I don’t have to make it up; it makes it up for me.
The night of November 25/6, 2000:
Lay in bed thinking all night knowing I was too dead to write and knowing the words wouldn’t be the same tomorrow, I’d lose them. All bedtime thinking was about the full form of the lesson.
Couldn’t sleep, had to dream, dreamed anyway, never stopped thinking all night. The lesson evolved into my dream. In the dream I was losing it because I still couldn’t sleep and this was insomnia taking over and it was wasting me away and I was having trouble even with coherence now. I was at the threshold where I had completely lost my college education, had no real job, no avenue to get one and my immediate family thought I was nuts. (This is not a far stretch from status right now.) I was even cracking on some of my relations.
And in the dream I was still learning the lesson, I was ashamed, and the people in the universal (the mind union, which appeared as a majestic, middle aged, black haired woman robed in blue) are telling me they wanted the God realization I had ‘missed’ and now understood to be applied and that they wanted to feel what they’d felt before. They wanted it to happen to us all the time, as far as it could happen. That it should resonate through us all the time. And I felt spectacularly gulled because I’d denied this by eliminating it within the dream of being with my human soul mate, or whatever I thought that was, which we know really wasn’t. (After all he chose not to, a choice he was free to make.)
Dream was there was this harmony with each other we felt, that we wanted to feel all the time.
But you know how I got to feeling Him -God inside me fully completely? By elimination. Total self-elimination. It makes me recall how far I’d gone to feel that way the most, to know it was true and not my reflection. Do I have to do it again? It was only for a moment! No longer than a few minutes . . . (There are tons of varieties of communion, the way you all think you feel sometimes, but they were not how I know. Just the way when you’re participating, you’re sometimes not certain you are, and you have no way of finding out. Well I found out.)
So how do I know? Reduction, the elimination of all variables. The last variable was myself. I nixed myself in order to be able to know it, and the way I know I really succeeded in nixing myself is because the universal knew I did it. I’ve already lost them/him once and I lost infinitely more. I lost God and everything I had ever believed or hoped in forever, any pure identity. I did it on the faith that God was there and this was not just consigning myself to oblivion. My soul was my sole litmus test. I accepted the full consequences of my existence.
It is something you would never ever choose to go through. You would only do it when presented with absolutely no choice.
There was other stuff in the dream, I kept meeting and talking to teen guys in gangsta mode. With the first ones I mentioned the problem of consumption. Like we, the West, who are something like a tenth of the earth’s population, consuming 80% of the earth’ goods/energy, what’s produced. (Don’t trust the figures, the idea’s an accurate one.) I said to the boys ‘we’re dead’. In-equilibrium like this on a full beyond capacity earth means we’re f***ed if the rest even try to catch up to our consumption levels and don’t succeed. And we’re still f***ed if they don’t even try; by definition this mode of consumption can only indicate a self-terminating civilization. They can’t rip the earth to shreds fast enough. I was adding my own favorite theories here and there, hamming my little pop philosophy; making them curious.
Then I see people I know on the stairs and my dad has snuck up and caught me on a tape recorder. Oh that’s great, I thought. I’ve just been playing, not laying it out serious and now he’ll review the tape, dissect it to bits just in order to use it against me. Perfect! I was mad at him. I don’t know how it happened 'cause it just did but at the moment I came up to him he suffered a stroke, fell backwards down the stairs. And all the enmity vanished because it looked like he was dying and I immediately ran down the stairs to hold him. I looked into his stricken eyes and everything between us ended there.
And he recognized immediately and said something like, Oh child, you should go. And what he meant was that he was granting me the permission to commit suicide, his blessing, because now he understood. I withdrew and curled up into a ball on the step. ‘I need to go so much,’ I told him in tears. I meant to home, God and Heaven. I’m that homesick, my father sees it would be better for me to die. So I finally got the permission to die at last. I realized too that if I went to the edge again, rode it, I would stand the closest chance of accessing what they, the mind union, wanted. The way I got to the edge the first time was to ‘die’. I would try again; it was what I was going to do anyway. My family would even help me this time.
