As Castro's right-hand man in the new regime, Guevara ordered the execution of hundreds of people while in charge of the notorious La Cabaña prison in Havana. He was unapologetic about the mass killings of innocent people, explaining, "To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate."

"Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine – this is what our soldiers must become," Guevara said.

Once again, in rallying his guerrillas in Angola, he wrote: "Blind hate against the enemy creates a forceful impulse that cracks the boundaries of natural human limitations, transforming the soldier in an effective, selective and cold killing machine. A people without hate cannot triumph against the adversary."

Nazeon said, "Life is but melting snow."

Why are you spending so much time building a snowman for a lover? He
will be gone with the morning sun. Why are you worrying about what the
snow lady said about you at the party last night? Her body will melt
before you plot your revenge. All these phantom creatures will one day
disappear in the light. You too. Why fuss so? Better to open your arms,
lie down in the fluff, and make a snow angel. Take her with you
throughout your days. And as she melts in joy, let all that worryin'
melt right along with her. Spend your days in play, in laughter, in
love. Life's ending sky will smother you in frozen rain soon enough.
Open. All the way. Let the supposed hurts and betrayals go. They are
only holding you back from sledding to freedom.

~dg

posted on Daily Dharma

Q: What's the aim of you not allowing yourself to be photographed, having your voice recorded or making your biographical data known? Could this affect what you've achieved in your spiritual work, and if so how? Don't you think it would be useful for some sincere seekers of truth to know who you really are, as a way of corroborating that it is really possible to follow the path you proclaim?

A: With reference to photographs and personal data, the other three disciples of don Juan and myself follow his instructions. For a shaman like don Juan, the main idea behind refraining from giving personal data is very simple. It is imperative to leave aside what he called "personal history". To get away from the "me" is something extremely annoying and difficult. What shamans like don Juan seek is a state of fluidity where the personal "me" does not count. He believed that an absence of photographs and biographical data affects whomever enters into this field of action in a positive, though subliminal way. We are endlessly accustomed to using photographs, recordings and biographical data, all of which spring from the idea of personal importance. Don Juan said it was better not to know anything about a shaman; in this way, instead of encountering a person, one encounters an idea that can be sustained; the opposite of what happens in the everyday world where we are faced only with people who have numerous psychological problems but no ideas, all of these people filled to the brim with "me, me, me."

- Carlos Castaneda (from interview)

But here's the real smack of irony.

Carlos Castaneda

Intending and Function

The universe in general is predatorial to the maximum, but not predatorial in the sense in which we understand the term: the act of plundering or stealing, or injuring or exploiting others for one's own gain. For the shamans of ancient Mexico, the predatory condition of the universe meant that the INTENDING of the universe is to be continually testing awareness. They SAW that the universe creates zillions of ORGANIC BEINGS and zillions of INORGANIC BEINGS. By exerting pressure on all of them, the universe forces them to enhance their awareness, and in this fashion, the universe attempts to become aware of itself. In the COGNITIVE WORLD of shamans, therefore, awareness is the final issue. Don Juan Matus and the shamans of his lineage regarded AWARENESS as the act of being deliberately conscious of all the perceptual possibilities of man, not merely the perceptual possibilities dictated by any given culture whose role seems to be that of restricting the perceptual capacity of its members.

Don Juan maintained that to release, or set free, the total perceiving capacity of human beings would not in any way interfere with their functional behavior. In fact, functional behavior would become an extraordinary issue, for it would acquire a new value. Function in these circumstances becomes a most demanding necessity. Free from idealities and pseudo-goals, man has only function as his guiding force. Shamans call this IMPECCABILITY. For them, to be impeccable means to do one's utmost best, and a bit more. They derived function from SEEING energy directly as it flows in the universe. If energy flows in a certain way, to follow the flow of energy is, for them, being functional. Function is, therefore, the common denominator by means of which shamans face the ENERGETIC FACTS of their COGNITIVE WORLD.

--CARLOS CASTANEDA Commentaries on the Occasion of the Thirtieth Year of Publication of The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge

======================================================

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. -- Edward Abbey

Addiction simplifies life.
- a junkie

Living the run is really about living your life from birth until death.

Life is a run – you hit the ground running at birth, and don’t stop until death. Even in a sedimentary life, time takes its toll, the aging of the physical body is continuous, and provisions must constantly be made for the survival of the physical body. Eating, breathing as well as all of the other bodily functions continue on day-by-day. Survival of the physical body, regardless of the circumstances, is a ‘run’. A never-ending race to the finish, regardless of where that finish may be.

Hence we are all 'Living the Run'.

=====================================================================================

Created to fear (Click to reply)
submitted: 9/28/2003 11:28 AM
by: jshorvath@...
We are the product of those that would benefit from our existence, and are the sum of all of their efforts to date.

