Suffering as a choice

Here is what I notice about myself and my decision making process. Well, an example will probably work best.

I'm sitting in the car. I have just finished grocery shopping. In the car are, among other things, half of a sandwich and a box of generic pop-tarts. I am not hungry. The sandwich tastes really good and so do the pop-tarts. I notice that I am not hungry and that I do not want to eat anything. I decide to eat something anyway. I eat one pop-tart. Then I eat the sandwich. Then I eat the other pop-tart. Now my stomach is uncomfortably full. I hear the thought, well, I might as well finish the box of pop-tarts since I am already past full and I will have to eat them sometime anyway.

So, what I see in this example is something that pervades my life. I see the choice that will lead to happierness, and I do not take it. I consistently chose pain and suffering. Not in large ways necessarily, although I sometimes do that too, but in these small ways, every day, I chose to suffer rather than to respect the limitations of the form.

When I came to human design I knew this, and it is this tendency that I hoped to heal. That I could chose what is correct instead of what leads to suffering, but it seems like this tendency has gotten worse. It used to be that sometimes I would chose what felt right, and sometimes I would chose what I "wanted." Now I consistently chose what I "want" instead of what feels right. It's like my mind is trying to rebel against the increased awareness by proving that it has power whenever it can.

Though, it is also entirely possible that in the past I was simply unaware of how often I chose to suffer and that what is happening now is an increased awareness of suffering that will lead to a decrease in suffering overall. Time will tell.




Photo by Marc Pilaro

Tribute to Harvey Milk

Just a small tribute to Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the United States, though he stood for much more than that. He was a decent politician, which is rare, and he acted as a voice for disenfranchised people of all kinds.

Somewhere in Des Moins or San Antonio there's a young gay person who all the sudden realizes she or he is gay knows that if the parents find out, they'll be tossed out of the house, the classmates will taunt the child and the Anita Bryants and John Briggs are doing their bit on tv and that child has several options: staying in the closet, suicide. Then one day that child might open up a paper that says 'Homosexual Elected in San Francisco' and there are two new options. One option is to go to California... or stay in San Antiono and fight. Two days after I was elected I got a phone call. The voice was quiet young, it was from Altuna Pennsylvania and the person said, thanks. You've got to elect gay people so that that young child and the thousands and thousands like that young child know that there's hope for a better world, that there's hope for a better tomorrow. Without hope, not only for gays but for balcks, for asians, disabled, and for seniors, the us's, the us's, without hope the us's give up. I know that you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living. and you and you and you, you gotta give 'em hope.

Check out the Milk Foundation for more good stuff. Click here to listen to the hope speech.


unfortunately in my wanderings I lost the tab where I found this photo. 

Maybe Sartre was on to something...

mmm...

We really are stuck here in these mechanics. I am reminded of it every day that I spend living with my mom.

The first twenty-five years I spent with my family I spent in relative silence. I would participate in the fun stuff, but I never participated in family arguments, and I never intervened when I thought I could be helpful. I saw my mom being mean to my dad. I saw my dad complaining about it and never standing up for himself. I saw my mom and my sister say terrible things to each other.

Everyone adored me. They confided in me, I heard their perspectives and I was "such a great listener." The thing is that it was all sort of a lie. I was holding down everything that I was seeing. No one ever asked for my perspective and I never offered it, but the bitterness that developed in me was palpable. Why didn't they ever ask me what I thought? Why didn't they ever want to know what was happening in my life?

Finally at age 23 I exposed myself. I told them everything. I told them what I thought of each of them and what I thought about the way we interacted with each other. No one disagreed. But they stopped telling me how great I was, and what a great listener I was. In the meantime, they kept being mean to each other in the same ways. Year after year I watched it, tried to point it out, tried to get them to talk to each other, tried to confront them about what I saw, and every time I did things got worse, and I got more committed to transforming the situation.

Then I met human design and finally it all became clear. Ah! I'm a projector. I can see the things I seem to be able to see. I'm not crazy! But I can't share it with people until they ask me. And because I'm a 5/1, my family never will.

Since then it has just been years of dealing with the fall-out. I apologize, but it kills me. It feels like I'm lying to myself, like I'm stabbing myself in the back. I am right! I think while I tell them I am wrong. But there's no explaining it. They can't ever understand what it's like to be a projector. But ah! It's so hard to let go! It feels like a cruel joke - to be able to see what we see and to be sentenced to do nothing about it until the apes recognize that we have something to offer. Sure, they're beautiful apes, but fools. They are all fools.

