Enlightening Nonsense

Duck and I were having what seemed like an argument “in the box” of the Instant Message chat. I finally typed in, “I love you!” She ignored that comment and kept barreling ahead with what a prick I am. A little later I wrote, “Did you see that I wrote ‘I love you!’?” Her response was, “You can take your ‘I love you’ and shove it up your ass.” I was thrilled and popped open the bottle of champagne that has been in my closet for seven years awaiting a special occasion to break out—she was willing to try anal, even if it was my ass that was going to take the pounding!

I had invited my friend Dizzy to my upcoming yoga class; it was scheduled for 10:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning. She emailed me that she wouldn’t be coming, that with her busy work and play rehearsal schedule and supporting her actor friends by seeing them in their plays, she needs to recoup and take care of herself. I totally understood. I then wrote her something that I suspected she would take the wrong way. And I was not disappointed—she did.

I specifically told her that I didn’t want her to take this in a guilt-inducing way and that I was hesitant to even share this thought with her. I said that while she supports her actor friends by seeing them in their shows.

“What do you think my ‘acting’ is? Right now it is my teaching and my writing.” I concluded with, “I RATHER you get sleep than abuse yourself trying to “support” me. THAT would be supporting me, you resting yourself so you can share yourself more effectively in your acting and with others. But if you are going to throw philosophy at me, I will show you where it has holes.”

The last line was a response to her trying to sound all spiritual using the term “self-realization” in the context of receiving a good review while starring on Broadway. That’s not self-realization; that’s ego fulfillment.

So how did Dizzy react? For now, let’s just say she was pissed off. Among other things, she dropped out of my meet-up group (http://yoga.meetup.com/758/) and wrote in the “Please tell your Organizer why you’re leaving this group,” box that,

“I’d rather not have the pressure accompanied with not meeting the demands of this group…I’ve been to many of these classes and have enjoyed them, but yoga as obligation is no fun for me.” [My highlighting]

I wasn’t “pressuring” or “demanding” or saying that she was “obligated” to come at all. I was just saying that if she cared to support this starving yogi like she did her starving artist friends, the way to do so would be to share in me when I am in flow, which is while teaching yoga and in my writing. I thought she was being a bit melodramatic, when mellow drama would have probably been more effective.

Now I’m not beyond getting sad or mad—and I do on occasion. For instance, when Duck told me to shove my “I love you!” up my ass, while clearing some room in preparation for the stuffing I discovered to my dismay that the gerbil I had put up there last week was dead. And you better believe I cried. And when I was walking barefoot in the park and stepped in a pile of shit, I did get angry, angry that my other foot would not be able to experience the pleasurable sensation of squishing down into a fresh, fully-formed pile of poo; stepping on the flattened poo felt nothing like it did on the other foot.

But my vision has expanded over the past year or so and I am often able to see the bigger picture of things and this helps me from getting sucked into the melee of minor battles, if I don’t choose to for fun. Now if someone says something completely ridiculous—like 19 terrorists with box cutters, of whom 7 are still reported to be alive, committed the crimes of 9/11 and that a minor fire could bring down WTC 7, a 47-floor steel-framed building in less than 7 seconds—well then all bets are off!

http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/hijackers.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8W0N-qH0ac4

It’s not really a “Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff” philosophy, which would essentially say that it is still “irritating stuff” but not worth the sweat. I have been able to see some challenges as not “stuff” at all. It was clear to me that Duck was upset and angry and her words were just an expression of this, albeit a bitchy one, in the same way that someone would drop a class of milk and shout out, “AAAAAAHHH!” Unlike what the yoga posers preach, it’s fine to let out some steam. But crying over spilt milk—I am in favor of the death penalty for such a heinous crime.

And Dizzy’s lash out was just her feeling overwhelmed by her own life’s busy-ness and by my diesel words filtering through her currently sensitive unleaded machinery. It would be the same way as if you were stung by a jellyfish you would welcome me peeing on you to stop the pain, but if you were sitting watching television and I pee’ed on you, you probably wouldn’t experience the same sense of relief; same urine, different circumstance. And actually, when I go to the beach I tend to eat a large asparagus salad and so my pee smells really rancid!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhE8Qk7eXUg

How could I get mad at them for reacting in the only way they have been conditioned to react? Even more, how could I take it personally? It’s funny, they were both in that moment trying to hurt me and all I could do was sit back and watch the show as if it were on television and think to myself, “Hey, I’m like one of the lead actors here!” And I realized that as long as I continued to read from the script, the show would continue to play out.

That’s why I’m so into improvisation, going off script. It becomes very confusing for the other actors who don’t know how to do anything but read the lines they have been fed since youth. But it keeps a stale show that has been running longer than “Phantom of the Opera” fresh.

I knew instantly that I would get a lot of mileage from Duck’s “shove it up your ass” line and because of this was in some sadistic way “grateful” for her outburst. And there was something almost amusing about how Dizzy would get mad at me and drop out of the group she’s been in for over a year because all I wanted to express was that I would like her to share in my joy of teaching.

Look at all the silly sit-coms on television whose humor is almost entirely based on misunderstandings and miscommunication. How can you not consider our lives a sit-com, with God sitting in his easy chair laughing his ass off as he human surfs?

REFLECTION:

Think of the last time you got into a good argument, and by “good” I mean you got really heated up over it. Maybe it was your boyfriend telling you that you look fat in those jeans, not understanding that when you asked him, “Do I look fat in these jeans?” you wanted him to lie. Maybe it was when someone told you that working out is for losers and you spend half your day in the gym. Was is personal or was it an issue that your fellow argumenteer is dealing with? If it was personal, why did you take it so to heart and let it upset you? You probably left there thinking, “What a douchebag!” and yet getting all worked up over a douchebag is pretty douche behavior in itself.

