I’d forgotten about it till I found it, though I remembered it when I saw it; and no, I won’t bother to find a clearer version for you to look at.

That’s a picture of me, of course – April of 2003, it seems. I was 21 then.

But let me step back a moment.

What I wanted to say was that, many times in my life, going back as far as I can remember, down even to my earliest childhood memories, I’ve found myself... alone.

Like, in an empty room, with no one to talk to, nowhere to go, nothing to do, having exhausted the possibilities afforded by the situation to entertain my mind with the sensory distractions around me, whether counting ceiling-tiles, exploring the surface of the walls around me, inspecting every inch of the floor, or looking over every inch of my body.

In my experience, different things can happen when you reach that point of final frustration, or surrender, when you realize there’s really nothing to do and nowhere to go.

But what I wanted to say was that, in my experience, what usually begins to happen at that point is a sort of digestion – a turning inward of the attention to the noumenal plane.

The fire of the mind and its hunger turns to the storehouse of accumulated impressions and begins first to bring light, then heat, to them.

And then?

Well, in that process of digestion by the fire of consciousness, what’s frozen in potentiality is given life again, for a longer or shorter time, until it’s transformed, consumed, and reduced to ash.

And this may be getting ahead of myself, as I tend to do, but I’ll trust that it’s right, as it usually is... but I should say that that ash then serves to fertilize the growth of new seeds in the noumenal plane – seeds that, missed by even my ever-watchful eye, have already been brought there on winds of change and which will sprout and take root before the next return to the inner realm.

Yes.

And before I return to that picture, and its story, what I should also add – it is relevant, though I may not have occasion to go into just why this time around – is that while one option, when placed in the position of surrender at the end of nowhere to go, nothing to do, is to turn the attention inward and engage in willing self-digestion, another option is simply to dissociate.

I can’t say I’m unfamiliar with that process, either, unfortunately, and I can’t say it’s all bad, either, unfortunately; but I will say that it’s a dangerous path to walk, even when done willingly and consciously, so far as that’s even possible.

The distinction between those two paths, digestion and dissociation, can be a fine one, and a difficult one not only to explain to others unfamiliar with conscious explorations of the inner realms, but to sort out oneself, as one turns inward.

In a word, having nowhere to go and nothing to do is, from a certain perspective, a kind of torture, especially for a certain kind of person, and it’s a natural human process to respond to torture with dissociation – which is to say, the spirit and its conscious mind leaving the here-and-now, leaving the body itself, to traverse non-physical realms while the physical body endures the suffering and torture.

The thing is, the conscious mind I’m talking about isn’t the same as the deep mind, the eternal and ever-present witness and recorder; that’s always there.

And in the absence of direction, protection, guidance, and overall good governance by the conscious mind, it’s a docile, innocent, guileless, obedient servant of whatever influences, external or otherwise, wish to make impressions upon it.

And, interestingly, that deep mind can be given instructions to follow which, later, the conscious mind, after having returned and taken up its governance again, will be entirely unaware of – at least for a while, anyway; that what’s hidden should come to light is also a natural process that takes place within the human being.

This is a big, big subject, with many, many ramifications, many implications – far, far beyond the reach of what I want to share here today, far beyond, perhaps, the scope of my life-experience to be able to discuss in a meaningful way.

But it’s not irrelevant.

For today, anyway, it, and this, serves as a stage, a backdrop, and grounds for at least a little discussion of the subject of memory.

Why do we remember what we remember and forget what we forget?

And why is it that, if you really spend time not in dissociation but in willing, wakeful self-digestion, you begin to see that life experiences aren’t stored in strictly linear, temporal sequence, but rather… in harmonious thematic groupings, each grouping bearing its own characteristic emotional mark, all of its members bound together by a sort of “sympathetic resonance of vibrations”?

What I’m saying is that, in my experience, memories aren’t sequenced like a dictionary – arranged, cover to cover, in a cold order conceived by a calculating mind divorced from lived experience – but like the radif of Persian classical dastgaah music – one living, breathing, organic whole naturally sub-divided, not unlike a tree and its branching trunk, into a small number of over-arching themes, each representing something like a “garden of feeling” consciously arranged with a mind toward expressing a particular set of harmonious impressions, each garden being composed of some number of interrelated sub-themes and unique melodies, all of which are able to be arranged and rearranged with some measure of expressive freedom, within bounds, to bring forth endless and ever-deeper understanding of both the radif-reperetoire itself and of life in all its aspects.

Just now this reminds me of the first of a series of thirteen essays I wrote eight years ago – alluded to elsewhere here, and shared only in small part – and two lines from it, one of which was echoing in my mind yesterday, one of which comes clearly to mind now, as I write.

I’ll share them both with you, the first amid a slightly larger contextualizing excerpt:

The shell of my heart cracked and tender love sprang out. Tendrils of love. Roots and vines and sudden trunks and branches, a concentrated, grinning, outgrowing forcefulness that would not be obstructed –  vitality and life – and a thousand leaves shimmering and shaking in noteless symphony.

A thousand leaves shimmering and shaking in noteless symphony – that was the line echoing in my mind.

And then, this:

Where do you think you’re going, what do you think you have to do?

Mm.

Why do we remember what we remember and forget what we forget?

