Fear In The Desert

There is water in the desert of despair, dirty mucky water, just enough of it to make leaving look harder than staying.
You see that water warming under the merciless sun and you tell yourself that one place is as good as another, that someday your dreams will come true, but until then you can rest here.
You may huddle under the shade of a Texas umbrella tree dropping poisonous gold berries into the powdery dust that covers its roots while you wait for your ship to come in.
Waiting, a broken robot that knows that it is damaged but can’t see that the damage prevents it from making the choices that might lead to repairs.
Your brokenness informs your decision to remain in the desert. It demands that you wait for a ship. A ship in the desert. You watch videos of rolling waves crashing upon distant shores and you wait for it to come in.
You are actually afraid of a positive outcome.
You are afraid that the world will not come crashing to an end within a year, that the government isn’t plotting against its citizens, that there are no sinister forces at work around you.
You are afraid of discovering a paradise beyond the desert, you are afraid of discovering that you could make repairs to your damaged operating system if you were willing to confront your self by acknowledging that you are the only one who can make the decision to leave the desert.
You fear the terrible responsibility.

Mama Bunny

I have been so heavy with sleep, drooping as a green leaf might droop under the accumulated moisture of a heavy mist. My body feels tired, my emotions are troubled, my mind muddled. I don’t want to touch a rock, to drag myself into the magic circle. Feeling trapped under the weight of things to do, things to do, things to do, I have an angst filled desire to moan, “Fuck it all.” shed some tars, eat some candy corn and watch The Vampire Diaries.
A tiny voice inside of me urges me against giving in to the weight of sleep. I crawl into the magic circle and touch a rock. I do a number of secret things with no attention whatsoever. It is difficult just to be there, forget doing anything well. My mind is pulling like a dog on the end of a leash, reaching for anything anywhere but refusing to heel, to be right here, right now.
Eventually the tiny white rabbit enters the magic circle. I know her well and think of her as Mamma Bunny.
“Keep trying. You’re doing good just by trying.” she tells me.
I don’t feel like I’m doing good. I feel like I’m going through the motions and I’d like to give up.
“You're in a valley. That’s all. On the mountain it’s clear. You are awake, everything makes sense, but inevitably you come down. That’s part of existence, a natural law. And in the valley you feel that you can’t ever reach the peak again, that maybe you’ve never been there. You can’t understand what you once understood. You can’t understand the mountain from the valley. That’s okay. It’s not worth trying to understand what you knew then. Now is now. All you have to do is understand that where you are now you won’t be able to appreciate where you’ve been or where you will be again. But you can understand that it is temporary, that you won't always be as you are now. You won't always sleep. One day you’ll be awake again. And it is in preparation for that day that you continue your practice. Even if you can’t do much through your practice at this moment, simply maintaining the habit of practice makes it possible for you to do something real later.”
“Look at it another way. The master of the house is away, but you maintain the house so that the master can return. If you let the house fall into decay, if you abandon it, the master can’t come home. Or when he does, he‘ll have to focus on putting the house in order. But if you keep the house in good shape, the master can return and do something productive with it right away. Which is better, because the master comes and goes on, and this house can only stand for a century or less, so time is limited.”
Mama bunny points her little face up at me, golden eyes shinning.
“Just keep it up. You’re doing good by trying. Trying is good  enough. It turns into doing. Nothing is permanent and you don’t have to understand everything in all of your facets. Practice makes it possible to experience another facet from whose perspective you will understand. If you don’t get up and do your chores, you can’t go to the ball, and if you don’t go to the ball, you can’t meet the prince! And you‘ll find that even if your chores seem impossible, by getting up and getting started, by trying, you‘ll attract enough helpers to get the job done.”
I lower my face towards mama bunny’s and gently touch my forehead to hers. Then I open my mouth and swallow her. She jumps down happily, a white rabbit plunging back into wonderland. I feel her glowing inside of me, a kernel of levity, a nightlight against the darkness of slumber, a movement in the underbrush that sends the dew into a sparkling scatter of droplets bouncing from a green leaf.

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.”

