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       #Post#: 1250--------------------------------------------------
       Postcard from Rumi's Field
   DIR By: guest89
       Date: September 16, 2014, 10:28 pm
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       Dear Jed,
       You don’t need to read any of this. Just having access to this
       place fills me with gratitude and I want to take the opportunity
       to use it as the place to get this process of Autolysis
       underway.
       Yes, I did a superficial pass of the internet looking for you,
       even while mindful of your admonitions that it’s an egoic
       diversion to do so. And smirked to find you hiding in plain
       sight. Autolysis is the task I’ve been dancing around, looking
       for a more obvious place to start than seems readily apparent
       and finding no purchase point. I’ve had stabs at writing things
       down, but it seems never much more than power journaling. I
       listen to your books while running or commuting and read them
       when I can, looking for clues and it keeps coming back to
       writing and it keeps coming back to “where the **** to start?!"
       So this must be it.
       When I stumbled across the forum at first I was all, “It can’t
       be him! I thought that the books indicated a less-jedded world
       going forward, not…this” and I let it go for a few months. But
       then it dawned that it really doesn’t matter in the slightest,
       because Jed McKenna has only ever existed for me exactly where
       he is now: in my mind. Making this the perfect venue within
       which to begin SA, in an environment with a ready-made lexicon
       to support the kind of dialogue needed to loosen the emotional
       bonds and think my way out of my beliefs.
       Thank you, Jed.
       I’ve been traveling this road my entire life, I laugh to write.
       As if I could travel any other.
       I started grappling with philosophy in my teens, taking the road
       most-travelled, thinking that smart ideas might get me laid.
       They did and that made all the difference.
       But Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy and his
       definition of the subject as being that which allows one "to
       live in an uncertain universe without being paralysed by
       uncertainty" has been a companion ever since. Like you, I wanted
       to know what was true. Unlike you, I am a dilettante; much like
       your characters Henry or Bob, but intellectually flabby and
       absolutely distracted by the bauble universe that vacillates
       between assaulting and caressing the senses.
       I’ve spent the past 30 years leaping back and forth across the
       partition between these studies and their thoughts and my
       everyday life as a husband, father and educator/business person;
       the kids mostly grown up and traveling their own paths, the
       loving, gorgeous partner, both of us with relatively unorthodox,
       forever morphing career paths and a life that has split living
       arrangements pretty equally between three continents over the
       course of my years. The mortgage on our enviably exquisite old
       house in a leafy central suburb of a growing city in a
       prosperous though benighted nation is in a pretty good state,
       I’m once again heading in a new direction, having taken up part
       time studies to become a counsellor, even as I hustle the
       corporate and academic world looking for clients for whom to
       build the learning toys my team lovingly craft.
       You wrote the books that, had I ever been able to write them,
       would have cost me the opportunity live the above paragraph.
       And, for taking that bullet for me, I am eternally grateful.
       Especially because I still get the books.
       The path to your books was via the Liberation Unleashed website,
       A Course in Miracles had a major impact and before that Tolle,
       Walsche and others in that vein. I only found myself, somewhat
       embarrassed, in the New Age aisle because the years spent
       studying the big schools had crashed and burned in Zen while
       living in Japan, with the epiphany that this **** makes no
       sense; that it was gossamer castles crafted from delicate
       strands of ...bull****.
       In hindsight, I’m just now realising that that epiphany preceded
       a couple of years of no further studies in the field then one of
       my lowest periods, when the thought of suicide as a solution
       first occurred to me. That was about 12 years ago.
       A solution to …what? I’ve never been able to answer that
       question. Some kind of misery that I’ve never been able to
       clearly identify. Maybe it’s a serotonin deficiency…or maybe
       it’s the knowledge that nothing means anything and nothing
       matters in the slightest?
       And it always seems so capricious when I pause to further
       consider that this life is such a small thing anyway. A short
       sputtering of light in an endless sea of darkness…so why not
       enjoy the ride while I'm on it?
       …wow, that all just kinda came out.
