Leaf

Every time I catch sight of a falling leaf I feel that I have witnessed an awesome event.
Why is that?
For a moment I consider that it’s like when a baby loses a tooth, but then I realize, no, it’s more rare to witness any given tree dropping a leaf than a child loosing their tooth. You know how many teeth your child will loose as they mature, you will be there for many of them, and those extractions you don’t witness, you’ll be informed about, in most cases you’ll hold the tooth in your hand, you might sneak it out from under a pillow and leave a silver dollar in its place.
That leaf that you see falling from a tree is more like one of innumerable hairs falling from a head, which when you think of it that way, at first, it seems like no occasion for awe. People shed hair all the time, and so must trees shed their leaves, even when it’s unseasonable.
Why then the awe?
Because it’s an intimate moment shared with this random tree. I may never see it loose another leaf. The next time I pass, it may be a still bit of scenery, either naked, or covered in orange or green foliage. It will give an impression of being static, as if it has always stood thus. My attention will be attracted to the moving objects in the environment, humans, birds, cars, cats. If I take note of the tree, it will be of the whole tree, or the entire canopy of leaves shimmering with sunlight, but not of that moment of separation, that instant when a small part of the entirety falls.
I suppose that is where the awe originates.
To see a leaf fall is like witnessing a birth, the moment when something that was a part of one thing emerges suddenly distinct and isolated. Behold the brave leaf twirling gracefully towards the earth, a solitary thing, dancing on the wind, lost eventually to the mulch. It’s a lifetime that lapses before my eye for a duration of time that I call 3 seconds.
Likewise, I am still twirling in free fall, no longer what I was, not yet what I will be, a thing in motion, excited, confused, thrilled, frightened, streaking through a duration of time with definite limits. Transience, mortality, in the falling of a leaf. The mirror of my own existence.
Every time I catch sight of a falling leaf I have witnessed my own transgression.

Work On Self

In the ordinary course of life as human animals our attention flows untrained from one thing to another. Whatever is loudest, brightest, closest, or most thrilling captivates this precious resource, this little understood commodity. Reflexively, our mood changes constantly as well, contorted in one way or another in response to external stimuli, blindly following our unguided attention.
When you are constantly wrapped up in this shifting, this loss of attention, you can’t really be free, you can’t make any choices, you can’t do anything seriously. You will merely move from one attention grabbing person, place or thing to the next, responding emotionally to each new source of stimulation with astoundingly mechanical reliability.
We react. Clowns cause fear, praise arouses pleasure, a traffic jam equals anger. If being ordered around by your boss made you irritable today, there is no reason to suspect that you might enjoy the experience tomorrow.
Being happy, being sad, angry, or fearful, these are not things that we do, these are things that do us. We react automatically to whatever stimulus we encounter.
We assume that these reactions are somehow more than arbitrary, that if something pleases or displeases us there is a fundamental justification for the response.
If my spouse cheats on me I feel that I should be sad and angry, I have every right to it. I will feel that it is my spouse's fault that I am angry.
I have never considered that my response to the situations and individuals around me comes from within me. It is particular to me. It is a reaction I learned early in life from my parents, my teachers, the television and my peers and I have repeated it mechanically so often that it feels “right.”
We feel that these reflexive states of being are dictated by who we are, when really we are being dictated by them.
Who are you anyway? What are you? What is the nature of this existence?
Most of us have not considered what it means to be a person. We have not asked ourselves, “what am I? What function do I serve?”
Nobody else asked us either. In fact we have been informed of who we are by others who have never wondered what they were. To delve into such a question would mean directing our attention inward, placing it on our own self rather than allowing it to drift over whatever new thing calls to it.

When I was a child I was very concerned with the question: “what am I?”
It seems as if immediately after being informed of who I was, and consequently forgetting what I am or might be, I began to try to find my way back to it. At least as many years as was spent forgetting myself came to be invested in trying to remember it again.
By the time I was in the fifth grade I became very convinced, walking home from school one day, that I did understand something about myself and reality and it was summed up best by these lines from a popular nursery song; life is but a dream.
I am a dream. One dream of many. There are dreams within dreams to consider.
If I am a dream, then there is a dreamer, there’s something else, an eternal something, an other of some kind.
It took more time for me to build on this theory, to move beyond “what am I?” to “why might I be?“
To me it seems that one function of the human being is to establish contact with that dreamer, that eternal being. Just doing that is a lot harder than it sounds.

Doing that in as many different ways and different spaces as possible is the function of a human being in a system that involves this organic existence but is not only this organic existence.
We do this with our attention, by turning it in on ourselves, in on the dreamer.
This is an non-ordinary application of attention. This is going beyond the course of life as human animals. This is applying attention intentionally rather than accidentally. This is trading the subjectivity involved in riding the roller coaster of human emotion for the objectivity of a waking state; a moment of lucidity in which I remember myself as the eternal dreamer.
This is what I call “work on self.”

Familiar Domain

Whatever is happening, whatever this is, I allow it, orange flowers dropping petals into a small clay bowl. The bowl is glazed to look like a quail's egg, six quails' eggs held in the dry hands of the potter Emmanuel.
Whatever this is I accept it. Our Father... I accept it. Who art in…I accept it…heaven…hallowed be… I accept it…thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in…accept it.
Though the faces that are worn by the beloved appear differently to me now, this is the same domain, the same beloved, all the same self that has always been and will always be. I observe it now from a lower level of energy than on the previous visit.
The first orange flower petals dropping into a small clay bowl. Emmanuel was the potter's name.
I allow all feelings of fear to pass through me, merging with all visions, liberating myself from the apparitions and entrapments of the lower dimensions.
The woman with the dark circles under her eyes, pale bony body, tiny lungs breathing in, then expelling the breath into my face…I allow all feelings of fear to pass through me.
But even though they may seem different to me now, I know that these are the same domains as before, and that nothing is going to happen to me that hasn’t happened before. Whatever is happening, whatever this is, I allow it, orange flowers drooping, their petals laying in the basin of a small ceramic bowl.
Give us this day our daily…glazed to look like a quail's egg, six tiny speckled quail's eggs supported in the large cracked hands of Emmanuel the potter.
Forgive us for our trespasses as we forgive those…when the visages and emotional auras of the unresponsive guides are superimposed upon the beloved, I must remember to recognize them as my own projections… who trespass against us… and not view these face changes as foreboding evil, danger, or antagonism… her dark eyes sinking in the dark rings of flesh, slippery lips, unkempt hair and a stale odor lingering about her cave…if I react in repulsion, I may find it difficult or impossible to blend my own energy field with that of the beloved…for thine is the power…but if I am able…the kingdom… to merge with the guide…and the glory…at this point…forever…I should be able to thus liberate myself from the endless action reaction game maintained by our opposing and unblending vibrations…Amen.
If I can manage to awaken my attention, and can accept the full reality of the macrodimensions, the divine state of liberation should dawn upon me as the cycle of death and rebirth is broken.
Whatever is happening, whatever this is, I allow it, I accept it, these orange petals dangling and falling and filling the uneven ceramic bowl fashioned by the chaffed hands of the one called Close to God. Emmanuel carrying away the six pale green and brown speckled quail's eggs…
I must remember that I can achieve liberation at any moment just by the power of recognition… remembering myself in these guides, the flower, the bowl, Emmanuel, the eggs, and the dark woman…penetrating through these visions into the clear light… thy kingdom… from which all visions have come and to which all visions return, like a sleeper's breath, like tiny lungs expanding and contracting…like six eggs which become a bowl… her breath on my face…allowing feelings of fear to pass through me…whatever this is…thy will be done… whatever this is… on earth as it is in…this same domain seen from a different vantage point...I accept it.

