Friday, October 20, 2017

October 20, 2017 When I Grow Up, I Want to Be the Universe

When I grow up, I want to be the universe.

I have many ideas about how to go about growing toward this.  I have a natural inclination to be theoretically inclusive, because that erases boundaries and soothes divisions.  In practice, I isolate myself.

People of Earth can be hard to take.  It's a clashing collision of opposites, duality, polarities, gulfs of difference between what is said and consciously accepted and the way things actually seem to play out.

I learn what I can from wherever I find what seems to be an accurate reflection of reality.  It can be a line of movie dialogue:  "We accept the love we think we deserve;" a song lyric: "if you love somebody, set them free;"  a teaching from a book:  "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you;" an out of context quote: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality.  To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."   Anything is a possible teacher.  Everything is a possible teacher.

In New Age thought systems, there's this idea of taking what resonates and leaving what does not.  It's what everyone does at every moment, but it's often used as an excuse for evading reality or catering to cognitive dissonance.  Avoidance does not help one expand the horizons of consciousness.  Denial is a hindrance to growth.  It can all be carefree, it really could, but there are shadows in our psyches that have to have the spotlight of our attention directed upon them before they can be truly cared for and integrated.

We are an integrated collection of countless beings who generally work as one.  From our cells, to our families, nations, galaxies and forever outward, each entity can be an agent of peaceful togetherness, joining with others to make something greater than themselves alone.  If the heart, lungs, or brain turned on one another in competition, everyone would lose.

This is why I hold love in such high regard.  It is that which unifies us, accepts, soothes, heals.  It is the fuel of creativity, that which frees us from our fear, the gravity that draws us together.

Wednesday, September 20, 2017

In Which Much Shifts in a Short Time

Now, this may sound a little woo-woo, but if you know me relatively well, you know that is where I dwell.  Leading up to the eclipse, it felt as though everything was getting faster:  time, expectation, restlessness.  The general feeling of "I've been waiting my entire life for this," swarmed up around me, boiling within.

Here we are, today, a moon and a day later, and things in my life are cycling into a new sort of dawn.  Meaningful people have fallen out of my life, concerns have dropped out of mind, and the sense of consciously trusting my heart and my intuition has never been so prominent.

Everything really seems as though it is for the best right now, regardless of how it will be in the future, regardless of how it was in the past.  It is all love.  I may see love differently than most, I understand, but when you recognize all beings as the same consciousness, flowing through perspectives, filters, stories of the perceived past or hopeful futures, you respect it.

The "other" person is you, not figuratively, not metaphorically, literally and completely you.  This lets you free them entirely from your own expectations and demands.  Recognizing them as an equal creator, as equally divine, their path as equally valid, lets you gift them with absolute freedom to be as they are without attachment or demand.

We are all.  There's only one of us.  The more time goes by, the more obvious this becomes to me, the greater the pervasion of this perspective on the surface of my awareness.  Now I recognize that attachments are fear based, because there can be no loss if you are all and all are you.  You can choose to be with those you love freely, and when they choose otherwise, you don't hold it against them because you recognize that they are choosing/creating their own experiences just as you are choosing/creating yours.

It really is geometry, shape, and tone.  It is all vibration.  We are everything simultaneously, but we focus our attention in such particular ways we perceive time and singular lines of that time.  But it is all love.  It is all you.  It is all me, free to experience anything at all.

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

Identity as attention

"Now, you are an identity. Pretend that you hold a flashlight. The flashlight is your own consciousness. Now. You can turn this flashlight in an infinite number of directions. These directions are always available to you. But instead, you get the habit of directing your flashlight in one particular direction. You hold it in this direction constantly and you have forgotten, you see, that there are any other directions.

All you have to do is swing the flashlight in other directions. You must momentarily, for now, shift the focus of the flashlight. And when you shift it, the direction in which you are used to looking will momentarily appear dark, but other images and realities will become available to you. There is nothing to prevent you from swinging the flashlight back. And when you learn what you are doing, when you learn what you are doing— "

Seth, ESP CLASS SESSION, OCTOBER 14,1969 TUESDAY

Anita Moorjani, Dying to be Me:

"Although I try to share my near-death experience, there are no words that can come close to describing its depth and the amount of knowledge that came flooding through. So the best way to express it is through the use of metaphors and analogies. Hopefully, they capture a part of the essence of what I’m trying to convey at least in some small way.

Imagine, if you will, a huge, dark warehouse. You live there with only one flashlight to see by. Everything you know about what’s contained within this enormous space is what you’ve seen by the beam of one small flashlight. Whenever you want to look for something, you may or may not find it, but that doesn’t mean the thing doesn’t exist. It’s there, but you just haven’t shone your light on it. And even when you do, the object you see may be difficult to make out. You may get a fairly clear idea of it, but often you’re left wondering. You can only see what your light is focused on, and only identify that which you already know.

That is what physical life is like. We’re only aware of what we focus our senses on at any given time, and we can only understand what is already familiar.