We are the product of those creatures that have created us for their service, and as such are in continual servitude to our creators.

But what service might we provide to them – what can we provide to our creators merely by way of our existence.

What is it that we produce – what is it that we give off – what is our benefit to them?

In a word – fear.

Fear – our most prevalent, most dominant and powerful emotion – not fear itself, but rather the frequency that fear is – for we continually emote (or vibrate to) the frequency that fear is, not by chance but rather by design.

Much in the same way that a microwave oven generates energy via a frequency, we, by way of our emotions, generate energy - a frequency based energy that is utilized by our creators.

Fear is our most prevalent emotion, and not without reason or purpose, for there is reason and purpose to all things human.

We were created simply to fear.

Created to emote or vibrate to the frequency that fear is.

Created as a source of that specific frequency required by our creators.

We fear, that is give off the emotion or frequency of fear, in servitude to our creators.

We, by way our emoting the frequency of fear, are the food source if you will, for our creators.

Biological fear transmitters, with the ability to replicate - the ability, by way of our sexuality, our genetically coded behavior pattern, to be driven to replicate.

With much forethought by those who created us, we are biological machines with one overriding purpose - to emote as programmed, day-in, day-out, for as long as we live, while in the course of our living, doing our part to create more biological fear transmitters. And generation-upon-generation, it continues on.

What a perfect cycle indeed.

Six Kinds of Loneliness
Pema Chodron

To be without a reference point is the ultimate loneliness. It is also called enlightenment.

In the middle way, there is no reference point. The mind with no reference point does not resolve itself, does not fixate or grasp. How could we possibly have no reference point? To have no reference point would be to change a deep-seated habitual response to the world: wanting to make it work out one way or the other. If I can’t go left or right, I will die! When we don’t go left or right, we feel like we are in a detox center. We’re alone, cold turkey with all the edginess that we’ve been trying to avoid by going left or right. That edginess can feel pretty heavy. However, years and years of going to the left or right, going to yes or no, going to right or wrong has never really changed anything. Scrambling for security has never brought anything but momentary joy. It’s like changing the position of our legs in meditation. Our legs hurt from sitting cross-legged, so we move them. And then we feel, “Phew! What a relief!” But two and a half minutes later, we want to move them again. We keep moving around seeking pleasure, seeking comfort, and the satisfaction that we get is very short-lived.

We hear a lot about the pain of samsara, and we also hear about liberation. But we don’t hear much about how painful it is to go from being completely stuck to becoming unstuck. The process of becoming unstuck requires tremendous bravery, because basically we are completely changing our way of perceiving reality, like changing our DNA. We are undoing a pattern that is not just our pattern. It’s the human pattern: we project onto the world a zillion possibilities of attaining resolution. We can have whiter teeth, a weed-free lawn, a strife-free life, a world without embarrassment. We can live happily every after. This pattern keeps us dissatisfied and causes us a lot of suffering.

As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don’t deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity. To the degree that we’ve been avoiding uncertainty, we’re naturally going to have withdrawal symptoms—withdrawal from always thinking that there’s a problem and that someone, somewhere, needs to fix it.

The middle way is wide open, but it’s tough going, because it goes against the grain of an ancient neurotic pattern that we all share. When we feel lonely, when we feel hopeless, what we want to do is move to the right or the left. We don’t want to sit and feel what we feel. We don’t want to go through the detox. Yet the middle way encourages us to do just that. It encourages us to awaken the bravery that exists in everyone without exception, including you and me.

Meditation provides a way for us to train in the middle way—in staying right on the spot. We are encouraged not to judge whatever arises in our mind. In fact, we are encouraged not to even grasp whatever arises in our mind. What we usually call good or bad we simply acknowledge as thinking, without all the usual drama that goes along with right and wrong. We are instructed to let the thoughts come and go as if touching a bubble with a feather. This straightforward discipline prepares us to stop struggling and discover a fresh, unbiased state of being.

The experience of certain feelings can seem particularly pregnant with desire for resolution: loneliness, boredom, anxiety. Unless we can relax with these feelings, it’s very hard to stay in the middle when we experience them. We want victory or defeat, praise or blame. For example, if somebody abandons us, we don’t want to be with that raw discomfort. Instead, we conjure up a familiar identity of ourselves as a hapless victim. Or maybe we avoid the rawness by acting out and righteously telling the person how messed up he or she is. We automatically want to cover over the pain in one way or another, identifying with victory or victimhood.

Usually we regard loneliness as an enemy. Heartache is not something we choose to invite in. It’s restless and pregnant and hot with the desire to escape and find something or someone to keep us company. When we can rest in the middle, we begin to have a nonthreatening relationship with loneliness, a relaxing and cooling loneliness that completely turns our usual fearful patterns upside down.

