How i Am

Thanks for inquiring and thanks for the support / encouragement -- I really appreciate it!

I am doing all right -- better now that I got all that stuff out and had an hour long cry. (I hardly ever cry anymore -- that's probably as much as I've cried in the past four years put together.) I don't know quite how to describe it, but ever since the whole "insight into emptiness" event, everything in reality keeps seeming to get "closer" to me somehow. People talk about "armoring" of the self, of "putting up walls" to keep things out. These metaphors aren't really metaphors -- that is more or less what happens -- and all of those walls are slowly crumbling away.

There are still things in my life that I was resistant to -- financial stuff, career stuff, transcending anger are the three I can think of. These things are now right on top of me, so to speak, and with the awareness I have of what is going on inside of me, it can get frustrating to watch in horror as I react in conditioned ways, even though I don't *want* to. I listen to my internal dialog, the stories I tell myself, my ego-attachments and clinging, my dualistic thinking.... bleh. I just wish I could find the flush button and let it all go, all at once, and have it stay gone. I feel like I'm wearing clothes that I've outgrown -- they are just too tight, restrictive and uncomfortable. I don't "dislike" them -- I just don’t want to wear them anymore. The nineties are over -- these shoes hurt my feet!

I'm working on it, though. I meditated the other day and keep getting the same answer every time -- meditate. Every day. Ken Wilbur says it, Rob says it, every single Great And Enlightened Master says it. I told Rob that I feel like because I'm such a talented student, I try to skate by without doing the homework, but when homework is 30% of your grade, that still means a C (or a D depending upon the grading scale) no matter how brilliant you do on the test or the term paper.

So, I've decided to pick up Vipassana meditation, because I can do it anytime, all the time, once I become practiced at it. (I can *do* this kind of meditation, I just don't most of the time, at least not regularly.) I'm also looking more into the Integral Model -- Rob assures me that Mr. Wilbur can show me how to build a tree made out of velcro for all of these realizations to stick to. Of course, that will mean meditating every day. :<)

That's just it -- I have so many insights, so many pieces, and I get glimpses of what I / my life could/ will be like once it is all integrated together, but at the moment it all still feels like a million little pieces that I'm trying to juggle at once, and I inevitably drop one or many of the things because I am trying to keep ALL the balls in the air. I really need a system to make this stuff All One Thing, or at least a few manageable things. Again, Rob assures me that the Integral Operating System will show me how to arrange and organize my bits into one solid whole. So, that's what I'm doing about it.

Really, it is sometimes the uncomfortable writhing and frustration that leads to the breakthrough -- it just gets so overwhelmingly stupid that even my ego isn't strong enough to convince me to hold onto it any longer. I am really struggling to exercise my free will, my autonomy, my choice, after living this long in a culture / paradigm that twists all of that into a complex mechanism of internal controls designed to keep one extrinsically controlled and enslaved. I am closer and closer to true empowerment, but the resistance at this edge of it is very, very strong. I will not give up, I will not be deterred, but there are times when I just want to yell ARRAGGHHHAHAHGH!!! This shit is HARD!!!!! But, I guess if getting out of samsara was easy, everybody'd be doing it. As Rob put it, I want to take ten million years of human conditioning and just !poof! transcend it. I look at him and say, well, yeah. :<)

It is frustrating, though, to go back and forth, knowing when I'm "in the shit" that its inherent existence is illusory, that it is only existing because I am self-creating it -- I am standing in the shit I shat. Empowerment and responsibility are hard to swallow sometimes -- probably because I come from a culture that wants to turn that into "it's my *fault* that I'm suffering," rather than "I have the power to end my suffering." Bleh. It is confusing to see all the tracks at once, to see the intersections of karma in every interaction, to grasp the intricateness of conditioned and unconditioned reality. Sometimes I think I should have studied Zen. :<) It's all so one/none oriented. But no -- I had to choose Tantra with all its myriad multi-layered realities on the inside out side of emptiness. Yes, it is perfectly fitted with my brain and thought structure, but damn -- some days, it's no picnic. (But the days it is -- WOW! -- what a picnic!)

Thanks for being there (wherever you are!), being my friend and being supportive of my weird twisty turning life-path. When I got your email checking on me, I felt warm and happy; your concern meets my needs for friendship, support and encouragement. Thank you very much and have a fabulous weekend.

Be well,

fMom

ARRGHH!!!!!

ARGHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ARHAAGGGAAAHHJJJAJAAAHHHHAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

{pantpantpant}

ARRRRAAGHHHHH!!!!!!!! ARAAHGGAHHHHHAHAAHAAHH!!!!!!!

Get it off me! Get it off me! Gawddaaaaamnn this stuff is HARD!!!!! FUCK!!!!

(Arraaaghhh!! and etc.)

I have all these heads -- I'm used to being complex. (That was the most life-affirming/creative thing I could think to use the schizophrenia for. I started consciously stretching my mind in all those directions when I was about nineteen. Constant stretching. To this very day. Twisty twisty twisty.) But now I'd like to stop, at least some of the time -- I need a neutral position.)

My head won't stay off -- it is driving me crazy.

Do you know what it's like, here, in my head? There's so much NOISE in here, I can't hear myself think… or rather, I can't hear anything but me thinking. I need a sabbatical, a vacation, a refuge from all the stories.

Somedays, I want to claim that it is the awareness that causes this….. tension, but that isn't the case. Now that I know this is all empty -- saw it with my own eyes -- even wrote about it, lived it, became it -- my ego(s) keep popping up, running around and claiming that they own the place.

ARRRGGGHHHH!!!!! Seriously.

