On leadership

The most important thing for a leader is to not be overly controlling and manipulative. The core of being a positive leader is to allow all of your followers their full reign of creativity and intelligence. You need to interact with them as living and changing organisms, and not merely view them from a templated abstraction about who they are.  If you only see them objectified through their various labels, such as “followers”, and you try and control them thusly, you will only succeed in snuffing out their fun and vibrancy and exhausting a lot of energy on your part.

There are many leaders, some of them are energetically dead and some are energetically alive. The energetically dead people tend to be aggressive or unbalanced leaders. They control the group from a position of authority that is fueled by a feeling of strength derived from tension. An energetically alive leader uses creativity and natural love to fuel his/her interactions. He/she does not need to hold up a strong ego to do battles for him/her, but simply interacts with everybody head on, completely relaxed.

Consider a tai chi form, which is a long sequence of precise movements. Many people think their way through the form. They guide their arms and legs into position through their ideas, concepts and principles they have mentally scribed as Law for their actions. This is a poor leadership of the body, because the body parts remain dead and tense while the mind simply guides them into the correct mold. The good practitioner knows not to interfere with or manipulate his/her body’s movements. The intelligence of the body has been strengthened through the practice of tai chi and each body part “knows” what to do on its own. The mind continues to analyze, but this analyzation no longer interferes with the aliveness of the body. This is a good leadership of the mind, because it fulfills its role but maintains respect for the conscious freedom of each of its “subjects.”

Consider how a snake moves its body. Its consciousness is distributed throughout its body, so that every body part can effortlessly move in coordination with every other part. This gives the animal incredible vibrancy. While a leader must be good at guiding his group pragmatically, safely and strategically, they must also have a vibrancy of aliveness so that a knowledgeable and clever mind does not overshadow his/her direct experience of his “possy”. Thus, the integration of this tai chi  ch’uan principle can directly improve the internal balance of a leader- enhancing his leadership skills and his ability to comfortably connect to his crew. 

Gnostic dimensions and Taoist Principles

Just an idea of how Taoist principles and Christian mythology can be integrated to create healing: 

I used to have a teacher that would tell me to go to Hell when I would try and be clever. It took me a while (and an excellent tai chi teacher) to get the reference: he was talking about Gnostic hell. Hellfire: the agony that cleanses one of the sinful, mortal physical world. This can also be considered moving into the dimension of all of the "Dead" parts of oneself that are ignored. It is common to want to live life comfortably, in a fluid and functioning mode. So, people abide by all of their knowledge and use it as a template for interaction. This is denying God, because God, in Gnostic terms and Taoist principles, is beyond knowledge and beyond reason. So, if people live a life purely rationally, pragmatically, linearly, controlled, collected, analytically, scientifically etc. then they are denying God. They must, in order to be cleansed, "go to Hell." The hellfire burns away the illusions of knowledge and fact and strips away the power of reason to control attention. This is not a pleasant process. However, it is a necessary step in order to eventually reach "Heaven" which is the world of being connected to God. So, Hell is being stripped of reason, Heaven is living consciously within the Kingdom of God. As one generates aliveness in the dead parts of themselves, in Hell, they are simultaneously increasing their connection to God in the Heaven Realm. Justice can only be done to the realm of reason (knowledge- the mundane plane) when it can be viewed for what it is from the non-local dimension of Heaven. With the two simultaneously existing in different dimensions of "reality" they interact and manifest powerful and healing creative action.

Preaching

Before you begin to preach, understand that your cleverness and beliefs on the level of mental concept and ideas only contribute to the strength of that level. It may give you social power, the ability to convince, to manipulate, to control. Yet this kind of strengthening denies and usurps all of the rest of you- all of the parts of you that are not oriented towards thinking and goal-making, winning, attacking. You are not one specific thing. When you act, be absolutely sure that your actions are healing actions that are a result of all of the parts of you experiencing life and relating to each other. This distributed attention to all of the parts of yourself allows the proper action to emerge as a result of your internal balancing. Being clever is not the same as being Alive. You might not become a millionaire politian living life in this way, but you begin to heal yourself and others through all of the modalities in which you interact with people. This is the secret of alchemy, you turn every action, every experience of life into "gold."

