mandyjw

I think the real reason we are here is to soothe the motion sickness from the wild ride of this trajectory we seemed to have been born into. But you're not actually moving at all, you bunch of idiots! HA! It sure feels like it though, doesn't it? We're all throwing up from sea sickness on the side of the ship while we watch the whales. You might be Captain Ahab carefully watching for your White Whale or you might just be on a cruise for fun. That part is up to you. Or maybe it's predetermined. Who the fuck knows? Pass the dramamine please.

In my hallway where my dream board is, there's a red pom pom my daughter lost that looks like a clown nose on the floor. On the dream board there's one thing written in red among dozens of others in black, it's the trip to go to the city where the connections are coming from.

I dreamed of a plane crash a week ago. This time there was this massive plane that crashed and a tiny plane chasing it crashed with it. Except like after 9/11, even though it crashed into the ground, houses started collapsing around it after. And I didn't know if I was safe to go in my house anymore, or who could tell me if it was or wasn't safe. And it wasn't my town, it had evolved into a much more populated place so there was lots of chaos.

Anthem of my teenage angst, brought up by reading a thread on the forum just now. What the fuck with the album cover, and just talking about 9/11? Synchronicity is by my side today. BLOODY NOSE! THE CLOWN NOSE! SHIT I DIDN'T think I could do this on my own. Puzzle pieces, click, click, click. Yes, Def Leppard. Someone is out there, someone cares, and you are in fact, just fooling yourself. It's a small world after all you fuckin' clown.

Living here, born to hermit parents, terrified of the world, so secluded and sheltered from it all, not letting yourself have what you want... you can imagine the fantasy and desire that grows and grows. What is color without black and white? What is springtime and birds singing when you've never stood in the middle of the deep woods in the dead of winter, closed your eyes and just listened to the perfect frozen silence? What is the fantasy of a tropical paradise in the dead of winter? I'm so well practiced at this, that I know it's far better than the real thing.

I suddenly feel sick to my stomach.

