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#Post#: 2547--------------------------------------------------
Re: biisuto
DIR By: guest89
Date: October 8, 2014, 8:29 pm
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The Kick.
I wrote the above not as a title but as a self-contained
sentence, to remind me that I want to remember that device, from
Inception: the music employed to bring Cobb and his team back
from the dream, or an accomplice’s push, that activates the
body’s delicate inner-ear balance system and brings the operator
back from his or her slumbering. It’s the agent that wakes you
up. The Kick.
I set this up quite meticulously in hindsight: laid out my day
like a mother laying a suit of clothes across the bed for her
son. I set my alarm for 0601 for a kickoff time of 0615, with a
15 min lead-in. This meant that my phone would sound the tiniest
of notes exactly a minute before the alarm would go off. Kind of
a test of my readiness, to see how alertly I returned from the
conventional dream world.
It went off perfectly. I stood and prised the phone from the
table across the room where it charges, returned to bed and shut
the alarm to pre-empt it going off. I was already awake. I lay
on my back so as to properly boot into the day, but I was
already there. Already here.
And she was laying there next to me, as she does every morning,
facing the other way, as is our habitual posture of sleep. We
ritually swap sides of the bed every half year or so when one of
us decides it’s time, both to keep ourselves from wearing deeper
unintended marital grooves as well as to preserve spinal health,
and almost always face outwards, back warming back.
I nearly always go to sleep after her and nearly always wake up
first. This morning, as I sometimes do, as I lay the phone on my
side table and lay back down, I roll towards her, scooching
under the blanket as we spoon, and I feel her familiar warmth
and breathe in her familiar smell. Home.
This is home and these few minutes are moments of utter
tranquillity to me. The womb.
Although asleep, her feet wrapped themselves smoothly around one
of my shins and I lay my arm down the big muscle of her curled
thigh, with the loving familiarity of a couple who’ve done the
same thing on many, many mornings, over many years of sharing a
bed.
Also as I’ve done many times before, I place my lips upon the
centre of her warm back, right on her spine, between the
shoulder blades, in a long and sensuous kiss and she responds
from her now lighter sleep state with the slightest of cuddling
motions with her legs and the tiniest of moans. I realise that
my lips are almost exactly where I’ll be inserting my sword when
I get up to begin the process of killing her.
I’ve consciously known this was coming for a couple of days now
and unconsciously for much longer, so I’ve found myself more
affectionate than my normally pretty affectionate normal.
Compensating. Her birthday is coming up and over the past month
or so I’ve been lining up a string of gifts for her that will
make this year rather a stand out.
But we’ve had a few hard years. Last year was our 50th and we
had travel plans. What with my new job as a deputy principal at
a prestigious private high school, she and I were going to wait
the extra month after our birthdays (they’re 12 days apart) for
our youngest to finish her final high school exams and the three
of us were booked to fly to Rome, Paris and London for three
weeks, to celebrate our respective milestones as a family,
together on holiday for perhaps the last time. But that never
happened.
I’m pretty conscious of these ‘for the last time’ kind of
things: one never knows when something one does will be the last
time, no matter how often you’ve done it in the past. I’ve been
this way most notably since my last motorcycle accident, 19
years ago when our daughter was a bump in a tummy. I woke up
standing in the centre of the intersection near our house back
in Japan, over the wreckage of my motorcycle, with a strange
dullness in my head and no idea how I came to be there. Before
passing out again, it occurred to me that I could’ve died and
would never have even known it.
Memento mori. Remember that you will die.
…all this preamble is of course a delaying tactic. I don’t want
to slice and dice her any more than I want even a paper cut
myself, except for the fact that we are inseparably joined, by
that which capriciously joins and separates the universe of
phenomenon: me. This mind and my ideas of her. My ideas of we
both and of myself. And I’m embarked upon the road of slicing
myself to ribbons here: whatever it takes to divest everything
keeping the darkness-dwelling, fictitious me walled off from the
bright light of Truth. I’m trying to welcome this while
simultaneously relaxing into it because it is indicated by the
path I have followed to this point and I very much believe what
Jed wrote: that resistance will turn what is merely inevitable
pain into bona fide suffering.
