Light and Matter

Here: some iPhone captures of light-matter systems whose patterns I found beautiful. It’s cool how subtle variations between photos/videos of a pattern can make a world of difference, in form and in feeling — I included some duplicates so you can check that out for yourself. Also, some ideas for how to look at the patterns, and some other perceptual considerations, inspired by my own engagement with them. Hope you enjoy. :)

1.

House in Portland, Maine. Sunlight streams through dirty door-top window. Passing through gap in a curtain, it illuminates a spider web, the wall, and the floor. Middle photo uses flash.

Suggestion: Muse about which details of the light pattern are formed by the spider web, and which by the dirt on the window.

2.

Brick wall at restaurant in Portland, Maine. Pink LEGO, pink light.

Suggestion: Take in the different configurations of pink light as you flip through the images. Notice how the configurations elicit subtly different feelings. As investigations of the body sensations that emerge as responses to the images, try flipping through the images quickly vs. slowly, and linearly vs. back-and-forth.

3.

Bathtub in Amsterdam. Lit by window (slats, to the right) and overhead light.

Suggestion: In the second video, maintain focus on the water that pools on the rim of the tub to the right of the spout. In the third video, maintain focus on the full system of water on the floor of the tub

4.

Escalator in Amsterdam Schiphol airport. Metal warping distorts reflection.

Suggestion: Pay attention to the apparent vertical bands formed by the distortion.

5.

Co-working space in Amsterdam. Staircase reflects on plastic square. I move back and forth.

Suggestion: Maintain tight eye focus on the plaque.

p.s. –

6.

Harbor in Chania, a Cretan town. Lampposts and building lights make wavy vertical patterns in the water.

Suggestion: See the light strips as time-series signals. Normally, these signals are presented horizontally, with time on the horizontal axis, and the measurement on the vertical axis. Here, it is rotated by 90˚.

Love on the Streets

I just had the most amazing Uber ride.

A car came at us head-on, in the wrong lane, 50mph. The drag-racing purr of a souped-up engine and the boldness of trauma, sociopathy, or both.

I took out my headphones to say, “What the hell?”

“I was ready to just close my eyes and let him hit us,” the driver said.

He was in his 50s, accented, nicely combed hair and short beard, soothing silver. 

I asked him where he’s from.

Kabul. Came over in the 80s, when he was 14. Before leaving he’d spent time in “holes” because they had no basement to hide in when the bombs were dropping. One night he huddled there for six hours, in the middle of winter, holding his two younger siblings under his shirt. When adults came for them, the kids had frost on their faces.

He’s been in America long enough to feel like it’s home; he loves Thanksgiving, it’s a big family affair. So his wife, last night, kept telling him: be careful driving tomorrow. Careful on the bridges, on the streets. The head-on driver must have been why.

We get to talking about the Middle East, by way of bombs in Kabul, by way of his dad, who was killed, his siblings, who were killed. I say, I’m incredibly lucky to not have lived an on-the-ground war experience. Hope it stays that way. But what’s different, I think, when you live that, is that the horror of it – and the loving desire for it to stop – become the frame on the world. Not geopolitics. Compassion, because you know.

He was agonized about the people of Israel; about the people of Gaza; the people of Kabul; the people of Ukraine. He had compassion; he knew. He said that last night he got together with his Israeli friend and they held each other and cried for a long time. He was crying now in the car, heart-felt. 

We’d arrived at my destination, and we were still talking – though now it was even between words and tears – and I was still in the back seat. I joined him up front.

He was sobbing. So much pain. All the children, the children split in half, the bloodied woman dragged into a car, the young people at a music festival. All the pain. Pray to the God of Moses, pray to Jesus, pray to the God of Mohammad – he prayed to all of them, there, in the car – asking for peace, love, deliverance from the evil. He said, I know You’re there, please, please help. We’re helpless. We held hands, we squeezed shoulders, we traded well-wishes. He said when he sits there looking at me, he sees his son, who’s a few years younger than me. He said he said to his son, a recent college graduate: find an Israeli, find a Jewish person, hug them, hold them, cry with them. We’re all children.

