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She never speaks to me in dreams.
An old girlfriend of mine used to tell me that you have to “bloom where you’re planted.” Which I think is a great and useful saying. But what I have found is that different types of plants require different light and soil conditions to thrive.
At the risk of jinxing myself further with premature pronouncements, I have, I can say, moved onto another stage of my life. Actually, no, not of my life, but of life. Of Life, that is. Living. Do I owe it all to a change of space, or do we tend to change spaces in our lives when we are ready for a change? It is not always a causal relationship. Life tends to work in clusters.
I spent the past year living in a cool dark basement room, with small windows reaching just above the soil line. In that time, I like to think that I found my own roots. Premature attempts at putting forth buds were concluded rapidly by unfavorable weather conditions. But now I live in the sky. Now I live in the second floor of a house on a hill, overlooking the entire city of Seattle. I live in what we’ve determined was probably once a nursery off the master bedroom. It is, I can say, the best room I’ve ever had - despite the omni-present sound of the highway. Of people passing by on their lives…
Or maybe instead this is the most harmonious reflection of inner and outer states which I have ever achieved. I had a good one earlier this year, but I made the grave and youthful mistake of pinning the responsibility for it onto someone else, onto another being struggling, as Rilke talks about, with their own solitude. Rilke writes about this in his Letters to a Young Poet, which strikes me as oddly similar to some of the admonitions for the proper conduct of the young samurai found in the Hagakure:
“We are solitary. We can delude ourselves and act as if it were not true. That is all. But how much better to recognize that we are alone; yes, even to begin from this realization.”
Two nights ago I dreamt that I was pushed into marrying a cat in some kind of arcane, almost Hindu magical ceremony. I thought the whole thing rather ridiculous, but played along anyway as the old man who was officiating was very kindly and seemed to think the event to be of great import. The dream is a loose reference to a news article I found years ago on the BBC, which has stuck with me. It was about a young girl who was formally married to a stray dog as part of a magic rite to break some kind of evil spell or curse. What became of that girl and her canine union, I have no idea. But I think I am beginning to understand the utility of such a symbolic union. It has to do with the sealing off of a door through which lifeblood once flowed out unremittingly and wrongly. It has to do with not looking for completion in someone else. No one else can solve your emotional problems for you nor should they. Better to marry a cat than to seek false images of love and completeness in another person. At least the cat will continue to go about its business, as these arrangements are meaningless to it.
Rilke writes:
It is good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, for a long time ahead and far on into life, is -: solitude, a heightened and deepest kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent-?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves (”to hearken and to hammer day and night”), may young people use that love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barerly large enough.
He also speaks of the love for which we are “now preparing painfully and with great struggle: the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.”
It only makes sense, then, that this room was once a nursery as it gives birth to now and sustains me in my infancy as I realize how little I know and how much space there is for me to grow. The fellow who had this room before me used to grow plants in here with an elaborate hydroponic set-up. My bed rests by the window where his plants used to reach up towards the silent heat of the sun.
- Folded Dreams
- Dreaming you’re somebody else
- Free Money Release
- The mind of which we are unaware
- Plane Crash Dreams
- Prev: Gnostic Whatzit Tonite
- Next: Saving The Gnostic Body
August 15th, 2007 at 7:12 pm
That room has such a beautiful view.
I’ll come visit if I can, when I can.
Mercy unto you and peace and love be multiplied.
August 15th, 2007 at 7:13 pm
Life tends to work in clusters.
August 15th, 2007 at 7:14 pm
Though the highway sound is a kind of permanent white noise. In this instance, if you can handle the risk of hearing loss, I would think it could be worth it in a way.
August 15th, 2007 at 7:15 pm
My theory is that there are 2 or 3 or 4 Tim Bouchers. It’s like the dread pirate Roberts except that at any given time there are still all the different Tim Bouchers working together as one Tim Boucher.
August 15th, 2007 at 7:16 pm
She certainly does speak to me in dreams.
August 15th, 2007 at 8:07 pm
Same girl actually told me she met another Tim Boucher this past week!
August 15th, 2007 at 9:27 pm
I would also like to forget about time, for me, getting rid of my watch, as well as starting to restructure my life has been very liberating.
Do you think your ability is unique, or do we all have that potential? That is one thing I am looking at by making this change.
I also have a time anxiety, but it is not active all the time, just when certain situations trigger it, and then I feel like I have missed or am late for something. Most of the time I am very laid back about (although I am almost never late for scheduled things).
August 15th, 2007 at 9:39 pm
I think its not that uncommon of an ability. I know my Dad can do it. Maybe its genetic. My Father is good at estimating things in general. I used to be able to estimate water temperature within one or two degrees by feel. This is because I used to keep a lot of tropical fish and did a lot of water changes and tried to get the clean water temperature right.
I am not a really precise person though. I usually just half ass everything, guesstimate.
I don’t know how this is related to what Tim is doing. I am doing pilates, strengthening my core, the more advanced you get the more you gain control of your whole body.
August 16th, 2007 at 10:16 am
Very cool!
August 16th, 2007 at 1:26 pm
I think this is related to what the angel was trying to teach me
I lot of the stuff was related to learning balance.
August 16th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
http://youtube.com/watch?v=BydBVEBFky4
YouTube - The Animatrix - Is This the Real Thing?
August 16th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
Hey Tim, Jwx, etc.
