Type - "A" is for assholes
"It's a prehistoric monster
It came from outer space
Encouraged by the Martians
To destroy the human race
The F.B.I. is helpless
It's twenty stories tall
What can they do?
Who can they call?"
From Hour of Slack #1463
Burnout occurs when one does not take time to release control over your personal reality.
Shit happens. Shit has happened. Shit will happen. Luckily, its not all your shit. You can take a break from wiping the turds from assholes, let them pull the wool over their own brown eyes.
My personal experience has included, and recently concluded, ten years of cleaning up after adults who are participating in a culture that encourages infantile behavior. Babies are just assholes who haven't learned how to wipe themselves yet. Unfortunately, I've invested ten years of negative experience into that same character in my own personal reality. Allowing myself to be tended to. Learning to tend to myself. My Christian core programming rewards tending to others, being a servant, praising whatever perceives itself as godly. The Type-A subtext in my upbringing chides me whenever I am at rest. I am not allowed to fail. I am not allowed to take it easy until the last customer is driven home, and the last bill is paid. No rest for the wicked, and everyone is wicked. Thank you Jesus.
In ten years of service, I watched myself grow and change over time. This was a great encouragement. Growing up in a church, only to escape into a Type-A Mecca, was consistently depressing. I began depressed and exhausted, already drained and desperate. In time, I learned the difference between the mental realm within my personal reality, the emotional realm within same, and the physical reality of my perceptual apparatus.
The perceptual apparatus seems the most complex and fragile of the three, but I may simply not have opened my hearts eye yet. My minds eye is wide. Yet the body is half-blind without the glasses that facilitate my vision. Without the glasses, there are evident energies that no one I have met lately has been able to see. The body seems to me as if a concentrated point of available energy brought into manifestation through the intersection of motivating and animating forces (drive for food, drive for love, drive for comprehension). If Jung's rubric holds true, there would be a fourth, spirit, perhaps, in some sense.
I want to concern myself with the available knowledges.
Lets begin.
All Dharmas agree at one point. When we are in flow with the rest of the world, walking becomes swimming, with a risk of floating. In the wave form, Dharma creates an awareness of the availability of flow. Healthy Yeti in early Atlantis rode it like birds. If we can find the point where that wave of Dharma becomes a particle, tremendous potential may be found.
"We could say that all teachings are basically a way of subjugating or shedding our ego. And depending on how much the lesson of the subjugation of ego is taking hold in us, that much reality is presented to us." Training the Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness, Point Five: Evaluation of mind training, pg 80, C.Trungpa
The cheap Roman trick in the Christian religion, is subjugating others egos ... but just enough to allow them to see the consensual reality of the church, without revealing too much of the realms beyond. It assumes people can't figure it out naturally, which is a bit of an insult. The Yeti who watered down their DNA until the hair fell out, and pinkness was achieved, added genetic safeguards against eternal torment. Humans learn by modes beyond the physical. The Christian seems to assume that the only available information is coming through the perceptual apparatus. Which would be true, if we had intended automatons.
Regard all Dharmas as dreams. The ultimate reality I choose to perceive, the one that has brought me the most comfort, the one that seems to present to me the most potential, is that of the infinite multiverse, where all possible realities, and a few impossible options, are ultimately available in some sense.
"...you begin to see things, to hear things, and to feel things. But all those perceptions are none other than your own mental creation. In the same way, you can see that your hate for your enemy, your love for your friends, and your attitudes toward money, food, and wealth are all a part of a discursive thought." Training the Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness, Point Two: Absolute Bohicitta, pg 17, C.Trungpa
Those thoughts are the building blocks of your personal reality. This is the same realm where personal demons form. They're like puppies that only you can hear. Stupid at first, but trainable if you don't abuse them. This is also where the hungry ghosts of dead celebrities come to seek blind association with their personal brand. If they are not actively serving you, I highly recommend exorcism.
"Don't make Gods into Demons...At this point you may have achieved a certain level of taming yourself...your achievement begins to become an evil intention, because you think you can show off". Training the Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness, Point Six: Ethics, pg 100, C.Trungpa
I have to apologize because its not as if he didn't offer anything to the world, but I am compelled to call Jesus the worst show off in all history. His stoicism seems like a really good example of why its a bad idea to embody stoicism. Thank you Jesus.
