Would you like cream or sugar with your dialectic tension?

...which would infer coffee.

....which is a flacid but adequate segue to bring us to today's subject matter: the dialectic springboard that time and somnolence can offer me. Huge, actually. You see:

I understand the dialectic tension as a force that can refine. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. uh-huh. I have an idea or a proposition. I challenge it, let's say through dialogue, inner or outer, and if succesfull, like the oyster taking in an irritant and spitting out beauty, I come out with something new. Refined. I have moved forward.

The words, like many that present themselves to me, are tied to diaphanous images. I see an engine, a progressive machine that takes thoughts in, and through the tension of progress, produces something new but related at the other end.

Time and sleepiness both offer this for me, although right now their tension feels like it's just pushing my face up against a window; pressure steady, with no give yet. This would be the input of the dialectic engine.

I have seen into the kernel of time and sleepiness, but only in a limited fashion ~ usually the painful half of the whole. Which is ok, the pain is one of the drivers of dialectic tension. Time Shadechaser? How can Time be painful?

The clearest picture I have is of being on a ladder, painting. Summer job, look at my watch, 9:05 am. And the feeling associated with it is just...helpless, trapped, time. oh my god i don't like painting how long will this go on I've got to work for the whole day and oh FUCK it's only been 2 minutes how am I going to get through the next eight hours I'm bored what should I do...

And so on. Trapped in a miserable situation, not wanting to be there, wanting so much to be somewhere anywhere else but trapped TRAPPED as the clock marches interminably forward. Sleepiness hovers around - sometimes as a precursor to the trapped clock checking, sometimes as an escape route from the unpleasant feeling.

And of the two somnolence is, well, maybe not worse, but more dreadful. I contract, there is a heaviness around the eyes...I need escape...I need, I HAVE to have a nap.

Now I have progressed enough o'er the years to have a bit of insight and space around time and sleepiness, but my face is still up against the window. Maybe being rolled down a bit with non-dual inquiry with hsfh, but still a low dead pressure system hanging over my head.

When I am sleepy now, where does the Witness go? It is clearly there but clouded. But how can awareness be occluded?

When I am locked in and dreading time, I can have enough insight to step back as awareness and just watch the different sensations, but this process itself is timebound, and experience, and as such ultimately doomed to be sucked down into the Time hole itself.

So how do I deal with somnolenc-occluded awareness? And how do I remain aware outside of experience so that timelessness does not collapse into Time?

Separation Papers

My concept of death has passed through many topical gates of inquiry; past the millstone of "why"; passed the emotional moors of nihilism, travelled to and from (or through) the barren yet exhausting existentialist wastelands. Got snowblind in those, almost lost my way, on the way to finding it.

So I've matured in my concept of death somewhat.

Now, when I look at it, and this is in the light of several deaths in my life - grandparents, friends, friends of friends - natural, premature, or otherwise - now when I look at it the closest feeling I can associate it with is a separation profound and unbreakable.

My sense is that those who have passed enter into an impersonal state, where they can 'see' or 'be' with family, friends, their past - but are not attached the way to it the way they were prior to death. That, plus an absolute barrier where communication - at least in the way we think of it - cannot take place. I believe that almost all rules in life can be broken, often need to be broken, but this one - here's a way to think of it - it does not seem relative. It seems absolute. The ultimate separation papers, from who you were to what you now are.

And the sense that it is not nearly as hard for those who have passed as it is for those who are left behind.

And that is the koan that I'm wrestling with right now on some level. As well as what happens in deep sleep, and the answer there that confirms awareness as non-corporeal.

I've seen through my spiritual travels and travails that happiness is wed to sadness; anger to joy; suffering to pleasure; in the world of not-two, they are two sides of the same coin.

What then, with this feeling, this vague abstract that paints death as profoundly one-sided?