Manster

Manster....mortal enemy of feminists. and lesbians....in short,

anyone with a sexual identity problem......or any identity for
that matter.....also, what every woman could be delighted with.

...and even though it's still possible to pick "normal" clear 

out of a crowd with good clear sense perceptions and intuition,

looking at the crowds, the pickings are thin.....so...yes....
"twisted", or some similar word is the new "normal".

Humphrey Bogart would be a manster in this age, almost

too real to be trusted by the grifters and the phonies...

not so much wearing a gun as displaying a trigger....

some people you don't fuck with, because you can see
that they can see....for example..here in Tepoztlan

In my friend's cafe/bar when she was starting out,
some heavies from the town, in other words "community"
heavies came into the bar and stayed, drank, got drunk,
said a few things but not really aggressive... except you
really felt their presence there. I was in there one evening when the 

heavies came in, already drunk, sat down for drinks and
everyones' assholes puckered a little.. They did nothing...
but it was unspoken that they could have. I think that they
were checking the reaction as a kind of test to see how the
proprietor, Anna, a fantastic person, would react.  It was
interesting, because I was with Barry, and his instinctive
New England sense of justice wanted to do something, but

I managed, on that occasion, to make a wise statement,
which immediately cooled his jets. I said "Barry, you don't
get heavy with the heavies."

So, a short time later, these big guys got up reasonably
well and there were hugs and kisses all around. So that,
to me, (in a small way because we're not talking about Iran here)
shows that the habitual patters one brings from

ones personal history are FAIL when you look into new cultures,
people,whatnot..... which is why Marco Polo succeeded and
Kurtz (Heart of Darkness) failed.

I think the only reason Buddhism succeeded in preserving
it's teaching stream  of authenticity was first, it was not well
organized....at least the Nyingma lineage... but also the Kagus
established the tulku system which not only established stability 

of succession, but because also (and here is where I extrapolate
the training of   tulkus from five years old to a greater paradigm)
That ANYONE who has some  basic talent in something which
any intelligent educator will tell you can be recognized

at a young age...anyone with such potential, can be educated and
trained to the  point of virtuosity and you don't have to have the
sociopath abilities of Michael Jackson's father to accomplish it.

I'll tell you exactly what it takes. Basic training in either or both
technique and improvisation. This can be accomplished through
mentorship, as well as intense adsorption in ones chosen 

art...in fact, that has to be part of the process.But my real point,
and I'll state it a little facetiously at first, is that whatever you do,
if you do a lot of it, you get better at it,,which includes any

activity including laziness.

So, to conclude the logic, if you apply it to the Buddhist path,
if you do it long enough, (and one really does need a guide
because the ego is one of the smartest and trickiest

functions of the mind) and meditate a truck load, it works,
first of all what does that mean, and second of all, how do I know?

First, what it means is that discursive mind can be worn out to
extinction, and that in itself is enlightenment. This is possible
because ego itself is ignorance, and the meditation practices,
which are only tools to increase awareness, when applied 

properly, do just that. As awareness increases, ego is exposed
with all it's self centered trickery, deception and fundamental
failure to achieve absolutely anything, This process of
disillusionment is so  painful, just like and for the same reason
as coming off heroin because our whole way of being has 

become habituated to seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, and
ignoring everything else....and that's a full time job. When one

begins the process of looking into that and dismantling the
mechanism, well, that's gotta hurt in the beginning. but with
revelations that increased awareness brings, the pain is not so
unfamiliar, and one begins to discover that it has interesting
flavors and textures that are worth looking into. Meditation
becomes an acquired taste.

How do I know? Everyone starts any path of personal discovery
with a nagging  question that differs from person to person.
It could be  "How do I deal with my suffering"...or, it could be "What's
this 'life' thing all about?" The number of questions is endless.
They may seem different, but their essence is the same.

There is a visceral feeling of something being off, of knowing
that there is something important that one needs to, but doesn't know.
There is a sense of separateness and separation and manifests

as self consciousness...a feeling that one is not part of anything,
not connected. The cultivation of awareness is an outward expansion
through the senses that clarifies phenomena and distinguishes

it from mental projections, biases and opinions that taint what we see
with knee jerk mental overlay. We begin to see that our connection,
to our experience as well as our connection to the world, is the
awareness itself.

As awareness increases through meditation, or, I could put it like
this: as the practice of meditation wears out the knee-jerk reaction
of mind based on previous memories and habituated reactions to 

experience, natural awareness which was always there begins to
shine through. As this process continues and awareness becomes
more prominent, the attendant emotions of ego, the energies

of emotions that have their momentum from constant re-enforcement
through habit, diminish because they are no longer being fed,. But....
how do I know?  Quite simply we become so familiar with

our own ego's bullshit that at first it becomes boring, looses power,
and, eventually, one day we just forget about it...it's just no longer there....
as if we were to loose interest in our favorite toy because of overfamiliarity.

Because our awareness expands outward, what's out there

becomes more interesting than boring, predictable, dull  me.
The mechanism of self preservation falls apart because we
begin to see that it never really worked anyway, and was
pretty much always a high maintenance pain in the ass...
So, we wind up in a constantly changing, uncertain, vibrant,
creative, improvisational existence where we dance with
awareness in an ever changing  landscape. What's wrong with that?