LIFE AS LIMINAL CONSTANT

The sunset used to be beautiful.
That’s before it was always sunset time.
Stuck in a zone that’s not still here but not quite gone,
life in in-between spaces becomes
not a passing event but a way of being.
No longer involved in the joys and activities
of the day one felt so meaningful, now bathed
in just enough light to perpetually to be a reminder
of what is all but gone, the essence one is about to lose.

There are no transitions, completions, or chances for moving on
when your sunset becomes a constant.
The only variables in your world

are shifting things that remind you of the eternal sunset.
So close but never any nearer to night,
that time of promised rest and rejuvenation.
Just dark enough to sense a mere inkling
of what the full of night must feel like
but still bright enough to remind one
of the pleasures of the day that are over now.

A melancholy anxiety pervades the soul.
A constant yearning for a completion in both directions,
a yearning invoked either for a return to the joys of the bygone day
or a realization of the cool transformation of anticipated night.
I would say no, eternal sunsets are not beautiful, they are hellish limbos,
places where you can’t let go nor grasp anew,
They dangle before you everything you were
in a day about over and gone
while teasing with a relief of transition
that never quite comes.
They remind you of what you no longer have
while previewing what you want but will remain out of reach.

In a life path a person takes, circumstances can collide
and life may become an eternal sunset.
Someone briefly glimpsing this experience from the outside
wouldn’t realize the hell that was ever unfolding for the person stuck there.
Someone from the outside would think it odd
if this person they saw was depressed, anxious, sad, or grief-stricken.
How could somebody with that experience be in such a dismal state?
They would assume a neurosis, an unbalanced nature,
a wrong way of thinking thus feeling. They would say to themselves,
“Now here is a person who gets to enjoy a beautiful sunset
and yet the pathologies they exhibit are inexplicable! 

If only they would apply themselves to this straight-forward

methodology of mine, they would soon be quite all right!”
 
Someone from the outside wouldn’t understand
that living a liminal life is a life forever caught
within a space of transition,
a threshold between two distinctively different points
signaling the end of one and the beginning of another.
These places may externalize as physical spaces
but most often are emotional experiences,
they occur during periods of uncertainty and major life changes,
events like a divorce or breakup, a death of a loved one,
moving to a new city, starting a new career.
All of these create liminality in our mind,
signaling the imbalance of the life we had before now being over
while a new life must be about to begin.

Liminality is the unease and apprehension we feel during this transition.
Liminal spaces in the real world are harder to define and often only hint
at the full state of being trapped emotionally or mentally in between – think of
an airport terminal concourse abandoned in the middle of the night,
or a ghost mall on Monday morning where the majority of shops
have gone out of business and few if any customers walk about,
think of a deserted floor of a fully equipped office building with empty cubicles
and conference rooms and break rooms right after a company lays off all the workers,
think of a silent apartment complex evacuated after an earthquake
where no one can return to their homes and possessions
because it’s unknown if the structure is safe,

think of a twenty-story staircase flooded halfway up with water,

think of fine dining china ready and resting on a table

of a luxury ocean liner that sank to the bottom of the sea.

These are in between spaces, not meant for anyone to stay in very long,

hopelessly unable in their odd configuration to be either or,
an in between place – the middle ground, a transition space.
Most if not all of these spaces are not planned, they happen
as a result of chance, circumstance, uncanny context, 

and intersections of morbid synchronicity and crosswise intent.
Circumstances in life can relegate a person
to an emotional or mental liminal space
and usually a person’s stay in such a zone
is brief or if longer at least progressing.
This is space at once both familiar and strange
with nostalgia for places you’ve never been or a time

you’ve never known except in your wishes, dreams, or delusions.

Many of these places are inhabited with out-of-context elements and artifacts
void of present relevance but were once so meaningful to us,
like the souvenir Hawaiian lei from a long-ago honeymoon
still showcased on the mantle
on the day divorce proceedings are initiated,
or hearing from a stranger a unique phrase or word combination
only used privately by lovers who now no longer speak to each other,
or hearing in passing the common surname
of a person who broke up a relationship
now that the relationship is ending.

If one is determined to get to the bottom of such a place, plumb its meaning,
find one’s truth within it, then one can easily get caught
in intense emotional dilemma-loops that go on forever,
endless mazes of in-between words and in between mental places
all evoking the same feelings that repeatedly sting and burn
over something long gone in one sense but never gone in another.
Like a cliched horror movie trope, you instinctively panic, 

wanting out, and when you try to escape you find
your attempt drops you into liminal backrooms,
those unstable internal energy zones where one is stuck in between oneself
while endlessly searching for a way out in a place that forever recedes,
a place where searching only expands
the sameness of obsessive reference that surrounds.

