Reclusland

A basic 3-part rule for balancing fun and security within a system:

1) Keep big changes to a minimum.  When they are necessary,be as consciously aware as possible of how completely your life will be changed by them.

2) Allow smaller changes and inconsistencies to occur all the time.  The more you are able to be caught by surprise and still maintain consistency, the better.

3) Pay close attention to the small changes.  This is life talking to you, if you have formed a language with which it can do so…

Allowing a slower trickle of chaos into a system that is more or less orderly on large scales, keeps things alive and secure at the same time. (see quantum foam, perhaps?)

It’s how your body works, after all.  Big changes in the system’s equilibrium (breath, food, sensations) come through very closely watched/controlled portals.  Everything else moves and flows all the time in distinct channels.  But try to keep everything exactly average and you kill the system.

PS: more updates on the information body idea-fore coming tonight, hopefully.  Plus a few changes in my thoughts on some recent posts, am waiting to think about it fully until I get home.

“Buddhists welcome science into monasteries”

Are they going to be the ones to keep our knowledge as the Empire crumbles around us?  God, I hope not…

No need to be so negative, I suppose, but still, something to direct our time-space traveling serpent selves away from, yes?

Memories/Impressions are collected to create the informational body, and the effects of this are reflected in the physical body.  The flaws in the informational bodies also manifest in the physical body.  They can be worked out only through a holistic confrontation of the problem from all aspects of the being.

“Pull up the intruder by the root of the weed…”

The poison is not removed until you can face it and it has no effect.  The key is to be honest enough to make sure that you just haven’t buried it too deeply (look up Scientology’s practice of removing engrams)  Buried things always come back up, no matter what.  The more that’s built on top of them, the more that will have to be destroyed to remove them.

(note that The Tower’s old name was “La Maison Dieu)

You can’t build a house for god, not without admitting to yourself that you are squaring the circle.  The Heaven->Earth circuit is an ever changing thing.  Houses without fluid foundations are not welcome.  But houses are needed none the less…

“Tao”, “Yana”, “Merkaba”, “Chariot”, “Centaur”…

All are vehicles and paths to divinity.  In fact, I could probably argue that any concept of “God” or “the divine” is the same thing, but I don’t have the time to do so here.  Joseph Campbell called them Masks of God.

Gurdjieff called them Kesdjan Bodies, I believe.

Perhaps these are not all quite the same thing, but, they are all fingers pointing to the same moon.

For the sake of this post, I’m going to call my “finger” the informational body.  Information is the energy and building block of the noosphere.  We build these informational bodies out of the impressions and sensations that we take in from the world, in order to best surf the tides of information that make up the noosphere.

Analogies can be made here between water and electromagnetic fields…

Also, note that what you’re doing right now is surfing the inter-net (indra’s net)

Cognitive dissonance is one way of describing any flaws that are present within our informational body.  This is caused by our inability to coalesce two polar opposites into the same matrix of information (the information body can also be seen as a functioning matrix of information).

Metaphorically (if not actually) our consciousness works the same way as quantum particles do.  When not being observed, our consciousness will wander off and explore other states.  We call this thinking, and it’s not bad in itself.

However, when we suffer from cognitive dissonance, we contain within our information body two contradictory ideas which we bring together (hence the discomfort).  I would hazard a guess that all psychological suffering functions this way.  Such information stops us from ever collapsing our informational body back to a single “particle” (to use the quantum physics metaphor again).  “The origin of suffering is attachment” to things which contradict other things.

Acceptance of impermanence is the only thing within which such contradictions can be solved.

Otherwise, the frequency of our movement through time-space at the speed of light is disrupted.  Our signal contains useless noise.  Static.

Yet when this is fully resolved, we can then serve our true purpose.  The bringing of the divine into the mundane.  Squaring the circle.  Potential dissonance here is the conflict between what the divine wants and what we want, but this is negated by the realization that there is no separation between what the divine wants and what we want, if we are honest with ourselves.  (do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, eh?)

