What crazy things
We wonder
When we are alone
In our minds
What impossibilities
We figure feasible
For the satisfaction
Of our fancies
What horrors
We conjure up
Only to have
Fodder for fear
What dreams
To hope
Especially
When we have none
August 07, 2021 at 09:53PM
I bring the full weight of my consciousness to bear on my own existence in moments of what would otherwise be boredom when I should really be meditating but my Western engine mind just can’t stop revving, solving problems until they are all solved and then creating new problems to solve, like sudoku and crossword puzzles.
Originally written: April 30, 2021 @ 11:11 a.m.
I sit on the edge of the bath tub with my elbows on my knees. My spine bends like a cattail in the wind. My head sags like a water droplet just barely hanging on to the underside of a wood railing in the rain. The whole world tips up on its side, and almost falls over completely, crashing into black, as the blood rushes into my head. One elbow slips from my knee and the cattail bends deeper at the waist as the water droplet has almost too much mass to hold on. My head spills out like a bucket into the bath water.
Originally written on: September 14, 2020
In the morning my theories about myself and the world and how the two relate and interact seem to be strong and resolute and I dare even use the dread-word “right.” But then the day comes along to muck that all up with its messiness and make me feel wrong again.
I am learning from my spiritual studies that that feeling of rightness may not come from the math and science and test-taking rightness I have known from school. It may be closer to the metaphysical truth of all of existence really being One and myself being part of it and feeling closer to that One when I am in the all-black, silent, unconscious night, and farther away from that One when I am in the differentiated, working world, feeling separate, more like a link in the food chain, and less like a drop in the ocean.
If you don’t like the way the world looks, lay down on your back. Look up at the sky, and see if it looks any better. Even if you’re inside, look up at the ceiling.
It’s the same concept concept as traveling. Changing your perspective changes everything. Laying down on your back can be just as good as drinking a beer.
I know things now
But I fear to forget
So I write them, recite them
Read them over and over
And carry a head on my shoulders
Full of the past
Like a traveler’s trunk
With too many things from home
On a journey to a place
Where there is no return
Back to how
Things were before
You seem to think
You need to think
About something
All the time
Thinking man
Think as you can
You just can’t
Think it all
I close my eyes and lose track of the reality that returns when I open them again. Standing in the shower, light-headed; I almost fall over. I close my eyes again. The longer I look at the black in the backs of my eyelids, the more animated it becomes, with figures I might learn to name if I were to look long enough. The black doesn’t always strike me. Sometimes I close my eyes and open them without noticing. The world returns and it makes sense to me, seeing again the same thing that I saw just before blinking. Other times, the black catches me, at first in its simplicity, in a reprieve from the physical world, full of complex optic details. Then these animated figures start to appear, moving with a life of their own. I wonder if we could adapt to that blackness, given enough time to evolve and get used to it. What would that black, close-eyed life be like?
I make these
Small calculations
For my chances
Of survival
Like whether to walk
On this side
Of the sidewalk
Or that side
And wonder whether
The time I take
To make
These calculations
Is greater than
Or equal to
The time I save
Surviving
Now I remember why I have forgotten why it is that I do what I do. Upon realizing recently, that I do not know why it is that I do what I do, I remembered this. Because I went about trying to figure out again, why I do what I do. Which is a funny thing, because I have been doing things all this time, but I cannot remember exactly why.
If I think of any particular thing I’ve done I can usually come up with a reason. For example, I ate breakfast this morning because I was hungry. But for all my decisions strung together, I can’t put my finger on a common theme, just disjointed ad hoc reasons.
So I started to think about it. I thought for a long time and took down notes and read some passages out of books. That is when I remembered why I have forgotten. I am not saying I know all. I do not.
But it seems there are some grim answers if you look hard enough, about why we are and what we should do. Upon thinking this thought, I was very depressed. And felt that I had experienced that depression before. I had, I knew it.
And that is why I have forgotten why I do what I do. Because at the point of my last depressions having stumbled upon these grim thoughts, I blindfolded myself and spun myself around and whispered a Truth in my own ear and pointed in a direction and said to myself, “Run.”
And so I ran. It took me a couple years to realize I couldn’t remember why I was running. So I’ll spin myself around again and whisper another Truth in my ear and set myself off running again.
