Dare the Universe

Blog Evolution

To make any blog more searchable, it helps to include a few words about what it's about.  It's also preferable not to have those keywords all appearing at once in the title banner.  Hence, why I've resorted to the tag cloud, visible in the module on the upper right corner of the homepage to Dispatches.  I did a quick skim of all the entries to date and tagged according to what I saw. By the numbers, this isn't as much of a divorce blog as I thought it was.  We'll see how it evolves from here.

The Secret, on Amphetamines

Thursday, I returned home from work.  Another busy week, yet more mediocrity. 

The reason I'm perpetually unsatisfied in most jobs I've held is that most of them have been office work without much room for creativity, and I'm a creative person.  The most creative office based job I ever had was at the virtual concierge where I worked before lucking out on the government position.  Even that gig was heavily regulated due to the nature of the service we were providing.  I stick with administration for the same reason that food servers with other passions stick to waiting tables: it's the only means of making money to support their basic needs they've ever done while bigger dreams are still pending.

I'll also flat out state that the Public Service, from a creative standpoint, is a zombie apocalypse.  It does many things well, but encouraging innovation, imagination, and outside-the-box thinking is not part of the deal.  Nor should it be: you need to conform to existing processes and suppress all independent thought or desires to change the system, because there's only so much you can change.  Again, nothing inherently wrong with that.  But  I can decide is where I want to stand in relation to it all.  I'll do my job, but I need to get out before I, too, get zombified.

So, I returned home from work and decide to pop in The Secret. 

Now, most of my science-y friends and more rationalistic buddies don't necessarily buy into the Law of Attraction, or the way it's presented in The Secret. Fair enough. What you have to realize is that this DVD was my introduction to the concept.  I have it practically memorized. So even though I have my own doubts from time to time,  The Secret is part of my own belief system. Thus, telling me not to watch it, or to discount it on empirical grounds, is like telling a Catholic not to attend mass, or a Muslim not to bow to the east. Many scientists are devoutly religious, keep that in mind.  And I have had some rather anomalous experiences the methodology that prove, in my subjective experience, that the Law of Attraction exists, and works as advertised.

And one such experience occurred that night. 

I decided to do some visualizing of my own.  Scheduled to pay a visit to my talent agency on Saturday to activate my profile and start getting auditions for film and TV work, I started to fantasize about such a gig. 

Since this opportunity landed in my lap, I've had various fantasies and daydreams of success in commercials, film and TV which I won't share here, frankly because I don't trust that some well-meaning but skeptical readers won't shoot them down on practical grounds.  Watching The Secret, I decided to indulge in these daydreams. 

Two minutes - two minutes! - after I began my reverie, the phone rang.  It was the agency.  On a hunch, they wanted to see if I could audition for a major restaurant chain the very next day!  Normally, they'd wait until I was completely set up, but they were in a bind and were willing to chance a long shot.

I was stunned.  Chalk it up to coincidence all you want, it was a wake-up call of the biggest sorts. 

And I ended up turning them down.  A manager at my office was retiring the next day, so my absence from the office would have been conspicuous.  Or so I told myself.  They said "no worries", and I hung up the phone.

Next day, I went back to work.  Long story short, I wasn't nearly as needed as I thought I was. 

Today, I went in, and finalized my setup.  And I found out I had a great chance to have landed that part had I gone to that audition.  Major.  More where that came from, sure, but I've learned a few lessons from this.

First, office work assimilates people: people become bureaucratized quite easily. This happens in the private sector, sure, but government's particularly nasty at that because everything's hyper regulated and monitored.  Just visit any family court.  Remember the episode of The Simpsons where Homer actually files for divorce from Marge?  Who could forget the immortal words of comfort of the court clerk (who looked suspiciously like Lunch Lady Doris)?  "These things happen. Eight dollars".  This lady actually exists, I'll tell you.

As physically safe and mentally simple as government work can be, it steals the spirit of the artist, one bit of ectoplasm at a time, until you're nothing but an overweight, cardigan-wearing zombie, more concerned with potluck parties and the weekly lottery pool than trying to do anything more creative and passionate.  Don't rock the boat. Don't ask too many questions. Don't take risks.  That becomes your life, if you can call it living.

Second, bureaucratization causes you to lose sight of your own big picture.  No adventure would be considered risky if you weren't willing to lose everything, but it takes balls of pure adamantium to actually do it. 

Had I gone for that audition and booked it, it would have been worth the one day off and the potential wrath of my boss to get the start of a new career and several thousand dollars which would help me pay debt and travel.  But on the phone, having to make a split second decision, the reflex to play it safe that I've developed over a year of government work was all too automatic. 

In order to be an actual risk taker and not some guy who blogs about it from his all-too-comfortable swivel chair on his lunch break, you've got to actually take risks.

Finally, there's always more where that came from.  I'm not only talking TV auditions, here.  I'm talking full-time jobs.   In retrospect, I got everything backwards ass.  I took the risk of leaving full-time work to pursue my passion when I was supporting my ex, and now play it safe as a single guy with no one depending on me. 

