Emptybottle.org

Music is a thing that I like. Music is probably a thing you like, too. Sharing music that we like, well, that’s a fine and beautiful thing to do.

I know there are about a million ways to perform that noble activity on various hand-held devices promoted and sold by various corporations who are interested in drawing you inexorably and perhaps, given their understanding of the way our brains work, irrevocably into their cash-and-credit cloudy chance-of-rain walled garden. And hey, friends and other people who somehow wound up reading this because your favored search engine just doesn’t know what the fuck: that’s just fine. Hell, I own APPLE INCORPORATED DEVICES too, and I’m down with googly android plastic pals who can mediate my experiences as I attempt to make connections with other humans. I’m a PC diehard, I guess.

It’s all good, until it’s not.

Here’s a thing I’ve been thinking about lately: the Mahayana Buddhist doctrine of Emptiness — unlike the ‘traditional’ No-Self doctrine that gravity-dropped straight rectified wisdom-turd out of the Buddha’s ass and I reckon gets it just right, self as process not thing, self as flame not candle — well, that Mahayana Emptiness Doctrine is intellectually indulgent incoherence packaged up in the lame wrapping paper of ‘mystery’. There is no wisdom there, I reckon. Dude, I know the mahayana became the dominant vehicle of Buddhist experience 16 or 17 centuries ago. I know. I don’t give a shit.

Even more disappointing, and, if you sit down and actually think about for a minute or ten, offensive to the Heart Of The Buddha Matter was the introduction of worship-worthy deities — that ludicrous ‘celestial buddha’ bullshit — where suddenly WAAHEY! there are goddamn superheroes in these crazy ‘heaven’ places, like AMITABHA BUDDHA and MAITREYA BUDDHA and SPIDERMAN BUDDHA, to whom you are supposed to pray for boons and interventions. It’s all wrong, it’s all corrupt and compromised, and that over-elaborate nonsense arose and got traction around the same time and to the same degree if not in exactly the same way that the message of the historical Christ fella was and is corrupted and compromised longish and long after the Fact. It disappoints, as every modern (even if by ‘modern’ you’re going back a dozen centuries or more) religious repack does. Fuck that noise. I’m no fundamentalist, but I am annoyed by fuckery of all stripes.

Wait, what was I talking about? Right: music and the sharing of it.

I love the music, my friends. And I stumbled onto ThisIsMyJam a month or two back, and I’ve been weekly or more often pointing to songs, generally while in my cups in my ritualistic Friday night worship sessions, and I recommend them to you. No embeddies, more’s the pity, so I link.

At least until the site gets bought out, and compromised, and corrupted: please come and join me in my weekly worship.