White tiles
Take time to turn
Into something
Noticeable
On the shower walls
My fingers rake
My wet hair
Not even washing
No shampoo
My mind
Is someplace else
In fact, many
Other places
At once
Until I open my eyes
And see white
Tile walls
And return
Realizing
I’ve been rinsing
My hair
For some time now
I don’t know
How long
Eating hot soup
On a cold day
I have to blow
On each spoonful
To cool it down
Which gives me time
To look out the window
And think
Between bites
Lying
On the floor
Looking
At the ceiling
Seems to be
More simple
Than the life
I left outside
Needing
This nothingness
To wash away
My mind
I see age, and it makes me want to live faster. I see an old man with long white hair in the coffee shop. He walks with a cane and holds onto the counter. It seems like he has trouble seeing too. I wonder what it would be like to lose my own sight. I think of all the things I could no longer do. I must do them now! Quick, before it’s too late. Run! Get up. What are you doing sitting down in a coffee shop? You must use your youthful abilities while you still can.
I am iffy
After a nap
Staring wide eyed
Woken
Too soon
From deep sleep
Jumped up
And almost fell over
Holding
My hands out
As stabilizers
Stumbling
Bumping
My shoulders
Against door frames
And hallway walls
Without my wits
About me
At the beach
With my friends
I went away
On my own
Over to the cove
And found
A little laying spot
And so I laid
Until I got caught
In a thinking hole
Then I came back
For my friends
To help me find
My lost mind
With my fingers
Interlaced
Over my chest
Lying down
Breathing deeply
Through my nose
I can feel
The rise and fall
Of it all
As I mediate, I stand with the point of my nose touching a surface that is black as night. The surface is like a wall that extends as far as I can see in all directions. If I only look forward, there is only this black. If I look side to side, I can still see some of the world outside of this black in my peripherals. I can see some light and non-black colors reflected on its surface. This is at the beginning. For as I breathe, with my eyes focused forward, looking “at” the black, I start to see “into” the black. Then my nose starts to permeate the black surface, as I take long, deep, and even breaths. The non-black colors in my peripherals narrow on each side of my field of vision until my eyes are completely submerged in the black. My nostrils and mouth and breathing are also in the black now. My whole focus becomes this black world that is beyond the surface, like it is to see the surface of water from far away and only be able to see it as a sheet of one color, until you are submerged beyond the surface and see all the sea life and depth underneath which contribute to the surface color. In the black I start to see mirages – abstract shapes of varying colors and textures, often moving off into one direction and eventually out of sight, like odd, slow shooting stars. I am not sure whether these are real or just my mind playing tricks on me. Perhaps memory scars of the lighted world that I left behind the black surface. I strive to step deeper into the black, but it is a viscous atmosphere, even more so than sludge, like rock that I can only move through very slowly, and by remaining focused on my breath. Otherwise, if I began to lose focus, I am pulled back out of the black. Sometimes I teeter back and forth, on the verge of the black, at the point where my eyes are just on the surface, and some of the lighted world remains on my peripherals. I wonder what it would be like to step all the way into the black and then turn completely around, so that instead of looking into the black from the outside, I would be looking back out at the colored world from the inside, with my nose pressed against the surface of a multi-colored world. But that would take much focus and time, to step into the black world and turn completely around. It might take days of meditation.
to sit still
and stay focused
with coffee
in my veins
is the test
of a mental task
wanting
to get physical
but needing
to look, count
and read things
sitting in the car
thinking
of my own problems
realizing
the driver
is patting his knee
and must also
have things to do
other than drive
and another rider
gets in
out of breath
and must have
been rushed
this morning
soothing
to think of others
and take a break
from myself
i talk in twos
making it simple
as if this
is not that
and that’s the end
only ours
and other
without parsing
the other
just not ours
easier to see
binary
and easier
to decide
but really
many more
than just two
most often
let it be there
push it as you will
into was
but let it be
short of memory
presently perceived
even then
when is it real
synapses firing
when is it real
i wonder
what makes it
what we’re after
what substitute
will suffice
like a dream
or a drug
lying to oneself
going insane
are just as well
in some cases
who’s to say
otherwise
supplanting
their reality
for another’s
who’s to say
when it’s real
a vivid dream
reminds me
of something i did
a while back
even though
i never did
actually do it,
it might as well
be the same
—a memory
misremembered
and a reality
recently forgotten
i see how
these things
would happen
now
having seen
what i hadn’t
when i wondered
how
these things
could
everything you think makes an impact. a thought is created when you think, and that thought does not go away just when you stop thinking it. the thought enters your subconscious and stays their in your mind, manifesting itself in dreams, body language, intuition, etc. influencing your thoughts and actions subconsciously.
