Layered Impressions

I've been in awe lately of the seeming truth that when one speaks or writes about something, one soon after then receives another layer of understanding through a circumstance or event. Even after all these years and life-miles trekked, for some reason it is surprising that knowledge, understanding and impressions are layered.  The experience frequently is as if the universe provides an inkling and then a completely unexpected "lesson" follows; one I could never have asked for or anticipated (making it also apparent my imagination is not what it could be).  "Laws" are at work.  "Knowing" is relative and probably always partial. I am a pawn on a mega-universal chest board, an intimate set of related threads in a tightly woven cloth.

The often repeated adage:  "You teach best what you most need to learn" must be true.  And that probably goes for any of the communication arts such as speaking, writing even energy exchanging. Could it be any type of manifestation is the Guide presenting the next layer of understanding in the provided impression?  In this arena, choice, visioning or determination has little do with it.  If anything, that type of force only gets in the way.  In this way, the idea of manifesting a destiny, forming a purpose appears negligible.  Those past times are the ego's playground?

\Which brings us to two almost-popular holistic approaches to life.  1."Visioning": One feels into one's vision and purpose opens, and allows (universal?) energy to be attracted to the vision.  In this approach, the concept is that the magnetism of your wish attracts what is necessary to meet the vision, the allowed openness receives it. This approach is limited by ego involvement and imagination. 2. "Reception": One feels into oneself and aligns, priming receptivity for the universe to seamlessly direct. One does not determine the direction as in #1, but allows oneself to be led.  This approach is limited by one's capacity to maintain adequate relaxation, hence receptivity.  Because it is not directed by self, it is easy to lose the thread of intention.  These are two very different ideologies.  In one, we primarily believe in oneself (ego driven or not). The other believes the universe knows better than the self as far as determining the needed direction.  Both believe in the power of the macrocosmos to impact one's life; in the first instance, it is almost an adjunct, in the second it is the master.

The question is where does my executive self, my ego play a useful role?  Maybe, once the direction is established, the useful aspect of ego, the performer, the doer, can provide the needed manifestation toward fulfilling the direction. Possibly, this is not a question to be answered until I am quite familiar with the workings of the ego.  How has the ego been experienced? In First person ("I") or Second person ("She/He/It")? How have I experienced the hindrance, the passive, the positive of the ego engaged?  Most importantly, who in me experiences ego?  The ready judge? The alter-ego?  Is there in me a space of objectivity, a suspension of the many buffers that color and hide ego's work?  In "Visioning", it is difficult for it not to play a role (useful or obstreperous). In "Reception", there is almost an abdication of an ego role, at least in the pre-direction aspect.

Regardless, the sense of an impression being layered is profound.  It brings to mind the layers of fascia and sinewy ligaments that layer gorgeously over each other to create a whole slice of optimally functioning musculature, a working organ and system. These layers are timely; coming both in sometimes quick succession or with long pauses in between.  Our human experience.

\"As Schopenhauer says, when you look back on your life, it looks as though it were a plot, but when you are into it, it’s a mess: just one surprise after another. Then, later, you see it was perfect. So I have a theory that if you are on your own path things are going to come to you. Since it’s your own path, and no one has ever been on it before, there’s no precedent, so everything that happens is a surprise and is timely.  — A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living.

Present to Death

Death and dying and contemplating this passage for oneself is a sobering reckoning most of us visit privately and with others at least a few times in life's journey.  A recent experience of this topic discussed among friends stayed with me for several days, and I feel compelled to write about it.

We all die.  And, if we are honest, we are afraid to do so.  If we had a chance to choose how to die, it would basically come down to a choice of the least unpalatable means (wishful thinking) for most of us.  What interested me in the aforementioned conversation among friends was the general insistence felt among the many in the conversation that they be present to themselves and the experience of dying; they wished not to miss the process, not to be in a drugged stupor nor apparent absence of dementia, but to experience their life to the fullest right up to the end.

As a nurse, all I could think was, "may the angels not be listening to this."  This human existence is an endless series of rounds of suffering (and joy).  There is no avoidance of pain.  It's our birthright and payment we make as human beings.  Experiencing our thresholds of pain in different layers is a valuable, even an illuminating materiality that can bring a richness to one's life.  That experience is something we take on willingly, especially if we know there is an end to it, a reprieve in sight (i.e. childbirth, brief uncomfortable procedures, a really bad headache, a divorce with a court date).  Pain medications are a god send when you need them.  Our pain thresholds decrease as we age.  The more frail we become, the more acutely we feel pain.  Pain medication and adjunct therapies that address pain receptors in our bodies/brains (clinical aromatherapy, bodywork, energy work, acupuncture, qigong) should be freely accessed if possible.

