So... why do I do this again? What is the practice of writing something that anyone can see? I was beginning to touch on what it was a few years ago; just a practice of showing yourself, in a way of bringing all your shadows into the light... Have I written about confession before? I'm sure of it. Confession, Repentance and Baptism. Confession: Seeing your habitual mind patterns, your interaction with yourself and the world.... Repentance: Taking steps to recognize and change any of those patterns you may not like, or that may be affecting you in a way that just doesn't serve you anymore.... and Baptism... renewal, when those conscious efforts become imbued in your being, just become a new part of who you are, naturally. A new pattern.
I definitely see the beauty in that process. If sin is an archery term, meaning to miss the mark, where are we aiming? The center... the center of our being... and what lies there? What is at the center? What am I trying to hit?
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Sunday, December 07, 2008
Monday, November 10, 2008
Another Autobio for Class
WK9
November 9th, 2008
Accountability, Responsibility & Integrity: Now I Want To Play
Through this most interesting and investigative lens of looking at one’s life in the terms of “cause and effect,” I am instantly, somehow, drawn into the world of accountability, responsibility, and integrity; accountability being simply an empowerment of taking responsibility for one’s life, responsibility being simply an ability to respond to life’s dramas, and integrity being the ability to be true to yourself in a way that allows you to respond in a good way. When I look at the world and my life in these terms, my personal role in the shaping of my life becomes much more apparent, inviting me to both claim this life that I have been given and become more and more comfortable doing so through gentle acceptance of the past, hopeful enthusiasm about the future, and stillness of mind in the present moment. Yet, intuitively, I see life as much more mysterious than this heady and somewhat sterile idea of “cause and effect:” I believe that life spontaneously arises for each person by virtue of what they are, by what they have become, so that reality arises based on being rather than thinking. Thinking can have both positive and negative effects on being, yet it ultimately can become an endless game of fixing and gaining and striving, and there seems to be a much greater reality beyond the mind of thought where an actual experience of God is available, where each moment and each experience is perfect, spontaneous and new. In this realm, there is no cause and no effect, no winning or losing, no me and you, no world inside and world outside… because they are the one in the same. So in the realm of infinity, where there is just one, how can there be cause and effect?
And it’s interesting, because it’s this very idea that we start with when we are doing treatment: we start in the realm beyond cause and effect, and move down into creation and law. It makes me feel as if I am living in two worlds at once, and my intention is to be able to infuse the glimpses I’ve had with the world beyond cause and effect into the material world that I experience with my bodily senses and emotions.
Writing in this way, seeing this particular effect as my present state of being, I am reminded of a certain ritual that I used to take part in growing up. As an only child until the age of thirteen, I remember spending lots of time alone, entertaining myself with my own thoughts (and Nintendo). One of my favorite things to do was to stand in front of a mirror and just look at myself. Staring, slowing, barely remembering to breathe, I methodically recited and repeated, "That's me. I'm living right now . . . and that's me . . ." Slowly my world seemed to dilate, and it's really an ineffable feeling, but I can say that it felt good. I did this everywhere: in the bathroom, in the car, in dressing rooms, and in my mother's huge, carpet to ceiling 3-way mirror, which was especially fun because if I angled the outside mirrors just right, I could literally see myself from all sides. I'm not exactly sure what my motivation was, but I can remember the surreal sensations that arose as I looked at my reflection trying to understand that that thing in the mirror was me.
I honestly cannot confidently say that this thing called “me” has personally “caused” everything that has happened in my life to happen. I believe that we come to this earth with a myriad of lessons to learn that hopefully we can come to realize before we die. There’s a mysterious way in which events have taken place in my life, and at the height of what I feel to be my conscious evolution, I wasn’t “causing” anything, but I was rather completely open to the infinite synchronicity that is life, a sense of surrender that allowed me to feel as if every relation, every experience was by Divine appointment, not mine.
Yet I will continue my story in terms of accountability, responsibility and integrity. I was a confident and happy child, throughout all my years through elementary school. I was blessed with an extreme athleticism and this ability to excel at sports, and my confidence, my outlook on life as fun and safe gave me wonderful friends. My beingness was one of great joy for life and I thrived in the context of contest and games.
