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Friday, September 14, 2012

RAVE: An Anthem for War (video)

[Mystic Wisdom] Quarterly

() Electroacoustic piece of music set to the poem "Anthem for Doomed Youth" by the late British poet-soldier Wilfred Salter Owen.

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
  
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
  
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Owen died on the battlefield in WW I after writing "Dulce Et Decorum Est" (ironically "It is Sweet and Fitting [to Die for Patriotism]"). He was a great loss to humanity in light of what Europe might have produced if the youth of that generation had not been sacrificed.

HARD Day Of The Dead, Nov. 3rd, 2012, LA State Historic Park. Tickets (harddayofthedead.com)

Day of the Dead
Dev and Seven, Wisdom Quarterly
Candy Eye (lilminx16/deviantart.net)
While the world is at war, promoted and prosecuted by the US military-industrial complex like MLK Jr. recognized, all I can do is dance to EDM. And the Mexican "Day of the Dead" (the Latin American Halloween) is being celebrated with a rave.
  
Next to the old Occupy Wall Street encampment under the occupied Los Angeles skyline, next to China Town, we will gather as in years before. I'm still in search of a peak experience worthy of a Buddhist monastic or the Buddha himself. When the lights are going off and the DJ is dropping a big fat beat, I'm almost there. Almost.
  
Back in the day
If I leave my body, will I see the larger Spirit World, the realm of devas.? If I dance so hard I can no longer feel my feet, will I elevate into spatial dimensions beyond our limiting atmosphere? In meditation, I close my eyes and see subtle light. I feel the unseen and touch emptiness. Sometimes Buddhism is the only thing that make sense, you know?
  
The Day of the Dead, when ancestors are honored and there is time to reassess and appreciate current relations, we will be with all our brothers and sisters under the Moon. But somewhere I know war is being fought for corporations and nothing else, no national security, no higher ideals. They're monsters, my brother among them. What can I do but dance, celebrating the Five Precepts while others are negligent, holding my head under a twice-colored cloud and focusing my mind.

The Buddha said, "Not having been, they come to be; once having been, they cease." What was he talking about? Everything, all conditioned-things. There is that Farther Shore beyond the beyond. We wish the killing would stop and the loving start so we could all arrive there. "Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond, O, what an awakening, yes!"

"Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate bodhi swaha!" is the epitome of the Heart Sutra.

The trouble in Libya Egypt, Yemen...

Pat Macpherson, Ashley Wells, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly
A minor pharaoh famed for not having his tomb robbed (ancient-egypt.com)
  
Spring, Egypt's Tahrir Square and the MIC (AFP)
A non-event, some video that had been up on YouTube for months, is suddenly seized on as a cause to protest and riot? Doubtful. 
  
It is difficult to say what is really going on, but this is clearly a pretext fanned by FOX News and presidential candidates in the US.
Should anyone be upset that the Prophet Mohammed is mocked? Yes. Our modernity means we have few if any sacred cows. That's fantastic and liberating for us. And eventually other spiritual people will devolve/evolve to that state. But until then respect is needed all the way around.
  
Buddhism is more peaceful and peace-inspiring than most people imagine. According to the Buddha, if a person hits another person and that hit-person hits back, that second-hitter is worse than the first. Jesus (Issa) would be proud to align himself with a nonviolent tradition like that.

Hi, I'm Republican Jesus
How far from that are our Judeo-European ways. Here we're encouraged to hit first and keep hitting.
  
(Growing up in Boston if I were to come home crying that I had gotten beaten up by someone, my father -- or my older brother in hi place -- would ask me, "Did you hit him first?" If the answer were no, I'd get a second beating. It's the Irish/Italian way. It's the east coast way. It's probably a holdover of surviving in a lower socioeconomic bracket. It's probably what any CHAV would do in Britain or gavone in New York).
  
Jesus is reputed to have said, "Turn the other cheek." If one is backhanded disrespectfully, turn the face to be hit honorably, openhandedly on the opposing cheek. In neither case is one to get mad, but we rarely follow that. At least we espouse it. At least we carried out crusades to spread Jesus's message of love to "barbaric" Muslims. (Did we teach them to cut off the hands of thieves, extract eyes for eyes, and not suffer children disrespecting parents under penalty of death, all things the Bible enjoins us to do?) We are the barbarians, and we can't bear to see ourselves that way.
  
"We aren't; they are!" we say. Or maybe everyone is. It's like Elizabeth Kubler Ross said, "I'm not okay, you're not okay, and that's okay."
  
So, hey Americans, stop insulting Islam! And, hey Military-Industrial Complex (MIC), stop invading, corrupting, installing, and deposing dictators friendly to the West.
  
Why?
Peace in the Middle East? (richardsilverstein.com)
If anyone believes the geopolitical Middle East is setting fire to embassies, schools, and effigy flags because of a YouTube video, they must not have been paying attention to events over the past few decades. It is analogous to the gratuitous Rodney King beating and attempted murder by the LAPD. Los Angeles did not erupt into rioting after criminal police were acquitted because of that acquittal. These are merely excuses, triggers, detonators to a tinder box of long held resentments.
  
It is because these abuses -- in this case abuse by the long arm of the US military under the control of our overt and covert government and the much shorter arm of the MIC's main ally Israel -- have been mounting for decades. They do not stir themselves up but are organized and antagonized by "our" PsyOp forces. So why do we keep falling for our mainstream media's slanted coverage which seems bent on instigating Armageddon scenarios wherever it can.