desire.
by rewired,
a while back.
"A student once asked Ben how to resist the animal in herself. Ben said, `That which is resisted persists. What are you resisting?' `Well, you know, the animal passions.' `You mean sex?' `Yes.' `That's so ironic. Most animals, except dolphins and humans, have a limited season of heat, of open sexuality. The constant readiness for sexual fulfillment is an unusual characteristic found only in species with large brains and high intelligence. Whatever it is, it is not animal passion. Your intelligence is so you can handle, enjoy and appreciate your uniqueness, not deny it.'"
-- Zen without Zen Masters, by Camden Benares.
“A Taoist teacher asked her student to accompany her on a hike. The teacher, with her student at her side, walked to the foot of a small mountain and started up the path that led to the top. About halfway up, she stopped and asked her student, `Which way is up?' He pointed up. She asked, `which way is down?' He pointed down. She said, `The same path takes you up and down. That is the unity of opposites. If you again tell me that you don't understand the unity of opposites, I will tell you to take a hike.'"
-- A Handful of Zen. by Camden Benares
“Come to the edge, He said.
They said, we are afraid.
Come to the edge, He said.
They came.
He pushed them...
and they flew.”
-- Duillaume Apollinare.
Rain falls under a green and orange portion of the sky in the distance. I can hear thunder, and what seems like screams lost within it.
The forest seems to grow before my eyes. I try and look to the sky, but the trees seem to grow to hide it from me. The darkness below the protection of their branches and leaves become the focus of my attention.
I see men on horses gallop out of the darkness there, out from the growing shadows beneath the forest. Their hooves are kicking leaves and twigs into the air behind them. They run towards me at full force. On their backs are the masked men. Each have a sword in one of their hands. In their other hand, some are holding hearts, others hold brains or little black boxes.
None of this makes any sense to me. None of it.
Then I turn to my side to find more confusion. I see him there, a grown man with a belt, beating it down onto the bare back of a young boy. His own child. I ask him what he’s doing.
He says to me: "It's what you're doing."
I don’t understand.
I look away from him. It's like someone turned on a light in my brain. It's like a buzz. A sudden high. I'm suddenly fully aware of everything. It’s clear to me where I am.
I notice the lawn before me. Where the horses are galloping towards me, between me and the forest.
And then I suddenly realize that I’m sitting. More specifically, that I’m sitting atop this heap of corpses.
I focus only on a specific few at first. These have blood dripping out from the corners of their widened, dead eyes. I soon notice, though, that some of them look very different. Some of them have this white, translucent flesh over their eyes and their mouths, which are wide open. It's as if they were killed in the middle of a scream and were covered in some thin, durable, translucent white skin.
Then I come to the realization that sitting on this heap of dead bodies frightens me. It makes me feel dirty and full of energy that just isn't what I want to come into contact with. So I jump off.
It's like I'm teeter-tottering in and out of a state of slumber and awakening.
I then look back at the abusive man and tell him to stop beating the boy. I grab the belt from his hand, and he struggles to keep it – a pointless game of tug of war. I kick him in the stomach, but his face grows in anger. I keep kicking him, and he falls to the ground, the belt lost in the grass to the left of us.
And then the boy grabs my arm and starts biting.
"OW!” I scream, giving him a confused look. “I’m trying to help you."
“Leave him alone, he's my father.” Says the boy. “I love him. He loves me.”
"It's strange, what you people call love." I say. I leave then, watching them as I walk away. They just remain still and fix me with a scowl.
The horses have gotten much closer. And they get closer still. Now they run by me, they run right passed me as if they had been heading for me but had thought that I had run farther in front of them. As if I'm invisible to them now. I walk right through their path, barely missing some of them, not caring if they would hit me. But I know they won’t. I also know I truly wouldn’t care if they did.
