There is an image embeded deep within the perception of this language. It is a metaphor that continues to trip me out every time I think about it, this image of reflection. Reflecting. Recently I have had the kind of life turbulence which creates incredible opportunity for going inside and reflecting on the state of what I like to think of as my soul.
Indulge me for a moment, if you will...
Consciously or unconsciously part of the legacy every native English speaker has inherited from our cultural ancestors all the way back in ancient Greece is a kind of logic, which is reflected in our language, our grammar, and in our tradition of using speaking as a tool for moving the minds of our fellows. Now the Greeks had a cultural mania for isolating the elements of nature, and they (probably meaning Aristotle and whatever traditions he developed on) isolated three parts of effective speaking: Logos, or (as I understand it at this moment) the logic of your words, Pathos, your naked emotional appeal, and Ethos is the part where you create an aura of authority by explaining who I am, what I have done, and how you know you can believe me.
So recently, with all of this life turbulence swirling around me, and in a state of disorientation I found myself wondering about my ethos.
Who am I really? What have I accomplished so far? What things, monumental and minute have I completed? And which others have I yet to complete? What is it at the core, when everything else is swept away, that makes me what I am?
What I know so far is that I have a history, I have values, I have ideals. And I am not my history, nor my values, nor my ideals. When my mind is graced with the opportunity to feel the space to relax, really relax, and reflect...when I take advantage of these precious, elastic moments to simply let myself recognize my presence in this moment... when i allow myself to stop playing the game of playing the role of how I think I want to look to an imaginary judge or audience... when I simply breathe and let myself be... What I know so far is that I like you simply and purely am what I am...
And you don't have to believe me, or take my word for it. You can just take a minute or two to reflect and recognize if it isn't true for you too, in a way.
then they showed me the hologram. it was soo fascinating, the way changing the angle revealed something new, some feature which had been hidden behind something else. then, for no reason I could understand I felt the fragile glass sphere slip from my fingers and in slow motion i watched breathless as it fell and shattered into fragments on the cold stone floor. Shocked I began breathlessly to apologize, wonder ing how I was possibly going to make it better, but alicia, the little one, just came over and looked up at me with those wide eyes that way that always makes everybody smile and she said "No need. Everyone does that at some point. Bsides, now you can see something super cool not everyone gets the chance to see with their own eyes..." And she meaningfully reached down and picked up one of the fragments. "Here. You can keep it as a souvenir and take it with you if you like. even the fragments are valuable here." As she held it up to me it glinted in the light and, looking closer I recognized that it was true what they say, the hologram was still all there, the whole universe of it as in tact as it had been when it had been whole. Still sometimes I spend timeless hours holding it up to the light, turning it around, turning it over, exploring all the features of it and remembering what I learned in that one breathless moment, and after...
The dreamscape seems somehow subtly different this time. The hills still roll in that subtle and familiar way, and the butterflies are right there hovering and fluttering above the brightly colored wildflowers, and the sun is shining bright as ever, there in the big blue sky.
I follow the contours of the meadow down
down to the crystal clear stream
I step into the ankle deep water and begin walking on the water rounded stones upstream
towards the source
the source of the current
I follow the stream around the long gentle curve of the hillside
I folloow the stream enjoying the play of the water against my ankles, the soles of my feet enjoying the feeling the massage of the smooth round stones
the coolness of the water affecting the clarity of my breathing somehow
and the sense of wonder wondering as I follow the stream what I will find at the source
following the stream fully present as present as I've ever experienced being even in the most pleasant daydream day dreaming a sunny afternoon
following this stream enjoying the gentle turbulence of the water walking against the current towards the source, wondering...
wondering how many times someone has made this trip, how many feet have felt the smooth cool stones against the soles of their feet,
wondering even if I haven't done this before in this dream and if I really did, then what happened when I reached the spring? What could possible have happened? And what else could I possibly discover there, when I reach the source the source of this sdream... continuing here, beneath my feet, beneath my consciousness against the coolly swirling current here beneath that big bright sun in that wide open sky...
Now Hear this and, since this concerns this crisis you have been concerned with Listen Very Carefully to every word. It is very important that you hear and understand this now.
This crisis could well save your life, and What's going to get you through this is more than faith alone, it is the firmly held deep inner belief, the certain knowing, without even knowing how yet, that you are going to get through it
And once you have done and you are on the other side of it looking back maybe you will and maybe you won't be able to say exactly how you did it but either way one thing's for sure And that's that by then you will have...
