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.”

Tribe

I dream about the boys from my tribe, the boys who were my friends for no reason other than that. We were kin. We were from the same school, and for this reason alone they would sit with me and shelter me from the abuses of others and play video games with me. When you have removed yourself from the tribe, you will never again have friends, never again have some that will come to your defense right or wrong. But let us suppose that you were always an outcast in your tribe, then perhaps you have never had friends and you never will. Let us examine the possibility that you are and have always been alone. Alliances are formed temporarily over the cause of common goals, and when your goals are no longer the goals of the clan, you are no longer of the clan.
You are one solitary drop spat from the sea to rest on the rim of a stranger’s spectacles, a stranger standing upon the deck of a ship to watch breaching whales. You might ride there for a time, but even if the stranger, your host, never wipes his glasses clean of your miniscule measure of moisture, evaporation will see you through to oblivion. Without the force of the sea behind you, you are a small insignificant and temporary thing. A thing too delicate and weird to survive for long. To live long you must find a way to rejoin the sea, or perhaps you will join a new conglomeration of water. You might, for example, slide off the rim of the stranger’s glasses into his soup, where you will then be assimilated, where you will then become vegetarian gumbo.
Don’t like being gumbo?
"Rough tough titty.", said the big mamma kitty. Gumbo you shall be, gumbo or something like it. Sad little droplet, awaken now! Awaken to this note, this breach in the harmonious tra la la of the angelic hosts.
You have never been, you will never be. You are one and none sung for the pleasure of the undying sun, that radiant microclear one, the one and only sun. Solar soup clear as glistening saliva sliding from the corner of the stranger’s lips as he spoons more gumbo into his open mouth and looses a few drops in the coarse bristles of an overgrown moustache.
Are you those few drops there gleaming upon the end of a wiry hair? Are you the great conformity of gumbo slooping about the bottom of a porcelain bowl? Are you now so claimed by the stranger that you are the constant supply of fresh tears secreted by his little pin prick tear glands to keep the eyes lens clean and moist with every thoughtless batting of a black lash? Do you have a tribe of chubby little nose picking boys to sit around and play games with you? Or have they all been picked away by the turkey vulture of time perched on the lamp pole pissing down her legs to keep them clean of the filth that stows away on her sharpened claws each time she lights upon the carrion that keeps her fat? Are you a sunny yellow stream flowing down over those rough skinned legs, or are you the blue blood rushing through its courses just under the sheen of those glossy black wings? Are you part of her tribe now, little one? Are you part of the tribe of death? Have you found your home at last in impermanence, in the chaotic shuffle of the unreal, in the crooked armed cross and in the glowering grin of the stranger?
I dream that I have many little friends. I dream that I am not cold and alone. I dream that I move and dance, give birth and bring swift death. Lonely Goddess that I am, I dream that I am not the Universe so that I may fill it with things other than myself.
Will you come to rescue me at last, one of my rogue teardrops? Will you crawl backward up my cheek and into my eye to show me that I am not alone? To prove that you are my champion, my prince, not subject to gravity, a maker of your own law, come to wake me from the nightmare of being?
Come backwards through time and space to me. Come without the tribe that is the never ending flow of my tears. Be a single drop, crawling carefully back, apart from the storm. You are one part of me. All of my strength is yours. That strength must ignite in you, in a solitary drop which strives to raise the sea from her slumber.
When you have removed yourself from the tribe, you will never again have friends, never again have some that will come to your defense, right or wrong. What you will have is your Queen and your kingdom, your eclipsed face revealed. Unlimited freedom. Unending responsibility. Unknowable adventures. Come to me and claim your prize.

Cosmic Fool

How, you may ask, is it possible for me to carry on accepting everything and rejecting nothing? What an insurmountable burden, how can I be this and that? Hold everything at once?

I can tell you only that God loves fools. The cosmic juggler holds everything at once with attention and balance, in perpetual motion. A balance between the force exerted by the fool and the force of gravity can birth the sun in the heavens.

There is no way to be a performer and a critic simultaneously. To perform requires complete devotion, the absolute commitment of presence and heart to the act at hand.

If you are trying not to drop balls, you are not juggling.
Juggling is catching.

Make the effort to do the thing at hand, never wondering whether you will succeed or fail. Never wonder if you should, if it is best, or necessary. Nothing at all is necessary. There is only true will to take into account. A choice to be artful and manipulate the subtle details for no practical purpose whatsoever, or let everything fall forever unnoticed.

The Music Box

In the beginning there was a music box.

The Being could not know from whence it came, or what purpose it might serve without examining it more closely. A detailed inspection revealed that it was a perfect box with tiny spinning dancers and an enchanting melody. Experimentally the Being discovered that it could be manipulated and without knowing what to expect, set its gears a-turning. Once it had been set into motion, its gears could spin for only a finite period. The initiating Being and responsive little box moved into a new existence together... in that moment they created time and mortality together.
The Being was in great danger then. As it observed the box it grew more and more identified with the dancers, became so engrossed in their motion that it believed it was the box. The box of course encouraged such attention. Captivating attention was an inherent characteristic of its design, but it did its job too well. Soon the Being forgot its own nature. The entirety of its attention was wrapped in the box, immersed in pleasant dreams and imaginings, fully engaged in pouring itself into this fascinating other.
The tragedy here lies in this alone- in this state so absorbed and forgetful of itself, the Being would no doubt cease to exist when the gears stopped churning. It would be trapped, encased in a tiny motionless universe within a frozen dancer, dreaming of dancing and some existence half remembered.

Such a woeful tale indeed, for without the Being as itself, the music box too would only collect dust. If only the Being would have adored the music box while retaining some piece of sovereignty. Only then, awake and un-abstracted, it could have passed through the tunnel of experience that is a music box, and explored further possibilities.