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Tuesday, January 30, 2018

WetDemon


Mirror Meditation

Mirror Meditation


Mirror Meditation

Some days I will stare at myself in the mirror. I did it early morning the other day at my job. In the warm and stale atmosphere of the men’s bathroom I patiently looked into my own eyes. It was bizarre and relaxing at the same time. With each second I interlocked my eyes and transfixed my focus on my face. Surprisingly, it was hard trying to focus on one spot. I felt some type of serene numbness in my face. Nothing clinical feeling, but I gradually started to hear my breath. Not just the outer pace and rhythm, but I could feel my nose breathing and the vibrations in the middle of my face. It was almost as if I become conscious of the breathing I was not controlling or trying to control.

The glowing aura of the fluorescent bulbs up above quickly left my irritable consciousness.

I felt like I was looking at a different person in the mirror and watching him breathe more than myself. I began to see changes in my face. Things started to look less symmetrical and appealing. My face was just the way it with it was. Relaxed and not striving to show in ecstatic emotion. I felt as my face was statuesque, stoic and unmoved. It almost felt like I was gradually detaching from the reflection in the mirror. A real, “Who’s Looking at Who?” type of scenario.

It felt meditative. ( however you want to interpret that term.) I saw it as meditation through the process of just being with myself, observing the person I think I know in front of me. There wasn’t a feeling of withdrawal, depression or disconnection, but more of a release and connection with what is. A meditation on the observed and the observed. A witness to myself and the image of who I think I am and what I look like. It seemed strange in many ways. It seemed like it would be quite chilling and awkward for anyone to walk in on me doing mirror meditation, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not good for everyone around me.

I asked.
Who is actually doing the breathing?
Who is actually doing the thinking?
( Is it me I’m looking for? )

These questions seem weird at first. I mean you are essentially having a staring contest with yourself. How bizarre. It felt as if the observation of myself had lead to me not trying to control my breath or movement of any kind. Whatever my body willed, I would allow, but not “try” to move for the sake of moving.

It’s almost as if I had an out of body experience. My reflection and my sense of self were melding. The lines blurring between my bodily sensations and the extreme sense of awareness and focus present in my vision. It was almost as if I couldn’t take my eyes off myself. ( Whoever that was...) But it wasn’t my self. Only a reflection. A projection of how I perceive this worldly and material body.

“ A brief actualization of non-resistance. Surrendering to a gaze that I released control of the need to control.”

// Observation of the dwindling of cyclical thoughts. //

Thoughts and the world in your periphery slowly fade to the point you are so transfixed on your face that you cannot look away. No more thoughts or worries penetrate your consciousness. Then there is a real sense of “me” time. Then the me starts to melt and transmute into the still image of yourself in front of your eyes. I was literally standing in front of the mirror looking at myself, but having an in depth experience by peering into the doing of being. The observance of I seeing the doings of being.

Staring into the thing that you think that is you.

Soon it felt as if the line between my reflection and my actual body was blurring. Lost, but locked into the focus of the staring. No thought or sense of time in the moment. Within this sacred moment any distraction could break the focus. Any odd imagined movement could throw of the flow of focus. During this meditation, there was no thought of trying to do something else. No thought of things that needed to get done during the day. A freedom from the need or obligation to complete or compete.

( I can only imagine how weird it would be for someone to see me staring at myself in the mirror. Chilling, if you will. )

The monkey mind seeking mechanism had disappeared if only for a few seconds even if those seconds felt like minutes. Once again, the sense of time was muted and not flying around me like an annoying gnat.

How glorious it is to be able look at your reflection. To take the time to be still. To be with yourself in all types of levels. It’s a marriage and a dance of perception.

Some may call it staring into the void. The universe conscious of itself. The unbecoming of unbecoming. The dissolving of the “I”. As I stare into this abyss of myself, I for a small portion of time lose this sense of the I, all the whole transfixed upon the two eyes that are staring back into myself or the low resolution of what I think of myself.

