I can't seem to write short posts these days. I keep trying.

You know what's interesting? How much it hurts when I confuse my feelings with my thoughts/stories.

This is a very interesting dynamic I've noticed. Here's how to see it for yourself:

When you are going through a rough time emotionally, pay attention to what your body feels like. Is there a tightness in your chest, a pressure in your forehead, a constriction in your thought? What does that actually feel like? Without all the thoughts about what's wrong and how your dieing and life is horrible. Just the literal sensation.

When I do that, I realize first hand: this is really not so bad. This is not very painful, physically. It's usually no worse than slightly uncomfortable. When it's by itself.

There is something that happens, when thoughts link up with physical sensations. It kind of looks like two crystals linked together by some sticky goo, maybe a green color, spinning around in space.

...

erm, I'm not sure that's really relevant. Anyhoo, when there is a thought that says something, like the thought, "something is wrong with me." and it is attached to a feeling, maybe a tightness in the chest, then it suddenly becomes this thing that we are really scared to face, that we are willing to do almost anything to try and escape from, and that we seem powerless to be able to control or understand.

I think this is because when this happens, we are dealing with something that doesn't actually exist. There isn't actually a connection between the mental auditory phenomena we call "thought" and the tactile internal phenomena we call "feelings." But we use one as proof of the other. For some reason, we assume that because our chest feels tight and our temples are throbbing, that means the thought that is going through our head about being a failure is true.

Once that imaginary connection between the two is snipped via direct perception (aka, looking at it, perhaps via the questions: what am I feeling in the body right now, and then, what am I thinking.) For some reason, for me, they loose there power. The situation is seen for what it is: some sensations, and some talking going on in my head. Vs. actually believing the story that the voice is telling me.

As far as I can tell, all suffering comes from these weird entity's I'm calling beliefs. We take these individual experiences, these crystals, and we try to link them together in weird ways, make up stories about them. Sometimes the stories are fine, or even nice. But often they are nightmares, or turn into nightmares, and then is when it's nice to know the dis-assembly instructions.

I've tried to just stop believing beliefs, but that doesn't seem to work at all. You cant' stop believing, as the song goes. But you can look for truth. If you look close enough at beliefs, with the intention of finding the truth of them, they dissolve. That is my experience. So far, the process of learning how this works has been both simple and complex. The actual process, when it works, is simple. You see how what you were believing isn't necessarily true, and you can no longer believe it is true. In practice, it's taken a long time, and I'm still learning, because a lot of the minds job seems to be erecting and maintaining defenses around your beliefs, and these are as complex and confusing as the mind can get. And for someone with a mind like mine, that gets pretty fucking labyrinthine.

What amazes me is that the mind can create the elaborate and ingenious defenses that it does, without even being conscious it's doing it. If I were to do what I love for a live, I suppose I would be a dream mechanic. I would use my belief engineering skills (almost entirely demolition based ;) to help people who's dreams had become nightmares. I would help them dismantle the beliefs that cause them pain, that make there life hell.

Fuck, that's an awesome job. I should create that. Heh. Just as soon as I'm done with the prototype (me).

Anyways, lesson out of my engineering scrapbook:

Figure 72.

a) Belief, Front View: "I'm not good enough"

i) I'm doing something wrong

ii) I'm a failure

iii) I need to do something different than I'm doing

notes: this is one of my core belies. It hurts like a mother fucker out of hell and makes everything not fun. Saps my desire to do anything (why bother, if I just keep telling myself I'm doing it wrong) It's one of the most resistant to dismantling I've ever come across. This is because of the much lesser known:

b) Supporting belief, side view: "This belief is true and if I stop believing it I will become an even bigger failure"

notes: The reason a) remains in place inspite of all my attempts to reverse engineer it is simple.

I don't want to stop believing it.

This is an important, very important lesson for anyone engaging in dream mechanics. You need to be coming from a desire for Truth. If you are instead coming from a desire to have a tighter butt, or more money, or a girlfriend, etc., then the belief will remain in place. It will remain in place because you have decided to hold onto the desire for a "thing" rather than trust that the truth will give you what you really want. Maybe I think I want a girlfriend. So I do the work (belief engineering) to try and get one. If I was able to approach that issue from the motive of truth instead, then I may or may not get a girlfriend, but I would have access to the love, acceptance, worthiness, and joy, that I was trying to get, by obtaining a girlfriend. From there, everything else is icing on the cake.

