Thoughts Without a Thinker

Hola mi gente,
So, I’m getting my groove back, using my creativity. Things are looking up. Next step: get my own place!

Entering the Stream

Stream of Consciousness, Chenille stems, styrofoam, Julia Buntaine.

Thinking to get at once all the gold the goose could give, he killed it and opened it only to find -- nothing.
 -- Aesop (620–560 BC) The Goose with the Golden Eggs

I once met a lovely woman, highly intelligent, beautiful writer. In her early 40s, she was at her creative and physical peak. I used to joke that she looked as if she lived on a Stairmaster. In short, here was a woman I felt I could enjoy knowing better, maybe even --who knows -- explore the “C” word with her. She had one major drawback, however... 

She thought too much.

She was ruled by her thoughts and she wasn’t satisfied with torturing herself with her thinking, she insisted I join in also. I’ll give you an example, we would plan a meet-up (she lived in Boston and I live in NYC) and initially we would talk excitedly about what we would do together, but as the date would draw nearer, thoughts stemming from her insecurities would predominate our conversations. At first I was more than happy to help her dispel some of these thoughts. I mean, she would have one thought (“Eddie doesn’t like me, so he won’t come”) and then another thought connected to that thought would appear (“Eddie is just coming because he wants sex”), which would be connected to another thought (“I’m such a loser”). This would go on until her whole thought process and beliefs around our meet-up would be so totally screwed up, so totally disassociated from reality, that I would have a hard time addressing all of it. 

Eventually, I would have to tell her that I didn’t need to hear all her thought processes and she was so offended that she broke off meeting with me. She was so hurt because, according to her, her thoughts were her and I shouldn’t have been so insensitive to her thoughts (or something along those lines). I don’t “do” therapy in my personal life, though friends constantly ask me questions that essentially are invites to “analyze” them. I don’t even adhere to that type of theoretical orientation. LOL

You might judge my friend’s thinking, but I see people do that kind of thing all the time. I mean, we all do it to a degree. We like to call it “analyzing,” but it resembles mental masturbation. We create scenarios out of a tangled web of thought constellations and ingrained belief systems we take as ultimate truth. I will add that my friend’s thinking brought her a lot of suffering in the form of clinical depression.

We live in a society in which we’re encouraged to live from the “neck up” at the expense of our bodies and the rest of reality -- we live disembodied lives. I see it all the time in my work. Ask someone how he or she feels and they will quickly proceed to tell you how they’re thinking about their feeling.

I often tell my women friends that they shouldn’t think around me because it makes my dick hard. I’m kidding! It doesn’t work, telling someone not to think, makes them think even more intensely.

Let me be clear: thinking is not bad in itself. In fact, thinking is an essential tool for our well-being and survival. Indeed, our distinguishing feature as a species is the ability to create complex symbols, agree on their meaning, and use them to encode our knowledge. The ability to think allows us to compute, reason, and create, and, most importantly, to share our understanding with each other in the form of speech or writing. We can even record our thinking (on blogs, no less) for others!

The issue here is that as a species we have grown to value thinking to the exclusion of other aspects of our being. We have become more identified with our thoughts and the more we become lost in our personal soap operas, the more disconnected we have become from what we have in common with other human beings and our ecology. We have surrendered our sense of self to our thinking mind, becoming “lost in thought.”

I should know, because I too was addicted to the non-stop ruminations of my thought-stream. After years of meditation practice, the most significant change in my life has been my relationship to my mind. We’re still together, my monkey and I, but we’re no longer in a codependent relationship. Slowly, but surely I am gaining my liberation from the tyranny of thinking.

The change was precipitated by the acknowledgment that my mind had a thinking problem. I was a heavy thinker, often engaging in about 70,000 to 150,000 thoughts a day! I got up in the morning and -- bam! -- I was thinking 2-3 thoughts per minute, continuing through the day until night when I thought myself to sleep.

I tried everything from analysis (which made me more attached to my thinking) to screaming and flailing about, which only temporarily diminished the flow of thinking. Eventually, I would turn to drugs in an attempt to “blow my mind” by short-circuiting the neural wiring and I have to say -- one time I even forgot who I was (literally).

