More Notes from SWEDA

SWEDA's a not-doing. Not-doings center around acting for something besides personal gain.

Not-doings are acts that we can't have strong feelings about, that we can't invest in, emotionally or otherwise. That's what makes them not-doings, and why they allow us to experience ourselves outside the constructed identity, with its carrot-whip agenda, as neutral, impersonal awareness.

Not-doings are things to do simply because we can ~ and because we know that, since in the light of our pending death, nothing is really "worth" doing, we may as well do something. It is the start of controlled folly.

A "pure" not-doing has no result at all, however, such as moving rocks around in a garden then trying to remember where they were and place them back in the exact same positions. It is pointless, and the only "reward" is that, because we can't think about what we are doing (it makes no sense), it calms down the internal dialogue and we experience a freer, more childlike expression of our being.

One problem people have with sweda, or with the people there, isn't that they aren't being straight about their incapacity to be straight; it's that they aren't enjoying expressing their twisty lack of straightness enough. They feel bored because they are used to only acting when there's something in it for them, some sort of perk. There are no perks at sweda.

Beyond the boredom and despair of constant self-immersion, of dwelling endlessly on our personal self, is the delight of acting and living for the sheer hell of it.

At SWEDA, you get to talk about yourself all day long with an audience of sorcerers!

What more could you possibly want out of life??

***

Being a man is like being a ghost. Living with death always at arm's length, just one touch away.

Living for nothing, yet with the abundance that comes through us when we are emptied of all our wants and needs.

***


Going finer.

The greater the noise, the harder it is to find a signal in that noise. But the deeper and more information-rich that signal will be if we do find it.

JDR talks about how it's easy to smell a flower and tune into the essence-of-being within that flower. He compares that with breathing in fumes, and tuning into the essence of being within those fumes. Point is, it is the same essence, the same being, but it's a lot harder to tune into it with fumes, than with the flower.

Going finer means being willing to drop beneath the surface and find what's of value even in the coarsest or most uncomfortable of situations. It's ignoring the gorgeous hard-bodied babe at the bar to talk to the geeky girl with pimples, because you sense that she has something to offer beyond boobs and lips. And then, by connecting to the geeky girl, experiencing a kind of attraction much softer, subtler, and richer because it wasn't immediately apparent.

It means being in an uncomfortable situation and, instead of trying to get out of it or change it to make ourselves more comfortable, just being in it as-it-is, and seeing what is actually on offer. What happens then is that we find a place within ourselves that is comfortable in the midst of our discomfort, and then we realize that we don't need all those surface elements to be comfortable, or turned on, or happy, or whatever, because we have all that within ourselves. We have the capacity to find a signal of truth in any amount of noise, of lies or ugliness or pollution or discomfort, or whatever we are surrounded by.

In simple terms, it is settling for less. And the less we settle for, the more we find.