Because chaos is friction, energy, movement. energy is movement, movement is change. Transformation, adaptation to a changing situation rubbing up against you so to speak. Unstability is the matrix, the source of adaptation, strengthening, evolution. The constantly shifting churning sea of chaos.
Chaos is TIAMAT, the primal dragon dark, mysterious, fierce stirring infinite space with her restless agitations. TIAMAT, the mother of us all. primal Chaos. And who is the hero who slayed her, was it Gilgamesh who wrestled with her, ripped her in half with his bare hands so that order could emerge from chaos?
Old myths, mostly forgotten, still carried hidden in the deep dna like structures in their distantly evolved relatives, the modern stories of how and why... because change is inevitable in a chaotic system
Because, as we know now from science as well as the ancients, order does naturally, unpredictably and sometimes violently emerge from Chaos, because change is inevitable in a chaotic system
with systems chaotically self orgainizing and order spontaneously emerging from the natural reorganizing of ever recycling elements of the past well into the distan future ultimately the thing that gets you through this is the faith your going to get through this because this current current of chaos is going to shake you into reorganizing and becoming stronger and even more resourceful maybe than you ever had to be before now.
so isn't it nice to know, as my councilor used to say that as you sink down into your center and soften and expand your vision in that way as some sort of feeling continues rising up as well as the spontaneous real ization, the deep realizing that what is going to get you through this is already all right here now.
something really strange and amazing just happened, I really wanted to share it with you in fact the back lower part of my brain I forget what you call it exactly, but it's still tingling as if lit up by a shining web of electricity somehow
somehow it was suggested to me what exactly would happen once I try this experiment on the grounds that "once you do you can never ever be quite the same again and why would you even want to" since it feels so very much better, so much more natural somehow being this way... although and this is the funny part, how much some people don't even notice how they are different or even how different they are...
Some people don't even notice that subsonic buzzing happening at the bass of the back of the skull
that happens automatically just by recognizing what happens when
in that space in mind where concepts naturally combine like fine + wine and time physical & fitness x mental gymnastics, feelings cross-blended with fantastic
and
there were to combine All the desire you ever deeply felt for Everything you ever truely wanted enough to be moved to take action + with & the skills abilities mental agility resourceful creative flux - ability of all the meanings you've learned and are making, ALL the learnings you are and have been continuously earning over a whole lifetime of learning
and the most curious part of all is the vibration or so called call that mysteriously emerges when you blend them Aaaaallllllll the way down deep beneath the conscious level of conscious understanding at all
Ahhh yes, that old saw the izit knot, dont you no, yes? no? Maybe? Aah? Oh! Yeah, Baybe!
To begin with now I would like to invite you to contemplate the concept compelling
What is compelling for you? In other words, what does compelling mean? What compels?
Of course you can't speak for the future, but you have been compelled in the past. In fact, most people have one or two or a handful of compelling memories, Memories so compelling just evoking them creates certain measurable physiological changes certain shifts in the way energy flows through the systems of the body. Times you felt
"Yes!" or "YAAAAY! Can we do that again? Please?!" for example or "Wooooooo! That was great!"
By now you have probably given some thought to certain memories you have kept alive over the years because of certain qualities you feel certain ways about recalling fully now I don't know if you've ever looked closely at a quilt or a collage or if you have even realized how when you fixate on details you lose track of the whole over all effect
Like how braiding turns a fiber into a cord reinforcing it expanding its strength while maintaining much of the flexibility only on a much larger scale
On the other hand take the concept "clever" and notice, as you do, how exactly it feels to you
Clever. As in "that was..." or "isn't that..."
And now just notice what happens in your body in your torso, maybe what happens when you contemplate Brilliance is it more than just vast and growing cleverness when you've shown it, or when you've seen it brilliance in stars suns reflections words thoughts and actions. Actions.
Where do you imagine thoughts leave off and actions begin in your own experience obviously.
Quilts, cords, concepts contemplating connections
someone was wondering what kinds of connections are easiest to make? I didn't even know what to make of the question at first. The question sent me questing so to speak seaking out the mechanisms by which I am able to understand the ways my mind makes some connections establishes understands some relationships so simply and completely without me even recognizing how I can recognize those connections as relationships consciously right? I mean when someone is talking to me I automatically (most of the time) recognize by which I mean I make the connection that I am the one being spoken to communicated with
And by the same token as soon as I think "I" "I" immediately know who "I" am thinking about.
