As opposed to anaesthesiology, or the rendering unable to feel, aesthesiology is the emotional reaction of the self to stimuli in lived experience.

Bourke, Joanna. (2008). Sexual Violence, Marital Guidance, and Victorian Bodies: An Aesthesiology. Victorian studies. 50. 419-36. 10.2979/VIC.2008.50.3.419.

The Nervous System and, more recently, the cardiovascular, have made themselves known to me in relation to how I eat food, how I experience embodiment and emotion, and how I encounter an untouchable self-presence.

Becoming aware of them, visually, in my mind’s eye, and being with them in that density-of-perspective way that stimulates actual growth (‘growth’ seems like a strange word here but it’s the one that’s coming up right now), has presented itself as a means to an end; a process of beginning.

Along with several of his books, I bought Alex Grey’s ‘Sacred Mirrors Cards’ when I had a visceral reaction to seeing his images — I cried. Once they arrived, I read ‘The Net of Being’ up until a page about metamorphosis and the butterfly. Again, I was touched and something changed in me. I felt a shift. It was as if the light of his words, of his story, b/c that is what I had been reading, was somehow enough to spark a re-cognition in me. On what I cannot say exactly. Only that it had and has to do with being free and being enlightened and the presence of god.

A few days later I opened ‘Sacred Mirrors’. The pack fell open at the juxtaposition of the Cardiovascular text and Nervous System image. It acted like a confirmation and led me to the next thing I was doing — some Ram Dass videos; listening, watching and taking note of what makes sense to me.

‘Getting Free With Karma Yoga’ Here and Now Episode 207 on YT, is where I started… again. Always re-starting, it seems.

Remember what you’ve taken birth for

That remembering only happens when you’ve awakened, he says. Otherwise, you fit your spiritual practices in a little bit and it gives you a little peace of mind but it doesn’t do the transformation that is available in a human incarnation, he adds; I’m paraphrasing.

It happens inside.

Nothing can force it to happen.

You awaken when you’re ready and what awakens you can be anything.

There is no critical moment, it is a continuous process that leads to awakening.

Through everything that has happened in life and many lifetimes, you become ripe for awakening and then:

…you begin to appreciate that you are on a journey that the meaning of life is a vehicle through which you can further awaken as you study more deeply you understand the nature of life experiences and the role of suffering, and you come to appreciate the way in which the end of suffering, the end of your suffering, has to do with the nature of your spiritual evolution or the clinging of your own mind.

Ram Dass: Getting Free with Karma Yoga Part 1 – Here and Now Ep. 207

Coming back to something is the trick to start with. For him, maybe it was simply ‘be here now’ and that was enough to re-kickstart his awareness into karma-zone experiences. For Alex Grey, something else.

It’s not really important what other people use to find their inner sanctum of reality where divinity lives. It’s interesting and at times inspiring but it’s really irrelevant, to me. I find it easier to let the games play out and to follow what’s really going on until I seek to understand. Once my seek-to-understand energy comes in, I know I’m on. Right where I am.

Centred in the sublime

Whatever I’m listening to, whomever I’m engaged with, there’s an overflow, an undertow, a current of un.knowing that keeps me centred. And that centredness is sublime. Not in sensation b/c the senses are my key to awarenesses that move me. My centredness comes in awareness of signals and symbols and cycles of information that keep pulsing out the same information to be re-cognised the way a birthday is a birthday but it’s never the same birthday it’s always different on a different day with different weather and different people at different places which have changed over time even if they appear to be exactly the same b/c they’re not.

Yesterday, for instance, I questioned whether I want to be on this awakened journey at all. If maybe it was and is all a bit too much for me to bear along with everything else that’s going on in my life. And that’s all part of it too. Part of accepting and appreciating my Nervous System. All part of honouring what is true for me right now in the moment and not trying to be something or someone I am not which, you know, would be impossible anyway!

I can do that. I can appreciate my own seeking-to-understand stance. I can be where I am and not balk at the light it casts on my life as a whole, b/c it doesn’t. And I can see that no matter how amazing or sublime it is, my journey is also just a series of awareness that grasp at me as I stand firm cold stoic unresponsive and watch them fall off as they fail to take grip, unwilling to save them from their fates. But I can’t explain it.

Without explanation

I can’t tell anyone what it is to be me. Nor can I re-present a united front of consistency that looks like and appears to be what is going on. Instead, I just end up looking like a flailing mess who can’t walk a straight line from here to there and doesn’t know her arse from her elbow, as they say.

Anyway, that’s what it is, my dharma, and I’m happy to be it. Happy to carry on, day after day, following the spread of a twenty-tab attention span, reading en masse, collecting information like a Hermestrismegistus a la Thothian librarian, and feeling sensations that will me into submission… if that is my fate. But I am also given over to the possibility that there is more going on here than I can tell.

So I keep coming back to it. Revisiting Dharma, Ram Dass, Alex Grey’s story, Ronda Renee’s coordinates, KWS, and more. Places that call me forth and lead me to my-self again (and again and again). That’s what the churn is for me, right now. That’s what I have / to work with, to grind, to awaken, to coordinate, to invoke, to simplify, to ignore and get back to not being me at all.