OK, here's some journal bits from recent SWEDA posts:

It is passivity. It is like giving up. But in a way that's warm and soft, not cold and hard.

I am a dead man. If I stay in the knowing that I am already dead, I experience being a ghost among the living, and the whole world becomes a ghostly hologram. I have found what is real within.

What is real, what has meaning and value, is there at the center of knowing within me.

Silence is an awesome possibility.

***

Feeling a pleasant sense of detachment and neutrality, and faintest curiosity. I wonder if this is, or would be, the predominant mood of consciousness, once it is freed from our patterns: faintest curiosity?

The way the shaman glances at the clouds and passing cars, for signs or indications, but uninvested in the story, like a child reading a comic book on a lazy sunny afternoon? Not wanting to miss anything, yet unconcerned by the outcome.

***

Was thinking yesterday about how, for most of my life, I have been imagining and willing myself into some future state, of happiness and completeness and joy and perfection, while becoming increasingly doubtful I will ever make it to this imagined state. I have clung to this belief that some day, I would be "there," but inevitably combined with the fear, the nagging voice: "What if I never am?" What if this is as good as it gets?

What struck me yesterday (while swimming) was that I don't feel or think like this anymore; I have become, without really noticing it, "warmly OK" with being less than happy and less than perfect as a human being. But the real surprise was that this being warmly OK was what I had always been yearning for, without knowing it. The idea of needing to be something I was not (happy, carefree, funny, loving, whatever) was the only thing keeping me from being OK with myself as I am. And yet this is all we really want anyway!

Not expressing it very clearly, its a sort of living paradox. The moment we are OK with never being OK, we are OK! Really, really OK.

Give it a try some time. It is so much easier than you think.
(Even so, it took me til my 40s to get it! )

***

Living for others as a way for us to feel good about ourselves: it never works. Taking other peoples' "needs" seriously when we can no longer take our own seriously is just habit. It's even a kind of hypocrisy, don't you think?

I used to say it was about giving in without giving up. But now I think that, for us as persons, there really isn't much difference. If anything besides warm OK-ness is what gets us out of bed in the morning, maybe its better if we stay in bed? Maybe we need to be warmly OK with being useless before we can even begin to be useful to anyone?