Dirtgrain

I still feel welcome, thanks. Rock on.

Check out ex-cult.org, and scroll down to the section on "Large Group Awareness Trainings (LGATs) including The Forum / est Landmark." A couple of the links: est and Werner Erhard, and The Awareness Page.

Neutral, friendly, cool, never tangling, I melt into the flux of things (or so I thought).

What is the 4th of July to Native Americans? It's ironic that people go to reservations to buy fireworks to celebrate the 4th of July. Where does patriotism fit into all of this? I can't help feeling that "patriotism" is an empty word that promotes mindlessness. It seems like every time I see that word, bad things are connected to it. Then again, I was never into school spirit back when I was a student. It made no sense to me. It's disgusting to see all of these empty blowhards on TV and elsewhere preaching about patriotism. Feh. Reminder to me: breathe and flow. It's all part of the flow.

Fnord

Hoo-ah. I'm sick of categorizing and cataloguing and defining. I read an anonymous quote in a dictionary of quotations once. It was a suicide note, and all it said was this: "All this buttoning and unbuttoning." That always registered with me.

Hello all (not to be confused with All. . . thou shalt not commit hygiene and whatnot): I am happy to have found your forum. Nice place. And now some dithering. We are energy and nothingness, ghosts in this imposter physical world. Reality is a skein of matrices of electron probability patterns and subatomic interconnections. Nothing is solid. You can never touch anything. It's no surprise that we can disappear into the vapor, that truth can disappear into the vapor. Words, those massless bubbles that float out of empty-space electron-probability-pattern matrices, whichever way we collectively blow them, can skew or enlighten. The irreverent ones are blowing-harder blowhards. They fear their nothingness and run from it, sogging their hands in materialism--a pretense that our nothingness can be filled. If only they could come to terms with their ghost nature. I'm trying to learn about Taoism and Zen and other Eastern ideas because I'm interested in it and because I am preparing to teach a class on the influence of Tao and Zen on literature (Emerson, especially), for the first time, to high school seniors next fall. At some point, I'll start a thread asking for ideas. Rock on, Dirtgrain