George in Uniform

A gentleman from Okinawa asked for any pics of me in uniform. This is it other than what I have already posted. (1) Parris Island (2) Me, my brothers (3) Me, my Mom

war styles

You do not want to get in between two people quarreling. Unless you are an idiot or a saint (the two are not all that different).

A person in the heat of battle is not easily distracted. Too busy giving shots and receiving them.

One thing I have learned about humans is if it is sticking in their craw, some will try to swallow it, some to spit it out. Some go on a crusade. Some hunker down.

That craw stuff is bile and bitter vetch. And watch out if it is YOU, person or group, sticking in the craw, because the crusader will use their war stuff on you. Slitting their own throat in doing so. The spitting crusaders are throat slitters, cutting off their own brains from their hearts.

The hunker downers tend to flood their own guts with bile. They wish to stomp and fuss and wear a righteous cape and roll their eyes and seek allies, but instead swallow and internalize.

You don't want to get in between them. Because there is no between. One slitting their own throat. The other busting their own gut.

Whatever happened to love you might ask. But you forget. This is war.

I know, I know. I should look at all the arguments for each one's righteous cause. But all I can see is what they are doing to themselves. Throat slicing. Gut busting.

Maybe they have come to terms by now and I am agonizing over nothing.

New Book

"Radical Openness is above all not a self-help book, although that, as a retired university psychologist and talented psychotherapist, is a book George certainly could have written. Nor is this, his latest offering, a manual for living a conventional spiritual life--though indeed, a robust sense of living in soul or spirit while knowing the Divine as a living reality permeates this book....

That these "irruptions of the heart" are conveyed in a lean, muscular, martial style of writing is no surprise either, for if I imagine George to be anything, I imagine him as a triple-hyphenated threat, the epitome of the warrior-philosopher-poet, and his well honed skills in the Asian martial arts are apparent in the parry, thrust, and the interwhirling play of his ideas." -- Foreword, Bradley Olson, Ph.D.

Radical Openness is available at iUniverse and at Amazon.

jelly bellies

The bodhisattva, having taken the vow to not enter Nirvana until all have entered, now sees that all have already always been in Nirvana, and

becomes a laughing buddha, a Hotei, a jelly-belly with a back-pack of goodies, on the road with all the other dharma bums, and

on the more serious side, founds schools with teachings and students and assignments and certificates of enlightenment, which

produce bodhisattvas who take vows to not enter Nirvana until all have entered, until

at some point the world is filled with bodhisattvas refusing to enter Nirvana in which they already are

settling down

Breathe in to your heart area.
When breathing out, breathe down
and inside to your balance point.

From Warrior of Spirit Handbook

like our cousins the trees

Like our cousins the trees,
we root and ground
while spreading our branches
to the cosmos.

From Warrior of Spirit Handbook

suffering as coagulation

Do you know why we suffer? It is because we are coagulated; we believe in certainty. As Francisco Varela has put it, we create a world, "forget we have done so, and then...fixate on it as certainty." Then we get angry because others are not going along with our creative design. We think they are mean, stupid, immoral, and a threat. The last is true. They threaten our world, and like Yahweh of old, we are ready to smite, to kill all "that piss against the wall," and the squatters too. This flaming of rage, of anger, of righteous indignation burns our butts. We smolder and blaze in our self-created hell of coagulated certainty. This has become our identity and we will not let it go. This is the plight of the beef-on-beef approach to life.

armor

The best armor a Warrior of Spirit can wear is no armor at all.
With heart wide open, one walks through hell unscathed.
When totally open, there is no opening.