Again I’m getting ahead of myself, but I’d say the key is emotional salience, or emotional intensity: the nature of the emotion, whether its uniqueness, its intensity, its significance in the great life-theme being composed, or its harmony or consonance with some deep element of an inherited repertoire – this determines whether it’s “engraved” in the first place, while what is engraved then serves as… let’s call it a node in a web of resonances, or a string on a dulcimer, or a melody with a unique frequency which, when plucked, struck, or intoned by another life-experience, by nature of its resonant frequency and its connections, can call forth other previously-engraved feeling-memories belonging to the same “dastgaah” or feeling-memory complex, however deeply hidden to the daily, strictly “functional” waking consciousness.

As I said earlier, this may not be the place to go into everything, certainly not in fine detail, but – interestingly – by way of experiences that I might call “Qigong-catalyzed coincidence,” in my recent time spent in self-digestion, I’ve experienced, as I often do, a strange interplay of dreams, intuitions, passing thoughts, things read and heard, and reachings out in physical reality by people from my past that has served, in part, to call forth long-forgotten memory-melodies that, perhaps, are serving to bring forth a new music in my life.

What will grow on the ends of that branching out, we’ll see; that’s not for today.

As I said earlier:

I have to say it that way, or we’ll be here all day.

But that picture – me, age 21.

Seeing that led me to dig up some old writing, which I’ll be sharing – if not here, as in appended below, then here, as in into this partially-extruded digitization of my imaginal realm, which I call my website.

Both the picture and the writing brought back a lot of things I’d forgotten.

I won’t go into all that; having written now what you’ve read above, I feel that I’ve said what needed to be said, though it wasn’t quite what I expected, dimly though I intended it when I began.

I guess all I’d add now, then, is this, as an entry-point or introduction to what I’ll share afterwards.

First, it’s interesting to see myself about a quarter-century later, and with a certain distance from the storm of dark feeling that clouded my perceptions of myself and my life when that picture was taken.

I’m not sure if you can see it on my face there, but beneath a sort of perfunctory smile, there was a… distance from life and from feeling, a lostness, and a restlessness that was a searching for meaning in a world that made no sense to me.

This is a theme I’ve had to return to again and again in my life – inner restlessness while living in an outer world that’s strange to me, – though being older now, I’m better-equipped, whether with wisdom, experience, or spiritual tools, to deal with the difficulties that entails.

I won’t go into all of it now, though I think that both directly and indirectly, what I’ll share after this will tell you what I mean.

But… the essence of the flavor of what all this boils down to – if you’d like me to serve you a spoonful for your health and to satisfy your tongue’s curiosity – is…

I’m realizing that who I am, I’ve always been and always will be, and… well, the suffering I endured, at my own and others’ hands, for refusing the life I was being offered (or even its very nature) was not in vain – both in the sense that it has borne good fruit and in the sense that my perceptions were a dead-center intuitive hit, no matter how much I doubted myself or others told me I was wrong.

And second, to bring this discourse back down to earth for a moment, I have to say… I look at that picture and think a few other things, too.

Like, Man, I was in fantastic shape back then. Just beautiful – a work of art. Why did I hate myself so much?

And, Back then, I had lots of hair on my head and very little on the rest of my body; now, I have very little hair on my head and lots on the rest of my body. Life has a wisdom, a balance, and a sense of humor.

And… I’m a lot closer to 50 now than I am to 21, and… I have to say, though I won’t be taking any salacious half-nude pictures to stimulate the flow of your saliva or to verify my claim... I’m in even better shape and health now than I was then.

More muscle, with better definition and balance in overall composition; just as flexible; stronger, and with better endurance than ever; to say nothing of a greater overall “fully-embodied presence,” even down to fine detail, with the excellent conscious control of movement that that entails.

And maybe I should leave it on this note, now that I reflect on that reality.

Though, encased in my latest cocoon, I might protest the lack of light, the nearness of its walls, and the stinging of the digestive acids effecting my newest death and rebirth, I am truly blessed in more ways than I can count, or than I will recount, not least of these being my exceptionally good health.

I’ve met and known enough people my age, or close enough, who are already hobbled husks of humans, and yet – and I’m almost ashamed to say it – I feel I’m still growing, thriving, waxing strong, flowering, and still have many fruit-bearing seasons awaiting me.

There are more lines on my face, but there’s still light in my eyes – can you say that?

Every day, my life begins anew, one wonder and surprise follows another – can you say that?

A few years ago, I admitted to a relentless inquisitor that, yes, sometimes I wished I had a woman, a wife, to live with me, but not for the usual reasons – for sex, for conversation, or for the practical convenience of her presence.

No; what I really wanted, now and then, was for someone to enjoy me enjoying myself, to be witness to the modest wonders revealed to and through me at every turn in my little life.

I experience so much of this magic, so many of these little wonders, even in momentary expressions of improvisation of my body-instrument in its daily doings, which I can’t tell or show anyone unless they’re with me then and there, attuned to the melody of the moment, and the swing of my being-tempo, with me.

Yes, sometimes I’ve wished to share that; but who can be small and quiet enough for it?

Of course, that wish is only the passing vanity of a moment; my own enjoyment is enough.

I remember that God is my lidless, ever-wakeful witness, while all my doings are etched in the imperishable record-halls of His eternal mind; who else, then, should I wish to share them with, or how?

Who else should I trust to make music with the modest melodies I add to the universal radif?

3 June 2025