As I began to understand and feel what this “me” was, I began to exert this sense of me into the world and with this sense of a separate self, I began to make decisions on the basis of trying to protect and feed this me. Here was a fundamental shift in my consciousness, that is, it was the beginning of my first sense of self-consciousness and acting from that place. This began a pattern that I am continuing to work with today. And it’s an incredibly interesting dance, as if this self-consciousness has grown and evolved throughout my whole life, and it is still here with me now. The question becomes, “Do I dance with it? Or resist it?”
My first two years of High School were incredibly challenging in this way. I transitioned to a new high school in both my freshman and sophomore years. Because of that, my self-consciousness was very high, and my self-esteem not so high. Both years, I started off with good friends and a fun life. But towards the end of both years, the group of friends that I had created decided that they didn’t want to be friends with me anymore. I was excluded from my group of friends and felt more alone than ever. Looking back at it now, it seems that I helped to create these situations by not fully believing in myself. If the world is a mirror, my world at the time seemed to reflect my fears of isolation. Yet I didn’t fully realize that I could change it at the time, I didn’t fully take accountability for what had happened and thus easily took on the victim role. Thus, I had no ability to respond and no chance to find integrity in my thoughts, actions and attitudes.
Yet at the end of my sophomore year, right after I had been excluded from my peer group and my date to the sophomore dance had decided to go with someone else, the girl that I had had a crush on for the entire year entered my life. And we fell in love. Looking at my life through the lens of cause and effect, I cannot fully explain how this wonderful person came into my life; it was seemingly out of nowhere. Logically, there must have been a part of me beyond my normal waking consciousness that still believed in connection and love, because this is what this person showed me again.
My remaining days in high school were an extremely bright time for the most part. My confidence in myself and life grew, and my soccer skills peaked again connecting me with my body. I still felt loneliness when it came to the world of the opposite sex, yet I was so extremely supported by friends and family that my consciousness grew and grew and my beingness allowed many beautiful circumstances to come into my life. I responded to life in a way that matched my intuitive feelings about the Universe: Life is good. Life is God.
My college years were all about experimentation and expansion. I spent a lot of time studying religious texts and my mind soared in the heights of being able to study what my heart has always yearned to learn. It was here that I learned about the conscious nature of reality, of being completely connected to the world in which you live. This allowed me to travel to India and study and practice meditation. In this context, I was more myself than ever, and I touched on an intelligence that is completely beyond one’s own mind, and I found a love of life itself, the entire process of living and dying and suffering and celebrating. And in this state, I again attracted the next love of my life.
Yet this was to be my next critical lesson as I began to confine the love of the Universe into the boundaries of a single individual. And as this entanglement ensued within my mind and being, the relationship fell apart. I forgot that the source of my happiness, the very ability to attract this love in my life was wholly based on the fact that I was in a state of love. And this basic confusion, of the source of love, took me down into a spiral of depression that I am still recovering from to this day. This was almost three years ago.
Depression has allowed me to dig up and sift through what my beliefs are about myself and the world. In the trenches of depression, I have questioned and quested, and ultimately have learned to surrender to the entire process of life itself. When you are in a state of confusion so much so that you truly don’t know what to create, it seems, you are really close to God. In this process of surrender, for me, it’s not so much about what I want to create, but rather, how I can serve. I gave up trying to be happy and instead just opened up my arms and heart as a vessel for something that could live through and as my life.
These days, I realize that I am a creator, but in this spiritual realm, I feel that we are co-creators, vessels, changing the world by virtue of what we are. The more I try to protect and serve the self, the more I feel a sense of struggle. The more I open up and accept and embrace the circumstances before me, the more I can create. I want to serve humanity and serve my soul, by going through life in a way that just appreciates the whole infinite process of life.
These days, I still battle with self-doubt, and use the tools of meditation and prayer to open me up, to do things my mind doesn’t think I can do. To take an approach of simple non-attachment, not being attached to a particular outcome, allows me the freedom to be. Life, to me, is meant to be a mystery. A life planned out, then sought out, even spiritually, doesn’t seem to bring real happiness… there is always this sense of mystery pulling us. This I feel deeply, and a connection into the nature of God arises with this sense, for God is not some sort of clock-maker, but an infinite being playing out its life through its myriad of forms living its life through our lives, through our hearts and minds, through our struggles and despairs, and our ecstasies and joys. I am more aware now of when I am resisting and when I am opening, and it’s not exactly easy to open up all the time. Yet, practice helps, and more practice helps more still. I have a teacher who has shared with me one of her mantras: “Fall in love with life in every moment.” And this is how I hope to create, through this act of loving surrender, through a releasing of self-consciousness, self-protection, self-gain, and self-loathing, and into a world where there is nothing to really do, except carry out this love through every inch of my being. It is in this way that I take accountability for my life, and respond to life’s situations that aligns with opening up and loving the entire process of life, and thus creating integrity with not only my thoughts, beliefs and attitudes, but the entire Universe itself.
