Sunday, August 8, 2010

Nothing and everything,; not-thinking at the HK Int. Airport (IATA: HKG, ICAO: VHHH)


Nothing and everything,; not-thinking at the HK Int. Airport (IATA: HKG, ICAO: VHHH)

Once again I sit in the opposite side of my usual side of the world, in what was colloquially known as Chek Lap Kok Airport (赤鱲角機場)... honestly I sometimes ask myself whether I’m being stubborn or if I am looking for something-ness and nothingness all at once…

Tonight, like many silly nights I start by roaming and questioning my episodic desire to walk away, and I have to clarify, its not a lovers runaway, it is no running away in a desperate, violent, passionate or emotional manner but simply to walk away in a patient, present, boring, yet thoroughly enchanting manner. This sometimes reminds me of a dim mood worthy of the Kerouac’s voice that lingers in my head, that boring perfect solitude that is so profound and rewarding in the least “practical” sense. Back to the airport, picture me and a cart, my cart holding my bags perfectly placed so that when I stand on top of its wheels, letting go off the ground and smoothly gliding down Hong Kong International airport’s gentle slopes I do not tip over but simply let go of both marble and thought into a present, enchanting flow. And so like this I shift from north to south, staring at peoples eyes wondering about their stories, their tragedies, just as the universe is infinite are peoples tragedies, it puzzles me how it couldn’t be any other way…

Every once in a while I’ll sit down outside, passively second-hand smoking among Cantonese animated characters, I will pretend I am out, looking blankly at the horizon and listen to their conversation, I’ll then trick myself into the belief that I’m not there but that I am everywhere, my mind then, like a computer, inactive for a little, will turn into a screensaver, shooting random images, memories, hate and love, judgment and love like if there wasn’t nothing in between, no tragedy or story to move from one to the other, a voidness so powerful that presents good and evil as ridiculous possibilities.. –Oh, how powerful this feels-..

I’ll grin, stand, and once again, walk inside, shifting from the warm, violent and emotional air of the harbor to the cold, dry, judgmental and monumental air of the airport. In a shift of perspective I also jump from the humbling, monotonous, “still very unknown” world of my breathing to the arrogant, powerful, disruptive and known world of my thoughts. Still thinking about 3:30PMs IMAX show of cosmic collisions, about how the moon was created in weeks after a mars-sized chunk of rock hit the earth, about Apollo 11 and the 380 kilograms of lunar rock we’ve brought since then, that’s perfect “human” right there…

Tomorrow I have a plane to catch; today I have nothing. I do have a perfect solitude in a very unfamiliar environment. Not in any way I pretend to jump into judgment but maybe this is just the face of the world we’ve created, uncaring, lonely, cold, but then again we also have pink and yellow, 20-20000 hertz, noise cancelling earphones, only 283 Hong Kong dollars (with TAX). Sometimes when you walk around cities like Hong Kong, when you become witness to a poor fellow breaking apart and crying in the 9am line to breakfast you think (or I think) bad,BAD world… but isn’t this exactly what we need to start loving each other? It is my duty to you recognizing that I did feel a lot of compassion at 9am line to breakfast. A compassion definitely beyond good and evil, thank you Nietzsche…

But then again, tomorrow I have a plane to catch, today I have nothing… but if I remember correctly, earlier today, while passively smoking, in my screensaver-turning self, nothing and everything came together all at once, so according to my current lucidty tomorrow I have nothing to catch, today I have everything… =)


it's all love,
Miguel

Friday, July 23, 2010

may your will be still


sometimes it is but a restless Tuesday, a couple of hours before a trip, or a combination of random possibilities that sets our mind ablaze...


tomorrow I leave, today I sit before a blank space with a full mind, chocolate bars turned into trembling hands, ready to move and shift from thoughts to strokes, from letters to concepts, the subjective to the pretended objective, and from this objective to the squared subjective, making it even more interesting... a self thankfully still devoted to questions, not ready for answers, picking up pieces from both memory and imagination and trying to fit them together not into a cohesive but into a dynamic existence, not an existence of goods and evils, no truths nor lies, but simply presence...