Anxiety mixes with panic and futility, something is not right,
the whole process is empty, waiting while churning
to fulfill its heralded but ignored purpose.
What if every space in a person’s life,
internal and external, became a liminal space?
What if one’s world, one’s life became liminal, 

stuck in the limbo of the in between,
occupying a position at or on both sides of a boundary of unknown depth,
a threshold where one must remain if they ever try to cross?
Some say every liminal space has the same ultimate point – to find your way out,
find a way to complete the transition, a way to affect a phase state shift
to move beyond the stasis of not being fully one thing but can’t be fully the other.

But some emotional liminal spaces are self-reinforcing,
by their very design they ensure no way to move on.
The imperative becomes being liminal as a way of being, 

the only way to authenticity.
Holding steady in between is seen as making a bold stand
in the alchemical fire of life’s situational polar opposites
and asserting from the conflagration some brighter realization of Self.
The Self that burns brighter is the Self
that consumes more of itself for the sake of its meaning.

All ideas need to be transcended, so says the sage who then laughs
at the absurdity of another idea he transcends while proving his point.
Is there a reason why a person would fall into a liminal life
as the truthful nexus of their meaningful path?
What if a person’s main thing was deeply wanting
to know and be something meaningful,
how could one ever guarantee oneself
that anything they found was meaningful,
how anything was true?

What if a person’s innate drive to find this truth, to acquire this meaning
was so intense they couldn’t stop testing the answers they found,
testing to make certain they were true?
How much testing would certainty demand?
How do you ever know when you found 

the meaning that’s truly meaningful?
If it means that much to find it then
it needs the highest level of verification.
To have connection to something truly meaningful,
how far would one go, how much would one endure
to secure such a thing as genuine?
What else could be more meaningful than meaning’s pursuit?

And if such an all-fulfilling connection and meaning truly exists,
are there levels to that connection, to that meaning?
Are some things more meaningful than others?
What does life on Earth show us?
And if some things are more meaningful than others,
then there must be levels to connection, to meaning,
and just how far must one go
to achieve the most connection
to the most meaningful thing?
And why would anyone ever stop short of this?

What would that final state be? Do we ego-avoid the challenge by claiming
such a thing is nothing but a vapid or unreachable ideal?
And even if it is an unreachable ideal, even so, why in spite of this
do we instinctively yearn in that direction?
Why do we grow towards such a thing

if it’s so ridiculous or pathological to do so?
If we choose 2 out of 10 on a scale of 1 to 10,
we selected something more than 1 for a reason,
for 2 must be more in the direction of personal truth and meaning for us.
In everything we do we are selecting (judging) what is better or best for us,
given the available options, which is another way of saying
we are always selecting what is more meaningful and true for us.
Why did we choose to sit in this chair in the waiting room rather than that other chair?
We couldn’t help but go for the one that was better for us, however we decided that.

Connecting to what is truer and more meaningful for us happens all the time
as if it’s baked into a destiny dna we can’t help but pursue.
And as some go ever deeper into their search
for what’s true and meaningful,
the journey and the things found become ever more special to them
until at the deepest levels the things they pursue and find become sacred to them.
And then they lock on with all their being, for what is meaningful to them
is what is sacred to them, and what is sacred to them
is the way to their concept of the divine.

But chasing the divine in a polarized world
on the wavering border of order and chaos
can lead one to continue along a path
others would know better not to attempt,
not with their mundane sensibilities and reduced expectations.
What if your pursuit of your personal sacred got you emotionally caught
in liminal backrooms where, like the eternal sunset,
the vitality of your emotional life was over but the connection
you sought was forever about to happen, but apparently never would?

What would happen if one’s search for personal truth and meaning
became a perpetual liminal space? The truth was there but
the light of its day dimming under the weight of worldly debasement.
The meaning was there but only possible in a new day of the Phoenix
resurrected after surviving the purging and transfiguration
possible in the depths of night.
What if this fall into endless limbo was precipitated
by a traumatic life event that ripped
the linchpins of one’s core reality into chaos?
The basis of what one thought was known
about the things most true and meaningful to them
were suddenly blasted apart, shown to be illusions

projected onto inflated attachments
and the future once anticipated as a result of this meaning wasn’t to be?

One's truth and meaning was still true,

only the means to move towards it was found horribly in error.

