Disappear In The Dark

I just wanted to lay down in the dark and disappear, one more phantom in a nest of nothingness. Say goodbye to kisses missed and kisses stolen and kisses desired, to soft cheeks and hands clasped and smiles from the wrong men. No more mothers, no more fathers, no more ancient primate prerogative driving from the depths. I would end the quest for biological immortality, the fear game, the tug and pull to be the one, the only one, the Queen of the Heap, the one to survive. 
What roused me from my usual exhausting efforts to preserve my identity was a chamber of mirrors, an expanded perception of self that allowed me to view the animal in the box through a tiny pinhole. That animal there, covered in hair, endeavoring to conceal its animalness with words and thoughts and fashion and rouge, that would be me.
That would be me there, struggling against my mother, against my sister, against all the king's concubines, rushing to capture the blissful prize of dominion, of the power of being. There are many, many possibilities and I am striving to be the one real self, the one that beats the others back into the abyss, the one who claims validity from the annihilation of all other possibilities, struggling for control of the gene pool, for control of the world, for control of reality.
Once upon a time I wanted to escape the cool dark stillness of nothingness, which is also the white noise of everything at once,  so I was born into this world. But what is here called “life” is in fact death.
I sacrificed the endless multitude for this experience of singularity. I have become separated from the larger body of My Self, the self that exists beyond time and beyond space. I have burrowed deeper and deeper into an angry psychosis, a desperate attempt to escape the Other who is myself.
And yet, even here in the shadow world that I have created the Other is represented. The Other lives inside of me, the Other lives outside of me, the Other is my own reflection, the Other is my mother, my sister, my daughter, all of them animals, all struggling for control over one another because they lack one crucial feature: a knowledge and mastery of self.
We are in denial of self. This denial is what we call “Life.”
And so, for a moment, seeing all of this, glimpsing that pitiful creature through the pinhole of objectivity, I just wanted to lay down in the dark and disappear again, relinquish my stranglehold on reality. Do the brave thing and sacrifice the singularity rather than the multitude, accepting the burden of the Real rather than hiding it under the carpet. For a moment I just wanted to relinquish my position as  The One, and take my place as one of the many. I wanted to accept annihilation and evaporate, become another phantom drifting placidly over a lake of nothingness.

Light Benders

Possible lives, possible moments, possible lies. Possibly the biggest lie I ever told was, “Fine, thank you.”
Sitting in the Boulevard Cafe, watching the traffic, watching the trees grow a millimeter a month, listening to the conversations of others, the music from bygone eras washing down over my lipstick stained disappointment. No cherry pie, but six choices of coffee. No cherry pie. The noise of life swallowed down with hot decaf tea. The noise of a kitchen, which is the noise of life, the stuff that fuels these fleshy forms coming out on large round white plates.

Fleshy forms, such a deceptive word, “fleshy.” We imagine something very solid when we hear that word, something definite and unchanging, something akin to stone or oak, but it is more mutable than that. It is changing constantly, cells being replaced nightly, a tiny imperceptible operation that leaves you with an entirely new body in seven year cycles. Like watching trees grow. You don’t see it, but its happening, its there, an invisible process of transformation. We have been deceived into thinking that we are stable, of an unchangeable essence, we are who we are and no other. We are one static personality, a good person, a strong person, or perhaps a bad person, a weak person, a smart person, a talented person, a tenacious person, an affable person, or we are a person composed of a combination of two or three of these choices but no more.

We think that we are inherently something,, but anyone who has ever turned their attention inward has faced the terrible truth: we are inherently nothing, we are only something in particular depending on who is looking. We are different things to different people, and when we are the only one looking in at our self, then we are just the one who is looking and the other we thought that we were is a farce. They start us in the beginning, making us choose the words to define ourselves; naughty , nice, fireman, ballerina, president, veterinarian. Just as they were started off. If we look far enough back we remember choosing certain things as if it were a game: my favorite color is green, I like rock music, I read paperback horror stories, I hate musicals and fish.

