Seth: To the assholes at the trance party who stole a wallet and made off with my bag:

HOW FUCKING DARE YOU.

How fucking dare you come to a celebration of comradery, respect, joy, cooperation and music and STEAL from this community!?

I will NEVER AGAIN be able to have that level of trust in this scene anymore, and that's REALLY FUCKING SAD.

You really should thank the person who ripped you off. Its not often that some one gives you such a direct and evident check on your attachment to stuff and ingrained anger.

You could easily pay several thousand for some 'est'ian seminar and never even get close to what you are feeling now.

Perhaps I'm old fashioned, but I like goa precisely because it isn't just about the music. You are lucky this person helped you reach a little farther into the darkness.

It is a pity that they traded their honor for a backpack.

But only you can give up your trust.

Jason: Thats a good point you made, very well put.

Seth: Well it's not about the backpack as much as it is the violation of trust.

What pissed me off the most was feeling violated - that someone would do that in such a positive and very warm environment based around coming together and respecting one another and enjoying the music and the company. Yeah, I can replace a bag. But I can't replace a sense of trust - and that's a far bigger loss than any bag, and one that everyone in the psytrance community should be concerned about.

I understand that. Here is something a mentor told me about trust.

We all start out naive. A baby trusts everybody about everything. But, people come in all stripes, and as you learn about unworthy people you feel betrayed. Naiveté is traded for cynicism and mistrust.

But this is just as wrong. There are people to trust and people to not trust. Mistrusting everyone is a dark and lonesome place which ends in in the final madness of fundimentalism and republicanism.

(ahem)

Anyway, there is another path. Naive trust and cynicism are both looking outside for trust. Real trust is not outside you. It is inside you. As you mature and deepen as a person you learn to trust yourself.

When you trust yourself the vagreties of other people who are unworthy of your time do not matter. So the guy stole your stuff. You handled it. You made it home. Your real friends had a chance to show their friendship and trustworthyness by helping you in a time of need. This deepens a friendship in ways a backpack never will.

The other thing which happens at this level of trust is it lets you set the tone of trust that surrounds you. This gives people you meet who are trustworthy a chance to step up when they meet you.

This is the kind of trust that coalesced around Dave a few years back when UMP was getting started. Its what makes a scene special and I think its what you are looking for and thought this guy stole with your backpack.

There will always be hurtful and divisive people trying to steal your stuff. You can't trust the intentions of everyone around you.

But you can trust your ability to handle yourself when you get burned and you can trust the many good people around you who are happy to step up and help.

Blind trust doesn't work. But choosing to trust anyway, with your eyes wide open and willing to take it on the chin when you make a mistake pays off in spades.

Its how you seperate the people who want your backpack from the people who want to be your good friends.

Seth: Hmm. Well said.

Thanks.


09-13-05 9:13  •  Wholesome Karma

Sarah: I've heard that karma comes from acting out of ignorance, fear or greed...but what about wholesome actions and their karmic reactions?

Wholesome is really just what you happen to think about a particular action at a particular time. The action itself is just an action. Cause and effect, karma, has no inherant morality, quality or value.

Morality, quality and value are just what you generate from your desire for, adversion to, or ignorance about your experience of karma.

09-11-05 9:11  •  Hurricane Katrina and Karma

D: Of course the experience of being in a natural disaster is the result of karma - nobody wants to hear that or say that - but if karma is real - then that's what happens. Going through the trauma clears your karma (unless you generate new karma by being a dick).

In as much as you may have chosen to be where a natural disaster happened, then that much is your karma playing out. In as much as natural disasters are a result of uncontrolled forces of nature then no, that is not your karma at all. Trauma doesn't “clear” karma any more than ecstacy “causes” karma. There is no karmic virtue in trauma and ecstacy is no karmic vice. Karma is simply the result of what has happened and it is totally free from any moralizing or judging.

D:(story of Tibetan nun who thanked Chinese soldiers beating her for clearing her karma)

Ani's story is totally uninspiring. If anything it makes me wish I could beat her and thus help her clear even more of her karma since by your logic she is obviously quite an evil person. What great and noble people those soldiers must have been. Or what a load of hooey this notion of karma results in.

HDL:For millennia the Tibetans have eaten and enslaved yaks. Perhaps the Chinese are reincarnated yaks.

For millenia rich Tibetans shat on poor Tibetans under the auspices of a Tibetan theocracy which sought a policy of complete isolation while clinging to technophobia and antagonism of its neighbors, but no, it's enslaved yaks seeking revenge.

