view2021/5/30
Zero expectations. That's what I should have. About many things, but specifically about writing. If I don't have any expectations then I've got nowhere to get caught. I can go in any direction and even if I don't produce anything that I really find all that enticing, I've still written something and it doesn't even fail to meet my expectations.
If I may, I'll just elaborate upon the joy of typing in Dvorak on a loud clicky mechanical keyboard. It – is – awesome. I'm sure it would be awesome with many a layout, but I use this one and I find that the typing experience, at least for English, is really quite suitable. Most words really are much easier to type and are mostly on the home row. Entertaining, is what I'd call it. It feels just delightful, simply typing. Even without the mechanical keyboard typing in Dvorak feels fluid and fun. Even without Dvorak using a mechanical keyboard feels clicktastic. Combine them and you get something really special. I just want to keep going once I've started.
view2021/5/29 #poetry
Rest your eyes a moment.
I know it's hard to read when your eyes are closed but trust me,
just close them for a moment.
The thoughts that drifted through your mind while you were resting your eyes were part of this poem too.
It's interactive.
Now rest your mind a while.
Do the shrieking thing, where you mentally scream at the top of you mental lungs at any thought that comes by until it is drowned out.
It's exhausting, I know.
So don't do it for too long.
Sometimes it helps to make a face as if you are screaming.
It can get the mental yelling louder for some people.
Take a rest after,
eyes open or closed
whichever is most comfortable.
Let your mind do what it will.
After a few moments
breathe in through your nose
noticing the feeling of the air
and out through your mouth
with a sound
whatever sound you like
a hhhaaaa or an uulll is fine if you just want to keep your throat relaxed
but any sound you like is OK
OK?
Now you add the last line aloud.
view2021/5/28 #poetry
Miraculous. Each and every moment as senses overfill my capacity to receive. Giant rivers of feelings on my skin, in my air passageways, mouth, and muscles. Ears collecting in every direction, announcing the activities of all that are near. And oh, what my eyes see. What they see I never can share. Always too much, much too much too much. I'm definitely not going to talk about taste and smell, they're just beyond expression entirely.
What comes from within, what I do take pains to express, is its own universe, as they say. So much and so much again. If everything but me turned to smoke, all of everything, and I opened up and pored out, there still wouldn't be enough space for it all. That's why I can fire off these concentrated laser beams that make such an impact. It's all compressed and pressurized in there.
Often there's such a rush to get out that all the exits get clogged and nothing else leaves. A gasp or a wow may reflect some minuscule aspect of it but often as not just silence and intensity of focus, observing the outside for any hint as to what is within that I can point to, any vibration that I can enhance to reveal the depth where my own powers would pale.
view2021/5/27 #poetry
Hey, today, if I may, I'll say, hooray and yay. The way I stay my course each day and write this May is a OK. I like to play with words and lay new verse, sometimes they don't rhyme – to my dismay. Do I have anything deeper to reveal than my thrill and zeal at how creating makes me feel? What's the deal, fer real? Bear with me, you see-you'll have to excuse any deeper muse from meter or having poetic attributes. I can't try to be cutes if I'm breaking assumed truths.
view2021/5/26 #poetry
Today I'll sketch a scene. I'll lay it out for you. Just walk into a dream. Perhaps it will come true.
Arvind blinked his eyes. 'I'm not really seeing this' he thought. On the mantle before him lay a tiny city populated by termites and a few ants and aphids, each had a little silver dot on one side of their head. The city was no termite mound though. It was glass and metal and high tech polymers. Some of the insects carried tools and some operated machines. Tiny lights colored the urban landscape with complex patterns. It was almost silent, other than a few clicks and hisses from some of the equipment.
Arvind didn't want to get too close for fear his breath might disturb them.
“Maybe you can blink away the phantasm. Keep trying, it might work.” said a voice from behind him.
Arvind realized that he had stopped blinking and that his eyes were quite dry. He also realized that he didn't have the slightest urge to turn and discover the speaker, his gaze was firmly glued to the city.
view2021/5/25 is a fifth part of a first draft of something
Of course, it is possible to change your experience without understanding how you've done it. You can attach to new ideas and let go of old ones without noticing that the ideas were separate from you at any point. Simply identifying with the thought immediately, instead of addressing it as a thought and comparing it to others before deciding. You can let thought patterns go from this higher level as well. Rejection alone doesn't work but if a thought pattern is labeled as rejected or bad and you also have a conflicting thought pattern that you sometimes switch to, then over time you may associate (finding yourself thinking the rejected pattern) with (switching to the opposing/positive pattern) and this will reduce and eventually reverse reinforcement of the rejected pattern over time. When this happens unconsciously then you remain at the whim of circumstance as to whether the rejected thought eventually stops appearing and how long that may take. This is a good method for intentionally releasing negative/unuseful patterns but when it's applied intentionally then you can make it much more effective and track your progress. The downside is that if you try to tackle each thought pattern individually then you can end up with more work than you can accomplish in the few decades that you have.
Techniques, environments, and drugs can be used to leverage large consciousness transformations into major and lasting changes to basic thinking frameworks, but with most of them you end up dependent on external instruction for effect, maintenance, and any future adaptations. You also have to find one that works for you, be convinced that it will, and spend the effort to follow through with it. There is a high failure rate for any specific method, different ones being more suitable to different constitutions. There are many many pitfalls on the course to finding a fit, many cults to join, bad trips to be had, years wasted practicing techniques without clear metrics to measure if they are working. Many leave it up to a mentor or teacher to judge their progress but this involves a lot of trust and the belief that they are competent as well. Some even expect the figurehead for a large organization they are part of to assess their progress but never actually interact with the figurehead on a personal level.