Scene cut: My family is sitting around the living room in chairs with friends and these were my teen brother’s friends and one of them was beside me and he was in the full on hip gear sporting labels and he slagged me for never wearing a single label and always wearing cheap stuff. He just had a way of saying it that made it clear distinguished labels were what described your identity and to not distinguish yourself showed true neglect of character, one’s self. Like the beauty of the labels described that person to the world and who would not describe themselves as distinguished, to show their self worth and human respect?
I nearly exploded at this 'cause the argument he was using was so absurd since he was arguing this identity came from clothing brands. But what he was talking about was a much bigger argument.
I responded perfectly in the dream in less that three sentences, but I don’t retain words from dreams. My voice was breaking up on me now like each phrase seemed to end in an almost static buzz, air sucked out of me, nothing inhaled just drawn out and only sheer force kept my voice clear. I sounded implacable. None of this was expected in this placid, genial room.
I retorted to Mr. Nike, ‘Yes that’s right, you all feel you need labels to distinguish yourselves, don’t you?’ But labels, even though it is the same exact reason for wearing Gucci or Nike, meant much much more. It meant all the external forms of identity we use to render ourselves, to assert we are uniquely (underlying, superior-ly) individual, to prove to ourselves what we are worth. It’s like the souped car that’s an ego support; it’s when you do that through consumerism, (the main form), how this whole culture is geared to realizing itself via consumption. It’s when you marry or have a girlfriend who’s really there 'cause that’s the only way for you to know that you are a loving person, you don’t know this inside you, you have to render it to see it and know it’s real. You have to have that identity reciprocated back, real from someone else, or you won’t trust it. It’s when you have your baby as an exercise in your own unconditional love, just so you know your capable, and you’re so pleased with your performance, you’ve done such a good job. Worse yet, you have that child when you need something to love you unconditionally, in awe of you. I’ve seen a baby born just to adore her father; his ‘manufactured’ unconditional perfect self-image is already in her stare. Imagine her disillusionment when she breaks out of this. Imagine her if she doesn’t!!! To my mind the greatest crimes are perpetrated within perception, you can argue everything else is spawned by how our outlook can be marred or skewed. We know this most essentially so we have this deep, very strong drive to establish ourselves as real, to demonstrate ourselves by asserting ourselves in rendering. We do this for our own protection at our most vulnerable essence, the level where we ourselves would be unable to see what’s wrong of us. Tell me hasn’t this occurred to you and wasn’t the enormity one of your deepest fears? It’s your fear of what your environment has done, how your childhood has indelibly marked you . . . That you even have this fear indicates an inherent belief that you existed before, how could anything in this world promise to fulfill that void? Yet I bet this fear, and its counter reaction, the quest for tangible fulfillment, is the twin born, most basic impulse that is being exploited by consumerism . . .
It’s not rendering what we are when we do this through materialism, we are just creating tangible reflections of what we want our self-image to be, and what makes this a false image is when the real reason we are doing it is based on our fear that it isn’t really there, within us. Self-worth, children, self-worth. We get to lose it here when we’re products of a brutal environment, molded by environment itself. The reason we are buttressing ourselves is because deep inside we all know something’s missing; ‘we need to belong’. Consumerism is a culture which exploits this to create endless gross national product endlessly growing. But earth is a finite system! Simple, big conclusion. Very basic. Do this and you are not even accepting the reality you live in a finite world! You will collapse the system and you will eventually Die!
Self-worth. Consumerism keeps us from ever going internal, from ever even trying to buttress ourselves inside and becoming self-sufficient. It just wants to give us a palace for a crutch. The bigger the palace the better it has robbed you, the more dependent you are, you have the most expensive crutch. Consumerism has kept us from ever even examining our doubt by preoccupying us with an endless array of things and pleasures. Why do we feel we need to belong to more than what’s here, so much that we’ll surround ourselves with it in order to feel we belong? What if that means we’re not in our natural environment, we’re not even from here? Could that mean you exist some more, more than you do here within these senses?
Begin by creating a bargain for yourself. If you know deep inside you that something’s missing from yourself, don’t question whether you are somehow inferior, accept that this means there is more to yourself, soul, spirit, communion, and what we may become. Take that where you want to take it, interior self-realization. Imagine you and seek inner truth. And understand if there’s more, that means accepting you may not get it all here, but that’s OK, because there IS more and you will have loads and loads of time to realize it. You have only this time to wonder, and it is in wondering you realize yourself more. You’re establishing yourself in reality. Die, and your character might actually be a very permanent thing that is eternal and knows everything and is not capable of transforming much at all. Here you can, and you can grow. That is the true beauty of creation. There are waiting lists up there!