When I was a kid my Dad was friends with this guy named Tommy. Tommy was the worst of backwoods ignorant. He was also a distant-ish relative. My parents out of their Christian love and hermit like nature did not believe in having friends, wanting friends or being selective with their friends. When someone came into their lives they had to be a true friend to them, even if their values or development didn't align. Tommy's dad was called Big Tom and he was called Little Tom even though he was bigger than his dad. He was enormous, didn't shower, didn't shave, muscular, tall, tan, tattooed all over with shit like eagles and mermaids, deep booming voice, black wild hair and mean looking eyes, and he was very crude. He was the most intimidating looking person. His dad was creepy in his own way, came to our school when we were kids and called himself "Uncle Pickle". Because I was raised with Christian values, the problem of having someone in your home who doesn't share them comes up. My parents were the rare type that would put up with almost anything, and say nothing about it, except on the very rare occasion that you really crossed a line. I was very uncomfortable around Tommy. He never said anything bad to me out of respect for my dad, but I knew what he was thinking and comments he made got back to me and confirmed this as I got older. The first two dobermans we got were very friendly, mine especially. The other one hated him. Mine would sit next to his side and worship him the entire time as he told horrible stories about moose dying terrible deaths. It made me sick to have him touch her, and she was just joyfully oblivious. Moxie was her name. Once I was in the computer room, which was next door to the bathroom and Tommy took a leak without closing the door. This made my dad angry and bothered him more than me but again, he never said anything. He had his own daughters and their relationship was creepy strange and bizarre. When I was a really little Tommy was married. I remember playing with dolls behind the couch when his wife unloaded on my Mom all the awful stuff going on in their marriage. I remember popping out from behind the couch and she was so surprised and embarrassed that I had been there the whole time. They bought me a stuffed clown doll. It was over-sized and I was too young to say that I really didn't like it, so it went in my bed with all my other stuffed animals. I remember Mom saying once "Ah, there's a man in your bed!" and this made me feel dirty and awkward about this clown. When you pressed his red nose it played "It's a Small World After All". Contemplating this morning made me think of that phrase which made me think of the song which reminded me of the clown doll, which made me think of Tommy. Mom raised me to believe that men were scary and dirty, (maybe that's not Mom's fault) and we went to a circus once and the clowns were giving out balloons to others kids and naturally I wanted one. She told me that the type of person who played a clown was likely to be very dirty and that they blow up the balloons with their mouths and who knows what germs they have. There was a similar message of complete disgust taught to me about carnivals, theme parks, carnival workers. When my sister was going through puberty, I was in the depths of my own spiritual fire and what I later labeled "obsessive compulsive disorder". I had a neurotic impulse to "clear" out anything that made me uncomfortable. If she was watching TV and a dirty word I didn't know was said, I had to make myself uncomfortable and ask what it meant. If she didn't tell me, I had to ask Mom. Once after my sister was watching MTV I asked mom what a "rod" was and Mom must have been feeling up to educating me that day because she said that masturbation was wrong, and this is something I never doubted so I never did. Once my sister had a cross country race in another city. My OCD came up in an enormous manner. "GO BACK AND PICK UP THAT TRASH NOW." I didn't. I walked further and further from the trash and it tortured me. "PROMISE YOUR SOUL TO THE DEVIL" Ohhh... that was the worst one. I learned to disregard those thoughts as I became a teenager. Later, I had to go to that very spot to race several times. So many of my vivid pivotal memories are centered in this one spot. On one race, a boy died and no one noticed and we ran past his body off in the field. One of my teammates was right behind him and I knew that he had to deal with this fact the rest of his life. He was my first ever crush, but when we went to high school I got over this quickly and painlessly because he was such a jerk . He grew right across from where the broken apple tree was. His brother just died, and so he has been around home more lately, I saw him the Halloween before last. He called me Amanda. In this city lived a clockmaker, and he became a powerful mesmerist. In the historical records his name comes up as the mesmerist who traveled here, the first one that Pomroy recounts going to as a child. The summer before last I saw the first whales I've ever seen. I went to a beach and there was a woman with a dog there. I couldn't keep my kids away so I talked to her a bit. She said that there were whales around, she was watching for them. I said that I had been on a field trip to this city on a boat to see whales but didn't ever remember seeing one. She said she was from that city. 20 minutes later and the sun was fading, the sky was beautiful I watched the water with my Mom and sister and saw whales the first time. That field trip. OH FUCK! THIS IS ALL CONNECTING! In first grade a new boy moved to our class. I was the only girl, there were two other boys. Alex, he was wonderful, creative and we resonated until we got older and then naturally we hated each other. I loved his hand writing. I love people's handwriting, and I did in school, I loved looking at it, as if it spoke to me and showed me the intimate parts of someone's soul. I especially loved boy's handwriting. There was no one who pressed down as hard on the page as Alex. He was always breaking pencils. Michael was dumb as a fucking rock, but sweet. He had beautiful green eyes and black hair, like Harry Potter. But his Mom didn't take care of him and he usually smelled. Michael was in love with me throughout 8th grade. I mean, I was the only girl. We had to draw pictures for a calendar project once and he drew us as a couple in front of a barn. In the picture he's chewing a piece of grass. They chose his fucking picture for the calender and Mom bought the calendar and everyone knew it was me and laughed about it. Anyway, in first grade Derek moved him. His dad was in the military and Derek had a buzz cut and already had very strong ideas about what it meant to be a man. He saw me and my purple round glasses and I was to be his girlfriend. I wasn't sure what this meant but I went along with it. Derek had expectations about how we should act, and how much time we should spend with each other. It was never much fun. Once I got mad at him and kicked him in the balls before I knew that boys HAD balls and now this fact was explained to me because I got in WAY worse trouble than I expected for sort of carelessly kicking at someone. He also wrote me a "dirty" note which I got in trouble for and didn't understand at all. I sat with him on the bus to go to this field trip to this city to go whale watching. I remember that he played or sang this song to me. When we got on the boat I connected strongly with another girl, her name was Sophie (Sophia, wisdom) and she was to later come to our school and would become my best friend and an incredible influence in my life. I spent the whole day with her. Derek was so pissed at me. I was supposed to spend all my time with HIM. I can't remember what happened after that, if that was the end of our "relationship" but we didn't sit together on the way home and he moved away after a short time. Sophie's mother grew up in a very wealthy, well educated family and she was a teacher in our school. In her early adulthood she went to Sierra Leon in the Peace Corp. Ever since she could never return to the wealth she had grown up in so she moved here and taught her whole life. We had an advanced reading class with her for a few years and she expanded my world quite a bit. What luck I had to become best friends with a rare liberal well-educated person in this disconnected unevolved place. Sophie's mom made sure they were well traveled. When the trade centers fell, Sophie had been to the top of the buildings and I was still scrambling to learn where NYC was and what the trade centers were. I never understood why I was so emotionally affected by 9/11 and Sophie wasn't as much. I called her on the phone after it happened and her Dad answered. "America has a bloody nose." He said. He would answer the phone when i called often and talk about politics with me until Sophie complained. He was always unashamedly challenging my Christian ideals and passionate conservative politics. I was indignant when he said that America had a bloody nose. People had died. How could he look at it holistically like that? Her dad unexpectedly died shortly before my daughter was born. Something about my daughter's chocolate brown eyes and mischievous disposition reminds me him.

