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Micro-story Spell Cocktails or "Sometimes Why"

The idea is to tell a very short story with yourself/an avatar/fictional stand-in as the main character and to "spell it out" what the change you are "trying" to will into being.

For example, "Alexander was unable to find a way to follow his soul's purpose and kept getting distracted. He had a hard time understanding how, or even sometimes why, his friends, peers, colleagues didn't seem to struggle like he did with making a living, being healthy, starting families, owning houses, and that sort of thing.

[It's best to rein it in and nip it and snip it early and faster. It's more important at this stage to complete the thing than to "do a good job" or whatever. Because this is very much like an infant or awakened coma-victim learning to walk with muscles that not yet adequately developed. The sooner you can accept a realistic idea of what your "muscles" are capable of doing, the sooner you can start appropriately and efficiently strengthening them and expanding the boundaries of their limitations. "Muscle" is basically the biological manifestation of will. I would say they are part of a sort of continuum or system of will which connects the "mind"/"I"/Self/Consciousness with the material world ... Anyway in this context obviously we are talking less about physical strength and stamina and more about "skills of will" such as ... willing one's attention back to a particular task when distracted by a thought or stimulus; holding the "end result"/"Final Cut" in awareness while simultaneously attentive to the "here and now" -- analogy like ascending a mountain, where you can see the peak, which is your goal, and keeping an eye on it while also avoiding roots and loose rocks and navigating what is immediate; also including not getting stuck looking at the distant peak and its majestic beauty, or absorbed with some tree bark or the antics of clever insects. ...]

Then one day he had a magical experience and realised that he was part of the Universe, and the Universe was an eternal, infinite, loving conscious Self, that was willing to commune and interact with Alexander in his current embodied, time-bound, finite life, and Alex started to connect with this seed core of Infinite Creative Intelligence and the more he did, he found he had more courage and willingness to do what he was meant to do in this life. It's hard to find the right word for it. "Easy" and "Effortless" hint at it but it's more like a nondual thing where it is BOTH effortless and the hardest thing you've ever had to do. The two are bound together and not at all mutually exclusive. Though in the moment it can be hard to accept this truth.

So then, he was able to be self-regulated and "be his own boss" and find ways to make a living doing things like working with plants and garden systems; creating foods and edible delights for people; giving healing massage type qi body work; performing in a variety of ways and mediums; telling stories through film, writing, and spoken word; and so on. He met a girl that was to him the most beautiful girl he'd ever met, within and without, and she felt that he was beautiful too, in his own unique way, and she could sense in him Great Love, and she offered her own Love and they "became as one" and supported each other to realise their "highest potential" and "soul's/life purpose". the end

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"Fail hard""Fail hard"

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I want to be an easy and smooth, balanced and graceful source of "positive energy", that is a source of inspiration and creativity, of hope ... of uplifting messages that help people burn through the fog of indecision and distractions.

You know. And foremost I would love these to be messages to myself, to the parts of myself that need to hear it from the "Executive Function" -- like, make your Executive Function a character. Give them a voice and a persona, play with the idea of different actors in the role.

It makes sense that I've seen more of a culture around "creating memes" and that whole language of conveying something -- a feeling, an idea -- in an instantaneous blast of image ... Often images borrowed from popular culture ...

The juxtaposition of text on the foundation of an image or character already embedded in the collective consciousness.

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It's true, I am struggling with things like consistency and focus.

I really feel like if I could just maintain a daily practice/routine I could be really successful ... or something.

I have to get over the impulse / feeling that I should have started long ago and it's too late to start and should just give up

What is the strategy?

Output and feedback. To start, to generate even small, incremental amounts of inspiration and influence and use those to -- like David Lynch writes about in "Catching the Big Fish" ... it's like you do these little creative acts, catch "little fish", little ideas swimming in the shallows of consciousness, and then those can be used as like "bait" to catch "big fish ideas" ....

My issues are with organization and distraction. And veering towards "instant" rather than "delayed" gratification..

Honestly right now, or in recent years even, or always, I just seem to be getting worse at doing anything consistently for more than a day or two consecutively.

Why? What would it take to be able to start doing the same thing every day? Like, practicing music, learning new skill, etc.

Is medication going to make a difference? I really kind of doubt it. I feel like my flavour of neurodivergence isn't going to be helped by meds. Still anticipating trying.

