A Silence So Loud You Can't Hear It

or, "How Do You Talk About Something No One Will Talk About?"

***

When I first discovered silence, it startled me.  It might actually be more accurate for me to say that every time I discover silence, it startles me.  It's everywhere and nowhere at once.  You can't point to it, but it's there.  And then sometimes there's just noise and confusion.

Frustrating things to describe, silence and / or confusion, and any attempts to capture them are ultimately met with more silence. 

But there are some silences so personal and so deep, so grounded in the moment and in my own existence that any perceivable expression is an expression born of silence that returns to silence, to a space so vast and so deep that any and all expressions of it are met with more blessed silence and love and joy and bliss at the overwhelming [       ]ness of it.

Some silences are peaceful and others are neighbors pounding endlessly on the ceiling of my soul with all of their emotions and machinations.  Some are meditations on big rocks near quiet streams in state parks while mustachioed men sit forlornly in Ford Toruses on their lunch breaks.  

Some silences are food poisoning in business class bathrooms on international flights for resent-filled work trips.  Blessed benzo nap approaching on the flight back while the boss barons on about the project's landscape.

Some silences.........................define you.  

At the level of "what I do," I'm a self-taught audio engineer, among many other things.  I haven't fully decided yet and probably never will what my most favorite musical thing is yet, but I will say that I absolutely love the process of mixing songs.  In the mixing of a recorded song, I create the space for the song to exist in a tangible form.

I only write songs so that I can record them.

I only record songs so that I can mix them.

I only mix songs so that I can master them.

I only master songs so that my emotions keep moving.

If I don't do this, if I don't go through this process, which has previously been tumultuous, but now I understand more, if I don't go through the process of expressing my emotions through recorded song, then I become stuck.  I suffer. 

I need to hear my voice in the microphone, in the studio.  In the silence, my voice is there.  I can will it to be there.  I can will it to do a lot of nuanced things.  I love my voice.

The first time I discovered my voice was in the silence after a religious experience on a Royal Rangers camping trip in my adolescence.  To the uninitiated, the Royal Rangers are basically Christian Boy Scouts.

We're standing around a fire, a bunch of us, it is nightfall, fire flickering, eyes closed and the normal machinations are happening.  The energy is building.  I am crying out to God, crying out to the Lord, genuinely, in the language I have, the language everyone around me speaks, which is the language of the pentecostal Assembly of God churches.

I am repenting.  I am asking Jesus into my heart.  People around me are speaking in tongues, glossolalia is the technical name, and suddenly I start to as well.  I kind of let go but also will my tongue to just start moving and it just sort of flops around in my mouth in a highly pleasant manner.   It's just going and sound is happening, sort of an "alallallalalallalallllllalalala."

I am feeling ecstatic by now and later walk around with the other glossolaliers, "drunk in the spirit."

In this memory, though, there is an intrusion.  I am repenting.  I am crying out "I'm sorry, I'm sorry."  I am weeping.  I'm not quite sure what I'm sorry about, in that I can't name it.  But I'm sorry, I am repenting.  I feel I have done something wrong and am now being cleansed.  I've not yet spoken in tongues but I am crying out loud.

A voice invades my repentant silence.  

"Oh wow, he's really into it," says one to the other.

Talking about me, of course.  They're standing in front of me.  I can feel them.  My eyes are closed and I'm on a spiritual plane and I can feel that their energy is not one of empathy or care.  It is the energy of pride and satisfaction.

"Oh, wow, look at how we are making him dance" is the subtext as I now understand it.  Part of me still screams out "FUCK YOU!!!!" to these fuckers.  I followed your lead.  I trusted you.  I followed you into this space and now you stand there and compliment yourselves on your work vis-a-vis my own expression of suffering, whatever that means.  I'm maybe 12, with all basic material needs covered, protected by the military base we lived on, protected by the Lord, I don't really know what suffering means, not yet.

And, anyway, F*** is on the list of words I cannot say at 12.  It is, however, one of the words my fellow glossolaliers says in their tent before falling asleep.  If it wasn't that one, it was certainly one of the other forbidden words.  Actually, all of them in the other tent are cursing.  Are they cursing and then speaking in tongues and then cursing again?  Am I remembering this correctly?  

I let my tongue start dancing again, more confused now but still expressive as ever, filled with some other-wordly force that everyone calls God or the Holy Spirit, that I call God too, even though I don't really understand the connection to the word, its sound or shape on paper, and what is happening.  Right now God is called "lalalllalalalallalalaall" and I still feel drunk as ever in the spirit and that feels pretty good.

After the trip, I was joyous.  I was light.  Was this the first time I'd let Jesus into my heart?  I'm fairly certain it was a near constant process for a while. 

But I was singing!  I was singing "Amazing Grace" from my soul.

I sang it everywhere.  In the shower, Amazing Grace, how sweet the reverberant reflections.

In the living room.  Amazing Grace, how sweet this sandwich.

There was so much space!   Space to run, space to sing.  Space to interact with other people with joy.

In college, I'm riding in the back seat, returning from the hospital where our friends' recently ex-girlfriend is staying.  Staying is a relative term.  She's there because she was in a car accident with a tractor trailer, did they say 18-wheeler?, and the circumstances are unclear.

On the ride back, the rolling hills and winding roads hold the spender of that joyous space, the joyous silence.  There was so much in that space.  Abbey Road is playing and I'm singing along, not even conscious that I'm singing, how sweet The Beatles, and my friend in the front seat turns around to me and says I have a nice voice.

Prior to that point my voice had only ever been my voice.  Now my voice was "nice."  In that space, how could it not be true?

And sadness?  That's a given.  So dominant in my life up to this point, before I could name what that feeling was, that it was simply a given.  It was the water I swam in.  This bad thing happened.  Oh.  This bad thing happened.  Oh.  Prayer upon prayer morphed "Amazing Grace" into "Semi-Charmed Kind Of Grace" over time.  What I really wanted, what anyone really wants of anyone else is silent recognition of the feelings roiling inside, feelings I couldn't name, that kept returning in various forms and machinations.  

On Netflix the other day I watched a special on Timothy Leary & Ram Dass.  I am fascinated by this whole scene.  It's all connected. 

At one point, Timothy Leary is testifying to congress on the merits of psychedelics and explains to Ted Kennedy, to paraphrase:

"Hallucinations are what happen when we don't understand the experience that the body is having."

