Category Archives: Meditation

August Lightworker Download

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Today I received a pretty steady stream of inspiration and wrote a fair amount of what is bouncing around in my mind. I was writing to a close friend, but it is pretty much meant for everyone.

It was why I was sent here. What I was supposed to do. But I can’t. Wabbits scatter. So I just have to remain in the core vibration and be strong. That’s the primary advice from my channel. I have to be strong for people. Possibly you all. Possibly for when shit hits the fan.

First contact. Natural disasters. Mass ascension. Helping people with the endless cavalcade of release and integrate energies pouring from Gaia to us via the Schumann.

This planet is alive. Conscious. With it. Awake. She talks to us with weather, the sun, and even yes, the Schumann gap.

The reason why everyone has been spicy, grumpy, scattered, shitty sleeping, bazonkers dreams, and sudden shadow work just bubbling up from below previously riveted deck plates.

The Earth is ascending. She’s rising in vibe and the Sun is helping. The Sun affects Gaia, and she is affecting us.

The higher the lightworkers help everyone anchor and raise vibe, the faster the trip. We’re headed to a kind of New Earth. Shits gonna start to happen, miracles people will call them. And everything will change. We are leaving the domain of limitation and duality. That is direct and unmistakable.

It will start with unexpected and inexplicable synchronicities. Then people will start to align with their path, their soul contract terms, and they’ll begin to manifest. With all of it, comes inexplicable abundance. Strength, health, money, time, attention, awareness.

You can see it happening in real time. Witness the Harris/Walz campaign. Something to believe in, a source of joy, they are either lightworkers or unwitting anchor-points. But they are vaporizing fear everywhere they go.

As people leave the low vibe behind, as they appeal to love, kindness, compassion, and courage they become the next runner in the relay race to the New Earth.

So as more people pick to be kind, they are emitting that into the universe. The law of attraction is immutable and infinitely powerful. It isn’t that we have to call something to us trying to get in as much as releasing all the shit that wants to get away from us.

The more that we allow our pure inner preferences to be expressed in our lives, the more simple and easy our lives will become. Trust in the process. Release the awful shit, and stop roasting yourself with deprecating inner monologues. That’s my current hurdle.

The more people that do this, the easier life will be for us. It’s supposed to be easy. We have challenges and they are supposed to be set to easy mode. But we call shit we don’t want, and we hold onto it, trapping what doesn’t want to be with us, with us. And so, we are beset with misfortune. Letting the shit that you don’t want go, opens the door to all the amazing stuff that is desperately trying to reach us. Every single one of us. Lightworkers were sent to help everyone learn this, make better choices, be kinder with yourselves, and we are meant to quite literally show the way. We point to an easier life. Abundance. Plenty. Not ever having to fret or worry, regret or dread. But stay here and now. Make your choices and allow us to show you that some of your beliefs are actually gremlins smashing all the good things away from you.

I’m tearing piles of tar out of the world and brightening it. The less tar around me, the more that people near me will not be so angry, upset, and fearful. They will begin to let their shit go. Then, once they start letting go, there is room, a void, a gap, and then all the blessings FIFO queue into your life. They are right up against you, but we are all riddled with beliefs that create cinder block shields. Nothing good can cross, unless you smash a cinder block out of your wall. Then the abundance comes.

But you have to listen to us. The raving ones. The people who are trying desperately to illumine the way. Don’t believe in us, don’t follow us. Listen to us. What we say. Our advice is leading you all to the New Earth. Nova Gaia.

Every person is a fully powered and functional warp core that believes it’s a baseball card stuck in the spokes of a bicycle!!! I am not shitting around! That’s EXACTLY what we see!

Everyone has the capacity of God. That’s the power we see in you all! It’s all the shit that people carry. Thinking that you have to carry it. Your traumas, your karmas, all of it. You all, generally, sit inside a lead casket and since nobody sees any shine, they assume shining isn’t even possible.

So we are to demonstrate our teachings through our living. We are to be powerful and abundant and all the things that each and every human is entitled to feel. To show you all, it can be done. To cajole you into trying to forgive your traumas. Try to release your karmas. It is only you holding yourself in the jail of your own making.

Think of it as red pill exit the matrix. If that helps. We are all in a matrix. Some of us have begun to red-pill ourselves.

Some Of The Best Things Come When You Are Dancing

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I felt inspired, and wrote quite a lot of material and I think it’s a great idea to share some of it with you all. It’s a series of statements I made from everything that I have learned and witnessed as a . As with tarot readings and other intuitive writings, at the very best, simply take what resonates with you and leave the rest. If it doesn’t resonate with you, I invite you to move on, this isn’t for you. None of this is for everyone, there aren’t any “new rules” here. These are presented as I wrote them, blocks of text, some of the prompts are responses and I’ve maintained the privacy of those folks out of common respect. Anyhow, on with the show…

A kind note, I use a lot of movie and GenX Saturday Cartoon metaphors in these writings, if you don’t know what I’m referring to, watching the referenced movies and cartoons might help.

