Making Peace with the cave man in my soul

Ah the much maligned cave man. You know, he is that primal self that makes simple, and often bad, decisions based on very simple criteria. He is most underlying of selves that just wants to eat, frack, fight and sleep.

I will not say that I have been at war with the caveman. It is closer to say that I have belittled him an though him less than the 'higher self'. Some Buddhist I am. I have failed to be the humblest of the proud by looking down at my most primal self rather than be informed by him.

I feel literararily like Lenard Nemoy who wrote I am not Spock only followed years later by I am Spock. The cave man I have strived so hard not to be has taught me some valuable lessons this weekend.

The cave man in my soul is not run by a 12 line program in visual basic. there is no
10 READ eatables
20 goto "Food"
30 eat
goto line 10

things are the far reverse. The feelings that make the cave man operate are are the most primal base things that advanced man contemplates and parses. He loves, he hates, he wants, he avoids. The cave man's lesson is as simple as his soul.

Some emotional states just are. We can mitigate, contemplate or try and change them but the net truth is that we will feel them no matter what our higher self ordains

My caveman has given me a precious gift I cannot change, contemplate or rationalize away. And there is such strength in this. With my higher self not fighting the shaggy primitive I have found a clarity of purpose that greatly outstrips clarity of facts.

The Maker of things can tell when I am firing on all cylinders like this. she just gets prepared for the latest divine madness. I myself have just come to realize what causes my spurts of near divinity.

My beautiful friend has taught me about the caveman in my soul The primitive analog in herself (cave girl?) not only lives in the sun of her attentions but has veto power over her higher self in some way I have yet to understand. There seems to be no limit to the things this wonderful woman can teach me.

I live the reverse. I am trying to learn to let my cave man speak. I may not agree, but I should take the time to listen

More on the cave man soon..

like the Dr. from Sixth Sense

You remember the scene. We all do. The kid is in the hospital finally ready to trust the shrink with his secrets. I am not referring to the famous "I see dead people" line. What seems so poinient today is the idea the dead only see what they want to see. Haley tells him that the ghosts stay in the land of the living because they can edit the facts that they allow themselves to see to fit the ones that they need to continue their existence. Chew on that.

Damn but that reminds me of an awful lot of the living as well. I do not cast stones by this because I have lived in that glass house. The topic could be politics, human relationships or the baking of muffins. We all will exclude the 25 facts we aren't looking for to see the one that we are. We could call it Dick Chaney disease: any truth we look for hard enough we will create.

I know what Dick was invested in, but what are the rest of us all so invested in that we ignore most of the world. How many arguments are are just us working hard to not see the other guys point?

Jim Morison talked about he infinity viewed through the doors of perception. a trippy and wonderful idea.

Why do we all work so hard to limit our perceptions so we can have life we don't really enjoy living?

Anger.. I had nearly forgotton it

I feel that this must be prefaced with the fact that I have gone decaffeinated for 6 days. It leaves me feeling short. maybe this will feel like a tempest in a teapot in the next few days but it is where I am now.

A funny combination of things have brought me to anger. I go years without feeling it and I did not recognize it at first. I have found myself in a cultural backwater of a place where I once was the great player. There has been an odd conspiracy of events that have removed me from focus.

Enough of that shit. I have started my campaign to be the meanest son of a bitch in the valley once again. It annoys me that this needs to be done at all. But on with it.

My beautiful friend is on a campaign of throwing distance at me. I was hoping to get another year before that happened. Alas no good deed goes unpunished. It is amazing how the beautiful and different see everyone else as boiler plates of humanity. What was the old joke? people think they are unique little snowflakes are just like everybody else. when we were angsty teens we all desperately looked for anything that did not look like the sameness and monotony of our over optomised suburban lives.
Now years and miles later we push away from anything that does not fit into our own well worked out mechanisms for life. I am aware that this is a sin I am guilty of as well. the irony is not lost on me. It is likely a large source of this anger.

I am aware of what I am. I love that I fascinate some people. I understand that I repel and scare some. I know too well that I am a fountain of intensity and that pushes some folks away, but my life is pretty damned good even on my angry day. even when my beautiful friend is building walls. God save us from people who are trying to fix, me, save me, or help me.

