Have You Ever?

  By Travis |
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Have you ever woke up in the morning, aware but not of what or who you are? Have you found yourself spontaneously wrestling with the compression of time at relativistic speeds, watching space-time map out in four dimensions that your mind can sort of grasp, but can’t translate into the daily run-of-the-mill mapping available to conventionally recognized senses? Have you been thrashing with sharp bursts of energy from inside, like electrical shocks that are intense but not painful? Have you watched your self-story fall screaming into oblivion, only to re-appear a moment later as it tries to gain purchase for the day? Have you smiled as you acknowledged that the price of a body-brain system is a self-story, and even though it seems possible to work the system into a shape where such a story doesn’t appear to occur, it … Continue reading →

Successful Definitions

  By Travis |
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Self examination is a constant work of looking at the assumptions I hold and questioning their validity. As far as I have found one of the richest fields for exploration in this way is language. The language we hold & use shapes the reality we experience. That then feeds back into how we carry ourselves through reality, which then affects our experience. It’s a vicious/virtuous feedback cycle that we all seem to spend most of our waking hours in. One set of the scripts that runs on this operating system of language has to do with evaluating our current situation and projecting into the future what it may mean. Specifically I am thinking of the idea of “being a success.” When I look at that phrase in my own system, what come forward is images of plentiful possessions, money, a … Continue reading →

Different Games

  By Travis |
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So one of my passionate interests is awakening, waking up from the sleep induced by the cultural held and transmitted beliefs about what I am, to directly face experience and stand as I actually am. To proceed through life from that point, rather than from some assumed point based on the words of others. This sort of consideration is usually called spiritual. So, my interest has lead me to explore the spiritual cultural landscape. One of the seemingly widespread beliefs in the modern spiritual realm casts life and reality as a vast game with no actual players. The (not exclusively) Buddhist teachings of no self get conflated with Cartesian/mechanistic world views to produce this image of a vast game board with pieces moving according to set rules with no one directing the movement beyond the rules. I can’t ascribe to … Continue reading →