consciousness

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

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

Becoming

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“…truth is a pathless land…”
Jiddu Krishnamurti

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

A Philosophy of Becoming: Part 1

Fragments of early childhood memory
continuously emerge as sensations
and attempt an integration

If we open to the “chaos”
of these emergent sensations
we can integrate them
and shed our identity

Our identity is the armor
that developed in early childhood
to ward off intolerable sensations

Identity protected us
from the overwhelming, unbearable chaos,
the fractures and torments
of painful childhood sensations

In order to give birth to ourselves,
in order to integrate at the level of Self,
we must directly experience and “hold”
the chaos, fractures and torments
of childhood sensations
without dissociation and without repression,
that is, with consciousness

Consciousness is not I
Consciousness does not identify with itself
as a thing called I

Consciousness is a process,
the direct unarmored experience of sensation
without the blinders of identity

Consciousness is a hologram
continuously changing shape
like water or sound

Consciousness seems to exist as an entity
yet is constantly in motion,
in change, in process

Consciousness is always in a state of Becoming

Consciousness has as its intention
the direct, unarmored experience
of the world

When our consciousness begins
to directly experience
unarmored childhood sensation
we no longer have a need
for identity, for “I”

When consciousness experiences childhood sensation
without armor, without identity,
the original sensations of childhood
that were too painful, too overwhelming,
can now be integrated

Tolerating the discomfort
of the original childhood sensations
as they arise each day
leads to the expansion of consciousness,
eliminates the need for identity,
and initiates the birth process
of the Self

In The Beginning Was The Word

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“War can kill victims but it cannot kill memory of survivors.”
Hak Kim: “Alive”

Guernica Child
The worms of death
pickled with incongruous silence
founded a nation of drones
dropping their bombs
in the middle of cities

The children who sing
with the language of concrete
bodies draped across enemies

Withered stalks of skin
adhere to lost continents,
limbs cry out for lonely trains
on platforms
where we used to live
singing love songs
of inscrutable hindsight

The sound of grandma
in her 1 bedroom apartment
on Kossuth Avenue,
three windows looking down
on pavements of children
limping across apocalyptic memory

A hospital memory before time,
its thumping heart sounds,
its broken windows,
its eyes of dogs shining
with incandescent radiation

An extremity of thought
along a hallway corridor
in a hospital wing
with glazed windows
filtering the late morning light
as it yellows across the plastic floor

Prior to the loss of time,
prior to the frozen-faced
armor that cloaks memory,
prior to sensation as hopeless rage

Beneath a frozen shell called “armor”
devising its own inhibitions,
dictating strategies for evading reality,
is the birth

Awake

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 Time Suite

By Robert Margolis

1. Cadenza

I have seen the incipient membrane of cities
The weltered contagion
The wending of shadows
The black night of stars
Shimmying indelicately
Memory lisping its sorry song

Have seen cadavers
Marching through cities
Blind figurines
Fingers of children
Whose cripples are empty

Have seen the skin of children
Limping through the old house
Saying “mother”

Have seen men in black dresses
Confabulate indecorously within the catacomb of song
The contiguous melancholy of buildings
Faces pressed against glass

Singing OOOOO
Singing OOOOO

Have seen bereft in Beirut
The transmogrified silence of statues
Women cloaked in diaphanous crusts
Mouths sewn shut

The sorry spectacle of Jack & Jill
Clambering up the hill

I was once encumbered by silence
Messianic whispers
Whimpering inconsolably
Among children
Digging welts in the frozen earth
Sifting through waist-high debris
Configuring remnants
Of black time
The ticking solstice
Of your eyes
Catacombs bereft of time
Where we walked
Our hands knotted
Fists against face
Mother’s grey hair
Flailing against time

We are emergent in time
The perpendicular axis
Weaving its insomnia
Meticulously, rending
Its hole face of scars
Its bereft soup kitchens
Its men gimping feverishly
Its women writhing on forks
Its cats & dogs mewling teeth
Its quiescent bacterium
Its stinking impermanence

Everyone loses in time
Everyone says time is a virus
Your mama says so
R u dying?

We are rudderless time

I remember that trip
A summer in August
The roar of the river
As we groped with our oars
You in the bow, your black hair
Streaming against the white sun
The river flecked with stones
Our shadows flickering
Impaled by the moon

And then it was autumn
Smashed by stink breath
I altered the tone of my hatred
To suit your black sun
Awake in neon nighties

In the middle of despair
Is the vernacular

2. Coronation: Summer, 1968

Morning time, a window
Opens nonchalantly exuberant
The hospital seems far away
Altered by time’s déjà vu
Ringed by time
The bells chanting time

Grass breaks through concrete
The wires meld with unfurnished rooms
Whose documented silence
Sings with the echo of ponged balls
Bounding on wooden tables,
Sorcerers chant
“The wicked thimble of Thumbelina”
Plastic slipcovers
Mound the dead furniture

Unbounded by them, the I sings
And leaps to its death
Liberating the singed Self
To soar, awake
Among the ruins of time

Time is ticking
And yet as a tick
It flies and bites
Through tongues
Wept throngs of mass indifference
Murmuring their murderous songs

Under the breath of god
We sing our own song
Catapulting the divine scent
Of tree and flower and field
A child’s white legs
Flash in the sun

Eclipsing silence
Eclipsing madness
Eclipsing the overmuch torn remnants
Where childhood lurks
Stinking its paws against
The furtive smiles
And tiny trains
Of a boy
Who would be king

JasondeCairesTaylorHands

Art: Jason de Caires “Hands”