It reminds me of No Exit, by Sartre. In fact, it is making me reconsider these existentialists and their brilliance. Three people are in a room. They are all dead. Garcin is the newest to be dropped off in the room. They know only that they cannot leave the room for all of eternity, and that this is hell. Otherwise, there is nothing. The three dead people begin to argue. Finally Inez understands something.

INEZ ... Ah, I understand now. I know why they've put us together.
GARCIN I advise you to - to think twice before you say any more.
INEZ Wait! You'll see how simple it is. Childishly simple. Obviously there aren't any physical torments - you agree, don't you? And yet we're in hell. And no one else will come here. We'll stay in this room together, the three of us, for ever and ever... In short, there's someone absent here, the official torturer.
GARCIN... I'd noticed that.
INEZ It's obvious what they're after - an economy of man-power -- or devil-power, if you prefer. The same idea as in the cafeteria, where customers serve themselves.
ESTELLE What ever do you mean?
INEZ I mean that each of us will act as torturer of the two others
[There is a short silence while they digest this information.]
GARCIN [gently] No, I shall never be your torturer. I wish neither of you any harm, and I've no concern with you. None at all. So the solutions easy enough; each of us stays put in his or her corner and takes no notice of the others. You here, you here, and I there. Like soldiers at our posts. Also, we mustn't speak. Not one word. That won't be difficult; each of us has plenty of material for self-communings. I think I could stay ten thousand years with only my thoughts for company.

Their attempts at not torturing each other are obviously failures, but it's funny to see the way that just them being who they are, each of the them being themselves tortures the others. Funny in a very dark way. Funny the way that I feel now when I realize that I am in that same situation. That I am Garcin, trying, now that I have discovered the mechanics of it all, to get out, thinking that by understanding it I could change it. And slowly, SLOWLY surrendering to the reality of the limitations of human interaction, to the fact that there is no exit.

I just can't help but continue to wish to dream of a time when we could understand each other. When we can be separate but also know each others' experiences. Maybe that wish is my own private Inez or Estelle. Or maybe that's exactly what human design promises. Guess I'll just have to wait and see. For now, the bitterness encompasses me. The thing is that if anyone valued what I had to offer from this bitterness it would only feed the bitterness, and the feeling that everyone else had owed me. It's not from here that I can find resignation. I have to resign first, and that's a bitter pill to swallow!


photo from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NoExit_cover.gif

Skin as Thin

Explorations in focus and color and light

Experimenting Noticing

I recently listened to the first class of Radical Deconditioning again. It's a class that I took in the winter with Leela and Dharmen Swann-Herbert. I have an all left oriented mind, so it's good for me to listen to things - classes, lectures - more than once. I tend to miss a lot the first time. The last time I took the class I was dating Devin and part way through it he broke up with me. It was certainly the most difficult breakup I had ever experienced, and part of my coping strategy had been to try to prove that I was really good at noticing.

Now I am not taking the class with anyone. I'm just listening to it and doing the exercises on my own. The first class is all about the transformative power of observation and experimentation. This is really the foundation for what Leela and Dharmen have to teach (or so it seems to me).

Their claim is that there is nothing we can do to get our minds to surrender to our lives. There is nothing we can do to get our minds to trust our lives. (Which leaves me wondering why Dharmen was yelling at me "you have to trust life!" the last time we spoke, but it seems everyone is full of contradictions.) The only thing we CAN do, they say, is to observe our life - to observe the mind, to observe our body, to observe the world outside of us, and to observe the things that we say. Observing, they say, is the key to transforming our lives. The transformation happens on it's own, the surrender happens on its own - but the observation is something we can do.

My friend Ashley came to visit about a week ago. It was hard to have him here because I am lost in a fog. He told me about a game. You sit in one spot in the woods and you sit there until you see a hair. You will always see a hair if you wait long enough. The trick is that you can't be looking for it. When you start looking for it, you don't find it. If you can relax your mind and let the hair present itself to you, it will. If you look, nope.

So I was out for a hike yesterday (on account of having met the girl in the tree the day before) and I found myself on someone else's property. I heard some folks coming my way. It was dense woods and so I felt safely hidden, but didn't want to take any chances, so I sat down to wait for them to pass. With nothing else to do I thought I would try the hair game.

