Tuesday, May 21, 2019

What is Your Pain?


What is Your Pain?


Reading this is can be a challenge.
Reading this can be a release,
from emotional pain…
because,
Emotional pain isn't pain –
it’s fear of pain being performed
as though one was, is or will be in pain.,
performing pain right now.

If one looks at, feels into, listens closely,
the raw feeling of so called emotional pain, what is there?
We are thinking certain thoughts as the mind.
We are responding a certain way in t eh body.
Certain feelings – a sensation that we think know
so well that it need not be investigated,
a sensation so important it dare not be questioned,
a sensation so urgent, there’s no time to waste –
this response must be responded to, as fight, as flight,
to be performed as anger, as sadness, as depression.,
and don’t you dare question that performance.
We are so engrossed in this critical performance
that we forget its gestures are a seeming habit,
a learned skill, a learned response, a signpost
flashing DANGER, PAIN, HELP ME – a distress signal,
but still just a signal, even as a feeling, without the
habitual label, without the habitual performance in
response to certain bodily signals unquestioned
 it wouldn’t even be recognized as a sensation –
not even painful.
But unquestioned this signal about a signal about
a past distress that warns of a distress to come,
this newsflash, this personal gossip, this
rolling rumor gathering force is a metaphor
come alive, telling us what it is, telling us why it is.
telling us who we are.
It is a taboo to investigate the role play of pain.
As it is a convincing voice in the role play of being
oneself, a present moment signal in the response set of being
oneself.
Without your pain, who are you? What are you?
When are you?
What are you doing right now?
Can you take responsibility right now?
Can you admit that you are doing this,
you are always doing this,
pretending “it happened to you”?
A sort of self hypnosis,
a doing, pretending to be a happening,
Can you admit, embrace,
and shall we dare say enjoy
the ability to respond?

Tuesday, April 11, 2017

role play


there is nothing but role play, at any given time, in any given direction, running in place, and getting there on time - an all together infinitude of thoughts and gestures, neuron migrations, memes on the move, muscular habits in concert, singing songs they think that they thought that they thought that they rehearsed, right now. the songs are singing about a singer. the memories are remembering someone who's remembering. thoughts are thinking about a thinker. actions are acting as though there is an actor, right now, as reading is reading about a reader. everything else is a dream. everyone else is news, anecdote, warning or fantasy. but you here and this here is so real, that it's not happening at all, so real that there's nowhere to rehearse for the rehearsal, the drums are already talking. the masks are already dancing, they rejoice - at play, at war, at love, at home, abroad, above and deep down below, in the earth, between your fingers - look through them, so very dead and alive, for the very first time...

"lamentation!" 

these are the very last tears you'll ever cry.



Friday, April 7, 2017

exquisitely awake


whatever I think about the world,
I'm thinking it
whatever I think about life,
I'm thinking it
whatever I think about death,
I'm thinking it
whatever I think about the future,
I'm thinking it
whatever I think about the past,
I'm thinking it
whatever I think about you,
I'm thinking it
whatever I think about my self,
I'm thinking it
whatever I think about thought,
I'm thinking it,
without beginning, without end,
beyond words, beyond thought,
call and response,
we are a relationship,
with relationship,
utterly responsible,
exquisitely awake

Sunday, April 2, 2017

there is a place



"there is a place, a location, that you come back to in your dreams, from time to time, and in the dream that place is familiar. When you awaken, if you take the care to inquire gently, you remember that it is even more than familiar. and when you remember to remember that you've been here before, it's so much stronger than deja vu - you know that place is real. You've been there before, again and again, in detail. And you're back, right now, as you read this. This is real. More real than dreams, more real than reality, because both "here" and "there", you know that place, you know without knowing how you know - a real memory of the reality beyond memory - located at the heart of memory itself, beyond which is like a wellspring - the place where we remember things is the same place where we see things is the same place that recognizes places and faces and traces of traces is the very place we call home again and again."

Sunday, March 19, 2017

true lies



"All teachings are prisons if believed in, but doorways if practiced" 

The so called modern perspective relates to models as though they are truths, 
while the traditional, organic, animist perspective relates to models, 
to spoken words, signs, objects, masks, dances and song 
as vectors of experience in the fathomless present
- a dialogue with the invisible.
Without pretending to understand, or to map, or otherwise theorize,
the focus could be on tone, emphasis, impact - function.
Here, Words are used to provoke -
call and response. 
So, if we become interested in how tone, rhythm, emotion, and context,
especially relational context affect the model, affect the word, affect the "mind",
we might ask, is it even important to model the "mind"?
is it important to model the "self"?
is it important to "decode the past"?
is it important to model the emergence and resolution of "trauma"?
is there even such a thing as a psyche?
is there even such a thing as an unconscious mind?
is there such a thing as a conscious mind?
can thought ever know what thought is?
Aren't all models of the mind, of trauma, of experience, of identity
lies
... more of less pertinent and penetrative
based on who speaks them, to whom, and how,
in what context, in service of what emotion,
to conjure what experience?

rather than asking,
"What Do I Believe?",
we might ask 
"How Do I Believe?"
If somehow we're always lying 
perhaps the only question 
we can truly ask right now is,
How Does This Feel? 
  


Saturday, February 25, 2017

a pure mirror

maybe the most profound insight
of the ancestral worldview
is that the world is a view -

that consciousness is endless and beginning-less
but awake to us and personal to us and creative through us  -

every word, gesture, memory and context,
powered by emotion -
a spectacle charged with meaning,
an operating system of colored links and icons,
textures to thoughts to feelings to meanings,
nothing pre-written and leaving no trace, self evident sensuality -
serpentine spiral of now chasing forever,
of here chasing there,
relationships in relationships,
a living metaphor,
a pure mirror,
maybe

Tuesday, September 20, 2016

the invisible





Every gesture we make appears as a context, a performance which suggests an audience, an audience which suggests a stage, a stage which suggests space beyond the stage, time beyond the stage, stretching out infinitely, in all directions, an infinite, inscrutable ocean of meanings and experiences that come into sharp focus at the crossroads of that single gesture. As we move, it moves.

The invisible, the infinite, the bottomless, ungraspable speaks when it speaks, as it speaks, about what it would speak through us. We are the midwives of an immaculate conception – the possible become sharp and dangerous right here and now, as our struggle as life against the great death. So our very doing is prayer, our very speech is prophecy, our dance is creation, our music is apocalypse, redemption, cliffhanger - axis. As we speak, it swings.

The Ancestors reach out to the Unborn through us, as our deeds and misdeeds stretching out in both directions, countless generations. So what are we doing, what are we saying, knowing, seeing, feeling in as much as there is truly no life after death, nor death before life for us, only for the Ancestors behind us, only for the Unborn before us, in as much as it is upon our memory that everything we love survives, it is only in our precious imagination that the children of our thought arise? Are we waiting to get it right? Are we waiting to be worthy? Are we hoping for perfection, while the house is on fire? How are we doing, saying, seeing, and sculpting the mask that we are, knowing that there is truly nothing else, nowhere else, but eternity? As we see, we are seen.