Expectations

When someone close to you expresses disappointment in your actions, it can be devastating. Of course, the reverse is true--many of us are "praise-junkies" who need at least a degree of recognition to validate doing what we should do anyway. Why are the opinions of others so important that they oftentimes override whatever we might have thought about ourselves independently? 

The arrival of the internet has made it more and more difficult to keep things that we do in the dark. Many people fear this loss of privacy, because the most common consequence of it is the loss of self-worth that comes from failing to live up to another's expectations... or perhaps worse, fulfilling expectations that are negative. Simply put, we generate much of our internal stress and conflict through what we perceive as the expectations of others. 

When one person expects something of another, even subconsciously, the former will act in a manner according to that idea. Probably with subtlety, likely not on purpose, there will be enough hints, negative thoughts, and body language to make it clear to the person with a problem that their "friend" thinks they are doomed. Compound that with the tendency of all of us to gossip about other's problems, and you have a recipe for a powerful negative feedback loop for the person in peril. 

I may not have explained my train of thought here as clearly as I'd like to, but I think that anyone who starts considering the way they treat "problem people" will be sure that at some point, they've contributed to their relation's lack of self-esteem (which is almost undeniably what will lead that poor soul into repeating negative patterns of behavior). 

We are all here to help each other along our journeys. There's nothing to gain by expecting bad things out of people that are in your life--only the guilt of enabling negative behavior by acting like its inevitable. Treat others with the awareness that they're building a self-image out of what's reflected in the faces of their friends--if those faces are disdainful or unloving, that self-image will suffer. 

Yes, it's a roundabout rehash of the golden rule, but this lesson has been so present in my life lately that I felt the need to try and explain it more thoroughly. Treat your friends, your family, and most importantly yourself, as if failure doesn't exist--because no matter the problem or bad pattern, there is always a chance to change. If that potential exists, then there really isn't failure, just a false-start. Love the people in your life with genuine positive expectations. If you perceive another's faults, consider how you might possess similar faults, and honestly decide whether or not its them you have a problem with, or something about yourself. 

Love the person next to you, and you won't have the opportunity to think badly of yourself.

 

Ayni -- The Spirit of Reciprocity

If you were to look up the word "Ayni" on Wikipedia, you'd get a short couple of sentences that more or less describe the idea of utilitarianism. The notion of communities looking out for one another in a basic way in order to ensure security for all shouldn't be that strange to anyone, despite the fact that many of our communities do no such thing.

The word itself comes from the indigenous people of the Andes' in South America. I certainly do not claim to be an expert anthropologist, but I am sure that the people that endeavor to honor the idea of Ayni consider it to be more meaningful than the implied definition of primitive tribal utilitarianism. What does it mean to them? As I understand it, Ayni is the idea of creating a "right relationship" between the people and nature. Nature is a broad term, yes, but for the individual, creating Ayni is simply the practice of sharing one's gifts. 

Ayni can be sought with all aspects of life. As simple as "give freely" sounds, many of us are thoroughly conditioned to do the opposite. Living in a sustainable way is creating the right relationship between yourself and nature. Giving compassion, love, and aid to anyone who crosses your path is creating the right relationship between yourself and other people. Remembering to be thankful for the blessings of your existence helps create the right relationship between yourself and the universe. From the smallest relations to the largest, every interaction we have with the world can be either harmonious or not.

The importance of this idea escapes many. Yes, it's true that from a strictly logical standpoint, the utilitarian concept of sharing everything creates security. Most people have more than they need of something and less than they need of something else. Isn't this imbalance at the heart of nearly all socially detrimental decisions?

In a broader sense, the universe can and should be seen as whole--one big system--and systems operate on feedback. Just as your thoughts can change the way reality seems, your actions can affect the way reality, well, acts. When you invest good energy into your surroundings, good energy comes back your way, and the opposite is true as well. 

There are real world examples of this concept everywhere you look. Any community where friendship and people are valued over money or personal gain is going to be healthier--and there extreme examples like the Burning Man festival where huge numbers of virtual strangers create a temporary but powerful community around sharing the gifts each individual brought (money is not allowed as currency except to purchase consumable items: toilet paper, coffee, ice). When money is eliminated from our relationships, the true value of resources, time, skills and one's art are no longer distorted by the elaborate game of monopoly that our fiat currency system is built upon. Smaller festivals, like the local Roots and Bliss gathering (https://www.facebook.com/events/498189540257596/) achieve the same kind of energetic cooporation on a smaller scale. 

