Electrical Impulses

The power of movement. A simple thing, taken for granted by those creatures that have long possessed the ability, but ask any cactus or man locked in a tiny cell and they will tell you that the power to move about freely is most precious of all. In the very beginning of your life, it was the first thing to be active in you, your movement center. You wriggled, you cried in hunger, and your body happily relieved itself of the wastes that were left in its system. You learned to crawl, and to walk and to grab and to hit. Viola! You had the most essential skills needed to maintain your existence on this planet. You had the power to translate electrical pulses sent from your brain via your nervous system into motion, activity, into an adequate response to some stimuli, such as music, or the sight of a hungry wolf, or the smell of a roasting pig.
The subtleties that could be added, the endowments of the intellectual and emotional centers, would do you little good in this plane of existence without the foundation of this first essential power, the fully functioning motor center. Now you have the ability to do, and with the addition of the other two powers, you have a heightened capacity for subtlety, a desire to find a purpose to put your fantastic abilities to the test. You’ve got the car, now baby drive it!
What are you going to do? What are you going to make of the multicolored world? How are you going to organize all that sensory impute? How does it make you feel? And what are you going to do with it all?
You can see an electrical pulse. See it in the way your limbs go wiggly when we hook them up to a loudspeaker. See how you groove and shake and twirl. That is the power of movement. It gives a shape to the unseen forces that are ever at work in the universe.
This truth is so obvious, so apparent that it seems to be hidden from us. We are blind to it. The ancient Greeks, however, were appreciative of this secret. They honored the human form, took great pleasure in athletic feats, not only as the triumph of the motor center, but as the culmination of all the aspects of the human being and even as a representation of those mysteries which are seen as originating elsewhere.
As above so below.
As within so without.

Death

We are immersed in a culture so afraid of dying that it’s only purpose is to live, at any cost, in any way that one can manage. And yet each one of us will die eventually, despite our best effort to outmaneuver death. In the end, we have not lived at all, we were always avoiding death and doing things based on whether or not they might lead to our demise or to bodily harm or to shame. We might long to see the step pyramids nestled in the pulsing wet bosom of Central America but choose not to take the trip because the politics of the region are unstable, there are scorpions and snakes in the jungle, there are thieves and murderers waiting for victims outside of the airport and the plane might crash before they can even get you. You might be sold into white slavery, your organs might be traded in the black market, you might be arrested due to a minor misunderstanding and rot away in a third world jail cell where you may contract a life threatening disease.
So, for all of these reasons, you do not do the thing that you long to do. Instead, you go to work and come home and pay your taxes and change the oil in your car and watch the movies that Netflix delivers to your mailbox, like some crawly thing creeping in the shadows hoping that the hungry crow won’t find you. But she will eventually, she always does, no matter how skillfully you avoid living, you can never avoid death.
One day you will go for your routine checkup and the doctor will tactfully announce that they have detected something abnormal and would like to run more tests and after more tests he will solemnly explain that you have cancer but might recover if you undergo chemotherapy. You’ll agree, clinging to the idea of complete remission, a full recovery, so the treatment will begin and it will make you feel sicker and your hair will fall out and you will have trouble paying your medical bills and, within three years, you’ll finally die with a bad taste in your mouth, hooked up to an IV in some hospital, leaving your family buried under a mountain of debt.
You will be dead without ever having seen those pyramids where kings and priests plucked beating hearts from warm bodies and held them out before the eyes of the mesmerized crowd below, before rolling the now cooling body down the steps and bringing out another hot screaming live one. You will not know what it is like to walk in the jungle listening to the monkeys scream and the insects hum and catch a glimpse of the vivid plumage of the quetzal bird before she flies away after the blue butterfly. You will not know what rich heart you sacrificed when you opted to stay safe and comfortable rather than embrace an experience of the real, will never receive the secret communication that was meant for you alone and might have been transmitted to your deepest being, coursing from the ancients stones into the soles of your hiking boots and up your legs until it bursts in your chest and washes over every cell of your brain like waves crashing over a breaker. You will die without understanding why you should have gone, without guessing why you should have spent your days under the hot brilliance of the glorious sun without fear of the hungry black bird that circles perpetually over head.
You will die without ever having lived.
Staying alive is not the purpose of life and death is a doorway which you will definitely cross.
In both life and death, keep your eyes wide open and place fear aside, like an old battered hat.

