MonoMyth

Monomythical mindset
like an atypical crystal,
eyes in the twilight
chaos
perceive a divide or a whole
ebon infinity swirling,
rainbow waters pouring,
until there's a story,
a hero and a journey.

Born from black waters
he rages against the rushing
tide, refuses to believe
that he's born to die.
Left handed swordsman,
with bride at his right,
to create or destroy
unsure which is the birthright.

Cleaving through shadow
they begin to divide
until two become many,
until one of the two dies.
Her essence, the vaporous
breath of life's knowledge,
his body the vessel,
feminine spirit fills his form.

Journey unfinished, he passes the river
and hastens there to quench his thirst.
Clouded and swirling
cool and satiating,
Lethian waters cloud the connection
and love--though not lost
the hero forgets his bride
drowned beneath depths inside the mind.

Wandering still he seeks to find
that which long ago was free
--outside and wild--
Pandora opened her box
and in fear, the children replaced its contents
with their mother,
a cage in which she has long slept,
waiting for the Hero to remember.

Crucibles & Cauldrons: Part 3 -- Discipline

Crucibles & Cauldrons: Desire, Difficulty, and Discipline

Do you know your own mind? It might seem like a dumb question, but it bears consideration. Think about an average day. Is it mostly filled with activities that you are excited for, or is it mostly a beat-the-clock situation where you hope to just survive the workweek? For many people, the difficulties of the average day can seem unbearable, yet there is no choice but to soldier on, with no glimmer of hope until "retirement" or "vacation." Unfortunately, by the time that day comes, the effects of living with negativity will bear the rotten harvest of physical sickness, mental health deterioration, or alienation from loved ones.

To return to my question about the mind, the answer should be yes. Everyone knows whether or not they enjoy something or are bothered by it. But for many of us, there is a feeling of being stuck in place. Couple that with the panic of running out of time to live, and a miserable attitude is likely. So how do we get ourselves unstuck? Even if you know that the difficulties appearing in your life are trying to teach you something, how do you apply the lesson, and effect change?

The best method for lasting transformation is self-discipline. Again, sounds like a no-brainer, right? (that was a meditation joke). There are many avenues towards developing discipline, and meditation is a universally useful method. So is working out, martial arts, learning an instrument, writing, or any creative outlet. These disciplines are helpful because they build on themselves--going to the gym three to five days a week for just six weeks will bring about noticeable physical change, just as twenty minutes of meditation a day will change the mental landscape of the practitioner. Discipline is what you do every day, or almost. You are what you do every day. If you play guitar five days a week, you're a guitarist. If you work on that novel in furious 6 hours bursts but don't pick it up again for a month at a time between sessions, you aren't really a writer.

So think about that daily routine once more. Is there anything in there that you wouldn't want included in the dictionary definition under your name? Is there anything missing? The parts of the day that seem wretched, boring, or in some way unbearable are the places in your life where applying discipline can effect great change. For most people, it's their job. Many of us dream of what we'd love to do for a living while we're stuck at what we actually do. But until you make it a priority to start practicing being the ideal you, in a disciplined way, you'll stay right where you are. Even if there's a mountain between you and your goals, it won't bother you at all if you're moving earth a little bit each day. Nothing is insurmountable. But don't forget about the double-edged sword that desire can be--remember that you are where you are meant to be, regardless of where that is. But if the difficulties in life are informing you it's time to change, don't put it off til tomorrow. You're not going to do it all or learn it all in one day. If you want to be something, you have to take one step at a time, even if it's a crawl. You'll be surprised how rewarding the process of inching along can be, in comparison to the misery of being stuck in a difficult place.

Crucibles & Cauldrons: Part 2 -- Difficulty

Crucibles & Cauldrons: Desire, Difficulty and Discipline 

When one transforms their desires or dreams from the malnourishing precepts of the ego (the desire to "make it big"), the drain that comes from wanting to be someone other than yourself will cease. It becomes possible to stop the clock on the fear that time is running out to accomplish some thing that will have made life worth it. The fear of death is replaced by the joy of life.

