"toasties," pumpkin soup and reincarnation

i've been keeping a cold at bay these past few days, and last night my yin fixed me a grilled cheese sandwich with pumpkin soup and a healthy side of kale, broccoli, ginger and squash. it was yummy and delicious, but this is beside the point.

the point is that we ended up having an amazing conversation about reincarnation and human nature, Bhutan and global warming, Claude Levi-Strauss and post-structuralist thought, Foucault and sex as a discursive instrument of power. (like you do).

we ended up talking about the Self, and how the expansive sense of self can be framed as either:

1) growth

or

2)

... d....................

.i...

..... s .................

........................ s

... i ...........

p ............

............ a ....

..................................... t ..........

.................. i

..................... o .......

n.

my own experience (in the most sublime meditative spaces) is of the latter, and it seems to me that the notion of an evolutionary Self is merely a projection of the ego. it is predicated on some (false) sense of incompleteness or inadequacy, and the illusion of growth ultimately serves to maintain individuality - and separation - by obscuring the egoistic, insistent desire for discrete form.

if one is all and all is one, there can be no growth - only realization.

(the pumpkin soup grew cold)