“And all of these things are just “permission slips”, like all the rest of the rituals and beliefs that humans have. You can do all of it without the permission slips of whatever you are doing, all the cruft that surrounds the woo-woo. You can just do it, directly, without the getup and pageantry. People just use the getup because they think they need it, they believe it will work, and in a way, it’s kind of a placebo effect. If you believe it will work, it will. You don’t need it, but your ego does, because it just can’t believe that any one person has such power. Part of the poisoning of belief in your head. How much of what is in your thoughts isn’t yours. It’s someone else’s baggage. So you pick it up, like the Japanese husband in Airplane 2, just having one more camera slung around his neck by his doting wife, until he topples.”

“The getup works even in Christian traditions. You go to church, you pray to God, you tithe, all of it… all slips. Ways to get what you want because you were told that was the guardrails of existence, it’s how everyone does it, it’s how we all do it. It’s normal do this, this way. But it is all the same. Prayer in Church, a circle cast with an Athame for a high pagan ritual, putting Officer Howie in a Wicker Man and setting him on fire. It’s all just permission slips to clear some artificial hurdle you were told exists. You do the thing, and the universe responds accordingly. The same for a religious zealot as it is with someone in a New Age shop buying a Cassanova Candle for true love. LOL. It’s all the fucking same thing. How we all channel the power we all have but were never taught how to use.”

“And then taught that we are inconsequential little sprockets, individually as effective as a firefly in a meadow. Inconsequential, powerless, just a floating nothing, a wisp just transiting the void. Except, there’s that awareness deep down. The thing that the thoughts adore deep within you. Which then leads to the idea that thoughts are pollution, filling your head, robbing your attention and your awareness. I often times think about the double-slit experiment when I’m considering the power of human awareness. If we don’t attend, the experiment displays wave diffraction. If we move our awareness onto it, it suddenly bellyflops over to particles. Heh, I did this when I was a kid, maybe late teen years. I had three plastic light polarization filters, longitudinal polarizers. Set up a flashlight, shine it through a polarizer, dimmer light comes out the other side. Then position a contrary polarizer beyond that, and there is no light at all. Smiling and nodding, makes all the logical sense in the world. Then put another polarizer in any orientation in between and poof, light flows through all the polarizers. So you have a paddock full of chickens, put up a single fence and only some of the chickens get through it, set up the other side, and no chickens get through it. Put a third fence in the way, and now chickens can get through all of it. LOL.”

“So anyways, if our awareness can do that, amongst all the other neat things, like how awareness can alter how water crystallizes, and you have all this very subtle effect and all you do is just sit and observe. That’s your bit, that’s what you bring to the party. That awareness changes reality on a teeny tiny level. And we stand around, absolutely cocksure that we’re helpless little fireflies in that grassy meadow. The fuck we are. But we never figured out how to train ourselves to USE our awareness in any manner, so it went into an atrophy state, and we live our entire lives with vast untapped reserves of power because we were taught we are individually powerless little nothings and we let that belief just sit there, ruling us, thinking there is nothing to it because it’s “normal” and nobody ever displays anything truly amazing or bombastic, so obviously it’s the truth, we’re helpless, because look… nobody can! Heh, but can they? ;)”

“How much effort is put in, before they figure they did enough, link their caboose to the train of Hope and figure, hey, I gave it a love-nudge, obviously that was enough to get the engine chugging along, toot toot! Here we go! …. why aren’t we moving? ;)”

“Like why positive thinking really can’t make a dent. Positive thinking is sweet wine, it can do incredible amazing things. So you have a lifetime of despair and thinking-of-yourself-as-powerless, filling your cask with sludge and bullshit. Then, years of collecting this sludge and suddenly you stop and decide to pour in some of that positivity. A few drops of sweet wine in a cask of sludge. WHY IS THIS CASK NOT ALL SWEET WINE.”

