Mama Bunny

I have been so heavy with sleep, drooping as a green leaf might droop under the accumulated moisture of a heavy mist. My body feels tired, my emotions are troubled, my mind muddled. I don’t want to touch a rock, to drag myself into the magic circle. Feeling trapped under the weight of things to do, things to do, things to do, I have an angst filled desire to moan, “Fuck it all.” shed some tars, eat some candy corn and watch The Vampire Diaries.
A tiny voice inside of me urges me against giving in to the weight of sleep. I crawl into the magic circle and touch a rock. I do a number of secret things with no attention whatsoever. It is difficult just to be there, forget doing anything well. My mind is pulling like a dog on the end of a leash, reaching for anything anywhere but refusing to heel, to be right here, right now.
Eventually the tiny white rabbit enters the magic circle. I know her well and think of her as Mamma Bunny.
“Keep trying. You’re doing good just by trying.” she tells me.
I don’t feel like I’m doing good. I feel like I’m going through the motions and I’d like to give up.
“You're in a valley. That’s all. On the mountain it’s clear. You are awake, everything makes sense, but inevitably you come down. That’s part of existence, a natural law. And in the valley you feel that you can’t ever reach the peak again, that maybe you’ve never been there. You can’t understand what you once understood. You can’t understand the mountain from the valley. That’s okay. It’s not worth trying to understand what you knew then. Now is now. All you have to do is understand that where you are now you won’t be able to appreciate where you’ve been or where you will be again. But you can understand that it is temporary, that you won't always be as you are now. You won't always sleep. One day you’ll be awake again. And it is in preparation for that day that you continue your practice. Even if you can’t do much through your practice at this moment, simply maintaining the habit of practice makes it possible for you to do something real later.”
“Look at it another way. The master of the house is away, but you maintain the house so that the master can return. If you let the house fall into decay, if you abandon it, the master can’t come home. Or when he does, he‘ll have to focus on putting the house in order. But if you keep the house in good shape, the master can return and do something productive with it right away. Which is better, because the master comes and goes on, and this house can only stand for a century or less, so time is limited.”
Mama bunny points her little face up at me, golden eyes shinning.
“Just keep it up. You’re doing good by trying. Trying is good  enough. It turns into doing. Nothing is permanent and you don’t have to understand everything in all of your facets. Practice makes it possible to experience another facet from whose perspective you will understand. If you don’t get up and do your chores, you can’t go to the ball, and if you don’t go to the ball, you can’t meet the prince! And you‘ll find that even if your chores seem impossible, by getting up and getting started, by trying, you‘ll attract enough helpers to get the job done.”
I lower my face towards mama bunny’s and gently touch my forehead to hers. Then I open my mouth and swallow her. She jumps down happily, a white rabbit plunging back into wonderland. I feel her glowing inside of me, a kernel of levity, a nightlight against the darkness of slumber, a movement in the underbrush that sends the dew into a sparkling scatter of droplets bouncing from a green leaf.