Not is a statement about my Beautiful Friend and about the well meaning co workers and near everyone but the Maker and the Heir. Yes I live my life in a way that wouldn't work for most people. It works very well for me. Come play or leave me the hell alone. I do not want a picket fence, a 401K or grandchildren surrounding me when I die.

Anger is like Fire: it is a good servant and a bad master. I am enjoying my anger, but I must not let it rule me. this is going to be an interesting next few days...

This is the new stuff

My life keeps cycling around to the last line in the matrix. "I'm not here to tell you how it ends. I'm going to tell you how it begins." If you think about that it is a strange cyclic point.

so many beginnings. at least I no longer feel like they will swallow me up. All the great ideas are starting to crystallize into solid things. The Maker of Things is looking at the actual going from the making of ideas to something you can hit with a hammer. designs and plans are done. feels like a milestone.

Incorporation. damn. I never thought I'd be incorporating again.

the last of the legacy problems are lifted. the last of the hurdles are gone. Again things begin. So many beginnings

I wouldn't have anything different!

now to the hard stuff

Alas there are no magic bullets. But most of the major stumbling blocks are gone as well. The road ahead is now open but still hard. it is the time for the hard work. The Maker and I made the first hurtle and we both relaxed a bit. this was a mistake but a reasonable one.
We lost a couple of weeks to reasonable things but it is nose tot he grindstone time. It is time to see if we are the ppl who we think we are or just another pair of useless dreamers.
The rubber has hit the road and so far I like the smell

The art of Disapointment

I have recently become acquainted with a completely new view on disappointment. We all face moments when we do not get the things we want or expect. It is disappointing. it sucks. life goes on.

My latest bit of involuntary knowledge is about people who choose to disappoint. My theory is that in some screwed up way in some peoples heads it becomes less pressure to go under the bar then over it. In some people, alas my only daughter being one, the disappoint rather than face the specter of failure. My Beautiful friend is as blown away bu the mind-state as I. the Heir, who had never heard me raise my voice, was stunned at my reaction. The Maker of Things, as always, analyzed it and comed the dross for facts.
I was exposed to one disappointment too many. Maybe I am to far down the path of the Poet Warrior to even understand. I can only act on the facts that I can understand.

I do know this: I hate being angry. I speculate this: She would rather face me angry then deal with her on internal fear of failure and anxiety of achievement. I conclude this: after more tan a decade of disappointment I am done.

a la kart life

It was one of those things that came from all around me at once. The Maker was talking about relationships and not settling for someone who is only 80% of what you want. There will always bee someone else along that covers a different 805. That is how the logic goes.
Several other friends of mine have had conversations on what is "settling" and what is being too picky and never finding. It must be something in the air.

So I thought about my cell phone plan. And my car insurance. And the menu at McDonald s. The year is mighty 2009. Why is it we expect to be able to pick and choose from the things we want in coffee machines and power steering option? And yet we spend vast amount of our time and energy looking for the perfect significant other to meet some preconceived notion. What made us decide that the person we want to most be with has to be a fairy tale fit or else we are 'settling for'? and (the big question) is what set the boundaries of that pre-conceived notion? too many Julia Roberts movies? what my mom told me love meant when I was 11 years old? Why do we pick these (sometimes) absurd frameworks of theoretical "right girl"? how do we pick them? what is the editor of our standards of happyness.

How much do we sabotage ourselves with these standards? There is a wild thought. our happiness standards are keeping us from being happy

Why can't we tailor the relationships in our lives to meet the needs and wants we have, rather than trying to wedge that special 87% perfect someone into a roll that works less well? the other 13% I'm glad to invest in my close friends or maybe even decide that it doesn't matter

I can't say that I know the answer to this one but I will soon.

The joy of silence

I had forgot the silence. It is funny to think of as something you can forget. I have had so many amazing experiences since the week before Halloween ( For some reason everything started that week) that I have lost the inner silence. The kind of zen joy of nothing.

It has been a GREAT season of personal relationships, achievement and really living up to my professed beliefs and ideals. It has also been an endless series of intellectually and emotionally challenging events. Even the timelessness that me and My Beautiful Friend experienced back in the jungle was intense.