“Yeah, pretty much. The constant drumbeat is still present… “You are not to ask how.” which is sooooo pregnant a statement coming from the great beyond. Don’t ask how. Okay. It sort of begs the question of why. What does the ignorance of how impact everything else? It feels like it leads to “don’t ask how, you won’t believe it anyways…”

“A lesson I found really speaks to this. A rather lovely presentation that links hardcore physics with the metaphysical art of manifestation. We all know that empty space is not empty, it’s frothy with virtual particle pairs, blipping in and out of existence all by themselves, so this level is wild and rich, but also has zero energy, because all the positive and negative particles created all tally up to zero. So in walks human awareness, thoughts and emotions plenty, and as the lesson goes, your thoughts create a empty structure in this quantum space, like an empty Energon cube, borrowing a metaphor from the Transformers, and then your feelings and emotions are a box of crayons, adding color, style, and actual “mass” to this empty “Energon Cube” until it fills up completely, then you pivot, and you draw this thought linked with feelings and pull it closer to you, lavishing it with attention and rehearsal and repetition. Do it enough, and supposedly, the Universe will render it for you, start the wheels turning, acting in the deep backstage, and the whole while, “Don’t ask how!” and… boom… you get what you created.”

“The trick of it is, sometimes you exercise your power by lavishing your attention on something, and sometimes you exercise your power by utterly ignoring something. HAHAHA Aaaaaand in walks so many Zen teachings I can’t even. “Do without doing, standing at the gateless gateway.”

“And you can see it happen for real. Countless stories of a small group of passionate meditators all sitting and lavishing their attention and awareness on peace and love, and then the city crime rate drops like a fucking stone. Inexplicably. Over and over and over again. Heh, crime, frozen water, stupid flashlights and plastic polarizers, yeah, we’re ineffectual little fireflies just floating around a meadow, totally inconsequential. Hah. And this is the shit we’re doing with all this atrophy. What could we do if we actually had a handle on any of it?”

“Just makes me wonder, if we all got together and agreed to manifest a world without all the ugly in it, really poured our hearts and minds into it… all the unlikely events that could pour out of such an endeavor humbles the mind. Imagining a world where we are all living in peace and harmony, manifesting it all, the more you exercise this part of yourself, the more effect you’ll have. Not even looking for results, but having such an outsized effect. LOL. And here’s the on-ramp to unity… the function of the dark in our world is to sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt across each of us, so we don’t unify. We don’t come together, we stay separate, little islands of light, flickering and doubting itself, easily cowed, easily controlled. Easy to manipulate for whatever ends you like. Fear is what keeps us all from unity, so if we simply elect to fuck fear, maybe through the LItany Against Fear maybe, a little handy saying that can remind us about the nightmare fuel that fear is and what it is doing to us all – if we could just get past it, and come together with one unified passion… All those little teeny lights all joining up, aligning with each other, crests matching crests, troughs matching troughs, amplification. Enough collective power, perhaps, to fucking change reality itself. Warping the past, changing histories, fingerpainting the future. We see many mandela effects, the past is a patchwork quilt that is constantly fading in and out of truth and existence.”

The Realms Of A Lightworker

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Many years ago, when I was twenty years old I experienced a massive and radical awakening through what I later discovered was a Kundalini experience. What I never realized was what this single experience did for me, for the rest of my life. In the intervening years, into my mid-forties, I explored everything. I resolved, in a poetic way, that the unexamined life wasn’t worth living, so I explored as much as I could. I intentionally opened myself up to everything that would come to me, and that’s when the synchronicities began.

At first, they were curiosities, coincidences and happy accidents. I was beset by strange memorable dreams, deja vu, and a whole host of little oddities that I could comfortably ignore. My explorations included a bunch of discoveries, and realizations that not everyone starts their life like I did mine. From eight years old, I knew what my life purpose was, I wrote it out, and I never revised it since, and it’s been with me for forty years of living and I have no reason to change it now. At twelve years of age, I lost what little drabs of organized religion were impressed upon me by everyone else, and I lost it in the most amusing of places, the Church Library at the First Presbyterian Church in Ithaca, New York, which was my maternal grandmothers church, and the one where I was baptized and grew up frequenting on Sundays. Then zoom forward, seventeen years of age, and I encountered a medium / psychic fellow who helped me remember a previous incarnation. I was an Irish Catholic priest, mid 1800’s, and being inducted into that understanding was at the time just another amusement, but turned out to be fundamental for all the things that came afterwards. All of these events, little accidents, little nudges, all to place me on a certain path, and now that I look back in retrospect, it is hilariously obvious that I was always going to end up here.

Then several years ago, I started knowing things. I would be able to guess, with shocking uncanny success, if I was posed with a problem or question, and in the first heartbeat, that answer, which more and more started just happening all by itself would just land in my lap. After a series of self-exams where I would honestly test myself, test this gift, and after I was rocking nearly 100% accuracy I accepted it and let it become a part of who I am. I don’t use it intentionally, instead my instincts guided me to regard it as just another worthwhile input, pouring all of what the world had for me, all my perceptions, the events that happened in my life, all into a central pool and let everything mingle. I later discovered that this gift has a name, it’s called claircognizance. The ability to acquire knowing, gnosis, immediately without having to expend any sort of mental labor to reach the answer. I still had no idea what was happening to me, but I wanted desperately to follow all these breadcrumbs left for me, like a trail of M&M’s.