Interdimensional Biological Spaceship Beast

I draw a card from an Albano-Waite Tarot deck and am immediately unhappy with this picture. The poor devil has no cock. It's clear that it is missing. While his wings are a vivid plum color, he himself is stuck with the color of a turd. He wears the white beard of a department store Santa Claus and his eyes are contorted by an emotion that must be sorrow or anger.
I cannot blame him. He is being made a mockery of in this picture.
The man, who does at least sport a Ken doll man bump, seems to be gesturing towards the absence of the devil’s penis. The devil sits on a perch with a five pointed star being driven point down into his crown as if it were insisting that he acknowledge the power of the one flowing from above to below. He is not holding the people in bondage as one would initially guess, but rather it is they who are keeping him. The chain around their necks symbolizes their wish to be separate from their bodies and keep everything below the neck imprisoned.
Despite this, the truth of the situation is discernible, the sly devil can accept his debasement and somehow use it to tell his own story. That star being driven into his head mimics the horns visible on his head. We do not come from one, it says, we come from two.
The man and the woman also don horns, and tails. The woman's tail is made of fruit and the mans tail is made of fire. He will bring the fire and she will bear the fruit, enough said.
Behind them the devil waits patiently for them to loose the binds that are strangling the life dwelling within them. With the Vulcan hand gesture he bids them to live long (perhaps eternally) and prosper.
He is not a prisoner after all, he is patient and kind and refuses to abandon them, suffering along with them. He waits for them to set themselves free. His knees form the shape of a heart between the man and the woman, urging them to embrace their nature and love one another without fear or guilt or shame.

The following day I draw another card. It is Strength. I see this card as the perfect follow up to the devil. This is the alchemical marriage, beauty and the beast, the unification of the eternal and the temporal.
The woman with the eternity symbol over her head and rose garland belt represents the eternal being, the holy guardian angel. The red lion is the animal, the biological machine, the temporary creation. This is strength; the two united, the rose and the lion.
The lion is powerful, strong, and regal submitting to her touch. His tongue lolls, his eyes roll back in his head as the fierce beast relinquishes all control to his eternal beloved.
This is strength: the willingness to submit to stillness, to overcome fear and desire, repulsion and compulsion, to cease to roar and gnash teeth and instead open the heart and allow the passion of the immaterial other to course through the material.
The lion is the Christ, the anointed one. The old kings were anointed with the menstrual blood of the goddess, a substance of awakening. The woman is the goddess, the eternal beloved, the devil. By adoring her, the anointed one redeems her and himself. They become something unimaginable, something more than they could have been separately.

I see the woman in this card as representing the same being embodied by the devil in yesterday’s card. Where in that card the eternal and the temporal struggle and are disconnected, here they are united. That patient waiting devil is the same as this patient gentle bride. In this card pure love flows through the two and this is what rules, not abstracts.
In this light I also understand that the man and the woman in the devil card are in fact chained to the fears and desires of the biological machine and its attempt to usurp power. The one jealous God that rules from above is the personification of these fears and desires.
The devil in the background waits for them to awaken to the knowledge that one is death and stagnation and two are life and creation. The biological machine must cease to struggle for control and open to the strange affection of the eternal in order to leave the dead end it made for itself behind.

A few days later I shuffle the deck and draw a card again. I am not surprised to see that it is the devil. It seems that my old friend and teacher and father has something more to communicate. Look again he says, but not with your eyes, which were made for the surface world where the light plays its tricks. Search with the feeling senses employed by those blind things which explore the subterranean world and make it their home.
Then guess what I am. Dark and warm and fruitful. Feminine.
The cock is not missing, it is there. The two human beings are the devils genitalia, his procreative tools, extensions of self with which he can probe the mysteries accessible through a voyage in the human bio-mechanical spaceship. This is also beauty and the beast. But we are the beast, and the devil is the beauty. So loving is beauty, so inquisitive, fearless, enduringly calm and optimistic, and, of course, giving.

The ideal components for building the inter-dimensional biological space craft named “Beast” is revealed to me in the following days.
First, the High Priestess. Her calm strikes me like a wave from the sea, shocking, invigorating in its placidity. Her intellectual center is awakened and at the service of her work for the benefit of the eternal. She encompasses the knowledge of life that bleeds forth from a cellular level and the knowledge of worlds constructed of concepts hinged on words. The depths of the subconscious work in symphony with the illuminated surface.
Her headdress is made of the horns and of the full moon, symbolic of her comfort with both masculine and feminine forces and with the seed and its fulfillment. It is also representative of the necessary relationship between two and one, that two become one in sexual unification and then, after the conception, one becomes two at the moment of birth.
The cross burns under the Priestess’s breast. Ripened flowers and fruits open like vulvas behind her and the horned moon is caught in the robes at her feet. She is calm and cool and well collected. She holds the written word in her hands. She can create with words, she can organize new structures and utilize existing ones to mysterious ends, in the service of the eternal silence, the guardian at the center of labyrinth, the watcher within.
Where some could be lost in the symbolic order, she is aware of its nature and utilizes it as the steps of the pyramid to the moon. She is poised between the two columns of the God of the Earth and the God of the Sky, a crossing of streams supported with grace and detachment.
She is as disciplined and focused on herself as Audrey Hepburn’s character in a Nun’s story, who realizes that while she may hide her faults from the church and her sisters, she cannot hide them from herself and God. So she struggles to do the real thing, whether anyone else is or not, whether anyone else can perceive her efforts or not.

