my eariest memory is lying on my back in the crib as an infant. i don't remember wanting anything, needing anything. i wasn't hungry, or in pain, or sleepy. i just remember the pattern of the ceiling as it was framed by the horizontal border of my crib. i heard people in the back ground. no idea what they were saying. nothing special about that moment, other than it's as far back as my personal memory goes.

of course at night, when the three-layered veils reverse themselves, memory reaches much further back. it's also more inscrutable. maybe even impersonal? that's to say, who's there after *this one* falls off to sleep? slow body drops out, subtle body drops in. our soul -Essential self- breaks free of a dense vibration of blood, meat, and bone -the odd housing of personality. the curtain opens on a different story. the soul has been gazing into a geological hour glass since before humanoid features were trendy. it's been pacing a macra-dimensional labyrinth where touching a wall changes its shape, taking a step alters the form underfoot.

ask the personality what it remembers, and it recites a laundry list of snap shots. frozen moments that betray both its sad enslavement to sequence (when i was three, when i was five, in 1979, in 1982, etc) and its insufferably narrow point of view. it's not its fault. personality suffers.

Aside: Why is that? the more limited a view is, the greater its pain, and the more inevitable its suffering. the bigger a perspective is, the greater its capacity for pain and the less likely it is to suffer from it. the personality can't seem to get this twist: it's what we EX-clude that creates suffering. the self is always trying to keep out what hurts. so it perpeuates and compounds its own suffering. if it were to radically IN-clude everything it would cease to suffer. it would hurt like hell, but it wouldn't suffer.

if i ask you what do you remember? don't we need to establish who you are? am i asking You the personality? You, the Essential Self? You, the GOD-FALL that dumps a Trillion gallons of ~?~¿~?~ into each quark every nano second of reality?

i'll tell you right now i don't like the word memory. no offence Memory, but to my mind nouns evoke a stasis that lulls discrete entities into a blase' apathy. oh, there's fixed *things* now? whew... we can all relax. the Universe is no longer threatening me with its Infinite Dynamism.

what is a noun but an incapacitated (assassinated) verb? are we in full understanding of the debilitating nature of such assumptions? do we really want to forfeit Reality every single fucking second of our lives in order to accommodate a lazy streak in the psyche? if there is a conspiracy afoot, its our small identity and its poisonous addiction to forming arbitrary divisions (fancy) and then defending them as the pillars of 'the known' (folly).

want to blend nicely into the Fraud that is waking consensus? all you have to do is divorce your self from 99.99% of your Native Endowment. beauty, depth, nuance -the most lethal threats to our precious, stable location. hold on to your nouns everyone! the morphine-drip for a fear-addled identity. on the other hand, you can tell the Zombies to take your fixed signifiers and shove them up their astronomical shadow. if you see a noun, keep digging til you hit the verb. i'm being somewhat inflammatory here (linguists, save your letters) but the POINT IS:

when it comes to tools, it helps to inquire: are we aware of them as objects, or do they operate invisibly in our subject? if they're an object in our awareness, we can use them. they're availabe to us (read: MORE LOVE). if they're invisibly part of our subject, we are doomed to their asphyxiating effect (read: LESS LOVE).

i know what you're asking. if i'm unaware of it, how am i supposed to work on it? that's the nice thing about the Universe. it provides a feedback loop. it sends you messages, through other people. they'll tell you things like "hey, you're a dissociative asshole" or, "it feels good when you really listen to me" or "i like to be spanked" or "you have a drinking problem". as we assemble these clues, we can use them to investigate our shadow! the best clues are verbs!

i'm just saying, there's a lot of unexamined nouns being thrown around.

i digress.

a personality is on Auto-Pilot. it's a Me-Bot. a knot of deluded impulses bundled with habituated preferences and conditioned responses. don't get me wrong, it's fun as shit. take it to vegas. walk it around a party. but don't drag it around after the initial stages of sleep, don't buy into its incessant blather during the day, and for God's sake don't sneak it into the Bardo. whatever you do, leave it with the body.

