Still Writing

Shit, here we are, some of you have been reading this stuff for years, the stories in my mind pour out and still do. I think I thought there’d be an end point and there is, it’s called death. I’ve had my ups and downs, sometimes they happen in a single day, even in a single hour, up you go, and down you come, the wheels of life never stop turning, not for me, not for anyone. They’re not supposed to. The point of existence is in the ride.

What a weird journey it’s been, not weird in a bad way, most of the truly bad stuff ended years ago, but still life, it’s never been too easy. Some bed of roses never appeared here, not yet anyway. Maybe you don’t really want it to be easy for as soon as easy sets in, boredom sets in even faster and what is easily gotten is most easily forgotten. A person gets used to situations faster than they think they do, so fast that what’s sublime today just becomes common place by next week. We more easily forget to pay attention when things are good as when they are not. Usually when they’re not, we pay attention, we think we need to find reasons or errors in judgment or some cause. There is no cause, or some wrongness, just all the forces that pushed you into awareness in the first place, which is really pressure. When the outer emanations of the world exert a certain force on us, we become aware, or alive. If it happens that they subside completely, you won’t be here anymore. You’d dissolve instantaneously. So we need these forces. These forces lead to impulses, thought formations, sensations, and ultimately action. Life it might be said is the propagation of experience. That’s really how you wake up in the morning and don’t just keep sleeping. Some pressure must find you first, the sun perhaps streaming through the cracks in the window covering, or just a noise from the living room, but something, some pressure must find you, if it doesn’t you’re gone.

I think one of the deepest realizations that I’ve had of late is that things don’t need to be nice, just exciting. A certain level of tension is built into the world at large which ensures conflict and action will still occur. We may fantasize that we would love peace and prosperity for all but if it ever happened, it would lead to the end, not a new beginning. Peace is really synonymous with stagnation. If no conflicts or personal dramas exerted pressure on us, we’d become complacent and dreary. We’d be utterly predictable and everything we did would slow to a crawl. A game devoid of danger becomes too comfortable, too reliable. Silence is not really built into the equation either. Thunder is not silent. The ocean isn’t silent. Even babbling brooks have a melody, and waterfalls can sound deafening to our human ears. Those humans who live in complete silence have lost something vital if you ask me. I call it their contribution to the chaos. Life demands expression, the louder the better or it shrivels up.

That’s the real reason humans love to follow movie stars and sports figures. They live loud, vibrant, and exciting lives. They rarely sit still and are always going places. We wish we were too, but most of us are too afraid to make any real movement. They have no sense at all that adventure might be theirs too if they just trusted life enough to give them some. Of course, most of us always dream we can’t afford it. We are buried in bills usually, at least that’s my excuse. And you know, it still does. It might give it to us in the form of an urgent or deadly health condition, car crashes are regular occurrences, and if you’re up for it, a full blown argument is always usually available for anyone who wishes to engage in it. Wars are actually liberating for many people. They destroy the life you had and give you a new one if your city becomes a war zone. Wars blow up lives and maybe that’s their real purpose, to instigate movement and change. You can blame it on the leaders all you want but in a place like this, you’re really just misunderstanding the forces at play if you do. Life is the last thing that ever plays fair, not because it hates the human race, but because it demands that new expressions take shape again and again. It doesn’t have a preference for how this happens just that it does so wars are fair game. The stories while clearly all false stir the hearts of people and make them act. Evil or goodness is only determined by the story itself. I’ve often hated the stories of life as we’ve recorded them, but now at least I understand them, so the charge is gone. We hate what we fear, to not fear it is to lose that hatred.

