I really don’t see what Lokesh finds strange in what is the rule of most religious ethical codes regarding sex. It’s called the rule of suspicion, usually characterized by the light-hearted allusions of gossip, a way to fuel guilt in others by those who feel above suspicion (in fact, being ugly helps) and the temptations of ordinary mortals.

I remember Lokesh being very allusive about dear Arpana on a couple of occasions.

But I don’t believe that “having a son is enough to be a man and not a rabbit-coward…how many deviations do you have?…Do you want me to believe that not even one deviation?” (Vasco Rossi: ‘Deviations’)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8GPJ7XTS28&list=RDo8GPJ7XTS28&start_radio=1

The Wiki link below is only in Italian, ‘Pasta Factory Battle’. The name came from the factory being near where Italian soldiers, on the road, blocked vehicles for checks.

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battaglia_del_pastificio

However, to avoid being drawn into a battle, and not having to hope for fortunate circumstances, it would be better to avoid the problem at its source by not wearing a soldier’s uniform.

If I had followed my heart and become a non-violent conscientious objector at 18, I would not have been eligible to participate in the public competition for a military police salary in 1989, because this issue also arose at the time, with my father having recently died and me having responsibilities towards the rest of the family, as the eldest child.

But above all, choosing non-violent warfare at 18 would have strengthened my sense of self-esteem and integrity, nourishing my rebellious inner self, unwilling to compromise.

In those years, there was a whole macho culture in our country that saw the year of military service as a rite of passage that transformed dreamy adolescents into real men; in short, conscientious objection was something for faggots or sickly people.

Evidently, I didn’t have the guts to challenge that narrative, as the first Italian conscientious objector, Andrea V., had done in 1967; 10 years later, he would become Sw. Majid.

I’m not even proud of how I lived that first year away from home, treated like a machine that responded to orders shouted mechanically and impersonally, from morning till night, with sleepless nights exposed to the bullying of buckets of water reserved for those more resilient to discipline, like me.

I broke inside, I became tough on the outside, a bully among the new arrivals and a friend of alcohol and chemical highs with my classmates, broken inside like me.

It took me a few years to regain a decent relationship with myself, long enough for me to feel the need to revisit old wounds, returning to the crime scene of identical barracks, with my rather cold corpse, with that melancholy for an old idea of ​​my soul, something that had been taken from me, which years later I would find intact thanks to the fragrance of our Friend.

There were poets and writers who found themselves on the front lines of the First World War (like Gadda or Ungaretti), almost none with the warrior spirit of Gabriele D’Annunzio (who, in fact, was no longer young but an adult fascist fanatic who flew over the trenches in airplanes).

In 1914, a Roman dialect poet, Trilussa, prophetically wrote one of the most, imv, powerful and moving anti-war poems, this lullaby:

Version recited by Gigi Proietti, a beloved Italian and Roman actor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5I29INt648

Here, the first 20 minutes of the video (afterwards, the author makes a political comment on current events that I disagree with: speaking about human rights in the abstract, that is, outside the context of social rights, means spreading the message that Italy has infinite resources to care for all those who arrive in the country irregularly, without this having a social impact or cost on the lives of residents, forgetting that they are often economic immigrants, that is, from countries not at war). If you’d like to delve deeper into the meaning and dialect pronunciation, for a yours possible future living in Rome, learning this poem by heart is more than enough to be accepted in most of the surviving Roman community:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0ne-swrm_k&t=778s

If you decide to run for mayor of Rome, you should also be able to sing the lyrics of the poem, here in a famous version by Roman Claudio Baglioni:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euEl_iBeSaE&list=RDeuEl_iBeSaE&start_radio=

Speaking of how money can mysteriously channel lives, even very different in culture and sensibility, into seemingly immutable military patterns, here is a lecture by Professor Zhok on the underlying economic mechanisms that the poet can perhaps only intuit:

“Analyses produced in a Marxist vein remain the most powerful in interpreting contemporary society, the most capable of accounting for and anticipating its underlying dynamics. However, they often suffer from a lack of “intuitiveness,” a lack of “figurativeness.” If you explain to someone that their actions, whatever they believe about themselves, are, in the long run, channeled or at least conditioned by the structural macromechanisms of capital’s self-reproduction, most people’s instinctive reaction is one of mistrust or disbelief. This is because they (and, in truth, each of us, with very rare exceptions) are not intentionally moved by those levers: they don’t want to “make ever more money,” they don’t want to “obtain increasing margins,” that’s not what motivates and motivates them.