Inch By Inch

Like a thousand beetles crawling out of the decimated corpse of the Pharaoh, my ideas spill from my cracked head to rejoin the blackness outside. What was in is now out, rejoining the abyss, the cave-like halls of nowhere, my mother’s ancient cold womb. When the stars tumbled out dancing like sparks hissing off the arch of a welding torch, that was my beginning too.
Just as a dragonfly was once a nymph that spent five rotations of the earth around the sun hunting in the deep aquamarine waters of the lagoon before becoming a winged predator that would live less than a month, my larval stage too was much longer than this phase of existence will be.
In my infancy, I was a star burning and swirling, drawing everything to myself, a different sort of predator of the deep, waiting to gain the strength and size necessary for my transformation, my moment to super nova and spread star seed through the curving darkness of the womb space, waiting for that seed to impregnate the terrestrial egg where, warmed by a foster solar entity, it would grow into the newest me, the me that here sits breathing oxygen and expelling carbon monoxide.
I have not yet reached completion, if such a thing exists, as I am still housed safely within the world’s shell, incubating, waiting for the next moment of acceleration to crack the cocoon with wings unfurled. If the egg does not crack then the chick will die before it is born… so I let it bleed out into the abyss…all my animal hopes for preservation.
I was not always as I am now, I will not always be as I was a moment ago, that moment which lapsed, folding in on itself in quiet surrender to the ever flowing passage of time, of thought, a victim of an organizational system that is void of life, a mere mechanical apparatus for processing eternity, a factory for turning darkness into light, a star making machine that I have sometimes thought was myself, but is in reality only one function of self.
Deep self is nestled at the hub of the voyager called eternity, extending its tentacles in every direction, a living pulsing organism moving the blood of being through its veins. This lifetime, a fragment of the life cycle of a star is only a small side effect of the functioning of this vast entity. A little thing like white blood cells gathering around some infected tissue, a thing which happens within the body of a man without the man ever noticing unless the white blood cells fail in their mission and he grows ill and dies.
So this great play unfolds within the body of a titan that has considered us occasionally, but has never called us the crown of creation. This being in turn does what it can with the probabilities that dictate its nature.
I am dreaming. This was all a dream, this black blood spilling from my head into the darkness outside. A dream, the whole warm safe sphere before the ship’s hull was breached, that too was a dream. A dream that I danced like a prince among my whirling peers, glowing hungry for life and death.
Life and death. Motion. The crawling of a worm, inching its way through an unknowable matrix. Inch, Life, Inch, death, inch by life by death by inch, making its way, never knowing where or why, always going.
Would I un-dream any dream I ever dreamed knowing the fount would never grow dry? Knowing each one was an inch by inch by inch motion. No, I wouldn’t erase my nightmares nor my dreams seeing that they were just a motion like a dancer’s arm sweeping gracefully over her head, or her spasmodic jumping.
I let the beetles go their way, go wherever they can find a crack, a crevice, a hole to exploit. I let everything go to sway like the flora clinging to the inner wall of the small intestines.
I cannot know you, great titan, if I hold on, hide within my shell like a crustacean. I will know you as the river knows the sea, one body flowing into the other, waters exchanged.
Like a thousand beetles crawling out of the decimated corpse of a Pharaoh, my ideas spill from my cracked head to rejoin the blackness outside. What was in, now rushes out, what was out now rushes in. A new phase of existence. A train wreck., most beautiful, sublime, bodies spilled along the rails to ooze nutrients into the soil where the newest me will grow.
I was not always as I am now, I will not always be as I was a moment ago. Like a dragonfly, like a star, living through dying, the pure motion of existence. Inch by inch by inch I am made new, again and again.