Guess what I just realized?!?
I used to draw, through my proprioception! I think other artists do too. I accessed my “body matrix” in my brain. It was like I was sensing a “phantom limb” and then I would sketch the phantom limb on the page, or a face, or whatever. Plus I think through this i accessed fossil memories and the body matrixes of my distant ancestors, Cro-magnons, neanderthals. The more recent ancestors, all looked vaguely European, but not like me.
I think this helped me with animal anatomy too and acessed somthing really related to shapeshifting. I would access the body matrixes of animals.
I am really looking forward to your new articles on this stuff Tim.
August 16th, 2007 at 6:56 pm
Yeah I think I know what you are talking about with the drawing. I am beginning to believe that certain mental “disorders” - possibly schizophrenia - are a result of the brain achieving proprioceptive awareness of energetic control centers and processes within the body, which are sometimes anthropormorphized into entities, etc (animism!). Jung *kind* of touches on this a little bit: about archetypes having bases in organs and internal physical structures, but I do not recall it being greatly detailed.
I tend to think as well that the reason alcohol is legal and marijuana is not is that alcohol deadens proprioceptive awareness while marijuana heightens it - but I could be just making shit up. I’m prone to doing that…
August 16th, 2007 at 7:21 pm
Yeah, I like to make shit up and not only that but state it authoritatively and dare people to prove me wrong!
August 16th, 2007 at 7:23 pm
I do notice though in the workings of my brain that I seem to have different characters watching what comes in through my senses and having slightly diffeent reactions and having these reactions at different speeds.
hard to explain. But it could be related to various chakra energy centers and corresponding organs communicating with each other.
August 16th, 2007 at 7:31 pm
BTW there is some good discussion on the Palm Tree Garden board and you came up in one of the discussions (after I brought you up) about archons.
Also that Guy on there that does that show, Coffee, Ciggarettes and Gnosis, is interviewing John Lash. There is a thread about it. I know you interviewed him, he was looking for tips on what to ask him. Maybe you can give him some tips.
Well anyway, I am excited about your project with proprioception.
August 16th, 2007 at 9:48 pm
I mentioned a silly walk and skipping versus walking exercises in a comment a while back. These are largely proprioception (pp) type exercises, using the body in unusual ways for everyday type activities. Gurdjieff used the concept alot in order to foster body awareness for self remembering and observation. A simple beginners exercise is to pick a spot in your body, say the underside of your kneecap, and try and focus on that spot as much as you can during the day. Another is to, as consciously as possible, run through and feel all the joints of your hands and feet, then the bones in between the joints, etc. Do it in a certain order, then the opposite, the randomly, speeding it up as you go.
I have been pretty good about writing left-handed, and yesterday I got my Baoding balls in the mail and started on those. I started to incorporate little movements into everyday activities that are inspired by the Alexander Technique and this has been very interesting, as well as the effects of the writing and already the Baodingers. Today I drove around downtown San Francisco, splitting my attention between traffic and these fine pp kinda Alexander Technique thingies incorporated into regular driving movements and positions. I did this mostly with my hands, head/neck, and legs. Maybe just wishful thinking but it really seemed to add to my overall perception of things. To sort of support this, at lunch we ate at an Asian fusion type place and they gave us chop sticks. I rarely use chopsticks, and when I do I am awkward. I picked up the sticks and to my amazement started using them very fluidly. I could actually pick up rice with them which I usually have great trouble doing. (darn, just realized I didn’t try them also in my left hand)
So ya, the combination of conscious pressuring of my physical mechanism through left handed writing and baoding, and Alexanderish stuff added to my usual pp stuff seems to add new dimension. Maybe it is sort of the next step that I haven’t taken, coarser to finer, so that neuronal pathways for subtler type things are activated.
Thanks for the nudge all. Also very interested to see how Tim’s stew turns out.
August 16th, 2007 at 10:20 pm
See my new post, and then add in that basically when you have a habit it clusters together with other habits: physical, emotional, mental, etc. Habits are clustered patterns which have become ossified.
You can have a bunch of habits basically that are hooked in together into bigger and bigger complexes, reaching all the way up almost to essentially having sub-personalities which are altogether dependent on the type of sensory input being perceived and filtered out through habitual response complexes (demons, etc) .
August 16th, 2007 at 10:25 pm
Glad to hear your experiences are paralleling mine with this, jwx. This stuff is really so simple and effective that it is almost ridiculous.
Oh, another one I have been trying to do is remove contractions from my writing (like I am Commander Data or something). It is very hard but a nice way to constantly stay aware of what you are really saying.
And man, my juggling has taken a HUGE leap forward too…! I think the juggling has helped me to mentally juggle better: complex groups and patterns of ideas, and hammering them into a nicer rhythm.
Haven’t tried the choppies, but that must be why Mr. Miyagi uses them to catch flies. And the “Wax On Wax Off” is an exercise in conscious pain.
August 18th, 2007 at 10:21 am
You have NOT tried the choppies? haha
personally I find a unified approach works better than trying to wrangle a multitude of power centers, which are self regulating, and probably shouldnt be messed with until a firm foundation is established. Centered and elevated is better than fragmented and reaching down, always checking. That why I’d rather praise the ineffable than split up my conciousness.
Watches are Time shackles
Still, we are each stamped with an unavoidable expiration date.