…ok, so not ‘my’ ideas, just thoughts of territory and
companionship that have accreted around this idea of us-ness
over the 31 years we’ve been in each other’s orbit. I’m crazy
about her and she (to use her words) adores me. It’s just how
it’s always been.
We’ve been ‘that couple’ for as long as I can remember. The one
that other couples dream of becoming. Mostly the Hers but yet,
still a significant number of grudging confessions from admiring
or skeptical Hims as well- the latter mostly in the now familiar
format of boozy confessions of admiration, where he’ll steel
himself, look me in the eye and say, “...how do you do it…?” as
if continuing a conversation we started some time previously.
I’ll usually smile knowingly at the deception he’s perpetrating
upon himself and wait for a real question before responding. But
I almost always feel duty-bound to do my part, to perpetuate the
urban myth of the perfect marriage.
From the outside, looking at a longterm relationship such as
ours is like gazing down on a serene woodland from a hot air
balloon. Lots of vibrant, green growth; clearings of long
grasses with colourful flowers and the glint of sunlight upon
still ponds. As the balloon loses altitude, you start to get the
occasional glimpse of darting wildlife and maybe some dead
patches here and there, with gnarly grey branches pointing
accusingly at the sky that tend to pull the eye towards them.
I’ve loved her forever, it seems. Which seemed more of a life
sentence when I flipped to hating her guts for being a selfish,
clinging and manipulative bitch. And except when I was engaging
in vengefully salacious behaviour, cleverly slipping beyond
conventional boundaries to punish her for using sex as a weapon
of withholding…or just out of plain curiosity; when I was
loathing her for being either white trash or way too good for
me, or worried that she was on the verge of telling me not to
come home anymore; or sickened at her using the kids as weapons
against me.
Disembark from your balloon ride and walk a ways, kicking at the
twigs and leaves and other things composting on the forest
floor. Stop and bend a knee to look closer and you notice ants,
shiny beetles and long, white crawlies, which scurry to get out
of the light created by the disturbance of your presence,
desperate to return to the warmth and darkness of their real
life, beneath the forest’s shit.
I’ve loved her forever, except only sometimes. Like in the
grimmer times that punctuated the first half of the
relationship, when we lived apart. And then later, when work
kept us a world apart for sometimes months at a time, and the
pangs of guilt and alarm to really know that absence makes the
heart grow fonder - but only for a little while. Until local
life and curiosity simply overwrites that place in your …what?
Heart? Phhht.
Life isn’t like books or movies. Not at all and especially when
you consider that the closest anyone gets to ‘happily ever
after’ in real life is actually only ‘ever after’ and that’s
only what you get when you’re dead.
A few things she and I do share is the belief that there is no
such thing as ‘soulmates’ or the delusion that there’s only one
person out there for each and every one of us. She taught me at
the outset of our relationship that just because you’re bitterly
fighting over something doesn’t mean "it’s over” - in fact, I
realise as I write this, that my relieved grokking of that
probably marked the true beginning of ‘us’.
I could probably wrap this all up nicely with a pullback shot
about how the interdependence of every element of the forest
inseparably forms a single, indivisible ecosystem, but I have to
stop now and start my day.
I’m not satisfied with this, I’ve really only begun scratching
at the surface here. But I have swooped in closer to the
tapestry of the story-that-thinks-it’s-me and begun to discern
the individual threads that make it up.
What I am satisfied with is this: my increased focus is slowly
revealing the overgrown path out of Pleasantville, “where all
the roads go in circles". ‘Desire for Truth’ is a comic book
super hero. What’s growing inside me is something much better: a
distinct and bitter distaste for The Lie…and the super villain
is always much more interesting, don’t you agree?
