memory

Living as Becoming : the emptiness project # 14

/ robertmargolis / Leave a comment
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

AWOL poem : the emptiness project # 11

/ robertmargolis / Leave a comment
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

Visiting Day

/ robertmargolis / Leave a comment

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

Becoming

/ robertmargolis / Leave a comment

“…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

/ robertmargolis / Leave a comment

“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