Twenty-Seven / It is Time

It is time to make a stand.
To insist upon the style of living that I want for my life without hesitation and guilt.
It is time to take action.
To insist upon the way of living that makes sense to me despite perhaps not making sense to others.
It is time to stand tall.
To no longer be apologetic for who I really am and what I really think and want to say.
It is time to embrace myself.
To love who I am whole-heartedly not just when I am alone but all the god damn bloody time.
It is time to truly smile.
To see with real humour the things going on around me and to have be seen back with precision.
It is time to EXIST.

- And so I begin my 27th year and since every fresh beginning should be commemorated with sweet honesty, I will declare the reason for this entry in all its honesty and express that shall I come out of the next few days heartbroken and devastated by the lost of my family, I know that it is still the reality of the exact situation, without my interference in changing myself, pretending to be a person that they expected me to be and swallowing the person they cannot accept. At least I will know whether they loved me for me.

I have always been unconventional in thought and deed. The word 'unconventional' though was just one noted when I relate how I am to others but there is really no strong reaction or rebellion in me except when I see injustice in certain concepts, especially when this injustice invades my existence. I do not see myself as unconventional in any way because to me how I am is actually what the natural flow of things decide and how I see the way a lot of other people are looks frequently to be patterned to a ritualistic and meaningless self-imposed mode of behaviour.

As a child whenever I appeared to be different or express differing thoughts from the norm, it was stamped out immediately by my mother. It was extremely suffocating especially since she was such a neurotic and over-controlling character. She would bother about everything regarding how I do my hair, what I wear, what I eat blarr... to the bloodiest, deepest end. And I could feel that every bit of me was being changed to suit her likes and dislikes. I could not even decorate my room in the way I would like to express myself.

I have always had a lot to express and methods of doing so. I loved to sing. I loved to write, to dance, to explore the mind in discussions. Singing she never hindered me. The few times that she did, I was stunned for an instant because a lot of the time I don't realise I was even singing, but then I will make myself disregard the interruption and just continue singing again. I think she didn't stop me much because she enjoyed that I could sing and she did like hearing me sing. Writing she could not stop me. How do you stop something like that? And it was my saving grace in school. My love for language and the prowess I showed in it was the only reason I could do well without putting effort into the education process. She did read my diaries and letters and other stuff though but I wasn't put off enough to change the content of my expressive writings much. I really needed the expressions I held dear, because everything else was so darn suppressed.

And in that suppression and that lack of appreciation for my character, my life outside was thus affected. Although I did use the world outside my home as another outlet to escape the prison that was my home, because of the lack of acceptance of my Self at home, I was unable to be entirely confident and accepting of myself outside. Thus whenever I meet a new person although I do begin by happily being comfortable and myself and all that but the moment I notice any discomfort in the other, I will start becoming more and more accomodating till I am an entire other person. And at home the lies begin to build up more and more into an entire fantasy story.

I actually hate lying, so as far as possible I will make the lie as close to the truth - right to the point it is just barely acceptable to my mother. It is a lot of weighing on my part on not compromising myself too much and accomodation to my mother. Because having to lie is compromising who I am - that I have to change myself. It is not healthy to my sense of self. And perhaps for others telling everyday lies might be pretty much a normal part of communication, I actually get rather ticked off by the whole idea as that part of me that enjoys sorting out the bias in things realises the lie is to allow the other and the masses' perceptive world to be untarnished and kept intact. And in turn, my world of personal splendour and beautiful concepts will be smaller and possibly could become lost.

Well anyway, this could not go on forever. My alternate lifestyle would come to surface sooner or later and a few days before my 27th birthday everything came to a boiling point. And honestly if I didn't have Isaac as a soulmate and fellow explorer, perhaps I would have caved in to the overpowering external energies and never have brought any action to my beliefs which would have deemed me empty and jaded in life although with nothing to expose to my parents thus no problem now. I am glad that I made the decisions that I did impartially and never allowed the influence of my parents to come into play. I really adore the life I have been living since we have come together and I am full of enthusiasm, direction and love for everything... then the wisdom and the learnings ventured... I am so blessed.