November 9th, 2008
Accountability, Responsibility & Integrity: Now I Want To Play
Through this most interesting and investigative lens of looking at one’s life in the terms of “cause and effect,” I am instantly, somehow, drawn into the world of accountability, responsibility, and integrity; accountability being simply an empowerment of taking responsibility for one’s life, responsibility being simply an ability to respond to life’s dramas, and integrity being the ability to be true to yourself in a way that allows you to respond in a good way. When I look at the world and my life in these terms, my personal role in the shaping of my life becomes much more apparent, inviting me to both claim this life that I have been given and become more and more comfortable doing so through gentle acceptance of the past, hopeful enthusiasm about the future, and stillness of mind in the present moment. Yet, intuitively, I see life as much more mysterious than this heady and somewhat sterile idea of “cause and effect:” I believe that life spontaneously arises for each person by virtue of what they are, by what they have become, so that reality arises based on being rather than thinking. Thinking can have both positive and negative effects on being, yet it ultimately can become an endless game of fixing and gaining and striving, and there seems to be a much greater reality beyond the mind of thought where an actual experience of God is available, where each moment and each experience is perfect, spontaneous and new. In this realm, there is no cause and no effect, no winning or losing, no me and you, no world inside and world outside… because they are the one in the same. So in the realm of infinity, where there is just one, how can there be cause and effect?
And it’s interesting, because it’s this very idea that we start with when we are doing treatment: we start in the realm beyond cause and effect, and move down into creation and law. It makes me feel as if I am living in two worlds at once, and my intention is to be able to infuse the glimpses I’ve had with the world beyond cause and effect into the material world that I experience with my bodily senses and emotions.
Writing in this way, seeing this particular effect as my present state of being, I am reminded of a certain ritual that I used to take part in growing up. As an only child until the age of thirteen, I remember spending lots of time alone, entertaining myself with my own thoughts (and Nintendo). One of my favorite things to do was to stand in front of a mirror and just look at myself. Staring, slowing, barely remembering to breathe, I methodically recited and repeated, "That's me. I'm living right now . . . and that's me . . ." Slowly my world seemed to dilate, and it's really an ineffable feeling, but I can say that it felt good. I did this everywhere: in the bathroom, in the car, in dressing rooms, and in my mother's huge, carpet to ceiling 3-way mirror, which was especially fun because if I angled the outside mirrors just right, I could literally see myself from all sides. I'm not exactly sure what my motivation was, but I can remember the surreal sensations that arose as I looked at my reflection trying to understand that that thing in the mirror was me.
I honestly cannot confidently say that this thing called “me” has personally “caused” everything that has happened in my life to happen. I believe that we come to this earth with a myriad of lessons to learn that hopefully we can come to realize before we die. There’s a mysterious way in which events have taken place in my life, and at the height of what I feel to be my conscious evolution, I wasn’t “causing” anything, but I was rather completely open to the infinite synchronicity that is life, a sense of surrender that allowed me to feel as if every relation, every experience was by Divine appointment, not mine.
Yet I will continue my story in terms of accountability, responsibility and integrity. I was a confident and happy child, throughout all my years through elementary school. I was blessed with an extreme athleticism and this ability to excel at sports, and my confidence, my outlook on life as fun and safe gave me wonderful friends. My beingness was one of great joy for life and I thrived in the context of contest and games.
As I began to understand and feel what this “me” was, I began to exert this sense of me into the world and with this sense of a separate self, I began to make decisions on the basis of trying to protect and feed this me. Here was a fundamental shift in my consciousness, that is, it was the beginning of my first sense of self-consciousness and acting from that place. This began a pattern that I am continuing to work with today. And it’s an incredibly interesting dance, as if this self-consciousness has grown and evolved throughout my whole life, and it is still here with me now. The question becomes, “Do I dance with it? Or resist it?”