It's like the monkey traps they have in India: there's some fruit placed into a jar with a small mouth. The monkey's hand can fit in, to grab the fruit, but once wrapped around the fruit, the monkeys fist is too big to come out again. And the monkey refuses to let go of the fruit, thus remaining trapped.

So too, by holding onto our desires, we are trapped in suffering. Byron Katie, a belief engineer par excellence, suggests that, if there is some belief that you can't come at with the motive of truth, then work on another belief instead. Something smaller, because it's hopeless to confront the one you're not willing to look at for the sake of truth. There are always plenty of others.

[end of scrapbook section]

I should mention that you're not going to understand this from reading it alone. You have to get your hands dirty, to get the experience that will make this make sense.

Anyways, that is where I am right now: poised on the brink of the belief, "I'm not good enough. I'm not a success. I need to do more than I am doing." asking myself the question: "are you willing to be no more than exactly what you are right now?"

Of course, if I was happy and skipping, I'd say, "hell no. I want to be super awesome, if I can." But right now, the pain of that thought has become so great that just being who I am, without that thought, is starting to look like a better option.

The bottom line is I'm going to be that anyways. I can be miserable about it and fighting it every moment. Or I can be happy about it.

"I'm not enough."

is it true?

SCDAMI

this is actually something old (as will become apparent) that I found in the "drafts" folder of my email, and wanted to move somewhere Permanent, aside from Facebook (which will probably be gone in a few years. So, here it is:

When I was young, I had a super hero. No, I was a super hero. Isaac was my secret identity. but really, I was, "Super-Can-Do-Anything-Man-Isaac." I spent a long time thinking up what my super hero should be. I wanted to be the best, I wanted the best selection of super powers, and I didn't want to worry about being killed by arch Nemesis's (how many esses should there be there?). So finally I decided on all of them. Quite simply, as the name states, SuperCanDoAnythingManIsaac, can do, anything. Anything he can imagine, he can make so. Often, when I was having a nightmare (and I often had nightmare's as a child) I would call on the power of SCDAMI (that's an abbreviation for the name, fyi) and perhaps, if it was really dire, my sidekick, to save the day, or at least save my skin. You'd think it would be easy, beating villains with the power to do anything, but the problem was, my dreams didn't always play by the rules. There I'd be, at the exit to some giant labyrinthine lair of evil, the dark figure catching up to me, and I was jumping and trying to call on my power of flight, and only getting ten, twenty feet off the ground, as the enemy drew closer. Sometimes I would find myself completely powerless to turn into SCDAMI at all, as some dark terror lurched towards me, fangs glistening with threads of saliva.

These dreams would particularly terrify me, and as I lay in bed, heart racing, after one of those nightmares, I would cry in frustration: why wasn't SCDAMI there? Why wouldn't my dream play by my rules? Almost never, would my dream give me full access to my powers. Why?

It's now coming upon my twenty third birthday. For a while the nightmares have receded. And now, the occasional nightmares are usually more like interesting action movies. I don't have an alter ego who I transform into to gain access to my powers, I just use them. I am just Isaac, the badass monster-slayer. Usually. I wish I knew how it happened. I wish I knew how it could be applied to life.

I've got one clue: Sometimes, transformation into SCDAMI wouldn't work no matter what. But always, when I doubted my abilities, they failed me. The main difference now, in my dreams, and I suppose in my life, is I have painstakingly inched my way towards self-confidence over the years. Like Superman is powered by the Sun or the Green Lantern by his alien doo-hicky, the source of power of Super Can Do Anything Man Isaac, is Belief. Belief that I can do anything. When that faltered, I would fall from the sky, I would loose my strength. When I became scared for my life, the monsters moved in.

I think perhaps, it is time to bring my Superhero self into the light of day. Perhaps I need a secret identity, something bigger than life to transform into in times of need. But above all, what I need for sure is a heroic belief in myself.
Belief that I can do anything.
:)

happy birthday.