Well, anyway, I remember making those choices. Perhaps I am the only one. Or perhaps I am the only one being honest. Because the truth is terrifying, a free fall of no cherry pie ever. You don’t see it, but it’s there, an invisible process of transformation catalyzed when nothing notices itself. Our outward forms shift and change and our emotional states vary and our thoughts obey certain patters, certain habitual tracks upon which to run their train. But who is the passenger? A pure and shining void. A frightful bit of nothing caught in a little temporal whirlwind. We call it life, self, mind and body.

And if you see this, if you look at someone beside you and perceive them as a fleshy dirt devil, a living process for transforming light, a sort of perpetual motion machine circulating raw nothingness, and you know that you are not supposed to see it, because you already agreed early on to play the game and not see such things, then you know you are not what is defined in the game rules as “fine.”  You know that if you tell them what you are seeing they will do what they can to stop you from seeing it because it ruins the game. 

So I say, “Fine, thank you.”  and continue watching our possible lives, possible moments, possible lies play out. Six different types of coffee but no cherry pie and the traffic flowing on the street outside.  A free fall. Watching the traffic, watching the trees grow a millimeter a month, listening to the conversations of  others, the music from bygone eras washing down over my lipstick stained disappointment. A frightful bit of nothing caught in a little temporal whirlwind I call myself.

Nothing Is True

Aren’t you so tired of all those voices from out there reaching into you like a murder of crows probing the cracks in a sidewalk, the recesses of your mind, with long sharp beaks? Don’t you feel the sickness growing in your gut as you are assaulted daily by the loud caterwauling of authoritarian voices demanding that you do this to be good or that to be smart or such to be healthy or wise or enlightened? Don’t you just want to tear all your clothes off and scream incoherently and run barefoot under the trees and stars?
This author, who states now her presence so that you will be aware of it as it comes into you so that you may either allow it access or deny it willfully, this author admits that she is and does.
Beware of those who wish to sell you THE TRUTH or give you THE TRUTH or explain THE TRUTH. Watch out for fools, for buffoons repeating words they believe to be endowed with wisdom, words from their parents, from their spiritual teachers, from learned books or mystical books, or fantastic television documentaries. Most of all, beware of the voices that came from outside but now live inside of you without your knowledge. The voices of all these loud insistent purveyors of so called TRUTH that now swirl around inside your head, triggered in response to various stimuli.
If you think you can speak the TRUTH, if you feel you should spread the TRUTH, or help others to awaken to the TRUTH, watch out, you’re running blindfolded with a sharp stick in your hand. Because the TRUTH, or that which this author sees as the signified experience indicated by that particular signifier, is indescribable, it doesn’t live here in the words, in this confusing scritch scratch of symbols.
The TRUTH doesn’t want to be spread. It’s the hyena-like cackle of words that wants to be spread. It’s the voice of your ancestors, the confusion of accidental associations between various stimuli and sounds and shapes that is shaping you, informing your decisions, building your version of TRUTH and REALITY.  And it wants to spread, needs to spread, will spread infecting every body it can infect.
There is no antidote against this infection of language except to know it is there, to see it forming your experience and do what you WILL as much as possible within these inherited constraints and work to free yourself of them when and where they interfere with this WILL, if that is something that interests you.
Or if that does not interest you, you can go on pretending that you are the infection, that you are in control, that you know THE ONE AND ONLY TRUTH. Or if you prefer to go willy nilly you might pacifically insist that you know YOUR TRUTH, which is just another way of saying “I won’t mention your nakedness if you won’t mention mine.”
You can take all your TRUTH, personal or universal as you may deem it to be, all your assumptions, all your apish babble and shove it directly up your ass, because this author is uninterested in THE TRUTH. This author is unwilling to offer up her own desperate attempts to make order out of chaos, meaning out of confusion, something out of nothing so that you or she may feel more comfortable. She will not promise you that everything will be okay, that heaven awaits the righteous, that good karma will carry you through, that positive thinking will align you with universal energies, or that Santa will be leaving you a gift this year.
Don’t misread this as an Atheistic or Nihilistic proclamation. This author has brushed up against something beyond the veil of words and acknowledges it. She simply wishes to exercise some restraint and abstains from birthing its shadow in the form of a word that the reader may misunderstand to be something they have heard or read of before.
You have never heard or read of this. The words you have heard and read, all of the words you will ever hear and read, are their own entity, maintaining a life independent of that of the signified. And this is why they can’t be trusted. It is of their nature to be separate. They can never be true. They can only be noisy, more babble to pierce the air and every corner of your mind with its deceptive and authoritarian assumption of power.