Staring.
Not attempting to stare.
Not attempting to grasp.
Staring and standing with what is.

A truly Out of Body experience melded out of mind while not minding the activities of the mind.

DG

Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Saturday, January 20, 2018

MANTID1


The Psychological Drain of the Technological Ghost Appendage


The psychological drain of the technological ghost appendage

Waiting impatiently in a line you don’t want to be in, you take out your mobile phone to squelch the anxiety and impeding ghost of boredom to occupy your mind and receive dopamine hits in your reward center from analyzing how many likes you got on that photo of your pet. Do we even really know what boredom is anymore? Have we lost the ability to sit in a chair in a room and do nothing?

Ah, the draw of nostalgia and getting back to a more simpler times where distractions were less accessible and the parasitic need to be connected with what is happening all the time isn’t agitating the core restlessness of our minds. It’s seem like now is better time than ever and thinking of a fantastical utopian society only leads us to more anxious flesh bots that have no gratitude for what is. It’s rather convenient to blame and attribute all these fervent monkey mind tendencies to our mobile devices or hallucinatory LCD screens, but it only makes the core of what we are smaller and less apt to reach a more stable sense of equilibrium and “satisfaction”.

When we have the world in our hands, we can tend to take it for granted and overuse our devices while creating a type of abhorrently pernicious codependent relationship. It is the integration of disintegration that disintegrates our own sense of serenity and autonomy once divorced from such technological convenience. A courage of comfort type of conflict.

We outsource our cognition through these tepid rectangular radiation boxes while simultaneously using it as a crutch to get out of awkward scenarios, transportation binds, halting trauma from the past, and the virtuosic tendencies to not buy that trinket that is on sale on Amazon. The utilitarian aspects are endless and the fact that we can order laundry detergent to get delivered to our home while simultaneously investing in crypto currency is nothing short of what someone from a third world country or Presbyterian church would call a miracle. What better way to feed the conspicuous monster of consumption, then to make menial tasks and base desires so accessible and convenient that the idea of traveling to a place to get something ourselves is outlandish and dare I say uncivilized.

This instant gratification we exercise on a daily basis sometimes without us knowing we are doing it, leads us more fractionated and more of a cog in the machine for the propagation of better machines. That dented and germ ridden world at your finger tips device becomes an appendage. Our heart skips and beat and cortisol levels shoot up when we realize that our mineral mined portable smart computers are nowhere near our heads or pockets ever so close to our precious genitals. So willing we are to offer our attention and bodies to the amorphous technological organism that we crafted with our own fanciful intellect. Like a cyber Jesus voluntarily surrendering his will onto the cross for the sake of a new resurrection of a God Like Extension of Artificial and Cognitive Intelligence. While we obey these habitual tendencies to connect with others, we don’t necessarily know where it is going. We don’t even know where we are going in relation to this ever-changing landscape of planned obsolescence and how it affects the relationships with ourselves.

Here we are. Showboating and sauntering across the technological plane while driving fancy cars, wearing fancy clothes and taking metaphorical pictures of the overpriced salmon we just ordered at the new pretentious seafood restaurant. In this day and age, taking pictures before meals and broadcasting them to the world is the new way of saying Grace. What an interesting propagation of arrogance and narcissism in an age of the reformed technological dependent individual. Advertising and projecting our own sense of psychosis and destruction.

What are we feeding and what is growing outside of our awareness? It has been posited that all this data and mindless scrolling of content helps this new technocratic super organism learn about our biologically and insecurity based decisions and habits. What better way to study demographics than to collect search history’s and develop algorithms to cater to the evolutionary consuming instinct and our predictive worldly desires.

