The Space to Notice

In the heat it is nice. The cold seems to prompt a lot of considering about dress, discomfort, alienation, and so on. You’re on your own little island trying to keep warm. The heat seems to draw forth a togetherness – we are all sweating, kind of drowsy, etc., so don’t worry about it. You’re out in the open with everything, sharing what’s there.

You get up irritated. It’s around lunchtime and you are forced in to going to lunch with Trish. She does a kind of postmodern guilt thing. You can’t really remember what it was. It would be difficult to explain anyway but it’s something that happens occasionally. Perhaps this is a mother/son thing. Assertiveness doesn’t really work the way it ought to.

Anyway. Lunch then to Nana/Papa’s to do some gardening. You bring a cassette player and some tapes on Buddhism that you got from the sangha in SLO. You listen while you drive around and while you garden.

You trim some bushes, load some wood in the back of your truck, and start to dig up the root of a lemon tree you had cut down previously. But its hot. After an hour and a half or so you call it quits for the day. You shower, change, and eat a bit.

The tapes help you. You go to the café on Broadway and have a cup of iced tea and later a cup of coffee. You intend to research the Electoral College so as to write a paper for class but end reading an email from Nick on experimentation. This prompts you to send him a quote you mentioned to him a few days ago. From here you read some stuff that’s on your red thumb drive. Old stuff. You read some work you did over the summer and realize its related to what Nick and you have been discussing in relation to ‘the path’. You send it to Nick. Its actually pretty good.

You are really seeing the importance of at-hand trajectory awareness at this point. You decide to eat at Nana’s. You then take a break – you decide you will chill out for just one hour. You play hearts on the computer for about 45 minutes. You lie down and watch your thoughts.

You get up and watch your thoughts. You watch your thoughts all the way to the library. You read near the window about the Electoral College. You find a good site and are interested. You stay till it closes. The employees say good bye to you while they wait by the stairs. One of them uses your first name. You watch your thoughts.

Shane texts you while you are driving home. You do not respond till you get home. You run a through a four way stop on purpose. You listen to a tape.

You tell him to come along on a hike on Saturday. Later he texts you about hanging out tonight. You intend to finish the Electoral College assignment. But later you change your mind. You will hang out.

You write this. You showered and then did some calisthenics and then sat on the cushion for some time, panting. Then you eat an orange and then you write this. You want to see the point of going to hang out. Earlier you had some thoughts about making things more growth centered with Shane. You want to show him him. Mirror. But you want to do this so that you can push things a bit further.

You have thoughts about just keep that space of silence open. Watch your thoughts. And also know why your doing what your doing. This is important. Really important. For now. So what is the purpose now? You will go to the party why?

Earlier you thought about the reason for doing the E.C. paper. You go: doing it will help to get more points, so that I may get a fair grade for the class, so that I may have a good enough gpa so that I may get into Humboldt easier for the second time, so that I may go to Humboldt next January, so that I may be around people interested in philosophy like me, so that I can push things further and see clearly.

Seeing the whole project in front of you but not as words, as feelings as narrative – such a thing gets rid of all insecurity and distractive meandering.

You will be space. Take the time to feel how you feel. No easy going with it. This shuts you off. Find the real honest reason for the movement. Don’t bullshit with the reasons. Make it so you have the time to see the real reasons. Then see if such a reason is commensurate with how you intend to be.

No stupid movement then.

Initiation of Vlog

03.17.11 Midday

While you eat breakfast you sit at the computer and watch a few youtube videos in your subscriptions box. Somehow you stumble upon a video about 11 seconds long titled day 21 or something like that. It featured bits of video of a fellows day edited together - like snapshots of fluid recollection. You watch all 20 or so videos on his channel in high admiration. While you exercise and shower you have an impulse. You locate Trishes flip video cam and see how it works. you make a quick recording and then figure out how to erase it. Perhaps you'll experiment with just the same format: throughout your day you will record moments, trim them down before you get to sleep, and upload them. You toy with the notion of doing something different so that it is not complete imitation. However, you quite like what the idea is. Perhaps you will also write up a short daily related blog and attach a link to the video.

You believe that such an experiment with video recording and journaling will assist in the endeavor toward self-knowledge. For one, you will be aware of leaving/arriving, the shift of roles, boundaries, and thresholds in a much more acute manner as you will be documenting the transitions of life - the traveling, the meals, breaks, the lulls in engagement with that which is at hand, etc. You will also be allowing for 'memory' to have deeper hold. That is, the dual process of video recording and right recollection of events in the written form will likely foster and concentrate the skillfulness of your associative and recollective powers. This is something you've noticed to be worthy of effort: it seems that the tendency of 'diffusion' has greater pull or gravity when Techniques of Self are employed. In different terms you are in a position to be far more

in-touch with yourself when you allow time to remember your 'ultimate concerns' a few moments during the day. Less fragmentation, less indulgent negativity, less distraction seeking.

Perhaps you'll contact the fellow who put up the string of videos after you've attempted the format, explaining your intentions so that lack of permission will not be an

irritation. It will be both a homage and an adaptation, after all.