Earth

I come from the earth and to the earth I will return. It’s no wonder that I should chase after the horned God of the underworld. I remember springing from the dirt. I come from the land and the land comes from me. I never was, I never will be. And still the grass grows and the worms crawl beneath it’s yellow coat and the earwigs creep into the cracks of the houses that men built. The black widow hides in the cedar. Death resting quietly in the shade, spinning her scattered incoherent web.
My father showing me the creatures of the earth, holding the black widow in his vice grips, calling me to come and look. Frightened, I hover at a distance. He assures me that it’s safe, come closer look at death so that you will know her when you meet her. He shows me her belly with its red hour glass. This is how you will recognize her. Stay away from her, don’t touch her, don’t play with her, and be careful in the dark places, she is there.
Another time he calls me and, when I come, he is holding a brilliant green snake in his hands. Again he tells me to come closer. This time he shows me the beautiful snake glittering in the sun like a length of new garden hose and tells me it won’t hurt me. This is a good snake, it helps the trees to grow. It kills the gophers that nibble their roots. It may bite you if you frighten it, but no great harm will come of that. It is a beautiful snake and I feel happy looking at it in my father’s hands and happier still when he sets it gently down. I laugh excitedly, watching it slither away, disappearing in the green of the grass as though it had never been there.
I come from the earth. I’ve carried it under my fingernails and in my hair. I’ve felt it under my bare feet. Its thorns have buried themselves in my flesh, its barrel thorns and fox burs have embedded themselves in my clothing. I’ve crawled around in its strong wooden arms and plucked its fruits and danced naked over its grassy back. I climbed to the tops of the trees and balanced above the deep dusty green canopy and drank in the sight that surrounded me; blue sky, yellow sun, dull golden grass like a head of blonde hair, the old broken fence of a brown so dark it is nearly black, sloping and falling, letting its planks return to the earth in broken rotted bits, the white house with the red tile roof, tall and proud and frightening and sad and hopeful, the mountains dark and round, mysterious and menacing and inviting.
I knew as I looked around me that I must remember the sight, that it was an important moment to be so high and see it all. I knew it was more beautiful than anything I was ever likely to see again. I knew it, but was at loss as to what should be done with such knowledge. I tried to hold it inside of me, but could feel it slipping even as I grasped at it, like sand through my fingertips, thoughts of school and playmates and my parents in the shape of words formed inside of my mind, washing the sight from my eyes even as I beheld it and, eventually, I climbed back down into the dark shade and silver branches below.
I nursed a black goat with a white star on her forehead from a glass bottle and a smelly rubber nipple and called her baby and watched her grow, the little nubs of her horns slowly working their way up just as the teeth in my own mouth would do from time to time. The goat disliked the smell of the awful rubber nipple and refused to take nourishment until my grandmother took her into her soft wrinkled hands and doused the nipple in milk and insisted, her old steely blue eyes shining mischievously. Then the kid drank and wagged its black nub of a tail and flicked its delicate furred ears.
I remember earth. Even here, sitting in my plaster box over the concrete and asphalt that reaches as far as I can see, I remember the untamed earth. The dirt and insects and serpents and death and horns which push to the surface where once there was nothing. One day I will return to it. I will be home. I sprang from the earth and to the earth I shall return.