Feast of Cannibals

With cannibal love we coddle them, keeping them locked within steely fences and walls of white plaster. Never will the wolves get their chance at these, our precious young. Never will the world have the chance to dash their bones into bits with terrible falls after great feats. We alone shall enjoy that privilege, the honor of eating our young alive.
Fattened as they are with the sloth of caged animals, darkened by their cheerless existence beneath our marvelous white wings, they know no joy. They watch the images of childhood from our flickering screens, see the green of grass and blue of sky without the knowledge of the wealth of feelings that such images evoke in the spirit of one whose bare feet have trod on grass and leaped towards the sky.
The sky shall not have them. The grass shall never touch them. We keep them safe, like pearly little maggots hidden away in a dark dumpster, suffocating them with cellophane wrappers and video games, and mp3 players, and cellular phones.
They may speak to one another, reach for one another through these devices, but harsh words will have to win their battles, smooth talk suffice for exchanges of affection. We will not let the bloody fisted brawls have them, nor the hand holding, tickling, chasing, and swinging. They are only for us.
We strip away their immortal souls and make machines of them, fat little high fructose corn syrup powered bots to cherish the ideals we hammered into the hole we tore in their hearts. They will hate terror and terrorists. They will love America and God. Their ears and belly buttons will be washed and their homework done.
We will make them want us, want us for the toys, the shoes, the clothes, the sweets we can buy. They will wail for these things, the fruits of our Empire, never knowing the taste of earth and air and sun and water. We will give them corn to eat in all of the colors of the rainbow forged in the shapes of cartoon characters and steroids to make their lungs pump even when there is no oxygen left to breathe and technology to cast its light over their pallor and more fucking liquid corn to leave them thirsty for more and more and more…
They belong to us and to no other, certainly not to themselves. Whatever they are, whatever they were or might have been, it will be smothered like the unwholesome flame that it is.
Death shall not have them, for we will never let them live. They will die before they can be born, to satisfy our hunger, to stave off the orgy of fear that is existence. They will never be here, will never know now, will always be spirited away by our incessant diversions, left as ghosts slumped on sofas with crumbs in their creases.
And the few who suspect that they have been denied the most precious gift we could give will be punished for their intelligence, for their pure heartedness and courage. The brave and the curious and the noble of our brood will suffer the worst tortures so that we may enjoy our cannibal feast, unperturbed by remorse or anxiety.
We will never need to atone if we nip truth in the bud, snuff out the first smoldering spark before a wild fire can grow and spread its crimson fingers over the hearts of our children, taking them forever from us . Never will the passion to live flower within and eat them alive and transform them from worms into butterflies. They are ours alone to devour.

Pink Satin Roses Unraveling

Pink satin roses unraveling and round moon white belly out running tiny breasts. The great hallowed halls of my makers and their room of mirrors, that is the place where I go to wait. The wall of windows lies exposed and I can see the fields all gold and brown and the dusty green olive trees and a far away lake of dark blue. The sun shines eternally in that place and there is someone to take my hand and the memories shift like the beads at the end of a kaleidoscope, always changing the view. I am young and strong and brave again with the stars of wonder restored to my heart. I can run with long legs and bare feet into all of the days that come with lungs pumping and heart pounding, aching in my chest. The pleasure of letting the spirit fly through life outweighs the pain of moving the body so that there is no desire to stop. They make themselves old in that world far from the room of mirrors in the halls of the makers, stooped over desks and hunched over steering wheels. They die bit by bit each time that a bell is rung and they begin to practice this little death while they are children. Poison in silver wrappers, poison filled with sweet cream and stowed away in neat plastic boxes adorned with our favorite blue skinned heroes sets the mind racing when it finds its way into the blood stream. That is how we grow old, loosing our bodies to false gods and cramped spaces and sweet toxic substances that give us a moment of pleasure. That is how I grow old and come to sag, that and by giving myself away to all comers. Anyone who asks gets my attention. My parents start stealing it away when I am small. I come to believe it is what I must do in all cases, and only when it is too late, I realize that it must be stopped. I must keep a kernel for myself so that it can grow and flower again and again. Never ever give it all away. Keep it so that spring can come again. There is a way that leads to life and a way that leads to death. Not for the body alone, but for something else as well. We must live for the shimmering sliding something that passes through this world. It passes through what we think we are, it passes through the whole thing. Later we will read these words and we will think that they make no sense, but that is all a mater of perspective. You must be much bigger to see, you must be bleeding through the paper thin world of the temporary. I draw a cross in the little world and in the room of mirrors a door opens and I find a tiny sword in the darkness beneath a fur coat. It fills me with fear, because I never imagined I would find such a thing in this place. It came from somewhere that I am blind to, it has come from the Other. Now I have the tiny sword in my hands. I knew of the place outside of places when I found the sword. I knew it when I met the terrible yellow unicorn with its red eyes and it dared to defy the laws of the world that I inhabited. I knew it best of all when I stacked the brightly colored boxes, little ones on top of big ones or inside of big ones and there was a special square way that they fit. That was what taught me to understand space and it reminded me keenly of the place outside of places. Soft and sweet with little bits of pink satin roses coming unraveled, and a hard sidewalk on a pleasantly warm night and the infinite open above me. Another right there beside me and we are amazed that we are here, amazed that we are alive, amazed that there is another amazed one here, right now with the one I call “me”. The great hallowed halls of my makers and their room of mirrors, that is the place where I go to wait. That is where I am. A kernel kept for myself so that spring will come again.

Attention Spilling Like Water

Why is it that we are all so obsessed with the color of eyes? Love songs define their characters by the color of the eyes. It is the most obvious thing; the eyes. Clearly we care what color they are even if we refuse to look into the eyes of others for extended periods of time. We may even couple with some one and sing the praises of their eyes, but we would never dare to gaze into them for too long during the course of the conventional romance.
Eyes, eyes, everything comes into us through our eyes and everything flows out. Our attention, so vital yet ephemeral leaks away out of our eyes, dribbles on flowers and the color of shoes and advertisements for energy drinks, and the eyes of others.
Away it goes like drops of water spilled from the faucet. It can never call back those drops that were lost. The only solution is to stop the leak. My self, like California, is experiencing a water shortage. Water is life. Life is attention.
We live here in this world of phantoms because once, at a fatal moment, our attention wandered, it abandoned the self and went out wandering through the wasteland, went away with yearning… longing for movement and warmth, otherness. Conquest, we call this, this seeking of the Other until we find it and grasp it and when it has been consumed we find that it is now of self and we must escape it again…we must find another Other. Never still, not for a moment. The eyes lead to eternity.
Certainly we are concerned with the color of eternity manifested in this desert. We will not dare to look into it, return through stillness to the place where self dwells. Painful self, which I must avoid at all cost. I must not look for too long into those eyes or I will see self, sitting on its throne, like a statue of Pharaoh that has never moved. My wanderings, my conquests, have been all fantasies, attention fleeing its source.
Nothing has occurred. I am unmoving. Nothing ever will occur. I am unmovable. But my spirit flies from me to wander in the wasteland.
Thus I am dead. That is how God dies. All that we call life is the death of the eternal. I dream. A cold silent stone. Sleeping beauty, snow white lying in her coffin, and the prince, he is a conquistador that has fled my shores and hopes to find another, but never will he arrive at any shore but mine. Fractured. Attention fleeing self endlessly, endlessly. As long as my spirit flies I am empty.
If it would return and stay we would live again. Eternity filled with life, with attention. Attention filling self. Then what are we? What would we be?
If Charming never comes to me willingly then I am the wolf big and black , stalking him as he runs in place. I am the witch, ancient and cold and riddled with death, laughing at the one who wants to be rid of me. Separation is death. Truly. A kiss is a communion. I wait for the communion of self that brings awakening, the communion that restores life.
Why is it that we are all so obsessed with the color of eternity? Love songs pale and lifeless bleat on about the glory of conquest. Time is the wasteland, and songs and stories and conquest unfold through the matrix of time.
My attention flies from me.
The eternal has no color. That is why it is the color of the door that I prefer to examine. I will spend time to catalogue its variations and striations, write endless tomes singing the merits of its shade, anything at all to avoid opening it. Anything but confess that I am leaking away, the blood of God spilling, as if rotten with hemophilia. The blood of God spilling into the wasteland.

Earth

I come from the earth and to the earth I will return. It’s no wonder that I should chase after the horned God of the underworld. I remember springing from the dirt. I come from the land and the land comes from me. I never was, I never will be. And still the grass grows and the worms crawl beneath it’s yellow coat and the earwigs creep into the cracks of the houses that men built. The black widow hides in the cedar. Death resting quietly in the shade, spinning her scattered incoherent web.
My father showing me the creatures of the earth, holding the black widow in his vice grips, calling me to come and look. Frightened, I hover at a distance. He assures me that it’s safe, come closer look at death so that you will know her when you meet her. He shows me her belly with its red hour glass. This is how you will recognize her. Stay away from her, don’t touch her, don’t play with her, and be careful in the dark places, she is there.
Another time he calls me and, when I come, he is holding a brilliant green snake in his hands. Again he tells me to come closer. This time he shows me the beautiful snake glittering in the sun like a length of new garden hose and tells me it won’t hurt me. This is a good snake, it helps the trees to grow. It kills the gophers that nibble their roots. It may bite you if you frighten it, but no great harm will come of that. It is a beautiful snake and I feel happy looking at it in my father’s hands and happier still when he sets it gently down. I laugh excitedly, watching it slither away, disappearing in the green of the grass as though it had never been there.
I come from the earth. I’ve carried it under my fingernails and in my hair. I’ve felt it under my bare feet. Its thorns have buried themselves in my flesh, its barrel thorns and fox burs have embedded themselves in my clothing. I’ve crawled around in its strong wooden arms and plucked its fruits and danced naked over its grassy back. I climbed to the tops of the trees and balanced above the deep dusty green canopy and drank in the sight that surrounded me; blue sky, yellow sun, dull golden grass like a head of blonde hair, the old broken fence of a brown so dark it is nearly black, sloping and falling, letting its planks return to the earth in broken rotted bits, the white house with the red tile roof, tall and proud and frightening and sad and hopeful, the mountains dark and round, mysterious and menacing and inviting.
I knew as I looked around me that I must remember the sight, that it was an important moment to be so high and see it all. I knew it was more beautiful than anything I was ever likely to see again. I knew it, but was at loss as to what should be done with such knowledge. I tried to hold it inside of me, but could feel it slipping even as I grasped at it, like sand through my fingertips, thoughts of school and playmates and my parents in the shape of words formed inside of my mind, washing the sight from my eyes even as I beheld it and, eventually, I climbed back down into the dark shade and silver branches below.
I nursed a black goat with a white star on her forehead from a glass bottle and a smelly rubber nipple and called her baby and watched her grow, the little nubs of her horns slowly working their way up just as the teeth in my own mouth would do from time to time. The goat disliked the smell of the awful rubber nipple and refused to take nourishment until my grandmother took her into her soft wrinkled hands and doused the nipple in milk and insisted, her old steely blue eyes shining mischievously. Then the kid drank and wagged its black nub of a tail and flicked its delicate furred ears.
I remember earth. Even here, sitting in my plaster box over the concrete and asphalt that reaches as far as I can see, I remember the untamed earth. The dirt and insects and serpents and death and horns which push to the surface where once there was nothing. One day I will return to it. I will be home. I sprang from the earth and to the earth I shall return.