Gurdjieff, Longing, and Wondering Thoughts

You are pulled. You long for a complete devotion to the path. You think of reading the S.A. book. Maybe call Michael and resume talking things through.

You speak with your political science teacher, Scarfe, about testing, standardization, educative intentions, and the mood of community college. You like her one on one. You kind of get into this really slow, deliberate façade with her.

You worry about things. Presentations in the weeks to come worry you. You feel also like you don’t have time for what’s meaningful – and for doing things right. You wish you could connect with someone. This girl in your Bio class reminds you of the main character in the French movie “Water Lilies”. You watch the rest of the film on netflix.

Maybe you’ll ride Steve’s bike. Save some money. Have it handy for path things. Maybe you’ll talk to Michael about trajectories. Maybe finish stats in summer and just ‘take off’. You’ve been yearning. Go away to school only when you think paying money to do so is worthy. You don’t want to get stuck owing money for a fucking loan. Stuck, etc.

A Gurdjieff quote recalls a lot of stuff about ‘right movement’:

“I wished to create around myself conditions in which a man would be continually reminded of the sense and aim of his existence by an unavoidable friction between his conscience and the automatic manifestations of his nature.” —G.I. Gurdjieff, ca. 1913

This reminds you of the way out. Eckhart Tolle in a park.

You are angry that school doesn’t provide instruction in self-knowledge. It can then only be an authoritative exercise. This is the bulk of the argument you have against ‘education’.

Mundane Ethical Dilemma

3.7.11 Early Afternoon

This morning when you went for a jog after your early class you notice a $20 bill lying in the gutter of a suburban homes driveway – there’s a newish van parked nearby. You look around. You pick it up. It’s wet from the water in the gutter so you wipe it off inside the pocket of your running shorts. There’s the thought that goes: ring the doorbell and ask if someone had dropped it. But you’re dull and jumbled. You stick it in your pocket, look around again and continue on your way.

While you jog you encounter a few thought-movements related to the banal moral dilemma. Could this be an experiment? – stick a twenty in the gutter and watch what happens from behind a fence? No, highly doubtful.

You are brought to an insight you had some few months ago while emailing Tom. Amongst the emotional resistance and arguments of the thought-movements you recall that ethical thinking comes about primarily when faced directly with a dilemma; it comes about secondly after the dilemmas themselves occur, when one begins to wonder if what one had done was ‘right’; and thirdly, ethical thinking springs up from the encounter and identification with stories, but at much weaker strength.

Your emotional movements stimulate the ethical dimension of the ‘lost’ bill. It goes: perhaps someone dropped it and will ‘need’ it. Or, you have not earned the money, and you also do not ‘need’ it. And, it will be growth-centered if you ring the doorbell.

You jog along listening to music and reacting to the narrative in your mind about what to do. You think about what you could do with the money. A haircut? You felt unattractive this morning and could use the twenty to get a haricut – smooth things out. And, as if to add support to this trajectory, you remember one time when you were younger that you’d lost the same amount of money while riding your bike – a lot of money to you then. This is reasonable, it says.

There’s a counter argument, though. It goes: you do not ‘need’ it, and it is not yours. There’s a recalling of what the ‘commissaris’ says in one of Janwillem van de Wetering’s Amsterdam detective mysteries – “I have not seen much of the Law, but what I have seen has effected me.” You think that returning it may be good. For instance, it would clarify some of your jumbledness this morning. Is this sufficient though? A negative aspect of yourself says it isn’t, that there’s a sort of childish stupidity about it. Yet it is not so. You are not doing it so as to be a ‘good boy’ or merely to feel better about yourself and the world. You feel that a voluntary action aimed at returning the money would help the ‘world’; that is, the quality of the movement would be noticed – perhaps not initially, but later – by the lost money’s owner, and that they would then be in a position to contact this ‘quality’ themselves in their further movements. Perhaps not use it just yet or ever, but they would feel it.

You think that the thinking is not necessary – all of those thought movements are confusing. At the moment of noticing the bill, the feeling was the guided argument. But then the thought came in and you reasoned about not feeling particularly up to ringing the bell because there was an anxiety about dealing with people. Perhaps the early feeling was the higher emotional center, the ‘thinking’ was mechanical.

And so you flip back and forth. There are some times your swayed by both impulses. Yet you finally side with the ‘qualitativenss’. You walk up the steps after jogging back to the house with the van. You ring the doorbell and wait. You ring it again and wait. You wonder if you might just put it under the doormat. The door opens up, suddenly. A girl about your age, attractive in a fleshy sort of way, blonde, but not uninteresting and dull. She’s sleepy looking, dressed in shorts and a baggy white shirt.

You tell here the story, leaving out that you jogged about with the money in you pocket before returning it. She opens the door the whole way and you hand it to her. You don’t ask it if it’s hers. You feel sweaty. She say’s: you’re nice to do that, have a nice night- I mean day.

Well, there we are.