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Okay. Here's one thing. Is practicing/training the will. To do an action even and especially when you "don't feel like it." Somehow. You have to be able to get through that resistance.

Is this really just an ADHD thing? Like... something actually biological...? I find it hard to believe, or at least.... I find it contrasts with the beliefs I wish to believe. Sort of.

What I want to believe is ... sort of essentially in the vein of "The Artist's Way" and Steven Pressfield's books on creativity, such as "The War of Art"... That we come into this life with a "calling" -- that is connected to our deepest Nature as part of the Universe/God/the Tao etc ... and that it is a process of growth ... through .... friction and resistance. Like "resistance training" muscles makes the muscles stronger over time, with regular, consistent practice.... it's true with our creative spirit ... maybe even, I speculate, that it's like we are "made in God's image", i.e. we are potential gods ourselves -- that we are infinite within and of the Infinite ... and this life, or lives we live through in this world and this reality of dualism is in some ways like a school, and education, a training program for us to learn how to follow the big "G" God, that is both within and without, that is Love ... that we are subjected to temptations and "easy ways" and instant gratification style pleasures that aren't morally good or bad or evil, but are just like opportunities to learn what kinds of decisions and choices are authentically satisfying and which are just superficial.

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Okay. I am feeling, and have felt for so many years, a kind of fixation on ... figuring out a way to live well.

I was compulsive about books and knowledge. I think to a fault; I collected and accumulated more books than I could realistically hope to read and integrate in a lifetime, thinking I would somehow synthesize a "grand theory" of sorts. Something inclusive of science and spirituality...

I'm going to take some influence from Jasun Horsley and go through my evolution of influences, since I don't see a way to dissociate my life from my philosophy.

Early on ... I think in my early adolescence -- it must have been after my older brother by seven years had left home to live and work in a Camphill Community in Ireland (connected with Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy -- my parents and I went on a short vacation during March break to somewhere north in Ontario where there was still plenty enough snow to go snowshoeing and staid in a hotel. In that hotel, in the drawer of the sidetable next to the bed where ordinarily at that time one would find a copy of the bible I found "Conversations With God" by Neale Donald Walsh.

I hadn't thought too much about "God" before that, that I can remember. My parents hadn't taken us to church at all despite (or because of) my mom coming from a Catholic upbringing and my father's father being a minister (Presbyterian?). But something grabbed me and I devoured the book. I think it was the first time I was exposed to the idea of "God" as not a separate entity but as here and now present in our thoughts, feelings, ideas, circumstances and environment; that at some level we were all inherently divine by nature and that we were "God" experiencing Itself subjectively; a hidden Unity within an illusion of separateness. This struck me as such a beautiful, obvious truth.

My brother was influential, despite being physically absent during these seminal years as I approached adulthood. He had a spiritual inclination, and during this time in my teens I went through his bookshelf. Another book that I read and influenced me was "The Dragon Doesn't Live Here Anymore," by Alan Cohen. I don't remember much specifically about this book now, other than that it was a bit "New Age-y" and was one of these narratives I'd come to recognise about a "typical" middle-class white Westerner "discovering" Eastern mysticism and getting taken in by some kind of guru/spiritual teacher. Similar to another book from my brother's shelf, "Be Here Now" by Ram Dass/Richard Alpert.

Also during this period and thanks to my brother's small library I began to discover Jack Kerouac, and read through a number of his semi-autobiographical novels like "On the Road," "Dharma Bums" and "Desolation Angels". I think this was also when I started to see more of the "shadow side" of things -- it was confusing at first to learn that Kerouac, despite being creative, successful, and "spiritual" had nonetheless still ended up essentially committing slow suicide and dying young through alcoholism. Despite this, I still picked up a distorted romanticized view of this lifestyle -- that one could be a "spiritual" artist/creator and also a hedonistic asshole.

This was further compounded by my reading "Tropic of Cancer" by Henry Miller, who painted a picture of living in poverty, borrowing money to buy wine, writing and womanizing, which started to seem very cool to me -- I had little self-awareness and virtually no social skills. I had a few short-lived relationships that basically consisted of me fixating and obsessing with a girl and then (if and when they actually kind of reciprocated) they or I would distance ourselves or break things off.

