Found notes
This note is not dated. Possibly an attempt to time travel. Not sure where the quote came from, but good advice nonetheless.
Dear Claudia of early ‘03 — you will get your heart broken a bunch of times more.
____________
“You should be cooking on all 4 burners.”
Sensory Bathing and Sensory Deprivation
I tried to meditate but it turned into worship. I say “but” when I should say “and.” I am shifting all of my buts and no’s into yes, and(s), because this is where the magic happens.
“I tried to meditate and it turned into worship.”
I realize now that meditation will become whatever it needs to be: breathing, listening, dancing, prayer, channeling — what ever it needs to be.
Right now, I am balancing practices of going inward for guidance and then immersing myself in the environment around me. Here is a practice of sensory immersion I pulled from Angel Tech: A Modern Shamans Guide to Reality Selection:
Close your eyes. Listen, moment-to-moment, to the sounds of your immediate environment. Listen to how your mind may make sense of the sounds: naming, categorizing and figuring them out. Now, give yourself permission to simply listen to the sounds as different energies. You can do this by not associating meaning to any of these sounds and just let the sounds come sweeping through you as currents of sonic energy. Let these sonic forces have their way and go where they may within, around, under and over you. If they like, let them merge forces with other sounds to produce new levels and overtones of sonic resonance. Your sensory task is this: How much can you give yourself over to this experience and let it envelop and encompass you…until you are at one with the sounds?
Grounding yourself with Sensory Bathing
I sit outside in a sunny spot and close my eyes. I listen to each sound and name it. I hear the wind rustling through trees. I hear various birds chirping — different tones. I hear wind chimes, some high, some low. A car’s motor. Loud, nondescript words. A plane flying overhead. Machinery turned on. My dog panting, then lapping water. A horn honking.
Life expanding and contracting.
My perceptive world is all at once multi-dimensional, and I am a part of it. Small and important at the same time.
I am that child crying out. I am the car speeding toward something. I am the rooster crowing. The urgent horn honking. The wind blowing — just passing through.
Going inward with Sensory Deprivation
I don’t deprive myself of all sounds. I use noise-cancelling earbuds to listen to Solfeggio frequencies and soundscapes that connect me with source energy. I put on my eye mask and I go inward. With every breath in I take in energy from the universe and then I breathe out longer than I take in. Every exhale feels like a gift from within. This is how I connect with the consciousness beyond my identity, my physical body and this reality.
Not here. Not the sounds on Earth. No light from this planet leaks through my eye mask.
I go inward — but outside of space and time. It’s dark, and sometimes there are visions, or hallucinations, or imagination — whatever you want to call it.
The things that I see are for me to interpret. And words are spoken — sometimes they make no sound, sometimes I repeat them aloud — messages about me or loved ones or whoever pops into my circle from time to time. In these short moments, I become privy to some arcane knowledge about how the universe works.
I understand how going inward can become addictive. The chasing of enlightenment.
Which is why sensory bathing is needed for grounding yourself. Use whatever methods you need for balance.
A perfect question to wake up to:
So—what do you want? Not just today, or at this moment, but within the arc of your existence?
— Mitch Horowitz, The Miracle Habits
How to ascend (a growing list of ways to elevate your energy)
Unanchor yourself
Make conscious choices
Exist in the waiting period
Sunbathe
Space out the silences
Ask for guidance
Pray & listen (meditate)
Stretch past your shame
See people as energies
Forgive. Accept. Love.
Breathe as deeply as you can into your mind, heart and body
Sound bathe in nature / Soul bathe in nature
Be the ideal place
“I’ve been searching for years for the ideal place. And I’ve come to the realization that the only way to find it is to be it.” — Alan Watts
Visual: Mind Voyages I
Here’s a gif I made of what I see when I meditate, attempting to traverse space consciousness.
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
— Robert Jastrow, The Enchanted Loom: Mind in the Universe
Wormhole wonderings and other things
An ad hoc list of what’s been happening:
YouTube: #MeditativeMind soundscapes
Reading: Angel Tech: A Modern Shaman's Guide to Reality Selection (while staying grounded in this reality)
Internet: CIA Electronic Reading Room, Analysis and Assessment of the Gateway Process + Vice, How to Escape the Confines of Time and Space According to the CIA
“Brain change willed is as close to magic as we’re going to get.”
Workspace:
We installed a new, larger window in my home office. My first thought: “View is about to get expansive AF.”
Message from meditation:
“One channel only.”
Advice about difficult friendships
It shouldn't be hard to be friends with someone. The sooner you realize this the sooner you'll start making real friends.
Cute and short explainer video about empathy
Making emotionally intelligent decisions
You should never make a permanent decision based on a temporary emotion.
— 33 Quotes That Will Inspire You to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence
Five steps for creating a new idea
This short, creative self-help book was written in the 1930s by an ad exec and it is, by far, the most useful text I’ve come across on the subject of creating new ideas.
“An idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements … This technique of the mind follows five steps. I am sure that you will all recognize them individually. But the important thing is to recognize their relationship and to grasp the fact that the mind follows these five steps in definite order — that by no possibility can one of them be taken before the preceding one is completed, if an idea is to be produced.”
The steps — summarized as succinctly as possible — are:
Gather raw material — specific and general. In advertising an idea results from a new combination of specific knowledge about products and people with general knowledge about life and events.
Masticate your material — take the different bits of material which you have gathered and feel them all over, as it were, with the tentacles of the mind. Make connections. Write every new thought down. Do this until you are beyond tired and even then go further.
Make absolutely no effort of a direct nature — drop the whole subject and put the problem out of your mind. Watch a movie. Listen to music. Go for a walk. Sleep.
Out of nowhere the Idea will appear — this is the way ideas come: after you have stopped straining for them and have passed through a period of rest and relaxation from the search.
Take your little newborn idea out into the world of reality — do not make the mistake of holding your idea close to your chest at this stage. Submit it to the criticism of the judicious.
“When you do this, a surprising thing will happen. You will find that a good idea has, as it were, self-expanding qualities. It stimulates those who see it to add to it. Thus possibilities in it which you have overlooked will come to light.”
On fulfilling your potential and self-esteem
When I notice myself worrying about “what other people will think” I find I’m usually not worried about any single person’s opinion. If I pick a specific person, I‘m rarely concerned about what they will think. What I fear is the collective opinion in my head. It’s imaginary. — James Clear
Old horoscope — what kind of woman to be
Be a woman who knows her own magic and in that self-awareness find a potent confidence with which to live.
— Old horoscope, 2003
Create dangerously
“To create today means to create dangerously. Every publication is a deliberate act, and that act makes us vulnerable to the passions of a century that forgives nothing.” —Albert Camus