Government and the need to win.

People have argued throughout history what is the best way to govern a society. On the one hand, people want freedom, liberties and the ability to openly speak their minds with brutal honesty. On the other hand, there is a necessity to have political correctness to maintain order.

Is it not deeply fascinating to you, that as a race we have the intellect to fly to the moon, create atomic bombs and build cities of overwhelming complexity, and yet we cannot, for all of our efforts, bring peace to this issue?

I believe that the system would operate fine, and everybody would be perfectly content and comfortable with it if there was not a "greed" (for lack of a better term) that permeated it.

If each individual's agenda did not abolish their connection to their natural nitche, then every agenda would be connectable. We can have opposing visions and statements but inevitably those abstractions would not conquer our mutual respect for and wish to co-exist with the Earth.

The "greed" occurs in each individual when all they care about are their personal abstractions. They want money, power, control. They want to "win" in one way or another, at contrast to what other people want. Is it possible to achieve your personal agenda (to win) without sacrificing your biological connection to life? If it is, I believe this is the solution to our ongoing political crisis.  Yet it requires every individual involved with our system of order to reawaken their connection to the Earth.

Good souls, bad people

SO many good souls all around, sending them love sending them love. What's a bad person but a person who doesn't fit in to the norm? We're all awkward, aren't we? Just doing our roles as best we can, never perfectly, but close enough. What's up with us that we all get so self-conscious? It's all our culture, isn't it? All of this avoiding eye contact garbage and holding eye contact garbage--techniques and manners of being that are appropriate/non appropriate. my life's a program, so no worries, I have time to dream in my head while I stir the cooking pot. I have time to worry and hope and contemplate and dream if I don't have to pay attention to what I'm doing. Dichotomies, dichotomies. I either have pay my attention to something or not. Usually if I don't have to, I'm somewhat satisfied for a bit. God forbid someone wants my attention. I'll dole it out in small portions, making it seem rare and valuable. I'll pay attention to what I think is important and to what I want. Nothing else matters, right? Aren't I just being descriptive?

On trust

The difference between being peaceful and in turmoil is our ability to trust. When we trust, we can be relaxed and appreciate the good things in life surrounding us. When we do not trust we do all sorts of things to maneuver around and conquer the environment we are in. We cannot trust the things around us that pose a danger; the people who will judge us, the angry parent, the wild rattlesnake, etc.. I have to hoard my trust and only give it to the parts of the world that do not fill me with anxiety.

What do I mean when I write to operate from trust? I mean that we are filling ourselves up with the world around us and letting it in- because we feel at home being a part of our environment. There are no parts of ourselves we need to hold back so we simply let our actions live in dynamic with our wonderful environment harmoniously. I do not cover up or pretend to be indifferent to things that I am not indifferent to. I allow myself to play, enjoy, smile, relax, share, listen and love. When we do not trust we lock ourselves up physically and psychologically. Ever seen a professional boxing match? The opponents do not trust each other, so they shrivel up in a "turtle posture" and try and punch through each other's shells. We do the same thing psychologically, of course. We tighten up and throw up our homeland security (I stole this from Sam) and begin to grapple with anything that threatens us- and of course this consumes our attention. We give exclusive focus to the objects that we fear are manipulating us. Thus, in our society where we are always surrounded by social and psychological dangers, we only give up our defenses and give our trust out to those things that are safe. We release into television, computers, video games, comfortable social dynamics, pizza, cigarettes and alcohol. These things give us the "high" of being able to trust- which is why we naturally become addicted to them. These things are conveniently placed around us by our society and are given to us so that we can have "easy trust"- that is, trust that we do not have to work for. Thus we are heavily brainwashed through all of these "channels" that society operates- because our trust is obvious, predictable, and steerable.

