A New Dawn

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.”

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God turns you from one feeling to another and teaches you by means of opposites, so that you will have two wings to fly - not one.

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"The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you; Don't go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want; Don't go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don't go back to sleep."

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"This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet."

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"It may be that the satisfaction I need depends on my going away, so that when I've gone and come back, I'll find it at home."

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“I died a mineral, and became a plant. I died a plant and rose an animal. I died an animal and I was man. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?”

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“Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation.”

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I died as a mineral and became a plant,
I died as plant and rose to animal,
I died as animal and I was Man.
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Yet once more I shall die as Man, to soar
With angels blest; but even from angelhood
I must pass on: all except God doth perish.
When I have sacrificed my angel-soul,
I shall become what no mind e'er conceived.
Oh, let me not exist! for Non-existence
Proclaims in organ tones, To Him we shall return.

*

I am so happy, I cannot be contained in the world;
But like a spirit, I am hidden from the eyes of the world.
If the foot of the trees were not tied to earth, they would be pursuing me;
For I have blossomed so much, I am the envy of the gardens.

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and attend them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.
Welcome difficulty.
Learn the alchemy True Human Beings know: the moment you accept what troubles you've been given, the door opens.
Welcome difficulty as a familiar comrade.
Joke with torment brought by a Friend.
Sorrows are the rags of old clothes and jackets that serve to cover, and then are taken off.
That undressing, and the beautiful naked body underneath, is the sweetness that comes after grief.


Rumi, the Sufi Poet

So, on my way to post this blog, I checked my email, logged out of hotmail, and there on the MSN page was the usual link to some article about men or dating or whatever. So, like a biting fish, I clicked, read it, and it actually turned out to be a really good article.

http://lifestyle.msn.com/relationships/articleoprahmatch.aspx?cp-documentid=18651861>1=32023

For those who are interested. Anyway,the idea of dating 100 men in a year, and not kissing any of them, sounds like a breath of fresh air compared to the tripe that movies and TV shows expect people to believe.

So, in some ways, that article brings me to my main point for posting. Connection. Honest, personal, deep connection. One person meeting another person halfway, me out of my shell, you out of your shell, and it's very nice to meet you. Sincerely. Now that article looks at the concept from a dating perspective, but I'm interested from a human perspective.

Example - very vague, general example: So I'm talking to a guy, and it's just words. Strictly words, and I would argue that there is very little, if any real communication going on. Yes, we're exchanging sounds with attached meaning, but that's not REAL human communication. Nothing in that is very human, I mean, I could be reading a book or listening to the radio - just words. And then he cracked a joke, and it wasn't very good, and I didn't get it. And then he clarified after realizing I didn't get it. And suddenly, as if divine light from the sky, there was a bit of honest communication - a soft smile, downturned eyes, and a bit of a blush. Nonverbal, but none the less communication. A lowering of one's guard, a show of emotion, bashfulness.

This intrigues me. It's like getting to know a piece of reality in a way that a desk or table cannot be known. A momentary view into a seemingly separate conscious awareness. A space with thoughts in it.

So, ice broken. Conversation proceeds, generally more honest. Later on, ice is back.

When I talk to people, I feel the ice. Not in a bad way, but kind of like I'm living in a video game. You just can't go into some rooms. It's like there's no map of reality there, or at least I don't have access to it. It's like lucid dreaming - sometimes interaction with others seems like you're interacting with a real person, sometimes it's like interacting with a manikin/zombie.

I want to interact in a world without ice. I suppose I need more Eckhart for this - to see people as they really are, and to connect from a level that is deeper than material reality. So, off to tutoring!

What a great weekend. :) As it was my birthday, I received gifts - some of which I will not soon forget.

Saturday I was supposed to go to Hearst Castle with my mom, but she sprained her ankle. Justin and his friend Danny offered to take me to lunch. Great! So I drove over to Danny's in Paso. When I got there, I rang the doorbell. Together they opened the door...

( ...in drag. )

to live in a dream world. Rather, I want this world to be like a dream world. I suppose it already is, I just haven't got my head around it yet.
Dreams are easy. There is no need for consideration of anything. No authority. No opinions. Everything just IS and is necessary, because how could it be otherwise once it is being experienced, and has no need for a cause. Pure existance of pure suchness.

Inhibitions are a curious thing. Rather than taking consideration of the basic mechanics of reality, inhibitions factor in invisible variables. What will this person think of this? How will that person feel? Action is inhibited based on these considerations. I supposed this is what ethics is all about. Ethics 1 (as defined by Mr. Dill) is knowledge of the good life and how to live it. Ethics 2 is how we treat other people. Does ethics 1 involve ethics 2? Does living a good life involve treating other people a certain way. Probably yes, but how does one know? From a strictly emirical standpoint, anything goes. All I know is me and mine. My perspective, my thoughts, my angle on reality. Whether what I experience has any intrinsic reality of its own, this I do not know. Do other people exist? Not sure.
If one is not sure of this, why factor in opinions of others?

