Conflict

The machine will always be in conflict with something. It worries. It agonizes. It schemes and plans. The machine may have a problem with the way a colleague looks at them, with the color of a neighbor's dress, with sideburns and taxes and that sibling that borrows money and never pays it back.
These problems are the problems of the machine, not problems of the being. Most importantly, they are not a conflict between the being and the machine. The being simply doesn’t put up a fight. The machine on the other hand is a bloodthirsty pit bull that will bite and its jaw will lock and it will shake and shake and shake the life out of anything. When confronted with conflict with the being, the machine latches on to a machine conflict and goes berserk.
For example your machine might want an ice cream cone when you are trying to do your daily meditation. But your machine wants an ice cream cone, but your teacher has recommended this daily meditation, but your machine wants an ice cream cone and how are you going to reach enlightenment or whatever if you have no freedom to make any choices and everything is all about routine?
Things are getting dogmatic and that asshole prefers his female students and gives them all of his attention and all he is doing is taking advantage of them and you really should tell him that you’re on to him and look for another teacher and there is a new yoga studio on main street, maybe you should stop there and see what kind of workshops they are offering and find out how they view free will and (by the way, while we’re down there we will get an ice cream cone from the place next door, but just because it’s on the way and we really need to show this asshole that we don’t need him, we can find enlightenment with a just teacher who will distribute their attentions evenly over their students regardless of gender, and then, or maybe just before then, get an ice cream cone.)
The moment it feels as if awakening is imminent, the machine lunges for something, anything to hold onto. A moment of awakening cannot occur simultaneously with a moment of identification, so if your machine can get a hold of something and start shaking it to death it can prevent awakening.
You might be painting a picture using careful attention, your mind remarkably still. Something unusual is starting to happen, you feel tingly and then you remember that your roommate will be home soon and she will take a shower and get water all over the floor and leave it there where you will step in the puddles of water, spoiling your socks the next time you want to blow your nose or urinate. Then you’ll be sitting there with no toilet paper, because she never puts a new roll on and her greasy hair sticks to the shower walls and your boyfriend was looking at her tits the other day because she was wearing that smutty shirt and she has to sleep with every man in the universe, and what you should do is stop painting and turn on the shower and let all the hot water run out so that when she gets in there will be none left for her, see how she likes a big fat dose of inconsideration. And you might run the water or you might crawl into bed and cry realizing that your relationship with boyfriend is doomed if he can be tantalized by the tasteless flaunting of bosoms. In fact, if he can like her at all, what does that say about you? Are you also a tawdry slut? Boo, hoo, boo, hoo. The painting lies unfinished, the being is completely silenced, the machine is thrashing.
Identification with the machine is the act of allowing one's attention to flow into the opinions, positions, and problems of the machine. Inversely, awakening is the act of allowing the attention to flow elsewhere, into the being, the most essential self. Any form of identification is counterproductive to work towards awakening. It doesn’t have to feel miserable to qualify as identification. Often times it feels ooooh too good.
If while you are conducting your morning meditation you suddenly realize fully and completely that you have the power to manipulate reality and can fly so you go soaring around the town feeling gleeful and transforming parking tickets into lollipops with the wave of a hand, and with a wink of the eye you get beautiful women to nurse you and you feel so wonderful laying in her lap on the park bench drinking Cristal from her swollen breast, then you are still identified. You’re just an identified psychic super mutant. If, on the other hand, while you are conducting your morning meditation you suddenly realize fully and completely that you have the power to manipulate reality and you remain seated and direct your attention inward upon your being, remembering your eternal self, that would be a moment of awakening.
The machine wants to solve things, it wants to do things, have things, to be things. The being is agenda-less. The machine is an inversion of this agenda-less-ness. It is a reaction to agenda-less-ness. Your existence in this world is a reflex against being. A reflex. An unintentional response.
You as a machine are just doing what you do, which is avoid Being. If you wish to work towards awakening you will have to learn to control this reflexive manifestation. To gain control of it you will have to distance yourself from it, find ways around it.
The best way to stop gagging is not to grab hold of your throat and squeeze or think loudly, “STOP GAGGING!” or wish obsessively that the horrible taste or smell or object lodged in your throat that catalyzed the gagging will cease to be.
The best way to stop gagging is to relax.
RELAX.
Don’t try to create relaxing conditions. Relax where you are, with what you are. Stop rejecting and allow. Don’t spit, swallow.

