A boxer is about to engage in a boxing match. One of his eyes is wide open and the other squinting tight. He gets a punch in the squinting eye – his opponent whacked a tight eye.
win – toa
A reporter is interviewing a runner who has just won a race, with a gold medal around his neck. The runner says “I tore out of the starting blocks and then tore past my opponents and I won.”
lose – ngaro
Two men are rowing a boat in a race. One of them gives up and says “There’s no point – we’re going lose.” The other man yells “Nah! Row!”
draw – ōrite
The Black Knight from the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, missing his arms and legs, says “Alrighty, we’ll call it a draw.”
Result – tukunga iho
A man is watching some Test Match Cricket. A friend comes in and says “Have we got a result yet?” The first man replies “The result is taking an eon.”
Strategy – rautaki
Two boys a playing a strategy game, like Risk or Chess. One of them thinks for a long time, then lays out on the game board a row of tacks.
The Maori word for ‘attack’ – huaki – sounds like the English word ‘hokey’ as in hokey-pokey icecream
Tactic – rauhanga
Two girls are playing tic-tac-toe on a sheet of paper. After the game is over, one of them takes the paper and hangs it up in a row of similar papers. She is the row hanger.
Violence – whakarekereke
There are two wrecked cars, and a man comes and whacks them with a stick. He is trying to whack a wreck wreck.
attack – huaki(-na)
A woman is carrying a container of hokey-pokey icecream. Suddenly the hokey-pokey grows arms and attacks her.
defend – wawao
A boxer is throwing punches at a sparring partner, who is defending them. Then the boxer pulls out a dagger, and the sparring partner says “Whoa, whoa!”
Competition – tauwhāinga
There is a throwing competition where competitors have to pick up a dwarf by the toe and fling him through the air. The competition is for toe flingers.
cooperate – mahi tahi
A swarm of servants is cooperating to dress a man in a business suit. They finish cooperating, but he does not have a necktie, so he asks “Where is my tie?”
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The above is an excerpt from the upcoming Learn Maori Vocabulary With Mnemonics, by Jeff Ngatai, due to be published by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2017/18.
Almost all of the arguments for legal cannabis apply for legal psilocybin
21% of Americans now live in states that have legal recreational cannabis, and an overwhelming majority of them live in states with legal medicinal cannabis. It’s now obvious to every honest person that cannabis is a medicine, and that the recreational positives of it vastly outweigh the negatives. However, even when cannabis law reform wins its inevitable comprehensive victory, it won’t be the end of the struggle for cognitive liberty.
The struggle for cognitive liberty has been waged for several thousand years. It arguably begun when the first ever conversational topic became taboo – perhaps when some alpha male enforced a rule that meant his tribe were forbidden to speak of a certain subject. Since then, the forces of cognitive enslavement have only become more aggressive and more sophisticated.
In the New Zealand of today, we plebs are not even allowed to smoke medicinal flowers such as cannabis, not even if one of us has a severe medical condition that causes them to suffer badly. We’re not allowed to because the deconditioning effect of cannabis means that all of the shameless bullshit and lies that the political class have pumped into our heads for decades would be at risk of getting rejected.
Because the conditioning that enslaves us is profitable to the ruling class – as it makes us compliant, submissive and obedient – it is worth money. It could effectively be considered capital. This means that allowing the population cognitive liberty to question their own psychological enslavement, and the means to achieve this liberty, is a risk to the accumulated wealth of the ruling class.
This is true of cannabis, and is true ten times over for psychedelics.
Ultimate cognitive liberty comes from the complete destruction of the conditioned mind (or programmed mind). The behaviours that have been deliberately programmed into us have, and are intended to have, the ultimate effect of making us unhappy, because there is nothing more profitable than human misery.
This refers to the programmed behaviours that the ruling class force into your head at school, in the workplace, and through the mass media. They do this because your slavery is profitable, and because it allows them to impose a form of order on society that is beneficial to them. For these two reasons, the ruling class opposes the legalisation of drugs that allow cognitive liberty to flourish.
For example, it is known well enough by the people who need to know such things that smoking cannabis makes a person less desiring of, and less attached to, material possessions. This is because it has the effect of reducing suffering, which makes a person less likely to work long hours to save the money necessary to buy the crap that they mistakenly believe will make them happy. So reduced suffering means reduced profits for the ruling class.
Therefore, maximum profitability demands that the cognitive liberty of the people who might question this brainwashing be minimised.
When the Western World was first exposed to the power of psychedelics, we just shat our pants. We were in no way emotionally mature enough to deal with an entheogen that reunited our individual consciousness with that of God. Reuniting one’s consciousness with God is the same as absolution from all suffering, and we were in no way ready for that.
However, now that many of us are mature enough to treat cannabis as what it really is – a deconditioning agent that alleviates psychological suffering – we are starting to become aware that much of the suffering we endure on a daily basis has been forced on us from positions above us on the dominance hierarchy.
This means that the further we can decondition ourselves, the less suffering.
This fact was understood by Kevin Saunders, who is the man behind the recent Californian ballot initiative that seeks to “exempt adults 21 and older from penalties of possessing, selling, transporting, or cultivating psilocybins.” Saying that the ballot is “a natural progression from marijuana legalization,” Saunders relates a personal story of overcoming heroin addiction as a result of the deconditioning effects of the drug.
Psychedelics have incredible potential for alleviating all suffering arising from psychological conditions that are caused by excessive conditioning, in particular anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress and addiction. Many people are aware of this, though they are currently shunned by the mainstream narrative, which has been set (as mentioned above) by those who profit from the suffering.
Over time, however, the truth will out, and this means that the legalisation of psychedelics is an inevitability.
