Love

One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life
One second it was a fist, the next an open hand
its own fiercely original power.
Many of us are muted versions of who we are capable of being
so well-known and yet reinvented
Beyond tribute, this physical manifestation flowers best in openness and freedom.
Framed and perched in a living room that can only be described as “well-curated,”
a game that I have been developing for over five years, alone and without funding.
Said collection is installed in a new space on the ground floor.
You can use it freely for commercial purposes with no limitations.
How exciting!
I opened my windows earlier today
not even death can stand in its way.
The new branding has a lot of different colors, and they’re quirky.
Others have preferred to leave it in the realm of the ineffable,
‘two bodies and one soul.’
An animalistic or genetic urge
knowable through the emotional and conscious feeling it provokes
LOVE
is all you need.

Saint Veshua

She had been on the mountaintop since the early afternoon the previous day. Such a painful curve of the wheel. Dark time lasted for an eternity, just the slowly arching crescent moon marked the movement of the earth and her body’s place upon it. They were solid, ancient and cold.
"It hurts to be so nonexistent," she said. He felt that she was at a loss for words.
"It only hurts when you are trying to prevent it." 
He sincerely felt the wish to say so much more to her but he also knew that it was not possible, it was simply beyond the scope of the options currently available.
"There’s a cold wind blowing through my veins. Someone has driven a stake through my heart."
"It’s your father." He said, "He was trying to protect you."
“They cut me apart and they put something in me… this is what they did… see? Look at it, look at it...”
He searched her form for a message, letting the tenuous sparks of insight fall to him like snowflakes. She kept her eyes wide, letting the blackness and flickering stars roll and tumble over her with possibilities, letting it drag her mind into depths that daylight preferred to avoid. The wind moved over her and a nearby howl maintained the simple music of their encounter.
"I wanted to make something real." She said.
"Don’t struggle." He advised, "That will never happen if you struggle and crack the vessel."
But she pulled the stake out and the insects come pouring from her heart. They rushed over the surface of her body to devour it. There were animals with horns climbing the rocks and a lilting flute called from the distance.
Their line of communication was severed.
He watched it all from a distant peak, his scarf flapping in the wind, spy glass poised for the view. What he saw was a blond girl from some great American novel kneel to pray, and at that moment her heart burst into flames which soon consumed the whole apparition. For a moment it reminded him of the Inquisition, then the formation changed, and the flaming girl collapsed into a brilliant star. The explosion was magnificent.
It knocked him off of his feet.
He lay on the mountaintop as morning light spilled into the world of a newborn day, and he drank in the pale pink light. He opened his arms wide, letting the new sun bathe him in its clarity.
From her vantage point she watched the birds and the lone hawk that swept over him in circles again and again, as though they had something specific to communicate, but she could not hear him anymore.
It seemed like an inappropriate use of materials, but that’s the nature of magick.  Below, he held on to her light, thinking that it alone would ease his wish to change the reality of these new limitations.

