fermentation and clarification of human being

I am researching and learning about nutrition’s effects on mental health. It’s becoming clearer to me that this is the middle path of overall health. A diet for mental health is similar to that for hypoglycemics and pylourics. A diet for mental health is similar to many wieght loss diets. A diet for mental health is similar to a diet for enabling the body in times of serious disease and cancer. This makes great sense! Clearing away some of the conditions that obscure the middle path of health, we can see that health is truly returning to ultimate goodness in all ways. This is the middle path both spiritually and realistically. And as we know by experience, the change from conditioned being to the unconditioned middle way takes time and patience. This is a process much like fermenting dandelion flowers, fresh juice, and local honey into a potent meade. Assembly, fermentation, transformation, clarification, and aging are all a part of the lengthy time-bound specific process of becoming meade. Becoming fully human is similar. It takes quite a lot of our attention and also a lot of letting go of the memes and matter that cloud our being, mentally and physically. This whole process is absolutely spiritual in that we are aware in our attentiveness to the process of change. And with this careful attention that we bring to our lives, we begin to deeply love ourselves and others in the clarifying view of existence that we inhabit so briefly.

One aspect of my clarification that I just realized concerns when I get sick physically. I typically don’t mind getting sick because I get to relax. Ahhh, a clue that I never understood before now. I am learning that my mind does indeed race, often with obsessive compulsive repetition and anxiety. I am learning that this is likely caused by my nutritional deficiencies exhibited in pylouria and hypoglycemia. I am learning that my brain is mostly an overactive one which causes both anxiety and depression in relation to pylouria and hypoglycemia. Lastly, I am realizing that nutritional deficiency (which is mostly a cultural conditioned phenomenon) as well as sickness itself are ways that my “ego-karmic-conditioned-pain-body” has been dealing with my intensity of mind and depth of awareness from an early age. In a word, control. Though in realizing this messy process of becoming a beautifully clarified human, I (Self) am truly embarking on my “solo” journey of healthy being as I see the cloudy particulates slowly settle to the bottom of my being and return to the earth as nutritive energy. These nutrients were what I needed to ferment into what I am now, but their time of activity is now waning and clarifying.

frustration, but moving along

I’m reading “Depression Free Naturally” by Joan Matthews Larson, PhD. I’m diggin’ it, it’s making very good sense to me.

Our societal level of nutritional deficiency is very conditional. It’s amazing that humans aren’t really instituting the depth of health knowledge and practices as if creating the most magnificently tall skyscraper or an exceedingly long bridge. Really now people, why is the nationally Recommended Daily Allowances for nutrition so low as to barely suffice to maintain our bodily being. Ahhh, how else can we make the room for selling massive amounts of things that normal people can’t provide for themselves–pharmaceuticals, insurance, surgery, expensive healthcare?

I gotta get naturally healthy. I’m certainly on the way. I’ve been struggling with practicing a myriad of things to keep me headed in the “right” direction. What’s amazing to me is it seems my depression may be largely due to nutritional deficiency and hypoglycemia. These are societal influences, period. That’s why I’ve been so resentful of what I’ve been taught and given in this life! A masking of nature through the conditions of a society that is quite ignorant in it’s informational and fundamentalist posturing. This is where criticism is good for my own movement into further health practice and finding people who resonate similarly in connection with deeper levels of our truly mutual natural co-existence.

ONWARD…

fresh goodness

breathing a full breath contingent upon the bodily sensation that it is welcome and beneficial to do so in a brief though profound moment of openness and relaxation of being

“Good Morning,” a phrase of greeting that people say in the morning. I nearly always wonder and doubt what people are meaning in this expressed statement. Are they commanding me to have a good morning? Is the person wishing me, and I mean me specifically, directly, and contextually, a good morning? What is the true intention behind their speech? I look very deeply into this seemingly simple and common aspect of human interaction. What I see as the base of this interaction is not intention, meaning, nor projection; I see a subtle thread of existence itself manifesting through the bodily habit of speech into the reverberation of external energetic being resonating through all matter and existence. So, the act of uttering “Good Morning” is essentially being. And this is my less conditioned understanding of human expression. All of our expression is exactly the same, whether I think so or not, everything is essential being as it is, good as it is and always will be.

Cheers! Here’s to arriving at being beyond thinking… through the dharma door of thought.

over, under, around; always just this

For the most part, as I am depressed, I lose my mind, body, spirit, energy, time, consciousness, awareness to my ego’s control. But, since my ego saved my life through perceived and real struggles and threats in a troublesome childhood experience by receding into depression, passivity and following the wills and wishes of others as well as possible, now, my ego is largely in control.

I’m feeling like I am having a mental breakdown now. I can’t handle all the pressure that my ego-centric karmic conditioning is putting onto me. It’s ruined my adult life, not saved it. I don’t really know what “Self” is anymore, or how to be other than my egotistically controlled small self which is really just killing me slowly.

Why is this so? WHY? Why do I live with a sense of pure empty worthless meaninglessness as my core understanding of self? I see nothingness, even beauty is empty, and thus all life too. My ego has certainly integrated Zen Buddhist concepts and psychologically philosophical cultural views to keep me, whatever me is, from happiness. I’m not worthy of anything. I should be dead, I should have died, but I am still living without purpose, reason, or meaning. Others don’t seem to connect with me either, nor I with them in any profoundly deep ways. All my relationships seem insignificantly superficial, and, yes, thusly, meaningless. Ego returns to thinking that the nature of reality is ambiguity and emptiness, so stop trying to make meaning out of nothing. I can’t make meaning, it’s all impermanent and shifting like all things in nature. Meaning is, well, silly.

Thus, I return to my most recently created mantra, “infinite being is being with.” No meaning, no trying, nothing can get in the way of being with as long as I am living. But, as the ego understands it, this may be it’s greatest strategy yet for keeping me from any amount of happiness in this lifetime. Since “being with” is effortlessness, purity, and the truth of reality, my ego has seemingly found a way to give up all conditionality and be thoroughly unhappy in this unseparated existence. All existence naturally depresses and overwhelms me in it’s magnitude. I cry, being with this crushing feeling. I cry, realizing that my fiancee left me. I cry, knowing my current career is unsatisfactory. I cry, viewing no deep authentic human connection in my life.

So, I am amidst the abyss of loneliness and emptiness. It seems not to matter that anyone else exists, because they can’t connect with me, or vice versa. Life has been deconstructed into the essentials of reality (ambiguity, creativity, contingency, change – impermanence, nonseparation, emptiness) whereas, like any bit of unconscious matter, I too exist here and now, hard and cold. It’s amazing blood and breath still flow through me. But that’s all there is, a material maze of coexistence, truly infinitely unknowable and nonmeaningful. It is what it is, that’s how it is.