So where do we go from here?
From here to here.
It’s all the same moment, already perishing and yet never-ending, already shattered and yet still whole, ever inviting us to step out of our minds and into what we never left but dreamt we did. This is a dance we know by heart, even as we play wallflower, lose ourselves in the audience, or get engaged to our crutches.
To know without thinking, to see without eyes, to fly without wings, to die without leaving, to love without expecting — such are the primordial yet everfresh chords weaving through our living chambers, perhaps muted, perhaps unheard, but nevertheless still here, like wildblue sky behind a sea of clouds.
Everything is the dancefloor. » Read more: Inviting Our Suffering Onto the Dancefloor
Some men, recoiling from hardness, get stuck in softness and hypertolerance, drawing their soft-shelled carapace ever inward, ever tighter, squeezing the power out of their breath and the heat out of their anger and the meat out of their lust, trading in their power for approval and security, chronically caving in to prove their harmlessness, confusing surrender with collapse and emotional flatness with equanimity.
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Personal Fear
Great movies are like great dreams — as much as you might understand them, you cannot peel them down to some final meaning. Dreams are moving pictures — did you ever have one where nothing was moving?
In everyday speech pain and suffering are generally used interchangeably: to suffer is to be in pain, and to be in pain is to suffer. Suffering and pain are also synonymously conceptualized in much of psychological literature and spiritual practice. Nevertheless, pain and suffering differ greatly from each other. Yes, to suffer is to be in pain, but to be in pain is not necessarily to suffer.
Are we “in” our body? It might appear to be so, as reflected by how our language conventionally employs “container” metaphors for the body — but bringing more awareness to such conceptualized “inside-ness” eventually reveals that what we essentially are makes its appearance not in a body, but as a body. This does not necessarily mean that we literally are our body, but that our body expresses rather than contains us. Nevertheless, the sense of literally being inside our physicality can be quite convincing.
Who among us has not been seduced, to whatever degree, by the promises of being someone special?
When you are asleep at night and dreaming that you are doing something somewhere somewhen, where exactly are you? Are you the body/person in the dream or the body/person asleep on the bed, and if you are identified with neither —for you in fact are capable of holding both as objects of your attention —then just who or what are you? Do these bodies you “see” contain you, or do you contain them? Perhaps both are not literal containers for “you” but rather are expressions, different expressions, of the essential you, means through which you can relate to your current environment, however unusual or alien that might be...
The future is far from what it once was. Its once rosy, reassuringly distant horizons have become something far less pleasant, something too close for comfort, something right in our collective face. Tomorrow is closing in on us with accelerating intensity; and time itself seems more and more compressed, leaving us in one hell of a squeezeplay.