The heart chakra is massive...

Up the spine you go. From the coiled kundalini in the root of your pelvis to the thousand petalled lotus of your divine crown, these timeless chakras are excellent compartmentalized metaphors for various aspects of the psyche as well as our experience of life. Devout Hindus spend much of their lives exploring and ultimately transcending each chakra on their personal journey to enlightenment. Very few ever get past the heart chakra. It is simply too big, too complex, too flammable for most of us to transcend. When we "follow our hearts" we are acknowledging a pathway that comes from our higher self, i.e. messages intuited via the heart from the higher chakras, the extra-karmic realms, the ones we may never get to.

People get down on this enlightenment stuff, and yeah, I can see why. It's vertically integrated, heavy-handed, and woefully unscientific mysticism. But without a doubt, I do notice progress, growth, and even a kind of elevation of spirit as I age. Call that what you will. I'm game for these "higher" levels of existence. I'm game for the churning ride of the heart. A muscle you must explore but mustn't explode.

Futurizing...

Someone mentioned that humans experience the present in six minute intervals. That is, any given moment contains about four minutes of short term memory from the immediate past mixed with a general sense of what we can expect internally and externally for approximately two minutes into the future.

This futurizing is very interesting stuff, for there are all sorts of ideas and emotions we might project onto the immediate future before we arrive there. We might psychically predetermine a negative or a positive future, a simple or a complicated one, one that brings excitement or anxiety. Of course the future doesn't contain any of these things - we conjure these adornments unconsciously in order to set a stage for ourselves so that we might find ourselves in the kind of future we vaguely expect. Perhaps the function of our present is to generate a six minute window of narrative continuity through a string of psychic environments we've spun together in the time leading up to our experience of a present moment. It follows then, that actual present remains a mystery shrouded in our comfy projections. Unless that actual, external present radically alters the storyline for us.

When ordering helium balloons the other day, Sarah and I noticed that they line each pre-inflated balloon with a strange jelly-like substance that when dried is said to fortify the balloon and make it last longer. In the same way, we too might line our imagined future with all sorts of advance notions that act as a filter or lens which makes the actual future more familiar to us when it arrives in the form of the perceived present. Does time endlessly fill a succession of psychically generated future balloons that fulfill our predestined allotment of dismay or delight?

("Tons of Balloons" by Mary Fagot)

Propulsive and Repulsive...

If you know something scares the shit out of you, long term avoidance is the equivalent of bad constipation. Pretty soon your whole being takes on the shape of non-shitting. A stooped question mark of impacted fecal back matter.

Let go. Unclench. Float in a most peculiar way. Drop the kids into the pool. Get jelly legs. Scare yourself horny.

No, I wouldn't be the first to encourage you to face your fears, but I might be the first to do it in such a scatological way. Moral fiber, yes, but also, prune your hedgings.