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John at Northampton Station

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Met by the ever-faithful John. Best friends since 1970. One of our newest ZCR Family members. Does his 108 bows and meditation every single morning, despite persistent hip problems.

He of this excellent book of poetry:

And the cool YouTube reading of this, the title-poem:

Coney Island Pilgrims

Boarding the Vermonter Line Out of Manhattan

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This is my first time taking an Amtrak in several years. Since the road is heading north from Penn Station, I get to finally experience the renovated Old Post Office, now named Moynihan Train Hall. The interior was underwhelming, but I suppose I was expecting something on the order of Grand Central Terminal. Maybe there are still too many memories of the old photos of the original Penn Station, before the modernist desecration. Professor Vincent Scully’s sadness still ringing in my ears for the possibilities of the place. It was nicely preserved, if a little not-uplifting. Maybe still entering the City like a rat, if better fed at the nicer eateries there. Not any charm or class — pure functionality. This’ll due, This’ll due for now.

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Unholy Alliance 2

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In this short video is revealed the true, ugly face of the snowballing theocratic movement in America, which has already ignited a Civil War now still in its low-burn stage, metastazing by the Tweet, by the second. This religious cancer is rapidly on its way to full inferno status – – these guys are throwing buckets of fuel on their already overheating “base”. It’s a clip of intimidation, which this fierce but deeply principled judge handles with balance yet righteous rage channeled back coolly through citation of constitutional passage:

God’s servant and Vicar to 140 million in Russian Orthodoxy, good Patriarch Kirill, would agree fully with this kind of inflammatory dog-whistling, this blowing on the embers, this generous ladling of the biblical hydrocarbon all over it in a demonic baptism. Is there anyone out there still idiotic enough to not clearly understand the reason why the traditionally anti-Russia GOP has been for years now so fervently acting as a handmaiden — and cheerleader — for the authors of the murderous theologies unleashed apocalyptically in Ukraine? I am confounded why otherwise perceptive lasers like Bill Maher and other commentators are not answering the question of right-wing American support for Russia by referencing these self-dealing affiliations hiding in plain sight: the common striving towards a nationalistic theocracy. Both the GOP and Russia want some version of that empowered Christendom appropriate to each his culture and history. A return to an imagined purity. Hatred of foreigners. A sense of inferior classes. History of brutality. Worship of a false nationalism and fetishizing the Old Testament military which carries it all out. Pure nihilism, in both countries, dressed up with the icons and successful business suits of the protectors of Holy Christendom worldwide. I don’t know why Bill Maher scratches his head over this seeming conundrum. They are both happy if the other succeeds, but why so different? It is all about co-Christianists allying for the purposes of maintaining power at all costs, to stave off progress and evolution and adaptation and freedom and change.

Politics per se is seldom conversation topic for me. But when European friends have asked this American, “How Trump could happen there?“, “Why only social and political deadlock?“, “Why this weird right-wing media support for Russia?“, I invariably find myself replying, half joking but more deadly serious than I would wish to admit, “There are many different things you can argue for or against, but this partnering is theo-nationalistic shotgun marriage of convenience between (mostly evangelical conservative) Christians and Russian fascism, and it was energized to its current blast-power East/West primarily as a sequelae to one significant legal ruling. This was given force because of something called Obergefell v. Hodges. This is the landmark 2015 U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriage in the USA. For it is then — along with Ireland’s unique public referendum affirming this right and thereby rejecting Church authority and tradition on the isle, when American conservative Christians — and traditionalists of the world — realized their world might be irrevocably slipping away after all. And these blind Bibleheads truly don’t want that, and have no means of handling it, in light of the brutally punitive instructions in their non-updatable Iron Age books. (And so, too, with Islam’s stance on the subject.)

