Lately conceptualizing an overarching, ubiquitous consciousness within which we, as individuals, are immersed always.  The consciousness is a broad river, constantly moving.  I picture our bodies like cups.  I see a string of cups suspended just above the river, each with a tiny hole in the bottom.  The river rushes up and fills the cups, but then, slowly, day after day, the water from the cups drains back into the moving river.  Once you've gone completely back into the river, are you the same as you were in the cup?  Yes and no, back in the river you're not configured the same way, but you're not destroyed either, you're free to join your source--to finally rejoin the whole.  The separation, the cup, is temporary--it's limiting, confining, and fragile.  The river is forever though, and will keep on filling different cups--an endless variety of cups--that in turn will drain back into the river, on and on, etc.

It's hard to believe in God, it's hard for me.  I'm reading a book on Hermeticism and one of its major precepts is that old chestnut: "As above, so below" which the Lord's Prayer also echoes ("Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven"). Occurred to me suddenly while watching TV yesterday, probably not a revelation to anybody else, but--look how a mother is a model for God on earth.  A mother loves her child unconditionally, sacrifices herself, devotes herself to the child's needs.  The mother creates the child in her womb, the child is part of her, yet separate.  The child might receive adequate love and attention from the mother, yet still turn out to be selfish and irresponsible. Not every mother is God-like in her child's life in the sense of being very loving  or even in the custodial sense, but every one is in the creator sense.  It's a universal truth, not even just a human truth--the drive of the mother, after having created her offspring, to protect and care for them.  When you zoom out from this planet, from this plane of existence, I believe this pattern probably persists at a macro-level.  A benevolent creator who tries to guide, who tries to nurture its creation--not just for the sake of the creation, but for the sake of the creator itself.  It's not just an altruistic, self-sacrificing drive either--in a way there is self-preservation at stake too, the deep desire to perpetuate one's being through progeny, to be a part of the future---of indefinite generations going on--in a way, to live eternally.  What's set in motion, stays in motion.  For motion's sake alone! 

The squirrels came and ate all the pears off of Joe's trees and afterward he commented how much stronger the trees looked--how they weren't sagging anymore and the leaves looked greener, more lush.  Sometimes when you lose everything you thought was valuable it's like a new vitality comes over you.  When you unload your fruits, you are stripped of the weight of all the expectations that accompanied that fruit--all the pies and cobblers you would have had to produce! There is a new freedom in just having to put energy into the core, build up the roots and trunk, don't worry about the products anymore.  Take the sun and water and put it right into your very center and next season--watch out.  The bounty will be astounding. 

Over the course of your life you become different things to different people.  You're not a Good Person or a Bad Person.  You are your actions at any given time.  You are an instrument of karma, maybe. This age of social media has perverted the ego even further beyond how perverted it already was.  Every person sees himself as being primary, as being The Center.  The bigger picture gets obscured when you focus on yourself as Main Character.  Think about how you have been a catalyst in the lives of others.  I have been cruel to others and hurt them, but I have been loving too and have helped some people.  A lot of times I have played a bit part or had some slight influence on another person's life for better or worse.  Isn't that just as important as being a protagonist?  Maybe it's more important in a way.  

When I went crazy back in high school the people with whom I had brief interactions--a receptionist, a cashier, a person passing on the street--glowed with a sort of holiness.  They became angels to me, or devils.  I saw them as guides and tempters, deities who were continuously putting me to the test.  

I'm not really crazy anymore (?), but it's interesting to think about all the roles we play in the lives of others.  How many times are we unaware that we have saved somebody or edged them closer to despair? I have to get my head out of the Internet circle jerk and really take this to heart.  I'm just a strand in a web. When I interact with another--let it be with love and gentleness, because my role as a bit player in so many other people's lives might count for way more, in the end, than what who I think I am as the star of the show. 

Ram Dass said, "Treat every person you meet as if he were God in drag." That is a new mantra.  I have been overcome lately by a feeling of relief.  A relief in letting the old idea of how important I was dissolve and fall away.  I listen to people's accounts of Near Death Experiences on YouTube every night and play Dr. Mario and they are all so similar.  They talk about a life review and feeling the pain you caused others as your own pain, and the joy and comfort you caused others as your own joy and comfort.  I feel I've always suspected that's how it would be.  That you'd have to balance the books this way in the end.  

They all say they feel enveloped by love, they don't feel frightened and they don't feel alone.  I hope it's real, I hope it's real, I hope it's real. 