Over time, I picked up many more skills, through my young adulthood I picked up Tarot, Runes, and Bibliomancy and started to appreciate the more numinous and subtle shadings of existence. I started asking the big questions, the purpose of life, why we exist, and trying to understand this world that I exist in, what it means and my place within it. Then I had three lifelong lessons to cope with co-dependency. The first lesson was co-dependency in my family, then in my love life, and finally in my public life. Each time I thought I was done with the lessons to learn, only to careen into the next lesson. All of this set me up for my development, but also encouraged me to start addressing all the shadows in my life. Early traumas, sadnesses, and hurts that all goaded me into a kind of compartmentalization. Every interaction with others was jarring and painful, unpleasant and upsetting. Turns out, my nascent empathy was traumatized and as such, I created barricades around this, to protect myself. Everyone who wanted to grab a token and hurt me could line up, get their abuse jollies and I would just sit there and take it, stoically. It was just dissociation, which I came to understand much later in life. You can’t reach me if I’m not here, so I would leave. Leave within myself.

Years of this, of being the black sheep of my family, to being isolated and lonely, a permanent outsider, never once fitting in properly anywhere, never a part of anything, always browsing from outside and looking in on a world that seemed to be really quite wonderful, but also not for me. So I decided that I could just do it all alone, I was isolated and lonely anyways, nobody could understand the vast sweeping ideas that I was having, so I just determined to keep it all inside. That I could explore where I wanted to go, how I wanted to evolve in this lifetime and I would do it as a solitary practitioner. It felt right, I had mile-high barricades built around me, I kept my caring parts, my empathy, close to me, protecting it from a rude and nasty world full of rude and nasty human beings, and I resolved that I would live the rest of my days, cut off and happy. Happy in my separate peace.

And then, suddenly and unbidden, I started to channel. I would talk to myself, or more clearly, I would hear my own voice talking to me, and there was both messages and feelings to this exchange. I didn’t think I was losing my faculties, I felt like it was another gift from the Universe, maybe something like a consolation prize for an unhappy childhood, perhaps. And I accepted it, if it was going to be a part of me, then I would welcome it, add it to the chorus that was feeding into the central pool of experience building slowly within my mind. By accepting it, it doesn’t upset me, and some days the channel “pops open” several times a day, and sometimes it doesn’t for weeks at a time, it comes when it comes, it says what it says, and always the messages are advice, suggestions, and above everything else, this pervasive feeling of love and support. I can’t make anyone proud of me out there, but I apparently can for my channel, and whatever is on the other side of the line. For good or ill, I accept it.

Then after a while, with a lifetime of material building up within me, I started feeling this unfocused foreboding sensation. Like I could feel something coming towards us, from the future, something we were all blindly stumbling into, traipsing into. That’s when I tried to reach out, I didn’t know what sort of warning I could give, so I started to try to help people. My gift comes with a curse. The curse of Cassandra is the closest mythological story I can come up with. Gifted with knowledge, the gnosis from the claircognizance, but the curse that I would never be believed. I came to understand that I was still an outsider, but oddly enough, I started to also find people who could actually hear me. I think they would be proud to call themselves neurodivergent, and when I would share with them, they would hear me. It was jarring and shocking. The curse was always with me, making me othered, separated, an outsider with those that surround me, except for the neurodivergent.

Over time, I came to learn that everything that was happening to me was suited to a much greater purpose. Ticking boxes, checking off elements, and slowly evolving my way into becoming a Lightworker. I had this sense of foreboding still, and I carry it to this day, it’s still with me. I then encountered a dear friend who I never considered interested in any of this stuff, but he started helping me by saying the exactly right things, at the right time. The channel kept on telling me that someone would walk into my life, sometime very soon, and that they would help me to grow and open up. So, with my channel telling me it was the best path for me, and nudging me with synchronicities and unexplainable coincidences, I gave up my barricades and let each one of them crumble. This one person, this one very special person, enabled me to share all that I had become, all I had discovered, and everything that I had to say. This person could hear me, they would listen, and they offered kindness and support. I then started to dream again, I wasn’t remembering the dreams like I had, but I felt this irresistible pressure build within me. I wanted desperately to grow, to relax, to unclench. I knew exactly what would be my next step in my personal evolution, and that was that I needed to be Bright. As a Lightworker, I am told that I have a presence and a glow to me, perhaps I do, but I also feel this urge to actually try. Not just to accept what the channel and other sensitives and empaths share with me, but to grab the reins and pursue it. This pursuit has become one of the most exciting and passionate pursuits of my entire lifetime.