I think my greatest challenge overall was to lose this sense of disappointment I had in my life in general. I confused this with a sense of disappointment with myself as if it was all a result of my lack of ability. I always thought I should be living another life and maybe one day I will be, but some things have stayed the same it feels for too long. The job for instance still drags on. I think on some level I suffered from a type of magical thinking, as if the world would come to my aid someday financially without me having to lift a finger, circumstances would just magically appear. Even though on many levels, my mind has cleared, the road to total freedom of movement and living has seemed a most long one. Thinking alone it turns out doesn’t do as much as thinking claims it will. Having some need to study a lot of manifestation techniques and tricks, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not the practices themselves that work but one’s ability to shift one’s assemblage point to a place where things really do work differently, even effortlessly. It’s the feeling that does the work, not thought, but you can’t get the feeling out of a thinking state of mind, to get it you must go beyond thinking to a place where thinking still exists but from a different vantage point. This literally means to shift your point of awareness on the luminous cocoon of assembled realities to another position. Most manifestation teachers don’t even realize that they’ve maybe made this shift and that’s how their desires are being made manifest. They don’t realize that from the common assemblage point that things can only work the way most beings think they work and so they don’t teach how to move the point but only teach their techniques which for most who are stuck in the common point won’t do anything. From other points, you don’t even need techniques, this would be most foreign to them. Most people who are able to manifest just stumble upon a point that works, then manifest from there, and usually quite quickly move out of it back to a more stable position or the one everyone knows or is living from. Sometimes this happens intentionally but very often it’s just a lucky switch up in which circumstances aligned briefly to move them out of one reality and into another. That there are thousands perhaps millions of these points located within our luminous fibers is never talked about. Perhaps most famously is LSD’s ability to temporarily make the shift for you and to move you back to where your point is most stable when it wears off. New situations or locations can also temporarily move this point which is how people feel so sublime on vacation, but if they move to another country, the novelty wears off, not because the location has changed but because their point of awareness has gone back to the dull point it’s always been at. From another point you might see and experience that every moment is new and exciting, full of potential and possibilities no matter where you are residing, because where you are residing is always only within your point, it’s not an actual place in the world that exists separately from the point of awareness. This is utterly confusing because if you want to be in Europe, you can’t bring it to where you are, you must go through certain motions such as getting on a plane or ship first. There’s no way you’re going to trick your mind into thinking it is in Europe when it’s been living in Oklahoma for ten years or more. Trust me, I tried and nothing happened. If that were the case, then reality itself wouldn’t even be stable, it would be flip flopping all over the place and you wouldn’t even be able to live within it. So certain features remain stable even if the way you are experiencing doesn’t.

I have to say I had a certain fascination with politics, or maybe how society in general was working for the longest time, years really. I couldn’t stop looking at it and maybe asking, “Why this?”, or more accurately, “For fuck’s sake, why this?” I watched a guy who has recently become rather famous in his assessments and explanations of, “Why this?” He has something close to 75 hours of videos all talking about documented historical events, and explains how humanity went from this to that, and how it did, how this event shaped this war, or the movement of people and the arising of certain ideas or mental movements caused certain realities to become what today we call, “normal.” Basically, he explains power structures or influence dynamics within groups of people, how some groups could be overpowered or subdued and other ones would be strengthened or emboldened to make the rules for all the other ones. He basically dissects all countries, governments, and religions alike to paint a very realistic picture of humanity’s progress or downfall so far. Yeah, mostly downfall I’d say. His predictions for the future are not exactly warm and fuzzy. I have to say for a time I was very intrigued and devoured his videos as if they told a story that actually made perfect sense and maybe some of it did even if it lacked one thing, the actual Truth. For even if we know how one group was able to rise up over another for instance what advantages they had and how they had them, we still don’t know why they did what they are recorded as doing, for many have advantages and don’t do anything, while some with none, do plenty. Even if we speculate about their states of mind, can we say with any certainty how such a state of mind occurred to begin with? It might have never or it might have led instead to something completely different.

