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.

Something you don’t like.

Right now, there’s something you don’t like. There are also other nows, and in some of them that something is absent. If you want to experience them, rejecting or denying or feeling patronizing about whatever it is that’s bothering you is the best way to lower your chances of that ever happening.

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.

dude where’s that, my, thing you know? right! car.

That movie is so gay. Also that one highly quotable line ’scrü the ünivørs’ should be a subtitle of this blog one time, once people start to actually care about such things, maybe. Okay I’ll have to care about them myself then.

New policy: dump any draft.

Yes it’s true, I can draft however much I want but it’s been shown that I will not edit drafts into audience-friendly form on my own. Maybe later, or when I get enough complaints (hellooooho?). So here goes! Relax, read, enjoy, wonder WTF I’m on about this time, shoot me an email or a comment and I’ll feel invited to elucidate.

In some strains of neo-advaitic theory absolutism and/or nihilism is way too prevalent to feel healthy anymore. Particularly useless if making use of enlightenment for healing is attempted. Looking at you Byron Katie. (Isaac Shapiro I’m holding out hope for, smart dude that.) Also a so called enlightened world view that forgets who it is that spends all this time doing all this stuff that it (the view i.e.) busily keeps declaring illusionary or irrelevant is sort of cutely dumb.

But I seem to be getting on the scent of a fullness-transcendence that is an alternative to the emptiness thingy that advaitics teach. (-> explain fullness …)

Maybe a third kind, something to do with how awareness and body/fullness are the same – sounds blindingly obvious, but it’s hard to re manifest the feeling – it’s the androgynous third to the male emptiness / female fullness thing, sort of a purer creativity that doesn’t need the coming together of male and female to create.

How ‘you’ can do something to ‘get’ differently enlightened – if retraining your system isn’t doing something we need to talk about the definition of doing. Simply getting your system to stop perpetuating production as a means of evading the Being Here Now is an excellent activity, and if you tell me I can’t do that you’re probably confused who you’re talking to.

Somabile: carried by the body, as all this bullshit is after all, how could that hang together let allone carry itself by itself?

New subtitle from:… jjgo.

I’d be way more willing to offer myself (??? maybe make me active and the guru the sacrificer? to be edited) to a guru if I felt he had a feeling of humility and was willing to get close to me and give me stuff. (This means that I’d still be very unwilling to do that, it’s just that it seems like such a surreally dumb thing to do to me now.)

vereniging voor herintroductie van uitstervende woorden: kukelen.

I don’t know if dykes are more likely to be attracted to the side of me that I would most like to be attractive for, and I don’t know how much ms. neighbour identifies with her bisexual tendencies, but I’ll tell you that if she came and told me, to my face, that she’d like to maybe chow down on some pretty rug again sometime soon, I’d totally egg her on. (did you notice how I said ‘egg’? Yeah okay more witty than funny.)

Include sound clips, e.g. Jordan with the subtitle, there was something in the latest savage lurvecast, and that one percussion line in Votono was really cute. Would probably make the blog a lot more engaging.

Why I like to preach – how it could even be a valid urge.

The horror, and what might be fun about it.

For some vague reason* I’m beginning to feel interested in artistic expressions of grinding defeat and annihilation, like darkpsy, books like Gravity’s Rainbow, and of course: Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks, which deserves its own post (later yeah right later). The inescapability of that mood used to feel very scary to me, but I’m starting to see a glimpse of release or devotion or, what’s Hingabe in English? in it too, now. (Could be all that hot sex I’ve been having over the last 36 hours.)

Inescapable doom could serve as an image of the hopelessness Chögyam Trungpa was talking about, for instance – the empty illusion of conscious intent. Or the horrific aspect of Warren Ellis’ work and blog, which is a great way to convince yourself that yes, all those nice things you see around you are just as transient as anything. They’ll rot and decay on their own time anyway, and it’s super easy to have your nice bits shattered, liquefied, maimed, or chewed off by aliens from Outside (where the Others come from). And of course there’s a heroism in accepting that certainty to such an extent that you take this othering influence into your own life and let it act out on your own body, so cross posts from Modblog never lose their relevance (not that I’m going to click through though).

Now for the theoretical part:

• emptiness and fullness
• samsara: emptiness doesn’t exist
• nirvana: fullness doesn’t exist
• tantra: emptiness == fullness ( == svabhavikakaya? some not very clear other kind of thing?)

*(cute, how each next word is one letter longer there)

Zoom in2 birdspace.

/& am a hooj wild bird floatin on thi currents slidin wifin thi driftin wind, hangin lazily loosed on ma outstretchd wings cantileverd acros thi singin air. Ma wingtip fevirs r eech thi size of hands; they flutir like a lam’s hart flutirs when ma shado folz ovir it. Ma feet r steel-tipt grapples hung on thi end ov ma hawser legs. Ma talins r unsheethd razers; onli ma Is r sharper. Ma beek is harder than bone, keener than juss-broke glass. Ma keel bone is a grate nife cozend in ma flesh & cleevin thi soft air; ma ribs r glistnin springs, ma mussils sleek bunchd fists ov oily powr, ma hart a chambr fild wif slo thunder, qwiet & unstressd; a towrin dam triklin powr, tikin ovir, hedwaters ov charjed blud pent & latent.

Wel, YES! This is moar like it! Why did I evir bothir been a hok? Why woz I so bleedin unambishis? I feel feers, I feel powerfil.

[© Iain M. Banks, Feersum Endjinn]

(See what I mean? Terrifically quotable.)

Passing time

As always I was reluctant to choose which of his books I was going to re-read, because I dread the specific horrificness his excellent writing is going to seduce me into witnessing, but I’m re-reading Banks, Use of Weapons, possibly his best? Who cares. So and as always I want to quote at length, which I still might, but not now, because just now, I read a sentence fragment which seemed to sparkle with one of those little gleams of ‘transcendental’ or metaphysical (or whatever) insight for me: “… the identity of thought and passing time.”

Now there’s an idea. Time, the passing of it, the concept of time as something that passes, the concept of time; being identical with thinking. Not a cause and effect relationship, it’s not that time passes because I think; it’s like only when there’s thinking around does the tableau of the world manifest a kind of time that passes from the might-be into the over-and-gone.

I haven’t read up on any popular science lately so I’ll say I don’t know what I’m talking about right up front, but here we go anyway: how was that again with the proof that time has an arrow? Far as I know that’s accepted physics, although there’s a couple smart dissenters, e.g. Julian Barbour. Anyway, it suddenly became clear to me again that if time has an arrow it isn’t possible to show it exists from looking at sense experience, all you get from that is an opportunity to compare memory images and conclude that there’s different ones.

Summer time…

Blockbuster time!
Holy shit.