Living as Becoming : the emptiness project # 14

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Helen Keller

“Like a snake, my heart
has shed its skin.
I hold it here in my hand,
full of honey and wounds”
Frederico Garcia Lorca

Living from the Unarmored Heart :: Birth of the Self

As a vehicle
for giving birth to the Self,
live from the unarmored heart

1. Replace “identity” with conscious suffering
2. Trade conscious suffering for “unarmored aliveness”

“Attempt to build a nothingness tree
Which carries its heart leaflessly”

When we live from the unarmored heart,
fragments of memory,
fragments of childhood,
break through into conscious awareness

When we live from the unarmored heart,
childhood memories –
colors, sounds, smells, images, feelings –
arise from beneath the armor of our identity-cocoon

Our identity-
our name,
our defensive configuration,
our “who i think i am”-
falls away

We become instead:
arising sensations,
arising feelings,
arising memories,

arising insights (!)

experienced by conscious awareness

Arising sensations, feelings, memories, & insights
replace identity’s compulsive arising-thoughts

The direct, unarmored experience of the world
includes “suffering,”
as conscious awareness replaces identity

Our “suffering” represents the originally-unbearable,
early-childhood experiences
that forced us to create an identity
as a flight from overwhelming sensations & feelings

All the pre-language body memories
of overwhelming childhood sensations & feelings
which led to the creation of our identity

can now re-emerge into embodied awareness = birth of our Self

As our identity transitions to embodied awareness,
everything becomes more intensely felt

We are opening ourselves
to our “childhood” : our direct bodily experience of all arising sensations, feelings & memories without escaping to our identity

Living can function either as a defensive flight from sensations, feelings & memories into compulsive thoughts,
in which case we are living from identity,

or living can function as a path to embodied sensations, feelings & memories = unarmored aliveness

When our identity surrenders to “feeling everything,”
unifying sensations, feelings, memories, & insights,
past, present, future,
personal, cultural, archetypal,

then living functions as a vehicle for the birth of our Self

Sitting in & living from the “chaos”
of arising sensations, feelings, memories, & insights,
we are able to shed our identity

= “Déjà vu” breaking through = sensation-memories breaking through = “reality” breaking through = the Self breaking through

Sitting in our “chaos”
is a way of eliminating our need for
dissociative armor

We replace our identity-armor
with embodied consciousness
which directly experiences sensations, feelings, memories, & insights
without the need for dissociative flight

This allows the unarmored aliveness
of our Self to emerge

Our Self is born from out of its identity-cocoon.

“Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.” 

Helen Keller

Constellation poem : the emptiness project # 13

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*Anselm Kiefer: from ‘Sternenfall (Falling Stars)

Constellation

It was not intended
to convey
a message other than
the dark street
where, walking, you
burned your hand
waving,
not intending to
be seen
nor to convey
a message
wherein your fingers
touched the sky
leaving welts
on all the stars,
pieces of skin
imprinted
above your head
a man with a mask
who
his eyes
burning
holes, your hand
reached,
he sang
to you
before it was
time
and even afterwards
on the dark street,
seeing sky,
you remembered
his eyes.

*Art by Anselm Kiefer (“Anselm Kiefer is a German painter and sculptor.His works incorporate materials such as straw, ash, clay, lead, and shellac. The poems of Paul Celan have played a role in developing Kiefer’s themes of German history and the horror of the Holocaust, as have the spiritual concepts of Kabbalah.”) – Wikipedia

Anne poem : the emptiness project #12

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Anne Frank

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” Anne Frank

Anne

The warm ovens that say crematoria
are someone you once loved–
in the lines, in the worn-out ovens

The concrete floor of the room
becomes you, a mirror
staring back at the memory
of windows and dead leaves

Falling outside your window
are dead leaves, so many colors
and you once knew all of them

Before the time of your time,
which is to say: your time.

(“The Holocaust was the World War II genocide of the European Jews. Between 1941 and 1945, across German-occupied Europe, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews, around two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population.” Wikipedia) 

AWOL poem : the emptiness project # 11

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Lidice massacre memorial

“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty or democracy?”― Mahatma Gandhi

AWOL

Afterwards, you weren’t home
The war was over
We stood on your front porch
Knocking

The windows
were broken
and in my heart
a small boy
broke all the windows
but you didn’t care

It was only
the start
of somebody’s
picnic

We waited for an hour
Then we turned around
& started killing

On the hill
On the hill

On the beautiful hill

We ran
and when somebody said
“I love you”
we all of us
laughed
like hyenas
& started killing

Laughing
like hyenas.

