Month: May 2018

Solo trip

I trip in my room alone on a Friday night and make these discoveries. I look at my hand and say, where am I? In my mind in my brain? In my hand that I can see? Can you see me? I ask myself. I encourage my awareness to be open to sensory inputs other than just sight. Can you feel or hear me? I ask myself

I’ve studied myself all these years; I’ve studied all my individuations of time and space, just as I’ve studied my sensory inputs. It’s all sensory inputs.

My body is the small part of the physical word over which God has graciously granted me control.

I feel healthy and fine to not be my body or my brain. In other words, I am no longer worried about losing my identity, mostly because I feel now that my previous conception of my identity was wrong.

But I wonder why can I not access everything. Why can I not be a palm tree on an island I can’t see. I can certainly be myself, even when I close my eyes and plug my ears I still feel my hands. And when I open my eyes I am in some sense what I see. And when I unplug my eyes I am in some sense what I hear. But I am limited spatially to what I see and hear around me. And I am also limited temporally to what is around me at this time. I can extend elsewhere and elsewhen in my memory, but it is more vague. Can I make it more clear?

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Clarity

The world is laid open in brief moments of clarity. An ordinary shower faucet says to me, “How interesting?” I look at its ordinariness and respond silently, “Very.”

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What to do

When it came time to decide what to do,
I realized that everything I had already done
had led to where I was
and I liked where I was.

So I kept on going, 
and here I am, 
having decided that
what I'll do
is what I've done.
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I fail

In my meditation, I cut through my shallow purposes, and realize that time and time again, I set goals and do not achieve them. For example, tonight around seven o’clock I started to read East of Eden by Steinbeck. I promised myself that I would read fifty pages before I went to sleep. I read six pages. Now it’s almost ten o’clock. I’ve just had dinner and I’m getting tired. I think to myself, maybe I’ll just go to sleep and read more of the book tomorrow.

Similarly, my later goals have slipped away. This happens for two reasons. One, I lose sight of my ‘why,’ my deeper purpose. Two, I rationalize that the goal is not essential to my purpose, or that it can be adjusted in timeline or magnitude without harming my progress toward my purpose. I rationalize that I need to be relaxed and healthy, not always so determined and gritty. I give into my desires for sleep, pleasure, and social life, instead of staying committed. I allow short-term feelings to supersede my long-term goals. Three, my goals are not specific enough. For example, today after a 7-mile run, I’m tired and feel like laying in bed and reading. This isn’t necessarily against my progress because I haven’t set a specific goal for today. I need to set specific goals for Saturday and Sunday.

Why do I want to write a best-selling novel? How do I do it, and do my current goals and habits align with this?

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Music high

I let music take me, I’m high. I know the higher I get, I risk being lower later, just by contrast. It’s fair, I believe. I’m thankful for the high. I must remember later to be thankful for the low.

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Dionysian flow

Sometimes I let myself fall into the Dionysian flow, when I return to my true nature as just part of a larger reality, floating along according to cause and effect. Only when I am Apollonian, focusing on my self-created structure, can I affect my life like a god.

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Morning

It’s on these mornings that I can’t get back to sleep, and must wake up to live.

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Why fear hell?

Does a skilled meditator have any reason to fear hell?

I remember challenging my teacher in theology class at my Catholic high school. I asked him, “If the wafer and wine really is the body and blood of God, and the congregation believed it, wouldn’t they grovel on their hands and knees, even through broken glass and hot coals, just to be in the presence of God, and even more to consume him?” I remember also asking my mother, “Do you think people at church might fear hell more than they love heaven?”

I sometimes ask myself why I don’t go to mass anymore. I think according to Pascal’s wager, if there is only the slightest chance that it is infinitely true, then doesn’t it make rational sense to believe?

But this was before I started to learn of the East, and began to have firsthand experiences of the One and Consciousness and a higher reality that made itself known to me personally. So now I wonder, “Does a skilled meditator have any reason to fear hell?” If we carry on living in our bodies after death and experience hell this way, the same way that we experience pain here on earth, wouldn’t a skilled meditator, given enough time, simply reach nirvana and remove himself from his senses and the pain of hell and never return?

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Muay Thai

Mark told me that Muay Thai fighters are always relaxed until they strike. They conserve energy this way, only releasing with each punch and kick. Dave taught me how to punch correctly, keeping my shoulders down and relaxed until I’m ready to draw energy up from twisting my foot, through my rotating hip and then through my throwing shoulder. Stay relaxed with your shoulders down until you’re ready, he said.

