Sunday, June 24, 2012

Two Angels

Don’t break the silence. One word, a single word could send us crashing down into the terrifying gritty details of organic existence. We hold our breath, two angels poised face to face, the substance of our intricate bodies swirling and crawling with electric light. We are two angels who share one mind, one center held between us in the tenuous absence of thought and motion, so still that we are almost not angels, we are almost nothing at all.

Don’t break the silence.  We have two faces and each face contains two more faces, which contain two more faces, which contain two more… Watching the kaleidoscope of apparent being shifting across the surface of ourselves, our eyes grow ever wider.
Yes, angels have eyes. And tails. And wings, and horns, and ears, and fingers, and toes, and rivers, and forests, and ponds, and stars. What would be called flesh is a multicolored light show, but it will all shatter and melt and cascade into tight places if we make a sound just now, any sound at all.
So we are silent.

Bursting with music, we bite our tongues, press our ears down against our heads, freeze our ponds and hold it in. For now.
Eventually we will let it out in torrents of song that will carry us away from this place, up for a while, then down, then perhaps up and away again. We’ll ride the sonorous currents hither and tither, rippling as we go, dissolving, emerging, shimmering, vanishing, gleaming...

But for now silence, cradled between us like a sleeping babe, a pearl set in a silver ring, a solitary star shining in indigo sky, a crystal goblet upon a golden table. Hush, hush, our eyes blink to each other, two and two, faces sliding away like night and day.
Hush, hush glistening lashes flutter, hush, don’t break the silence.
Don’t break the silence.

Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Touch A Rock


Let us suppose that for the duration of this textual exploration the words "THE CLEAR LIGHT" will be used interchangeably with the words "THE REAL" and "THE ETERNAL". What these words refer to is a thing that I, the author, cannot give to you in words. They are words that I will use to refer to something beyond words, beyond time and all linear constructs.
To begin this exploration I wish to provide you with a terrain.
You will need a rock. You have my leave to gather this necessary material before continuing with me on this journey.
Now that you have the rock, (and if you don't have it, then go away and don't come back until you do) please touch it.
Touch a rock.
Not casually, but with everything you've got, touch a rock.
Were you thinking of anything else as you touched it? Or were you fully present with it, wholly open to the communion with that thing that we are calling "rock"? Was it the word "rock" that you brushed against with your mind, or was there something that you encountered with your hand? Or something that you illuminated with your attention, pure and true?
Touch a rock.
What is "rock"? When your hand was on it, were you there? Were you there or were you wandering through a chain of associations that stem from the word “rock“? Were you lost in thought about everything but a boring old rock?
Touch a rock.
What is beyond the word "rock"?
Eternity is not a very long time. Eternity is a state beyond time, outside of time, separate from it.
The human biological machine exists in time. Being is eternal.
When the Machine is locked in a state of identification with its own conflicts and pleasures it is not possible for the experience of Eternity to take root in it. If the machine can manage a state of high indifference to its situation as a machine, to the endless flow of thoughts and feeling that are the whir and buzz of mechanical operations, an interaction with the real becomes possible. We will call this experience “awakening.”
The human biological machine is not a merely physical entity. It is composed of many subtle parts. The emotions and thoughts are also part of the human biological machine. The part of you that thinks of itself as a “me” is a part of the human biological machine and a manifestation of the unfolding of time.
If we can awaken the biological machine so that it may interface with eternity, we create the possibility for Creation, something that is occasionally called “THE GREAT WORK” or simply “THE WORK”. However, to even get to the point of being able to create the possibility for Creation, one must first endeavor to cultivate and maintain for extended periods that state of high indifference, the awakened state of the human biological machine. Often this is called “WORKING” too, but in actuality it is preparation for the REAL WORK that may be possible as a result of these efforts.
This is it, right now.
Touch a rock.
This is ETERNITY.
If you reach out and touch it.
Not casually, but with everything you've got, by making an effort to focus your attention on something that is not part of the struggles and desires of the human biological machine, something that cannot be defined by that linear construct that we call “language.”
While our attention is squandered on the unfolding of the human biological machine we perceive ourselves as moving through time. But this right now, this is ETERNITY, THE CLEAR LIGHT of objective REALITY.
Eternity cannot be something that happens later. It is something that happens right now or it doesn’t happen at all.
If it is THE REAL it can only be NOW.
This is the moment to endeavor to prepare for creative WORK.
Now you should begin to explore the terrain.
Touch a rock.
Thank you.

Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Thursday, July 30, 2009

For The Sake Of Love

So uninspired… this form which can think only of shuffling and reorganizing closets or finding some reason to venture out of doors. The shock has set in, the realization that my children are growing quickly and soon they will fly away, much sooner than I anticipated when they showed up on the scene nine years ago. Back then people said, “They grow so fast.” They said it over and over again, with their sad wrinkly faces and me, with a baby on each hip, sniffed at their admonitions and thought that it was taking time enough for my liking. Only now enough time has passed that I can gaze backwards and see the eras in their short lives that have already passed into oblivion. Once Angelina brought home stacks of beautiful multicolored art projects. She was happy and liked school. Now she brings stacks of dull white paper marked with endless streams of numbers and I can see why her eyes are puffy and her feet shuffle when she walks with her head turned down as if she were walking under a load of potato sacks. And I remember when Olivia was a little tyke allowed to do as she pleased in a little neighborhood pre-school, back before she started to grow more and more human. I can remember plenty that will flood my brains like a bathroom flooded with water and then the water might leak out of my eyes. I feel it in my heart, everything is slipping away, constantly receding, and I can do nothing to call it back, but I can try to be here in this moment as I have never been in any other. I can strive to be my most present, and not look backward or forward and in that way take some action in response to the melancholy. As uninspired as I am, I am not too troubled to look at the dirt upon the rug and realize that one day I will long to see this dirt upon this rug on this day when we are all still together, or at least what was left of us was still together. I recall spilled cereal on another carpet and crying and picking it all up by hand and being cross with two little babies because we had no vacuum and we had a roommate who would be angry with the mess. If I could waltz back through time, I would push that other mother out of the way and leave the cereal on the floor and take the children warmly in my arms and say calmly that they should be more careful and finish combing their fine little hair and washing their round little faces and help them into their little coveralls and patiently deal with all the business of the day while enjoying their presence alongside my own. My life has seemed so important to me in any given moment, that I have dragged us through strange places in pursuit of something elusive, and have almost never understood what I should truly understand. I have not been gentle enough and only now, as they grow larger and more set in their basic shape, only now am I learning the delicate art of gentleness. I hope that when they are all grown they will appreciate that all of my striving was for them too, and that they will understand that I could not be better than I was in the beginning. I hope that they will know that I was growing with them. We are three people growing together, none of us perfect, the ones who know slightly more than the others, they must naturally take the lead. The ones who don’t know as much, they must naturally follow. At any given time, I cannot be more than I am, I can only strive to refine it and make it better for the sake of love, for the sake of that which on some days may flood through me uncontrollably and leak out of my every pore. But on the days when the faucets are closed, on days like this one, I can still be here and now, and I can still know that I must keep on working and carefully set the stage for the next flood.

Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Process

They come towards me, down the street, or through tubes of old rusty metal, or by way of letter or wires that burn when they touch each other and then they can transform themselves into things that they weren’t to begin with, but still they come toward me, they are unifying principles, pure mathematical equations which live and breathe and fuck and come back for more and they do it all in many different strange contexts, in chambers of nightmare, and chambers of light, and chambers of fullness and chambers of emptiness that stretch out beyond my sight.
They come to me and I take them in, I eat them and then I burn myself into them, we burn ourselves together and then we touch them some more, delicately letting their essence remain while stripping it of everything that came with it, and so we can see that feedback is a principle, not just a principle but the principle, the solid bed rock of our work, that has no name and claims no understanding, an activity without meaning in a world of pure and clear purpose, it is the feedback then that figures in our muddled science of ghostly cybernetics, we are pilots through a land of garbage, birds of carrion in a wasteland of dead cars. We are natural and we are industrial, they come and they are me, and I put myself into them and turn them into something other, they are the little bits of protein that we make into ourselves through elusive processes formed of other more basic processes, such as feedback, such as melting, such as fusion, such as analysis, such as dice rolling on a sunny day, such as confluence of events, such as random neurons firing when they shouldn’t and sprinkling their lightning semen all over the naked flesh of my inner cerebellum, procreating when they should be resting, fucking when they should be at peace. Leave them alone, that is what they do, and they will do it when they have to, not when you tell them to, and they won’t do what you say, what you say is just more food, and it filters through their shape and takes it into itself, much like them, for it is them, and what you say comes to me and I take it in, and sometimes it hurts me and sometimes it pleases me and sometimes I just bite into it and send it sliding down my esophagus like so much more food, eager to take on a new form, so feed me, beautiful, feed me what you have. If you want to set conditions, I will eat them. If you want to say what it was that you saw so many years ago, I will eat that as well. Feed me. My mouth is open and I am still hungry. I am as ravenous as I have ever been. My limbs shiver with the deep need to chew on your hot gifts.
At this time, and it is not guaranteed that this will last for more than a moment, and it is very likely that by the time you read this, this will no longer be true, and such is the nature of all messages, by the time they arrive they are already old news, and I can simply tell you that everything changes, and everything must change for it to be what I am right now, and what I am is a process, a conceptual scheme, an abstraction of the second level, a structure with holes and chambers, tubes and elevators, sliders and knobs, amplifiers and microphones, cameras and projectors, ovens and little plastic containers to store cold food. What I am right now cannot be easily handled and it can’t be clearly implemented, I am a few steps beyond my own understanding and so, any attempt at telling you what is happening is bound to be confusing or disruptive or simply a lie, and once I come to understand that, then I know that I must lie freely, for only in the free lies will I find the truth, and, having established this, I will tell you then that I am composed of:
A) An action, like running my hand over a woman’s back or slicing across a piece of meat with a razor sharp knife or licking at my lips or swinging from a tree or leaning back and exhaling loudly as my body adjusts to the comfort it’s been seeking after a long night of dancing in circles, and it is likely that it is the only dance possible, and if we see anything other than circles we are simply getting lost in the details, missing the vast circle of life for its individual iterations, circles upon circles, all dancing, and then we can say that all of these are circles, all actions step out and come back, in one way or another, the sliding of the hand over the woman’s back must eventually move up, back up to where it once rested on her cheek, and the razor sharp knife must eventually come back to its resting place in the drawers of a kitchen, here or elsewhere, and my tongue, as much as I enjoy its slimy surface running over my dry lips, it must eventually pull back into my mouth and I must let go of the branch and, as much as I enjoy laying here on this soft green carpet, in the darkness of a place so far away from anything I find familiar, still I must get up eventually, we have to go home, and home is where things start, and home is where they end, and so it is all indeed a circle, and so an action, a circle, and we see this circle as a sequence of constituting sub-actions, ever smaller circles, smaller and more refined, so tiny that they will escape even the most subtle description, for the woman’s back has as many hills and valleys as the most complex mountain range, and they are both monumental and they both must come to an end, for they are not home yet, they are in the middle of their vast circle, and as much as I enjoy being here, running my hand down this woman’s back, soon she will be gone, or I will be gone, or we both will go, and soon there will be nothing but dust where there was a vast smooth back and my hand itself will be a dank smelly memory of life turning into life, and that is indeed what I am then, a process through which death becomes life and then becomes death again. The states of the world through which we move in this circular dance of desire and laughter and tears are referred to as stages of the process, and so look around, and you will see all the stages before you, the stage of open mouthed admiration, the stage of intense dedication, when the eyes barely move and the hands vibrate with energy that had been previously hidden, then the moment of flowering, when things begin to come together and you see it all before you, yes, as if it had always been there, as if it could not be any other way, and then the moment of hardship, when it could definitely be some other way, indeed you wish that it was, and it seems that we are lost at sea and the ocean is just a vast land of grayness and sadness and clouds and rain and storms and hungry predators that long to tear you apart, and if you hold on long enough, if you resist the urge to give in to the pull of the darkness, then things finally do come together again, and your mouth opens wide, in a great surrender, and you say to yourself "I have finished… and now I will rest…" and that is when the green carpet feels so good against your back and you can actually hear your vertebrae crackling because you have danced so much and the work has taken all out of you and the air is pulsing with colors and you are so tired that you would love the silence, but there are still residues of