Pure hypnagogic delight

History is the stories we tell about the past.

Tripping out in a cafe this morning. I was proof-reading, and running on boredom, tiredness, caffeine and hunger - a real state of neutral emptiness. I kept nodding off for a few seconds at a time, then jerking awake, and it was a good feeling I was getting into, pure hypnagogic delight. A sense of self and a sense of nothing, passing out and coming to, and in the space between them - a few seconds at most - getting into warm, gold light, supple bliss.

Anything can be accessed and created in the head - if you can think it, you can feel it, experience it. But it's hard to conjure up the right state of mind, to hang on the edge of sleep and wakefulness, to lose yourself but still remember things.

The fact of the matter is the world is a game of hide-and-seek. Peek-a-boo! Now you see it, now you do not, because very obviously if you were the supreme self, what would you do? I mean, would you just sit there and be blissfully one for ever and ever and ever? No, obviously not. You would play games. You would, because the very nature of a no energy system is that it has no energy system unless it lets go of itself. So you would let go of yourself and you would get lost. You would get involved in all sorts of adventures and you would forget who you were, just as when you play a game. And although you are only playing for dimes or chips, you get absorbed in the game.

There is nothing really important to win, nothing really important to lose, and yet it becomes fantastically interesting, who wins and who loses. And so in the same way it is said that the supreme self gets absorbed through ever so many different channels which we call the different beings in the plot, just like an artist or a writer gets completely absorbed in the artistic creation that he is doing, or an actor gets absorbed in the part in the drama. [continues]

Alan Watts

What is supposedly essential in me I neglect, run ahead of, lag behind, zig-zag and avoid. What is supposedly essential are only the stories I tell about myself to myself, when the key is to forget them all and only to be feeling.