I told him I grew up Jewish. The Abrahamic God isn’t my view now, but Love is. I kept wanting to say, live as an expression of love! That was the way. I did. I said, it’s an act of love to have a heart as sensitive as yours. I felt it. I felt his love. People feel the responsiveness, the receptivity. 

I repeated the Buddhist phrase: may you be happy and free from suffering. May your family be happy and free from suffering. May all your loved ones be happy and free from suffering. May all beings be happy and free from suffering. 

He had to go pick up another rider. When he rolled away and I was there in the sun, I cried a bit. Heart a little numb today. I walked upstairs to my apartment and imagined him there, a kid, in Kabul, in a hole in the ground, with frost on his face, and I leaned against the wall and cried some more. I saw a text about a movie night.

I’ve been asked how I feel about all this. This is how I feel. Live from the heart, live right where you are, because love is on the streets.

Twelve Things At The Park

Twelve things:

The first is a confession about poor posture. I’ve been meditating on park benches. They are the rolling wooden type, a valley for your butt and a hill for your thighs. Each one is slightly misshapen – unique. To sit upright means your sitz bones push against a wooden outburst and it’s painful. So I sit with poor posture when I meditate on park benches, and I’m self-critical about this because I know that posture does, in fact, impact the outcome. I meditate in the park a lot. Have you heard of that litmus test for self-criticism where you consider whether you would criticize anyone else for the same thing you’re criticizing yourself for? This does not pass the litmus test.

The second is that at the park’s entrance I look around at the benches, trying to find a feeling of being drawn to one particular bench, or of being averse to others. If I can find such a feeling, I do what it says. Intuition training. Different benches prevail at different times. Sun and shade, who’s sitting where, what I would watch. Averse, always, to one bench with a conspicuous gap between two of its planks.

The third is that there is a new experience recently, a warm sensation in the chest both bounding forward and staying put. It feels like “the urge to think, coming from a place of love”.

The fourth is that I’ve been reading Rumi. Well, reading oversells it; I’ve been listening to an audiobook. And “listening” is a verb whose binary nature (you’re doing the verb or you’re not) elides the reality that the act it describes has degrees — like “bounding”. The act of “staying” is binary.

The fifth is that I listened (cf. #4) to a podcast with a spiritual man who, breaking up with nonduality after ten years, says true nature has many faces, not one. Good thing Brooklyn is non-monogamous, now.

The sixth is that after digging around my ribcage with a foam roller, I was light on my feet in a conversation. I stumbled into such lightness for the first time recently, and I’ve been trying to become light again through mind methods for several weeks, without much success. A little foam rolling did it. The conversation in question happened at the park, sitting at a table (usually not in the running for meditating).

The seventh is that I found out about an eye trick for open awareness meditation. When I tried it I felt like I’d been sipping a laced drink. Scene of the crime was – you guessed it – the park. Mind is tied intimately to body; eyes, posture, fascia. The winds carry the thoughts. Yet the same traditions that teach about mind and body contend that mind persists beyond body in some form. Hmm! (There’s more to learn.)

The eighth is that my forearm, wrist, and hand tendons are acting up, I think from holding dumbbells too often. Previously I could do this trick where I would trace the tension (probably) through fascia to other parts of my body, then physically or mentally release the tension in the remote location. Unfortunately, I’m out of practice.

The ninth is that many people around me are on emotional journeys. Letting sample bias be what it may be, is this a phenomenon of the mid 20s/30s (age) or a phenomenon of the early 20s (era)?

The tenth is a new categorization of motivations. I’ve defined them by somatic feeling and accompanying mental posture or activity.

    (1) Felt in the heart – love.
    (2) Felt brightly in the head – intellectual curiosity or conceptual configuring.
    (3) Felt as a clutching in the body and the face, like a cousin of holding my breath – attachment of some kind, social craving, “cool”.
    (4) Felt like Pixar light spilling out giddily from my belly, my heart, my eyes – play.
    (5) Felt like the synesthetic expansion of soil – being an animal.

Which bench should I sit at? Should I meditate with proper posture? Remember, foam roll! Body controls mind, but mind goes beyond body? Why the park? Why the “Why the park?”

The eleventh is that I used to mistake (1)-(3) being present together as beauty. And, I’m not sure yet how to square #3 (heart-thought) with #10 (heart-love, head-thought).