My first two years of High School were incredibly challenging in this way. I transitioned to a new high school in both my freshman and sophomore years. Because of that, my self-consciousness was very high, and my self-esteem not so high. Both years, I started off with good friends and a fun life. But towards the end of both years, the group of friends that I had created decided that they didn’t want to be friends with me anymore. I was excluded from my group of friends and felt more alone than ever. Looking back at it now, it seems that I helped to create these situations by not fully believing in myself. If the world is a mirror, my world at the time seemed to reflect my fears of isolation. Yet I didn’t fully realize that I could change it at the time, I didn’t fully take accountability for what had happened and thus easily took on the victim role. Thus, I had no ability to respond and no chance to find integrity in my thoughts, actions and attitudes.
Yet at the end of my sophomore year, right after I had been excluded from my peer group and my date to the sophomore dance had decided to go with someone else, the girl that I had had a crush on for the entire year entered my life. And we fell in love. Looking at my life through the lens of cause and effect, I cannot fully explain how this wonderful person came into my life; it was seemingly out of nowhere. Logically, there must have been a part of me beyond my normal waking consciousness that still believed in connection and love, because this is what this person showed me again.
My remaining days in high school were an extremely bright time for the most part. My confidence in myself and life grew, and my soccer skills peaked again connecting me with my body. I still felt loneliness when it came to the world of the opposite sex, yet I was so extremely supported by friends and family that my consciousness grew and grew and my beingness allowed many beautiful circumstances to come into my life. I responded to life in a way that matched my intuitive feelings about the Universe: Life is good. Life is God.
My college years were all about experimentation and expansion. I spent a lot of time studying religious texts and my mind soared in the heights of being able to study what my heart has always yearned to learn. It was here that I learned about the conscious nature of reality, of being completely connected to the world in which you live. This allowed me to travel to India and study and practice meditation. In this context, I was more myself than ever, and I touched on an intelligence that is completely beyond one’s own mind, and I found a love of life itself, the entire process of living and dying and suffering and celebrating. And in this state, I again attracted the next love of my life.
Yet this was to be my next critical lesson as I began to confine the love of the Universe into the boundaries of a single individual. And as this entanglement ensued within my mind and being, the relationship fell apart. I forgot that the source of my happiness, the very ability to attract this love in my life was wholly based on the fact that I was in a state of love. And this basic confusion, of the source of love, took me down into a spiral of depression that I am still recovering from to this day. This was almost three years ago.
Depression has allowed me to dig up and sift through what my beliefs are about myself and the world. In the trenches of depression, I have questioned and quested, and ultimately have learned to surrender to the entire process of life itself. When you are in a state of confusion so much so that you truly don’t know what to create, it seems, you are really close to God. In this process of surrender, for me, it’s not so much about what I want to create, but rather, how I can serve. I gave up trying to be happy and instead just opened up my arms and heart as a vessel for something that could live through and as my life.
These days, I realize that I am a creator, but in this spiritual realm, I feel that we are co-creators, vessels, changing the world by virtue of what we are. The more I try to protect and serve the self, the more I feel a sense of struggle. The more I open up and accept and embrace the circumstances before me, the more I can create. I want to serve humanity and serve my soul, by going through life in a way that just appreciates the whole infinite process of life.
These days, I still battle with self-doubt, and use the tools of meditation and prayer to open me up, to do things my mind doesn’t think I can do. To take an approach of simple non-attachment, not being attached to a particular outcome, allows me the freedom to be. Life, to me, is meant to be a mystery. A life planned out, then sought out, even spiritually, doesn’t seem to bring real happiness… there is always this sense of mystery pulling us. This I feel deeply, and a connection into the nature of God arises with this sense, for God is not some sort of clock-maker, but an infinite being playing out its life through its myriad of forms living its life through our lives, through our hearts and minds, through our struggles and despairs, and our ecstasies and joys. I am more aware now of when I am resisting and when I am opening, and it’s not exactly easy to open up all the time. Yet, practice helps, and more practice helps more still. I have a teacher who has shared with me one of her mantras: “Fall in love with life in every moment.” And this is how I hope to create, through this act of loving surrender, through a releasing of self-consciousness, self-protection, self-gain, and self-loathing, and into a world where there is nothing to really do, except carry out this love through every inch of my being. It is in this way that I take accountability for my life, and respond to life’s situations that aligns with opening up and loving the entire process of life, and thus creating integrity with not only my thoughts, beliefs and attitudes, but the entire Universe itself.
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
Seattle
Ah, Seattle. This interesting meld of masculine and feminine energies. Held by the water that comes from all around... like being in a womb again... and challenged by the mountains, to go out and fulfill your potential.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Saturday, May 12, 2007
This sounds strangely familiar.
