Disqus - Latest Comments for Lion Kimbro

Re: Создайте карту ваших достижений в жизни

Lion Kimbro — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:17:52 -0000

Hi; I created the map above, and I've read your dialog in discussion.

I am absolutely in agreement, that it is NOT about recording successes; Rather, it is about seeing your life as a whole.

If you can decipher the English in the map, you'll see that it is not so much about successes and failures, as it is about: "What did I believe at the time?" "What books was I reading?" "What was happening in the world?" "What was I interested in?"

Even if you can't read English, surely you can see the black hearts, which are romances gone very, very wrong. (..!) If you can read the English, you can see about when I worked at a gas station during the post dot-com tech draught, etc.,.

The goal is to see the pattern of life, and how the individual connects with the society, and to keep a sense of what the forces are in the world, that are at work, both internal and external. It is to connect with life, and see across time.

Thank you for the attention, and I *do* highly recommend making a map like this. I see it as basically a spiritual practice.

Re: Damanhur in the News

Lion Kimbro — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 07:32:55 -0000

Very briefly, but the question of "freedom" and "zombie" is an interesting one.

Basically, the concept of "freedom" is turned upside-down at Damanhur. Whereas out here, we think of freedom as "that relaxed freedom at the end of the day, after we're done with work, wherein we can do whatever we want," they think of freedom as "the ability to persue dreams."

If you have dreams but can't bring yourself to the discipline to carry them out, -- as far as Damanhurian philosophy is concerned, "You aren't free."

What this results in, is Damanhurians who are intensely dedicated to their work, whatever it is, and who are intensely eager to work on multi-person projects, because divine results require the work of more than one person.

My understanding is that the ethic is, "find your inner nature, find others with similar dreams and complementary natures, and work together with them to make something real." This is all within the framework of global change and betterment of the human condition.

Damanhurians do not take vacations, do not take holidays, and basically work all day, every day. (*) This is all taken on by themselves, and it is always clear to them, "This is your path of volition." How does this work out? The path of the Initiate forces some very hard questions on people: "You are aging. What have you done with your life? What are you doing with your life? Are you truly free? What is freedom? What happened to your idealistic visions of youth? Did people get to you? Did you grow tired? Will you find solace in idleness?"

(*) There *are* things called "Journeys," which are roughly equivalent to vacations. But they're "vacations with a purpose," generally; To develop other parts of the individual, to explore strange new concepts, to do metaphysical research, to carry out a ritual, or whatever: It's not, "Let's go to the beach and get a tan."

Damanhur moves at a steady clip. If you don't keep up, you start to move towards the periphery; They're not about slowing down. That said, if you request help, or you want to move faster, they'll share tips, heart, and slow down for you, so that you can go fast again. They have a complex relationship between competition and cooperation. Damanhurians are very competitive. At the same time, I am hard pressed to think of a more sensitive and caring and sharing community. I had a fairly low key bad evening once, and the next day, everybody seemed to have known about it, and was asking me, "Are you okay? What happened?" -- even staff at the grocery store, who I didn't even know!

This may all sound very paradoxical, but I have never met a happier people, and with such a heavy investment in each other's mutual happiness. They laugh, sing, smile, hug, and there is a strong sense of solidarity, just about everywhere. When they say "Con te," they really mean it.

They have deep psychic sensitivity. I don't mean "psi phenomenon," but rather: They're very sensitive to moods, feelings, the subjective experience within themselves and others, mindset, set, and setting. They live in a surreal world, both in terms of their thoughts, and in terms of their environment (pillars everywhere, artworks everywhere, labyrinths, circuits, little statues of people, and on and on.)

I thought the observation above of "Falco is an illusionist" was interesting; I think he would say so himself, directly, if he hasn't already. In the Path of the Initiate books, there are many references to "The Power of Maya," the power of illusion. Their concept of illusion is not negative, though; Rather, it is conscious dreaming that they're focusing on. They don't see illusion as falsehood, so much as they see it as a conduit both of possible reality, and Being (Truth.)

They take apart language, look at connotations and associations, ritual, art, geometry, form, time -- quite rigorously, and measure the affects of these forces on themselves and others. They take imagination very seriously, (while retaining humor, of course, ...,) and the path from imagination to reality very seriously. So "illusion" is something they think about a lot, and then how to transfer reality from where it is, to what the "illusion" is. They have a very complex and baroque metaphysics, for researching and communicating all of these ideas, and carrying them out.

