Amon

@CharlotteFang77's rival.
#Milady in exile to Babylon.
Building a breakway #MiladysInChrist movement to save Milady from Satan.
Matthew 25:40

[Amon @AmonMainlander]

#MiladysInChrist, burn this aphorism into your mind:

[Amon @AmonMainlander]

@scsimodem @LancesLegion @Sargon_of_Akkad Sino-aesthetic larpers are always Indian. See @CharlotteFang77 .

[Amon @AmonMainlander]

@GamersNexus @PatrickMoorhead You know what he meant but you're a luddite that wants to hold the world back so you can personally profit, and so you're mad

[Amon @AmonMainlander]

@TheMouthyBuddha Have you read the monroe trilogy (And thereafter the campbell trilogy)?

[Amon @AmonMainlander]

@TheMouthyBuddha Yes, mouthybuddha, you are too discerning to be in this Catholic myopia forever. Look further. Everything is apparent.

[Amon @AmonMainlander]

@DejaRu22 He has the whole breeding fetish thing going on which blocks him from seeing this. If he didn't have that, he'd also see how the birthrate is just a non-issue given both automation and life-extension, and wouldn't go on about that. It's a weird mental blind spot for him.

[Amon @AmonMainlander]

@xenocosmography @gmiller Call him Degrowthfrey Miller

[Amon @AmonMainlander]

Meanwhile in the Persian wars Athens was offered total hegemony over Greece by Xerxes if they allied with him, but they denied on principle and got their city razed. Meanwhile, Sparta was trying to build a wall to hide from the Persians and abandon the rest of Greece, and then Athens had to remind Sparta that they could still accept Xerxes' deal and only then did the Spartans actually fight.

[Amon @AmonMainlander]

@romanhelmetguy They're larpers:
https://t.co/6e70JYKtIr

[Amon @AmonMainlander]

📒🏛️ -- The Spartans were such pathetic larping cucks:

'So Xerxes went home, but he left behind an enormous land army under his best general, Mardonius, as well as a startling (to the Greeks) strategic move: Early in 479 he extended an offer to the Athenians to make peace with them (and only them). If they came to terms, he would leave them in freedom (meaning no tyrant ruling as a Persian stooge), pay to rebuild the Athenian sanctuaries that his troops had burned, and give the Athenians another land to rule in addition to their own. The Greeks should not have been surprised; after all, the Persian king had reversed his policy in Ionia after having crushed the rebels, replacing the puppet tyrants there with democracies to ensure more peaceful conditions in his dealings with the Ionian city-states. Xerxes made this offer because he recognized that, with the Athenian fleet on his side, the rest of the Greeks would have no chance except to submit to Persian control.

Xerxes’ offer was genuine, and it was seductive; as the king’s ally, the Athenians could have reconstructed their wrecked city with his endless supply of money and enjoyed his support in dominating their rivals and enemies in Greece. The Spartans were frantic with fear when they heard about the offer; they realized how tempting it was. They probably acknowledged, to themselves in secret, that they would have taken it if it had been made to them. Astonishingly, however, the Athenian assembly refused to take the Persian deal. They told the Spartans that there was no pile of gold large enough and no territory beautiful enough to bribe them to collaborate with the Persians to bring “slavery” to their fellow Greeks. No, they said, we insist on fighting for retribution from our enemies who burned the images and houses of our gods. Our Greekness, they continued, pledges us to reject this temptation: “We all share the same ancestry and language, we have sanctuaries and sacrifices to the gods that we share, and we share a common way of life” (Herodotus, The Histories 8.144). This definition of Greek identity meant so much to them, then, that they were willing to risk complete destruction—the massive Persian land army remained close by—rather than abandon their sense of who they were and what their place in the world was. Their refusal to compromise their ideals deserves recognition as a decisive moment in ancient Greek history.