Later, I would practice a form of meditation in which the goal was not to stop thinking, but rather expose the mind to itself. Before my meditation practice I was completely absorbed on the content of thoughts, how to manipulate them and extract meaning from them. That is what we’re taught and graded on in school and it is what our culture values.

But no one had taught me how to look at my thoughts. Ordinarily, we go through life with what psychologists call a pre-conscious stream of thoughts coursing through our minds. Barely noticeable, this thought stream exerts an enormous amount of influence in our lives. We do this mindlessly without awareness. In fact, modern science shows that our thoughts aren’t the dominant player in our lives. Brain research finds that most of our interpretations of the world as well as our decision-making process takes place on what evolutionary psychologists call the “sub-personal” level, without a rational thinking self directing the process.

When I first sat down to meditate, I was almost overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the thought stream. Eventually, I learned the simple task of watching the stream without making judgments, or running around to analyze them. A resentment thought pops up, I acknowledge it gently and then let it go. Sure enough, some time will pass and another thought will present itself and I do the same thing -- I see it, acknowledge it and let it go. Eventually, this has a stabilizing effect -- you’re not stuck on the thoughts that seem to come from nowhere. You are not stuck on the content of your thoughts but engaged in the process of the thought-stream.

Eventually, with lots of practice, I was able to observe the “gap” between the thoughts. This is pure consciousness, pure awareness -- the most powerful healing force I’ve ever encountered... but that’s for another blog for another time.

It may not sound like a lot, but it’s a huge thing for me to say that the main difference between my experiences today and those of 20-odd years ago is that I catch myself quicker these days. Essentially, today I’m less prone to be carried away by every thought that comes along -- I don’t get caught up in my delusional personal soap opera as often as I used to. This is especially true in the area of resentments and personal relationships. The thought-stream is not ruling my responses or filtering my reality as much as it once did.

Today a thought can arise and I can say, “thanks for sharing, but I’m not engaging that today, I’m too busy doing something more important.”

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it, please consider helping me out by sharing it, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, or even throwing me some money on GoFundMe HERE or via PayPal HERE so I can keep calling it like I see it.

Reflections on Revolution

Hola mi gente,
I attended a coalition meeting this past Saturday and it compelled me to write to short pieces. One I posted yesterday and this one -- a reflection.

I can’t stay quiet and I abhor when conscious communities stop questioning assumptions. 

It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.
 -- Assata Shakur, An Autobiography

The following is a work in progress. Assata’s words bring to mind what I call conscious radicalism. A method of inquiry and practice that questions everything and takes nothing on face value.

It is our duty to fight for freedom…

It’s winter in America, as brother Gil Scott Heron noted. But there’s a new resistance here… 

Rather than passively accept second class status, movements for the liberation of people of color (and our white allies) are defining, resisting, and rising against white supremacy and its many tentacles that have been choking our people for centuries. Unfortunately, I might add (fuck it, I’m keeping it real), some social justice organizations have become part of those tentacles. This newer resistance, however, composed mostly of young black and brown people, is involved in the struggle to be free from subjugation, oppression, and domination. Its pursuit is the manifestation of a truly just, sustainable, and equitable society.

It is our duty to win…

The sheer weight of the task of unravelling a massive social habit of and addiction to violence and injustice cannot be underestimated. It comes with the convenient amnesia about historic transgressions of such enormity it overwhelms the mind. It proves daunting at the least, stunningly and increasingly destructive on mental, physical, material, and psycho-spiritual levels. Even as the effort is meant to liberate, its current methodology was for the most part forged within the same construct it seeks to undermine: competition at the cost of collaboration, power over equality.

We must love each other and support each other…

I am no longer surprised to the degree of chauvinism in the nonprofit sector when it comes to self-care. We work long hours with little pay. The boundaries between our personal lives and mission-related work have become blurred or have ceased to exist at all. In fact, I have observed many within the social justice field take pride in how much they can do without. I get it, this is hard work, and much of my personal mission is closely tied to my collective endeavors. I understand how easy it is to be obliterated in all the mess. But this serves no real purpose. 

