Harmonizing Voices

It’s been a crazy weekend with a slight break from the writer’s torrent and now I am back on the keys tapping along looking to unveil what’s souping around my brain. The Writing I’ve been doing this week has upped the intensity and brought a lot to the fore. The deep caverns of mind have really become unsettled. The calm of meditation is the antidote to getting too churned up in thought and that is the other component that needs to be focused on with direct awareness if I am going to keep riding this wave. Without my practice I feel caught up in the sea of thought. I usually don’t talk about my personal practice because it contains more tales of struggles and navigation through resistance

Being chained to silence and fearful of how people perceive me is a shackle I can’t afford. This is the swing of the pendulum that pulls me and tells me to work directly with situations as they present themselves. This type of openness is not to say that I need to roll out my painful neuroses and dump it on my audience. That’s irresponsible. In the next breath though I feel like my waterfall mind needs to aerate, and get walking around room.

Part of me sees this writing as too personal for many, or too self-obsessed, making a grand show of the life I am dealt, spinning endlessly over the same old ground. PhilB_108 tweeted a Tosh quote about dusting himself off and starting again. I feel like this is good medicine as I dust away the circumstances that have landed me here, and look to new ways of exploring the next stage of my life. The 21 day experiment that I have mapped out is only the beginning, from there I will move forward more structured and aware of the next step. I am not saying that I will exercise masterful control over all the nuances of my life, because that would be too much pressure. Perfection is not perfect because it isn’t human.

Then where do we stand when we look at the vast example of a Buddha or a Jesus Christ? I think this is the dilemma that is uniquely human. Becker goes down this ground in Denial of Death when he talks about our grand spiritual nature as compared with out stinky animal self. He paints man as a being sandwiched between the animal and the gods which is not very different from a surface reading of two of the six realms in the Tibetan system.

It is these cross-cultural comparisons and similarities that is making Campbell’s Hero with a 1,000 Faces such a powerful read for me this week. He has a gift of bringing together stories from everywhere and pinpointing their common elements so they form a clear picture. This was the goal of Becker in Denial of Death when he states his intention to harmonize the disparate voices shouting each other down for attention.

Nothing unsettles me more than the constant intellectual and spiritual rumblings which don’t take into account unifying principles. This is why I am so hesitant to take on labels, and firmly form specific identities. I strive to keep the doors open to all kinds of views and perceptions. My mind wants to bring together these seemingly at odds voices. Once I heard the poet Roger Bon Agard speak at a reading and he talked about leaving at the waistside the things that didn’t serve him. I can relate to this shedding of the useless, while keeping the nuggets that can help assemble a coherent map of experience relating to the intersections with the rest of the world.

This brings me to the question of, okay; you have a 21 day writer’s pact with yourself, sealed in the daily postings online in the form of a blog, then what? My girlfriend suggested writing articles and pitching them to magazines and websites to help me get started. In the past I thought of creating pamphlets that could be created on specific topics, and sold cheaply to begin gaining notoriety, and some meager pocket change for my toil. I begin to put this next phase into the workings of the current phase because I am big fan of process.

As I travel along I am open to keeping it transparent the way I wish so much of my world would be. I don’t like cover-ups, and hidden corners. I adhere to the path of openness, and bravery. Not taking the easy way but pushing the limits of consciousness and sharing the important discoveries along the way.

I want to participate in the game, and in the process find the other participants. I am okay with the fact that I sat on the sidelines for much of the way. Accepting the past in order embrace now will guide us into the mysterious future. There is many skillful ways to work with the mind, and the shadows that lurk beneath the surface. This is why I live my life as a grand experiment. My body and mind are my laboratory to understanding what is happening. We didn’t choose to be born. We start out here with a nightmare when we are thrust from the womb in trauma. The world gives us comfort but it also tears us to pieces. The trick is learning how to keep those pieces in tact long enough to develop along the evolutionary path continuing on in the journey of the physical into the final mystery. When we embrace life in such a way death no longer becomes a burden to be fearful of, but instead is just another door that we have to pass through in this life of ours.