This is a search for subjective truth, a science which takes into account the consciousness of the observer.  All previous bets are off.  It doesn’t necessarily have to be true in all places and all times.  It just has to be true in all places and at all times for you.  And it has to function in the world as well, so the world must be taken into account for within your information body.  Thus is the CosmOS broght to the EarthOS…

Dante’s claim for the Paradiso, the last cantica of his poem, is as daring as it is clear: “My course is set for an uncharted sea.” History has in fact granted him the unique place that he claimed with that navigational metaphor, both as pilgrim and as poet. Just as, within the fiction of the poem, the pilgrim’s course is privileged beyond the aspiration of ordinary men, so in its final course the poem accomplished what no other poet had ever dared.  Throughout the Divine Comedy, the metaphor of the ship serves to describe both the pilgrim’s journey and the progress of the poem: on both counts, Dante can refer to himself as a new Jason, who returns with the Golden Fleece that is at once the vision of God and the poem that we read.

For the 20th century reader, the fiction of the story requires a great effort of the imagination – few of us still believe in a paradise in any form, much less in the possibility of reaching it in this life. The claim of the pilgrim to have reached the absolute seems to us even more fantastic than the fiction of the Inferno, where at least the characters, if not he landscape, are quite familiar.  For this reason, the Paradiso is often thought of as the most “medieval” part of the poem.  This reputation should not, however, obscure for us the sense in which, as poetry, it remains daring and even contemporary.  By attempting to represent poetically that which is by definition beyond representation, this cantica achieves what had scarcely seemed possible before (even for the poet of the Inferno and the Purgatorio) and has remained the ultimate aspiration of poets ever since.  The quest of Romantic poets and their successors for “pure poetry” has for its prototype the Paradiso.

The poetry of the Paradiso represents a radical departure from that of the Purgatorio, as the latter represented a departure from the poetry of the Inferno.  The changes may be thought of as a gradual attenuation of the bond between poetry and representation, from the immediacy of the Inferno to the dreamlike meditation of the Purgatorio to the attempt to create a non-representational poetic world of the last cantica.  This refinement of poetic representation perfectly matches the evolution of the pilgrim’s understanding within the story: he first learns of all from his senses, from the sights and sounds of a hell that seems actually to exist, now and forever, thanks to the mimetic power of Dante’s verses in the Inferno. As the pilgrim depends upon his senses in his travels, so the reader seems to be with him in a world which exists autonomously, almost as if it had not been created by an act of the imagination.

In the Purgatorio, on the other hand, the major revelations come to the pilgrim subjectively, as interior events in what Francis Ferguson has called a “drama of the mind.” The dream-vision is the primary vehicle this for this illumination; Dante refers to the power which receives it as the imaginative (Purgatorio XV).  According to medieval physchology, this is the same power which enables poets to create from the fragments of sense experience and memory, so that in Dante’s view, the poetic power that created the poem is the same power that is illuminated with the pilgrim during his ascent of the mountain. The poet’s imagination, hidden by it’s own concreteness in the first part of his poem, becomes the focus of his attention and of ours in the Purgatorio. Thus, the landscape is suffused with mist, the tone is nostalgic, and the reader is called upon to respond with his imagination to both the sensory and the emotional suggestiveness, to imagine “visible speech” in the bas-reliefs, to hear the music of familiar hymns, to recall the lessons from the Sermon of the Mount.  The substantiality of this part of the poem resides in the subjectivity of the pilgrim and in our reaction to it more than in an explicit architectonic creation of the poet.

In the last part of the poem, the pilgrim’s vision is transformed until it no longer has any need of any representational media whatever in its communication with the absolute. The technical problem involved in finding a stylistic correspondence to this transformation reaches insoluble proportions by the poem’s ending, for it demands straining the representational value of poetry to the ultimate, approaching silence as its limit. Insofar as the Paradiso exists at all, therefore, it is an accommodation, a compromise short of silence, as Dantes suggests in his first canto:
How speak trans-human change to human sense?
let the example speak until God’s grace
grants the pure spirit the experience.

