Following the energy... acting on strange impulses... surfing the waves...
I've been diddling around with some experiments the last few days. They involve not suppressing the stranger impulses I have on a regular basis. These impulses are the type where I have no rational reasoning for following through on them, and many of them seem to be rather silly. They are not generally harmful, although sometimes they have the potential to be misunderstood. They are the result of thoughts that rise through the energy and enter my consciousness. They are constantly there, but normally I brush them aside.
A few years ago, my friend Mark, a professionally trained puppeteer who has never, to his knowledge, been inside John Malkovich's head, asked me if he would ever become "successful" to the point where he did not have to maintain a boring day job. I answered him with my first thought, rather than pausing to come up with a coherent response. My first impulse when he asked me the question as to tell him, "Only after you meet Parker Posey, fall in love and marry her." We had not been talking about Parker Posey, nor had we recently seen her in a film, and there was no good explanation for why this was my first response to his question.
Yesterday, while Mark was in New York City meeting with representatives from Sesame Street, most of whom he knows rather well, he was out in a hallway at the studio when Parker Posey walked past him, smiled and said "hello" to him. He returned the hello and they went on about their business. Later, in asking around about whether she was doing something with Sesame Street, which would explain her presence in the building, he was told she wasn't and no one had any idea why she was walking through the studio. They figured she was just cutting through the studio on her way to somewhere else.
So, then Mark called me to excitedly give me a report on what had happened and how he remembered my response years ago regarding his potential for success. The entire episode would have meant nothing if I had suppressed my first impulse in responding to his question.
Does it mean anything? Probably not, if you approach it from a dry, rational point of view, but from the perspective of personal mythology, it became a magical moment in Mark's life and also in mine.
This report was filed with my office in the midst of my current efforts to surf the energy waves by following my first impulse reactions and responses. I took it as confirmation that doing so is the right course of action at this time. Some of you out there in E2 land who have received strange messages from me over the past couple of days and haven't been sure why I sent them, they were impulses I acted on. Most of them involved referring you to certain writeups on this site after reading something you had written and making a connection between the two of them. What to some may have seemed like I was blatantly trying to trick them into reading something of mine was really a quest for a connection, to see if there was a reason beyond the obvious why their writeup caused me to think of one of my own.
It is my humble belief that we've been turning into machines, following the dictates of a rationalistic, cause and effect, glued to logic and scientific method lifestyle. This sort of life, where we attempt to function like the computers we are all sitting in front of, sucks out our spiritual dimension and leaves us feeling empty and mostly insignificant... at least until we feel a strong emotion we cannot deny... and it is my feeling that this is creating a culture of depression and anxiety we turn to medication to control... to keep the machines functioning at the request of a collective that demands we fulfill the roles we are assigned in the larger machine.
We don't need to reject the logos¹ of advancing science, we need to see it as the useful tool it is, and balance ourselves with a greater acceptance of the tools of mythos². Life can be filled with wonder if you open yourself to it. Beauty atrophies when unappreciated. It also disappears when you try to define it.
¹ "English-speaking mystics of the present day have been known to use {logos} to refer in an abstract way to the world of thought, and to the universe as information."
--From Logos by Oolong
² Whereas I use the term "logos" to encompass the world of rational thought where proofs are used to assert truth, I've adopted the term "mythos" to encompass the world of faith and beliefs that are outside the realm of logos. It is my assertion that both are needed in balance in order to create a meaningful existence.
This is dedicated to PyramidHead.