The Hands

The real power is at the bottom not at the top. It is in the legs and not in the head, in the South of Egypt and not in the North. It is in the hands of those that pick the cotton and not in the hand that wields the whip. That hand learned to hit because it couldn’t do the work for itself. It was soft and white and weak. It wanted snuff and lace and iced tea. The hand with power wanted song and sex and to nuzzle up to the earth and sigh. That’s where it found its power, pouring out of the black teat of the earth itself, nurturing them and calling them back for more. The hand with the whip is too afraid to go near that teat gushing with the terrible flood of life and death. If it could, it would whip the earth too, and make her bottle the stuff of life and have it pasteurized and sent to them on a conveyor belt. They want to live like pasty white vampires taking by force and making fierce faces like wounded bears. The people who are friends with the dark rich soil and deep wild places don’t have to make faces. They don’t feel afraid. They just accept the elixir of life and drink until they are intoxicated by it and dance with the knowledge of it coursing through their golden veins and finally lie down to sleep without fear of what further dreams may come. Let them come, when they do, the party will begin again, the same party in a new guise. Life and death dancing round and round and taking turns like kind children sharing the swing under the old willow. My turn, now yours, my turn, now yours, my turn, and now yours, that’s what life and death do. The people with the power are the people that live close to this rhythm. They know how to do. They do and the others take. And even this they understand. But when will it be their turn? The white hand would be a day with no end, the abolishment of night and earth and legs for the continued rule of light and sky and head. They don’t want to take turns. They don’t want to share. They don’t want to do. They will whip so that the others do and spend their days in a haze of righteousness. They clutch the whip tight as they rule from above, because even they know: the real power is at the bottom.

Foundation of a Shadow

Give me your hand and let me take you into the tangled jungle of flesh, blood, and bone. Let me take you into those caverns where chest cavities gap wide open, making the walls that hold you and tangled indiscriminate masses of fleshiness make an uneven carpet of malformed shapes. The colors here are peachy and dripping crimson and veiny royal blue. Shredded muscle tissues hang like scarlet drapes, windows look into the hive-like interior of bone where the marrow rests maroon in its pockets. You will find that everything drips here, like melting wax. You needn’t move at all to journey through these chambers, they do the moving for you. Morphing, they collapse in on themselves as a new interior design emerges on the back of the old. We can walk through the catacombs of gore in their bright colors until deformed skulls emerge in the landscape, stark and white, being swallowed by blackness that eats itself until a new bright white set of bones bleeds into the forefront and strange vines of darkness reach like tentacles from every corner, weaving their way through the forest of ivory skeletal structures.
Vaguely, you think that this must be a bad trip, except nothing about it particularly bothers you and even that doesn’t bother you anymore, not the way that it used to when you wore little golden crosses on delicate chains around your neck and imagined that God dwelt in a palace of crystal surrounded by English gardens. Now you can tumble within the swirling black vapors like a sky diver through clouds, without fear of Gods or Devils that struggle over pure souls like Counts and Dukes over the young virgins of adventure stories. Now they are just these two things that give you the benefit of travel; shadow and light, and neither one loves you more than the other and neither one will hurt you more than the other. They are not your parents. They are your children, your toys, your tools. They are the tricks that make something out of nothing, motion out of stillness, form out of void, and whatever you are, wherever you go, you’re just passing through, crawling through sticky bloody hells as tantalizing to the senses as any heavenly field of lavender under a bright blue sky.
Crawl out into an office of clean white walls and blue Berber carpet and white laminate counter tops stocked with jars of tongue depressors. Slip up onto a cushy rainbow colored bean bag and make yourself comfortable, because you are a body now, a human that knows the words for “bean bag” and “laminate” but not the words that describe the other places where you have just been. The therapist arranges herself on another beanbag. Her coat is white, her hospital pants are powder blue. There are pens in her pocket and glasses on her clean friendly face, framed by straight auburn hair, fashionably layered to balance against the spectacles and make her seem perfectly ordinary, not too much of anything, nor to little.
“I like bean bags,” you tell her.
“Yes,” she says, “they do the job.”
“I’ve always meant to get one/ wanted to have one/ am meaning to get one soon/ saw some when I was little.” You say all of these things at once but it is organized into one concise sentence such as,
“I’ve always liked them.”
There are some juggling balls out on the floor. You pick them up because they seem to be out of place and you think that you are preparing the room and making her comfortable while she waits for the person she is going to help, so you tell her,
“I can juggle.”
“Really?” she is sincerely interested, but not overly excited, just right, like warm water.
You try to juggle but you don’t catch the balls. Apologizing, you try again. When you throw them into the air, you experience a temporary blindness. This shouldn’t hinder you because you know you don’t need to see the balls to catch them. You try not to look at them and focus on the woman’s face the way you were taught, but it seems that you are also throwing them out of pattern so that they spill onto the floor far from reach. Collecting and examining them, you notice that one is smaller than the other two. You explain that this may be the reason you are having trouble and trade the odd ball out for another that seems to be of the same size as the other two. Then you notice that all three are of slightly different sizes and decide not to throw them all over the room again.
You tell the analyst:
“I’m out of practice. I used to have a friend that I practiced with. He taught me how to juggle. I could juggle three when I met him…”
A vision of when you first saw a jester with jingle bells on his cap standing under a canopy within a circle of hay bails. You looked at the straw on the ground as he shows you how to throw the ball so that you catch it again. And you bought three little sacks, like tiny firm bean bags that were delicately furred and took them home with you.
“…but he taught me how to pass with a partner…”
You picture the different ways that you passed, sometimes facing each other and standing perhaps three feet apart, sometimes side by side with one arm each wrapped around the others waist, locked together like Siamese twins, your left hand passing to his right.
You describe the different methods to her and continue, “And he taught me to juggle four balls, and two in one hand so that I could juggle four that way.”
While you are speaking, you begin to suspect that she is here to listen to you. She is not waiting for anyone else. And you wonder what you will discover. You wonder what it means. And you decide not to finish the story because you are afraid of what it reveals. That is how the blackness eats itself here, how the scene falls away so that another will emerge built on the foundation of a shadow.