I don't really know enough about Ayni or the people who practice it to say that arts festivals are in the same spirit, but I like to think they are. When enough people get together who are out to help each other first, everyone gets helped multiple times instead of only having themselves to rely on. And when you put that together with a respect and reverence for nature and a diligent ethic to be responsible for your impact, the universe will be a more harmonious place. 

Vertigo

There's a hole in my chest. It isn't noticeable like a gunshot wound or freaky abscess. The gap is inside me, like an abyss in my soul. It's not always comfortable, but sometimes I forget to notice it. It's not the result of some heartache or tragedy. 

It's just a feeling.

A feeling like something is coming. An anticipation not unlike Christmas as a kid--that anxiety to get it over with, that tinge of fear that what you've hoped for might happen, but might not.

I bring this up because a conversation I had with a friend last night got me thinking about the feeling for the first time in awhile--not that it's gone away, I had just been living with it, riding it out. 

This friend and I were talking about, I guess, the point of existence (if I had to summarize succinctly). We started off discussing the implications of the notion of now. There are many clues in sacred texts, the mathematics of nature, and the phenomenology of consciousness that point to the relative nature of time--specifically that all time is happening in the same fractalized instant, and that separation of events and the flow of time are illusory constructs of our limited perspective. 

It seems like a nonsense theory to some, perhaps, and understandably so--because real or not, we still experience the flow of time, and what are we but the sum of experiences? Veracity has never been a requirement for an experience to be meaningful. But like the ancient cartographers who assumed the world was flat (because of their perspective), so too might our understanding of the universe be skewed. While we're on the subject of globes, consider that at any surface point of a sphere, is in a way the center of the circle. Is it so difficult to believe that time might be structured in the same way--so that each moment of time is it's own middle?

If you're quite certain that your perspective on time is accurate and that things flow logically from moment to moment, with cause and effect staying in line chronologically, remember that human beings are only capable of experiencing approximately 4% or so of the energetic spectrum that comprises reality. You've likely heard it said that the vast majority of space is empty--the gap between atomic and sub-atomic particles is so vast relative to the particles' size that it's reasonable to say that our very bodies are mostly empty space--yet we recognize the world around us as made up of solid boundaries. The dissonance between perception and reality is a constant of consciousness.  

Maybe that's where this vertigo I feel comes from.

Nexus

The cacophonous crashing of thundercloud cadence

rolling over and through 

the boy frightened him, 

and war drums fell-- 

although he hid himself, and buried reverberations within,

until love cast itself upon his fear,

with a tender, "There, there." 

Later, he lies down upon the grass

the blades are crushed and the edges of the air

are softer now--

looking and longing to be struck,

lightning leaps between the 

super-heated spinning summer sky.

Still afraid, he falls asleep.

And then, within, the spark finds

its mark, ignites the dark and tepid heart

which hid from pain and refused to see

the crystalline convergence,

the nexus of connection,

the miraculous equation:

"This energy has always been;

the thunderbolt had to happen,

It has always been on its way.

It has already struck me.

It will always energize my soul.

It has already disintegrated my body.

I receive it.

I am glad."

Estimate Vs. Actual

Topics that have come up today are leading me to think about my future. Often when we sit down and try to seriously consider where our lives are headed, the resulting thoughts are either swept up in fantasy and imagination of ourselves somewhere else, doing something we actually like for a living, or the future seems so mystifying that simply thinking about it can be painful or frightening. We take stock of our lives based on how well we have pushed ourselves along down whatever particular path or discipline will be required to complete the metamorphosis into an ideal version of our selves.

I'm old enough now that five or six years ago I probably had this thought program running often, since back then I would have been starting college. Whatever my specific goals for back then were, I'm totally sure that I've missed the mark on all of them, apart from graduating. Should I be happy with that? What were those goals anyway? Think back to five years ago and what you wanted then. Can you confidently list things that you never stopped thinking about or striving for? Probably not--everyday life isn't that way for most people, I think. 