In fact…this has all seemed way too easy, once I got over the
massive hump of starting. I’m amazed at how smoothly this all
just poured out, with a minimum of editing, since I sat down at
0615 this morning. I credit the universe for the ‘how’ and my
desire for Truth with the ‘why’.
In fact, all I had to do was make a space for it to happen- and
then show up.
#Post#: 2614--------------------------------------------------
Re: biisuto
DIR By: guest89
Date: October 9, 2014, 6:49 pm
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I came up dry this morning, but I’m trying to develop a process
here, so will note an observation and see where it takes me.
Waiting for a train yesterday I was observing the multitude and
listening to Jed's conversation with Andrew, about him being a
fictional character in a soap opera (Damnedest) and it occurred
to me that, while I believe that I am the major writer of the
story of this life, the reality seems that this story of ‘me’
entity is being written by all of the external forces that
impact upon it.
Like a sea-tossed cork, whose direction, speed and even buoyancy
are determined entirely by the medium within which it floats and
impacted like a billiard ball by all of the other corks afloat
there, it is my environment that is writing this story, making
‘me' merely an intersection of everything that is happening
locally, registered at this point in space and time by a tiny
locus of awareness.
While the sea is there, the corks don’t actually exist. They
just believe they do.
Japan is the archipelago formed by the intersecting movement of
vast tectonic plates, themselves the effect of subterranean
expanses of shifting planet, floating upon seas of molten rock.
It was pushed up from the seabed and fed through the cracks by
rivers of magma. And yet the humans who dwell there believe it
is a stand alone entity, rather than two slabs of planet
dry-humping. They call it ‘nation’ and are recognised as such by
other nations, likewise fabricated. Wheels within wheels.
Fractals.
We are all writing each other’s character and story by the
interactive overlap between us all. Literally, we are as ripples
on a pond: of the exact same, indivisible body of water yet
psychotically convinced of our individual ripplitude.
But each of bring something to market in this universal, ongoing
and fluid dance of matter and energy and it is manifested across
the same isthmus that allows the dance to be witnessed…maybe
it’s that tiny mote around which a snowflake, a raindrop or a
pearl is formed. Some tiny, core imperfection in the fabric of
Consciousness that fosters the accretion of beingness…who knows?
This is more inferred than understood, but is evidenced by the
Mozart Effect that Jed wrote about, that says you could not have
swapped out Wolfie at birth (or even conception) and expected
the substitute to grow up to become the same musical prodigy.
I’ve seen this in my children, each of whom possess a certain
something about them that has not changed since …ever.
It is the same ‘me’ness I feel, that aspect that looks in the
mirror and is always a little surprised to see what is looking
back at it.
That’s not to say that if you ground up one of my kids into
hamburger that I would be able to pick them out in a line up of
mounded meat, so the je ne sais quoi explanation doesn’t
actually explain anything, it’s just a fairytale I invented to
lend meaning to the ongoing process of individuation I am trying
to see through.
Where does this well of bullshit speculation spring from? This
is the stuff of which religions are born. How does it help me
burn off the encrustation of lies? I don’t know. Maybe it
obscures them further.
#Post#: 2766--------------------------------------------------
Re: biisuto
DIR By: guest89
Date: October 12, 2014, 11:04 pm
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On my run along the river the other night, Ahab’s rant came back
to mind, with emphatic urgency: “Swerve me...? The path to my
fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is
grooved to run…Naughts an obstacle; naughts an angle to the iron
way.” And it made me think about the promising well I knowingly
tracked my lumbering intellectual rig away from, to go and waste
company time and money drilling that dry hole last time.
What’s with that? It made me think about how focused would I be
if time really were of the essence? Well, I know it is of the
essence -here in the dreamstate…but what if I had a known period
within which to figure things out for myself…?
...Then, in bed after posting a half-hearted rant on that hazmat
thread I read your "21 Day Ebola Challenge".
