... or meta-awareness... or something like that.
There are a number of links in the chains of what is passing through my mind – reading Buddhist stories (especially Paul Reps' wonderful translations), working on a project nearly twenty years old, my own analysis sessions – and even the experiences of working with my own analysands, which are both utterly unlike anything I have ever undergone, and at the same time additional reflections of everything I have ever undergone –
This is perhaps because I read so much.
As I am, in my recent analysis sessions, both aware of what I expect of myself, and also aware of what my new analyst Brian expects of me – which implies/has a basis in: what he expects of himself, what he expects of anyone –
Not just links, but many chains, linked at various points in what seem more than three-dimensional spaces. Which they are, of course.
Perhaps my awareness is also slightly amplified by several intermittent illnesses over the past couple of weeks.
After typing notes for an analysis session, revising the text for the edited book – and Dune, Lynch's film, is on television. I've actually been exasperated by this film in the past, but now it seems interesting and strange, and I am also drawn to those parts (there are many) that are about the way the mind reads things.
Of course, I was always drawn to those parts, even on first reading the book.
Herbert was writing in a way that reflected some of his own seventies experiences – learned disciplines, Eastern religions, ingested chemicals. Not only awareness, but various kinds of hyper-awareness, and awareness of hyper-awareness –
Am I making sense here?
I am slightly struck, tonight, by the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother who tests Paul, and her metaphor: that those who do not have the control she is teaching are animals, as opposed to humans. I am of course inevitably an animal in this context, but it is notable that I – like everyone else who read it, apparently – would learn this image of self-control, of awareness....
In fact, there is certainly more than a shadow of the memories of reading science fiction in my studies now, in learning to be an analyst. Therefore what are my models? Not really the Zen or the Taoism learned by a generation slightly older than me, not quite a disciplined practice.
But, at least, the awareness that such awarenesses are possible: the sense that memory can be held, contained – not quite the current younger generation's image of themselves as having something parallel to computer memory, but the older sense that as we change and grow, or re-grow, we can re-experience the spaces of memory where we have lived.
Which is why, while doing the laundry after the cleaner has gone, and typing on the computer in a project that is finally getting completed after nearly twenty years, and a film is rolling by on a screen, I can feel oddly aware – super-aware – of my mind – because of its own links: why do I think of a room in Berlin, why is there a flash of my Los Angeles kitchen, why do I experience myself at different times out of the past fifty years?...
The acknowledgment that our minds to not hold memory or knowledge in organized structures:
and that when we fragment a bit we rediscover large parts of ourselves –
perhaps the parts that matter....
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