I want Samsara to stop and STAY stopped. But it doesn't. Blinky blinky blinky, onoff onoff onoff.

I resist material success, equating it somehow with spiritual failure. (The part of Me was played in that sentence by a cultural Midwestern paradigm designed for self-perpetuating oppression. I have lots of those heads in my head.)

Seriously, I am willing to give up all stories and ideas of who I am so that I can just be who I am. I'm trapped in my own story, a character in a plot I can't seem to escape. I'd finally stepped away from the couch, backed away from the subtext, then BAM! back in the story again.

It is best, I think, to not even think about the story if one is trying to step away from it.

I am aware that the only force in the universe that is oppressing me right now is ME. My karma, my choices, my conditioning, my habits. ARRRGGGGHHHH!!!!! Gawd, why can't I let it go? And keep it gone? I DO NOT WANT THIS. It SUCKS. By NATURE. I know this, I know how to let go of it, I have in the past let go of it, I know what it is to be free of it, so WHY, oh WHY do I find it in my hands again? It's f'ing CREEPY the way it follows one around. Karma, conditioning, habit. GET OFF ME!!!!! BLEH! DONE! GO AWAY!

This is not dis integration -- I do not desire the erasure of parts of myself, but rather the patterns in which I am arranged. My bits are mine, my bits are me, but I have choice -- am the only one in the universe who can make this choice -- about how I arrange them. But I want someone else to do it for me -- what the hell is that?! What kind of conditioning / paradigm / invisible worldview engenders such a giving over of autonomy, choice and freedom? WHAT THE HELL IS MY HEAD TRYING TO DO TO ME?

And I wish it was just my head, but it's not -- it's the head I got from sticking mine into the cultural paradigms, seeing through their filter, and calling that reality. I've changed my view of reality quite a bit since then, but it's like little…. elves or something come and put these wretched glasses on my eyes while I'm sleeping. Every day an effort to pry them off my face -- it usually takes hours, most of the day, until I feel anything like an autonomous person again, and by then I've often already acted in conditioned ways. (Luckily I am aware now that I can stop as soon as I have this realization, rather than feeling impelled to continue the story.)

I think I need a retreat. Seriously. I'd like to hire a zen master to come live in my house….. nix that, I've already got four… five, if you count me.

AAARRRRRRGGHHHH!!!!! Change is HARD. FUCK! (Say, now that's an idea….)

It is difficult to watch one's personality in meta, knowing that all personality is empty. Who is that? Who am I? What kind of story are we telling? I've become the audience, the chorus, and wrestle for the pen to become the author.

My life is empty, a blank screen. I choose the character(s), the plot, the drama or lack thereof. (Suddenly the lyrics from my sweetie come to mind: We're all actors in a badly written play.) Man, sometimes this sucks, even for a reality show. It's all just a show, but it's so fucking believable.

I can view reality in so many different ways that sometimes I'm not sure which view is most efficacious. It seems that no matter how I view it, what I eventually see is my own karma racing toward me to bite me in the ass. My mind often resists the knowledge that I am the one doing this to myself -- I feel it skittish around the edges, refusing to land on the boulders of certainty, not wanting to fully embrace its autonomy in order to cease the pattern.

I want the patterns to cease, desperately (maybe that's the problem) but find myself impelled by conditioning in very inopportune moments. Repeatedly. (That is my pattern.) Little by little I erase these patterns; sometimes they drop away entirely for longer and longer stretches of time. I know that this is the nature of the evolution from a state to a trait, but DAMN, it's hard to keep going, pushing forward, when it feels like a constant push.

I mathematically quantified my level of subjective resistance to freedom. At the moment, I have a score of -11. Any time this score is a negative number, I am probably going to feel lethargic, drug down, entropic, dismal or despairing -- in these cases, I am running on credit, taking from resources gained in the past or borrowing against resources to be acquired in the future. In other words, I am not energetically making a profit -- my efforts seem to outweigh their fruits.

Ignorance. Can I really claim it as the affliction from which I suffer anymore? No, I am more wrestling with attachment (as in clinging)/ aversion) and anger these days. Part of me wants to say that I wish it was ignorance, though that isn't actually true -- despite the common saying, ignorance isn't bliss. If I know then I also know there is a way out and more or less how to get there. If I don't know, then I don't know there is a way out, much less how to get there. If I didn't know, I would be stuck, not realizing that my feet even could go anywhere else, but knowing and walking are two different things.

Perhaps I am ignorant about how to not be ignorant. Part of ignorant is "ignore," and that is definitely one of my afflictions. Not too many things, but certain things I have a strong propencity to want to ignore. Or even if I don't ignore them, I have a way of not looking at them directly. I still feel this internal resistance to particular parts of reality. I think it is habitual bracing because these are topics I used to have very negative reactions to thinking about. Just thinking about them was constrictive, stifling. I think I am afraid that I will still react that way, or the bracing is just automatic, a habit.

Fine. Yeah. I have all the afflictions. I'm still stuck, inside this head. Periodically. This is one of those periods -- has been for a bit now. I know I'll shake it off again, that this is just part of the state/trait process, but damn -- I had it for quite some time that last time.

Well, I guess a big uninterrupted dose of emptiness will do that to someone. (I have practice not shying away from stuff like that, thus little resistance once my eyes adjust their focus.) I await my next view of it, working on developing patience as I go.

You know, I have persistence -- I just wish I had efficiency, too. The two together would be… well, not a -11.

Bleh! Conditioning. Just because I can easily see where the pattern came from doesn't mean I can change it instantaneously. It changes, but sloooooooowly like an iceberg. Waiting for me to get my shit together is like watching water freeze.

Sigh. Well, at least I'm not screaming anymore.