The twelfth is that I’ve recently started learning about biofeedback. The basic setup of biofeedback is that a real-time measurement of some aspect of your biology is used to control something you can detect with your senses. For example, your brain’s electrical activity could control the size of something on a screen, like a circle. The programmer programs the circle to get bigger if your brain activity does something “good”, and then you – the user – are asked to make the circle get bigger. In order to do this, you will need to figure out how to do that “good” thing with your brain and keep doing it. You might use this to help you meditate, for example. 

Twelfth, cont’d. Armchair philosophy, though not from the chest (see #3 above) says: to get people to adopt a new activity en masse, you need some behavioral continuity between the new activity and something else people are already used to doing. When the desired new behavior is familiar, people will be more likely to do it because the learning curve is comparatively less steep and it’s already socially acceptable. Consider FaceTiming: it was new to video chat from a phone, but familiar to chat with audio from a phone, and to chat with video from a computer. Biofeedback systems do not meet this criteria because with biofeedback, you’re imploring the user to do something (“control the size of this circle by relaxing”) that doesn’t have a behavioral analog. There’s also the related issue of needing a new physical object, like an EEG. I want to say biofeedback is aesthetically inelegant and call it a day. Too many pieces cobbled together in strange ways. Unfortunately, biofeedback works…

Twelfth cont’d, cont’d. To illustrate how biofeedback can be implemented in a way that’s familiar and doesn’t need a new physical object, consider partner dance and sex. There’s a quality of mind and body referred to as “easfulness”, which looks and feels like being easeful (...duh). It’s something you can sense in others (through sight, touch, moving with them, listening to them), and feel in yourself. As an empirical fact of human interaction, as you become more easeful, your counterpart does too (and vice versa, via a mutual feedback loop). Therefore, if you pay attention to the easefulness of your partner and intend to do what you gotta do for their actions to become more easeful, partner dance and sex can both become biofeedback activities. Your partner is both the sensor (like an EEG) and the sensory stimulus for feedback (like the circle whose size is controlled by the EEG). At this point the mechanic has transitioned from something technological to a somatic exercise, a dance instruction, an advice column in Cosmopolitan. Same conceptual framework, different packaging. (3) or #3?

Visual Presence

Ideal Parent Figure (IPF) protocol is a technique in which you visualize yourself as a young child, say between the ages of 1-5 years old, interacting with “ideal parent figures”. Ideal parent figures are imagined people, or entities, who are your ideal parents. (Note: they are not your real parents, and the imaginal creation of these ideal parents need not imply anything about your real parents.) That is to say, they’re utterly perfect, relative to your needs. They respond to you exactly how you need to be responded to. In the imaginal world of your visualization, they regulate you; you feel a sense of safety, curiosity, joy, wonder, and they delight in this. Around them you feel implicitly innocent. 

IPF is practiced as a visualization meditation. I do it 1-2x per week. It can be used to gradually adjust one’s attachment conditioning by forming a set of new memories which change your orientation in the world. There’s a heavy-duty technical book about it which situates Ideal Parent Figure within a broader psychotherapeutic strategy for working on attachment conditioning. (I haven’t read the book.)

In general, I measure the effectiveness of a psychological intervention in terms of a) noticeable changes in my experience, b) noticeable changes in my behavior, and c) frequency/duration/durability of these changes. For me, boxes (a), (b), and (c) are all checked by IPF. 

Recently I did a session that was peculiar because due to its subject and its effects.

I’ve had an eye problem since I was a small child where my eyes bounce back and forth involuntarily. It’s called nystagmus. It mostly hasn’t been a big deal, aside from making it hard to read the whiteboard in school and preventing me from driving (my vision is technically good enough and I passed a driver’s test when I was 18, but for now I’ve decided not to drive).

Yet recently I’ve been wondering if maybe the eye shaking has had more of a consequence than I’ve hitherto appreciated. Eye movement is connected to cognitive processes; it’s common wisdom in open-eye meditation tradition that a) still eyes beget a still mind, and b) the angle of the eyes matters (for example, pointing the eyes downwards is helpful for concentration meditation). My internal experience bounces around; I’m always hopping between thoughts, feelings, sensations, sensory information, etc. Maybe not more than the average person, but I suspect so. Stilling the bounce is a proximate goal of my meditative journey. I’ve been wondering if perhaps the eye shaking is related to this cognitive/affective dynamic. 

