Hmm...

No particular topic in mind to write about. Early morning meditation and a text message from a girl I met online. I shouldn't have given her my number. Why would anyone assume I'd like to talk at 7:30 am on a Thursday? Again with the weird dreams, only this time I can't remember. Sinus congestion has been going on for weeks now and no real reprieve. I understand sinus pain and can commiserate with those who have it. My thoughts are random, indefinite, without a goal or a purpose to drive them. I travel in many directions, have many hobbies, a jack of all trades as my father would say. And yet I still want to be a master of one, or of many. What does this life mean? I'm still on the "what's it all about thread," but i suppose at this moment I perceive contentment or something close to it. If love is the answer, then it cannot be human love; it must be universal. We humans seem to fall victim to our minds quite often. If the stresses of daily life or of our physical malfunctioning is allowed to influence our psyches, then the perception of love is unlikely. Our main drive should be to increase the time in which we are able to feel love, and by that I mean perceive it. Does this mean to slow the chaotic whirling of the mind, or to be thankful for all that we have, or both? There would appear to be various ways of reaching the same point, as there are different paths to enlightenment. Enlightenment is a state of elevation in which the perception of love is total and complete, and one's mind does not regress into the madness of mere human functioning. It is beyond the human mind. It is inclusive of every blade of grass, every tree and building, every breath of air, and every pair of human eyes that reflect our own souls... When I can clearly see myself in everything and everyone- this is higher consciousness. Recognition of beauty: yet another means to attaining higher states. Seeing the light reflected in a single drop of rain, or a thousand million drops falling in front of a streetlamp. Hearing the melody of birds or seeing an old woman sitting on a park bench, the lines and folds of her face, the thought that she is a wonderful kind of energy with deep pools of experience, and she keeps wandering on some spectacular journey through the stars. We are all stardust after all, tiny flecks of sand in a gigantic space. We are the space. We are the stars. The entire process of creation is one of our breaths. Ahh but to perceive it completely, to know this with intuition and with a depth of peace, to ride the waves of this vast ocean without fear but with love. What is this concept called love? Is it an actual thing? Is the word love a perfect symbol for the feeling we ascribe it to, and is it that we feel love or that we are aware of it? Is the feeling of connectedness we have when we are with family a small taste of a greater love, a cosmic love? I think we simply want to feel connected, and we receive that feeling when we are in a relationship, or when we are with loving family members. But the feeling of connectedness is an act of perception, because we can be around people who love us and feel nothing, feel isolated and bitter. Likewise we can be alone and feel a passionate joy that can aptly be described as a feeling of love; again it is a perception. So. Connectedness. A feeling of being connected, of being loved, of being a part of a greater love. The connectedness we perceive in a romantic relationship cannot be entirely real, because when the object of our love is taken away, so too does the connected feeling dissipate. The only real love occurs when realize our connectedness to everything, when connectedness does not depend on the love of an individual outside ourselves.

Dream

So I'm somewhere near my parents house in America, only the area is a cross between an Asian slum and an American suburb. Right out in front of our house is a giant dumpy apartment building that appears slipshod thrown together, and stairs with nearly the steepness of a long ladder spider their way to the top, an uncanny distance from the ground. My ex-girlfriend has recently taken up residence here, a common living style - in the dream - for Taiwanese people. She lives on the top floor, the rooftop (which happens to coincide with reality as she lives on a rooftop in Taipei). People come over to visit me, friends with children that wish to play, and one of them sees the long staircase as a fun adventure. The child of my friend is about the height of my ex, though probably only 8 years of age. He sees her climbing up to the top and races after her, of which she is quickly aware and somewhat frightened. At the top their is a struggle between them, him playfully wrestling, her appearing to take this assault seriously, and in a moment of aggression she shoves him hard and he falls off the edge. He drops many stories down into a large glass jar full of water at the bottom and it smashes into pieces and severs his head from his body. His body is also sliced into parts, dead on impact. She is shocked but goes into her apartment as if nothing happened while we stare in awe at the gruesome sight. The following days are filled with talk of prosecution and arrest, and I take it as my personal responsibility to explain to my ex that with the death of this child will come a reckoning, and many will say she is guilty. She of course refuses to admit guilt, and while the incident seemed like an accident, there is no escaping the fact that this child died horribly on the street in front of my house.

I suppose if I am to analyze the dream, the coldness of her reaction is much like it was when she broke up with me. No explanation, no admission that her behavior was awful, and me trying in vain to realize what was really in her heart. The fact that she felt unhappiness over having to deal with this issue - in the dream - could also mirror the feeling she must have had during our breakup. But what I felt from her was a coldness, a callousness that could not be penetrated. She would not bend or show sympathy. She would not soften her heart.

This was a particularly weird dream, and I have had many of late, all seeming to be on the violent side. And no, I have not been watching horror movies, but last week I dreamed a serial killer abducted my entire family and was killing us off one by one until I somehow threw him on the ground and smashed his head with a block of concrete. At least we won in the end...