When one recognizes that their entire life is ruled by addiction- to things that they trust (i.e. does not pose a threat)- it is easy to become depressed. Yet it does not necessarily mean one has to give up the things that they enjoy. One becomes "addicted" to new healthy things like tai chi and yoga. One begins a long, courageous and powerful journey of leaving his/her secure comfortable life behind and discovering whether he/she can live within trust. 

If we become more powerful internally and our learned concerns no longer have the power to subdue our natural trust, then we naturally give up the powers of addiction over us. We become unshakable; we can meet the world with trust and not be consumed by fear. We cannot be manipulated because we have psychologically been freed of the violent cycle of manipulation. Thus there is no end to our re-found ability to trust. We simply trust in the nature of everything, and that psychologically connects us to everything around ourselves. This kind of relationship with the world brings true understanding, and we have no fear of anything that we deeply understands the nature of. 

Every Experience Lived is a Drug: summary and excerpt

Every Experience Lived is a Drug

Primordial medicine for unbridling the ageless dance of Spirit

By Stefan Trilling

Summary: Trilling shares how we can change our relationship to the world around us to live life powerfully and with a heart full of wonder. This book offers insights into various modalities of healing, ancient secrets of restoring and revitalizing connections to the world around oneself, and how to replace one’s unhealthy addictions with reawakened creativity. At the end of the book, Trilling offers detailed instructions on how to preform sacred psychedelic ceremonies (with or without the use of a drug) as a modality for reconnecting to the earth and to one’s True Home.

Excerpt:

Every action in life is a psychedelic drug. When we consume food, we are taking in a certain energy that affects the overall relationship of all of our body’s structures. If we eat junk food, we drain the cells of our energy and release neurotransmitters that depress or hyper-wire the somatic nervous system. If we eat food that balances our body, our physical and psychological health profit. The very air we breathe in every moment and the quality of our breathing greatly effects the way the nerve impulses in our body operate.

There is no action or non-action that occurs that does not change who we are. As life continues, the particles of our beings are interacting in quadrillions of different complex ways, continually altering the physical world. To live from the perspective of this ever-changing continuality, and not merely from the ideas of the mind, is living in Real Time. Non-real time is made up. The numbers of a clock are a mere human abstraction. Yet, we live our psychological lives within this abstraction. We predict plan and strategize our way through life, and all of this is based on our idea of time. We live this world in a linear, mechanical and predictable mode of time. Our psyches reflect that, because we abstract the world around us in the same way that we abstract time. The practice of seeing things in Real Time allows for us to maintain our presence in our lives, because we are directly experiencing the flow of events as they occur. We are not locked up in ideas about the past and the future, because we are concerned with Real Time, what is occurring within this moment. It is living within the relationships occurring in every moment of our experience that creates the beneficial, mind-expanding effects of the Drug of Life.

The mode of "getting things done"

What I could learn from all of you if we all shared our premium picked knowledge with each other. Imagine if we could spend our time talking and exchanging information, insights, opinions, ideas, stories. How much we would learn every day. Wouldn’t it be great if conversation was an alive thing that did not have to be limited to structured roles? What if people could just talk to anybody around them and share information? The average five year old asks hundreds of questions every day. Why should we stop asking questions, even if we know the answers by now? I think that the mode of “getting things done” does not leave time for questions and new ideas. If only we had more time, less work, more leisure and a less structured lifestyle- perhaps people would find the mundane more appreciable and worth attending to. If we had the energy to bring joy to our simple every day actions, we would not need the addictive pleasures that compensate for our lack of time to appreciate all of the boring stuff.