“The Lidice massacre was the complete destruction of the village of Lidice in June, 1942 on orders from Adolf Hitler and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler.” Wikipedia

Photo: Ashley Pomeroy, Sculpture by Marie Uchytilova

Awake & Sing

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Picasso- The Tragedy

“The only crime equaling inhumanity is the crime of indifference, silence, and forgetting.” James Orbinski

Minamata

In a tiny room,
in the Hiroshima dance hall,
an old man
sings Kaddish

A universal dream machine
tells you not to go home:
There are too many scars
on her body

The number you have forgotten
is inside your black book

Holes in the sky
The brown earth
Digging a hole in the sky
Welts on your skin

My hands are burning
as I dip them
into the river of you

Take my hand,
little one
Bathe in the river

Are you digging?
We are digging a hole
for our god you
We lay the bodies there
one at a time

We had a memory
You were there
You held my hand
I carried you to the river

The smell of you
on my body

Please help me to understand
I have come from a far place
My eyes are cold
There are lesions on my body

There are lesions on your body

You are being forgiven
for being far away

I sing you in the river

(“Minamata, Japan is known worldwide due to Minamata disease, a neurological disorder caused by mercury poisoning. The disease was discovered in 1956. A local chemical plant was blamed for causing the disease by emitting untreated wastewater to the Minamata Bay.” — Wikipedia)

Empty the Mind, Fill the Belly

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  • It always starts with inhibiting conceptualization (arising thoughts) in order to experience the underlying, previously unconscious sensations generating those thoughts
  • It’s as if the thoughts are the symptoms (discharge mechanisms) of the unconscious sensations, as if the sensations want to be expressed
  • The thoughts are attempts by the sensations to reach consciousness
  • To expand the parameters of experience
  • Until there is no separation between thoughts & sensations
  • We’ll call this “insight”: in which thoughts are woven through sensations & sensations are woven through thoughts
  • We’ll call this “the birth of the self”
  • We’ll call this “liberation from self-estrangement”
  • We’ll call this “unarmored aliveness”
  • And the price of admission is consciously experienced primal suffering
  • Because the sensations are unconscious for a reason
  • They originally caused pain
  • So the price of admission is opening to the pain
  • That’s the crucifixion
  • That’s the path
  • That’s the yoga of the self process
  • And it always starts with inhibiting arising thoughts
  • And experiencing the underlying sensations
  • Empty the mind, fill the belly

    Picasso: The Old Guitarist

Visiting Day

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PicassoChild

Child with a Dove

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When  we walk inside the broken place
Your hair, your eyes, the broken way you smile

The broken door that hurt your hand
Your fingers broken, one memory at a time

When we walk inside the broken place
A ghost of skin and broken strands of hair

Your mouth a broken O
Your dreams bereft of skin

We call your name
It echoes

Our mouth forms O
Our mouth says U

Your hair, your eyes, the broken way you smile
All come into view

Seeing

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“There is an abiding beauty  
which may be appreciated by those
who will see things as they are
and who will ask for no reward
except to see.”
Vera Brittain

 

 

 

 

 

 

The heart doesn’t break,
it wakes up to what it always was:
the earth’s wound,
unencumbered by illusion

Formlessness, emptiness, the Self,
awakens to the earth’s wound,
unencumbered by illusion

Experience stripped of language,
experience stripped of identity,
experience stripped of hope,
= the Self experiencing the world
of unarmored sensation

By embodying impermanence,
by integrating hopelessness,
the Self eliminates the need for hope,
eliminates the need for identity
as a flight from impermanence

Hope is a symptom of identity

As identity falls away,
as hope falls away,
as hopelessness falls away,
an empty vessel remains:

A conduit
for experiencing the world,
for seeing the world,
as it is

vincent-van-gogh-mulberry-tree-c-1889_u-l-o4qkl0
Mulberry Tree

Labor Pains

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“Mama take this badge off of me
I can’t use it anymore
It’s getting dark, too dark for me to see
I feel like I’m knockin’ on heaven’s door…”
Bob Dylan

Kali Birth

Meditation Koan

The emergent self
releases the sacrum-sphincter,
releases the heart-mouth,
releases the eyes,
empties the mind of I-thoughts,
experiences sounds,
tolerates the arising
of the original infant self’s
unbearable sensations
released into consciousness
as identity becomes unnecessary
at which point the Self
is born

Butoh heart

“A broken heart is an awakened heart.”

Emptiness 101

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EmptinessWoods

  • “reality” = emptiness (experience stripped of language, conceptualization, ideation, identity)
  • living from, writing from, acting from, “reality” = using language-as-“music” (sound) after unarmored experience (sensation)
  • emptiness = language stripped of dissociation
  • emptiness = experience stripped of preconceptions (dissociation)
  • if dissociation (flight from reality) is “built” from originally (infant) unbearable sensation (“pain”, “suffering”), emptiness (reality) is “built” from consciously experienced (integrated) original (infant) “pain,” “suffering” “impermanence” “terror of annihilation”
  • emptiness is the absence of dissociation
  • emptiness is language stripped of dissociative metaphor
  • emptiness is the language of the original (infant) experiencing self after having undergone neurological & psychological maturation (that is, having developed the capacity to experience all sensation without the need for dissociation as defense against the terror of annihilation)
  • emptiness replaces dissociation with impermanence (formlessness)
  • in which the ground of being prior to form is impermanence
  • in which impermanence is the death of the self-as-identity
  • and the birth of the Self-as-emptiness
  • emptiness reveals the Self (unarmored consciousness, awareness) to its dissociative configuration, identity