The reasons for the years of GOP/conservative/right-wing American kowtowing to Russia and even taking Ukraine policy out of its party’s avowed political plank, during an election year, and denying them the protection they pleaded for, are only for this tired, tired, tiring Jesus-thing and its strange alliances. Kirill and Putin have violently prevented gay pride gatherings in their cities, and made it illegal to speak of homosexuality in classrooms, even instructionally. There is no robust, unfettered public critique of the nationalistic regime in Russia (whose American theo- /and ethnonationalists represented by Lindsey Graham, above, most certainly salivate over). The idealized traditional family is emphasized. Strong patriarchal State is fetishized as a decisive, hard-knuckle low-free-speech-rights order. Cops unchecked; courts carrying out crass enrichment, a worse and worst Darwinian “Squid Game” for those not connected, not willing to go along. And foreigners kept out to the extent that it’s possible.

I’m not here thinking myself capable of providing geopolitical commentary (though it sure looks and quacks like a duck). And I do not spend such considerable time on presenting my sense of this most most cynical fraternity East and West, merely from . I’m not commenting so extensively here merely through some limbic animus towards Christianity and the whole Abrahamic project (though I do reflect straightforwardly on their toxicity in other places, it should be known).

But it is absolutely clear to any reasonable inspection that these two parties representing antagonistic nationalisms (antagonistic to each other) and competing economic and historical aspirations, have clinched each other and supported each other because of an acknowledgment (hang in there with me) by each of them — plus a Bolsonnaro, an Orban, Duerte, a Cardinal Burke, Rush Limbaugh, or Steve Bannon —that world is always updating towards interaction not always approved by their vellum-based moralisms, and that — whether inspired by theology or using theology as a cover for troglodytic thinking — the aims of both deep-seated prejudices and sicknesses of mind need old moldy words to organize and authenticate the moral power of their destructiveness and their nihilism.

That these two teams both support each other – – the lawyerly theocracy of the religious right in America and the daemonic kineticism of religion and politics in Russia, unleashed on poor Ukraine with Biblical fury! — is not at all unclear to me.

It’s symbolized by two dudes marrying. Now, the Obergefell v. Hodgess decision is not some cause for this blood pact they made. But it (and Ireland and the up to 30 nations now which legalize that natural possibility) certainly catalyzes, in their faded imaginations, the sense that we are at the end times, or else they must act quickly to put maybe accelerate or at least not mind if that is unleashed.

This is why I really shouldn’t read the news anymore. This stuff really leaves a pit in my stomach, an unfillable fear and also a kind of rage at the ignorance we must contend with.

This is especially frustrating when we realize that there are original architects of the USA hammered into its construction ideas quite skeptical of the role of religion and public governance:

The Most Segregated Hour in America - Martin Luther King Jr.

The Local IS the Global

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Another fucking infernal selfie but there’s no other way to not include this spontaneous soul drop-by while down on the Lower East Side, down here in Little Ukraine, finding myself outside St. George Ukrainian Catholic Church (who would’ve imagined?) where they are raising funds for the effort. There are Ukrainian flags all over the neighborhood.

The Zen Center Regensburg has donated to a Ukrainian women’s veteran association, and I have donated to a front-line first aid organisation. (It was announced in a previous post, to encourage others to do the same) I will be happy to pay it increased bread prices when I return to Germany next month, and into next winter, when it will really begin to bite world-wide and test these sanctions. But I am OK with paying higher fuel and food costs. This is a battle against darkness and medievalism, pure and simple, egged on by a church steeped in Iron Age worldviews. We must support, wherever we can.

The local is the global.

With Alan

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The Dr. is In. He is where I stay downtown. On his sofa. Amidst his towering collection of philosophies and theories of art. This is where I sleep. A BIG TV with great sound which I binge-watched some MSNBC news programs on one evening, just for the experience.

But I go to meet this man. Raised in a deeply Christian family which was active in overseas missionary work and church-building, he’d had his head exploded by readings in Nietszche which turned him forever against religion as a youth. Now he writes and directs films centered around philosophical matters.

The retired doctor is explaining here some aspects of the films he is currently helming:

A philosopher trapped in a filmmaker’s trapped in a doctor’s trapped in a Korean artist’s body. A rabid Nietszchean, even his idol (Alan owns a first-edition Nietszche-marked copy of “The Twilight of the Idols”) would smirk proudly at this natural Übermensch. A little too right-wing, and Old Testament, but at least he admits it. There has been a lot of senseless crime in this City where he spent such mind-opening formative years. An elderly man was senselessly bludgeoned right outside the front door of his building, and nearly killed in full view of onlookers. There has been widespread looting in his neighborhood.

