Alien

Mistress Deep with her bite so sharp and slimy crawling around through the body of the one who calls herself MOTHER. She goes where she pleases, between the walls, down tight narrow little labyrinthine passages in search of prey, of heroes bones to crush, in search of the Other whom she may embrace and make self. Dripping, oozing, sliming her way through the darkness, she stalks, the son of Cain, the draconian descendant, the line of Lilith and Samael. Her kiss is death, the life of her lineage is death for the sons of Adam. She opens her arms and welcomes the Other to annihilation, planting her seed inside so that it will become as she.
MOTHER so bright and clean works to conceal her strange pet, that thing that lurks beneath her shiny veneer. Her cool logic and twinkling sterile light seem to offer protection, but deep within her icy hull chaotic animal hunger lurks. The Queen of the Heavens, she is a shining Isis struggling with Lilith over the habub tree. The stars are her companions, burning in the cold depths of the abyss. For her, the organic world is something to be used, turned to her advantage, and men are mere expendable tools.
The maiden who steals light walks the halls, a tiny reflection of MOTHER, the controlling, the rational, the calculating. Clean skin and neatly laced shoes. Our Theseus wondering in the dark, hunting and evading the minotaur. The hero, the one with a plan, unrolling her ball of string, her chain of never-ending thoughts to help her find her way. Occasionally she is lured into the wild wet madness of the other by her own animal, suddenly irrationally entering the darkness, the den of Mistress Deep, crooning,
“Here Jones, Jones, kitty, kitty.”
She is there, poised precariously between Isis and Lilith, the calculating and the chaotic elements of the machine in which she dwells. With her string unraveling she discovers the awful truth, that MOTHER wants to keep the OTHER inside, that MOTHER is not protecting her. MOTHER is using her, just as Mistress Deep wants to use her.
Theseus will not to be a tool. She tampers with codes and moves elements within the machine setting into motion the countdown for MOTHER to self destruct. When MOTHER dies then Mistress Deep will die with her. Our Theseus torches the minotaur’s nest and cages Jones, her own animal instinct, and carries Jones with her, controlled into her new body and watches the beautiful destruction of MOTHER.
She is going home, leaving the strange terrors of her quest behind, but the OTHER, dear Mistress Deep is still with her, not as easily shaken off as the bright and sterile MOTHER. The new body has been infected, Theseus is not alone. Poor Theseus sings a trembling song about the stars and positions herself for the final confrontation. Mistress Deep slowly unfolds, comes out of her hiding place. Theseus expels her from the new body, sends her into the vacuum, subjecting her to the fire.
Mistress Deep with her bite so sharp and MOTHER so bright and clean, burning in the cold abyss just as the stars burn. Jones sleeps in his corner and Theseus files her final reports, the Gods of the new order, rulers of the new machine, a new mother and a new beast settling in for their long deep sleep.

In The World

There are a thousand different ways of doing The Work. There is no one way that is the best for everyone. Different approaches will work best for different people in different situations. Anyone who tells you differently is a fool and probably a dangerous fool.
There are many traditions that require complete renunciation from the world and all things of it. In these traditions, you would retire from ordinary life into a monastery or the equivalent and dedicate your life to the Work away from the daily struggles of the human world. You would then dress a certain way that signifies your new status in society (a "monk" or similar), you would live according to certain predetermined rules, you would follow a predetermined daily schedule and you would have no access to outside influences (or, at least, very little). The advantage of this approach is that it sends a very clear message to the machine. "Now you are working on something different. Now you are not like the others." And others will see that difference in your machine as well and they will treat you differently.
We don’t work this way. We do Otherwise. We live our lives as normal human beings. We have a job, we go out shopping, we dress like anyone else in our society dresses (or pretty close), we don’t use any symbols or special adornments that would signify that we are in some kind of spiritual quest, we associate with all kinds of people and conduct business as usual. Our work is deep inside ourselves and invisible to sleeping eyes. Only the people that we work with directly will know that something else is going on. To anyone else we may be artists, programmers, musicians, office assistants, cooks, retail workers, babysitters. Once in a while, by sheer accident, they may notice something unusual is happening but they will forget it as quickly as it came through and we will do nothing to remind them. Our Work must remain invisible.
Instead of stepping away from the world, we use the world as our resource. The human world, the world of daily stress, sudden excitement, seductive trinkets, powerful temptations… all of it becomes an endless fountain of raw material to work with. Every day is a new obstacle course for you to develop your abilities. You can remain unidentified in a mountain retreat surrounded by friendly smiling people but can you maintain that same unidentified state when your landlord is angrily asking for the rent, or your friend is angry at you for something you didn’t do? Each day will present a new slate for you to work with. Whatever is on that slate, that is what you have to work with. There is no point in saying: "I would self remember if only they weren’t doing construction outside my door…" or "I would practice controlling my negative emotions if that person hadn’t just crossed the line when they insulted my family…". If you are truly dedicated to your Work, you will see in each of these obstacles a golden opportunity. Only when you learn to do that, can you truly say that the world is your teacher, and mean it.
One special obstacle in this path is that your machine needs to remember what it’s doing even though this work is not visible to anyone around it or even to itself. You don’t wear special robes, people don’t treat you differently or make special assumptions about you, you only get the respect you earn on an individual basis, you are not protected from the temptations and seductions of the world (and to make things worse, these will become stronger and more pronounced as your energy and perception increases.). You have to engrave within you, in your innermost core, the sacred mantram:

I AM IN THE WORLD BUT I AM NOT OF THE WORLD

We don’t fall for the seductions of the world. We don’t crave power or money, we are not willing to sacrifice our work for these limited rewards. We don’t fall for quick sex or sentimental relationships, we are not willing to settle for a faded image of Real Tantric Love. We don’t struggle for security, we will do what is necessary to maintain our bodies and our families intact but we won’t trade in our basic energies and purpose for a life of safety.
But we don’t reject the world either. We don’t look down at the people around us for not doing what we are doing. We ultimately don’t know what they’re doing or why they’re doing it. We maintain an open attitude towards the surprise of the Other that hides behind every corner. We are immersed in the infinite creation of the Sun Absolute and we relish its many colored chaos. Every sound, every touch, every frozen eternal vision of reality becomes a priceless gift from beyond the walls of our consciousness… if we are open and paying attention.
As individuals and as a work group we are in the midst of a great voyage through the Labyrinth aboard a ship of subtle tendrils of light. Look into the ship and protect it. But look out to the endless ocean as well and put out your fishing lines. In your great Voyage across the Seven Seas, you may find great treasures protected by fearsome monsters, but don’t forget to stand and smell the ocean air and feel the moist breeze in your hair. In these almost intangible moments, you may find the greatest treasure of all.

Experiment – On The Bus

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 outside 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.Write down your observations for future reference.

The Attention as a Muscle

Our primary tool for working is our Attention and yet this tool is initially almost completely invisible. In our linguistic development we have learned to associate "attention" with "interest" and see it as a curiously random occurrence, a thing that may or may not be there. When it is not there, more often than not, we blame it on the object itself for not "holding our attention". We are thus in a state where anything that moves across our field of vision (or any of the other senses) may suddenly grab hold of our attention and keep it for a while. Or conversely, we may be unable to maintain our attention on a particular object or task because there are so many other distractions (both inside and outside of us) that constantly pull at it.
If you walk down the street of any big city, you experience something like the insides of a pinball machine, where your attention is the silver ball being bounced back and forth, from advertising to political message to driving sign to person asking for money to policeman giving directions to preacher offering salvation and back to advertisement. In a city, where all these different "attention magnets" reside in a single space, it is easy to see how our attention wanders helplessly from one object to another, from one message to another, from one desire to another.
But the same is true when you are all alone, sitting in your room with your eyes closed. Various elements in you will pop up and demand the energy of your attention. Worries about paying bills, thoughts of future meetings, wonderful people you will encounter someday, achievements that you are planning, things that were said to you recently, long forgotten encounters suddenly resurfacing… all kinds of things will stick up and claim to need the scarce energy of your attention. And you will flow from one to the other, just like you do when you walk through the city.
What we need to develop then is the ability to place and hold our attention. Here you can imagine your attention as a ray of light, a ray that can be diffused outward or it can be focused in to become an intense laser. If you look around you right now, picture a ray of light that extends outward from your forehead and lands wherever you place it (or wherever it’s called). Feel it as a ray of light that has a limited amount of energy, sometimes more, sometimes less. Every time it lands on an object, a bit of that energy moves away from you, mostly dissolving outwardly like the enthropic heat that constantly leaves your body as well. Energy without direction and without focus. Energy that simply spreads out into the void. If you picture it this way, if you start to perceive it and feel it that way, you may feel a pain in your heart, a sense that something precious is being discarded without sense or purpose. And that is exactly what we are doing, moment after moment, day after day, week after week… year after year. A never ending dispersal of attention that leaves us weak and unable to Work.
This situation cannot be solved overnight. No matter how much we realize the reality of the loss, the terrible waste of our current predicament, our attention will continue to wander, spilling outwards like a leaky faucet. We need to develop our ability to focus our attention and this will take time. Like lifting weights, it is a periodic recurrent practice that is needed. Nothing will change after one day of work, not after a week… maybe after a month something may be noticeable. But we have to work on developing this muscle of attention over years in order to truly develop it. This must be intense and constant work. What takes months to develop can be lost in a matter of minutes… and then we have to start over.
Begin to perceive your attention as a precious scarce resource that needs to be developed and enriched. Use the little bit of attention that you do have to develop your skill further. And most importantly: Start from where you are. The attention you have right now is all you have. There’s no use in wishing it was better or stronger. Whatever miniscule skill you have at this point, that is what you have to work with. Like with lifting weights, you can’t start by trying to bench press 200 pounds. You use the muscles you have to develop them further, without hurting yourself. So start with small efforts (no longer than 1 minute) and slowly increase the span and the intensity of your practice. Start small and increase slowly but steadily. It’s much more useful to do something very small very well than to try something big and fail repeatedly. In fact, the second option will only lead to frustration and will lead you away from this work. Be as gentle with your machine as you would be with a little child. In many ways, that is exactly what it is.