Annihilation Shall Be The Name Of The New Federation

If only my fingers could flap fast enough, my synapses fire rapidly enough, my elaborately configured mechanical creation respond with electric lightening speed to the whispered request of that other subtler I… The "I" that is the emptiness between the human who sits cross legged on the floor and the white candle flickering a foot away. The "I" that has never existed and will never exist and is eternal and imagined, very real, as real as the Narwhale, hunted to near extinction for its magickal horn. The "I" that is not at all and yet is, voiceless, a whisper of nobility, dignity and nothingness. The "I" that is free of any agenda and waits silently, aimlessly, for something to come and rouse it from slumber. The "I" that is locked in a high tower and awaits its prince, the "I" laying out on the table with electrodes strapped to its inert body waiting for the lightning to strike and for the good doctor to shriek with excitement, the "I" sagging under its crown on the throne, listening to the whispers of the deceitful counselor awaiting the arrival of the replacement that may slay him and make the kingdom anew.
That eye suspended in the invisible skies of mind is one thing, and the thing that can move is another. This wriggle jiggle body bot, this conglomeration of nations, the united states of human experience, pumping blood, pressing out Carbon Dioxide and gulping in oxygen, producing subtle chemical cocktails which cause my breasts to be tender and swollen and my voice to be high pitched. This other thing that I am, this thing that is, this thing tied to the earth, to the planet that is an extension of its lesser body, this mortal creation with its precious and fragile shelf life due to expire in another 60 to 80 years if it isn’t knocked abruptly from the shelf before then, to shatter upon the sterile linoleum beneath the fluorescent lights and then be no more, it is something Other.
These two "Me"s, each one representing it’s own federation; on my right hand the federation of the dying and on my left hand the federation of the undead, both sides ever at war and yet ever longing to embrace in some final ecstasy which will blot out the existence of each and birth something new and entirely unknowable; the new empire of the eternal light and night, the explosion that results from the union of opposites, the newest latest and greatest coming of Christ; half worm, half eaglet, a winged serpent twisting through the forgotten tunnels of time and beyond them in the endless abyss of the uncreated. One eye blind in the light, the other blind in the dark.
Whatever either "I" imagines, whatever either "I" hopes for cannot be the end, for our children are never as we imagine they will be, they are something else, unpredictable, a synthesis of what came before, a frightening new evolutionary mutation which may succeed or fail to meet the standard of any of an infinite number of categories in which they will be judged by David Hasselhoff or Paula Abdul.
This right now, this moment, is the frustrated lovemaking of the sky and the sea, one which seeks the clarity of the stars and one that seeks the tangles of the deep. No, not one, one nation and one other nation causing a sensation, an appalling congregation of fertilization on behalf of the acceleration of creation fostered by intense aggravation.
Who are the judges really? And when and where, by which angels from which rung of what ladder will the categories be drawn up and decided upon?
What you know is not real. What you know is the fictitious nonsense of a sedated dreamer. What you deem wisest and worthy is spittle on a mad man’s bib, wait a moment and a nurse will wipe away your loftiest definitions of self, the universe, god, and everything.
Yes, I have been like one of those bad moms on a day time television talk show, broadcast to the populations of the Western hemisphere of that planet earth in the milky way galaxy (which goes by a different name in different company) that confesses that she has allowed her teen to have sex under her roof, only I’m much worse than that, I have allowed serpents and birds to mate within my own consciousness, and not (like those other moms profess) because I thought it was the safest place for them to be, but because there are few other places where angels and demons can get together and do the nasty. There are only so many mind blown mortals, walking about, staring wide eyed at the world, wearing around their necks signs, written with invisible ink, which say:

"Speakeasy through me ye Gods and Devils…
and fuck prohibition!"

This that you have stumbled into, these ramblings, are the dirty linens left behind by monsters of sky and water, alien entities like Spaniards and Indians, attracted like the opposing poles of magnets, things which come together via compulsion laced with reluctance. These things meet here in the house of the holy, in this den of sin with the understanding that Annihilation shall be the name of the new Federation.
If only I can move fast enough to be of service. If only my fingers flap fast enough, synapses fire rapidly enough, mortal body bends and bows gracefully enough, heart breaks open wide enough, then let me serve the new kingdom. Let me be servant to the Federation of Annihilation.