I’ve just dreamt I was a spy. This is not an uncommon dream for me made all the more predictable by my evening’s entertainment: The Bourne Supremacy. I’ve always been attracted to the spy mythos beginning with Bond films and The Avengers. What is an agent after all but someone who has secretly realized their potential and is now able to act in the world from that realized strength. In a certain sense they are embodiments of the Buddhist ideal: the Bodhisattva. http://web.presby.edu/~gramsey/bodhisattva.html

I was watching all the little extras on the DVD and in an interview the director makes the point that unlike Bond, who survives in the end by his use of gadgets, Jason Bourne survives through intelligence and timing. That sounds nice doesn’t it, to have both intelligence and an impeccable sense of timing. To be able to plan and to act, I have something of Hamlet’s curse – the failure to act when prompted to by the universe.

The spy is first a seeker and then an actor. I think I might start to tell myself stories about being a spy. You see I’m not happy with my personal mythology. I think there are some key problems with the stories about myself that I’ve used to motivate me. I am need of new, better, or modified stories. As a “wordsmith” it seems readily plausible that I have the skill set to alter my personal narrative and trajectory in radical ways, to re-imagine who I am, who I’ve been, and what I am becoming. The question then becomes am I discovering stories that more truly reflect who I really am or am a I shaping stories that we be the guide for who I want to become, and if the result is the same either way, does it really matter? (I feel like William Hurt interviewing himself in The Big Chill – “And what are you evolving into?”)

What would it be like, I wonder, to live in the world with a body and a mind that had been mastered and perfected? That seems like a worthwhile goal, not as an end in itself but as a means to help others. The spy is after all out to save the world. So if a person were going to start on that path they might get up tomorrow, when the world is fresh, and go running in the cold air.

In my recent haphazard quest to leave the house I have been thinking about Joseph Campbell again, The Power of Myth guy. I’ve been thinking about the call to adventure that takes the hero from the familiar into the unknown. By leaving the house I make myself available to unplanned experience, albeit mostly in bars of late, but bars are after all crossroads where people come together without clear purpose and where anything can happen. Or you have a few drinks, spend too much money and go home. That seems fairly predictable. It’s not enough to leave the house; you have to be open to the new when you’ve crossed your threshold and you have to be ready to act.

Carlos Castaneda talks about making yourself available to the spirit. I should reread The Fire From Within to help get my head back around the concept of being open and available for the new. For Castaneda some of the energy for acting comes from not wasting your finite supply of energy on unnecessary things. In The Power of Silence he talks about how much energy we waste by talking… more on this later. I am going back to bed.