True fear

The true feeling of fear also allows for an experience of all of the other parts of one's self. It is when the emotions all are allowed to "sit" within consciousness uninhibited and uncontrolled. Fear, joy, sorrow- none are greater than the rest and all are allowed to rise and fall. The wholeness of one's being allows them to move unrestricted. It is the explanations for fear that our culture has developed that trap fear into thought, and our explained world is generated from this misuse of fear. If one allows the emotion of fear to be integrated into one's whole experience, then one stops using fear as a generator for functionality. This creates a drastic change in an individual. The individual must find a different source of energy than his enslaved fear in order to function. The individual at this point needs to rediscover the intelligence of his/her child-self, so as not to continue to mis-use fear.

Being truly seen.

The desire for empathy is the desire for having the universe see you with your own eyes. It is the impossible, the desperate grasping for the universe to be knowable, predictable, understandable. And for that we need to know ourselves. When another gives us empathy, we see ourselves and know ourselves because the other is looking at us with our own eyes. It pities us (As we should be pitied) for our perceived hardships and it applauds us (as we should be applauded) for our perceived accomplishments. Therapists are paid to be good at this job. We seek the world to mirror our knowledge and give us reassurance and we want that so much that we actually have a psychology that pays others to understand itself. What we do not want to see is sympathy, literally having one who has transcended our "eyes" and no longer echos an expectation converse with us. For that would be truly terrifying, to not be able to measure and know the person we are conversing with while they see us in all of our predictable shortcomings.

Please help the Earth.

I think that what drives a teacher to inspire his class and a therapist to heal their clients is that they are invested in creating an optimal environment around them. Wouldn't it be nice if we lived in a world where every person was vibrant and un-manipulated, not weighed down by all of their hurt and poisonous obsessions? The only way to create this kind of a world is to re-create ourselves and live our dreams, and very quickly! We do not have time as a culture to continue to sustain this mode-of-living for much longer. The issue is purely psychological. We have the cumulative resources to create a world where our technology is not destructive to the planet, but there is too much political and monetary greed in the system to create such a change. Help the world, not only through whatever lifestyle you choose for yourself (off-grid living, investing in forests and solar companies, etc.) but by nourishing yourself. Yoga, meditation, walking in the forest, qi gong. And most importantly, psychologically become free of your habits and liberate yourself so that you can begin to heal the world on an energetic level.

Excerpt from upcoming novel!

Excerpt from my unedited novel. Let me know what you think:

I had seen so much, and traveled so far. I felt more overwhelmed than ever, the THING dragging on me and pulling me everywhere. I actually felt distinctly dizzy. I had taken the pills the man had given me and I had become wide eyed and alert- though I felt paralyzedly so and the gaze of my eyes seemed to rot everything that it saw. It was as if some sickness was guiding my vision to specific dead things about the Living Things around me. The momentum that had carried me in this way through the city was fading, and I leaned against a street corner to rest. Turning my head I saw a large man in a black coat leaning on the wired fence behind him.
The stranger was staring at me, and I felt an uneasy chill that made me want to shrink up into a ball and hide. It seemed that with his stare he was intentionally trying to dissect my mind, to find out what I was made of and what was holding me together so that he could break me. He smiled, and I was alarmed by the convoluted gesture. It seemed that he was warping his countenance in an effort to make me believe he was my friend, though really it was just a ploy to get me off of my guard. I wondered at his mechanical actions. How did he expect me to buy into such a fake idea? But even as I looked back into his eyes, I felt a great dread enter my consciousness that perhaps, perhaps, this person could do to me great damage and that I would not have the strength to counteract him. I gave an unwillful and involuntary shudder. The stranger's eyes seemed to harden into certainty, as if I had given him the satisfaction of telling him that I was exactly the way he pictured me in his twisted logic. My eyes turned downwards and I looked unseeing at the floor. I felt like a lamb at the slaughter. I stumbled away and the thing dragged me into more turmoil.
As I walked through the city streets, the alien feeling of my sense of sight was beginning to create a kind of existential nausea. The images that my brain was receiving were so bizarre and foreign that I was soon feeling tense and panicky just by experiencing my surroundings. The noises and lights and disconnected rhythm of the city was transporting me into a state of total catatonia. I dragged my body into an alleyway and sagged to the concrete floor against the side of a dumpster. The acrid smells filled my nose and the sense of terrible nausea intensified.
I sat there mouth agape and staring for several long minutes, mesmerized and utterly controlled by my senses that seemed to be attacking me. It was as if my internal system was mimicking the chaos of my surroundings. More than anything, I did not want to exist.
I looked up to find two men standing a few paces away from me. One of them was the leering stranger, who was holding a knife. The other was a large muscular man with red hair and clutching a large metal reebar in his hands.
"Kid, give me your fucking money." said the red haired man. The stranger stepped around me and lurked in the shadows of the alleyway. I stood up and swayed slightly, stumbling a bit towards the stranger. The stranger raised his arms and lunged at me, swinging the reebar towards my right hip. At that moment, a pigeon flew off of the dumpster and over the man’s head. It was such a beautiful and effortless flight, where a feeling of hopelessness could not possibly exist. Absurdly, I was deeply moved by the experience of the bird, and suddenly I was filled with the biological need to act; the psychological poisons immediately ceased to have power over me. In the clarity of a single, suspended moment, I felt the tensions release from my body, and my body suddenly felt filled with substance- as if before it had been a deflated balloon.
I was awakened to emptiness, and at the speed of thought, I rippled my attention throughout my body and the area around me to disturb the man's focus. I needled him with a sudden stare of measureless power. Temporarily memorized by a sudden unknown opposition he was faced with, the stranger hesitated and his knife arm missed its target. Weaving through the spaces between us, I dealt him three blows simultaneously. My right hand broke his collarbone and my left leg kicked the inside of his knee, while my left arm jabbed his wrist, knocking his knife onto the floor and sending it spinning. I sensed a heavy weight about to smash into my back and I turned with its linear momentum, sending the other strange man that had side stepped around me toppling onto the sprawled body of his broken companion.
The stranger sprang back up, though the large man did not stir. He snarled and twisted his face up at me, walking cautiously towards me. He seemed reluctantly amazed. Fearfully gazing at me, he said “you scum, why can’t I see myself in your eyes?” He lunged at me and I struck him once in the chest. The force of the strike rippled throughout the man’s entire body and caused him to black out.
I treated the men as best as I could and left them where they lay.
I wandered onward, my body buzzing and prepared for battle. However, I was loose and the tensions that came along with heightened sympathetic nervous system activity seemed to be eliminated. I felt strangely exhilarated, prowling the city streets with the subtle and fluid movements of a stalking wolf. It seemed incredible before that I had momentarily forgotten how to listen. The bird that had taken flight had saved me; it was so beautiful that it gave me "reason" to connect to life. I had learned the key to dealing with the inner-folk. To aggressively listen so that I could still MOVE inside of the strange structures I was being presented with. I now walked, listening to everything, unrestricted. I noticed that as I "worked" my attention that my environment seemed to have changed once more. I could feel the life in each person that walked past me, despite any rigidity holding them in their systems. In a sense, I saw their centers that they were rejecting, and I could love them as an animal of the forest.

New Website

My new website

http://particlewaveperception.weebly.com/

An unshakable power

It is written on my grandfather's tomb stone, "you may forget what one says, you may forget what one does, but you will never forget how one made you feel." Obviously, both are important: what you say, and how you effect people energetically. Different ways of saying the same thing understandably seem contradictory for one who cannot "grasp" the SUBJECT MATTER.

What is the language of listening? In our culture, there is only a language of telling. Yet surely there is an aspect to our existence that allows us to listen. Now optimally, a regular person already is capable of impressive functioning: that is, he has learned what to say and when to speak and also what to listen for. He is a master of his interactions. Yet who decides what it is that one listens for or deems what it is that's appropriate to say? 

I once was walking through the woods with a friend of mine called Medicine Bear and several other teenagers. The other teenagers and I would be talking to each other, and every now and then Medicine Bear would say "do you hear the birds singing?" It was disruptive and soon nobody was talking anymore, because they were trying to bring their attention to other aspects of the world that they were not already programmed to.