In this morphing landscape of manipulative consumerist algorithmic tactics, we are one click away from infinite clicks away. Each unmindful and unconscious habit of liking, reacting and responding to online content forms patterns of psychosis built on the pillars of insecurity where the need for acceptance and the pursuit of pleasures are paramount. Like begets like. Like rats constantly pinching that button that gives them sweet and savory pellets, it seems as if we are chasing the effects of the original high. The first rush of dopamine that coded our expectations for our future dubious and deviant interactions with technological advances. Like flies to a light, we get caught in the screen daze. Screen fatigue creeps upon our eyes and after a minute of rest, we crave that sweet unconscious scrolling of information. In one ear and out the other. Will we ever be satisfied? Replacing critical thinking with a cheap knockoff substitute with frilly edges and a shiny surface begging to be stroked and recognized in all its squeamish glory.

Facts and anecdotes on demand.
Instant Gratification on a whim.

Some wax poetically on the coming of the cybernetic revolution. A romantic idea of sorts aligned with the magical thought of humans slowly transgressing into some type of cyborg. Well, look around. The cyborg coming has already come. The integration of human cognition and hyper functioning is here. A first phase in a type of phantasmic organum that is predicated on the marriage of biological humanoids and benign and dubiously intentional technological advancement. A type of positive feedback loop is put into place that attempts to transcend the way we have lived and integrate it into a new type of humanoid actualization and manifestation.

Where does this technological progress end? This constant growth aligns with the corporatist and consumerist infrastructure that brought us to where we are today. Like. Buy. Sell. Like. Buy. This technocratic future now is growing like some type of cancerous growth aligned with the need to expand and evolve into a monster of unknown manufactured minutiae. How can we contend with this complacent existence littered with our lack of awareness and gross negligence?

The mysteries of Phantom Leg Syndrome creates dewey residue across the Medical Industrial Complex. Much like PLS, we can think of this technological and psychologically dependent ghost appendage we call a mobile device as creating a Phantom Phone or Phantom Ring Syndrome. You might have felt it before. The twitching above your thigh. Muscle memory and nerves imprint the constant buzzing and vibrating into us without us knowing it. A cybernetic ghost if you will that drills into our psyche and implants its neurosåis and patterning into the sacred flesh of the body. Psychic Residue. We can feel that absence of the technological appendage in times of need and times of unrequited complacency. It is both a metaphysical phenomenon that rings true both literally and metaphorically through the echoes of how we perceive ourselves in relationship to this agreed upon hallucination we call reality.

( A mobile device whispers I OWN YOU that crescendos into a state of confusion and catastrophe built on desire and resentment. )

Within our own biased sense of pernicious anthropomorphism, we can see how our “text neck” postured bodies are servants to this eternally expanding technocratic web that seems to have no end. A fly gets caught in the web. A horse gets stuck in the quicksand. The struggle to get out of the quicksand sinks it deeper and deeper. The resistance to this entangled web only entangles us flies more in the dominating super structure. The more this web starts to mimic the neural connections and cosmic unconsciousness us humans are a part of, the more we start to merge into a new age of unpredictable predictability. Neurotransmitters and networks merge in order to service our dopamine driven masters. We are like the steps and genitalia for this amorphous technological blob. Pawns for the system to continually upgrade and feed off the data of how we act and react to the way IT wants to change and use us for the dawn of new hierarchy of dominance and “advancement”.

What we thought we were using and building took a sharp turn when we lost control of what we were doing. We lost this sense of being. Being with ourselves without the pull of the screen. The fruits of our labor created seeds of new and unpredictable origins. Origins of a new technological age of merging and replacement. This new ghost appendage seems more and more less “ghostlike” because it is very much alive! Alive with a new system of intelligence. An arm with an arm and a mind of its own! Fractals of infinity set in place by ones and zeros put into place by what we may refer to as Human Progress and Advancement of the Human Race. How many other invisible appendages are being created or are going to be created in this new dawning of cybernetic integration? Appendages with appendages. Multiplying potential points on a map begging to be drawn in by parasitic algorithms and unconscious acts of expansion and growth. Connect the dots if you will or let the dots connect themselves as we watch and embody an invisible octopus like body driven by compulsion, instinct, and the surrender to appease its next contemptuous upgrade.

//We feel the pull as our phantom tech body uses us as a host.
// Where are we being pulled?


DG

Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Not Your Truth.