Another Myself

I had fallen asleep, and like a Maya Deren film, I watched from bed as I came out of another house and crossed the street, approaching the house where I lay. I saw the blonde haired girl walk out into the street, tossing her hair in the wind and I told the man that was tangled in my arms and legs:
“She’s coming.”
I thought he would want to disengage. I didn’t know that the girl on the street was me. I didn’t know that the man in the bed was you. He had been caressing my face and I knew we loved each other. I knew I loved him. I wouldn’t pretend I didn’t. When he told me that he had a girlfriend now, when he introduced us, I didn’t know that she was me. He had said that he could spend the day with me working on our project, but he would go back to her when night fell. He stood at a distance telling me this. It was as if he wanted me to understand that he was with her and was not interested in being with me. It was like the letter he had sent, him telling me that he had a girlfriend, and implying that I should not pursue him. I never meant to be in pursuit. I belonged to you. I was only telling him the truth without any hope of reciprocation, without any desire to change circumstances.
So I unpacked my bags across the room and conversed politely with him which is what it seemed he wanted to do. He wanted to show me the progress he had made on the project. The audio was surprising. He had used samples of my voice, and samples from a CD that you made. I was quite amazed. I told him that it was wonderful. I told him that I was proud of his progress. I realized that this was why he was risking seeing me, to show me that he had taken something from me, that he understood. I was proud of him, of the time I had put into him, of how my attention invested in him had blossomed into something incomprehensible and creative in the truest way, beyond boundaries, beyond ownership.
I was careful to stay back, at a polite distance. Then he closed the gap. He came close to me, he lay down on the bed beside me and we embraced. We held each other and he caressed my face. I should have known he was you. I should have known when I heard the music and recognized that it was your music. Or was it that I was you? I was you and he was me. You were proud of me for what I had done. I wanted to please you, laying there entwined, but then I saw myself coming, the one who would rend us apart, the one who would keep you to herself never really having you. You saw her coming and said:
“She’s coming.”
And I said:
“She is?”
And felt worried. I wanted to hold on to you, but then I didn’t know if I could stand up to her. She had promises. Words that bound us.
I was laying in bed holding another myself in my arms and through the window I saw myself crossing the street. She was coming. Blonde hair floating behind her in golden streamers. Youthful face and lithe body hurrying insecurely across the street. We had cheated her before. We might do it again despite the promises.
I was crossing the street and I got the feeling that you were in bed with her, despite the promise you had made. I had the feeling but I thought, no, that’s silly. I know I can trust him. But I had the feeling that while you had used the words sincerely as an expression of what you had felt in the moment, now while I was gone, a different moment was unfolding and the words would be gotten around. They would have meant something different now that you had this new moment unfolding before you. Things were changing. I could feel you slipping away from me.
I was laying in bed caressing your face. In that moment I loved you, I was glad to be with you. You said:
“She’s coming.”
And I realized she would not like this. She would not see how innocent this love was. For a moment I thought I would let her see. I thought she will come and see us and go and I will still be with you. Then I thought it was not too late to keep my word. I would go with her at nightfall. What was a little hug? A little caress? Nothing more than a little brotherly affection administered to an old friend. I would leave you and go with her.
You were caressing my face and I saw her through the window crossing the street. My legs were tangled with yours. Our chests were pressed together.
“She’s coming.” I said
I should have known that you were her. I should have known that I was him. I should have known that I was you and you were me.

I had fallen asleep, and like a Maya Deren film I watched from bed as I came out of a house and crossed the street. I saw the blonde haired girl walk out into the street and I told the man that was tangled in my arms and legs:
“She’s coming.”

BOOM

All of that careful work, the seeds you gathered for the harvest, painstakingly filling your little gunny sack, careful to brush the dirt away and separate seed from stone and branch and refuse, all of that effort applied to accumulating and the accumulating itself leads to a precarious position. Each day you have made efforts to contain the energy of life, taking care not to raise your voice or titter and twirl like a squirrel on caffeine, abstaining from orgasm, and carefully taking measures to accumulate more, and more, and more. More fuel for the rocket ship, more fuel for your work, but it is so much more than you have ever had in your life, it is so much more than others going about their days and their lives have ever held in their sack. It is exciting, dizzying, tempting, difficult to bear. As the sack grows full, you wobble and weave under the weight, you are intoxicated by its volume. You may feel teeth chattering excitement, or you may feel as powerful as a Titan. If you indulge in sorrow then every seed will back you up with the power of plutonium. If anger comes a knocking and you try it on for size, then every drop of the energy you have accumulated may flow into the bulging veins of wrath. The seeds will apply themselves to whatever vice you apply yourself to, and the machine, the mechanism for harvesting will supply an endless array of dead end distractions on which you can blow your hard earned savings. The trouble, terrible trouble is that you must not only accumulate but apply the energy accumulated to a suitable task. All that fuel pooled together in a barrel is nothing special until you put it in the rocket, and the rocket is no good if it has no navigational system, no link to mission control. A moon launch would go horribly wrong if the computer running the mechanical functions of the ship suddenly feels it would be better to head for the sun or take a dip in the sea, because after all who the fuck needs mission control, I AM THE ROCKET. Naturally it leads to disaster. The operating system is not the rocket, it is part of the rocket just as mission control is not the rocket, but it is meant to be a part of the operation. A link between mission control and the operating system must be clearly established and maintained so that Mission Control can guide the rocket to uncharted territories. The energy accumulated for voyaging must be utilized properly for the voyage and not be allowed to pool up by that guy with the cigarette dangling from his lip glowering at the whole thing and muttering that space travel is not possible, and who gives a damn anyway, and someday I’ll be the one in charge, and BOOM!

