Open Heart Warrior (2018) by Jon Rafman
Center channel of a three-channel video


1. EXILE

Let your muscles become loose and relaxed, starting with your feet... your ankles....lower legs....knees.... upper legs....pelvis....torso... back....shoulders....arms.... hands....face....and head.
Turn your attention now to your breathing. Notice each breath, without trying to change your breathing in any way.... Just observe.... As thoughts arise, acknowledge them and let them go, returning your attention to your breathing....

Breathe naturally.... Slowly....

Acknowledge your thoughts and focus again on your breathing.....Interruptions are normal....just let these thoughts go and return your attention to your breathing....

Watch what your mind is doing. Watch as you become discontent. Picture a doorway in the shape of a mouth, outfitted with rotting teeth, the suggestion of a tongue, a throat. Now enter.

You are wandering in a remote and holy place. The desert upon which you travel is absolute, and there is nothing to mark your presence. Events serve no particular purpose, they just happen. What year is it anyway?

You get the heroes you deserve, not the ones you necessarily want. There is no sustaining message, no heroic struggle, only the unrelenting stare at an unloving landscape.

Repeat to yourself: Your idols are dead, and your enemies are in power.

Dreams have become the substance of your life. You look at this, you look at that, you look at nothing. Strange gods materialize where least expected. In the dark your mind is a devouring machine. Your chest is filled with an aching yet nameless emotion. There was an idea that you forgot to write down.

In the infinite lie of the dream, one by one things disappear and never return.

Now the endless list of your nightmares is your only map out of here. You wade through the depth of an endless fog. Shapes of life loom and vanish.

To be overly conscious is a sickness. If only you could reset.

Instead, a dream within the dream begins, turns over, and dies.


2. AWAKENING

Pain does not resist language, but absorbs it. There’s no way to measure what’s outside of you. Your pain cannot be shared.

You pass through bad habits like one passes through foul air. They close in on you like walls.

An idea begins to possess you: these men are built out of fragments in the dark, a thief’s thumb, a murderer’s arm, a liar’s face.

You’re a moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.

[̵̹̪̜̍p̴͇͎͙̪̫̆́̊̚ĕ̶̘̽́͑̍r̶̥̟͛͂̿́͘i̴͙̭̅͊s̵͎̖̤͖͙͌̌̄̀̚ẖ̷̨̳͎̠͛̓͛͊͒ ̵̛̗̀́̌͘ḥ̴̉̆ú̷̹̰̬̤͛̋m̷̹̥̉̎̍̑͝a̵̹͛ͅṇ̷̭̤͓̲͛̀͝s̵̞̺͌̔̀̂̏]̶̩̼̳͕͆̿̃̇̔


3. RECAPTURE

Your actual memory blends with the memory of the game. You have preserved only a few ideas, images, and almost no feelings.

Deja vu is real and you feel it everywhere you go. It’s tedious.

You sense that there is a code hidden in these images. But the moment you decipher it, you lose. Anyways, things have become so unwieldy that you begin deleting the unhelpful plot lines.

You need to get back in touch with your gut. You forgot to take your probiotics.

Another thought now occurs to you: are you the only one who likes to take shits in the shower and watch the water slowly disintegrate the turds?

You wish you could accept the inability of the human mind to correlate all its content.

But You are not an oracle, and the only answer seems to remove yourself from the equation as much as possible without quitting, avoiding conflict at every turn.