The distribution of the attention throughout the entire environment requires NOT KNOWING (The art of Zen) what to bring your attention to. It is dropping all of one's programming so that there is nothing left but biologically received information. In this case, one doesn't respond to events through a social lens, but one simply creates every interaction they have, as they have it, while paying attention to everything. One cannot be socially manipulated in this way, because they are no longer hiding behind a self-image that is acting for them. 

It might be strange to consider functioning without being "locked" in a specific pattern. How else are you supposed to know what to do? Well, that's the point really, to develop the skill of spontaneity rather then cleverness. When you are able to respond to events without locking yourself, you are free and can experience life wholly no matter what the situation is. You develop an unshakable internal power that is very healing.

The psyche and science

Science is a mode-of-operation that is obviously very useful. However, assuming that it should be the psychological state of a person is an abhorrent error. Science has become so strong in our culture that our very identities are caught up in the scientific vantage point. If one introspects long enough through pragmatic analysis, he will come to a very intricate mental understanding of himself and the world around him. This IS reality for American culture- it is our pragmatic thinking that is continuous in our everyday life, not our biological receptivity and natural response to our environment. Pragmatic thinking in its essence denounces the intelligence of anything but the comprehending mind and thus limits us to a very rigid (though tremendously elaborate) mode of seeing the world.
To frame another description, a human infant is born into the world with his biological perceptions unfiltered by social influence. She does not know what to look for in her environment, and thus she identifies with only her biological vantage point. When she goes to school, she is taught what things are. Yet she does not only learn “dog” and “tree” and mere cultural labels for things, she is taught how to see through a social lens. Eventually, the unfiltered nerve impulses that make up her world are filtered by her cultural lens. This lens in our culture is strictly pragmatic. It is mental analysis that makes up the adult human world, and the biological (infant) way of seeing the world is forgotten. We now warp our natural, biological attention to the needs of our society- which is often at great contrast to our biological needs. This creates a conflict between our natural-biological selves, and our mental-social selves.
I have found that people get tired of this conflict and eventually totally suppress their biological selves. These people thrive on addictions for their energy. They thrive on screaming at each other because of the adrenal-energy this creates. They eat sugar and smoke cigarettes to dull their nervous systems and to feel a certain way so that they can continue to function. They ignore their biological needs, because these needs compete with their contrasting needs to socially operate. Thus, their pragmatic vantage point dominates their lives and they cannot function fluidly. People cannot feel alive and free because they are slaves to their knowledge of the world around them. The creativity of their child-selves is bottled up forever while they see the world from the same dead lens. It is ultimately the balance of the two, analytic thinking and the human organism’s natural intelligence, that creates the harmonious relationships of a person that is whole. 

Old kung fu tv series

David Carradine was my childhood hero. In Junior High School I would watch the old kung fu movies with my grandfather everyday after I did my homework. I was amazed by everything about the character: the wise things he said, the way he carried himself, how he was so humble and kind...

Yet he also died from masterbatory strangulation. Such a stark contrast to his tv character!  

Many of the things that were said in the old kung fu TV shows are directly from the Tao Te Ching. It is so easy to say them- and I think that is a big problem. Anyone can just say wise things, and forget that what is said is merely a label for the experience that created it. So if you take the wise label, and attribute it a meaning, anyone can sound profound. It takes someone saying something shocking, (such as in a zen koan), to give new life to the words that are describing. That is the key to "Argument". Two people can be saying two seemingly radically different things- and yet they are living within a mutual experience that surpasses their labels (belief systems) without doing them injustice. 

Meta-operant de-conditioning

Operant Conditioning:

Conditioning in which an operant response is brought under stimulus control by virtue of presenting reinforcement contingent upon the occurrence of the operant response. (http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=operant conditioning)

In my own words, training a person to act in a certain way under certain environmental conditions.

My version:

Meta-Operant De-Conditioning

De-programming an individual from learned cultural behavior that is harmful to his/her biological intelligence.