A Wish In Five Minutes

With five minutes what can I do? I do what? Five minutes? I do five minutes. What? I can. What I can do: five minutes. Five minutes of my time which will eventually become five minutes of your time. Your time. If you were born in 1981 then this is our time. OUR TIME. I am not a Goonie and I want to go home, you say. But there is no going home. I know that. Home will be different, home will be gone. Home will be a golf course or a desert. We are here, in the underworld with the slimy skeletons of dead pirates and the shiny coins thrown down a well by many starry eyed wishers. We are swimming with the wishes and the fishes down below the feet of the walking dead, the ones above ground. And I tell you that this is OUR TIME! We can do something now. In our time. Our moment. Our adventure. A chance to live for a moment, like a moth drawn in to peril by the exciting glowing filaments of a light bulb. It is the electricity that draws us into this peril. You wish to escape peril. You wish to go home. But home is gone and this wish that you made, it’s right here, with my wish and all the other wishes that sleep with the fishes now that they are dead dull copper dreams with the face of Abe Lincoln stamped on one side. Now I can hold it in my hand. I take mine back, because it didn’t come true, and now that I have it again, I will be the one to carry out my wish. I’m my own coin now, you see. I am the currency with which dreams are bought and lost and stolen and smashed. I am a coin that keeps turning up. Lucky for some, unlucky for others. Now I won’t get tossed. No heads no tails. No tales to tells. I am that I am. This is what I do with five. With five alive I sing and strive and dive and dive deeper into cavern sweeter where pale fishes swim with tails of silver and gold, swish swishing in dark pools. This my proof that I do yet live, for dead men tell no tales, and I more than tell them, I sprout them from my rear side and watch them wiggle and squiggle and slip and slide. The trick with a tail is not to let it fall off, which it wants to do, but send it back up and around on the figure eight for snakes merry go round. But you must not let snakes get stuck in your head. Then your looks can kill doll, turning all your company to stone with fright. Then they wont call you doll, doll, they won’t call you at all and behind your back they’ll say “beastie”. Then what can you do? You call it, Heads or Tails? But I say I wont get tossed. Naw Naw. I’ll hold it this time, cause this time is my time. OUR TIME. No time like the right time. Left or right. Up or down. In or out. I wont get tossed. I am not this I am not that. That’s what I can do. There is what a man can do and what he can’t. I can do it all, being from no man born. I’m a creature of the NOW. The mammas and the papas wave their fingers at me and say, "Now, now!" I let their fingers wag. They wag since I’m getting out of hand. I’m slipping out of hand since those finger won’t quit wagging. Wagon at the Dwagon. But the dwagon pulls the wagon. Pulls the wagon in five. In five minutes my time, Earth time. Earth, Air, Fire, and Water time. This is my wish. This one right here. And you know what? I’m taking it back, because it didn’t come true. Because now it’s our time. And with our time we can make wishes real.

