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Read "Empty Space....a haunting" by M. John Harrison. Third in a trilogy, along with "Light" and "Nova Swing". Funny, surreal, and ultimately very disturbing. Highly recommended.

I motorized a fidget spinner, for efficiency's sake.

I should go back and work on it, so that it lasts longer than I do.  And that's all the "eternity" any of you fuckos will ever need...The knowledge that a tiny monument to stupidity will outlive you.

Do you need a hug?

I was born and Life came up to introduce herself. "Hi, I'm Life".  "Hey" . "My calling card".  I took it and held it up. Written on it was one word. Death. "Uh, hey Life. Your calling card says 'Death'". "Yes it does". "The calling card of Life is...Death?" "Yes". "How can that be?" "It's my other side" she said as she turned around.  She had a very nice backside.

Minutes after a "Fox and Friends" segment titled 'Media questions President's mental stability', Trump takes to twitter to reassure the nation: "Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability  and being, like, really smart".  He then says he is a "very stable genius". Thanks for the reassurance Mr. President! 

For us it was in the basement where the pool table was.

The NYT has thrown a bombshell.  One tidbit is a D.O.J. staffer to Sessions asking a congressional aide if there is "Any dirt on Comey". Another flame-thrower is the Keebler Elf wanting  daily negative press stories on Comey.  This article, combined with the "Fire and Fury" book that lands tomorrow, promises an interesting news cycle.

Do I feel that I'm exploring the afterlife? Yes. (Or as I choose to call it: more life )  Want a little map? Makes a weird story.  The afterlife is a whole lotta real estate. Immediately out, there are the Belief System Territories.  Any specific belief has it's own piece of non-physical real estate. No matter how beautiful the belief,  each  belief territory is a trap, a static stuck place. That can only be escaped from once a crack in your belief in that place occurs.  These places are to be avoided. Believe in a specific heaven? Great! You'll go there. And be stuck. Maybe for a very very very long time. My interests lie outside of the Belief Systems. That's where I hang. There's higher realms past  where I can access, but I am quite dense as I am now. Too much load. Gotta lighten up quite a bit more. Too heavy as I am . Damn, this sounds fricking nutso, donut? The most important spot for all of us is...here. Physical reality. Having the Human Experience. There is stuff available here that exists nowhere else. That has incredible value, here and elsewhere. Yes, some things you can take with you. Like a sense of humour, a sense of having fun. You have no idea how valuable those things are in the "after-life".  Incredibly valuable. So why bother accessing "more life" if we are already in the most important place we can be, the Human Place? Well....you lose the fear of death for one thing. That really takes a certain edge off of things. Not that I don't fear the potential process. Pain & suffering etc. But not the outcome... I completely understand if y'all think I'm insane. I'm fine with that. I rarely talk about this shit.  And will not mention it again. Frankly, it's kinda boring for me to talk about. Oh, but back to Gurdjieff terminology. Does your personality survive death? No. Your essential self does. 

And I'll be honest, I'm skeptical of astral projection. I don't doubt that you've had experiences, I just am not clear on what they are or what they tell us about the world. Do you think the astral body you project is the same thing as Gurdjieff refers to as the immortal (kesdjan) body? Does astral projection give you knowledge of those that have already died physical deaths, an understanding of that world? How do you know that you're not just in a trance of heightened imagination? How confident are you that your astral-body is will still be around after physical death? and not just yours, but everybody's? In what sense are they still part of the world, given that it doesn't seem like they do anything that we can notice?



thank you for the thoughtful post!

You should be skeptical. (,can't stand the phrase "astral projection"  though. Too occulty for me)  Nobody should believe what I've written in that post.  You'd have too see for yourself, repeatedly verify it within your own experience  to think I'm not delusional. Me, I didn't go looking for it at first  It happened on it's own. I began to try to voluntary initiate it happening. Basically by remaining alert and watchful as my body fell asleep. When my body was so relaxed I couldn't even feel it any more I would try initiating movement.  If I succeeded at that, the game became to see how much attention I could pay, to amp up my presence. You ask very good questions, like how do I know it's not a trance state. Basically,  my own conscious awareness is equal to or greater than my own everyday physical awareness ( as little or as much as that may be) I was as awake just as I am in daily life, the same sense of self, the same ordinary me. Except I'm in a different environment  (usually) and... I can fly.  It's different from lucid dreaming . With that there's still the feeling of "dream". With this other thing, there is no feeling of dream. You are as awake as much as you are in ordinary life (however much that is for you)  It's hard to explain. After decades of this, I became a member of a small group where we would verify the experience. An example: I took a nap. Went to a group members house ( in another state ) Saw and heard her talking to someone she called Suzie. When I got up from my nap, I emailed her and described what I heard and saw. She said her daugher-in-law was visiting her. Suzie. I had no knowledge of her name or that she existed. We all did these kind of verifications. Eventually you go "fuck it, this is boring verifying shit.  Let's explore!"  So basically my answer is: if that non-physical reality is an illusion, then ( for me)  so is this physical reality. Because the sense of realness is equal for me.  I'll answer yer other questions later, frustrating though my answers might be.  Gotta do some things.  Don't believe any of this. I wouldn't respect you if you did.  And hey! Maybe I'm completely  bullshitting you! You have no way to tell. It's text on a screen.