I’m in. This is it. The price of truth is everything? But I
already emptied my pockets on the table, so now I’m throwing my
pants on top, for good measure. And I always ride commando…then,
I guess I need to saw both legs off and pony them up as
well….and keep cutting.
…I wrote, but have since had time for reflection. How do I know
that I mean it? What is the corollary of a decision? To cut off
all other alternatives and to plough through all distractions
that crop up between here and there.
But then of course there’s the whole thing about the ‘who’
making the decision. Like a dream, ‘I’ am the canvas upon which
the dream and all her characters are painted. The dream is the
paint but, here in the dream, I’m not the painter... **** off.
The reason I’m having a hard time breaking through here is
because I’m impotently beating upon the monolithic ‘what-is'
with the tiny fists of, ‘should-be’.
The word ‘surrender’ appears and more audiomancy (while cutting
the veg for asian stir-fry) recites ‘Curtis On The Rocks’, from
Incorrect.
The HA thing is no longer a mystery to me. I’m not sure it ever
was. I’ve always known of a fundamental, substrate difference
between those who lean directly into the teeth of the gale and
those who trim their sails to propel them where they wish to go
despite the wind.
The notion of ‘surrender' reveals the difference between
blinkered, capricious wanting and having a feel for the groove
of your destiny in the fabric of the universe. Destiny’s a
heavily laden word, but I mean it here in the simplest sense of
‘what happens’.
Of course there’s a known timeframe here: four score and ten
plus a few, or minus everything right up to the next moment…in
the Donny Darko sense, but without any mystery: a clear and
present Damoclean sword hangs above my head. “Wake up and smell
the coffin, Kemiel!”
Here’s the thing: I already know how this ends: it dies. And
with it all falsity - right up to and including the thing that
believes in a ‘me’ to have ‘my’ anything. When every shred has
been sloughed away and what’s left savours its
attributelessness…
...And still the words pour out…
It’s Saturday, she and I lay cuddling in bed together, two
castaway orphans clinging together on a king-sized raft. The
kids are gone-gone, the cats are elsewhere. I look into her eyes
and the disconnect is nowhere; gazer/gazing/gazed upon, a
single, seamless event, nestled in a cloud of nothing forever.
If this be a dream then why the desire to awaken, when awakening
is anyways inevitable?
“Because the dream is a lie,” is what keeps bouncing back, like
blind bat babblings from the contours of a cavern dark.
“And lies are…bad.” a doubtful statement, without inflection.
But the rationale is offered without any clue as to why one
thing should be preferable to another.
You told me there’s nothing to recommend truth, Jed, except for
the fact that it’s true. This is how I take your meaning:
There’s absolutely nothing ‘wrong' with the lie, because it's
the lie of my willing suspension of disbelief that powers the
fun park and makes the movie a feel-something couple of
slack-jawed hours in front of dancing lights.
Eyelids blink shut. And the dreamstuff pouring forth from
single-pointed consciousness in all directions, manifesting as
mind, senses, words, outwardly forming pillows, partner and
implying a universe in space and time... pauses, like a burst of
corpuscles, pulsing through capillaries at the behest of a
distant, beating heart. Eyes open, the flow resumes and she’s
there again, watching...it seems.
I would not will it to end, but when that's what’s to be then I
won’t resist it either. I am outside. I am that which contains
and looks in upon it. I am formless omniscience, unperturbed.
I just don’t know that. It’s not any kind of living experience
anywhere but in this mind’s jealous eye.
From here the dream is a hermetically sealed wonderland,
bordered by fluffy clouds and me inside. While conceptual
speculation abounds, true knowledge doesn't penetrate here.
Lucidity at this point to me means only the vision to
acknowledge the dreamlike nature of this place and admit that it
is utterly indiscernible from a dream. At this point it does not
entail waking up within the dream, which must be the product of
another process and a different order again from waking up from
the dream.
The dream manifests as the energy flowing from what’s behind
these eyes to the eyes across the pillow. It’s the light
illuminating the dream, while the periphery enclosing that
-right up to the most distant star and back beyond the big bang-
is the conceptual framework within which I enclose it…a vastly
integrated perspective without a shred of experiential evidence.
