Welcome the energy of Within, the principle of Wholeness. Welcome the energy and spirit of the mysterious. The color of this energy is gold. Welcome the gifts of balance, oneness, and the connection with all things, for all things are one and all things are related. The animal within is the human being, the desire is for serenity, and the emotion is humility. We welcome the energies and spirit of Within.A simple beauty washed over me. An astonishment. An awareness that the ancient past has awoken in him, and how that ancient past has thus re-arrived in my life. It has made itself present, and seeks to wake me up, and keep me awake, to a new, yet old, way of being. As the world outside gets increasingly chaotic, I feel the desire, and see movements around me, to create a calmer world within.
For me, yesterday was a day unlike any other I had yet experienced. It was a day of such substance, even in its so-called mundanity, that in the middle of the night, I found myself in the path of an emotional, psychological, and physiological tidal wave that threatened to engulf me. My breathing was rapid, my body shaking, my thoughts spiralling, my pain, emotional, excruciating. I had pushed to my threshold, and gone over the edge.
I struggled to maintain anything resembling composure, or to avoid complete panic. I was at a loss... "why is this happening to me?"
A phrase that had been through my mind in recent times arose again... Reality Shock. At once, I knew that this phrase spoke to my experience. I had opened myself so boldly to others, to the deepening of the quality of my experience, to the deepening of the quality of joy, of suffering. I had awoken myself to the incredulity of the human experience, to the wonders of our times, and to the majesty of nature. These beauties, and crises, the extremities that lay behind the mundanities, I wanted to - I struggled to - keep breathing them all in. I believe that last night I payed the cost. Becoming aware, truly aware, of the worlds without, and the worlds within us, within myself, seems to be a rather excruciating process. But it hurts so good.
This morning I woke up with a subtle awareness that something deep within me was different. I felt immediately, that my attempts to crystallize patterns of awareness of myself and all of my default actions had become more manifest. They wished not to be ignored any longer. The things which I always *wanted to want* to do, I now wanted to do. And it's once you get to the first level wanting that things get serious. I walked slow through the park on my way to work, where I always "wanted" to walk slow. I didn't eat the cinnamon bun on the table at work, even though it was "just there". I didn't obsess over messages on my phone. I didn't get sucked into being walked over, nor the overall drama of a relationship, or choose in subtle ways to punish her for not doing something that was just a projection I put onto her anyways. I didn't feel bad for asking another for help, and council. And here I am writing, something I always want-to-want to do.
By the way, I didn't generate this want-to-want phrase. I was just struck by it back around New Years by this delightful Globe and Mail piece 'Midnight solitude as the old year ends'.
In it, he says something so well
...there wouldn’t be this unsettling sense that something was supposed to happen. I wouldn’t feel any longer that a walk on the beach was not enough, or that the sound of the tide was embarrassing to witness.*This* is the return of an ancient way of being, that is incredibly difficult to maintain in the modern world. The ok-ness with self. The pure, unadulterated joy of the here and now. I find that one thing which really threatens it, oddly, is clocks and calendars. These abstractions on the passing of time seem to keep us so distracted, that no moment is truly a present moment. There is a need to *go timeless* in the way that we experience ourselves and the world. We are threatened, so profoundly, to turn our attention away from that which is filled with beauty, and that which is truly important to us. We must reclaim our lives, and dedicate the major portions of it to creating a peaceful world, not a hostile one. The revolution, truly, will happen within ourselves. It has never been clearer to me. The world will spin in its out of control ways, and we will have no say in much of it. Learning to have our say in that which we can have a say in, that is a challenge of its own. There is a profound difference between the days in which I wake up and ask myself consciously 'how will I meet the world on my terms today?' and the days that I don't. Just like there is a profound difference between a night when I hear a housemate saying a Native prayer, and one I don't. The difference is that while we are still so early in this process of reclaiming the time in our lives back for that which is important, these strange attractors are crucial. I know how easily I can forget the quality of experience that I'm wanting to cultivate. It is all too easy. One night sucked into a mindless tv show threatens to put me into a tailspin for a week... As I go about my days, I will be looking for these things that seem to inherently invoke feelings of calm, or rightness. Using them as reminders of the more beautiful worlds that we can create for ourselves, within ourselves. And then, the hard part, trading our less beautiful worlds for those.
I'm tired of just choosing the good life for myself half way. This is my commitment, here, now, to go all the way. To give it my all. I fully expect to fail many times, but I know that will be part of the process. The trick is to not be self-deceiving and try to create failures. The fear that we are powerful beyond our wildest dreams is something that I believe exists strongly in many of us, and is a difficult one to overcome.
The animal within is the human being... I choose to wake up tomorrow morning as that animal.
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| Pasquale D'Silva - triangimals - http://psql.carbonmade.com/projects/4812927 |
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