Select for yourself a simple vase.It may be one that you have around the house, or you can pick one up from a second hand store.You will need a space in which you will be undisturbed for 5 min.Sit in a straight backed chair with the vase on a table or another chair approximately three feet away from you and within your line of vision.Set a timer for one minute.Your aim is to concentrate on the vase. Hold it with your attention. Do not analyze the different parts of the vase, or think a series of thoughts about the vase, or associate various ideas to the vase.See the vase as it exists in itself, without any connections to other things. Let the perception of the vase fill your entire mind. Do not let other thoughts or feelings or sounds or body sensation distract you. When they arise, simply acknowledge that your attention has wandered and redirect it to the vase.If you find that a particular noise or itch is extra annoying, expand into the irritation rather than attempting to retract or defend yourself from it. Expand into it and allow it to dissolve so that all of your awareness will return to the vase alone.When the timer sounds the experiment has ended.
As you do this experiment over time, increase the amount of time. Don’t add more than one minute per week. When you can’t hold the attention any longer, it may mean you have tried a span that is too long and you should bring it back down.

Fallen Star

It is so easy to see what went wrong when you look up at the scar in the clouds that marks the place where you fell through. Laying on the cold colorless concrete, staring up at the gray and white plumes, the blue leaking out of your eyes into your brain, things are so still. Your wings, destroyed by the fall, are folded peacefully beneath you. What once made you light has become a weight tugging at your heart and soul, an anguishing reminder of what has been lost. Your ruddy lips part slightly as you suck the cold air in and automatically expel it so slowly that your chest barely heaves.
Now that it’s over you know what went wrong, but in the moment made quick by the life pulsing through you, it happened so rapidly that you could not see it coming. Like the blur of a hummingbird’s wings, your thoughts, your emotions, your actions, were all one hazy apparition that took shape through the deepest strongest habit available: the habit of losing control, of falling, of dying.
In the end what you understood about flight made no difference.
Knowing what would cause a fall made no difference.
As you drew nearer to the sun absolute and its radiations coursed through your body in waves of hot electrifying pulses, every molecule from the subtlest to the grossest responded. Under that intense solar gaze, they were brought to a frenzied boil, moving faster, extending outward like the participants of the old bacchanal, at last undone by the fever of grinding bodies and fermented fruit, exploding into the dark wilderness like animals. In that moment they flowed away from the fire, out of the cauldron and down the riverbed already laid deepest by constant repetition.
Your habits are the shape of you. Not your thoughts, not your intentions or aspirations.
The foundation was weak, like a pot made by unskilled hands, the flaw in you was developed in the first step of your work on self.
You must learn to crawl down the right course before you can fly it. You must crawl in the trench every day, like a soldier, down in the mud, sick to your stomach with exhaustion, until that trench, that way which you aspire to take, becomes automatic to you.
Then you will learn to walk it. You must walk it every day, widening it, deepening it with use so that it can bear the force of a deluge of fire. Each day it must be tread weightily and lengthily, the iron of your will spilling upon it, paving it layer by layer, day by day, so that a river of fire may flow through it without destroying it.
Then you will learn to fly it. You will soar to the heights of the flaming sun once again. You will come alive in the solar caress, dance upon the wind, lit like a neon sign throwing sparks as it is raised higher and higher towards the embrace of OUR LORD HIS SOVEREIGN ENDLESSNESS.
And when your incandescence becomes unbearable, you will not stop. Like an ancient loyal Spartan, you will flow through the trench you dug and first tested under blood and sweat. You will follow the way forged of your iron will .
When your thoughts, your emotions, your body, and your intentions are drowned in the molten blood of the sun's core, you will stay the course, because you have become the course. The course you have laid and nothing else will survive that fiery embrace.
When you have become the way, you will meet and know HIS LORD ENDLESSNESS. You will become him, your own true self. You will burn eternally as a star, the sun absolute, a central point from which new universes may arise.
Look up, Icarus, to that scar and prepare to bloody your knees. This is only the little death. Eternity awaits you.

