I am sitting at the Rocking Frog, knowing that I should sit here and write yet desirous (after listening again to the Tai Chi interview) of moving my body throughout the world, just to experience the connection with my motions and explore my awareness of them on various levels. Also, however, I begin to realize, to have dawn upon me, the importance of sitting still. When motionless, your body has less to focus on, and the movements of your mind become more accessible to you. The tendrils of thought, reaching out and feeling/filtering the world and your experience of it. I say not that static is necessary for attainment of mind-presence, but that meditative thought can be a tool to help you acknowledge which directions your mind gravitates towards, and how forcefully or stubbornly it travels. This can also be the state for slight adjustments, using your presence within this usually-shrouded process to tweak your own neural pathways and reactions.
Additionally, this helps me to grasp something which I have had some curiosity about for some time now, which is ritual motions and sounds. Beta waves, caressing the brain; tribal chants, unlocking depths of perception; walking and running meditations, pacing your thoughts differently than they might have drummed upon you before. These are all....unusual...for lack of a better. They, like drugs, remove you from the stagnant tar-pits of routine into which we all sink for majorities of our time. Challenging the mind...taking it out of expectation – from solid ground to quicksand. When you are displaced, you must think on your feet....and what better way to prepare for any possible future than displacing yourself as much as possible, adapting to all terrains?
Something about a tribal chant...removing the individual from himself, removing accountability and identity, unshackling from the body and expanding into the far-reaching pulses of sound, and beyond them even the silent world. When one's self is already dissolved into sound, you see, a significant portion of the bridge between self and nothingness has already been traversed. Can you imagine what that is like? What a liberating, frightening experience that must be?
Hopefully we all experience something so liberating, by degrees, in our own lifetimes. But with society as fractured as it currently is, I find it hard to believe that we could experience it with the same authenticity as a tribe might have. Being a part of that movement, of that sound-generation, in which the barriers between individuals completely dissipate and you become a singular unity...I can't for the life of me imagine what that would be like. I want to.
July 24, 2010
July 14, 2010
Neutral Jing
What has been on my mind lately? I've become so distanced from the process of writing...I used to have such a reign of what my mind was processing from day to day, recording, remembering. But now, on the brink of this trip, I feel like I have been exercising the privileges of being social, blowing off my own creative work in an effort to spend time with people before leaving them for an indeterminate portion of time. I'm having thoughts, certainly, but somehow they become shattered by the frantic schedule I'm keeping...not having a good sit to sift through them, they become so pummeled by the constant flood of sensations that they are unrecognizable when I come back around to thinking about them, and I forget where I might have left off. What I was headed toward. What emotions I was spun up in when I first pioneered them. Without vigilance regarding these things, it becomes very difficult to trace a thread throughout one's thoughts...to keep a procession, instead of slipping in rank. I follow my thoughts from A to G, but then distance myself from them for a time. When I come back to them, I have a vague semblance of what G might have entailed, but it loses all context and meaning if I don't have the foundations of E and F still firm underneath it. Thus I regress back beyond the last achievement, resting perhaps at C, and must push forth again towards the distances. In the meantime, though, all my motivations have changed, and the G which I may reach is distinctly different from the G which I previously excavated. A troubling business, this 'thought'.
Overall, I'm pleased with how whimsical the world and my mind are when they orbit one another. Things come up which I could not have foreseen; any moment can occasion an explosion of personality or philosophy. It is bothersome, however, to acknowledge that I have no idea what a particular trigger might be or look like. There are such moments when I am caught up in a social circle, and something strikes offhanded, some flash or coincidence on my peripheral vision. I thoughtlessly acknowledge it, but being social requires a constant 'group' presence, a mask, and in pursuit of this I abandon the distinct subjectivity of such glimmers. I may club and drag them back to my tribe, but in doing so I alter them differently than if I were to be alone observing them...I turn them on their head for comedic effect, I dilute them for the masses and exploit some simplicity of what might have been a great concept had I pursued it on my own or in the company of genuine discourse. Occasionally I feel the charlatanry of this process, and I feel somewhat shamed, diminished by it.
Lately I have been running in packs. This is an oddity for me...I'm used to being around a single other person, or perhaps two. The dynamics of these situations are notably dintinct...the broachable topics being drastically different in varying degrees of severity. With a lone companion, one can talk about anything one wants...still the topic will find itself fair game. It may be shot down, evaded for the purposes of comfort, but it will at least find attention and acknowledgment. I miss having an intelligent girlfriend. It's too hard to bring such things up in group discussion, or especially in party-scenarios where one must constantly keep pace with the fluid dance of many partners, many conversations which ideally should be so simple (yet clever!) that others can easily drift in and out of them at their moment's pleasure. I've never been tops at this simplistic cleverness. I am somewhat in awe of those who are~ I lack those razor-sharp, caustic, fervent tendencies...I gravitate, generate, slowly roll into presence like a timpani. I'm beginning to think it has to do with different dispersals of energy...separate and chosen (if unconsciously) types of expression. I am learning from these quick-witted types; I can switch this on if I need to. It feels inauthentic, to me, and I doubt that I could keep it up for long stretches....this conversational sprint. But it is there, a tool at my disposal, and I notice how it alters situations, how it commands. I feel the heat and the power of this clearly incendiary technique. I could not burn like this for long - my hourglass turns - I require respite, shelter. I am mostly sorcerer, but augmented with warrior tendencies at my reserve.
Overall, I'm pleased with how whimsical the world and my mind are when they orbit one another. Things come up which I could not have foreseen; any moment can occasion an explosion of personality or philosophy. It is bothersome, however, to acknowledge that I have no idea what a particular trigger might be or look like. There are such moments when I am caught up in a social circle, and something strikes offhanded, some flash or coincidence on my peripheral vision. I thoughtlessly acknowledge it, but being social requires a constant 'group' presence, a mask, and in pursuit of this I abandon the distinct subjectivity of such glimmers. I may club and drag them back to my tribe, but in doing so I alter them differently than if I were to be alone observing them...I turn them on their head for comedic effect, I dilute them for the masses and exploit some simplicity of what might have been a great concept had I pursued it on my own or in the company of genuine discourse. Occasionally I feel the charlatanry of this process, and I feel somewhat shamed, diminished by it.
Lately I have been running in packs. This is an oddity for me...I'm used to being around a single other person, or perhaps two. The dynamics of these situations are notably dintinct...the broachable topics being drastically different in varying degrees of severity. With a lone companion, one can talk about anything one wants...still the topic will find itself fair game. It may be shot down, evaded for the purposes of comfort, but it will at least find attention and acknowledgment. I miss having an intelligent girlfriend. It's too hard to bring such things up in group discussion, or especially in party-scenarios where one must constantly keep pace with the fluid dance of many partners, many conversations which ideally should be so simple (yet clever!) that others can easily drift in and out of them at their moment's pleasure. I've never been tops at this simplistic cleverness. I am somewhat in awe of those who are~ I lack those razor-sharp, caustic, fervent tendencies...I gravitate, generate, slowly roll into presence like a timpani. I'm beginning to think it has to do with different dispersals of energy...separate and chosen (if unconsciously) types of expression. I am learning from these quick-witted types; I can switch this on if I need to. It feels inauthentic, to me, and I doubt that I could keep it up for long stretches....this conversational sprint. But it is there, a tool at my disposal, and I notice how it alters situations, how it commands. I feel the heat and the power of this clearly incendiary technique. I could not burn like this for long - my hourglass turns - I require respite, shelter. I am mostly sorcerer, but augmented with warrior tendencies at my reserve.
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