fear: labryinth, minotaur, thread

What follows is a verbatim recreation of hand-written entry in my notebook. The notebook entry is a dialogue between myself and...whatever else came in. I wrote a question down, and then an answer came and I wrote that down. It didn't feel like a conversation with myself, a dialogue where I played both parts - it felt like I was asking the questions and then essentially channelling the answers, answers that sometimes surprised and moved me. As you'll see, the questions fade out rather quickly and it essentially becomes a monologue on the theme of fear. The first half is written mostly by the other interlocutor, and the second half mostly by me. Looking back now at the first half, it seems that rather than waiting for me to express my questions/doubts/curiosities as they arose, the answering voice sensed those arising and wove them into the monologue. Which is why the Q-and-A format goes away.

I started asking the questions because I was feeling stuck and wanted guidance. What emerged is a characterization of fear as the energy that makes experience possible - a dynamic friend that first drives us from home, provides us experience abroad, and then provides us with the puzzle pieces we need to find our way back home. There's other stuff too, about perfection, open heart, humble mind, etc. Looking back now, this feels like my praying for guidance on how to heal, and my puzzling over/sussing out the dizzying notion that all is perfection and cannot be any other way.

The dialogue uses conceptual framings and abbreviations that later appeared in my essays "General Relativity" + "Special Relativity." Reading those first will provide valuable context for understanding parts of this dialogue. Or, reading this first will expose you to some of the raw materials & early thoughts that later became those essays.

I've italicized my words and left the responses in normal text.

There are a few points where I see a clear error in word choice or thinking. I use [sic] to acknowledge those.

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what is the energy resisting our path to healing?

fear

why does it resist?

that's it's nature

why is that its nature

God wills it

why

it's our skeleton key - it unlocks both our freedom + our surrender

it drives us to assert our independence, our will, our way, apart from God. It's our prodigal son's inheritance, our ticket out, our chance to see what we can do, to make something, do something, be something, take something, create something, ourselves

--> I

O --> I

--> I

irony is, we're O, + we're driving ourselves from ourselves, for experience.

we choose fear as our Eden Apple b/c within its code, its pattern, is a reminder of our nature - we are O, as I, as i, to experience, to remember, + by surrendering our fear will to our love will, to return.

fear does this by demonstrating, in mirror image, what love would do. Not fear affection for what pleases, but love affection for what reminds us of our nature, + shows us the path of return: the path of healing, healing the wounds of fearing, the wounds we designed pleasure, pain, imagination + the rest of reality to give us, like whipped horses, to drive us from the comfort of O, to compel us into experience, into lifeforms, into ever-denser games of pain avoidance + pleasure-seeking, the drama amplifying our waves to maximize our experience, until eventually we realize that for all its fun, beauty, intrigue, exquisiteness, boredom, agony, suspensefulness, somewhat predictable blend of predicitability + unpredictability, the drama is exhausting, we're addicted to both it and to hiding it from ourselves,

+ it's perfect, it's exactly what we designed while in heaven with full knowledge of all that is, that we would love drama, we would adore the chance of play roles in lives, to create performances, our microcosms for the macrocosm of our collective manifestation of I's, the division we made, you + me, you + I, O my you, your me, sweet darling, we planned this, your youness, my meness, the isolations of vanity, you can't be me, I can't be you, our addiction to masquerading our ness and anti-ness in dramas, sagas, episodes, lifetimes, driving ourselves to wilder + wider oscillations until we reach our (determined) max + break, (crest), + we reform not as a flatline but as our original oscillation, the vibration of O, the tune of unconditional loving awareness, + we remember it instantly, O --> I - i - I - O, that we designed this experience, including this experience, + our de ja vu, our little side chats, + off the records, our addictions, our agonies, our drifting, our horrors, our told + untold, it was all the experience we designed for ourselves in an omniscent + all-knowing state [sic], to experience the perfect amount for our breaking as a wave, our pitched remembering, our onward crumble, our slide + soak into O, where we await each other, having never left, + having so much new story + love to share

it'll happen

you'll know afterwards you go go, O

our perfection is inescapable reader, love

our suffering is not

- the code for remembering, for return, lies in the fear

- we buried it there, to be found when it's time for us to find it, + it will teach us, if we let it, like a mirror sensei, a boxing shadow, we learn in phases - discovering the fear, studying the fear, battling the fear, hating the fear, denying the fear, and on. until we realize fear is a role model inviting us to love being like as [sic] fear loves drama, unconditionally.