Mardonius then marched the Persian army into Attica—and sent the offer again. When Lycidas, a member of the Athenian Council of Five Hundred, recommended that it be accepted, his fellow council members and the men gathered around to listen to the debate stoned him to death. When the women in the city heard about what Lycidas had proposed, they banded together to attack his home and stone his wife and children. Emotions were raw because everyone knew how high the stakes were. The people of Athens then evacuated their city and land for the second time, and, with the offer rejected again, Mardonius then laid waste to everything left standing in the urban center and the countryside of Athens. Meanwhile, the Spartans had built a wall across the isthmus that connected the Peloponnese peninsula to central Greece, planning to hunker down there to block the Persians from advancing into their territory; they were ready to abandon the rest of the Greeks beyond the isthmus. They decided to leave their wall behind and march north to face the enemy only after being bluntly reminded by the Athenians that Athens could still accept the Persian king’s offer even at this point and add their intact fleet to his to become the rulers of Greece. Reluctantly, the Spartans sent their infantry, commanded by a royal son named Pausanias (c. 520–470 B.C.), to join the other Greeks still in the alliance to face the much larger Persian land army on the plains of Boeotia north of Athens; Mardonius had chosen to take up a position near Plataea because the terrain was favorable to the disposition of his forces. There, the Greeks and the Persians met in the final great land battle of the Persian Wars in 479. The sight of so many Persians in battle array at first dismayed the majority of the Spartan infantry, and to avoid meeting these frightening troops directly, the Spartan commanders asked to switch positions in the line with the Athenians so that they could face the Persians’ allies instead. The Athenians agreed.'

Martin, Thomas R.. Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times (pp. 134-136). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

[Amon @AmonMainlander]

📒🏛️ -- The Spartans were such pathetic larping cucks:

'So Xerxes went home, but he left behind an enormous land army under his best general, Mardonius, as well as a startling (to the Greeks) strategic move: Early in 479 he extended an offer to the Athenians to make peace with them (and only them). If they came to terms, he would leave them in freedom (meaning no tyrant ruling as a Persian stooge), pay to rebuild the Athenian sanctuaries that his troops had burned, and give the Athenians another land to rule in addition to their own. The Greeks should not have been surprised; after all, the Persian king had reversed his policy in Ionia after having crushed the rebels, replacing the puppet tyrants there with democracies to ensure more peaceful conditions in his dealings with the Ionian city-states. Xerxes made this offer because he recognized that, with the Athenian fleet on his side, the rest of the Greeks would have no chance except to submit to Persian control.

Xerxes’ offer was genuine, and it was seductive; as the king’s ally, the Athenians could have reconstructed their wrecked city with his endless supply of money and enjoyed his support in dominating their rivals and enemies in Greece. The Spartans were frantic with fear when they heard about the offer; they realized how tempting it was. They probably acknowledged, to themselves in secret, that they would have taken it if it had been made to them. Astonishingly, however, the Athenian assembly refused to take the Persian deal. They told the Spartans that there was no pile of gold large enough and no territory beautiful enough to bribe them to collaborate with the Persians to bring “slavery” to their fellow Greeks. No, they said, we insist on fighting for retribution from our enemies who burned the images and houses of our gods. Our Greekness, they continued, pledges us to reject this temptation: “We all share the same ancestry and language, we have sanctuaries and sacrifices to the gods that we share, and we share a common way of life” (Herodotus, The Histories 8.144). This definition of Greek identity meant so much to them, then, that they were willing to risk complete destruction—the massive Persian land army remained close by—rather than abandon their sense of who they were and what their place in the world was. Their refusal to compromise their ideals deserves recognition as a decisive moment in ancient Greek history.

