Some Wild Weeds

I sometimes wish I didn’t know so well how Nisargadatta used to yell and just get frustrated with the people who were gathered in his meeting space. It’s literally maddening to try to get through because you fucking can’t. You can’t get in to a person who thinks this world is the way they learned it was. I don’t want the world to be as I learned it was. I hate that I was given that framework because it sucked and that’s not the best picture if you ask me. I know I gave my children this small ass world as well. I try to tell them, “Don’t worry about the future because there will never be one”, but they can’t understand this. Every now and then they want to be petty instead and talk about who’s doing what in this house. Money of course is the real issue because the car brought it up into front and center. Everyone should be out working my oldest thinks. Work is life. That’s what he learned I guess and now that he’s got a college degree he’s basically sure of it. Life equals work which equals money which equals fun and freedom. Of course, he’s since applied for over thirty jobs and no one has hired him, not yet. That’s got to feel like a punch in the stomach after all the studying and passing of tests he did. I sometimes actually wish it worked that way, but just look, a lot of fucking people have been working non stop for many years and haven’t gotten the prize. No instead they just get more bills, more stress, and usually ill health towards the end of it but that’s the only framework anyone gets anymore. The whole world is under this spell. I sometimes wish we lived in a war zone because all that shit would fade away very quickly at the sound of the first bomb exploding. People living in war zones don’t know how good they got it if you ask me. Everyone instantly becomes more human, more alive, and more willing to share and help each other. When your very life is on the line, what’s truly important, being what you are, comes to the surface very quickly.

Of course, we shouldn’t need this. We might be what we are peacefully and naturally. Violence is obviously not the answer. I hate violence of any kind I can tell you that. Hell, I don’t even like violence through speech or words, because in some ways this is even more harmful but really it’s just unnecessary. We are really just a stupid species, maybe we always have been, I don’t really know. I know we think we know what we were like 200, even 2000 years ago since we have stories for everything. We talk as if we know for sure what happened where, how, and why, but I don’t think it’s that clear. I think we think we know stuff and that’s all. Thinking you know something for sure is really a reality maker since it’s so convincing. The flip side is seeing that nothing is true except that we have awareness, and everything, how we live our lives is based on the mind, or imagination. I know I have often wanted to imagine something else as well, and while it’s been so much better than it ever was, there are still pockets of frustration when I can’t or don’t do it. I just know this too. If there is frustration that is always a sign to more action, it signifies don’t stop, for God’s sake you’re so close, don’t stop now and let it all be for nothing. You have every support to follow your dreams, everyone does, it’s just a matter of persistence. Honestly if it came too easily, it wouldn’t even register as anything so you wouldn’t enjoy it for very long either. If you have to struggle long enough and then you get your dream, the taste is so much sweeter, and you’ll fully appreciate it.

The money game we got going is really a form of violence as it keeps people living paycheck to paycheck, forever scrambling to cover the bills and to find a way to add that extra little something that life is really made of in-between doing all that. Our greatest heartache as a species isn’t that we give too little it’s that we dream we don’t have more to give. Of course, many people are just for themselves and really do go around using others for their own gains or pleasures. Some are scamsters as they are able to weave convincing tales to extract what they want from you without causing you to think they are. You’ll only find out later, much later when the culprit is no where to be found. I’d say this little trick is happening almost continuously in ways we would never dream they are, in subtleties that totally escape our notice. It’s almost like a thick blanket of this has been laid over the whole worldwide population, like a layer of deceit that is dark, and ominous, and passing through it to the other side requires hacking your way through it just as if you were hacking through a jungle that’s been growing for thousands of years with no paths visible anywhere. Of course, many people write about their paths as if another person could map out their directions and travel the same pathway but it isn’t so. The reason it isn’t is because the pathway exists in your mind’s pattern and no two patterns are the same. When the one came along to the precipice and found a rope to swing across with, no one else finds such a rope, because their own mind hasn’t produced one and can’t produce one. It’s not as simple as just say it is so and it appears. There has to be enough energy for starters, the energy to create has to have accumulated to the exact specific proportions to create your crossing but you won’t see a rope. Some lucky fellow might see a magic carpet that he’ll have to ride down into the depths and back out, but most just see a path leading down and back up that they’ll have to slog their way across. Problem is if you’re looking for a rope, and you think that’s the only way, you’re going to be looking for the wrong thing because that way is not for you and you can’t make it be. Then you’ll be confused, you’ll spend time looking the wrong ways, and you’ll miss what you are looking for because your mind is otherwise occupied.

