Kim Basinger And Vintage Wine

So here's that scene I talked about previously, and that I promised I would post here.

It's from the hot erotic movie - well, in fact, one of the most outstanding erotic movies of all time - 9 and 1/2 Weeks.

It's the scene in which Basinger's character, an art gallery manager, goes to find the artist 'Farnsworth' whose exhibition is coming up, but who has apparently gone missing just beforehand.

This movie is one of the starkest examples of just how far the difference is, between those who really know something about whatever subject they are discussing, or looking at, and those who have all the public reputation for knowing, but are simply ignorant but aggressive and vocal.

9 and 1/2 Weeks was misunderstood in its day, and largely still is, on the whole when you talk to modern people who watch it even now.

But you'll get an argument from those who believe they know the full story - same as you will if you say that no Tibetan monks from the original Lhasa temple were, or are, actually Buddhists...

The real religion of the Tibetan monks has been systematically suppressed for decades by the Communist government of China, and the modern outward presentation of Tibetan monks as Buddhist is a fabrication.

Everyone knows the story that the Dalai Llama is found by the priests of the Lamasery of the Tibetan tradition, by offering a particular young child a few toys and personal effects that belonged to some previous living chief Llama. 

This idea - after a fashion - can be seen in the scene I have posted here, in terms of an artist's, in this case, the fictional artist Farnsworth('s), approach to his subjects that he converts into his paintings.

Basinger's character tells him he has captured a moment, and he replies that he paints the transitions of understood and familiar reality, to the point of their strangeness probably in some unstated metaphysical way.

If you are a very rich person, and you have acquired the taste for great French wines like Latour or Lafite or Angelus or Haut Brion - there is no real point drinking any of them and believing you are really experiencing what is in there, unless you can come to terms with the ideas, for instance in one of our public Kindle novels: particularly, say, Chapter Eight 'Star Silk Drop' from the book 'Russian Propaganda Spy Story.' Here - https://www.amazon.it/Russian-Propaganda-Spy-Story-Invulnerable-ebook/dp/B082NJW9DM/ref=sr_1_5?keywords=Spy+stories&qid=1576275822&s=books&sr=1-5

"The Beauty Of Divine Beings Dancing"

One of the main purposes of this site is to encourage a certain way of thinking - a way to use the human mind that will permit its practiced exponent the ability to sense things almost before they are materially here. But more importantly, to be able to distinguish authenticity from clever semiotics and propaganda employed by experts in mass public control.

It is no secret that my family had quite some history in China, and that among a few key people I am what is termed 'inside the family door.'

Zhang Zhiyi

At the same time though, I suppose much like the vast Chinese cultural panorama itself, my own immediate family had its own peculiar internal rivalries - my elder sister spoke only Hokkien when she was almost into her teens and for a very long time afterwards was quite reluctant to converse in English! Whereas I would consider myself more aligned to the Teochew cultural grouping and it was among these that I spent most time right the way through to my late twenties.

Many of those who taught me in the commonly known Chinese arts have now passed away - the revered Lacey Brothers, the most recent to return to the Grand Ultimate. However, there is more than the usual 'hard training and fighting' martial arts aspect that I can tell you about, and about which I was often ribbed on - and that is, that I had the reputation, bestowed literally by the very old leaders of our clan (one of whom was the very highest ranking Chinese Martial Arts teacher in the world at the time, namely, the then Chairman of the World Chinese Martial Arts Association) of being capable of learning some things from one or two of the oldest practitioners who had some insight into the legendary Zhang Sanfeng. It is not strictly speaking, true that the Wudang Tai Chi style is not within the usual Shaolin Kung Fu arts, because, in fact, it is readily acknowledged by all that Zhang Sanfeng formulated the snake and crane forms that all Shaolin practitioners are quite familiar with. 'Sanfeng' ('Sarm' = 'three') simply means 'three mountains' and this was a title he gave to himself, having scaled all three of the largest peaks.

