8.It just occurred to me that in the long APAPB passage I was remembering watching Being, but also watching myself watching as an appearance of Being. What happens if I look at myself as Being? I will try the forest where I have recently begun to feel that I belong with all the other creatures. This was a surprising sensation. So I am a bug on a leaf watching.
APAPB. Something is approaching. From the the sound of footsteps on the leaves and twigs snapping, it is a big creature. Ah it is very big; It is walking on two legs. It has no antenna and its head is in two parts. The top part is gray with a flat protusion all the way around the head. Below is pinkish. It has two large eys and a mouth large enough to swallow hundreds of bugs at once. The body is reddish on top with two appendages; the bottom is brownish with what appear to be very hard feet. Fearsome looking creature. The creature is looking very intently at a flower and probably will eat it. No the flower must not be good because the creature watches a butterfly on another flower. Watch out butterfly. But the person takes out a black rectangle thing and holds it close to the butterfly which flutters away. This is strange behavior. The person stops on a bridge and leans over the side. It must be thirsty. Hmmm it must have a long tongue. But it only looks. Perhaps it wants a fish. But fish swim by and the creature just stands there. Finally, it lifts its head and turns away and starts walking away from me. Soon all I hear are leaves and an occasional twig. Ah, the appearance of Being. This is such a mystery.
7. F. Like with many things I am looking at the time issue from a personal perspective. I need to remember to start with the cosmos and work down.
6. F. Tonight when I think about time I feel my head is going to explode which is an improvement over my reaction earlier this week. I can understand that trying to live in the future magnifies death. The future has an end point for each and every one of us. Death is less a threat living in the present. When it happens, it happens.
5. BrM. Our inner mind witnesses the world around.
4. F. pause
3. Last evening Pia noted that my earlier APAPB contained all sunny images. She wondered if I had noticed (I hadn’t). It got me wondering what if I tried the same thing with other types of images what would happen and the parallel experiment is below.
APAPB. I am arriving back at college after a summer for my second year and looking for one of my good friends. I learn that he had had a seizure while swimming and drowned in a lake over the summer in a tragic accident. He had been an eagle scout and a good swimmer. I think back to when I was six and my mother took me by the hand and led me up to the coffin of an uncle who had died leaving four young children and a wife. My mother quietly whispered to me that this was death and held my hand tightly. My uncle looked very peaceful like he was sleeping. Then six years later, the closing of my grandfather’s coffin. It had all seemed unreal until that moment. Then the awful lowering of the casket into the ground and he was gone from our lives. I then remember the young child at the farm on the squeaking brass bed in the attic of the old stone eighteenth century farmhouse. There was a curved staircase with a string down the stairs from a single light bulb at the top. From the top landing were three rooms. The brass bed was in the largest room, in the middle of the room, a good distance from the light. Down the far side of the room was a mass of old belongings including a dress dummy and hanging clothes. I would go very slowly up the stairs to the light and then dash to the bed. The grandparents waited down below until the young person got into bed and reluctantly said “OK” and then the light went out leaving the young person alone with the fears, the dress dummy, the shadow of the clothes and the animals scurrying around in the roof. The child pulled the covers over his head hoping to mercifully fall asleep as soon as possible awaiting the morning light. Shifting to the window of the house in the city, watching as the father of a classmate staggered home drunk, yelling insults and threats, leaning against the gas lamp and yelling into the house. My classmate told me that when his father came home drunk he beat his wife and the classmate. One day someone came and got the mother and the two children and I never saw the classmate again. Much later while teaching third grade, one of the pupils did not have his homework finished. When I asked why he told me in great detail that the night before some people broke into his home and held the whole family at gunpoint while they ransacked the premises (the story was confirmed). Another child, two years older than the rest, was habitually late. Nothing seemed to work so I wrote up a report as required. A case worker went to his house and then told me that the father was very apologetic but he had to leave for work at three in the morning and this young ten year old got himself and his younger brother up and ready for school every day and, most poignantly, that he liked being in school this year!!! All these appearances of Being too.
3. F. pause
2. Gr.
1. TGT. Another rainy day to dry out and explore the presentation of appearance
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It would seem the most important thing about our various times is not to be limited by imaginary constraints, including, maybe sometimes, “acting our age”. Sometimes we need to look at things as we did as a child and I am beginning to think that is because we need to look at things without our “self” clouding judgments about them or pretending we know something that we don’t. Being restrained from time includes worrying about what we have to get done for some imaginary future deadline.
