THAT'S ALL

     I like Adyashanti.  He is one of the many spiritual teachers and philosophers that I have had the pleasure of listening to throughout my last couple of years in which I have commuted to work (close to an hour's voyage one way).  I've gone back and forth as to how I feel about gurus who present themselves and their teachings so readily in the public eye, but this particular guy to me is one who, regardless, points the way and makes sense - at least most of the time.  I've picked this clip above particularly so you could listen to 44:00 and the experience he describes.  He recounts a happenstance in which he sees a kind of series of many different past lifetimes in which he could approach individually, notice a person in each scenario as who once was himself, and in each of these experiences there was a "core of spiritual confusion" which he was drawn to interact with - such as one in which "he" was in the process of drowning.  He would go to these points and to the "me" that was there and literally whisper words of clarification into his own ear ("You're dying.  That's all...").  "I would see exactly what I needed to bring completion to it...  Each time there would be this resolution...  and I could feel a resolution in this moment - this life stream..."  I really dig that.  It's so much like processing in individual therapy - just making sense of something that happened - of untying a knot in consciousness - and releasing that energy by coming to a sense of closure.

     Letting it be.  That's the thing.

     Once you get to a certain point, you can speak from your perspective continually without really thinking about it and still speak the truth.  It flows.  You flow.  Each points the way.  "Like a tale of little meaning tho' the words are strong..."  What is meaning anyway but what we attribute to it in the first place?

     This makes me think of the movie Jacob's Ladder from back in 1990 and perhaps its most pivotal scene.  The main character (played by Tim Robbins) meets with his chiropractor, who is really his guardian angel.  They begin to talk about Meister Eckhart.  I've never done any research on Eckhart to try and find this, but I did buy a book of collected works by him inspired by this conversation.  This conversation came about when Tim Robbins' character was telling the angel about how he was seeing demons coming out of the walls at him.  It began simply: "I'm afraid of dying, Louis..."

"Eckhart saw Hell too; he said: 'the only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won't let go of life, your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they're not punishing you,' he said. 'They're freeing your soul. So, if you're frightened of dying and... you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. But if you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth.'"

I'm so used to being me.  It's what I do best, actually.  But what happens when "me" ceases to be?  That's the ultimate question, isn't it?  The true source of all philosophy.  How do we come to terms with our own demise?  How do we make peace in that regard?  How do we stop looking for more?

MUTTERING TO MYSELF IN THE DARK

Insomnia has struck again, and so here I sit in the darkness of my girlfriend's living room at one in the morning muttering to myself and listening to Gregorian chants via YouTube.  It's like I'll get all settled down with numerous yawns and a fairly consistent relaxed feeling, but then the eyes refuse to stay closed...  And here I sit...

We just came back from watching The World's End at the Malco 12 in Fort Smith several hours ago, and by now, of course, all the other denizens of this dwelling have long fell into the sweetest of slumbers.  The film had its charm, to be sure, but it was no Shaun of the Dead.  Nonetheless, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost come through again as two guys that would be cool to just hang out and have a beer with. 

It's been quite hot over these last few weeks, but of course it is summertime.  Taking long walks is one of my favorite pastimes, but 90+ degree weather makes this near impossible to do and enjoy - even when the day is a sunny, happy occasion.  Most unfortunate.

I think again of my own mortality.  Someday, my form and my thoughts will inevitably cease to be.  Will some part of me live on, or will there be merely a silent encroaching oblivion?  My experiences with altered states of consciousness and out-of-body adventures predispose me toward ideas of the continuity of existence into some evolved step ad infinitum.  Even with this kind of faith, one has to wonder and marvel.  One day, I shall watch my final sunrise in this flesh.  And I shall cease to be..

Anyway...

ANOTHER SAD ANIMAL TALE...

I must start off by saying that Jenn and I just came off of a good mini-vacation. I took her to see Jeff Dunham at the Verizon Arena in Little Rock on Sunday, and we stayed overnight and returned this morning. We stayed at a Best Western nearby which had been newly built, so that eliminated a lot of the usual problems one runs into when staying at a hotel. The only drawback was that somehow we got a room on the same floor as some kind of pee wee baseball team. We kept hearing preteen kids running up and down the hall and yelling occasionally. Jenn complained when this kept happening after 10:30 at night, and this seemed to help somewhat. The show itself was pretty good, but it really amazed me how such a simple comedic ventriloquist performance (with the addition of his friend the "Guitar Guy") commanded somewhere around seventy dollars a ticket (for floor seats). Given, one doesn't see that many ventriloquists these days and Mr. Dunham has worked for many years to make a name for himself, but wow... It's just the human touch, isn't it? The guy brought out jokes based on his life experiences, and he was genuine in doing that. Gives me hope for humanity in a way because people resonate to such a performance with such force. It's hard to explain, I guess...