Anger

We must begin with the understanding that I am a very angry person, so much so that nearly anything that comes from me is sure to be laced with a fine trim of rage, either subtle or not so subtle. This is because I have been sensitive my whole life to being forced to do as others suppose I should. I have been threatened by angry outbursts and squashed and prodded with the hope that I would become what is considered a model citizen.
My father made me mad in every sense of the word. My mother played the role of the villain’s henchman, the one that is in the story for comic relief and because the villain needs someone else to do their dirty work. I am angry because I was told that my drawings weren’t good enough, that you must do something right or not at all. The music that I liked was NOT music, it didn’t qualify. All real music was set to 4/4 timing, a rhythm that was natural, like the beating of a heart. I am angry because I was told that reading fiction was a waste of my time and I should read a real book. Perhaps the only thing that was praised was my writing, my story telling, maybe because a teacher had reported that I was talented. Then I was prodded to write stories with the idea of selling stories, as though there were no other possible reason to write a story, sing a song, or paint a picture. When I did make music I was told that I needed to make an effort to write a song that could be sold to Joni Mitchell so that she could perform it. When I announced that I would be an actress, I was taken to a commercial acting class… “O.B. sanitary napkins keep me confident and dry all day long…”
Anything that wasn’t pleasing, relaxing, and palatable by the masses wasn’t art. My father would have liked Hitler’s paintings. This is the reason that I am angry, so angry that I don’t even notice that I am angry, so angry that I could jump off a couch crush strawberries over my face until I am crimson and recite the national anthem backwards to the tune of a Lady Gaga song. I am angry because I knew that he was wrong but I was too small to defend my delicate creative being from my father’s corrosive view of life. I am angry because I was bullied by a greedy critic for more than half my life.
When I see anything that resembles these characteristic in others, when they champion greed or criticism with know-it-all confidence, it triggers a violent reaction within me. When someone appears to be making even the subtlest attempt to place a yoke over my creative being or that of another, even a hypothetical other, I feel the urge to smash a glass on the coffee table and slash the offender from their guggle to their zatch in order to fashion a hat from their entrails and paint the story of my victory over the walls with their blood.
Instead, I write something that will never make it to the best seller’s list or be published in a Newberry award winning children’s book because now my delicate creative being is active and productive and I will let nothing stop it.
I do not think that anger has no place any more than I should think that laughter has no place. They both belong here in my selection of words. Whatever I am, whatever I think, whether I am angry or frightened or joyful, that is what I can use, the raw material that I have to be creative with. I must not wait until I am a happy or peaceful person to start creating. Then I would never create. I write on the wall with my own gory entrails. The twisted workings of my machinery are bent to the ever unjustifiable purpose of being a free builder. So while I must confess that in my spirit aggression is a very near cousin to affection, I feel that there is nothing at all problematic with that unless it prevents me from doing that which I am determined to do: make stuff, whatever kind of stuff I can.

