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If time flies when I'm having fun I must be having the time of my life. Oh, dear God, it's Saturday already. I thought Tuesday was just yesterday. I just got through writing about it being just one more week before I'm scheduled for having my cataracts removed and replaced by clear lens. Now it's closer to Tuesday next than it was to Tuesday past.
I've been eager to get this procedure done. It's not clear to me the exact reason why I anticipate this event with zeal. But, it's a somber zeal, if zealotry is a wise choice as a framework to portray my emotional response to some well-trained whippersnapper deliberately cutting a hole in my eyeball. For any reason.
I don't know whether I wanna just leave it be, and take my chances with living out my life with only an unforeseen, fuzzy logic to show the way.
It's a double bind resolved only by a series of personal decisions. All scary. I gotta lose some weight in order to be more comfortable while in some eternal fetal position. The spiritual equivalent of what Robert Monroe called a "curl".
It's a de-folding. It's the first part of life that is the un-folding. I remember an era from prepubescent through my early teens when I might unexpectedly wake up in the middle of the night, and "see" things at the foot of my bed that were not cogent by abstraction. When that happened I would pull the covers over my head, go into the fetal position, and fervently pray that what I envisioned "out there" would just go away.
Sometime "it" did. Sometime "it" didn't. Either way I learned to deal with these sorts of images (imagined or not) by employing tediously-learned, abstract strategies that served the same purpose psychologically of hiding under the covers, as when a boy, yet in full sight of any interested witnesses.
I was a desperate and fervid teenager. I really, really practiced be-co-me-ing with invisibility. I never slowed down until I could do it right under your nose without incurring suspicion.
Typically, however, when I finally got my contrived act down pat in order to get over on a potential witness, I immediately realized that I had always known what I sought to know. It happened now even more than then. I have lots of abstract tools that allow me to develop an attitude that will pass in a very short amount of time.
It was the development of this abstract strategy to replace the extreme vulnerability of "playing 'possum" with a more dignified, classy, object-driven performance that caused me to "go big or go home". There were times when I was required to test my hypothesized theories again the world, and all comers.
Sometime I went home instead, because in essence I am is small change. Conquering desire is more important to me than conquering the world.
There is no reason, in this situation, not to rightly suppose that to confront the Jinn in this Bo tree manner, is not the considered act of an insane human being who has lost his marbles. Why would a human have to prove individually that they have a right to their ground-for-Being? Especially to a bunch of dis-spirited, chain-rattling, dispossessed, docetic yahoos that can't be-co-me human despite their contrived histrionics to indicate the contrary.
There is a metaphor in the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching that advises the seeker/pilgrim that when they're approached by evil people, they should occupy their minds with their own thoughts, and the evil people must pass them by without harm. Contrarily, if the evil people can distract you from your own thoughts to thinking about them... you're screwed. Probably, but in any case, you have to deal with them, when you wouldn't have had to if you had been stronger in your unsatisfying resolve. '-)
In the latter stages of my nomadic wandering I tested this saying with real people on a constant basis in my interactions with strangers. It didn't require that the strangers be particularly evil. If I focused on my own thoughts, nobody couldn't approach without insisting. The thoughts I focused on to avoid confrontation didn't have to be fancy either.
In the past, I've wondered if I was forced by circumstances to wait until I could focus my attention on my abstract thoughts more profoundly to cause people to reliably pass me by. I can be such a bumpkin. Eventually though, being a scatterbrain proved adventitious due to serendipity. Such that, when I finally accomplished serenity, I realized that I didn't actually have to practice. I practiced to realize I didn't need to. Is that fair? Why am I always the last to know?
My intent changed when I accidentally discovered that focusing my attention was not the point of practicing invisibility as much as to let my attention be drawn to particular, ongoing events that happened for my eyes only.
If I intentionally looked for some expected object to be there, it would be, but only as a delusion and a distraction from the thing-in-itself. As it turned out, I wasn't required to create solutions as much as to observe existing solutions to what, in effect, were not problems. My situation seems to require less discipline and more patience. I am is "waiting for the time to come when the chance is gone..."
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