Deranged Yo-Yo's

Who are those deranged, and up and down the elevator shaft of None, yo yo’s that take on the work of liberating the primordial being that awaits at the center of the labyrinth? They are yo yo’s for they do rise and fall as necessary to navigate through the four dimensional labyrinth, and they are deranged, because they are the undoing of the organically arranged. Some are tough and some are sweet, but none could know what they were getting into until they were well into it. There is no way to convey to a non yo yo what the experience of coming unraveled is really like, you must become a yo yo to know what a yo yo knows. I can say to you, our work is to liberate the primordial being at the center of the labyrinth, but what on earth can that mean to you, because chances are good that the idea that you are a voyager lost in a labyrinth is likely to sound absurd or quaint, primordial makes you think of amoebas or dinosaurs, and liberation is an absolute junk word- it means absolute zero to you who have never actually tasted it. Even a seasoned yo yo will find it difficult to remember the secret that lays entrenched within the words and ideas espoused within and around esoteric schools, in science fiction books, on the sides of buses, and in Kung Fu movies.
Who, who, who is the Lord of the Labyrinth, when I am one and there can be no other?
What, what, what is a labyrinth, if not the shape of my own fears and fantasies?
Not just philosophically speaking, but actually, in the sensory language of liquid light that has been preserved in the darkness, feeding on rot, I am the voidness of the void. When you are ready to get off the drug of organic sleep you will find yourself in the shape of this or that guide, and if you are of a goodly kind, they may take you to the entrance of the kingdom. And you, not knowing what lies beyond may leap gleefully into the abyss.
But ha, ha, it is not such a quick and painless choice to make, for to see the hidden you will have to give up your mortal eyes and ears, and everything that you thought was true. Blind and deaf, you will have to trust your guide to lead you into the new world. You must give the guide permission to derange you so that you can see, hear and know the secret ways. It is not a momentary excursion into wonderland, from which you will re-emerge refreshed and able to enjoy your remaining biological life in the home you have always known. You are to be modified, altered, and when you have been transformed, home and biological life are no longer what they were.
Nothing can ever be the same. Just as the same man cannot set foot in the same river twice, you can never go back. You can freeze, unfinished, or move forward into the unknown. Many a Yo Yo has been lowered into that forbidding hole, and yet the experience of life on the other side of the mirror can not be told. The trick is this: if you think that this Work of liberating the minotaur is best left to another, more qualified mad man, consider that they are only a projection, an illusion dreamt by you.
You are the one trapped at the center.
You are the medium in which you are trapped.
You are your helpers and your adversaries.
The only course is to come to know yourself, and to do so you must come unraveled. Unravel to travel, dear would-be yo yo, into the center of self. Your intellect, as you know it, cannot help you. The programming you received in child hood was good for conditioning you to live within mechanical society, the society of sleep, but to see the world that you were conditioned to close your eyes to, you will have to be deprogrammed. You will need to have your brain washed. The right guide can take you to the river and wash that filthy brain right out of you, teach you to use a new set of tools for navigating spaces where brains are no help, and then, if they be a goodly guide, they will proudly boot you into the elevator shaft of None.