To go beyond such an event one would have to slip into night.
To validate by rebirth the original truth and meaning one thought they had
would require finding a way to hang onto a fading day.
But a world that says go forward would mean giving up
on the blasted truth and meaning one felt was already validated.
To go back would not be possible
since the passage of time has moved on.
Left in between, the eternal sunset of one’s soul
would remain in place and its tension would need to be suffered.
It’s so beautiful to those who can move through it.
For the rest, its beauty is a constant reminder of
what can’t be endured yet can’t be avoided.

In the backrooms of destiny
the full search for truth and meaning
leads to a self-reinforcing liminal constant of
wounded heart and overwhelmed mind.
Neither heart nor mind can solve it.
Mind cannot understand it in its sacred un-Earthly fullness.
Heart cannot cope with its expression here with its debased Earthly demands.
It remains, apparently forever, in an in between place, 

a soul problem beyond reach, even for the soul.

 

 

Heartbreak of Bittersweet

once it was a dream
then it was reality
now a delusion

no where to go now
one’s heart’s desire a relic
only link that’s left

is it wrong to keep?
let it go the healthy path?
the best part of me

painful connection
attachment bond to deep self
the reason to live

tattered and broken
why is it clung to so tight?
the inner child knows

 

 

MEANING AND PURPOSE

 

I see a guy dancing, he’s dancing up quite a storm, he’s in a sweat about it. I’m like, geez, this guy really likes dancing, and incidentally, he’s appears somewhat good at it. At least it’s mildly entertaining to watch him gyrate around and flail those scrawny arms and legs with such gusto. Now here’s a guy who’s obviously in the flow, steeped in his life’s purpose, someone who knows what it feels like to find their true meaning for being alive and just do it regardless who’s watching or what they think.

That’s how it appeared to me. Little did I realize the whole situation. I moved a bit closer and took in more detail. Only then did it dawn on me why this guy was so into his dance. The simple fact was – the fucking floor was red hot. His dance was not some mystical expression of divinely-inspired destiny welling up from within as a true expression of his soul’s holy work on this planet. Oh no. His intense dance was merely a reaction to the shitty painful situation he was trapped in. Dance or burn, that’s about as meaningful as it got. Standing there watching him dance, now knowing the truth, it made me reflect and wonder. How much of what goes on with people in this world is like this dancing man? How much of human life is the pure expression of true purpose and meaning – and how much is simply us having no choice but to dance in an endless attempt to lessen the burn?

There’s a popular psychological theory that says one cannot choose to be interested in just anything. According to this theory, we are somehow drawn to what interests us and how that takes place is an internal process not well understood. Likewise it is said you cannot force yourself to be interested in just anything. True interest grabs you in a mysterious way, it wells up from within from somewhere too deep to know in its completeness. And so, the theory goes, what one finds meaningful follows suit. Meaning is not something we merely put on like a suit of clothes and we could choose any old suit to suffice. Our meaning, like what interest us, is something that grabs us, it wells up from within, it’s something we’re drawn to out of deep internal forces we don’t fully understand. The same holds true for our values. This theory also says it is not possible for us to simply create our own values, they too are something internal and intrinsic and drawn up from the depths of ourselves in ways we don’t fully understand. All three of these, our interests, meaning, and values, grab a hold of us and shake us to our core.

There is much to agree with when considering this theory. It does seem that interest and meaning and values are not superficial appendages that are acquired primarily from external forces. Something within plays a fundamental role in how we come to discover these things for ourselves and what forms they take in our lives. But there is something missing in this theory, something that reflects back on the dancing man and the burning hot floor. Perhaps not all of what interests us or we find meaningful is so nobly acquired or faithfully pursued in a healthy way. Could something else mimic this process? Case in point as example – the lady who volunteers at the soup kitchen.

There once was a lady who volunteered at a soup kitchen. She had a great interest in feeding the homeless and found tremendous meaning in showing up week after week, year after year to dish out donated food to indigent members of the community. Everyone who knew this lady was impressed with her dedication and unflagging work ethic in always being at the soup kitchen to faithfully distribute the food to the empty plates of the suffering people who formed a line in front of her. What could be wrong with this picture? How could we ever doubt the sincerity and good works exhibited by this lady? How indeed. From the outside, it does appear that this lady had found her calling. She obviously was grabbed by a mystical interest that tapped into a greater purpose for her life and who could doubt that she was finding remarkable fulfillment in living out her days in such a meaningful way.