there was a story, there is a story, a story about the head that fell of, Akutagawa wrote that the only part of ourselves that can be trusted is the part that ¨knows (I should add ¨feels¨) he/she/it can´t be trusted, hence the origin of my thesis, my proposal, my suggestion... One that circles around what I perceive as a lack of balance, an ün¨blance between the world of the known, and the world of the unknown...

genesis reads about the garden of eden, a place with among others, two special trees, symbolic trees, the tree of good and evil (tree of opposites in some translations), and the tree of life, it was indeed a temptation for man to associate knowledge through good and evil, to deliver himself to temptation while looking for judgment, for truth, for good, and such for the original sin (also translated as original mistake), and so we became aware of our nakedness, so we lost access to the tree of life... in this I find great knowledge, with this I suggest not to make that original mistake, lets not fall in that ün¨balance, in a world of science and truths, in reductionism and perfectionism, progress and capitalism, both through religious dogmas and through scientific explanations we fixate our selves and associate them with the world of the ¨known¨... it leaves no space for growth, knowledge or even god, it leaves us with nothing to surrender.. no-one to surrender...

let us not forget that the mind works with good and evil, through them we experience, we feel the warmth of love and the bitterness of loneliness thanks to good and evil, the yin and yang of perceptions and the rules of creation... yet a very different story if that of the tree of life, of ishvarapranidhana, of surrendering, what is experienced when we sit in silence, when we let our will be still so the will of something bigger can flow through and throughout us... this detachment that grows as we observe our minds, as we tap into a very unfamiliar core of uncertainty, of humbleness and tinniness.... with this as an argument I invite us all to become both familiar and intimate with this uncertainty, to be a little skeptical of our-selves (both good and evil), not because we don´t believe but simply because we don´t know, cherish that very sensation that Morpheus describes to neo when he says have you ever felt that what you believe is real is not real, look not for real but simply balance your self by making him familiar with what tickles reality, what ridicules time and meaning...

with this in mind, hehehe I start my travels this year, with great people we intend to go listen to some surely realty tickling voices...

Monday, June 14, 2010

un dia en el parque

in honor of the greatness seeded within those very tiny pieces of time, extended and dragged into our core by a subtle and sublime significance... something that suddenly shifts, when will is only the beginning of something and willingness is really what lets it happen...

in honor of this I share a little video, filmed in a little piece of time, in a park nested in the chaos of a perhaps too big mexico city... with a coach marked by simplicity and a charm I hope is shown in this little experiment...

cheers, love, dark chocolate and peace flowing to you all

http://www.vimeo.com/11312535

blue day


a blue day


it is funny what we set ourselves to think… "we humans" (quoting prot)…

today i woke up to a blue day, perhaps the lack of sleep, too much or too little sugar, our collective energy, gods will, shiva's tantrum, a fluctuation, virus, flaw, gift, a yin of a day, or a smile looking at it broadly…

however fixated I am to look for the reason that differentiates this moment from perhaps, another less blue moment, is not the reason behind it, but what it creates or evokes in my place within a game of temporality… one could say that blue days are not exactly sad days, but more like stuck days.. not far from the hindu concept of dukha, or a taoist lack of movement… being stuck, or a runaway from duality sounds reasonable, for a moment it even makes sense until it inescapably tumbles back to duality, even lends itself to irony as it becomes restless (as the lambs become lions)…

