RE: 20th March 2025 - Ain't Goin' Out Like A Punk Never

Hey VC.

Thank you for your kind words VC. And don't worry about my intention in sharing the Zottegem farm story with you. I felt that it was time to put it out here as i have been drafting a video on this in my mind. I wanted to do this talk on video once i moved out of the rat race here, but i guess you and @manclar the Charro get to hear it first.

I would like to share a magic show with you...Richard Turner...an American card mechanic (that means someone devoted to the study and applications of artifice at the card table). He developed an eye condition by the age of 9 i think which left him completely blind in the normal sense...yet his vision as he describes it in the long MIT interview is...strange.

He became the foremost expert on card cheating, and as a blind man who created his own card cheating techniques, without ever seeing any in life, only going by feeling, is amazing. His personal bottom deals, second deals, turn-over second deals, one hand second deals, his blind card stacking, blind card counting, dead cutting (that means cutting to a location of a deck of cards to a specific card, or a specific number of cards with zero margin of error; and the many other routines you shall enjoy on the interview) is simply amazing.

It was Canadian Dai Vernon, who immigrated to America and became very prolific in his work on prestidigitation (most honored at Hollywood's Magic Castle), once lied to a young Richard Turner, telling him that he saw an amazing display of card artifice at the table. Dai described techniques which had never been achieved but only in his mind's fantasy. Decades later Richard Turner, the man without eyes, achieved what Dai dreamt of...and what Dai dreamt of...you will enjoy in the video...

The Iching is known throughout the word as a book of wisdom and divination. But unbeknownst to people, there are 2 different types of this book. One is the original bronze age text from the Zhou dynasty, which was a book reserved only for the Royal families of the time. It was a book for diviners, passed down only from diviners to diviners. It was a book that held a system of codifying this world and all it's happenings, circumstances, the workings of Heaven and Earth, the myriad transformations of cause and effect; it was used in a time surrounded by undeveloped moral ethical concepts, a time of barbarity, of regular human sacrifice in a culture that believed these things pleased the spirits and ancestors; it was a book compiled in a time of heavy ancestral worship. It was a book that held a deep system of understanding and aligning with the world, through a series of 64 hexagrams, each with 6 lines. These hexagram symbols go way beyond the Zhou dynasty, according to excavation expeditions. It's a man made system of being very accurate clarity to the present, but it also has the capability, this man-made system of codifying this world, to bring clarity to the future and past. The ancient-ancients also new that mathematics was the language of the gods and blueprint of this world, and in development of mathematics during this Zhou dynasty time, it was a serious breakthrough for the consciousness of mankind. They basically found a way to read into the Universe, in a language of maths, symbols, omens, portents and lateral thinking, and codified all possibly happenings on this existence into 64 symbols that have such oracular power. It's the closest man has ever come to the Divine by intellectual means.

The Zhou Dynasty Iching (or Yi) was used later on by tacticians like Zhuge Liang to conduct military campaigns; he used it to create many battle-ground formations using the concept of the trigrams (aka the Bagua, the Eight Primordial symbols). The Yi was then later used in Feng Shui, in Daoist internal alchemical practices (like Chi practice, Dan Tian practices that lead to the Philosopher's Stone/Elixer of Immortality).

By the time the Han dynasty came about, the Zhou Dynasty Yi was transformed from a book of divination used in a time of war and bloodshed, to a book of Confucian wisdom. This rendition includes the core bronze age text alongside 10 Chapters written by Confucian scholars called the Ten Wings, all explaining the Yi from a Daoist/Confucian point of few. The Iching (Confucian-influenced revamp of the core bronze age text) is a different system of divination that the Zhou dynasty style.

As for Buddhism, in the greater Vehicle there's a Sutra called the Lotus Sutra. It's one of the most important Sutras. Can check it out here, skip to "main themese" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Sutra

At this current stage in life, all i can do is stop lamenting, let what needs drying dry, because things don't remain dry always. I still have life within me, so i continue my journey of learning, refining and perfecting.

Witnessing my heart die can be positive thing. My passion for the arts and my trust in people may have been stripped from me, but i'm sure a small part is in there somewhere. That's the backup harddrive partition. For now, i walk on.