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Just a freelance mystic here
- Thread starter HCSpirit
- Start date
Every way I can come up with to explain where it comes from comes back with " You are only allowed to post URLs to other sites after you have made 15 posts or more." That's even after I have stripped everything even hinting at the existence of urls from the post. (Really, I'm not trying to spam the board. I spend too much of my life dealing with people who want to use the systems I administer to send or host spam to need or want to generate any myself. I'm just trying to answer a question).
Welcome to RF.
About the URL, try spreading some spaces around the dots.
About the URL, try spreading some spaces around the dots.
Hi and welcome to the RF
Let me try again then, though I'm not sure spaces around dots will do, as I eliminated any trace of url-edness the last time without success. Maybe what I need to do is add gratuitous characters between other things.
I lack imagination when it comes to web handles. Sometimes I pick the name of some object I have on my desk at the moment of decision, or something I see out the window at that moment, but most often, I just manufacture something out of whatever my em_ail address is at the time. Currently I'm using a we_b-ma_il account associated with my-b_log, 'hard core spirit_uality', which is where the "H C" comes from.
Better that than trying to abbreviate the-do_main as "hardcore", which has some very unfortunate suggestions on the net
Lol. That it does!
Just for the record: we've had a vet crisis (and subsequent financial crisis) here. Anyone looking for the aforementioned blog that cannot be named needs to look for it on hardc ores pirituality at blogspot, at least until I can dredge up the cash to pay for both it and the parrot (I figured I'd keep the parrot )
It may take me another few days to restore the posts. And to actually spend more time around here.
) It may take me another few days to restore the posts. And to actually spend more time around here.
It means it was the nearest word in the dictionary I can find to whatever it is that I am without having to make something up that makes absolutely no sense to anyone but myself
Once upon a time ago, I was an angry and depressed teenager staring out my bedroom window plotting to bring a shotgun to the school that had suspended me for fighting back against bullying, and kill everyone I could before killing myself (not a promising beginning to a spiritual story, I suppose). I would have been the pioneer of this sort of killing -- it was the very early 1970s-- but for what happened next.
For absolutely no apparent reason, the blackness that seemed to surround me split apart, and in a moment I was handed an armload of tools to clean up and refine my thinking, guidelines for how I ought to act, and a few "if you do this, this is what will happen"-type things. This was not just unlikely given my far-from-spiritual state of mind at that moment. I was a militant atheist who had wanted to become a physicist. Cognitive dissonance doesn't even begin to explain it. So I spent the next few years simultaneously playing with the new toys in the toy chest and denying that anything like what happened could plausibly have occurred.
I went on to college, and studied physics and mathematics while majoring in political activism
To cut a very long story short, I screwed up (ethically), in politics, and then I made an almost identical ethical error when I ran away from political activism into music. After leaving music I decided my problem was that I had been in a position where I could engage in self-aggrandizement in both politics and in music, and that I needed to do something staid, where I couldn't bask in public attention, like write political philosophy. So one day, I stuck a sheet of paper in my typewriter, and started writing on power. I never got past the working title.The problem was that I knew enough mathematics to rip my ideas to shreds. What's worse, I knew enough to rip everything I believed in to shreds. And worse yet, I could show that there was no possible answer to the question that concerned me -- at least not as long as I limited myself to conventional rational thought. Yet, I could catch a glimmer of an answer out there, just as one can spot a dim star by looking just to its side. So I started to poke at that glimmer of an answer, trying to tease it into full view. Then I stopped, because I saw that it was the idea I called the Forbidden Thought.
The Forbidden Thought was an idea I had bumped into in the past, too often, I would have said. To approach it was to approach something terrifying beyond any other terror. It had the quality of annihilation itself. There was little doubt in my mind that were I ever to fully form that idea in my head, I would surely die. So when I saw that the answer to the philosophical and ethical questions that concerned me the most were the Forbidden Thought, and only the Forbidden Thought, I did what I was already pretty good at: I ran.
I ran away from the part of the country I was living in, because too many people knew me as a minor political figure and looked to me for political answers, which I did not have. Then I ran some more, because some people still knew of me as a political figure where I ran to, and other people started thinking of me as very wise, and I happily agreed with them, whereupon I screwed up yet again in the same general way as I had previously screwed up. Only this time, after I fully realized how badly I had done so I (atypically-- sometimes my early Catholic childhood leaks out) fell to my knees (in front of the toilet-- I had been brushing my teeth) and prayed to the I-know-you're-not-a-person-but-sometimes-its-easier-to-think-of-you-as-one Universal Truth (the Generic One, handy in a pinch even if you're at heart a nontheist
) saying that I would do anything but that I wanted that ugliness ripped from me. And that's when things really went all to hell, fast. After a cascade of events, in a matter of weeks I was homeless (back before homelessness was the plague it now is). Now how did that old saw go again, about being careful what you pray for?
I was homeless for roughly two years (not entirely without interruption), and I spent the better part of those years either running or thinking or both. I ran myself in an ever tightening spiral right back at that Forbidden Thought. Only, this time, I was ready.
These days I live more or less in keeping with the things handed to me that evening, many years ago.
So, I'm a mystic. The nearest "religious" ties I have are to science, political philosophy, and atheism (unless you count the Catholicism I abandoned when I was about ten years old). That makes me, what-- generic? unaffiliated? underground? I prefer "freelance" at the moment (though no, I'm not for hire).
YmirGF
Bodhisattva in Recovery
Good stuff. I look forward to reading your views on an array of topics. Hopefully RF does not disappoint you.
Since when have we not disappointed people? Are you suggesting the Forum has changed in the six or seven years you and I have been here, Paul?
Welcome, HCSpirit!