I’m thinking too much tonight to be able to sleep just yet. Lots of thoughts are going through my head and they have to do with what others may or may not do, what others may or may not think and how badly I want to do what I want to do. Most of my thoughts revolve around my longstanding quasi-Jonah Complex and yet others revolve around thinking about various esoteric errata.

I once heard about a wise grandmother who said that she just didn’t understand why so many need to grasp at somethingness instead of standing firm in that which is empty. In other words, she was observing that instead of allowing the Divine Order (causality) to be just what it is, we attempt to rage against the flow of life in order to bind it to what we take as being our will.

So much of my mental life is taken up with responding to various anxieties about various possible outcomes. Tonight I’m not enjoying rest because I’ve indulged in imagining working with and planning for the irrationality of myself and others in a futile attempt to assuage my own feelings of fear, doubt and aversion instead of simply allowing all to be as it is. I guess what I mean is that I tend to forget the lesson Fritz Pearls taught about being in the here and now. When he had a client that was suffering from grave fear, he would instruct them to stop describing the fear and start describing what is going on right in this moment. The client would go on to say something like, “I am sitting in a chair. I am talking and the sun is hitting my face through the window. It is warm. I smell coffee. I am noticing the dust particles moving in the sun…”. At this point, Pearls would interrupt his client and ask them, “What’s wrong?” and the client would usually answer, “Wrong? Nothing’s wrong.” Pearls was pointing out that when we are focused on the bare reality of the hear-and-now, we aren’t suffering from fears, anxieties and frustrations.

So, I think I’ll focus on my feelings of being tired and get some rest now LOL.