This fact has always been an obstacle to a full understanding of that explanatory model, almost two centuries after its first formulations. If we look at the national and international movements that led to the First World War, we clearly see how the conflict appears as the fatal horizon of unlimited and necessarily expansive economic competition, which first exhausts its own internal resources, then spills over into colonial adventure (first globalization), and finally takes action, transforming economic competition into a full-blown war. However, although a hindsight analysis clearly reveals these processes (and although some, like Rosa Luxemburg, had already described them at the time), the vast majority of people on the threshold of the First World War (including prominent members of the ruling classes) interpreted those circumstances as “a quest for living space,” “national self-defense,” “patriotic pride,” “protecting their families from foreign barbarism,” etc. They didn’t go to war to please the Rothschilds, but for entirely understandable human reasons. The bitter wisdom of Marx’s Cassandra lies in the fact that, in reality, they were actually doing the Rothschilds and the Krupps a favor, not themselves, not their country, not their families, etc.

Today the situation is similar, with the added benefit of big capital’s far more refined manipulative capacity than in the past. Even today, we shouldn’t think that all “capitalists” act for “capitalist reasons.” In truth, they are a minority. The point is that “capitalism” is technically a very simple form of production and social reproduction: it is a system (an “algorithm”) that has a single “target”—the progressive average increase in capitalization—and therefore a single direction: infinite growth, infinite expansion. It knows no other goals, or rather, it can exploit all of them instrumentally, but they do not represent the real point of failure. It is therefore a social system that automatically generates unlimited consumption of resources, expansionism, and the universalistic imposition of its own paradigms everywhere, and thus cyclically generates crises, conflicts, and massive destruction, which merely rewind the clock of the same blind dynamic.

The point I want to emphasize here, however, is that the capitalist structure, over time, has also learned to construct its own “ideology,” which is slowly beginning to take on an increasingly defined form (see the “visions” of figures like Peter Thiel). This “ideology” is not supported by the crude and abstract prospect of “making more and more money,” a barren prospect largely incapable of moving even the sharks of finance. This ideology has some fundamental tenets, linked to the ideas that in the philosophical tradition have been called “nihilism” and “will to power.”

The ideology of capital is:
1) NIHILIST, in the sense of destroying any reference to natural, traditional, or historical values;
2) PROGRESSIVE, in the sense of conceiving of “moving forward” at any cost as coinciding with the “best”;
3) TECHNOCRATIC, in the sense of imagining a world in which wisdom is defined as competence in the exercise of technological power;
4) TRANSHUMANIST, in the sense of conceiving of humanity as raw material freely malleable for ulterior purposes, specifically for the purpose of “increasing power”;
5) MONOPOLISTICALLY UNIVERSALIST, in the sense of assuming that there can and should be only one true worldview, to be extended to the entire globe, excluding every other vision as essentially “inferior.”

The Musks, the Thiels, the Gates, the Soros, and many other less famous ones all move within this nihilistic, progressive, technocratic, transhumanist, and universalist horizon. It would be wrong to think that they “only aim to make more and more money.” In their eyes, capital appears only as a necessary tool, which, as necessary, naturally, cannot be compromised in any way. But they consider themselves “idealists.” What they fail to grasp, as do millions of others who would like to be in their shoes, is that what appears to them as a “true vision” is simply the translation into an image of the workings of capital.
1) The triumph of capital (money) is the replacement of natural and traditional values ​​with exchange value (price);
2) The process of capital is ideally a continuation of indefinite accumulation (progress);
3) Capital is the most powerful metatechnology in history: it is the means of all means, the instrument that allows the control of all other instruments and all goods;
4) Capital is the power of infinite and unlimited transformation: it has no form of its own, but can be transformed liquidly into anything; and therefore it seems it could retain value even if human beings were to disappear;
5) Capital is an abstract form, intrinsically universal. Capital’s worldview is to historical and anthropological worldviews what numbers are to the words of human languages: a universal, transversal, yet semantically empty language.

So, when today we see the world’s evil concentrated in the Trumps and the Netanyahus, let us remember that they will be gone soon (okay, never too soon), and that their lame excuses, their comedian-like justifications based on the Bible, the Holocaust, human rights, etc., will soon be gone, but the fundamental drive behind them (and many even on opposing political sides) will not.
The drive to think
that there are no objective values ​​(neither in nature nor in history) will not go away;
that “moving forward” toward progress (that is, toward a further “moving forward”) is in itself good;
that the possessors of technoscience are also the possessors of knowledge and wisdom;
that humanity is a expendable accident;
that every other vision, perspective, or opinion is merely an atavism, an error, or a prejudice to be eradicated and displaced.