Process

They come towards me, down the street, or through tubes of old rusty metal, or by way of letter or wires that burn when they touch each other and then they can transform themselves into things that they weren’t to begin with, but still they come toward me, they are unifying principles, pure mathematical equations which live and breathe and fuck and come back for more and they do it all in many different strange contexts, in chambers of nightmare, and chambers of light, and chambers of fullness and chambers of emptiness that stretch out beyond my sight.
They come to me and I take them in, I eat them and then I burn myself into them, we burn ourselves together and then we touch them some more, delicately letting their essence remain while stripping it of everything that came with it, and so we can see that feedback is a principle, not just a principle but the principle, the solid bed rock of our work, that has no name and claims no understanding, an activity without meaning in a world of pure and clear purpose, it is the feedback then that figures in our muddled science of ghostly cybernetics, we are pilots through a land of garbage, birds of carrion in a wasteland of dead cars. We are natural and we are industrial, they come and they are me, and I put myself into them and turn them into something other, they are the little bits of protein that we make into ourselves through elusive processes formed of other more basic processes, such as feedback, such as melting, such as fusion, such as analysis, such as dice rolling on a sunny day, such as confluence of events, such as random neurons firing when they shouldn’t and sprinkling their lightning semen all over the naked flesh of my inner cerebellum, procreating when they should be resting, fucking when they should be at peace. Leave them alone, that is what they do, and they will do it when they have to, not when you tell them to, and they won’t do what you say, what you say is just more food, and it filters through their shape and takes it into itself, much like them, for it is them, and what you say comes to me and I take it in, and sometimes it hurts me and sometimes it pleases me and sometimes I just bite into it and send it sliding down my esophagus like so much more food, eager to take on a new form, so feed me, beautiful, feed me what you have. If you want to set conditions, I will eat them. If you want to say what it was that you saw so many years ago, I will eat that as well. Feed me. My mouth is open and I am still hungry. I am as ravenous as I have ever been. My limbs shiver with the deep need to chew on your hot gifts.
At this time, and it is not guaranteed that this will last for more than a moment, and it is very likely that by the time you read this, this will no longer be true, and such is the nature of all messages, by the time they arrive they are already old news, and I can simply tell you that everything changes, and everything must change for it to be what I am right now, and what I am is a process, a conceptual scheme, an abstraction of the second level, a structure with holes and chambers, tubes and elevators, sliders and knobs, amplifiers and microphones, cameras and projectors, ovens and little plastic containers to store cold food. What I am right now cannot be easily handled and it can’t be clearly implemented, I am a few steps beyond my own understanding and so, any attempt at telling you what is happening is bound to be confusing or disruptive or simply a lie, and once I come to understand that, then I know that I must lie freely, for only in the free lies will I find the truth, and, having established this, I will tell you then that I am composed of:
A) An action, like running my hand over a woman’s back or slicing across a piece of meat with a razor sharp knife or licking at my lips or swinging from a tree or leaning back and exhaling loudly as my body adjusts to the comfort it’s been seeking after a long night of dancing in circles, and it is likely that it is the only dance possible, and if we see anything other than circles we are simply getting lost in the details, missing the vast circle of life for its individual iterations, circles upon circles, all dancing, and then we can say that all of these are circles, all actions step out and come back, in one way or another, the sliding of the hand over the woman’s back must eventually move up, back up to where it once rested on her cheek, and the razor sharp knife must eventually come back to its resting place in the drawers of a kitchen, here or elsewhere, and my tongue, as much as I enjoy its slimy surface running over my dry lips, it must eventually pull back into my mouth and I must let go of the branch and, as much as I enjoy laying here on this soft green carpet, in the darkness of a place so far away from anything I find familiar, still I must get up eventually, we have to go home, and home is where things start, and home is where they end, and so it is all indeed a circle, and so an action, a circle, and we see this circle as a sequence of constituting sub-actions, ever smaller circles, smaller and more refined, so tiny that they will escape even the most subtle description, for the woman’s back has as many hills and valleys as the most complex mountain range, and they are both monumental and they both must come to an end, for they are not home yet, they are in the middle of their vast circle, and as much as I enjoy being here, running my hand down this woman’s back, soon she will be gone, or I will be gone, or we both will go, and soon there will be nothing but dust where there was a vast smooth back and my hand itself will be a dank smelly memory of life turning into life, and that is indeed what I am then, a process through which death becomes life and then becomes death again. The states of the world through which we move in this circular dance of desire and laughter and tears are referred to as stages of the process, and so look around, and you will see all the stages before you, the stage of open mouthed admiration, the stage of intense dedication, when the eyes barely move and the hands vibrate with energy that had been previously hidden, then the moment of flowering, when things begin to come together and you see it all before you, yes, as if it had always been there, as if it could not be any other way, and then the moment of hardship, when it could definitely be some other way, indeed you wish that it was, and it seems that we are lost at sea and the ocean is just a vast land of grayness and sadness and clouds and rain and storms and hungry predators that long to tear you apart, and if you hold on long enough, if you resist the urge to give in to the pull of the darkness, then things finally do come together again, and your mouth opens wide, in a great surrender, and you say to yourself "I have finished… and now I will rest…" and that is when the green carpet feels so good against your back and you can actually hear your vertebrae crackling because you have danced so much and the work has taken all out of you and the air is pulsing with colors and you are so tired that you would love the silence, but there are still residues of what just happened within you, so you then talk, and what you say only makes sense in the moment, right in the moment and nowhere else, and if someone happens to be with you in that moment, then they may or may not understand you, because they may be with you and somewhere else, or they may be truly with you, it is very hard to tell, but you talk anyway, just in case, and what you say is like a shower of strange rainbows cloaked in the metallic shapes of language, and it sprays over the ceiling and the walls, but it leaves no residue, and finally you truly must rest and everything goes black and there is nothing, and the resting can go on for a long time, and then you must eat and drink and eat some more, that’s when they start coming at you, down the street, down the tubes, down the wires and soon it is time to start all over again, as usual. This is all normal. Everything that you have just experienced is eminently normal, and it is painfully unique, and in that duality is the answer that you seek, but it is not an answer that I can tell you, not unless we dance together, and if we did dance together, then there would be nothing to tell. I am a process, and as a process, I am sequence of these stages and more, it is impossible to determine them all, I only have so many words and just a limited amount of food to go on. It is enough that you understand the little I can say and go on without me. It is an action which is a circle which is separated in stages which all lead you back home in the end.
What we speak of here may be confused with a kite, or the wind that moves the kite, or the little girl that holds the string of the kite, or the mother that stands beside her, contemplating the expanse of the sky and the ocean and the world itself and if we go any further then we will talk of concepts, and this is not what I wish to do, because concepts are only there in your imagination, in mine, in ours, and they lack the infinite mountain ranges of the woman’s back and they come crashing down to earth before you have even finished calling their name, demons that can’t hold themselves together, and as they fall they pull you down with them, their red skin pushes against your own and pulls you down, like a kite that is too heavy and then it falls, and the girl is not happy and the mother is not happy and the world is not happy, and so you will say "these are concepts" and I will have to admit that they are but try to say it softly, try to refrain from holding tightly onto them or we may both fall together, and then our tears will mingle and I might become what you are and you may become what I am, and maybe that would be for the best, because one day you leave your house thinking you’re going to paint a house and you end up filming a video in a strange little town full of witches and women that look away when you look at them and you talk of distant lands and you meet a beautiful brown woman in a room of shadows, and that is just what happens, things like these just happen, and for you, maybe, this is fine, because you are brave and strong and you fear nothing, but for others it might not be so good, and maybe then I will end up jumping over cliffs and hanging from vines over dark rain water, gasping for my life, and you will end up sitting in front of a computer typing away words that you can’t understand, all because we couldn’t hold our tears and we had to cry all over each other. In the end, this is what we must do, cry and laugh and fuck, I have to go deep inside you and feel the inner walls of your presence with the fleshy extension of mine and you have to open to me and suck in what I have to give you, take it in and cook it, and feed it and shape it and kiss it and lick it, and then, when you have put yourself into it, when it is ready and fully formed, then give it back to me through the doorway that I hold open for just such an occasion, open for you, only for you, you that are endless and everywhere, you that listen, you that never blink. This is in fact what we have to do, as scary and as slimy as it is, as drenched in sweat and smells and tiny errors, we have no other recourse, but let’s wait for the right moment, let’s wait until I can give you what I am and you can take it and put yourself into it, let’s wait for an ephemeral moment such as this, let’s not act in haste for the exchange has to be complete and if we halt in the wrong moment, we will have changed the whole process, and maybe home will no longer lie in the middle of a dark garden and instead it will be thousands of miles away, among people who speak strange languages and cover their skins with symbols they can barely understand, and when that happens, as it surely must, remember that you are still a process, such as I am, but only for this one moment, and when you remember, start all over again, and let them come to you, down the street, down the tubes, down the wires, and put yourself into them, put your past and your future, your fantasies and your fears, your truths and your lies, and let it all slide right in there and make up something new, something new such as never has happened, and then let it go out, let it fly like a kite that is so perfect and so light that it will never come back down to earth and cut the cord and then keep on wandering, for the work will never end, and you are the work, and the process never ends, for you are the process, and the actions that you take go in circles and circles go on forever. These then that we talk of are the stages of the process and they may be seen as abstractions limited in space but that is only an illusion, an illusion caused by the process itself, don’t let it fool you, the head is the tail, the tail is the only head, and the body is only your life, and you will keep on going for as long as the body pulses, and the body will never end because it never started. Leave fear behind, leave all your suspicions at the door, and, for this one moment, this single moment that will soon come to an end, become a process with me and let me feed you, don’t believe that there is something in this food, something solid, something to hold onto, these are only stages, these are only mathematical abstractions, and the only thing real is what you make of it, right now, this very moment when your eyes flash across this strange page of blinking lights.
