The Furies

Are You An Important Person?

Are you an important person? Many people would not answer publicly in the affirmative, yet most people believe this to be true. Humans are as individual as teapots with egoic steam pressure forming the storm and creating an illusion of importance. We are all “tempests in our individual teapots.” When the ego collapses and the world somehow continues regardless, that ego might just realize that it was neither holding the universe together, nor was it responsible for its own continued living. When we can see that the process of living “just happens,” then our egos can finally relax and release the pressure, and instead, just effervesce.

Complex Creature

Be not impressed. Retain no impressions but refresh and cleanse continually abiding no memory residue. Without resistance or barriers, the ripples on the lake will run out and dissipate. Otherwise the energy will form turbulence and then waves and will continue to reverberate and grow. As thoughts arise, let them flow, for if held, will begin to reverberate and grow, fed by fear and emotion until they’re a “Complex” – a creature that will certainly maul your psyche.

Anecdotal Life

What is life really but a series of collected personal stories strung together in a loosely coherent and amusing way?. “I remember the time when…” How paradoxical it is that what actually creates the “you” are your personal internalized stories about who you “were”: but the “were” that composes “you” is long gone and your stories are just distorted, imperfect memory traces. But still for many people – essentially that is, all they are. What can we gather unto ourselves? Experiences? No, because they only exist evanescently as they occur. It seems that residual memories are about all we can collect, and these we often confuse with the experience itself. Those fleeting and faded memories seem to be about all that linger to offer proof of a human life lived. And without our precious memories, Who would we be?

Perpetrators

Victimization is most often the Self being preyed upon by one’s own interpretation and memory of events perceived as negative and hurtful. It’s the holding and replaying of a memorialized and painful event infused with meaning and significance that threatens our egoic story. We then continue to victimize ourselves over and again by constantly replaying these memories, leading to regression and the reduction of our life. How is it that we have become perpetrators in the perpetuation of our own slow dissolution? We have taken over for the original victimizer and continue the flagellation, keeping the wounds alive.

Masterful Trickster

The ego is a masterful trickster and survivor. It’s the “cake and eating it too” arrangement where the more we think we’re “eating” of the ego, the more entrenched and secure it becomes. So the ego in the guise of our “higher self” provides the ultimate trick: convincing us that enlightenment and the elimination of the ego self is our most worthy goal. What follows is the “dog chasing its tail” while remaining constantly amused, albeit, continually frustrated. Until the realization and complete acceptance that the ultimate destiny of the individual personage (or ego self) is inescapably “total and complete annihilation” (“you” will not survive), then there can be only a playful delusion of the seeker which insures the continued survival of our egoic personage.

I’m Sorry

How many times have you said or thought you were sorry?  Of course, it’s often in the context of believing that you somehow failed or disappointed yourself or another.  It’s the basic belief that what happened could and should have happened differently with a more desirable outcome.  We believe that we failed in some way that we could have avoided; that things could have been better if only we had been more attentive and responsible, if we had been better or different than we were.  Our world could be a little better than it is now, but it’s not, because of our personal deficiency and failings.  Such is the basic stuff of guilt.  There is often no easy way to dispute this kind of thinking.  It also seems a bit preposterous and useless to continue in this manner.  If a different and better outcome was really available, then it likely would have happened – but it didn’t.  Even if we can accept that understanding of reality, still the “what if” inevitably arises, compelling us to imagine a more preferential outcome.  This grasping and regretting process is just our human brain and ego naturally trying to run the show, or at least shifting things a bit in our favor.  We may even realize that events happen because they have been configured by all of preceding history to happen in that moment, in just that particular way.  Still, it doesn’t matter, for we will continue to regret various outcomes, believing that we could and should have done things better.

You Shall Be Erased!

You shall be erased!  It’s not only that you will soon die, but also all of that quality of “you” will soon after be completely erased.  It’s as if every experience of your life and every action was written upon a blackboard and then the “eraser monitor” arrives.  With a quick swipe of the moist felt eraser, the board is cleaned.  It then appears as if you never existed.  It’s true that this process happens in a different time frame for everyone, but even “famous” people are also erased.  It just takes a bit longer while distorted interpretations of who they might have been linger as phantom icons.  It’s not just that life is completely silly and that anything we might do, all our sound and fury, matters not.  It’s that we all are such temporal bubbles, soon to completely disappear from the pond surface.