The earth may be dying, but she's alive enough to show me weeds and birds and I'm alive enough to appreciate them.

Maybe I wasn't alive enough to put kids out into this world, but I'm alive enough to care for the kids others made. 

Maybe I wasn't alive enough to lead, but I'm alive enough to serve.

Probably I'll never make a significant scientific discovery or be admired by very smart people, but I was alive enough to sing.  I was alive enough to cook, and write, and love! 

Sometimes I don't feel alive enough to feel pleasure, but I can be alive enough to enjoy my memories of pleasure, to allow and honor the pleasure of others.

I wasn't alive enough to ever be a great beauty, and even if my attractiveness is diminishing by the hour, I will long be alive enough to appreciate beauty.  Beauty needs a beholder to be beauty at all. 

I'm alive enough to sing, even if it's just for myself.  Even when I'm not alive enough to sing, I am alive enough to be still inside of a song someone else is singing.

When I'm not alive enough to speak my own words, I'm alive enough to listen and take on another person's burden, alive enough to be there to help them organize the chaos in their mind.

One day I won't be alive enough to stand, and I might only be alive enough just to know I'm alive.  

After that my life will get less and less until I'm only alive enough to nourish the birds and weeds I appreciated when I was alive enough to walk. But maybe even that is Alive Enough! 

I think it's time to stop being aspirational.  Maybe there is no big perfect experience. I think the gnawing expectation of complete bliss steals the Joy of Enough.  If you revel in Enough that can be so freeing.  What if where I am right now could be enough?  I wouldn't need a golden palace in heaven when I die.  I wouldn't need the perfect body, perfect hair, to write the perfect book, make the perfect song, have perfect relationships.  I could dispense with the psychological tyranny of always trying to be better. I would be able to finally settle.  Settle into the cozy little cottage of Enough.  I might be able to shake off the persistent shame of not Doing my Best or Having it All.  I might be able to finally rest in there.  

What a weird place to be on the spectrum between the obsession with fame and the desire for privacy, anonymity.

Brian told me once about a story he read where after years of social media narcissism and a culture of unchecked self-aggrandizement, the pendulum swung the other way and people wore masks and hid from surveillance cameras.  Everybody wanted to be a ghost.

Today I caught my reflection in the window while I was buying water ice and with my big sunglasses and surgical mask, I was unrecognizable to myself!  I shut down my Facebook page too, I feel the urge to sink further and further back into the ether--for people not to know me, not remember me.  That seems more desirable to me now than attention, and yet I am writing this. (But nobody reads this.)

This morning I had a thought about life here on earth being a gestation period.  Maybe we're meant to develop as souls--serve, learn, expand our spirits--and when our bodies dry up and slough off, consciousness emerges into another phase.  A better one?  An easier one?

When I started working at Bancroft I learned about the four functions of human behavior according to B.F. Skinner and one of those was attention.  So many things we do we do solely for the attention of others--to be seen. Is it possible to outgrow the need?  Sometimes I think I can feel myself getting past it, but my involuntary fantasies tell the truth.  I always dream of writing the perfect song, making a perfect recording and feeling the glow of everyone finally recognizing my genius (that was a joke).  Is the deep need to make art just another expression of our need for the attention of others?  Yes, probably, but at least making art is a thoughtful, constructive way to assert yourself.  Better than a cheap status update.  Or is it?

Years ago, back in the 90s, I took a sleeping pill and wrote in my journal as it was taking effect.  I wrote that in the future there would be a literary movement called "Literature of the Immediate" and that instead of conceiving stories, essays, arguments, people would literally just write about what they were experiencing in the moment.  I saw Twitter coming a mile away, I guess you could say.

We're here now.  A lot of people don't let a moment's planning, second-guessing, or refining get between them and what they want to say.  Is it better?  No, I don't think so, and I am trying to go back to the old way of thinking before I speak/write.  Still--the moment is all we really have so....

There goes the monkey mind again trying to categorize existence--are you famous or are you anonymous?  Are you taking your time to think carefully enough about what you want to say and writing for "real" or are you throwing any whim that bubbles up right onto your Facebook page?  Is it weak to want others to see you or is it just natural?

Alt-right conspiracy wackos see mask-wearing as prostration to the Illuminati or whatever, an admission that one is a sheep.  But what's wrong with being a sheep?  That's what I want to know.  Every time I try to control anything, life just happens to me anyway.  So....baaaaaa, I guess.