After the Priestess comes the Magician. He stands with one hand raised towards the heavens and the other pointing to the earth. In his raised hand he holds a double terminated rod so that each end is both sending and receiving, circulating the energy from the heavens to the earth and from earth to heavens.
Over his head the figure eight, symbol of eternity, hangs suspended, representing the eternal being voyaging continually through material existence, like a rider in a train passing through a tunnel. The placement of his arms combined with this symbol forms a subtle cross.
He is young and full of adventurous fire. He is fearless and surrounded by roses and lilies, the goddess and death and the mystery of the flower which blooms and withers while the vine lives on and on to support new blooms again and again.
On the table stands the cup, the sword, the baton, the pentacle. He has the building blocks to create a new symbolic order, a new world. He is a storyteller, imaginative, ready to create a rich inner world through which the various aspects of self can be expressed and slowly/subtly become known to him.
He is a professor with his puppets at the ready. He will put something of himself into them, igniting them into a dance that he will both be inside of and apart from.
He is a point of connection between worlds, he is worlds within worlds within worlds. He is the creator and the explorer journeying to discover the breadth and depth of himself and establish lines of communication that reach from one shadowy pocket to the next, unifying the self.

The man and the woman in chains at the devil’s feet have the potential to become these two, the High Priestess and the Magician. As long as they cling to their individualism and their habitual behaviors they are the slaves of the symbolic order. They are not aware of their circumstance or their latent potential. They live and breed and die never having escaped the bondage of their own mechanical nature.
It is only through an effort to know themselves and the Other that they may cast away their chains and become something more than their biological nature dictates. They must surrender, despite the fear of death. Then they may begin the work of building the vessel called “Beast” or Adam Kadmon, to become the instrument of the Eternal.

One more time I shuffle the cards and my old friend comes to say goodbye. This time we can relax and have a good conversation without me applying cerebral analyses to his every line.
It is painful to be the Devil. His trick is not to mind it, to relax into the pain.
Pain is caused by resistance, by clutching to forms that cannot be in the OTHER spaces, the places I want to travel through. Relaxing into hot pulverized jelly is the only way to go. I cannot take my baggage; linguistic structures and thought forms. The software of the machine does not function in the OTHER spaces, the software dies with the hardware, then only the otherware works and the only way to develop otherware is to start now with little treks into the OTHER spaces.
But it’s a dead man’s party, so leave your body and persona at the door.

Sheep Roll In Soul

They show me that we are good sheep, sheep who walk in neat lines to be counted lustily, sheep who roll by in cars. They show this to me. They say, “You are a sheep. Sheep need to have this.” And that is the advertisement; sheep in lines, sheep in cars. They call it the soul. They want to sell me, a sheep, a soul. So ludicrous that my mind is dropped from its usual turbulent fury to a complete silence. I needn’t dig deep. They put it right out in the open. We have become so hopeless, so used to the manipulation of life and words that we don’t need the message to be too discreet. You can simply tell us, you are sheep, you want to fit in with the herd, you want this car, we will give you soul. Soul, the thing that flies or the thing that makes you rock and gyrate to the music. Soul. Yes. I told you. I can say nothing more than what they said, it was so plainly put in pictures and animation and words. I am left silent. Why fight it? Why suggest to a sheep, “Hey yew, they’re just trying to eat yew? They’re getting fat on yew. And yew are getting fleeced.”?
They want to be sheep. They want to be herded. They want the bearded man with the bo-peep cane to stand over them and smile with a heart pinned to his dress. They want him to tell them where they should go, when they should go, they don’t even need a why. Glad to accept that father knows best, they’ll do what they are told, because after all they are sheep, and the shepherd is much smarter, far better suited to make the best choices. He leads them to the greenest grass, the sweetest pastures, why object? We get what we want. Listen to it. You don’t’ even have to worry about your soul. You can buy that too. All you need to do is consume. Feed in the green pasture and the shepherd will give you a soul. He is looking out for both your material and spiritual well fare. He is loading you up onto the conveyor belt and watching you disappear into the dark depths of the light crushing machinery. You will be dust. You will be ash. Immortality is for Gods, not for sheep. You are a quick snack for the Cannibal God and his brood. Yum yum, they taste so good doused in Christian Doir and wrapped in lycra, served on platters of satin and oak. Down in the earth six feet deep your soul will roll along the black asphalt above with a new sheep at the wheel ready to go and earn a paycheck and hit the online stores and shopping malls. Ready to sign its life away, holding a pen clenched in its bovine maw, yes on the dotted line, thank you, and here, here, and here by the X , yes, thank you. Pockets full of plastic and we all fall down. Ring around, around, around. I know it’s true, I’ve said it before, I’ve sung it in nursery rhymes and set it in words and pointed and hopped up and down. And this time I mention it with less passion, with less concern. You are right after all, we are only sheep. If you’re only wish is to feed in greener pastures, then bon appetite. Enjoy it while you can. Because that soul you bought, it won’t roll where you’re going to go. The asphalt reaches only so far.
(A note to the reader- if you find this more than mostly confusing you may need to run a Google search on SOUL. The very first listing will help find a Kia dealer where you can buy your very own.)