Keeping it 100, this is a reflection of the oppressive forces under which we labor. We mirror the same power dynamics of the larger dominant society. We earn little, work long hours, and have even less to show after decades of doing this work. How is that justice? If this set of circumstances was being played out by corporate interests, we would be (rightfully) outraged. Yet we do it to ourselves. We adopt the same oppressive hierarchies that keep us down and then we expect change. We run our organizations and our movements just like corporations and we inflict the same harm, with just a few reaping even a decent living.

Yet I do see a change coming. I see young people seeking a different form of consensus or at least attempting to define a consensus that is truly equitable. Liberation can only come about through love and until we do away the master’s tools, we will continue to flounder. For too long our methodologies have been forged within the crucible of the dominant mindset of colonization, capitalism as religion, corporations as demigods, domination of people and planet, zero-sum mentality, rape and plunder as spoils of victory, human and natural resources taken as objects of subjugation to the very few privileged -- the one percent.

I am taken aback to how easily we fit into our internalized oppression. Even when we are conscious of how the structures we resist can manifest in our work: suppression, depression, martyrdom, and simply taking the abuse until there is no room left in our bodies to contain all that destruction. Eventually, it turns inward and, like the disease that it is, eats at us from the inside-out. Without the habit of questioning our most cherished assumptions, and the practices of self-awareness, and undoing vicarious trauma -- in other words, without love -- the degree of suffering we will unwittingly bring upon ourselves will be too much.

We have nothing to lose but our chains…

Conscious radicalism is about bringing a focus and a method of inquiry that keeps us aligned with our missions. In the final analysis, this movement isn’t about a particular legislation, incremental or revolutionary change, a particular jail closing, or even mass incarceration. This is not about subject and object, practitioner and observer. This is about liberation. A liberation that is both personal and collective. It is not about branding, or taking photos with people in power, or sidling up to the symbols of our oppression. It’s about leadership predicated on the models passed down to us by our ancestors, who have been resisting for centuries. This isn’t about seven effective habits, positive thinking, or prosperity gospel. This is about love in the service of true freedom.

We all bear the scars and wounds of this struggle. Therefore, when we bear witness to this suffering writ large, we also bear witness to the wisdom of liberation from that suffering. And we bear it together.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it, please consider helping me out by sharing it, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, or even throwing me some money on GoFundMe HERE or via PayPal HERE so I can keep calling it like I see it.

The Friday Sex Blog [Riding the Horse]

Hola mi gente,
The holiday season is upon us, and with it lots of good cheer and partying. I wish you all the very best but, whatever you do, please -- please: Don’t. Drive. Drunk.

Getting Comfortable in the Saddle

Statue of the 11-century noble woman, Lady Godiva, who reputedly rode naked through her town after her husband harshly taxed his tenants.

Alchemists sought to transform lead into gold. In the same way, we all have the natural ability to turn our moments of confusion or emotional pain into insightful clarity.

One day I went with a girlfriend horseback riding. I had ridden before, but my companion at the time warned me that we were going to ride “real horses,” real horseback riding. I was so intent on impressing her and I somewhat exaggerated my horse riding experience.

Big mistake. Out they came with this huge, fire-from-flayed-nostrils beast, and no sooner than I got on it and kicked, it just took off. No matter how much I pulled back on the reins this horse wasn’t stopping and we were headed straight to a fence that, it seemed to me, this motherfucker was determined to jump. Luckily, another rider was able to put his horse in the way, causing a collision that threw me off the horse. Fortunately, no one was hurt. As I lay there my ass and pride damaged, the animal just stared and I swear it was laughing at me. They asked if I wanted to switch horses for a tamer one, but I refused. I got some lessons that day on how to ride, but when I got back on that magnificent animal, I held the reins so tight it wouldn’t or couldn’t move. Cautiously, I learned to interact with the beast so that we were able to trot around the place. 

Eventually, my friend taught me enough where I became a pretty good rider and over time I developed a close bond with that horse, admiring (while respecting) its spirit and strength.

Of course, you know there’s a metaphor in here somewhere, right? LOL!

Personal growth is like that: in the beginning we might find ourselves holding on to the reins, white-knuckled, hanging on for dear life, afraid of the full power of our emotions. But if we venture outside that comfort zone, we begin to explore the more meaningful, and infinitely more rewarding, emotional landscapes. We learn to relax in the saddle, to ride.