Once that mindset is achieved, the difficulties of life don't just disappear. They're still present, but they are no longer a wall between the self and a mythologized future self. Instead, the disharmonious aspects of life can become guideposts towards the creation of new methods of self-discipline. Difficulty and discipline can work together to work great transformations in life, but the key is to pay attention to the message in the difficulty.

Whenever problems occur in people's relationships, work situations, or their self-image, there is always something to be learned. It might seem like an obvious insight, but on a deeper level, the difficulties that manifest in a person's life often seem to follow a pattern, do they not? Anyone who examines the story of their life with honesty can say that at some point or another, disruptions occurred in their life based on behaviors or mistakes that they repeated more than once.

Why do we get stuck in such loops? When distortion enters into life, people tend to react in one of two ways--either ignoring the problem, perhaps even burying it within their subconscious, or by facing the problem in some way, which when carried through with typically allows the person to synthesize a new understanding about themselves or the world. When new awareness is reached in this way, it is far less likely for the same problem or difficulty to do damage when it reappears (although reappear it may, as some lessons in life bear occasional reviews, lest they be forgotten). The flipside is that when a problem is ignored or not treated with full attention, the disruptions that occur tend to get more and more violent, until it can't be looked away from.

Most people have probably experienced this in romantic relationships--the sneaking awareness that things won't work out, ignored and shoved aside and allowed to fester until the end comes in a screaming or crying fight. Putting aside the problem of needing to break-up caused what might have been a small emotional pain early on to become a volcanic eruption.

The thing to keep in mind is that problems in life aren't problems--they're challenges that allow us to grow into more aware and conscious individuals. Trouble is just an adventure that isn't finished. Allow the stress of the curveballs that life throws to fuel the creative ability to solve problems instead of ignoring the message that the universe presents. When you find that you can gracefully step through life's ups and downs without getting in your own way, the musical rhythm of life becomes the guide for your every movement, and the entire universe will dance with you.

Crucibles & Cauldrons: Desire, Discipline and Difficulty -- Part 1

Crucibles & Cauldrons: Desire, Discipline and Difficulty

It's been a good year for me. I feel like I keep achieving new levels of personal awareness and social/emotional consciousness. The simple key to unlocking these potentials: desire, discipline, and difficulty. I would like to share my thoughts on these three tools of self-realization, as I have come to understand them. This first post will deal with the first tool--desire.

The desire to change oneself would probably be at the top of most people's wishlist. For me, a great deal of my life has been spent with an incessant background discomfort with myself. It wasn't that there was anything wrong with my surroundings or my life--instead, the nagging feeling that something wasn't right inside was coming from precisely there: inside. By constantly engaging the fantasizing part of my brain (imagining a future where I was a somebody--usually defined by whatever career I thought I wanted), the desire to be a different person led to the development of discomfort with the person I already was. This wasn't that intolerable for most of my life, but as my 20's moved along, thoughts began to emerge informing me that I was running out of time, that because I hadn't yet found my place, calling, or even began to develop a skill-set to carry me into a career, that I would never achieve the vague Babylonian dream to "make it."

I was growing up, and so the question that is so integral to everyone's upbringing, "What do I want to be when I grow-up?" was forced to change. Now it was, "I'm grown-up now, but who am I?" It felt like I had spent so much time focused on the first question, I never took time to answer the second. Looking back, I see that I had the question completely backwards. How could someone know what they want yet not know their own self? Desire alone was not enough to answer that question, and as I did pick up the tools I needed to find out about me, my understanding of desire finally flipped around.