And he has contributed much back to society as a successful doctor and patron of the arts. And I can understand, from this rage at a changed NYC (especially as an endangered Asian these days), the anger that inflames what I believe to be dangerously Trumpian reactionary views in people like him. I told him, I hope his political choices never do arrive at any more power than they have already grabbed through the Supreme Court and the legislative branch, up to strangling the power of the popular vote! This all takes place under the banner of “More ORDER!” We’ve really got to be careful about all of that.

But I love him, all the same. It mustn’t be easy seeing the home you love turned into such a battleground. On several stops while we walked around the neighborhood doing his errands, we needed to be physically keyed into several stores by security guards who eyeballed us tightly first. Smash-and-grab flash-mobs are a constant danger in this neighborhood, it seems, and nowadays no chances can be taken. There’s definitely a worry here, quite palpable. The innocent old days are done and gone. That’s clear. This is usually one of the safest neighborhoods (Cooper Union) in all of the five boroughs, and yet there was definitely a different mentality tangibly in the air, partially veiling a differentiated space between this visit and the last time I stayed here.

The Bee-Hive

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And this was the daily goal: a prominent trademark law firm in this building, at the corner of Lexington and 43rd St. I was a sort of glorified calendar-keeper for a group of top-level trademark/copyright attorneys. There was nothing edifying about the work, though I did get to see some of the slimy underbelly of the vampire-squid capitalism of Vanity of the Bonfires NY, as a real experience.

It was a year or more of hard work commuting to and from this building that gave me the resources to explore deeper my emerging lifelong philosophical and spiritual interests: foremost among them, the experiences presented by Emerson and Mahler. I had no social life during that year in New York — no real partying. I was just squirrelling away chestnuts to be able to jump off into some deeper study, which I knew to be graduate school but I suspected (because I had for decades) that it meant something monastic, as well. And I might need to support myself without a consistent job in any uncertain period of discernment, you know? That’s what I was sometimes considering. And I knew it really meant taking full responsibility for my collage loans (I had something like $30,000 debt hanging over my head right out of college) and having the money for a flight ticket to Korea. This building helped me to answer some of those questions AND helped me to pay for graduate school entirely myself, without needing to borrow a nickel from friends or family. So it is also an important marker on this pilgrimage of farewells.

Old Crossroads

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First time passing through this beautiful, cavernous space in several years. I felt my breath escape a beat as I emerged from the tunnel into this main hall again. I’m back on the road, from temple and home to other connections. Entering NYC on the Harlem Line just now from the restful ‘burbs.

I used to traverse this space twice a day while commuting to work in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Working as a paralegal in Midtown and Downtown funded my graduate studies in divinity school and eventually helping me to find the teachings that would revolutionise my life. So there is always much gratitude that I had access to the tools, then, that enabled me to study and embark on the deep existential searching which would lead so powerfully to the the core of “don’t know” mind. I was raised white, in a safe town, was given an excellent education by a fairly driven family in a time of peace and stability in the strongest country in world history, with lots of opportunities, and I somehow found these impossibly clear and practical teachings pointing straight to the nature of mind. Some sort of “paying it back” is in order. Thus the relentless activity all these years, which I will try now to eject from thanks to this pandemic and its lockdowns and cessation of regular gatherings.

But passing through this space is a part of this strange part of this strange pilgrimage home: Visiting a space which represented my furious effort to make money to pay for graduate school, so that I might have access to deep thinkers and perhaps find a teaching/teacher that would help me to be liberated from a lifetime of agonized suffering. This place was a head-down barreling-though experience, focused as I was on merely earning in these factory law firms so as to pay my own tuition and living costs for a monastic retirement from the world, for reflection, to enter some Emersonian study, in a New England setting.

This was one of my launch pads.