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What to study

When it came time to decide what to study, I thought of mainly two options: the human species and the rest of the natural world. At first, I wanted to master the whole of everything, to know math and biology and natural history. I said to myself, “Our lives are determined by the world in which we live, let me learn it.”

But each discipline uncovered a vast abyss that refused to be mastered. I could not learn all of math. I could not learn even the full life processes of a fruit fly. Or the recorded events throughout all of history as they actually happened. I felt small and ungodly to not be able to know, especially at this time in history when to know is so valued.

I focused my efforts and what seemed to matter most. What mattered most, objectively, I did not know. What I did know, or at least so I believe, is that I am, ironically, because I think. And because I am, and I am what I am, I thought that is was what I will study, myself and my species. This is the abyss, which I have found worth the time to struggle to know. Because even though I may not be able to master all of it, or even a tiny fraction of it, every small smidgen of progress is a journey and adventure into myself and the people I love.

I used to think I needed to know more truths to make more money, but money is a man-made thing and truth is not; what I need to know more of is man.

And so too with love: I used to think I needed to get stronger and more attractive and richer; but I really needed only to know more of love itself.

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Destination: Spain

I left San Francisco when I was doing just fine in the ways of money and moving up in the world and all the other things you would expect of a working young yuppie in America. But it was time that I make some progress of my own in the ways that my books told me were classically important, rather than just what was going on at the time and what everyone else was doing. So I set out for Spain.

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Death

We weren’t dying or anything. But it felt like we were. It felt like death was coming a lot sooner than anybody was expecting it.

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Healthy

See all the thoughts and dreams you are having now that you are sober and healthy.

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Modes

I experience life in varying modes—once, so slowly and beautifully, healthy and paying attention to everything; another, so fast and blurry, sweating and barely able to keep up and survive. They come and go, these modes. I wonder about people who live whole lives in one mode, if anyone does. Especially anyone who has lived a whole life in the slow and beautiful mode. I’d like to live that way.

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Dream of the Deep

I had a dream that it was monday morning and I was riding passenger in my mom’s white suburban and all the kids were in the backseats. it was winter.    

I was sitting in the passenger seat and thinking of a wild party that I’d been to that weekend. This was an example of a dream that spanned multiple days and nights and I could remember. As I was sitting there in my own world of thought and not paying attention, my mom put the car in drive and instead of putting her arm on the back of my seat to turn around and reverse the car out of my grandparents’ long blacktop driveway, she pulled forward and left onto the snow-covered lawn.

I asked her, casually, “What are you doing?” She responded, casually, “Getting the snow off the tires.” Now, this doesn’t make any sense. At the time, it made perfect sense. I only replied, “Be careful not to pull too far forward.”

We started into the grass, slow at first. But my grandparents’ lawn was sloped, and we picked up speed. I sat up in my seat and looked through the windshield. We were sliding forward. My mom no longer had control of the car. I started to become slightly worried. I thought we might crash into the thin wall of trees ahead. And we did. But this didn’t stop the car. And that was when I saw the icy frozen pond. And we were still picking up speed. And before I could think of anything else—to jump out, or save my siblings. We slid with such speed into the pond and then it was all so sudden and the icy water was over us with immense pressure and I looked upward out of my window to the icy blue above, unable to open the door from the pressure as we went deep deep deep.

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Beloved

There comes a time when your beloved changes their name in your head. At first they are, “name” and it is filled with bits of information and memories: you met her at a coffee shop, her dad does this, she said this the first time you met, and so forth.

But when you really love her, and you’ve slept with her for the first time, and spent time together, then her name takes on its own meaning in your language. Just like a tree is “tree” or chocolate is “chocolate,” she is her name and nobody else will ever have that name in your mind.

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Forward

My anxiety about failure and fear of death keeps me awake and drives me forward.

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Saturday

It got very quiet last Saturday night. I realized I didn’t have much to do. It was nice outside at four o’clock in the afternoon so I went out on my balcony and laid there for about a half hour. Then I came inside and read a chapter on the couch. Then I laid in bed and watched some videos about fighting and getting in shape. Then it was time to take a shower and get ready for the night. But I realize now that instead of thinking about what I really should have been doing all afternoon, I let my mind just barely avoid it by finding the next lazy thing.

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Balcony

I lay out on my balcony, perfectly fine and alone, minding my own business. A pretty girl steps out onto the balcony across from mine and robs me of my peace. I can’t just lay here anymore. Now I’m thinking of her and how to get her attention. I imagine telling her my room number and her coming over and getting into bed with me. I can’t think of anything else. I have to go back inside.

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