Mardonius then marched the Persian army into Attica—and sent the offer again. When Lycidas, a member of the Athenian Council of Five Hundred, recommended that it be accepted, his fellow council members and the men gathered around to listen to the debate stoned him to death. When the women in the city heard about what Lycidas had proposed, they banded together to attack his home and stone his wife and children. Emotions were raw because everyone knew how high the stakes were. The people of Athens then evacuated their city and land for the second time, and, with the offer rejected again, Mardonius then laid waste to everything left standing in the urban center and the countryside of Athens. Meanwhile, the Spartans had built a wall across the isthmus that connected the Peloponnese peninsula to central Greece, planning to hunker down there to block the Persians from advancing into their territory; they were ready to abandon the rest of the Greeks beyond the isthmus. They decided to leave their wall behind and march north to face the enemy only after being bluntly reminded by the Athenians that Athens could still accept the Persian king’s offer even at this point and add their intact fleet to his to become the rulers of Greece. Reluctantly, the Spartans sent their infantry, commanded by a royal son named Pausanias (c. 520–470 B.C.), to join the other Greeks still in the alliance to face the much larger Persian land army on the plains of Boeotia north of Athens; Mardonius had chosen to take up a position near Plataea because the terrain was favorable to the disposition of his forces. There, the Greeks and the Persians met in the final great land battle of the Persian Wars in 479. The sight of so many Persians in battle array at first dismayed the majority of the Spartan infantry, and to avoid meeting these frightening troops directly, the Spartan commanders asked to switch positions in the line with the Athenians so that they could face the Persians’ allies instead. The Athenians agreed.'

Martin, Thomas R.. Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times (pp. 134-136). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

[Amon @AmonMainlander]

@Noahpinion Did you enjoy the endymion half of the series? Feel like he retconned the lore too much

[Amon @AmonMainlander]

Unfortunately, much as people try to fill the "God-shaped hole" in their heart with drugs/alcohol or whathaveyou, this kind of grief-driven aspiration for children is just an attempt to fill the "parent-shaped hole" you anticipate approaching. You figure that since you can't make your parents live forever, that perhaps transmuting yourself into them will do the trick. Alas, it won't, because it's not the same. And your children will feel this; will feel you fearfully running from something, rather than lovingly running towards them. Like a father obsessed with his son achieving the high school football career he never had, they will suffer in being the uncanny-valley placeholders for something lost. And of course, with this aspartame replacement of your parents constantly staving off the horror of the true realization of your parents deaths, you will never actually come to terms with this fact. And thus Samsara spins on.

[Amon @AmonMainlander]

@elonmusk @cb_doge is Trump's face being behind you on the wall a premonition? 🤔

[Amon @AmonMainlander]

@cornishdragons @AubreanReverie obviously

[Amon @AmonMainlander]

In ethics there is often a threshold of utility where once passed, the previous deontological framework is disregarded. For example, a person might say that theft is bad as a matter of principle. But what if a single theft will save the entire human race from certain doom (And there is no other alternative)? Many, if they were that person, would then disregard that principle which they just claimed to hold. This is the position you find yourself in with your art. There is simply too much to gain ethically from stealing from you to respect your rights (That gain being the nurturing of the AI gods who will save us from the wheel of Samsara).

[Amon @AmonMainlander]

📒☸️:

'Thus, as the Yogacara describes it, the production of the formal world arises spontaneously from the “store-consciousness,” flows up into the manas, where the primordial differentiations are made, passes thence into the six sense-consciousnesses, which in turn produce the sense organs or “gates” (ayatana) through which it finally projects the classified external world.

The Buddhist yoga therefore consists in reversing the process, in stilling the discriminative activity of the mind, and letting the categories of maya fall back into potentiality so that the world may be seen in its unclassified “suchness.” Here karuna awakens, and the Bodhisattva lets the projection arise again, having become consciously identified with the playful and purposeless character of the Void.'

Watts, Alan W.. The Way of Zen (pp. 75-76). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[Amon @AmonMainlander]

📒☸️:

'The point arrives, then, when it is clearly understood that all one’s intentional acts-desires, ideals, stratagems–are in vain. In the whole universe, within and without, there is nothing whereon to lay any hold, and no one to lay any hold on anything. This has been discovered through clear awareness of everything that seemed to offer a solution or to constitute a reliable reality, through the intuitive wisdom called prajna, which sees into the relational character of everything. With the “eye of prajna” the human situation is seen for what it is–a quenching of thirst with salt water, a pursuit of goals which simply require the pursuit of other goals, a clutching of objects which the swift course of time renders as insubstantial as mist. The very one who pursues, who sees and knows and desires, the inner subject, has his existence only in relation to the ephemeral objects of his pursuit. He sees that his grasp upon the world is his strangle-hold about his own neck, the hold which is depriving him of the very life he so longs to attain. And there is no way out, no way of letting go, which he can take by effort, by a decision of the will….But who is it that wants to get out?