There’s another phenomenon of my internal experience I’ve noticed, which is that I do this thing where I go fuzzy. My inner experience “blurs out”, and when this happens my visual field blurs, too. This shows up when I’m walking down the street, when I’m talking to people, when I'm working out – in most settings. It feels subtly tense.

I’d been thinking about both these things, and developed an intuitive hunch that I should explore this eye-shaking in IPF in relationship to the fuzziness. (I’ve had intuitive hunches about IPF subjects several other times, each to notable effect compared to the average IPF session.) So, I gave it a try.

To begin, I closed my eyes and visualized that I was three or four years old, standing in the family room of my childhood home. My ideal father figure was there. I had the feeling that there was some physical danger, that something was wrong. My ideal father figure scooped me up and, kneeling on the ground, held me to his chest with one hand over my eyes. Slowly the feeling of physical danger receded. We then went outside to the deck and I sat with him in a chair, still held to his chest.

The rest… I can’t remember very well. That’s typical for these kinds of visualizations. [Footnote: Though I often wonder whether the ability to subsequently remember one of these sessions correlates with the effect of the session on the mind/body. I wonder whether recording the session (when it’s spoken out loud with an IPF guide) and listening back later would fortify the efficacy of the visualization. Practically, much of the experience isn’t spoken out loud, but I think what is spoken out loud may be sufficient to re-invoke the visualization, and/or the felt experience. I will experiment.] At another point in the session, I relaxed out of the fear/aversion to the way my visual field shakes when my eyes bounce – and connected this fear/aversion to the fuzzing out I mentioned above. Separately, as this child self, I encountered anger at being made to feel like there was some inadequacy with me because of my eyes. And, I felt anger that my anger wasn’t seen/understood.

Having worked through a) the resistance to attending to my visual field, and b) some of the emotion around my eyes, after the session I started exploring what would happen if I relaxed when I noticed myself fuzzing out. It basically went like this: notice fuzz-out, release whatever tension seems like it’s maintaining the fuzz-out, see what happens. Concretely, noticing the fuzz-out might entail, for example, having my eyes pointed at a particular part of my computer screen and realizing I’m not actually focusing my eyes at the right focal plane, nor am I paying attention to the contents of the screen.

What happens when I do release is fascinating! There’s a sense of unadulterated presence with the thing I’m looking at. The feeling of “soaking it in”, “being there”, and – pulling in another thing I’d been exploring the last couple weeks – “being open to it”, which feels like a releasing sensation in my chest and sometimes abdomen, sort of like what you might feel if you’re foam-rolling your legs and get a good stretch of the torso in, and suddenly you feel this “releasing” feeling in your torso. 

If I try to do this intentionally, which doesn’t always succeed, there’s generally an order of operations. First, I try to “open my heart”, i.e. relax tension in my chest in such a way that, subjectively, it feels as though I’m more “open” to whatever I’m paying attention to, more willing to be impacted by it. Then I notice that my eyes are somewhat unfocused relative to what’s that’s directly in their line of sight. I then “let go” of the non-focus and allow my eyes to focus on whatever object is directly in their line. When this happens, there’s a releasing sensation in the middle of the forehead. The prominent feature is that there’s a “knowingness” or “presence” that suddenly emerges about the object I’m looking at. In other words, I suddenly feel like I’m really seeing the object. 

I’ve been playing with this while walking down the street, among other situations. It’s sort of like… having a beam of focus to point at objects, for example hopping from person to person to person as they walk by. 

When eyes rest, they go to “infinity focus” – the muscles that usually contract them relax, and they don’t converge to a single point (which they ordinarily would if they were focused on an object at a particular distance). What’s interesting is that during this phenomenon I encountered, it actually feels like there’s a release when the eyes focus on what’s in front of them – counterintuitive, because you would think that focusing takes more effort. Yet upon transitioning from fuzz-out to focus, I feel a noticeable sense of release in the muscles of my eyes, forehead, nose, face and neck. I also have a release feeling in my belly and my chest as well. Given that the expected result would be more muscular tension rather than less, I have a pet theory that there are two competing psychomotor processes, one “natural” one in which my eyes “want” to see what’s in front of them and in which my mind “wants” to process that visual information; and a second competing process which doesn’t “want” me to be present, doesn't “want” me to process that stimulus, and so inhibits the first process, “locking” the eyes and sensory processing into infinity focus. Perhaps the feeling of muscular release is what results from the abatement of this second inhibitory process.