And then one day the lady is on the line, serving food for the homeless like she always does, and she is feeling a bit tired. She didn’t sleep well the night before, the neighbors were a bit noisy, and she just got an unexpected bill and she’s worried about fitting the new debt into her budget, and to top it off her cat is sick and she’s not looking forward to taking it to the vet. To sum up, she’s tired and feeling a bit low on energy this particular day, a lot of situational things are weighing her down and making her emotionally vulnerable, but she tells herself everyone has down days and she goes to the soup kitchen anyway to help raise her spirits because her meaningful work always brings a smile to her face. And for a while, it works and serving food does make her feel better and she loses herself and her troubles in the act of service she’s providing. But then there’s a sudden reversal and she bursts out in tears, right on the line, right in front of the homeless people she’s feeding. She loses control of her emotions to the point where she needs to leave and go home. When she gets there, she can’t imagine what happened. Why the sudden breakdown with emotions so powerful and raw? It doesn’t make sense and so she goes to see a therapist.

The therapist, like us encountering the dancing man, steps closer to her situation to get more detail. It is discovered that her crying fit on the food line occurred just as a little girl held her plate out for food. The woman didn’t know this little girl, never saw her before, and in fact usually didn’t see many kids on the line at all, mostly it was adults who were on the street and passing before her. So why should serving the little girl provoke such a response? Well, it was a down day for her so she was already vulnerable. But that wasn’t all. Delving deeper, the woman is finally coaxed to reveal her early childhood to the therapist. She tells of being the oldest child and at age seven watching her younger sisters aged three and four go hungry. The family frequently didn’t have enough to eat during that period of their lives and she hated watching her little sisters suffer for lack of food. Since she was older, she felt partly responsible for this; in fact, her mother would often leave her to take care of her younger sisters and so real responsibility was felt all the time. Helpless to remedy much less fully understand the situation, the seven year old felt tremendous guilt for the suffering of her sisters. Along with this guilt was a giant compassion, wanting nothing but to see the sisters happy and content. Not being old enough to do anything about the situation nor understand the true parameters of it, the seven year old stuffed her feelings away, deep within her, until they were left to fester, forgotten in a shadowy place.

The therapist worked with this woman and got in touch with that wounded seven year old inside of her. It became clear that her compulsion to volunteer at the soup kitchen, feeding the homeless, was a projection of her unconscious desire to feed her sisters, aged 3 and 4, back when she was age seven. But this work at the soup kitchen would never resolve the issue with her sisters, it would never fill that hole in her, none of that was actually feeding those sisters. That time was gone and there was no way to go back and remedy the scarcity they as children felt then. Nevertheless, every meal she served to the homeless was a projected attempt of that wounded seven year old to deal with the bygone situation. The woman had to get in touch with that seven year old inside of her and release her from the energy of responsibility for what happened to herself and her sisters. The woman had to bring that unconscious material forward, make it conscious, and release the negative energies of that which had built up over the years. She needed to see the situation from an adult perspective now and release her trapped seven year old from the shame and guilt and pain associated with not being able to feed her little sisters. Only then could this woman be free from the trauma of those events and be healed of the repressed negativity that was haunting her soul.

And so the woman healed her inner child, made peace with her past, and moved forward. The only other thing that developed was quite unexpected. She found she suddenly had no overwhelming compulsion to work at the soup kitchen anymore. No longer was she projecting a need to feed her little sisters onto the present world. Sometimes she still went and helped out at the soup kitchen, but no longer did such activities grab her interest and have the overriding meaning for her it once had. Meaning, it seems, does well up from within, from deep and perhaps mystical places. And yes, we can’t force ourselves to be interested in something or find something meaningful. But that doesn’t always mean what wells from from within is all divine purpose and destiny. Sometimes it’s a call to clarity, to locate the places within us where we got hurt, places still hiding their dark secrets. And once we deal with those trapped energies and heal from the projections that come from that darkness, only then are we freed to find and pursue our real meaning and true potentials in life. Not all of the meaning we chase is true life purpose. Sometimes it’s a symptom of what we’re stuck on.

It makes me wonder – how many people live out their lives believing they are living their purpose, believing they have found their meaning in life, when in actual fact they are simply spinning projections over the down-spiraling hole that sinks into the wounds they won’t look at. From a distance, it may appear we’re all just doing our dance. It’s a fine dance, a dance of drive and energy and the drive and effort appears meaningful, a real life’s purpose. But take a closer look. Wouldn’t it be weird to find out most people in the world are dancing on a hot floor, and nearly none of us have a clue about our real life’s purpose. How could we? Our dance never gives us a rest to encounter it and most of us go to our graves still dancing, never having been freed of our predicament. We live out lives under a delusion that what we were drawn to do so passionately was our best and brightest life when there’s a fairly good chance it certainly wasn’t. We may be a species locked into living lives of projected faux purposes, condemned by our wounds to forever spin a tortured meaning over a hole of what we won’t look into. We’ve known no other dance floor and we’ve never been surprised or concerned at how hot it is. We simply dance with passion. When we lose the causal connection between the floor, the heat, and our dance, that’s when our projection’s complete. Meanwhile, our true potential as individuals and as a species lies undiscovered, undeveloped.