In my restless state I ponder in meditation, I could feel stuck…it would be easy and perhaps even a great escape through logic (wo/MAN I love logic), go climb and forget all about it, I could also be unwilling or perhaps un-wanting, that would be sweet (tuck under my sheets), getting away from "proving me wrong".. yet, what If I more humbly recognize myself as wanting? what matters now is not my lack of movement but my lack of presence ,the disparity and obliviousness of a self accustomed to get away from itself, or at least from one of the sides to itself… a couple of days ago I wrote about the infinite possibilities of human consciousness, how the presence of a free, unlimited consciousness (not the intellectual approach, but the spiritual approach) could set us free to move… it could interact with the other mental, physical, and constrained part of our nature to flow from one to the other.. that day I wrote about how dreams, imagination, a the subjective "feel" behind concepts like love, compassion, fear, suffering, empathy and so on had a liberating (reality ridiculing) quality behind them… about how the lesson from dreams could be not to hunt us but to teach us (the lesson of art to decode and not to encode (game of words?hopefully =)), not to remind us trauma but to show us the absurdity of fixation upon traumas, how by the multiplication and onirical reproduction of trauma in its most ironic, ridiculous, or "Extra"real form we can remind ourselves not to fixate but to re-create, not to fix to to mess up completely, beautifully (wo/MAN I love words)….

i remember a while back when a great teacher in china told me about the world of the known (human, real, put together, conceptual, left brain, timely, rational, real, physical, mechanistic, concrete, yang, macho, abc, phenomena, master roshi, yoga for dummies kinda thing) and the world of the unknown (ironic to put something in here no?,,, perhaps emotional, onirical, emotional, spiritual, a-temporal, a-logical, infinite, we've spent a lot of time trying to put it together thats for sure heh)… he taught me how we loved to breathe in, but hated to breathe out, we loved to control and were desperate not t to forgive, loved to speak but forgot how to listen…I felt evil, shit I felt bad, he just said it was practice, social, mechanistic practice, extensive and pretty meticulous human practice, conditioning, not evil, no demons, these were just symbols to bad practice…

in the end… today I would love to understand, but I'd hate not to, maybe even attribute it to myself, reproach myself, all in a quest to preserve rutine, why destroy when you can explain, make it stronger, its a great question,, hehe as great as why go skiing? why not sit in a bed eating chocolates all day? maybe thats just half the picture (thankfully?)

perhaps it is also a great day to listen, a day to deliver myself to the world of the unknown, let it be presence that creates movement, let it be presence that lets my heart and imagination roam free, ponder, suffer, and delight itself upon bigger questions….

as it turned out it was also a day to write, to remember those I love and how close they feel sometimes… to be thankful and embrace…. and let go this piece of myself in hopes that its taken somewhere nice, deliver some questions maybe...

and now its time to stop.. smile.. and send the best of you in me to the best of you out there… =) … peace
ohm peace hermanos y hermanas

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

brother and sisters

saludos... greeting... just wanted to say helou and share with you something I have been working on... its in
http://sites.google.com/site/thepathtooneself

namaste everyone.. may the divine sweetness inside us seek nothing but the divine sweetness in all of us =)

Thursday, August 27, 2009

a tuesday afternoon


Today I believe there is a story to be told, it all happened in the valley of Mexico, a place that used to be a lake. The story, or tale, all came to be in the mind and life of an individual, myself. A random series of events that, with time, flowed smoothly, oblivious to the self (my “self”) paying attention inside them. Thoughts and events that in the end came together and somehow rang in my mind like letters to a poem. Letters once my imagination put together, became a humorous, simple story.

I will start with something I believe important to the story; it is part of the context, a context unnecessary to describe yet pertaining something crucial related to my means of communication. This “crucial” became nothing but the motivation, the thrive and the spark of a destiny that either had sense (religious), made sense (logician), was given sense (utilitarian), or had absolutely nothing (skeptic). In the valley, where there used to be a lake, today, Tuesday august the twenty-fifth of 2009 I traded my means of transportation. It was to a smiling simple man with a big mustache that I sold my mothers fancy, air conditioned, Dvd equipped, sweet smelling, memory packed, inspirationally named SUV for a pair of 100% indigenous, leather smelling, hard-to-break-into, asymmetrical, beautiful, handmade, also memory packed, happy sandals. What was a hedonistic shame, a spiritual gift, and somewhere in the middle something that just happened ultimately became the spark of a tale.