There are six ways of describing this kind of cool loneliness. They are: less desire, contentment, avoiding unnecessary activity, complete discipline, not wandering in the world of desire, and not seeking security from one’s discursive thoughts.

Less desire is the willingness to be lonely without resolution when everything in us yearns for something to cheer us up and change our mood. Practicing this kind of loneliness is a way of sowing seeds so that fundamental restlessness decreases. In meditation, for example, every time we label “thinking” instead of getting endlessly run around by our thoughts, we are training in just being here without dissociation. We can’t do that now to the degree that we weren’t willing to do it yesterday or the day before or last week or last year. After we practice less desire wholeheartedly and consistently, something shifts. We feel less desire in the sense of being less solidly seduced by our Very Important Story Lines. So even if the hot loneliness is there, and for 1.6 seconds we sit with that restlessness when yesterday we couldn’t sit for even one, that’s the journey of the warrior. That’s the path of bravery. The less we spin off and go crazy, the more we taste the satisfaction of cool loneliness. As the Zen master Katagiri Roshi often said, “One can be lonely and not be tossed away by it.”

The second kind of loneliness is contentment. When we have nothing, we have nothing to lose. We don’t have anything to lose but being programmed in our guts to feel we have a lot to lose. Our feeling that we have a lot to lose is rooted in fear—of loneliness, of change, of anything that can’t be resolved, of nonexistence. The hope that we can avoid this feeling and the fear that we can’t become our reference point.

When we draw a line down the center of a page, we know who we are if we’re on the right side and who we are if we’re on the left side. But we don’t know who we are when we don’t put ourselves on either side. Then we just don’t know what to do. We just don’t know. We have no reference point, no hand to hold. At that point we can either freak out or settle in. Contentment is a synonym for loneliness, cool loneliness, settling down with cool loneliness. We give up believing that being able to escape our loneliness is going to bring any lasting happiness or joy or sense of well-being or courage or strength. Usually we have to give up this belief about a billion times, again and again making friends with our jumpiness and dread, doing the same old thing a billion times with awareness. Then without our even noticing, something begins to shift. We can just be lonely with no alternatives, content to be right here with the mood and texture of what’s happening.

The third kind of loneliness is avoiding unnecessary activities. When we’re lonely in a “hot” way, we look for something to save us; we look for a way out. We get this queasy feeling that we call loneliness, and our minds just go wild trying to come up with companions to save us from despair. That’s called unnecessary activity. It’s a way of keeping ourselves busy so we don’t have to feel any pain. It could take the form of obsessively daydreaming of true romance, or turning a tidbit of gossip into the six o’clock news, or even going off by ourselves into the wilderness.

The point is that in all these activities, we are seeking companionship in our usual, habitual way, using our same old repetitive ways of distancing ourselves from the demon loneliness. Could we just settle down and have some compassion and respect for ourselves? Could we stop trying to escape from being alone with ourselves? What about practicing not jumping and grabbing when we begin to panic? Relaxing with loneliness is a worthy occupation. As the Japanese poet Ryokan says, “If you want to find the meaning, stop chasing after so many things.”

Complete discipline is another component of cool loneliness. Complete discipline means that at every opportunity, we’re willing to come back, just gently come back to the present moment. This is loneliness as complete discipline. We’re willing to sit still, just be there, alone. We don’t particularly have to cultivate this kind of loneliness; we could just sit still long enough to realize it’s how things really are. We are fundamentally alone, and there is nothing anywhere to hold on to. Moreover, this is not a problem. In fact, it allows us to finally discover a completely unfabricated state of being. Our habitual assumptions—all our ideas about how things are—keep us from seeing anything in a fresh, open way. We say, “Oh yes, I know.” But we don’t know. We don’t ultimately know anything. There’s no certainty about anything. This basic truth hurts, and we want to run away from it. But coming back and relaxing with something as familiar as loneliness is good discipline for realizing the profundity of the unresolved moments of our lives. We are cheating ourselves when we run away from the ambiguity of loneliness.

Not wandering in the world of desire is another way of describing cool loneliness. Wandering in the world of desire involves looking for alternatives, seeking something to comfort us—food, drink, people. The word desire encompasses that addiction quality, the way we grab for something because we want to find a way to make things okay. That quality comes from never having grown up. We still want to go home and be able to open the refrigerator and find it full of our favorite goodies; when the going gets tough, we want to yell “Mom!” But what we’re doing as we progress along the path is leaving home and becoming homeless. Not wandering in the world of desire is about relating directly with how things are. Loneliness is not a problem. Loneliness is nothing to be solved. The same is true for any other experience we might have.