I didn't feel that he was telling people to stop having kids, I think he was trying to give them peace around a subject that causes so much pain and confusion in people's lives. Many intelligent talented people are opting not to have children right now anyway, and many intelligent talented children and born to parents who didn't have the opportunities to develop themselves. As society evolves more opportunities are available for everyone, you don't need to win the parents lottery to self actualize. Also overly involved, overly motivated parents can be a detriment to their kid's development.

Training your mind is just like training a dog. It takes incredible focus and resolve, incredible flexibility and most importantly immense love. I want to do better by my mind and my puppy. I want better focus. Why did I go so far down the road of Mr.Money Mustache penny pinching, moralization and optimization just to flip to the law of attraction? I have no regrets, but I do want to understand what I got out of it. Most people here would say it was working through stage green. The idea of hedonic adaptation was huge for me, it caused me to question happiness. The idea that we can buck the trend of societal expectations and design a better world starting with us, and have the guts to go in the direction of what we think is right resonated. When I believed that I lived in a material world it was hugely important for me to set my sights on happiness and wisdom rather than material things. I went so far in this direction and the black and white duality of it that I realized I was on a dead end road of self destruction of my own happiness. I wanted to let go of material attachment and I was doing it aggressively the best way I knew how within the paradigm in which I lived. When I was a kid I wanted to have nice things and a nice life but I felt like as long as there were starving children living in Africa that made me evil. Several verses in the Bible made me feel like I should dedicate my life to God, and not have a relationship or kids. I felt like I had to dedicate my life to either God or my desire for a family, kids and material security. The further I went to work in this direction the further from spirituality (or Jesus at that point) I went. Stage orange, going for the kids and the house, "killed" my spirituality. Looking back, I lived and breathed desire and goals and hard work. Looking back, the old house, the fascination with old houses and the past and the miscarriages were deep spiritual "windows" during this time. I tried to temper the pain with the fascination of the past, the magic I had possess me when I bought this house and the pain fused into one thing. There was this apple tree that had broken off but it bloomed and bore apples that year and in the background someone had spray painted the word "forever" on a pole. I also vividly remember picking apples with my mother at her friend's old house immediately before the miscarriage, and picking up a Bible again during that time. I bought the antique garnet ring that became my most prized possession, I wore it to my first trip to NYC which broke my reality and made me fall in love with something terrifying. I left the ring on Pomroy's grave for the crows this spring after the miscarriage. Finding Leo's videos burnt up the stage orange, he was stage orange at the time. I remember being so helped by his videos and also feeling motivated and the flip side of being lazy and not striving enough, and also strongly feeling the societal pressure of needing to be attractive from his videos. My surroundings were so comfy. It is desirable to not look attractive, not draw attention, mind your own business and other people will mind their's. But in cities where societal expectations and motivations have their energy concentrated in a small space, this energy overtakes me. For a girl I have been given a gift of not needing to care about my looks, and to focus on other things. But if the situation is right, when I leave my rural living safety bubble I deeply feel the insecurity and pressure of appearances that I have not yet freed myself from. I am susceptible to this. Then there was a disastrous winter, The Power of Now and the first glimpse I had of the power of letting go of my complaints and seeing the beauty. The snow on the pine trees. The insights into what Jesus meant in the verses I had pondered over for years resonated. And yet, that was the catalyst of letting go of Christianity. You cannot let go of anything, but the intention to is everything. You can focus, and you can love. When you do both together, it seems as if things are let go of. Love is a funny thing, it's so all encompassing that it's as if it's the thing that allows us to focus, the "it's ok, I got this, you go on and do what needs to be done". Can love be focused? Can something that is everything also be focused? Holy shit, well that journal entry got to the heart of the problem. I wasn't even trying to focus. Hmmm...