What's it all about?

Do you ever have those days where you do things you know you shouldn't, then end up regretting them before the day is over and berating yourself in a mentally masochistic manner that is completely useless in helping the situation? Welcome to the club. Do I do this often? No, but once in awhile is once too often for me. I am not going to tell you the details of this story, only that it involves a girl and that I should not have been involved in the first place. Ahh guilt. Ahh lust. Ahh punishing ourselves through remorse in order to somehow feel better. Ridiculous logic but it seems to work well with our backwards human psychology. So what's it all about? Why do we enter situations we know are harmful to our overall well being? Obviously some people could handle the same events with less reaction. You might angrily yell at a loved one and be completely guilt free throughout the day, or you might run over a squirrel and simply chuckle.

So the gravity of these occurrences is relative to be sure. What gets me is that we all must know intuitively the things that will leave a negative imprint on the old psyche, and yet we sometimes do these things anyway- maybe we do them often. I've frequently had this feeling that there is a right way to live for each of us, a way of orchestrating our lives so that we maximize our potential and do all the things we know we should do, like exercise, write letters, pay mom a visit, get up early, stop bad habits. So I feel like there are a bunch of things I know deep down I want to do on a daily basis with my life, and if i were to do these things I would be empowered and energetic and feeling successful and happy, because I got down to my core desires and made them happen despite my inherent laziness. In the same day, if I were to avoid all the activities that I know prevent me from achieving - activities like watching TV or eating junk food - then I would be one step closer to that feeling of success. Should one day be a microcosm for how we would like to live a life? It seems like if I imagined the perfect life for me, with praise and making people happy and lots of love, and then I tried to achieve it in one day (because tomorrow I might be dead), I would be getting the most out of each day instead of squandering them watching reruns or munching on crap. I would live unselfishly instead of selfishly. I would be energized by giving freely and working hard, laughing hard.

The problem is that we don't do this. We don't treat a day as if it were a life. We don't live as if this moment were our last. Yeah I guess some people would want to drive cars off cliffs in that case, or shoot guns in crowded malls, but most of us want to leave feeling we have given something to the world or made someone happy. We're too focused on gratifying our own desires and working the self-induced stress out of our systems. We don't have time or energy to figure out what would really make each day better. So we sit complacently in tired routines. But what if we started to change? What if we change this day? And what if we built momentum toward living our core beliefs? We have to imagine how life would be different, how it would improve, how much weight we would start losing and how many more books we would read, smiles we would give.

I'm not saying I can fully do this yet, or even get close to living a bunch of successively perfect days. But I can imagine what it would feel like. Feels pretty good...

My blog is still here...

Well, I had had some trouble when my blog suddenly changed into Chinese and certain areas were unreadable for me- yes my reading and writing of the language still blows. But it is still here and I am back. It's time, like my wise friend Gary has said, "to get our stuff out," meaning to put what is inside us into some tangible form that others may choose to learn from, or simply enjoy. The world is connecting more and more, and so many people can now share ideas that may benefit few or many around the world.

My goal for right now is simply to be as honest and fearless as possible in putting myself out there, in exposing my insides to whoever might listen, not so that my ego can get a boost from the approval of others, but so that someone else might find meaning in the writings that pass through me.

I'm reading Messages from the Masters right now by Brian Weiss, M.D., and yes i believe in reincarnation. I have for many years now. Call it my influence from living with Ananda Marga monks, or chalk it up to many years of reading various books on philosophy, transpersonal psychology, or metaphysics. In any case I am a believer that the energy which inhabits our bodies - call it a soul if you like - will some day exit these vessels and continue on. Physicists say that energy is never created or destroyed. It seems therefore probable that the energy which maintains our bodies simply transmutes, but does not extinguish. Yogis would say that our life essence has a particular vibration, a collection of waves so subtle and complex as to contain echoes from every deed we have ever done, and every action visited upon us. This is what is known in sanskrit as karma, the reactive force of past lives. It would seem as humans our nature is to evolve, and while we cannot grow in one life beyond our physical containers, it is our nature to expand non-physically, or spiritually. How do we do this? Love seems to be at the core. To give love and be capable of receiving, to foster the ability to perceive love in all aspects of life, in all manifestations of reality. There are tools the yogis use to reach higher states of consciousness, higher states of love awareness, and these are the practices of yoga and meditation. Meditation allows the ego to be silent, thereby allowing a more knowledgeable self, a kind of superego, to have awareness of the more subtle flows of mind, of consciousness. A deep sense of well being begins to rise up in us as the mind grow silent. We begin to perceive sounds outside, body sensations within, until those too cease to be, and all that remains is our thoughts. Ripples eventually quiet, and we are left floating calmly on a glass lake by moonlight. It is here we begin meditation, here that feelings of freedom, love, well being flow through us as waves of positive energy.