In actual fact, at any given moment >99.99% of the content of
consciousness is inferred, rather than experienced…what if that
last tiny kernel around which it manifests were nothing but
Maya, mother of the dream, a dance in consciousness with a
phenomenal universe cascading from her skirts?
It’s fuzzy and dim everywhere except for where awareness bestows
light and clarity right at this moment. I assume it to be the
limits of human attention and working memory, but what if it’s
instead the clever cushion of delusion? The mechanism that turns
24fps into a movie. It really is in no way different to the
dreams I see at night... except for the apparent persistence-
nonetheless also perfectly explainable within a dream context.
This is such bull****!
Analysis of the cold meat thing on the slab with its organs in a
stainless steel dish and a frozen facebook page is a 180 degree
misstep. The mystery departs with the life that abandons it. And
the meat isn’t the slightest bit curious.
Bereft of one of those Inception totems, I cannot prove this
isn’t a dream and cannot prove it is a dream. So I have to just
stop caring about that distinction, right? Isn’t that all there
is to stripping the spine from this thing and seeing it flop to
the ground? The caring?
Caring keeps the dream alive. It’s an emotional investment in
its continuity. Withdraw that support and it shrivels.
Convert caring to suspicion. Suspicion that life is a dream must
be a first step towards that. Withdrawal of emotional
buttressing is what follows when suspicion becomes perception.
“Illusion once seen through...” and all that. So perception must
follow from seeing... which comes from being on the lookout for
it.
But your “21 Day Ebola Challenge” indicates that I can do more
than just hang around waiting for Maya to slip up. I can go on
the hunt for her.
But do I want that? Am I prepared to give the remaining shards
of belief in a dream away in exchange for the certainty of
nothing? That’s the (pretty self-answering) question here. If
this is all a dream, why give one element away in exchange for
another? If this is a dream, then neither element is any more
or less substantial than another. I’m grasping at wisps of
wistfulness and the grasping holds me in place.
Thrash, thrash, thrash…there’s something here (note to …’self’:
back to Curtis and also that description of the breakout
archetype. There’s something glittery amidst that)., but I need
draw a line and move on with the week. ('Sposta be studying for
an exam this Thursday, as well as a work deadline on
Wednesday…wtf, right?)
#Post#: 2780--------------------------------------------------
Re: biisuto
DIR By: Jed McKenna
Date: October 13, 2014, 1:54 am
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Yep.
Love ya, Jed.
#Post#: 2832--------------------------------------------------
Re: biisuto
DIR By: guest89
Date: October 13, 2014, 8:49 pm
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You’ve mentioned that if I’m not repulsed and embarrassed (or
something) by what I wrote yesterday then the Autolysis isn’t
doing its job…so that’s working.
The words have a momentum of their own, don’t they? If I could
restrict writing to what I’m seeing, directly experiencing and
contrasting that with the beliefs that spring up for smiting in
the process it will be of more benefit.
Ahab sought to “strike through the mask” that was Moby Dick; a
great, white screen which visibly personified to him all the
ills of his world and rendered them into a practically
assailable target for him to seek and destroy.
I keep finding myself grappling with projections, beliefs and
other blockages, in the same way that I searched for my ‘self’ …
they seem so real while I’m affected by them and then I’m amazed
at the point of realisation to notice that there just ain't no
spoon. I catch myself shadow boxing and feel gloriously stupid,
even as gratitude for finally seeing through it washes over me.
I never discovered the ‘self’ of which I spent years in informal
search (…more just ‘on the lookout for’ actually, only latterly
in earnest and amidst great personal travail). I merely
exhausted the possibilities of where it could be hiding and the
lightbulb deduction from my inability to find it and some
judicious questioning was "um...because it doesn’t exist…?" This
conclusion sent a bemused posse of mental faculties back to
their day jobs and life has been significantly simpler since.