THE SHIP SUNK IN LOVE Should Love’s heart rejoice unless I burn? For my heart is Love’s dwelling. If You will burn Your house, burn it, Love! Who will say, ‘It’s not allowed’? Burn this house thoroughly! The lover’s house improves with fire. From now on I will make burning my aim, From now on I will make burning my aim, for I am like the candle: burning only makes me brighter. Abandon sleep tonight; traverse fro one night the region of the sleepless. Look upon these lovers who have become distraught and like moths have died in union with the One Beloved. Look upon this ship of God’s creatures and see how it is sunk in Love. -Rumi THE AWAKENING In the early dawn of happiness you gave me three kisses so that I would wake up to this moment of love I tried to remember in my heart what I’d dreamt about during the night before I became aware of this moving of life I found my dreams but the moon took me away It lifted me up to the firmament and suspended me there I saw how my heart had fallen on your path singing a song Between my love and my heart things were happening which slowly slowly made me recall everything You amuse me with your touch although I can’t see your hands. You have kissed me with tenderness although I haven’t seen your lips You are hidden from me. But it is you who keeps me alive Perhaps the time will come when you will tire of kisses I shall be happy even for insults from you I only ask that you keep some attention on me. -Rumi AFTER BEING IN LOVE, THE NEXT RESPONSIBILITY Turn me like a waterwheel turning a millstone. Plenty of water, a Living River. Keep me in one place and scatter the love. Leaf-moves in wind, straw drawn toward amber, all parts of the world are in love, but they do not tell their secrets. Cows grazing on a sacramental table, ants whispering in Solomon’s ear. Mountains mumbling an echo. Sky, calm. If the sun were not in love, he would have no brightness, the side of the hill no grass on it. The ocean would come to rest somewhere. Be a lover as they are, that you come to know you Beloved. Be faithful that you may know Faith. The other parts of the universe did not accept the next responsibility of love as you can. They were afraid they might make a mistake with it, the inspired knowing that springs from being in love -Rumi WHISPERS OF LOVE Lover whispers to my ear, “Better to be a prey than a hunter. Make yourself My fool. Stop trying to be the sun and become a speck! Dwell at My door and be homeless. Don’t pretend to be a candle, be a moth, so you may taste the savor of Life and know the power hidden in serving.” - Rumi

A New Rule It is the rule with drunkards to fall upon each other, to quarrel, become violent, and make a scene. The lover is even worse than a drunkard. I will tell you what love is: to enter a mine of gold. And what is that gold? The lover is a king above all kings, unafraid of death, not at all interested in a golden crown. The dervish has a pearl concealed under his patched cloak. Why should he go begging door to door? Last night that moon came along, drunk, dropping clothes in the street. “Get up,” I told my heart, “Give the soul a glass of wine. The moment has come to join the nightingale in the garden, to taste sugar with the soul-parrot.” I have fallen, with my heart shattered – where else but on your path? And I broke your bowl, drunk, my idol, so drunk, don’t let me be harmed, take my hand. A new rule, a new law has been born: break all the glasses and fall toward the glassblower. -Rumi

Oh Shin honey.

Devils awaken as angels, angels awaken as devils.

@Shin I know I have a bit of one, but I'm not giving it away.

@Shin Nope. I have an accent?

I was never your follower, I'm not asking for your help, and I cannot feed any of your tendencies. It's all you. Do you see the subtle or not so subtle blame here? Sort of like the blame of "woman" in the fucking old testament? You planted the tree, you told yourself to pick the fruit, you ate the fruit, you gave it to someone else, you split yourself and then what happened? Blame and shame. Stay there if you want, I'm done with it.

It's funny, I think you're right and desire to let go of it but I've been thinking about this quote from you a lot just recently. On 4/1/2019 at 7:58 AM, mandyjw said: @tsuki Honest to God. I thought you'd tell me to let go of that story and impulse. tsuki lol, what would you do if I told you to let go? Are letting go and holding on an action? Hahaha It wasn't arrogance in my eyes, it was confidence and it did have power. The power just wasn't yours to own. Your desire to purify the shadow of arrogance is good. Just know the confidence doesn't have to die with it, that's the light. My apologies to Marta as well. The path of least resistance of human interpretation, drives and mind filters along with dissolved boundaries created a strange situation. You can't own that either. You can't own the dark just like you can't own the light. We can take responsibility though. Thanks tsuki, it feels really good to bring this stuff to light.

