I started to write something here. I’m way over due. But whenever I come back to this blog, I re-read so much, that days pass before I press a key on my keyboard, and weeks pass before I finish any hesitantly started entries. In the weeks since I started to write this entry, I’ve read at least a couple books-worth of my own writing in this blog. I don’t think it is healthy to re-read oneself, just as mind and ego are unhealthy places in which to dwell. But I never made any of my lovers use a rubber; I don’t do ‘healthy’ well.
In the endless maze of revisiting ten years of my own mind—from which I have miraculously returned—I found something that said better exactly what I had half-started to write. It seems I haven’t made much progress in eight years. I wrote this in September of 2002:
castle keep
I’m afraid of you people. Don’t you know that? No. How could you? I think I hide it pretty well, and I almost never admit it. In fact, most of the time I deny it, even when nobody’s asking. Just by being whole, functioning human beings, you scare me. And even if you are not whole and functioning, you still look like you are to me, so you still scare me. If you reveal that you care, that you’ve invested even a pennie’s worth of emotion in me, then you scare me more. How am I supposed to handle what you’ve given me? How am I supposed to give you anything back?—or maybe I am not supposed to treat it like an exchange, or am I? And if you are an authority figure, if you’re a cop, or a boss, or bigger than me, or more scared than me, or as angry as me, then I’m going to start out so terrified that I’m going to have to hate you just to hold myself together.
And if you never notice the panic that I’m in, and never see the hysteria that I hide inside, and if you treat me like the whole and functioning human being I pretend to be, instead of the trembling, quaking, crumbling, sandcastle that I am, then I’ll try and make you go away. I can’t disintergrate, I just can’t. So I’ll try and make you go away, even though I don’t want to, because I don’t know what else to do.
I’m sorry.
Where to go now? One wonders, when tied to the bow of a ship, like a giant tanker moving swiftly through the swelling sea, things like “What direction am I going?” or, “What port will I see next?” or, “Will they inadvertently plow through something floating in the sea, some debris insignificant against the steel hull but terribly significant against my tiny, tender, un-steel-like form, thereby reducing me to a smear of red and pink on the rusted hull?”
Where to go now?
More immediately, and with a somewhat less expansive scope, one instead wonders how to escape the overwhelming rush of sea into one’s face. One wonders how to breathe. One sees one’s life gurgling by in the tiny little reflective universes that are the bubbles all about as one plunges into and out of and into again the relentless sea. That is where I find myself now; quite overwhelmed, quite helpless. Quite afraid.
A moment ago, I sat upright on the edge of my chair, un-reclined, with back straight, in a proper typing posture for the first time this year. It was a position I adopted every day when I wrote a journal faithfully, a position my now worn-out chair is all but incapable of maintaining, it has been reclined for so long. That moment was one of those reflective bubbles of my past life, long lost, passing before my eyes.
There has been progress, though it chills me to admit it. My question of a moment ago, “Where to go now?” is just what I imagine the sailor about to be keel-hauled would ask himself right after being pushed off the front of the ship, as he bobs and chokes near the crest of the plunging bow before being dragged under. I, like he, am closer now to nothing. Nothing is where I need to go. I have a book by Ayya Khema, the title of which captures what I am trying to say; Being Nobody, Going Nowhere, Meditations on the Buddhist path. Presence—consciousness beyond form—is the goal. And ego appears to be the enemy. So writing is a poor crutch to help me on my pilgrimage. Like eating chocolate to lose weight.
But that is consistent, the incongruity, I mean. I alternate (when not writing, which is all the time lately) between listening to recordings of Eckhart Tolle, and watching porn. One encourages me to be conscious, present in the moment, and say, “Yes”. The other is pictures of porn stars saying, “Yes”, discourages consciousness, and facilitates escape from the moment. It seems ludicrous that porn and Tolle are in the same sentence, but characterized as diametrically opposed, which they are, I can’t help but see this conflict—this manic switching from one to the other and back again—as making perfect sense. One is presence, the other is escape. One is awareness, the other is unconsciousness. One offers freedom from form, the other is obsession with form. And while there are some truly wonderful forms visible in porn, there is a whole lot of really bad porn out there. I know; I’ve been looking.
I’ll spare you the pearls that come from the naked boys, and instead share with you the wisdom of Eckhart Tolle: “The purpose of life is to die before you die.” Now, relax your definitions a bit, and try to understand. There is a difference between losing form, which is the death of the body, and letting go of form, which is deliberately releasing our death-grip on that which is physical, and willfully embracing that which is formless, that which is the enemy of the mind. Letting go of form is conscious death, that is to say, death which is experienced consciously. The trick is to let go without physically dying.
Letting go is something your mind does not want you to do. It wants to stay in control, it wants to keep you subservient. It is what it is supposed to do; it is mind and that is its nature. It will make you think you are dying in an effort to make you grasp and cling. The trick is that when it makes you think you are dying—let go completely. Quite a trick. That is dying before you die.
Anyone who knows me knows I have been saying it most of my life: “I want to die.” Maybe I knew of more than I was aware, because physical death was never what I really wanted. Letting go is what I came here to do. It will happen when the physical form goes. Or, if I wake up sooner, it will happen before that. And whether it happens or not? It doesn’t matter. Consciousness is all that matters, and consciousness is indestructible. If I wake up now, consciousness will be there; if I wake up on my deathbed, consciousness will be there then.
And if I never wake up at all, consciousness will still be there.