From “Canvas”– Creative Arts Magazine, 2007

Thersites Watching

By Rosemary Pennington

Thersites sits, watching the men walk by
Men arrayed with steel and iron
And their own virility.
He sits and watches all this
And shakes his head,
Lost in thought,
Lost in meaning.

He will not fight this fight,
Oh, no.
He’s had enough of causes,
Thersites has.
His shoulders bow from battles long since lost/
His knees bend under the burden of death
And destruction he carries.
Oh, no, Thersites will not go into battle again.
Not for love.
Or money.
Or fame.

Once, he dreamed of honor,
Just as the men he watches do now.
Once he thought he knew valor
And what it meant to be alive.
To feel the steel in your hands
To aim
And to fire.
To deal death the way a croupier
Deals cards.
He knows better now.

He has been beaten
By men he once thought his betters
But who he now realizes
Are just men.
Just flesh and blood and bone
As he is flesh and blood and bone.
He has called them what they are…
Cowards, liars, greedy,
And not regretted it.
Even as bones broke
And ribs bruised
He does not regret pointing out their hypocrisy.

So, now, Thersites sits and watches.
He watches the hypocrites,
As they speak of honor with one mouth
And whisper of wealth with another.
He watches as they work their army
Into a frenzy of hatred.

He shakes his head

I read this at Diary of a Daoist Hermit today and it is so appropriate for the recent leg of my journey:

One of those key Daoist concepts that take a lifetime to understand is that of “pu”. Usually, this is translated as “the uncarved block”. The reference is to a piece of wood that has not yet been shaped by some craftsman into some image. Unlike other religions or philosophies that seek to mold the believer into some form or another, the ideal in Daoism is for a person to find him or herself in their innate, spontaneous reality.

Of course, it is a lot more difficult to do than to say. For example, no one comes to a specific place in their life without having had a wide range of influences already impressed upon them. Where do those old impressions leave off and where does the original nature begin? We can try to discern our original nature, but this doesn’t just happen without some effort. How can one tell the difference between a process that is stripping away outside influences from one that is imposing a new one?

I am doing Byron Katie’s Work for a class and I thought I’d share:

Judge-Your-Neighbor

1. Who angers, confuses, saddens or disappoints you, and why? What is it about them that you don’t like?

I don’t like her because she refuses to connect with me, has no remorse for what happened with him, acts like a sneaky witch every time I see her, continues to pursue him, and is mean to my friend. I am confused about why she is hanging around OneTaste. I am disappointed that she won’t be vulnerable enough for us to get some closure around this. I am angry that she makes me angry.

2. How do you want them to change? What do you want them to do?

I want her to sincerely apologize for her actions. I want her to stop pursuing him. I want her to be nicer to my friend. I want her to stop sleeping with every guy she meets. I want her to disappear from OneTaste forever. I want her to stop being my shadow.

3. What is it that they should or shouldn’t do, be, think, or feel? What advice could you offer?

She should stop being a sneaky bitch. She should stop acting like a remorseless skank. She should feel compassion for the people whose lives she is effing with. She should think I am way better than her and that she could never steal him away. She shouldn’t think she has a prayer at Teacher Training. She should be afraid of me and try to make me like her.

4. Do you need anything from them? What do they need to do in order for you to be happy?

I need her to stay the hell away from him. I need for her to make even the slightest effort to be my friend. I need for her to stop being sneaky. I need for her to stop creating conflict in order to get attention. I need for all of my friends to hate her.

5. What do you think of them? Make a list.

She is sneaky. She is a slut. She is worthless. She is a bitch. She is not trustworthy. She is a coward. She preys on people in weak positions. She is a complete bum. She is fake.

6. What is it that you don’t want to experience with that person again?

I don’t want to feel dirty when I look her in the eye. I don’t want to feel like she is an unpredictable psychotic snake. I don’t want to feel like I’m not good enough if she is with him. I don’t want to feel like a fool. I don’t want to feel like she doesn’t give a shit about herself or anyone else.

Inquiry: I don’t like her because she refuses to connect with me.

1. Is it true?

I don’t know. I tell myself it is true. I tell myself that if she would make an effort to open up, I would see something good in her and start to like her. I’m not sure that is true. I think I don’t like her because she is terrible in every way and it baffles me that anyone would like her or that he would be stupid enough to be with her so then I feel like I am not good enough. Like if my friends can like a wench like her, they clearly have terrible judgment and so their approval is worthless in propping up my ego. That’s just great. Good heavens.

2. Can I absolutely know that it’s true?

No. I have no idea why I hate her so much. It is irrational and confusing.