Unhinged Words

So beautiful I could cry. Friendship is a mysterious ephemeral thing. We all do know from experience that no one gives us anything for nothing. All has its price. And yet sometimes, rarely, once or twice in a lifetime, someone looks at us and their heart is so brimming with compassion that it spills out through their eyes and they offer us something that no one should offer; something so good one usually keeps it all to one’s self. True love, pure love, friendship, compassion. One in the same, these many words, these many unhinged words.
The sun peeks out for a while, then the sun goes away and there is cold again and gray mists. My life again. Wondering about the story of my life, how it will read, what it will awaken in the reader. Will my life bring others to life? Or will it go out like a light, extinguished with a clap so that only empty full darkness will remain? What has been done to us? Have we really done this ourselves? Betrayed ourselves so that we are no longer free?
No longer free to live. Another unhinged word. Free. Live. They have all come undone. They all mean nothing because they refer to experiences that we have never had, that our parents have never had, that someone, dear fool, did have and bursting with it endeavored to explain, to share by virtue of oral communication, spilling pearls out onto the grimy sidewalk before pig faced orphans that grabbed them all up and snuffled them and rubbed them in sweaty hands and passed them on to a new generation of piglets.
There are still a few fools rattling around out there, a few who have had the experience and then watered at the eyes realizing that they had said compassion, they had said love, they had said discipline, responsibility, freedom, but had never experienced it until this moment. And now in this moment the word means something, for the first time ever.
Can I give you an example? Can I give it to you now in writing…with words, some of which are still empty for me, and some of which are full?
Empty full darkness that clings to us on all sides. This one life, this one moment, perhaps infinitely more complex than we realize, like the insides of a pomegranate, can it be lit like a fuse? Make it bright, dazzling for a moment so that we can see the delicate tendrils that connect so much to so much else?
With pictures darling, with stories.
By seeing the woman sitting on the flat trailer bed in her red and white striped dress, singing, while the man drives the tractor round in circles. What does it tell you? The buildings are stretched squares making them rectangular and they are frosted with white stucco and pale blue stucco and the pigeons stand around kissing on top as though they were the adornment of a dirty wedding cake. The thick black power lines hang crossing and re-crossing over the streets, making the sky into a piece of modern art when viewed through the eye of the round boy in his stained white shirt and black pants looking up as the flock of pigeons flies from one frosted rooftop to the other, basketball gripped under his arm. There are iron bars on the windows and gates in the garages and front entry ways so that small brown girls stand behind them looking out like prisoners before retreating to ride pink plastic tricycles in the gloom. At the end of the street the chain link fence stands between the apartments and rows of head stones besieged by mustard yellow lichen, keeping company with decaying bouquets of both organic and synthetic flowers. A fence to protect the dead from the living, and a wide green lawn punctured by words, where memories go to slowly fade away. A mysterious, ephemeral thing. So beautiful I could cry.