Concepts quilted contemplated, folded corded and woven together in a colorfully woven tapestry
a multidimensional map of the mind emerges synergetically spontaneously from the warp and weave of analogy more and more easily and even more effectively....
What a strange day it's been all the way down here on the surface!
Funny how nothing turns out to be quite what you expected, but the more you are aware of the way that everything ultimately turns out to be related somehow. Unless of course, you believe in coincidence. On an inconceivably epic scale
for example Like the infinite variety of ways form repeats in nature and art, like the infinite variety of variations on the theme of music the infinitely clever ways computers even at this primative stage combine 0s and 1s little virtual bits of virtual things bonding chaotically with little virtual nothings, thinking virtually nothing as they simulate and through simulation stimulate the human thought upon which they are modeled, in whose image they are constantly being upgraded Just like the weaving patterns chaos weaves fractilating throughout all form in both directions*...
which is why when we
*zoom in deep enough, you get to zero. Zoom out fast enough, you get infinity. Beyond zero, "they" assure us everything fractures fractionally inevitably into chaos...
...even as at the exact same time Beyond infinity, as I have heard the Wise conjecture, there lies just more of the same on ever increasingly incomprehensible scales of complexity. Or, alternatively it simply loops back in on itself somehow... like a surprising moment of self reflection, pop ping back up on itself from underneath, somehow like that mythical snake swallowing its own tale for all infinity
Ourobouros or was it Tiamat: The Dragon of Primal Chaos torn in two torn into both thing and nothing, (virtually 2) at the very beginning
of the big bang
but either way you look at it,
Either way, there "you" are,
almost all ego
caught up in the decadent middle of it all somehow Somehow "making", literally "making sense" Of the small fraction of the locally available (to your senses) similarly scaled (to your body/mind/sensory perception peripheral extension scope) and therefore humanly perceptable
Chaosphere.
Then I took the bullet train from the countryside back into the city Not even taking the time it would have taken to think to marvel at this miracle of modern mind over raw organic material electricity and metal least of all the wheeel mostly infact i just slept... I don't even remember those lost dreams, except I remember they were exceptionally vivid and viscerereally weird, like
Later when i was talking philosophy and thought with two friends who i think of as bohemian intellectuals but that sounds so passe now that information changes hands so quickly now in this information age.
One is a Scottish scientist turned painter and the other is French
We live in a big house together with a whole bunch of people people who come and go in and out like ideas like memes in a human mind like dreams in a human sleep
on the train i was reading a book about trances a chapter about unconscious/ /conscious
dis association
where you empower someone* to believe you have both a limited conscious and your much more unlimited powerful and free mind your unconscious
which understands differently, holistically, holographically, even chaotically if you will,
so there we were in the Painter's room drinking fruity red wine from Australia with a screw top talking about that and holograms interference patterns and chaos
fractal geometry. Pythagorean pentagrams. the womb of chaos the next hot paradigm the golden mean.
The Frenchman being French and therefore much more rational than normal people couldn't at first wrap his head around the golden meme: The idea that consciousness is an inevitable emergent property of Chaos, as witnessed on every scale, In phi- and the route it takes to be that- the Fibonacci sequence the golden meaning of the fact that creation is simultaneously interconnected and fundamentally unstable, and that very instability, like theme and variations, 1s and 0s plot and sub plot an inverted pyramid seeking stability naturally inevitably shares much the same structure as "consciousness" because evidence of consciousness on any scale is evidence of consciousness on all scales both ways, all the way in, and all the way up*
or even in the way you combine these words in your mind with what else you know demonstrates the chaotic creativity of consciousness since, in sharing this I have no idea at this time how much let alone what specific chains of memories meanings and associations all these connections have fired in your neurology let alone just how much the deepening rapport between your unconscious and your conscious again helps you accomplish.
All I can be sure of is for me here in my little corner of the chaosphere and my good friends everywhere It was another wonderfully weird one all the way down here on the surface...
As near as I can tell, I am largely who I think I am. It isn't always this way, though.
Take my dream for example.
my dream...
In my dream I gradually realize I have been walking in a narrow canyon which is curving slowly to the right.