What happens now I believe is what happens in life when we take our mind off something in particular, a singular stream of any type of experience. Narrated in a form that seeks to be objective (impossible), loyal (impossible), blank (impossible), a form that thanks to impossibility yields us the freedom to put the pieces together,,

I sat at home, looked at the clock (4 pm), thought about my day (great day), packed my climbing shoes, packed my chalk, walked towards a rendezvous point, it rained, I got wet, my hoodie fell to a puddle of oil and water near the sidewalk, I felt humidity creeping inside me, I saw a couple kiss below the bushes on the sidewalk, they giggled as I saw them, instantly thought I’d do better, I felt jealous of “that”, wondered what “that” meant, I imagined rats planning inside the sewers, a homeless man called me “guero” (blonde) and asked me for a cigarette, I answered I didn’t smoke, he didn’t believe me, I tried to look honest, he kept walking, he looked used to “it”, I disliked “it”, I kept walking, thinking, I saw small cars, looked for big yellow cars, didn’t find any, kept walking, saw a taxi driver frowning in front of his broken car, I sat with him for a little bit, both beneath a bus stop sheltered from a growing rain, he told me about how since last Saturday he has no water, about how every day he has to take a few trips to his brothers house to fill buckets with water, he told me about angry people, sad people, I remembered my big garden, golf courses also came to mind, I remembered playing with sprinkles as a child, the faucet running while I brushed my teeth, I kept walking, hummed a couple of songs, “mama tierra” among them (by Macaco), felt connected, felt responsible, felt powerful, got scared, kept walking, made it to my destination, hopped in a white car, kissed a beautiful girl and started travelling at previously impossible speeds.

As every other Tuesday I climbed, failed and succeeded all in the lapse of a couple of hours. I tried very hard in an attempt to be tired so that we could leave early, Mariana had homework, and I had to walk. I got tired quickly, with my forearms pumped, my fingertips on fire, and a smile on my face we left, Mariana to do homework, I to walk. There are a few details as a reader I believe you should know before I continue, in the beginning on the previous paragraph I clearly stated what I packed, but I forgot to mention some of the things I didn’t pack, among them money. As I kept walking, the night got colder and my feet got heavier, my mind thought about taking a bus for the last section of my trip yet only to stumble upon the fact that I had no money, so I kept walking. As I walked I did not stumble, but merely recognized the occurrence, or occasion, or location, that I was in front of a store that happened to have something I needed, a couple of pens and a blank paged notebook. I made sure they accepted credit cards and I proceeded to buy 3 black pens, a blank paged notebook with a beautiful and colorful frog on the cover, a black sharpie, a funny orange sharpie, a couple of blank cd’s (5 to be exact) I saw sitting next to the M&M’s by the cashier, the M&Ms (the yellow ones with peanuts), and a bottle of water. Once again I forgot to inform the reader that as I stepped into the store, humming and moving in accord to the tempo of happy music I realized a cop was behind me trying to tell me something. In a moment of understanding I knew I had to leave my backpack inside the lockers on the entrance, something I always knew yet had previously pushed it into a convenient unconscious. As I paid I realized a girl by the cashier had organized my objects into a bag, I also realized I had nothing to give her. I smiled and in a gesture of sympathy I dug into my pockets to surprisingly find a single, lonely, forgotten 10 peso coin, displaying tonatiuh from the Aztec sun stone on its front, and the telling of a story on its back, its center 65% copper, 25% zinc, 10% nickel, its golden ring 100% bronze. Without anything in my mind but gratefulness, without any thought of the potential benefit I could receive from that coin, without thinking the bus I could take home, without thinking I could give her half the coin and still have enough change for the bus, without thinking my backpack was in a locker at the entrance of the store,I gave her the coin, sled my earphones back to my ears, thought about everything I hadn’t thought off (except my backpack), and happily stepped outside to continue my walking.

