Session 2

I stared in the mirror today for a few minutes. I grew up and live in a Western Society Culture. This culture has put an emphasis on production, speed, and efficiency. “What are you doing today?” translates to “What are you going to produce/accomplish? What actions are going to produce an outcome that I (someone outside of you) can measure?” We feel discouraged and disappointed if we don’t do something. Sometimes we do things that can’t be measured by others. Sometimes we have to do things that we as individuals can measure. This might mean taking a few minutes out of the hurry and rush of the day to look in the mirror. It helped to see me. I hadn’t done it in awhile and I reassured myself that I respected who looked back at me. I said nothing, did nothing. Just looked. Deep and hard, straight into my eyes and was happy with who looked back. I didn’t shun and I feel I’ve had a productive day.
I stepped into the shower and found myself in a trance. Our Western Society Culture has us focusing on the next. What’s the next thing we have to do? What’s the next thing that we have to accomplish? We break this down into little and big things. Little things are the grocery store, class, interviews, and day to day living. Big things are careers and goals that we work for through little things. We forget to slow down and see everything outside of our lives. It’s what Indian religions call an “observer.” This is the part of the mind that can step beyond our tendons and muscles and see everything. See how the events of Buenos Ares are touching Sri Lanka which are touching New York and so on. See how all of these events are channeled and touching your bones and muscles. When we take time to stop and feel what are bodies are saying and see the big picture…the interconnectedness of everything, then we can better accomplish our tasks for the day.
So, I step in the shower after looking at myself for a few minutes, and I can feel the individual drops on my back. I take a shower every morning, but I have never felt a shower like this. It stopped me from moving. My feet were close together, my hands raised to chest level, as if I was holding an offering of some sort…and maybe I was. In everyday life, this would be a somewhat weird and uncomfortable stance, but at that moment, it wasn’t. My mind started to sing a song, but something else pushed the song away. I felt like there was no limit to my conscious. I had my normal brain pattern that thought about the day, songs, and other such things…and then I had something else, something I have had before, but not in my conscious thought. It was something that I’ve had unconsciously, but for some reason came into my awareness today. I can only understand it in this Indian idea of an observer. There was something else watching everything, keeping my smaller mind from thinking about the everyday. It was aware of everything. Aware of the proprioceptors keeping my body’s gravity centered…fixing the nuances that would normally tip me over if I didn’t have them correcting my stance. Slow down…control your breathing…push everything out of your mind…close your eyes and you’ll feel them working. You don’t have to think about them working…they just operate within your body. It was fascinating. I could see every individual drop of water hitting my back. I had the temperature a little hotter than normal because my back was feeling tense and I could feel the impact of each drop and how it was massaging my aching muscles. I had my eyes open at this point and could see the beige wall in front of me with small drops of water clinging to it, but I could also see my muscles releasing their tense grip on the chemicals that were being held in. I could see what was holding in the tension and allow it to let go. I was aware of something larger in me than just what I typically skim off of the top. In a way I guess I was probing. My stance hadn’t changed, and I was aware of this and how different it was, but at the same time comfortable. I wanted to move my hands, but knew that the minute I did, this trance would be finished. I had to actually prepare myself for them to move…had to say to myself that they were going to move. I imagined what it would feel like and how it would change my consciousness.
Then I moved my hands. Everything was broken, but I held on to what had happened because I knew I wanted to write it down. I grabbed the shampoo and began to wash my hair. This shower was different though. My mind was flooded with a surge of inspiration. I had to go and write all this down. I started to think about the music I’ve been writing and thought about some interesting ideas that I could pursue with them. I thought about what I wanted to do with my life and what was fun and satisfying to me. I want to write. I don’t know about what, but I want to write. I thought “Why not try and get my thoughts published?” Maybe all of the conversations that I’ve been having in my head could be interesting to others, even if there is no plot to the writings. Who knows? All that matters is that it happened. And whether or not anyone can measure what I’ve done today doesn’t matter to me. I feel I’ve accomplished something important and my day was prosperous to me. Isn’t that what we strive for every day in this Western Society Culture?

Session 1

They say to be a good writer you have to write every day. Constantly. Well, that’s easy when you actually have the time to put your words down on paper…oh, and what you have to say is interesting. When I say interesting, that doesn’t only mean that you have to believe it is; it also means that people in the world have to deem it worthy of their time. They have to have the willingness to take time out of their day to sit down and read your words…they may not have any point or poignant subject matter, but people feel that the words you’ve written down are giving them something more than they’re taking from them.
Understanding the “interesting” gives an artist a great deal of power. I know that what I’m now writing doesn’t have much substance, but it is an accumulation of thoughts that are in my head that do have a value of interest, otherwise I wouldn’t be putting effort into them. Knowing this, please understand that what I am writing originated with no plot, no frame of reference, nothing. It was simply me sitting down and thinking. Any underlying themes or ideas came from pure nothingness and have been produced by connections of thought.
Sometimes life has no real plot or setting. It just is. A stream of consciousness moves way too quickly for a writer to keep up with. That’s why books, movies, television, and other entertainment forms are so popular…they have a frame of reference; something that pushes the audience from beginning to end. We can step out of the mundane, day to day goings on of life and step into a world that is controlled, concise, and organized in an aesthetically pleasing way. Music applies the same principles. There’s an underlying theme to every note, every letter, and every aspect of entertainment. That’s what makes it entertaining. There’s no real underlying theme to life. There’s nothing that pushes an individual through to the end except for the pure and simple fact that there is a consciousness there. There is a living, breathing individual that is going through the world in their own way. That’s the only frame of reference.
We can try and insert meaning. We can say, “I’m going to be an engineer” and that would be the illusion of an underlying theme. One would feel like they had a platform to stand on. As you’re reading this you’re attempting to piece together all of the sentences to create some point, some sort of overall plot or theme. And what’s crazy…there is. It’s there, hidden in every sentence. Doesn’t this sound a lot like life? What starts out from nothing actually creates a meaning as it grows.

Maybe each individual sentence is a theme on its own. I feel that a piece of writing works just like the world. There is the overall everything…the entire global perspective that we can watch. We can see huge trends in weather, fashion, knowledge, technology, economics, politics, and everything, but those overall trends are created by us analyzing them. Truly, they can all be measured as coincidental outcomes from each of us individuals operating within the large context.
Just like letters on a page. Letters form words that form sentences that make up paragraphs that are chapters that make up a novel that has a big idea or a punchline. But that punchline won’t come without the reader’s consciousness finding it. Sure, the beginning spark came from the author, but the reader breathes life into it. The reader creates the meaning. Seems to me that that’s how the world works. One person is the letter. There’s no real meaning or intrinsic value there except for when put together with other letters that can create a word. We live in a world where it is no longer enough to simply be a letter. Where our value is created by the larger context we inhabit. Is that life? Is it no longer enough to simply be?