The inverse, oddly enough, is a great recipe for healing a Demon. Welcoming it, thanking it, rejoicing in its Demonic power, and simply being playfully appreciative of it, these are the ways that enemies can begin to become friends. It's not easy, and its counter-intuitive, but it is super effective. And a clever entendré at that. I have actually used this technique to placate the demon of a friends acquaintance. Play therapy works well on disincarnate watcher types and poltergeists. But, that was my personal reality.
Beyond the personal reality, is the consensual reality in which the apparatus functions. Beyond that, others.
I see all this as an intersection of energies forming lives which also intersect. In one sense a network of points, in another an ocean of potential. The two perceptual modes are one of the things that Christian hid from me. Seeming to allow point to point thinking, while using the wave function of repressed drives in bursts to achieve their own material goals. It's almost as if someone learned of the wave state use ability, without really ever fully letting go of the point to point perspective. Point to point is work. Waves are Slackish. Both are ways to deal with the physical, but flow implies to me the expansion of consciousness towards the infinite, and points are by nature contained.
Self-Liberate!
"...the realization that our discursive thoughts have no origin." Training the Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness, Point Two: Absolute Bohicitta, pg 19, C.Trungpa
Now in the particle point to point mindset, there is a trap of A or not A thinking here. I may have a dream about a plate of shrimp. Upon waking, I hear the fishmonger with a fresh batch, walking by with a cart. So what? Right?
I could be washing last nights dishes, and find bits of shrimp tail in the drain strainer. At least that is real, that is true, in some sense.
Disallowing the reality of ambient thought forms on the mental plane is a reductive method. The useful application of this idea is that troubling thoughts may be easily dismissed as either unknowable via the perceptual apparatus, or otherwise silly. That seems to be the point. The wave, on the other hand, more fingers. Release action of that moment of thought from which one seeks liberation, is the wave of change and the wave of liberation. As a wave, it can be understood more easily as a state of being than a moment of embodiment. Vibrational calibration of the perceptual apparatus is recommended as a process, not a jarring reality shift. But those valuable elements of self, can be carried as particles or along a set of such, as one experiences the eternal (I hope!) flow of change. It doesn't matter if its coming from a source in the physical reality, or either of the intersecting human planes. If you let it, it will change. If you engage it, it tends to hold form until you take action, then there is change. Both possibilities represent instability, both potential for growth if right action is taken.
I really feel alien. It's annoying as hell to have to explain myself in a series of increasingly stupid statements to see at what point my mental plane intersect theirs. Frustrating.
"This slogan deals with kündzop, or conventional reality...All of our experiences are based on others, basically."
"If you want me, take me, possess me, kidnap me, control me-go ahead, do it. Take me. I'm at your service. You could bounce on me, shit on me, cut me to pieces or anything you want. Without your help I would not have any way to work with my journey at all."
Training the Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness, Point Three: Practice as path, pgs 48-49, C.Trungpa
God is on the radio, and you are playing with your knob.
If there were some Orwellian Gamemaker puppeting our lives like some kind of twisted otherworldly Truman show, how would you expect communications to pass through into the system? I see two basic options, directly and indirectly. Direct communication with the divine is fairly personal and individually presented within the belief system running inside your personal reality. I won't speak to your reality. That's your area of expertise. But, we share a common problem in the idea of indirect divine communication.
If there is an overwhelming conscious intention at work in our consensual reality, it seems to me that something, with a talent for controlling its inner workings, is creating something that is learning how to control its inner workings. What a strange loop!
As we expand, does our personal reality grow? As IT grows, do we learn more about IT?
If I am to go this far into the deep end it seems that the perceptual apparatus is key. Others represent both their personal reality, which often contains modifications and beliefs which differ from my own, and a potential message from the divine.
That's the thing. In point form, people are people, so why should it be, that they and I get along so awkwardy? In wave form, as a field, as a force, the collective power of all points in the board may compose the body of the divine. We are ITs fingertips and ITs eyes, as IT conducts a bizarre self-surgery.
And like an asshole, IT passes through into our world through tightly clenched points of whatever the hell we are now.
