Song Of The Day: Paranoia, The Destroyer / The Kinks
Word Of The Day: Xenagogy / A guidebook
Upper Right: I'm trying to floss every day again. Gosh, I don't care for flossing. The first two days of bleeding are the most exciting part, after that it's just the tedious chore of passing waxy twine between teeth. But the results! The results are fantastic, you get to keep your teeth. My mom and pop spent of lot of money so I could have straight teeth, I might as well try and keep them. My wife enjoys scaring the shit out of me over this one, her dad is a dentist, and when I haven't flossed for a few weeks or months, she likes to look at me with this combination disbelief and pity and say "do you KNOW what will happen if you don't...floss??". My dad isn't a dentist, and I feel free from all those rituals, including brushing. I brush when the texture of my teeth dictates it. Well, used to. But now I've been trying to brush and floss every day.
I'm also eating lots of fruits and vegetables (for real, yo), drinking about a vat of ginger tea every day (which makes me feel really, really good. It's crazy. Just TRY drinking a gallon of water every day, and if you don't lose weight and feel fantastic, you're not doing it right. Put the water in your mouth. You know you're doing it right if you pee all day.) I'm doing yoga, going to the club each day, and ladies and gentlemen, I enjoy working outside. I like raking leaves with my daughter, who is actually more of a chaotic leaf blower than raker, but that's cool. We do a kind of dance.
Lower Right: Oh, fuck the lower right. No? OK. My wife, she likes lower right shit. She's all about landscaping and working the property. My idea of a hot night in the lower right is sterilizing everything. In future incarnations, I will be born with a Clorox Spray Bottle as a left appendage and roll of paper towels as the right. My main lower right gig right now has been comprised of finishing the new album. There's a cascading water-fall that drops right off the edge of my Upper Left and pours into the Lower Right. I've taken its profusion of flow fore-granted for a long while, and I really need to bring some balance to the affair. This means I need to devote a big infusion of energy and sustained attention to the BUSINESS of music. I need to get the lower right shit cooking: New management team, new record label, distribution, radio, promotion, publishing, and revitalizing the punk monk community around the U.S. and Europe in conjunction with all of these emergent blossoms. Aside from that, observing the cataclysmic trend in weather has kept me transfixed for the last year. Wow. Let's hope there's still a mass media to engage when this record comes out. JUST KIDDING. Little apocalyptic humor for you. Don't worry, you're already dead. Death can't kill you.
Lower Left: Always, always hard at work in the Lower Left. My entire life is about lighting fires in the lower left. By way of example, just had a session yesterday with a Shaman. She's ultra kick ass, I go in and see her about once every six weeks. She is really, really good, and she goes all the way down and up, and out, and in. I've been increasingly relying (in the last year) on counsel. Basically, I have a community (culture) of practitioners and teachers to access, and this sub-culture helps me orient and stay correctly directed in my work in the larger meta-culture. Allow me to blunt: I was born into this life with a two-fold prime directive: Wake up (over and over), and do everything you can with everything at your disposal to cultivate awakened awareness in World. In the lower left, this science of unknowing and unlearning is largely one of
1, just being with people where they are. join them. no judging, just joining. i don't mean adopting and fusing with any and all view points, but i do mean accessing and inhabiting all perspectives. once inside, just be there. stay there until there is an authentic relationship established from WITHIN between you, that person, that perspective, that view.