But I also never found a ‘me’-shaped hole in the universe
either. There is no lack, so the understanding that self is less
than a ****ty crust around the fictitious edges of a glorious
void was nothing greater than, “click: doh” and a little smile
at the feeling of easy rightness about my new context.
That was so simple in hindsight and blew so much clutter out of
my mind that I mistakenly believed for a while that I was
finished. But as questions began to return and I noticed that I
both still gave a rat’s-arse about so many things and that
there had been little real motion as a result, it began to dawn
on me that things had really just started: the game was only
just now afoot and everything to then had been a kind of aimless
preamble.
This was the point at which I picked up Theory of Everything for
the first time.
That made total sense to me, so I picked up the trilogy and,
armed with a fistful of Jed, every new experience, every holy
book or theory I have ever read or considered has been cast in a
new light. Like Brad Pitt, who upon learning that his lovely
wife is also a government assassin in Mr. & Mrs Smith remarked:
"We're going to have to redo every conversation we've ever had."
I find myself enabled to categorise all phenomenon one of two
basic ways: ‘yes’ or ‘I don’t get it’. The latter has much of
great import to tell, I’m sure, but it’s also where all the
garbage is so I don’t have to think about it much because if it
isn’t garbage then it will find a way in. Or it won’t.
I understand clearly that there are mountains of cleverly worded
crap masquerading as knowledge and muddying the existential
waters for all who walk any path in the wake of those who feel
moved to write about it. I’ve done my share of sh*tting it out
behind me, in one form or another as I’ve trodden my own path.
Luckily for the masses, not more than a handful have made
themselves sit through my glib extrapolations from
inconsequential insights, in forums similar to this. But there
are entire franchises of new-age nonsense out there pandering to
the thumb-sucking desire for pacification and meaning. ACIM was
one of them and I watched identities appear and bloom in its
inspired light with fascinated horror.
This is why following any path is a sure-fire method for getting
lost. Up until some point, where the **** started making sense
to him or her, the sage was flailing around like any noob with a
tummyful of angst, a bunch of questions and no practical
methodology. But this is exactly how they process themselves
out; they just themselves don’t realise how it worked in
hindsight and so -in no doubt sincere attempts to assist those
who follow- try to reverse engineer it. This of course ends up
exactly like that scene in The Life of Brian, with everyone
reading absurd meaning into irrelevancies ("I notice I burp
after eating"). Of what relevance is any of it and how would the
neophyte know at what point it begins to make sense to jump onto
such a path?
It isn’t, they wouldn’t and it doesn’t.
And, although warmed rosy by positive feedback on the skills and
an attaboy for the occasional offbeat thought, I have never,
ever wanted to become one of them. In fact, many years ago I
made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t commit to writing
anything book-like until I was sure that I had something of
import to export. Something truly “meaningful”. But I’ve come to
understand - even before I encountered you, Jed, that there will
never be anything meaningful about which to bend my talents. And
rather than feel upset by it (and this is in part thanks to
you), I feel wonderfully liberated and (except for this forum
crap I spew out) fully exonerated. My instincts were good.
Having written that, I’m totally blown away at your revelation
that Moby Dick was Melville’s own autolytic process, visibly
personified in the character of Ahab and practically assailable
as a work of literature.
And rather exhilarated to consider that, not only can I make
excellent use your process married to his, but that I have even
made a few good starts at it over the years (one of which is an
homage to Heart of Darkness).
This is a key. I feel it. Funny that it smacked me in the face
too, when I first read Incorrect. How obvious! Jed writes.
Melville wrote -and look how it helped them in their respective
processes?
I love to write too and have been screaming for something as
scratch-worthy worthy as untruth unrealisation as motivation for
doing so...so….how the **** did that slip by me after I already
saw it?
Here’s the part where Jed invokes his wisefool demon-dealing
strategy: “fight when you have to, but keep climbing when you
can, grasshopper!"
I could waste time beating myself up over that, or I can dust
myself off and move on.