I grew up a block away from a railroad and there was a freight train that went by most mornings between 1 and 3 o'clock.  When I went to college and then came back, the train suddenly started waking me up, but up until then I had been so used to it that I'd never even heard it.  There is this phenomenon that exists whereby some things become so familiar to you that they become virtually invisible, almost imperceptible.

That's how I think about death now.  I've been afraid of it so long I couldn't help but think about it all the time, and now that the pandemic is here, it's been at the forefront of my mind even more than usual.  I think of death as a constant companion.  We shrink away from the word, consider it so exotic and ineffable.  The great existential mystery.  It's not.  Death is more real and more natural to us than life, by far. 

If death is off and life is on, you were off for the entirety of time until you got turned on and then you'll stay on for 0-100 years or so and then you'll turn off again and be off for the rest of time.  I used to think that was tragic too, but it isn't.  I saw Sadhguru say in an interview once that your body is just like some dirt you borrowed from the earth and when your life ends you have to give it back.  In the meantime, life is like a window screen and death is like everything on either side of that screen.

Your body and your mind are just a filter against which material reality continually registers causing you to have an experience of that reality.  What that filter mostly does is create the illusion of duality in order to force you to distinguish yourself from your surroundings and to categorize the stimuli in your environment.  This thing is not that thing, this is another thing, that's something else.  

Consciousness is ok sometimes, but mostly it's exhausting because it makes us play the never-ending, (well, losing) game of classifying objects, feelings, and experiences into neat little rows and columns.  That's the screen doing that.  Chopping up reality into little boxes.  Breaking up a single beam of light into a grid-like shape shining on the opposite wall.  

The waking mind is mostly a nuisance because it works overtime trying to justify itself.  It separates you from the world around you and tells you how special and unique you are.  In doing so it surely sets into motion every pathology, physical and psychological, that exists among human beings.  

A lot of the busywork it does involves convincing you that death is terrible and unfamiliar and The Worst Thing.  But take a look at what's really going on.  Every night you lie in bed and allow your consciousness to dissolve and it feels wonderful.  Once in a while you become so engrossed in doing something or perceiving something that you feel your ego melt away and it feels wonderful.  Sometimes you achieve such perfect communion with another human being that time stops and you experience a nourishing, blissful stillness and it feels wonderful.  

Those are times when the screen goes up and death creeps into our living experience and those are some of the best times in life!  I don't know if any part of individual consciousness persists after death.  I suspect not, but sometimes I don't just suspect not, I HOPE not.  My best guess for what happens when we die is that you'll feel the bodily tension relaxing and letting go and, just like when falling asleep, you'll feel your consciousness fading, blending with your surroundings.  Probably the dying brain puts on a little show for you and you get to see all your dead loved ones again which will be nice, and then--asleep, no pain, so separation, complete unity, no constant grinding of the mind or muscles.  The ultimate healing.  

The iris that bloomed 4 days ago in the backyard, so gorgeous it was almost embarrassing,

Today it started to wilt.

When night comes, does the darkness offend its vanity?

Blacking out the beauty of its short life for hours at a time?

My grandmother, that irascible giant, rushed to the hospital, weak and in pain. 

Leaving the emergency ward, she leaned against me, though not wanting to. 

I noticed today a childhood friend had varicose veins. I touched the lines on the side of my mouth. 

On the way home in the rear view mirror new strands of silver stood out against my black hair.

Another May whirls into the past.

The year pirouettes and it's October again. 

When, as I child, when my mother said that dinner would be ready in 20 minutes I would feel astonished at the idea of waiting so long.

Hungry I'd watch the seconds tick away on the kitchen clock. 

Time doesn't move the same now.

Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Rumi, Lao Tzu, Maurice Sendak--

Nothing could have prepared me for this. 

Advice

Smash your iPhone with a hammer.
Come back home to your body.
Practice looking at the objects around your house that do not glow.
Look at their lines and curves.
Tell them, "Oh you are so beautiful, I am sorry that we've been out of touch."
Sit with yourself and take a deep breath.
What is inside your brain?
Throw the pieces of your iPhone in the trash and take a deeper breath.
Blow out all the air and the pings and the pokes and the likes until your lungs are empty.
Stride outside into the sunlight, a wholly new person.
The next face you see will be the most beautiful face you have ever seen.
Real as it is, with all it's angles and ridges and flaws, right there in the actual world.
Right in front of you.