       You wrote the books I possibly would’ve, had I not taken this
       bullet for you, had I the fire and the rigour to follow the path
       sometimes and briefly illuminated by this wavering heart and
       dimly perceived by this sputtering mind.
       Yeah, not really. I know.
       You pulled away the blinkers shielding my world’s eyes from that
       which cannot be simpler and, with four elegant slices; you cut
       through the entire body of thought on Truth (and how and why to
       stop dodging it); you distinguished waking up within and from
       the Dream; put a name to Maya and introduced me to Memento Mori,
       that, as the very taproot of fear, I’m working to befriend.
       But the price of Truth is everything in exactly the same way
       that the price of Truth is nothing. I realise clearly that
       everything in this life is highly flammable; I’ve seen a number
       of times that the tiniest alteration to circumstances over which
       “I" exercises not the slightest control brings the entire house
       of cards crashing down….or resurrects it somewhere else.
       I’ve been asking myself the same question you put to readers:
       what the **** am I doing here? If my life is so
       comfortable-interspersed with abjectly miserable-  but currently
       pleasant, then why the **** am I so inexorably drawn to a
       mechanism which only functions to help me burn the whole thing
       down?
       But I know the answer to that too. “Because it’s a lie” and
       because my mission is to know Truth. I am conceptually there, I
       really am. But, as you wrote in Warfare about Socrates and
       Descartes together forming the alpha and omega of all knowledge:
       “That’s an easy thing to say, but it’s a helluva thing to know.”
       So, my objective is this: Human Adulthood. Untruth Unrealisation
       can wait…unless it can’t. I’ll find out.
       #Post#: 1257--------------------------------------------------
       Re: biisuto
   DIR By: Jed McKenna
       Date: September 16, 2014, 10:49 pm
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       Dear biisuto:
       Thank you for sharing. Yes, you will find out.
       Love ya, Jed.
       #Post#: 1523--------------------------------------------------
       Re: biisuto
   DIR By: guest89
       Date: September 21, 2014, 10:48 am
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       There’s really no need to spend time reading or replying, Jed.
       Having connected so well with your books, addressing the thought
       of you in my previous post seems to have had some kind of
       catalysing effect. Funny how the mind works. Good. Whatever
       happens trumps everything that doesn’t, right?
       SA seems the perfect approach, yet I’ve not been at all
       productive in that. Now the ‘I’ (that doesn’t exist, yada yada)
       sees that I’m dragging my heels. It just hasn’t quite worked out
       how….which seems ok too, now I think about it. …See what I mean
       about writing to you? It’s like drano! As soon as I write
       something the answer is right there!
       I had no idea what I was going to write here, just didn’t want
       to leave too big a gap between posts and so I hit fingers to
       keyboard.
       At the end of Notebook you wrote, “...That’s how you know where
       to go. Follow the fear. Go into it and light it up. Inside your
       fear is the next door. Go into it and light it up. Inside your
       fear is the next door, the next thing holding you in. Let fear
       be your guide.”
       You’re right, it’s about fear. I’ve had that Joe Campbell quote
       on my phone desktop for a long time: "the cave you fear to enter
       holds the treasure that you seek”. It has resonated with me
       since I first read it, years ago. Had no idea what it meant, but
       it didn’t seem so important until this stuff started getting
       serious.
       It’s about fear...and Joe has been trying to tell me.
       It’s a been a chicken-and-egg thing. After nearly three years
       earnest resonance with the gold behind ACIM, with some guidance
       late last year (damn…why so much autobiography!) it clicked that
       this thing I thought I was turns out to have a hollow core,
       (like those really damaging bullets). I get a little crazy (or a
       lot, depends on the episode) and then then it all stabilises a
       little…damn these coping mechanisms,… then when I look outside
       again the outside world seems that little bit crazier than I
       remember it and my sanity gets sharper. And colder.
       I worked it out that if it’s true that I’m no-one then, within
       the dream, I can also be anyone I choose to be. Even discounting
       both “I” and choosing form that, that has proven to be quite an
       interesting experiment.
       It turns out that…for all the insanity; the pain; the misery…and
       the seeming lurch of the pendulum towards orwellian dystopia...