@tsuki When I wrote the first journal I made here, I made so many assumptions about the part you took in it. The law of attraction explained why, at first it wasn't an assumption, it was a complete and total knowing of an aspect, or a blindness to everything that didn't matter from the perspective of Source. You helped me to focus, and it grew bigger and bigger until it took over. I saw through the veil, I was seeing the glimpses into how perfectly planned my past was, how perfectly it had been designed (or creatively written) to lead me to that very moment. Remember the book theme? When it ended I was back to my human perspective and even though the feeling of bliss stuck around and my reality was shattered, coming back from that state was an awkward transition because my normal thought patterns were left to make sense of it and they made a lot of assumptions without discerning. It's just like now, I can see flaws in my upbringing, I can see flaws in people and situations but I've had this experience of complete and total altered perception, and I know that I am creating the flaws through the filter of mind, and I know through focus they will cease to exist in my experience, and that my focus and experience is the creation of my reality itself. When I was writing the journal I assumed that your state of mind the entire time was the same as mine throughout and that's why everything that has happened since has been such a mind fuck. One assumption I made is that you had already had and fully understood the exact experience I was having then. I know now that neither of the realities I experience can be assumed. I am left without ground, trying to navigate a world where I must make and be ready to throw away assumptions. By the way, I'm sorry about all the assumptions and misunderstandings. Anyway, that's why it's very interesting to me that you are reading this particular book and starting with the Old Testament God the Father. Just remember who (you) wrote it and that the book is not the book. Selfish is a good thing, at least it is when it's focused and without its assumptions about others.

Remember the insight of how we "chose", "imagined", "wrote the story of" our upbringing and past? Or did you not come along with me on that one? Whose history do you really want to know, whose history was actually merciful?

For some reason this morning right after I woke up I was thinking about the theme of the movie Coraline which I watched a couple days ago because I got really sick, and the similar theme to the end of Gone With the Wind. Coraline wants to lose herself world of fantasy and perfection over her reality threatens Coraline but is overcome. The other mother wants her eyes in exchange for buttons, she must sell her soul. Scarlet is ruined because she creates a fantasy in her own head she won't let go of, which drives as she manages her survival during the worst of circumstances. When she is allowed the thing she wants, she realized she had what she wanted yet never wanted it and never wanted what she could not have. Lately I've fallen into a depression or non depression where my days are fine, but I look forward to sleeping and it's the highlight of my existence. A frequent thing that happens in the winter. This morning I wrote this out as a response to a question in a conversation about beauty and then discovered this new Lana Del Rey song. Beauty is always an illusion that occurs, no one or nothing has it. It's a tool the light beneath it uses. I've never been able to figure out if I'm attractive or unattractive. Attraction is something that happens sometimes. I've never managed to attach or detach to it one way or the other for very long, the pain of going back and forth of trying to do that isn't worth it. It's just something that happens, a meeting or resonance in the eye of the perceiver that has little to do with objective reality. That's all. The "ground" we all pretend to have agreed on, so we can make assumptions about each other and interact with each other based on those assumptions. We all have preferences, we seem to be programmed to resonate with certain things and some of them we seem to have in common, or they are agreed on by most people in our surroundings. Like how many people love the color blue, etc. No one can say the color blue is beautiful. There are a few people who hate blue. But if you make something in blue it will almost always sell quicker than other colors. You can derive rules from observing enough people and manipulate them to sell things, or predict their behavior based on these collective assumptions. If everyone made everything blue people would gravitate to other colors. Variety and rarity are factors that make someone take notice and appreciate. If you question it long enough or poll enough people you realize that attraction is just a phenomenon that occurs only in the experiencer itself, and it can happen on different depths and levels. 'Cause you're just a man It's just what you do Your head in your hands As you color me blue Yeah, you're just a man All through and through Your head in your hands As you color me blue Blue, blue, blue' I don't want to be beautiful, I don't want to be ugly. I don't want to successful, I don't not want to be successful. I don't know how to be free of these things except by opting out. I want to opt out of this game and I just want to go to sleep. Change my eyes to buttons Mommy. The stupid idiot never realized what it was he was being enchanted by. The lilies of the field never toiled. I want to feel the way I feel about a sunny field of wildflowers. I want to go to sleep there and wake up as one of them.

@tsuki Ok, I'll try to keep my prejudices about the old testament to myself. But dear Jesus, it gets boring and violent the further you go. It's a very strange combination. I have recently started taking Jesus' name in vain, in reaction to my Christian upbringing. Sometimes it's like "was that a prayer or a profanity?" I DON'T EVEN KNOW ANYMORE. Jesus take the wheel.