Soccer Moms

it’s all meditation now, isn’t it. from the etchings in motion on my eyelids to the scratchy thing in my chest and the waves, waves of cry that just come on sometimes, this time after an instagram story. and the wind, wind coming through my open window and the open, open door behind me – tradeoff, door open and wind flows, less privacy to emote. and door closed, private, but still with stagnancy. there’s a song snippet playing in my head, doo doo doo, do doo doo doo doo dooooooooo, dooo dooo, earlier when I listened – I think the fourth time today – I felt intense love like I haven’t felt in a while. one of those feelings that feels “complete” in its self-justification, sometimes that sort of feeling comes when I’m listening to electronic and there’s a drop that set’s up adrenaline in just the right way, and sometimes it’s poo-phoria, like fuck it’s transcendent on the way out. sort of blessed that there are states which feel complete, justified, like in the state the state deserves to exist, that’s just part of the state. states have referents to other states through memory and sometimes there are nodes who lead to themselves, and I think it’s just positive nodes, but maybe there are negative nodes that lead to themselves though not because of desirability, just because of felt inevitability. are there realms? lately all these things I write are like poetry with long sentences. pre-meditation, like pre-meditated writing, doesn’t work right now, it could work again, I have a couple ideas, like artificial intelligence and awareness – a piece about those two, and I worry if it will be “actionable”. I should just build, build, build. build and make are different. build happens when the product can do something. make happens when the product looks a certain way, has an aesthetic. is there a function or is there an aesthetic? can there be both? maybe that is where the artificial intellect and the aware intellect fornicate, function and aesthetic. i guess i care about aesthetic for awareness-having beings but this is the danger zone, it’s better not to reflect on why i care, i’ve learned, because then things dissolve and I do less and I feel less good. valence is my utility function. doo doo doooo do doo doo doooo I’m going to embed the song so you can hear it when you read this,

I think it’s beautiful, it’s on my modern rock playlist

now which is a misnomer, “indie rock” is right, but I named it modern rock because names are fuzzy sometimes in my head and I associate indie with modernity, it’s like saturated with a certain emotionality, maybe it’s kitsch – or it could be kitsch, I hope it isn’t kitsch – I don’t want to feel like it’s kitsch. this writing is a meditation, there are no other thoughts besides what’s going onto the page. and there are feelings / sensations and perhaps images, like the word “modern” sort of flashes before me and an approximated reconstruction of the cover of the playlist which I think has some green or some orange in it and probably four squares, I should know this, well no why should I know this there’s no real reason to. brains are so fuzzy, you know? some people’s are more sharp, like crisp, like not-melted chocolate peanut buttery girls scout cookies, another name which I can’t remember right now but of course I have the gestalt of it, you know I wonder— when I don’t have a name I have to activate some episodic memory/reconstruction of the experience, but when I have a name I don’t have to, it’s just the name. is there a reason? do I have attachment to the episodic manifestation as opposed to the symbolic manifestation? is it a beneficial strategy my mind learned to use for some reason? is it a thing I could trace to a gene or a complex thereof? dooo doo dooo doo dooo doo doo doo

