“So hows’ intending the awareness of the atoms of your body going?”
“Oh, its going good I guess. I can’t focus. I can’t seem to hold an intention any longer. what like no I feel like I’m too involved in daily affairs. The daily world consumes so much of my attention that I have nothing left for intending an awareness of the atoms of my being.”
“Ah,” Einstein said leaning back in his chair, “don’t worry about it. Before long adventures one must almost always takes stock of everythign in the mind’s inventory. We look at it seeing what we can part with and what we can’t. We worry ourseves to death over our appearence, Perhaps you’re looking over all the variables of impossibility, the ones that are preventing you from reaching the variables of possibility. Is it possible to become aware of the atoms in your body? That would be a phenomenal feat!
“Well, I don’t know, ya know? I just don’t feel like that’s something worth dying for. I means what the point? You’re there fore fifteen minutes, but there’s so much to do here! I’ve got bills, I’ve got car expenses, I’ve got homework up the wazoo! And I think i have a crush on suzie Q.
“SQ?”
“Yes, SQ, she’s in my class. We’ve been texting back and forth and . . . “
“Oh well, you need a girlfriend! If you can’t die for yourself you can die for other people!” He bowled over laughing slapping his knee as if i’d said the funniest thing in the world.
“You’re looking for love a love to die for. That’s a lesson that is very hard to learn. Love , from whatever basis of love you are loving her is from ego not your heart. And when the loving is done and your ego scraped off of it - ego love - people call irreconcilable differences. Love from ego hurts my friend. It hurts. Love a woman from your energy body and showowzee! You’ll fall in love, dash about the sheets for the next six months to nine months and learn so much about each other, yourselves and whatever this grand amazing journey is that we call life, that you’d be superb friends afterwards if it were ever to end that is. You’d end as friends. your’ studies would pick back up, you’d have more confidence then you perhaps you’ll decide to tackle the atoms of your body.”
He shook my hand, busied himself with his papers and said goodbye. I felt really pumped up. I wanted a big hug too or maybe i wanted to hug him. I decided not to. I was free to date women. This feeling lasted all the way to bus stop when I came to a realizatoin point, what about tonight? What was I doing tonight? What was I doing for my true beloved? How could i walk away from that amazing sense of freedom and all absorbing mystery? Did I really want to date? What if I projected this enrapturous passion toward my nightly dreaming activities?
I rode the bus home thinking of ways to infuse this realization into and I began to think of my what was I doing to take care during the day to take care of my beloved dreaming attention. I decided to take better care of myself and when I got home I removed a lot clutter from my bedroom. I laughed to myself and began to do all my small tasks for her. I cleaned the apartment, poured water into a pot, listened to background music, intending to enmesh my awareness in the sensory fabric of things; while romancing this imagined encounter tonight in dreaming with my beloved. This carried on into the next day. I washed the car taking great care and full attention too everything I did. And if I got to be with SQ it didn’t matter. If didn’t get to be with her it didn’t matter either. I had no expectations to determine the course of outside events and focused all of my attention on romancing all the different facets of the philosophy of the being who is going to die.
And then she showed up. And then there she was sixteen pistols in the wind and a shotgun aimed right at me. When two people meet like this there is always an instantaneous knowledge that there is so much more than meets the eye. From the instant i saw her I knew in a deeply subconscious way that we’d be lovers. She was in full regalia, laughing and bantering about with all the people in the room. I’d parked myself on a couch in a house party on a backporch somewhere and she was in full flirt with a extraordinarily good lookin man. He could been a Ken Doll but more rustic n stree wise with a shine in his eye that says raging intellect with a chip on his shoulder. She was drop dead gorgeous. Her name was Erin and she was 6’2”, brunette and she came with legs that didn’t quit, lips that didn’t stop eyes that refused to stop sparkling and a smile that tickled me ridiculously. When she smiled. I wanted to smile. I wanted to find the path up to matching the sparkle in her eye.
I feared to match her sparkle too quickly. She wanted spectacle. Something that I dreaded. Ever since I got glasses in the 4rth grade i’d feared being a spectacle. I didn’t want to be poked fun at. I never got therapy for it. My 8th grade best friend got therapy for it. We didn’t have the money for therapy. I noticed my introspection just as everyone in the room burst out laughing. Erin’s jokes resounded through the glass bouncing off every piece of wood on the porch and died in the corners of the concrete steps. I could hardly believe the scene of events unfolding before my eyes, but something deep inside my silence noted that ‘not believing what I was seeing as it was happening’ was a solid weakness that was common amongst my friends and family. I didn’t know how I knew this but I knew it. This woman was not like that at all. She was ever present, moving in, nudging, emotionally touching, linguistically bold, raucous in entertaining herself, her man and the rest of us. Everyone in the room was either consciously or unconsciously, was enrapture by her witty repertoire with her man in arms.
She talked a blue streak, a yellow streak, a green streak and a purple streak on and on about any subject in world that one could imagine. Her eyes radiated a certain charm, and her smile, wit and indefensible confidence were par excellance’. As I got fully with the porch more and mingled a bit. i was offered a smoke and took one. Listening laughing and talking. I remember her coming across as someone who was extremely intelligent, wise to world, but she hid her wisdom underneath a viel of atrocious sexuality. She let it all hang out. Every bit of her attention was focused, honed, and zoomed in on her sexuality. Every last action she took was geared towards obtaining and commanding, in subtle and dramatic ways, every single persons’ attention in the room. And she was talking to only one guy!