First thing I thought was, what if I don't find a hair? am I going to be really disappointed in myself if I have to give up? maybe I shouldn't make this kind of commitment. Am I just setting myself up? Then I relaxed, remembered what Ashley said - that you only find the hairs when you're not looking for it - and I started to adjust my seated position when lo and behold - a hair. Then another.

Cool!

It was easy. The first time. But I found myself once again resting in the woods and once again the thought came through - maybe I'll try the hair game while I sit here. This time I was really scared. The chances of me succeeding twice in a row seemed slim. My mind was sort of sure that it wouldn't happen, but it was also really excited by the idea that it would. I remembered what Ashley said - that you only find the hairs when you're not looking - but it didn't help this time; I couldn't stop looking.

What happened next was illuminating. I watched as my mind tried to get itself to surrender. I watched it try to trick itself into thinking it had surrendered. I watched it get mad at itself for not being able to surrender. I watched it try to trick itself into surrendering. And then, finally in desperation, I saw it give up completely. And then I found a hair.

What was illuminating was not so much the truth of Ashley's statement, but the struggle that my mind had with accepting the truth of it, and implementing it. It's the same struggle that I have with my life. During the hair game I got to see on a micro scale what is happening in my mind in relationship to my life on the macro scale.

I got to see it. heh, but that's all. I just got to see it. There's nothing else that I get. I don't get to change it. I don't get to teach anyone about it. I don't get to convince other people that it's important. I don't even know if it is important.

I have spent my life exploring this consciousness and I can't say that I have found much reward in that investigation. I just haven't found anything else yet that seems more worth doing.

So, I've been watching. For the last few days.

Most of the time my mind is able to convince me that it's dramas and complaints are legitimate. Often times I'm able to convince other people too - that part scares me. It means I am responsible for what I say. I can't count on other people to call me out. I thought I could. At least, that's what John made me think. I mean, that's what he told me he could do. I thought that was the key to healing my relationship with my life - having someone else tell me when I was lying to myself, but there's no one else who can see through me the way I can see through myself. That's not what a projector is for - to tell you what's true and what's not true for you. I don't know what we're here for, but right now it seems silly to me to think that we are here to help generators live their lives as themselves. It seems to me that we are here to guide large groups of generators in large scale projects. But maybe that's just this projector.

Sorry, there's still a lot of anti-John left in me.

{There's a female cardinal sitting on the back porch. She is just sitting there, and has been for some time now. It's rare that the birds sit there so still, usually they are eating, or they are in the trees. Oop, there she goes, down to the feeder. Bright orange beak.}

So, I don't know. Things seem like they are getting more honest every day. And there is no Devin now in which to frame that progress. No one to prove things to. No one to try to hold onto. Just myself. Which seems good.




cool photo of brain rays: http://www.metaphysics-for-life.com/mind-over-matter.html

What is surrender?

Warning: Nihilism ahead

I've been seeing the connections lately between what Dillard has to say about the joke in life - that we are sewn into it like so much corn, and that being sewn into it makes us subject to it - and some of the epic stories that have graced the movie theaters in my lifetime: the Matrix and Hunger Games keep popping up.

What strikes me is that these movies give us hope - like Dr. Snow in the Hunger Games points out - but it is a false hope. In the Matrix, Neo gets out of the Matrix, and then goes on to fight the bad guys who are keeping everyone else hooked up to the big joke. In the Hunger Games, where everyone is pitted against each other and everyone is on their own (much as in life), the heroine beats the game by threatening suicide, and she is able to save someone else's life. She then goes on to rebel against the people who control the game and all of society.

But in real life there is no one controlling the game and there is no one keeping us connected to an artificial matrix. The matrix we are in is real, and we cannot get out of it. We can commit suicide, but even this is only a temporary release from the struggle. We are stuck here, "spread into matter, connected by cells right down to our feet, and those feet likely to fell us on a tree root, or jam us on a stone." Not just possibly, but likely. And that's the part that is hard to understand and hard to accept. 

We are pitted against each other. We are alone, and yet we want to be united. We can make alliances or we can create unions with another sorry soul, but these are only useful tools for advancing our chances at survival. We are in bodies that are designed to survive through manipulation, cheating, and lying. We are not designed to want to be here. We are designed to want what we are not. We can only be liberated from suffering by accepting that these feet are likely to fell us on a tree root, and to see life as a joke instead of a symphony. We are liberated through surrendering not just to our own incompetence, but to our immorality as well, to our selfishness and to the endless cycles of living and dying, and to pragmatism.

Some more Spring photos