The Path of the Heart

Oh, those sad lost creations of Neverwhere, wandering aimlessly from one cast off husk of a dream to another, from one pretend family and one imagined life to another. In world of the sleepwalkers, there is no real home, there is no real heart. We are born into the black abyss like the rats of NIMH into a dark air shaft. Only those strong enough to build their own heart and hearth will survive, only they will become anything at all. The weak will be sucked away into the cold darkness. Those who do pull themselves together and become the center of a tiny universe will suffer all of the growing pains that we expect infants to endure, as they struggle from crawling to walking upright. What is a magnificent triumph in the beginning is small potatoes as the work unfolds and you race against time like a slinky dripping silver down an unending flight of stairs. Its movement is fluid and harmonious with the laws of nature.
Your own motion will ever be subject to the very same laws, but there is a hope that something within you will supply you with a supernatural reserve of power, enough so that you may operate both as time does and as time does not. That secret something, your ace in the hole, would be the ace of hearts, that same heart you started growing when you crawled out of the chaos one morning so long ago and defiantly declared:
"I am the center. I am the point upon which all lines of force converge!"
At first it would be small and tender, a meek little thing fluttering like red rose petals twirling on a breeze. You must do more to nourish it or it will fade away and you will face oblivion. You must grow the heart, keep the heart, and tend it unerringly, for there are great gales ahead, storms which outmatch the tempest from which you emerged, and if your heart is a small fragile thing, it will splinter and bust and you will be no more than dust, the sort that trickles through the narrow waist of an hour glass.
Like a garden left untended, a heart will cease to function if it is not cared for. If neglected, the bloom you could have watched swell with care, will wither and be choked out by other hands, coarse things from the primordial chaos. The effort must never cease. In every moment, you race against sleek silver time, striving to widen your sphere of influence, striving to grow as a star grows, drawing on the mysterious force at the core of your cosmic body and, in so doing, burning brighter and hotter, ever more painfully.
It hurts to come to life.
It hurts to be alive.
There is only rest in sleep.
This is the unfolding of your heart. In the wasteland, you will be your own sanctuary. In the desert of Maya, you will be like the hermit crab which carries its home upon its own back, always searching for the next opportunity to expand into a larger sanctuary, a vaster greater heart.
Know yourself well, love yourself well, and perhaps you will find another you to travel with, the Other that is the moon’s reflection upon the water. This is will happen as the heart grows greater. But do not become distracted by the dead rocks that orbit the sun.
The heart must be maintained, the attention trained within, or you will be lost in the carnival of chaos, lost in a hall of fun house mirrors. You may look at mirrors up and down, but you may not come to know mirrors, you will only come to know illusions and distractions. The only thing that you may know is an invisible thing, a line to tether yourself to in the darkness, a small kernel of self which must be watered with constant attention until it grows and grows and blossoms out of the dirt of the dream.
Through the madness of the dream it is born, but it is not of the dream.
You are not of the dream, traveler.
You are a strange bloom in a cold black desert. An improbable but beautiful thing. A heart. A hearth. A home. A point from which the infinite can be navigated.
Explorers need stars to chart a course. If you want to become an explorer one day and rise from your knees to chart the cold valleys of the wasteland, you must first become the very star that you will follow. Once the star has grown within you, never falter, never deviate, never let your attention stray, never become fascinated with the many obstacles of the labyrinth. Follow the star that is you unerringly, until the very path that you walk becomes your home, and the void around you becomes the real heart that beats within you.
Do not be discouraged. The path is lit by the light of those who came before you.

