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This morning I'm using a new text editor called TextWrangler to write with. It's a free software program my brother downloaded for me in anticipation of me setting up my own web site domain. It's been pointed out to me several times over the years that text editor programs are not the same as word processing programs. Text editing programs are what programmers and coders use to write binary code in it's various shapes and forms.
Yesterday, while staying in air-conditioning due to the heat of the afternoon, I worked my way through most of the simple tutorial that comes with the free software. The best I seem able to reach for while reading and performing some of the interactive examples, is to just go through the motions and figure out how useful the lessons might be in the future. I used the text-to-voice software (that comes with the Mac operating system) to have it read the text of the tutorial to me.
Listening to the text spoken by a digitalized voice at the same time I am reading it seems to help me stay on track consciously. I'm feeling a little stressed trying to stay interested in learning the basic coding lingo. Mostly HTML. They say it ain't too hard, but it can be hateful. I only have a minimal familiarity with it. Managing a web domain for the sole purpose of posting my blog on the internet may be more than I wanna deal with. What if it should fail?
Asking myself this harsh question has become more tedious recently. At least some of the back-burner events that pop into consciousness as I contemplate my life are gaudy looking. As if the point they tried to make were a futile attempt to comprehend the impossible. Not as visions of sugar plums either, but rather, a streaming sequence of inane cartoons poking fun at my previous failures as indulged delusions.
These cartoon careactors seem like the hypnogogic figures that attacked Siddhartha as he sat under the Bo Tree or the hordes of "kinsmen" in the Hindu story of Arjuna. In the same way these stories or myths speak of their heros as Everyman, I am is everyman too. In my opinion, at some level of understanding, conscious or no, each of us is what Everyman itself is composed of. A great cosmic soup in which individuation loses itself in absolute abandonment.
My own hypnogogic hordes that attack the Everyman in me are my own unrealistic memores of some very real failures. Possessiveness as a stubborn Taurus personality trait always figures in the mix somewhere along the line. I may act duplicitously magnanimous and sharing to install hidden "backdoors" in the source code of the social contracts I pretend to, and also pretend they allow me to exercise a preferred vested interest and say so, no matter what.
The imaginary audience I'm usually performing for (when I "practice" meditation and contemplate my own life) is variously composed of those hypnogogic images that represent the purported truth that I am is a fool. A buffoon. "It" is all about being, and in order to remain in the state of being that acts as it's own ground, "It" has to refine the unremitting accusation of "you are not me" into a wayward, dismissive glance.
Meditation for me is a bold attempt to extemporaneously tame the shrewish goblins of my past for a while. What I offer to this spooky, nightmarish group of shamed me-more-s is that despite their right to sullenly exist as a bane to my existense, and as a device designed for fair play, I demand an equal right to my own ground for being without their input.
Even in their eternal presence. I created them as an excuse for being. Granted, they didn't ask to be given an abstract life as metaphors or myths. I regret putting them through the heart-rending pain of being rejected as unworthy in the light of my present needlessness,
Each shade (ghost) has particularly hurtful life lessons attached to them. That's the "if" of the "what" can happen which accompanies personal failure. To ask "what if it fails" is all about consciously consulting the pain of my own past failures.
It is the pain of when I have failed, in the past, and pain during my intense anticipation of failing again for not even trying to succeed tomorrow. It's my cowardly fear of a failure that must die anyway as it passes the event horizon that precedes the point of no return.
It's the loss of that vaunted fear of failure when the soul is passing through the flaming swords at the entrance of the matrix that seems particularly dreadful. Not because it's undeserving of a pretense of life even as mere illusion, but as a last, though wayward comrade, on the lonely path to the cessation of hope.
Maybe that's why I seem a little sad since the cataract in my right eye was replaced with an artificial lens. The very prospect of being able to see fairly accurately again is sort of like gaining hope for the future. For example, being able to pass the visual test to get my driver's license. My spiritual quest has a lot to do with abandoning hope, and here I am undermining myself by what visual acuity will allow hope for in the future. I bear sha-me. '-)
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