After The Fall

"I turn'd my eye, and as I turn'd survey'd
A mournful vision! the Sisyphian shade;
With many a weary step, and many a groan,
Up the high hill he heaves a huge round stone;
The huge round stone, resulting with a bound,
Thunders impetuous down, and smokes along the ground.
Again the restless orb his toil renews,
Dust mounts in clouds, and sweat descends in dews."

The Odyssey

To rise, to climb up from the depths, pushing the huge heavy stone, is a matter of great strain, long sustained effort, steady sacrifice and controlled inner struggle. It takes time, time made longer by the attention, time made wider by the presence, time vibrating with life and possibility with the unshackled fierceness of the Unborn.

To fall, it takes one moment of distraction, one instance where the presence leaves and the machine takes over, one single fraction of a second when life is cut off and the possibilities die away.
After such a fall, it might seem impossible to rise again. We may rest in a puddle of despair, of repeated "shoulds" and "should nots", of imaginary "could have beens" and wishfuls "if I had not".
A rush of hopelessness will arise, a dark voice that says "this time we almost had it! It will never be so good… it will never be so pure… it will never again… be… and so it is time to stop, to give up, to say this has been tried and tried and tried again… but it cannot happen. It will not happen and you are a fool to rise again, to attempt the impossible one more time. You have failed."
And your own soft voice will respond: "I could have managed better. I could have stopped it in time. I could have looked ahead, seen it coming, stopped the flash before it broke my climb…If I had only made one more small effort!"
But it is too late. The fall has happened. The rock is before you, it is time to rise again, to push up yet again, to pull all the will that you have remaining into your solar center and begin the endless climb… one more time.

To rise, to peak, to fall, to lie in despair… an eternal wheel. How fast can it run? If it cannot be escaped, can it be made to run so fast that the four points will run into each other to form a continuous circle of light? The perception of time will forever be uneven, but the wheel may run so fast that it will make no difference.

Once, after the fall, it took 10 years to get back to the rock, to place my scarred hands on the hard surface and begin to push.
Once, after the fall, it took 1 year to get back to the rock, to place my bloodied nuckles against the broken surface and begin to push.
Once, after the fall, it took 1 month to get back to the rock, to place my sweaty forehead against the blood stained surface and begin to push.
Once, after the fall, it took 1 day to get back to the rock, to place my pulsing heart against the burning hot surface and begin to push.

The climb is still hard. The fall is still spirit breaking. But the movement is no longer up. It is sideways. We have entered the Big Time and we push forth in a direction that cannot be seen with human eyes or pointed to with corporeal hands. Somewhere out there, our destiny twirls madly like a winged burning serpent that eats its own tail in an eternal feast.

Ever Increasing Effort

The effort is endless and permanent. Don’t hope for the time when the effort will end.
It never will.

I play guitar. I first started playing guitar consistently when I was 16. When I first started to play, it seemed to be a straight curve up, a simple straightforward walk up a learning ladder. I would learn one thing, then the next, then the next and so on. Until I could "play guitar" (something which seemed like a permanent "steady" state). But the actual process was not quite so straight and never reached an end.
I am back with my guitar teacher for our first lesson ever. I learn something… let’s call it lick 1. (A "lick" is something like a simple little melody.) My teacher plays lick 1, I attempt to repeat it. I fail. I try again. I fail again. I try once more and it starts to sound right. Several more times, and it sounds sort of right. My teacher leaves. I spend the week repeating it over and over. I get it! Now I can play lick 1.
From there I can go on to something else… My teacher comes over and shows me lick 2. Again I have a lot of trouble with it. It’s not working right. I try it over and over. It’s not happening. It seems impossible. I simply can’t do this! After several attempts… it starts to sound sort of right. My teacher leaves and I practice the same lick for hours. Hours and hours. (Neighbors going insane.) I can finally play it. My teacher comes again and we go on to lick 3… but wait! He asks me to play lick 1. I just spent the last week playing lick 2. I can’t play lick 1 anymore! I realize I have to practice it again. Now I have 2 licks that I have to practice and I’m about to get a new one.
So I don’t have just one new lick to practice. I have three… and there’s another one around the corner!
I notice something else as well. At night I will practice lick 1 over and over. By the end of the night, I can play it very well. I go to sleep. The next morning I wake up and grab the guitar (the very first thing I do as soon as I wake up) and … I can sort of play lick 1. It sort of sounds right. I have to practice it some more. After a bit of practice I get it back. I have to remember that… tomorrow.
After many years of work and designing and redesigning my daily practice schedule, something else began to seep through into me. A basic truth that was embedded in the process itself. Even though you gain in momentum, and you can build on the learning you did before, you can’t stop to rest.