The landscape suddenly changes. The old fades out like a phantom, and a new one fades in – an amazing, surreal sight. An ocean appears before me. It is a light blue, a beautiful blue, but it's as if these red swirls and lines are mixed in with it as well in certain areas.
A man in a white toga first catches my eye. He lifts a finger, and motions for me to follow him and a few attractive females clad in black. They lead me onto a canoe. On it is a flag that has a symbol on it that appears to be an eye.
That man, he seems very tranquil, but I don’t trust him completely. I find that my suspicion is not only directed at the man, either. The women seem full of angst, but quiet. They give off an aura that seems to warn me not to approach them. I keep away from them as I step into the canoe.
As we leave the shore behind and head off across the waters, I suddenly feel as if I am finally going somewhere that I'd wished to be for a long time. Or that I am being taken to see something that I've wished to see for a long, long time.
I sit down on a board across from the women in black. There are two of them. The man sits down beside me. I look at him quizzically as he does so. I feel the look of puzzlement grow on my face as he takes my open palm. He thentakes out a knife and cuts me, and then closes my hand. My face contorts in confusion and pain. I'm in pain, I'm enraged, but I'm so shocked I find I cannot really react. I can hardly believe I had let him do that. I can hardly believe the pain I am feeling.
"Just let it alone," He says. "It's good for the mind."
It hurts like a bitch, but his words seem to give me strength. Calm and confident. Almost as soothing at the waters we sail on. I find I strangely love the feeling of this pain in my palm.
I notice that above the canoe there are these birds -- black birds with growing green and blue eyes – swarming above us as if ready to attack. No one else seems concerned. They don't even seem to notice, but that doesn't alleviate my concern in the least. I watch them closely as they circle us again and again. It almost makes me dizzy. I watch them very closely, like the paranoid old fuck I am.
I am old, aren’t I? I try to think about it for a moment, and I suddenly consider that I may be perhaps eighty three.
I look to the man again. "How was it that I got here?"
"By land," he says simply.
"Well, how did I get to where I was on land?" I ask.
"I suppose you came from the sea."
It seems to explain nothing. At least no more than anything else.
We come to this little island surrounded by a cage. The first thing I see inside is a grill with meat roasting on it. As we get closer, I see that beside that rests a small table, on which rest a pack of cigarettes and a red candle with it's wick aflame. In the center of the cage, draped in shadows, is a bed. On it lay a beautiful woman wrapped in black leather. There is also a bottle on another table on the other side of the bed.
The canoe we are all on naturally turns itself to a position where I can easily reach the gate that leads into this island cell.
I look at the man in the toga. "What is this?" I ask him.
"This is what has always been." He says. "This is a choice you always have, and a choice in which you live within the twilight."
I lift an eyebrow. His words, soothing at first, are beginning to sound corny.
I step into the cage, hearing the water lap at the sides of the island and at the sides of the canoe. I move forward cautiously, senses acute, looking around for what I am certain is a trap.
I hear a click behind me. I turn around to see that he has locked the cage door -- something I should have seen coming. He smiles and rides around the island on the canoe. I don't say a word to him. I turn back around.
I look at her lying there on the bed. God I want her, but I don't move. The cigarette -- it almost seems to call out to me, and could easily be lit by the candle that offered the flame with which to do so -- but I don't move. The meat on the grill... damn I am hungry... the water.... I find myself so thirsty...
I find myself scared. I realize that I’m not in a cell, I am in a prison. And this cage, this prison, it contains the cells, all laid out here before me.
I turn and try to open the gate. I can't open it.
Then I stop. There is something to be learned here, I am almost certain. Something behind this island is whispering. Is the goal to escape, or to experience? Or is the goal what one makes it to be?
"Life is more than physical life,” the man says, in the canoe just beyond the bars. “Physical life, and the desires it contains, the desires that make it what it is, are an aspect of life – and all aspects should be experienced to their fullest. Why else would we be? What other reason would their be to be if it were not to evolve ourselves, to evolve beyond ourselves, to share ourselves and draw into ourselves?"