I would say always in uncertain times, times when political power fuels unrest among the masses of human bodies, it’s natural to search for answers or solutions to problems that never seem to go away. There is no denying the fact that human beings just in general if taken in at face value are mostly a sad lot. Not because there isn’t world peace, but because the average human life is really not truly worth living as we learn to do it. Too much is added now, and likewise left out for in one’s entire lifetime, one may not get rid of the first, nor be able to acquire what’s missing. Of course, human life is a rather delicate balance. Too much of one thing can put a strain on everything else and to strike an actual balance in one’s own life takes tremendous insight and often hours of contemplation. Nothing is gained here without struggle and in many ways, for as much as we complain about hardships, it’s our very comfort that stifles us the most sometimes. I think maybe I had to learn this the hard way. I had some idea of comfort in mind when I turned to awakening practices to begin with. I heard about the bliss and the relinquishing of control and thought, “Yeah, that’s for me. I want to live easy”, but then who doesn’t? No one can prepare anyone for life if you ask me. It can do what it wants with you at the drop of a hat. You can’t say it can’t because to live at all, you must know it already has. Safety and or some foolproof security is therefore always only ever an illusion we chase ever so stupidly and while our absurdities stare us in the face, we still deny them. Probably we always will.

And yet, over time, humanity will change positions. Parents and children do not inhabit the same position and never will. It is always slightly above or below or maybe to the side, but not the exact same point. The collective point of assembled reality will change yet again, and again, endlessly, forever. Some things that are called “normal” today will be seen as we now see some things that were called “normal” in the 1930’s, ridiculous, probably cruel, and shockingly so. At no point, is all lost though we may lose many lives through simple foolishness, human abilities will wane while others are strengthened, countries will vanish or be replaced with other ones, on and on it goes, the circus of life still continues. It will never make sense, not perfectly anyway, not from this level, not from this particular point. No one living in or from this can ever say why we are here. We will literally never know it. Even if we posit that in order to be aware, awareness needs something to be aware of, we can never know why it needs or wants to be aware. We can not even say that awarenesses needs or wants anything. I don’t think it does. I don’t think it cares what we do here to ourselves and others, not one bit. It is only I who cares how my life goes but to me that’s not a mistake. There’s no reason to be coldhearted or totally impersonal in my interactions with myself or dealings out in the world for if I am ever in need of any true comfort, it will always only be a matter of giving it to myself which is ironically the only way to encounter it over there. If we really want to live right, we must gift this life to ourselves, not as an accomplishment, or some lofty goal, but as a statement of fact that were it not for existence itself, we would not exist at all in any capacity. If we weight this fact against our lives and the shapes those lives take, against experience itself, we will have lost this gift completely, we will by design overlook it in favor of the ten million things, none of which we really know beyond our trained and conditioned understanding of what they are, which they are surely not.

Life is aliveness but when it becomes dependent on anything to bring it to life, to bring out this aliveness in some proper or expected way, it dies on the way out of us. As long as we measure anything in terms of value, we instantly kill not just it, this aliveness but ourselves in the process. By now, we are merely actors playing out a script we didn’t write, don’t understand, and secretly resent. That’s most people, at least in West, unless you visit a prison, or a suicide ward, you are talking to shadows pretending to be people. You know this because you know the game and how it has to be continuously played, not merely for profit or physical survival but because the alternative is too hard to take. Opening up pandora’s box brings monsters we are ill equipped to face or deal with so we don’t. We save it or bury it further down, until the day life deals us a blow which it will, it always does. At some point in time, the real story of our lives is sure to leak out of us, and that’s when we face ourselves, not as a show of strength or a test of our intelligence, but in that moment when you can no longer hold back the tears, not because life is ugly, but because you can see that which lies beneath it’s ugliness, and this is too beautiful to ignore. Your body can’t ignore it, your response then is not your own, but that of life, acting for its own sake. Then you are sure to realize that it’s been doing this very thing your whole life, and you just didn’t know it. An entire lifetime is really just a chance to shift your assemblage point to another spot on your luminous awareness configuration to produce a new type of awareness, indeed an assembled reality with different rules. Everything you do, or don’t do, think or don’t think, feel or don’t feel, is only ever geared towards that. It has nothing to do with anything else. Mind blowing. Every moment you are aware is another chance to move to a different reality. What takes persistence and patience is to stabilize within the new position. Instead we are constantly going back to what we know, since we see it all around us, and it feels so convincing. It couldn’t be some other way, unless it is. I think it is. I have been stabilizing my new position for years now, and I still fall back. If this process is anything, it is also persistent and we are at the mercy of not ourselves but it, forces we don’t know are all around us all the time. So where does that leave us then? I have no idea, your guess is as good as mine.