Desire to achieve great things is not bad. Attachment to a specific outcome, on the other hand, is where dissonance lives. With any plan a person makes in life, whether it's a plan for the afternoon, a ten-year career plan, or a plot for world domination, there's an interesting consistency: nothing goes according to plan. Life simply doesn't work that way, and nobody needs that fact explained to them--we've all experienced it daily. The beautiful aspect of this is that many of life's greatest moments come when we least expected them, and in fact trying to stick to a personal plan of how life's myriad situations should unfold will only leave a person feeling disappointment or fury. The Joker would certainly agree with the idea that the more strict a planner a person is, the easier it is for them to be thrown off their game or upset by disruptions. This attachment to outcomes is where desire's dark side manifests, and compromising decisions are made, justified by the ends.

The fear of an outcome that doesn't match one's desires is inextricably linked to our common fear of death. When things don't go your way and you freak out, you're essentially leading yourself to believe that you only had one chance, and it's gone. We've all heard that we should live like we could die at any second, and while many people who say that are trying to encourage living in the moment, the logic of the statement is flawed by fear. When I think that way, that I could die tomorrow, it's more likely to initiate panic than comfort. Why not flip around language of the sentiment? What if we didn't fear death like it was holding up a stopwatch and staring at us like a creepy gym teacher? A beautiful soul once told me not to live like the dying. Wake up each morning in wonder, like a long-dead hero who has miraculously been returned to life after a thousand years of sleep.

That's when desire transforms, from a gnawing void inside into a simple beautiful question: "I'm awake, so what do I want?"

Dreaming

I practice lucid dreaming. Not everyone has heard of it--so here is a quick description. A lucid dreamer goes out of their way to bring attention to the fact that they are dreaming, and also makes notes upon waking up of what transpired. Some try to control the direction of their dreams and are able to do so, however, I prefer to let things unfold as they will while trying to pay attention.

A dream I had just a few nights ago has stayed with me past my morning journal entry, and so I would like to share it, because it was vivid and real beyond most dreams that I've ever experienced and remembered.

Like all dreams, this story picks up in the middle, from the point where I realized I was dreaming.

I was being shown or taught how to do something, and I was aware that what I was learning would be extraordinarily important. I knew I was on the verge of understanding what I was supposed to do. In the paradoxical logic of dreams, I was unaware of what my mysterious duty was, I just knew that when I got it, I would get it.

My awareness was centered in a dark and cloudy place, a reflection of the uncertainty I felt towards what to do next. I knew that once I grasped my lesson, the world would become clear and illuminated, and my anxiety would disappear.

After realizing this, my teacher, a shadowy figure without a discernible face or even gender, beckoned me towards the darkest forest of shadow. I was afraid, but not too afraid to enter, because I knew that on the other side was my goal.

I floated through darkness. Time did not exist anymore. I had always simply known and been part of this darkness. There was no pleasure or sorrow in this, but there was a longing for the light, and a memory of both fiery warmth and satiating icy coolness.

Where the water met the flame, a great cloud of vapor hissed in my mind. At first, I thought the steam would evaporate into nothingness--but in the haze, I saw a crystal with a tiny light inside. I turned it around in my hands and the light began to refract into red, yellow, and then a rainbow of sparkling light. The more colors bloomed out of the crystal, the more beautiful it seemed to me, and at the same time my appreciation of its splendor seemed to be what amplified and multiplied the variety and intensity of the colors, and it exploded into kaleidoscopic colors I had never known.

I asked, "Is this the light?"

As the thought formed in my consciousness, the crystal merged into my being, seeming to become my heart. As if I was Neo being jacked into the Matrix, a surging rush of power jolted into my body, entering from the back of my neck at the base of my skull. A humming, pulsating, electric vibration shook my entire reality, levitating me upwards, lifting me off the forest floor. Light exploded out of my eyes, nostrils, mouth, and fingertips. I realized I was no longer just inside my mind, I was also seeing myself rise up, overflowing with light and energy.


I'm sure that the next thing I remember is waking up. I've forgotten already how I felt when I woke. But I don't think I can forget the dream.