Nostalgia And More Chinese Antics

Had an interesting evening meditation yesterday. I had started reading Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now a couple of days ago, and he emphasized that people live either in the past or in the future but never in the present. He himself is of course a level 6 ninja in this aspect, so I trust him. Anyway, I was doing the surrendering exercise, and I was focusing on some of my nostalgia for a certain girl whose name I will not say explicitly (I will be fair however and give a hint: her name is one of the 24 arrangements of the letters 'c,' 'h,' 'u,' and 'n').

Anyway, I was surrendering this and that, and some of the other, some etc., and also lots of yadda yadda yadda, and I was feeling pretty good about myself, which is of course strictly prohibited by the meditation police. It was going well though, but at the same time it wasn't a relaxing process, it was a bit of a race; I'd surrender one scene, and another would show up with a little sign saying "dwell in me for a bit," and I'd say "good idea...wait! No! I surrender you!" And then I'd sit there waiting for the next ambush.

This game continued for a while, and then I decided to invoke some Tolle magic on myself. Not being a "future" kind of guy, I decided to start with my past, and went ahead and erased it all in one stroke. Of course, I didn't actually give myself amnesia, but I somehow managed to get a feeling of what it might be like to exist in a state of memory loss. I said to myself that I of course have certain feelings about things, but that now it no longer matters how I got to those feelings. Thinking this way, I figured that it would be easier to surrender emotions - they'd have no past to cling to.

I never really got to that second part (surrendering past-less emotions), but I did feel really weird for a while. The state of having no past was odd and interesting, a bit like coming out of the pool into the fresh air. Eh...pretty bad analogy, go ahead and insert your own.

Feeling on a roll, I decided to try one other thing, and inspiration suggested to attempt disappearing myself. I visualized stepping back out of my body, and tried to erase both my body and my mind, dry-eraser-across-blackboard-style. This isn't the first time I've tried this, but it was the first time it gave any sort of result. Usually I just end up waking up from yet another daydreaming sequence where my erasing had seamlessly morphed into fingerpainting, or worse, the dreaded "washing dishes" nightmare.

This time though, I managed to slip into another weird feeling, different from the past-less one, but equally strange. I felt like I was in the background - this is the only way I can think of to describe it. I didn't feel my body at all, and didn't really have a center of mass to my consciousness, just kind of faded. Pretty cool, but very tenuous and hard to hold onto.

Blah. No more.

I woke up today at 7AM and remembered some dream, but then, in a moment of weakness, decided to get some more sleep. And that's the end of that story; dream lost forever. Shame on me. To atone, I took Michelle for a 4 hour vacation to the dentist chair.

MIT finally shut off my webspace a day or two ago, so the previous entry's sound files pointed to nowhere (at the time of its creation). Yesterday I spent a good 5 minutes(!) remedying the situation and throwing my hands up in the air at the various inconveniences involved. For instance, Blogger doesn't allow uploading sound files. Pictures and video are OK, but there's some kind of prohibition on plain old audio. Being, as always, on a tight schedule, I didn't have the time to fight the man on this one, so I just converted my clips to video.

More Chinese learning took place today. I was learning indefinites - things like anywhere, anything, somelobster, nokitten, and I thought the Chinese approach to using these was really funny and simultaneously brilliant. For example, when you ask a Chinese person who's headed nowhere in particular "where are you going, my Chinese brother?" he'll tell you "I'm not going where." Isn't that efficient? Or if he's really not going anywhere at all, he'll say "I'm not going everywhere." This is like something made to order for Abbott and Costello.

Here's a semi-accurate semi-completely-inaccurate Chinese style English conversation for you to see what I'm up against in my quest to learn Mandarin.

Mark: you good.
Authentic Chinaman: you good.
Mark: you are going where?
Authentic Chinaman: I'm not going where.
Mark: not going where?
Authentic Chinaman: yes. not.
Mark: ah...and there is who?
Authentic Chinaman: there isn't who. There isn't everyone.
Mark: and you there will do what?
Authentic Chinaman: there I will not do everything.
Mark: excellent! can I come with you?
Authentic Chinaman: but I'm not going where...
Mark: I'm not going where either. I'm going there.
Authentic Chinaman: I'm not going there. I'm not going where.
Mark: me too. Or was it me neither. Crap. You understand?
Authentic Chinaman: I don't understand everything.
Mark: you everything don't understand? Or you don't understand everything?
Authentic Chinaman: I don't understand everything.
Mark: yea, I'm pretty lost too. Good, I go now. See again.
Authentic Chinaman: see again.