The night before, I was in a Gulag, doing endless work under endless abuse, under a hot sun. We did pushups, we were beaten, we were insulted.
My sets of dreams lately have had distinct textures. I feel like some deep part of my self is contacting not just my waking consciousness, but what lies beneath all of this. Some of this is me, my past, my pain, but some of it is more.
The Gulag, in particular, had in a way I can’t describe the texture of a straw mat. It was composed of strands, threaded together to make an apparent whole, to make what seemed solid ground, but which wasn’t.
I feel like this gulag–Laogai, to use the Chinese word, which is more relevant, since they still exist all these years later, after so much of the world has evolved into something approximating pervasive decency–represented a true bottom for me. This is the bottom of my perceptual field. It contains my early trauma, but also the trauma of life itself, the suffering at the root of it.
Below, there is no more ground. It opens up to sky below as well as sky above. It is thick, very thick, and dissolving it will leave me in open space.
But this is the goal. This is freedom. I can go where I like.
And it occurs to me that the Self–the Atman, or atta–which the Buddhists said did not exist consists in a faculty which has as its only purpose LIMITING our perception. The Self is “that which makes dreams and vistas smaller, the eyes dimmer, the mind duller, and which erodes all the other faculties in negative ways.” The Self is a step down transformer which serves the sole purpose of rejection. It has no affirmative function, and asking it to do more than it can is to destroy it. This is why growth has to be gradual, and the release of the restraints also gradual. The hose has to become bigger and bigger, until the ocean can be embraced, and the hose dissolved as no longer necessary.
Tantra, I read, means woven. What we create is likewise woven. And what is woven can be reduced to strings, and what was behind that pattern can then be seen. You enter what is behind the picture through the strands composing it. There is really no other good way.