       I actually like the dream….but not all of it, I realise the
       active attachment aspect.
       …so why am I playing with matches in the middle of this
       incendiary dreamscape?
       It’s because I don’t want to be fooled by it. I don’t want to
       be one of those cows…so I’m looking for the next thing.
       This is enough for tonight. Must to bed.
       Thank you for being here, Jed.
       #Post#: 1624--------------------------------------------------
       Re: biisuto
   DIR By: guest89
       Date: September 23, 2014, 5:45 pm
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       Last year stepped out of my self. Three years of studying ACIM
       and gripped by the growing conviction that I really have no idea
       what I am, I subconsciously tried to precipitate what I called
       The Crash. I did this by having a go at shattering the framework
       that seemed to hold all my ideas of “me” in place and had become
       irksome over the preceding decade or so.
       No, that’s a revisionist approach to history, attempting to make
       sense out of what was senseless at the time. But I found your
       books shortly after it all happened and everything began to make
       sense.
       E.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g.
       I had no cognitive structure or language to describe what was
       going on internally. I’ve never been particularly ambitious,
       career-wise. It’s always been about the off-the-grid, informal
       things I did: you know the stuff you just do because it’s such a
       part of you that you cannot not do them? For me it was the
       philosophies, the language (we lived in Japan for many years)
       and always the writing - this latter that became a kind of
       nemesis after I kept hearing, “you should be doing that for a
       living!” for so long, I worked out I was a failed writer because
       I just didn’t see the connection. I never seemed to do anywhere
       as much as I wanted to and have never produced what I would ever
       call a finished piece- a cliche. Early on I decided on some
       bullshit, that "I could live or I could write but not both” and
       it stuck. Now I have a lifestyle to support and writing beyond
       the odd facebook rant got pushed off into some retired future
       in-tray.
       (I’m purposely not worrying the shit outta this stuff, as you
       said in your descriptions of SA, and nonetheless feeling the
       release that comes with it. I’m feeling there’s way too much
       autobiography, but what else am I…? I could maybe do with a
       pointer in this regard. I feel finally here writing this shit
       that it’s something. Feels different to previous attempts. Is it
       possibly any more authentic because I’m addressing it as if
       you’re reading it?)
       Although I’ve experienced acute anxiety and depression at times
       because of unhappiness in work situations (don’t we all…?, work
       and career never seemed so much a priority as a treadmill/dynamo
       for financing this lifestyle. There’s some tails wagging dogs
       going on, I know that. I’ve been employed or in business with my
       wife (she’s the driven one) and for myself numerous times with
       varying degrees of success and reward. It’s generally fun and we
       enjoy an enviable lifestyle, boosted because we started early
       (right place + right time) in real estate.
       Having written that, I still wouldn’t say that I’m particularly
       driven by money or success. Although aware of the concept, until
       Human Adulthood popped up in your books I’d never read anything
       about manifestation as I felt it was just some hoodoo you can
       only fuck up by focusing on, like trying to chew gum and walk.
       It resonates strongly with me, though, especially the part about
       money being there when its needed and getting good parking
       spots. But I never realised it was a kind of art (or is it
       science….?) Your talk of being in a “co-creative partnership
       with the universe” makes perfect sense to me.
       So it wasn’t about that when I did what was necessary to step up
       and land an amazing job, considerably outside my comfort (but
       not capability) zone. When I got it, I wasn’t amazed. I left my
       previous role then stepped literally out of my notions of what I
       was and far beyond what I had previously demonstrated as my
       capabilities. My thoughts were that I would either crash or
       crash through. I had nothing to lose and everything to gain,
       either way.
       Well, as it turns out, I did both.
       I swear the thought never crossed my mind until this minute, but
       throughout the nine, short weeks I was in the role, I was a
       living, breathing Kurtz, from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness…or, I
       now fancy, more like Brando’s version in Apocalypse Now.
       What I mean by that is that I carefully considered my
       objectives, became absolutely goal-oriented and refused to
       submit to anything that tried to stand in my way. I also
       resolved that no tactic would be considered off the table and
       success in the mission was the top priority.
