My state of mind lately has been changing. My reality has been changing a little with it.

First I decided to spend what money I’m supposed to come by in a couple weeks, on something I should, rather than something I’d planned. That’s a good thing. Much more responsible.

Then, a few days ago, I was talking to the Four. How is my kid gonna see the value in inner work, if there are no outer confirmations there’s some point to it all? I asked them. I know I haven’t meditated on say, getting my bathtub, or floor, or water issues fixed, except once maybe, in combination with other things. But I want this to happen and SHE expects it SHOULD if meditation ‘works’. I didn’t realize that until a conversation we had the other day, but suddenly, it had a lot more importance to me that this occur.

I had recently had a talk with my best friend and was telling him I thought one reason this thing I wanted hadn’t happened, was because for some inexplicable reason, I just didn’t care enough. Like the only thing I’ve cared about for awhile, I mean really at the gut level, is my personal evolution. The reality around me has been real, sure, and things sometimes drive me crazy, but I just haven’t had the “ooomph” for anything except “internal experience” and that sense of inner growth.

Well this shift to the focus on my kid, and her plaintively asking me why stuff was still broken if we were meditating, wasn’t this supposed to fix it? And I told her well but I’m not really meditating on that, and she’s like, WHY NOT?!? which was a good point I suppose. Anyway I just suddenly DID want things to change.

So day before yesterday, especially at night, I spent a lot of time imagining that all of it at once (why not?) got fixed. The bathtub replaced. The water issues for the sink fixed. The water issues for the whole house fixed. The bathroom floor totally replaced. Yes I know we’re talking thousands of dollars. I know that I haven’t got that money, dad hasn’t got that money, and in YEARS I have not been able to find a single person trustworthy to do this. (Yes I’ve had numerous plumbing services out. They are the stoned-drunk mafia-of-incompetence in my small town. They actually cause problems they then can’t fix, for me and others. A good plumber out here could make a killing.)

I don’t care. I just “acted as if” as Seth used to talk about, and tried to “emotionally feel it,” to believe it, to accept it, to allow it, and feel happy and relieved about it. I felt like it could happen!

Yesterday morning a local man message’d me, I had asked a bit prior about whether he might be able to help with this, and told me that he probably could and we’d talk in a couple weeks. That really cheered me up. That seemed like maybe after all this time, something might happen! “Let it be.”

A few hours later my dad and a guy showed up about this very same topic. I mean I’ve been trying to get dad to help me for YEARS but just suddenly he is inspired?  On the very SAME day, after years of nothing, TWO different fix-sources just show up in my life??

He said he’s going to pay it up front (somehow. A loan maybe) and I can pay him back. I don’t know when, but it’s going to get done.

After years and years of these problems and wishing, all the sudden every one of them is going to get solved at the same time. Yay.

***

This reminds me that a couple months ago, I suddenly really wanted my kid to have her graphics tablet. The one I spent way too much money on for her previous birthday and it died like a rock not long later and I couldn’t find the info I needed for the warranty work so it sat, from shortly after her birthday a year ago, like a paperweight in my room. I felt kinda mad about that. I WANTED IT TO WORK, all the sudden, more than I had. For HER sake.

The next day, I looked over at it, and I really thought it ‘should’ work. Why shouldn’t it work?  I wanted it to work. So why not?  I remembered all the time we’d spent messing with it in desperation, frustration, how dead-like-a-stone it was. That seemed just… irrelevant. Maybe it’ll work! I thought, feeling positive and like it could happen! It was just a “wild hair,” a wild idea — why not try it?

So I got it down and dusted it off and plugged it in. It worked fine.

Never mind the past. Or that this seemed impossible. I wasn’t going to argue. I have to believe.

***

Last night the kid had taken the computer. I wanted to listen to music or binaural or something, almost anything, and meditate. I’m sick of having nothing if the computer is gone. I was going through my bag with my light-sound machine when I found my old Creative Zen. It’s about… 4 years old perhaps, I forget. It had disappeared from where I kept it plugged in, for a long time, and when found, was dead as a rock, plugging it in to charge it did nothing.

Now, my housekeeper has two kids, and me one, and I admit it’s one thing that pisses me off to no end, that things vanish and “nobody knows” where or why or how and then they turn up broken or something in a different place. Kids are so annoying in this respect.  I had given up on it as dead after quite some time of grieving about it and trying to get it to work, but apparently not given up completely, since I stuffed it and its cord to the bottom of this case and forgot about it for eons.

I looked at it and thought that frankly I just WANTED it to work. It’s hard to describe this feeling, and it’s a little subtle. But it felt like ‘reality’ was a great deal less important than what I wanted. It felt like the only actual question about whether it worked was up to me. I felt this kind of happy sense of it could happen! Try it! and another kind of “shrugging-allowing” sense of, “Okay! Cool!.”

So I got it out, dusted it off, and plugged it in.

And now I have a Zen again. So I have music or meditation stuff. Yay!

***

The navigation on the Zen makes clear how much handheld electronics have improved in the last several years. I kept forgetting and touching the screen, as if that would do anything! It had 4 buttons I’d forgotten how to use in the years since, and a middle thing that I never was able to work particularly well.  I missed what I wanted and couldn’t seem to get to it so I stayed with where I landed, Jai Nunito which is like new age native drum type music. Oh well, that would do.  So I got all comfy with it and went to see Inner Guide.

IG I said, I need to do 8 of disks. It’s clear I’m avoiding this. We can start anywhere you like. I mean like, if something else is necessary first, that’s fine, I’ll go ‘through’.

She did something on my head and I found myself standing with others in the dark but near a fire, watching this man dance, sort of, a native man. I was grinning about that — the drums clearly related to this! — when I had an “understanding” I think from IG.