Another aspect of cool loneliness is not seeking security from one’s discursive thoughts. The rug’s been pulled; the jig is up; there is no way to get out of this one! We don’t even seek the companionship of our own constant conversation with ourselves about how it is and how it isn’t, whether it is or whether it isn’t, whether it should or whether it shouldn’t, whether it can or whether it can’t. With cool loneliness we do not expect security from our own internal chatter. That’s why we are instructed in meditation to label it “thinking.” It has no objective reality. It is transparent and ungraspable. We’re encouraged to just touch that chatter and let it go, not make much ado about nothing.

Cool loneliness allows us to look honestly and without aggression at our own minds. We can gradually drop our ideals of who we think we ought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be. We give it up and just look directly with compassion and humor at who we are. Then loneliness is no threat and heartache, no punishment.

Cool loneliness doesn’t provide any resolution or give us ground under our feet. It challenges us to step into a world of no reference point without polarizing or solidifying. This is called the middle way, or the sacred path of the warrior. When you wake up in the morning and out of nowhere comes the heartache of alienation and loneliness, could you use that as a golden opportunity? Rather than persecuting yourself or feeling that something terribly wrong is happening, right there in the moment of sadness and longing, could you relax and touch the limitless space of the human heart? The next time you get a chance, experiment with this.

- Pema Chödrön

Said a traveler to one of thedisciples, "I have traveled agreat distance to listen to theMaster, but I find his wordsquite ordinary."
"Don't listen to his words.Listen to his message."
"How does one do that?"
"Take hold of a sentence thathe says. Shake it well tillall the words drop off. Whatis left will set your hearton fire."

Anthony de Mello, S.J.

Creatures without feet have my love,
And likewise those that have two feet,
And those that have four feet I love,
And those, too, that have many feet.

-the Buddha

Re: Can anybody give me information on Russian MA...
Quote:
Out of curiosity was your first teacher in the military? If so is that were he learned all those martial arts. Yes and no. Sergei was an engineer, and this made him eligible for officer training, but in a reservist capacity, i.e. he didn't have to see a lot of action on the front. The implicaion I got was that he used military connections who had connections with chinese miitary connections to arrange the exchange program, so you could say that the military was involved in a way.He also had a job as a sort of debt-collector for *cough cough* genlemen requiring some discretion, which he later parlayed into a detective agency. A big difference between what he did and what you would expect from such a job description over here is that often the collectees were also organized, armed, and often dangerous.He got into that line of work as a result of his rep as a sport fighter. He'd made the papers a few times, gotten some championships, and on the Soviet street, a sport fighter was in demand as muscle, maybe a step below being in spetsnaz for value.I can corrobate this with what my friend Misha who used box during that time said - often street toughs would walk into his boxing gymn looking to boost their reps (and hourly rate) by going in the ring, and fighting dirty. His trainer would tell him "Infidel" (his coach was muslim) "if you do not beat this guy, you cannot box under me anymore." Misha's boxing is pretty dirty if he wants it to be -hidden elbows, cross buttocks that look like hooks, lotta old-school bareknuckle moves this guy knows ...Anyway, one interesting bit of information from my first teach - when he started out collecting, with just the sport background, he would win his streetfights, but would often sustain some injury in the process. However, he then met this guy Lavrov in Krasnodar (if you look on certain websites, there is a series of articles related to RMA, primarily by Pachenko. Most of Pachenko's articles try to discredit the idea of a native RMA, but one article on that page has an interview with Lavrov). Lavrov knew some RMA, and according to Sergei, it made a big difference - no more injuries, and he understood his other stuff better. Lavrov was deteriorating by then tho - too much drinking. Anyway, Sergei sees the writing on the wall, moves to Canada wth his wife and an incredible amouint of liquid currency, teaches at a karate school for pocket money (did I mention he also has a 5th dan in karate?) and hears about Vladimir. He sort of thought it was a scam actually, and he wandered in with a very smug attitude, thought he'd have some fun and show some people up - and then Vlad pounded on him in such a fashion that he realized that Vlad was way more advanced than anyone he ever saw, and he really had a lot to learn. A familiar story for the people in Toronto.Nowadays Sergei runs a resort camp in Eastern Ontario, doing quite well.

There is this traveler in the desert. It's very, very hot, and he is thirsty. In the distance there is one lone tree. He didn't know that it was a wishing tree. He goes and sits beneath it and he thinks, 'this is nice, I only wish I had a cool drink now'. Lo and behold, a cool drink appears in his hand. 'Oh! Terrific!' he says. 'Now if I had a soft bed to lie on and drink this with a bit of a breeze to fan me'. Lo and behold, a soft bed appears, as well as a maiden with a fan, fanning him. 'Oh! This is terrific. Now all I need is a good meal to go with all this and everything would be just right'. Lo and behold, a big meal appears. Then the mind says, 'Hey! What's all this? What's going on? Maybe it's a devil?' And the devil appears. The mind then says 'Oh! He's going to eat me'. And he does!