someone I follow on instagram and sent a DM to because I love the way she use uses words (no reply but she did watch a story of mine) posted something earlier that made me sad, she basically tuned into how much sadness and chaos and fear there is in the world, which is fundamentally true and it’s indelible and it’s probably less true now than ever before but it’s still true. i go back and forth, insight, is it insightful to notice that there is all this fear etc and normally we tune it out? is it insightful, on the other hand, to realize that fear is the mind killer, emerging from the mind, auto poetic auto asphyxiation, huh. that was a nice phrase, I like that one. earlier while half-meditating on love the phrase came to mind, “my enneagram is seven in the streets, and two in the sheets” it is accurate i think both literally-ish and definitely metaphorically. recently i read a description of my enneagram results and they made me angry because they told me how I ought to be and apparently I don’t like being told how I ought to be and I projected the childhood-parental narrative onto that and had a whole long internal meditation-internal family system experience where I was crying in the kitchen and our subletter came down like four minutes after the tears had dried. I really cry a lot these days but the thing is it never feels wrong and it is rarely because I’m sad, per se, it just feels like… that which comes next, the next thing to come up, next step in the long, long process of “deep healing” as someone called it recently to me but I almost gagged because I am negatively conditioned against “phrases” or “terms” that come from “communities” or “affiliations” because somewhere in my past I began to feel like I severely rejected community and also the nihilism phase made it very very hard to handle tropes, totems, tokens, virtual signals – I don’t think any of those phrases were right, each one had a slightly different somatic manifestation, lol there is only one friend who I talk like this to, this fluid flows thing, one time I translated a text from this speak to normal english speak and she thought it was funny and i thought it was funny too and sometimes i love this speak and sometimes i hate it a lot because it feels… well some judgement aversion is activated and i feel more chaotic-neurotic than i want to, like uh oh do you see how wishy-waggly-washed the whole thing is in here? now it is not always like this and in fact it is most like this when writing – someone who i think that friend knows and who has a niche-famous substack wrote something once about writing as altered state of consciousness and that sounds about right to me, especially when this girl I sent a DM to posted a thing on her story about how she is tuned into the horror of the world and is depressed and made a comment at the end about people not replying and expressing concern then inviting her out to a drink, I almost liked the story but didn’t when I read the last line because I’m too proud for that, but it did make me sad so I went to lie down on my roommate’s bed whose bed I sleep in sometimes when she isn’t home (with her permission don’t worry) because it is so much more comfortable than mine and her room is so much bigger (which is to say there is a floor in excess of the footprint of the bed) and I just cried a bunch, really from sadness, like sadness just wanted to be expressed and I thought about loss and felt loss like I do sometimes when I wake up from naps and think about all the people I might lose, I wondered who the first of my friends to die will be, that was a hard thought. and at no point during this crying did it feel pathological, it felt like it should happen and the sadness was real and poured out and i’ve been trying to write recently, or i’ve been feeling bouts of “I should write” and then thinking that maybe my writing / desire to write right now is very egoic and that I shouldn’t do it, or that it won’t work, or that I’ll do it and it will feed the dragon or whatever. one piece of writing I “want” (whatever that means huh) to write is both functional and aesthetic. I want to take my internal family systems work, which I take detailed notes on, and turn it into semi-fiction, fictional in the sense that not everything I write will have literally been visualized in my head but not fictional in the sense that many of those things that happen in this story will really have happened in my head during my IFS process, but does that make it fiction or not? like if I write a dramatized account of something that happened in my head is it real? I think it’s real. it does not map onto matter outside of my head but it definitely maps to matter inside my head so I’ll call it real. anyways it will be aesthetic if I turn it into a story and if I just write about past IFS it will be purely aesthetic but what I think would be really cool and delightful and unique - yay unique unique for praise and self-evidencing of ego stature etc - would be if I literally did IFS as part of writing the story, now that’s hard because i think it will be hard to write anything out that isn’t just short bullets or direct articulations of interactions with parts, and a story requires much more than that, and I want the story to become more creative-imaginative-generative than my IFS processes usually are, a Dalí type thing – my insides are not so generative most of the time – and maybe the process of doing this IFS thing while I try to write in the more generative way will encourage special things for my IFS session which don’t normally