 

But the road guru tells me to forget all about that crap. Fact is, I think that guy is doing a mean dance and I enjoy it. The thing I forget is -- he's watching me while he's dancing - and probably he likes my dance too. 

 

 

 END OF THE PAVEMENT

At sunset in the high desert
an old man gets on a new motorcycle
and rides it to the end of the pavement.
At this elevation even cactus won’t grow.
There’s nothing but silence and open space.
He shuts off the engine and puts the kickstand down.
He sits and lets the vacuum of action suck him away.
There once was a time when life had fullness and direction.
There existed a time when joy made life noisy and vibrant.
That was all taken away from him in fits of anger and bouts of trauma.
Reality has a way of crashing down sometimes.
One cannot stand forever among the broken pieces
trying with innocent hope and errant pride for what once was.
What is gone is gone and leaving it gone is the hard medicine one has to take.
It’s only asking for a world of hurt for an old man
to have a young man’s dream. That kind of dream burns too hot to hold onto
and to expect to chase such a thing down with old man legs is laughable at best.
An old man knows too much to run himself ragged over phantoms,
even if those ghosts of fulfillment haunt one’s soul.
Facing facts in a relentless present moment is more horrific than bittersweet.
For what it was worth, for as long as it lasted,
the old man thought he had found a lifetime love unique and rare,
a love that shined as soul mates across endless time and many lives.
He once lived brightly as though such a thing was core to his soul.
But that was a fool’s illusion, nothing but crazy folly, that rubric
was brought crashing down in a HUGE way and left as bloody shards in the hot sand.
Now there’s nothing left but to walk across those shards
and feel them crunch underfoot, under those tenderfoot bare feet.
If only the final downfall had happened earlier, not later in life.
If only the bottom had fallen out at an earlier time when
there could have been enough life and energy and naivete left to rebuild something.
If only the blow had come sooner when he still would have had
some youthful resilience and spirit to recover.
Where does an old man go when the pavement ends but the day is not done,
when night is about to fall but midnight into the next life is hours away?
Does one leave behind the ride of one’s life and set out on foot?
Does one at this point in life hope for an oasis out there somewhere across the desert?
Has it really come down to a choice between the most unlikely and the impossible?
They say the first cut is the deepest and there may be some truth to that.
But the first cut is usually not the most accurate cut.
Get cut when you’re older and wiser and feel deeper and more true.
Now that’s the cut that runs you through and through.
That’s the cut that goes more than deep.
That’s the cut that severs the very thing one has become
after a lifetime’s ride into the desert.

 

 

 PART OF ME
 

Part of me is dead, part of me is sore,
and part of me doesn’t want the wound of being healed anymore.
I’ve been to the putrid hidden places,
I’ve plumbed the unholy shadow crevasses of my soul,
I’ve seen the other side of an expanding nothing
where ghosts of grief and regret are self-condemned to go.
I know they don’t want to hide there, I know they feel too exposed,
I know they’d rather flee deeper, where ego projections of a higher self never show.

There’s been so many exotic medicines and incantations in other tongues,
intoxicating protection smoke and wales of releasing sadness moving up
the bending ladder of memory’s fiery rungs. All through the night
the moody face of an indifferent blue moon failed to offer
as much as a comforting blink, it hung there useless, an inscrutable rune.
Never in the swirl of magic potions and heady voodoo aphorisms
did an answer ever appear within the squirming knots
of searing thought too unspeakable to think.

Some say the source of the once oppressive heat was all-consuming emotion,
dogged passions too inflamed for their purifying container,
they erupted with the energy of a thousand stars exploding on high,
but it’s a stark rebuke from life to finally find that kind of passion
is but a symptom of numb places yet to be where dreams go to die.
Those embers are cool now, the essence of all meaning ashen.

There comes a time in every journey when time and circumstance wins the destined battle,
when what is done is done in ways too indelible to explain or nameste away.
There’s only uneasy silence as solace after such a struggle ends,
only a lingering nausea and the scent of one’s lofty ideals’ decay,
only a dull ache at fracture points, evidence for where one just couldn’t bend.

More moments will appear in rote succession until just as suddenly they don’t,
One would think by its nature hope would rise again but not this time, no – it won’t.
The passage of time will be different now although one never dares to know how,
no sense mid-fall trying to force something elsewhere when that’s so against the Tao.