Now... Here's the point you need to grasp hold of: Wudang is linked at its deepest expressions, to Chinese Taoist magical thinking, and Zhang Sanfeng is held to have achieved immortality. And so, for those 'hard style' fighters and thinkers of much of the modern schools, ancient traditional disciplines like calligraphy and dance and music, are looked down upon in comparison to breaking sticks and rocks and so on.

Chinese Communism too, for another example, despises anything to do with the magical thinking side of Taoism, and it has quite deliberately created a formulaic, state-authorized version of public Taoism with systems of monk training and a whole range of rituals and literary regimes designed to support fundamental Communist ideology, and not, Taoist philosophy at all.

Shen Yun

One of the sects within the ancient Taoist tradition is what today has a base in New York City, and that travels the world as the Shun Yen Dance Company. 'Shun Yen' means 'the beauty of divine beings dancing...' The Beijing government shadows this group around the globe, and has been alleged to have interfered with its members and its commercial affairs in various covert ways.

The Wudang Mountains are about 430 kilometers from Wuhan, where the current coronavirus outbreak is said to have originated. The road to the mountains runs through Hubei Province where Zhang Sanfeng lived and taught.

Those From Very Far Away

It is extraordinarily hard for me to convey everything I might want to 'put out there' partly because there is too much 'cross-talk' in the way people are informed now - they accept the media as fundamentally the only source of facts. You could think well maybe not, maybe the internet has overcome this blanketing of social information by only one version of interpreted truth, but I don't think so...

It's got to the point where a childish two-dimensional definition of what used to be a sophisticated turn of phrase in the English language, for example, is 'truth' and the actual authentic meaning is only used by an ever-narrowing group of people who if they are lucky, get merely cast as 'conspiracy promoters.' If they are lucky. 

This is the Dior Floral Cocktail - yes, Dior has it's
very own cocktail! 

...Allow me to explain something to you: if your eyes are not accustomed to the dark, no matter how much you believe or think you have good eyesight, and you are used to high light levels, but then suddenly the world is plunged into darkness around you - you won't be able to see. And that is in spite of any arrogance that you have 'good vision.'

Scientists do this type of thing all the time. They capture data present to their sensibilities - but not all the data that is actually there and available. And then they make pronouncements on what is 'there' and what 'not there.' And of course people get terribly jealous if you suggest you have some faculty they do not have. In an upcoming article I will post a very short clip from a famous movie, whose essential point is that older, wiser, people, have ways of seeing, and of thinking, that are not part of the mind-set of younger people. Musicians and artists often do understand this, scientists do not. 

Science is possibly one of the most over-rated things around, because it provides many useful functions, but cannot provide any insight into the superficially non-repeating dynamical, alive aspects of universal reality. What does that mean? It means if aliens landed in Roswell on a Monday, but never again turned up there for another hundred years, and even then on a Tuesday not a Monday, all the scientists would be dead by the time a pattern had formed for them to 'see.' And those who were alive at that time would look back and say, 'ah well, but there was something wrong with the historical record.' You see, this is potentially just arrogance rather than the application of any kind of real science. It's what has happened with the narrative about industrial environmental pollution - which is absolutely a real thing, but which has morphed into 'global climate change.' 'Change...' ...not 'pollution.' 

One fellow told me recently, that in the time of Homer (or at least the books attributed to that name), 'people believed the sun was a fiery chariot,' and therefore whatever Homer had recorded about an event could not be viewed as having been made by humans 'with brains' (I presume that's what he meant) like modern people have today! And when I asked him had he heard of someone called Eratosthenes and what he had discovered he said 'no, not really.'

You see, it's a waste of time. And moreover I don't have any incentive to go further than do things like this fun (for me) blog.