Zicky Tabby

600 words of witch light. Switch light for the might of height , so bright so bright, the rafters right. They say meow wow hay mamma hay, but no, no we don’t go, no way, no we stay, fixed like star fish on ships bellies suction cups sup, sup, sup. Rainbow bright me, me hearties yo ho. And we don’t go, no, no, no, no, no. They sing it like weeeeeeaowww, meowwwww, like daisies dancing on days of delight, de light, dat shine so bright, so rainbow bright with blue windmill turning, the stars are burning, the child is learning and loosing the way of the zicky tabby ooob da, the secret language of the stars, of the gum stuck beneath table tops, pink and blue and gray whispering of days chewed by, mouths once explored, the secrets of the zicky tabby ooob da, the white haired lady dressed in black downstairs and the bright red and yellow plastic tea set up stairs, and Robin hood and Little Jon and a dress that never gets worn, oooob da. That is the life of mankind, the womankind with him, that’s the life, the life of the dress that never gets worn. We have it here, but we no gonna use it. We knows its special so we gonna let it waste away unused. Afraid. Afraid is the people of the word, And stuck, stuck like the gum under table tops. We got the little box what fits in the big box what fits in the bigger box what fits in the biggest box, Oh my! Oooob da! Sometimes in and sometimes out, then we come back and see that we grown bigger, that we learned more words, we got us a bed spread, shiny and pink and dirt under our finger nails and holes in our trousers, and dogs sniffing at our holes and big mountains rising high like the pie in the sky, we all do die, sometimes, we die. We cry an we cry and in dreams we fly but somehow we can’t get unstuck dubby duck, we can’t get back to the free jazz, just being this little body growing on macaroni and cheese fuel, like little sticks of dynamite going down yum yum, and we are sad but we don’t know why. The peoplez all around us is droopy eyed scraggly haired. The dog has got burs in her furs and frozen rattle snakes for Frisbees. We can’t play in the sand box cause iz full of earwigs… you know de pin c h e r bugzzzzzz. There be some big trees out in the autumnal breeze, swaying, gentle hipped, murmuring songs about the baked land and the poisoned flowers all pink and white. Got them words running over my brain, got my A B C D E F G and my SH and CH and TH and PLEASE, and THANK YOU and AMEN and I APOLOGIZE and I AM SORRY. And glub zub dub I am sorry, sorry I kant make no one here happy on this green earth. Green and brown and yellow gold with sparkles and purple and white butterflies bleached like the bread and we got the TV. The TV got me. IT got me so I can only dream in cartoonzzzz. I don’t remember how I dreamed before. Now I am black and white cartoonz and I am stuck running in place and the big bad wooolfe is coming to eat me and I try with all my might but I iz stuck in place, in black and white cartoon space. More to be afraid of the longer I iz here. Don’t remember when this song got started, don’t remember what we sang before. Oooob da’s gone from this song. Zicky tabby is now 1 2 3 and 1 5 1 9 6 LAGUNA AVE. 909 678-1169. Goody bye Zicky tabby farewell oooob da. The witch light, once so bright now burns dim in the sad gray grim. Might of height won dis fight, so we say goodnight to the light. What iz right, what iz right, is might, iz height. Iz goodnight Oooob da, goodnight and bye byes to de light.

