Death and Refinement

Last night I watched these movies, which blurred harmoniously together through my intermittent dosings and dreams of Pema Chodron's Compfortable with Uncertaintly
and Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose. The gist of these beautifully done films is that in order for an organism to refine it's physical form, along the way a great many cells must die and are programed to do so when signaled. Then the organism absorbs the dead cells and metabolizes them for energy to live. It's why most of us humans don't have webbed hands and feet by the time we're born. Those cells were programed to die and fueled our bodies' development.

This is a clear physical world example of an order that, I am becoming increasingly aware, exists on all levels of life including the psychological, emotional, and cosmic. In order for a being like me, for instance, to refine my life so that I'm living as the essence of me, I have to become aware of the baggage I carry that is nonessential. I must stop identifying it as a part of me, allow it to die and feed myself off the substance. To be more specific, just as my body signaled active cell death in most of the webbing between my toes (if you are familiar with my toes then you understand why I say most) and used the metabolized the dead cells into energy for developmental processes, I can metabolize my baggage. I can build my awareness that the stories I've been attaching to my memories my whole life, and the resultant cycles of thought and emotional response are not me. I can see the pain body that has grown from the fuel of stories for what it is and use it to fuel my presence in the here and now.

The pain body has been growing from the fodder of my memories, hurt feelings, and the cycles of thought/pain that have been chasing their tales around my psyshe. Everyone has different examples. Some of mine include My mother couldn't love me enough to raise me so no one will ever love me , or on days when I missed the school bus and had to walk from CTA pink skinned white folks scared me and called me foul names so whenever I come across them I feel uncomfortable, hated and resistant to whatever they say to me, or A man became belligerent with my partner and I on the eL and crossed into our personal space so we summoned our own rage as forcefield and he did not touch us so I have to walk around using rage to keep myself safe. These stories can go on and on and form the contents of my pain body. I can discipline myself to see it for what it is, something other that my Self/Truth. I can discipline myself to identify my emotional responses and thoughts as what they are, things that I experience but that aren't themselves me. In so doing I can stop growing my pain body and signal it to begin it's death. I am fortifying my presence here and now with the awareness that the the contents of these stories are not the contents of my Self, nourishing myself with the substance of the dying pain body.

Programmed cell death and instigating pain body death. The dead substance fortifying the living. Death that allowed the pairing down of the organism. Refinement. Getting down to the essence. My ego finds some satisfaction in my evolving awareness of the fractals that make up the universe. I'm just experiencing it all and learning to be present. Thanks for reading.