Recently I have been spending some time pulling the legs of some LA girls who have these 'manifesting' channels on YouTube, and I told them they were in lots of trouble because none of what they were suggesting was working among their millions (literally, it is millions) of followers, and that was because they had committed the cardinal sin of breaking their own gender-political rules - they were promoting 'manifesting,' when they should have been promoting womanifesting! 

I got a few giggles and chuckles.

And then some of them actually asked me did I have a specific meaning for what 'womanifesting' was..

Pretty lights...

So I told them that Jesus Christ was only the second child of God the Father, and that Solomon had the jump on him as far as 'manifesting' went, because he kept appealing to the first-born identity, who is called in the Old Testament text in the original language texts 'the Princess of the Heavenly City of Peace' (commonly misrepresented in the modern English versions simply as 'the Shulemite woman'). And what I got were a bunch of more-or-less modern 'fundamentalists' leaping up and who actually thought I was on their side by suggesting that 'manifesting' was witchcraft and against the Will of God, and that although they loved watching the channels in question, held some inner disquiet about it all.

And I had to say, 'but no, no' - I did not at all think 'manifesting' was against the Will of God; far from it if you look at those source texts themselves. And then of course I simply had to heap burning coals upon heads by posing the following question - 'if all Christians understand the Prince of the Heavenly City of Peace (same identity who met with Abraham and gave him this famous/infamous Eternal Blessing) to be Jesus, then who is this Princess of the Heavenly City of Peace that Solomon keeps writing encomiums to?' Or do you want it that when it suits you you say the phrase means 'Jesus Christ the actual person,' but when it doesn't suit you you want it merely to be some metaphor, a turn of phrase meaning something vague...?

Right now I could make some bald assertion about something and offer no proof about it. ...But I'm not going to do that. Just keep your eyes on the skies, as I have been saying for a few weeks now.

Chateau Latour

The Chateau Latour wines - there are three of them produced each year - are the 'old school' Bordeaux style of wine.

I mean you could go on and on at length describing what any particular example of this wine tastes like, if you have tasted it, and if you had the kinds of words that are typically splashed all over 'old school premium magazines...' Except that, of course, today, there is pretty much no such thing as a 'premium magazine!' 

The 2005 Grand Vin will cost you around two and a half thousand dollars. 

Okay but let's move a touch above and beyond the rest of the world here, shall we?

So what's the secret? The secret is who will you drink this wine with. And even a few steps before that is how will you 'connect' with the worthy...

I want you to imagine that inside your mind, it is just like the planet on which you live. There is this blaring noise, my friends, going on inside your head - and it comes from all the 'truth' that everyone around you has shared with you since you were a little child, insisted on sharing with you, and still are sharing and frankly, are possibly even imposing on you by this stage likely as not without you even being able to resist all that easily.

Where we 'live' from moment to moment inside our own heads is mostly close to where all the noise is - that is, we don't see it as noise; we see it as 'truth,' and using reason, being 'informed,' moreover we have the audacity to say 'informed with facts!' Uh-huh.

 

McLaren seat back

Now let me tell you what you already know about the natural world... When you go into some lonely forest, you will walk through tall trees, thick growth, undergrowth, narrow paths if you are lucky, with the highest energy sunlight mostly captured in the canopy level, and slower frequency/lower energy light filtering down to the lower levels, until, right at the bottom, there may even be plants that have iridescent blue-green leaves, which scavenge the small amounts of red spectrum light. 

In the relative darkness down there, in the silence, then, you can start to discriminate one frequency from the other, and observe the different characteristics of each one, without being pushed around by the 'noise' of too much data and too much indiscriminate stimuli.

So... Are you getting close to an understanding of what it means, when some wise people of ancient times employed phrases like 'a still small voice?'

You know, when Zarathustra rushed out into the marketplace and screamed that he had found 'truth' or 'the' truth, and he threw his message into the blaring 'noise' that was already there, the crowd thought him mad.

Finding 'the truth' isn't even all that difficult. Keeping your mouth shut about it is intensely challenging.

