The universe wants to fuck you.

This may sound like a bad thing. By the time you notice it could be a good thing, there’s all this resistance built up that probably should dissolve a bit before we can check out how good of a thing it is.

But just as struggling when the universe fucks you is deeply pointless ¹, unbuilding resistance through struggle never got me anywhere.

But to get back to the point: you, me, the universe. Wanna get it oan toniyeeite? That’s what all this talk about ‘the beloved’ is about, yesno? I’m sort of wary of the tendency to not take that word for a too literal image, ’cause it implies that fucking is something to be overcome. We’ll see, but for now, that seems like just another throwback to asceticism.

1) although it might appear sexy to some ²

2) really? who? or even, where?

It’s very dangerous to think about how to make life better (as opposed to e.g. how to have a better life), because you might start to feel encouraged to make other people’s life better too.

Living amongst a lot of humans of a purportedly lower civilizational level (according to at least two ideologies I know myself to have been way over-involved with in the unmourned past) has shown me the stupidity of believing that concepts like ‘civilizational level’ are remotely useful as a descriptor of humans. If you think you win something by categorizing, why not rank people according to niceness? (My neighbourhood wins.)

Relative to their power, there might not be that much difference in the amount of happiness/suffering the different civilizations have caused in other beings anyway. And if you think this can and should be measured, and you think the implications of those measurements can be analyzed and used to steer your actions, and predict how awesomely humanist the effects of those actions will be, well: good to know, because it’s good to know that you’re a cold blooded psycho crazy person from Looneyville, and I’ll politely avoid you.

The quibbles raised against abandoning the projects of hope, or the cessation of the illusion of choice, or giving up on the supposed need to find understanding to guide my actions all amount to the same thing: “but won’t that mean you’ll do wrong things and/or fail to do good things?”; and can all be refuted by acknowledging the role of interest. Being consistently appears interested and interesting, there’s nothing that suggests being will suddenly become uninteresting when hope, choice or understanding aren’t there; and hints that it will contrariwise appear more interesting and interested are plentiful.

Warranty for the life of humans

Sometimes, I feel absorbed in HereNow. This is a perception, and the perception is HereNow, and most of that is whatever is touching the senses of the human system. But the human system itself vanishes into a blind spot at the center of HereNow. When I look back at that system from my perch at the tropopause, it feels bafflingly tiny and laughably insignificant; like a swirl of scum flung off a wavelet on the ocean of Being. I feel a gulf of unknowingness between the vastly empty weight of Being and the deeply flimsy transience of what the human system identifies as, whether intentionality, body, choice, mind, or desire and so on. It seems unimaginable that humans can continue existing in that vacuum, under that weight; and impossible to understand why we haven’t exploded, or been crushed, respectively; or in the same happening.

Of course, there’s an ‘and yet’, and it goes like this: some of the things humans do are very awesome and feel very nice; quite as if their doing transcends their existential triviality. The ripples from the new patterns they somehow manage to cause to appear in the scum on the waves on the ocean of Being somehow manage to influence other patterns, sometimes they unstick (dukkha -> sukkha) a little bit of fluff that miraculously kept itself stuck in a pattern that felt unhappy or constrained, they cause a pattern of desire to become a pattern of satisfaction, they encourage new and exciting patterns of desire to emerge and so on. Be they doings of art or love, science or politics, I wouldn’t want to miss them, even if right now I can’t see how they can exist. And the damnedest thing of course is that they feel as if they cause the scum to feel more alive, they cause the transient chaos of living as humans to feel more grounded and open, they make the human pattern feel part of the ocean for a few moments, and in those moments trivial existence feels like it is essential being. I may be blinded by hope when I say this, but it feels like it makes the ocean capable of harbouring new patterns, new forms, new beings; and that feels decidedly non-trivial; also fun, healthy and good. Maybe the ocean doesn’t ultimately care (or maybe it does, who can tell, and it sure wouldn’t matter if someone can), but why not have fun healthy good things happening, even if the illusion of choice is just that.

So now my simple brain wants to know where this overly convoluted heap of waffling is leading and decides  to use it to have another crack at the hoary old dilemmas surrounding the (again, illusionary) questions of what ’should’ ‘I’ ‘do’ and why. (By now I hope you get why I call those questions illusionary, right? Otherwise that’s what the comments are for. Hey didja know there’s a comment section? You can comment there. It’s fun! Healthy! Good! Do eet. Do eet noowwwww.) Alright, so there’s an unimaginable rift between what I’m in the habit of calling me and Being, but still, now what. Especially considering the fact that Being could crush me like less than a bug and nothing would be lost, nothing would change. Maybe we are after all ‘justified’ (rhetorically speaking) in assuming we have latitude to choose, hope, build, desire – Being hasn’t snuffed us out yet, so why not. We’ll have to assume that that’s as much of a warranty for the possibility of human life as we’re going to get, and right now, maybe that’s enough. Although looking at the world and what it suffers: barely; and we keep trying to cut it closer. So roll on the revolution. As long as I can dance, I’ll do my part. Looking forward to see yours, too.

