I ran 7 more cemetery miles today.  Actually just  *now* .  Felt *left out all alone*.  Like an Iraqi fugitive transported to the land of the foreign dead.  Busted my psychic gut for the last lap, I did.  Yes, that was a vintage gesture on behalf of all that’s universally intrepid.

I’m sunning now between gravestones and sipping 'something' from a can to replenish my sacred bodily fluids.   Zazen.

I helped a chick name Sue this morning retrieve her personal belongings from the premises of an estranged lover.  No, I wasn’t alone, but attended by a motley band of rascals.  Though her ex- didn’t want to let us in, the shock and awe of a horde of scoundrels appearing at his door on Sunday morning forced his hand.  But get this: she said ‘just two dressers’ and it turned out that she had a full half-household to move.  So after spending three hours when we expected to spend only one, my buddy Mike and myself re-prioritized and just shuffled along. 

He shuffled home to rake leaves.  I shuffled here to bask in the sun.  Satori.

It seems that Xangans, by evidence of the sparsity of comments, have been recently 'melting away' as quickly as the Saddam regime.  omg, I hope that most of my now-missing readers were not part of that Saddam regime.

Energy abounds in the world.  Pure energy.  No one can absorb it all less they burst forth as bright as a sun.  And no one can swallow the sun.

‘Sensory data’ is mediated energy.  Energy is thus interpreted and stripped down to functional essentials.  Our senses empower us by gathering a few filaments of energy here and there.  Thus assembled, the consensual gravity of the ‘known world’ bears down upon each of us to make sense of our interpretations in the ‘given’ context of what’s deemed a joint reality.

Though there are slight variations in the conscious senses, (e.g., some see better than others, some taste salt more acutely, some hear tones that others miss, etc.), there is a great and overriding genetic uniformity throughout all of humanity in what filaments of energy the senses gather and how they are assembled into meaningfulness.

But why do we insist that mediating energy through the consensually-acclaimed senses is the only way to apprehend it?  What happens when the point of assemblage is shifted , as in dreams, as through the use of energy-shifting drugs, or even by means of acquired volition?

While many might claim that dreams and ‘altered states’ of consciousness lose touch with a consensual ‘reality’, might it not be the case that our collection points for energy assemblage shift with these other states of consciousness and that different and unusual, yet equally real , filaments of energy are thus tapped, assembled, and interpreted?   

I’ve pressed here above to the limits of my knowledge and experience.  And I now stand at a door which others have described below:

When human beings are perceived as conglomerates of energy fields, a point of intense luminosity can be perceived at the height of the shoulder blades an arm's length away from them, on the back. The seers of ancient times who discovered this point of luminosity called it the assemblage point, because they concluded that it is there that perception is assembled. They noticed, aided by their seeing, that on that spot of luminosity, the location of which is homogeneous for mankind, converge zillions of energy fields in the form of luminous filaments which constitute the universe at large. Upon converging there, they become sensory data, which is utilizable by human beings as organisms. This utilization of energy turned into sensory data was regarded by those shamans as an act of pure magic: energy at large transformed by the assemblage point into a veritable, all-inclusive world in which human beings as organisms can live and die. The act of transforming the inflow of pure energy into the perceivable world was attributed by those shamans to a system of interpretation. Their shattering conclusion, shattering to them, of course, and perhaps to some of us who have the energy to be attentive, was that the assemblage point was not only the spot where perception was assembled by turning the inflow of pure energy into sensory data, but the spot where the interpretation of sensory data took place.

Their next shattering observation was that the assemblage point is displaced in a very natural and unobtrusive way out of its habitual position during sleep. They found out that the greater the displacement, the more bizarre the dreams that accompany it. From these seeing observations, those shamans jumped to the pragmatic action of the volitional displacement of the assemblage point. And they called their concluding results the art of dreaming.

This art was defined by those shamans as the pragmatic utilization of ordinary dreams to create an entrance into other worlds by the act of displacing the assemblage point at will and maintaining that new position, also at will. The observations of those shamans upon practicing the art of dreaming were a mixture of reason and seeing energy directly as it flows in the universe. They realized that at its habitual position, the assemblage point is the spot where converges a given, minuscule portion of the energy filaments that make up the universe, but if the assemblage point changes location, within the luminous egg, a different minuscule portion of energy fields converges on it, giving as a result a new inflow of sensory data: energy fields different from the habitual ones are turned into sensory data, and those different energy fields are interpreted as a different world.

   - Magical Passes, Carlos Castaneda