Do It Anyway

I guess I’m still partial to spiritual autolysis, maybe because it seems I was born to do it, maybe I’m just biased that way because of the way it took off for me. I never forget however my first time even trying it. Maybe because I was just so desperate at that time, I had this insane desire to know something, just anything about myself and my own life. It was later in the evening, the kids were either in bed or just occupied, I can’t remember, maybe it was closer to three or four in the morning and not actually “evening” anymore. I had gone out of my way to buy a keyboard, which I hooked up to my phone. I didn’t have a fancy phone but it was big enough to see writing on I guess. I needed the keyboard because to this day, I don’t text for shit. I’m like a one letter at a time, and hope for the auto word thing to help out. At any rate, I remember at the time really having to force myself to try it. I had been thinking about doing just this for possibly several days and had picked out a specific day and time to try it, so it wasn’t just something I did on a whim, no there was planning involved and also a resolve in place not to get up before I had given it a fair shot so to speak. Anyway, something did happen there, I wrote a good amount and the content was nothing I was thinking about beforehand, how or where it came from, I still couldn’t say, just that it did come which surprised me. I don’t think I was even there that long. The whole operation lasted about thirty, forty, maybe an hour tops but when I got up, I remember feeling like I hadn’t really done anything significant, probably the question, “How could this possibly do anything to help me understand myself?” was very near the surface. I specifically remember thinking it wouldn’t or didn’t do anything but hey I’d tried, that was about the most I could say about it right then. And yeah, nothing changed, not on that day or the ones that followed, but what I really mean by that is nothing perceptible to me changed. A change I realized many years later had occurred, just by that one session. I’m kind of astonished now how it could have had such an impact without my own mind knowing anything about how it had for quite a while, years even. Just one day, just one little bit of writing, how could it do so much? You’d be surprised what it can do, I think it’s probably the most powerful practice there is which is how Jed recommends it. He knew. He must have. To me that’s just wild, but I like the wild thing now. I like looking at it I think unless of course it is a bat that’s launched from somewhere and is now flying back and forth across my living room in the middle of the night. That experience occurred shortly after I had done the writing, I wonder now if it was some sort of omen. Had I unleashed a part of my mind that I had never experienced before? It seems quite likely now. Perhaps that bat was a wild detestable beast freed from haunting the confines of my own mind.

When I look back over the last ten years of my life, I’m basically amazed at how it went. It’s almost as if the person that experienced those ten years was not the same one that lived all the ones that came before. That’s pretty wild on some level and yet there’s still so much more to come, at least I hope so. The weirdest part of this whole journey is probably how in the beginning and for many years you first end up rejecting all you know about life. You travel down all the little paths of pain your mind has grown inside of you somehow and you alter the understanding within them, usually one by one. That’s a lot of work, since we are such multifaceted creatures and we do contain multitudes. We contain information and this information is basically stored or collected on a sort of timeline, at least that’s what I think. Don’t ever think I can prove any of this, maybe this is just my very own type of interpreting it all. It very well could be. I think it works to deepen the understanding within my own operating system but I don’t really know if it can work for you too. You might have to come up with your own ways of understanding and that’s maybe how it’s so difficult and even mostly futile for one person to say to another, look don’t you see it? It’s maybe preposterous to think anyone can see the way you do, in the same way, with the same feelings or force of perception that's arising in any given moment I might add. How I was looking yesterday or even ten minutes ago is clearly not even here anymore and most likely can not be replicated since life is ever new. Each passing moment takes something from before it and with that, but also with this, something different arises. I guess that’s really what’s called creation, the arising of experience within your own little matrix of life.

But anyway, looking back, I see there’s a type of thread there, some things are repeating themes and yet there does seem to be some thread of growth within it all, like a type of expansion, along with a lessoning of stress and urgency in response to what is being perceived here as “the world at large.” I sometimes wonder if all this had gone down forty years ago, if I’d lived in a different time period, if I would not have had the same reaction to whatever worldly events were being promoted as going on then, if I would not have looked at that with the same sense of bewilderment and recognition that it’s off the charts completely bonkers. I actually think I would have which just means it’s insane no matter what year you live in or think it is and will probably continue to be so. Maybe that is also part of the design in some strange way, pain and suffering, government and war, bureaucracy and hierarchy, are all illusions within the imagination and our one job is to escape it all. There’s no fixing it because it isn’t actually real, the actors are there to shock us and maybe that’s the point, otherwise there’s nothing to play with or just look at so we don’t snap out of it. I’m sure there have been many cultures perhaps in the past or even now, that don’t do anything shocking, maybe everything about it is easily tolerable, life never becomes too difficult to navigate within them but nothing crazy happens either. Maybe that would destroy us faster as a species then what we got going on now. Death through dullness. Delusion is necessary. Getting shocked or whipped around through a type of centrifugal tunnel of events is inevitable. Of course, we all have our own ideas of what we’d like those events to look like, but do they? Do they ever adhere to our own visions? I can’t say mine have but that’s really how I’m amazed. All in all, I’d say it’s gone in a better direction than I could have ever imagined or came up with on my own.

