An intriguing few days, with more time available to investigate and immerse into the virtual world experience of Second Life.  With two especially generous helpers,  Pema and Storm, offering steadying minds and hands, there has somehow been the opportunity to bring more of myself into the SL experience.  One thing I notice is the image of coming through a keyhole, as if from one dimension of hesitations around ’known perspectives’ into the freer sense of a vast realm open to the creative imagination, many possibilities at hand.  Another interesting element is the ‘home base as refuge’ established on a lovely beach plot with the generous help of Storm.  

Could the keyhole embrace the key to the opening, the emergence, the potential for new vast imaginings?  Perhaps.  Key to much seems to be the boundless generosity experienced from such as Storm and Pema, which serves as does reverie that function of receiving, accepting, releasing…. qualities which may be key in fuller recognition of Being

Deeply moved by two encounters yesterday: the reflection available within the envelope of time, and the quote Caladonia brought to the Playasbeing group “Consciousness is the choice of which abstractions we experience out of an infinite number of ways of slicing the continuity of the universe.  It’s the feeling of existence that is the choice” (www.jaronlanier.com/zombie.html) . Within the envelope of ‘enough time’ I could reflect with pleasure, curiosity and openness about a conversation I was chatlogging (playasbeing.wik.is/Chat_Logs/2008.08.17_1300) and that added dimension of space for reflection seemed to add a glow of potential, evolving meaning that felt awesome.  And the Lanier thought helps in glimpsing the relationship between human consciousness and the infinite: the multi-dimensional universe and human necessity to ’slice’ it, sort of reducing its continuity into ways which the human mind can comprehend. Another aspect from the Lanier thought is that Nature does not have nouns, but as humans we need nouns for our ’science’; but nouns which are arbitrary distort the continuity of the universe. My experience of these encounters led to dreams of openings, explorations, and creative uncertainty.  All in a for me remarkable 24 hour period.

So many ways to experience widening perspectives, as I have over the past 10 days: cycling, and kyaking among rural islands and in pristine waters in the Pacific Northwest; approaching Mt Rainier bareheaded and with awe on a summer’s day amidst the wildflowers, with the sound of the glacier stream in the background; sharing with loved ones over this time, in myrth or quiet reflection upon shared times and inner thoughts. Appreciating the richness of these diverse avenues.  And dipping into dreams, which reflect all of these experiences from a kaleidoscopic vantage point.

    Coming back to You Seeing Being Seeing–Evolved Seeing Being Seeing with awe-filled aspects of the natural and the inner experiecing worlds.  Feeling still nascent in these evolving ways of Seeing, and so needing to fully value my own trajectory in this regard.  Balancing caution against hesitation to move yet more into the Unknown.

Beginning to read Heidegger’s “On the way to language” a dialog between a German and a Japanese philosopher with such tiny gems: “How is one to give a name to what he is still searching for?  To assign the nameng word is, after all, what constitutes finding.”  And “…we may confidently entrust ourselves to the hidden drift of our dialogue…as long as we remain inquirers….You do not mean that we are pumping each other, out of curiosity, but…but rather that we go right on releasing into the open whatever might be said.”  These few lines from the first of this small work express the some of the gems of experience when trust and openness can prevail.

Sometimes the daily events which tug at the sleeve of attention are more wearying than may be realized.  Easy to bypass the patient friend within which looks for a moment of repose to offer gentle illumination carried by the turn of a leaf or a bird on the wing. 

Patient friends, as well in the external world, await to offer just their presence, which of course is a gift beyond measure. Noticing,  opening is all it takes to be enriched by that gift. And then of course to give in return. 