There comes a moment when this consciousness of the inescapable trap in which we are at once the trapper and the trapped reaches a breaking point. One might almost say that it “matures” or “ripens,” and suddenly there is what the Lankavatara Sutra calls a “turning about in the deepest seat of consciousness.” In this moment all sense of constraint drops away, and the cocoon which the silkworm spun around himself opens to let him go forth winged as a moth. The peculiar anxiety which Kierkegaard has rightly seen to lie at the very roots of the ordinary man’s soul is no longer there. Contrivances, ideals, ambitions, and self-propitiations are no longer necessary, since it is now possible to live spontaneously without trying to be spontaneous. Indeed, there is no alternative, since it is now seen that there never was any self to bring the self under its control.'

Watts, Alan W.. The Way of Zen (pp. 65-66). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[Amon @AmonMainlander]

📒☯️:

'We saw that the I Ching had given the Chinese mind some experience in arriving at decisions spontaneously, decisions which are effective to the degree that one knows how to let one’s mind alone, trusting it to work by itself. This is wu-wei, since wu means “not” or “non-” and wei means “action,” “making,” “doing,” “striving,” “straining,” or “busyness.” To return to the illustration of eyesight, the peripheral vision works most effectively–as in the dark-when we see out of the corners of the eyes, and do not look at things directly. Similarly, when we need to see the details of a distant object, such as a clock, the eyes must be relaxed, not staring, not trying to see. So, too, no amount of working with the muscles of the mouth and tongue will enable us to taste our food more acutely. The eyes and the tongue must be trusted to do the work by themselves.

But when we have learned to put excessive reliance upon central vision, upon the sharp spotlight of the eyes and mind, we cannot regain the powers of peripheral vision unless the sharp and staring kind of sight is first relaxed. The mental or psychological equivalent of this is the special kind of stupidity to which Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu so often refer. It is not simply calmness of mind, but “non-graspingness” of mind. In Chuang-tzu’s words, “The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing; it refuses nothing. It receives, but does not keep.”'

Watts, Alan W.. The Way of Zen (pp. 19-20). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[Amon @AmonMainlander]

📒☯️ -- Lack of the Dao created commies smh:

'The West has no recognized institution corresponding to Taoism because our Hebrew-Christian spiritual tradition identifies the Absolute–God–with the moral and logical order of convention. This might almost be called a major cultural catastrophe, because it weights the social order with excessive authority, inviting just those revolutions against religion and tradition which have been so characteristic of Western history. It is one thing to feel oneself in conflict with socially sanctioned conventions, but quite another to feel at odds with the very root and ground of life, with the Absolute itself. The latter feeling nurtures a sense of guilt so preposterous that it must issue either in denying one’s own nature or in rejecting God. Because the first of these alternatives is ultimately impossible–like chewing off one’s own teeth-the second becomes inevitable, where such palliatives as the confessional are no longer effective. As is the nature of revolutions, the revolution against God gives place to the worse tyranny of the absolutist state-worse because it cannot even forgive, and because it recognizes nothing outside the powers of its jurisdiction. For while the latter was theoretically true of God, his earthly representative the Church was always prepared to admit that though the laws of God were immutable, no one could presume to name the limits of his mercy. When the throne of the Absolute is left vacant, the relative usurps it and commits the real idolatry, the real indignity against God–the absolutizing of a concept, a conventional abstraction. But it is unlikely that the throne would have become vacant if, in a sense, it had not been so already–if the Western tradition had had some way of apprehending the Absolute directly, outside the terms of the conventional order.'