When George W. Bush declared a “War on Terror” in the wake of 9/11, right-wing parties in every Western nation immediately won a great victory. Ever since then, they have been able to appeal to the need to fight this war on terror in order to get votes. This has given them a big advantage over the left-wing parties, but now the left wing has its own equivalent of the War on Terror: climate change.
George W. Bush and his Republican Party knew full well that there would never be an end to terror, because there will never be an end to the human nature that impels sexually frustrated young men towards political violence. The Middle East will always be violent, because it’s in their nature to be, and even if they weren’t someone else would be.
Somewhere in the world, there will always be violence and terror, and this means that the War on Terror is an endless war. It is a battle that can never be won. No matter the circumstances, right-wing parties will always be able to use the violence somewhere in the world to justify increasing military spending and cracking down on civil liberties.
This has given them a permanent advantage over the left wing – until now.
If there’s one thing that can be said for certain about Nature it is that she is ever-changing. And she always will be – for over four billion years, Nature has thrown up an ever-shifting set of environmental conditions and admonished her children to adapt or die. There is absolutely nothing we can do about this, because Nature is infinitely stronger than even our collective will.
At any given time, somewhere in the world, there will be people suffering due to the whims of Nature. Somewhere in the world there will be droughts, somewhere else there will be floods, and in other places there will be storms, hurricanes, earthquakes, typhoons and tsunamis.
What the left wing has recently caught on to is the fact that, insofar as we have a moral obligation to fight climate change, this obligation will never and can never be discharged.
If the political class is at all capable of persuading the people they rule to submit to further taxation in the belief that the money will be used to “fight climate change”, they will be able to do so in perpetuity, because the climate will always change.
Because it’s a law of Nature that the climate will always change, no matter what humans do or don’t do, the left wing will always be able to use climate change as a justification for increasing government reach and cracking down on civil liberties. In this regard, the left wing has a weapon that matches the power of the right wing’s War or Terror. Any time anything bad naturally happens as a result of freak weather events, the left wing will be able to use it as an excuse to turn the screws.
This is how we have ended up with politicians like Jacinda Ardern saying that climate change is the “nuclear free moment” of our generation. The Labour Party knows that it can thump the drum of climate change forever, and therefore there is greater scope for long-term gathering of political capital if they prioritise this issue rather than issues like cannabis law reform (which will be soon be solved and moved on from).
Ten years, twenty years, fifty years from now, the left wing will still be prattling on about climate change.
Buddhism isn’t for everybody. If it isn’t for you, there’s always anti-Buddhism
Most Westerners are familiar with the basic tenets of Buddhism. Few understand that there’s a popular religious movement that seeks to achieve the exact opposite of those tenets, and this movement is sweeping the Western World. It’s called anti-Buddhism, and most practitioners of it don’t even know it’s their religion.
The tenets of anti-Buddhism are essentially the mirror opposite of regular Buddhism. Where a Buddhist will try and make himself satisfied with his lot, thereby decreasing his desires for material pleasure, an anti-Buddhist will try and make himself less satisfied.
The anti-Buddhist will search through every part of his mind, conscious or unconscious, looking for misery. He will ruminate for hours on the most trivial of insults, grinding his teeth at the effrontery, and entertain the most ludicrous revenge fantasies. The tiniest of unfulfilled desires is justification enough to rage at the injustice of the world.
Where the Buddhist cultivates an aura of peace, the anti-Buddhist cultivates one of hatred. The entire world of phenomena is seen through this blood-red lens. As a consequence, everything in the whole world is worthy of contempt. The anti-Buddhist can have no real friends, just temporary alliances founded upon mutual hatred of an other.
And so, nothing is ever good enough for him. The most fortuitous event is not considered a blessing but rather him getting restitution for prior injustices, meaning that no gratitude is necessary. He simply moves straight on to fulfilling the next desire.
Like the Taoist, the Buddhist strives to live a simple life. He recognises that material possessions are just objects that ultimately end up possessing him, because they demand that time and energy be sacrificed to their maintenance and protection. The result of this simple life is the sense of peace and freedom that comes from not having to stress out about defending your wealth.
The anti-Buddhist rejects this line of reasoning as that of a weakling. The value of his life is a direct function of the resources and territory that he controls, and only through the maximum amount of stress and misery can the true value of his life be reached. Indeed, it’s vital that everyone around the anti-Buddhist sees and knows about his suffering, so that they can feel the awe that is the natural response to being around someone so great.
So where the Buddhist greets his fellows with a gentle smile and a reassuring word, the anti-Buddhist scowls and immediately starts going on about his health problems, or the need to exterminate some group of people he hates, because his capacity to cause fear in other people gives him a sense of power that he mistakes for being a worthwhile person.
If there’s one thing that really distinguishes the Buddhist from the followers of other practices, it’s meditation. Through meditation a person can get to genuinely know themselves and the ebbing and flowing of desires within their own mind. Paying attention to how their own mind works, they learn to distinguish genuine desires from conditioned ones and so learn to direct their energy to things that make them happy.
Correspondingly, meditation is the one thing that the anti-Buddhist avoids at any cost. Every millisecond of every day has to be crammed full of as much stimulation as possible, lest one inadvertently catch a few moments of meditation and accidentally become happier. There can be no such thing as rest, no such thing as peace. All efforts have to be devoted to the ceaseless acquisition of capital, because to pause for a moment is to risk slipping back down the dominance hierarchy.
Anti-Buddhism is widespread in our society, but it appears to be falling into decline. We have been so wealthy and yet so miserable for so long, that it’s no longer deniable that anti-Buddhism has failed to bring us any improvement to the quality of lives. Perhaps it’s time to return to the original spiritual practices?
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