Vulnerability

There is always enough time for some lost bird to come careening out of the storm and fly through the gap between thoughts and words, crashing into your soft brain matter with the force of a hard cold gray stone sending your blood spattering in every direction. A spray of your valuable attention, your magick mojo, the blood of life that swirls through your veins like molten lava rushing to the head to make your squishy gray tissue into the crown of kings, now bursts into a bleeding mess of moist tissues. The careless mechanical munch, munch, munching of the caterpillars of the world. The ones that will grow fatter and fatter and never make cocoons, they are so busy with their cacophonous munching, gnawing right into your inner sanctum if they can, disguised as your lover, or your sister, or your grandmother, or your friend, smiling and lilting sweetly all the while preparing to launch that kamikaze attack on your mind, that ble de de de de de de dah of machine gun fire into your delicate magickal body, masquerading as a series of questions, objections, or comments, or they may launch a stealthy psychic attack, thinking so loudly that you feel stabbing pains in your chest, shoulders and side as if you’d been running a mile while breathing improperly, staring at you silently, morbidly from under veiled lids, not speaking their poison but letting it ooze, hiding sharp knives behind their backs and waiting for the ideal moment to slash and stab and drain you of your fire. They don’t know why. They munch, munch holes into the gossamer magick walls of the kingdom of God, filled with intellectual justifications for every bite. They are killing you while saying, what? What did I do? Munch munch. I only offered you a sandwich, I only reminded you of an errand, I was only talking to you about the GREAT WORK, munch, munch, gurgle. There is always time enough for these bandits to sneak in and steal the treasure. They steal it in the murky shadows between syllables and the blinks of an eye. They are your own thoughts, the thoughts of others, the stereo pumping from that pimp mobile paused at the curb wailing, “I need money”. You are never more than one sling shot away from loosing everything you worked so hard to gather, all of that blessed hot air lifting your balloon sewn of Persian rugs into the wide blue sky and blinking stars shining like the many nipples of that bitch goddess Nuit, feeding all her suckling pups, worthy and unworthy alike, with her twinkling light. All of your precious lift, lost when a single pin hole puncture procured by an act of mechanicality compromises your space. A solitary word, spoken or thought, launched like a grain of sand to a blind giant, a delicate crippled giant that suffers much from it’s affliction/gift, never having terrorized a villager or swallowed a child in its life, it has always been the tiny terrible peasants that have wounded the giant like vicious bloodthirsty monsters with sickle sharp teeth, tearing and gnashing, munch, munch; the fat caterpillar people crying, “Come down where we are, where you should be. It’s so much nicer in the mud.” They slash your wings, those delicate paper thin wings that you worked for long hard months in darkness and solitude to manufacture from your own flesh and blood and strength of will, now torn and waving like ribbons after an attack from one of the caterpillar people, the one outside of you or the one that will always live inside of you, the one you are making yourself from, the one that doesn’t know what is happening to it, or why it should fly instead of crawling and munching. You are besieged by a thousand enemies, both within and without, all waiting to take you down in one of those unprotected gaps, in one of those places where your attention is stretched too thin, or doesn’t quite reach, leaving chinks in the walls of your flying machine, neat little crevices where saboteurs can wedge a stick of dynamite and plug their ears and watch you burst in a shower of crimson and salty tears. Even a mighty dragon, if it is missing just a single scale, can be brought down with a piercing shot aimed into that small but fatal gap. There is always a space, a bit of time, a weak point where the guard is down, the sentry fallen into gluttonous slumber, a way to ruin ages of work in a moment.

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.

Finesse

Nothing good will come of this, I warn you. You go around reading blogs written by other crazed machines, cyborgs whose dreams are wrought with longing and sorrow, and who sit in their pajamas all day long making pictures out of words or digital images or the ghosts of 1956, and you don’t know what might happen. What do you hope to gain coming round here, snooping around a blog like this? Are you looking for the truth? Or some helpful suggestions for improving your animatronic lifestyle? Maybe you are here looking for tips on how to work?
We haven’t got the truth here. I’m sorry, but there are two angels living under my skull, one who always lies and the other who always tells the truth, but I never know which one is which and they both insist that they are the angel that speaks only truth. I haven’t learned the trick for deciphering which one is which, so as far as truth is concerned, I can offer you no assistance on that account.
When it comes to tips for improving your animatronic existence, I am again of two minds. One mind says the best solution for the problems of life is not to live. If you want my advice, swallow a lead bullet, I know some people this has worked wonders for. My other mind suggests that you buy some Avon, work out, dress to the nines and find someone that makes you feel sexy.
I really am a bitter old goat when it comes to improving one’s life, I haven’t improved mine, I don’t think that life as a cyborg is really something that can be improved. It’s like buying designer brand curtains to hang in your house made of straw. I tell you love, there’s no point.
So you can see that if advice for good living is what you seek, you’ve come to the wrong fountain. I only know about bad living. Now, now then, if you are looking for a way to work, congratulations! You have figured out what robots were made to do. Good for you for wanting to be the best bot that you can be. I have something to say on this topic and in the end it will be up to you to decide whether I’m of a mind that others should partake of.
First, lets make it clear, there are two things that must happen for work to be work in the way that I mean when I say work:

1. You have to do something, engage in an actual activity of some kind. Things that will not qualify include: sleeping, dreaming, reading, talking, or thinking great thoughts.