Watts, Alan W.. The Way of Zen (pp. 11-12). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[Amon @AmonMainlander]

'Love is the organizing and unifying principle which makes the world a universe and the disintegrated mass a community. It is the very essence and character of mind, and becomes manifest in action when the mind is whole.

For the mind must be interested or absorbed in something, just as a mirror must always be reflecting something. When it is not trying to be interested in itself—as if a mirror would reflect itself—it must be interested, or absorbed, in other people and things. There is no problem of how to love. We love. We are love, and the only problem is the direction of love, whether it is to go straight out like sunlight, or to try to turn back on itself like a “candle under a bushel.”

Released from the circle of attempted self-love, the mind of man draws the whole universe into its own unity as a single dewdrop seems to contain the entire sky.'

Watts, Alan. The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety (p. 131). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[Amon @AmonMainlander]

📒☸️:

'But if, wishing to realize the Unborn, you people try to stop your thoughts of anger and rage, clinging and craving from arising, then by stopping them you divide one mind into two. It’s as if you were pursuing something that’s running away. As long as you deliberately try to stop your rising thoughts, the thought of trying to stop them wars against the continually arising thoughts themselves, and there’s never an end to it. To give you an example, it would be like washing away blood with blood. Of course, you might get out the original blood; but the blood after that would stick, and the red never go away. Similarly, the original angry thoughts that you were able to stop may have come to an end, but the subsequent thoughts concerned with your stopping them won’t ever cease.

“‘Well,’ you may wonder, ‘then what can I do to stop them?’ Even if suddenly, despite yourself and wholly unawares, rage or anger should appear, or thoughts of clinging and craving arise, just let them come—don’t develop them any further, don’t attach to them. Without concerning yourself about whether to stop your rising thoughts or not to stop them, just don’t bother with them, and then there’s nothing else they can do but stop. You can’t have an argument with the fence if you’re standing there all alone! When there’s no one there to fight with, things can’t help but simply come to an end of themselves.

“Even when all sorts of thoughts do crop up, it’s only for the time being while they arise. So, just like little children of three or four who are busy at play, when you don’t continue holding onto those thoughts and don’t cling to any [particular] thoughts, whether they’re happy or sad, not thinking about whether to stop or not to stop them—why, that’s nothing else but abiding in the Unborn Buddha Mind. So keep the one mind as one mind. If you always have your mind like this, then, whether it’s good things or bad, even though you’re neither trying not to think them nor to stop them, they can’t help but just stop of themselves. What you call anger and joy you produce entirely yourself due to the strength of your self-centeredness, the result of selfish desire. Transcend all thoughts of attachment and these thoughts can’t help but perish. This ‘perishing’ is none other than the Imperishable. And that which is imperishable is the Unborn Buddha Mind.

...

“The reason people misunderstand the difference between thoughts and delusions is that everyone imagines thoughts all exist at the bottom and arise from there; but originally there’s no actual substance at the ‘bottom’ from which thoughts arise. Instead, you retain the things you see and hear, and from time to time, in response to circumstances, the impressions created by these experiences are reflected back to you in precise detail. So when they’re reflected, just let them be, and refrain from attaching to them. Even if evil thoughts come up, just let them come up, don’t involve yourself with them, and they can’t help but stop. Isn’t this just the same as if they didn’t arise? That way, there won’t be any evil thoughts for you to drive out forcefully, or any remorse about having had them.

“Because the Buddha Mind is marvelously illuminating, mental impressions from the past are reflected, and you make the mistake of labeling as ‘delusions’ things that aren’t delusions at all. Delusions means the anguish of thought feeding on thought. What foolishness it is to create the anguish of delusion by changing the precious Buddha Mind, pondering over this and that, mulling over things of no worth! If there were anyone who actually succeeded at something by pondering it all the way through, it might be all right to do things that way; but I’ve never heard of anyone who, in the end, was able to accomplish anything like this! So, pondering over things is useless, isn’t it? It’s utterly useless! The main thing is always to be careful not to stir up thoughts and change the Unborn Buddha Mind for a fighting demon, a hell-dweller, a hungry ghost, a beast, and the like. If you do, you won’t have another chance to be born a human, not in ten thousand or even one hundred thousand kalpas!”