MEDITATION:

Imagine a person with whom you tend to get into deep arguments. Be in your body and hear them say their moronicy. What does it feel like? Is your stomach tightening? Is your breathing higher in your chest? Is your mind racing a mile a minute, ready to throw its daggers through your own mouth once that idiot pauses for breath?

Now engage in an out-of-body experience. Rise about five feet above the situation and just watch as a spectator, not a player. Notice how without all the body sensations filling up your being that the situation does not seem so “pressing.”

Now float yourself 100 feet in the air, so all you can see are two small mini-people that you perceive are arguing. Now you can’t feel the body sensations, you can’t even hear the words. You can see a little movement, such as a firm point towards the other or the hands of one of you being thrown in the air and can guess it is not the most amicable situation, but from this distance notice how uninvolved and unaffected you are.

Now float yourself up halfway between the moon and the Earth. All you see beneath you is a blue marble colored with greens and browns and whites. You know the two of you are still arguing somewhere down there but all you notice is the beauty of the Earth. How “big” are the problems you have down on Earth? How “important” is that argument you’re having down there on the big, blue marble?

Now bring yourself back into your body with the person across from you yelling and screaming. Can you take any of the “bigger view” and bring it into your being in your body in the here and now? Notice how now you would probably prefer to give the other person a hug instead of a counterpoint. But that would be going off-script. Perhaps life as an improvisation would spin our big, blue marble a little more joyfully. And even if tearfully, we wouldn’t get so caught up in it, for after all, it’s just a game of marbles.

My book connections got my 10 Commandments Of Dog Training manuscript on the desk of the head of a big publisher they deal with. I found out that boogers are also on that desk and he had more of a chance of flicking those around than flipping through my manuscript.

So they sent it to New World Publishing, which although has the same beginning as New World Order—the evil vision of the elite manipulators to control the world by killing most of the people through poisons in our food, water, vaccines and through biological and high-tech weather-disrupting weapons, controlling and destroying economies, and by world governmental bodies, such as the U.N. and the World Bank—they also published Eckhart Tolle’s first book and I thought could possibly be my quickest route to “Oprah.”

A few weeks ago, I received a rejection letter from New World and so I am forced to conclude that they are part of the evil plan to control the world, knowing full well that my book would be anathema to their dominion. The rejection letter basically said, “We only publish a few new books a year and we wouldn’t risk this on a dog training book by a nobody like you.”

In a bit of classic comedy that even I couldn’t help but find amusing, there was an inked stamp at the bottom of the letter that read, “Signed in her absence,” which meant that the person whose name was on the letter probably was buffered from ever haveing to see or even hear about my book. While a bit harsh, I prefer when someone pisses down my back that they don’t try to perfume the smell by telling me it’s only raining.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfdpcrOgUp4

But their comments also showed me that whatever lackey actually typed up the letter, in most probability didn’t read my manuscript. While the skeleton of 10 Commandments is about “dog training,” the meat is really a book about relationships and how we can become more aware of the needs and feelings of our significant others, or anyone with whom we interact—be they four-legged or two-legged—and help the partnership become closer and more fulfilling. It is also written in a very “hip” rebel yogi way that is much different than the lame self-help books which boil down to looking at yourself in the mirror each morning and saying, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggonit, people like me!”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvgMIerTXl4

Even if New World Publishing did take on my first book, I was just going to drop them and find a different publisher for my second book, following Eckhart Tolle’s lead.

[To read the Introduction to The 10 Commandments of Dog Training go to: http://rebelyogi.com/the-10-commandments-of-dog-training-introduction.html]

10 Commandments needs a third edit but even in it’s current form it is chiseled enough for anyone with an eye for gemstones to see the shiny rock that lies beneath the surface. But more than a “book,” it symbolizes for me that I am moving to a place where it is time for me to share the wisdom that comes through me to a larger group of people, as opposed to only the three people who show up to my yoga classes and the handful of insane asylum patients who have managed to control their delusionary outbursts long enough to sign-up for my un-blog, Enlightening Nonsense.

I will eventually work on chiseling away more of the roughage and writing the third diamond sutra of this book. I may write a book proposal, which requires all these steps like showing who the market for the book is and how you will help promote the book. I am not a big fan of following “standard” procedures, so I just as easily may not. I may look into getting a literary agent, hopefully one who has a casting couch and I have to sleep with in order for them to take on a “nobody” like myself.

I received a random email on my MySpace account that I never use and only signed up for in order to contact a girl. He told me that he was writing a book where the lead character was named “Asananda” and his father was named “X” and thought it was crazy serendipity that he found someone out there named Asananda X (Asananda is in the name in the blank space between “Swami” and “X” and during my initiation as a sannyasin, I actually took the name “Swami Asananda”). He gave me a link to a site where he self-publishes and even if I were blind, deaf, dumb and creating animal sculptures with my own feces, it seemed kind of clear that the Universe was sharing with me a possible direction to go with my book.

I have to run now, as I need to go to the post office and send some anthrax to New World Publishing, as I’m growing tired of waiting for our government to go on another anthrax mailings spree, and finish up my Big Bird shit sculpture. But you haven’t seen the last of me, oh publishing world! HOO-HOO, HA-HA, HEE-HEE!

I’m looking forward to when I become a household name like…what’s the name of that chick that wrote the “Harry Potter” books? Then when New World comes up to me begging to publish my next books, I will bend them over the table, sodomize them while fantasizing it’s Duck I’m having anal sex with and declare:

“I WILL NEVER BE A PART OF YOUR NEW WORLD ORDER! AND BY THE WAY, THAT’S NOT RAIN ON YOUR BACK!”