This sense of compromise, of poetic inadequacy for the ultimate experience, is what accounts for the poignancy of much of the cantica, but particularly of the last cantos, where both memory and fantasia fail the poet, who can describe only the sweetness distilled within his heart.

The prodigious achievement of the poet is that he manages, with the limits of this compromise, to represent nonrepresentation without falling either into unintelligibility or into silence. Within the story, this accommodation takes the form of a “command performance” of all the souls of the blessed for the exclusive benefit of the pilgrim.  In the fourth canto, Beatrice tells him that all of what he sees in the heavenly spheres of the Moon, the Sun, and the planets is there only temporarily, until he is able to behold all of Paradise without any such “condescension”:

So must one speak to mortal imperfection,
which only from the sensible apprehends
whatever it then makes fit got intellection.

- Taken from John Freccero’s introduction to John Ciardi’s translation of the Paradiso.

(see also: The Gun (a story))

Wanted to make a note of this article from Brainsturbator, particularly the first comment…

Other things to look into from this:
Stigmergy
Science and the Akashic Field

Had no access to “teh internets” for most of the morning.  Am working on several things, but won’t be able to draw to many connections or provide many explanations until next week.

And who knows, after tommorrows’ 10 hours or alchemical pressure cooking tomorrow, none of this may mean the same to me any more…  We will see.

Two monks were arguing about the temple flag waving in the wind. One said, “The flag moves.” The other said, “The wind moves.” They argued back and forth but could not agree.

The Sixth Ancestor said, “Gentlemen! It is not the wind that moves; it is not the flag that moves; it is your mind that moves.” The two monks were struck with awe.

To which I would add “through time at the speed of light”.

“Flag” and “wind” are both 3 dimensional illusory constructs, created from the informational input that the mind gathers as it moves through time-space.

Every conditioned thing is thus: wave patterns of movement through time. Frequencies of movement connect each discrete object to the next.  Nothing ever stands just-on-its-own.  That would reqire a 3 dimensional universe, in which no life could live, because no change could ever happen.

We think that things put out vibrations and frequancies, which we gather up with our senses, to make a picture of the universe.  But really, there are no things there to vibrate.  It is all just vibrations.

Surf the lightspeed wave of god/consciousness as it moves through time-space. Be aware. Wait until the flow rises to enliven your mind, and then you can push off and into infinity.

This sounds cheesy as shit, but I’m loving it!

Holy shit, I think that’s it!   With the help of speedbird’s recent comment, I think we may be on to something big here.  Speedbird says:

Einstein says we’re all moving at the speed of light all the time – it’s just that if we stay still in space, we move at the speed of light through time. Things that move in space travel more slowly through time.

THAT is the reason for the illusory quality of all things.  EVERYTHING is moving through time at the speed of light.  Enlightenment is the actual realization and experience of that, which requires thought to be brought to a speed faster than light.

The second noble truth of Buddha is “the origin of suffering is attachment”.  This is why.  Things (including your thoughts) are already going at lightspeed, through time.  Grapsing just slows you down.  Now this might be good, if you are aware of what doing, because it could work the same way as a rudder on a boat, but if you’re not aware of which rudders your grasping onto, you’re going to crash your boat!  And that causes suffering.

So we have to slow our minds until our thoughts are not moving at all in space, and we are able to be aware of our alreadt at-the-speed-of-light-movement through time-space.  Sitting at that level, we then encounter “god”, the absolute, eternity, or, as we’ve been calling it here, a 5th dimensional perspective, where time is spread out around you and can be interacted within as a space.

The Sufi’s (and probably the gnostics too, although I can’t find anything on them right now.  I know the gnostics had something about “trampling your clothing underfoot” or something like that) considered this to be dying before you die.

Except we have to stop thinking of it as if the material world is a prison which our “enlightened immortal souls” are trapped in.  We’re not-yet-but-almost those enlightened immortal souls.  We are matter raised to the point of connection with God!

These bodies are prisons, they’re chrysalises, and they only feel like prisons in the moments that we break out of them.