"Then why does something tell me it's wrong?" I ask him.
"Wrong is right, right is wrong."
"You’re making absolutely no sense,” I tell him with a scowl. “Your talking vague, metaphysical garbage. Corny bullshit. You're speaking contradiction. Contradiction is not the key."
"No," he returns, his face not changing a damn bit. "The key is something else, and leads to that which exists behind what you call `contradiction.'"
He smiles again. I hate that man, if only for that smile.
I pace about the prison. I walk and I watch her, the cigarettes, the water, the food.
"What's wrong?" He asked.
"I'm hungry."
He smiles again, finally. "Than eat."
"I'm thirsty."
"Than drink."
"I'm addicted."
"Than smoke."
"I'm horny."
"Than fuck. Her legs are open. Her lips are trembling. You can smell her yearning. Why not pursue these things?"
"Because I will not be controlled by my hunger. This desire, this urge. I won't be a slave to it."
"Then why do you enslave yourself to your addiction to your sorry sense of security? To your imagination? Your brain? Is it not as unhealthy, addicting, as controlling as any of these things? It obviously makes you very unhappy. And why?"
"I don't know. I don't know why."
"Yes you do."
"No, I don't."
"Yes, you do, in fact."
"And what is that? What is it that I know?"
"Don't ask me -- you know it. Realize it now."
"No." I say. "That's stupid. You lie."
"I cannot, and would not if I could."
"Get me out of here."
"You hold the key."
"I do not!"
"Useless denial."
I look down in my hand. There it was: the key. IHere feared it was another metaphor.
"So I can leave, since I have the key. It must be that the goal of all of this is to leave, because I have the key in my hand to unlock that door. To escape this prison and the cells it contains. These desires. This addiction to addictions."
"These smaller choices within a bigger one."
"Whatever," I say. "I have the key, so the purpose must be for me to leave."
"Indeed, you do have the key to open that door and leave. You also have the tongue to taste, the desire to smoke, and the penis to fuck, and the mouth that wants to drink. But what do you choose? What do you always choose? You choose nothing, not even escape. You pace and question. What is it that you want?"
"The truth."
"The truth is none of these things?" He asks, waving his hand across the prison. "And is the truth so grand after all? Is the truth the goal, or is the goal to escape from it, escape from it's bars? Or is truth, like beauty, like goals, like everything, all in the eyes of the perceiver?"
"I don't know. Fuck these riddles. Just tell me the answer. Tell me, because I'm so confused right now and I just want to do the right damn thing."
"You’re not listening,” he says to me. “You're not ready now, are you?"
"Ready for what?"
"Ready for what you truly desire."
"Yes, I am."
"So that desire makes your reality. It will come to you. In the meantime, you will starve?"
"Won't I loose it otherwise?"
He smiles. "Loose what?"
He is gone. I had only blinked, and he now he is nowhere to be seen. A darkness falls over all of my surroundings – they all fade to black. I find myself looking outside a bars, but no longer the bars of a prison. It is barred window of a house. The lady moon is here, high up in the sky, setting my features aglow.
I look down at the water, which I see crawling up the outside of the house. It is calm, though, the way the shimmering dark blue of the water splashes calmly against the wood of the house. In the ripples of the water, beneath the black blanket of a sky and the glowing maiden above, I look down into the mysterious ocean I so very much want to leap into. I look down into the reflection. Down into the stranger. Down into myself.
"Hey." The feminine voice behind me says, her body lost in the shadows in the far side of the room behind me. "Hey, stranger, come to bed. Come back to me."
I look out at the ocean she can't see, through the bars she can't see. I swallow. I have nothing to loose. Nothing but this hate and this fear and this rage and this confusion. I have nothing to loose, and I have everything to gain -- including more of what I hope to loose.
"Just a second,” I tell her. “I'm just finishing up here... another moment, and I'll be there.”
by rewired,
a while back.