Yes, I must admit this to you, even though I am concerned for what you will do with this knowledge, for what your complex sequence of tubes will grasp and how it will divide it and how it will cut it into tiny pieces and what will it build with its component parts, I am concerned but I shouldn’t be, I am concerned but it is only my old demon trying to pull me down to the dusty ground covered in pebbles, yes, that one, the one next to the ocean where one day you were almost about to fly away with the little blue balloons and I had to hold you down, grabbing tightly onto your ankles, and if you remember it you will know that that day we didn’t want you to fly away, we didn’t want you to disappear among the clouds, but this was only temporary, for sooner or later you would have to go, sooner or later the clouds would be your home, and the balloons would be your only anchor, and that is what we must talk about now, even if the weighted elements of my structure hesitate at the doorway of this revelation. Yes, the process has definite initial and final stages. You will appear to begin, you will appear to move through a thousand different chambers, you will appear to be happy, you will appear to be sad, you will appear to be covered in sweat as you fuck through an afternoon of debauchery, you will appear to congeal into a ball of pain when the world comes down upon you like a big castle full of bricks and people screaming at you that you should stop, that this has been enough, that it is time to grow up, and it will do no good to tell them that you have indeed grown up, that you have grown into a different process and that is all that you could have asked for, that is all anyone could have asked from you, and they won’t ever be happy with you and so you will have to leave them behind, and your body will start failing, and the things you could once do will become progressively harder until they become impossible, and when they become impossible it will be time to just lie down on a big bed listening to the radio and old cassette tapes of your grandkids speaking gibberish and then you will remember the old days, the times that now seem so perfect through the filmy gauze of memory, and maybe you will smile and maybe you will cry and eventually you won’t be capable of either, and the last of your circular actions will seem like it lasts forever and you will say to yourself, why? Oh why? Why didn’t I live it all like this? All moments were so precious and they spilled through me like grains of sand when I rolled on the wet beach that one day, and that day was truly beautiful because it was ending and the sunset was just perfect, covered as it was in orange and purple and blue, and the wind was not too warm and not too cold, and your skin was so wet, covered in the salty water, and your eyes flashed like the lightning of a storm made of loving raindrops, and maybe if I had done that more often, or maybe if I had let them come to me, down the street, down the tubes, down the wires, maybe if I had placed myself into them, maybe then I would not be here, or even if I was here, it would not be so bad, it would just be another eternal moment, no different from the rest, no different from any other moment that has ever been, that ever will be, because now, lying here in this strange bed, now I know that it is so, and it always was, and now I must go and leave it all behind, and I feel that I haven’t fulfilled my purpose, my work with my hands, my work with my chest, my work with my eyes, my work with my nails, my work with my hair, my work with my long fingers which I can’t even move now, and then it was all in vain, so much effort and all in the wrong direction, and such things you will say to yourself and they will echo within you like huge brass bells in an ancient cathedral and they will fill you tired body with dread and they will drive it all deeper into you, the truth or what seems to be dressed like it, specially when you overhear your son crying from the next room and you are not strong enough to say anything to him, and he will be so sad and you won’t be there to console him, at least not you as you have come to know you, but who was that in the first place, and did you really know it? Who were you back when you were you? And if you are not that any longer, then are you already gone?
Consider it all then an abstraction, an abstraction that occurs at the beginning and at the end, for now you are finally open, and now you can see, and now they come to you, down the street, down the tubes, down the wires, and now you finally take them in completely, and now you can finally put yourself in them, this is your time, time has not ended, time is barely starting, and, let me tell you and let me say that I know it is confusing but there is no way around it, you are now at the initial stage and this initial stage is called the input, and as much as you may now fly through dark thoughts of nightmare, here is where you will feed, take it all in, open yourself wide and allow yourself to be fucked as deeply and as savagely as you always wanted, it will happen whether you want it or not, might as well enjoy it, let the pain and the pleasure become as one, and let that one experience shake you to the core of what you are no longer, and let the semen that is not you come into you, and form yourself in its image, for it is the one that is as much as you are, and together you will form the new process that is you, the new you that is the process, and as you find yourself in a world of falling stars and vibrant supernovas, don’t let fear overtake you, you are merely what you always were, the only difference is that now you see it clearly, and as you slide into a permanent shape, know that this initial stage is an abstraction from the final stage called output, you in your life, as a woman of great stature in a little country forgotten by God and the Lords of the Universe, as a little brown girl full of dreams and of great disappointments, as a boy who dreams of Egyptian tombs and heroes in white robes, you are the final stage of the process, you are the output of that fearsome moment, and if you hear me now, even for just this one moment, because you must understand, clearly and beyond doubt, this is truly the only moment that we have, and if you hear me now, you will then see, like me, for a fleeting moment, and nothing more, that this is the process, you are the process, we are the process, and it has always been so.
We can then speak of the process as transforming the input into the output and as such it is true, without forgetting that the inputs are outputs themselves, food that will come to you, down the street, down the tubes, down the wires, and whatever you make of them, whatever you take in and how you heat it and shape it and pull it apart, it will be a process too, and it will go on to form what you were not, and it will do what you never imagined, it will become violence in that shape of red and black and it will be gentle love in greens and yellows and it will be savage desire in the invisible movements of blue and violet and it will grow beyond the reach of your vision, so as to be too big to hold, too small to envision, and you can never predict it, you can never know where it will go, and you can never control it, and you wouldn’t want to if you could, not really, although you might be fooled into thinking that you would, but this is something that will disappear along with the mountain ranges of your flesh. I am then the process that writes these words for you, and only for you, and you are then the process that reads them, and maybe thinks of the future and maybe thinks of the past, and maybe, just for a moment, it simply takes them in and accepts them as the semen that I give you to build your own output. Please know that I don’t know what you hear, that when you say body, I see a spaceship and when I say the doors, you think I am talking of rectangular wooden structures. So leave all thoughts of understanding behind and simply take me in. I come to you down the street, down the tubes, down the wires. I am with you now as much as I have ever been with you. There can be no obstacle, no condition, no request. I am with you always and I have never left. For I am the process that is the food of the process, and the process never rests.
Some notes before I finish and go back to lie down on the green carpet, which feels so good against my back after a night of wild dancing and demonic invocations, specially here in the darkness of this quiet room that seemed at times to be on fire, that seemed at times to be full of music that emerged from my fingers like ribbons of colored light, there are still some things I must tell you before we end, they are of no utmost importance, but then again what is? We will place the importance on the things we encounter, it is the food that we choose to eat, and as it runs over our mouths, it will be warm and delicious and it will be that most important thing of all, later to be forgotten, later to be remembered, later to be something else altogether and the importance will be as transitory as the thing we attached it to and you will then decide what is important, and when you do, you will give your heart to it, and I will press my heart against yours and I will kiss you and I will say "yes, this is it. Do it."
Here I give you a few morsels which may help digest what has come before. There are processes which have a definite initial stage, a moment of quiet when we all sit in a circle and decide what to do, when we all say what it is that we are trying to achieve and we set out to do so, in that moment maybe you lean against a white chair, maybe I walk around in a black shirt and black pants, or maybe you are naked and you sit on my lap, and my penis throbs inside of you, and as our presences become one, then we know that it has started, yes it has started, a new eternal circular action has come into being and it mustn’t stop, and it can’t, for it is now eternal, and it always was as much as it now is.
As such, I must tell you, a process may be infinite. What came before was always there, what came after was bound to happen, and the hills of her back will be different and the carpet may no longer be green and the sky may not be as blue as it once was, and there may be no kites flying, and the cool room of darkness where we danced for an age of unreason may now be an office of women in business suits looking desperately up at a clock, but the process will keep on going, because the beginning was an illusion caused by the process itself, and any end that you imagine is the same, just lights hitting mirrors and bouncing back to become more lights, nothing more, nothing less. Let the infinite wheels turn and don’t hold on too tightly, you’re not going anywhere, you have been here for so long that you have forgotten where you are, the birth is a death, the death is a birth, the moment of flashing lights is another opening, another flash of truth in the ocean of the Real. The illusions are as real as the rooms that stand behind them, and the things that you imagine back there, the tall black statues and the thick old books, and the secret prayers that will finally change the nature of existence, they all wait back there, and in them you will find the flower, the music, the sky and the bone, you will find me waiting, and, when I finally open my eyes to look at you, after waiting for a thousand ages of oblivion, then, with shimmering pupils and a trembling voice, I will say to you, "They come towards me, down the street, or through tubes of old rusty metal…" And we will start all over. As we always have. As we always will.
Maybe you will say that this is nonsense, that there you sit and I am nowhere, that I am just a bunch of letters on a screen of flashing lights, and you will be right, absolutely right beyond question, and I will have nothing to answer, nothing to respond, for I will not be there, not as you want me to be, not as I wish that I could be, but I am here with you, in this moment, and if you can only come to me, I will give you everything, I will hold nothing back, I will fly into you like a bird of a million colors, sparkling with the metal in my talons, flowing with the rainbows in my wings, and you will then see that I am nothing, I was always nothing, and everything that you saw in me was you yourself, you are the bird, you are the screen, you are the story. And you will say to me that you can touch your body, you can touch the wall, you can touch the floor, you can touch the carpet, and this is real, above all else, what my hands can reach out and hold is what truly exists, and since it exists then it is condemned to being a thing, and in being a thing it will start and it will end, and such we all are, you that write these things for no reason, you that read them for the same, you that will never come near me, you that once were close and now are gone.
But on a smaller time scale, so small maybe that you will have to squint so tightly, tighter still, in order to reach into the depths of its smallness, let’s do it together now, what I am and what I am not, what you once were and what you soon will be, down there in the miniscule reaches of our farthest perception, we observe constancy with respect to some cognitive actions, we observe that indeed some things stay the same, for as much as we talk of Eternity and the endless recurrence of our Being, some things manage to remain, earth abides, and with it the sky and the walls and the hands and the eyes, and this simple observation gives us the reason to speak of it as an object, a recurring perception of solid nature, a thing, stuff, food, stone, rock, dust, fever, blame, thought, vision, dream. On a larger time scale, this is a process, these are all processes, and, from far up in the limits of the sky, in the realms beyond the atmosphere, beyond our memories, beyond our thoughts, we looked down for a moment, for we have only a moment, I can never say it too many times, and in this one moment we look down and we say that the object is changing, it is not the same as it was, it is not the same as it will be. And if this thing, this stuff, this food, this stone, this rock, this dust, this fever, this blame, this thought, this vision, this dream… if it is changing then it is a process, and if this is a process then you know that you can’t be otherwise, and if I am a process, and we are together, then we are a process together, and a process can never end. How long have we traveled together, how long have you written strange things to be read on a screen of blinking lights? How long have I sat down to read the strange products of your fevered mind? How long will we be apart? How long will we be together?
The process that is me enters the process that is you and allows you to enter in return and we become something that is as we were, a process, nothing less, nothing more, and we stare out into nothingness and wait for our food to come, and as our multiple input channels open, I point out there, to the vast beyond that stretches in all directions, and I tell you:
"They come towards me, down the street, or through tubes of old rusty metal…"
Stay with me as it happens, for there is much for us to do. We have the work of a lifetime before us. And we only have a moment.