Breath center

I think I mentioned before that toe-breath is unbalancing (and the fact that it’s too much of a bother to look up and link to the post in question shows that blog management really isn’t as loser-friendly as all that yet), and although I’d still consider it a useful emergency move, the feeling that what it it does is pull me off-center is growing, and that’s never a good idea.
So I’ve been playing around with radially centered breath for a bit. I’m not interested in finding out if I’m working with hara, navel, dan-t’ien, Almaas’s empty cube (is that called moon spot, or is that something else again? note to self call Raymond), or the spot midway between sacrum and pubic bone; it’s somewhere in there, though I feel that (for now at least) I’m working with something that tends to be a bit higher and more to the front of the body than I feel is comfortable and sustainable and uh, right.
There’s a breath that goes radially into this spot, from crown and perineum, fingers and toes into this center, and outwards again. It was interesting to follow this movement of breath-like energy, and notice that there’s a different flavor of energy that can easily move synchronously but also antichronously (is that a word? when breath inhales this reaches out, when it exhales it pools together; you know what I mean). And a third layer, which was more one of intent or desire: it’s possible to find a spot in the breath cycle, or in that second layer (which I might call something like a libidinous cycle) where I feel most at home or most able to feel pleasure in exerting myself.
And at least a fourth layer, one cycling between where witnessing rests most easily and mindfully, and where it feels impossible to even stay awake.
It provided me minutes, nay seconds of fun just trying to keep track of all this stuff polyrhythmically, and I think it could be kind of revealing or maybe just a fun getting to know you exercise to play around with this and figure out where you like to be, and where you aren’t, and maybe why.
Oh by the way toe-breath (does calling it that disgust you? You’re probably from the Usa) is a move the vereniging voor herintroductie van uitstervende woorden would call a paardenmiddel. It would advise you not to use this particular paardenmiddel, though it would applaud your use of the word. Damn it, that worked better when I wrote it all in Dutch. If being dumb (in a vaguely funny way) and deeply incomprehensible can be called better than being obtuse and completely incomprehensible.

Men and Women: Are they more Different than Alike?

Talking with (which means listening to, a lot of the time) ms. neighbour is adding a lot of flavour to my perception of gender and concepts of genderedness.
A different perspective is opening up when I take account of the possibility that in a lot of the different sectors of being (somatic, mental, sexual, spiritual etc.), humans might have pretty much equally big and full potential to live as a woman or as a man. The presupposition I appear to have accepted ’til now is that people inherently ‘center on some point of a 1-dimensional scale of gender’, which I often thought to be unconsciously (genetically, environmentally, socially) determined; and that just isn’t very compelling at all anymore – it still feels pretty ingrained though. E.g. (now when I think it out loud it’s kinda obvious) you can live somatically as a woman even though corporeally you’re a man. You essentially don’t have to do anything to prove worthy of this label, as long as your somatic being isn’t being a man, and it’s just an intellectual desire for you to have it be called feminine, in which case you’re just playing word games. This is possible because that’s how big genders are.
Now, I still suppose that it’s possible to call things womanly or manly, but one of the benefits of this perspective is that it seems impossible to me to judge a majority of the stuff we think about when we think about gender on the aforementioned linear scale, because this is quite emphatically not a linear scale anymore, femininity and masculinity are much more like two potentially completely interpenetrating clouds of sense and meaning and desire and good stuff, really.

Oh about that horror…

That turned out to be about Kali. Ms. Neighbour introduced me to her, and she (Kali, not the bobbly one, well maybe her too but in a much nicer way I’d hope) wants to bite my head off, but then I get to bite off hers, so that’s alright. I don’t know if she’s round the bend enough to not even mind anymore if I’d call her a nice lady, so I’ll refrain. Of course, that’s not really an insightful way to refer to her either.

That elusive, huh?

I was imagining arguing against the acceptance of hierarchy and of ideals of progression, and instead proposing to look for the flow of the authentic, the spontaneous essence, or even barefacedly imagining one day to have as improbable an encounter as one with that shamefacedly whispered about, rarely spotted shambling woodland creature: the healthy ego.

By the way: as an ideology Wilberism is clearly progressivist, a bias that is of course acknowledged, embraced nor transcended.