I stopped at a park to ask about a book fair that was passing through, I asked if they would be there tomorrow, they said yes, I resumed my walking, I thought about the rats again, I thought about why I was thinking about rats so much, I pondered through answers, ate M&Ms and avoided the cracks on the sidewalk, accidentally stepped on a puddle of water, turned right on Miguel Angel de Quevedo, thought about how close I was, thought about how far I was, appreciated the silence the night brings to the city, I imaged the valley some time ago, the valley being a lake a long time ago, I remembered the taxi driver filling buckets, I remembered long showers, felt powerful, imagined churches being built on top of the Aztec temples, about the 31 days every year that the air is actually considered non-toxic in the city, about the estimated 100,000 children that die every year due to pollution, I thought about what we own owning us, about us really owning what we own, about not owning, about love, about my family, about the “city of hope” as Lopez Obrador spoke about it, about parents reading bedtime stories to their children, I kept walking, walked in front of a famous bakery, thought about bread, remembered I had no money, thought about maybe looking for money in my backpack, remembered I had forgotten my backpack, thought about getting angry, thought about being happy, started walking back to my backpack, realized the night was colder, my legs were heavier, thought about not walking back, fantasized about skating back, realized I had to walk back, fantasized about walking back, put on a new cd (dark side of the moon), roamed around endless reasons to be unhappy, roamed around endless reasons to be happy, tuned into my earphones as my heart surrendered to track number 4, thought about time, about patience, about all we create, all we destroy, about how the sun is the same in a relative way but we are older, about all that we are, about all that we trust, about all that we own, about everything there is, about the sun circling around pacing our lives, about time, about a gift, sneaking behind us to show its too late, I walked up to the locker, found my bag, It felt funny in my hands, almost dreamlike, I walked back, realized my shoes were rustier, the nigh was colder, the dark side of the moon was over, my heart was older, and my soul was younger…. (11:00 PM)

Thursday, July 23, 2009

why today be the first? =)



with all my love,


Whether its the echo of my lingering dreams, the "blues" of change, of the embracing of whats coming, today was the first time I decided to write in a little while.....


It had been days while I remained fooled and humbled by the paradox between the lack and the infinity of sense... Today while sitting with myself I remembered the words of a great teacher who once told me, "love and the rest is coming"... hence the title of this blog, an attempt that grows out of a challenge to my own mind and to the way I was taught "I thought, therefore I was", Descartes famous saying rang in my mind not because of its lack of truth, but because it ignored that every great truth comes in pairs. Its arrogance ignores what Bohm once called the law of exclusive truths...... when he pointed the direction between the mind and the self he ignored the conection between the self and the mind......... he taught us how to "learn to love" (mind to self) yet spoke little about love to learn.


The last couple of weeks have represented nothing but change, I left and brought with me what became my home, a loving family, teachers, masters, unwavering friends, beautiful skies, penetrating seasons and a set of moments, undefined by lenght but marked by profoundity. It is to all these nouns with their adjectives that I now honor and remain thankful. I travelled with a blessing of a girlfriend and another gift of a brother, met masters and lessons. And what I wish to write and portray is a little glimpse of if how these things changed me. This summer the world, my life, and causality came together to present me with a choice, I used what I had to choose and embarked my self into another adventure, one full of lessons, and while I consciously lead my mind the greatest lesson would come from a humble spirit that simply followed. A spirit who, like water, knew the power of non doing, a spirit that loved the earth, loves depht, a spirit that does not compete and a master that teaches without speaking. A master that gently changes us when we listen, he does not compete with the mind because he doesn't recognize good and evil because like love, "it" or "he' or "she" exists apart from them. Like Lao Tzu wrote it, he acts but takes no merit, and many times because of this we dont listen. But seen in a beautiful way because of this it is a lesson to listen. With this intention I create this space, an attempt to share, to listen, and ultimately to grow. I believe its interesting how in history there have always been those who listen, and it is what they shared that continues to change us. Those messages of love and compassion, those stories of fear and denial that live in a collective experience while continuing to bounce inside us. And I hope that through the simplicity of our stories we can practice listening....


Since I left I have been moving south, crossed the border into mexico and have continued to walk, jump, or hop (like in a yoga class) through moments, people, and lessons that I will try to share through this little space in the computer. I hope that I get to hear about you, your thoughts, or anything that we can share in the spirit of growing, learning, laughing, or any other verb we can think of.


to all my friends, teachers, brothers and sisters

like vash the stampede would say LOOOOOVE AND PEEEACEEE

=)