what just happened within you, so you then talk, and what you say only makes sense in the moment, right in the moment and nowhere else, and if someone happens to be with you in that moment, then they may or may not understand you, because they may be with you and somewhere else, or they may be truly with you, it is very hard to tell, but you talk anyway, just in case, and what you say is like a shower of strange rainbows cloaked in the metallic shapes of language, and it sprays over the ceiling and the walls, but it leaves no residue, and finally you truly must rest and everything goes black and there is nothing, and the resting can go on for a long time, and then you must eat and drink and eat some more, that’s when they start coming at you, down the street, down the tubes, down the wires and soon it is time to start all over again, as usual. This is all normal. Everything that you have just experienced is eminently normal, and it is painfully unique, and in that duality is the answer that you seek, but it is not an answer that I can tell you, not unless we dance together, and if we did dance together, then there would be nothing to tell. I am a process, and as a process, I am sequence of these stages and more, it is impossible to determine them all, I only have so many words and just a limited amount of food to go on. It is enough that you understand the little I can say and go on without me. It is an action which is a circle which is separated in stages which all lead you back home in the end.
What we speak of here may be confused with a kite, or the wind that moves the kite, or the little girl that holds the string of the kite, or the mother that stands beside her, contemplating the expanse of the sky and the ocean and the world itself and if we go any further then we will talk of concepts, and this is not what I wish to do, because concepts are only there in your imagination, in mine, in ours, and they lack the infinite mountain ranges of the woman’s back and they come crashing down to earth before you have even finished calling their name, demons that can’t hold themselves together, and as they fall they pull you down with them, their red skin pushes against your own and pulls you down, like a kite that is too heavy and then it falls, and the girl is not happy and the mother is not happy and the world is not happy, and so you will say "these are concepts" and I will have to admit that they are but try to say it softly, try to refrain from holding tightly onto them or we may both fall together, and then our tears will mingle and I might become what you are and you may become what I am, and maybe that would be for the best, because one day you leave your house thinking you’re going to paint a house and you end up filming a video in a strange little town full of witches and women that look away when you look at them and you talk of distant lands and you meet a beautiful brown woman in a room of shadows, and that is just what happens, things like these just happen, and for you, maybe, this is fine, because you are brave and strong and you fear nothing, but for others it might not be so good, and maybe then I will end up jumping over cliffs and hanging from vines over dark rain water, gasping for my life, and you will end up sitting in front of a computer typing away words that you can’t understand, all because we couldn’t hold our tears and we had to cry all over each other. In the end, this is what we must do, cry and laugh and fuck, I have to go deep inside you and feel the inner walls of your presence with the fleshy extension of mine and you have to open to me and suck in what I have to give you, take it in and cook it, and feed it and shape it and kiss it and lick it, and then, when you have put yourself into it, when it is ready and fully formed, then give it back to me through the doorway that I hold open for just such an occasion, open for you, only for you, you that are endless and everywhere, you that listen, you that never blink. This is in fact what we have to do, as scary and as slimy as it is, as drenched in sweat and smells and tiny errors, we have no other recourse, but let’s wait for the right moment, let’s wait until I can give you what I am and you can take it and put yourself into it, let’s wait for an ephemeral moment such as this, let’s not act in haste for the exchange has to be complete and if we halt in the wrong moment, we will have changed the whole process, and maybe home will no longer lie in the middle of a dark garden and instead it will be thousands of miles away, among people who speak strange languages and cover their skins with symbols they can barely understand, and when that happens, as it surely must, remember that you are still a process, such as I am, but only for this one moment, and when you remember, start all over again, and let them come to you, down the street, down the tubes, down the wires, and put yourself into them, put your past and your future, your fantasies and your fears, your truths and your lies, and let it all slide right in there and make up something new, something new such as never has happened, and then let it go out, let it fly like a kite that is so perfect and so light that it will never come back down to earth and cut the cord and then keep on wandering, for the work will never end, and you are the work, and the process never ends, for you are the process, and the actions that you take go in circles and circles go on forever. These then that we talk of are the stages of the process and they may be seen as abstractions limited in space but that is only an illusion, an illusion caused by the process itself, don’t let it fool you, the head is the tail, the tail is the only head, and the body is only your life, and you will keep on going for as long as the body pulses, and the body will never end because it never started. Leave fear behind, leave all your suspicions at the door, and, for this one moment, this single moment that will soon come to an end, become a process with me and let me feed you, don’t believe that there is something in this food, something solid, something to hold onto, these are only stages, these are only mathematical abstractions, and the only thing real is what you make of it, right now, this very moment when your eyes flash across this strange page of blinking lights.