Not “Your” Truth

There’s been a word flu going around. People using this term as “your truth”. What does this mean exactly? “Your”inherently implies possession to something in relation to the self. An extension of the self that is. What is your truth? That would imply that it is some type of subjective best suited for who you think you are. That seems rational. Is your truth different then an objective truth? Maybe truth is a conflicting word in this context. Maybe truth in relation to your own self is delusional. ( This may be more true that what we think truth is. ) 

Since when is the truth necessarily about you? Is this so called subjective truth a form of patterned thinking or conditioned world view? It seems as it has more to do with what you think is true for yourself. This ultimately means serving your own sense of identity. This identity is conditioned for past experience and thought. An identity that grasps onto a subjective sense of truth can lead to a separation from what is. The actuality of how the world works and how people interact with each other. If your idea of truth becomes a part of your identity, you risk diluting yourself/ perception and creating conflict from strengthening the self through separation from what is. The attachment to this illusory sense of self fits with the idea that desire and the boasting of the “I” is the root of much suffering.

“Speaking your Truth”

To speak truth is one thing. To speak a truth that is entangled with “I” is a perversion of the truth. It is a grasping for what should be and a retreat from understandings of the observation and awareness of compulsory thought. What you think is true for you will by proxy not be true for another person. This is why it is dangerous to believe in this subjective sense of truth attached to the sense of self. Since it is centered around “your”, it is built upon the pillars of attachment to thought, ego the illusory world view of what was and what should be. What about what is(sense data without the self) and not your own hypnosis?

So what you “think” is true is only really what you think. And what you think is your truth is centered around the desire to become something that is not yet actualized. A striving to become that becomes a part of your identity and your seeking to be something you think is truth to your own desires and needs. How does that help one get any closer to what the truth is? The truth is in fact in front of you and has little to do with you.

When we adopt this idea of seeking or living our “own” truth, we are really strengthening the sense of self which is intrinsically tied to what was and the gooey remains of past experiences. Memories. Thoughts. Patterns.

The observer separated from the observed leads to conflict and division. 
You can live your own story. ( in your head)
You can speak your own illusory narrative.
You can attempt to speak the truth, but you can only come from what you know and what you don’t know. All derivative of thought. Tied and constrained to the past. Just like the self.
To define a "truth", "your truth", or "the truth" is to stagnate and slowly kill anything close to the Truth because from definition comes rigidity, confusion and conflict.  

His Story. Her Story. History. ( Of the past )( Murky Memories ) 
When YOU try to appropriate the truth for your own self interests, it ceases to be anything close to the truth since it is perverted to enhance the self itself. Truth might have nothing to do with means to ends. Saying what Truth is is a truth claim that goes against what truth is. How can we really know what the truth is when we try so hard to define it and make it a solidified and stagnant thing? 

Ask yourself:

Why would I seek a truth that just serves me?
What purpose does that have in bringing about growth in understanding ?
If I think that something like “my” truth is about helping others, how would it not be more than getting satisfaction from acting out a premeditated sense of giving?
Is there a way to accept that we cannot know to know what the truth is?
Is there a way to not seek truth and accept our own hypnosis?

DG

Saturday, January 13, 2018

OddDuck


RugMan


Why Cereal is a Salad.




Through the invention and progress of modern agriculture and industrialization, we have seen the abundance of grains and starchy vegetables farmed for the masses. These ubiquitous food stuffs make up almost everything that lines the colorful packaged rows of our supermarkets. Corn is fed to factory farm cows. Humans also love corn. Wheat makes up many types of cereals and carbs concoctions with cartoon characters and sometimes elegantly used fonts masking the food stuffs as healthy or organic. This diversity of homogenization has brought us such varietal compositions as Count Chocola, KIX, Raisin Bran, Frosted Flakes, Lucky and Charms and other sugary glyphosate ridden concoctions packed in colorful boxes designed to attract and manipulate your brain into buying. 

