Where to Find Her

Many eschew the haughty doughty of meditation for its more down to earth cousin - simple relaxation. Although most use intermediaries to meet her. They may be introduced through spirits, like whisky, scotch, bourbon. Even lessor spirits know where to find traces of her: wine, malt liquor, beer. Some newer, post-industrial, spirits of the digital age: prosac, xanax, valium provide bordellos for extended liaisons. Older, plant based allies like opiates and soporifics, offer more rustic but exotic brothels on the frontier. Each of these arrangements require gratuities. Some skim payment immediately afterwards, some defer and string out the payment, leaving wakes of poverty, with little to meet the daily rent of simple satisfaction, much less the profound and transformative contentment that comes from a true and bonded relationship with relaxation. After many such payments, some can no longer afford even to feel just right.

A few, let's call them hunters in contrast to merchants, seek communion with their relaxation a different way. They may have experienced their first tastes through intermediaries, their first introductions to possibilities of ecstasy inherit in relaxation, but they chaffed at the ongoing requirements of these chaperon middle-man. Their bodies also have balked at the heavy taxation inherent in such commodity transactions.

And they begin to look for it themselves. She is a mighty ally, attested to by those who sacrifice their very character and way of life for her companionship.

But hunters begin as hunters begin, looking for sign. Following trails. Being alert during the day for her scent, until they began to realize the little tricks that kept from scaring her away and began to approach her native habitat and gain her confidence. That's when things change for the hunters. Now they can never go back to the shrink-wrap offerings of the market places, having tasted her fullness in the wild, meeting her with their own vibrant and unadulterated presence, they become together what was only glimpsed by those enamored with her tinsel.

Your Worth to Others

Photograph by Alexander Yakovlev

In The Five Levels of Attachment, Don Ruiz Jr. talks about how we we live in two different dream worlds. A personal one and the dream of the world. The most important world being with own dreaming. The dreaming of the world has a different objective, one of domestication of our minds to function between within the mind of the group and consensual reality. The world dream emphasizes normality, predictability, limitations of options and accountability of our actions to the group. And while the group has been a very important construct in the survival of our species, it becomes very dangerous to our personal well-being when internalized.

Often we mistake qualities of our selves for static properties rather than processes that are continually recreating a state of mind through habit. One of these processes, aligned with the world dream is a conditional acceptance and love of ourself based on how we are perceived by others. It's an important mechanism for socialization but can be destructive for individualization. Especially when our identity becomes wrapped up in receiving validation and approval from others.

We may find ourselves looking to the reactions of others for our self worth. How others are reacting to our appearance, to our behavior. It's really not even an objective process, rather it's our perception of their reactions and our interpretation of what those reactions mean.

To be fully free, in our life and expression, it's sometimes necessary to reclaim the importance we give to the opinions of others. To be sovereign of our own interior domain, we might have to give up any relevance to both the positive and negative attitudes toward us from others. As least as far as having anything to do with accepting ourselves.

We may feel tremendous guilt in just this idea of loving ourselves unconditionally, which itself is a strong indicator of our complete domestication, when we reject the validity of this acceptance within while seeking it externally. The ability to feel compassion for others starts with the ability to feel it for ourselves. Those who hate or disapprove of themselves find it very difficult to love others and very difficult not to constantly stand in judgment.

Contrary to the message of the world dream, we can love ourselves, accept ourselves as we are, and still feel compassion for others and adapt well in society. We have just removed the major hooks we provide for our own manipulation and act from a sense of completeness rather than lack.

But it's a process, rather than a quality we magically acquire. It is an ongoing awareness that's required to dismantle the default programming that keeps us chained to what we assume is normal and decent and moral and replacing it over and over again with our authentic self until we tilt the scale to living mostly free rather than mostly subject to our worth in others' eyes.

meditation

This morning, meditating...the nature of my meditation has changed. At night I use technique -ritual and focus. I visit places. I explore. In the mornings I simply sit and observe what I am aware of and try to catch the felt-sense of what or who it is that is aware of these things. The contents of my mind and senses aren't important and they settle when not engaged. The pond becomes clearer. There is peace, stillness. I try to wrap my awareness around this presence, but it contains no qualities. It is my form of prayer and reminds me of an old verse in a holy text and modern apostle Popeye: I am that "I am" and that's all that I am. Sam.