A dream, first in awhile, this morning, after a day of deep but almost unfathomable emotion: the dream is of being on a sprial staircase at the edge of willing, surging waters which seem about to spill into the stairwell.  Then slowing spiraling up to get above the waters, but the intensity of their presence remains.  Pondering the dream I thought of the emotion of the last while, and realized that along side of the gratitude of reconnecting with my Playasbeing friends may have been the upwelling of sadness,tears, rage perhaps toward the pain of my imprisoning doubts; but then realizing as well, in terms of the reading/studying I am trying to do re the nature of ‘evil’ in everyday humankind, that these very wrenching doubts may be those internal elements which lead us to abandon our individual selves in the face of authority, pressures, and situations which erode/erase our sturdy inner selves, leading to the erasure of our own humanity.  This dawning realization feels so important, but so difficult to gain clarity on.  BUT the re-connection with my Playasbeing group, and the fellowship and beauty it offers, which lingers, gives me the courage, or perhaps sturdies the self to look and to dream about this aspect of our everyday experience which can wreak such pain and suffering. 

As mentioned in Playasbeing’s welcoming response to yesterday’s posting here, trusting companions may be the vital link when doubt erodes trust in oneself.  Is it ironic or fitting that the investigation of the dark forces can only be done in the company of the light and beautiful forces of humankind?

Returning after an absence of several weeks which still puzzles me; reading earlier postings and the lovely generous responses stirs the question: why go silent for even awhile?  Perhaps too much preceding access –too much intimacy, exposure, emotion?  Retrospective voices which capture and direct attention from moment to moment provide differing accounts, while the day to day mind may be deaf and dumb to the myriad forces, fantasies, doubts that underpin ongoing experience. Best to observe, and to proceed aware that every step requires shifts of balance, and trust in the new.

Yesterday I received a note informing of the death of the wife of a colleague who I know via a group which has met twice yearly for now 27 years.  I was stilled for 24 hours, only able to allow the welling of sadness which had accumulated over the several years of the wife’s failing health.  But then I felt impelled to write two notes, one to the group and one to the bereaved colleague. I am enclosing the note to the group of colleagues here as it conveys the image of the bond of friendship which binds us and has done so increasingly,  As I wrote the note I thought of the web of roots which support the mammoth redwoods of northern California, webs from the intertwining roots of many trees which allow them to stand for perhaps 1000 years.  It felt to me as I wrote this note that this web of friendship might last that long.

“Dear all, Upon reading B’s message, yesterday, I seemed to need to just allow the welling of sadness, in silence for awhile, before I could even write this note.  Each of us of course has our own experience, our own emotions to embrace for J and for the loss of S (his wife).  I will convey some thoughts to J, but here I wanted to share my deep appreciation for the bonds within our group, both amongst our group as a whole and with each of its members over time.  How special it is to have this web of relationship, which may become more apparent at these times of grief.  Thanks to everyone for this.  “

The web of friendship which allows deepening personal emotion and experience for everyone.

Awakening in the middle of the night, not sure what I was feeling disturbed about, I began to read for a paper I am writing in RL, a paper on ‘ enslaved states of mind.’ Reading about Abraham Lincoln’s likely personal views toward the soon-to-be-freed slaves just before his Emancipation Proclamation during the midst of the American Civil War in the early 1860s, I found that my previous idealizations of Lincoln were loosening; like leaves of a tightly bound book being loosened there was room to breathe among the various pages as possibilites about the man rather than my up-to-now tightly bound idealization, which in itself is a kind of prejudice or conviction. Via the image of leaves in a book loosening I could more fully grasp the value of the PaB work which indeed is loosening previously held assumptions.  And then to become aware that these tightly held assumptions/convictions/prejudices in themselves are enslaved states of mind, I felt I had the outline of my paper rather fully in mind.  An example of a kind of waking dream, I thought, stirred by being disturbed, occuring during wakefulness, but invoked by the PaB experience and practice.

This morning awoke with a dream which as I traced it I could see the theme of chaos and tumbling imagery, the thread of intending to do x being obstructed y seemed to then become the chosen path, all viewed through a familiar but not altogether reliable lens…my thoughts went to the current interface between the familiar external life and the less familiar evolving internal life that comes via the PaB experience.  Chaos may be the turbulence inevitable when streams flow together from different but confluent streams or rivers.  Interesting that previously I have generally trusted the messages from the dream space, but now I may be exposed to viewing the dream as the turbulence itself, not an untrustworthy messenger, just delivering a different message, one of process rather than content.