I enjoy a good bowl of cereal from time to time and the act of eating it brings me back to my childhood. How fun it is to pick out the marshmallows from lucky charms and eat them while letting them soak in the murky milk so you can drink it up later. When the cereal is finished, you have the delectable glucose/galactose cocktail to light up your taste buds and pleasure centers. Sometimes you just can't have one. You got for another bowl and fill your stomach with the starchy and gluten ridden chewed up mush. Don't worry, your cells will burn through that glucose fast you will be hungry later.

Lining the shelves are the mainstream cereals that have very little nutritional value, but there are also the semi nutritional ones with a few bucks attached to the price. They love to tell you how natural and organic they are. Less carbs. Less Sugar. More Fiber! In any case, you feel guilty for choosing the candy like cereals on a regular basis, so you reach for the healthier ones that may or may not strip the sense of childlike insulin spike you were looking for. It is the sacrifice for your health, but in the end it is worth it. 

So you can trade the less healthy cereals for the more healthy cereals. Great. Then you start getting into salads. You want to cut carbs and refined grains so you can maybe shed off that 10-15 pounds you put on for the holiday season. We get it. Go for it. Of course in this contemporary Standard American Diet (SAD) culture, a salad doesn't seem that appealing as a juicy hamburger or maybe a bucket of fried chicken. We know what we should do and our sugary addicted brains put on the breaks to prevent us from simply being excited about "eating a salad". There are so many ways to make and eat a salad. You can always buy the prepackaged semi wilted iceberg bags with the sad carrot shavings or you can buy the ingredients fresh from the produce sections and compose your own vegetable kingdom symphony of tastes. The choice is yours. 

To bring things in, how are salads like cereals? It seems like it is an odd claim to try to find the similarities in plant bowls and cereal bowls, but there may be more than meets the eye. Well, what makes a bowl of cereal. If you are doing it right, you have canonical cereal that consists of some type of grain base or corn base and the occasional dried fruit, nut, sugary marshmallow, chocolate square and/or healthy bran stick designed to influence the progression of a healthy bowel movement. Then the choice is yours for the milk. If you like the juice from the udder, then you can pour that on top of the cereal potpourri concoction. If regular old milk doesn't strike your fancy, you can choose the alternatives such as soy, almost, hemp, quinoa, rice, coconut and so on. The Health Food Industry has allowed the market to flourish with wonderful milk alternatives to soak your cereal in. What a time to be alive. 

If we go back, we can see that cereal comes from plants. Large monoculture crops made from wheat and or corn. This all comes from the ground, much like lettuce, peas and carrots. We tend to overlook that. We tend to forget that wheat and corn, which no doubt make up most of the things in the middle aisles of the supermarket, are indeed plants. Also, newsflash, coffee is also plant or at least a derivation from what was a plant. One of those things you can put in your health anecdote mind folder that you can pull out when sometimes feeling guilty for grabbing that 7th cup of Jo. Lettuce, corn and wheat are all part of the Agricultural Industrial Complex, from which we get such illusion of choice when choosing cereals and some salads. 

  " The Dressing" 

So what about the milk on the cereal? Doesn't that take it out of the salad category? Well actually, no. The milk could be considered the dressing of the cereal. There are many lactose based dressings that we reach for when eating our salads, aren't there? We have ranch, blue cheese, creamy feta, caesar, Green Goddess, Thousand Island and many more! Do yo see the correlation? Then we have the non-dairy alternatives such as oil and vinegar, vinaigrette, Balsamic vinaigrette, Newman's Own Poppyseed, and many more! The options seem endless. Do you see the parallel in the the variety of dressings and the variety of different milk like substances you put on your cereal. Dressing and Milk seem to almost serve a similar purpose although sometimes dressing is more about enhancing the flavors of the kale and cucumber. But in this case, try eating the cereal without the milk. Does it not lose its intended flavor? Doesn't the milk aim to enhance the flavor of the sugary and semi-fibrous cereal bits? The cereal needs the milk or milk alternative as much as the salad needs the dressing to bring about the flavors of the different vegetables. It is a marriage of Epicurean proportions. It is the like the balance of chaos and order and the yin and yang from Taoist teachings. Each compliments the other and when the ratios are off in milk or dressing, the whole plate or bowl seems compromised and in need for addition of more or less of something. 