Our tragedy is that in our attempt to render self-realization, we are inherently making it false, if it springs from the need to magnify what’s there because you can’t believe in it unless you make it material. If it is necessary to you to make it material, you are doing this to prove what you are because you don’t believe it, meaning it is not real at all and you are just playing your inside out in some elaborate false image of the self. You don’t need to make it material to know who you are and discover the best parts of yourself. When you use the material to buttress yourself, you’re really losing the belief that you are more than just material, going in the opposite direction, which is descent into a false self-image, if you really are more than just this. You have undermined the need you were trying to support by trying to make it material! You need a distinguishing label to tell yourself you’re distinguished because otherwise you can’t see it. How consumerism buys and packages your soul. All this I was laying on the kid, in less than three sentences.
I said something like ‘You need labels, but I never need any labels to tell me what I am. I don’t need them determining me. I am not a product of my environment. I am a product of what I build myself to be inside. Everything about me is on the inside. It has no reflection in my environment.’ (It has no extension into my career, family. It has no articulation in my life, other than my Journal habit, what I write. Everything that is most vital to me no one in my environment even knows about . . .) I am realized entirely within myself.
‘You require material, and people, for realization. You must consume to be realized. (Think about the human cost in a clothing label.) It is because you consume, simply in this exercise of self-magnification (which is inherently false), that the whole world must be consumed to support the Western image. If you learned not to consume this way (wear your clothes just because you really do need them and they look and feel good to you), your society would not be horribly distended.’
The family could see where I was going and were visibly nervous. Squirming in their seats. My youngest brother cut in, voice tremulous (this was his friend), ‘Don’t JUDGE him Sis!’
I realized and softened the hardness out of my voice, put on a big grin. ‘If we all learn to support our self-image inside ourselves with our own belief, we will not consume more than we need. We can live instead of killing ourselves by slowly draining the life system.’ (We will not be vampires.)
I turned to my family and said, ‘There, wasn’t that easy? Nothing big or difficult. Not pages.’ They nodded in relief and approval. It was not some big complicated maze. And everyone was still OK.
Everyone wants the harmony, needs it to feel alive, needs the part they are missing.
Everyone needs THE MOMENT, the moment where they know their existence without a doubt.
In the dream I’m alone and I’m thinking, I could never even repeat that moment, the supreme moment of belonging that accessed the mind union. The fact is I know I can’t. Bottom line is I can’t even say it was me, at least not at that moment when I ultimately experienced becoming One. It was belonging in Him. It was brought about by a very unusual set of circumstances I did not create. I don’t even know how to get there, to the space where you can know through the mind union knowing, no doubt. Not without creating the edge I stepped off of that meant He must come. He comes and goes as He wills. I can’t even find that edge. It’s invisible. I could never synthesize that edge; it must be real and absolutely necessary. It was created by the circumstances in a moment that was so extreme, so very isolating and painful, that I thought, ‘so this is what it’s like to be crucified’. I went through the most pain it was possible for me to imagine. I lost the universal/him. I lost what I thought of as God and everything that had meaning to me, even my own belief in my own purity. And now I’m scared; I know if this is what it takes for the universal to know me, what has God been through to make me know?
Anyway in the dream I am going to die tonight, in the hope I will go home, and here is my brother he’s come to help me. There are all these nifty electronic toys lying about. Future toys, all gadgets, all entertainment. And my brother is taking them apart and taking out all their batteries. The batteries are special. They’re like light batteries. When you crack them open it’s like seeing a ragged, sheared off end of a fiber-optic cable, but the light coming out of the ends is much more brilliant, like golden light stars. They were in a big frond. And my brother said that the way I was going to go was that I had to light the fronds of stars on fire, let them catch flame and burn to their brightest, and just then I had to blow every one of them out. And if I did that correctly, one by one to all of the batteries, I would eventually die, maybe reach the edge. So I started on the task of blowing them out. I had hardly any breath left to do it. The thing is, there weren’t enough batteries around for me to die. I was never going to.