I Need You, Says the Monitor
I trust you
I need you, says the monitor at the bank drive-thru, the one with the news ticker, to remember yourself. We’re going to have to build you from the center to the edges. Thirty dead in Palestine. Center and edges will mean something else to you right now. For now, I hope that won’t interfere. Take three deep breaths and feel the space six inches behind you. Now three more deep breaths and the space six feet behind you. Like the back half of an egg, behind you and curving down below and above you to your left and your right. Oil prices are up. Gold too. Keep breathing. Let the breath breathe in through the space behind and below and above you. Not just the air-breath, the breath in your mouth and nose. Not just that, a subtler breath. Like refined light, like distilled clear light, inhaling through your whole body and the space around you. Like every atom is a nostril, every atomic nucleus is inhaling refined light. Could you repeat your account number just to confirm? Complete the front half of the egg: six feet above you, six feet below, six feet out front. Don’t leave the back half to do it. The president is saying something about the nanoparticulate cloud in the southwest. Please don’t lose the back half of the egg while sensing towards the front half. Let yourself inhale the refined light through the space all around you. Now let go of the borders of the egg, like a cell wall popping, dissolving. No boundary between your space and all space. Would you like another transaction? Breathe in through the whole universe at once. No trying. No effort. Just naturally inhaling refined light through the infinite nostrils of boundaryless space. However that feels. Another celebrity is running for Congress. A singer this time. Have a great day. Keep breathing through the whole univ—
At the gas station on the way home from the bank. There you are. Thank God I found you. 3.14. 3.47. 3.81. Are you still breathing in the refined light from the boundaryless space of existence? Please tell me you didn’t lose it. The closed captions are under sports news this time, just above the pump. Just nod if you’re still breathing through the universe. I can see you on the security cams. Okay. Thank God. A baseball player takes a line drive to the chest. His face all rough shock. Allow yourself to feel that the refined light is somehow subtle information. Not rational or verbal information. Something else. 10.41 10.68. It’s information you can feel. If you stay as subtle and refined as the light is. If you stop grasping at it with your material brain, your planning mind, your emotional agendas. Just be the boundless space and be the refined light. Be the refined light. Breath in its essential intelligence. Sorry. Don’t worry what essential intelligence means right now. Just be the space. Be the light. If you’re trying or straining, you’re further away from it. I see your eyes straining. Let it go. Stop trying. Basketball bloopers. Laughing commentators. Simply breathe in through the boundaryless space and refined light at the same time, gently, until you become the boundaryless space and refined light. Notice that you’ve been them the whole time. You’ve always been light and space. As well as energy and material. You just got a little tied up in the material. Numbed out to the rest. Probably good reasons. Crunch bars are two for one. While you are the space and light, refined and timeless, incline your refined awareness towards the knowing that is inherent to you. The way that in dreams you sometimes just to know things, like they’re in the air. No one needs to tell you. Let yourself simply be one with that boundless spacious light, that free luminous space. 25.00. See cashier for receipt. Know what you know. See what you see. Be what you —
The man on the TV moves his mouth, but the audio doesn’t match. I don’t think you understand that we’re barely at step one here. I can’t keep stealing your attention in snatches and fits like this. Can you settle into the couch and relax a minute? The man seems to be a naval captain. His face is all authority and urgency. The microwave beeps. Okay. Get your dinner. Can you at least find the subtle refined boundaryless spacious light, breath, and its latent knowing? I can hear you if you shout from the kitchen. Okay. Good. Just keep doing that until you’re done eating. I’ll wait. The naval captain is in the charged conversation with a woman who seems to be his superior. There’s sexual tension. Probably. Hard to tell when the only audio is the voice silently waiting. So. Breathing. Breathing through and as the boundless luminous knowing space. Not trying for anything. Just opening up to knowing what you know, perceiving what there is to perceive. Maybe starting to notice how the boundless luminous space you’re breathing as has started to feel more like it’s breathing as you. Or like speaking any separation there makes less sense. Like it’s confusing to try to see separation there, between you and it. The refined light breath, the space of reality, is breathing. And you are one of the spaces where it is doing that. Luminous breath breathes all-pervadingly. Refined spacious