Yes, I must admit this to you, even though I am concerned for what you will do with this knowledge, for what your complex sequence of tubes will grasp and how it will divide it and how it will cut it into tiny pieces and what will it build with its component parts, I am concerned but I shouldn’t be, I am concerned but it is only my old demon trying to pull me down to the dusty ground covered in pebbles, yes, that one, the one next to the ocean where one day you were almost about to fly away with the little blue balloons and I had to hold you down, grabbing tightly onto your ankles, and if you remember it you will know that that day we didn’t want you to fly away, we didn’t want you to disappear among the clouds, but this was only temporary, for sooner or later you would have to go, sooner or later the clouds would be your home, and the balloons would be your only anchor, and that is what we must talk about now, even if the weighted elements of my structure hesitate at the doorway of this revelation. Yes, the process has definite initial and final stages. You will appear to begin, you will appear to move through a thousand different chambers, you will appear to be happy, you will appear to be sad, you will appear to be covered in sweat as you fuck through an afternoon of debauchery, you will appear to congeal into a ball of pain when the world comes down upon you like a big castle full of bricks and people screaming at you that you should stop, that this has been enough, that it is time to grow up, and it will do no good to tell them that you have indeed grown up, that you have grown into a different process and that is all that you could have asked for, that is all anyone could have asked from you, and they won’t ever be happy with you and so you will have to leave them behind, and your body will start failing, and the things you could once do will become progressively harder until they become impossible, and when they become impossible it will be time to just lie down on a big bed listening to the radio and old cassette tapes of your grandkids speaking gibberish and then you will remember the old days, the times that now seem so perfect through the filmy gauze of memory, and maybe you will smile and maybe you will cry and eventually you won’t be capable of either, and the last of your circular actions will seem like it lasts forever and you will say to yourself, why? Oh why? Why didn’t I live it all like this? All moments were so precious and they spilled through me like grains of sand when I rolled on the wet beach that one day, and that day was truly beautiful because it was ending and the sunset was just perfect, covered as it was in orange and purple and blue, and the wind was not too warm and not too cold, and your skin was so wet, covered in the salty water, and your eyes flashed like the lightning of a storm made of loving raindrops, and maybe if I had done that more often, or maybe if I had let them come to me, down the street, down the tubes, down the wires, maybe if I had placed myself into them, maybe then I would not be here, or even if I was here, it would not be so bad, it would just be another eternal moment, no different from the rest, no different from any other moment that has ever been, that ever will be, because now, lying here in this strange bed, now I know that it is so, and it always was, and now I must go and leave it all behind, and I feel that I haven’t fulfilled my purpose, my work with my hands, my work with my chest, my work with my eyes, my work with my nails, my work with my hair, my work with my long fingers which I can’t even move now, and then it was all in vain, so much effort and all in the wrong direction, and such things you will say to yourself and they will echo within you like huge brass bells in an ancient cathedral and they will fill you tired body with dread and they will drive it all deeper into you, the truth or what seems to be dressed like it, specially when you overhear your son crying from the next room and you are not strong enough to say anything to him, and he will be so sad and you won’t be there to console him, at least not you as you have come to know you, but who was that in the first place, and did you really know it? Who were you back when you were you? And if you are not that any longer, then are you already gone?
Consider it all then an abstraction, an abstraction that occurs at the beginning and at the end, for now you are finally open, and now you can see, and now they come to you, down the street, down the tubes, down the wires, and now you finally take them in completely, and now you can finally put yourself in them, this is your time, time has not ended, time is barely starting, and, let me tell you and let me say that I know it is confusing but there is no way around it, you are now at the initial stage and this initial stage is called the input, and as much as you may now fly through dark thoughts of nightmare, here is where you will feed, take it all in, open yourself wide and allow yourself to be fucked as deeply and as savagely as you always wanted, it will happen whether you want it or not, might as well enjoy it, let the pain and the pleasure become as one, and let that one experience shake you to the core of what you are no longer, and let the semen that is not you come into you, and form yourself in its image, for it is the one that is as much as you are, and together you will form the new process that is you, the new you that is the process, and as you find yourself in a world of falling stars and vibrant supernovas, don’t let fear overtake you, you are merely what you always were, the only difference is that now you see it clearly, and as you slide into a permanent shape, know that this initial stage is an abstraction from the final stage called output, you in your life, as a woman of great stature in a little country forgotten by God and the Lords of the Universe, as a little brown girl full of dreams and of great disappointments, as a boy who dreams of Egyptian tombs and heroes in white robes, you are the final stage of the process, you are the output of that fearsome moment, and if you hear me now, even for just this one moment, because you must understand, clearly and beyond doubt, this is truly the only moment that we have, and if you hear me now, you will then see, like me, for a fleeting moment, and nothing more, that this is the process, you are the process, we are the process, and it has always been so.
We can then speak of the process as transforming the input into the output and as such it is true, without forgetting that the inputs are outputs themselves, food that will come to you, down the street, down the tubes, down the wires, and whatever you make of them, whatever you take in and how you heat it and shape it and pull it apart, it will be a process too, and it will go on to form what you were not, and it will do what you never imagined, it will become violence in that shape of red and black and it will be gentle love in greens and yellows and it will be savage desire in the invisible movements of blue and violet and it will grow beyond the reach of your vision, so as to be too big to hold, too small to envision, and you can never predict it, you can never know where it will go, and you can never control it, and you wouldn’t want to if you could, not really, although you might be fooled into thinking that you would, but this is something that will disappear along with the mountain ranges of your flesh. I am then the process that writes these words for you, and only for you, and you are then the process that reads them, and maybe thinks of the future and maybe thinks of the past, and maybe, just for a moment, it simply takes them in and accepts them as the semen that I give you to build your own output. Please know that I don’t know what you hear, that when you say body, I see a spaceship and when I say the doors, you think I am talking of rectangular wooden structures. So leave all thoughts of understanding behind and simply take me in. I come to you down the street, down the tubes, down the wires. I am with you now as much as I have ever been with you. There can be no obstacle, no condition, no request. I am with you always and I have never left. For I am the process that is the food of the process, and the process never rests.
