Sunday, December 9, 2012

St. Catherine of Alexandria's Demon

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The myth of individuality must see defeat.  The ego, constantly confronted begins its steady recoil, its steady death.  It becomes a puppet.  What speaks through this puppet?  Anything but 'you'.  The pretentious baptismal blasphemy of identification.  The wretched flagellate fights, devoting the sinful body and thus the will with constant blood.   Sleep comes in a barrel of wine.  The pain means distance, separation, hierarchy, definition.  This too, must end.

The passing hebdomad: a swollen knee, a bent shoulder, some additional tension.  Must not have trusted the inside all the way, applied too much outside, too much me.  A jagged yellow rises up the middle column, devastation pays tribute to king 'I'.  Eventually this passes, and the teacher begins learning again.  Practice with them, with 'no-mind' and eventually practice-itself, with those people, develops sentience.

We receive billions of signals from the environment in every moment, most don't make it past the receptors, not strong enough to create action potential and reach the brain. Of these, thousands remain.  I contemplate them, stumbling to figure out who they apply to, what they mean, how to use them, a stasis of recursive interpretation.  Listen with the whole body and don't stop.

Instead of doing what you can do, or doing what you think others should do, or doing what you prepared for these specific people.  Every resistance in front of you, every groan and grunt, every eye rolling, every hard face, every blank eye scrutinized, the yellow streak never ends.  Armoring the inside against discomfort dulls the connection, makes a mind of no-mind.  Breathing through doubt, paranoia, guilt, shame, fear transform their tension into time.  Every decision in the space of 7 deep breaths.  Practice with them. Observe closely and learn, let go.  Stop thinking.

For every person a complaint.  A desire.  An expectation.  These things separate them. If you spend more than 20 hours practicing with someone recovering from shoulder surgery without developing a certain specific tightness and pain in the shoulder pay closer attention to them.  If you spend the next ten hours without every idle moment apart resulting in a constant fidget in an attempt to dispel that affliction, pay closer attention to your body.  Yog means "yoke" or union.  Learn patience, to teach patience.

Knowledge has no use.  Fold knowledge into the body, wring knowledge out of the body.  Daath's crown shines in the thick dark.  Wearing it, become king of the dark, blind but the length of one foot.  Forget knowledge, sentience means listening.  Just listen, practice listening.  Hold the singing bowl up to your chin after dragging the stick across the lip.  Listen, how long until the reverberation passes completely?  You can do better than that.

The nether vertex of a descending hexagram plunges into the heart of a rising pentacle, piercing through Tipareth and filling the hollow with the flood.  A yantra steered by padmasana.  I saw the subtle body in this shape.  "The best teaching: Practice with someone."  Stop teaching.




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