       I write this without a trace of irony, but I did so well at it
       that the Chairman of the Board himself called me into his office
       to fire me. It wasn’t that my “methods were questionable”, they
       were succeeding spectacularly. In that amazingly short space of
       time I was turning the place around and -even better- I found
       out precisely why it had been dying (although, to be honest, I
       had pretty well deduced that part during the months preceding my
       appointment).  The trouble arose because I was messing with the
       Chairman’s plans for the Anglican Church to take over the place,
       afforded by his presiding benignly over its failure…well, at
       least I ruined the “benignly" part for him.
       But fuck it. I got what I came for. In spades. And boy did it
       hurt!
       #Post#: 1633--------------------------------------------------
       Re: biisuto
   DIR By: Jed McKenna
       Date: September 23, 2014, 11:04 pm
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       Dear Biisuto:
       Is that a Japanese biscuit you eat with cappuccino?
       Well written, entertaining, good backgrounder, kinda b.s.ish.
       So, let's get Col. Kurtz like. WTF do you really want? NO
       PRETENDING HERE.
       Be as brutal as you can and then some more. You caught you on a
       fishing trip, landed with some difficulty and now it's time to
       gut you. What's inside? Really, I know you have a talent, for
       hiding, so now turn it around. Mercilessly, Pink Mist yourself.
       Oh yeh, sure, sure, be gentle and remember to breathe.. I always
       say that, but only to certain types, which Kurtz ain't. I have
       big expectations of you, don't disappoint me... and don't worry
       about me pulling the rug out from under you, I guarantee I will!
       Love ya, Jed. (no, really) and please, please, please, don't
       tell me you like golf. I will never speak to you again.
       #Post#: 1825--------------------------------------------------
       Re: biisuto
   DIR By: guest89
       Date: September 28, 2014, 1:53 am
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       Talking a good game will get you a seat at the table in a game
       of talk. But that game is tired and that blade is clearly
       ceremonial. Like Neo’s eyes, it’s never really been used. I’ve
       been looking in the wrong direction this whole time and spent
       this life both fattening-up the dream and papering over any
       cracks as they appear, instead of tearing it down in search of
       the truth I long ago surrendered to relativity.
       Blame seems a completely inappropriate response. How could I
       have known, when this marvellous, awesome, horrifying wonderland
       is configured exactly to dazzle its denizens, such that the
       truth might lay there in plain sight, out in the open yet
       totally overlooked?
       But the game’s not over yet, as evidenced by a universe so
       disposed as to drop these pointers right in my lap.
       A lot b.s.ish, yes. All narrative is a lie and self-serving. But
       like the Course and others before it, ToE arrived with the most
       impeccable timing imaginable- and why not, when things always
       do?
       WTF do I really want? No pretending here…?
       I pray for the next thing; the courage to do whatever it takes.
       To fold my arms, step off this ledge and just drop, down through
       the rotors, eyes open. Pink Mist.
       I certainly won’t try to pretend I’m not both ambivalent and
       scared shitless, because there are also aspects of the dream I
       adore. But either the insanity is genuinely ramping up, or my
       tolerance is being rapidly depleted. What lies ahead is
       literally unimaginable. So be it. It’s what I came for. Bring
       it.
       I’ve been in freefall before, in the Joe Campbell heroic journey
       sense. That last time was the most acute, but even so and even
       though I found and began reading your books almost immediately,
       over many months, fall was arrested yet again and temporary
       stability restored…or maybe it was just slowed, because I sense
       no firm footing but rather a sense of having normalised
       uncertainty, to an extent.
       “You don’t arrive in C-Rex by convincing yourself that you’re
       already there, but by destroying every shred of the illusion
       that you’re not.”
       I get it. C-Rex the idea and C-Rex the place are not the same,
       clearly. But even U-Rex-blinded as I am, I still dwell in C-Rex,
       because that’s all there is. To know that must I ruthlessly
       excise all that is false. What’s left then must be true. I
       understand clearly that everything past “I am/consciousness” -
       basically everything that seems to exist within consciousness -
       may be real, but only in the way that this mind, these fingers,
       this laptop and everything beyond seems ‘real', ie., unprovable
       conjecture from within the lightproof box I suppose my ‘self'
       entombed within. Like a movie to which I willingly surrender
       disbelief in order to not just enjoy but (importantly) to make
       any sense of. Solipsism. I get it.