I know what I am supposed to do, my role in all of this. As a Lightworker I am supposed to inspire others. I am to follow a path of ever increasing emotional vibratory frequencies. I have to ask at every juncture, what do I prefer? What choice would lead me to where I want to go, this image in my mind of a world that we all want to live in. One built out of kindness, compassion, love, and respect. That’s my path, and as a part of it, I felt this overwhelming revulsion to all my prior low-frequency emotions. Hate, Fear, Anger, Rage. So I actively spurned all of those, at each juncture picking hope, kindness, compassion, and deep feelings of love over all the awful feelings. I was so angry, all the time, and I have come to understand that anger and fear are just messengers from beyond me, helping me to push myself towards the light. More than just abandoning the low frequency feelings, I embraced them, felt them, let them reach expression through me and as I did, they one by one faded out of my life. As it turns out, I was doing shadow-work, without even knowing that it was called that.

For me, in this world, I see the realm we exist in made up of three spheres. The lowest sphere is what my channel has termed “The Tar”, it’s hot, black, sticky, and has a breathtaking undertow that will grab you and pull you under with it. The Tar is a world of hate, fear, risk, suspicion, and scarcity of everything. It’s repugnant to me, and when I feel it, I try to steer away from it if I can. The next sphere is “The Dim”, and that’s our current world. You can see the light, it isn’t bright, but it is visible. You know what you should do, you see the path, you just need courage to walk it. We all live in The Dim, it’s the work-a-day world, the subsistence of living, the endless trudge of Same Shit, Different Day. The last sphere, the sphere I am working to enter, to champion, is “The Bright”. This sphere is one of kindness, compassion, respect, understanding, and is the home of my irrational altruism. That impulse to do something nice, unbidden, without any recompense because to give of myself in this way feels authentically vital.

I figured, as my journey started to take me down many unusual and out-of-the-way avenues, which I term my “woo woo” landscape, that really all of this, how I got here, what it all means, can all be reduced down to me simply wanting to have the Bright feelings, kindness, compassion, love, hope… the things that gain and generate and produce without working for it. A balm to the scarcity of The Tar, I suppose now that I have laid it all out for the first time from thoughts to words. My Lightworker nature just gives me a kind of vector, not only do I want to be more in The Bright, but I want to bring more of The Bright to everyone around me. All the advice that I get from my channel and all the sensitives and empaths that I have gotten to know on a personal level all give me little nudges. At first I wanted to scoop up everyone that I cared for, like a kind of shepherd of my flock as it were, and try to literally drag them into The Bright with me, because I didn’t want to lose any of them to The Tar. I could help them rise above The Dim, if I could just be strong enough, and convincing enough, to try hard enough. Once I had started trying, the channel and my sensitive friends all started to beat the drum to correct my path, another nudge. My place wasn’t to force or cajole or even prompt people, but instead to understand that what really matters in everything isn’t hard power, but soft power. Hard power is slapped down by Karma, where soft power is supported by Karma. So I shifted my approach and now I am concentrating all my energies on picking the right options in each juncture, and flowing from trying to make people hear me, to trying to inspire people. I can’t inspire without actually sharing myself with others, and so, this blog post was born in my mind and I write it out in an effort to be Bright and to shine.

The foreboding of what is coming is still with me. The world has sputtered and coughed in recent years, and there is this sense of something on the horizon that we are witlessly marching into, all of us. I don’t know what it is, nor when it is supposed to be, but I do know that I am right where I need to be. I need to tell people who I am, what I can do, and to simply inspire and shine as best that I can, being as damaged as I have been – and to rise above that trauma, all the reasons deep inside me that are screaming at me to not write any of this, to not share it, to not shine. If I don’t shine, I won’t be noticed, and I’ll be safe. If I ignore all of that, if I chase this Bright down and embody it myself, then I will shine, I will be noticed, and there might be risk. Then I smile and recall that I am to pick whichever choice is brighter at every juncture, and so, it’s brighter for me to share this with you all, knowing that an act of deep disclosure of a personal vulnerability is a monumental act of grace and trust, fills me with such joy and happiness. It’s scary, it’s frightening, and it’s also incredibly liberating! As with many things, when you are up close to a thing, all you can see is that thing, so this feels huge and monumental, but over time, and perspective that develops, this is just a blip, a pebble on the path, not a mountain.

The time for me to inspire, to learn to shine in time to reach my loved ones, if not more people, is running out. I don’t want to convince anyone of anything. I want to only share ideas, not beliefs. Ideas are fluid things, they can be endlessly revised and they don’t pick up the kind of baggage that comes with belief. Soon the foreboding event will happen, and I, and the other sparsely distributed Lightworkers will be standing alone again, but instead of being alone and separate from the rest of everyone, we are supposed to stand and guide. To be independent and strong, and to show the way.