In order to be a teacher in these higher regions of existence it is by no means sufficient to have simply developed the sense for them. To that end science is just as necessary as it is for the teacher's calling in the world of ordinary reality. Higher seeing alone does not make a knower in the spiritual any more than healthy sense organs make a scholar in the ream of sensible realities. Because in truth all reality, the lower as well as the higher spiritual, are only two sides of one and the same fundamental being, anyone who is ignorant in the lower branches of knowledge will as a rule remain ignorant in the higher. This fact creates a feeling of immeasurable responsibility in the person who, through a spiritual call, feels himself summoned to speak about the spiritual regions of existence. It imposes upon him humility and reserve. This should deter no one — not even those whose other circumstances of life afford them no opportunity for the study of ordinary science — from occupying himself with the higher truths. Everyone can fulfill his task as a man without understanding anything of botany, zoology, mathematics and the other sciences. He cannot, however, in the full sense of the word, be a human being without having come in some way or other nearer to an understanding of the nature and destination of man as revealed through the knowledge of the supersensible.
The highest to which a man is able to look, he calls the Divine, and he somehow must think of the highest destiny as being in connection with this Divinity. The wisdom, therefore, that reaches out beyond the sensible and reveals to him his own being and with it his final goal, may well be called divine wisdom or theosophy. To the study of the spiritual process in human life and in the cosmos, the term spiritual science may be given. When, as in this book, one extracts from this spiritual science those special results that have reference to the spiritual core of man's being then the expression theosophy may be employed to designate this domain because it has been employed for centuries in this way.
Auto Bio
It seems a funny and strange process to write about one's own life. Yet now, as I begin to create my own story, I can already distantly feel its value rising into my chest. And its oddly intense, an experience that mixes memory, inner contemplation, and outer circumstance. And when we add to it the dimension of time, and a human's incredible ability recontextualize past and present events and circumstances, we then have a story that has the innate ability to change and evolve in each passing moment: The story I'm telling you today, is most likely not the same story I would have created five years ago, and equally as unlikely that it'll be the same five years from now. Yet, each story would be based on the same exact life.
So perhaps I'll start with what seems to be the driving theme that continues to help shape my experience of/with life.
As an only child until the age of thirteen, I remember spending lots of time alone, entertaining myself with my own thoughts (and Nintendo). One of my favorite things to do was to stand in front of a mirror and just look at myself. Staring, slowing, barely remembering to breathe, I methodically recited and repeated, "That's me. I'm living right now. . . and that's me . . ." Slowly my world seemed to dilate, and it's really an ineffable feeling, but I can say that it felt good. I did this everywhere: in the bathroom, in the car, in dressing rooms, and in my mother's huge, carpet to ceiling 3-way mirror, which was especially fun because if I angled the outside mirrors just right, I could literally see myself from all sides. I'm not exactly sure what my motivation was, but I can remember the surreal sensations that arose as I looked at my reflection trying to understand that that thing in the mirror was me.
We are born with these senses, literally sensors for experiencing and interacting with the world around us, and the stimuli are all coming into a single self. We have to look in a mirror, hear ourselves on an answering machine, or see ourselves on video to even come close to experiencing ourselves in the same way we experience the rest of the world. And even then, it's not really interaction, it's just observation (at its best, but normally, just projection). So out comes this breach between oneself and the surrounding world and with it my adolescence. . .
. . . which has its advantages, like GIRLS!! and rebellion!! and being cool!! My mind focused more now on the way I was appearing to the rest of the world. This was both incredibly exciting, and absolutely terrifying as I developed a greater sense of being a male and also felt for the first time a real different and independent mind and body from my parents. Thus, I dove in, with sports and girls becoming my main focus. This was coupled with a growing concern with how I appeared to the outside world. I looked in the mirror now, to make sure that I was looking good.
In my adventures outward, I became more and more of a social creature. I developed incredible bonds with friends, and I valued both close and intense one-on-one conversations, as well as experiencing the energy of large groups of people coming together. I fell in love with fine arts, and was incredibly inspired by my Middle School Art teacher, but then fell out of it, and chose chorale singing more in high school, largely because I was never inspired and sure about my art after that wonderful teacher in Middle School. In high school, I had my first experience of being in love, I won two state soccer championships, and discovered how much I loved being a leader, as I become the team captain in my senior year. I can say that I was completely happy and thrilled throughout my high school years.