Isaac was like a symbollic reminder of the biggest wall I have put up. I have been escaping from the reality of the situation long enough. The way I want to live is simply too difficult for my mother to accept and I know it and have been pretending when I am with her that I am not that persona, and when I am not with her that she is ok with the persona. If there wasn't symbollic Isaac, I do not know how long I would have continued being two-faced with myself and my family life. But then if there wasn't Isaac, there would be something else that I would have to face up to in the end, because I have never given in to being the person my mother wants me to be when I am alone anyhow.

And so she found out I am with a guy of another race. A race she has condemned to be con-artists and irritants and dirty and disgusting. And every bit of her racist dreg I am meant to agree with so as to prove my filial piety! I am so much the anti-thesis of the racist person, or the anything-cist person whatever the fuck that this repells me absolutely. I rarely notice the skin colour of the person in terms of them being another fucking species altogether and I always get shocked by the discrimination some people think they have the right to express just because they are the majority race in a particular place, and then getting all righteous and indignant when they are treated the same elsewhere. Worse is when they start feeling dignified about their sweeping statements about an entire race of people, missing out individualism altogether and with that very reason that they themselves were discriminated against by that race in a rare situation when they were the minority.

Truth is I am very ashamed of her. I want to be brutally honest with myself today. However how I am going to approach this is to accept her as she is and also to be patient with guiding her in this matter, so I am first trying to stop being affected by her so very very much so as to be a calmer self with her. This is extremely difficult because she is quite a tyrant in her ways and I spent a lot of my childhood being fearful of being hit and till I was quite old I was still receiving blows every now and again. There was once she even threw something really heavy at my forehead. Despite what she thinks, I am actually seriously afraid of her.

It's just that I do not back down. I do not want to be cowered into doing her will. It's weak to be like that and I do not want to be weak. And the last thing left is to expose the remaining lies that I HAVE to tell because when I told her the truth, she refused to listen. And started slapping me everywhere violently and there was no compromise from her side ever but the only option given was her way or none at all. I have planned the revealing of certain parts of my life at strategic ages because the younger I am the more power she has over me and if I had told her about Isaac when I was 21 and we were only a year into the relationship, she would have used very drastic measures to totally stop us from being together. I valued my freedom and I wanted our relationship to progress without the bias of this interruption. Most of all, it was very clear to the both of us that what we have was very rare and should be treasured dearly.

It's reunion dinner day tomorrow. It will be the first reunion dinner that I will not be with my family. I will miss them but I have to make my stand. This is the only way. I have to disengage myself from them till I am ready in a lot of areas. I suspect Isaac is psychologically rather stressed about the matter as well and its horrible that he has to be put through such heavy discrimination when as my other half he should be cared for and loved by my parents as well. Imagine being unable to show yourself to your other half's family because of your skin colour. It's a horrible, horrible predicament. Colour is not anything you can improve or change and it's actually something you should unconditionally love about yourself. And I am sure that since on his own he's already so despised and disliked by them, he wants to meet them only when we are more stable and financially set so that they wouldn't dismiss him as some half-fucked Indian guy and thus feel really lousy about himself.

I don't understand and I don't want to understand these racist people. The Indian culture is intense yes... its full of colour, full of intoxicating incense, full of visually stimulating gods and a people who act with passion and intensity. Yet it is another culture of people after all... of course they are different. Their culture's beauty can only be understood if you are able to understand. But then again, why should anyone under the racially Indian umbrella be totally associated with the culture? I am racially Chinese and I do not think of myself as Chinese most of the time except to write on the info sheet when I do need to fill that in. Isaac and I question every tradition and live spiritually in the world we have created. This same beautiful world that we both share and only we understand. We saw this in each other from the start and we've been through so much together and yet nothing could even be remotely said to be a test of relationship. We have just merged into one and have faced life together ever since, learning from each other and making our dreams and world materialise bit by bit.

Yes, it is time. I need to make my stand. And be firm. Be strong.

An advance Happy New Year to anyone who follows the Lunar Calendar.

Love

The interconnectivity of all that exists
A divine energy living in the subconscious
Perhaps the myth of Mother Earth explained
Dramatised, romanticised and so thus simplified
Peaking in the sexual nature of creation.

We think love is something that can be manipulated
That it could transform to hate,
That it could diminish or increase
But that is a concept tainted by the ego,
By moods, by circumstance and by logic.
Universal love is the only meaning to love
The invisible viscosity that binds everything together.