the personality has a very limited perspective. sometimes that's fun -even useful. most times it's a liability. you want the OPTION. if you can't choose it, if you can't leave it, it's going to make you its Bitch.

an Essential Self on the other hand -that is, a healthy and well developed Essential Self- has quite an expansive radius of "I". it's intimate with its atmosphere. it is sensitive to what's Present. it is Clear about the illusion.

a developed Essential Self engages what's painful but doesn't have to suffer it. the Essential Self is with whatever comes and goes, but isn't dragged around by it. a healthy Essential Self performs photo synthesis for the Kosmic Atmosphere. simple respiration . it literally breathes the rising and falling Reality. transmutes Whatever Is.

ask the Essential Self -or well developed soul- what it remembers, and it doesn't display a strand of ornaments decorating identity. the Soul conveys the summary of its 'memory' through its Being. it IS the summary of its memory.

the practice of the Essential Self is inter-penetrating this & that. it is weaving i & we, inside & outise. it studies the wound. it seeks the remedy, effortlessly. Remembering = the Anatomy of the Soul. if you want to Remember, inhabit your Self. it includes all that it has encountered. Remembering makes for a more useful Agent of LOVE.

from the Personality, the anatomy of the soul is a blur. the ego doesn't have a fever, it IS a fever. through the Fever, the soul seems to traffic in bizzare currencies (spectrum of energies, matrix of modes, diaphony of decoys). they're impossible to decode. they're best dismissed and disparaged. the ego takes a peek through the soul and sees:

sanity < Reality

and wisely backs away from the precipice.

the personality clings to memories.

the Essential Self practices Remembering.

memories are part of our story. remembering dissolves our story.

provided there is the GIFT of an adequately developed Essential Self, its the Bodhisattva's job to Remind & Remember. let the soul function fluidly in this Kosmic Chimera. IN THE SERVICE OF LOVE.

the soul is beset with puzzles a personality -literally- cannot imagine. an Essential self can't walk its Riddle without simultaneously reconfiguring it. if you thought a Rubic's Cube was hard, ask your soul what it's like performing the Calculus of Decoys that accompany every moment. every "correct" solution spontaneously alters the next set of clues. the soul studies the multiplication of meaning, but these are not inanimate integers. there are no dead Puzzles in the Mystery. no objective games for the Witness to sharpen its skills against. every spec is the spec of Presence. the soul sees the travails of the personality and shrugs.

it's counting clicks that cycle from big bang to big crunch. while we pine over fleeting gratificiation and passing status, the soul acquires the Equanimity to study the Twinship of Something and Nothing.

end note:

this week I finished a new painting of two crows. in this painting, these two crows are just barely touching. it took a week to paint, but about five minutes into it, i realized it would be titled "Simple Recognition".

as with most of my crows, i paint them using a form of micro-calligraphy in the language i'm constructing. if you look at the crows a few steps back, they look like ornate birds. if you get closer, you see their bodies are comprised of hundreds of phrases in this language. in this painting, i focused on variations of two particular words. the first crow's body was comprised of the word "moi-mee-ehn-drayz") which translates to "point of all places", one of the first idioms in the language. the other crow's body was painted with the word "soo-vyee-oh" which is a word my wife and i actually came up with together after doing years of gazing meditation. it means a kind of simple Remembering, a dynamic recognition of Reality As It Is, which can only arise in mutuality. it's not just eye contact. if you've ever done gazing meditation with someone, especially the same person over years at a time, you understand there is a kind of Remembering and recognition that is nearly ineffable, except to the two people experiencing it. they can't describe it, but they don't need to either. it's conveyed in the Mutuality, and expressing it is almost redundant. that is what this painting is, that kind of Remembering, the Simple Recognition of ~?~¿~?~

after i finished the painting, i started to get this download -the unpacking- as the painting filtered slowly through the dingy aperture of "me" (after the fact). in the above blog i'm basically journaling a download from the crows in that painting. hearing what they say requires slowing the vibration down a lot (and therefore distorting its potency of Presence) but is still usefull. if nothing else it clears the space for the next painting.