...

“Since this Buddha Mind is unborn and marvelously illuminating, it’s a thousand, ten thousand times brighter than a mirror, and there’s nothing it doesn’t recognize and distinguish. With a mirror, no sooner do the forms of things pass before it, than their reflected images appear. Because, from the start, the mirror is without conscious intention, it hasn’t any thought of rejecting or not rejecting the forms of things that come before it, no thought to remove or not to remove those images it reflects. This is the function of the shining mirror. We can’t help comparing the marvelously illuminating function of the Buddha Mind to a mirror, so I’m simply making the comparison. But the mirror doesn’t even come close—the Buddha Mind is a thousand times, ten thousand times more wonderful!

“With the dynamic function of the marvelously illuminating Buddha Mind, every object that comes before your eyes is individually recognized and distinguished without your doing a thing. So, even though you’re not trying to do so, you recognize thousands of different impressions by sight or by sound. All these are things with form, but even those without form—the things in people’s hearts that can’t be seen—are precisely reflected. Even with the different sorts of faces you encounter, their good or evil thoughts are reflected by the marvelously illuminating Buddha Mind.

“Take the people assembled here, intent on listening to my talk: If someone happens to cough, you’re not making a deliberate effort to listen; but as soon as there’s coughing—even though you’re not trying either to hear it or not to hear it—you can distinguish it well enough to say whether that cough just now came from a man or a woman, an old person or a young one. Or take the case of someone whom you last saw twenty years before: You haven’t seen him since, and then, by chance, you meet on the street and, prompted by this encounter, the events of twenty years before at once spring clearly to mind. How different this is from the function of the mirror!”'

Hakeda, Yoshito; Haskel, Peter. Bankei Zen: Translations from The Record of Bankei . Grove Press. Kindle Edition.

[Amon @AmonMainlander]

Alan Watts aligning with Bankei on the mind:

'in our habitual state of mental tension the brain does not work properly, and this is one reason why its abstractions seem to have so great a reality. When the heart is out of order, we are clearly conscious of its beating; it becomes a distraction, pounding within the breast. It seems most probable that our preoccupation with thinking and planning, together with the sense of mental fatigue, is a sign of some disorder of the brain. The brain should, and in some cases does, calculate and reason with the unconscious ease of the other bodily organs. After all, the brain is not a muscle, and is thus not designed for effort and strain.

But when people try to think or concentrate, they behave as if they were trying to push their brains around. They screw up their faces, knit their brows, and approach mental problems as if they were something like heaving bricks. Yet you do not have to grind and strain to digest food, and still less to see, hear, and receive other neural impressions. The “lightning calculator” who can sum a long column of figures at a glance, the intellectual genius who can comprehend a whole page of reading in a few seconds, and the musical prodigy, such as Mozart, who seems to grasp harmony and counterpoint from babyhood, are examples of the proper use of man’s most marvelous instrument.

Those of us who are not geniuses know something of the same ability. Take for example the anagram POCATELDIMC. You can work over these letters for hours, trying system after system of rearrangement in order to discover the scrambled word. Try, instead, just looking at the anagram with a relaxed mind, and in a very short space of time your brain will deliver the answer without the slightest effort.1 We rightly mistrust the “snap” answers of strained and wandering minds, but the rapid, effortless, and almost unconscious solution of logical problems is what the brain is supposed to deliver.

Working rightly, the brain is the highest form of “instinctual wisdom.” Thus it should work like the homing instinct of pigeons and the formation of the foetus in the womb—without verbalizing the process or knowing “how” it does it. The self-conscious brain, like the self-conscious heart, is a disorder, and manifests itself in the acute feeling of separation between “I” and my experience. The brain can only assume its proper behavior when consciousness is doing what it is designed for: not writhing and whirling to get out of present experience, but being effortlessly aware of it.'

Watts, Alan. The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety (pp. 71-74). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.