That’s what occupies my time now, all my thoughts, every motive is bent to pursuit of this Brightness, and right now my channel is open, and whatever lies on the other side has this to share here, “The thing that scares you the most is quite often your next step. Be brave. Do your best.”

And that’s what all this comes down to. Do my best. My gift to give is giving itself. I am to give my shine to everyone, in hopes that they understand what it is that I want of the world. To leave the Tar and the Dim behind, to be Bright.

Walk in the Light.

Favorite Things

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As I grow older I find simple pleasures sometimes have a resonance that I previously discounted. The younger me never thought very much about hobbies, pursuits, and things I could do all by myself as being worthy. But then age started to creep up on me, I’m 43 years old now, soon to be 44 years old.

The things I enjoy now fill me with a certain considerable thrill. I’m taking care of myself. I call it self-care and it’s very good for me. It also fills me with a twinge of regret, that I didn’t pursue this when I was younger. The past is window dressing and set design, so we don’t spend any time or energy on it. You cannot change the past, you can just forget it. A funny touch of irony is that as you frequently access memories, you damage them, so a painful memory left in the dark and never recalled is fresh, while a memory that is replayed and remembered has more resemblance to Frankenstein’s Monster than a real memory. Each time you dig up the past, you start stapling new things to it. Funny that the way to destroy the past is to pick it up, drop it, and pick it up again. Recall it, frequently. You can enhance this effect by starting to drag creativity into it as well. Perhaps an awkward conversation was awkward because you were wearing clown shoes? Maybe. Over time, the doubt that they weren’t clown shoes erodes and you’ve turned your painful memory into an absurdity. In the end, there is less and less emotional resonance with absurdity and the memory dies. Getting back to the present is the key, in fact, it’s only in the present that you can really live. The future won’t happen the way you think it will, the universe is perverse in that manner.

The things I enjoy now are taking care of myself. Being possessive of my time, what I spend it on, and selecting people in my life that are important. Important for me to be in their lives, or them to be in mine. All of life is an elaborate script, with people dancing on stage, cavorting for a time, and then dancing off, exeunt stage left, pursued by a bear. I’ve recently come into new projects, and one of them is growing this beard. It’s a feature, it’s a project, it’s a hobby. I never thought I would do this again, the hair coming in super curly and having to put up with the commentary on my appearance. Perhaps age has led me to a kinder growth pattern, or perhaps it is hormonal, as I age. But I am truly and madly enjoying the feeling of having it, and the occupation of caring for it. Nothing quite like enjoying a thuroughly strenuous workout, getting squeaky clean afterwards, and then sitting back with a glass of fine bourbon on the rocks while I slowly work beard oil in with my boars hair brush. Twinges of itch fading as the oil moisturizes both my skin and my new facial feature. What used to be wiry and chaotic is now soft and orderly. I haven’t found the silver bullet that does it all for me, but I have found many excellent efforts. These options have created a new pursuit, a new hobby. Every day it’s something new, different combinations of balms and oils, and if you get close enough, you might catch a scent that already has gotten compliments. I think that it might be one of the most unexpected parts of this entire thing, patently that nobody really bats an eye at me with such a prominent feature now, but that they comment on the scent without really understanding what it is. They enjoy it, and that makes me chuckle with satisfaction.

The older I get, the more I wish I had started sooner. I suppose the only real advice I could give anyone who was seeking it would be an appeal to the Golden Rule, and to start as young as you can with jealous levels of self-care. Nobody really will care for you as much as you will care for yourself. Find things that put a bounce in your step, make you look forward to the mornings, the afternoons, and your evenings. Things that don’t involve other people to play the part of gatekeeper, but within yourself be the gateless gate. Don’t seek happiness from without, but rather assert happiness from within and kindle the flames as best you can with your own efforts. We all have firewood, metaphorically speaking, and many of us have a rain-soaked woodpile that refuses to burn. You can’t really start a fire even with kindling unless you spend a lot of time either holding the flame to the wood or drying it out. The only way to dry your kindling is by keeping it covered and letting the air get to it. In this metaphor, life only gives you what you can handle, when your woodpile or your kindling is nice and dry.

The ice is nearly gone, the bourbon is nearly out and there is little more the brush can do other than scratch the itching that growth like I have sometimes brings about. Find something you love, cultivate it, and respect life for what it was always meant to be, to quote Brandon Sanderson in his Stormlight Archive books, one of the most fundamental ideals is Journey before Destination. Spend a while with that little phrase, see where it takes you.

