Thousands of miles, millions of steps, an endless stream of dream and contemplation. What does the distance I've traveled really add up to, and what has mattered in the long run?
Every experience, from the smallest acts of breathing up to the huge life-changing steps I've taken, has helped me begin to define myself in ways that I would not have thought possible.
I was prideful enough to believe that there would never be a string of any words in any order out in the infinity of communication that, when spoken together, could call to mind no other entity than that which I am; and, who knows, perhaps that is still true, but what has certainly changed is my willingness to accept clarity, and to create in my life the key to the gate guarding progress.
In just a few years of effort, after a moderate lifetime of self-loathing, I have managed to come across the sea from a place where I could not even look at myself in the mirror without risking illness to being capable of saying "I love myself" and really, truly, meaning it.
That shift, viewed in its wholeness, is absolutely incredible. I remember the days where I could not have even imagined standing in the place where I stand now. In fact, there were many days where I doubted that my feet would even manage to carry me this far. I scoffed at the people who claimed to have survived what I was describing, and rolled my eyes at those who told me to stick it out because 'it gets better'. Now here I am on the threshold between all of those negative experiences and what has every possibility of becoming an extraordinary life, and the wheel turns, as I speak those same words as those who came before me.
It doesn't matter how rough it gets, because there is no storm that you cannot weather. Every pain you have endured has served only to chip away at the image you hold of your weakness, showing the strength beneath. Hurt and loss are only two of our many teachers in this life experience, and they bear the burden of administering the rigors you endure in becoming who you are. Do not curse them, or yourself, instead try to act out of forgiveness, and graciousness, because even those things which break you down to your basest parts are only ever purposed for your greater success as a human being.
Take risks, and opportunities. Wear your heart on your sleeve. Never let a bad thing spoil a good one. Follow your gut. Love deeply, and often. Forgive everything.
Be present, and your safe, comfortable, place will always be right there in your shoes.
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Sunday, April 7, 2013
Thought and Contemplation
Just a little disclaimer, this article was written from a stream of consciousness, and perhaps the thread that connects all of these thoughts is tenuous. If you find it difficult to follow, please feel free to leave questions, and I will make my best effort to answer them. This is an understanding in gestation, so please forgive its incompleteness.
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I have struggled these last few years with many things, and over and over I have seen cycles born and completed. The unending microcosms infinitely expanding into macrocosms, the very breath of life weaving its way from being to being, from thought to thought, and from heart to heart.
In the beginning, I was a player in this drama, taking responsibility for the manipulation of the images I saw before me. Attempting, vainly, to pull threads of consciousness together to form the skein of an "ideal" world. Acting, in my own way, as if the spark of the divine that smolders within me gave me not only the power, but the duty to affect change on the world that exists outside my own experience. I spent months searching my own mind, books, teachers of men, any knowledge that I could find in an effort to create for myself an identity for the ancient energy that gives me form. Entire lifetimes hidden away within each cell that composes me. I feel, in every instant, a clear and acute sense of this vast store of experience, as if I had left a mark in every footstep I've taken. When I quiet my mind and close my eyes, sometimes I can even see the colors dancing before me, practicing that eldest of arts, drawing ever closer to perfection in their expression, but very rarely is their meaning clear.
I seek now in a way very different from the mode in which I began. The paths that lay before me twist and intertwine like the roots of a tree, but only now does their pattern begin to allow clarity of vision. This revelation of understanding, as with most, came from a very simple realization. There is a difference between thought and knowledge.
In the silent blackness of sleep, the energies that communicate with us every second of every day take their opportunity to present their message upon a blank canvas, free of the harshly humanistic judgement of the logical mind. That is precisely where my work is to begin. Many cultures across the world have since ancient times revered the realm of dreams, giving credence to the wisdom that can be gleaned from it, but those insights are not lost to us in the waking world. The only barrier that stands between our selves, in the eternal sense, and the self in our daily life is an unwillingness to know. Even now this knowledge remains frustrating to work around. So often we try to fool ourselves into believing that what we receive in life is anything but what it is that we want, and moreso that our results lie contrary to our efforts. The falsity of this belief has been lain bare, due to this understanding. Nothing is ever affected upon us by anyone other than ourselves. We are, at our core, creators, creators of great and terrible things, scientists, artists, craftsmen, and everything that lies between, but paramount to all else is our facility to create meaning. For every event in our lives that we give thought to, there is a story. And the more time we spend in the realm of fantasy we build around that story, the larger it gets. It is wholly possible to take an experience that in reality only lasts a few moments, and extrapolate it into entire lifetimes, and it is precisely this that is dangerous.
When we create from a place of conjecture, or thought, rather than a place of knowledge, we build for ourselves a fantasy with no foundation. Without the exercise of the intuition, this assignment of meaning is arbitrary and pointless at best, and harmful at worst. Think of the conversations you've never had, the experiences you avoided, the foods you didn't taste, the places you didn't travel to, all because it required a decision, and around that decision you built a story. That is thought, in its essence. It is the ego, furiously trying to spin itself into self-sufficience that it is completely incapable of. Continuing to rely on this structure after coming to this understanding would have been tantamount to mental masturbation. Fruitless. But with the release of the old paradigm, there came the sight of the new.