We will encounter this configuration again and again, in further international aggression, further humanitarian bombings, further preemptive strikes, further “wars of civilizations,” further genocides in the name of progress, further incarcerations in the name of good, further assassinations in the name of the idea that our way of life is non-negotiable.

Until, either we destroy it or it destroys us”.

MOD:
Veet Francesco:
1/ The link at the end of the first paragraph has been lost.

2/ I was tempted to leave out the lecture by Professor Zhok as being not really appropriate for SN, but have included it, depending on the response from readers, ie if enough find it interesting and relevant, then it will remain, otherwise it’ll be deleted

The power of homophobia is such that homosexual individuals often feel culturally compelled to misrepresent their sexuality (something known as being “in the closet”) in order to avoid social stigma. However, homophobia also impacts heterosexuals, as it is impossible to definitively prove one’s heterosexuality.

Accordingly, heterosexuals and homosexuals wishing to be thought heterosexual are compelled to avoid associating with anything coded as homosexual. This is accomplished through the repeated association with cultural codes of heterosexuality and disassociation from codes for homosexuality.

Conversely, the suspicion that someone is homosexual often is cast upon whoever displays behaviour gender-coded as appropriate for the opposite sex. For men, competitive team sports, violence, cars, beer, agro rants, and an emotionless disposition have been associated with masculinity (and thus heterosexuality), while an appreciation of the arts, fine food, individual sports, and emotional expressionism has been associated with homosexuality.

It’s a funny old world.

I’d like to return to the recent criticisms (by Kavita, Lokesh, and partly also Veet Tom) about the things that appear written on this forum…don’t worry, I’ll be brief; I’d also like to read something more interesting than the things I write; evidently, I already know them.

I don’t argue with the criticisms regarding the aesthetic form of the comments. Not being a native English speaker, I have no idea how, effectively or not, my (or others’) stylistic choices are translated into a language other than my own, to communicate content with what I intend to be the right expressive tones and colors.

The accusation about the content is that it’s mind-tripping and/or boringly repetitive, as in the case of the topic that was dear to NP for a while, about the documentary “Children of the Cult.”

Personally, I felt it natural to respond to such reiterated and generalized accusations, against the attempt to describe the spirit of Sannyas that structures our community like a psycho-cult that sacrifices children. I did so extensively and precisely, topic after topic, whenever NP or others gave reason.

Now, I’m not a philologist or biographer of Lokesh, but I don’t think I’m wrong in recalling, on this Oregonian topic of the misdeeds of Osho and his devotees, more than a shrug on his part, as if it didn’t surprise him, as if they were just more low-quality recreational things to be uncritically accepted as true events, events that really happened, events carved in the cold, hard stone of cynicism.

His usual paternalistic and pretextual indulgence, activated every time he’s given the opportunity to add to the long list of failures of Osho and his naive devotees.
It doesn’t even surprise me anymore that he joined the outraged-scandalized chorus, with an inquisitorial finger pointing at the sinner of the moment, Lokesh being a devotee of a brahmacharya baker.

Were those who subjected certain dossiers to critical scrutiny wrong, or were wrong those who missed to do so or even joined in the accusations and gossip?

If those who write to reject attempts to distort the spirit of the Orange Movement are driven, as in my case, by a debt of gratitude (which is also expressed by the love for the truth required to preserve that spirit so it can still be enjoyed), what is it that drives those who continue to write on a forum of Osho friends-lovers that this friendship-love is misplaced?

Resentment, perhaps?
Would it make sense to come here and pretend to be Osho’s disciples just to show that they have regained their autonomy from the Master by flaunting their ingratitude?
And if it’s neither resentment nor ingratitude (or a mix of the two), why come here to celebrate their own malignant cynicism about the private affairs of a man who can no longer defend himself?

Perhaps the “so funny” people who no longer write here have grown tired of being subjected to these insistent questions and in-depth analyses, which are of a certain usefulness, therefore, not just mind trips.

Finally, I would like to point out that the contribution of many friends and lovers of Osho on this forum has been lost due to the poisonous climate described above, thanks to the people who write things that make K. and L. sneer.

(Osho, ‘Satyam, Shivam, Sunderam’)

Take care, man, I know you mean well.

There was a science fiction novel by John Scalzi not that long ago called ‘Old Man’s War’, in which the premise was that old people were recruited for wars in space and given rejuvenation treatments.

Maybe the real freedom will be being free from the Sannyasin identity too?

The other group says let him die in peace on the beach.

Certainly these groups are great enemies on the internet.