I knew that was true, but now I can name it.

***

When mixing a song, right at the point where I sit down and decide to mix a song, within the context of the song, there is silence.  I haven't hit play yet.  There's no sound coming out of the speakers or the headphones.  With respect to the song I am about to mix, there is silence.

So I hit play, and the song starts playing and I start bobbing my head and then my mind says "Uhhh, the guitar is way too loud" and my face squinches up and I stop the song to adjust it.

Silence.  

An ambulance passes.  I wait.

Play :: sound.  Stop :: silence.

Is anything really ever truly silent?  Does sound have any inherent existence?  I need all this equipment to generate it.

Or just my voice.  But, either way, it takes energy to generate sound.  Stop the energy, and silence results.  

Some silences take energy to maintain. 

Any scandal that has ever occurred for any reason is a scandal precisely because there was a complex web of silence that, for a while, provided space for the scandalous thing to occur.  Once people find out about the thing on a large enough scale, the scandal is over and it's named as such.  

Scandals that are presently occurring are not really scandals as such, because within the context of the protective silence, the scandalous thing is seen as normal or minimized or deflected or denied altogether by those who maintain the silence about what is happening.    

In such an environment, no one goes around and says "Well, yes, I did see that happen, but we're trying to maintain the scandal here, so you know, how are the kids?"

A scandal is only a scandal when the silence about the scandalous thing is broken on a large enough scale, relative to the scale of the thing that, prior to becoming a scandal, was the thing that no one talked about.

Before that point, a scandal is simply water in a fish tank maintained by the fish.  For any fish to call their water scandalous and throw it out would kill all the fish.

For another fish to come into the tank and call that tank's water scandalous relative to their previous water will ultimately mean death for the potential whistleblower fish.  

And so an equilibrium is established.  And, within that equilibrium, things can still be alright.  I can still swim, and if I don't care about the confines of the tank, that may be just fine for me.  It's better than flopping around on the ground, gasping for air.  Maybe I like my fish friends just fine.  Maybe I like my fish job.

The problem for me came when my internal tank broke open for a moment one day at work when I was 27 or so.  The thing that Timothy Leary said is true.  

Memories.  Body experiences.  No context.  Shifting context.  No words.  Words.  Familiar words and concepts.  Familiar but foreign.  Everything is both a container and is contained.  Everything has levels.  Everything is connected.  Don't you see this?  Let me tell you again.  Let me tell you again.  Let me tell you again.  Let me tell you again a different way.  Why don't you see this?

Hospitalized.  Play by the rules.  Don't talk about the thing I can't talk about.

The second time my tank broke open was maybe 4 years later, though, honestly, time isn't so linear for me anymore.

Different context, same memories, more specificity.  This time I knew better what was happening, but that's only generally to say that I knew I was having delusions and dissociations again and that they were connected to certain memories.  But are they really delusions?  What is true?

And what can I really say about my life since the second time my tank broke?  The water's still draining out.  What's left is space.  Silence.  Words connected with emotion in the moment.

And there are periodic dips back into the cocoon that held me safe for so many years.  Words looping back on themselves.  Separate emotion.  Analysis of emotion.  Delayed emotional processing.

What's left are other people.  Human connection with freedom to connect as myself, as I am in each moment.  

Two years ago I am standing in the First Unitarian Church on Chestnut.  I've seen several music shows here, both upstairs and in the basement, but I'm not here for music or for church.  

Not long after I moved to Philly from York, I saw Margot & The Nuclear So & So's in the basement of The Church.  I was there with my friend from York and his girlfriend.  The ride home was a peaceful post-show-drunk buzz, Tuesday night, rainy autumn evening, bye you two, I had a great time hanging out, drift into blissful post-human-connection sleep.

The hangover the next day, though rather vicscious, I deemed worth the experience and looked forward to being able to more properly alleviate it later after work.

Joe died not so long after that.  I don't know if I've ever properly expressed that through tears until just now.

Standing in front of the First Unitarian Church two years ago, I am not aware of Joe or Margot.  That's in a different tank.

All I know is that I have a name for my experience now, and not only that, a space to express it.  I have the microphone and pewfulls of people, many of them wearing the same T-shirt I am wearing, one that I helped design, are looking at me.  But they're looking at me differently than any group of people have ever looked at me before. 

I speak and there are looks of silent recognition.  I have found it.  I can say this thing that doesn't have a name and now it has a name in a physical space and the physical space and the people in it reflect my truth back to me.

I walk home with my friends in the kind of silence that only comes after breaking the silence that I had been keeping for so long.  This is a new experience for me.  It's not really all that new, actually.  It's refinement.

Some silences are fundamental.  Some silences need energy to maintain.  

I broke my silence that day in The Church, the silence that could not be named because to name it would break the tank.  I said that I believed I was sexually abused as a child.  I wasn't even completely sure at the time.  It was just more true than the contrary.

Sharing my truth has broken my proverbial tank over time.  But in truth, it broke on its own.  Nothing bad has happened as I'd always feared, not in the way I feared it, and not in a way I would call bad, but I wouldn't call it easy, either.

But....but.......and......and, it's really an "and."  I can no longer think in "buts."  Everything is an "and" relative to my experience in life.

My experience is my experience and I must be grounded in what I find to be true inside of myself, inside of my body, the energies, the emotions, the reasons, the motivations.  

If I am grounded in my experience, then others' experiences become "ands" relative to mine.  I can hold my experience and others' experiences as true and from that place and from that place alone, truly relate to another human being as myself.  

This is not an easy thing to do, especially considering that in some cases it means accepting that those close to you can both show genuine love and support and also perpetrate abusive silences.

No one likes to break their own tank.  To be frank, it's a fucking mess of a [          ] journey to clean up. 

The tank was really just fucking dirt anyway and I have sprouted.    

Listen to me. 

Speaking Out of Need And Want

Good morning yous,

Happy effin Friday.

The weather's colder, a chill is in the air.  I like this time of year.

It just occurred to me that Thanksgiving is next week.  That's pretty crazy, I could have sworn it was at least two weeks away.  Last night at group everyone was talking about their families and stuff around Thanksgiving.  It seems everyone has their, ehem, misgivings about it.