Pride

Someone had been left on a porch in a basket as an infant; the classic fairytale beginning. He must have been the illegitimate son of a king, or otherwise noble born, and abandoned to anonymity to spare his life. Or perhaps a prince from another world hidden in ours from his enemies. So he always held his head high, remembering that he had something in common with Moses. His son likewise turned his nose up just slightly and remembered that he was different from those around him, and so his son’s son as well.
They were clever men, intelligent, makers of things. The son built a big house with his own hands on the corner of a popular street and two more generations were born in that house. Eventually the grandson of that first abandoned prince journeyed across the seas in search of opportunity, bringing with him his wife and their own little son. That son grew up in the distant land upon which they landed and eventually had a child of his own, not a son, but a daughter.
She only once heard the story of the basket but she never forgot it. Even without having heard it, she knew already that she was somehow different, better than everyone around her. This special pride born of nothing more substantial than white skin and wit was tempered by a Christian upbringing, so that even as she was arrogant, she felt a twinge of guilt that she should be fortunate to be so perfect while others were, by no fault of their own, born into vulgar families. She sympathized with those that she thought lowlier than herself and rarely met someone that she would see as better than herself.
Brought up in a large house in the country, she was lavished with every possible trinket, a fabulous play house, marvelous pets, her own room with a king sized bed. A golden plaque, with the Lord’s Prayer inscribed upon it, was hung on the wall beside her bed.
In her most vulnerable years, pride kept her from harms way, pride made her selective of her company and her occupations. She liked to read and could read and speak better than most of those from the country town where she lived.
It was not long however before her pride had turned to arrogance and it left her isolated. Her sympathy went to the devil who seemed to have suffered an affliction similar to her own. She lived up to the adage, “Pride cometh before the fall.” Once that pride had been a thing that allowed her to do as others dared not, to be as others dared not, but now it held her like a reign. If she imagined that she had been offended, pride commanded some action, even if affection dictated another course.
Her circle of associates grew smaller and smaller until there was only one left, a person that she held in great esteem. She seldom left her house or spoke to anyone outside of this one companion. And then, again and again, one thing or another that he said or did injured her precious pride and, more than once, she thought that she would have to forsake his company as well, in order to preserve some of this imaginatively produced regal bearing.
With difficulty, she observed that the gift of her forefathers, which had born her far into this strange and mysterious world, now threatened to throw her into a lower realm than she had previously imagined. But like the princess that refused all suitors and insulted them, she too found herself in the hands of the one that could not be insulted, a king thrush beard. Like that princess, she was put to tasks which challenged her pride and wore it away as the wind and sea erode the sandy cliffs.
Someone had been left on a porch in a basket in the distant past. The classic fairy tale end must come to pass eventually, but our prideful girl has not yet had all of her pots broken in the market place, and there can be no fair prince until then.