The Negative Emotions

When we first got interested in these ideas, it may have begun with an intellectual action. Maybe you read a book or a page on the Internet, maybe you heard about this from someone else, maybe you saw a movie… something came in, a "poisoned" impression that set the wheels of your intellect turning. Maybe your Being responded from deep within (sensing the presence of the Other calling you to the Waking State) but the manifestation of it was probably mostly intellectual.
Very often, what begins as intellectual may stay as intellectual and never move from there. You may read about this now, think about it, think that there is some truth in it, think about doing something, talk to others about it, think some more… years later you may still be thinking that it would be a good idea to do something and maybe you should think about what to do. At that point, maybe you will find another book to read, someone else to talk to or another movie to watch.
If you get past that stage, you may actually make a move. You may go to a place where these ideas are taught, you may start to try some exercises, you may learn some Yoga, you may learn to twirl. At that point a new center has entered the picture: your moving center, the part of you which actually makes the body function, shift from place to place, dance, curl up in a little ball and so on. When you shift from the intellectual center to the moving center, something crucial has happened. The weight of your relationship to these ideas has become manifested in the physical world and, through this manifestation, it can start to function. This stage may last a long time as well.
At some point, through your work on the Attention and Presence and your conscious efforts of self remembering, the weight of your work will transfer to the Emotional Center. It is at this point that the Real Work begins. Everything else that came before is a preparation. Once you start to work directly with your emotions, the Work has become Real and, with that, come more responsibilities and more danger.
One of our primary forms of energetic waste is through the manifestation of negative emotions. Here we will define "negative" not as "bad" or "immoral" but as flowing outwards into direction-less dispersal, without any conscious purpose. Any emotion that disperses energy involuntarily would then be "negative" whether it masks itself as happiness, excitement, anger, envy, sadness or humor. Our entire machine constantly twitches with negative emotions: we are not happy about the weather and we complain about it, someone looks at us in the wrong way and we replay it in our minds for hours, somebody cuts us off while driving and we spill out curses into the wind.
It has been said that in a sleeping machine negative emotions are the only emotions that can occur. Only in the Waking State can we feel true Love or Compassion. In the sleeping state, we can only twitch helplessly in an endless manic dance of negative complaints and explosions. And these involuntary dispersals occur with extreme frequency. Our initial work will be to be able to observe this state of things without trying to change it. Simply watch, record and examine, without judgement or remorse.
In the Western world, it has been thought traditionally that our nervous system, and specifically our brain, is the fastest form of communication within our bodies. In these ideas (and recent scientific discoveries confirm this) we know that the Emotional center is actually much faster. That means that the habitual reactions in the Emotional center, the negative emotions, will move so quickly that you cannot catch them with either your Intellectual or your Physical center. In the first stages of your Work, it will be impossible to try to stop these, but you can observe them as they move through you and you can record their passing. Develop a constant habit of noting your explosions of negative emotions. Give your different negative characters names and personas. Call them your "little demons" that trade you back and forth like a basketball. Describe them and get to know them very well. If you can draw, make pictures of them. If you have someone to help you, take photographs of the different manifestations or shoot some video and examine it carefully. Again, watch without judgement and, at first, don’t try to change anything at all, no matter how harmful.
As your Work progresses, you will eventually try to gain control over these negative manifestations. As has been stated before, you have to start small. You have developed these negative emotional habits over an entire lifetime. You cannot stop them overnight, or in a month or even a year. It will take a long time of constant work to even begin to get a handle on them. Start with several months of simply observing. When you feel that you are ready, start trying to contain the more simple ones, the ones that are the least harmful and which hold the least power. (For example, don’t try to stop your bouts of anger or resentment towards your family members. That is too deeply engrained and too heavy to lift. Start with your complaints about the weather or about the cancellation of your favorite sitcom. Hopefully that will be more within reach.)
The Work with the Emotions is dangerous and tricky. Ideally someone will be with you, a guide that passed through this terrain a bit ahead of you. As much as you may love this person, it will be difficult to remember that they are trying to help you when the Real Work with the Emotions begins. This is indeed a maze of deadly traps through which only the bravest and most persistent will manage to pass.

Parting the Seas

Imagine your torso as a body of water. Visualize it, feel it. Realize that ordinarily when you throw a stone into the water, it will create ripples. If a stone should come hurtling at you it would disturb your waters, the impact would reverberate throughout the body.
Now imagine something that has recently disturbed you, an event or interaction that troubled you emotionally. Perceive that interaction or event as a stone that is being thrown at you. As it approaches, you will part the seas. Maintain the sensation and visualization of the area from your chest to your navel as a body of water. Imagine that the water is parting, making way so that the stone will land in the sea bed without creating ripples.
Hold this image and breathe deeply, inhaling and exhaling to the count of six. Begin to make a small movement with part of your body. As you do so mentally describe the motion to yourself (as you have done before in working with energizing the machine). For example, while moving your right index finger in small clockwise circles say to yourself mentally, "I am moving my right index finger in a small clockwise rotation."
After doing this for a few minutes allow the waters to close over the stone where it has settled.
Practice this experiment for ten minutes daily for one week. In ten minutes you should be able to run through the whole sequence approximately four times. In addition, as you go through your day and find that something is eliciting an emotional response from you, apply the experiment to that "emotional stone" in the moment.