the words in the music you hear, in the books you read, and from conversations you eavesdrop on; the things you see looking out the car window, on the television screen, in your own living space. all this enters your mind through your senses.
a dream, for example, causes a chain reaction, where you wake up with the feeling of the dream, whether that is horror from violence or fear from losing a loved one, or joy from achievement or love from a dream of passion. these dreams are grown from a seed planted in the subconscious by the once conscious mind.
not this one
painted on my eyes
a realist landscape
passed through
a watercolor filter
behind closed eyelids
maintained by some
abstract light
getting through
and some memory
refining the edges
i get more and more
up and outside
realizing
there is a mind
that decides
and sets the body
in motion
and the body then
runs along
until the mind
thinks up
something different
the realization
being that
the mind and body
though supposed
to belong
to the same
are often different
for the mind
that would decide
often does
at first at least
but then becomes
affected
by what the body does
and begins
to think a little differently
tried to rise
but in that time
that i decided to wake
after i’d gotten
my head off the pillow
but sometime before
i could get my feet
on the floor
my body pushed out
of my tired mind
that waking thought
and here i am now
finally waking
but sometime after
when i first
tried to rise
i wonder if
feeling is the same
as being felt
i wonder if
movie actors have time
to be themselves
i wonder if
those who run the world
know that they do
i wonder if
work will go by
fast or slow
i wonder if
our landlord will finally
fix our fridge today
i wonder if
baby
really loves me
i wonder if
the company
will make it
i wonder if
my brother
will be alright
i wonder if
sleeping with baby
makes my back
better or worse
i wonder if
or when
my body will start to fail
like my dad’s
i wonder if
my dad was like me
when he was young
i wonder if
my mom
still has hope
i wonder if
i’m doing the right thing
i wonder if
i’ll feel the same way
when i’m older
the world is shaking moving
making faces at me
in the candle light
the tile floor gyrates
beneath my feet
the little white
hexagon tiles
each bordered
by gray grout
pulse back and forth
confusing my sense
of where my feet bottoms
meet the ground
mocking my
impaired mental state
a mind
behind
closed eyes
wondering
where
in the world
the body
has gone
something about
having your head
under the faucet
and shower water
rinsing out
the shampoo
brings every thought
you’ve ever had
rushing forth
at once
on there
open wise
there’s not
much more
than
a closed mind
you’d be
surprised
contrary
to
the wide claim
into a cerebral space regardless of what the senses say where a thought can start itself like a fire without fuel telling stories with pieces from different puzzles and letting a close eyed wanderer leave the necessary time and place of a body into a directionless mind travel that starts and sustains itself even dreaming when the body rests
i think about
screwy things
like nails
nailed into
the insides
of pipes
that touch
whatever
the insides
of the pipes
touch
like drinking
water and
anything else
that shouldn’t
get rusted
sometimes i step
up onto a chair
just to get into
a new headspace
a little higher
abstract rubbing
closed eye patterns
seeing shapes and colors
that remind and then melt
into memories and draw
the attention away
from eyelid backs
and drift off
right after thinking
of nothing
then something
pops up
so thinking of it
for a while
until gradually
thinking one
after the other
before remembering
to think of nothing
back and forth
like this
until the somethings
grow shorter
and the nothing
takes over
i get out and into
a slow mind
before returning
to a fast body
with feet
moving somewhere
that a slow mind
has forgotten
thinking with mind’s
crossed eyes
between worlds
that see and
worlds that think
not knowing what
separates a dream
misremembered
from a reality
recently forgotten
i know i shouldn’t but i do it anyway – what really goes into this thought? do we know that we shouldn’t? or do we do it because we’re not really sure? and some feeling in the moments tells us to do it. so we go ahead without really taking the time to flesh out whether we know that we should or shouldn’t. partly because we don’t always have enough time to think about it. and even if we did maybe we still couldn’t know.
i was lying in bed
at 12:45 at night
and my roommate had his TV playing just a little too loud
and i started to think about the type of people that have TVs in their rooms
and i said to myself i’m not that kind of person
but then i thought maybe i’d like it, to have a TV
so i started to imagine having a TV in my room
then i wondered what if i were to get sick of it, what would i do with it?