Each of us has the capacity for knowledge, and when I state that I mean knowledge free from the restrictive constraints of physicality that claim the misnomer of reality. After all, attempting to embrace an incomplete understanding while fooling yourself into believing that, at the very least, the borders are in the correct places, will only limit your capacity to grow and expand. What I propose, instead, is that you embrace the understanding that in any given moment everything that is, and was, and will be, stands together as a whole, a whole to which you are an essential and unique part. Through this connectedness, you have access quite literally to omniscience, but we have grown to limit ourselves by our ability to perceive, or more accurately, our physical senses. Outside of those, our perception is factually exponentially larger. So the practicum becomes, sit in a space without your senses. Do not make effort to contort the information that comes into your awareness or bend it to your purposes. Take it, examine it, understand it, and after you are certain you have seen precisely what there is to be seen, begin to operate your mind around it. That is, in my current understanding, the true purpose of our mental process. To take the wisdom and information from our higher selves, and find mechanisms through which those designs can come into being.
This topic is so large, so much greater than my life experience, that I hardly have the capacity of speech to even begin to describe it in rudimentary terms. The flashes of understanding flow past my awareness with an incredible speed, and I am struggling every day to catch glimpses from which I can gain clarity. I apologize that my capacity for explanation is so lacking at this juncture, but I understand quite clearly that this is not a process that I will complete quickly, nor is it one that I can expect to fully comprehend at the age of nineteen. I will continue my work, and further my understanding as I am able. Soon, now, I feel I will know my mission, and what a blessed day that will surely be.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
I have struggled these last few years with many things, and over and over I have seen cycles born and completed. The unending microcosms infinitely expanding into macrocosms, the very breath of life weaving its way from being to being, from thought to thought, and from heart to heart.
In the beginning, I was a player in this drama, taking responsibility for the manipulation of the images I saw before me. Attempting, vainly, to pull threads of consciousness together to form the skein of an "ideal" world. Acting, in my own way, as if the spark of the divine that smolders within me gave me not only the power, but the duty to affect change on the world that exists outside my own experience. I spent months searching my own mind, books, teachers of men, any knowledge that I could find in an effort to create for myself an identity for the ancient energy that gives me form. Entire lifetimes hidden away within each cell that composes me. I feel, in every instant, a clear and acute sense of this vast store of experience, as if I had left a mark in every footstep I've taken. When I quiet my mind and close my eyes, sometimes I can even see the colors dancing before me, practicing that eldest of arts, drawing ever closer to perfection in their expression, but very rarely is their meaning clear.
I seek now in a way very different from the mode in which I began. The paths that lay before me twist and intertwine like the roots of a tree, but only now does their pattern begin to allow clarity of vision. This revelation of understanding, as with most, came from a very simple realization. There is a difference between thought and knowledge.
In the silent blackness of sleep, the energies that communicate with us every second of every day take their opportunity to present their message upon a blank canvas, free of the harshly humanistic judgement of the logical mind. That is precisely where my work is to begin. Many cultures across the world have since ancient times revered the realm of dreams, giving credence to the wisdom that can be gleaned from it, but those insights are not lost to us in the waking world. The only barrier that stands between our selves, in the eternal sense, and the self in our daily life is an unwillingness to know. Even now this knowledge remains frustrating to work around. So often we try to fool ourselves into believing that what we receive in life is anything but what it is that we want, and moreso that our results lie contrary to our efforts. The falsity of this belief has been lain bare, due to this understanding. Nothing is ever affected upon us by anyone other than ourselves. We are, at our core, creators, creators of great and terrible things, scientists, artists, craftsmen, and everything that lies between, but paramount to all else is our facility to create meaning. For every event in our lives that we give thought to, there is a story. And the more time we spend in the realm of fantasy we build around that story, the larger it gets. It is wholly possible to take an experience that in reality only lasts a few moments, and extrapolate it into entire lifetimes, and it is precisely this that is dangerous.
When we create from a place of conjecture, or thought, rather than a place of knowledge, we build for ourselves a fantasy with no foundation. Without the exercise of the intuition, this assignment of meaning is arbitrary and pointless at best, and harmful at worst. Think of the conversations you've never had, the experiences you avoided, the foods you didn't taste, the places you didn't travel to, all because it required a decision, and around that decision you built a story. That is thought, in its essence. It is the ego, furiously trying to spin itself into self-sufficience that it is completely incapable of. Continuing to rely on this structure after coming to this understanding would have been tantamount to mental masturbation. Fruitless. But with the release of the old paradigm, there came the sight of the new.
Each of us has the capacity for knowledge, and when I state that I mean knowledge free from the restrictive constraints of physicality that claim the misnomer of reality. After all, attempting to embrace an incomplete understanding while fooling yourself into believing that, at the very least, the borders are in the correct places, will only limit your capacity to grow and expand. What I propose, instead, is that you embrace the understanding that in any given moment everything that is, and was, and will be, stands together as a whole, a whole to which you are an essential and unique part. Through this connectedness, you have access quite literally to omniscience, but we have grown to limit ourselves by our ability to perceive, or more accurately, our physical senses. Outside of those, our perception is factually exponentially larger. So the practicum becomes, sit in a space without your senses. Do not make effort to contort the information that comes into your awareness or bend it to your purposes. Take it, examine it, understand it, and after you are certain you have seen precisely what there is to be seen, begin to operate your mind around it. That is, in my current understanding, the true purpose of our mental process. To take the wisdom and information from our higher selves, and find mechanisms through which those designs can come into being.
This topic is so large, so much greater than my life experience, that I hardly have the capacity of speech to even begin to describe it in rudimentary terms. The flashes of understanding flow past my awareness with an incredible speed, and I am struggling every day to catch glimpses from which I can gain clarity. I apologize that my capacity for explanation is so lacking at this juncture, but I understand quite clearly that this is not a process that I will complete quickly, nor is it one that I can expect to fully comprehend at the age of nineteen. I will continue my work, and further my understanding as I am able. Soon, now, I feel I will know my mission, and what a blessed day that will surely be.
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