So to recap, both cereals and salads have a plant base. Cereal may be more processed, but it still holds true to it's form and most of its remaining nutrition. Of course, lettuce and kale are less processed, but if you take the many years and agricultural experiments it took for it to take the form it is today, it is far from its natural make up. This also brings up the Beer and Bread similarities. Some call beer, "liquid bread". This is another topic of conversation, but at least the salad and cereal similarities both maintain solid forms and do not necessarily migrate to something more liquid. This is why a smoothie cannot necessarily be a salad even if you put all the ingredients into a blender. 

Cereals and salads seem to have the same procedural implications it takes to make such categorical contextualizations. This seems to sound a lot like the Hot Dog Sandwich Similarities that have been discussed before. Is a hot dog a sandwich? It seems like it fits all the procedural implications and contextualized categories, but it can be easily seen that a sandwich cannot be a hot dog since the inherent pillar of what makes a hot dog is indeed the hot dog itself and possibly the bun as well. This is much like the square and rectangle conundrum we have learned in grade school. A square can certainly be a rectangle, but a rectangle cannot be a square because of it's two different sizes. 

When can cereal not be a salad? 

A cereal cannot necessarily be a salad when it is stripped from its mainly plant based, but this also brings into the question of the extent to where the plant base category can extend. If you take out the grains from the cereal and leave the chocolate or even sugary marshmallow pieces, doesn't that still make it a plant base since the sugar comes from the sugar can plant and the chocolate comes from the Cocoa plant? This is a really interesting discussion that could even extend the categorical Salad/ Cereal paradoxical structure. In this case, I would be open to the possibility of extending the sugary pieces and chocolate pieces as part of the plant base even when divorced from the corn or grain bits. Talk amongst yourselves. 

In conclusion, it is important to see the parallels present in this cereal and salad discussion to make more informed decisions for your health. Sure, cereals can be more sugar laced, less healthy and lead to more insulin spikes and resistance, but you can also mess up a salad with a sugary dressing or the dreaded stale carb croutons that may or may not knock out one or a few of your fillings. I mean really, croutons seem to throw and wrench into the gears sometimes when eating a vibrant salad, but can also add some texture to break up the creamy decadence of the ranch dressing. Sugar content aside, we can truly appreciate how cereal and salad share a procedural driven contextualized categorization alignment that allow for more creative ways of how to construct and eat them both. 

DG

Saturday, January 6, 2018

What is Happening?


What is happening?

What is happening?

Well, yes with what you think is YOUR life, but what is really happening around you? You know the cars driving around you. Your friends and loved ones. The trees in the park. The squirrels chasing each other in your back yard. Certainly the most finite answer is that everything is happening all around you. All at once! How overwhelmingly absurd and taxing to think about. There we go. To Think about. So much of what we think is happening doesn’t have too much to do with what IS happening. Well, of course there is some relationship to what you think and what is actually happening, but WHAT IS actually happening has many onion like layers on top of it. Let us look into this.

You see a leaf fall from a tree on a walk to a park. How humbling and honorable for you to even catch that small momentous occasion of gravity and decay happening together in beautiful cohesion. You think to yourself. Look at that leaf. Look how lovely it falls and look how gracefully it caresses the ground below to join the other dead leaves. Later those leaves will be eaten and decomposed by tiny microorganisms and other living things to enrich and give back to the earth and its awe inspiring life cycle. If you can visualize and pull back you can see that you are a person watching this process unfold. Then we can look at how it made you felt. Maybe a sense of awe and wonderment swept over you and for a small portion of time you forgot about your problems and some of the trivial and pesky problems you have created with family members and coworkers. A retreat from the mind laboring on past misunderstandings and festering in its own compulsory cycle of thought. Hypnosis! You were pulled from the hypnosis of head drama and thought stagnation to witness things simply happening.