Switching that around means daring the Universe.  It means being willing to sacrifice a sure bet for the slippery chance at your own fairy tale.  It means knowing that just as you step over the chasm, a step will rise up just as you're about to fall and catch your foot.  And another, and another, until you reach the other side.

The last time I decided to really take a risk was in 2007. That was when, supported by my ex, I quit my job at the distribution centre where I had worked since high school with nothing else lined up to replace it.  And all along that chain of events leading me to this writing, never once did I end up starving, or on the street, or having to tuck tail and move back in with Mom and Dad.  On the contrary: money and work always showed up somehow, in various forms, just in time to keep me going.

That's not to say it didn't have a price in debt or stress, but overall, Serendipity has looked after me.  I just forget about her in weaker moments, as do we all.  Fortunately, Serendipity is a forgiving lady. And hot to boot.

I'm not quitting my office job, to be clear, nor am I going to slack off.  But I am extending the same rule I had when I started: never let it interfere with my greater ambitions.  There are always other jobs, but precious few big dreams, the latter of which have only the narrowest of opportunities to become reality.

I have no illusions that I will become a major Hollywood star or anything, nor am I giving up writing to do this, but I am definitely open to the possibility, and am willing to be passionnate about any work I get and see where the passion leads me.

And next time they call, I am saying "yes" to whatever gorram audition they have for me.

Eames the Forger says it best in Inception: "You musn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling". 

Surely,  I can dream bigger than my desk.

Something Wicked This Way Comes, Part II

(LS Ratio: 4:6.  Mood: "I feel the earth...move...under mah feet.  I feel the sky tumba-lin down, tumba-lin down....")

Monday morning was the Summer Solstice. I flirted with Wicca and Neopaganism back in my early twenties for about half a year, and while it didn't work out - Jodyism being a far more compelling path - I still like to observe the points in the solar cycle, if only to make myself believe that Planet Earth turns slowly....(say, that's catchy!).

Living at the Burlington waterfront, I also have the major advantage of the Beachway, which lets me watch the sun rise from right on the horizon line of Lake Ontario. 

So Monday morning, I got up really early and got myself out there for 5:30am, around sunrise.  I walked out to a spot on the beach, sat down, meditated until the sun peeked over the horizon - it was real purty - and then got up, dusted myself off, and started back.

And that's when I was attacked by one of these little fuckers.......

I felt the air over my head suddenly whoosh and I heard a sharp chirp.  Given it was still pretty dark out and there was no one else around the path back to Spencer Smith Park, it caught me off guard.  I looked up again, disoriented, only see the red-yellow-black blur coming at me again.  I ducked, but the talons still brushed past my scalp.

I looked up as it flew back into the tree, muttered something like "Dude, okay, I'm going, all right?" before hastening my exit from the scene.  He did not follow me, so I'm assuming he was just defending his nest and I happened to be the only threat in sight at the time. Either that or I woke his red and yellow-tailed ass and he wanted to express his displeasure at not having his full 4.75 hours or whatever the hell birds need for uninterrupted sleep.

I thought, I got attacked by a bird.  This is going to be an interesting week.

Lo and behold, I showed up to work later that morning and barely made it into the lobby when we had to evacuate and wait for the fire department, because someone pulled the alarm.

And, of course, the earth moved yesterday...

Really, this week has, indeed, been anything but routine. 

I never finished the omen entry that I started, but this week's definitely given me some more source material.  There's just this odd atmosphere present, an elevated level of strangeness just about everywhere I go.  Even hanging out with friends last night until about one in the morning seemed...off somehow.  Lots of big picture discussions about life directions, career paths, finding one's calling.... surprisingly unusual for our typical get-togethers.  

I wrote earlier that omens indicating your alignment with your path, and that the point of the analysis isn't primarily what the event or occurrence is, but rather, your relationship to it.  I'll go back to Carlos Castaneda's retelling in A Separate Reality of the headlights following he and Don Juan Matus along that lonely road in Mexico.  What makes the omen, in this case, isn't the empirical reality that they're car headlights, but what the appearance of those headlights in your reality means for what you're dealing with right now.

So what does getting attacked by a bird, two building evacuations, a surreal conversation with old friends on a Wednesday night, and an earthquake mean to me? 

In a very literal sense, I feel it means that the world is changing. 

It's telling me my routine is going to be upended, not in a dramatic way, but enough that things will stop feeling so mediocre. 

It means I may need to move away from fault lines and steer clear of wild animals.

There are other ones, though.  My omens mostly involve crows.  I don't see them every day, even though there's a nest somewhere close to where I live.  When I do see they, they tend to be swooping right in front of my car as I'm on the highway, or perched nearby as I'm walking.  On the surface, their appearances are random, but what you don't see is that they tend to show when I'm feeling energized and in line with what it is I'm looking to get done.  In other words, when I'm on the path.  Dismiss is it as coincidence all you want: to me, the crows are a sign of growth, change, and progress.