Further!!
#Post#: 2844--------------------------------------------------
Re: biisuto
DIR By: Jed McKenna
Date: October 14, 2014, 3:22 am
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;)
#Post#: 2917--------------------------------------------------
Re: biisuto
DIR By: guest89
Date: October 15, 2014, 6:29 pm
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I woke up this morning with a pretty clear image of how much of
this life is occupied by its story so I wanted to jot it down
before I get lost in it again.
The fabrication that occupies the space available is absolute.
There is no part of this entire universe and what contains it
that is not an element of the lie that is ‘me.’ The edge of the
story is also where “I” end.
Coincidence? I think not.
The early morning birdsong wafting up from the school…now the
parrots fighting over the palm nuts in the trees over the
pool…the straight architectural lines of the spire at St. Mary’s
in the morning sun, against a backdrop of cloud and blue sky…the
needy cat with the exquisite face but poor social skills,
waddling over to flop her chubness on the arm of my chair and
score an early morning scratch… the torn leg of my now summer
pyjamas peeking out from beneath this thing I’m typing into on
my lap…oh, the gibbons from the zoo down the road hooting and
squawking. I’m so used to it, I forget that most of the city
doesn’t live with the sound of lions and great apes in the quiet
times from dusk til dawn. Beyond that, the growing hum of
morning traffic on the freeway and the occasional car passing
along our street. This will increase over the next while, as the
Korean construction crew begin to arrive across the road the
continue with any of the three almost completed houses there.
These are the direct inputs I’m registering now, plus a squeak
of speculative interpolation from ‘past’ and ‘future’. The ones
out of my line of sight were identified and pigeonholed with
labels by past experience. In fact, there’s a whole lot of
inferred universe and time that I use to keep it all locked into
place, in the here and now.
My task is to strike through all of it…the challenge is “how?”
How do I get my fingers under the edge so that I can begin to
pry it up…?
#Post#: 3052--------------------------------------------------
Re: biisuto
DIR By: guest89
Date: October 19, 2014, 10:37 pm
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I pursued self for a long time, like a mirage in the road that
just keeps its distance no matter how fast I move towards it.
Not consciously, but in the many ways and means employed and
devised to adorn and add to, over a lifetime.
Then no-self was recognised, unheralded by fanfare, crash or
even audible click. Yet things have been less complicated since,
as knotty bits of habit and belief began to leak mojo and
unravel.
So it is now also with “no-thing”, aka “nothing”.
It keeps appearing in sentences and thoughts, like that same
mirage. The mind knows it’s a mirage so if you don’t swerve the
car or alter your trajectory the mirage keeps moving with you.
But when I stop what I'm thinking and pause on what nothing is
trying to tell me…wow. It’s like driving right up to the mirage
and disappearing down a wormhole.
See, I was getting bummed because it’s been becoming clear that
-for all the thrashing about, writing and thinking and being
disgusted with my lack of progress- I’m really getting nothing
from this process - and I couldn’t be more pleased to finally
get that: this growing sense of hopelessness and …just nothing.
Nothing’s happening here.
The mind will never be satisfied with what it gets from this
because there’s nothing to get and certainly nothing that would
satisfy its problem-gnawing raison d'etre. This guarantees its
dissatisfaction and now it seems I’ve found an inside track to
run on here…all the while working to loosen ties to the beliefs
(that bind and bite), as they are uncovered.
#Post#: 3107--------------------------------------------------
Re: biisuto
DIR By: Jed McKenna
Date: October 21, 2014, 7:14 am
---------------------------------------------------------
Dear Beast:
You already have a lever and are prying away. Patience is called
for.
Love ya, Jed.
P.S. Put that cat on a diet.
