how sleep helps the radical

Lenin once suggested that we be as radical as reality. Trouble is that we have a bit of trouble taking it in and leaving it unsullied by the oceans of conditioning in our heads. Parenti very cleverly speaks of reality being radical, a neat way to avoid mention of who came up with this cogent bit. Not that I blame him. We are conditioned to disregard people like Lenin, even when we study him. The reason reality is radical is because of the mental conditioning that effectively blocks it from one's consciousness. When one is the actually sincere kind of sincere about assimilating reality without letting what we already think or what we already want to believe becloud, besmirch, benight this endeavor, sometimes we can take it in while sleeping, while the walking-around mind is out of it.

I get it in my sleep a lot, but also while awake. You notice the difference in character of notions coming into your mind after you've been at this Zen bit long enough. A good way to think of it is that truth, actuality unmolested by consciousness, enters consciousness like dreams enter, or like in the moments between asleep and awake, where there's no busybody correlation going on. Most people never hear it, even though it is speaking to you all your life, but some people do hear it and try to write it, make all kinds of fanciful explanations for it, get elevated as poets or musicians.... When you are trained to look, you do end up seeing, but the habit of identifying this stuff turns it immediately into the stuff of your conditioning computation and you're baffled again. A thought, a product of your computational mind, sounds more like speaking. It's "louder", seems more to be of a voice. Input from your true mind is softer, isn't always speaking in language, and it's never wrong. The whole point of the practice is to silence the crashing din in yer head so you can discern your own awareness of reality. Since you identify so completely with that cacophonous blather, this ends up being harder than you're willing to try to do.

Anyway, my nonevaporative loss of steam was about abandoning the advocacy mode in favor of something more recondite, but possibly a lot more effective. The part that my walking-around mind likes the best about this is the ability to put all this ugly orange stuff away.