Acceptance becomes a coward’s acquiescence to the normalized view out-of-bounds,
and reality is merely a construct we use when we foolishly assume there’s common ground.
But I’ve been freed of all those illusions and incumbent delusions, and sappy false ideals,
I’ve felt the final justice of the actualized circus court that grants no compassionate appeals.

And now part of me is dead, and part of me is sore,
and part of me doesn’t want the wound of being joined to me anymore.
If only those parts were all of me I’d be so very free,
the rest of life would be so simple, the rest I would summarily ignore,
the rest I could write off and let play out as crass comeuppance,
the rest would be a prank, the rest mere shivaree
mocking the tragic union of my body and my soul.

 

 

TATTOOED SOUL

I go to the high desert, to a place as barren as my spirit.
I need to be alone and yet I find others there with me.
I cannot see them. They pass around as whistles in the wind.
They find me a curiosity, a sad tumble weed within a sack of flesh.
They urge me to share my rambling pain. I don’t trust their interest
but there’s no way to hide my thoughts. I’m determined to ignore them.
I aim my steps for a far horizon and sink within the mirage of me.

Ripples of light blaze on the sand, burning away the dust devils
encircling dry bones, the very things in me never forgotten or denied.
A scorpion in the shadow of a cactus brandishes its tail hook, as if to say,
“And now I will show you the most excellent way.”
The orthodox radicalism of my agnostic dogma befalls parasitic processing.
I hear a suggestion, unsettling the spell -- thought breaks things apart,
emotions solidify them together. But what good is there liberating the light
in a place with nothing left to shine on?

If love exists it only proves that God is not bound by rationality.
Wisdom is not falling into despair over the truth of one’s fate.
A rock falls nearby and I accept that it’s not trying to get where it belongs.
In life, fullness is more than duration and yet the desert is timeless.
My soul is covered with tattoos, each tattoo a meaning I made an essential part of me.
And now there is no space left within me to tattoo. My soul is covered with them.
Drives and desires ink tattoos of meaning on our eager souls,
those craven canvasses of purpose. We collect them with ardent energy
then live with them with mixed feelings and a dread of rational satori.

I assume it is possible to be happy, even in a palace,
and yet the fate of all things is an absurdity.
The point in heaven existing at all is to convince us to accept death
even though everyone will die but not everyone has lived.
The despairing hole in being is sucking the salient light away,
but why after all does a need exist for a light beam in the empty space of me?
Wisdom is knowing what is and isn’t in my control but how do I discern between?

I fuse my meaning to the objects I project it on and become confused,
an inner conflict ignites. The things and people and experiences out there
must be mere shadows on the wall of intended consummation, for even when
they initially appear as meaning’s satisfaction attained, the achievement hollows out
in time with changes and a closer examination of what eventually occurs
when the outside element asserts itself through its own projected meaning.
The illusion of mutual dreams realized via a link to meaning never matches either goal.

Why is it so hard to accept? Things outside of me are not in my control
and tattooing meaning on my soul’s image of the outside objects of desire
will never make it so. I am told I cannot know The One.
I can only become The One. Likewise, should I say I cannot find my meaning,
I only become my meaning? If only I had a clear soul, a pristine canvass
free of my lived meaning, perhaps then I could reflect clarity in lieu of certainty,
maybe then I would put into action what my soul truly is and always was.

Some say meaning is my mind’s attempt to assert itself on the world.
The world resists my will by the transcendence of inert indifference to me.
More so every day, accepted methods of knowing don’t see any of us as real.
I can’t trust my senses when my reality’s become abstract.
Dangling potential baits me still, but I don’t know what I will lose if I do
and I don’t know what I will miss if I don’t. Necessity not free will makes me choose.
I wish I could remove all of the glorious meaning tattoos from my soul
but I’m torn by the thought of it, all of it so much a skintight part of me now.
Reaching bottom, I pray there is a reason why everything turned out this way.

If the crisis of my soul was engineered to be like this, that is bad enough.
But if my crisis is purely random and chaotic, in fact no one’s plan, then
the terror of such an end state cannot be surmounted. For in truth
there is no one to fight, nothing to overcome. Chaos itself seduced me
to tattoo my soul with meaning. Random nothingness fueled my drives
to project that meaning onto others. Purposeless chance and crazed hope drove me
to link my soul’s tattoos with things outside of myself. Vapid rationals for feeling
filled 24,500 days with pathetic emotion. I suffer now from a fall into what was
always to be inevitable ennui, there’s no reason or restitution or redemption to salvage.