She was drop dead gorgeous The kinda woman men die for. Plump lips, crystal blue eyes, true and genuine laughter mixed in with street wiseness. She was not only street smart but aggressive, controlling, loving, kind and she sold her herself over and over again to her man, to the peeps on the porch and she did it in the most elegant, dramatic, confident, alluring, sexy and provocative way imaginable. In fact it bordered upon being offensive to some unknown part of me. Deep in my subconscious mind I realized I was extremely offended by a woman using all of her sexuality to obtain her goal. There was no drawback in her no reprieve. She marched on and on and on doggedly in handling her man in arms attention. He was almost exactly the same as she was - daring, bold, provocative, muscular, handsome in a James Bond kinda way. He was cool, cunning and brash when he was interacting with her. I noticed that he refused to be turned into a little boy to fend off her advances and he didn’t resort to flirting them off either, but chose to laugh in a teenage like manner and kept repeating his position ‘No - she could not move in with him. Internally, emotionally I was attracted to her and offended by her to an equal degree. I found that quite startling. And I liked it. In fact, I like it a lot.
She loved the spotlight and thrived in it. She was to say the least unlike anyone I’d ever encountered before in my life. She was ever present, and dressed in the skimpiest shorts one could imagine. With her 6’ 2” frame, she walked around the porch and the shorts hung off of her perfect ass in just such a way that, if you got the right glimpse at the exact right time, you’d see everything she had. She was looking for a place to live or to crash and obviously, with the way she’d played the guy, a man to enslave.
* * *
Once, I got home from the party I set my intention to be aware aware that I was a being who was going to die. I recapped for two days in the closet using my list as a reference guide so i could get through as many past relationship trauma as quickly as possible. Friday night to Monday morning i worked diligently on this practical task noticing that i could not do the task for more than two hours without falling asleep. I awoke Monday morning with the oddest feeling. Right smack dab in the middle of my day was my death. I couldn’t see anything past 2-3 o’clock that afternoon. My body froze in animal fear and my mind raced to find away around my death. I immediately vowed not go to class that day, but my death still stood as hard as stone monolith in the middle of my day. I vowed to stay home and not move a muscle. And I didn’t move a muscle. Still, my death loomed over me. Then I vowed to go to the grocery store, hoping that would dissuade this overpowering feeling of the complete absence of the rest of my life, but still my death didn’t budge. I gave into animal fright. My intellect gave up. How was I really going to get out of this final appointment? I’d conjured up? I still felt it. In no way, shape or form did any part of my life exist after a specific mid-afternoon moment in time. The abyss of no-more-continuity stared me in face and I began to wonder how in the hell, REALLY, was I going to do get out of meeting my death face to face that afternoon?There was no doubt in my mind that I was disappearing for an interminable period at some point this afternoon. I could not believe it. I was actually, really dying this afternoon. In sheer worry I moved a muscle and rolled over onto my back wondering WTF when all of a sudden the presence of my death disappeared from the middle of my afternoon.
The whole feeling of having a final appointment that afternoon vanished as if it were a mirage. The afternoon, Monday night, Tuesday morning, and all the shit I had to do the next day flooded my consciousness. I chuckled remembering Einstein’s advice to laugh when the dice are thrown cuz there’s more to the universe than we think there is.
However, I could not get over the feeling, the direct experience of witnessing my death. I marveled over the two distinct frames of mind. The amount of pressure upon me was enormous. It was as if i was going to die at two o’clock that day and I was balls to the wall, run and hide, scared out of my wits. This meant to me that I didn’t live my life according to the truth of it as it is from a scientific perspective - death is a fact. We all die. All life dies.
The enormous bliss of facing the everyday world was anesthesia - total routine. And the idea that there was a tonight, a today and a tomorrow was total heaven. I was stoked back into feeling immortal and yet, I realized at a deep level that Einstein’s method worked. The recapitulation, the idea of intending with body, the movements he showed me had rooted me in the here now and my awareness coupled with my internal silence overturned labels and catagories like butter. I realized that all of my senses detect abstract sense data. As I got up out of bed. I could feel my usual day unfolding. The morning and afternoon were routine. I was very familiar with it and I could feel them in my body. And my body was solid.
According to Einstein, my ‘mind’ or my ‘folder’ reached it’s limit and I experienced the contents of the folder and my ego, my self, the idea that I’d had that monday, tuesday, wednesday were mine and destined to be mine forever, and the feeling that I was or had ever been immortal was whisked away that morning. All I did was roll over and everything arranged itself right in my body n mind. I laughed at the comparison that he amount of pressure placed on my daily awareness with its endless things to continually do in the world attention was minimal at the most. The pressure was next to nothing compared to that moment of dying. The idea that I had to go to class, stop by the supermarket, pay a bill - squiller. Nada. Nothing. Hardly pressure at all. I marveled at the clarity of my attention when I felt that I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, that my death was waiting for me in the middle of the day. I was scared witless though. I had no power to sustain it . . . that feeling of immediate impermenency.
To be continued . . ,
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