All Things Must Pass

 There's nothing you can hold

For very long

And when you hear that song

Come crying like the wind

It seems like all this life

Was just a dream

-        Stella Blue, Grateful Dead

Been a strange couple of nights.  It is almost dawn and I am still awake.  No particular reason that I can tell.  I can remember a time when that would bother me but these days it is just one more thing to observe and not look for reasons.   

I was sitting outside watching the fog and mist roll across the wetlands and my thoughts turned to the concepts of impermanence and uncertainty.  Both of those things, when they moved from the conceptual plane and I faced what they really meant on the visceral level, were, well, rather scary.  It was inevitable though on this path that they must be faced and accepted.  I don’t intend to dive into that – there are mountains of literature from Buddhism and Hinduism to quantum theory.  

I remember that uncertainty, which I see as a result of impermanence as well as the nature of Mind, was one of the first things I had to face in this part of my path.   In Human Design, the open Mind Center is keynoted by the need for certainty in its Not-Self aspect.  The deep layers of conditioning tend to foster the need of certainty as the vehicle for security.  But that certainty, that security, is an illusion.  When I grasped that at the cellular level, it was one of the biggest releases that I got from HD in the beginning.  I am not designed for certainty even if it were theoretically possible.

A Buddhist teacher also provided another layer to that when he was talking about mindfulness.  He was discussing the aspect of observing and accepting “what is.”   He preferred a translation of the Pali term as “what is becoming” since it more fully enveloped the impermanent nature of things.  Things arise and they pass away.  Thoughts arise and pass away.  Emotions rise and pass away.  All constructions rise and pass away.  So to try and see what is by default impossible as it implies almost a stopping of the constantly mutating nature of the creation.  It implies a static reality that with diligence we can finally grasp.  But with the almost quantum theory view of an ever-changing and evolving matrix of “what is becoming” we have to practice that mindfulness constantly.   I only bring up this rather elementary explanation because it also has very real implications from the Human Design point of view.

In the Type of a Generator (70% of humanity) the Strategy is To Respond.  The only truth a Generator can know is through response.  But it is more than a number of discrete “things” entering our aura that we respond to.  The reality is that we are responding at some level to everything.  And in a quantum, mutative world we are in a responding field.  So to be truly and wholly in response we basically have to be Mindful, not of what our concepts of what we should be responding to, but the whole, mutating, evolving “what is becoming”.  It is a daunting realization.  And a tiring one to contemplate that to truly live by Strategy we have to open up completely and totally to Mindfulness in its basic form and at a level that we aren’t usually operating at.   Cognizant at least at some level of the energies and fluctuations operating in this creation.   I am not even close to that place yet.  But just the budding awareness of it has led me to deeper levels of surrender – there is no way it can be done on the mental plane.

As usual, I am not smart enough to put all of this into meaningful words – they live right below the surface and on a good day I grasp it intuitively.  It is making every day more of a stream of consciousness than a search for truth and meaning in the world.  It also has been a driving force in dismantling the mental conceptual framework that I have lived in for most of my life.  Makes normal conversation harder though.

Well, sunrise is about here so time for tea and then venture out to try and meet the world on its terms and not mine.  Thank you for your patience in these ramblings from an exhausted mind.

Blessings,  Charlie