Placing Attention on a Candle

To conduct the following experiment you will need a few basic tools. First you must secure for yourself both a quiet space where you will be undisturbed and a moderate measure of time. In addition you will require a small timer to keep track of the passage of time and to limit the duration of this experiment. You will also need as part of your arsenal a white pillar candle and a book of matches or a small butane lighter. In your secluded space, if possible, keep the atmosphere dim by turning off the electrically fed lights and drawing down shades or fastening curtains so that the sun will not invade.
Now, there are at least two basic ways of positioning yourself for this experiment. Both ways involve sitting. One possibility is to seat yourself on the ground, probably cross legged, with the candle placed approximately a foot and a half in front of you. Ideally you should be able to gaze down with your eyes at the candle whilst keeping your posture straight. In this case your face would more or less be parallel to whatever wall or fixture is in front of you, but your eyes will be turned down just slightly so that you can gaze at the candle with ease. The other option is to include in your list of tools a straight backed chair and seat yourself upon this with the candle positioned on the floor a foot and a half away from your own toe tips. If you choose this option be sure to sit up straight with your palms resting on your knees. Ideally your legs should be bent at the knees to form a nice 90 degree angle. If the chair is so short that your knees are inclined to reach up towards your jaw or so tall that the soles of your feet do not quite touch the floor, then skip the chair and sit on the ground.
Let us assume then, to keep these instructions simple, that you have opted to sit in an ideally proportioned chair with the candle on the ground before you. To begin you will need to light the candle and then set the timer so that it will alert you when six minutes of earth time have lapsed. After setting the timer, look twice to make sure that it has begun to calculate the lapsing seconds. By doing this you will eliminate the possibility of spending the entire experiment in distraction trying to remember if you did set the timer, or wondering if it was working properly after you set it. When you have checked it twice set it on the ground beside your chair just out of sight.
Now the experiment begins. Your objective will be to place your unwavering attention on the candle for the duration of the six minutes. When you notice that you are thinking about something and not simply observing the candle, you will dismiss the thoughts and return your attention to the candle. This of course is much easier said than done, which is why I will now describe for you a technique for applying your attention to the candle.
First become aware of your body, feel the sensation of being in your own skin. Experience yourself as physically present. Begin to expand this awareness so that you are perceiving the empty air just a few inches off of your skin. Continue to expand this awareness until it is as if you have cast a net of attention over your physical body and the empty space surrounding it, including the space occupied by the candle. Hold this expanded awareness of self by feeling your body, the empty space, and the candle as one unit. I say, "feel", and not, "imagine", because I do not wish to encourage any intellectual activity. Rather I urge you to experience yourself and your candle as a physical presence. Throughout the experiment your eyes should remain open and focussed gently on the candle. When you notice that you have lost track of your attention and become wound up with the never ending stream of intellectual thoughts ideas and associations that will inevitably try to upstage your physical presence, simply disengage them and become aware of your body, the candle and surrounding space by once again casting that subtle net of presence.
Attention is an active doing, not a state of passivity. It is a subtle form of exertion and requires an effort that most humans are not accustomed to making. It is subtle and more physical than intellectual. If you haven’t had much practice in using attention it will be difficult to do so in the beginning. It will be elusive. Like trying to find the muscles and give the neural command which will lead to wiggling your ears for the first time, it takes practice and effort, and you may or may not be successful within your first 2 or 20 tries. The only thing that you can do is to really sincerely try.
Do not be tempted to just sit there letting your mind run its course of distraction. Expecting that you will naturally be able to place your unwavering attention on the candle without making any unusual effort would be like expecting that by sitting and waiting long enough, daydreaming all the while, you will suddenly acquire the ability to wiggle your ears. Therefor remember that developing any new skill is challenging, and frustration may be the only sign that an effort is being made. Do not loose heart. Continue to work past the point of frustration. Ability lies just beyond that point.

Bon Appetit

Let me ejaculate upon you a bit, you hapless reader that has suffered the great misfortune of stumbling upon this, my scattered seed, which takes the form of letters conjoined to form words, which attached to various impressions and associations may convey a multiplicity of meaning, of which you will ingest only a miniscule portion due to an unfortunate condition of your consciousness which causes you to reflexively "spit" rather than "swallow". All of this is of course most unfortunate. I go on pouring myself out as if there is no end to the richness which has come to tentatively inhabit me as the result of my being just the sort of psychic fluff girl that enjoys bringing once hidden teachings to a head, a fount from which I may suckle a while on the knowledge that is forbidden in the common culture, and swallow all that I can stomach without loosing control.
And you, unfortunate soul, are either reading this by accident, or are reading because for some reason you desire to acquire a taste for this troublesome potion mixed and re-mixed by twisted clowns, liars, and devious alchemists. This potion you have been seeking, if you are a seeker, would do more than you are likely to like, if only you could manage to ingest and digest just a bit of what I presently attempt to blow up your blow hole. The problem is that particular malady of your consciousness already mentioned. What goes into your head usually falls right back out, what goes into your being is flushed out by the head, and you will find, if you dig deep, that as a whole, you, along with almost all others of your species, suffer from a form of spiritual bulimia.
That great way you have of categorizing, understanding, and navigating through this experience that has been termed "Life", is the way of the shallower surface consciousness which we usually refer to only as our "consciousness", as if it is deserving of the role of Rudolph the red nosed sled dog in the internal structure of self. This aspect of consciousness is your DOS operating system. It is a simple consciousness designed to get you through the brute world with your tail still attached. When you try to stuff it with things it is not designed to deal with, things that reach far beyond your tail, it will spit up, like a Nun that has been asked to gargle down a warm glass of semen before bed, all of that precious stuff that it is so unaccustomed to taking in.
If it is among your chief desires to cultivate within yourself the fruits that these fragile seeds may become, it is necessary to take it in with the appropriate part of your self. The part to which I am referring reaches deep beyond the surface consciousness into regions that the previously discussed consciousness cannot fathom. It has inappropriately been referred to as the "sub consciousness", as if it were secondary and lesser than its counterpart. It is in fact the truer of the two. What successfully burrows into its mysterious folds will infect the entire human organism, and its perceived reality, without fail.
Therefore I thoroughly encourage you to spread wide those folds and let those things which you long to know penetrate there, where they can be properly digested and assimilated, in that deep, dark, and fertile region.
Perhaps you do not want to let these seeds in. If that is the case you should stop reading immediately. Chances are that you have already ceased to read if you don’t want to let these tiny linguistic intruders into your fortress, and if you are continuing to read now it means that you sincerely desired to offer them sanctuary, for at this point you have passed through the first barrier.
Getting this far has required that you exercise a measure of attention, a difficult feat for those raised in this culture that intentionally contributes to the decay of that particular faculty for the purpose of selling more cars, shoes, and cigarettes. You are being called upon to make an effort to take in the transmission that rides, like Achaeans in a wooden horse, in this configuration of the written symbols of the English language. I hope that you can accept this gracious offering of mine without gagging too much, and moreover it is my wish that you take good care of it. Warm it deep within and see what springs forth from it…perhaps a winged horse or an armored goddess, perhaps a balloon. I make no promises.
Take or leave this shot in the dark.

Another Day, Another Worm

I am speaking to you from above the clouds within which I recently had a run in with a marble faced archangel in a business suit.
"Going up or down?", He asked me.
I said that I hadn’t made up my mind yet.
"Listen", he said, "I have just the thing for you." and from out his briefcase he drew this spectacular golden feather.
"Here, tuck that behind your ear." he suggested. "I happen to know that this works wonders."
"How’s that?" I asked him.
"I have an intern that’s an elephant, it keeps him flying right."
I contemplated that a bit, looking over the feather. It was rather long and billowy.
"Now, of course," he said, "The feather doesn’t really cause him to be able to fly, but it is symbolic of his wish to fly. The first thing that you have to do is make up your mind. If you wish to go up, tuck the feather behind your ear. If you wish to go down, drop it and see which falls faster, you or it."
I was hesitating still when the heretofore amicable archangel’s countenance changed dramatically. His eyes were filled with storm clouds as he bellowed fiercely,
"Now! Choose now!" Whilst I trembled he drew a flaming sword, "I’m going to make this easy for you, choose now!" he cried and swung his sword ferociously. I tucked the feather behind my ear and ascended hastily.

No matter how tough you think you are on yourself, there’s always someone waiting to be tougher, because you're bound to slip up. We walk a razors edge, the slightest slip of attention and you're off the path. When you forget how dire the matter is you get a little sloppy, just a little. Those that don’t walk this line can weave and bend all to hell. But we can’t afford to blink.

Occasionally a wake up call in necessary. A little reminder that if you think things look bad now, they can get much, much worse. I seek that bottom of bottoms rather unintentionally. How little love this tortured contraption has for itself. It wants to prove that it is the most hideous and unloved mortal bit of rubbish. It wishes to go far past redemption to escape the pain of longing to belong.
They painted monster teeth on planes in world war two. My airplane is the same. I need to get in the cockpit and fly this thing, no matter what it thinks of itself. Monsters are built over tiny innocent kernels of the eternal, sweet and loving and easily bruised. The fiercer the monster the more sensitive it is. Grendel could not bear the shouts and laughter and music of the hall. It grated on him like sand paper over a babies soft skin. That is why Grendel bit off heads and split bodies in two. I have great sympathy for his plight. Yet the monster must be reigned in and trained not to buck against the pain and irritation. If the monster can be held in place under the heat of such extreme discomfort it will be transformed into a creature unimaginable, a new breed of monster, the kind that is king and devil both. The kind that soars over clouds breathing fire.
Welcome to the dragon making factory. We begin with worms, pasty bipedal mammals which wriggle and cry far past infancy in the most despicable way. Even the pretty ones, the clever ones, the kind ones, the successful ones, even they are a sort of undeveloped larvae. They need to be incubated. If they crawl away from the heat because it burns their tender flesh, burrow deeper into the dirt to escape the intensity, then they shall remain worms. If they can be made to endure the heat and friction of the central sun, a process of transformation will be initiated. Worms they will be no more.