       I just don’t know that. I need to know that. I need a light…no,
       a flame.
       Where’s the purchase point on illusion? Aren’t mind, thoughts,
       beliefs and words likewise identically dream photons, refracted
       upon the screen of Plato’s cinema and rendered by emotion into
       the hologram I experience? It’s impossible, when you consider
       that any tool you could believe into existence is inevitably
       made of the same stuff. Like trying to fashion a shovel out of
       sand to dig your way out of a hole.
       And why do I want to dig around in that muck anyway? Isn’t it my
       quest to just climb out of it? It just occurred to me in the
       context of a pending visit from my parents that I’m only going
       through the motions. I killed them over a decade ago in what was
       a painful, sustained and, in hindsight, suspiciously Autolytic
       writing incident after returning to Australia. So I cannot claim
       ignorance of the efficacy of your process.
       But having internalised what I have over the years, studying
       your writings made everything click for me. It makes everything
       work. There are no gaps, no wiggle room, no escape - and I don’t
       want escape. Rather, I’m dry-humping this b1tch.
       Nothing beyond I AM is true, so whether the swamp makes sense or
       not doesn’t matter (except to its denizens, with emotional
       attachment to fuel the illusion of movement). Truth is that I’ve
       been just going through the motions in a growing number of areas
       of life and, seeing it now within the context of SA and TR, for
       the first time it seems the best possible way that things could
       be…a burgeoning lucidity. And so, rather than wonder further
       about what may look from the outside to be a growing detachment,
       maybe I need to identify those points where I’m not detached,
       and actually unsheath this damned sword?
       But what am I to slice- and how? A dream erasing a dream, like
       the reverse of Escher’s hands drawing one another. "C-Rex = one
       and everything else = zero". That’s math anyone can parse. That
       I’m without doubt about this illustrates how much I
       underestimate the power of Maya. Emotional attachment. I get
       everything you so lucidly wrote, but the amusement park is still
       wide open for business and I’m still here, grinning like a dope
       at all the bright lights and holding my candy floss up like a
       limp prick…I guess I’m not really as taken in by it as I was,
       that’s something. I get daily, hourly and often more reminders
       of this…and it always arises with a feeling of ...‘yes'…”there
       is no jar, just an endless ocean”.
       A talent for hiding… I cannot disagree...what’s hiding? what’s
       the fear? hiding from what?
       I can clearly see the math, what you wrote up for the class is
       in plain sight on the board. I watched you "walk haughty science
       out to the woods and come back alone". It all seems to add up
       perfectly, except it seems that my conclusion was arrived at via
       belief and not by having worked the equation for myself. This
       seems crucial, in that concept = dream content. "How do I know
       logic is logical?” "How do I know that 2+2=4?” Because I find
       myself still here, in the place where those things take on
       reality. There’s no other place to go -and remain myself. I
       understand it needs to go. There’s this awkward silence you get
       when a guest has outstayed their welcome….but the fucker just
       won’t take the hint, y’know?
       But self is a fiction. I didn’t have to depart the dream to work
       that one out and am in no doubt. I know that because the
       long-nursed, low-key urge to suicide seems to have utterly
       evaporated and I’m (not quite but) pretty well here for the ride
       now. There’s no place to lay a blade. So how do I “do the math
       for myself”? How do I do that …when both blade and buddha are
       elements of the thought stream?
       Hiding…ok, it seems too easy. I have this, “What’s the catch?”
       kinda feeling about things, but I also have this other thing:
       I’ve (had) proven to my satisfaction something I’m having a hard
       time believing …while conversely I seem afflicted by beliefs I
       have no way of ever proving...(seems something in there to
       explore, now I put it that way) ...It seems cold and
       disrespectful to see the beloved as “baggage”, but that’s
       exactly what they are in the context of this process, aren’t
       they? My worst nightmare is exactly as valueless as my favourite
       thing and both are exactly what keeps me anchored in place.