It’s important that novelty and ‘experience’ be in my life in order that she has elements to use with me. I suddenly got that back when I recently got how she was making these things “out of me,” that they composed me, well also, the stuff that is “in my head and environment” both then and recently are also “raw materials” for her to build with.

So for example if I had gone to a carnival earlier in the day, she would be able to use my more vivid recent experience of say, rides, or funhouse mirrors, or whatever, in my meditations. This is important as far as personal symbols, creative doorways for her, and the ‘power’ of these symbols within me.

So it’s not just that having native drumming in my headphones ‘influences’ my meditation experience. It’s that anything I put in my headphones or experience ‘recent’ to a meditation, literally gives her raw materials to build my meditation experience with. And I had the sense that was good. This is helpful.

Back to the med. I was watching this man dance. It wasn’t… it wasn’t like dancing as I know it really. And I’ve seen a tiny amount of native dancing and it didn’t seem quite like that either. Everybody was watching, I was in a crowd of people standing. It was almost more like the man was doing a cross between charades and occasional ‘expression of emotion’ together, but all to a sort of beat. It was interesting.

I thought it was interesting how good the visual was. The whole firelight and his skin and such. The people around me were rather ‘peripheral’, true, but the focus of things was really done well. The dance came to a close and people were murmuring and I was busy gawking at the quality visual still, when the man turned a little and looked right at me.

And saw ME.  I mean, not like whoever I ‘was’ in the meditation, which actually felt like a man, not like myself, I suddenly realized. Saw ME, as if THROUGH that man.

Like he realized I was foreign, was sitting-in, as I call it when we do this in dreams.

I felt kind of surprised and uncomfortably pinned, and then I realized two things at once:

1. The man dancing was a shaman and was ridiculously ‘aware’.

2. Somehow even though this is ‘in my head’ it has some level of reality at least for me. Much like some of my best meditations from 15 years ago, this had a degree of autonomy with the characters.

He walked toward me and took my hand and pulled me out into this big circle everyone had made around the fire and a big space in front of it. He seemed to want me to dance, but I didn’t feel it, and didn’t feel like it. That wasn’t my thing. I just kind of stood there and looked at him uncertainly. He pantomimed a certain ‘move’, a push of one arm out and shift of the legs, and I did that, uncertainly and not very much. He kept doing this, getting me to move, more and more, until I was finally moving with a lot more enthusiasm, and the people around, who I still couldn’t see except as forms in the shadows, seemed to be encouraging this, and responding to my improvement.

Finally we really started going and I had the feeling what he was trying to push was for me to let go and just really let some kind of emotion “take” me and “dance me” you might say. I was finally able to do that, to just lose myself in it for awhile, and then I realized I was done, standing still and breathing hard, and he was smiling and the people were talking and everyone seemed… I dunno, happy in some way.

He took my hand again and pulled me away from the people and we started walking. At one point we stopped and he did something, like made me eat something, and did something himself and then blew smoke literally up my nose that made me inhale and then cough. Then we walked for quite some time and into this lower level of ground with stone and scrub trees and water. I was weaving. I felt like I was kind of drunk, but not in that depressed less-aware way, just in a sort of dizzy way.

He started talking to me — I didn’t understand a word of it — and did something to my face I thought might be stripes or something on the cheekbones. Then he gently pushed me down to the shore on my knees, and indicated I should “look into” the water.

So I leaned over and looked. I couldn’t see anything but farther out in the water, the reflection of the moon. The water was a glossy black surface, lit only by the stars and moon and I could hear the drums and flute as if in the distance now. I realized I was weaving a little, I wasn’t very steady, still slightly dizzy. I thought I saw something below me, and I refocused on the water and looked into it, and suddenly I was looking into the eyes of a person and feeling so shocked by it for some reason.

Just as this happened, separately from that experience, more like as myself doing the meditating, I had this whole “re-lived memory” (‘revivification’ is what they call this in hypnosis) of a time circa 1994 when I was dreaming, and this young native with stripes on his face and a wild look seemed to be leaning over and looking down at me and looking totally shocked, as if he were looking into the water and saw me of all people and boy was he surprised. I mentioned that in Bewilderness is the only reason I remember it still.

And this hit as I was looking into eyes — no sense of face recognition, just ‘into the eyes’ — and then as if ‘stapled to’ the previous memory, I had this just-recent memory of this surrealist movie “Being John Malkovich” where he goes into his OWN head and it’s like a “feedback loop” and so everything and everybody is John Malkovich.

And I wonder and realize all at the same time that somehow I have literally made a loop — I was looking at MYSELF — and the myself in 1994 or so was looking at the me now, in 2010, via him — and this was happening through this intermediary of this other young man or boy who was me, but also him, and was sort of … channeling me you might say.

I wonder what this means. That the me then made contact with the me now, as if some kind of loop had just been closed and that meant something. Does that mean something? Does that tie me to the ‘Bewilderness’ era of my past, through the gut-middle instead of just through the distance of memory?

I was suddenly free of all those thoughts and back ‘in’ him, swaying, and the other man had a strong grip on my arm and was hoisting me up and I was walking, a bit raggedly, with him back toward the music. We were some way from the fire when he brought me into a darkness and laid me down, and then some flickering bare firelight came from the ground near me.

He was on his knees next to me, with his hands over me, and I could feel that he was going through my chakras and cleansing and pulling and with some fuzzy surprise, it occurred to me that this guy was doing the same stuff that we can do now except we are oblivious until someone teaches us and we have some slightly stilted, paint by number form of it, and he had this powerful real thing, and all I could sleepily think was, Who taught him? How does this native shaman know all this stuff?

That’s all I remember. I woke up a few hours later only because the kid interrupted. The music was still in my headphones. I felt like I had a slight hangover.

***

I’m… still working on getting to the 8 of Disks.

P