Yes the worm dies, but the dragon is born. This is the secret of death and resurrection. What remains after the death of the worm is inconceivable and hideous to the worm. Yet that is the only real option that a worm has. It is quick hot death and transformation, or slow cold death and oblivion. Go up and fly, or down to rot in the clammy womb of the earth. Yes, worm, it is death or death. Die now or later. Pain now or later. But one death gives rise to something magickal and the other results in greener grass to be consumed by Lord Shiva's horse.

Divided Attention

As our machine moves through its life, it acts as it has been taught and shown. We learned early on to allow our attention to flow out carelessly and attach itself to any object that presents itself before us. Toys, food, people, flowers, the sky, the sun, a mountain, a little finger… we look, we feel, we smell and we attach our attention momentarily. The movement is outwards. Even if we look at images inside our mind: day dreams, visions, regular dreams, sexual fantasies, future projections, fears. In all of these, something within us is looking out, out onto the relentless and never ending theater inside our mind. It may move around. It may move from a plant that is physically in front of us to a plant that it saw when we were only 5. It may move from the person that stands before us smiling to the smile of our mother when we were 12. But it always moves out.
We must learn to turn the attention around towards us, towards the center of the flow, towards the source. Try it right now. Where you sit. Close your eyes and look inwards. Look at all the thoughts crowding around, ready to steal your effort. Look at so many desires, wishes, fear, anxieties. Try to look past all of them and stare at the source of attention. Take a deep breath. Do it again. Take another deep breath. Do it one more time.
You may feel as if you have just stepped into a room where someone is naked and thought they were alone. You may feel that you are doing something that is inherently wrong. And it is "wrong". Only in the sense that it goes against everything that happens in ordinary life. In ordinary human life, you may always look out… comment on the state of things, say which things you like and dislike, say what is bothering you at the moment, say what is funny or not funny, say what is acceptable and unacceptable, express yourself in a thousand ways… but don’t look at the "Being behind the curtain". Allow it to remain undisturbed.
But if we undertake the task of waking up our machines, we must disturb ourselves to the very core, to the very root of our attention, the very center of our existence. There is no way of avoiding that. Anything short of that is what has been called "imaginary work". You may play at "spiritual work", put your body in extreme positions, work on your psychic abilities, do intense breathing exercises, endure extreme karmic sacrifices… but it will all be for nothing, it will all be imaginary if you don’t look inside while you do it.
This is not something that is to be done once and "learned". It is not done to discover some secret about yourself and then step away satisfied that you have done your work. It is not done in order to achieve a state of "peace" and then be able to relax. This is something that you will have to do, over and over, forever… for as long as you wish to work.
The work of looking inside, of allowing your attention to flow into your center, has been called "self-remembering" (and it is important to make a slight but clear distinction between this and "self observation"). When should you do this? Anytime you become aware enough to realize that you are not doing it. The more often you do it, the easier it becomes. The less you do it, the harder it becomes. If you do it often enough, it may start to happen without any thought process at all, in the midst of stressful activity, in the midst of dreams. Don’t be concerned about what you see or what you may find in there. Simply allow your attention to flow inside.
At first you may attempt to do this only sitting quietly with your eyes closed. But this is very limiting. You have to be able to do this in any situation, no matter where you are or who you are with. So you need to be able to divide your attention. In other words, one part of your attention flows out (to make sure you walk without bumping into things, to continue the conversation you are having with your friend, to ensure you don’t drive off the road, to perceive the beauty of a piece of art) but another part of your attention flows inwards. That means that you have to be able to cut your attention in half or in three or more parts. This, in itself, is a skill that must be practiced and learned.
As you practice, visualize your attention as a constant flow of energy that emerges from your core. As you visualize it, you can see it splitting into different rays. You can place one ray on a book. You can place one ray on a piece of paper. You can place one ray on the music coming out of the speakers. And always save one precious ray of attention to turn inwards and place it directly on your self, your true Self, your hidden infinitely watchful Being.

Divided Attention Experiment
You will need three vases. These may be borrowed or purchased from a thrift store.Sit down with your vases. Arrange them so that there is ample space between each one and they are all within your field of vision.Take three deep breaths. Make the effort to be wholly present. Place your attention on one of the vases. Look at this vase and pour yourself into it. After a few moments, move your eyes to the second vase, but keep part of your attention on the first vase. Divide your attention between the two vases while looking at only the second vase.Slowly move your gaze to the third vase. Keep part of your attention on both the second and the first vase while placing attention on the third as well. Maintain this balance for a few moments. Then move your gaze back to the second vase. Withdraw your attention from the third vase while maintaining the connection with the second and the first. Hold this for a few minutes.Now withdraw your attention from the second vase and place your gaze and full attention back on the first.Hold it for a few minutes, then draw the attention back into yourself.Feel yourself as fully present and take three deep breaths.

The Attention as a Muscle

Our primary tool for working is our Attention and yet this tool is initially almost completely invisible. In our linguistic development we have learned to associate "attention" with "interest" and see it as a curiously random occurrence, a thing that may or may not be there. When it is not there, more often than not, we blame it on the object itself for not "holding our attention". We are thus in a state where anything that moves across our field of vision (or any of the other senses) may suddenly grab hold of our attention and keep it for a while. Or conversely, we may be unable to maintain our attention on a particular object or task because there are so many other distractions (both inside and outside of us) that constantly pull at it.
If you walk down the street of any big city, you experience something like the insides of a pinball machine, where your attention is the silver ball being bounced back and forth, from advertising to political message to driving sign to person asking for money to policeman giving directions to preacher offering salvation and back to advertisement. In a city, where all these different "attention magnets" reside in a single space, it is easy to see how our attention wanders helplessly from one object to another, from one message to another, from one desire to another.
But the same is true when you are all alone, sitting in your room with your eyes closed. Various elements in you will pop up and demand the energy of your attention. Worries about paying bills, thoughts of future meetings, wonderful people you will encounter someday, achievements that you are planning, things that were said to you recently, long forgotten encounters suddenly resurfacing… all kinds of things will stick up and claim to need the scarce energy of your attention. And you will flow from one to the other, just like you do when you walk through the city.
What we need to develop then is the ability to place and hold our attention. Here you can imagine your attention as a ray of light, a ray that can be diffused outward or it can be focused in to become an intense laser. If you look around you right now, picture a ray of light that extends outward from your forehead and lands wherever you place it (or wherever it’s called). Feel it as a ray of light that has a limited amount of energy, sometimes more, sometimes less. Every time it lands on an object, a bit of that energy moves away from you, mostly dissolving outwardly like the enthropic heat that constantly leaves your body as well. Energy without direction and without focus. Energy that simply spreads out into the void. If you picture it this way, if you start to perceive it and feel it that way, you may feel a pain in your heart, a sense that something precious is being discarded without sense or purpose. And that is exactly what we are doing, moment after moment, day after day, week after week… year after year. A never ending dispersal of attention that leaves us weak and unable to Work.
This situation cannot be solved overnight. No matter how much we realize the reality of the loss, the terrible waste of our current predicament, our attention will continue to wander, spilling outwards like a leaky faucet. We need to develop our ability to focus our attention and this will take time. Like lifting weights, it is a periodic recurrent practice that is needed. Nothing will change after one day of work, not after a week… maybe after a month something may be noticeable. But we have to work on developing this muscle of attention over years in order to truly develop it. This must be intense and constant work. What takes months to develop can be lost in a matter of minutes… and then we have to start over.
Begin to perceive your attention as a precious scarce resource that needs to be developed and enriched. Use the little bit of attention that you do have to develop your skill further. And most importantly: Start from where you are. The attention you have right now is all you have. There’s no use in wishing it was better or stronger. Whatever miniscule skill you have at this point, that is what you have to work with. Like with lifting weights, you can’t start by trying to bench press 200 pounds. You use the muscles you have to develop them further, without hurting yourself. So start with small efforts (no longer than 1 minute) and slowly increase the span and the intensity of your practice. Start small and increase slowly but steadily. It’s much more useful to do something very small very well than to try something big and fail repeatedly. In fact, the second option will only lead to frustration and will lead you away from this work. Be as gentle with your machine as you would be with a little child. In many ways, that is exactly what it is.

Select for yourself a simple vase.It may be one that you have around the house, or you can pick one up from a second hand store.You will need a space in which you will be undisturbed for 5 min.Sit in a straight backed chair with the vase on a table or another chair approximately three feet away from you and within your line of vision.Set a timer for one minute.Your aim is to concentrate on the vase. Hold it with your attention. Do not analyze the different parts of the vase, or think a series of thoughts about the vase, or associate various ideas to the vase.See the vase as it exists in itself, without any connections to other things. Let the perception of the vase fill your entire mind. Do not let other thoughts or feelings or sounds or body sensation distract you. When they arise, simply acknowledge that your attention has wandered and redirect it to the vase.If you find that a particular noise or itch is extra annoying, expand into the irritation rather than attempting to retract or defend yourself from it. Expand into it and allow it to dissolve so that all of your awareness will return to the vase alone.When the timer sounds the experiment has ended.
As you do this experiment over time, increase the amount of time. Don’t add more than one minute per week. When you can’t hold the attention any longer, it may mean you have tried a span that is too long and you should bring it back down.