That we are not all the same in terms of our capacities never comes up. Instead some crazy metric is used as a type of measuring stick of failure. As children we are told what to do and this leads us down paths that have nothing to do with our authentic journey. Usually it does nothing to fortify the capacities we do have and literally usurps them all simultaneously until we become what we see all around us on a daily basis, defeated, ineffective manifesters of lives that are as dull and monotonous as the cement we use to pave our roads with. Then we spend our lives surrounded with this energy field of doom and gloom, until one day we start contributing to it. Actually we become it. For years we are ordered around like little soldiers with no will of our own, and then when it comes time for a little freedom from that, our own wills have devolved from lack of use. We might have been building them up all this time, but instead the culture demands that we always curtail ourselves in some way. Now someone else writes out full scripts of what we can express and what we can’t. We are told to stick to the script, state your name, where you’re from, express gratitude for your situation even if you hate it, and smile when you don’t feel like it. No one cares if you’re happy as long as you look like you are. After years of this charade one’s whole energetic system isn’t just ineffective, it’s totally discombobulated. It doubts even the smallest authentic expressions that still surface are reliable and usually denies them sinking one further into a maze of total inebriation.

The fact that so many can’t see the insanity is proof of it. If we could see we might glean immediately the childish patterns of our leaders. Well, I don’t like that, they’re not doing what I told them to do, so launch the missiles, kill them all or as many as you can. Most of us aren’t involved in any of it, we’re just trying to live a life in some sort of satisfactory way but now due to social media our minds have to deal with some sort of constant existential threat to our freedom and very existence. We’re not free to begin with but we never see this. Millions upon millions of people celebrated the 4th of July here. For most it wasn’t really about the country, not patriotism at all, it was just a chance to gather with their neighbors and loved ones. Most parties had a cooler of beer for the adults so they could pretend more easily that this is not only life, it’s a good one, we should be grateful our leaders are making wars and defending our liberties. With flags flying, and hands saluting some invisible concepts of sovereignty, they cook hotdogs and hamburgers made from the flesh of tortured animals, sit their fat behinds in cheap lawn chairs and watch fireworks as if it is a sign of prosperity.

That’s the kind of layer the whole fog looks like, but that’s just the surface layer, going farther, much farther through the muck of your mind, you’ll encounter real terror, the terror of death and annihilation that you are really heading towards every day you’re alive. These fond memories of community and connection, the sparklers you lit for your children won’t be your friend then, they’ll be the very fabric that pulls your heart backwards into wanting to believe in all the stories you were told about life and love and what a life is for. If it’s at all satisfying enough you won’t even look, not today, not ever. Your whole life will be living within the stories you learned and that’s it. And that’s most people, literally almost all the beings you’ll ever see fall into this category. What you don’t realize is this collective fabrication is a force you’ll be forced to reckon with if you want to move past these hallucinations. Energetically speaking they have momentum and you wade knee deep in this momentum every time you leave your house or open up YouTube. It’s almost like a vortex that tries to pull you into itself, like a self feeding monster of sorts that wants its stories to continue and needs you and everyone else’s energy ie attention to do it.

You think maybe, “Oh I’ll just close my mind to all this and go my own way” but you’d be naive there. You’ll be sideswiped and sidelined because you’ll be totally unprepared to face it when it decides you’ve strayed too far out of its field of influence. You’re not giving up your allotted amount of energy, and it doesn’t like that. It needs to feed and it’s you it feeds on. Every argument, every conflict you fight with, gets sucked into this field. It breeds and multiplies itself this way. That’s how all the people become weaker, their voices start to sound like the peeps of those little chickens who by the millions are thrown into a sort of mechanic meat grinder because they’ve been deemed useless for productivity. If you were to just pick up one of those baby chickens and really observe it, hold it, feel its life pulse, see the intricately beautiful way it is designed for life, while standing in front of the life destroyer, it’d blow your mind right open. The indignity and despair of this atrocity would overwhelm your senses in a way that you’d never expect. You’d immediately start seeing things a little differently and probably you’d stop eating chicken nuggets with some delicious hot sauce as if they were a gift from God.