Then there's also the Music Oracle.  Songs have meaning, not always in the lyrics, either, but it's an exercise my friend Stephanie told me about.  If you're in the car or elsewhere, and you have something you're working to figure out in your head, you'll start noticing that the very next song that comes on has a message relevant to your situation.  If a song's following you - and not necessarily a Top 40 song that you can hear everywhere - then stop and listen for the lyrics, or even just the feeling it generates inside your mind, and see what it says about your biggest challenge to date.

The spooky feeling's still in the air as I finish this, though.  All I can do is keep writing, keep patching up this gash on my leg from baseball, keep everything chugging along, and see where it takes me.

Strange thing is, I think I have an inkling of what I'd like to do, but I'll chill for a bit.  The work week still has 24 hours to go.  God knows what's going to happen next....   

Something Wicked This Way Comes...Part I

***
(LS Ratio: 4:10. Mood: Sleepy)

Anthropologist-turned-brujo Carlos Castaneda, in A Separate Reality, writes of an instance in which he and his mentor, Yaqui shaman Don Juan Matus, are on their way to a house where a group of Don Juan's associates will be seeking out Mescalito, the spirit figure accessible only through consumption of peyote. The road in Sonora, Mexico, that they drive at night rises and falls over a series of hillsides. Cresting one of those rises, Castaneda looks back and sees two lights, which he initially perceives to be a car that's been following them for some time.

"Not so," says Don Juan (paraphrasing here, of course). "The lights are Death. Death follows us, all the time, and it may catch us." Castaneda, at the time, was unclear on his teacher's meaning: Don Juan never spoke in metaphors. To him, the world was literally filled with deities and spirits, demons and angels, so whenever he spoke of them, they were as real as anything in our daily experience. To Castaneda, they were just car headlights.

Was Death really following Castaneda and Don Juan on that hot, dry desert night in Sonora? Conjecture still follows the late Castaneda, a former anthropologist who "went native" with the Yaqui, as to whether or not he'd just invented Juan Matus and Don Gennaro for narrative purposes.

Then again, I recently read a great quote - can't remember it now, can't find it now, either - that says that it's frightening to think of what's actually possible in the world, so we choose to believe that many of those things that scare us can't exist. I believe Don Juan existed. And I can say that if it were me in that car, I would have likely given the Yaqui sorcerer the benefit of the doubt. A death omen is a death omen. Keep driving. Don't stop.

I believe in what late Holographic Universe author Michael Talbot called "a participatory universe", in which the boundaries we in the West believe separate the human mind from the human experience do not exist, and are themselves constructs that we can dismantle at will. That's what all that "physicists' blackboard" stuff was about in my past few entries.

Physicists share a number of things in common with shamans: taking themselves out of the world to redefine and study, in their own way, what is possible in that world, and returning to find that the world has, in fact, grown from their studies. Working on oneself, by oneself, ends up redefining our perceptions and feelings, and both serve to re-shape the outside world after their own images.



I've been experiencing omens. We all do, but most of us dismiss them as coincidences, if we notice them at all. Then again, the Law of Attraction presumes a participatory reality, meaning that your mind and emotions influence external events. This is where the process loses many would-be believers: after all, thoughts can't make things happen in reality, right?

I've heard almost all the arguments and "explanations" for how these supposedly supernatural, meaningful synchroncities can all be either accounted for as psychological tricks of the mind or by explanable empirical phenomenon. And all of them miss the point. By light years.

The one that concerns me here, for this purpose of this post, is the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, which, LOA skeptics assert, accounts for the meaningful synchronicities that occur whenever we are looking for something in particular (i.e. why, if you're shopping for a particular Corvette, you start seeing Corvettes or Corvette references everywhere in your daily experience.)

(Strangely enough, in Googling the term Baader-Meinhof for this link, I found a definition on 1000 Awesome Things, a website and book I only first heard about yesterday on French-language Radio Canada as I drove into work. Spooky.)

That's the trick, though: it may be all in your subjective experience, but that's the only thing that matters, isn't it?

After all, you don't subject your daily experience to empirical testing: you just live your day. The Law of Attraction, the Path of the Beam, are not about what the happenings are, but about what they mean to you. And yet, others experience omens of their own, making this a distinctly transpersonal phenomenon.

Is there the possibility that this stuff is "real", in that the results can be eventually measured by scientific instruments? I'd like to think so, considering that other forces previously dismissed by the leading thinkers of the day as "mystical" - notably electromagnetism, speaking of attraction - are now powering our cities and iPods.

Anyone who kept an open mind back then is now thought of as a pioneer, since time and study proved there was quantifiable evidence of these phenomena. In their own times, without that evidence, others thought they were off their collective gourd, much the same way that we dismiss today's psychics and parapsychologists, alien abductees, and believers in life after death. Faith was and remains the key word. And wouldn't it be nice to be ahead of the game?

So yeah, I believe in omens, same way I believe in gravity, electricity, the weak and strong nuclear forces, and all the other energies that make up our daily lives in the first half of the 21st Century A.D.

What omens have I been getting lately? Stay tuned....