Even though the content of experience or memory or ideas, including ideas about self, is irrelevant in this awareness, it is not detachment. If anything (and it's really nothing) it's abiding in the radiance that is the ordinary world without the automatons false identity seeking to digest and utilize and process this or that, an experience more akin to sleepwalking and dreams than the awakening into presence and radical acceptance of what's going on. In a sense it may be detachment, but it's detachment from a small self that compartmentalizes every experience in its limited domain as good or bad, pleasure or pain, fear or hope. No quality is real.

leveraging fickle

too many ideas been slipping through the holes in my head or pooling up in the quagmire sludge of clippings and notes and stashes of info like a squirrel with nuts buried all over the forest only a handful he remembers. Always been a problem, been approaching it many ways, most of them unsuccessful in the long term. my latest strategy is I've created a tag in evernote called "Curate" ... these are ideas, some of them old ones that have been kicking around for decades, others more recent, not to many that recur like this, but the curate tag has a list of these that I come back to daily, weekly or whenever and elaborate on further, extend, refine, cogitate about and let 'em age and mature like a good black diamond melon waiting in the sun until it's just so juicy its ready to explode or turn into natural moonshine

and at the end of the year, instead of worrying about resolutions and behavior and ideals, I'll just review the ideas I've curated for the year and file them off in a folder and begin my incubation of new ones or ones that are still ripening. In a few years, I should have a nice collection of where my head's been, what was important, or what I thought was important, what I learned or what I didn't, how I benefited or suffered from carrying these ideas throughout the year

Before You Go, What Insights Would You Pass Along?

i would have remarkably little of value to share. perhaps only:

1. be true to yourself. we die alone so don't put much thought into how other people see you.
2. question the beliefs of your time, your culture, your group, your family, your friends. the only thing you really know is what you know yourself. and sometimes, not even that.
3. make every day magical and sufficient to your life, spend it in a way you won't regret in the evening, without forfeiting it to some uncertain future or some mindless impulse.
4. learn not to judge others so you can free yourself.
5. there's nothing you have to do, so don't bend yourself out of shape resisting imaginary authority.
6. learn what accomplishment means to you and accept no substitutes.

It Takes a Village to Raise an Idiot

Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river. The current of the river swept silently over them all -- young and old, rich and poor, good and evil -- the current going its own way, knowing only its own crystal self. 

Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to the twigs and rocks of the river bottom, for clinging was their way of life, and resisting the current was what each had learned from birth. 

 But one creature said at last, "I am tired of clinging. Though I cannot see it with my eyes, I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom." 

The other creatures laughed and said, "Fool! Let go, and that current you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed against the rocks, and you will die quicker than boredom!" 

But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go, and at once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks. 

Yet in time, as the creature refused to cling again, the current lifted him free from the bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more. 

And the creatures downstream, to whom he was a stranger, cried, "See a miracle! A creature like ourselves, yet he flies! See the messiah, come to save us all!" 

And the one carried in the current said, "I am no more messiah than you. The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure. 

 But they cried the more, "Savior!" all the while clinging to the rocks, and when they looked again he was gone, and they were left alone making legends of a savior. 

Illusions, Richard Bach

I was reminded of this when writing this in my journal this morning:

...being aware only of the breath is training to let go of everything else...and what happens when we start learning to let go, of the thoughts, feelings, urgencies, stimuli, the parade of important and well-known figures of psyche passing by, is that the happiness, bliss, and ease that they promised if we would follow the parade out of town is actually something the shills had stolen and was always in our possession when we just stop and let them go by without us investing

 a strong self makes for a weak consumer...and vice versa...so it's in the best interest of commerce and the immaturity of our nascent social organisms to keep individual egos crippled, needy and distracted so the system works. Maybe someday we, as a whole, will transcend the fearful clinging and insecurities that have made grouping so vital for species survival. Until then, only a few will break with biology, using this new fangled "consciousness" that we are trying to wield like the wings of Icarus.