Consequence, precursors

“So here too he feels terrified and bewildered when the blood-drinking deities appear with their huge bodies and thick limbs, filling the whole of space, but as soon as he is shown he recognizes them as his own projections or as yidams; the luminosity on which he has meditated before and the self-existing luminosity which arises later, mother and son, merge together, and, like meeting someone he used to know very well, the self-liberating luminosity of his own mind spontaneously arises before him, and he is self-liberated.”

 ~ The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Francesca Fremantle & Chogyam Trungpa

I find myself again wandering the abyss.  Something disintegrates.  I wonder about the experience of trying to meditate during a sandstorm.  Hard, abrasive particles whipping themselves across too soft skin at high velocity.  Always come back to the desert.  Always have to cross the desert.   Seems uncomfortable.   I’d like to compare my current abyssal state to that, but I have no frame of reference. 

Chronozon stalks me, maybe I should just let him eat me this time.  Choronzon keeps the gate, ever vigilant, ever hungry.  Gatekeeper and gate?  Keep reminding myself that in order to effervesce you have to push through the bottom of darkness with great force.  Past teeth?  Past gums?  Down his throat?  This relationship has little to do with the Emerald Tablet (as above so below).  My discipline disintegrates, my mind disintegrates.  My memory disintegrates.  I leave hope behind.  Hope is an empty plate when you are starving.

The weather changes.  Fall came quite suddenly; the mornings are now cool enough they require a hoodie.  The children surround themselves in a miasma of anxious angular yellow spirals, not yet settled into the new routine of the school year.   It seems I can do naught but absorb these accursed things. The leaves have yet to begin changing, I prophesize that this will signal the beginning of the calm.

Work schedule changes.  I adjusted to summer very well.  8am to 3pm 5 days a week.  Sometimes staying a little longer.  Now, just as the weather indicates later sleeping I rise at 5, get to my first job by 6:40.  Home by 8:30.  Second job starts at 2pm, home by 6.  I practice in the afternoon instead of as a termination to my work day.  Still adapting with great difficulty.  The work I enjoy and am used to, the hours however...

I find myself grasping at a reason for this abyssal state due to its discomfort.  This seems an incorrect attitude.  It should be embraced.  I am disintegrating.  I have the opportunity to rebuild my practice from the ground up, away from the habit trails of the summer season.   As I continue to disintegrate, old habits and horrors will emerge to the surface of my raw and battered brain, they can be ground and discarded easily, nothing can withstand a sandstorm.  A darker inspiration.  I need more time to draw. 

Autumn signals an end.  Without this end, people go hungry and spring will not come.  The “first emergency” in chess, once it clears you can refine your strategy, but if you don’t make it past, the game is over.  Every friend I’ve lost has died in the fall.  Every relationship I’ve had end, has ended in the fall.  Autumn harvests all things.  I need to relax in practice and let it do its work.

This desert presents me with an opportunity.  My death.  My own death.  My own decomposition.  Taken by disease, violence, accident, then decomposing.  Confrontation of the “dead self”.  This, a grim meditation for Autumn, harvest time.  If I were to die tomorrow, what would I want to spend today doing?