Relationships often over-glorify the sacred word
When you appreciate, understand, love, you connect.
And so your mind plugs in to the workings of the universe
But your soul has always been there. It is part and the same.
Yet this recognition makes you stronger
This knowledge of your cosmic bigger self
And then there are those rare beautiful connections
And as the inner potential begins to open up one by one
Genius, inspiration & action spill forth

We can only begin to understand what love is with wisdom
Yet within our instincts we already know
The simplest man as the wisest man
Living by the knowledge that all is known
And the more we know, the more we not know.

Love is the space between
Love is the smile exchanged
Love is the kiss of life
Love is the consumation of two
Love is quintessentially YOU



We are all part of the universe, and we are the only thing we know god to be. The beginning and the end.

...

It seems ironic that after writing to discard 'self-doubt' on that meditation sheet, I am now swimming against waves of endless self-doubt after self-doubt. Knowing what wisdom is isn't providing much movement in terms of physical actions. The problem lying on the analytical abuse of meaningful things, extremity entering so subtly that once observable, we understand how much baggage we have actually imposed upon our instincts.

It's one thing to analyse the ins and the outs of what instincts mean and contain, it's another to pick it to pieces and label it before using it. It is the human condition after all and should only be studied fully together. Spiritual studies done the other way around where studying it comes first then if it makes sense - apply, only confuses matters with its focus swung into the wrong space.

Self-doubt is the product of the ego. If the ego was non-existent, every little journey will not be qualified and contained within those small unimportant details of self-doubting self-indulgence. Everything just leads to another learning process to another more beautiful existence to a greater, greater self. There's no beating yourself up for the mistakes that you make because you understand yourself and you understand why you made them. There's no perverse endless cycles of selfdoubt rushing in - beating up oneself - selfdoubt about the selfdoubts - beating oneself up again - selfdoubts about the beating up of oneself - beating up oneself yet again...

In that wisdom of truth, there is only light, the darkness always gets pushed behind once it becomes the darkness, and the newfound light is always in front. This light isn't optismism, it isn't hope, it doesn't signify new phases or change. It is the rebirthing process of knowledge, the knowledge that is in the ether and everywhere. The dimming of the light represents the absorption of the understanding deep into the soul and the new light - the new soul that emerges, fresh and yet old, so timeless in essence bringing with it all the ages that have lived in you and the final state of you now.

In this moment, I have exhausted myself to perfection and require the rest enough to recharge, but since I cannot do so at this time, I am in that place where the mind is so unable to connect with the heart to find meaning, I am in the 'lullaby' zone - half-asleep, half-awake yet it's not a state of slowness really, or daydreaming. What it is is actually a meditative point of rest the vulnerability of which, opens portals to higher potentiality. The body enforces this over the mind when the desire to stay awake is stronger than the body's silent voice. It forces this meditative dreamstate for rest to touch the body. And the essence of yourself becomes louder as you recognise how connected you are, but you already knew. Just as you know all things.

Trust. Your innate intelligence. If we don't over-think, we always know. Our thoughts tend to develop from the all-knowing, all-accepting wisdom to a comparative, relative, measurement. In this drift, comparisons will be missing the point altogether. Worlds can be found just in the appreciation of one being, an individualistic expreience. It makes no sense to find deviations and lines between two individuals because you will be missing out on the dimentiality of each item, each subject, each single existence. They are meant to be art pieces, studied, felt - expressed.

It is still enlightening and so much a part of being a seeker though to dissect characters & situations etc, like how we do for literature texts, and see the workings of human flaws and structures. It teaches so much, makes you horribly indignant about the inconsistency of society's thoughts and actions and thus love life all the more terribly because it is just so wonderfully intricate and complex. Yet in this sense it works because it is done to answer specific questions that all lead up to one bigger point of understanding thus, a separate topic from that of the individual's art piece of itself. And an individual piece itself.

I think my answer lies in leaving things be. I have to start doing that some time. I am missing out on the show... this fantastical show of life.

...


"Being never develops. Being simply is. There is no evolution, there is no time involved in it. It is eternity, it is not "becoming." Spiritually, you never develop; you cannot. As far as the ultimate goal is concerned, you are already there. You have never been anywhere else."
- Osho