and i imagined throwing it off my four story balcony
but you would have to be careful not to hit someone bellow
and there might be a blast radius
so i thought about how wide that blast radius might be
and i thought about whether it mattered from how high up the TV was thrown
and then i thought no it doesn’t because of some physics lesson that everything falls at the same speed
but no i said that’s momentum’s that’s the same for everything (even though i was wrong)
and even though the momentum stays the same the speed increases because the momentum is adding to it
then i thought about the symbol for momentum from my high school physics class
meters per second squared, but why the squared
then i think about how it’s the meters per second of change in the meters per second of speed
and i thought of how the units cancel out to get the squared
and then i said woah
and that was the end of the rabbit hole
Experiencing what is, thinking of what will be, wondering how what is will affect what will be, letting your thoughts about what will be define your experience of what is, letting your feelings about what you are experiencing be good only in the case that they are good for what will be, only allowing yourself to be a certain way, which is to say only allowing what there is to be a certain way, as you experience what is, and making these requirements for yourself based on what you want yourself to be at some point in the future, which is to say making requirements for what will be in the future—in other words, trying to control the future. All the time doing this in the present, to manipulate what will be in the future, instead of just allowing the present to be itself, and thus looking deeper into the experience of the present with your full self that also exists in that present, letting water run together with water, instead of always focusing the attention of your present self on thoughts of the future, letting oil try but fail to run together with water. Future thoughts are merely experiences of a reality that has yet to pass and thus are less clear and beautiful than the thoughts of a present reality that exists right in front of your nose and overwhelms your appetite for attention over and over again if you really look deep enough and never run out of things to see.
Like just now, I am high, unable to function too well in terms of what my experience will demand of me in the future, especially when I have to return to work, but I don’t have to work for four days, and all that my present experience demands of me is that I relax, and so I ask myself, why let thoughts of the future change my experience of the present? Especially when my current state of being high is actually better suited for this present reality and will certainly change, many times perhaps, before the future experience of going back to work according to which I am now judging my present self and for which I now prematurely try to change my present self, and as a result would make my present self more ill-suited for the present experience in favor of being better-suited for a future experience. Why does that make sense? It does not, I don’t think.
Or, with my writing, I paused because I was going to write something but forgot, so I stopped writing, and started thinking of what I had forgotten, trying to remember, thinking of what the writing would be if I could only remember what I had forgotten, thinking of the future of the writing and ignoring what I was thinking in the present, restricting my experience of my present thought process so that I could pull a thought forward from the past in the interest of a future version of the piece that I had conceived of only in my mind.
you create these theories about yourself and take them as truth before they’re tested; with only so much time to test, however, you don’t really have a choice. but you do have a choice to remain humble and remember that most of your theories are untested, especially when someone challenges you with good intentions.
THIS IS IT, THIS IS IMPORTANT – control your mind, do not let it run rampant with its thought, in idleness focus only on the breath, focus also on the beauty outside of yourself and on people especially.
This is the key to avoiding the depression of your ego trapped in your monkey mind; mindfulness is everything, consciousness is everything.
Remember what it was like to be focused outside of yourself on your environment at 2:30 in the morning and then what joy came from opening your window and smelling fresh air, let that gratitude and focus exist outside of yourself in the fresh air.
Watch as thoughts flow through your mind like a river, in between asleep and awake. You don’t remember them; not even conscious that you’re doing the thinking.
It’s all to affect your consciousness—whether by moving about in physical space to change the inputs available to your senses; or closing your eyes and plugging your ears and nose to ignore the outside and focus on what goes on silently inside; or taking drugs to create something that otherwise wouldn’t be there or to affect the way your senses perceive.
If you’re not satisfied with the consciousness that exists just laying in bed in your apartment so you get up and go for a walk (your consciousness takes in the stretching of your muscles) and you get to the park and take in the greenery that surrounds the trail (your nose smells the damp November leaves and you even bend down to let your fingertips feel them)—you’ve chosen how to affect your consciousness with all the physical possibilities available to you.
Or, take the same situation where you’re alone in your apartment and not enjoying it, you could also escape it by departing mentally while remaining there physically, if you were to crawl off your bed and sit into meditation on the floor. Focus on your breath, forget the feeling of lethargy, forget everything else your senses are telling you. Go to a memory if you’d like, go to a created fantasy world, or go nowhere, to nothingness.
Still another option, in the apartment, you could crawl out of bed and take the bong off the counter and, without having to do much work yourself, let drugs artificially take you somewhere else.