Delirious Couture

Do try not to be any trouble, won’t you. The night dresses at Juicy Couture advise that good girls like to sleep, and so they shall, swaddled in their sweat shop fashioned cotton couture lying atop a mountain of soft fluffy pink sheep (also fabricated for a nickel a piece in some god awful plant in the People’s Republic of China). Across the street from the Juicy Couture you can shop for silverware in a place called Christ Awful, well actually I believe it is spelled Christophel, however the pronunciation is almost the same, and anyway, if you weren’t born with a silver spoon sticking out of your mouth you can do what a good citizen should do and take the train downtown, or walk or ride a Vespa and use a MasterCard to buy your own Christ Awful silver spoon so that you can mimic the monarchy like a good little ape.
Please note that I have not compared you to a monkey, as monkeys have long curly tales and you most probably do not have a long curly tale and are therefore an ape rather than a cute squirrelly little monkey with a pointy toothed grin and an overwhelming desire to bedevil all less agile creatures which cross your path. No, you are an ape, which is content if the keeper puts a diaper on you so that you wont crap on the concrete, and provides you with a shiny red trike to ride around on, and maybe once in a while dresses you up in a tutu, bonnet, and make up and has you wait in the window of a burning prop building so that a clown can rush up a ladder to rescue you while a man with hairy elbows, done up like a woman in grease paint, a wig, and a sequined gown, points to you and shrieks: "My baby! Help! Somebody save my baby!" and if you are cooperative you get all the bananas you should like later, and maybe a mug of cheap yellow ale while the clowns all sit around in their stained undershirts playing poker and smoking smelly cigars.
That most definitely describes you. So be a good pet and dress up like a grown up human and toddle off to an office building and fake your way through the day so that you get paid, and then go and purchase things which are way beyond your means so that you look even more grown up and sophisticated and successful. If you can’t manage an office because you lack a degree which signifies the degree of humiliation you are willing to suffer in order to get to a truffle or a wedge of cheese, then you can always work at the Seven Eleven or a fast food restaurant, or do some hard labor and you can at least shop at one of the low level department stores which offers things which are similar to those things which can be bought over by Union Square, only there are certain differences which have been purposefully made apparent so that the good truffle sniffers and ass kissers can show of their meritous conformity via fashion, as if their shoes, handbags and jackets were brownie buttons commemorating their ideal citizenship.
If you are a complete fuck up in the areas of ass kissing and truffle sniffing there are several options available to you. You could become addicted to drugs, sex, or alcohol or any combination of the three. As far as the system is concerned, it might be better if you choose drugs which will inhibit your ability to perform sexually considering you are not likely to produce any offspring which will be no more socially adapted than yourself and will therefore also fail to join the workforce and become perfected consumers, I mean, citizens of our fair nation.
Another option is to become a skilled criminal, which means that you break the law continually as a way of life. Addicts often succumb to criminal activities out of need, so that they can get more booze, coke or whatever floats their boat, and of course we must not forget that most of the best substances to abuse are illegal to obtain or keep in ones possession, so it is assumed that those that take option A are also already criminals, hence the word "skilled" is employed to give distinction to those who choose option B. That word, "skilled", has been selected to imply that criminality is a craft which may be honed, and if you are already ill equipped to thrive as a model citizen, this may be a good life choice for you, because in its own way it does help the system. Police officers need bank robbers, counterfeiters, con artists, petty thieves and gangsters to chase after. (Politicians, embezzlers, and preachers fill a more specific niche within this category, but really such a career should only be selected as a last option if you find that you are nearly completely inept and suffer from serious mental and emotional aberrations.)
Option C is, of course, suicide, though it really is a pity that option C comes after option B because the world would probably be better off without Politicians and Preachers. C is the most respectable of all options and if there is any way that you can find it in your heart to boldly and completely self-destruct before you breath up one more ounce of the scarce supply of oxygen being sputtered out into the atmosphere by the few trees to have escaped the fate of being converted into housing projects or papers to push around on polycarbon desks, then I hope that you will go through with it.
The very last option, option D, is open only to those who are beneath even death and who are completely certifiably insane but who have managed out of a sense of self preservation and desperation to escape the notice of professionals in the field of mental health. If you have by some great cosmic error discovered that death offers no respite and are either so misfit and maladjusted to the popular culture, or so disdainful of it that to eat one more banana will cause you to drive a plane into the tallest circus tent that you can find at the heart of the great empire of apes, then for you there is a fourth way, an option D. The D may stand for Doom, Destiny, Deconstruction, or Delirium or all of the above. This option is for bad girls who will not sleep on mountains of pink sheep, and worse boys who will be outfitted in the dehydrated couture of the reversed current, who sit together in darkness and play life back-words, reciting the tenant of Hassan the Assasin, "Nothing is true, all is permissible."