For most people most times, violent emotions are destructive. People fly into rage, for example, and say things they don’t mean and later regret (can I get a witness?). We may sometimes lash out and hurt someone, or when hurt by rejection, we mope and eat and lay in bed, our hurt festering in the murky waters of self-destructive depression. Most violence has its roots in a form of self-abuse that manifests itself outwardly.

Therefore, at the earlier stages of psycho-spiritual evolution or self-actualization, growth means cultivating compassion and less emotional violence toward yourself and others. My experience has been that the more self-awareness you attain, the more you are naturally motivated toward peace and harmony. At this stage, when upset or angered, you learn to take a few breaths and calm yourself. You try to practice kindness rather than hate, acceptance rather than judgment, joy rather than anger.

In this way, you can become harmonious -- and frightfully bland.

In the stereotype of a harmonious individual, all joy and acquiescence, there is a loss of the depth of love power for the sake of a safe but superficial calmness. Yes, you may have progressed from irresponsible violence and poor impulse control to a practiced tranquility, but growth doesn’t stop there.

After developing the basic skills necessary to breathe through our emotional reflexes and to act graciously, there’s another world. There is a whole new experience, lover, out there waiting for you: you can learn to open as your emotion. Rather than striking out in self-destructive, knee-jerk ways, and rather than merely breathing through your anger in order to achieve calmness, you can actually use anger, or any other emotion, as a gateway to a deeper love, a deeper expression of truth and your lived experience.

If you look back to a time when you felt you wanted to hit someone, punch a wall, break something, you will note the presence of an overriding sense of feeling trapped, restricted. Whether by your own limits or by external circumstances, you most likely felt imprisoned and loveless. Violence is always a dysfunctional attempt to break free, an unskilled effort toward greater freedom or love. Openness is freedom and love. Even the most violent or self-destructive emotions are based on our need for openness, to be free, to give and receive love.

When you are open, then you are able to give and receive love fully, and you are free. However, when you don’t practice how to be open, then you’re unable to live as love, then your chi, or vital power/ love-energy, backs up and roils as emotional mayhem. In this reality, there is a feeling of being trapped and alone, powerless, unable or fearful of riding that magnificent and powerful force, to ride free like the wind. You become emotional constipated.

Embraced skillfully, intense emotions can be a quick path to a deeper experience -- to a more profound openness. Ever heard of “angry sex”? Anger can provide you with the sharp clarity and thunder necessary to awaken from moody distraction, if you can release and really feel your love that moves as anger.

Sadness, something we all try to avoid at all costs, can expose your heart, too. Sometimes we harden ourselves against sadness, in the process creating dead zones in our psyche and body. It’s as if in our fear of unleashing our full potential, we’ve numbed ourselves against feeling fully. We have the reins tight in our hands, and we’ll never let go, lest we lose ourselves, we think. Soften yourself and feel your sadness. Really feel your sadness. Softness is like the ocean, while it is yielding, it is not weak. Yield, surrender to your sadness without falling apart. Soften your belly, feel the tidal swells moving through you, the heaves of gasps for yearning. There’s an astounding depth of love released by sadness. Ever heard and experienced the raw beauty of the blues art form?

Love can transform all these previously destructive emotions into something powerful and alive.

People mistake my work in social justice for anger. But aggression for love’s sake is passion. Even the word protest uncovers some this: Pro means being for something. Test is to speak, as in testify, or testimony. To protest is to speak for something, to stand for something. To speak truth to power.

In order to take the next step, we have to come to the awareness that true spiritual and sexual passion demands your capacity to open as wild as the moment does. Just like with me and that horse. Sometimes the force of our emotions can scare us, and we need to be careful, to develop psychologically safe spaces. But to refuse to venture further is to deny yourself life.

Smacks and shouts and dark desires can wield love as powerfully as gentle kisses, mild-mannered moods, and pats on the back. And yes, this takes practice, and you might want to hold on to those reins a little tightly at first or until you feel safe. It might take years to open freely in this way, but until you do, it’s as if you’ve entered an amusement park but have refused to get on the rides.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it, please consider helping me out by sharing it, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, or even throwing me some money on GoFundMe HERE or via PayPal HERE so I can keep calling it like I see it.