old as time

For decades on end he had been building his house on shaky ground. Over and over again it had collapsed, but not suspecting that the ground was shaky, he kept building on it.

During a trip to the city, guided by That Which Cannot Be Named, he had entered a bookstore and purchased a book of ancient teachings. Through hard and repeated effort he practiced those teachings, unsure if his labors would bear fruit but trying to cultivate a stillness within.

He built his house on more solid ground, but it soon slid back onto the shaky stuff, and collapsed. After pondering the situation he realized that he needed to check the structural blueprint he was using to build. Sure enough, he discovered a weakness contained deep within it, a tenacious shadow nestled into its core. The building was his life; the house his sense of meaning, self, purpose, worth; the shadow a nagging heartbreak as old as time itself.

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥

allow the yang

When I see an attractive woman who I get the feeling might find me attractive too, my chi tends to slam up into the 6th chakra from where it normally resides in the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th. Instead of approaching her and saying hello, as my lower nodes are telling me to do, a voyeuristic and deeply insecure part of me pulls inward and launches a furious attempt to calculate just how much she might like me as well as how best to get her to not like me. The bundled chi energies start heating up my physical flesh from the eyebrows on backward, the 3rd eye area, as I strain to think of something to say to her. Women pick up on this immediately, fleeing from sickly waves of needing, wanting, yearning energy that lash from the yet-shadowy depths of what, in short, is a pocket of pain. I’ve come to understand, with time and conscious effort, that in the left-rear quadrant of the 6th chakra lives my ego, or at least a fear-body that kicks in if when encountering women I allow these strong yin to overwhelm the yang of the 6th. This pocket, a largely Read Only Memory part of my consciousness, was in early youth hijacked by irrational forces, should my recollections hold true. If the hijacker was an outside party, it could have arrived during a spell of fever-dreams around age nine or ten. In one of these dreams, I became aware of a brilliantly white space of indeterminate size - the Great Vast Crushing Nothingness mentioned in earlier works. My sense of self was in extreme flux, shrinking and growing from infinitely large to impossibly small, sometimes both simultaneously; and into this space appeared a being not of my own design, a vaguely humanoid figure that appeared in front of me before rising up and to the left of my field of vision. This entity spoke to me not with words but feelings, a sense of tremendous and all-reaching power. (I have no strongly negative memories of this dream / visitation, rather ones of gut-wrenching and paralyzing awe.) If this pocket started as an autochthonous formation, however, I suspect it festered into existence in those first teenage years in Germany when the ‘rents were on poor terms; I was struggling with learning the language yet still going to school in it as well as learning to play the trumpet with my teeth in braces; and my few friends and I were on a collision course with catastrophe. I internalized a lot of loneliness and self-loathing during that time, venting it as my teens progressed in ever fool-hardier ventures. Whether by either of these two ways, or by another, the dominance of this pocket of pain is shrinking in direct correlation to a growing self-awareness helped along by spiritual and meditation work done on the Island of the Gods. Through impartial observance and daily practice, its strength will diminish further - if my good fortune holds, that is.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

fortunes and luck

At 4 in the morning was when my clock struck to signal a shift in my fortunes and luck. I'd sprung from the bed before it could sound twice and switched on the light-saving overhead lights then sat in the small room for maybe fifteen producing a paltry intermittent stream. With a five solid minutes I buffered my quest yet when I arrived just one other did rest and woke not in time to head out with the group which duly out toward the chauffeur did troop. With no cars in our way we sped through the dark and walked in while their local driver then parked and met with a manku (or monk, in this tongue) who brought out dry sarongs for everyone. Thus clad and all ready we made for the spouts and entered cold waters with nary a shout and opened our chakras and relaxed our souls and let ring our innermost balancing bowls. After those 5 outlets had washed us off good we changed into dry clothing in which we could sit for a long period down on the stones and pray to many gods in varying tones. We lifted our bare hands up to chackra 6, washed them in smoke rising from red incense sticks, then prayed once again but with flowers between our fingers which had been so recently cleaned. After that was done sat for meditation and two of us felt a powerful sensation of energies flowing in down out and through repeating and flashing with patterns we knew. Once finished we went then to view Shiva's rod, the rock and stone member of a mighty god, then left by a side-door the groomed temple grounds and reflected on all the knowledge we'd found. We sped back past rice-field and workshops for wood and sought out a café in bustling Ubud and made there new friends with a small group of men. They had on their chests round devices which blinked which caused us to wonder pause inspect and think and caused us to jump in the leader-dude's van and speed right back out to the country again. The price-point was high for what we would have got wherefore we did not buy anything on the spot but pledged to meet up with him a few days hence when passions had cooled and our minds were less dense. My nap didn't happen for now I must ride to find me a resto with decent Wi-Fi where I can complete a task started last week before my eyes flutter shut tired and weak.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

our enemy – television

Television is the creative person's bane, a threat greater than most others are. Watching TV feeds the human need for companionship without ever really satisfying it and crushes creative capacity by tricking the brain into thinking it is doing something and being productive when it is just sitting idle. Creativity, power, assuredness, and passion all reside in the 2nd and 3rd chakras, the lower half of the torso that extends from the breastbone to the genitals. Look down at your own belly for a moment. Can you see your belt-buckle or waistband as it sits atop the pelvic bone? Can you feel and move the abdominus erectus, that muscle that runs from the bottom of the breastbone to attach to the top of the pelvis? If you cannot, you are not alone – more than a third of all Americans are obese, and many of these individuals carry a large portion of this additional weight in the lower halves of their torsos. The decision to sit down and watch television has disastrous consequences on the 2nd and 3rd chakras – it numbs and dulls them, confusing and stifling the free flow of energy through the regions of the core, an area central to living the best of possible human lives. Man is a gullible animal; after seeing just a few commercials related to food he will get food from his kitchen and eat that food (without focusing on what he is eating) while staring longingly into the beautiful bright lights of his TV set. If he repeats this sequence often enough he will get fat, and his increased girth will further stifle the free flow of energy through the region of his core and exacerbate the unhealthiness that stems from a lack of regular exercise and from a preference for prepackaged foods ready to eat over meals carefully and consciously crafted. Persons who wish to lead lives full of creativity and passion avoid watching television; they know that there are more constructive ways to fill their time than by staring at an electric light-box; they paint, draw, dance, or write; they make educated and intelligent decisions about what to eat and what to put through their orifices of eye and mouth and ear instead of numbing out the intestines by shoveling in as much sugary and salty and fatty foods as the gut can handle without bursting; they lead happy lives untethered from groomed and glossy but ultimately vacuous material. Downtrodden and passionless masses of the world, awake! Turn off your television sets! Humanity, and Mother Nature, need you now more than ever. Aho.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