So yeah, that’s where I find myself, caught in the crosshairs of a world I don’t really understand nor want to participate in anymore. The writing is back though so that’s something. Basically I just woke up around noon and what you just read up above is what poured out. I don’t make a plan there. I don’t have any ideas just let it do what it wants. Look I’m not saying that I’m even saying anything. To be sure, I don’t know what it all means. I just sit and let the fingers move, that’s about my whole involvement in it. Maybe we have to let the energy pour out of us into something, in order to get it back. That seems to make sense but all I really know is the impulse to sit here is one I can’t resist. I have to do it for some reason. I don’t have to know why anymore although that would be nice, in the end it’s not necessary.

On a physical sort of note or record, after we got the car back yesterday, my kids and I went on a long walk almost five miles if you think distance is a thing. There’s a trail that basically follows the highway, it looks like a nice bike path but there are bikers, walkers, and a few runners. It’s not too far from us, maybe five miles tops and you’re very unlikely to encounter stray dogs on it which is how I like it. Too many times, I walk in my neighborhood, and I get some angry dog coming up to me barking and growling. We have our own dogs, in fact, we just adopted two puppies from the same litter. My oldest son is raising one and the other basically belongs to my daughter. Sometimes they seem almost like surrogate children since no one has any. I have no grandchildren yet and I’m not saying I need them. I don’t. I personally think I was not prepared for the art of child raising and don’t think it goes too easily unless your time is your own, you’ve got plenty of money to spend on them, and you’re aware of what the process actually entails. The only thing I think I ever had going for me was some sense of unconditional love so yeah, they’re beautiful children, overly loving in most ways and highly sensitive to upsets that don’t reflect this love of life. Of course, maybe all parents love their children even if I didn’t feel that growing up. My own parents were very self absorbed, with their image, with what they wanted, and I didn’t get a sense of anything. Maybe that was my gift, to become so utterly confused that I’d have to take measures to sort myself out or live miserably. I can’t discount the mysterious ways this life force works.

My days off are over, and it’s back to work tonight. If you don’t know me like my other readers do, I’m a blackjack slash craps dealer in a casino. I make my money through tips and we keep our own. That means we don’t pool the tips. It’s a sort of every man for himself operation. Craps is a little different because you work as a team so when I’m on there we do share the tips but only among the crew you are working with. Tonight it might be noted is the last day to make the money that will come out on the next paycheck, the one we are all waiting for around here because the car issue took all our money. So in some way, the pressure is upon me except that I know, this pressure is completely optional and it will go how it goes. I’d like to think that I influence what happens and what doesn’t but at this point I don’t really think I do. I think there are forces in the universe that can however come to your aid or block it completely. It might be called your state of mind, that which allows for the flow of life to flow abundantly or you might have some restrictions. Obviously if we know this we’d want to tip it in our favor, maybe we think we can do something to open the gates, that’s the general consensus anyway, but I’m not so sure. My experience is the more I want the gates to open the more they shut down. Flow then might be said to be a type of surrender to what does occur. Basically what I’ve noticed is that if I feel a type of disappointment for maybe not getting a tip or missing a tip that someone played for me because they lose the hand, it generally escalates. I think this is because I thought I knew what should happen and when it didn’t, I felt wronged in some way. This is, of course, an internal pattern. There is a way to live where you don’t have any idea what is or isn’t meant to happen and you don’t care which way it goes. It’s not faith because you believe everything is for the best but more an accumulation of experiences that has shown you that you can absolutely rely on life to take care of you and your needs which in reality are very few. As long as you’re still breathing you might say it’s doing that. You might not know in the moment how it will let you live, just that it always does, it comes through when you don’t expect it to. Expectation is then a flow killer not a helper.