I know I am looking for something. But I can neither remember nor imagine what "it" could possibly be.
Eventually into the sandstone of the narrow canyon wall I find a door. As my eyes, fatigued bleary by now with heat and sand and glare focus on the door I distantly appreciate its elaborate beauty.
It is made of wood and metal or stone and is inlaid with an elaborate mandala of precious stones by no means obvious at first glance.
I remember and am reassured around my neck I am wearing a big solid brass key
inside the temple built into the living earth the living earth of the canyon the ancient space is brightly lit by hundreds of flickering candles casting dancing shadows making it difficult to orient- Again I get the flickering feeling of intense and subtle beauty in the elegant complexity of the space surrounding me
there is a reflecting pool there in the center of the vast elaborate space and I can't imagine what the ancients used it for I mean some sort of worship obviously but then why am I here? why was I looking for this place in the first place? I know it was all important that I find this place, but why? What is so...
I look at my reflection in the cool clear pool my mind stops moving as the reflection becomes still clearer and the surface is still as still as the reflection bright as if illuminated from within somehow in fact I can see the details Gorgeous ceiling perfectly fit for a sacred space even more clearly in the reflection than I can in the
actual physical space
but
but my own reflection appears blurred somehow distorted almost as if the pool were rippling shifting distorting as I'm watching fascinated to the point of fixation
And as I continue fixating trying to shift my focus into the reflection of the depths of my own eyes here in the pool I feel a deep whirling a swirling sense of movement stirring and somehow I find myself upside down somehow staring up at the brilliantly lit cieling beneath me
eyes all ablaze with light light from within reflected light and light without
uncertainty which way is which I wonder confusion I recall is the catalyst for something
and in this moment staring up into my own eyes a moment of startling clarity I recognize Who I am is fluid and how I see myself in this subjective sense subjectively sensing myself dissolving into the clear brilliance of self illumination
as the light grows brighter, flares and floods the space I find myself traveling at twice the speed of grace of light and thought and meaning to the edge of space we race
my reflection and confusion uniting in cool fusion swirling spiral union I dissolve into this solution suspended here for infinitely in all places at once fulfilling all possible possibilities including the one that can't help wondering if this is really All Then what really is Me?
From shining eyes of light project compassion confusion and the bliss of reunion
through the dreaming screen between and the hazy misty fog words that appear here hanging in the etheric air all the while within my dream I dream you dreaming and reading and realigning and realizing
as you find yourself there in that secret temple again key at your heart and gorgeous door at your back as you make the long walk back down that canyon back down into your breath your body this solid body surrounding you feeling solidly solid as a sacred stone sanctuary
unsure of why exactly in my dream it should feel so truly good to come back as you as you truly are since you see when you see yourself as near as I can tell through these dreamily reflecting eyes of light...
Now, this is no reflection on you, but If you are at all like me And I suspect you already know you are, there have been times times when you have wondered "how can I make this (whatever it is) simpler for myself?" with varying degrees of success.
I've been thinking a lot lately about thinking, and I'm not sure exactly what to make of it...
for example
Over the past couple of days I have had some very brilliant conversations with some of my brilliant friends in several parts of the world both in person and in absentia via machine, for example, and I've had the opportunity of noticing how getting feedback in conversation creates new possibilities of thought that just wouldn't have been possible without the feedback loop of true communication evolving ideas, thoughts and feelings even as it continues feeding back in on itself.
For example
You know how
sometimes when your good friend is talking they'll say something in just that way that that rings a bell that just resonates with...
...with something in your experience some certain memory and you think something like "Yeah! that reminds me of ... " And you remember something that is in some ways precisely similar and at the exact same time in other ways exactly not the same as what they had in mind? How many times does that happen, that you notice yourself doing it I mean How much more often does it happen that you don't, I wonder... Because, I know I do,
like
Like all those times when when you are understanding something "else" from someone's communication, something they don't say consciously out loud but which you can clearly understand, right? How much more often do people, I wonder, just take the whole process for granted rarely even noticing how much you're doing it throughout the course of a given day.
And I am also finding that throughout the course of these conversations over the past couple of days with my very brilliant friends my mind has been changing as new pathways of possibility have literally continued opening up throughout my brain and more and more I continue finding myself finding myself thinking differently about some of the ways I can choose to choose to make this even simpler not just for myself but simpler