I certainly have my stuff around it....everyone was going around and talking about their "angst" as we were calling it.  Toward the end of group it was me and another person who were left and the group leader asked the other person to talk about their angst.  They shared about work mostly.  When it was time for me to go, it was at the end of group.  I was both hoping for the opportunity to share about my stuff and relieved that I didn't have to.  Either way, there was a definitive sense of emotional pain I felt and was able to hold while I listened to others share.

The thing about the pain was that it seemed to be self generated in a way.  Like, the thoughts I had were more about whether I should share, whether people will listen, whether I even want to talk about my angst to begin with, when what I felt was sad.  So when it came down to the end of the session, the part of me that was terrified to talk about my own stuff was relieved that I had an out.

I took it.  I said I didn't feel it was a good space or time and that was true.  I could have said something high-level.  But I opted to exclude myself entirely from the discussion.  That in and of itself caused the feeling of emotional pain to grow.  If I had spoken up I don't know what I would have said.  I wanted to keep my pain to myself.  My voice felt so small.

How to speak up.  When to speak up.  When to speak at all.  Most of the talking that I do is out of necessity.  That's not necessarily a bad thing but sometimes I think I'd rather not talk at all.  There are times when communicating with others can be fun.  Parties.  Concerts.  Weekend time.

My mathematical mind wants to group these times of speaking into two categories: speaking out of need and speaking out of want.  I think most of the time I feel I am speaking out of need because speaking at all, communicating, is ridden with anxiety.  It is not a relaxing or calming thing for me most of the time.  So I speak out of need most of the time.  I can do it just fine on the whole, but it's not usually something I look forward to.

There's a party this weekend we're going to and that sounds fun.  There I will speak out of want.  I am looking forward to that.

When I speak out of want, the communication is easier.  It can be fun.  Engaging.   When I speak out of need, communication simply must happen.  When I don't speak at all, that can feel comforting, but if I don't speak out of fear, then I silence myself.  What to do?

And then there's the whole reaching out to people thing.  In order for communication to occur, in order for relationships to be built, one must reach out to other people and initiate contact sometimes.  I feel I am not so good at this.  Or, at the very least, this terrifies me.

I secretly want to reach out to people more, to just have conversations for the sake of conversations, but that want is really a need because I don't do it much.  It's one I don't want to do.  I'd rather observe from the sidelines.  I can tell you everything that's going on, I can speak up if I need, but otherwise, I'd prefer to be on the outside.  Is that true, though?

Sometimes I'd much rather be in the middle of the pack, surrounded by all sides with friends and people I admire.  Sometimes that's the case.  Sometimes I find myself there.  The mystery to me is how that actually happens.

Family is such a basic thing that a lot of people tend to talk about it a lot.  Other people, like myself, not so much.  That's hard for me.  When people talk about family I'm not sure how to relate.  This isn't because I don't love my family, because I do, it's because I feel foreign there.  It's like I was born into this thing and people told me stuff and I believed it.  Aunts and uncles come to visit on the holidays.  Oh, we're related.  Oh, I can see a resemblance.  No one actually has been able to explain to me what all of this is for, though.

What I'm saying is sometimes I have an incredible sense of being here right now but I don't necessarily have a sense of established familial lineage that some people have.  A sense of groundedness through genetic lines.  It all kind of feels random to me, sometimes.  At least the initial roll of the dice.

And, who knows, maybe there's some larger purpose here.  I mean, I tend to believe that this isn't my first go round on this jawn.  In some belief systems, we have chosen this path before we were born.  Now that gets into some heavy heady shit, especially when this present moment can be a lot to deal with sometimes.  But that feels true to me.  It feels true to me that the consciousness that is writing these words isn't confined to just the life of this body.  I can feel the continuity of myself beyond this body.  It feels here.  It is here.  I am here.  That's all I can really say.  What else is there to say?  There is but one.

It saddens me that I have trouble connecting with my family.  It saddens me that I don't reach out more.  My family of origin are there and they are cool and they are people I am genetically related to.  Beyond that, I'm not sure.  They are human and I am a human.

I am alive and am grateful for that.  I guess that's my connection.  My family is my direct connection to life itself.  If I view life as larger than just this body, then my family of origin are just that.  They are humans and I am human and I happened to enter this realm and this time through this specific family.  That feels true to me.

I've expressed this before at group, but it still feels a little weird to say elsewhere because I'm not sure how people will take this: I feel I have both originated from my family, my parents, and also that there's a fundamental part of me that's beyond that.  I am consciousness and they are consciousness.  Physically I was given birth to.  At the level of consciousness I simply am.  Both of those things are true to me.

From the perspective that we are all consciousness, which is essentially the same thing as saying we are all human, I can view myself and my family and other humans with compassion.  From the perspective of birth and family and life processes, I struggle.  And that's OK.  The mental and emotional dirt that humans have to push through in order to get to the light of self is there for nourishment, in the same way plants rely on and push through the soil in order to grow.

So in terms of speaking up, for myself, the compassionate thing to do is to recognize when I want to speak up, when I want to share something with another human.  And then to act on that.  And also to be OK if I don't act on that.  This stuff comes out one way or another, at the appropriate time.

Love,
Casey

We're all Phases of the Present Moment

Dear yous,

Good morning from 4:30 AM on a Thursday.  I've been waking up pretty early the past few days, feeling somewhat active, so I figured I'd make good use of the time and write.

I had a moment of contemplating whether it is worth me to continue this blog.  Or whether it's worth it to write altogether.  I had a 1001 variations on the thought "I'm worthless."

I could go with that thought - I've done it before with other things - and that usually leads to depression.  When I suppress myself, when I don't communicate or don't speak out of a fear of not being heard, then I'm not in a good way.  If I follow the thought "I do not belong here.  I have no place here," then my world will transform into one that has no space for me...or one in which I can find no space.

In this spaceless world, when I walk I feel like I'm constantly bumping into people.  My shoulders are too wide.  The sense that I have of my body is not always what my body is in physical reality.  When I speak, no one listens.  Sometimes the environment works to make this so.  I'll be speaking with someone, trying to say something of meaning, and something external will interrupt, with consistency.  It's like no one pays attention long enough for me to say what I'm trying to say.  I'm  able to make words and sounds but they are disconnected.  It's like my timing is off.  It's all timing, really.