Damanhur is really difficult to understand and to describe. I visited for a week with a friend. I got into it immediately, my friend had a much harder time initially. After we talked, and worked there for a while, he saw it the way I did. If you focus on "are these ideas real or not," you're sort of missing the point. I mean, the whole Path of the Initiate book series is deliberately and explicitly framed as fiction. My impression is that many, perhaps (?) most Damanhurians, do not take these intentional myths literally. But there is deep truth to what is being said. It's hard to argue with the idea of, "We're aging," and the questions of, "What is man? What is life for? What does your life mean, in the grand scheme of things?"

Re: Stay-At-Home Mothers Aren’t Worth It

Lion Kimbro — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 16:12:45 -0000

I suppose in an atomized every-family-fends-for-itself society, this makes some sort of sense.

I have difficulty relating with it, because I don't believe in the every-family-fends-for-itself way of life that we have brought ourselves to, though.

There are "compensations" outside of money and salary. To go to an extreme in order to illustrate clearly, consider an indigenous tribe: There's no monetary compensation (there's no money period,) but there are still feedback loops that make sure laundry is done, food served, children raised, sex enjoyed, houses built, and so on.

I think our efforts to tie everything to a monetary system in the name of efficiency has turned our shared vision of the world into something like a catalog, which may be the best metaphor for the world that we have today. Time=Money, which is then "spent" on purchasing goods, security, relationships, and experiences.

What are the alternatives? Michael Ende (Momo, the Neverending Story,) had some radically different equations (Time is Life, for example.) Living by commitment to a vision that emerges from within. This may sound like catalog culture (because there is an illusion of choice,) but it is actually very different: authenticity and creativity are not necessarily experienced as choice.

I can envision societies that "choose," by the visions that come from their heads, to compensate women for doing laundry, as a class. This seems quite legitimate to me, as a social decision.

Some alternative thinking here.

Re: Goals Are Not the Problem. You Are the Problem.

Lion Kimbro — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 13:55:44 -0000

I like the approach of Alexander Kjerulf, above: attention to what our goals are.

I'd add some perspective on: the role of goal-setting in our lives, and the great pattern of life.

Somehow, in the successful-entrepreneur-to-be culture I find myself in, I find a wealth of selfish goals: Make $X dollars, by year such-and-such; Get a house, a boat, find a pretty wife, live by the beach, and so on. It's not that I'm angry about this; But rather: they seem to be on the small side. The genie from the bottle can demonstrate: "What would you like?" and the person responds: "Wealth, castle, and pretty wife." This is a shallow dream. Contrast with Oberto Airaudi, founder of Damanhur, or the dreams of activists, many of whom are doing the work of saving the Earth, and so on. Now who is dreaming large, and who is dreaming small?

And why are we reading (success) books that encourage small dreams?

I'd point to Napoleon Hill's later works, nearer to the end of his life; He wrote a book called, "You Can Work Your Own Miracles." Most people don't point to this book, but I found it intensely interesting and invigorating. Napoleon Hill goes deeper into his true cards (spirituality,) and he notes that he was short-sighted to pay attention only to extravagant stories of personal wealth accumulation. I believe he saw that much of the work that goes on is not in steel and empire (which, surely, is important,) but much closer to the ground.

Re: New condo looks like ’sprawling octopus’

Lion Kimbro — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 16:14:00 -0000

Ben's comment seems fair to me. It does seem a little strange to me that a Denny's is being considered for landmark status. (Perhaps it's an adobe?)

Movies seem like things that should be downloaded, seen online, rather than having a whole store that you have to walk to.

Restaurants, stores, movie theaters, traditional theatres, activity centers, -- these are the sorts of things I can understand wanting to walk around.

Is there an effort or a plan to locate these things somewhere? If not, then saying, "Oh no, it's turning into condos," doesn't seem very regenerative to me. If an effort is being criticized, (such as turning this into condos, which is very useful to people,) then I would want to see the effort that was supported -- an effort to have stores and shops as a part of a vision.

Should the bottom floor of the condo building be a grocery store, for example? Can the bottom floor be shops and stores?

Re: New Ballard bumper stickers

Lion Kimbro — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 07:27:08 -0000

I don't understand why anybody would buy these condos, and news reports seem to indicate that they're not selling. As far as I can tell, they're 1/2 - 1/3 the space, for the same price as a house. Perhaps I'm just missing something about their appeal?