If I don’t take time to stop and think and write things down, my mind get cluttered, like a garage where you throw all the extra stuff that you don’t want in your front living but you’re not quite ready to throw away in the trash.
At some point it will become unmanageable where you can’t even open the garage door or the garage just becomes a part of the house where you don’t go anymore and start to miss the whole point of having a purgatory in your mind where you can save some ideas that might be good when you look at them later, but if you just let it build into a clutter that you’ll never go through then you’d be better off just throwing everything out in the first place and focusing more on the simple and superficial living room.
I’m more concerned with what is visceral and common rather than with what is scientifically correct but esoteric. You can throw bigger parties with the visceral commoners.
Recently I’ve noticed I use words at the wrong times. I am self-conscious about sounding unintelligent. But sometimes I still can’t help but think it sounds musical, or that it makes sense in some odd way. When I look up the word in the dictionary, I’m usually wrong. I know what I’m trying to say, but we’ve agreed on the dictionary, so I have to abide by that if my intention is communication. I consider a world my only intention is communicating with myself. What would that sound like? I’m sure that crazy people sound perfectly sensical to themselves. They’ve just stopped checking themselves with the dictionary, so their words are only their own.
At some point soon I need to return to using language the right way. I’m too young to go so deep into poetry like this. I need to stay close to everyone else and their language. I love humans too much to go off on my own. Not yet.
I feed contents into my mind like ingredients into a pot of stew. They mix and mingle and seep into one another. As long as the ingredients are each individually appetizing, the whole stew will turn out.
Similarly, poetry that visits me in the night or whole stories that tell themselves in a daydream or bits of arguments in philosophy that make sense all of a sudden—these are composites of my readings, experiences, and thoughts.
The order in which these regurgitate in my writings doesn’t so much matter as does the quality of each individual mental input so that no matter what combination, my writings are composites of ingredients that are high-quality individually.
I wouldn’t have wanted to think of it, had I any hope of experiencing it again in the real world. Without such hope, all I had was the memory. I know to avoid living in the past; in this case, however, even a hazy and abstract semblance was better than any present reality. Laying in bed at night I played it over like a movie on the back my eyelids, each time it became more distorted. Still, there was nothing out in the city that could be any better for me. Until now, I’ve finally forgotten enough, so that my memory is not even of the actual occurrence, but more so of my longing for it. Only recently have some present realities presented themselves as superior alternatives.
“I have a bad memory,” I tell people. Nowadays I’m better at organizing my writing than my own memory. I have to write everything down or I forget. So when I need to remember something I search my phone or my notebooks instead of my own mind.
It’s a bunch of thoughts fighting for my attention. They all collide heads and explode and nobody wins. So I end up thinking of nothing all the time, until you ask me and I don’t know what to say. Like a classroom when all the students raise their hand at once and the teacher doesn’t know who to call on.
I try not to think of it and reconstruct it in my own mental. I used to do this, reading and rearranging according to what I thought would be optimal. Performing my own mental surgery to rewire my brain.
Lately I try to let all that happen naturally in the physical. What my body takes in: what it eats, touches, hears, sees; how it breathes, exercises, works plays; who it loves and fights; where it spends its time in nature and the city. All these exposures subject my mind to certain natural rewirings via the physical inputs of my body in space and time.
If you believe that reality was created this way for a reason, and our hearts and souls were put here for a reason, it is not far off to believe that if you do the right things starting with the physical, then all the intended effects will flow up through the mental and to the spiritual.
Just by breathing and watching, so much can be done, even more than by a mathematician who tries to work out all the figures on his whiteboard or a guru who tries to memorize the spiritual texts. All that is higher is there in the base physical, too, ready to be absorbed by simple bodily actions.
It is when I remember, imagine, or hope that I am putting ideas into my mind that break the connection between my body and mind in the present physical reality. Ideally, always, I am thinking of what my body is presently experiencing so that I can listen to the story that the physical world is trying to tell me, without trying to piece together my own story from the confused fragments in my mind. A full cohesive and linear story is written into a lifetime in the physical world.
In the middle of the night, I can’t control my intellect. Healthier, I’ve found, just to follow along where my dreams and subconscious ideas have gone on their own throughout the sleeping night, like a child with my hand held by my parent, I don’t tantrum or run in another direction.
Often what is there is already there so that when I wake up in the middle of the night and start to write something exactly like this, all I’ve to do is start with the first words in my mind and the rest come tumbling out after due to no extra effort of my own. It’s all from what’s been done in my subconscious between 10pm and 4:30am.