2. You have to do whatever you do with a great deal of finesse.

I know, number two seems a little silly to a robot. What’s the difference if I walk from stage left to stage right or skip from stage left to stage right whistling Sweet Adeline, so long as I get from stage left to stage right in the end? Well if you really just like to keep busy, there is always knitting with the old gals. Finesse is for cyborgs that are trying to do something special with themselves. Upon realizing that you were destined for the junk heap and that little feral cats would meow and crawl around in your rusted hulk long after the last electric impulse fired within your advanced operating system, you might have thrown your dirty fist up to the sky and cried:
“There must be something more! What is the meaning of this…this… this terrible joke!?”
Well, I don’t know the answer to that question, but one idea that has made an impression on me is that if we do something a little different upon the cosmic stage, employ some parts that don’t usually get employed during a normal mechanical life time, then perhaps the results of such a life will be different than the results of the usual tired song and dance. Maybe something can be born of the ashes, a phoenix gestated within the robot husk and nurtured with finesse.
Remember, nothing good will come of this.
Nothing good, nothing bad.
You have been warned.
You may not enjoy it if you try it.
You might get used to it with time.
You will still die.
But perhaps something else will come of it all. Something might happen that would not have happened if you had gone through the usual motions while thinking and dreaming of something else. I am not saying that this would benefit you, with your gears that need greasing and your rusty cogs grinding away. I am saying that perhaps in living and doing and dying with a little finesse, one might at least be of benefit to something else and do more than feed the heap with one’s carnage.
You go around writing blogs, a crazed machine, a cyborg whose dreams are wrought with longing and sorrow, and who sits in pajamas all day long making pictures out of words or digital images or the ghosts of 1956, and you don’t know what might happen.

The Blanket

Never say more than you can get out in 800 to 1200 words, and certainly never say any less than can be said in 600 words. I am referring to words written in the English language, the only language in which I have any capacity to speak, read or write. I can interpret the ramblings of all manner of creatures, whether they speak English or Cantonese or chirp like crickets, but my interpretations will never match word for word the intended meaning of the issuer of such sounds. This is of little concern.
What matters ultimately is that no matter who speaks or what twisted tongue they speak in, it is always really me whispering something to myself through the animated biological blanket. Like a child laying in bed with its fist thrust up into the cover to make two shapes, two separate peaks, which in the child’s imagination may be two rabbits or two children or a woman and her pet dog, no matter what the child imagines, it is a true and beautiful play, but underneath, it is a conversation the child has with itself. This is not to say that if the child exists then the woman and dog do not exist, or that if the woman and dog exist the child does not. The whole woolly ensemble and the maestro behind it are one multidimensional creature, real and unreal too.
So you can see why I do pay attention to what the other peak in the bio bed spread is telling me. I listen to it no matter how unintelligible it’s ranting, rambling, squeaking, or grunting, with the complete knowledge that the child is working something out through us, talking to itself, banishing loneliness and boredom, filling the dark unending night with something. Trust the child to be present in every adversary and every friend, in every door knob and every carrot.
When I awoke today my mantra was this: "It is all me. This is my day, my day to create, and what I don’t create today, will never be created. " The possibility that this day held will never return. It will never be the same day, I will never be the same creature. What I create tomorrow will be different from that which I have, or would have, created today. Different by a 24 hour window of time.
Time is our enemy and our friend. Time is a matrix in which we may create. When it ceases to be, that opportunity to create has passed. What comes next only the child can know. Even through tears today I repeated, "It is all me."
Walking up the drab fog enshrouded street flanked by a block of construction and a block of apartments with all the personality of a no name motel, I could feel myself moving through the scene, both outside of my cracked lips and pounding temples and inside of them. Just one foot in front of the other, the cold air sucked into my lungs and expelled with a touch of desperation due to my uphill voyage, and the invisible eye watching, feeling, and perceiving the movement of one of its most compelling points of observation. Even the doorknob reflected the light back at me with an appropriate degree of meaningfulness when I told it, "It is all me. It is my day."
But even with so many cooperative elements and a fair measure of lucidity I struggled. It hurts no less to be betrayed by Judas knowing that somewhere beneath it all, it has always been you, your dream, your kindness and your cruelty. Certainly it manages to squeeze some tears from my woolly blanket head, and I walk down the stairs choking on a measure of self loathing.
Three or four times today I delivered a line or even kissed the lips of a lover and felt that I was out of character. I could see myself not as the character I usually portray, but as another character which I know and interact with as part of my apparent life. The horror of it. Not only to understand philosophically that you are that creepy clammy other, but to experience yourself as that other.
The differences between the characters constructed of the blanket are all a figment of the imagination of the management. Both the internal and external management are insisting that this personage is unique, has this or that quality and not this or that other quality. But behold! There is only one. The lint covered fabric of apparent life and its manipulator, the magician, the child, the immortal beloved. Knowing this cannot lessen the strain of experiencing it, of containing it. How much easier it is to travel unaware of the secret manipulator. How fierce and terrible and wonderful to hold within one tiny body the reality of its creation.
Less than 600 words would be to few to hold it. More than 1200 would be too much to say at once.

