistic optimist thats similar to how i quit smoking cigarettes. i gave my hands lots of things to do, and bought shitloads of individually wrapped candy. ate one for each craving. it does a few things: replaces the activity with something else, occupies you, and rewards you for your choice to not indulge in the habit. but the best thing is to craft several counterattacks to the addiction so you have many weapons. tell your friends not to indulge you, etc. and make sure you are absolute, and don't cave even once no matter how small. 031012 ... oE yep..congrats on the kicking the cancer stick pit.. 031012 ... realistic optimist thanks! i'm at 3.5 years i think... 031012 ... Dafremen (smoked 2 packs of winston reds when he quit) Thank you Nicoderm CQ 031012 ... pipedream yay! yay! i've been anti-smoking ever since i could remember...when i was about eleven i convinced our driver to kick the habit, and i used to yell the surgeon general's warning equivalent in my part of the world at people lighting up on the road when i would whiz by on my bike with the back-pedal brakes (which are wonderfully cool for makin' a curvy screech into your driveway). so sprout is nine, eh? hehe detective PD at it... now i can be laPD or something- hahahahahahahahahaha 031012 ... Lemon_Soda This site is really that book I've been looking for. The one that goes on forever... Lovely. 031017 ... oldephebe no oldephebe may not know The Truth in his head but I've got a this handful of little truths wreathed in eldridge flame in my heart pocket. Here's another, and one that i have consciously not acknowledged on occassion. We here in blather exspecially the more voluble among us are often given to pounding the gavel and dictating, or rather making imperative utterances to poeple. Adorning ones self with the unearned imprimature of authoriy. For example: "Shut the hell up" or in my case something like "I'm opaque but not fake.. blah blah.. Overt polysyllabic syntax is superior even if you have to go on an etymological expedition to wrest meaning from my brick house of the voluble and vague, pretentious or earnest and yet more virtuous blather. So dammit read it and be enlightened don't stay stuck in your prosaic linguistic constructs!" Here's the thing staements like that or even terse commands constitute what everyone knows or hears as an authoritative performative. It's purpose is to clarify or delineat an authoritative relationship between the speaker and his interlocutor. One that does not neccessarily exist. It peremptorily assumes the interlocutor, or the other is subject to said imperative(s) We are all sensitive to someone assuming an unearned posture of authority and delusionally demanding our respect or submission to the tersely spoken imperative. In the future, I am going to strive to ameliorate my tendency to that. Prefering the other before oneself does not mean one should abdicate personal authority, it just means regarding the other with respect, stepping into his/her sandles. Of course the seismically unstable tyrant or the megalomaniacle who demonstrates even after your appeals to equanimity that you have no rights or virtues worthy of respect should feel the full scalding force of your ire. Perhaps, perhaps if one can be committed to ameliorating or tempering the serrated blade of his/her reflexive tongue and try to imagine a space wherein you are the recipient of an unqualified, unprovoked authoritative performatives pawned off as reasoned argumentation. Maybe it just might begin to shape empathy within us. A subtle distinction in syntax can reach your advesary without disemboweling your argument of its clarity and authority. Just a little something to think about. later... 031118 ... stork daddy of course, pawning something off as unreasoned can be just as bad if your declaration of something as unreasoned is also unreasoned 031118 ... Fatal Flower dammit, why didn't anyone tell me this before? it would have saved lives and time. 031118 ... oldephebe Someone recently spoke to me of encrusted jewels (stones) falling off of a crucifix and whether or not that constitutes some kind of an ominous indice or arbiter. I would suggest that something provocative like that can help us to look a little closer beyond the easy or conditioned symbolic conclusions and see the naked cross as emblematic of Christ (the man or God however you choose to regard him))an encapsulation of his true nature. Humble, gentle, strong giving the ultimate sacrifice. The stones falling off of the cross are like the scales falling off of our eyes enabling us or one to see the fullnes of our lives (as He did)in the sacrifice of his/our life. When we have our own garden of Gethsemene moments, which can happen more or less relative to our state of mind..we can look at what His choices were, what His mind set was, how He was able to project himself beyond his fears and face the challenges that awaited him. He was able to unite the flesh, the will the imagination and the spirit and this is what gave him the perfect cast of mind to complete the task set before Him. Stones will one day return to the dust from which they were wrought, but our acts out of a sincere spirit, and the Power that state of Mind imparts are eternal, lasting. Our acts of courage, compassion humility, service, victory will feed others courage in the midst of weakness. Just a thought... 040430 ... oldephebe In Gethsemene, in the blood and sweat and fear Jeasus had it all stripped down to it's bare essence. His humanity, to lay his body limp in the lions mouth, the ground gave way and He became face to face with His Death and His immortality, how the Spirit would enable him, reanimate, reconstitute his bleeding broken body. He was at War with himself in that moment, the enegies of evil and the assualts of his own epistemological experience in the frailties of the carraige of humanity were set loose upon him. No benevolent, comforting hand reached down from the sky to console him. His own thoughts calmed, spoke to the agony that had burst the capillaries near his sweat glands and caused the blood to be mixed with His sweat. The sky was clear, the moon was this beautiful beacon in an untroubled heaven, until then the responsibilites that he'd carried had not made his life a burden. But this night, this night neither the busom of his natural mother nor his heavenly father would comfort him. There are things that WE must FACE alone, w/o friend or family, and like Jacob we must wrestle through the night and in the dawn, at the struggles end the test imparts a new name filled with glory, a certainty being battle tested we go into the next challenge with the armor and sheild of that knowledge. Someone once said that sometimes there's nothing left to do but give up or get up and Jesus chose to raise his prostrate body off of the ground, feeling the full wheight of the frailty of his humanity and faced the tempest of fiery arrows, faced the doubts and deceptions and even the truths that the accuser of man set upon Jesus soul. "Humanity would fall again and again, Humanity would not recieve the gift, the cup of grace humbly but would twist it and 'cause it to build empires, cause it to bring other kingdoms of the world to come crumbling down..this is the nature of the low creatures you are trying to save. They will abandon you. You've walked and labored and prayed and bestowed miracle upon miracle upon them and still they will abandon you. Humanity will eventually after all the symbols and the signs and the prophecies you've fulfilled: Humanity will yet abandon you to their petty, fratricidal ambitions. The disconsolate heart of man knows no other course, cast off these rags, this sentence, this oh so noble robe of martyr and return to the splendor of heaven." I tell you, it is the strength Christ found in His frailty, in His faith, in the compassion He had for the plight of Man that enabled Him to accept the lonely road into the fathomless chasms of Dark that awaited Him. He closed up the mouth of the grave, hell and death, he came through the dark a different person. He was shaped into something Sacred that night. When our enemy comes to tear down the tabernacle of our souls, we build it up, we build it back up. We look at the wound with the eyes of a new person. We're changed by the struggle, by facing challenges by empowering ourselves to WIN. Jesus did that with His mindset that his choose, he empowered himself, unadorned and alone to face the tests that would lead him to be nailed upon a symbol of death and torture and turn it into a symbol of victory. What you become through your struggle will stay with you for the rest of your life, it will inform your steps, your thoughts...it will enable you to rebuild the tabernacle of your soul over and over again. ... 040501 ... Lemon_Soda *just...listens* 050610 what's it to you? who go blather from