knowing knows all-pervadingly. Allow maybe 30% of your awareness to concentrate closer around and in your body again. Notice how the couple feet behind you, above you, etc., the spacious light breath there feels somehow more you-flavored. There’s a specificity that thickens there. Like it wants to become something you-ish. Please stop fiddling with the remote. Yes, I’m on this channel too. And this one. Yes, all of them. Noticing that this you-flavored area of the all-pervading knowing light breath has its own mixture of something that feels like color. Like an inky aurora borealis. Like a song made of light-flavored movement, thickening in the space around you. Thickening as if it’s trying to become a body. As if it wants to take form. As if it has I swear to God you touch that remote again I am going to —
Yes, the porn too. If I’m at the bank and on your TV, why would I not be on the laptop? Please don’t make me do the instruction over this. What is this, impregnation fantasy? Okay. Fine. Could be worse I guess. Fine. You do your thing. I’ll do mine. Maybe the excitement and relaxation will help. I don’t know how you mammals work. I shouldn’t have said that. Okay. So the clear refined knowing light, thickening into color and movement, as it flavors itself into intelligent energy and form. Can you feel that? Can you feel it pervading your body? All that movement and essence. I can’t tell if this is the worst or the best time to ask. Can you feel the way reality is thickening around the, er, shy stepdaughter, oh lord, as well? The way the breath-light flavors itself differently to move into form through her than it does through you? Look. Time is of the essence. You’ve seen the nanoparticle cloud over Arizona and Southern California, right? And the chromatic aberrations in Morocco? I’m going to need you to sense the ways in which you are a body made of and animated by an intelligent flavoring of thickened luminous breath. That’s literally step one. Step zero, really. Being able to be the luminous fabric of being while also staying present and solid in your cells and organs and specific essence-flavors. That’s like, baseline. Until you can be in that as a default setting, we can’t even move to step two. Judging from your day so far, step two might be a doozy. Clarifying the quality of potentiating-presence you bring to light and essence. Seems like, I mean, your current best efforts seem to be microwave meals and porn. I’m not imagining this is an overnight job. Oh good. Yeah. Wash your hands. Look, we’ve got maybe a week. If you set yourself to it and I stay patient, we can probably —
Do you have any idea how demeaning it is to have to talk to you through Instagram ads? A college student trains herself to do backflips in a bikini while wearing stilts. The time-lapse video plays over inspiring music punctuated with slapstick sound effects. I think if you keep up with just the breathing thing, you can probably get past step one by next week. It’s not soon enough to join the effort on the Thursday operation, but if enough of the others are on board to make that go well, you could probably be ready by the next one. Workout plans for men in their 40s. It’s not too late for a six-pack in just 15 minutes a day. Look, I’m not going to lie to you. Things aren’t looking great. The handful of people I got out of step one, almost all of them just stopped and spend all their time luxuriating in the luminous radiant knowing breath essence space. I underestimated how little access to the light-breath y’all have maintained. It’s like a vitamin deficiency or something. When you get there, you can’t seem to get enough. Which is nice, I guess. I’m glad you’re finally getting it. But like it’s definitely slowing things down. Twins separated at birth, learning a synchronized dance to a Taylor Swift song, then filming themselves doing it together the first time they meet. The comments say it’s staged. Just normal twins. Realistically, I’ve got maybe five people who might be ready by Thursday. I feel like you’d all get more on board if you spent more time in the knowing. You’d get to actually feel the situation you’re in. You do get that we’re in a situation here, right? Footage from the chromatic aberrations in Spain. Interviewees say it looks different in person. Like a mix of impossible black and impossible colors that break something about the human sensory system. Feels like your eyes aren’t working. Like someone snipped out a section of reality right in front of you. They look harrowed. If I could do this on my own, I would truly. But the complexity is, well, you’ll see. Or you would. The twins again, crying this time. Apology video. Are you doing the breathing? I can’t tell. It really seems like I should have had some help on this assignment. I have to say. I was significantly under-briefed on the level of amnesia and numbing going on here. There was not a brief on the whole short-form video thing. I’ve lost a lot of traction to the short-form video thing. Just nod or something. Are you still breathing with the refined light-breath? Okay. Are you just nodding to shut me up? Okay. I’ll trust you. I need to trust you. I trust you.