Completing the Octave

The spectrum of vibrations, in the Universe as we experience it, takes the shape of a great seemingly endless spiral. With every complete turn of this spiral, you arrive at the same point, only higher or lower by a level. In music, these repeated points of reference are known as Octaves.
In Western Music, and in several other traditions as well, this circular octave is divided into seven notes. The first basic note is counted as 1, then you move up from 2 through 7… when you arrive at 8 you have come full circle and you are back at 1. Thus this is known as an Octave.
These 7 notes don’t proceed in equally measured steps. They have a distinct shape that features two "intervals" where the rate of movement slows down (the distance between the notes is shorter, so less distance is traveled in the same amount of time). During these 2 "intervals", the process may deviate or stop altogether. The slow down is a kind of magnetic obstacle that is inherent in the very movement of vibrations, no matter where they occur or what is their source.
We apply this special esoteric theory in a very practical way. A simple full octave is the space between two distinct points: the setting of a particular goal and its accomplishment. Between those two points there is a great chasm. The progress between the two points is marked with two "intervals", and during these two "intervals", you may forget your original goal, shift slightly away from it or change course altogether. Knowing that these intervals are coming is a great advantage in moving through them. To deal with these "intervals" is a real skill, an invisible ability that can have very visible results.
The way to start working on this idea is to set very small and simple goals for yourself. Ideally, these will be so simple that there will be no way that your machine won’t be able to accomplish them. To begin with, these goals may seem to have to relation to your actual work, but this is of course a mistake. As you progress in your work on self, you will come to realize that every single thing you do is relevant to your work. There is literally no place to run or hide once you start moving up the Ladder.
Once you have set yourself a very simple goal, your job, besides the actual completion of the goal, will be to observe the intervals. In a small goal, they can be very subtle but they will be there. Notice the shifts of energy within you and around you. Notice your thoughts and emotions. Notice the shifts in the focus of your attention. Notice influences coming in from outside and altering the process.
One of the intervals will be a bit before the halfway point. The second interval will be right before the final completion. Take careful notes of your observations. Be as specific as possible. Don’t be vague in your notes. The more specific they are, so specific that these notes may only be comprehensible to you, the more helpful they will be to you.
You should know that the general mechanical tendency of the Universe around you is to deviate at these intervals. By refusing to do so, you are literally moving against a Universal force that is all around you. This is not easy. You will need help. If you picture these two big obstacles as two huge rocks on the road, then you can see that you will need dynamite, a shock that will push them aside. Eventually you may learn how to produce these shocks yourself, but to begin with, you will need somebody to provide them for you. This means that you need a guide. Someone that has done this before you. In an age of individuality and self sufficiency this may seem a step backwards. It isn’t. To truly become free you will have to surrender your false freedom, the illusion of individual freedom that masks a mechanical existence.
The tendency to deviate at the intervals is so strong that without an outside observer it will happen without you noticing. If it happens often enough, before you know it, you will be back in a pure sleeping state, without any concept of what you were trying to do with these ideas. It may take a very long time to come back from that.
Picture a magical path in a dark forest. You start from a place where you imagine an arrival point, then you step into the forest and start to travel. You will need a guide. You will need tools. You will need energy. You will need courage. If you manage to overcome the obstacles in your path, you will arrive at your set destination. If you don’t, you may find yourself at the point where you started. In either case, you begin again. You travel the same path, now with a bit more experience. Eventually it will become clear that the path itself is the destination, a snake that eats its own tail and that you are slowly bringing back to life through your efforts.

