Samsara - or the other one

Jesus was a tantric, wasnt he?  Magdalene was a priestess, so the rumor goes...

In America, we can be buddhists, yogis, taoists, Christians, druids, and anything else we want to be all at the same time.  There are plenty of dogmas, but we are free to ignore them all.  This is category defiance.

Good riddance.

  We dont fit in categories.  Reality doesnt fit in categories, but cognition requires a self-reflexive syntax that does, so our thinking minds are perpetually categorizing the un-categorizable.  The syntax of cognition depends on the categories of either/or, but reality is both/and...

Spirituality or sexuality?  

Renunciation or gratification?

Heaven?  

Or... hell?

Religion is either/or,

Tantra is both/and...

Reality is paradoxical, so pondering 'why bad things happen to good people' leads us nowhere but headache-land.  There is some  "good" in the "bad" stuff,  and there is some "bad" in the "good" stuff... Because theyre just labels, not absolute values.  The labels are inherently empty...  just a temporary and temporal perspective, nothing more.

the map is not the territory, and language is just a map.  Language may approximate but cannot replicate truth...

(the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao...)

Orthodox sages have concluded that the eternal is to be pursued, and the impermanent is to be shunned, for the impermanent leads to suffering. 

 Yet it could be said that this very either/or dichotomy leads to judgment and consequently craving/aversion/suffering...

...so the unorthodox viewpoint declares that the either/or dichotomy between the eternal and the impermanent is the true cause of suffering... and by embracing BOTH the eternal AND the impermanent - yang and yin, unity and diversity, father God and mother Nature, masculine and feminine, bliss and suffering, the Absolute and the relative, the in-breath and the out-breath, nirvana and samsara, form and emptiness - that we transcend dualistic opposites and experience union... 

So the heretodox movement, whether it be tantric, or daoist, or nazarite, is the attempt to weave two distinct polarities into a composite whole.

Or, as Shiva once told Parvati, "Every inbreath has its opposite, its dissolution.  Find the still point between them-"

Independence

If a social network successfully keeps itself from being gamed by advertisers, marketers, propaganda, and big brother, it will ultimately outperform government in the field of public service, won't it?  I am proposing that a healthy, decentralized, user-driven (rather than corporate/state driven) blockchain verified social network will eventually evolve inevitably into a cybernetic public service mutual fund, investing in the public good at optimum cost effectiveness.

Hear me out:  social networks are where people invest.  We are investing our ATTENTION via social networks.  And social networks are both democratic and meritocratic - everyone has a say, and the best ideas rise to the top.  Memes become viral through the operation of free-market principles - there is a high demand for good content and thus the supply of good content propagates virally.  

What is this 'good content'?  Good content comes in two categories:  The truth, and what makes people happy.  The market is driven by people's desire to be happy.  And even though the corporation/state is heavily invested in manipulating people into believing that more new shoes, more new clothes, more new cars, more new tvs,  more movies, more new wars, more new fears, and more new weapons to defeat more new enemies will give us happiness,  it is a very structurally unsound proposition requiring an exorbitant level of manipulation.   This is enormously cost prohibitive, and self-defeating in the long run.  And all that stuff didn't make us happy. 

In other words, the corporation/state is providing us with 'bad content' and telling us its 'good content', while at the same time doing everything it can to prevent authentic 'good content' from going viral - and yet good content is seeping into the public domain, where every attempt is made censor it.

And the censorship isn't working, just as free market economics predicts.  Where there is a demand, supply will inevitably arise.  We want to be entertained, and we want the truth too, even if it sucks.  As it becomes more and more obvious to everyone that government is ultimately what stands in the way of real peace and prosperity, because Empire requires slaves and war, we will no longer look to Empire to give us the peace and prosperity we so deeply desire and instead we will create it ourselves, using the internet, without Empire's consent or approval.  Economic prosperity is a natural consequence of a healthy and vibrant ecology, while the current paradigm is about as appealing as following a herd of lemmings off a cliff into lava.  Government has lost a critical mass of support, as the Deep State is unelected and unrepresentative.  In our hearts we have declared Independence, with precedent.  And so we turn to our ecologies for survival, as we always have-
Make gardening the centerpiece of public education.  That's sustainability.