My Eyes Droop

Having spent forever searching for jobs my eyes are drooping lower than are my knees. Test, questionaires, references. All thrown out into the ether oy space with not a human face anywhere! Is this how we do it now, invisible and computer screened?

My eyes droop so will sleep.

Smoke

There is always something on the baking tray which burns and fills the room with smoke!!! Then you cannot see properly!!! Then the fat from the frying pan leaps out and bites you multiple times on the forearm!!!

I was looking on the Wolf at the Door website. It reminded me that I used to write a lot more than I do at the moment. Every morning I sat at an old wooden desk in Abbey House and wrote from my beautiful fountain pen. Ananda was talking of the importance of narrative, in seeing how we all have a narrative on our experience. I have a story. Hillman talks of how we can see our story from many different stylistic points of view. For example our life can be a comedy or a tragedy or a surrealist nightmare. The real creative skill is to be able to morph between these different styles, to loosen up our tenacious grasp on one single mono narrative. I wonder of the souls deeper movements are the slow transformation of our story, who we are, where we are going, what we are capable of. I believe we are capable of so much more, but that the perpetuation of our story inhibits us. For me it is a queeeezy feeling in my guts that make me feel like I will fall over if I aim too high. But really mind is insubstantial and workable and (if you believe it) infinite. The ability to peel away the old story to let the new freedom in is hard won. I might float off the face of the planet if I were to follow my wildest dreams! But I would be liking that too, it is preferable to leadening myself down with a vast list of 'out of bound' possibilities. It is touching the Earth of what we really are, which is Kingly.

Tea Sleep

Tea with curdled milk. Mind with curdled heart. Sky with curdled clouds sweeping away last year. Blowingthe dead trees down, across the snakeypath. There are two king fishers who live along the snakey path. It could be that their tree was blown down. When you see one of them, you stop breathing and feel that something wonderfull and fleeting has happened. The shyest bird yet the most intensely coloured. Why is that? After meditation class I feel tired and a bit dull. It is easy to think that the class went badly, but it's just the way I feel. You can't truct what you feel to be the truth sometimes. It is lack of appreciation which mutates the one thing into the other.

Tea with curdled milk. Day with curdled night. The nights seem to last too long and have done for too long. When you start to think like this, it is time for fresh tea, and a fresh look at the sky.

I have this book by Jung on alchemy. Have'nt read much of it though. I keep looking forward to coffee and a long time with a book, it has'nt happened yet. Life is built fast and it is hard to get truely lazy again!

Quick grey

Listening to Snow Patrol which I quite like. It's the sort of music I used to listen to when I was a teenager, it still has a certain appeal. The rain is jewelling the window grey gems, it might even be beautiful if I let it. There is a very full sound and the sky is very full of brooding. The day is before me and I am hoping for opportunities to change my work situation. They may or may not come today, whichever I can still do something. I little nudging away from my fixed ways of seeing things. Dharma prctice could be called the path of nudging. I have just begun to wonder about desire, wanting things. It is a big area and I have a lot to work out about being free of desires yet being potent and alive. Are they contradictory??

Bye

Counter

Just got one of those little hit counters added to the blog with the aid of Jayarava. Is it vain putting that there? You can also get a link to true dating dot com if you feel like getting yourself terribly muddled by engaging in internet dating! That was'nt exactly my idea but I don't know how to change it.

Mud Dell

The Yogacara chaps talked about the 3 aspects of reality. It's a while since I read about it so I can't remember the sanskrit words, it is something like deluded aspect, conditioned aspect, perfected aspect. So from where we are, deluded, we see an ego constructed habitually interpreted story of the world. Behind that is reality. We can also see this realtiy from a non-deluded non ego mind. We are seriously deluded. This is not nice and it has consequences for oureslves and others. The world is affected by how we interpret it. If I am deluded, I do not see clearly what is happening. I then add to the openness inherent in reality, I kind of twist it to suit my habitual mind. I think this is why we all experience life in different ways. The Dharma roughly breaks these styles of delusion (halucination) into 6 catagories; the well known 6 realms of the wheel of life. The hungry ghost is oral. He does not beleive he will get what he needs so he is sly. Even when he gets it, he is so used to not getting it that he trashes it to feel 'normal' again. We are addicted to our delusional state. This has been shown to even have neurochemical backing. We recognise our world so we recreate it out of the openness of the situation. Openness drives us crazy so we burry our heads in madness! When we become aware of this we feel worried about our sanity. We hope there is a way out of our madness. The madness is not only of the head, it also pulses around our body. We respond to ghost feelings. feelings of things which occured in the past but which we still live by.