"A student once asked Ben how to resist the animal in herself. Ben said, `That which is resisted persists. What are you resisting?' `Well, you know, the animal passions.' `You mean sex?' `Yes.' `That's so ironic. Most animals, except dolphins and humans, have a limited season of heat, of open sexuality. The constant readiness for sexual fulfillment is an unusual characteristic found only in species with large brains and high intelligence. Whatever it is, it is not animal passion. Your intelligence is so you can handle, enjoy and appreciate your uniqueness, not deny it.'"
-- Zen without Zen Masters, by Camden Benares.
“A Taoist teacher asked her student to accompany her on a hike. The teacher, with her student at her side, walked to the foot of a small mountain and started up the path that led to the top. About halfway up, she stopped and asked her student, `Which way is up?' He pointed up. She asked, `which way is down?' He pointed down. She said, `The same path takes you up and down. That is the unity of opposites. If you again tell me that you don't understand the unity of opposites, I will tell you to take a hike.'"
-- A Handful of Zen. by Camden Benares
“Come to the edge, He said.
They said, we are afraid.
Come to the edge, He said.
They came.
He pushed them...
and they flew.”
-- Duillaume Apollinare.
Rain falls under a green and orange portion of the sky in the distance. I can hear thunder, and what seems like screams lost within it.
The forest seems to grow before my eyes. I try and look to the sky, but the trees seem to grow to hide it from me. The darkness below the protection of their branches and leaves become the focus of my attention.
I see men on horses gallop out of the darkness there, out from the growing shadows beneath the forest. Their hooves are kicking leaves and twigs into the air behind them. They run towards me at full force. On their backs are the masked men. Each have a sword in one of their hands. In their other hand, some are holding hearts, others hold brains or little black boxes.
None of this makes any sense to me. None of it.
Then I turn to my side to find more confusion. I see him there, a grown man with a belt, beating it down onto the bare back of a young boy. His own child. I ask him what he’s doing.
He says to me: "It's what you're doing."
I don’t understand.
I look away from him. It's like someone turned on a light in my brain. It's like a buzz. A sudden high. I'm suddenly fully aware of everything. It’s clear to me where I am.
I notice the lawn before me. Where the horses are galloping towards me, between me and the forest.
And then I suddenly realize that I’m sitting. More specifically, that I’m sitting atop this heap of corpses.
I focus only on a specific few at first. These have blood dripping out from the corners of their widened, dead eyes. I soon notice, though, that some of them look very different. Some of them have this white, translucent flesh over their eyes and their mouths, which are wide open. It's as if they were killed in the middle of a scream and were covered in some thin, durable, translucent white skin.
Then I come to the realization that sitting on this heap of dead bodies frightens me. It makes me feel dirty and full of energy that just isn't what I want to come into contact with. So I jump off.
It's like I'm teeter-tottering in and out of a state of slumber and awakening.
I then look back at the abusive man and tell him to stop beating the boy. I grab the belt from his hand, and he struggles to keep it – a pointless game of tug of war. I kick him in the stomach, but his face grows in anger. I keep kicking him, and he falls to the ground, the belt lost in the grass to the left of us.
And then the boy grabs my arm and starts biting.
"OW!” I scream, giving him a confused look. “I’m trying to help you."
“Leave him alone, he's my father.” Says the boy. “I love him. He loves me.”
"It's strange, what you people call love." I say. I leave then, watching them as I walk away. They just remain still and fix me with a scowl.
The horses have gotten much closer. And they get closer still. Now they run by me, they run right passed me as if they had been heading for me but had thought that I had run farther in front of them. As if I'm invisible to them now. I walk right through their path, barely missing some of them, not caring if they would hit me. But I know they won’t. I also know I truly wouldn’t care if they did.