If I'm in my flow, if my life is moving to a nice rhythm and things are flowing, I can see the timing of things.  I can see the gaps between people on the sidewalk where I will walk.  I can see all obstacles in my way, so to speak.

If my timing is off, I can't see a route anywhere.  I am stuck.  Life is a wildly complex, massive moving stream of people and cars and survival needs and who the fuck can really navigate this anyway?  That's how it feels.  In this state, I can't access that realm of myself that feels things emotionally, so I say things that are indirectly related to how I'm feeling.  I can get stuck in the mundaneness of the shitty side of existence: rote motions, food in food out, say this to get that.

I exist.  I know this to be true.  I wake up every day.  I eat.  I sleep.  I do all the normal human things.

If I am fully engaged in the present moment, then my sense of separate self is dissolved in it.  I am moving with the wave of the present moment.  There is motion happening, but no separate sense of "I."

The moment "I" am doing the thing in the present moment, then my experience is no longer directly of the present moment, of the sensations happening, feelings, thoughts, motions, smells, all of the "hard problem of consciousness" qualia - my experience is removed from the present moment by the thought of myself experiencing the moment; I'm experiencing what is happening in reality through the filter of thought, which categorizes and filters the experience I'm having, the experience my body is having in this moment, according to past experience.  This filtering, I've found, is ultimately illusory.  All that mental stuff can play out and at the end of the day I'm still sitting here right where I find myself.

I take this moment to be fundamental.  I look around and I can see that motion is happening.  The motion of my fingers on the keyboard.  I cough.  There are thoughts.  My face is scrunched as I do sometimes when I write.  My cats are half-sleeping, breathing in and out.  And every so often, and this is perhaps my favorite thing about Philly, I can hear the calm whine of the Septa busses as they drive down Broad St. amid the quiet predawn.

So in this moment I, that is the totality of me, including my body, my thoughts and feelings, can either be aligned with the what is happening or not aligned.  When I am aligned with the moment, there is flow.  When I am misaligned, there is obstacle.  The only observable difference in myself between the two poles is timing.  This leads me to believe that we're dealing with waves here!!  Let me explain.

If I'm sitting at a red light, about to make a left turn, I'll probably have my blinker on.  Usually, the cars in front of me will have their blinkers on, too.  If the rate that my blinker flashes is close to the rate of the blinker of the car in front of me, I'll see my blinker and their blinker align for a moment, then drift apart....they'll be opposite at a point - mine on, theirs off, vice versa - then they'll drift back together until the light turns green.  I'm talking here about phase.

In terms of car blinkers, we're talking about two things being related to each other by timing.  The moment that the person in front of me turns on their blinker + the moment that I turn on my blinker + the rate of our respective blinkers = how in sync or how out of sync I will perceive our blinkers to be. 

I take it that life is a very complex version of that.

The moment is fundamental.  I have some independence of motion in this moment via my thoughts and physical body motions but regardless of what transpires out there or in here, I am always this body in this moment.

If I can only control this body and I can only ever be aligned with what is happening now, out of line with what is happening now, or some degree in between, then it can be said that I'm either in phase with the moment or out of phase with it.

When we're talking about timing and phase and rate, then we're talking about wave functions.  In my experience, I've found that viewing life as a giant complex wave feels true.  When I am aligned with this wave, then I'm flowing with it.  There is no separate "I" to struggle against anything.

So back to the thought of "I'm worthless, why do I do anything."  That's just a thought.  It's a powerful one, but it's still just a thought that arises and dissipates over time.  Is that thought any more or less true than any other distinct thing I can point to in my consciousness?

And, also, as far as communicating, I need to do it.  I need to share myself.  And so far, I've found this blog to be a satisfactory outlet.  At the end of the day I'm doing this for myself.  I write this for myself, both so I can communicate in the moment, but also so that I document my journey through some complex trauma and mental stuff.  The words are there and in the words and the timing of the posts is the underlying story, the feeling, the thing I'm trying to say.  And maybe others will stumble across this and find some value, some recognition in the expression.

With love,
Casey

Wheel of Intimacy

Dear yous,

It's been a while and I've been living life.  I'm alive and that can be pretty cool sometimes.

One of the things about being alive is that there's a definitive up and down to the feelings and moods that I experience.  That's part of the thing.  That's OK.

Another thing about being alive is the depth of experience that is possible.  Gurdjieff talks about this in terms of taking impressions via the senses, registering finer and finer impressions as one gains deeper understanding of themselves.  This makes sense to me.

I'm aware that my consciousness is fundamentally the same as it's always been and also that experiences I have day-to-day can serve to deepen or enrich my consciousness.  In other words, I tend to view time not as strictly linear but also circular, spiral-like, whose purpose is ultimately to refine what's already here, not necessarily usher a linear progression from start to finish.  

In this context, then, I'd like to talk about consent.  I'd ultimately like to drive down to the level of talking about consent in terms of relating sexually to other humans and to oneself.  I recognize that for me and others, this can be a difficult topic.  So I'll start broad and then refine.  Normal CWs apply, though I keep it pretty high level.

OK.  In the broadest terms, consent is defined by a quick google search as "permission for something to happen or agreement to do something."   This is wonderfully generic and I have fallen in love with its non-specificity.  Let's break this down.

There is "something" that can "happen" or mutual agreement to "do something."  What this "something" is was not made clear by google.  This is wonderful.

This is wonderful because to view this definition in the negative sense, this implies, to me, that without consent "nothing happens" and there's "nothing to do."  This gets into physics in my mind: inertia.

In physics, inertia is "a property of matter by which it continues in its existing state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, unless that state is changed by an external force."  

As a living being, I feel a lot inertia.  I wake up and generally do the same things everyday.  When I don't do these things, I feel anxiety.  My body wants to keep its current day-to-day motion going.  

Also, as a living being, I feel like I don't want to do anything a lot of times.  I just want to exist.  To be.  To breathe and have that be enough.  If I move, if I break my inertia of the moment, then I move out of conscious choice, returning to rest once that movement is complete.

This, I feel is fundamental: there exists a state of rest, of existence, in which conscious choice is possible, in which true power is felt.  Power to act out of what is needed in the moment.  In this state, there are needs and also paths for those needs to be met.  There might be worry, but that can come and go.  Feelings can be consciously acted on in the moment or left to dissolve for another time. 