I am taking this week and reliving my silence and just sitting in my thoughts. I am chewing through my goals. I have achieved much and am contemplating much more. This deserves some quiet time

I had a nice conversation with The Maker of Things a about he difference between knowledge and wisdom. Sometimes it is easy to know what to do and hard as hell to do it. The Maker is on an fearless journey of self exploration herself. She makes me believe in myself by her faith in me

While I wait here at the center of things. In the pause before My Beautiful Friend arrives to stay. She makes me transcendent to even my own strange life. Some I though t would be eternal are moving along. I will take my seven days or so and consider

and the silence is it's own kind of joy.

What to leave in What to leave behind

It has become a funny balance point. The idea of personal moral evolution has always been at the center of my philosophy. I am now looking at those who have been the steady friends that have stood by me as I progress onto what I do next.
Some who were once my closest confidants are becoming bit of a drag, some are coming with me into the future.
What a terrible thing it is to look at the choices of leaving behind these who have been my companions in the storms past. not fair weather friends, real hard core playa's. and to be moving past the world that I shared with them.

Everyone who stood by then who can play in the new world and the new game, I will do everything I can keep them in my life.

At least one, maybe several are being left behind. The joy of moving forward. damn

Audacity

vii

Audacity.
That seems to be what it has all come down to. I sought permission yesterday for my huge aims and dreams from the three who make it possible. I am not, in a general sense, someone who needs the help of others to accomplish extreme things.
My Pretty Friend was oddly encouraging and confused that I would have misgivings at all. She is the soul of inspiration after all. It is not a surprise that she responds to my question of my own right to the things I am attempting by being inspiring. She is my muse and I have faith that she will stand by me. Not the way everyone deserted me when things got hard last time I tried anything like this. I hate the reminiscent sound of it. My reflections on the period of time called the Big Game.
The Maker of Things also was surprised when I asked her permission. Now is absolutely the last point where things could be stopped without some collateral damage to the lives of those we inspire into acting in our endeavors. In a few short months the Make and I have become great friends who are wired into each other’s future. Her odd lack of empathy, a thing that is often disconcerting, was good to hear. She was committed to the building of things. Everything to her is just a matter of order of assembly.
The Heir Apparent simply asked for his marching orders. But with a title like that what else could he do?
And I miss Peg
The Big Game. I am currently starting businesses with the eventual goal of changing the wealth and poverty cycle in Africa. The Big Game I did to get a half a dozen pretty girls into bed. Either way it is about using a Cult of Personality (I wonder did Ted Turner have days like this?) to shape people’s ideas. To get the things I want really. The Big Game ended badly (although I did bed a few women). And I lost a lot. It is not the goals that make this different than the last time. It is the trust,
The people around me this time are here fully informed. They are here because they believe in my goals. Love is easy. Trust is hard as hell. This time when I screw up ( and everybody eventually does) I trust that there will be someone t her to hold it together and a hand to help me.
But enough of the introspective emo-shit. Today is the last day of things that hold me back and the first day of greatness or great failure. I am not one for recriminations or ego-moments but for this single inhalation of a moment I have made an exception
It should be fun

living on purpose

iv.
So much seems to be about priorities. About making them, about admitting to ourselves what they are. And about being able to be happy with what we have decided is important. It is a complicated dance.
I cannot decipher these points in order, as they are all hopelessly intertwined. I attempt to look at their interlocking selves. The easiest should be the making of priorities. We decide what we want and place it as the most important thing in our lives…. But think about that. Who can say one week to the next what they REALLY want? Instead we push forward our goals for things we think we should want. The things that TV, our parents or the collective sense of right says we should. I question whether any but a tiny few of us ever put our greatest efforts foreword on the things we want the most.
Many of us live the lives that are easiest for us, not the most fulfilling. It is easier to live with unfulfilled dreams that to face failing. I have listened to so many friends, acquaintances and lovers espouse desires to be the things they want the most, but somehow never work to achieve. Instead they perpetuate their comfortable day to day life. It is easier to charge up the Visa card then to really get out of debt. It is easier to date the girls who are around you than to search for your soul mate. I wonder how many of us set false idols for what is most important in our lives than just find it too much work.
As far as being happy…. Maybe that is the crux. How many of us even know how?
How Is it we let our own lives be a spectator sport? What forces lead us to duck under at what may be our moment of greatest self?
I have never been as prone to this as many others; at least I do not think so. After my time in the jungle and my intense new… Friends (what a pale word that is) I feel compelled to not lose a moment. When I watch Futurama I do it with the intention of enjoying the ½ hour. When I patent a process I do it so the world is better. When I eat for the joy of food, Drink for the great buzz. Everything I will try my best to do with intention. To live on purpose.
Since returning from the jungles I have done pretty well with this, although not perfect. Luckily my pretty friend seems suffused with the “CR time” feeling and her company puts me back in that perfect moment before the waiting room. The world has begun to hear me. With the contributions of the maker of things they will hear me much louder.

