I’m going to keep my posts in sequence. We’re a few days behind chronologically because I posted ahead, due to the move.
This is Day One in Paradise, my new apartment. Thank you to Sara and Jason for moving me in.
The whole flat has been redone. All fixtures are brand new. I even have a dishwasher (oh my).
Meanwhile, if this view I’m looking out on (see photo) is to be the final view for me – keeping in mind that I was born in this neighborhood a couple of miles behind me and the years here were carefree – well, hallelujah!
I’m overjoyed to be in this particular location and you can close the book on me.
It’s someone else’s turn to be the beneficiary of good fortune now. I dreamed and Michael made it a reality. And now I’m complete.
After many years of moving, I have the books on my desk whittled down to my lifetime favorites. (There they are on the desk in the third photo.)
What are these?
(1) The Bhagavad-Gita. Prabhavananda and Isherwood translation only.
(2) The Heart of Awareness: A Translation of the Ashtavakra Gita by Thomas Byrom
(3) The Heart of the Ribhu Gita ed. Da Free John
(4) Shankara’s Crest-Jewel of Discrimination
(5) The Sutra of Hui Neng
(6) Sosen’s The Book of Nothing
(7) The Tao Teh Ching of Lao Tzu. R.B. Blakney translation only.
(8) The Cloud of Unknowing.
(9) The Hua Hu Ching of Lao Tzu.
(10) The Bible.
No excuses. No explanations. These are the books that survived all the cuts throughout all the years. (1) With these books on my desk, I have all that I need as fundamental background and philosophy. Add to that the years of channeled wisdom … this generation is blessed.
I’d like to record in my ascension ethnography (see insert) some reflections on moving because this time has apparently been one in which many of us are re-positioning ourselves for the final run-up to … well, everything. Certainly you can see that I’ve been re-positioned to my maximum satisfaction.
An ethnography is usually thought of as being a study of another culture, society, or locale. But to one who follows the awareness path, one is one’s own study, drawing on ethnographic tools like factual description, objective reporting, and focussing on patterns of behavior. The awareness ethnographer’s purpose is to communicate significant – not trivial – understandings about the person, who in this field of study is the self.
Good morning, New World
When we move, we completely take our identity apart, an identity many of whose aspects we may not even have suspected that we had.
And with our identity completely apart, we can do a variety of things.
(1) We can try to hold things together by keeping to our routine as much as possible. But this gives rise to shocks and insecurities because we don’t have – for the period of time of the move – the familiar things that go into building our routine.
(2) We can hang out in the space and get whatever it wishes to communicate to us.
(3) We can go completely unconscious and sleep a lot, sleepwalking through the process, rebooting when our identity has been rebuilt.
I’ve chosen Number Two.
Given that I chose to hang out in the space and see what it had to communicate, the first thing I observed was the process of moving itself. It’s fundamentally simple.
It’s a process of picking something up from this place and placing it down in that place (moving). That applies down to the last pen and the last pillow.
And as long as I treat it as a very long To Do list and approach it one item at a time, I’m fine.
But the minute I go up to the lifestyle level and ponder the significance of each item in the new lifestyle I’m creating, I become agitated.
Will I do my apartment in Japanese Zen style? In West-Coast Canadian? In booklover’s heaven?
What a difference a day makes. Covered in snow.
What I saw for myself was that it was best to leave lifestyle questions to whatever comes later. I found myself saying: Get the move done first. Recover your existing lifestyle (urban monk) and revise your surroundings later.
The second thing I observe is that a great deal of oppression has been lifted off me. Being free of the management of the old place is a great blessing.
The last act in the drama between me and a friend and the building manager was being caught in a classic scam by the manager.
Remembering that Michael had asked me to leave without being manipulative or hostile, I took it on the jaw. I was happy to end an experience that had been going on for some months.
I need to not lose focus to disappointments like this. And there will be more, Michael has told me.
I – along with you – am going to build a new world in which none of these things happens.
I’ve been in that world of bliss. In that higher-dimensional state, even the thought of acting in a hostile manner would never arise.
OK, down to my first dinner in my new place. And back to normal.
Footnotes
(1) So much of a reader and book collector was I that at one point in my life I had left so many books with a friend in Ottawa that they filled a whole room. Those were the days when I didn’t mind throwing boxes around. Now I definitely prefer whittling down and leaving it to the Internet to store my books for me.