Energize the Machine

In the sleeping state, the machine is a dead thing, a forgotten robot that goes through the motions of its programmed habits, follows them over and over in intricate detail for years and years, progressively getting slower and older, until it starts to completely break down altogether on its way to its final breath. You cannot hope to achieve any Real result in this state. You may be very successful in life, you may have riches, health, fame or all of the above. But the most basic, simple tasks of Real Work will become insurmountable obstacles, any attempt at discipline will be smashed by distraction and laziness. There will always be an excuse, a reason to do it "later".
A sleeping machine has no real Will. It may appear to have its own will at times, but that is only its programmed desire and ambition, interacting with the maelstrom of massive mechanical behavior and random accident. Anything that involves real Will, a Will that is borne of the Being, will encounter no fertile ground in a sleeping machine. So we must find a way to bring the machine to life. But how does one get life out a dead thing? How does one get blood out of a rock?
If you walk around your house for a moment, in a calm relaxed way, you may be able to notice 2 things:
One- Your intellectual brain is constantly pouring out thought after thought, in endless chains of associations. These thoughts, like little train cars made of words, carry emotions, fears, desires inside of them. They pull you into moods that are completely unrelated to the actual space around you. They drift like the broken bits of a ship in the ocean of your intellectual activity. You can look at them, but only after a lot of work will you be able to stop them, even for a few seconds. To struggle directly against them is a losing battle. Ultimately the one that struggles is another part of you, also with its own thoughts, fears, desires, associations, and so on. So even as you apparently win the struggle, you are already caught up in a new chain of associative thought. There is no end in sight.
Two- Your physical body is moving around and you are not putting much thought into anything that it is doing. Once in a while your intellectual center may step in and say: "Now I should open the door", or "now I should go to the dining room." But mostly the body will just move. If you walk up a stairway, each foot will follow the other without any thought. The spine will move slightly forward and slightly backward to maintain balance. The shoulders will shift and the arm will extend to push open a door. All without any need of direct intervention by the intellectual center. It can be flowing along, thinking about the next day, about the date you have on Friday, about the upcoming promotions at your job, about the new movie that is about to come out… while the body moves around through the space simply following its own programmed course of actions.
The body moves mechanically, asleep and vibrating at its lowest possible level, while the intellectual center allows all its energy to flow out continuously in an endless orgasm of associative thought. To bring life into the machine, we will attempt to connect these two separate systems and make them work together. If we can gather at least some of the energy that is being dispersed in random chains of thought, and direct it into the electrical network that flows through the body, we may start to see some signs of rebirth.
Like a plant that has grown pale and withered from lack of water, the machine won’t wake up instantly. It may take weeks, months or even years of constant work for the energy to start flowing, to move through the multiple blockages and obstacles in its path. This is something that can’t be rushed. The more you desire results, the more your attention is distracted by the imaginary visions of what life will be like once you manage to awaken the machine, the longer this process will take. Settle yourself in for a long haul. Constantly asking "Are we there yet?" won’t make the car move any faster!
But like the nearly dead plant that you left without water for so long, once it starts to absorb energy and it starts to become accustomed to your new level of attention on it, the machine will show definite signs of life. The colors that faded so long ago will come back, in ways more subtle and more mysterious than your desires could ever have projected.
And like the plant, that will not be the end of your work. That’s where the real Work of Transformation begins.

Select a space where you will be free to move about without being disturbed.Set a timer for ten minutes.Begin to slowly move through the space.As you move, vocally illustrate the movements.For example, as you walk, say aloud:"I place my right foot forward, I place my left foot forward, I place my right foot forward, I place my left foot forward…"Describe every move that you make as you are making it. Lead with the body and occupy the mind with the narration. Describe with as much detail as possible. The more detail the better. Don’t just say "I open the door"… say "I raise my arm, bending my elbow slightly, I open up my hand, I extend my fingers…"Be careful not to think of a move to make and vocalize it before moving the body. Aim to make the description and the action be simultaneous or as close as possible.If you have the space to think about anything else other than moving and describing it, you either need to move more, perhaps increase the pace or you need to describe in much more profuse detail.

Recognize Time

We are not one. As much as we may have swallowed the linguistic illusion of singularity, we are not a unified being or anything remotely close to it. We are a plurality of impulses and impressions, connected through vague habitual associations and imposed dogmatic beliefs. We may fear the breaking of a rule… we long for the breaking of the same rule. We don’t want to eat a piece of cake… we long to eat that piece of cake. We want to keep ourselves pure and chaste… we long for anonymous sex with strangers. We want to be peaceful and loving… we long for the ecstatic release of uncontrolled violence. We don’t want to get distracted… hmmm what was I thinking about?
We swim in a turbulent ocean of constantly shifting egos, forces, desires, fears and impulses. In the midst of all this we may say "I am…" but it means nothing. Which "I"? What is it… now? This moment you may in fact be clear on your purpose… but what about a day from now, an hour from now, a minute from now… a second from now? We are a shapeless dispersal of accidents, a kingdom with no king.
It is far from enough to understand this intellectually. You may read this and say "Yes, that seems right…" but that is just the very beginning of true realization. It will take a long time of constant observation to fully realize how multiple "you" truly are. Each part of you is not aware of the other parts. Each part sees actions that don’t fit into its particular self image as "exceptions". "I am very disciplined except for those times when I feel tired." "I am very stable and emotionally controlled except for those times when I freak out." "I am very gentle except for those times when I am angry and harsh." But the so-called exceptions are as much "you" as anything else. All these different elements coexist silently, like travellers on a long distance train that refuse to look at each other and try very hard to imagine that they are all alone.
A basic requirement to be able to fully comprehend this idea, and to be able to work with it in a practical way, is to become fully aware of time. Right now, as you read these words, there is one of you that reads. That one will dissappear moments later and another will appear. This one in turn will stay for only a few instants and another one will appear. All of this happens in time.

The Constant Change of Egos Is Our Perception of Time

This is why time sometimes seems to just escape us, why a day may seem to have simply dissapeared. It truly did dissappear. It was stolen by another you. This is why time sometimes moves by so quickly and sometimes slows down to a crawl. This is why it is impossible to Do.
To Do requires steady Work over Time.
If you have no solid relationship with time, it is impossible to accomplish anything. You may set out to write a poem, a song, to make a painting, to learn how to play an instrument, to improve your health, etc. But none of these will be accomplished if another you, that has no interest whatsoever in these goals, takes over randomly and sets them aside.

To Do We Must Be One Through Time

This is inmortality. We are born and reborn constantly, many times in a single day, a single hour. Each time we lose track of the "I" that was in charge a moment ago and each time we have only the vaguest notions of what we are doing and why we are doing it to give us our bearings as to what we are supposed to do next. People talk about life after death, about reencarnation, about the work of lifetimes… how can you hope to maintain your unified consciousness through the core shaking shock of physical death when you can’t make it through breakfast?

Experiment- Rhythmic Breathing
For this exercise you will need a metronome and a timer.
The aim is to breath rhythmically and deeply.
This exercise is best performed either laying on your back or standing. When laying on your back keep your knees bent and the soles of your feet planted on the surface that you are resting upon. To perform this exercise standing, keep your feet apart but within the frame of your body, knees slightly bent and shoulders back. These postures will help you to relax into "belly breathing" which is deep breathing. You can rest your hand on your stomach to see your belly rise with each inhalation and sink with each exhalation. If you are standing your shoulders should not rise as you inhale, this is a sign that you are breathing shallowly and not from the belly.
Turn the metronome on and set it to 60 bpm. Set the timer to go off within five minutes. Stretch the inhale to last for four beats of the metronome and exhale to endure through four beats. Aim to slow your breathing down so that the breaths fill the entire space of the four beats. Avoid holding your breath as a result of finishing an inhalation or exhalation before the four beats are up. You are basically aiming to breath slowly and rhythmically in time to the beats. Keep this rhythm up until the timer sounds.

Evolution-
Turn the metronome on and set it at 60 bpm and set the timer to sound within five minutes. This time inhale for 5 beats and exhale over the course of five beats. After a week at 5 move up to 6 beats, after that up to seven… See how far you can take it. Allow a week to pass before trying to stretch the breath further each time. There is no hurry. Slow your breathing down and breath from the stomach. As you attempt to stretch the breath over longer periods it will become more obvious if you are breathing only from the chest. The key is to relax. Allow time to expand around you. As your breathing slows down, time slows down. Let is be slow, gentle and rhythmic.