Learning to connect with one of the special thoughts, one being nothing, and the other being your sense of beingness (some conflate this with feeling the presence of god), and then using that as an anchor to stay out of identifying with any other thoughts is a way to reset, detrigger, decondition, release, diminish all the patterns. It is neigh impossible to 'just do it'. It is a very subtle trick. Identification is sticky. It traps you, and quick. Years of conditioning to skip the deliberation in favor of effective in-the-moment action must be unraveled.
view2021/5/24 is a fourth part of a first draft of something
Thoughts can become linked. These chained thoughts can be run through one after the other without a break or new decision, seamlessly as if on a track. Thoughts can also be associated with each other as globs or webs or what have you. Almost any associative property can connect thoughts together.
This association of thoughts allows for complex programs of behavior. Established patterns. These patterns are what we typically associate as ourselves and identify with. They can change, they are not you.
Identification with a thought is just a process. The identification can become stronger over time and because of the limiting nature of being within a thought, once an identity has been formed or a thought processed as strongly true (another form of identity) then it may seem unreasonable to let it go. This process can be reversed though. This process is the only thing you can actually do. The only choice you can make is to identify or not. Everything else happens as a result of that choice.
view2021/5/23 is a third part of a first draft of something
Most of the time the whole process seems automatic and you don't even notice the decision of whether to invest in a thought or not. Thoughts that you don't spend any time on you probably won't remember having. Thoughts that you attach to just seem like part of your internal environment and are fully accepted, without a second thought as it were. Metacognition is only present when it serves a purpose so this lowest level decision process goes on unnoticed most of the time.
Not everyone believes that choosing one's thoughts is possible. Some people just believe everything they think unquestioningly. Being attached to a thought limits one's perspective, as mentioned. Being attached to the thought that you can't choose your level of interaction with a thought can lead into a whole defense for this position and rejection of any alternative position. Meditation and practical guided exercises can show an alternative where explanation fails.
The operation of your single ability is to program the subconscious/superconscious. You are delivered options on a conveyor and are to approve or reject each one. Kind of a poor analogy because both approval and rejection are ways to add weight to the thought and reinforce it.
view2021/5/22 is a second part of a first draft of something
We'll say a thought is any mental action.
Attending to a thought is done by feeling it is true, in a way. Thoughts that don't seem meaningful are dismissed in course. If it seems meaningful you may strongly react to it by pulling it into your focus or trying to push it out. Either way you are subtly labeling it as meaningful or true. This will cause it to come back to you and this reinforces it. The next time you think it you can reinforce it again and this cycle can continue until it is very well conditioned that you accept that way of thinking as part of your reality. If you simply let it go it will diminish over time as it comes back, returning due to present conditions or accrued conditioning. The reverse of the process. Eventually, if you let go without reinforcing, it will vanish from your experience. You can let it go without reinforcement in a few ways. One is to attend to another thought instead, another is to attend to nothing (which is a special kind of thought) or your beingness/experience of simply existing (another special thought type). Another way is to release it intentionally which is really just attending to the thought of a release process which is a different thought pattern. So essentially there is only one way with some different flavors, a couple of which are special.
The only thing you can do is attend to a thought or release it. Any other more complex activity that you presume to perform is accomplished by allowing yourself to become a thought. Thoughts come to you continuously and you choose which ones to focus attention on. As you do you are enrobed in a thought or another and that limits what other thoughts may appear to you. This way experiences are navigated and decisions made. The programs of complex actions are played out as you reside within them.
Thoughts that have become so engrained into your experience so as to seem indisputable are often no longer addressed by your conscious mind and reside within the subconscious. Many complex multi-step actions are stored there. Often they have a label that you use to activate them such as 'eating' which involves arm motions, jaw motions, tongue motions, and throat motions as well as specialized coordinated regulation of your breathing and some other things including sensing in various ways. If you consciously think you are to be 'eating' then you can activate the whole host of connected thought-programs.
*The words get in the way of the ideas.
view2021/5/21 is a first part of a first draft of something
Let's see… There is just one thing that you need to know. Whatever place in heaven or hell that you may find yourself this one thing will keep you free, able to move to where you would go, to change your experience. This is the action of free will, how it operates on a fundamental level. Without conscious understanding of this action it may be called into question whether one has free will or not, for having it and not using it nor knowing how amounts to not having it. The difference is one who does not know can learn.
Personally I don't give this thing a name because any name can have other meanings attached to it. A named concept can become distorted by being stuck onto new or different things or be put into a context that doesn't fit. Names also let you argue semantics.
We exist insomuch as we experience anything at all. Within that experiencing, for the most part, we have a contrast between self and other, a viewpoint and perspective of separation. Experiences without that separation don't often fit into a narrative and are difficult to attach memories to so they seem ephemeral or incomprehensible from the narrative viewpoint.
In my current narrative I experience myself able to think about my thinking. I can think and I can notice thoughts and ideas. Often when I am thinking I do not see the idea or thought as separate from myself. I become the action of thinking that thought and notice only things that result from it or are separate from the identity of me within the perspective of me inside that thought. While I am within the identity perspective of acting as that thought I am limited by it's constraints. In order to change that experience and have different limitations I must change or abandon the thought. Just as when wearing glasses one is not constantly aware of their presence but is always looking through them and therefore seeing everything from the perspective of vision through the glasses, one will be experiencing their experiences through many layers of identity, thoughts, beliefs that color their experience but are not always apparent. These filters can be changed but you can't act on them directly. You can't act much at all. Your thoughts and filters may act like complex programs that carry out activities and act upon your experience but you don't have a steering wheel in this process. You don't actually have control on a large scale level. You only have one way to control anything and that is more basic and it is binary. On or off. That is your power.
You can either attend to an experience or attend to something else, be it a thought, feeling, external, or internal situation. *Nothing is also something else