Let's take this fundamental state of rest and make that the baseline.  In this fundamental state of rest I am alive, I am aware.  I am breathing in and out.  I can focus my awareness on only this if I choose.  I can speak or not speak as I desire.  When I respond, I speak from a place of depth.  When I listen I listen with my whole being.  This is the fundamental state of waking existence I will be basing this analogy of intimacy on.  

This fundamental state is a state of inertia in the restful sense.  In this state, I am content to be as I am, where I am.  If I choose to move, I do so with conscious intent.  If I choose not to move, I also do this with conscious intent.

So, if I am in this fundamental state, what will motivate me to move?  If I am content and have all my needs met or, at the very least, if I feel capable of getting my needs met, if I feel an abundance of love and strength, then why move at all?

Of course, there are bodily needs to attend to.  I must eat, take from the environment.  That eating turns into waste products that must be put back into the environment.  All of these things require action, motion of my body.

Let's say I live completely off the land.  I grow my own food.  I am intimately connected to the full cycle of my body's needs.  Maybe a lot of my time and mental resources are concerned with this.  I am connected and relate to others for my survival.  This way of life feels to me to be fundamentally connected with the earth, with life.  I don't live this way currently.

Currently, I live in a city and have the ability to get my groceries Instacart delivered and to have Blue Apron as well.  Even will a full fridge, I can feel disconnected from the food in it.   Takeout is usually the least amount of effort and more short-term satisfying.  In other words, food to me a lot of times is a bothersome necessity.  I must eat in order to keep this body going in order to do all this other stuff that I do in my life.

By why do this other stuff if the other stuff isn't fundamental?  Why do I feel the need to focus on all manner of non-survival things in order to feel better about myself, all the while doing the fundamental survival things out-of-order or just plain neglecting them?  What is my motivation, my drive, my inertia here?  Why is eating a bothersome chore?

I can say with some certainty that my motivation is ultimately survival, but it's survival at the level of connectedness.  I feel such a desperate need to connect sometimes, paired with a desperate perceived inability to initiate and sustain intimate human relationships, that I simply don't do it.  I have the desire to connect with people but often feel like I don't know how, and so I don't.  I do all this other stuff instead.  Sometimes the other stuff is self-destructive.

There is an important distinction here.  I desire human contact and connection but often don't feel I have the agency to go through with it, so I take that desire, that energy and direct it to other things.  In other words, there is either meaningful human contact or other things done to avoid or deal with lack of meaning human contact.  If I could boil down my life to that duality, I'd say that's it.  

OK, so if I have this desire, that's my motivation to move from fundamental rest.  If I have a desire, I can feel it wanting to move my body.  I can feel the actions that will occur to fulfill that desire.  Or maybe I've never done the thing before and I feel like I just jumped off a cliff.  In either case, I feel the desire.  That's the impetus for moving, for doing something different.

I have a desire and I can consciously choose to act on it or not.  This can include suppressing the desire, a mechanism I know well.    Why would I choose to suppress natural desires?  Why does anyone?  Well, that seems to be the culture we live in.  And my personal history lends itself to suppressing my desire for human connection.  This is pretty common, I think.

So I've identified that I have desire to do a thing.  To do "something."  I can feel this desire and then either nothing happens or something happens.  Since my default setting is to suppress a lot of my natural desires for human contact, the something that happens when this desire arises is suppression.  My body tightens and I get a specific feeling in my chest.  I feel small.  I feel withdrawn from the environment.  This happens over and over and over again until it's automatic.  Wilhelm Reich talks about this in terms of body armor, muscle rigidity that forms as a suppressive response to emotion over time.

With this armor, when I feel like I'm operating from this place, I feel small.  I feel like I have no agency.  I can feel this desire but the desire is overwhelming.  It has no outlet and so it implodes inwardly.  It builds over time.  Attempts to overcome this armor, to operate from a different place, are met with frustration, rage, anger.  

In terms of motivation, what motivates me from fundamental rest, desire is the active force.  If desire is the active force, then agency is the gate that either allows that force to continue out into the environment or to flow back into myself.  If I feel like I have a sense of agency, if I feel like I can either act on a desire or not and either choice is OK, then the desires themselves are not a big deal.  They are things that arise in my conscious awareness and fall back out of it again and I am the conscious agent through which these desires move and express themselves.  I am in harmony with my environment.  The Tao. 

By contrast, if I don't feel agency then that gate is closed and then my desires become a seeming insurmountable problem.  The desire for human connection doesn't go away, it just builds and feels impossible, only able to find outlet indirectly, or through use of substances.

In those times that I do feel the agency to connect with others, then the next gate on this circle analogy is the process of connection.  I reach out to you with words or eyes or hands.  You reach back.  Or not.  It's a give and take.  It happens over time.

At some point, being humans, if I am going to really connect with you, I feel we must touch.  It doesn't have to be a big thing.  It can be a hug or a handshake or maybe a hand on the shoulder.  Just some sort of physical contact to make me really believe you are there.  That are you physically there and that I am physically here.

The closer that we become physically, the closer that we become mentally, emotionally, the more intimate we are.  The more I see your humanity and the more I allow you to see my humanity determines the level of intimacy we have.  This may involve more than just a greeting or parting touch.  Maybe we cuddle.  Maybe we're lovers.  

Let's bring consent into the mix here.  I have a desire to connect with other humans.  I feel agency.  I connect.  I feel some level of intimacy.  The connection temporarily ends.  I see you again and we re-connect.  We build more intimacy.  Or maintain it.  Or maybe we grow further apart.  Either way, if we're going to relate at all, consent is required.

Consent is defined wonderfully loosely as "permission for something to happen."  In terms of human relating, that something could well be anything, but here that something is intimacy.  Ultimately, when I connect with others I desire intimacy.  I want to see and hear you.  I want to be seen and heard by you.

In order for this to happen, consent must occur.  There's a protocol that develops.  We learn how to communicate.  We learn our body languages.  I ask you to do things.  You ask me to do things.  We do things together.  We say yes sometimes.  We say no sometimes.  These things don't necessarily have to be sexual but they could be, given mutual feelings and consent.