Epiphany

v.
To create a hothouse seems to be the answer. I do not need to be a builder so much as an instructor. I do not need to teach data sec or language instructions but the means of success. Between the Lady and another old friend, one that we might call The Builder of Things, there is a critical mass. There is a nucleus of design and hope. My ideas are a fine thing. My plans are even achievable in some cases but if a …mind space of achievement and enlightenment can be made, then the meager ideas that The Builder and I have cobbled together can be a lesson plan. The first one or two need o make money. They need to also make an enlightened difference. A kind of green design of the soul, we must build in a way that is sustainable development for the enabling of personal moral evolution.
It strikes me sitting in a frozen desolate corner of North America that is digging itself out that I do not need to be atlas who bears the world on is shoulders, or Prometheus who bears eternal punishment for his theft of fire from the gods. I need to be Arthur Deming, The man who went to a broken and dispirited Japan after WWII and showed them a way to embrace the larger world. He taught them to use the dregs of what they once were with the understanding that had eluded them as the world changed around them.
Goddamn. If I wasn’t a changed man with delusions of grandeur before now I surely must be.

priorties

iv.
So much seems to be about priorities. About making them, about admitting to ourselves what they are. And about being able to be happy with what we have decided is important. It is a complicated dance.
I cannot decipher these points in order, as they are all hopelessly intertwined. I attempt to look at their interlocking selves. The easiest should be the making of priorities. We decide what we want and place it as the most important thing in our lives…. But think about that. Who can say one week to the next what they REALLY want? Instead we push forward our goals for things we think we should want. The things that TV, our parents or the collective sense of right says we should. I question whether any but a tiny few of us ever put our greatest efforts foreword on the things we want the most.
Many of us live the lives that are easiest for us, not the most fulfilling. It is easier to live with unfulfilled dreams that to face failing. I have listened to so many friends, acquaintances and lovers espouse desire s to be the things they want the most, but somehow never work to achieve. Instead they perpetuate their comfortable day to day life. It is easier to charge up the Visa card then to really get out of debt. It is easier to date the girls who are around you than to search for your soul mate. I wonder how many of us set false idols foe what is most important in our lives than just find it too much work.
As far as being happy…. Maybe that is the crux. How many of us even know how?

What is wealth? what is happyness?

iii.
I am back on North America time. It has been a few days since the laconic travels through the jungle and the cultures that are so different from my world. So far the foreign sense of time stays with me. It is not that I am moving at the slow pace of a tourist traveling through the country side on my way to see the volcano. I am not unaware of the time and date. The changed world makes the entire of North America seems claustrophobic.
I do not mean the absurdity that the Rockies, the Smokies, the Ozarks and the White Mountains together are not enough space for me to feel like the walls are not closing in. Denver, Dallas, Boston, and Birmingham together are enough interaction for anyone, no matter what experience they seek or how starved for it they are. It is more that I feel that we, as a society, missed an important turn off on the road we travel. Are we on a good road and just gone too far?
It seems to me that we have been saying the ends justify the means for so long that we have become those means. My foreign travels showed me people who would love to have big flat screens, four dollar lattes’ and the newest coolest shoes. In the jungle, the markets, and the Capital they all worked long days and long weeks. The make crap money and cram into tiny houses with their relatives. But in a way that seems to elude most of us North Americans they are living their lives in real time; they are happy in the now. When did building our secure future become so constantly and obsessively redefined that we lost the ability to enjoy in the now?
I realize that the ways that we work have made us wealthy as a culture and inflated our bank accounts. Our western fetish with total quality management and maximized time over resource curves has made us great and achieved in scale beyond measure. But what have we lost?
I am sitting here on my jet plane in my business casual attire, missing my pretty friend. I am seeking a way to bring the timelessness of my foreign travel and the enjoyment of now to the unbridled efficiency and power of the great North American machine. If I can manage this trick I can truly change the world.