I would like to live magically, out of context, in a dream, acting from impulse. I don't want to plan anything out. I don't want to make any mistakes. I would like for every action of mine to be spontaneously right. How do I judge it's rightness? no idea, but I don't plan on doing a lot of thinking in this state, and thus not much judging, so it's right by whatever cosmic standard of rightness there is, and I don't have to worry about it. This is the plan. The last plan. ;)

How to accomplish the plan? Meditate, act, meditate, act. Integrate transcendental consiousness with my waking consciousness.
Spontaneity. Turning the wheel. Postcards. Smiles. Excercise. :)

Strangely, my little voice inside has been telling me to excercise. Actually, not really a voice, it's just my body. It wants to excercise. It used to not like excercise, but one day I just got this urge to excercise. It think it's related to the evolution of my consciousness. Meow...

Tomorrow is going to be magical. :)

like a piece of silk. Of late, my life has felt a soft calm sea of silk. Smooth, comfortable, relaxed. My mind has been quiet, the events have woven themselves together cleanly, one thread upon the other. All in their place, none more important than the other. All of it so smooth, rather luxurious.
Then, something happened. Quite inconsequential. A converstion. Nothing of great note, but even the smallest speck is noticed on an otherwise smooth white surface. A pull in the thread of my silky experience. One thread, snagged by moment in time. And that little pulled thread in my silk has created a tiny row of wrinkles. Little arrows pointing along the path of the thread. Suddenly, my attention that was so beautifully centered in each moment as it happened has been minutely diverted in the direction of the snag. *sigh*.... I want my peace of mind back.

When I look back at things I've created in the past, I always surprise myself. Sometimes I feel like I was more talented in the past. I feel like I'm reading the work of another person. Still, it's so interesting to see my "personal" progress, to see the energies that emanated from my form in different stages of my remembered existance. Lately, I've been starting to reach inside and pull out what I can, getting the flow of creativity going. I enjoy making "art" for it's own sake and my art history class has really started inspiring me.

Anywho, here's some stuff I ran into a few minutes ago that I wrote when I was 12. I surprise myself. For some reason I really like it.

"Dropout"

She sleeps in every day of the week till ten o'clock and when she gets up she yawns and looks out the window. The world moves by with a purposeful hum. Her face is red and blotchy from the night before. She is surpised at herself because now she does anything for a laugh or for a moment of relief from the daily boredome. As she puts on her bathrobe and ties the pink and white sash, she notices that her waist is beginning to bulge slightly. She pads into the kitchen to look for something to eat. The dirty dishes are stacked in the sink and on the drain board from the night before. She flicks on the radio with an irritated, impatient turn. The country music trobs through the tubes and fills the room with sounds of similar days. She finds some cereal and milk and fixes her breakfast as she listens to the radio. The day stretches before her like a treeless desert. She wonders what to do. She is too tired to do the dirty dishes, the ironing, or dust the floor. She would like to go shopping for expensive clothes. She thinks about her friends who are sitting through their boring classes in school, waiting for lunch. It is fun to be out of school. School was a drag and a waste of her valuable time. She walks into the living room, sits down, and turns on the TV to watch soap operas. She can almost hear herself talking later tonigh to someone who will ask her about being out of school.
"Groovy, really a gas," she will say.

So I was driving home from Santa Monica today and listening to NPR in the car. They were playing an episode of "This American Life," which I enjoy, and the topic was "Love". There was an extended act in which a man spoke about love and tried to quantify a brief excursion with a woman he loved. It was really interesting, just hearing him speak. He might have been reading from a book. I mean, I guess all of radio is hearing people speak, but this had quality to it. When the show finished, I felt like talking and I wanted to be heard. I wanted to sound like what I had listened to, so I got out my cell phone and went to the "record sound" option and began to talk as I drove through the hills. The plan was to record this strike of genious and then type it out as a blog. My topic: time, space, impermanence. I talked for a good three minutes, possibly more, before I decided to stop and see if my "gem" had been preserved. At this point, I realized that my phone didn't have enough memory, and had only recorded my preamble. Then it hit me how comic the situation was - me rambling about impermanence while trying and failing to preserve it. lol That's another point for the Universe... I keep counting but I've lost track...

So, considering this strain of ideas loves to meander through the corridors of my mind, I'll try this again. Just my luck, it probably won't post properly. However, the fact that I just said that has probably jinxed the situation backwards, so the Universe will allow me to post it properly just to spite me, and in the end I will have gotten just what I wanted, in spite of the Universe. We will see...