Existence as The Junk Lady

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While talking with a friend about meditation and the buddhist idea that the world is occupied with a force called maya, that wants you to stop seeking awareness, and perhaps making an effort towards enlightenment by plying you with distractions. Maya could be summed up as all the things that disturb your meditative awareness. Everything from a ringing phone, a neighbor kid ringing the doorbell, or an itch on your nose that is driving you to distraction. It’s all maya.

Then as part of the conversation, an image from a beloved movie appeared in my head, of the Junk Lady from the movie “The Labyrinth”. She is all hunched over, surrounded by Junk in the Junk Fields where she makes a home, and spends all her time trying to dissuade the purpose of the main character with objects that she once loved. Handing them to the main character one after another, in a rapid succession to confuse and derail the greater effort of the plot in the movie.

The more I think about the Junk Lady, and that whole scene, the more it resonates. That maya is like that. An itch here, a ringing phone there, a screaming cat downstairs, a plane making the house rattle because its too low, or whatever else happens that tries to interrupt your focus on whatever it is you have selected. A word, an emotion, or your breathing. This force is also within as well, the little mind some call it, when you are trying to focus and all of a sudden, because you aren’t doing anything and that is strange and wrong for the little mind, it starts to run around like an agitated monkey, rummaging around and throwing out memories, stray thoughts, whatever it can get its clever little fingers around and bring to the big mind to get it to stop being quiet. Trying to count breaths and before you know it, you’re thinking about pulled pork and BBQ sauce as your stomach gurgles. That is maya, in a nutshell.

Revelations

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I’ve attended a few church services in my days, I go mostly at others requests or because it’s important to go to be kind to others – like funerals and such. Every time I go, it always appears to be a catholic service that I end up attending. As a pagan in a candy-flavored protestant shell the catholic services are hilarious. Mostly I equate catholics with aerobics. Get up, sit down, back up, back down, now kneel! kneel! kneel! Back up! Back down! Quick quick! It’s good for my joints.

I do pay attention to the sermons and to a lot of the crufty stuffings that surround these rituals. The church has a kind of fantastic structure – it’s like ossification. What at one point was very flexible has over time accumulated the calcium of dogma and habit and hardened into an almost mindless progression. It’s structured so durably to argue that if you go frequently, you probably have a church-going reflex established in your nervous system. You hear a certain turn of phrasing and bam, you’re standing upright. That sort of thing.

The sermons however still give a hint of that old flexibility. But even still, much of the sermons I hear orbit the same dull white dwarf star. They seem stuck, constantly beating on a dead horse – the dead horse of sin. It’s something that’s remarkable and fills me with uncomfortable awkward feelings. It’s a preoccupation that has been hashed so much that it’s way beyond cliché. What if the sermon wasn’t about sin but about everything else. Everything but being evil and bad and worthy of only gods punishment. How about a sermon on grace. On tolerance. On feeding a starving person because being a good person feels good. How about if we give satan, hell, sin, and judgement a vacation?

I’ve noticed this and it concerns me, but I keep my mouth shut because the last thing anyone wants when soaking in their dogma is some chatterbox asking awkward questions. There is a problem here though, and it touches on such bombastically goofy concepts like original sin. We are born corrupt and evil, sinful, right from the get-go. Infant sinners. How can anyone win? There is no win condition! There is just this dreadful plodding through life. There is no chance to lose anything because you’re doomed from the start. The catholics and the christians in general would now reflexively vomit up Jesus Christ as their big-red-mystery-button. He died to deliver us all from evil and sin and blah blah blah. I doubt the entire crucifixion story as a inaccurate batch of hokum. Yeah, he got nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be if we all just got along, but then he died – then they put him away and then he was resurrected and went off in a blaze of glory. That seems too convenient and tidy to me. It’s too neat, too tied up and packaged with the delightful brown-paper wrapper of hope. Dead as a doornail, laid out, prayed over by a handful of believers and then poof! Back to life!

Even medically that seems silly. What’s more accurate? How about if he was in shock from blood loss, maybe in a coma? To someone 2000 years ago, with the medical skills of a sea sponge someone who didn’t move and looked all pale and tragic was obviously dead. He popped back to life, it was his miracle. His last miracle in fact. So, worship this fellow who utterly failed to stay dead. Or, he recovered from shock, recovered from his coma, got up in the middle of the night, and wandered off. I bet he wandered off, claimed he was someone else, and led an entire full life and died of old age with someone he loved, and here’s something that really will freak out christians – he might just as well have had kids. Daddy Christ. Why not? What’s more plausible? That a man dies and then pops back to life and is God on Earth or rather recovers from shock and a coma, wakes up, wanders off, has more of his life story play out and dies of old age?

