Some time ago a good friend gave me the following technique to use when dreaming. “If when you dream you find yourself I a position where you will die, don't struggle just remember it's a dream and let yourself die. It's really liberating!”
I tried this out a number of times and found it to to be true. Then one night in my dream I found myself surrounded by a horde of zombies. Death in this case would not be clean from a fall, or sword stroke or collision. Here I knew that I would be torn to pieces by foul, rotted stinking breathless hands. I remembered it was a dream, I remembered my friends advice, and I choose to wake up…
In case you think that my night time adventures are mostly filled with nightmarish brutality, it's rare for me to have anything like a nightmare and more common to have a varied mix of nonsense fragments, inappropriate nudity, occasional heroism, hot sex, frustration and luminous ineffable beauty.
Still the zombie experience has come back into my mind from time to time.
Now I realise where the zombies come from, and through intense research, involving many disastrous failures I can propose to you a practical suggestion to deal with brain eating zombies.
You may believe that zombies are not actually a problem in your daily life… I think that on closer examination you will appreciate just how common they are.
Most of our thoughts are no different from zombies. Though their living purpose has been served they continue to shuffle through the landscape of your mind. They are no longer animated by awareness but are attracted to it. Indeed they can never know awareness, so they make do by devouring your brain instead.
One zombie lumbers up his spattered t-shirt bears a list of things that you have neither forgiven nor forgotten. Another mumbles about a story that never happened. A third leaps towards you green nails grasp for your throat, it's face that of a person who hurt you years ago, another in almost perfect condition looks a lot like a sexual fantasy. In the background are faceless shuffling anxieties.
You see you are surrounded by a zombie army….
So what can you do about it? Let's start by looking for answers in the numerous zombie movies and analyse the structure of how such stories usually unfold.
It often starts with the infection of a single individual. The rot has barely set in and from the outside the zombie looks almost normal, if you can ignore the dead eyes..
The family of the zombie not willing to accept the demise of their dearly loved parent or child or spouse does their best to care for the empty shell.
Inevitably in a moment of dreadful hunger the zombie seizes a member of its distraught family, a devoted father for example. Even if the father manages to escape with his life and a semblance of reason you know in your heart of hearts that the infection will quickly be out of control.
Soon the entire community is falling apart as the living dead feed their insatiable hunger.
However thick the defensive walls around the huddling survivors you know the infection will find its way in. Inside the walls a pressure cooker of paranoia develops, on the outside a sea of ravenous corpses wearing once familiar faces… No matter how many chainsaws, shotguns, katanas, flame throwers or tanks are wielded at some point the hero will fall victim to the patient dead.
If you wish to be free of the zombie plague you cannot engage them in combat. If you engage with zombies though you may destroy one or many you know that more will take their place, and soon one will find an opening, their teeth will break your skin… you know what happens next…
This is the lesson of zombie movies.
But if you cannot fight what options are there?
As I said zombies can never know awareness, but are attracted to it, so fix yourself to the awareness that they can never touch.
Whatever thought zombies reach for you with grim hands and tombstone teeth do not react. They will come, they they will be drawn towards your awareness. As they reach for you do not react let them fall into and be surrounded by the open emptiness of awareness.
Hold to this and the natural decomposition of their tired bones will return. The last tendinous fragments that held their shattered frames together will fall apart, and the ground of mind will reclaim them peacefully.
Fertilised by the old bones of thought and relieved from the endless trampling of dead feet new thoughts rise up into awareness, grow, flower, fruit then wither away naturally like plants in a forest.
Once the zombies are gone you will be free to start gardening…
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