Quiet Place

In a quite hidden place, a place just barely missed by white padres and Spanish soldiers on their excursions in search of a new home for yet another one of their adobe Missions, which they planned to introduce throughout that great hot oven called California with the same zeal as those that would come later to fill it up with golden arches and Wal-Marts, crispy French fries, greasy slabs of processed meat product on white buns drowning in maroon pools of salty tomato render, matching short and T-shirt sets in hideous floral patterns with a few loose threads left dangling because Ming was very distracted as she worked, worrying that the pennies she was earning would not be enough to prevent her husband from selling their daughter into prostitution- in this quiet hidden place, the water sparkled, birds fished in the reeds and antelope grazed along its warm shore.
When white people talk about a place, we talk about its beginning as the moment in which we, the great white race came along and began the tedious work of defiling and reducing it to nothing more than a series of plaster cubes and parking lots. If we are extra gracious, we mention that there were some other humanoid life forms dwelling in that place before we rode in, Injuns, and that is what we commonly consider prehistory. However, this quiet hidden place had a history before the Pai ah che were a people, before they left the banks of the Colorado river and wandered into a little valley, circled by purple mountain ranges with a wee little puddle sinking down at its center, and decided to stay. Before this place was Etengvo Wumoma, its only name was that uttered when a breeze passed through and sent the leaves of cottonwood trees a’ shivering with delight. It was defined only by the eerie wailing of coyotes in the foothills, or the occasional scream of a puma. The sun baked dirt and dried grasses held still and silent, offering no utterance to define themselves. Occasionally though, the wind had her fun with them too, and then the parched dusts would be lifted up from the rock hard terra like a lady’s night dress lifted up and off, and the wind would whirl it round and round until she had made a devil of it, setting it free to spin like a top, knocking tumbleweeds aside like marbles before it was at last spent and allowed to settle back down on the hard body of earth.
Void of the chattering of three brained apes of any color or degree of spinal erectness, this place had a life of its own. It was ruled by spirits of an unruly and completely incomprehensible nature. Neither you, nor I, who can decipher, understand, and dream dreams inspired by the ideas conveyed through this assemblage of symbols, (whether we see them in print or digitized upon a liquid crystal screen) can even begin to grasp at the existence of such spirits. Their motives are entirely unlike our motives. They will never be released in death. Therefore they have none of the fears or concerns that dominate the minds of beings which must struggle and strive to exist and self perpetuate. No, these things will endure, and their fears, if they could fear, would be different from our own.
If they could dream, they could fear. If they could dream, perhaps then they could have imagined or foreseen what would become of their very body, their corporation of earth, fire, wind, and water. If they could have imagined a future, then they could have had a moment for fright. But they can only know the present in intimate detail. They can only find themselves channeled into the fiber optics of massive glowing arches and fluorescent tubes of light. They can only feel themselves flowing from rusty faucets into waxy paper vessels that touch monkey lips before they go coursing down into the belly of a beast, where at last they can take some revenge before eventually finding themselves expelled into a porcelain bowl to be sent spiraling down into dark pipes and into a vat somewhere where they can meet and mingle with chlorine and some limited filtration before being sent to another rusty faucet. They can only feel the weight of asphalt and tons of steel rushing over their skin.
Once mighty, once free, now subjected to tortures inflicted upon them by lesser beings than they, these spirits can know no end to their woe. As we white men go about applying for loans and slapping up mini malls and tracks of residential housing, and writing down the history of a place we have named and regarded as our own, it is entering our systems in ways so subtle that few of us would dare to imagine it. Beware the land that has endured the humiliation of domestication. Those spirits will be ever making the careless monkeys pay for the silence that they have swallowed up with their chattering. They make us pay for the quiet hidden place that we have erased from existence with our banter and banknotes.
Our greatest enemy is that one which we have just conquered. Now that we have digested our rival’s flesh, how do we intend to protect ourselves from it, now that it has become a part of us? How do we intend to combat the inevitable experience of indigestion that accompanies the consumption of an unwilling party?

Doubt Your Perceptions

Imagine yourself as a lonely creature, buried in a solid metal vessel full of thick chemical liquid, in the basement of a dark forgotten building. You were born there. You can’t get out of the box. Your body is so degraded that you have no hope of escaping. And so you will probably die there. The darkness of the box is all you know, all you have ever known and all you will probably ever know.
And yet you get information from the outside. It comes through little messages that are sent to you from helpers, creatures that you have never directly met but which you are convinced are there. They send you these little messages through wires that reach directly into you and feed you images of the outdoors, the smell of the rain as it hits the asphalt, the rustling of the leaves as the wind rushes past them, the slight rasp of a violin bow as it hits the strings, the gentle touch of lips against your skin… it’s all being sent to you, it’s all being communicated through little wires by your trusted helpers… trusted helpers that you have never met, that you didn’t choose and that you have no discernible connection with.
Given such a predicament, it is very tempting to simply drift and dream, let your degraded body float in its endless bath, close your eyes and let the movie play. Enjoy the constant flow of messages and let them wash over you. In this dream world, you may have a job that you go to every day, you may have a wife, a husband, a boyfriend, a lover, you may have mountains of money or none at all, you may have people talking about you or you might be ignored by the masses. You may have parents that love you, or say that they do. You may have kids who are very loving or who can’t stand the sight of you. You may have friends that swear undying loyalty or you may have enemies that wait behind doorways ready to stab you in the back. No matter what the images are, you may feel that the best course of action is to let them flow over you, let them come and go, and just enjoy them for what they are: ghostly images sent to you by unknown directors.

Maybe one day something doesn’t match quite right in the images you receive. Something rubs against something in a way that seems wrong. Somebody has made a mistake. Something else has come through… maybe something you were not meant to see. It could be as small as a sentence in a book, as big as the sky painted in the wrong color, as subtle as a moment of time repeating in every detail and revealing its unreality. It doesn’t matter what it is, but you can taste that there is a quality to it, something that feels different.
A strange itch may begin within you, an uncomfortable sensation that something has been present with you all along but you have not been able to look at it directly, an anxious feeling that tells you that you have assumed too much, that you have rested too long and that it is time to act.