2, once there is no longer a defense up against you, and it is understood that you are not an aggressor in the conventional sense, and you have the benefit of understanding that perspectives emotional, psychological, spiritual, and cultural technology from the inside, you can (possibly) demonstrate options to your friends in that particular perspective. demonstrate is the operative word here, because when is the last time any of us gave two shits about what someone SAYS unless we agree with them? talking is the least effective means of supporting transformation. the most effective support role is first just transforming yourself, and LIVING a reality that includes just a little bit more. we shouldn't misunderstand the paradox of development, especially culturally, which is where we are most prone to this particular confusion. when was the last time you looked at a two year old kid and thought "you fucking idiot. you can't read, your speech is a mess. you have no conception of actual conditions and circumstances you are in. i have no respect for you". we don't do that, because two year olds are supposed to be two year olds, there's nothing wrong with that stage of development, its indispensable and appropriate, as are all the fulcrums and their concomintant features. when you're two, we should help you be healthy at two years of age. when you're five, we want a healthy five year old, and so on. no age or developmental stage is "wrong", unless it becomes arrested and the movement stops. if your body is 25 and your emotional capacity operates at an eight year old's mode (uh, take it from someone in rock 'n roll, it happens), then that disparity is not useful. the point is that each aspect or capacity in us develops, all these "lines" (spiritual, pschological, emotional, inter-subjective, etc) can and should be developed, and all quadrants have lines. waking up is not just a matter (not anymore, anyway) of developing ONE line of development (spiritual), it's about the tetra-evolution of I, which is always ever-morphing in the ceaseless unfolding of all relative forms. We're always waking up, each time, in a new Universe, even though the undying, unborn recognition of IS is immutable, the relative is always in flux, and development is occuring in all four quadrants (or paralysis, or repression, etc). to me, an integral approach is the Bodhisattva's magic decoder ring. first, its critical in developing the discrete, individuated entity of Stuart, or Stuart, or Stuart, etc. beyond that, its the most viable technology in existence for moving beyond the intractable swamp that freezes us (and our parts, and our various voices, secrets, fears) in certain places, as people, and as cultures. you thought I forgot we were in the Lower Left, didn't you. Nah, boo, i got you. So, in terms of my life mission, a big part of it is becoming acquainted with the parts of me that are in other people, spread out through culture, and understanding the assets and liabilities of all perspectives, the healthy and pathological aspects of development, and how to be of the most useful assistance in love with every brother and sister in every culture.
3, all options are on the table in the lower left. being a bodhisattva doesn't mean being a soft-focus teddy bear. sometimes it does, but it doesn't mean BEING anything in particular, it means having everything (all possible perspectives) at your disposal, both as the rightful inheritance of a human being, and as a true friend of other human beings. all the theys are us, all the thems are "I", and so on. to know yourself is the hardest thing, yeah, especially when yourself is every fucking person on the planet, and every living thing, and every inanimate object, and every memetic strata in cultural geology, and so on. it's the hardest to know the Self, but it's also the most useful.
family has been my most potent teacher in this regard. you can't choose the political and social constitution of your parents or your children, and being in any family is an incredible opportunity to have some killer (literally, they will incinerate the parts of you resistant to relationship and learning and un-learning) engagement. and marriage? marriage, in my personal experience is the great accelerator. like, hey let's see what happens when slide every fader on the board to TEN. let's put rocket fuel in our mini bike and chase tornadoes. it works. IF you are both mutually comitted to integral spiritual practice, it will expose and radiate every shadow, secret, short coming, repression, lie, and arrested dimension of your being until you actually, miraculously...evolve... a little bit. then, you think WOW, i'm so fucking awesome. and it all starts over. then you have a KID, and it really starts over. this kind of brutal expansion of what is "I" (which is always a WE, which is always an IT, which is always ME, all pronouns are woven into a micro / macro 20 dimensional Indra's net of diamonds, and it's all a hoax) really, truly one of the greatest privileges on the planet. if you find yourself in such difficult conditions, you should definitely freak out and fucking go ape shit with how hard it is, and simultaneously remain in deep contact with the inestimable GIFT you've been giving. something, somewhere, is trying to mold and love you into a useful instrument of the Mystery. once you're sufficiently invigorated and strengthened by successive deaths, you'll begin to get Lower Left field assignements. yes, as an agent in IS, you get cool assignements. well, you always have, but now you'll get to be cognizent that you are participating.
UL: ya'll i'm gonna have to write about the upper left part of my practice tomorrow, or tonight. i gotta get to the club.
