Thursday 23 February 2012

Reflections



A brand new day. A clean, white sheet of digital paper. Magpie by my window. Ashes of snow over the valley; the cold trees mirrored by their aerial roots against the muted gray. Looking within I begin to trawl the still, dark waters of my psyche for the carp of inspiration.  What do I want to share today? Clouds. Only clouds. Whispered reflections upon what we leave behind--we who are divided, ever, for the sake of a mystical union with ourselves.

By candle-light before dawn I draw the three of rainbows, the guidance of those messengers of spirit that we call angels. The very principles which allow me to divine are such as belie the rational order of existence. Is it not a wonder? We intrepid minstrels…employing chaos to sing the praises of a symmetry that exists only within the confined spaces of our moral certitudes. In fact, there is no rational order save that which we grasp to like drowning sailors in sky-oceans of frozen wind.  Experimental psychology, though yet in its infancy, reveals to us that we are deluded when we insist upon the rationality of our behavior.  Not only is our behavior anything but rational, but we are scarcely aware of it in the first place. Moreover, we do not think with anything resembling either intent or logic. In fact, over ninety percent of our thinking takes place beneath the level of conscious awareness. What this means, of course, is that not only do we have no idea what we are doing, or why we are doing it, but we do not know how we go about it in the first place. And still we wonder why we sometimes feel ever so slightly mad?

If you were extremely adept at visualization you could try seeing your life between the palms of your hands, floating gently there like an intricate, radiant sphere of interconnected lines--a multidimensional cats cradle, a mandala of light. And you would see, perhaps, where certain strings were broken; areas left unfinished; tangled skeins; accidental knotwork, but also discordant connections where colors clash and bleed. Naturally, you would see the undeniable harmony and resilience, the delicate precision and the  fragility of this living, ever-changing, pulsing sphere of light and sound, and you could work it then, a strand here, a linkage there…and your life would heal because you would not know what you were doing, guided solely by the biological wisdom of your hands and the dance of your fingers. The only thing you would have to go on--your sense of that which is beautiful and your appreciation and respect for what is as ephemeral as a bubble of air on the surface of a pond, blown by a passing fish.

Our sorrow then, the shrieking of frozen thoughts--mind cramps. Our mothers knew.  They distracted us from should and must and no and yes and ought and shalt when life disturbed our way of things. Now angels take their place, from time to time, and it is in that discipline called freedom of expression that they come to meet us--not when our minds are still, but when through motion they simply cease to be all that which our expectations molded of them, neither objective nor subjective but creative of both.

Parenthetically, although it is chaos which allows structure to emerge in the first place, it does not follow that we therefore become even more mindless than we already are.  We are sailing on a ship called ocean, and our task it is to steer, not to hold the boat together. If we can but discipline ourselves to receiving guidance we see that things have a way of resolving themselves in unexpected ways.  That we do not believe this is beside the point.  Mindfulness has less to do with knowing what you are doing or how or why you are doing it than with a certain loving and highly focused regard which allows change to follow in accordance with the laws of its own being. If we find ourselves appalled at watching on the sidelines as we do what we seemingly do not want to do, the fault, more often than not, lies with our expectations and with our faulty interpretations of what are no more than dimly perceived observations.

Unfortunately, we are trained to disregard discrepancies and inconsistencies within ourselves, as though we resembled blocks of granite in a matrix of ice and not the gooey, amorphous permeabilities that confront us when we drop our vigilance, and to laud goal-directed behavior as though it were a virtue above all others. It is no more of a virtue than anything else. One is reminded of the old saying: "show me a man who always stands on his own two feet and I will show you a man that can't ever take off his pants!"

But consider this, that consciousness is intention and that energy follows it as surely and as consistently as the tail follows its owner. I would be willing to bet that not a single one of the life-themes by which you establish the meaning and purpose of your inexplicable existence emerged with any help from what passes for your lamentably besieged cognition. Quite to the contrary.  Your life-path grew spontaneously from out of the dark and fertile loam of your inner vitality as effortlessly and with as much discipline as an acorn growing into an oak tree.  If then you desire to change the trajectory of your life, it is pointless to focus on your beliefs. As soon capture a whale by its spume. Attention changes form. It is that simple.  It changes form not according to the partial knowledge that you yourself presume to possess, but which in actuality posses what you think of yourself as being, but rather from that infinite and inexhaustible intelligence which effortlessly creates and recreates itself anew in an infinite array of ever changing forms and is, believe it or not, entirely capable of extricating you from any mess that you could possibly create for yourself.

Blessings of Peace, my heart, my eternal other self,
Your little dragon
 http://www.smashinglists.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Blue-Dragon.jpg


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