To make an analogy, let’s suppose you’re an inanimate object but you’ve got some awareness because you’re not really a leaf that fell from a tree. But let’s say you are a leaf and you fell from a tree and landed on a riverbank a couple feet from the shores of the water and the flowing current. There you are, you fell unto the earth between some bushes, some wild weeds, or whatever, use your imagination. You’ve been nestled down between all these other living plants, and since you have no real propensity for movement save the winds that blow or rains that fall you’ve been stuck in this spot for most of your existence. Then one day, in the mist of your decomposing, because that’s what a leaf off the tree does, they decompose, a raging storm develops. This storm is so powerful that it is moving everything, it’s blowing down the riverbank of your so far forever home and blowing shit up. The tree you fell from is swaying in the wind about to break, the rocks are moving a little, wild torrents of water are coming out of the sky, so much so that the swell of the river explodes its banks and now your little home is underwater. The mud you were stuck in starts to soften, releasing you upwards. There’s not much left of you because you decomposed and parts of you disappeared but a little something is left and it is now moving. You were huddled down in the mud for so long you didn’t even know there was anything else. To you the world looked like mud, other leaves that fell on top of you or to the side, some large and lots of little branches, lots of plants, and maybe animals passed by every now and then, but that was basically the gist of your whole world because it was all you’d ever known or seen and now you’re adrift on a wild current of water. This little leaf, let’s make it more human, is at first utterly alarmed, At the first sign of true movement it tried to secure itself to the ground it knew all to no avail. It’s little bit of will was no match for the forces it was now encountering and the more it tried to hold on the more afraid and constricted it became, basically innerly immobilized with fear and dread and every other base emotion there is. Then as it started to move it discovered it was just happening. There was no way to stop it so it stopped fighting the inevitable and just let go of the mud and the little stick next to it that it thought was its friend because it had been there right along with it in the mud for as long as its memory existed. So it’s moving now but still basically terrified of all this chaos, the roaring currents slap it around from side to side so hard it breaks off a piece of it. It watches as a part of it floats away into a whirlpool and doesn’t resurface, there’s no retrieving it so reattachment is impossible, no such glue in the water. This goes on for a time until the storm eventually subsides and it finds itself washed up on another shoreline. Here the plants are different, the trees are taller, not familiar like the ones it always knew but ominously looming over it, blocking the sun completely. It stays in this little spot and laments that its former home is gone for good. It doesn’t know where it is now and wouldn’t know how to get back to the place it started from anyway. The entire world looks different so eventually it settles down. I guess this is it, it thinks but it’s not, little does the leaf know that yet another storm is already brewing and this one is even more powerful than the first one. When the storm hits, the little leaf has less resistance this time, it’s not so dug into this spot, so when the waters come it easily captures it and it’s off again, down the current of water it goes to yet another location. This time it settles in more easily, it may only be temporary like the last one, so not really going to bare down into the earth it intuits. I’ll just stay up here where there’s more to see. Its whole being was in the mud before buried under debris but not so now and it’s starting to like having a different view of things. And the storms keep coming, now they’re coming all the time so the leaf just gets used to them. It sees them as a chance to move on and see something completely new now. This time when the storms come, instead of being afraid it gets excited and tries to move into the flow of energy that is presenting itself. It thinks if I can just lift up this little part of me since I’m so small and light the currant will do the rest and off I’ll go blowing to parts unknown again.

Yeah, I don’t know where that all come from, I never do but it seems close to my experience in some very abstract way. So I did my daily exercises here and I noticed I was fairly exhausted. All the movements felt like putting out effort I didn’t have, like the energy just wasn’t there but I barreled through them anyway. I know when you don’t have the energy that’s when you should actually push your limits. Of course, this was no real limit. It was just a ten minute arm workout I do here with three lb weights and some leg exercises I do with five lb ankle weights. The arm workout I do is a video and I just follow along with the lady who recorded it and on the legs I do 350 reps, 175 on each side. I think this fatigue might be from my lack of nutrition but oh well, there’s not much to eat, not much I like anyway so I can’t be bothered to worry about it. I know from my anorexic years that past a certain threshold with or without food and it was without food back then, another type of energy kicks in past the point of normal functioning. Food may be beneficial but it’s not absolutely necessary past a certain point and I’m not starving yet. Tonight I’ll go back to my cheese cubes and crackers and I always bring a bowl of oatmeal with peanut butter with me though I don’t usually eat it until I’m back home. For some reason it’s just back up in case I really do get hungry which hasn’t happened yet. I used to always drink an energy drink at work but for expense sake that’s off the menu and I’m bringing very highly caffeinated tea instead, watered down with some cold water and a little monk sugar we still have. That’s probably a good development. I always wondered what was in those colorful little cans and since humans came up with the shit, I know on some level it can’t be good for you anyway. Humans have a morbid sense of what they can safely put in their bodies and as we can see, it’s not working out so well. If it was you wouldn’t drive down the road and see five medical facilities as opposed to one grocery store. Maybe that’s what this whole thing was about, the energy drinks were about to kick my can, and needed to stop, hence no money for that or anything else. You’d be surprised how this place will actually correct you when it really wants to. You might think it’s bad luck, being broke looks like bad luck until the bomb veers off course and drops on the community of mansions and the homeless shelter remains standing. Stranger things have happened.