The thing about all of this for me, if I can be vulnerable here, yous, is that I understand all this theoretical stuff all well and good, but my sense of agency feels kind of broken.  I feel like I've had to create this analogy in order to understand the process of how intimacy happens so that I can move on with my life.  I've spent so much time analyzing and agonizing over this, over my perceived inability to connect with others.  I've since realized the fallacy of my thinking.  I'm human like everyone else and so have the same basic desires for human connection and intimacy.

In order to function as a complete human, I must be able to feel all four of these things: Desire, Agency, Connection, Intimacy.  If any one of these are missing or suppressed, that energy gets diverted to other activities that don't involve human connection.  I think of it like a wheel with freely spinning energy, clockwise in this case.  Each of the circles are gates that must function and be open in order for the whole circle (i.e. me) to function properly.

Desire is the energy that arises that motivates me to move from fundamental rest.  If I feel agency to act on this desire, I can act on it.  I can then connect to my environment.  Through that process of connection I gain some level of intimacy with both myself and others.  

If any of these gates are stuck or closed, then I will feel broken.  If my desires are suppressed - specifically, here, I'm talking about sexual desires - then this filters out into higher level life things.  If my lower level, more fundamental desires are suppressed, this will manifest at all levels of my life.

If my desire is free but my sense of agency is all fucked up, then I will compensate by using substances to increase my sense of agency or to reaffirm my lack of agency.  Either one leads to self-destruction.  

If my desire and agency are free but I am unable to make the connection piece happen then I will be unable to achieve intimacy and will fall back to suppressive patterns.  My sense of agency will weaken.

Even if desire, agency, and connection are all working fine, I've found I can connect with others and not feel intimacy whatsoever.  It feels empty.  I feel I need all four of these "things" in order to feel that I am whole and functioning properly as a human. 

So, really, in this model, consent is required at all levels.  I must consent to feeling the sensations in my body.  I must consent to feeling agency and taking action.  I must act with consent in connecting with others.  Through acting this way I can feel intimacy with others.  Intimacy is built.  The wheel must have all its gates open in order to circulate properly.  

Intimacy is the thing here.  Intimacy can include sex, but it doesn't need to.  What I ultimately desire is human connection and intimacy, which sometimes manifests as sex.  I used to think it was the other way around, that sex = intimacy.

Of course, the direction of energy can reverse as well, so that intimacy is withdrawn.  I believe this to be a healthy part of the process.  There's a winding up of intimacy and a winding down, a back and forth negotiation between humans, moment-to-moment about how to exist together in the same space, about how to touch one another if that's what's desired.  I mean, that's the ideal, in my mind.  In reality, our given conception of this stuff is wildly broken.

I feel like if there was a good model for this stuff, it would exist already.  There wouldn't be so much abuse in the world.  But I look around and I see abusive dynamics everywhere, including in myself.  I feel like we're collectively fucked up about how to relate to one another, especially sexually, which is fundamental to our existence.  To me, it's not enough to say "practice consent."  I need to understand the lower level, more fundamental stuff first.  Like, what would motivate me to put my face next to another human's face in the first place?  Sure, I can ask, I can obtain enthusiastic consent, before putting my face close to yours.  But why the fuck do I want to put myself in that position in the first place and what do I do once I'm there?  That's what I want to understand.

With love,

Casey

This Connection is Disconnection

Dear yous,

Good morning, happy Thursday.  This morning I find myself in a central Jersey hotel room wondering about a lot of things.

You see, I've been doing this same consulting job for 7 years now, more or less, and one of the things inherent to the job is travel.  During the last seven years I've travelled a decent amount, going to places like Santa Barbara, CA and Ireland and Germany, all on the client's dime.  That's all well and good, but there's one fundamental aspect of travel that really gets to me after a while: disconnection.

There's this whole world, this pharmaceutical corporate world, that exists.  And while I've been part of it to some extent since I started on this career path after leaving college, being in this world makes me feel disconnected.

From the moment I walk into a windowless conference room, because that seems to be the default setting for most of my traveling work, I feel disconnected.  I've worked with some of the people here for a few years now and so familiar faces are always nice.  But beyond "Hey, how's it going?" I find myself not wanting to say a damn thing in those rooms beyond what is necessary to complete the work.  "Hey, the printer is jammed again."  "Is the next script ready to execute?"

And so that's what this week has been: endless streams of software testing scripts.  Click here, take a screenshot, check pass or fail.

All of this leads me to the question of why I feel so disconnected in this world.  I mean, I generally feel disconnected, or would say I generally have the propensity to feel disconnected if unchecked, in the world at large.  But there's something about this pharma world I never really clicked with.

One trip, several years back, landed me in San Juan, Puerto Rico for a conference thrown by the vendor of the software we use.  The trip itself was pretty extravagant: nice casino / hotel to stay at, fancy dinners and outings.  One night they bussed us up to this hacienda in the hills where they had more open bars than you could count and cigar rollers and general extravagance.

I ended up winning a over a grand in the slots and so left feeling good about that.  But the other parts of the trip?  Forget about it.  They're like the other parts of any of my work trips: getting through them, alone.  That makes me sad, but that's the truth.

That's why I'm getting out of this line of work: I don't relate to this world and don't feel like I want to relate to this world.  I never understood why or how people interact in these sterile environments.  The most I could hope for is to get decently drunk and chain smoke and then conversation with strangers is kind of nice.

Here on this trip this week, I feel that same old feeling I've always felt on these trips: alone, disconnected, wondering why I'm here and why I have to get through this.

I could have brought stuff to record and almost did.  But the feeling I have after sitting in a windowless conference room all day not feeling connected is one of not wanting to do anything at all.  I don't even want to be with myself.  I don't want to call anyone.  I don't want to talk to anyone.  I just want to keep refilling my glass with the free Miller Lite they have for social hour which ends abruptly at 7:30 and read my book on Reich and Gurdjieff.

Why is it that when I walked into the lobby this morning to grab breakfast to take back to my room that I could feel and see heads turn and eyes looking at me?  I don't necessary ascribe any qualities to myself that cause this: I think it's more a function of how people already in rooms look at people who walk into the room.  This bugs the shit out of me.  Leave me alone.  So I ignore everyone.  I put out that vibe that says leave me the fuck alone which is really just masking the underlying vulnerability of "I'd really actually like to connect but don't know how so I've given up."