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A question came to me when discussing this idea of being fully "present" right up to the end:  How could we not be present to this cataclysmic event, same as the impossibility of not being present to our birth?  We are born as Whole selves.  Seemingly our purpose is to find how to live this wholeness in the time we are given.  We don't spend a lot of time knowing or experiencing this.  We don't know how, but (hopefully) spend a lifetime working toward being in relationship to the Whole that we are.  But despite this lack, we are still One.  A muscle is still a muscle even if it is atrophied.  We can't miss our passing because we're in a coma, or in a medication-induced delirium.  To imply this, is to believe Presence is a cognitive state.  It is not.

The body is an incredible dimensional, layered and impossibly complex organism.  Some type of life is going on in a person living in a coma. Arnie and Amy Mindell have proven this in their studies of coma patients.  You just have to hang 
around people in these altered states for a period of time to sense this is true.  We on the outside are 
not privy to this passage they are moving through.  But there is no mistake the experience of moving 
toward a death is not passing them by.  In the case of quick, usually violent deaths (it is my opinion), 
the layers of ourselves (body, energybody, spirit, soul) are separated.  And there is a need to re-assemble 
before a passing is complete.  There is a presence in this, an actual energetic movement toward the 
Wholeness we are in body on earth, and probably beyond.

So, we may have these temporary distractions of suffering, agony, trauma, violence which ultimately leads to our death, but our innate divinity is always present.  It's the thing that leads us Home, through this important transition.  We seemingly are in preparation our entire lives for this moment, are living this truth in small ways almost on a daily basis; through our system changes, relationships, the almost inconsequential letting go and acceptances that is our daily bread.  The cultivation of a deeper understanding of the layers of presence possible to be earned in a lifetime, is a support to an actualization at (bodily) death.  It is impossible not to be present to one's own death.  The cells, the energy fields within our body system are constant cues, despite our denial variations or momentary circumstances that seem to remove a consciousness from the equation.  The reality of the breath and depth of consciousness sinks in.  Consciousness... Presence are not cognitive activities.  They are a fuller, deeper, more whole experience, connected within, connected without.

Foreign Territory (over 40)

Remember that queasy feeling of not knowing what the hell you are doing, where you are going, why you are where you are at a particular juncture in one's life?  It is a familiar feeling from age 15 to 40.  That extended age group is in a chronic developmental and maturation learning curve.  But by the time  middle age has hit, most of us have secured ways, gotten most usual life learning experiences under our belts making us more knowledgeable and experienced.  We have guaranteed for ourselves an obliteration of that queasy feeling of not knowing by getting a lot of knowns down pat.  But then life has a way of throwing us back into that "what the hell" territory when we're given unexpected illnesses, unforeseen change in life shocks, a turned-on-its-head event one didn't see coming  and the queasies re-enter.  And unlike those earlier years, there sometimes isn't a lot of others in our peer groups to commiserate with or exchange notes about these life dilemmas.  All our well-worn decades of experience seems not about fending off the new, exciting, traumatic, terrifying process of never-had-unknowns.  Change is a bitch, and we are hard-wired to resist that inevitability at all costs.

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What about foreign territory, one willingly submits to?  The place you've never been to before but are being organically pulled, even when the very notion is almost paralyzing?  No avoidance.  No turning away.  Once assumed, fear does not surrender herself; she and Intention walk side by side.  The submission of Intention takes on parental qualities. The gnashing teeth of Fear wears on the intended. The parent embraces, reassures all that the fear drags with her.  The odyssey continues with a few blips and pauses. Until the day the foreign territory is reached.  Fear recognizes she has been a carriage without wheels, Intention has been dragging along. Intention recognizes the willingness to have Fear accompany (that she even belongs on the journey), even providing the wheels and brake-release for Fear.  What is created are conditions for an unlikely partnership.

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For, despite Fear's childish railings, her negative and resistant faculty is an important and necessary aspect of the Whole. And the maturation process the Intention has had to acquire to amble willingly the unknown odyssey has created a tolerance and allowance for the Fear.  There is no contemptuous annoyance, wish to obliterate, blaming finger for Fear any longer.  Some kind of understanding and forbearance has evolved.

Traversing foreign territory means embracing these two aspects of one's humanness.  Our hard-wired 'avoid at all costs inconvenience and discomfort' and the innate adventurer who has questions about what is beyond what is already known.  Nature prepares us under 40 by making most experiences new, having us experience what we don't already know out of necessity.  After 40, we have choices.  We can trust these past lessons of trial and error or we can hunker down in the acquired comforts.  We can bury the adventurer in the norm of human resistance, or rekindle the young person's open inquiry, striking out into foreign territory.

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