3. How do I react when I think the thought?

I feel like I am trying too hard and I’m embarrassed. I feel self-righteous, like everything is her fault. I feel smug because I am such a gracious connector to stoop to her level and try to be friends. I feel safe because I know she will not try to connect with me. I feel popular because this story is very useful in making my friends like me better than her. I feel sneaky because I am not being totally honest with anyone and it is all for my personal gain.

4. Who would I be without that thought?

I would be more honest and genuine. I would be closer to my truth. I would not be tricking my friends. I would not be so concerned with other people’s approval. I would be more free. I would take responsibility for my own refusal to connect with her.

5. Turn it around.

I don’t like myself because she refuses to connect with me.

I don’t like her because I refuse to connect with her.

I do like her because she refuses to connect with me.

I don’t like myself because I refuse to connect with her.

I don’t like myself because I refuse to connect with myself.

I just learned about Living Time, by Maurice Nicoll. Here are some questions he poses in the book

What do we think about time?
We exist in a world that we do not understand in the least. What is nature? What is time? What is space? What are we?
We take all for granted. We do not face any real issues in our thinking but catch hold of some ready-made opinion. Do we ever get used to the mystery of time, for instance? Is not the problem of time always in the background of our minds although we can never really think about it? Consider the strange experience that a person was but is no more. Consider our childhood and death. Where is all that which has become was, and all that will be? What is this strange now and then, which when perceived together cause the mind to tremble on the verge of new meaning?

Thanks to my new favorite blog: Astro Inquiry for the info. Check out his recommended books!

My brain seems to have coalesced enough to share the tale of my Tuesday night.

I’ve been in a very existential, unstable mood lately. On Tuesday night things came to a head. I was lying in bed when all of a sudden I started convulsing. It started in my back. I could not control it. It was as if I had let go and my body had taken on a life of it’s own. Then my hands stared moving on their own, my face, my shoulder, my legs, everything was twitching in turn. Then noises began to arise from my throat. The noises began to form words and even sentences! There I am watching this whole thing, totally unable to control it.

This was both scary and exciting. At one point I started growling “I’ll f-ing kill you.” Very Linda Blair. At another point my hips very shaking to a beat and I was singing, “I am dancing, I am dancing.” All kinds of crazy things arose. This went on for two hours!

My friend D is into Adyashanti and his true meditation practice. D has been having experiences like mine for over a year. He says it’s a normal part of awakening. I don’t know. All I know is that something in my consciouness has been nudged and all sorts of strangeness is manifesting because of it.

If anyone else has had this experience PLEASE contact me.

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, that the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own… That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke.

- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Boy oh boy, he wasn’t kidding. I moved in to OneTaste yesterday. My life is falling apart at the seams. I don’t care about anything. Everything seems totally ridiculous. Something that seemed like the biggest, craziest deal on Sunday is almost totally uninteresting to me today. I don’t even know where my edges are anymore, they seem to be crumbling so quickly.

And nothing to do but wring my hands standing there amidst the rubble wondering: what’s next?

Go read this LA Times interview with CalTech physicist Sean Carroll on entropy, time and the multiverse.

Mr. Carroll is saying that time is irreversible and therefore directional; our world has some type of order, a thrust forward. He also says that this order is highly unlikely to arise on its own and would almost certainly have to have come from some previous set of affairs or other universe:

So you think the way the universe began is unnatural?

Low-entropy configurations are rare.

If you take a deck of cards and you open it up, it’s true that they’re in order. But if you randomly chose a configuration of a deck of cards it would be very, very unlikely that they would be in perfect order.

That’s exactly low entropy versus high entropy.

The universe is more than what we see?

The reason why you are not surprised when you open a deck of cards and it’s in perfect order is not because it’s just easy and natural to find it in perfect order, it’s because the deck of cards is not a closed system. It came from a bigger system in which there is a card factory somewhere that arranged it. So I think there is a previous universe somewhere that made us and we came out.

We’re part of a bigger structure.

This is exactly what I have been thinking about lately. The reality that we are able to perceive is something. It has meaning and direction. However, our world arises from and exists in something else. We don’t know what it is, maybe we are some alien child’s science fair project. Even if that is the case, the alien child’s world exists in something which exists in something etc. Turtles all the way down.

But what do the turtles exist in? If you started two points at zero on a number line and sent one up the positives and one down the negatives at the same pace, they would both keep going towards infinity, but their sum would always be zero, right? So regardless of the turtles, alien science projects, or any other nonsense we can think up the answer is always zero, always nothing, always void.

Maybe?

Here is a super interesting post from Overcoming Bias on whether or not morality is just a result of personal preference. Best quote:

“Your strange beliefs about the nature of morality have destroyed your soul.  I don’t even believe in souls, and I’m saying that.”

Ha!

So is there truth or isn’t there? Something or nothing? All questions seem to be boiling down to this for me lately.