Whereas the weirdest part, irksome even for a writer that tries to get down what’s good, is just how much I don’t recall upon waking, how many dreams I don’t remember but lived like my real waking life nonetheless. These forgotten dreams affect me surely but I do not know them firsthand. All I can do is write what there is and go back to sleep and wait for my parent to wake me again with her wisdom.
I lay awake and suppose there isn’t anything I could have done differently with a day like this one which happened to be full of all the things with which a day is usually filled except for the feeling that anything was really done that hadn’t been done before.
That feeling irks the god in me. I let it go; content to lay here in my bed at night and breathe it all away. Tomorrow is a new day and my memory has gotten so bad recently that I rarely remember what I was worrying about the day before. I was worried about this until I realized that most of my problems aren’t really worth solving. They’ll sort themselves out or come up again slightly more dire further down the road and I’ll have to deal with them then but there are only a few of these that come up again.
Most of my problems don’t need dealing with right away. It’s only that other people don’t have it so good that irks me about this. Not everyone can lay up in their bed and just breathe and be safe and fed. So sometimes I think I’ve worked out a good system for dealing with my own problems but then I think I better get started on everyone else’s.
It gets messy when you consider some people create their own problems. It’s the ones that really had no choice that I want to help first. But then again I consider maybe the people who create their own problems don’t have a choice either.
K said, “I’m getting anxiety again.”
“About what?” I asked.
K looked at me annoyed. “I don’t know, that’s what anxiety is!”
I identified with my mental either because my body was not great enough to satisfy my god complex or because of the idea that my physical self was not my true being. Now I discover the spiritual and find that even my mental is probably not my true being. Still I persist in my mental identity, probably because of my god complex.
I am 23 and just now realizing how dynamic my body is. I can completely destroy it and return to health in just a few days of good habits. Or I can build it up and make it strong and destroy it in a short time. Same with my mind. I can be so stupid and forgetful in a moment and then so brilliant and creative in the next. The effects of drugs have influenced these thoughts I think.
I can recreate a child-like enamoredness by pretending that I know nothing and treating all sensory inputs as novelties. I remember nostalgic moments and ask myself, why am I so fond of them? They were new in the moment. I knew less about the world. So I try to go into experiences saying wow and ahhh and asking everyone, why? And saying ohhh when they answer. Like a child.
The long and pedantic words are not really the big ones. It is the words that are short and simple and well-known that are big, swollen with the meaning of a thousand tongues that have touched them. I read a word “pulviscular” recently. When i looked it up online, the only evidence of the word being used was from the original text where I found it. How is this supposed to mean anything to a reader? Other than what she finds when she opens up the dictionary to seek out the word and then defines it in terms of the other smaller, simpler words that she has known from mnemonic context. It is these short and stubby words most often used that have swollen fat and convey the most meaning. It is the complex and haughty words that are rarely used which must draw their meaning from the short and stubby words that are truly the big ones.
I used to be critical of those who would claim to think of great thoughts but then say, “I just can’t articulate them.” I used to think that they didn’t really think great thoughts at all, they just wanted people to think they did, without having the obligation of proving it via articulation. But now I believe that these people really did have great thoughts. I believe that they were thinking of the ineffable and universal truths, truths that cannot be articulated in our empirical world. Truths like the Dionysian musical mood and the way that love feels. But these are not the truths that are valued in this world, so those that can think and feel great thoughts but can’t articulate them, these people are treated dubiously by the rest of the empirical world. Many of these must be the great artists. Those who were forced by their genius into outlets that were not conventional or orthodox. But what else would we have them do! There were no other vehicles from the other worlds, of which they thought (or more accurately, felt and believed), to our world here. It is the people who have the gift practical thought and articulation that thrive in the empirical world where they know how to speak the languages—mathematics, science and all other studies of the natural world—that hold sway over cause and effect.
I remember the times that a name was “on the tip of my tongue,” as they say. I remember ideas that I had in the shower but forgot to write down after I got out and dried off. I remember what it’s like to be in bed and in love, but not really. I really only remember the generals, and not nearly everything. I really only remember that I have forgotten.
I am amazed by the diversity of my experiences over the span of just a few days. I am healthy then sick, satisfied then wanting, in touch then out of it, hungry for love and people then alone and fine with it. The only consistency is that I am watching always. Now I question even that, for if I weren’t watching, would I know I wasn’t? I can’t know i I missed something if I did. So maybe then: I am watching then not watching, until I am watching again.