A long series of questions may emerge within you, questions that were not there before, each like an ancient comet that you have sighted in the distance before but now rages like a ball of fire in front of your eyes:

What is really outside the box?
How can I trust these unknown helpers?
Should I figure out who they are? What they are?
Is there something else out there?
Something that is not the images I receive?
Have I been lied to?
If so, who is lying to me?
Why are they lying to me?
Is there something Real out there?
What is Real?

You will need three bowls.Fill the first bowl with hot water, the second with very cold water, and the third with water of a medium temperature.(The hot water should be quite hot, but not scalding as you will be submerging your hand in it.)
Put the three bowls in front of you, on a table or other surface, within easy reach.
Place your right hand in the bowl of hot water and your left hand in the bowl of cold water.Count to twelve. Then place both hands in the medium temperature bowl of water.Pay close attention to what each hand seems to be experiencing. Each hand will register a different sensation, even though they are both subject to the same environment.
Consider that you may not always rely on your highly sophisticated data processor (also known as your nervous system) to objectively determine what is Real.

Awakened

When the Being is dormant within the machine and the machine is permitted to run its own course, we are experiencing the sleeping state. It is a state of passivity.

The awakened state is the experience of electrifying the machine and activating the Being with the mysterious power of attention. It is a state of activity.
The awakened state is not permanent. It comes and goes and grows and grows. By working towards the activation of the Being we are actively seeking the awakened state, not merely waiting for it to land upon us. With practice it is possible to maintain awakened states for longer periods of time and with greater frequency.
The awakened state is an opportunity to develop the Being. Because the being has become active, the awakened state is the opportunity to give it a work out.
To develop the Being something must be done in the awakened state. Sitting and basking in it does not give the being the opportunity to do something. It should be a physical activity through which one may be present. Anything that does not have a direct physical component may too easily fall into the realm of intellectual imagination which falls deeper into the swamp of Desire.

View each awakened state a golden opportunity to DO.

Imagine that you could only go out of your house once a year, for a few hours.

Would you stay at the doorway looking back into the house?

Work to reach the awakened state. Once you reach it, don't stop working.

Begin Working.

Things to do in Denver when you're Awake

What do you do with the waking state?
Get down in the details. It is difficult to perform very ordinary tasks in the waking state.
We are not accustomed to doing anything in this state. Our daily activities are usually managed by the personality, the mechanical creation which is so good at performing these tasks you can sleep right through them. This bio machine called human being is so efficient it can manage an entire lifetime for you while you sleep.
When you have made the effort and do wake up, you will find it difficult to remain in said state while performing activities that are usually done asleep. There are millions of things that you can do while functioning automatically as a sleeping machine. It has become habitual. Because it is habitual you will find that even when you approach an activity from the waking state you may find yourself baited back into sleep as you engage in it because you are used to performing that activity mechanically. The habit of doing that thing automatically is stronger.
The way to get over it is to develop a new habit of performing that activity in the awakened state. To form a new habit you will have to make the effort again and again until it gains "momentum"... more "momentum" than the old sleeping habit. In the waking state you may create ever more activities/spaces in which you can be awakened.

Cogs

Where are the boundaries?

The lines etched into our minds that dictate how we behave and interact with our world, tell us what is dangerous, what is safe, lovely, and frightening- how objective are they?
We move like animatronic pirates, revolving in the same circle in pursuit of wench and wine, endlessly running round and round.

But what is it that keeps us in formation, revolving without question. Are we afraid of the outlying caverns and doors that lead from our world into the sun drenched alien landscape beyond?

Or have we been lulled into a stupor by the repetitive motions of the entire clockwork fantasy, the mechanical motions of living acted out by ourselves and our peers?

We are chained in the invisible binds of conditioning. Such subtle bondage requires abnormal astuteness to be observed.

When we are asked to accept this or that, right or wrong, black or white, we are really being asked to forfeit our perception of everything in between.
When we sacrifice our vision to preserve contrived divisions we are absorbed into the machine, one more cog in a sleeping giant.
And our apathetic submission has consequences beyond our own miserly existence.

For one truth to rise all others must fall.

Consider that your choice to remain in the service of the sleeping giant because it is easy, comfortable, and sensible is a choice to send a myriad of worlds into exile.
Consider that whatever fate you sentence them to marks your own destiny.