D: When people take UNIVERSAL RESPONSIBILITY for their world ...

They are solipsistic, delusional, psychopathic megalomanics. Sorry D, you do not have universal responsibility unless you are GOD in a TOTALLY deterministic universe you created. Not only does shit just happen, I am an active agent doing things beyond your control.

Just because the pop psych crowd wants to own the word “victim” doesn't mean that there aren't victims. Taking control of your attitude doesn't alter your circumstances, it just alters how you react to them. Even with the best attitude, you may well still be powerless over your life, just as we all are as we die. Trying to be “empowered” all the time is just more delusion.

Pretending a hurricane is just bad karma is no different than calling it the wrath of a sheepherder god.

D: I've had several disagreements with friends who were abused as children about this. They can't imagine that they somehow chose to be born into a shitty situation.

They didn't choose to be born into that and insisting they did really sucks on your part. It is just this “blame the victim” mentality which makes me wish whoever thought this great lie up in the first place had done something more useful with his time, like biting his own tongue off.

The real karma at work here is you have proven yourself insensitive to those friends who tried to confide in you something which hurts them dearly. Instead of at least listening politely while you ignored them, you actively tried to add more guilt to an already horrific exprience. Way to go.

D: But you either believe in karma, or you don't.

Wrong. What is real and actual is outside belief or disbelief. Only what is not real is subject to belief. The karma you describe requires your belief to sustain it because it is false.

D: We are either heir to our actions (even if those actions are in a lifetime we can't remember), or we are completely powerless in our lives.

Ah, the classic false dilemma of karma.

You are heir to some of your actions. You are also not heir to some of your actions.
You are heir to some of the actions of others. You are also not heir to some of the actions of others.
You are heir to some things which just happen. You are also not heir to some things which just happen.
You have but a measure of imperfect control over what you do and become and what happens.

Its a wild and woolly universe and you are definitely not in charge, or universally responsible.

09-11-05 10:11  •  More Karma

D: Who knows why anything happens? Who knows why anyone feels a certain way? Anyone who says they know, doesn't.

Not everything is impenetrable. I scratch because a hungry mosquito bit me. I feel full because I ate.

D: But you can say - "I chose this, I chose my parents, my upbringing, my country of birth, my status." It's incredibly empowering.

You can say it, but that doesn't make it true. I'm alive not because I chose to be, I didn't exist at that point. I'm alive because my parents chose to have sex. I'm an American simply because this is were my mother's gestation ended. There's nothing special about it and my choices at the time (Suck thumb? Kick?) did not include choices about countries.

I really don't care how hugely empowering it is. I care about is it true and it isn't. I wasn't responsible for the cause of my existence, no one ever is because before you exist, you don't exist.

As I grew I gained some control over my existence, but if you think you have total control over your existence we can play the zen slap game until you own up to your limits or admit you are a psychopathic masochist.

D: It beats asking "Why me?"

I must admit this is not a question I've found compelling. "Just because" is fine. I've been victor and victim, so what? That is how the game is played. But "victimhood" has always seemed like too much to bother with.

D: It may not be a truth that you resonate with...

Truth is truth. Show me real proof of honest truth and I will resonate just fine. Belief is not truth. Belief is just a mental patch to get you by until you actually know. What we have is in part random, but it is not just random ever since neurons evolved. But that doesn't make me god either, or the only one playing.

Beliefs don't make me happy. Being happy makes me happy. Beliefs make me uneasy about the sloppy holes which still exists in our knowledge. Beliefs cause suffering because they have no necessary correlation with reality and blindly bumping around reality hurts.

D: I've found that the idea of universal responsibility is incredibly liberating and gives people the opportunity to chose what IS.

I have found it a dangerous meglomaniacal delusion which denies the complexity of reality and the actual roles of others.

Sometimes my actions can have great effect. Sometimes they have little or no effect. Sometimes I must surrender to the currents which pass beyond my grasp and go with the flow.

What IS, IS of its own accord. It is a complex symphony of choices, randomness, other's choices, and just plain weirdness. How dull if it were just up to me.

08-24-05 1:23  •  Intoxicants and Zen

R: Holding oneself to a higher standard in the matter of intoxicants is just traditionalism.

Hi Folks! Anyone else going to Burning Man this year? We leave in one week. Let us know if you are going - see you there!