I get a mental framework to really conceptualize the world so I can make some progress and talk about it, but then all of a sudden I’m thinking only in terms of the framework and missing other things.
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.
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.
It is difficult to truly love when still attached to the ego. Because the ego is motivated by itself. The highest love from the ego is what Rand describes: an acknowledgment of value in the beloved, based on the lover’s value system. But you see how this is necessarily self-motivated.
In other words, “I” have this need for love, and it is specific to my own philosophical values, so that the highest love of which “I,” in the sense of my own ego, am capable, is to seek out the “you” which most perfectly satisfies my philosophical value system.
This, is really only an intellectual graduation from its physical antecedent in that we are sexually attracted to the mate that is best suited for our evolutionary value system, i.e., most likely to produce offspring that survive and excel in the physical world.
However, when one comes unattached from the ego, and finds oneself rooted as part of the whole One, it becomes unnecessary to concentrate and channel love through this one particular, justified, and logical Randian framework—albeit, this framework seems to be the highest love on the mental plane, and therefore of the Western world, in the sense that it is at least not random, and the greatest thing one can achieve mentally is to be right, and insofar as we say that what is “right” in regards to human decisions is what is rational, i.e., what is “best” in the sense that it produces the max utility for said human, and utility is relative to the desires and the intellectual value system of said human, then we can call this the highest love in the same way that we would say economically that a perfect buyer and seller have met in the marketplace and found a sort of synergy to produce the most value and therefore are motivated and self-interested in a very logical way to “stay together” and not buy from or sell to anyone else in the market. Still, this is a lower love than one unattached from the ego.
When we detach from the ego, we gain access to a much higher and “bigger” love, whereby we are no longer the same “I” attached just to our one body, mind, and soul with a particular set of interests and values all within our one self. We have now graduated to what seems to be our truest self as part of the One—all of creation as one interconnected living organism—whereby we tap into a much larger need and ability when it comes to love in that we are part of the motivation system that rules everything, which is motivated to love everything, and therefore unlocks us from the pigeon-holed Randian mental love and gives us both the power and desire to express a much “larger” love unconditionally to everyone and everything.
Rand was on the right track when she wrote in The Fountainhead, “To say ‘I love you’ one must first know how to say the ‘I.'” She understood the necessity of knowing ourselves in order to love anyone else. But the Randian “self” is solipsistic, and unaccommodating of a metaphysical reality with connections between us all that make us all part of the same entity, and thus makes possible this “larger” love.
I am starting to “see,” literally, the variability in my mindfulness. My vision sharpens and dulls as I watch the picture in front of my eyes becomes less or more blurry.
And the pictures in my mind tradeoff with the sharpness I see in the picture of reality, like my mental images are holographically printed over what I see of the real world.
For example, I see my mother and wonder who will take care of her when she is older; even though, in the present reality, I am holding a half-eaten sandwich at lunchtime. I have entirely forgotten about it and replaced it with the mental image of my mother and the emotions that came along with thinking of her.
Until, of a sudden, I think to myself, “I am not being mindful.” Or, “I am not present.” Or something else to remind me of my present and physical state, so that I really start to “see” again, and register the picture of my hand holding a sandwich, as the mental idea of my mother floats away.
My mental meditation is similar to my spiritual. For mental, I make coffee and sit to read; for spiritual, I light a candle and sit to breathe.
For mental, I watch the words and count the pages; for spiritual, I watch the gates of my nostrils and count the breaths.
For mental, I arrive at a place, inspired and thinking, like my mind takes a step up, into a plateau on a higher intellectual level, where I am free to move about with increased brain function, pulling memories from this and that book, making them debate one another, picking up the winner and putting it down in my own words, writing more and more notes in the book’s margins, until there is too much and I must move onto my own blank pages that I fill with what seems to fill the gaps between the books I have read so far, though my fillings may, unbeknownst to me, live in a book I have not yet read.
For spiritual, I arrive at a similar place, after having watched my breath for some time, I can see the candle’s dance play through my eyelids, I make this my drishti and watch until my senses let go, and now travel to a plateau through my third eye where I can play without a sense of space or time.
After yoga, in shavasana, my mind is free to move about its memories. I sit at my desk in the office and hold an orange. I walk down the stairs to the basement of my childhood home and step out the glass door to the backyard. Everything is so clear, as if I were really there, and my eyes might open to find my body in shavasana just as easily as they would open to find any of these other realities.