I always think that the start of the Iran/American war was an ominous sign. The fact that a so called location mishap blew up a school full of over a hundred sweet little girls was very telling. If ever the Iranian people needed to see the U.S. as evil villains to be defeated under any condition or sacrifice, they now had it. And the war is back on, ceasefire is over, peace treaty is in the garbage bin. Alas it was too good to be true, the proverbial axiom of life. Oh, well, I just saw bits of a video talking about the populations ability to procreate becoming almost nil by 2045 without medical help. Funny, how the medical guys always want to insert themselves into the survival of humanity. Here I just think, so what? Most people live lives of quiet desperation already, so that sounds like mercy to me or something like, “Look, you’ve fucked it up. You’ve gone down the wrong path for thousands upon thousands of years, I don’t think you’re going to self correct because if you were, you’d have done it by now, so I’m going to do it for you. I’ll start some civilization over again after I’ve had a chance to evaluate what went haywire, and maybe eliminate this aspect all together. Maybe I’ll just eliminate thinking since most of you suck at it but don’t worry so much, you were basically lost in a dream, and it was never truly real anyway and nothing was ever at stake. Everything is still fine and always will be. News to you and yours, you don’t have as much power over all this as you think you do, actually I’d say none, not really but go on now, have fun and pretend you do.”

I just let it all go for now. I submit myself to the mystery. I am yours. I always was. There was nothing else. And yet the telling of stories is still a part of it because why not? It’s more interesting this way. Life must somehow be amused and I have to drag my dizzy ass into the shower. I think my armpits might stink.

Work was uneventful, no big scores, but not terrible either. Terrible means I made under a hundred dollars in tips and not terrible means it was closer to three. Anything over five is called a good night. I left an hour early because my daughter called me and was in distress. She takes some medication right now and I guess the pill didn’t go down right and got stuck in her throat. I was due to go back for my last hour when she called me so instead, I told my boss my daughter didn’t feel well, and he had me tap into another table and close it. He said it’s fine, skip the cards and I’ll clean it for you. You always help me so it’s the least I can do. I honestly had no idea what he was talking about as far as my help went but left in a hurry anyway. I figure if anyone thinks you help them, you don’t protest and just go with it. Actually it’s best to just “go” with anything that comes up, since as we’ve seen by my little episode of car trouble, resistance is almost always absolutely futile. The leaf as I’ve described above is at the mercy of forces seen and unseen, and even if it’s all imaginary, to resist means to fortify or strengthen said upset thereby usually making it worse. Other game players or characters it must be known are always full of fear and will usually fight you if you give them an inch of a reason to do so by maybe expressing your opinion. Trust me keep all opinions to yourself. I probably added a couple thousands dollars to my car repair bill by leaving the place a bad review online, although to my credit I went back and deleted them because I was like, “Why did I bother with that?” It seemed unsavory since I know things, other people and events, can only be the way they are and there’s not really a choice in the matter.

On that note, being dumb is also part of journey and process. Being dumb really amounts to doing what you think you have to do, because that’s just how you learned it was done. It feels off somehow but you still don’t know any other way to live, you feel you have to have to play along even if maybe you don’t. You’ve literally seen it doesn’t have to be this way so you make a lot of changes in your inner world but the outer reality stays the same. We play our roles according to the stories we know, and until we know something else, limbo can seem like ten years or even longer. That’s where I think I’ve been. I may have to sink down even further into some abyss to find any sort of stable current because usually that’s where you find them. It’s not up here, I know that. Whatever stories I already know about this world and life must be destroyed. This is one cold hard process. To die to what you already know takes some effort, and it’s not about love. Love might be a motivation but it’s usually a secondary one, the first is discomfort. Sometimes things have to get bad again before you’re willing to change. It is therefore advisable to find a way, any way, on your own, before this life forces it upon you. We’re actually seeing this on global level right now, because that is the universal pattern. Pain is the supreme motivator of change, stagnation is suffocation. When the old ways won’t work, they lead to destruction each and every time. Chaos and fear will reign. Most are sucked in as the forces overwhelm them.

That may be where I’m at so yeah, not going to just sit here and wait this time. That doesn’t work anyway, no it just gets you a lot of bills, and sometimes a headache. I don’t get headaches, but I had two bad knees lately, first the left and then the right. Both were so inflamed, the doctor sucked a cup of fluid out of one and the other required a steroid shot. My wake up calls have been steadily coming, I can’t even deny it.

Further. As Always. How much further? It doesn’t matter. Just don’t stop.