Some notes before I finish and go back to lie down on the green carpet, which feels so good against my back after a night of wild dancing and demonic invocations, specially here in the darkness of this quiet room that seemed at times to be on fire, that seemed at times to be full of music that emerged from my fingers like ribbons of colored light, there are still some things I must tell you before we end, they are of no utmost importance, but then again what is? We will place the importance on the things we encounter, it is the food that we choose to eat, and as it runs over our mouths, it will be warm and delicious and it will be that most important thing of all, later to be forgotten, later to be remembered, later to be something else altogether and the importance will be as transitory as the thing we attached it to and you will then decide what is important, and when you do, you will give your heart to it, and I will press my heart against yours and I will kiss you and I will say "yes, this is it. Do it."
Here I give you a few morsels which may help digest what has come before. There are processes which have a definite initial stage, a moment of quiet when we all sit in a circle and decide what to do, when we all say what it is that we are trying to achieve and we set out to do so, in that moment maybe you lean against a white chair, maybe I walk around in a black shirt and black pants, or maybe you are naked and you sit on my lap, and my penis throbs inside of you, and as our presences become one, then we know that it has started, yes it has started, a new eternal circular action has come into being and it mustn’t stop, and it can’t, for it is now eternal, and it always was as much as it now is.
As such, I must tell you, a process may be infinite. What came before was always there, what came after was bound to happen, and the hills of her back will be different and the carpet may no longer be green and the sky may not be as blue as it once was, and there may be no kites flying, and the cool room of darkness where we danced for an age of unreason may now be an office of women in business suits looking desperately up at a clock, but the process will keep on going, because the beginning was an illusion caused by the process itself, and any end that you imagine is the same, just lights hitting mirrors and bouncing back to become more lights, nothing more, nothing less. Let the infinite wheels turn and don’t hold on too tightly, you’re not going anywhere, you have been here for so long that you have forgotten where you are, the birth is a death, the death is a birth, the moment of flashing lights is another opening, another flash of truth in the ocean of the Real. The illusions are as real as the rooms that stand behind them, and the things that you imagine back there, the tall black statues and the thick old books, and the secret prayers that will finally change the nature of existence, they all wait back there, and in them you will find the flower, the music, the sky and the bone, you will find me waiting, and, when I finally open my eyes to look at you, after waiting for a thousand ages of oblivion, then, with shimmering pupils and a trembling voice, I will say to you, "They come towards me, down the street, or through tubes of old rusty metal…" And we will start all over. As we always have. As we always will.
Maybe you will say that this is nonsense, that there you sit and I am nowhere, that I am just a bunch of letters on a screen of flashing lights, and you will be right, absolutely right beyond question, and I will have nothing to answer, nothing to respond, for I will not be there, not as you want me to be, not as I wish that I could be, but I am here with you, in this moment, and if you can only come to me, I will give you everything, I will hold nothing back, I will fly into you like a bird of a million colors, sparkling with the metal in my talons, flowing with the rainbows in my wings, and you will then see that I am nothing, I was always nothing, and everything that you saw in me was you yourself, you are the bird, you are the screen, you are the story. And you will say to me that you can touch your body, you can touch the wall, you can touch the floor, you can touch the carpet, and this is real, above all else, what my hands can reach out and hold is what truly exists, and since it exists then it is condemned to being a thing, and in being a thing it will start and it will end, and such we all are, you that write these things for no reason, you that read them for the same, you that will never come near me, you that once were close and now are gone.
But on a smaller time scale, so small maybe that you will have to squint so tightly, tighter still, in order to reach into the depths of its smallness, let’s do it together now, what I am and what I am not, what you once were and what you soon will be, down there in the miniscule reaches of our farthest perception, we observe constancy with respect to some cognitive actions, we observe that indeed some things stay the same, for as much as we talk of Eternity and the endless recurrence of our Being, some things manage to remain, earth abides, and with it the sky and the walls and the hands and the eyes, and this simple observation gives us the reason to speak of it as an object, a recurring perception of solid nature, a thing, stuff, food, stone, rock, dust, fever, blame, thought, vision, dream. On a larger time scale, this is a process, these are all processes, and, from far up in the limits of the sky, in the realms beyond the atmosphere, beyond our memories, beyond our thoughts, we looked down for a moment, for we have only a moment, I can never say it too many times, and in this one moment we look down and we say that the object is changing, it is not the same as it was, it is not the same as it will be. And if this thing, this stuff, this food, this stone, this rock, this dust, this fever, this blame, this thought, this vision, this dream… if it is changing then it is a process, and if this is a process then you know that you can’t be otherwise, and if I am a process, and we are together, then we are a process together, and a process can never end. How long have we traveled together, how long have you written strange things to be read on a screen of blinking lights? How long have I sat down to read the strange products of your fevered mind? How long will we be apart? How long will we be together?
The process that is me enters the process that is you and allows you to enter in return and we become something that is as we were, a process, nothing less, nothing more, and we stare out into nothingness and wait for our food to come, and as our multiple input channels open, I point out there, to the vast beyond that stretches in all directions, and I tell you:
"They come towards me, down the street, or through tubes of old rusty metal…"
Stay with me as it happens, for there is much for us to do. We have the work of a lifetime before us. And we only have a moment.

Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Friday, March 21, 2008

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.

Labels: , , , ,

Saturday, November 10, 2007

Experiment: Turning Water Into Wine


To execute the following experiment you will require two translucent goblets of equal proportions; one empty and the other full of water, and a small bottle dropper.

Set aside a space and time in which you may conduct this experiment without interference of any kind. Be seated with the necessary implements laid out before you. Take the dropper in hand and begin to breath deeply and slowly. Allow your breathing to connect you to your physical presence.

When you feel sufficiently collected, summon the full power of your attention and place it on the water in the first goblet. Use the dropper to transfer the water from the full goblet to the empty goblet one drop at a time. Keep your attention on the water and its slow transposition.

Let each drop be the only important thing upon your mind; worry neither about the water that has already been moved nor the water that awaits relocation. Be present in the motion of taking the water, in the motion of moving to the next glass, and the motion of releasing a single drop. In every step be attentive to the moment and free of concern about the steps that precede and succeed the present.

Your mind will wander, do not resist and struggle with this natural occurrence. When you have become distracted, simply acknowledge the break in your contact with the moment and restore it. Do not hope for the experiment's conclusion.

Continue as if this is your eternal occupation; it will not end, it never began, it has always been and will always be so. Carry on thusly until all of the water has been transferred.

Labels: , , ,

Monday, September 24, 2007

Experiment: Self Remembrance Express

Board a crowded bus or train.
Once seated, invoke your presence. To aid you in this, place your attention on your entire body including the empty space three inches above the skin. Keep your eyes open and seeing but preserve your attention to self.
Feel that you are in a space all your own, the interests and psychic activity of the others on board the vessel should not intrude. You prevent them from intruding by simply keeping your attention on self rather than placing it wholly on them. It is okay to look at and perceive them, just remember yourself at the same time.
If you find that you have gotten caught up in a thought of one kind or another, simply bring your attention back to your own body. Keep track of the frequency with which you completely forget yourself.
Stay onboard for approximately 15 minutes before getting off. Repeat the entire experiment during the return voyage.
Record you observations for future reference.

Labels: , , ,