Denial is often viewed as a failure of acceptance.  When viewed as such, denial seems irrational.  But, of course, it isn’t.  Denial is an affirmation of status quo.  Denial is an insistence on what subjectively is.  Reality changes non-stop.  But mind doesn’t.  Mind first creates an illusion of permanence and then clings to its own version of reality.  How wondrous!

Denial is an essential part of our survival know-how.  Accept the coping legitimacy of denial.

But denial is more than just survival.  Denial is evidence of our remarkable ability to re-create reality to fit precisely with our moment-specific needs.

Denial is customized perception, a pattern-hold, an amazing unconscious (!) transformation of the stone-hard reality into a soft pillow of the mind-specific dream-world.  There is a dream-weaving magician inside each and every one of us.

Denial is the 8th Wonder of the world.

I love junk email: its desperation, its naiveté, its brazenness.  I can relate to the humanity (psychology) behind it.  Can you?

For example (from this morning): “LOAN OFFER!  READ THE ATTACHED FILE AND CONTACT MR. CLARK.”

Yes, it was all in caps.  And no, I didn’t contact Mr. Clark…

You just know there’s suffering and ambition behind this.

Suffering + Ambition = Humanity

Who are we saving all these word-processing files for?

Are we going to read what we wrote?!  All these unfinished poems?  All these unpolished stories of narrative fiction?  All these drafts of actualities?

Of course, not: we are once, we are ever a-changing, we are - in a sense – never…

Even if we save a memory-file, it will be opened by the echoes of our here-and-now Essence (i.e. by what we are yet to be (if we are lucky to still be in some hypothetical – however near – future).

Psychological health – it seems – has evolved to include electronic health [e-health].

Purge the digital dust.  In the overall schema of thing-less things, memory is just ones and zeros anyway (foreground and background).

Good hardware is software: it flexes and bends with twists and turns of life, without clinging to its to Form.

Memory is a waste of information.

Live [breathe, love, think] now:

There is an “om” in Mom. 

Remember to chant it today.

At least once.

All life distinguishes “inside” from “outside,” i.e.  “self” from “non-self.” This is the fundamental duality (fundamental distinction, fundamental sapience/wisdom, fundamental bias) that all life operates on.  Life is self-serving, partial to self.  It views its own self as a subject and all else as “other,” as “environment,” as “objects.”  All life objectifies other life as “environment” (to use and to eat, and/or to flee from so as to not become used by it, so as to not be eaten by it).

All life is fundamentally unfair to other life, that is, until it enlightens to its inevitable interdependence and, on a higher level, to its essential sameness.

We begin with adaptively-intense dualism of self/non-self.  We start out in a highly self-centered (ego-centric) manner.  It makes sense: we are helpless and scared; so we have to think in a highly conservative manner.  This developmentally early us/them dualism is there to protect us.  We take no prisoners: the world is polarized into black and white.  “You are either with us or against us” is the mentality that underlies our socializing.  We socialize not for fun but for protection, we group into cliques, we circle the wagons.  We are busy surviving. 

Record says I was born 42 years ago, on March 25th, 1969, in Moscow, Russia. The year of Woodstock, the year of Moon Landing, the year Muammar al-Gaddafi came to power in Libya.  But, of course, it’s nonsense: I am far older than 42.  Older than Earth, in fact.

Indeed, the fundamental matter* I am made of has been in existence for at least 13.75 billion years (give or take 0.11 billion years).  So, I am at least that old!  But chances are I am even older, far older than that.  The Big Bang, of course, couldn’t have been the absolute beginning.  The ex nihilo argument of the Universe coming into being from a total nothingness is pseudo-scientific nonsense. 

Self is a memory of what you were.  As such, self, with all its accomplishments and their implications, is a bygone.  Let bygones be bygones.

The informational self is a train of a wedding dress of a wedding that is already over.  You kissed the reality.  It kissed you back.  Now, forget this glorious highlight of an accomplishment.

Yes, you had your shining moment or two.  Maybe hundreds.  What now?  It’s time to plug back in to the reality that’s still awaiting your attention, time to cut the anchor of accomplishments.  Out of the long shadows of the past, it’s time to bask in the sun that still shines.

1.
Lean into the sky with your stare.
See all of its black infinity behind the azure blue of the familiar.
Realize that all, all, all of that is you!
2.
I know, I know
You thought it was just you.
I know you thought it was all quite simple:
That there was you and not-you,
That there was this you here and all that not-you there.
It’s not.
All of it is you.

Week 2 Exercise: Change How You Enlighten Your Smoking Mind

Smoking is pyrotechnics: cigarette is a fuse, your lungs – a bomb of pleasure and worry.  This week’s objective is to change how you set yourself on fire.

Get a new lighter, a lighter you wouldn’t intuitively use.  For example, if you are into classy metal lighters, get a BIC with a NASCAR theme.  If you like a minimalist, slick, urban look, get something really colorful or camouflaged.  Show some behavioral plasticity, pick the wrong color of plastic – if you don’t like yellow, get yellow; if you like white, get black. 

There is a story in Zhuangzi (a Taoist book named after Zhuangzi, a 4th century BCE Chinese philosopher) that goes something like this…

A master carpenter Shi and his apprentice are walking through the woods in search of a good tree. The apprentice sees a great big old oak tree and asks his master why he walked past it paying it no attention. “Oh, enough with that,” the Master exclaims, “don’t even talk about this one!” The Master Carpenter then explains: “This tree… it’s so bad that if you made a boat, it’d sink; and if you made a coffin, it’d rot; and if you made a roof, it’d leak… This tree is good for nothing and it’s exactly because it’s so useless and worthless that it’s been standing here so long…”

Are the Master and the Apprentice looking at the same tree? Not likely.