I read something by Bukowski the other day where he said when he doesn't drink he has nothing to say.  I can relate to this.  Sometimes I seriously question why I would want to say anything at all, drunk or otherwise.  I don't even really drink all that much anymore.  What's the fucking point?

Connection, I guess.  Connection for the sake of feeling connected.  That one still escapes me.  As far as I'm concerned, sometimes my attitude is to just fucking get through the day.  And sometimes that extends to getting through this life.  I just want to get through this life.  I'll do all the things I need to, but then please let this be over so that I can be left the fuck alone, merged with the infinite.

Whatever, that's pretty dark.  It's not all bad and I can see enough of the bigger picture to know that this is only one particular aspect of myself that has developed a decent amount: the negative, disconnected aspected.  I've fostered that one enough to know it well as hell.

And so, now I want to foster the positive, connected aspects of myself.  I've felt connection and I do feel connected, generally.  It usually feels brief, though, and out of my control.  Connection happens somehow.  Sometimes the environment is such that I can open up and feel connected.  And then that window closes and what agency do I have to seek out more connection?  What does that even look like?

After 7 years of this gig, I've figured out that I don't really want to be connected to anyone in this world of work.  I don't want to share myself with anyone here.  I feel much too large for this world of work and stifled by it.

My hope is that by finding new work, working in a different world, I will want to connect.  I will want to interact.  I will want to share myself.  Day-to-day I want to be around others to whom I feel connected.  Day-to-day now I sit at home, alone, on a computer.  That can lead to disconnection.

Disconnection.  Disconnection.  Fuck.  I have a windowless conference room to go to.

Love,
Casey

Attraction

Dear yous,

Good morning from central / north Jersey.  It's a strange place here, all the pharmaceutical companies and the relatively patient drivers and the U-turns that must be made to get anywhere.

I've been keeping up with this blog pretty consistently for a couple months and that feels good.  I now feel that I've laid enough groundwork for myself to be able to talk about some of the deeper things I have going on inside of me.

I used to believe that in order for someone to really understand me, they needed to know this other *stuff* first - stuff about my history and how I see myself and how what I'm about to say fits in the larger context.  This isn't becoming for conversation and has the effect of being overwhelming to the extent that I find it difficult to connect with people.  And, well, in reality all of that isn't necessary; at the core we're all the same and so my task in communication is more one of translation than explanation; translating others' communications into my own internal language and vice versa.

Hence this blog.  This is my place to write it all out, provide the context I need in order to express how I'm feeling.  In that context, today I want to tackle a topic that has plagued me since I hit puberty.

Attraction.

That feeling that you get when you catch another person's eye or otherwise see and / or interact with another person to whom you feel attracted.  This has historically been a tough feeling for me to handle.

My default response, in that situation, feeling attraction towards someone, is to avoid it altogether.  I don't see you.  You are not there.  I am not here.  I am not accessible.  Don't you look at me that way.  How dare I look at you at that way.  That kind of thing.

Gurdjieff talks about this type of response in terms of "buffers," different "I's" that exist within all of us.  We have all these different "I's" that come out in various situations and take over.  We identify with the feelings and thoughts and then "I am this" or "I am not this."  Between these "I's" are "buffers," rigidity in muscles, energetic blocks, behaviors that keep the I's separate.  I most definitely have an "I" buffer when it comes to attraction.

When I look at the root causes of this in myself, I can point to a lot of things: my religious upbringing, childhood trauma, patriarchal attitudes.  I want to focus on the patriarchal attitudes for now since that is most universal.

I presently identify as non-binary, so I am writing this from that perspective.  I was socialized as male and have lived that way for most of my life, so I'm touching that perspective as well.

The most overwhelming feeling I have when I feel attraction towards someone is actually a two-sided thing:  I feel both that I should exclude that person from my consciousness due to the danger of the feeling and that I need to act on that feeling - either through interacting with the person or most often relieving some of that feeling through other means: avoidance, substances, whatever.

This second part of the feeling I get when I'm attracted to someone, the feeling of having "to do," I believe to be inherent to patriarchal attitudes.  That because I feel attraction to someone or maybe sexual feelings, that I have to do something about them.  And not only that, that there's some sense of urgency to it.  That if I don't act on these feelings I have missed my opportunity and it will never come around again.  I usually feel bad about this and so do whatever I can to shut these feelings out before they start.

The reality of the situation is that these feelings are natural and they don't need to be a big deal.  Excluding these feelings from my consciousness for a long time has caused me a lot of pain and heartache.  It's not healthy to deny oneself.  Feelings arise and then they subside.  These types of attraction feelings don't necessarily need to carry any more weight than any others and yet I still feel trapped by them.

From a non-binary perspective - I see in myself that I don't identify with any gender or can feel either masculine or feminine at different times - I see myself on the same level as everyone else.  Everyone is feeling these feelings in their own way.  The fact that you might be attracted to me is OK.  The fact that I might be attracted to you is OK too.  Nothing needs to be done about it.

And yet, I still don't really feel that's true.  I feel that I have some sort of defect, that I am broken this way.  A lot of my energy, my buffers, are dedicated to avoiding these feelings on a daily basis and that's not freedom.  I'd like to be able to just interact with someone to whom I feel attracted without it having to be a big deal and without having to feel like I need to do something about it; extinguish the feelings, avoid the person, run away, or maybe interact.  But that last one is a hurdle that still seems quite tall.

At the end of the day it's not sex that I want it's intimacy.  Closeness with another.  Sex could be part of that but it doesn't have to be.

And so now I find myself at the curious place of being aware of this stuff and starting to reach out to others, but still a little unsure about how all this stuff happens.  Still a little unsure about all of it.  And that's fine, too.

There's nothing to be done because it is.

Love,
Casey

Enlightenment

Dear yous,

I want to share with you a semi-dream experience I had the other weekend.  This is not your typical dream, and actually I wouldn't even describe it as a dream in the typical sense of how that's understood, of a story unfolding or maybe vague images and dream sensations.  It was more like a mode of consciousness maybe or simply an experience, I don't know.

The actual thing of it lasted maybe a few seconds that I was consciously aware of in the normal waking sense.  I was aware of my body but not awake...but that's not entirely true, I would say I was awake, conscious, but in different way.  It was a space.