I thrived briefly in a special program where 20 or so students got to work in a sort of outdoor education setting where we learned about deep ecology, Taoism, took turns cooking lunch and washing up, and had grade 4 and 5 students come for overnight field trips where we would put on activities and performances to teach about environmentalism stuff. Every semester two or three students were selected from applicants to continue as co-op helpers and intermediaries between the program instructors and the next semester of students. I wanted to do this and I believe was very close to being selected but was rejected because I'd struggled to hand in my final assignment on time. I didn't know that this was because of my ADHD neurotype. I thought I was just undisciplined and prone to procrastination. To this day this rejection haunts me and I feel like I lost part of myself in that moment. All of my close friends were selected into this role except me and I don't think I will ever forgive the teacher for his ignorance and lack of understanding. But he was basically a child himself, I think only in his late twenties, and at the time neurodivergency wasn't well-known or recognized like it is today. Still, the correct thing to do would have been to draw out my potential and help me improve rather than rejecting and shaming me.

Also during these years I had terrible self-esteem and would look at myself in the mirror and repeatedly punch myself in the face for being "ugly." Also, apparently in grade six I had started "cutting" myself or something but I don't remember doing that, and it's possible that the attention it got made me learn to be more discreet about my self-harming "meltdowns" -- they would always be in extreme states of emotional overwhelm and never deliberate. Always violent outbursts. Of course I felt immense shame and embarrassment about doing this sort of thing once I had calmed down.

....

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So this is a kind of therapy.

Yes, I've been resisting therapy for many years. I think there is something in my condition/neurotype that is suspicious and highly critical of authority figures and the whole culture around "experts".

I was sent to a couple counselors around grade two or three -- maybe 8 - 10 years old? And I don't really remember much but from what I've been told I was not cooperative and refused to go back.

Certainly my parents were not great at making me do things I didn't want to. I guess I was a very "willful" child. Really we are all fucked up with PTSD from the sudden death of my older brother, who was only four at the time. I was 6 months old, and my oldest brother was seven.

This was in the 80s and I don't believe the effects of trauma were yet well understood, never mind how to process and heal it. We should have all been doing therapy. My parents seemed to have a kind of denial-approach and just let us do our thing and hoped that we would turn out all right.

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Okay, I'm going to keep pushing ... it's better to make sporadic incremental efforts than to give up and do nothing.

My thinking is that this can be a place to practice sharing output in a semi-public space... Probably no one will ever see it, which gives some sense of it being pretty "safe" and low-risk, but at the same time the potential possibility for it to be seen by anyone on the internet serves as a relatively gentle impetus to write and create with coherence and cogency.

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"Science will give us mastery over ourselves, over the puzzles of nature, and ultimately over death. Dense calculations and the electrical spasms inside microscopic circuits will allow us to map and know the universe. It is only a matter of time before we work out how to be immortal." (The School of Life, "How to Survive the Modern World", 2021. p.3)

It's interesting to me when people deify "Science" like this. If we really want to be truly "scientific" are we not obligated to simply acknowledge what and how much we don't know. The difference between "possibly might" and "will" in this context is the difference between a rational statement and a cult.

Is it really so hard to say "we think this may be the way this [specific aspect of reality] tends to behave based on this [specific and relevant data], but there is a lot we don't know."

Is it possible that some kind of paradox is at the nature of reality? That is, can one thing be true and another, contradictory thing, also be true?

I want to elaborate on this, because it's something I've been fixated with for years and have never found a satisfying way to reconcile "materialist" and "spiritualist" paradigms. ...

...

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Jabberwocky (1977)

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Face-Bathing

Like forest-bathing but in the city when you walk you just turn your face to neutral, open, receptive yet radiant lovingkindness and let everyone's faces wash over you.

There's more I'd like to say about this...

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I feel like it's been too easy for me to get stuck on projects because of perfectionism. So part of what this is is just getting my nervous system used to putting stuff out in public with consistency. Even if no one sees it I believe there is still inherent value in this practice, in the potential possibility that someone could come across it my chance or intentionally. And so I also am doing this to make a habit of putting stuff out there with the intent that it might be of help or inspiration to someone else.

I do choose to believe that we all have something within us that can be made into a gift or offering of love, and connecting with this inner creative core is maybe the most important thing for us to do in life. In a way that benefits all.

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Statue of Ganesh, Spanish Banks, Vancouver BC circa 2022

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Looking South from Industrial Ave. Vancouver, BC, December 2022

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January 2024

Around 3rd and Manitoba, I think

#Vancouver #Street art

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