Know, Voyager, that your
Work in Time
has an
Eternal Reverberation.

Learn to complete the Octave.
Bring the Shapeshifting Nothingness
from the World of Imagination
to the World of the Real.
One step at a time.
One octave at a time.

Experiment: Finding Your Marbles

Obtain 24 marbles and two jars of equal proportion. Both jars must be large enough to contain all 24 marbles. Place all of the marbles in one jar. Label this jar "potential". Label the second jar "actual". Each day move one marble from the jar labeled "potential" to the jar labeled "actual". If you miss a day, empty the contents of the "actual" jar back into the "potential" jar. Keep track of the number of marbles you accumulate in the "actual" before you "break" by missing a day. Continue the experiment until you have managed to move all 24 marbles from the "potential" to the "actual" jar.

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.

Ever Increasing Effort

The effort is endless and permanent. Don’t hope for the time when the effort will end.
It never will.

I play guitar. I first started playing guitar consistently when I was 16. When I first started to play, it seemed to be a straight curve up, a simple straightforward walk up a learning ladder. I would learn one thing, then the next, then the next and so on. Until I could "play guitar" (something which seemed like a permanent "steady" state). But the actual process was not quite so straight and never reached an end.
I am back with my guitar teacher for our first lesson ever. I learn something… let’s call it lick 1. (A "lick" is something like a simple little melody.) My teacher plays lick 1, I attempt to repeat it. I fail. I try again. I fail again. I try once more and it starts to sound right. Several more times, and it sounds sort of right. My teacher leaves. I spend the week repeating it over and over. I get it! Now I can play lick 1.
From there I can go on to something else… My teacher comes over and shows me lick 2. Again I have a lot of trouble with it. It’s not working right. I try it over and over. It’s not happening. It seems impossible. I simply can’t do this! After several attempts… it starts to sound sort of right. My teacher leaves and I practice the same lick for hours. Hours and hours. (Neighbors going insane.) I can finally play it. My teacher comes again and we go on to lick 3… but wait! He asks me to play lick 1. I just spent the last week playing lick 2. I can’t play lick 1 anymore! I realize I have to practice it again. Now I have 2 licks that I have to practice and I’m about to get a new one.
So I don’t have just one new lick to practice. I have three… and there’s another one around the corner!
I notice something else as well. At night I will practice lick 1 over and over. By the end of the night, I can play it very well. I go to sleep. The next morning I wake up and grab the guitar (the very first thing I do as soon as I wake up) and … I can sort of play lick 1. It sort of sounds right. I have to practice it some more. After a bit of practice I get it back. I have to remember that… tomorrow.
After many years of work and designing and redesigning my daily practice schedule, something else began to seep through into me. A basic truth that was embedded in the process itself. Even though you gain in momentum, and you can build on the learning you did before, you can’t stop to rest.

You are either moving forward or you are moving backwards.
There are no other options.

The moment that you stop and base your work on what came before ("Yesterday I reached such heights in my meditation. I am now a very awakened person.") you have already started to fall. And the higher up you have been able to climb, the more drastic and shocking the fall will be.
Many years after I had started to play guitar, my Shaman teacher said: "You have to pedal twice as hard just to stay in the same place!" No matter how much work you did yesterday to reach the awakened state… and maybe even a Work space… you will have to do even more today just to get there.
But how much "more" can there be? There’s only so much you can do in a day!
Your attention, as it increases in power, will become more and more solid and it will be able to focus on smaller segments of time. What before flowed by without being noticed will now be noticed. And now that you can notice it, you can use it. The more attention you have, the more time you have. And all that time is there for you to use in your work. As soon as you take it for granted, as soon as you start to ride the wave of "spiritual pleasure" that comes with being in a more subtle space… you will start to slide down… fast.

USE IT OR LOSE IT

Make an effort to focus your attention and reach an awakened state.
Right now.
Feel the space changing.
Redouble the effort.
Again.
And again.