I play games with my mind. Young and western, a student of philosophy in particular, my physical self is pushed forward by my mental. Running on the treadmill, I chase after a goal: a certain distance in a certain time. Until I realize I can certainly achieve it; in fact, I am almost there, and my body is not tired yet.
So I reset the goal, and reset my mind to push my body to chase after it. My body knows no better; it forgets completely the former goal, though admittedly more tired than the start, it chases after the new goal with the same ardor as the original. But now my mind has caught on to what may be an infinite regression of goals, so O focus it on a drishti: a paint speck on the wall, and just watch it and listen to my breath, and avoid looking at the numbers for distance and time on the treadmill.
For my whole young life, I asked why. I would stop in my tracks and ask why and not keep on going until I was satisfied with the answer. So you can see why it was a problem when at some point in college I asked my philosophy professor why and he told me for the first time that there may not be a why and that was the first answer that stopped me in my tracks instead of starting me going again.
And ever since then I’ve been playing these mind games, inventing up answers and getting along that way until my mind figures out the trick and wants to ask why. Only I find fewer and fewer who can provide an answer of any decency. Most of the time they have not asked enough why’s themselves. And so I am stuck answering my own why’s but most of the time I don’t have any reasonable answer so I just invent up a new game to get me along for a while.
I want to experience it like it's my first and last; first, with all the curiosity of a newborn baby, and last, with all the gratitude of an old dying man.
What is it about a view that makes me feel, is it the memories of my other senses? That I have climbed a mountain with my feet and smelled the trees that stand on it, so that when I see the scene now it is my eyes reminding my feet and nose. Or is it just the colors and shapes for my eyes—I doubt it is this objective and aesthetic latter, but is instead the former: the whole body and mind remembering via the eyes.
There are some things we can only learn for ourselves; mental things that can’t be written down, recorded, even passed from parent to child; things that we lose between generations.
I am not yet good enough at maximizing the time I do have in the present to start worrying about how I will spend my time in the future.
Sometimes when I am writing a message to a friend I can’t decide whether to say “I think” or “I feel.” Almost always I choose “I feel.” Just seems that my friends understand me better when I say it that way.
It all wells up and gets me so anxious, when I’ve not flown a kite or been with friends at the surface and resisted my conditioning long enough to swim deep mentally and grab at something new and original.
I drink coffee in the morning and write poetry and get so worked up and anxious and have a panic attack and think of so much at once that I’m thinking of nothing at all just feeling a great worry and so think to myself about my artist friend who after a day of creating has real men in her real bed and so think to myself: I just need to fisticuff tonight and I’ll feel better.
You look out at the space in front of your eyes and wonder if it’s real and three-dimensional, or if it’s all just a two-dimensional painting right on top of your eyeballs, or if your eyeballs and the rest of your body are just a projection of your brain, or if your brain itself is just a projection—so that it’s all just the manifestation of a consciousness that’s really not physical at all.
I really lost my mind today, and so lay up at night, not hungry or tired, but perfectly comfortable; I know I’ll be fine in the morning.
Coming out of the top of the Maslowian pyramid we start to wonder if there is another pyramid flipped upside down and stacked on top of the first to make both pyramids like an hourglass figure—and there is a chain of hourglasses, that connects back to itself in a full circle.
Some cases of mental illness are such that, in regards to some part of his conditioning, the invalid has forgotten how to be human.
I now know most of the principles, and continue to experience examples. Same principles; facts change. The same themes with different narratives.
The mind is half spirit and half body; the spirit was invented when the mind began to grasp things other than the physical.
Don’t worry about it if you don’t need to; don’t worry about anything if you don’t need anything.
It’s one of those things where you know you know it but you can’t quite remember; and it’s a funny thing because thoughts like this are those on which we seem to base our decisions more often than the conscious and thought-out thoughts. I suppose that’s why I still curse and throw things sometimes, as I can’t quite remember the time that I decided this was not a thing I should be doing. Something else takes over and I just do it.
It’s one of those things where you know you know it but you can’t quite remember; and it’s a funny thing because thoughts like this are those on which we seem to base our decisions more often than the conscious and thought-out thoughts.
I suppose that’s why I still curse and throw things sometimes, as I can’t quite remember the time that I decided this was not a thing I should be doing. Something else takes over and I just do it before I can even think.