Experiment: The Flower Sermon

The sermon itself was a wordless one in which Śākyamuni merely held up a flower before the assembled disciples, among whom there was no reaction apart from Mahākāśyapa, who smiled.
-Wikipedia

What a trick, beginning and end.
If you are a flower who can perceive its own existence and perceives it to be self contained and inherently existent, the moment you bloom seems to be the beginning and the moment your last petal drifts to the black soil seems the last.
If you are black soil you have been built over the course of billions of years, shaped and changed by flowers and other bio matter living and at last decaying over you, by waters flowing over and pouring down, by eruptions from deep below and fires raging above, by the deification of life forms worming through you and striding upon you and by things which fall from the far heavens.
If you are black soil you do not track the life and death of a single flower, but rather count the rise and fall of entire populations of wildflowers, count them silently as you swallow seed and send bloom bursting forth towards the sun.
Can the life cycle of the flower be separated from the life cycle of the black soil?
Does it exist independently?

Can it exist independently?
Why, objectively, would the existence of a human animal differ from that of a flower?
If you are a ballroom of red, yellow, and white burning spheres and spinning bodies of minerals, metals, and vapors dancing the dance of gravitational force, you do not count the individual dancers. Not the blue bulb nursing black soil, not it’s burning yellow partner, nor it’s small pock marked attendant, nor any other. If you are such a ballroom you trace only the dance, silently keeping time in the perpetually motion.

Lay on your back in a silent place.
Cross your arms over your chest and close your eyes with a timer set for 24 min.
Breath deeply and slowly, feeling your belly rise first, then your chest.
The sound of your breathing should be undetectable.
Other than this breathing, do not move.
Without speaking it aloud, repeat the following mantra for the duration of the 24 minutes in your mind:

"Nothing ever has happened.
Nothing ever will happen."

The first line will be contemplated on the inhale, the second line with the exhale.

Experiment: Sunyata

“Śūnyatā signifies that everything one encounters in life is empty of absolute identity, permanence, or an in-dwelling 'self'. This is because everything is inter-related and mutually dependent - never wholly self-sufficient or independent. All things are in a state of constant flux where energy and information are forever flowing throughout the natural world giving rise to, and themselves undergoing, major transformations with the passage of time."
-Wikipedia

What are you made of?
Sugar and spice and everything nice?
Of clay rolled up by an eager creator?
Will you tell me of your cells and tissues, of that great pumping valve called heart and other pieces like it, or of the systems of these pieces?
Will you tell me that you are mostly water?
Or will you invoke the atom?
If you invoke the atom will you deduce that we are made up largely of empty space?
Are we stardust?
Are we golden?

Tell me, what are we made of?

What are we made of?

What are we made of?

The stuff dreams are made of?
Are we all made of sound?
Are you made at all?
What makes you so sure that you exist?

I am not so sure that you do. If I look at you without blinking perhaps you will evaporate like a little molecule of water at a lake's surface under the sun's rising glance.
Is there even an I?
Is I not a temporary state, a momentary resting point, a center of reference to contextualize being-ness?
I emerged out of the hollow mouth of the Zero because I couldn’t bear the un-scratchable itch associated with being a point in every direction.

Emptiness is form;
form is emptiness.

Therefore the void is deniable but unavoidable.

Lay on your back with your arms crossed upon your chest, your delicate eye lids carefully sealed over your slippery eyeballs.
Set a timer for just one minute.
For one minute only maintain this posture without moving.
Breath deeply, feeling your belly rise, then your chest expand and your collarbone rise slowly and sequentially with each inhalation. This is where your attention should be kept for the duration of the minute; on the breath.
Repeat the experiment each day, adding one minute more to the timer each time.
On the first day you will maintain the pose for one minute, on the second day for two minutes, until on the 24th day you conduct the experiment for the duration of 24 minutes.
When you reach 24 minutes you will no longer increase your time.
After the 24th day continue conducting your experiments only for the duration of 24 minutes.