First of all, time keeps slipping by. The whole of my experience as a conscious being is very slippery. I can't pin it down. I'm sure that's kind of the point, but at least once, I'd just like to pin it down. Unfortunately, even if I did pin it, that experience would only be valid for that moment, and then it too - the experience of the pinning, would itself slip away. But as the seconds slip by, it's not really the seconds that are slipping. A second is a second, I could have one anytime I want. But it's the experience in that second that slips by. That particular experience, that is very distinct. It's very set. like ink that has dried and set - when you run your finger over it, it doesn't smudge. And somehow, this setness of it does not keep it from continually changing, like flowing water. Each moment is set, but the whole is dynamic. Like the contrast of point and infinity. So this catches my attention, and I can't help but marvel at it. I'd like to experience something unchanging, like the unified field. The Now, that does not change - the space around experience. That is comforting. It makes the world seem more like a dream, because I notice the same space in my dreams when I pause within them to observe them properly before they fade away.

So I'm quite suspicious of time and space. Mostly time. I don't quite trust it. I'm not sure if it really exists as we seem to experience it. I have this hunch that everything happens all at once - past, present, future. If it happens all at once - all times in one time - then time ceases to exist. From infinity, it is collapsed to a point, even though it is still vast and infinite, it takes up no space temporally. Again, I think everything happens at the same time, but we just don't have the capacity to experience it all at the same time.

I kind of feel the same about space. Like everything really exists in the same space, which kind of does away with the conventional notion of space and collapses it all into an unmanifest sort of realm that takes up no space and yet contains all extended forms within it. This I am not so sure about, even though I suspect it based on my thoughts about time. Time and space are so intimately intertwined... Actually, when I think about space and extended things (I'm borrowing Descartes and other philosophers' lingo here), my thought is that it is all Consciousness having some vast sort of dream in which it experiences itself. I know this has already been expressed by various eastern religions, but whatever.

The Big Dream. *sigh* (happy sigh)

Our individual dreams are an analogy to the cosmos. as the little "self" dreams a dream in the night and inserts itself into the dream to experience the dream - a manifestation of itself, so does the big "Self" dream the dream of Reality into which it inserts itSelf as individuals - little "selves" - to experience itSelf.

Which reminds me... I must see if I ever posted something I wrote on that very topic, and its relation to lucid dreaming.

Halloween is coming.... the election is coming.....


Get *tons* of No Prop 8 stickers/pins, and hand them out with the candy. The kids won't know the difference. The parents, well... I dunno how they'd react.

If Obama stickers were free, I'd hand them out.

Meow. :)

So Tuesday night I went to Rocky Horror with my dad, who has the only pictures of me there, and who has been subsequently showing these pictures to everyone he knows. When I found out about this, he told me "you're a hottie." ummmmm, okay..... dads are not supposed to say that. but I digress....

Anyway, fun night, got home before 10, all seemed well. Went to bed, slept for half an hour, woke up not feeling good and managed a grand total of 4 hours of sleep the rest of the night. :( Bad enough as it was, I had a midterm in Philosophy the next day and I had planned to do all my studying the morning of. Studying did not feel like it went very well because I don't absorb anything when I'm not rested. Anyway, long story short - I took the test and got 100%. Yay! Because I was personally impressed with the subject matter, I would like to share with all of you my explaination of Aquina's argument for God from contingency and necessity. (Keep in mind this is basically me saying exactly what Gilbert said in class. Still, I think I composed it rather well for a zombie.)

1) Contingent things can be or not be.
2) If everything were contingent, then at some point in the past, nothing would have existed.
3) There must be some thing(s) that exist necessarily.
4) There can be no infinite series of necessary beings whose necessity is caused by something else.
Therefore, There must be a being that is necessary in itself.

(Digression - please read "being" as "thing that exists". I don't think he actually proves the existance of a "being" in the conventional sense. )

Aquinas' first three premises could be considered a tiny reducto ad absurdum proof on their own. What he is saying is that if a thing is contingent, that means it doesn't have to exist - it can be or not be. A tree is an example. There is nothing about a tree that necessitates its existance. Anselm implicitly assumes, for the sake of this mini-argument, that there exists nothing necessarily, and everything is contingent. Thus, there is no creator god and no creation. If there was no creation to start things off, time would be infinite. If time were infinite, and infinite amount of time would have already passed - time enough for all possibilities to be realized - including the possibility that all contingent things are simultaneously not in existance. Thus, nothing would exist now, which is not the case. Thus, we must reject the first assumption - that nothing exists necessarliy, to conclude that there *must* be something(s) that exist necessarily. That gets us to premise three. Premise four points out that there can't be an infinite chain of necessary beings that get their necessity from outside of themselves. At some point, there must be a first necessary thing that is in itself necessary, or else there could not be a second, and without the second, there couldn't be a third... etc. This is not to say that a chain could not go on infinitely in the temporal sense. In that case, though, there would still have to be a first thing necessary in itself that caused necessity from outside of time. Thus, Anselm concludes that either in time or out of time, there has to be a thing (being according to Anselm) that is necessary in itself.

:P

I was thinking about this in the car the other day. It's so cool to think that there is something that exists necessarily. It can't not exist. I don't think I'd call it "God" in the popular sense, but I'd say it's pretty amazing.