on radiolab today (a show which i have come to despise, due to a past terrible interview with a hmong survivor), the theme was how the soul or self was nothing more than a story told by the brain to allow it to believe in itself as some unchanging entity.  it mentioned, among other things, that what makes human beings unique was the ability to manipulate adjectivals, to mix or match them, as it were, in order to create new and unrealistic combinations and their related mental images...  the implication being that, beyond this sort of "magic show", there really is nothing there.

***

i have distinct fears, most often in my dreams...  the fear of losing control.  not of losing control, as in the control of one self over another, wilder self...  but the fear of actually losing the self.  of being possessed by another, or of forgetting oneself.  the feeling of waking to progressively reduced levels of consciousness, and finding more and more of oneself being taken away.  the feeling of charly in the novel by that name, of falling into a room of darkness, the "return trip" of the platonic voyage out of the cave.  it is the fear of fading into a dream.  it is the fear of allowing all responsibilities to slide.  for, if the self is a narratival entity, then what makes a story real/believable are the consequences and responsibilities of the characters.  if they do not have responsibilities, and if there are no consequences for the characters when they fail at their responsibilities, then -

they might as well not exist.

***

in one dream, i felt as though each choice i made were countermanded by another, a male, a controlling element.  i felt my will, my very desperation, being sucked away by this other.  as i woke from the dream, i wondered at the recent incidents of the women, abducted from their lives to become slaves and worse for a monster.  at the terrible feeling of becoming something so very reduced.  of becoming nothing other than the extension of someone else's will.  and i vowed, as in the famous zen saying, that if i saw the buddha on the road, then i would kill him.

i remember how, periodically, my grandmother would take me to see some monk lady in nuuanu to have her "remove" spirits from me, lost spirits who would cling to me, and attempt to influence my life. as if i needed that narratival excuse for my apathy, my lack of conviction of things...  the "parasite excuse" is so convenient, after all...

***

to wake, and to feel that all that one has struggled with has not addressed the relevant issue.  the true issue.  and that one has basically been wasting one's time.

that is the feeling that i seek to erase.