Sun in Piscis

“I have stories to write. They are told in my head. But I must get ready. Must work today. It makes me want to cry. When will I be able to just write all that wants and needs to be written?”

Life’s circumstances clearly determined that it is time to write today by gallantly erasing all distractions from this fateful morning. I’ve been postponing the silly desire to write for too long. What about philosophy? asks a little voice. What about Nexistentialist writing?

Well, life had a lot of other demands lately. I started a new job as a substitute teacher. Got bills to pay. And this winter, illnesses hit the home hard. Flu virus variations, contagious as they are, made their way through the entire family.  

Can an ordinary middle-aged, turn-of-the-twenty-first-century woman, a mother, wife, caretaker, and general laborer really be a philosopher?

What it actually means to be a philosopher remains unclear to me at the moment. Despite the fact that philosophy is the foundation for all human activity. However, exploring how philosophy is the foundation for all human activity, means embarking on a journey millions of years in the making. This complex matter must be postponed for another day, when I ‘m not pressed for time thanks to the boundless duties and demands of living in a comfort-oriented society stooped in capitalistic consumer conceptions at the tail end of a patriarchal era with scarce femme philosophers to be found in the bookstore. 

This winter I’ve felt like a working, training, studying, praying, caretaking nun. I thought about God a lot. I searched “it” in a dream at night, calling out Hail Marys in Spanish and the Lord’s prayer in German, the only language I know each prayer in by heart. The former, a gift from my Catholic Mexican grandmother, and the latter thanks to my Rhinelandish Catholic identity crisis in grade school while living in Bonn, former capital of Western Germany. Yes, every once in a while, I wrap myself in rosary beads to dance to the beats of existential desperation.

Then, two yoga teachers showed up in my dream. I believe my subconscious is urging me to conclude my basic yoga studies at the online school. My progress has been internal instead. The body is achieving fundamental changes. The more I am aware of my physical existence in more detail though, the more annoying I find the idiosyncratic asymmetries of the human body. Sometimes it nearly drives me insane. I know I will never “fix” the odd pair of breasts bestowed upon me, one clearly larger than the other. This must impact the body’s overall sense of balance and movement. I tried to influence the size of the smaller breast while nursing my first baby by using it more often, so it would swell up with milk way more. Of course, it didn’t work. The larger breast needed release just the same. I gave up on the breast-equalizing project, and let the body do whatever it needed to do. Vipassana Yoga is helping me to accept the body as it is, to work with it as it is, and to be curious about its condition without judging it. But there is so much I notice that is off from all the experiences I’ve had like injuries, bad posture, habits, pregnancy, birthing, aging etc. I also notice the recalibrating and transformative effects conscious training has on the body’s structure. A pandora’s box of questions* opens and distracts me from the serious study of what has been presented by previous scholars. I lose myself in the spontaneity of being, rolling with the changing cycles of my feminine fate, becoming self-absorbed and weary of external scripts, while at the same time craving answers from beyond my own perception.

Truth be told, I ultimately seek liberation from becoming. But in the meantime, I am stuck in a karmic-dharmic wheel of being human in a very biological, socio-cultural, idiosyncratically terrestrial, and even cosmic way. Like, am I ready to give up sex? Hell no! At least when ovulation energy takes over it becomes inescapable. Plus, cumming has a lot of power. But it does take energy, strength and endurance to explore the full extent of this fascinating female human visionary superpower. Does it suck to constantly bleed and suffer the lows of the female cycle? Hell yes! And yet, there also lies power in that. The power to rest and release, not only on an individual level, but in terms of collective consciousness healing as well. Great forces can be channeled through the female menstrual cycle. This also takes practice and training. How can I become a renunciate? I am too much of a woman to forego the intense physical impulses that drive my reasons for being. Reasons for being that are millions of years old.

Do not be fooled by the false notion that suffering will indeed cease. Suffering is an inevitable part of life. It is the first noble truth, according to Siddhartha Gotama Buddha.

1.       Life = Suffering

Oh, how I hate this statement. Not only because life is not merely suffering. We live in a world where pleasure abounds. According to Gotama Buddha’s third noble truth, the cessation of suffering is possible through the invalidation of desire. Is this true for pleasure, too?

3.       Ø [desire] => Ø suffering

However, there will be suffering.

What I found most astonishing in revisiting Siddhartha Gotama Buddha’s journey, is that he continued to face suffering until the day he died, liberation and all. Like when his disciples were fighting and it stressed him out so much that he fled into the forest to distance himself from the quarrel in peace. Or the pain he experienced before dying, though he remained stoic, or rather, equanimous. Equanimity was the Buddhas’s true superpower. Did equanimity trump suffering? Perhaps. Did suffering disappear altogether? Unlikely.

Thus, let’s not make the reality of suffering any worse than it needs to be. There’s no need for war, addiction, greed, and destruction. Your conventional heartache, monthly bleeding, illness, unfulfilled desire, or fatigue are daily suffering enough. The Buddha taught how to live despite the suffering in a state of equanimity while faced with life’s changing facets.

*Is there Nexistentialism without self? Or, as philosophy leaves the mind, does it mutate an I to the stratosphere of non-being? How can non-self even be, if it is simply not selfed? For, self is ethereal being manifest, one of many (atoms etc).

In philosophizing, in scientific inquiry, in art … to what extent is imagining and imaging, making images with human genius (and stupidity), creating collective realities?

Body-form sensation. Is it because I can feel it? Or, if I can't feel it, it's really not? Or, is it whether I feel or not? Sensation is a broad concept. Experiencing sensations is not just feeling, but includes the acitivity of all senses (sesnsual, sentient, sensible, perceptive systems), consciously and unconsciously so. 

Is awakening the process of becoming ever more conscious of the subletest and gorssest aspects of material (manifested) reality (physis, psychis etc)? But what about the realm of the unmanifest, the potential, the apparently immaterial (because in a physical, biological universe everyting is expressed in matter)?

Does an immaterial reality actually exist? In a physical universe, can there be such a thing as immaterial phenomena? Just because it can't be sensed or perceived, it does not mean it isn't physically present, does it?

Is sensation (physical perception/ physikalische Wahrnehmung) different from form (physical phenomenon)? How can the (body) sensation be the only thing that changes if it also form? Unless form is relative to sensation (inclduing sight etc) ... Because sensations seem to change faster than form. But is it actually so? Thus, sensation and form are intricately, inescapably linked. Can I change the sensations by moving form? Even if the form isn't fundamentally changed. To what extent does movement change form?