       I cannot think of any questions right now, but I believe that’s
       because I haven’t walked the terrain where the good ones must
       lie and not because they have been exhausted. How about: "am I
       utterly full of shit?” Not just in the
       no-you-so-of-course-you-are sense but in the “student vs.
       traveler” sense.
       How about a pointer? Is this enough to get a bead?
       …and the ‘biisuto' thing is an old college nickname, ‘beast’
       (derived from my family name) as it would sound spoken with a
       japanese accent: [BEE-ss’tow] a joke and a gift all rolled up in
       one, from a good friend. And the first eHandle I ever used… and
       the golf…? I play a little, but like all sports, it’s something
       I've done to blend in as an adult…but since I left Canada and
       hockey as a kid I’ve had no heart for any other game.
       #Post#: 1828--------------------------------------------------
       Re: biisuto
   DIR By: Jed McKenna
       Date: September 28, 2014, 3:11 am
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       How about an intent of some kind. One little one will do. A
       sorta 'next' list. But just take one. I get a wandering sense
       from your writing. Maybe I'm wandering. Who knows? Focus...
       love ya, Jed.
       #Post#: 1838--------------------------------------------------
       Re: biisuto
   DIR By: guest89
       Date: September 28, 2014, 8:24 am
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       to remove or enable vision past all that stands between this and
       Truth.
       #Post#: 1853--------------------------------------------------
       Re: biisuto
   DIR By: Jed McKenna
       Date: September 28, 2014, 11:22 am
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       Geez biisuto, I said 'one little one..' WTF.'
       Love ya, Jed.
       #Post#: 1956--------------------------------------------------
       Re: biisuto
   DIR By: guest89
       Date: September 29, 2014, 10:25 pm
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       The universe put you down here in front of me like this, so I
       guess I’m basically curious, Jed. I’m staring at the horse’s
       mouth, as it were, so I want to avail myself of that. (You can
       skip to the * to get to the question part)
       I’ve been through a pretty intense decade or so, the capstone of
       which has been finding your books that wrap up symbolically what
       I’ve been going through actually...But not really. What your
       books have done is even better: they gave me a rock solid
       footing, opening my eyes that the life I’ve been living is the
       symbolic thing, that maps to something much, much better: truth.
       Like the function of totems in Inception, but far less
       complicated.
       I’ve ‘got' Truth now and that feels just so wonderful. It hugs
       me when I wake up in the morning. It’s the light which
       illuminates all. It’s the torch with which all the insanity is
       just incinerated, on contact. When lucid, I don’t confuse it
       with reality, although habitual vision still thrusts the latter
       most rudely into my eyes with boisterous insistence. But the
       eyes are made of the same stuff, so it stands to reason.
       You’ve described a universe within consciousness, but insist
       that to truly grok that fact requires more than conceptual
       understanding: It requires an actual journey. So the dividing
       line between legs walking and me just believing that legs are
       walking…between grappling with the dream and dreaming I’m
       grappling with the dream is a little fuzzy. I’m concerned that I
       think I’m thinking and not really thinking at all, so I guess a
       pointer from somebody who’s been this way would be most cool.
       I’m no longer content with being a member of the Maya State
       Prison Escape Club. It wasn’t my plan to come and ask you...
       BYOFT and all that...but here I am. Your availability made it
       possible. The books seem more than adequate pointers, so I must
       be stupid and my apologies if it makes me seem ungrateful for
       them- I’m not at all. I’ve studied them recursively for nearly a
       year and, while no distinctive, discreet sense of ‘next’ ever
       seems to emerge in real time, I become aware of stuckness and
       then it’s over till the next thing.
       To be clear, I’m not looking for my ‘next’ within the books,
       just that idea of ‘nextness’. I see your work as a kind of
       radical sanity; an oasis of certainty in a desert of crazy-ass
       anything-can-happen. Which, I get, is okay too. So much of
       what’s reported out there is so alarming- check out the
       headlines on any given day since news began: Big Brother and his
       police state, beheadings, exploding t-shirts, refugees,
       riots…fear, idolatry, usury and extreme violence and epic
       stupidity on a massive scale.