This approach does not rely on a philosophy on how a person should be. Indeed, if a client is suffering, the lens of this approach views all symptoms of that person- mentally ill or normal- as the same. They are all considered ways that the person continually manipulates him/herself. In general, it views people as behaviorally programmed to react, respond and create from the cultural ideas that they have been surrounded by since birth. The rebellion and difference of opinion of each person is also considered a reinforced behavior through cultural programming. The very act of mental rebellion is, in fact, a mental construct that was created from the programming that created the other mental construct from which the individual is rebelling. All of the individuals ideas and beliefs about their reality is considered their programming, and they thus manipulate themselves in accordance with their programming.

The therapist cannot fit into the same outlined category of the client. For the therapist, the opposite is true. Each action is spontaneous and does not emerge from his/her cultural programming. The therapist sees the world biologically, free from mental ideas and obstructions. Thus, when the client communicates, the therapist can observe the way the client is manipulating himself culturally. He then corrects the behavior from the biological perspective. Thus, the therapist is not manipulating the client to be a certain way. The therapist is merely removing the behaviors of the client that are already manipulating him/her. If this is successful, the client regains their natural biological intelligence and is able to function without culturally manipulating him/herself.

This can be done through any modality: Dialectic, tai chi ch'uan, yoga, art therapy, etc. The only requirement for this therapy to succeed is that the therapist does not manipulate his/her client. 

An issue with the form (Tai Chi Ch'uan)

The form is an ancient tai chi ch'uan ritual, that is used like a holy Text in religion. The form is a series of movements, just like in the Bible there are a series of words. The depth of the movements studied (or words studied) are endless. It is an exhausting practice of perfecting each movement with nitty-gritty detail, so that each movement is utterly smooth and precise. Practitioners of the form find that even though they know all of the nitty-gritty details of the form and of tai chi principles in general, they are unable to apply them to the form in "Real time". For instance, the practitioner should be relaxing their hip and sinking the weight into the right leg, but the person's hip is frozen and locked, and the thinking mind is trying to figure out how to relax the hip. Meanwhile there are dozens of different things that the person has to pay attention to simultaneously: the movement of a hand, the breathing into a specific lung, the placement of the foot, the alignment of his body, the relaxation of the neck muscles, etc. It seems impossible to keep everything that's important in mind. Some of the principles of the form suffer while others are condensed around by the thinking mind. 

Similarly, the true studying of a Biblical text, a book of Zen koans, or other mythological texts requires tremendous knowledge of the content of the text, and further, requires the application of all of the "principles" learned from the text in one's daily life. One realizes that there is a gap between one's knowledge and one's ability to apply their knowledge. A practice like this, I believe, is essential to distinguishing between what one "knows" intellectually and what is going on around oneself.

The desire to win

If the outcome is disconnected from the experience of the actual engagement, which it usually is, than there is no shared truth from which to operate. So, when a conversation is fear-based, the benefit will go only to the most superior manipulator. If all in the party are harmoniously connected, than the conversation can become a "play" where the creativity of each participant interacts and an optimum outcome can emerge. Its not a "capitalist" interaction vs. a "communist" interaction, but rather an interaction full of lables and distinctions as compared to an interaction that does not let labels and distinctions interfere with the actual, living relationship between two or more participants.

Dear God, I hope you get IT

"This is IT. I have IT!" Cries the man in wonder as, for the first time, he feels the stirring of something new and beautiful. He writes IT down and calls it God and teaches people God, forgetting that God is merely an abstraction of IT. But IT cannot be spoken, so God is used instead, and people think that IT is "God." God is convoluted, misinterpreted and manipulated to serve the purposes of each person in their ever-persistent personal agenda. God becomes the dictator of thought, and the programming of God becomes everyone's reality. Then people try and rebel against the cruel, unjust reality and create a better version, but their identities are all tangled up in "God" now, so everything they create is still warped and convoluted and manipulative, etc. 

