Daughter of Godcast 154 Surmise

With recovery from the doohickey glitch I've felt like doing way less. I've slowed down. Podcasting isn't a chore, I enjoy checking in, scattering a few breadcrumbs. I am an art maker after all.  But slowing down means - watching shows, re-reading novels, lounging - deliberately easing off on feeling obligated. Season 3 Summer Vacation was all about soaking up the sweetness of just being alive.

Maybe that's another positive aspect of breaking my arm - crystallizing awareness about why I am an artist. I'm not making art to be famous, to get rich, to get laid and especially not to give my self permission to feel adequate and worthy, making art is about pleasure. Instead of launching Season 5 Summer Vacation II last June, I invited a cosmic ray to bit flip non redundant doohickey code, resulting in catastrophic failure of computational balancing and speed control and wham, broken clavicle, broken radius and general trauma.

No lie, physical trauma is a drag, I could make a long list of draggy aspects. However, there's nothing like an injury to install deep awareness.  Bliss is the foundation of action, now I know this right down to my bones.

While riding the doohickey, I was feeling a little off. I was fending off a sense of needing to hurry up and complete the financials so I could focus on shooting so I could wrap post and have the test screenings and get the feedback and on and on. Feeling nervous and even edgy about getting the financials done. That's no way to ride a doohickey! No way to live. Getting things done is no longer a viable goal for me. We don't breathe to be done with breathing, do we?

The folks who make the doohickey claimed that I missed or ignored warnings from the doohickey, that I didn't understand push back. They are just covering their ass.

I definitely ignored and pushed through my emotional indicators, I blew off the shakiness. Riding the doohickey was a dicey hack, a way to superimpose some fun and get the job done. Why did the ride go awry? I wasn't inspired to joy BEFORE I got on. Plus neutrinos.

I'm looking back with a mix of poetic license and actual insight, I don't need to wrap the doohickey incident up in a pretty red bow. What I am taking away today is I want to act out of joy, or not act at all. Better to do nothing than to be motivated by fear or frustration.

AND so we come to the ultimate doing of nothing, mediation. A subject on which I am profoundly ignorant and so uniquely qualified to discuss.

Meditation undoes doing at the source, thought. I do stuff first in my head. I think about doing, feel motivated and then do. If action is about results, and I know that the best results flow from bliss inspired action, then I don't really need to think about action, I want to think about bliss! or not think at all.

But is thinking about bliss the same as feeling bliss? Maybe thinking is a kind of bliss blocker. What if being in the flow of bliss was our base state and thoughts just block the bliss, distract us from the ever available?

I don't know, these are just theories, the only way to find out is to stop thought. Yep, that's a thing. On purpose, having not a single thought in our head.

We've all done this, perhaps without really noticing. My guess is that meditation isn't some esoteric spiritual practice reserved for yogis and monks, but rather a pretty basic human process, like breathing or farting. We are constantly slipping into no thought states - while driving, dancing, making music, making love... when we're in the groove, focused in our moment, when we just are. We have all been awake and thoughtless, thought free. Or if we are having thoughts, they just aren't urgent or compelling. They just kind of pass on by, like clouds.

Meditation is yet another onlining of latent circuitry, like being able to thrive in killing cold through Wim Hof breathing, or turning on the mammalian dive reflex by getting our face wet. OR that story I told about proximity detection while hiking in the forest in the pitch black. There are all these modalities of human experience waiting to be activated and explored. The Marvel pantheon of superheros, this huge catalog of movies showing up about people or entities having extraordinary powers, that's just a reflection of what we actually are discovering, or should I say rediscovering. Who knows what humans were before the Earth was pounded by comet fragments 11k years ago. The point is we are more, way more. What moreness does mediation enable? Who wants to come with me and find out?

I'm back from the surgeon Hollander as of yesterday, and he said I'm supposed to be me, just do what I normally do. A couple more months for complete healing, but the clavicle is solid, he says. My name is Dan Kelly, Shri Fugi Spilt, same name but brand new today. I can't do what I used to do, not quite yet. And who wants to be what they were anyway? I get to climb an awesome escarpment of pain on my way to who I now am. I might have to learn how to play guitar again from scratch. I can't yet do a single pushup. I am about to reme, maybe I'll do things a little different this time.