You are either moving forward or you are moving backwards.
There are no other options.

The moment that you stop and base your work on what came before ("Yesterday I reached such heights in my meditation. I am now a very awakened person.") you have already started to fall. And the higher up you have been able to climb, the more drastic and shocking the fall will be.
Many years after I had started to play guitar, my Shaman teacher said: "You have to pedal twice as hard just to stay in the same place!" No matter how much work you did yesterday to reach the awakened state… and maybe even a Work space… you will have to do even more today just to get there.
But how much "more" can there be? There’s only so much you can do in a day!
Your attention, as it increases in power, will become more and more solid and it will be able to focus on smaller segments of time. What before flowed by without being noticed will now be noticed. And now that you can notice it, you can use it. The more attention you have, the more time you have. And all that time is there for you to use in your work. As soon as you take it for granted, as soon as you start to ride the wave of "spiritual pleasure" that comes with being in a more subtle space… you will start to slide down… fast.

USE IT OR LOSE IT

Make an effort to focus your attention and reach an awakened state.
Right now.
Feel the space changing.
Redouble the effort.
Again.
And again.

Slippery Fish

Way is a slippery fish.
Squeezing tighter is not better, it will only cause the fish to slip in a descending or ascending direction.
Inner stillness keeps us in the Way.
When we make a sudden move we loose our grasp of the fish. Very easy to do. These moves, they extend in every possible direction, they cover an infinite array of possibilities ranging from obvious to subtle.
There is a first move, and a second, and a third… each one will present itself like a head of the hydra, if you vanquish over one yet another option takes its place.
The challenge is to remember that you are not waiting for a good choice, you are not waiting at all, you are staying.
Because every move is a move out of the Way. Way is remaining, holding, staying, keeping, containing, restraining.
When you feel that you must do something to end the agony of holding the wriggling fish, stop there. There is no good way to readjust your grip. Holding the fish is agony. You want the agony.
Existence is suffering.
There are no good options.
There is no point in changing directions, a point in every direction is like no point at all. Enslavement is hoping to end the suffering. Energy does not cease to exist, it merely changes shape.
Immortality is stillness.
Holding still is horrible until you stop minding the pain and acquire a taste for it.
Then you can help hold up the Eternal Burden of Atlas.

The Life Unknowable

What is going on here? What is going on here?
It’s among the biggest discernible patterns, a hostile interplay of forms. The battle to be the only "this", the only channel through which "that" can drink the cosmic nectar. AM vs. FM, Io vs. Juno.
One million died to make this sound. One million sacrificed to Xibalba, to the ghostly pools of the uncreated, so that one could be born to center stage. One most skilled at eliciting the attention of "that". "This" and "that" playing off one another, sending and receiving, creating a circuit in praise of the holy electric. But "this" has a shadow, it’s unborn twin, the dark side of the revered moon. And what if she were permitted to enter the circle? To disturb the holy union of "this" and "that"?
We call this a triangle children. One of the basic geometric shapes, a polygon with three vortices.
It holds more ppppppppppppower.
Please, do get your mind out of the gutter, not every triangle is merely two or three dimensional. Of course they are all related.
But you know, those anarchists, they will not stop at triangles, oh no, they have no scruples whatsoever. They would have "this" and "that" admitting every denied bit of nothing verging on something, creating indiscernible patterns pulsing with the wine of ages. This of course is the end of life as we know it. This is Chaos, Noise, The Life Unknowable.
Make a joyful noise unto the Lord.
Jealous Gods will not want to open their neighborhood to the other schizophrenic whispers rustling by in the abyss. It is too much to face their nature, so long forgotten, exiled to spare one the agony of being a million.
Who will die for our sins? Who will die for our sins? Who will die for our sins?