And as I entered college, I was even more thrilled about my independence, but I stayed close to home, largely because of my little sister, who was only six at the time. I didn't want to miss out on her childhood. So while I was going to college and living on my own, I was still being financially supported by my parents, and I still went home a lot to visit. My college experience seems now more of an experiment. I entered my freshman year convinced I was going to be a doctor, yet as I studied the field more, and really learned about the field of medicine, I was turned off by it almost completely. With insurance and pharmaceutical companies pretty much running the medical industry, something in me said, "There's got to be something better." And so I turned to psychology. There I found lots and lots of studies and deductive reasoning, and labeling of disorders, without any real answers of what to do about them (besides taking drugs). So I again looked and looked and found comfort in Religious Studies and Philosophy. It was here where I was able to read texts from authors throughout history that spent their lives learning, studying, practicing, seeking Truth. And I found that all religions, especially the mystical forms that they took on, were all pretty much speaking of the same experience. I also learned how dangerous religions can be in their ability to control and manipulate large groups of people. I wanted to see the truth for myself. So I went to India. I can honestly say that I am still being changed by this experience. Studying and practicing Buddhism in the country of its birth, being inundated with new culture, I fell in love with myself and the world, and the line between the two was as blurry as its ever been. And I fell in love with a girl.
She was from New York, I was from Boulder. And although we didn't really plan on it, we kept the relationship going. And this began to slowly dominate all of my decisions and intentions. We finished our senior years at our respective schools, seeing each other once a month or so, and as we were thrust into the real world, both of us had no clue what we wanted to do, but we did know we wanted to do something together. I still can't believe how hard it is to make a decision with another person. And our relationship oscillated between two mutually supportive individuals, to one entangled mess. Because I made this person my world, I attributed any success and happiness to her, and I blamed her for any time I was unhappy. And eventually the strain was too much and after three years, we broke it off.
A year later, I am the person writing this story. I haven't stayed in one place for more than nine months at a time since graduating college, I am still disentangling that knot from my relationship, and I am rediscovering life as me. My thoughts are constantly dominated with paradox, this intrinsic, mutually present relationship between inner and outer, between duality and non-duality, between spiritual and practical. My karma gave me a childhood that was happy and comfortable, but without any competition, my ego seemed to form later, and I almost had to thrust it upon myself as I stared in that mirror. My later years, I developed this ego, then gave it up in India, then had it show up in the most unlikely place I would have ever thought: Love. And it was my attachment to love, and this single person that enabled this new ego to take on such a strong and fierce form. My relationship with it began as a battle, is developing into a taming, and coming out as insight. Confusion abounds, but, I am trying to work with it, rather than resist it entirely. I am realizing more the unending and changing adventure that composes life, and want more than anything else to just enjoy the process. I know that I am happy when I am speaking, writing and creating art, and hopefully Waldorf training will provide an environment and context to develop these simultaneously. I look forward to the next chapter.
Adolescence:
don't forget to mention:
So perhaps I'll start with what seems to be the driving theme that continues to help shape my experience of/with life.
As an only child until the age of thirteen, I remember spending lots of time alone, entertaining myself with my own thoughts (and Nintendo). One of my favorite things to do was to stand in front of a mirror and just look at myself. Staring, slowing, barely remembering to breathe, I methodically recited and repeated, "That's me. I'm living right now. . . and that's me . . ." Slowly my world seemed to dilate, and it's really an ineffable feeling, but I can say that it felt good. I did this everywhere: in the bathroom, in the car, in dressing rooms, and in my mother's huge, carpet to ceiling 3-way mirror, which was especially fun because if I angled the outside mirrors just right, I could literally see myself from all sides. I'm not exactly sure what my motivation was, but I can remember the surreal sensations that arose as I looked at my reflection trying to understand that that thing in the mirror was me.
We are born with these senses, literally sensors for experiencing and interacting with the world around us, and the stimuli are all coming into a single self. We have to look in a mirror, hear ourselves on an answering machine, or see ourselves on video to even come close to experiencing ourselves in the same way we experience the rest of the world. And even then, it's not really interaction, it's just observation (at its best, but normally, just projection). So out comes this breach between oneself and the surrounding world and with it my adolescence. . .
. . . which has its advantages, like GIRLS!! and rebellion!! and being cool!! My mind focused more now on the way I was appearing to the rest of the world. This was both incredibly exciting, and absolutely terrifying as I developed a greater sense of being a male and also felt for the first time a real different and independent mind and body from my parents. Thus, I dove in, with sports and girls becoming my main focus. This was coupled with a growing concern with how I appeared to the outside world. I looked in the mirror now, to make sure that I was looking good.