So there is expansion, experience you find at long last can be relied upon to serve you up with whatever comes next, just not to hurt you but to grow you both up and out. Yeah, if I look back over my life, I can see a type of progression, and many synchronicities I might add that always worked to my favor and not against it. It’s curious I suppose on some level to determine that there are benevolent forces at work here, they’re not all out to get you. I think there are definitely some dangers, you can cut yourself just chopping up vegetables for instance if you’re not aware of what you’re doing, maybe your mind slips off into some story and bam, you were chopping up a cucumber and now your finger is bleeding. That doesn’t mean the knife is bad, but it might mean you weren’t aware of the dangers of the activity you were engaging in. All in all though, if you took all the shit that you thought went wrong and weighed it against all the shit you thought went right, which would win? Isn’t it the latter every time? Most of our fears are completely non starters when it comes to our actual life. The times we are really shocked usually stem from things we’d have never even considered were possible. So that’s something to think about.

Interestingly enough, throughout history, there has always been mention of angels or perhaps different Gods. Carlos Castaneda mentions something called “allies”, all just benevolent forces that come to aid us, either by keeping us safe from some unknown harm or just bestowing something we like or need. You might argue that all of it is just a facet of our own imaginations or thought processes, for instance if we think someone will always come to our aid should we need it to happen, it’s our belief that causes someone to appear to us in some helpful way. Maybe we see them as helpful, perhaps they were always going to appear and it was up to our own perception as to how they appeared. If we believe they will help us they do, and if we believe they won’t maybe they rob us or kick us in the ass when we’re already weak and on the ground. That’s a lot to unpack for sure and I’m not even sure it can be unpacked but does it need to be? Maybe, maybe not but it never hurts to look. In my Nagualism course, it speaks of places that let you dream them, and places that actually quiet your mind, they induce silence by their qualities which in turn moves your assemblage point, assembling your reality in some nicer way. It also speaks of “getting help from the world”, just not in terms of people but forces that might appear as people, or not just some help that comes from wherever, however, not as something you might physically see or even experience directly. If you think about it at all, you can easily see and deduce that those of us who think well of this world and our place in it usually have better experiences or more advantageous ones, they go on adventures or create things that most of us couldn’t even comprehend, I mean could you have created a cell phone? That one product took a hell of a lot of imagination and just the belief in possibilities had to be enormous given what little knowledge they were working with when the first one came out. Now okay, everyone knows you can build a cell phone and this is the design but before, that design was just an idea in someone’s mind. So what I’m saying here, is having some type of trust and belief in possibilities can come in handy. Eventually I think you actually come to rely on some fact that life knows what’s doing even when we don’t. We can’t see all the forces that are acting on anything in any one given moment but there does seem to be an intelligence to life. Maybe we can’t prove it, but it sure seems like a thing, but again, that may be a mindset, something we nurture within ourselves when the world instead says it’s all gone to shit, we have some inherent capacity to hold out hope for something else, something that works better than that idea.

Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I think that we actually come with this capacity to see everything, our lives, some world, in an easy light. It’s only after our parents betray us that it starts to wither away, what really happens is we become skeptics, pessimists, instead of seeing benevolence this pain of betrayal however that happens, makes us stop trusting in life, after all if the people tasked with loving us the most don’t or didn’t do that, what can be trusted to work as we think or intuit it should? Not much, right? Of course, this has a type of rippling effect on us, we might start to see life itself as a dangerous affair. I think it’s safe to say that everyone gets betrayed just that’s how human imagination developed. I mean this one idea is basically mirrored and reflected everywhere, otherwise why think someone’s going to be interested in lifting an ethernet cable from Walmart? Most of the phone chargers are right out in the open to grab up, not Apple of course, Apple is special, their product’s integrity needs to be protected so behind the glass it goes no matter what it is. It’s strange because it’s a very subtle tactic, probably an unconscious one, but just seeing this type of thing where certain products are being locked up, implies already that humans can not be trusted not to steal and if they will steal from Walmart, your mind might easily intuit they will most definitely steal from you because where’s your power to protect yourself? Do you or your house have a glass wall around it? It’s almost a subtle form of brainwashing really, the idea that humans are bad or will be bad if not prevented from being this way has been with us as a species for a long time. We think of course we have proof of this phenomena, after all Russia invaded, but what if all these stories are just made up bits of delusion. Your mind comes across them now and it’s trained to register it all as real, when it isn’t. I would say your mind basically does this automatically until it doesn’t anymore. Maybe that proves nothing can be trusted, it’s all a mind manipulation on some level but is that any reason to stop trusting in life itself? Maybe it’s this lack of trust in life that precedes it all, it makes shit like this possible, where trusting goes the other way. But it is what it is. A person living in a small village let’s say up in the Alpine Mountains, well they have to shop too somewhere maybe, but they don’t have a Walmart and they don’t encounter anything like this. So you can’t say it’s an intrinsic part of our minds, maybe it’s just inside of my own, I’m not really sure, maybe where you live nothing is kept behind the glass. It’s strange once you realize it’s a very personal thing this image projector, and idea maker.

I watched a video online that came up to me. It was a protest in Dresden against the war mongers who are in charge of Germany now. It seemed pretty big which was actually heartening, let the people rise up and be heard was my thought there because they don’t want war. Some old guy came on and was speaking out, he’d maybe been there for the whole bombing just like my mother had. He was basically asking how they hadn’t learned the lesson that war doesn’t work. He said the citizen’s don’t want war and they have a responsibility to their children and grandchildren to prevent one. He asked how long Russia was supposed to stand by and do nothing of all the provocations they were instigating. This won’t work he said, we couldn’t even fight a war, we’ll all be gone in seven minutes. All in all, many of them were like send the politicians to the front lines if they want war so much. I have to admit I loved that, fuck all, go and get what you want is my motto but leave me the fuck out of it. Of course, maybe that’s actually a good idea, we could make it a requirement of government positions that you first spend two week to a month on the front lines of a war zone, if you survive you can come back and run for office, but by then you will have seen the carnage up front. There will be no grey lines for you when it comes to wars and what they actually look like. Given how this world goes, it shouldn’t be too hard to find a war either, since there’s always at least one going on somewhere. Then too, if you start a war you’re basically required to fight in it in some capacity, no more governing shit from the sidelines, you don’t get to sit in a decadent office drinking cappuccino and eating filet mignon while other people go out and do your war imaginings. Wow, I come up with good ideas. My mind is really working well these days I think.

Then there’s some anarchy going on in France as well. It’s been promoted as a protest against poor education systems, the kids are maybe like, “Fuck this, we’re not learning anything. We’re just being herded like cattle into these over crowded classrooms with these idiot teachers.” Yeah, I guess they want some reforms there but really if you ask me that whole system just needs to come down, there’s no reforming a brainwashing system unless you just want some alternative type of brainwashing. The West is framing it as an Islamic uprising, they let in too many migrants, and now all hell is breaking loose, that’s what they want, that’s how they operate he said. Fuck, how about people are just fed up with everything, with how it’s all going, that seems about right if you ask me. Isn’t that some type of awakening? A call for more freedom of movement within an oppressive system of governance that rewards the rich and just continues to crush the poor? I think we’ve seen this pattern before, it literally repeats throughout history every 100 to 200 years or so. The people long for their lives back, that’s all it is. The idea of freedom is tied to money now, and for most that’s unattainable. I know I’ve felt that at times, how deep this pattern goes is basically heartbreaking.

Maybe that’s it’s purpose, to break hearts open, or maybe it’s just cruelty, this mind pattern isn’t being orchestrated by heavenly forces, it’s being pushed out by the trillions of little actions and words that go on all day long all around the world. If we collectively create it we can collectively destroy it as well. Of course, destruction is inevitable. Where there’s accumulation, later there must also be loss. All opposites might have a shadow side to the effect if you force one up, eventually what lies in the shadows grows like mold, and sneakily finds a way to envelope the other side to bring that down to size for a time, equilibrium is somehow built in but it’s more like a seesaw because you need movement. Too much peace and tranquility breeds boredom and stagnation until chaos arises and then just like clockwork too much chaos breeds stability and a slow methodical like movement until that becomes boring as well, and back and forth we go. Shit, isn’t that just the yin and yang? I never really explored that symbol.