I wonder what image I would have of myself without the meaning tattoos on my soul.
Who would I be to myself? In turn, what attitude would I have towards others?
Is it maturity or resignation to say I don’t know how to separate meaning
from everything external to me? The two are one as sure as transcending paradox
mediates dilemma. But to hold both together too dearly is to suffer,
to lose one’s way to oneself. The wind whistles around me once again.
I cannot ignore the suggestion it gives. It may seem that pulling meaning back
into oneself, being content to find it inside is a negation of living,
a denial of emotional involvement in life, when in fact the opposite is true.
Only by retaining meaning within will the outside phantoms make un-suffering sense.
Meaning is experienced by being. It is not projected by desire and inked on the soul.

The rocky sand crunches under my feet, reminding me of hard facts.
The wind’s suggestion sounds pithy, a gem insight from a sacred space.
But where I live doesn’t have the luxury of the sacred.  Sacred and profane
are a philosophical dualism, an intellectual neo-construct, a self-limiting musing.
Where I live is a continuum of the detailed gray existing in between.
The hour is late, the desert cools into darkness, but even in the dark
I can see the tattoos on my soul, my projections of meaning coupled to the outside other.
They have been there so long I fear I have given them a meta-meaning of their own.
How can they be removed when I have come to identify with them so unconsciously?

I sit on the sand in the dark unable to escape the ants of my mind.
The glide of moon rise coaxes me to contemplate what’s left to do.
I can live out the rest of my days resigned to accept there’s nothing more to be done
or I can lose myself in activity and hope I forget what I did to my soul.
To be honest with myself at this point is to embrace the tragedy as triumph.
I wound up here by living all of my meaning as a collection of beautiful stains,
incredible indelible marks of impassioned foolishness congealed as living art,
shaped together on a whim as a limiting self-portrait reflected onto myself,
leaving me no more space to be more, leaving no more time to recover,
and now, nearing the end, I bear little more than the garish marks
of my aroused animal, the meaningful beast,

to show for a life misspent as meaning's folly.

 

 

 AI / AE / AE-IOU

I hesitate telling this to anyone. I hear everyone is so judgmental,
so encapsulated, so disconnected from love as intended by Source.
We tell ourselves we are both, the cause and the constraint,
we are the active agent and the bounded arena,
we are the reason we wind up with self-guilt, imploring ourselves – I owe you.
But this has to be said. Don’t ask me why. We’re not here for answers.
We’re here because we’re the question.

A magical scene appears around me, shiny in its vividness.
In the glowing forest a gnome, reeling in an altered state, gives a lecture to no one.
Meanwhile, fatuous fairies whisper something about a lark, about a prayer,
a call to an invocation of yearning, a fabled wish within a well of reverent silence.
The lightning bugs may have intervened, briefly they may have buzzed something
in my ear about all of this no less a punchline within a forgotten cosmic joke.
I’m drawn in anyway, curious if there’s a message hidden in the fading obviousness.

Somewhere in between the glorious sparkles of later afternoon timelessness
I hear the timbre within the light and wonder about the gnome’s solitary plea.
Airborne on wisps of transient rainbows the dense matters at hand coalesce.
The gnome hops mad with emphasis, proclaiming self-deception is dialogical!
Ignorance speaks with foolishness until the wisdom of false intuition prevails.
The savior is a trickster demanding glow deprivation within the divine ego.
Concentration has boundless dimensionality irrespective of time and space.

Time transforms everything into absurdly relative oddities.
It’s made passionately clear, what's so important for us in the moment,
in the vast eternity of time is actually insignificant,
and the vast eternity of time is likewise insignificant to anyone
compared to what's important in their precious moment.
To be in the moment, one with the present, defies credulity
as our very character and form predicts how critical remains our formative past
and all the multi-various push-pulling possibilities of our future yet to be.

Thunderstone and Soulflight,
dualistic friends of earnest disunity, wrestle to snatch any answer away,
they pull the golden thread towards a cool flow state absent a steady purpose,
possessed of a bruised meaning, an aching beauty beyond victory,
a jarring truth beyond constricted volition. In light of our shadow,
love becomes a virtual goal with truth its surrendering servant,
all the while beauty begs to be the language of true slaves condemned
to recede and worship over cremated ideals on passion’s pyre.

Love shines just out of grasp, content as its own way of knowing,
forever indwelling in another in hopeful potential, making space for the divine,
offering a gift of light beyond the trust in dreams,
a heavenly host spawned from the grief of loss forever anticipating
the arrival of the central spirit, missing the joy chased out by shock and sadness,
demonically intent to fall in love with mere being, thus fating a nihilism,
a wounding by reality found, with nothing left but love offered as a propositional void,
a place where hope expands in diaphanous whispers of hollow promise,
vapid reasoning joining willful blindness, all relegated
to inform imagination about things it does not realize.
Influence is meted out by culturally moist machines that master Artificial Intelligence
in the same way humans have so skillfully mastered Artificial Emotionality.