In my adventures outward, I became more and more of a social creature. I developed incredible bonds with friends, and I valued both close and intense one-on-one conversations, as well as experiencing the energy of large groups of people coming together. I fell in love with fine arts, and was incredibly inspired by my Middle School Art teacher, but then fell out of it, and chose chorale singing more in high school, largely because I was never inspired and sure about my art after that wonderful teacher in Middle School. In high school, I had my first experience of being in love, I won two state soccer championships, and discovered how much I loved being a leader, as I become the team captain in my senior year. I can say that I was completely happy and thrilled throughout my high school years.
And as I entered college, I was even more thrilled about my independence, but I stayed close to home, largely because of my little sister, who was only six at the time. I didn't want to miss out on her childhood. So while I was going to college and living on my own, I was still being financially supported by my parents, and I still went home a lot to visit. My college experience seems now more of an experiment. I entered my freshman year convinced I was going to be a doctor, yet as I studied the field more, and really learned about the field of medicine, I was turned off by it almost completely. With insurance and pharmaceutical companies pretty much running the medical industry, something in me said, "There's got to be something better." And so I turned to psychology. There I found lots and lots of studies and deductive reasoning, and labeling of disorders, without any real answers of what to do about them (besides taking drugs). So I again looked and looked and found comfort in Religious Studies and Philosophy. It was here where I was able to read texts from authors throughout history that spent their lives learning, studying, practicing, seeking Truth. And I found that all religions, especially the mystical forms that they took on, were all pretty much speaking of the same experience. I also learned how dangerous religions can be in their ability to control and manipulate large groups of people. I wanted to see the truth for myself. So I went to India. I can honestly say that I am still being changed by this experience. Studying and practicing Buddhism in the country of its birth, being inundated with new culture, I fell in love with myself and the world, and the line between the two was as blurry as its ever been. And I fell in love with a girl.
She was from New York, I was from Boulder. And although we didn't really plan on it, we kept the relationship going. And this began to slowly dominate all of my decisions and intentions. We finished our senior years at our respective schools, seeing each other once a month or so, and as we were thrust into the real world, both of us had no clue what we wanted to do, but we did know we wanted to do something together. I still can't believe how hard it is to make a decision with another person. And our relationship oscillated between two mutually supportive individuals, to one entangled mess. Because I made this person my world, I attributed any success and happiness to her, and I blamed her for any time I was unhappy. And eventually the strain was too much and after three years, we broke it off.
A year later, I am the person writing this story. I haven't stayed in one place for more than nine months at a time since graduating college, I am still disentangling that knot from my relationship, and I am rediscovering life as me. My thoughts are constantly dominated with paradox, this intrinsic, mutually present relationship between inner and outer, between duality and non-duality, between spiritual and practical. My karma gave me a childhood that was happy and comfortable, but without any competition, my ego seemed to form later, and I almost had to thrust it upon myself as I stared in that mirror. My later years, I developed this ego, then gave it up in India, then had it show up in the most unlikely place I would have ever thought: Love. And it was my attachment to love, and this single person that enabled this new ego to take on such a strong and fierce form. My relationship with it began as a battle, is developing into a taming, and coming out as insight. Confusion abounds, but, I am trying to work with it, rather than resist it entirely. I am realizing more the unending and changing adventure that composes life, and want more than anything else to just enjoy the process. I know that I am happy when I am speaking, writing and creating art, and hopefully Waldorf training will provide an environment and context to develop these simultaneously. I look forward to the next chapter.
Adolescence:
don't forget to mention:
Thursday, April 12, 2007
About Me:
As I project through these shades formed from the cogs worn from rust and overuse I am waiting for this machine to produce my heaven, and I wait, and wait, and wait and wait, one spring frees itself, pulled by gravity and lightness, spinning so fast that it completely misses the heaven it was striving to create. Just a blur and, so dizzy, almost sick, its tension unravels, slowing to a stop as a circle with no refenence points, gliding in and now guided by the very gravity and lightness that tore it apart from the machine, infused by heat, more malleable, liquid now, it now rests in the space of my ear canal whispering my new mantra: "yes."
What's this? (What are you waiting for?)
I sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're going and meet up with them later. You know? It's this kind of waiting, of waiting for SOMEthing to work out, to come along and make you feel awesome about life, one thing to save you, to bring you out of the mucky muck. And, really it's not that bad, and therein lies the freedom of of almost saying fuck it to the whole idea of persuing something that holds hidden pleasures and freedoms, because freedom lies in the here, subtlely calling you from a future, each situation urging us to finally say yes, and be done with this lesson revealed through the muck, and let it be shone through like the halos we see in Christian and Buddhist paintings, that the transfiguration, that nirvana was not really a sudden light coming out of JC or Siddartha, but instead the eyes of those being transformed, thrown open by a final surrendur... fight or flow, stop or go, yes or no? No rush, really, just.... come on!!
And I feel that I am repeating myself over and over and over again... yet my experience of life has changed, just like I knew it would, as if I am experiencing now, that future self that was trying to keep my past self alive, urging it along to still, and let the lessons come in.... identify where you are stuck, then let it go... that is what going through karma is, this is the lesson embodied in all of the lessons, the physical world as a dense manifestation of divinity, simultaneously enslaving and freeing, each obstacle really a trampoline, each leaf really just a ray from the sun, Hydrogen to Helium to a our sun, forging the chemicals that compose all life on earth, put together in a different fashion, mingling in flesh and thought and light, completely complete, in its own right, spontaneously existing by virtue of what it is, attracting and repelling and breathing. It's not meant to be a struggle... but sometimes that's exactly what's needed to let it all go.
So my intention isn't just merely to be happy, to feel content or look in spirituality for another thing to hold onto, but instead to just let it all in, yes, fuck yes, oh God yeah. My intention is to stop waiting.
I give up this striving.
Looking at my life like an Avatar of a video game. And perhaps in doing so, in freeing, in freedom without waiting for a specific outcome, one truly does become an Avatar.
And even beyond that,
My intention is to fall in love with life in every moment.
From WIE:
When Christ went to the desert after his baptism, he went to face the devil. He didn't think in his mind, "After forty days I will return." He just went there. He came out of the Jordan River, baptized by Saint John the Baptist, and went to the desert. He went to the desert. And he said to the devil,
"My friend, look, until now you were playing with the people. You started with Eve in paradise, and now you are finishing with me. I am here alone. I am not eating. I'm not drinking. And the cold in my bones in the night in the desert is terrible. I suffer. But I don't play games. I am here. Alone. And you come to me and you tell me to turn stones into bread. You tell me to prostrate to you. You? To give you the authority of my people? Go now. We have seen each other. I know who you are and you know who I am."
And in that moment the devil gave up everything.
And I feel that I am repeating myself over and over and over again... yet my experience of life has changed, just like I knew it would, as if I am experiencing now, that future self that was trying to keep my past self alive, urging it along to still, and let the lessons come in.... identify where you are stuck, then let it go... that is what going through karma is, this is the lesson embodied in all of the lessons, the physical world as a dense manifestation of divinity, simultaneously enslaving and freeing, each obstacle really a trampoline, each leaf really just a ray from the sun, Hydrogen to Helium to a our sun, forging the chemicals that compose all life on earth, put together in a different fashion, mingling in flesh and thought and light, completely complete, in its own right, spontaneously existing by virtue of what it is, attracting and repelling and breathing. It's not meant to be a struggle... but sometimes that's exactly what's needed to let it all go.
So my intention isn't just merely to be happy, to feel content or look in spirituality for another thing to hold onto, but instead to just let it all in, yes, fuck yes, oh God yeah. My intention is to stop waiting.
I give up this striving.
Looking at my life like an Avatar of a video game. And perhaps in doing so, in freeing, in freedom without waiting for a specific outcome, one truly does become an Avatar.
And even beyond that,
My intention is to fall in love with life in every moment.
From WIE:
When Christ went to the desert after his baptism, he went to face the devil. He didn't think in his mind, "After forty days I will return." He just went there. He came out of the Jordan River, baptized by Saint John the Baptist, and went to the desert. He went to the desert. And he said to the devil,
"My friend, look, until now you were playing with the people. You started with Eve in paradise, and now you are finishing with me. I am here alone. I am not eating. I'm not drinking. And the cold in my bones in the night in the desert is terrible. I suffer. But I don't play games. I am here. Alone. And you come to me and you tell me to turn stones into bread. You tell me to prostrate to you. You? To give you the authority of my people? Go now. We have seen each other. I know who you are and you know who I am."
And in that moment the devil gave up everything.
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