The landscape suddenly changes. The old fades out like a phantom, and a new one fades in – an amazing, surreal sight. An ocean appears before me. It is a light blue, a beautiful blue, but it's as if these red swirls and lines are mixed in with it as well in certain areas.
A man in a white toga first catches my eye. He lifts a finger, and motions for me to follow him and a few attractive females clad in black. They lead me onto a canoe. On it is a flag that has a symbol on it that appears to be an eye.
That man, he seems very tranquil, but I don’t trust him completely. I find that my suspicion is not only directed at the man, either. The women seem full of angst, but quiet. They give off an aura that seems to warn me not to approach them. I keep away from them as I step into the canoe.
As we leave the shore behind and head off across the waters, I suddenly feel as if I am finally going somewhere that I'd wished to be for a long time. Or that I am being taken to see something that I've wished to see for a long, long time.
I sit down on a board across from the women in black. There are two of them. The man sits down beside me. I look at him quizzically as he does so. I feel the look of puzzlement grow on my face as he takes my open palm. He thentakes out a knife and cuts me, and then closes my hand. My face contorts in confusion and pain. I'm in pain, I'm enraged, but I'm so shocked I find I cannot really react. I can hardly believe I had let him do that. I can hardly believe the pain I am feeling.
"Just let it alone," He says. "It's good for the mind."
It hurts like a bitch, but his words seem to give me strength. Calm and confident. Almost as soothing at the waters we sail on. I find I strangely love the feeling of this pain in my palm.
I notice that above the canoe there are these birds -- black birds with growing green and blue eyes – swarming above us as if ready to attack. No one else seems concerned. They don't even seem to notice, but that doesn't alleviate my concern in the least. I watch them closely as they circle us again and again. It almost makes me dizzy. I watch them very closely, like the paranoid old fuck I am.
I am old, aren’t I? I try to think about it for a moment, and I suddenly consider that I may be perhaps eighty three.
I look to the man again. "How was it that I got here?"
"By land," he says simply.
"Well, how did I get to where I was on land?" I ask.
"I suppose you came from the sea."
It seems to explain nothing. At least no more than anything else.
We come to this little island surrounded by a cage. The first thing I see inside is a grill with meat roasting on it. As we get closer, I see that beside that rests a small table, on which rest a pack of cigarettes and a red candle with it's wick aflame. In the center of the cage, draped in shadows, is a bed. On it lay a beautiful woman wrapped in black leather. There is also a bottle on another table on the other side of the bed.
The canoe we are all on naturally turns itself to a position where I can easily reach the gate that leads into this island cell.
I look at the man in the toga. "What is this?" I ask him.
"This is what has always been." He says. "This is a choice you always have, and a choice in which you live within the twilight."
I lift an eyebrow. His words, soothing at first, are beginning to sound corny.
I step into the cage, hearing the water lap at the sides of the island and at the sides of the canoe. I move forward cautiously, senses acute, looking around for what I am certain is a trap.
I hear a click behind me. I turn around to see that he has locked the cage door -- something I should have seen coming. He smiles and rides around the island on the canoe. I don't say a word to him. I turn back around.
I look at her lying there on the bed. God I want her, but I don't move. The cigarette -- it almost seems to call out to me, and could easily be lit by the candle that offered the flame with which to do so -- but I don't move. The meat on the grill... damn I am hungry... the water.... I find myself so thirsty...
I find myself scared. I realize that I’m not in a cell, I am in a prison. And this cage, this prison, it contains the cells, all laid out here before me.
I turn and try to open the gate. I can't open it.
Then I stop. There is something to be learned here, I am almost certain. Something behind this island is whispering. Is the goal to escape, or to experience? Or is the goal what one makes it to be?
"Life is more than physical life,” the man says, in the canoe just beyond the bars. “Physical life, and the desires it contains, the desires that make it what it is, are an aspect of life – and all aspects should be experienced to their fullest. Why else would we be? What other reason would their be to be if it were not to evolve ourselves, to evolve beyond ourselves, to share ourselves and draw into ourselves?"
