bodhisattva (detail)

[from my livejournal post 5/26/2008]

Basically, life is getting more real. Happiness, disappointment, diseases, and life goes on. Books become escape, and aren't actually lovers and children. They are books as sadly as television is television. Everything is as it is, rather than how I saw it or experienced it.
It feels like the start of a fall, when your feet are still technically on the ground, when it's just so barely beyond the horizon of potential recovery. But it doesn't feel like falling, it just feels like that exact position, before your brain even deals with noticing you can't do anything, before even notices what you might do if it weren't that moment too late.

But it doesn't feel bad.

Also, I'm redefining my life. I started with the idea of love, and now I'm on to exploring heroes. It's like sound, and peeling away all the dark grey and red and yellow-ochre and dark green and steel-blue tendrils, everything that's attached but you know is not quite purely the sound, until all that's left is the only-thing-worth-living-for, comfortably-reassuring "om." It's remembering, step by step, in detail, that the "om" is in there, in everything, and that the panic or fear or happiness or whatever you're feeling is an illusion, because you know true peace and happiness and love, and you know "this" isn't it, no matter how good or real it feels, because even when you forget what nirvana feels like, you at least remember it feels better than this.
And also, since these illusions are there, then you have to understand it's most rational to assume you put them in there, for some better or worse reason. If you figure out which were for good reasons and which for bad reasons, and if you decide to replace the ones that were "for good," then still remember that you're placing illusions between yourself and nirvana. Remember it's unnecessary, and remember later why you did it, for what good reasons you did it. Because if you're not still pursuing that "good" goal, then your illusions aren't doing you any good any more. And remember that, ultimately, they never were, never are, and never will.