So now that I'm out of school and I can compare my estimated future to my actual present reality, it occurs to me that types of goals my past self had were useless. My thinking wasn't structured around how to make myself into a better person or advance a discipline. It was magical thinking, like a kid daydreaming about being Spider-man. Many exiting from high school do not have goals so much as fantasies where they are not themselves anymore. In this scenario there is no thought given to what can be done today to meet that goal. I think that's why these types of goals are so fleeting and hard to remember, they were not so much plans as escapism. 

It's what you do everyday that defines who you are. And so, if you have a goal or a plan for your future, do something NOW! Find a way that you can get yourself a few inches closer everyday. Discipline is the key to transforming wishful thoughts into results. 

(For those who are curious, my main goal for the future is to stay alive. Expanding on that, I'd like to become the kind of person who is especially skilled at living--say, the type of guy who could get exiled into the wilderness and not starve or die of exposure/animals). 

Knowing Now

All the time in the world and nowhere to spend it

each moment unfolds into stagnated space

Entropy eats every degree of energy, 

unless I ignite the reactor inside me--fueled by blessings--engaged by sight

I can see miles with eyes open to light

but in darkness boundaries fade with like everything else,

love lies in that limitless void, lies in wait, and lies about its violence.

Strike sight from my sockets, send me somewhere unknown,

give me gratitude for the grandiose mystery. 

Even though understanding escapes me,
from the blessings of love flows endless dreaming. 

Delightful Descent

It's been one of those days for about a week. We all have them--stretches of time, whether hours, days, or weeks, where nothing really seems to gel. For me it probably has everything to do with falling out of the good habits that I spent all year cultivating: eating healthy, supplementing, working out, daily writing, socializing more, and the like. While I haven't been that bad at all in an objective sense (especially compared to the 20-year old version of myself), relative to the lifestyle I have been aiming for, I find myself way off-course. 

I should feel bad. That's what the brain is telling me. "You're going to lose all that work you've put in," it wants me to think. And while the negative thoughts are indeed present in the sense that I am aware of them, something is different. I've been here before, much deeper in the hole, where I started leaking self-confidence on a daily basis until one day I woke up and found I had none. This time is different. I know that today, by sleeping in, I didn't live to my full potential--I could have gotten stronger in the gym, or worked on a writing project. But didn't sleeping feel good? If I am honest with myself I know that I'm totally fine. My 100 pounds heavier self is very far away. He's probably dead and gone permanently. So what if I had ice cream a few days in a row? It's the fucking summer. We don't want ice cream to go out of existence, right? And if every person on the planet suddenly became "healthy" and put a hard stop to all forms of creamy ice, would the world be a better place? Okay, I guess it would, but that's not really a world I want to live in. I'd like people to be generally healthier and happier, sure, but we need the bad to have the good. And ice cream isn't bad at all, folks. It's just a matter of how you use it, like a gun (okay it's not a weapon but if you ate only ice cream for a long enough span you'd probably still die).

Anyway the point of all this is that we should learn to forgive ourselves for what we perceive as our failings or weaknesses. It's a great idea to engage in self-reflection, in fact Confucius would say that such recrimination is the noblest path to wisdom. But when that recrimination goes into beating yourself up mentally, there's a problem. And in our culture, we tend to exhibit programming that is downright suicidal in terms of self-image. So instead of spending your precious thoughts focused on how you failed today, think about what good you did today. And if you can't think of anything, stop reading this and go do something good, and think about that. Most importantly, when you wake up tomorrow morning, don't take today with you. Forget what you perceive as having fallen short on, and begin each day with thankfulness that you have an opportunity to try again. And hey, when life makes it too hard to resist the ice cream, fucking enjoy it. 

Otherwise it was a waste of ice cream.

Light

It's a fairly ubiquitous theme in mythology--that first, there was darkness--that the story began with light.

I had never given it much thought before. Why would light be the first act of creation?

Perhaps it is because without light, there is no creation. In darkness there is no substance, only potentiality—like Schrodinger’s cat, there’s a real possibility that the void is nothing but emptiness and death. Perceiving the darkness, there is fearfulness. Like the darkness, the universe is a thing made up of context. We all perceive the binary opposites that comprise reality, but in our perspective, things seem to have defined beginning and endpoints. But what east is there without west? There is no east pole or west pole, east and west only exist when you stand still and look for them. And even then, one simply flows into the other. Life and death, darkness and light, these are seemingly opposed forces that seem like they would cancel one another. But the light casts the shadow, does it not? And in that way, perhaps life and death are forms of the same type of energy as well, simply misunderstood by we mortal humans as we stand at a specific moment, the now, in between the two sides of the perceived spectrum of past and future.