In this space was nothing and yet it was my body.  My body was the space but my body wasn't fundamental.  The space was fundamental.  I understood both things to be true.  I am the space and that space also is my body.  The fundamental part of me is the space, which is just one space, a singular space, indivisible, fundamental, unwavering, empty, aware, full space. 

In this space, the unified body-space, I felt ecstasy of the literal sense.  I didn't feel ecstasy.  There was no separate "I."  I used to read about this kinda stuff and be like, whoa, that's some twisted logic and it sounds scary as hell.  But it just was.  Even writing this now, I feel no great sense of urgency to communicate this, like, I can take my time, even though I am excited to share it with you.

The ecstasy was in most of my body, in most of the unified body-space, but it felt more concentrated on the left side.  This makes sense because I broke my right arm pretty seriously a few years back and I think the right side of my body is a little misaligned, out of whack.

Then there were lights, a serious of circular lights going across  my forehead, in this body-space, like the sun, like if you saw a time lapse of the sun across the sky.  It was bright, like the sun, but not blinding and it wasn't separate.  It wasn't a separate sun in this space and there wasn't movement, there wasn't a progression because it was all the space and the space was fundamental.  But to describe it, and remembering it, it was a progression, that went left to right across my forehead.  I take the cloudiness to be the impurities in my body-space, the stuff that still must be worked out.

I felt the energy rush up my left side, across my forehead, the sun progression non-progression happened and I heard a voice say "Now you are enlightened."  It was not my voice or a mental voice.  It was a voice in the space.  I realized this at some point and made a joyful ecstatic orgasmic sound, breath, and then normal consciousness kicked in as a tension.  I think I felt my partner stir.  And at some point they got up out of the bed and I had awareness of the space and physical reality around me at the same time.

There were three levels of awareness that unfolded in an order.  The fundamental level was the space.  The next level is body awareness.  Body in bed, partner stirs.  Groggy, a kind of tug of war between the two.  Little sense of boundary.  Wanting to get back to the Space proper, realizing the inevitable fading.

The third level is awareness of physical reality.  Partner getting up.  Construction of mental world, day-to-day identities.

I've experienced this before at a much slower pace, so I can recognize what this is now.  Space.  Then construction of identity.  I experienced this as a from-scratch construction of the world from absolute stillness, slowly, over the course of maybe a few days or weeks?

Mental conception spinning, explaining internally, but not hooked to anything.  Joy, terror. 

In the Metro station waiting for the train back to Philly, visiting a friend in DC, I catch the eye of a homeless woman and feel the depth and weight of her shame, slow, heavy vibrations in the eyes, light shining thru nonetheless.

"This can only exist because I created this."  I feel responsible for the homeless woman.  Her grief was connected to my grief but I wasn't connected to my grief.  There were manic thoughts.  The world fades and then reconstructs itself again, over and over, in the moment, in the line that forms around me for the train.  The line forms ahead of me, behind me, I am negative space.  I am a bright concentrated point.  I created this.  If there is no separation, then I created this.  This separation is an illusion.  Time is depth, refinement.  Nothing new is ever added.  Nothing is taken.  Refinement. 

I saw it start from scratch when I woke up.  Stillness, then another level of refinement, then another, more specific, then another, like a fractal.  The space became segmented in a fractalic way, one fundamental space, then large blocks, then smaller blocks, then smaller blocks, till something came into mental space that was recognizable, that could be described.  Yes, that's a tree, that's what it's called.  A tree has a sound associated with.  Squiggles on a page.

The structure of things becomes clear.  The structure is body tension moving through space.  Humanity is a connected web of body tension moving through space. 

People have their routines, the same things they do every day, the lines they walk, the papers they read and I was outside of this.  I was seeing the structure, the rigidity of bodies, but I had no body.  I was a point of consciousness.  I was negative space around which physical space moved, independent of time.  What occurred now wrapped back around me and through me in all dimensions to meet that occurrence.

I don't feel agency.  There is no me.  There are thoughts and 3D visuals.  They are not hallucinations.  I understand that I am seeing reality from a higher dimensional space.

If I can see my shadow in 3D space as a 2D projection, then my 3D body must be a projection from a higher dimensional space.  Without time there is absolute. 

My friend opens the morning paper on the train and the page is blank.  The words appear as he reads them.  I experience the reality of that paper appear for him.  I can see him read what I understand to be the "newspaper" and that's in my reality, but the words on not in my reality.  The words are squiggles.  They are patterned symbols without inherent meaning.

As my friend reads, the words appear and the meaning appears.  I feel fear.  I feel body tension.  It's recognizable as typical news headlines.  But my body is all of the bodies of the people in the train car.  It shifts, it moves, it's dynamic, it's a wave.

I get back to Philly and have a therapy appointment.  I arrive on time with no agency of my awareness.  That office did not exist before I arrived and though recognizable, it constructed itself as I arrived, just in time, in perfect time with everything else.  Fast movement, gross movements into slower, more subtle, refined movements, till stillness.  I sit down and open a magazine and the words appear as I read them, on a blank page.

In therapy I try to explain my experience of being 5D but the thoughts are manic.  There are too many levels for the true communication to get through and the communication is fundamental, it is now.  It is the thing.  I am that.  I am this.  I am not confined to three dimensions.  You're looking at me like I'm crazy.  You look concerned.  Everybody always looks concerned when I try to explain this stuff.

Today, present day reality, I had a powerful orgasmic experience.  I cried afterwards.  I wept.  I felt the tension in my face melt.  I felt my abuse event(s).  I felt strong physical tension,  tension in my neck, at the base of my neck where my head meets my spine.  I feel this to be the place I retreat to, the source of some essential tension in me.  The absolute horror and withdrawal without escape.  I felt that but was not in it.  I was OK.

There is no language, I am sublanguage.  I feel shame.  I feel shame pass.  I take a shower.  I am ungrounded.  I squeeze some shampoo out of the bottle in my hand and that is comforting.  I've done this before.  The pattern of identity reconstruction is much faster now. 

The neighbors upstairs banging still triggers me, the repeatative motion, the frantic nature of it.  I think it's because it was the upstairs neighbor who did it, who abused me.  Or there was an upstairs neighbor home, making noise while it was happening. 

I have band practice tonight.  I feel excited about that.  My identity has been reconstructed.  I've gone outside myself and back.  I am the Space and I still have to do the dishes, so I will do them with joy in the recognition of this.

Love,
Casey