IT has no room in the house of God, because the house of God is too small and crammed up for IT. If IT becomes the house of God, than God becomes a functioning tool to serve IT. If God is IT, than one must be careful not to get caught up in words, ideas, beliefs and forget that- while IT is god- IT is NOT God. 

Dear God, I hope you get IT

Who are you?

Is who you are unchangeable? Are you the same person you have been all of your life? Surely you have looked through old love letters and journal entries and realized you do not believe the same things or think in the same way that you used to. If all of that changes, what are you? Is there any aspect of your existence that you can pin down and identify? And I wonder if, when you do, this feels like a completely adequate description of yourself. 

I think an important question that everyone in our society must have at one point asked themselves is "how is one able to feel free in an existence so heavily structured/scheduled?" I think this freedom depends on what you identify with. If you are a "positive thinker" you get by through optimism and hope for the future, and that is your freedom. If you use anger to bully your way through the day than anger grants you the freedom to get what you want. If you identify a lot with the system you are in, and you are very comfortable being a cog-in-the-wheel, than you get by through your pride in what you do. If you are a religious or spiritual person, you function through your powerful belief in a system of worship or thought. 

Yet back to my original question, is who you are unchangeable? Certainly to function in society, it seems like one has to hold themselves in a pretty decisive way. If your a positive thinker, you cannot alter your thinking without suffering. If you are a bully, then you fairly desperately rely on your aggression to be able to function. It seems like in order to function in our structured society, we trap ourselves psychologically in a specific way. We are no longer allowed to change.

There is another way to function in society without holding oneself in a rigid psychological state. It is extremely difficult, because it requires admitting to yourself in every moment that you do not know who you are. You constantly question your own beliefs, your own analysis. You do not condense around any aspect of yourself, but rather witness your own experience of life as it happens. While you still have a "map of the universe" via beliefs, you do not identify solely with those beliefs anymore. You are able to live outside of the realm of beliefs and human logic. You no longer manipulate what you do and what you think. This is called "living in the present moment."  

On teachers

I've had teachers abundant that have refined me, changed, me, whittled me down to a sharp spear of precision, of strategic perfection; they taught me attitude, affect, character, tactic and technique- all boiling down to goal, their goals and my goals. Changing the world from up upon our mountain top. From our telescope view honoring our agenda, battering through the obstacles of LIVING, fixed upon our aim with red battle haze blocking out the rest. Who would have thought, after all these accomplishments, I'd love most the rare teachers that clubbed me incessantly and laughed the whole while. And from the puddle of chaos that was left, watched with me and saw what would emerge?

Schizophrenia

I have a hunch about what schizophrenia really is. I think that people who have schizophrenia fluctuate between their understanding of the world and directly experiencing the world. However, they have not developed the ability to interact from their direct connection to the world, yet they do not have a firm grasp on their understanding of the world either. This naturally leads to complete dysfunction, constant confusion and an inability to behave “normally” according to our society’s standards. If we saw schizophrenia as a natural part of transitioning into deeper, meta-understandings of the world rather than an illness, our methods of treating it would probably be very different. We as a culture have a tendency to suppress, cover-up and eliminate any symptoms of behavior that are abnormal. If we instead embraced these abnormalities as something very beneficial to achieving a more holistic connection to the world we live in, imagine the differences we would see in the treatment of psychological disorder.

Clever Mind vs. Descriptive Mind in Short

A mind overburdened is a clever thing, that chooses its steps with intense judgement so as to take the easiest path without having to change. There is a list of scruples both right and wrong that are directed by experience and all to cover up a vague guilt. Thus all actions are ruled by power and the road chosen is that which will cause the least agony, because life is so full of suffering.  And if possible, some safe-satisfaction. Pragmatism- the devil’s device. 

A mind unburdened is merely a descriptive tool. It does not interfere with the experience of life.

Yang Form

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoA_92MNcBQ&feature=share

The above link is for my video of the Tai Chi Yang Short Form