       See? This is why we can’t have nice things! ...like an end to
       poverty and hunger, universal health care, renewable energy
       sources and free and easy access to internal odysseys... yada,
       yada, yada.
       And even that is becoming okay, as the light gets brighter and
       altitude increases. But the madness also seems to be ramping up
       in magnitude, clawing at my ankles even as its effects on me are
       dying away. Maya, right?
       Your work is an acid bath and the world is dissolving of its own
       accord, so I just can’t see anything lasting against which to
       hurl my…what?
       Attachments seem to be melting more or less with the increase in
       light intensity. Even the things I love and don’t want to lose
       -especially those- they too have been fading in this brighter
       environment, just like waking from a dream (go figure!) Although
       there’s the sensation of something missing when it goes, it
       fades quickly. This seems to happen almost as a byproduct of
       recognising the attachment, so it seems almost a capricious,
       empty gesture to arc up and go ballistic if it’s more or less
       melting on contact anyway. Like throwing rocks at a homeless
       person. I’m not angry at my delusion, I’m just not into it any
       more. The magic is gone when the house lights have come up and
       you can really see the cardboard, masking tape and caked-on
       makeup.
       Love itself is just a word (it seems so weird to say that and
       mean it). It’s just another (artificial) category of
       attachment…the spiritually sanctioned, “good” kind.
       ...I guess what I’m trying to say is, you describe a long,
       painful journey, where each step is itself a long, painful
       journey. I’m getting discomfort here at times, sure. Angst.
       There’ve been tears and dark thoughts of self-annihilation, yes.
       Great loss and divestment also of much baggage too, as it crops
       up. But, while I would certainly not describe this as ‘done’, I
       nonetheless am not suffering (in the way that, say, people in
       Syria appear to be suffering) and what I went through in
       hindsight -not just over this past year but the preceding decade
       or so as well- seems …well, dreamlike, as if it happened to
       somebody else.
       Fear. I have it identified as the emotional Rome towards which
       all roads lead. I’ve been making a study of it and turning
       towards it (when I recognise it). Fear of death. You called it
       "the boogeyman" and said it can’t be killed. I’ve been
       practicing my 'welcome death dance' (memento mori) and now,
       (somewhat perversely perhaps), I no longer wish to die. More
       accurately: there is nothing external that triggers that same
       nihilistic hopelessness. Life is hopeless, right out of the box!
       Yet I still see fear jerking this Pinocchio’s strings from time
       to time. When recognised, though, it rapidly evaporates. (Turns
       out you can just stare that beyotch down! Fear is only effective
       when you ain’t looking directly at it, go figure!) In fact, my
       fear studies indicate that any fear so far encountered will
       evaporate in almost direct proportion to how quickly it is
       recognised.
       *I guess what I’m looking for is an indicator that I’m at the 5
       yard line with 12 seconds to go and the score tied…or, I’ve at
       least taken my first step or two onto the field…or, that I’m up
       in the bleachers just wearing a fan jersey…or, that, no, I’m all
       the way back at home watching the pre-game commentary on TV for
       a different game, ensconced in a nice, deep armchair.
       Does that make sense? You’ve said that it works the way it
       works, but it seems to work this way. Now you’ve put names to
       it, I’ve a pretty good, self-validating toehold in the
       co-creative thing, which indicates this and that, as it does...
       and you mentioned that HA splits a cab with TR for a while…I
       know it’s coming (hopefully before death) and was just hoping to
       meet it head-on and minimise resistance…except there doesn’t
       seem too much of that, which seems the damnedest thing.
       Is that possible? Or is Maya arm-deep in my colon, walking me
       through the script she wrote?
       And…am I maybe just getting clingy here in the lifeboat? Is that
       what’s going on? I know I’ve been feeling very alone in this,
       not having anybody who understands what’s going on with me to
       talk about it with. It’s how I found you, isn’t it, and what
       made me curious about yardsticking my progress?
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