9th of September 2023. Okay. Acknowledging that I get a moment to write this. On Keep. That is a positive. It means my mind is calm enough and available to do this. That is a positive. So, let us set out to do it. State of affairs in my life. In the moment, I feel fine. “The feeling of wanting to improve my experience. The experience of wanting something different is what is in the way of my freedom from thoughts and sensations. It is the cause of all my suffering”.
So, there’s still more. Or there’s still something else my attention has to turn to. There’s an experience my attention is overlooking. Well, the task is to continue to search for that. The conversation from the parlour is filtering through the wall and doors into my ears and experience and it is distracting me. That is what is happening right now.
Okay, what else is going on. Thoughts really have been occupying my mind. Of people I think I have animosity with. People I can’t keep eye contact with which is almost everyone. Everybody in the entire estate that I used to talk to, the relationship has become awkward. But all that is the movie in my mind. It feels uncomfortable and I wish I could feel different than this.
I want the scenes and scripts to stop playing in my mind, but it always does that. Okay. It’ll be easier to just let that be rather than trying to change it which causes conflict in my mind. But it’s thoughts. It’s bits of language. It colours my experience, but I know it has no definite contact with my life in this moment. I’ll be fine. I can deal with that.
My body and mind are all I have to experience the world. I think it is enough. I was thinking of doing a situation report of my life on Medium. First, I do not have an audience. Second, I do not need to post anything really. But I want to tie up the series there so that anybody who stumbles on it can find an okay ending to the last few posts. The ending when I say that things aren’t so bad anymore seems like it’ll be okay, to me right now. So there’s that.
But now that I am writing this session, I am realizing/getting a feeling that I do not have much to put down there. The moral lesson of this session is realizing that while I still have thoughts and flashbacks and ‘visions’ that make me uncomfortable and a bit ashamed. Anxiety, fear, shame, freezing, they are all uncomfortable sensations in my body in the moment they happen. So the experience of all of those is similar mostly.
I guess it’s just the images and bits of language that flash in my mind in those moments that make me think they are different. And I’d like to have a bit of separation from that. Sam says “It’s not separation and it’s not oneness that is the experience”, it’s really “not being implicated”. Not being identified with the experience. I don’t have to feel like it’s happening to “me”.
I think it is an okay and worthy aim to pursue. I have experienced once what that freedom is, and it was very positive. It is a positive experience. I put 25 minutes on the timer and I am feeling like I don’t want to sit through it writing. I feel like I have run through all I really need to write. I plan to take Garri after this, that’ll be cool. But that experience will be ephemeral. All experiences are ephemeral, nothing wrong with it. The state of my mind and how skillfully I am using my attention is what counts. The trick is to not be the cause of your own suffering.
Then I’d read some more pages from the Why We Struck book. And while I don’t agree with much of what he’s saying, reading some of the events there has given me a sense of enjoyment. I have enjoyed reading the book so far, even the parts I do not agree with have informed me on how something like a coup and attempts to enforce socialism played out.
I have routinely written 7–8–9 line paragraphs in this session and it makes it all look not very neat. I will break that down in edit. Okay, done. Looks much better now. Less daunting. I don’t want to run away from the page so much now.
Back to my life. Scheduled to be back in education soon. Cool. Maybe not all the people who have not been nice and patient with me in the way I’d have liked are necessarily bad people, nor does it mean I don’t deserve niceness and patience and being treated with respect. Maybe they’re also just hostages to their own minds and the stories playing out in it that they do not have the residue attention to be patient and kind to me. And I am parsing that as an insult to my own person. It’s not really an insult like that.
The way I picture it now, it’s just the actions of other people poking at my sensitive spots. I am thankful for someone like M and Dreyy whom I don’t feel like that with. Even if it might be that they’re too preoccupied with their lives to be dismissive of me, the vibe I am getting from them is zero actions to poke my sensitive spots. With Dreyy, there’s a lot of intentional niceness. With Oricspace too, and Richie, and M. I am grateful for that. In all my interactions with people out in the world, it is different with them.
Putting experience into written words isn’t always a straightforward task, I am finding. I usually have to take a moment to find the right words to capture some scene in my mind, and I don’t think I am always successful at that. But I don’t always have to be.
What is my task in life right now. What goals am I hoping to meet? Or should I aspire to meet? I don’t know. The post will always be shifting, as I see it now. It really should be a spacious mind. A purefied mind. Detached from whatever content seem to arise in each moment. I do not think people’s status updates on WhatsApp is something that should capture my attention that much.
I should try more to give myself room to not do anything. And let’s see what experiences I have then. What tasks do I have in life now. Realizing a purified mind. Carrying out actions in the world without clinging. Without being fraught. Without my mind being tethered to resistance and craving. I want to have that experience more. No one would do it for me. And I only have each present moment to really have that experience. No other moment really exists in reality.
