Is my own awareness my choice?

2/23/14

This would be the main concept: that a limited awareness in turn limited my awareness of my own power to choose, i.e. "i didn't know that was a choice!"

Actually, it could have been that I was aware I didn't know something. My fear of that truth led me to never discover something as a choice. Oh, conservatory training, boarding school, voice lessons? I don’t know the first thing about looking into that. It’s not that the fear  has to be overwhelming, but just slightly stronger than the desire to do the thing.

"You can't make a list of the things you don't know." But then, isn't working through that list the life's work of everyone you know?

When you go to a spinning class, the bikes have a braking button with big letters: STOP | PUSH. It's not meant to be read as a duality. But it really is the ultimate choice. Ask that girl out? No, the fear of the unknown trumps the allure of the unknown. You won’t know until you seek out the answer, of course.

People develop elaborate systems of risk-analysis to mitigate such situations, all in the name of rationality and practicality. But practicality is, perversely, a mode of self-preservation, and for what exactly are you preserving yourself?

[Morning Pages Excerpt 2/23/14]

When a tree apples, can it also joy

Or mourn

Or sigh

Or cheer

Or hum

Or chant om

Does a tree ever harden his eyes, or soften them

If she is always relaxed, is she also always dancing

When you are dancing, are you away from the center
or about to discover it

When you worry, have you lost the center
or are you clinging to it?

               

The prayer is to know the one, to disregard the many, the idea of the many. 

To disregard what is right and to live what is true. 

And there is no more true, 

only true and obscured true.

And it’s no more or less your choice as anyone else’s.

[Morning Pages Excerpt 3/16/14]

the symbol for the thing

Ultimately, people come together not because of the results of what they care about, but because of the caring itself. This I find confusing because the result is just a byproduct, a happening, an experience. It is the outward extension of the inner connection. And like so much else, I confuse the symbol for the thing. 

The symbol confirms the thing's existence, but isn't that just because we've decided the outer life is more "real" than the inner life? That the "stuff" of reality is reality itself?

Actually, this is the entire psychology of consumerism and marketing. Marketing appeals to our valuing distant associations, but we become conditioned to see the value and it’s placeholder as interchangeable. 

But what else? I’m sure I could do a whole rant about internet experiences, but that seems like a surface example. The deeper question is what else do we hold up as important when all it is is a symbol of the truth?

Does everyone ponder the aging life?

Do people ever get to the point where they simply and completely believe, 

or is there always some part of them that questions? 

Perhaps it goes unquestioned, like an emotional numbness that slowly sets in. 

That numbness does not seem analogous to a death or a struggling. 

It seems like an idea of some anti-nirvana, where all would be blank and empty, 

but the blankness is you to the point of meaninglessness or anti-meaning.

I’m not ready to believe that. Can people really ever lose or erode completely that awareness of the vibrations, of the longing? Even fathers have a listlessness, a wistful distance in their eyes from time to time. Certainly that aching is something all of growing humanity shares. Anyone who has been alive long enough, can (and certainly must?) ponder the aging life, the often painful clarity of hindsight.