Awake: An Inner Autobiography by J - HTML preview
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THE EQUINOX
A few years later I was in a truck rented on a rapidly maxing out credit card with a limit that should have never been given to a coordinate in this reality whose use to the economy was so marginal to not even be heretical or criminal, but invisible.
The nighttime highway, the darkness a black veil concealing the plains that stretched out infinite surrounding me, a body of starlight stretched out over me, though the star I was following now again was interior.
With each move over the years what little I owned had been discarded until all there was left in the back of the truck was boxes and boxes of ponderous books.
Books that filled the emptiness of my new apartment.
Books that I never read any more, but whose presence I could feel. Their weight pulling me, holding me down.
I just wanted to get rid of them.
After my move and the construction of my new base of operations, a new laboratory for my inner development where I could try and resume my experiments again, attempt to transmute myself back into life again, I noticed something was beginning to grow and emerge inside me again, though at the time I thought they were just peculiar and interesting experiences in a life awash with them.
It became common to be talking about someone and they would suddenly appear.
People responded to my thoughts as if they were vocalized, but were not.
I would know something immediately somehow without using methods of knowledge such as experience or learning.
There was a sudden continual swelling and breakthrough of similar experiences, which I thought were just more curious experiences in a life filled with them, experiences which became my day to day reality, as common and real as this cup of coffee sitting in front of me as I write this, as the music I sit and listen to as these words flow out from nothingness.
As the conscious intelligent and alive subtle energy, that self-aware divine technology, built up to the point of its glorious rupture into the world, it was like the moments previous to a storm, that same unknown charged wildness began to radiate, and among other manifestations and effects, people began to open up, fall apart, as the prison walls and bars of their False Selves began to crumble. Friends, acquaintances, strangers, anybody, were spontaneously approaching me and confessing their life stories, true dreams, true fears, true hopes to me, until it was too much. I had to put an end to it, it was too weird, for sanity's sake, I didn't know what was going on, I had to tell them to stop.
A spinning black chaos of a night, enflamed desires upon enflamed desires, desires frustrated turning to anger like all blackened desires do, then rage, then hate.
Pointless. I go home.
Pacing ranting rage towards my so-called friends, my so-called family, the evil beings masquerading with ill-fitting disguises to be members of the human race, the curse of this fallen existence, even God if the idea wasn't just a narcotic delusion to sedate idiots children and savages.
Pointless. Not even drunk enough to chloroform myself insensate to this hell.
I give up.
Then.
It had been so long since I had a taste of this.
My degraded state was opened up and washed away by the grace of the timelessness of eternity.
I looked over at the table beside my bed - where there was once piles of books now there usually were none - except for some reason that week I had chosen a book from the untouched dust brown forgotten stacks of books in the spare bedroom - The Essential Plotinus.
Just as the barriers and boundaries of temporality dissolved so did the barriers of anger rage and hate in my solar plexus – my soft and surrendered heart now radiated love towards my friends, my family, the beautiful members of the human race, this miracle existence, its mysterious author, the sacred totality.
I get up and look at myself in the mirror, to make sure I'm still alive, I still exist.
Feel completed. Whole. Nothing to achieve. Nothing to do.
This is it.
The pinnacle of human existence.
Golden green radiating.
I'm sorry for everything. I was wrong.
-
I basked in the bliss of timelessness and eternity that night - purged of enmity – this unworthy vessel refilled with light.
And for that night at least – I – the real I – was back.
My apartment was filled with books collected over the years, books found and selected by obsessively combing the shelves of bookstores now dematerialized by technology, through mail order catalogs with their slit open and resealed shipping envelopes, at the second hand shops of unwanted furniture sat upon by unwanted owners staring at unwanted televisions, looking for that one book that would help me understand my confusing and amazing experiences and breakthroughs, the same impulse that by coincidence and circumstance has somehow pulled you to this book, these words, this message, me.