Next, imagine that one day, someone flicks on a switch. There for the first time, in a sudden burst of brilliance and sound and color, you can see the entire warehouse, and it’s nothing like anything you’d ever imagined. Lights are blinking, flashing, glowing, and shooting sparks of red, yellow, blue, and green. You see colors you don’t recognize, ones you’ve never seen before. Music floods the room with fantastic, kaleidoscopic, surround-sound melodies you’ve never heard before.

Neon signs pulse and boogie in rainbow strobes of cherry, lemon, vermillion, grape, lavender, and gold. Electric toys run on tracks up, down, and around shelves stacked with indescribable colored boxes, packages, papers, pencils, paints, inks, cans of food, packages of multihued candies, bottles of effervescent sodas, chocolates of every possible variety, champagne, and wines from every corner of the world. Skyrockets suddenly explode in starbursts, setting off sparkling flowers, cascades of cold fire, whistling embers, and animations of light.

The vastness, complexity, depth, and breadth of everything going on around you is almost overwhelming. You can’t see all the way to the end of the space, and you know there’s more to it than what you can take in from this torrent that’s tantalizing your senses and emotions. But you do get a strong feeling that you’re actually part of something alive, infinite, and altogether fantastic, that you are part of a large and unfolding tapestry that goes beyond sight and sound.

You understand that what you used to think was your reality was, in fact, hardly a speck within the vast wonder that surrounds you. You can see how all the various parts are interrelated, how they all play off each other, how everything fits. You notice just how many different things there are in the warehouse that you’d never seen, never even dreamed of existing in such splendor and glory of color, sound, and texture—but here they are, along with everything you already knew. And even the objects you were aware of have an entirely new context so that they, too, seem completely new and strangely superreal.

Even when the switch goes back off, nothing can take away your understanding and clarity, the wonder and beauty, or the fabulous aliveness of the experience. Nothing can ever cancel your knowledge of all that exists in the warehouse. You’re now far more aware of what’s there, how to access it, and what’s possible than you ever were with your little flashlight. And you’re left with a sense of awe over everything you experienced in those blindingly lucid moments. Life has taken on a different meaning, and your new experiences moving forward are created from this awareness."

In Which I Offer an Unedited Stream of Consciousness Without Apology

I wish I'd taken at least one poetry workshop (did I ever? I don't think I did) at some point.

I know I'm no poet, but I think it would have shown me something about pacing and phrasing and keeping a musical rhythm.

Poetry is a finer art than prose; a novel can tell you a story, but a poem makes you feel what it's about.

I think about all the experimental short stories I put forward for workshops because they were nothing I really cared about.  I never really risked myself, did I?  I feel a bit fraudulent.  That's not much of an artist, is it, to disallow vulnerability, to only put forth the events that I'd already processed and healed?  There's no rawness or growth from such a practice.

Maybe I don't really know myself after all (and how could I?); I only know what is past, not at at this moment, and certainly not where I am going.  I don't ask "who am I?" because that assumes I am a "who," when "what am I" --no, "what is 'I'?" is the question I am really pondering.

I don't consider myself a writer anymore, because I don't know what it means.  I'm not an artist because I'm not expressing anything real.  I'm hiding.  I'm always hiding, or running to some new town, or coming back to an old one to rest.

What is real is that I'm empty, and cluttering up the space with ideas about reality that I can never confirm, identities I as a human can never truly know.  I select aspects of a persona to present because they are the most pleasing, all the while I am an empty eye staring out from behind a rotating handful of filters to shape my perspective.  I'm not a person.  No one is a person.  That's just another filter, another shape to take.

People will insist that I am loved, but to be loved, don't you have to be known?  How can emptiness be known?  How can an eternal, infinite, undifferentiated void be known or loved or understood to be different from anything else?  You don't love me; you cannot.  You love your perception of me, and I love my perception of you.  "I" is a mystery, perhaps the only unsolvable one, and it is the same for all of us.

Is it a shape we take, is it a story we tell ourselves? Is it the pages and canvas upon which we are scrawled?  So many times we look at what comes next, as if we are drawing a line through time, when perhaps we are painting a portrait, revisiting our definitions and contrasts through the use of negative space.  We may not know what we are, but we usually know what we are not.

People who try to control you try to tell you what you are.  They're just telling you what lenses they use.  I have no interest in control.  I have an interest in love, and I love you so much I will always let go of my idea of you, to allow you to be whatever you choose, for you are not your portrait.  You are the canvas, the artist, the paints, and absolutely nothing in particular.

I will love you by believing that you are free, completely and entirely.  You do not need me or my ideas or my stories.  I will not tell you a story about time, beginnings or endings, because I don't know if any of that is real.

I don't know what I am, or what you are, but I cannot be convinced that the you beneath the you you think you are is temporary.  What can exist without the whole of itself?  What could exist without you or I, because I am certain they are the same, although I can never convince anyone of anything at all.  I wouldn't want to, though, because that is an attempt at control, and control is the opposite of true love.

All we ever really do is use our ideas to fill the empty space of self and tomorrow.  The more we let go, the clearer the void becomes, until even the questions go silent.

I lied in the title; I do apologize.  Thank you.