Now now, don’t upset the christians. They don’t like this sort of talk. What do they like? They like pain. They like doom. They like agony. Talk talk talk all about sin and death and doom and hate and God being disgusted with us and how we should be ashamed for our sentience. What a head trip. And yes, Adam eating the Apple from the Tree of Knowledge and being cast out of the Garden of Eden. If that isn’t a thinly veiled allegory for developing enough awareness to become sentient I don’t know what is. So what’s the point? Stay stupid. Stay asleep. Be ashamed of your sentience. Really, do your level best to bury the fact that you are a vital thinking knowing being and remain in your half-asleep permanent walking slumber. Eat, breed, worship, die. In the end, feel like a wretch for living your life and being told that you won’t ever be worthy – except that if you accept some stranger (yay for Jesus!) into your life, you’ve got that Golden Ticket to Willy Wonkas great chocolate factory in the sky. Talk about endless constant reinforcement. Your only hope is the fellow selling hope by the seashore, he’s Jesus, and he’s everywhere. Except you know, when you are living your life, you act like a beast because that’s what is expected of you. Be mean, brutish, hateful and spiteful. You might as well since you’re a sinner. If there is no talk about being good, no talk about maybe being honestly worthy of God’s love, no freedom from the endless oppression of original sin which is dumped on you at Chruch every Sunday, and the really warped part? You feel guilty for not going! What a knotted pair of knickers this is. You go to be reminded just how awful you truly are, and if you don’t go, you feel guilty for not going – to hear what an awful person you were born as!

Imagine what Church could be like without all this heavy baggage. No hocus pocus, no fairy tales, just a weekly reminder that we are born good, born pure, born innocent. That we should celebrate our sentience and that we should champion enlightenment and seek ascension. That we have an innate ability to transcend wretchedness and awfulness – we can be good people, we can be good to each other, we. can. be. good.

Then before you know it, if you aren’t paying too close attention to how things are unfolding you look up and see that you’ve become a buddhist, or even worse, a jain.

I think the world could use less christianity, less Jesus, less of this oppressive spiritual baggage and more of what comes naturally from within each of us. We don’t have to be awful.

We can be good.

The Debris of Mind

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I have reinforced certain habits using the gadgets that I am so fond of using. Specifically the Reminders app that is linked to my Apple ID and my iCloud account. Enter items one place and they are present on all the other devices I use – ta dah! So I have a structure of repeating reminders that I use to structure my workdays – actually my entire life – but lets just go with workdays to make it seem less sad and dependent. I schedule snacks, lunches, even the end of work because when I’m concentrating deeply on something time just flows right on past me. Without alarms and reminders I would be late for everything and I might even forget to attend something important. So my reminder went off today, for my mid-morning snack, which is a cup of fruit-on-the-bottom greek yogurt and so I went into the mailroom here at work where the community fridge is located and as I was walking to get my snack I noticed the mail. Oh! The mail! So I got sidetracked. I got my mail and brought it back to my office. Mostly it was junk, just more meaningless wastes of paper as most mail is these days and I sat back down and got back to work. Then I had this nagging feeling like I had forgotten something and I looked at my reminder list and my snack wasn’t checked off.

I would love to attribute this to anything but what it is. Technology has softened my wits. I’m easily distracted and waylaid and that in itself is just another problem. It’s not age, although I would love to blame it on something like that, but what it comes down to is that technology is a double-edged sword. Sure it enhances life and makes it easier on us, but by doing so, it eliminates the rigor we once had to not forget when we move from room to room. The only real saving grace is that doorways represent really fundamentally important context changes in the human brain that can demonstrably damage items in short-term memory. You can get up, walk out of the office with a fully fleshed out plan and each time you pass a doorway that plan gets hit by a mental tempest. Coworkers stopping you to talk, mail in your mailbox, something going on with the machines in that room that need attention, anything at all can swiftly kill even strongly made plans.

This got me thinking about an imaginary environment, a building made up of doorways, in a long linear arrangement, say 15 rooms. Each room loaded with things designed to distract and confuse. Bright lights, blaring sounds, overstuffed mailboxes, a copier machine spraying paper, a ball-pit filled with brightly colored balls being gently agitated with mystery sounds coming from underneath it, perhaps even animals and clowns, like a circus. People walk in the entrance and as they slowly make their way through the doorways and the distractions erode even the most intensely established mental frameworks. When people reach the exit, they walk away refreshed and emptied. The worries, the concerns, the issues they carried in with them at the entrance are utterly blown away by the simple act of slowly walking through this environment. At the end you could have a nice big lounge filled with soothing music and overstuffed chairs with a really long wall of excellent books that you can pick out and read for as long as you like. Perhaps another room where you can nap. You could bill such a building as a “Mind Wash” and I bet people would pay to be able to enjoy it. All your worries, all your troubles, at least temporarily blown away by all the doorways and all the distractions and then the mood music and lighting and books and napping pads on the floor. 🙂