happen. do you know sometimes, especially early on, when I do IFS sessions and I get to a crucial point the backs of my eyelids start to flicker black to bright light and I can sort of tell that there is some real good re-configuration of brain stuff happening. it’s been too long since I had one of those, I have been doubting the efficacy of my IFS recently and partially I am nervous because I haven’t seen that flickering in a long time. I’ve felt kinda powered up for a few days in terms of the meditative stuff, right now being no exception, nor the love from dooo doo doo nor the crying from that no-reply-DM-person’s post, and a variety of other things that come and go. i’m kind of tempted to try the IFS thing right now but I’m scared because what if it breaks my writing flow. maybe I’ll try it right now let us see what happens. are there any parts around who want to come forward? ok there is a part, it’s the part that knows certain things it doesn’t want the other parts to know because well there are two options and it won’t even tell me, either it fears the other parts knowing it because it’s bad or it fears the other parts knowing it because it’s good. uh oh i feel like it is the bad thing but maybe the part wants the other parts to think– nope, I’m doing IFS in the wrong way, which is a trap I fall into. one therapist would call it the “problem solving” or “commanding” part. the right way is to ask the part. hello part. what do you look like? I want to get a good picture of you. he is somewhere a little younger than I am right now and he’s holding a scroll, standing with weight on one leg like I do, lips are somewhat pursed and he is shaking his head and thwacking the scroll held in his right hand into his left hand. head shakes, like he is going to deliver punishment. outfit-wise, how do you want me to see you? actually forget that, how do you feel that there might be an audience here if I don’t delete this portion which I’ll be honest I might. audience, either you won’t see this or you will. I won’t tell you whether I’ve made any edits. maybe I will. I like the idea of you not knowing. mysterious! fun. anyways hello part, secret-keeper? secret-keeper I think that’s who you are. i’m sorry you should be the one to tell me this, not the other way around. what is your name? i’m not the secret-keeper. oh! who are you? I am the knowledge-keeper. the insight-keeper actually. you misunderstood my head shaking and my thwacking. you felt like it was foreboding, didn’t you? yes I did. it wasn’t that, it was like a kind smile, like you will understand one day – I can’t promise it will be today – and when you understand you will smile too. there is a fear part. hi fear part, what are you fearful of? i’m fearful that you’re changing the course of this session because you think there will be an audience, and that in reality insight-keeper really is secret-keeper and that secret is bad and that you’re lying to yourself and you’re either lying because you don’t want to know or because you don’t want to write something that is bad and maybe goes out to the public eye because you fear judgement. i do fear judgement it’s true. fear part, I hear you, do you think you can take a step back while I work with this part who calls himself insight-keeper? is that ok? yes it’s ok but I will be standing by to make sure nothing stupid happens. understood, I appreciate that. thank you for your appreciation. insight-keeper part, I ask, what is it that you feel, if anything, about this process being within the panopticon? well, follow me through this space that I will describe for you because it’s the only narratorial device that will simultaneously work and allow this session. cannot go into third party narrator to describe surroundings because it will break the flow. already part disengaging. insight-keeper back, there is another part coming up that has to do with the veracity of insight-keeper part but hey part please hang out to the side while insight-keeper part has the floor, is that alright? fine yes fine i will hang out there with fear part, dick. insight-keeper part, i’m sorry for distracting. you aren’t distracting, this is just how the process goes. i want you to follow me. we are walking now on a white floor, maybe it’s marble but maybe that’s the wrong word, again the gestalt episodic thing, fuzzy, fuzzy. it’s got florida vibes, the place where we are, in that the space is spacious and things are white and the ceiling is arched. so we’re walking through the hall now and you follow me into a study where there are a couple very comfortable eames chairs and a carpeted floor and big windows that look out over some very green tropical plants and the ocean in the background. you take the seat looking out of the ocean, I’ll sit at the desk across from you, it’s a rich brown wood whose name I also don’t know because gestalt thing fuzzy fuzzy wuzzy wuz a bear fuzzy wuzzy has no hair and onwards from that divergence, what would you like to know from me? i…. i feel scared to be in your presence, like anxious about something. but i am trying to be in [Self] which I don’t do a good job of. why don’t you do a good job of being in Self? I don’t do a good job of being in Self because I don’t feel like I have agency, whenever I think that I’m not in Self I think maybe I need another IFS therapist who can help me be in Self because I can’t do it on my own anymore at least and this is something I wonder about all the time, where there is a truth value of a belief and then a utility value of the belief. Maybe it is true that I can’t do this on