(fear is the Iago always whispering non-truths to stir drama)

we break our addiction to drama by becoming our own protector + loving ourself as relentlessly as fear assails us, + @ a point we realize we lose, we can't beat fear @ fear's game, i can't do that, i was designed to not be capable of that, so that i would finally succumb to prayer, to involuntary humility, to earnet begging, to surrendering control, to whatever occurence(s) return(s) our wave to its heart wave (reunion), to It's essence wave (redemption), + to O's wave of unconditional loving awareness (rapture), a single waveform tha tunites awareness in simultaneous existence as all 3, thus begins the journey home, the return, in escapably, b/c home is so lovel it takes a foe as formidable of [sic] fear to keep us away, distracted, + confused, this long.

there is no fault because the design is perfect, it was made w/ complete knowledge in a spirit of unconditional love, + part of its design was to seem so imperfect, so far from perfect sometimes, until it was time to see it as perfect, not in the sense that one cannot convince others there are flaws and worse, but in the sense that the delusions too are perfection, are designed. And from where I sit, believing all this, + susceptible to delusion, I say that the design was to keep us ignorant long enough to keep us from fleeing experience + running home, or may more like booting us from the nest so we're forced to discover our wings and fly, + my best guess is that the delusion drives us into drama to maximize our spirit wave's oscillation, to experience the perfect amount of transformation, b/f we remember the truth of our divinity + begin a more selfless + humble + tender journey home, in the vibration of I + eventually in our true death, as O, where we've always been, you + I, I + you, the Oneness we never stop being, we forget.

But I still fear. I still hurt. I still forget + choose before remembering.

Even my most heartfelt + fully construed conceit is just that. Awakening awaits me. I speak this from my sleep. I pray to awaken, perfection, I pray to be reminded, perfection O-I-i.i.-I-O. Oneness-spirit-lifeform-surrender-rebirth-awareness-Spirit-Oneness. All of it designed by us, the Is, while enjoying complete knowledge + infinite unconditional love. May that truth shepherd me through this dreaming, this somehwat predictable forgetting, for this dream seems real to me + what happens here matters to me, + I choose - I guess it's more O chose I'd dream i'd choose - more lovingly + wisely, the more I open my heart + recognize fear, + this is my hypotenuse, my attempt to simultaneously dream well + court awakening - lol - IOI - miOim - through a somewhat haphazard blend of pursuing healing, processing insecurities, prayer + pleading, opening my heart (+ trying to, + forgetting to, + taking breaks, _ quitting, + trying to), + metaphorizing my sense of I(T) all (like this), + is this rhetoric, revelation, hogwash, way off? O perfection. O forgetting. O perfectness, forgotten, your forgetting perfect. If we can choose + can't avoid perfection, what's kinder than remembering, embracing reminders, honoring the freedom to fear/loathe/[illegible] avoid reminding (perfection), recognizing the profound sillines of considering oneself - an i among many, from an I among many, from the Oneness you + I, I + you, are completely, perfectly, together as i, together as I, united as O - superior, or inferior, more or less blessed, more or less deserving - + the silliness of all contempt, + most deliciously contempt for seriousness, + I could get hung up on what I'm trying to do here, or I can say it's perfect anyway so who cares, how are you love, have you had cool water lately, are you remembering the drink you're practicing, letting go of the hope for a different past, + acknowledging the perfection of all beheld + all beholding, the perfection of all experience + all experiencing, + feeling sometimes like that's bullshit, perfection. That's its insulting, perfection. That's its unforgiveable, perfection, there's something wrong with you for believing that, perfection, have you breathed lately Joe, O I would love a glass of thank you, much better, I am rambling in a dream, perfection, + "again" forks into shame, seriousness, silliness, stillness, + surrender, + whatever happens, perfection, whatever happens, remember, perfection, you can't do wrong, you can't ultimately do harm, + opening your heart is kind to others, kind to yourself now, + perhaps most of all kind to the selfs [sic] + others to come, + indulge your clever qualms with kindness, perfection, don't they boil down to how difficult or inappropriate or unwarranted kindness sometimes seems, + how we'd never be deliberately unkind unless we somehow convinced ourselves it was justified or unavoidable, + we do that, by design, for purposes we (by design) can't fathom, we keep coming up with excuses to not be kind (including received unkindness), + would could trap us in a loop like that except addiction, + what could drive addiction except confusion, who could outwit clever us except cleverer fear, why did we set ourselves up to fail like this, ah yes, so we could surrender in earnest, accepting it's kinder to ourselves to be kind to ourselves, + kindness is what we do when our heart is open + our mind is humbled. The perfection is my heart open, is my mind humble, sometimes I'm convinced that's all I can really do, all I ever do, is ask those two questions in various forms, again + again, + all these other choices I seem to make [...] sometimes the kindness is in just asking, the divinity is in experiencing fear + pain + asking again anyway, + humility is in forgetting to have asked for wow so long woo-wee, okay, wowzers, okay, deep breath, my O my, is my heart open, is my mind humble, is my spirit steady (oh), _ when I'm feeling cheeky, how's the perfection coming, perfection? How, Joe, are you holding up, with all the remembering + forgetting?