"Then why does something tell me it's wrong?" I ask him.
"Wrong is right, right is wrong."
"You’re making absolutely no sense,” I tell him with a scowl. “Your talking vague, metaphysical garbage. Corny bullshit. You're speaking contradiction. Contradiction is not the key."
"No," he returns, his face not changing a damn bit. "The key is something else, and leads to that which exists behind what you call `contradiction.'"
He smiles again. I hate that man, if only for that smile.
I pace about the prison. I walk and I watch her, the cigarettes, the water, the food.
"What's wrong?" He asked.
"I'm hungry."
He smiles again, finally. "Than eat."
"I'm thirsty."
"Than drink."
"I'm addicted."
"Than smoke."
"I'm horny."
"Than fuck. Her legs are open. Her lips are trembling. You can smell her yearning. Why not pursue these things?"
"Because I will not be controlled by my hunger. This desire, this urge. I won't be a slave to it."
"Then why do you enslave yourself to your addiction to your sorry sense of security? To your imagination? Your brain? Is it not as unhealthy, addicting, as controlling as any of these things? It obviously makes you very unhappy. And why?"
"I don't know. I don't know why."
"Yes you do."
"No, I don't."
"Yes, you do, in fact."
"And what is that? What is it that I know?"
"Don't ask me -- you know it. Realize it now."
"No." I say. "That's stupid. You lie."
"I cannot, and would not if I could."
"Get me out of here."
"You hold the key."
"I do not!"
"Useless denial."
I look down in my hand. There it was: the key. IHere feared it was another metaphor.
"So I can leave, since I have the key. It must be that the goal of all of this is to leave, because I have the key in my hand to unlock that door. To escape this prison and the cells it contains. These desires. This addiction to addictions."
"These smaller choices within a bigger one."
"Whatever," I say. "I have the key, so the purpose must be for me to leave."
"Indeed, you do have the key to open that door and leave. You also have the tongue to taste, the desire to smoke, and the penis to fuck, and the mouth that wants to drink. But what do you choose? What do you always choose? You choose nothing, not even escape. You pace and question. What is it that you want?"
"The truth."
"The truth is none of these things?" He asks, waving his hand across the prison. "And is the truth so grand after all? Is the truth the goal, or is the goal to escape from it, escape from it's bars? Or is truth, like beauty, like goals, like everything, all in the eyes of the perceiver?"
"I don't know. Fuck these riddles. Just tell me the answer. Tell me, because I'm so confused right now and I just want to do the right damn thing."
"You’re not listening,” he says to me. “You're not ready now, are you?"
"Ready for what?"
"Ready for what you truly desire."
"Yes, I am."
"So that desire makes your reality. It will come to you. In the meantime, you will starve?"
"Won't I loose it otherwise?"
He smiles. "Loose what?"
He is gone. I had only blinked, and he now he is nowhere to be seen. A darkness falls over all of my surroundings – they all fade to black. I find myself looking outside a bars, but no longer the bars of a prison. It is barred window of a house. The lady moon is here, high up in the sky, setting my features aglow.
I look down at the water, which I see crawling up the outside of the house. It is calm, though, the way the shimmering dark blue of the water splashes calmly against the wood of the house. In the ripples of the water, beneath the black blanket of a sky and the glowing maiden above, I look down into the mysterious ocean I so very much want to leap into. I look down into the reflection. Down into the stranger. Down into myself.
"Hey." The feminine voice behind me says, her body lost in the shadows in the far side of the room behind me. "Hey, stranger, come to bed. Come back to me."
I look out at the ocean she can't see, through the bars she can't see. I swallow. I have nothing to loose. Nothing but this hate and this fear and this rage and this confusion. I have nothing to loose, and I have everything to gain -- including more of what I hope to loose.
"Just a second,” I tell her. “I'm just finishing up here... another moment, and I'll be there.”
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