You make a really large sum of money and unprepared, you will walk into a place in the forest of your own mind, that no one explains properly mostly because they have never been there and returned intact, or else, they wander lost there pretending they are 'the elite' or the 'wealthy.' 

Just a place in Barcelona somewhere

In the forests of your mind, especially if these grow up the sides of elevations, there are vast 'fog walls' which descend down upon you, and in which you will be utterly lost if you don't know what you are doing. Mountain fog is very moist too, full of actual droplets of water, and you can't see beyond ten feet in there. Depending on what side of the mountain you are, the fog may not even lift right throughout the day, and at night, you'll be cold and drenched and all alone.

Now you can carry on like most people do, pretending that you are ever going to find your way out all by yourself, but you never will. 

What do you think now? Are you coming with me up into the hills? Are you going up by yourself maybe, high up there to find the mystical blue poppy all alone, and by yourself?

LOL.

...What do you think? Now that your eyes and ears are becoming more accustomed to the silence and the dark... Are we alone? ; ) 

My friends, I am quite sure there are still many among you who have been reading here for a good long while and you are still quite sure that you haven't got vertigo, and that you know 'up' from 'down' and that you literally do have the power and the capability to judge what is really true basing it all from what you are quite sure you know and have already established as fact, or at least the factual basis for knowing what is real and what is only delusion.

     

Water Into Wine

The problem with the Sun - wonderful though it is - is that its glare, its effulgence (composition of all the colors), drowns out everything else that can be transmitted through the atmosphere. Our whole education system is built up on a powerful delusion - which is, namely, that we can look, and we can see, everything, and then our minds can understand things via that process of uncovering all and examining what we have found thus.

When you go to the opera, or to a movie theater, they draw the curtains, turn down, indeed, turn off completely, the lights and only selectively throw some light where it is necessary to shine a light, and moreover, they even make the lights that are thrown (by people who already know where to throw it), often of grades and shades of color only.

Feelings, emotions, are accessible through gradation, through coloration. 

Some things are of course, perfectly obvious - we can listen to dirges from funerary rites all day long, watch bathos-filled movies from Hollywood recounting sad tales of misery, suffering and woe, especially of lost loves and love that never was. And then we can all turn up on the doctor's doorstep next day complaining of depression. And he can give us some prescription drugs that will numb various parts of our 'brain-body' interconnections, and if we are extraordinarily lucky, he will give us some manufactured, synthetic impersonation of 'happy' too.

So what does it feel like to be a good person? What does it feel like inside, to be satisfied? Or what (does it feel like), to be astute? Or to calculate accurately, complex and differentiated categories of things which all impact on each other to attain a singular consequence or outcome? Or what, to live in outright luxury, or to be very rich, or to drive Lamborghinis and Ferraris and Rolls Royces, and to drink expensive wine among glamorous people all the hours and days of your life, and to sleep well when you are tired?

Does it really take actually being in those environments - or does it take a complex frame of mind first, to really apprehend the available complexities and ranges of emotion entailed when these experiences are at their optimal peak.

God celebrated with alcohol when he Blessed Abraham...

Now because we are all pretty damn stupid creatures, requiring to literally be taken by the hand and smashed against some obvious wall before we admit anything that we really don't understand and are too juvenile to make sense of right off, and also too filled with baby-like ego to accept that we don't know what it really is... ...I will make you hurt first before we go take a drive in that Aston:

This is Tim Buckley's 'Song For The Siren' and the form of music is incredibly ancient, being a threnody - sang by the female gods once at the Dawn of the Creation of Man, also when a great war is ended, and again one time it will be sung at the End of Mankind. The type of singing is known as 'mouth singing' and although this particular song is relatively easy to 'hear' and make sense of the words, most of these types of songs are completely incomprehensible unless you are very intoxicated - or unless the words are right there in front of your eyes in the full light of day(LOL; get it?).