This is all a big muddle!

Bach

I type. Yo Yo plays a mean cello and Bach who is both dead and not dead, well his mind is hear now. A one way mirror across time. My mind is apparantly in potential as wide as the sky. Yet through hoops and loops it shoots. Round wires and along snickets and ginnels and many other types of path which we only have in Yorkshire.

Today I was up against the mind made shakle of fixity As one fine fellow called it. The great difficulty in transforming ideas into embodied reality. The water of creativity becoming the wood and earth of life tactile. The third fetter. Bugger it. It lurks, highly programmed and fully competent and will itself being undeluded, delude magnificently. The mind's underneath, with dark worms and even scorpions I assure you. There are, in caves, both the unbeleivable fullfillment of all longings and the complete kit of self sabbotage. And I think they intertwine most crazilly.

So the mind clouds. It clouds over like a heat haze. It also forms clouds of infered actuality onto the blue sky of open space. Coloured and patterned, but ultimately free open space. And it creates dense storm clouds of catasrophe, of all hell being conjouired from vapour. The image of the rainbow is too pretty to describe it. Yet the image of hell is too gruesome to fashion it. It is kind of, the everyday stories of confinement and habit which we tell ourselves, to keep us cocooned yet recognisable. It is how I emerge dripping with possibiltiy and frzon simultaneously.

Time to sit and breath some.

Then It Fell Open

It was a storm lurking. It was electricity plugged around the lungs. Insults. They store up like a charge in the body. We call this tension and it hurts. It is said that where there is tension there is suppression of feeling. Therefore the tension in the body is the shadow, it is the feelings and views about ourselves that we cannot entertain. So they are locked away in the muscles, the organs, the posture, even the cells. The unconcious is there to be read in the very body. If I can feel the feelings beneath the suface tensions then I can own who I am and I can engage once more in my life, fully and with feeling. If I cannot sit with my feeling I tense it up, lock it away and then it haunts me as unrealistic responses and patterned.non spontaneous life. Rule, routines, petty selfish thoughts of self preservation. And then it falls open. Gushes out and all that force bursts out and we shake and wonder what on earth is happening. So the expansion of life is also the flavour of insanity. The breakthrough is the breakdown and can only be completed with emotional nerve. Very hard.

Sunday

I am hopoing to get my new phone enabled to send photos to my blog. Inspired by Jayagupta, I thought it would be a nice idea to put a few images of what I find interesting or bewildering to share with whomever. I am still getting used to this idea of a public private space, as it appears to me is what a blog is. I fill it in in the comfort of my own room or wherever and anyboddy who feels like it can have a little look. I guess it is very post modern. The desire to connect yet undertaken in a very alienated sort of way. Yet it is desirable. I want somebody to read this and go, oh what a fascinating charchter. Why? I don't know exactly. I once heard somebody say that we read to know that we are not alone. So maybe know we blog or read blogs to know we are not alone.

Sunday is a funny day. The builders upstairs came early to create noise and then left againwhen we were nicelu awake. Very thoughtfull.

Each day I meditate.

I have been doing this for years. I kind of have to. Like breathing, well it is breathing. But what I mean is that it has a flavour of being essential. Like all day I go around being filled up with life and then I need a space to just be with life. Today I was mainly sat with tension around my chest. This is not unusual. People who are new to meditation expect that quite soon they will be able to experience lots of bliss or a mind devoid of thought or some kind of huge expansiveness. I too used to think this. Looking back now I recognise that this is wishfull thinking and it is the desire for there to be an easy solution to the human condition. I don't beleive there is an easy soklution. The big lesson I need to learn and most of everybody else aswel is patience.

In Buddhism this is called 'ksanti' and can be translated as 'patient endurance'. It also has the connotations of receptivity to meaning. Sometimes meditation feel like sitting and waiting to realise that you are alive and that this realisation will be liberating. I mistake life for being ordinary when in fact it is extaordinary. It is like glancing at something so fleetingly that you mistake it for something else, something scary or naff, when in fact it is quite the opposit. However it seems that simply thinking this is not enough to get this truth to sink right into our bones.

On Line At Home

At last, after yonks of nicking other people computer time, I now have one of my own. Maybe this is a chance to do a bit more blogging. I still don't know if anybody reads this stuff, I guess they don't if I never up date it!! There must be millions of blogs floating around. It's all a bit new to me.

Anyway. Huskies, they are lovely dogs are'nt they?

Be well.