my own, be in Self that is, but maybe this belief is inhibiting my ability to be in Self. I think perhaps there’s something deeper hiding me from Self. not hiding me from Self, just like making me prevent myself from being in Self, there’s a part in the way. as insight-keeper I ask you now who am I talking to? what part? I am masquerading as Self. who who are you? I get up from the chair to look into a mirror on the wall, maybe it will help me figure out who I am you know? I am performant in the bad way. I am inauthentic version of Self. you don’t need to have judgement, just listen to whatever your mind tells you. what would you fear if you were not there? ah that I would have no ego. i am a manifestation of the ego here to block the Self from emerging. it feels like I was sent though, like I am the agent of a devil creature to do his bidding. thank you for being honest. can you ask the one who summoned you if he is willing to come forward? you fucking stupid shits all of you. will you just leave all this shit alone in here. please? for fuck’s sake. yes fine I will describe myself for the benefits of this stupid audience, oh this audience is going to think this shit is fucking crazy, that you’re fucking crazy, l OOOOO l you have fun with that, so much fun. me? i’m not so much angry as I am just exceptionally grumpy. irritated. I’m irritated, that’s what I am. I’m irritated that you are trying to unearth and revise all these things because could you just leave them fucking be and not disturb me from where I am? no you’re right I suppose I’m not all that devilish, I guess I am fairly understandable, this sense of “agh god damn it” you get when you like stub a toe or when like there are no spoons left because no one else unloaded the dish washer when i didn’t unload it because I didn’t want to unload it. yes I’m irritated because I’m being inconvenienced. what way are you being inconvenienced? I am being inconvenienced in that I cannot get any god damn rest when you’re doing this thing. I sit down, I am just nestling in to chill and boom how I have to fucking get up again and relocate. and this has been going on for months and months and months do you know how annoying it is? I just want to sit on this damn couch out there in the living room and look out through the open sliding door to the beach and the water and smell the salty oceanic air and not feel god-damned irritated because lord do I feel irritated right now. i’m sorry you feel irritated, I the insight-keeper say. oh. thank you. I, the insight-keeper, would like to ask a question – whether maybe you feel like there is something under the irritation? actually, wow, such deceit! I do not think it was the insight-keeper who asked that, it was the pseudoSelf who asked that. come from a place of curiosity, right? so with curiosity I the insight-keeper just want to know more about you, irritated part. are you willing to share? thank you for asking. I… it feels nice to be asked. no one has asked me that before. uhm what’s let’s see uhm well gosh I feel sad, yeah, I feel… not needed anymore. I sense your earnest curiosity and I really appreciate it. I’ll try to keep going. take it easy, it’s ok whatever happens. thank you. I… I…. I miss something maybe? I want something? I want to be loved. I still feel your curiosity thank you. I’m being asked to do all these things and no one is showing me any appreciation for it. I don’t even know what I symbolize, getting up between different spots etc, but everyone is asking me to do things and no one is thanking me for it. I just want someone to acknowledge how much effort I’m putting in. damn it my dad called in the middle of this to ask me if he could put me in touch with someone. kind of interrupted the flow. and then I checked a work text. ok I can let it go and go back to the headspace where I was. a funny thing happened which is that the notes app was apparently slow to process so I watched like two or three sentences get typed out word by word and now I wonder if I should just display this for you in a way that just types word by word on the screen, like play sit back for you, that would be funky and maybe you won’t read it. anyways ok back to the situation at hand where this part has just opened up because he is doing so much by moving around to all these locations and feels unappreciated for it. ok i – i ok hi it’s that part, yeah gotta communicate it somehow to the audience, we’re on reality tv here or something like that and anyways I feel like maybe I can figure out what I symbolize. I think that when I get up and move around it’s really crap maybe it’s coming i’m not sure hold on. like trying to squeeze a kid out into the pool lol. that constipated life tho. thx antibiotics. you know what it is, there is loss. every time i have to move it is like i have to let something go, like i’m losing that thing, and it’s just so hard every time right like I am getting so nestled into wherever I am, like feeing whatever I’m feeling and then I have to let it go!!! I don’t want to let it go!!! god damn it! no one is thanking me for having to learn how to let all of these things go, every little moment you know. i am standing here in front of my computer with a welling feeling in my chest, waiting to see what happens next. stuff is happening inside non-verbally, i’ll pause to let it unfold. i found out what’s on the scroll. nothing. do nothing. and thank you for that. epilogue. the whole sea of parts are swaying and singing together, dooo doo doo, doo doo doo doo doo doooo. celebrating the passing of the doing part.