Like east and west, the past and future do not exist outside of the context of one moment in time. That moment in time is now, and it emerges continually without interruption. The past flows out of the now, and is created by it, despite the illusion many people are under that the past created them. Any person can change the way they think about past events, and in doing so change how those things construct their identity, their life story. Time travel is already possible in the mind--and we can go back and change whatever we want by finding a new perspective through the lens of experience.

The future is also nothing more than a fluctuation of possibility--a wave pattern of potential outcomes that constantly changes as the present moment unfolds. 

So if the universe and all binary mechanisms are simply misunderstood parts of the same whole, light takes on a new significance. In darkness, the future is a state of fluctuation and probability, with no clear outcome or solidarity of meaning. The past is the same, an extension outward from the now, but with the illumination of the light, of our perception of it, what happened, and how it affected us.

Light is the first blessing of the cosmos. Through the light, we are granted vision. Our visionary powers are extraordinary, they allow for the collapse of infinite potentialities into a specific outcome, through our point of view in the here and now. With our sight, we can see the connections between all things, even things that seem like opposing forces. Through vision and will, one can find the beauty in each moment as it unfolds. When your true eyes are open, there is no death in the sense that our culture perceives it. There is only the ever-shifting wave of energy that powers all spirit, emerging into and out of the forms that we give it.

The recognition of this harmony creates an intense feeling of gratitude in the beholder, as all of the connections one can bear witness to become the catalyst for the next level of perception: the reality of infinite blessings that we all share. The natural state of energy is fluctuation, either via an entropic drain (negative energy) or a feedback loop (positive energy). Gratitude and blessings are the mechanism for positive feedback of the spirit. Thankfulness is a direct reaction to the realization of the miracle of your existence—seriously, just stop and think about the mathematical odds against your own existence, or the odds that you are even reading these words. There are no coincidences or accidents, only the emergent now. The feeling of gratitude serves to amplify your spiritual energy, this radiates out of you and into the cosmos. And once the gratitude has set the charge inside you, the blessings of the cosmos will find their way into your heart, like metal shavings to a magnet.

This is why light comes first—so that we may have the vision to perceive our blessings and be grateful for them.

Leggo'

As a junior in college, I had a certain professor who taught me more practical knowledge than perhaps any other person in my life. The course was simple: sit in guided, mindful awareness meditation for 15 or 20 minutes each class, and then simply discuss our strategies on writing. The only homework was to write, write anything, for another class, for a personal project, or a journal of some kind. Fifteen minutes a day was the prescribed minimum, and the only means the teacher used to judge our success was an online blog we were instructed to keep. The blog was only meant to be a series of updates on whatever writing was being done. Sounds easy, right?

Like every other class in college, I consistently found myself making the wrong choice--i.e., not doing my work. Even when all I had to do was lie, and make up some bullshit about working on a project, many days throughout that semester I failed to even do that. Oh, and did I mention that during this particular semester, the class I've described was the only one I was enrolled in? Pretty ridiculous to not put out more effort than I did, but... I'd like to say I still learned a lot from that class. The mild self-loathing I developed during the times I was slacking reminded me of any other type of discomfort--it was a message from myself that I was doing something wrong.

That feeling never really goes away... With one exception. When I have managed to apply the lessons I learned from that course--daily mindfulness meditation, daily writing, mindful exercise habits, etc.---I have landed at a valuable insight. What you do every day is what defines who you are. And so, I want to write every day, because on the days that I write, that feeling of wrongness, of wasted time--it goes away. 

This is the blog that I had to create for that class, to do my measly fifteen minutes a day. I'd like to think I can outdo that now, and perhaps without the metaphorical gun to my head in the form of class deadlines I might not be as likely to self-sabotage my master plan. But perhaps the most important lesson of mindfulness is to learn to accept what is. And so, starting now, I plan to let go of that self-critique that pulls me down when I'm not consistently "working" on my creative outlets. Is it really possible to cut that cord? I don't know, but I think I've learned enough about letting go to give it a good shot.