legba lodge: 11/1/25

.. if you help everybody, you help nobody ..

.. but don't bother trying, cuz that's impossible ..

.. or is it ..

"You know what's so elegant about this little game, Jake? Nobody knows where the enemy is. They don't even know he exists. He's in every one of their heads .. and they trust him, because they think they are him. If you try to destroy him to save them, they'll destroy you to save him. It's beautiful, man .. you have to admire the opponent's elegance"

- from Revolver

“Your body doesnt need much to keep going; it’s your brain that you have to take care of. If you can make your brain imagine a better place, it can get you through anything”

- from Roofman

Energy, Aenergy, an urge, eh?

(AKA whatever happened to Uri Geller?)

And, where does it go, your energetic jujitsu? Out your mouth, in your mouth, out through your fists or lean in with a kiss.

We can't help escape the grand something - even when we die there is no way for the existence of our actions to be obliterated, we live on, and [to my knowledge] everyone here has yet to be able to make a determination on whether room for action continues to exist in some personal sense after passing on to the other side.

There'll at least be little simulations of you, your personality, likes and habits, spinning around in the heads of everyone you leave behind. Think, what would [insert selected person] do?

You can almost hear them talking to you, maybe sometimes screaming or cursing from out the depth of the dark dead past. We should all probably try to ignore those ones, but with more forceful memories, it may not be as easy to forget as a calm, quiet "nice work".

Just like everyone ends up listening to the loudest people in the crowd, those most able to flick the emotional pinwheels, the living memory of bygone demagogues, authoritarians, and all around general assholes tend to stick around in the mind. At least hopefully only there in the mind and not in the room next door.

The amount of energy bottled up in people is an unfathomably deep seething abyss. We have and continue to be drastically transforming the surface, and depths, of the Earth - even the space outside the gravity well isn't safe: we are polluting outer space [and Mars, and the Moon] etc.

There had been untold numbers of human bodies toiling away to build the great pyramids and the great wall of China, but that is only a small slice of the picture, since the motive power here, the source impulse, was to be found in the mind of the emperor or sacerdotal priests or whoever.

The fountain of power lies within the human mind. The terrible force of hydrogen bombs riding along on intercontinental ballistic missiles took its baby steps right out of someone's noggin. Now, you might say, that the energy that can be released from nuclear energy is wholly unrelated to its genesis in the human mind, but how can that be?

How can anything be separated from its beginning without obscuring the essential nature of that being? The consequential train of effects can never be considered apart from the [first] cause without doing irreparable harm to understanding.

The early (?) WWII era scientists had an idea and that idea, that supposedly small constellation of fluxing neurons and fleeting words in air, writ down on page, guiding the hand of human technicians, was the seed of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The ball started rolling and then... it blew up.

The point is the smallest things, subtle things, can have untold power of effect. The kaleidoscopic forms that flit behind our eyes are really the most powerful things that exist on this planet. If there is such potency locked up "in" there, when directed to physical operations in the external world, then perhaps the mind is something more than the supposed mass of grey matter.

The force of the world's technological achievements seems to suggest, to me at least, that the mind and its contents contain a reservoir of power and potency far beyond the mechanical equivalent of work of a (single) human body.

And, if the energy of an atomic weapon lay hid inside someone's cranium, all wrapped up and waiting to be unboxed, then maybe the role of the mind, as pronounced in some traditions, in the creation of the world has something of an energetic basis to lay its foundation upon.

We can reach outside the limits of the repetitions of the past and pull back new forms from the realms of potentiality. How could a mere lump of jelly, a sack of flesh and blood and bone, do so much if it is not even firmly tethered to the real?

"If you don't go to jail, you're doing it wrong, okay?"

- from The Lowdown

.. the problem with a con cept like 'ethical investing' is that it's superficial .. which isn't to say that unethical investing is better; not at all .. but if we aren't con stantly improving, we're standing still, & how is that progressive ..?

.. & it is in that spirit that we might seek to release the term "investing" from merely material matters .. to invest effectively & con structively, one should surely live that Way, carrying that posture into everything else they do too ..

.. such a change of perspective necessitates a new term to talk about it, so let's use "energetic investing" .. & where there's energetic investing, there must surely also be energetic accounting ..

.. so, where does your energy go, what do you put (of) yourself into ..? .. our energy goes to such tedious & pointless things sometimes, but ultimately we have to sign off, as it were; or do we ..?

.. surely the ethical thing to do is to avoid such pointless waste; at least as much as it's reasonably possible to .. but then again, sometimes that just isn't an option ..

.. the trickster hypothesis, in a sort of John Keel, Jacques Vallée, CG Jung trajectory, is broadly that there is an agent that at least appears to enjoy foiling our very best laid plans ..

.. from an animistic perspective, what we know is, in the end, a small part of what's out there, & it's almost naive to assume there aren't other levels of intelligence ..

.. needless to say, such a trickster intelligence can, & does pose a challenge to making con sidered choices; to investing our energy response ably ..

.. but we shouldn't be too hard on the trickster; sometimes, the most effective way to see a flaw in our reasoning is to see it play out in 'real life', thereby gaining a wider, more thorough perspective ..

.. nor is this trickster the only difficulty we might encounter in making good choices & soundly investing our energy .. there is also what Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek frequently refers to as 'ideology' ..

.. for Žižek, ideology is not simply an illusion which hides reality from us, but rather the 'illusion' which structures reality itself .. such a theoretical position con veys an essential point, namely that reality is not a spectator sport ..

.. in fact, it's hard to stress this point enough, though Žižek has certainly tried .. we're always already participating in shaping reality, even simply by perceiving it, & therefore can't help but share response ability for it .. especially if we want to invest (our energy) well ..