But now for the sad animal tale. Jenn and I returned the rental car in the middle of the day today. Since I returned it to the Fort Smith airport terminal, we took lunch and even did a little shopping on that side of town. We usually go back to Van Buren the Barling way through the bottom lands when we're on that side of town, and we cross the bridge over Lock and Dam 13 to get over the river. It was on this bridge where Jenn spotted a cat that was not much more than a kitten - a little black one with some spots of white. She begged me to get out on the bridge as she turned around and try to get the cat out of this very life-threatening situation. I obliged, and we ended up kind of stopping traffic there for a few minutes while I tried to approach this terrified feline. When I first approached, it looked up at me with eyes full of terror and ran out of the middle of the road, jumping up on the concrete guardrail. "Don't jump, kitty," I said, but it was hard to use slow and deliberate mannerisms when you are in the middle of a bridge and traffic is flying by. I walked as carefully as I could toward the kitty. Panting from the heat, it looked back at me again with terrified eyes. Then, it looked down at the water flowing fast underneath us hundreds of feet below. As I walked to its side of the bridge, it hurled itself off and into the river. I watched with disbelief as it took what seemed like forever to hit the water. It floated away, and amazingly I think it survived the jump as it seemed to keep its head above water. I'm always going to carry that image in my head of the cat plummeting toward the water belly-down with all four legs extended. I feel a little guilty for hesitating at that critical moment when I was within arm's length of grabbing him, but I feared that 1) he might have had rabies or something similar and 2) that he would probably have clawed me to pieces if I did put my hands on him. Jenn consoled me by saying that at least we did try to do something for the little critter and that he was certain to die if he stayed on that bridge. Maybe he was able to swim to safety... There's a part of me that clings to that possibility. Jenn reminded me that the Lock and Dam 13 area is where a lot of people drop their unwanted pets off at. That's just depressing...

WORRY

Against all better judgment, I tend to worry about things. What if I totally flop professionally after graduating from John Brown? What if I'm not making the most of my time? What if my continually poor diet leads to health problems? I could choose any of a host of things to run over with in my mind, and I often do. Over the year, however, I have found ways to divert this constant morass of nagging and unproductive thoughts. I basically ask myself if there's really anything I can do about the issue right now. If there is, I will take action - even in some small way. If there's not, I rationalize and tell myself I'll pick another time to deal with it during a more opportune moment. Of course, this doesn't work every time, but I've found that this simple method is effective. Speaking from a cognitive behavioral perspective, a lot of my worry comes from my core belief that I'm lacking in different ways. Even though I was raised in a good loving home I still brought with me from childhood some feelings of inadequacy for whatever reason. Thinking back, I could have done and been so much more than I am today: the backwards-looking "what if" regarding things I might have done differently. One part of me dwells on such regret, while the other focuses on present-day opportunity (and the latter part is the one that I try to feed the most).

Being a former English major, I'm always interested to divulge the etymology of certain words. I looked for this with the word "worry" and found the following at Answers.com:

Worrying may shorten one's life, but not as quickly as it once did. The ancestor of our word, Old English wyrgan, meant "to strangle." Its Middle English descendant, worien, kept this sense and developed the new sense "to grasp by the throat with the teeth and lacerate" or "to kill or injure by biting and shaking." This is the way wolves or dogs might attack sheep, for example. In the 16th century worry began to be used in the sense "to harass, as by rough treatment or attack," or "to assault verbally," and in the 17th century the word took on the sense "to bother, distress, or persecute." It was a small step from this sense to the main modern senses "to cause to feel anxious or distressed" and "to feel troubled or uneasy," first recorded in the 19th century.

I like that image of being strangled, as that says it all.

As I often preface this to my friends, I know the thought of one's eventual and inevitable death is a morbid thought (and obviously this fact of life is a great source of worry and fear for a lot of people), but actually it helps me with being able to rationalize the absurdity of some of my worries. Who will be around in 100 years to acknowledge any of my shortcomings? What will it matter to me then pending the time I've ceased to draw breath and after my body has been simplified by cremation into dust? One could use this as a license to totally live for today and totally not give a shit about anything, of course, but that's out of balance as well. Going in that direction, you're bound to have some regret regarding what could have been or find yourself homeless at 40, having burnt all your bridges with the people you know after so many years of self-indulgent celebration. Life's meaning is something that you create for yourself as you go within the parenthesis of birth on one side and death on the other. You cannot control the happenstance of your birth or the inevitability of your demise, but you can work to make the most of your life in between.

self loathing

This morning, I moved our pet turtle from the bathroom sink (where she had stayed for well over a week) into a cooler which I had cleaned out in a good way, I thought. Apparently the soap I used to clean out the plastic container was toxic to Looksi, because before I left for work she was dead...

I feel like utter shit. Though this death was certainly not intentional, I still feel quite responsible.

Just thought I'd share this...