Uh...O.K. I was just hoping that after having read Beelzebub ten times you might could offer some insight into it. You know...reveal a hidden gem you uncovered. Maybe after the eleventh time you read it? Only if you're not too tired and care to share of course.

Shit Man... You told me nothing.  For reading it ten times?  That's all y'all got?

Tell me something you've got from Beelzebub. If you have a mind to.

Another Gurdjiffian notion I find to be (mostly) bullshit is the necessity of making "super efforts" to effect change. It's true, there are circumstances that arise where you do need to amp up things as high as they can go, to really force the juice along. Yet in my life what's been way more important is consistent on-going effort. The "pay attention and stay awake" game requires a deeply relaxed  yet focused attention.  Instead of using a sledge hammer to vanish a rock "Hulk go Smash!"  I favor the wind & water way. Steady relaxed focused attention. Wind & water over time will smooth down that stone  into nothing. You have to be patient and not expect immediate results. But steady relaxed effort bears fruit.  Super-efforts mostly create tension which can cramp attention. Yet there are times to amp it way up. Nothing is written in stone.

Like you, I entered a work group through attending a public reading. It was a chapter from a short Ouspensky book.  Afterwards the speaker said that the most important idea to him was though "We have none presently, we do have the possibility  of creating a soul which can be immortal within the confines of the Solar System" I threw up in my mouth hearing that.  At that point in my still young life, my years of lucid-dreaming had turned into full-blown out-of-body experiences. And if a moron like me was directly experiencing his non-physical body, then EVERYONE had to have one. In other words, it's an innate thing for every single person. Not something that needs to be created. Nothing unique. Nothing mystical. It just is. Folks might not be consciously experiencing it, but it is there as a core part of every single human being. ( 'fore I go on. I am nobody special. I am a statistic. A strange statistic yeah, but still an idiot. Like you)  I have since found out, that at least in the S.F. Gurdjieff Foundation, that fucked-up idea that you need to "form a soul", a non-physical body, is dogma. Well cupcake, if you believe you can't consciously leave your physical body and explore non-physical reality, you will never do it consciously. Because if you don't think it's possible, you will never pay attention to it. You are already doing it every fucking night anyway. Unconsciously. You just need to remember that you are actually doing it. In the present moment that you are actually doing it. It's not that hard to become aware of. Takes some practice. And you do need to be able to pay attention. But still. C'mon! You're not a little baby anymore! Am I right? You can do it! ( I'm ranting 'cuz I'm pissed) Fuck you Gurdjieff fuck-heads for saying it's only advanced holy beings that have immortal vehicles. I'm living proof of that. If I'm an example of an advanced being, then honey we are all fucked. Granted, your soul might be at  the level of a petulant 5 year old, but you are still an immortal being that will never truly die. You might need to grow the fuck up, but fellow immortal, I salute you!

Like, there's a whole chapter about the alchemical processes going on inside of us, how consciousness requires a certain kind of food, and this food is created by processing other types of food, such as impressions. And I don't think any of it is true in a material sense. First time I read it, I tossed it. He claims that self-remembering builds up a definite kind of energy inside of you, and this energy fuels certain processes that are otherwise frozen. He explains it all in extremely material terms. And I thought - yeah, all of this could be easily disproven. But you know... talking about presence and awareness as something like a muscle that you develop... Talking about how you need new impressions to have new thoughts, how your being can be hungry, how impressions become behaviors through this quasi-metabolic process... there's some meat there, if understood abstractly.

It comes back to something I've been saying recently - that religions are maybe not best understood as a literal explanation for how the universe works... They should be approached as a network of symbols which correlate to how things in the world (the external and the internal) are arranged. By understanding that there's a relationship between the big macro universe and the personal microcosm, the next step is to embark on a quest (like the quest to find the holy grail) to find patterns which exist

I too feel there is some real alchemical meat there to be digested. It's only abstract when we talk about it .  It's nitty-gritty when you feel and see it happening.

I read your thread Mr. C.  Welcome to kindergarten.  I love G's harmonium improvisations & some of the private Paris talks.  Jean deSalzmann has a post-humoursly published book called "the Reality of Being" that I like.  Some of what Gurdjieff wrote is utter bullshit. Sometimes I think it was intentional.  Maybe he wanted you to make effort and find out for yourself what is shit and what is not.