waitingrooms

ii.
I sit in the waiting room between places. Eventually a plane will come. It will take me to a city to wait for another plane. Eventually this will take me home.
I travel back to the place that for near a decade has been my life. My things (endless things!) felt cumbersome even before my journey. I felt owned not only by my possessions but by conceptions and commitments. Travel has long been my norm. When did I stop being changed by it and start bringing my expertise to the place I go?
I think of the Buddhist stories of masters and their begging bowls. They would preach for their supper if speaking their wisdom was asked of them. By traveling in poverty these teachers were like me at the market with bad language skills. They could not isolate themselves in their comfort. Not of language, or of softness and warmth. I must learn this balance. I must learn the way to be humbled by the things I see and still be able to reach the world with the things that I need to do.
The Waiting Room is a timelessness that is like impatience stretched. It is not at all like the timelessness of the places we visited. I do not feel relieved of my need to adhere to time. It is not like I felt in the jungles and on the endless afternoons with my pretty friend sleeping against my leg. Here in the waiting room it is the reverse; it is the feeling that time is passing and that nothing I can do will affect the events that will happen. Time has become the measure of impotence instead of freedom. Does this make sense? The jungle makes you free from time in the way that the waiting room makes you captive of it.

Soon the endlessness will end. Soon I will be back in my seat of strength. My narcotic comforts of the soul will surround me. My amazing travel companion will be nearby. She, although changed differently, is as altered by our travels as I am. The Jungle and the Lady will both stay with me and in my head if I have any luck (or grace) at all.
It feels in some way that the Lady and I are bound in a more primal way that romance. In truth if I knew this feeling had existed in previous decades I would have eschewed romance for a travel companion of this merit. If neither the Lady nor I fall from the path the next few decades will be a lot of climbing of rocks and deciphering of languages together.

i.

It is not that I have been transformed but that the world has changed. The things I have always known are accurate still but in ways that mean different things. It is not my intension to be oblique. I simply am trying to reframe myself to the world.

I am, without question, a high intensity, highly adept man at dealing with the world. But what that means…And what I mean by the world is the question. There are those that would describe me as a Machiavellian bastard. I would not fight this definition although it feels course. I have suggested many times that I never do anything for only one reason. This is of course untrue as much of the time I am playing things by ear. This does not seem to preclude me finding multiple USES for everything I say. I am highly adept it seems at maintaining the illusion that is my mystique.

I seek to make the world better. Poet Warrior talks endlessly about how all motivations are either selfish or are intended to make the world better. Most actions are combinations of both. I seek to make the word better in ways that will make me very rich and be the most interesting things I can spend my time doing. This is both selfish and altruistic If I do it right.

I set my sights on changing foreign places I have not (until recently) been. I travel with a woman I love madly but to whom I am an old friend. I seek to find the best way to teach what I have learned. Instead I find that I finally understand some of the quiet bits of Buddhism that have always eluded me. I am a stranger in a strange land in a relationship I cannot control. I have a tiny command of the language and do not have my normal colossal resources. Strangely enough I could not be happier.

These places are showing me that the world is not what I always thought it was. I have lived in a narcissistic fragment of it. The fact that my companion cannot be controlled or manipulated is an absolute joy. The simple idea that I need work to make myself understood to a street vendor means that I must pay attention to my surroundings. This is also a joy. I find instead of the teacher I was contemplating as my next transformation I want to come a place such as this and know utterly nothing again. I have become handicapped by my knowledge. I seek the emptiness of discovery.

Both the Woman and the land are places where I can make my desires known but not enforce them. It is a kind of joy to be the supplicant…. Not the Machiavellian bastard.

I do not know where I go from here. I know it will bear little resemblance to what I would have planned scant weeks ago.