The falling leaf wasn’t about you. The falling leaf feel on its own accord, acting at just the right time to fall in accordance with a myriad of biological, physical and celestial like factors that could make a rational human being's head spin with trying to over analyze and categorize. The falling leaf did however give you some type of experience. It may have given you pleasure. You want to hold onto that pleasure. To create more of it. The mind wants to grasp onto that feeling and try to reproduce it. Then you do turn it about you. But why? It is the benign separation from the observer and the observed. Dopamine boosts and cortisol levels decrease as you experience what is happening. You may think you are experiencing that experience, but when you THINK, then the experience gets caught in the entanglement of your head since thought is of the past and housed in the center of memory and past experiences that seem to strengthen the illusory sense of self. In the end, most everything is happening without you and without the sense of self ( product of time ).

So you see the leaf fall. Great. Now, the mind wants to find these different HAPPENINGS and seek the reward that comes with it. Then you try to methodically arrange a way to find more of these experiences. Is it for the sake of pleasure? Is it for the sake of trying feel humble or some type of universal connection with the cosmic consciousness? Well quite possibly, maybe. But we are getting caught in the head again. Caught up with the idea of attempting to bend things in the outer world to fit a sense of meaning or belonging.

You may think to yourself. Maybe I was meant to see this leaf for a reason. Maybe this leaf is a small awakening to a deeper sense of awareness and connection. Who is thinking that thought? Were you? Well, thought it always happening in the sphere of your own consciousness. Uninvited. Involuntary. Carl Jung came to realize that people do not have ideas, but ideas have people. This of course relates to thought since ideas are a part of the thought making process. When we think that we think what we think, then we feed the ego that potent chowder that it hungers for in the future.

People are naturally programmed to seek meaning in the world. To achieve. To accomplish. To seek and to reward. If we look at the dopaminergic limbic system of the body, we can see how susceptible we are to going towards the things that make us feel good, whole or secure. The carving out of neurotransmitters based upon the habits we form and the things that give us reward and contentment. This lattice structure influences how we act and see the world. If we observe without resisting, labeling or analyzing, we can see how things unfold in front of us with very little effort. If we are present or in the flow with what is and what is HAPPENING, we can see how much of it we are a part of and how little we need to or can control. If we allow things to happen and for LIFE to happen, we can see that happening is infinite, impermanent and an ever changing reflection of what is. The need for control comes from the ego attempting to make sense and boost its own slimy and self interested agenda. Do you see?

So you see the leaf? Correct. Do you need to try to label the leaf? Do you need to try to figure out what particular color that leaf is? Does it matter that the leaf has a few holes bitten into it most likely by caterpillars? All pertinent questions. These questions are all happening to you. The thoughts are triggered by the sense data that is coming into your rods and cones of your eyes and right into that fatty wrinkly brain of yours. It’s not about trying to control those thoughts. Its not about trying to resist those thoughts. It’s about allowing those thoughts to HAPPEN. Do you see how they NEED to happen? When you interrupt the workings and neurosis of the mind, you are throwing a wrench into the gears of what is. Resistance breeds more resistance. Then a few seconds later you may or may not realize that you are trapped in a type of thought carousel of your own making. This relates to a famous Tony Robbin’s quote,” Stay in your head, You’re Dead.”

So what is happening? Not much and everything all at the same time and the absence of things happening is still happening NOW. It has always been happening in the now. The happenings in the past have already happened obviously. Why would it matter now? Why would it matter that 5 more leaves feel before the leaf you saw fell? It is an interesting thought experiment. If you notice your mind trying to recreate an experience, you are noticing your mind trying to recreate an experience. The separation of the observer and the observed is tantamount in melding with the ultimate experiencing of what is. Experience is a label we give to what we have been through in the past. Experiencing is melding of what is outside the realm of analyzing, categorizing an thinking.

IT is HAPPENING all around you!
Well, what is IT?
Does it matter?
IT is now.
NOW is Happening with or without YOU!

DG