Performers

His father died in Auschwitz in 1944. The family name perished along with that old kosher butcher and another was born, a name that would rise in fame. To avoid a similar fate he adopted the name of a General and joined the French Resistance where he rescued his father in the guise of a multitude of frail Jewish children lifted from concentration camps. When that manifestation of the war ended he accepted the burden of the world and became the fool of god, mastering and then teaching the Art of Silence, the science of presence and posture. This teaching spread, trickling from those that surrounded him like invisible droplets of water from the many fingers of a spread hand to yet other hands, open and waiting. Out into the world, invisible drops found their way into the nervous systems of so many that could not understand what had passed into them, and some that could, and yet others who held it like a microcosmic well, waiting for the coin that would be tossed into its depths with a wish. What came to pass when the well at last met with the coin, an action, that tracked through the matrix of time, began in 1944 and waited 6 decades to blossom in a woman troubled by laundry burnt in the oven and dreams of a wise man once met, is the subject of this writing; the answer to the wish. As a rosy cheeked maiden the woman had been taught by a student of God’s fool. Here she was told to commit 100% to her performance on stage or before the camera lens…

In the dream, the wise man, a dancer and artist, told the woman not to be apathetic. Sitting in the cramped cab of a pick up truck feeling dazed from the many changes and choices she’d had to make that morning the woman thought back to her dream and suddenly understood the root of apathy. It lies in feeling that one cant keep up with the changes. It stems from a lack of decisiveness, it is the opposing force to commitment.

WE ARE ACTION, THE POSTURE, THE POSE.

We become the shape we take. We take shape by committing presence and attention to posture, and gesture. There can be no pussy footing around. Life is a tremendous piece of improv theater. Things change. When they do we must quickly choose and assume a new more suitable pose. There are no wrong choices in improv, the only mistake is to let the attention wander and let our performance be without presence. The great secret has been taught to actors and dancers and mimes and musicians, and yet not all of those within such vocations have the wish to use that secret. There are those outside of such professions that wish to encounter a great spiritual teaching, but do not even guess that it requires becoming a performer.

This, the stage of life, has been so used that we have forgotten its true nature. So distracted by the myriad of thoughts racing through our imaginary minds, we are lost on the set, submerged in identification with those thoughts, we have forgotten that we are performers. In such a state we are not even characters, but the ghosts of characters that would be or could have been. We are made of energy which might be used creatively, but instead it pours from us in chains of thought, chains that tangle and bind us to an imaginary existence. We have thought more of ourselves than we have ever been. To be, you must posses a vehicle to be in, an apparatus with the capacity to be filled with that wealth of energy. We have called this apparatus a human being, it has a nature which is physical, as well as emotional, and intellectual. It is an apparatus over which we have never tried to exercise any control, and therefore we do not posses any control.

It is by working from the bottom up that anything real can be done. It is within the physical human body that any real mystical transformation occurs. The first true step towards spiritual work is literally a step, a step taken with a physical foot moved deliberately and with presence.

Energize the Machine

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

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

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.

Move Slowly

When things have gone off course and you feel the need to hurry in order to right them, slow down. It is most important to observe rituals of awakening in the moments when the tug and troubles of the sleeping world seem to demand all of your attention. If something must be sacrificed, let go of the dead limb. Do not loose your hold on the vital and delicate stream of immortality to gain a tighter grasp on the process of decay. You will never be able to prevent the death of the mortal creation, it will never truly be safe or comfortable.
The intelligence that has been developed to prolong the mortal creation’s existence will find it difficult to admit such impotence. It will in fact edit out the real in order to seem even more useful than it really is. Its plight is pitiful, destined to die with the mortal creation, frightened and delirious , cowardly burying its head in the sand to preserve the illusion of individuality which it perceives. And it will voice its concerns loudly and desperately, do anything to win control of the nation. It especially uses fear and urgency.
This aspect of self is the drowning man who panicking, drags the able bodied swimmer down. Be aware then that to give your whole self over to its rule is to invest only in certain death.
Be disciplined, move slowly, and don’t give in to its panicked cries. Nothing can be saved by submersing the self in sleep, by identifying with that voice. Move against the resistance, towards the awakened life that the distressed sleeper by nature must be blind to. Strive towards the dark, frightening, uncertain territory with steady measured steps.