#Post#: 3130--------------------------------------------------
Re: biisuto
DIR By: guest89
Date: October 21, 2014, 10:09 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
The cat must've heard you. She (or her brother) left a
disembowelled pigeon on the dining room floor this morning, its
heart most prominent...some kinda warning ya think...? :o
I wake up with a mild sensation of dread often enough for it to
be ‘a thing’. Or, I could be doing something, or doing nothing
and be suddenly seized by this sensation that I’ve forgotten
something terribly important that I was supposed to have done or
be doing, some appointment I’ve inadvertently missed or for
which I’ve neglected to prepare.
The exigencies of the consultant’s existence, you might suppose.
And it’s true. I stupidly operate from at least three calendars
and have been wrestling to reduce it to one. Yada yada.
But that’s not it. Although there have been things forgotten or
neglected, I’ve determined that the dread..this fear, is itself
generally sourceless. There is no missed meeting or task undone
- nothing beyond what has become the normal, acceptable level of
inbox overflow. Forcing myself to focus upon it as it arises,
the feeling stems from a general and aggregated state of being
overwhelmed by the volume of mentally-constructed, so-called
‘life’ things that come at us all, at the bandwidth of
consensual reality…plus or minus those things about which
peccadilloes prescribe I should be fearful or otherwise…a kind
of ‘me’ flavour to the general level of background fear.
Whenever the fear arose, I was oriented outwards looking for the
thing about which the fear had arisen, without ever really
questioning the validity of the fear itself. What I mean is,
suppose I can’t readily identify the object about which fear has
arisen…? What tends to happen next is that I observe myself
merely appropriating the nearest substitute shortcoming,
perceived weakness, or such chink in my egoic shell and link the
fear to that, all so that the fear wouldn’t go wanting for a
credible source. Don’t doubt the veracity of the fear: doubt
instead that fear is unwarranted. Like a cop at the lights
yanking some innocent civilian from their car to race off and
chase an indeterminate bad guy, whom it is believed is
absconding to the horizon and freedom.
What I was not doing was turning around to look at and direct
the beam of awareness inward, upon Fear itself, merely reacting
on its behalf like some stupid, button-eyed sock puppet.
“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek,”
That Campbell quote has been preying upon me for a long time.
It’s been the lock screen on my mobile for over a year…neither
my wife nor kids can compete with that. When I first read it,
years ago, it cut very deeply through…something, into
….something….then just lay there, dormant, like “a sub-routine
for later execution” I think you’ve referred to this kind of
thing, Jed. When it popped up again -at just the right moment,
as I’ve come to expect- I latched onto it and have held it tight
ever since.
So, without really understanding what it means, I started to pay
attention to fear when it arose, whenever I have the presence of
mind to (instead of metaphorically shit my pants) stare the fear
down and look towards it instead of avert my gaze. And what I’ve
been discovering is (suspiciously) exactly the same as what I
discovered when I got all Spanish Inquisition about that ‘self'
thing: ain’t no such thing.
Without exception, every single time I’ve done that the result
has been the same. Fear isn’t an attribute of a thing, but a
reaction to a perceived threat…or an unperceived threat, right?
When the threat remains outside of perception, we start getting
superstitious and invoke intuition and other mumbo-jumbo to
account for it. Beyond its legitimate function as a primal EWS
survival aspect of the lizard brain, it adds no positive value
to any event or situation. It’s merely a contraction in…what?
Ego has misappropriated the fight or flight instinct, rerouting
its circuits to protect an imaginary entity from perceived
threats to its integrity.
So my hypothesis at this stage is its value lies in being the
power source of the egoic force field, that functions to keep
all the bad stuff ‘out there’, in the dark…or, maybe it is the
darkness itself?
Laying these observations out in plain sight like this makes me
appear insane, I’m sure, which is a good thing. Layers of
nothing, folded and piled onto further layers of nothing at all.
But it’s an insanity that animates this being right here- for a
change- instead of the displaced insanities I normally project
onto the outside world on a daily, more often ongoing basis. Out
there, fear is the ring through society’s nose, by which Rupert
Murdoch et al so masterfully drag our collective attention
around…
But let’s not dissipate our energy and attention outward once
again.
Further!
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