One by one, more and more books were added, collected, multiplied until their weight was palpable, all these endless words symbols ideas and concepts which I had amassed as tools and methods of exploration and expansion were now a burden, an actual physical weight on my being that I desperately wanted to get rid of. The thought of having all these books with their endless words symbols ideas and concepts around me, lugging and towing their weight with me everywhere I went, was now torture. I just wanted to get rid of them.
I placed an ad and sold them for a pittance.
Relieved.
They were finally gone.
The next falling apart, the next move, the next falling down.
The books gone, the rest of my belongings given away or dumpstered in the alley. No external attachments now except for the rags that clothed me.
No possessions, no real job, getting by on the charity of family and friends who must have thought I went mad, odd jobs where sporadic is too generous to describe their frequency and the mysterious and silent intelligence of that conscious entity silently intervening to keep me alive at that precarious and fragile stage, naked, stripped, outcast as the farthest dot on the horizon of that desert, for one cannot become everything, unless one becomes nothing.
When one totally drops out of the game we call life society and reality one can see it for what it is, not as something that always was is and will be, but an arbitrary construction, a creation of supposed eternal and immutable laws we believe that is external and objective to us rather than concepts of which we are the author, concepts which we can reconfigure and erase like these words before me.
You can see the rules goals and strategies objectively, how they enmesh shape and control your life, things that are considered so obvious that they are invisible. Yet it is these invisible structures that dominate every aspect of your life and existence, down to every cell of your bodymind, so invisible that you sit in a prison and call it liberty, and even with the key right in front of you, in your hand, you will not use it because you don't want to lose what you consider freedom.
Money, relationships, family, work, sex – those interlocking infrastructures of lack and fear –
one can only be freed from them when one had stepped outside of them, the separation and distance making visible the nature of their power.
I gradually fully perceived the ghost empire outside me, inside me. How its laws and customs, its borders and walls, structured me, controlled me.
Down by the river with notepad and pen to do some writing – working on yet another novel that would not go anywhere – summer finally beginning after a long winter dark and crushing, frozen and sunless – greens and browns and blues forgotten during that black period now recognized and remembered again – why did I forget I'd see them once more? Why did I lose faith? Why did I doubt?
Greens of leaves and grass rising from the dead – browns of woods – blues of the miracle sky cloudless cathedral dome of nature – the living river ancient, my non-human companion, its silent speech, its liquid body reflecting and shimmering, always here for moments like this – a symphony of birds.
-
I used to force myself, discipline myself, to use any period of relative inactivity to work on myself. During a walk somewhere, during a lull at work or school, even while sitting at the bar drinking a pint of beer I would experiment with some forgotten esoteric mind exercise or technique I had read about in some obscure text or put in front of my mind's eye some artistic or intellectual problem I was wrestling with, causing unconscious processes to work in the background until the impasse would finally yield with a burst of illuminating insight.
For some reason on that day walking home I decided to work on myself using a meditation I had read about in the early days of The Search. I could not remember if I had ever used it before, or if I had, it obviously had little effect.
-
I asked myself,
Who am I?
Who am I?
Was I my location? My job? My bank account?
No.
I was not just that.
Was I this shape? This form? This body?
No.
Not that.
That family? Those friends? Those relationships?
No.
I was not that either.
Those actions? Those successes? Those failures? That pride? That guilt?
No.
I am not that.
The disidentification tore and shattered attachments in my mind which felt as solid as flesh tearing, bones breaking.
It's OK. Let it go.
I am not that.
No.
I am not that.
Not these thoughts. Not these memories. Not these desires. Not these lusts. Not these fears. Not those hurts.
I am.
Just.
Simply.
I AM.
And with that realization it felt as if my mind was filled with light.
-
At the time I didn't think much of it, just another sudden bursting forth of the inner radiance of realization in a life that had been common with it to the point of banality, but looking back now that was the beginning of the end of the self I thought I was.