Machine

True communication is very rare. It seldom occurs during casual transmissions of linguistic data between humans. This is due to the law of associations.
A single word bears different meanings for individuals from varying cultural, economic, geographic, and social backgrounds. There are many words that we use in our daily vocabularies without having any real understanding of what it is that the word actually signifies. They’ve lost meaning due to their careless use and the fact that they are handed down generation to generation as loquacious filler. The handers down, having no experiential understanding of a word, pass the pronunciation on and so the word lives on, but the thing which it once referred to is lost in abstraction.
This is true of words like "Love" and "Soul". You will hear these words often used by individuals who have no experience whatsoever of either love or soul. (In fact, you yourself are probably such a person.)

When I say love, you, no doubt, have certain ideas about the meaning of that word. You might be shocked to know that my understanding of the same word is drastically different from yours, and that your neighbor has an even different idea of what love means than either of us.

Because of this, three people can engage in a verbal exchange and the conversation will be an entirely different one for each of the three persons participating.

So the first step in being able to do anything of significance with anybody is to establish a means by which you can truly communicate. To do this you will need to share experiences and correlate them with a mutual terminology.
Here are some terms I would like to begin to define-

Machine
Being
Awakening
Identification

It is necessary to not only explain their meaning, but to also demonstrate it experientially. For that I will have to suggest experiments.

At present I will begin with defining Machine.
I will from time to time refer to THE MACHINE or THE HUMAN BIOLOGICAL MACHINE or THE MECHANICAL CREATION or THE MORTAL CREATION. All of these terms refer to the same thing. For now, we will go with Machine as short for The Human Biological Machine. This term refers not only to the human body, but to the thoughts and emotions of the human as well.

It is a hard notion to swallow, but your thoughts and feelings are as mechanical as your body. These three cannot be separated, they are co-conspirators.

It can be easy to understand the physical body as a mechanical marvel, it’s mechanicality is more readily observable. It needs to consume, expel some of what it consumes, and rest at regular intervals. It will also seek to reproduce itself. These are the things that it is bound to do to maintain its functioning, and it can perform these functions automatically without the exertion of any special will. It is wired to do so. The thoughts and emotions function in very similar fashion, but at a more subtle level. That makes them harder to observe closely and objectively.

The thoughts and emotions and the physical body work together to maintains an existence. They will fight like hell against anything that seems to threaten that existence. They will also struggle against each other seeking dominance over the triumvirate. Each of the three functions through a simple set of habits formed more or less haphazardly with the objective of continuing to exist.

It is a sophisticated animal, but an animal nonetheless, objectively no more or less valuable than any of the other species populating the planet earth.

It is the Human Biological Machine.

For one week carry a small notepad with you at all times. Throughout the day, record your emotional state. Keep track of the hour of day, the mood or feelings experienced, and a note about the events or circumstance leading up to the mood. Try keeping an hourly record, but note shifts as they occur. In this way, if nothing in particular happens you will still remember that at 1pm you were in your cubicle feeling bored, but that at 1:19 you got a call from a friend and became excited and jolly.

Parting The Seas

Imagine your torso as a body of water. Visualize it, feel it.
Realize that ordinarily when you throw a stone into the water it will create ripples. If a stone should come hurtling at you it would disturb your waters, the impact would reverberate throughout the body.
Now imagine something that has recently disturbed you, an event or interaction that troubled you emotionally. Perceive that interaction or event as a stone that is being thrown at you.
As it approaches, you will part the seas. Maintain the sensation and visualization of the area from your chest to your navel as a body of water. Imagine that the water is parting, making way so that the stone will land in the seabed without creating ripples.
Hold this image and breath deeply, inhaling and exhaling to the count of six. Begin to make a small movement with part of your body.
As you do so mentally describe the motion to yourself. (i.e. the popcorn exercise). For example while moving your right index finger in small clockwise circles say to yourself mentally, "I am moving my right index finger in a small clockwise rotation."
After doing this for a few minutes allow the waters to close over the stone where it has settled.
Practice this experiment for ten minutes daily for one week. In ten minutes you should be able to run through the whole sequence approximately four times.
In addition, as you go through your day and find that something is eliciting an emotional response from you, apply the experiment to said stone in the moment.