I was thinking about all the stuff I was able to get my daughter for her trip and I’ve determined that I’m just a giving machine now, not because I want something but because the universe is actually giving and I’m more like this universe now. I think what really happens is we obtain some pattern of lack because we confuse our parents ability to give with realities ability to give. One is limited obviously and the other is not, it just couldn’t be. I look back sometimes and see just how giving it has been here, and I’m sometimes blown away at the apparent generosity I have received thus far after all, my internet is fast again due to the ethernet cable. Also they are sending yet another box which should fix the issue, no charges incurred for any of it, just like no charges incurred for any of my son’s complicated knee surgeries and now his eyes. I may be a little broke again now but oh well, does it really matter? At some point, I figure I’ll bounce back up in the other direction, shit I figure if I can get this low on funds maybe the upside which is most likely forthcoming will be truly fantastic, super low, super high, yin and yang, maybe the lower you can actually go or tolerate sort of determines how the opposite polarity will show up, and that would be fantastic. I think in the end you’re really just supposed to appreciate the contrast and enjoy the roller coaster ride.

One more thing I thought about tonight. I was thinking about how there is no doer. So if there is no doer and all this writing just spills out anyway, is that so wrong? Why do we love this silence thing so much? Why does everyone always suggest it’s superior to some sort of expression whether that’s music or writing or just standing on your head? It’s kind of odd if you ask me, but mostly it just smacks of some sort of life denying shit, after all trees grow a lot of leaves, yep, they grow, provide shade and maybe a home for the birds, then they all fall off, die, and a new batch appears but if the tree’s ability to produce leaves withers, then the tree dies completely, guess that’s firewood. I don’t know, I think a lot of people get totally confused over what comes out of them, and I personally think it’s just some ego attitude to tell anyone what to do with themselves, but telling them just sitting in silence is the highest thing you can do is cruel too in some weird way. I personally think everything has a song to sing and without singing it, something goes without, everyone misses out on whatever gift they came with. Maybe they just use the meditation thing as a way to see what they need to see, but from what I can tell the idea goes a lot further than that, and instead of just dropping it when it’s served its purpose, it gets glorified into proving your some type of superior being who’s not taking up as much space as before, or causing the least amount of havoc. I think if you look around though, if you look at how the kids are running around on the streets of France, you can see that they are finally expressing themselves, other people might not like how they are but if there’s no doer, than that’s life’s expression as much as anything else is. I can tell you this, if I’d had the funds, I’d have flown to Dresden and waved a banner with that group of people but then I like German people since they tend to cover their bases and that whole protest was a very civilized event. There was no trashing the environment, in that historic city, that would be an even bigger tragedy. I can absolutely see how they wouldn’t want any more bombs to land there since the place itself is fucking beautiful. I just want to go there one day and maybe take a walk along the old railroad tracks that entered the city. I’d like to take a hike in the woods that my mother as a child had to hide in, who knows, I’ll bet there’s a hiking trail there somewhere by now but I wouldn’t be sad, I’d be grateful that the war that entered her being was able to exit through mine. Maybe the real miracle of life is being able to take the dark side and merge it with the light side, maybe that’s a type of alchemy and you somehow hit gold that way.

I think one day when I’m even older than I am now, I’ll teach this spiritual autolysis to people. It’s funny too because last week I came upon a table of drunk blackjack players who were all having a rip roaring time. Then they all started calling me “teacher” and I was a little confused so I asked, “Why are you calling me that?” One of them said, "Oh we just like to give each dealer a name and that’s just what came up for you", so yeah, they just kept calling me that. I was just thinking this is a real twist if there ever was one since I’d have never considered myself to be anything of the sort. But you know maybe one day I will, I am loathe to rule out anything anymore I guess. Then again, how would I teach it? I’d maybe just say, do it. Or do it anyway. Go against anything that tells you not to express whatever is inside of you. I mean really who knows what is in there? You might not know. I didn’t. I still don’t. But there’s always something. There’s always more. And that I think is a facet of reality itself, it’s unlimited and it doesn’t end. It will pour out expressions forever.