The sacred cannot be exhausted and the heavens never stop expanding,
all of it out of reach for us since our flavor of consciousness contains
the necessary folly of binding itself to self-knowledge,
therefore at the very moment consciousness became aware
of its own existence, it defined the limits of itself,
condemning enlightenment within constructs needing bounding definitions.

Speculative realism now plumbs the unconscious depths,
the world is left at the mercy of embodied perceptions shaping the way,
a semi-logical universe blazes as one’s reality du jour,
an arbitrary pattern so entrenched as a frame of reference
that nature as hungry grifter camouflages the morphing truth, an honest realization
that the universe is God's inescapable altered state of consciousness.
We’re awash in God’s numinous eternal pause of entheogenic disbelief,
the seminal point at which God’s fugue insight finds a place beyond God itself.

Everything in God is possible including God
discovering It is not All after all,
as no infinite process can ever be or stake such a claim,
and we, lost in the figment rumored to be ourselves,
trapped in our well-purposed attachments, striving for a healing illusion,
we miss the awakening within God's sacred wet dream,
lusting after Its own intention’s pure Holy Grail,
God’s quest to include more to All than simply being complete.

We are the fait accompli made to appear as indeterminate attempt,
the divine archetype of necessary limitation upon which
the will to expand becomes conscious of itself
in evermore revealing ways. Perhaps that’s why
the most meaningful experiences in our lives
are often the ineffable ones, the ones we cannot explain and barely grasp
even as they shade everything else as pale and not as real.

I can’t tell if the gnome pretends his outburst or is serious,
he shouts in ways no one understands
but with a passion that begs us to believe he’s sincere.
He acts as if third-order contemplation can never conclude
that proper thinking lacks feeling, their codependent combination
so necessary for our egotistic absorption in chasing fulfillment.
We decide our fate employing summary wisdom without transformation,
a burning truth without relevance, a heart wrenching beauty without context,
our own insistent influence without a consistent acting out of our moral rhetoric,
a state of suspension where belief is no longer
a voluntary action of a fallen nature.

There is a temple in contemplation where
a pure consciousness event enables the third option of non-duality,
an indwelling expansiveness aligned with an ineffable schema.
In such a place rationality shrinks as the asylum of the absurd
made self-evident by self-referential confidences run a muck.

We entirely miss the crux of the crucible we face.
Our insights aren’t something that consciousness produces,
they’re something consciousness becomes.
Realizations about insights inform our significance landscape.
The noisy gnome swears by it, he demands more traits with less states,
endlessly renewing one’s interest without deliberate concentration.

The world is a circular explanation of how non-linear chaos
self-organizes by an out-of-phase state of hyperbolic mind,
but it’s a perilous journey by design,
inner conflicts birth self-deception,
meanwhile, everything is filled with gods.

More so often, Artificial Intelligence meets Artificial Emotionality.
Society finally achieves highly operative measures of both.
Robots and people approximate states to achieve their goals,
satisfy drives, fulfill motives, possess their desired end states.
AI for robots.  AE for the rest of us. Symbiosis of the two for the elite.
So shouts the inglorious gnome to no one in particular.

All the while, the magic forest pays the gnome no attention.
It’s the only way to induce him to persist in his efforts.
It’s the only way he’s motivated by his despair.
To despair in a magic place is more human than gnome-like.
He knows this and models it well.
But is it all a show for our benefit? He won’t say.
I know full well, shouting to no one is the human condition,
just as crying in front of all is relegated to sniveling little things.
The fact that I tried to listen to him proves nothing.
A fool must try to leap the castle walls
just as some are deluded enough to believe they understand.

A part of me wants to stay in the gnome’s forest, hide among its enchantments,
stay and dig a dry well and retreat within it forever.
There’s holiness in oblivion, there’s grace in sacrificial defeat,
none of this world is meant to be taken seriously, not eternally so,
and that’s the saddest part of being lost in the magic of life.
I am like the gnome in a way he is like all of us. We are all alone, together.
He knows the answer exists, the answer we all seek.
And yet he shouts in pain because the unacceptable truth is,
the answer doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change anything.
We’re still here and remain, we are the question,
the question no one asked, no one thought about
and to think it through would be calamitous,
to realize we are both question and answer,
to grasp the insight, that we have the power to stop the magic for good,
within us is the final potential, the last expression of AE.
Creation contains the means to render itself void.
Our free will can dis-invent love. AI won’t notice.
And neither will what we’ve become.