EarthOS -> CosmOS via MandalaOS port…

While meditating a few weeks ago, I had an experience that, when properly contextualized, may help to explain a little portion of what I’ve been thinking about recently.  But first, an explanation on meditation plus a bit of back-story to set up the context:

1) Meditation:

My meditation practice is to sit and count my breaths, while focusing on both the movement of my breath and my hara.  I sit and keep my focus solely on these things, while fully acknowledging and then releasing any thoughts that happen to arise.  Even the subtlest  intention of a thought requires acknowledgment and release, and then I back at 1 again.  The goal is to count to 10.  I usually don’t get past 3 or 4.

For me, this combines many different forms of self mastery/understanding in a simple, repeatable act.

- First and foremost, this is the unification of action and intent, by way of the keep-it-simple method.  I have only three things to focus on: body-as-still-point with the hara focus, body-as-movement with the breath focus, and using the counting to keep my intellect focused on the entire process as well.  Anything other than that and I’ve stopped acting on my intent, so I have to start over.  This is a very easy intent to put into action, but a very hard one to honestly maintain.

- Second, it combines (and hopefully coordinates) awareness in all three “brains”, as Gurdjieff called them.  The physical, in the posture, breath focus, and hara focus.  The emotional in the breath focus, the hara focus (“smile from your hara”, I have been told, is a beginners qi-gong practice), and the acknowledgment and release of thoughts.  And the intellectual in the breath counting, the holding of all three focal points, and the acknowledgment and release of thoughts.

- Third, the meditative posture and the focus on bringing the breath into my hara seem to work as a Reichian exercise as well.  The breath massages the armoring in my neck, shoulders, diaphragm, abdomen, core and back.  This seems to help ensure that when thoughts do arise under intense focus, they are things which need to be acknowledged.  When I was first taught meditation, I was told “All your karma will come back to you on that pillow”…

(Make a note: karma stored in the body.  The body as akashic recorder…)

All in all, this makes mediation into a sort of alchemical pressure cooker for me, burning out impurities.  At least, that’s the idea.  I sit for the time it takes to burn one entire incense stick, and the incense works as an external signifier to yoke my practice to the flowing of time around me as well.

Of course, having typed all this out, I’m now going to have to forget it, or my practice won’t work any more.  Because I’ll be thinking about the practice as I have described it, instead of actually practicing it.  But that’s a risk I’m willing to take for the sake of sharing this with you lovely people…

2) Back story (a touchstone):

Up until last September, I was putting myself through a program of therapy (the basic sit-on-a-couch-and-talk type of therapy).  For me, it was a really good kick-start for getting my head out of my ass and beginning to act in the-world-as-it-is (of which this site is but one of many fruits).

During the therapy sessions, I came to realize that a specific childhood event of mine (of which I was already aware) could be thought of as a sort of seed for the growth of many other problems later in life; a small flaw in the early foundation of my personality that threw all my later ego-growth out of whack.

Now, I would like to emphasize that this was not a “recovered memory” nor did it involve any attempts at hypnosis.  It was a real event that occurred to me when I was about 6 months old, which I had learned about from my parents prior to putting myself through therapy.

Yet it was only in therapy that I came to realize how the feelings/fears that this event engendered in me were, from then on, carried throughout my life, and how they were still present and active in my current behaviors, despite the fact that I now knew better than to be scared by such things.

When I was about 3 months old, I was taken to Minnesota to visit my grandparents for Christmas.  On the plane flight back, I caught a cold which came and went for several months before turning into severe bronchial pneumonia.  (This was also right about the time when my mother ended her maternity leave and went back to work, so I was already dealing with a standard emotional milestone of childhood, even if I hadn’t gotten sick.)

Once I came down with pneumonia, I was hospitalized and kept in an oxygen tent, cut off from physical contact with any-and-everyone by thick sheets of plastic.  I was also strapped down to be x-rayed several times, and no one was allowed in the room for that either.

Basically, I imagine there was a lot of aloneness, a lot of crying, screaming, and need for physical comforting, but not much external response to any of these expressions of suffering.  I’ll leave it up to you to imagine what opinions about the world this may have formed in my little infant mind, but they shouldn’t be too hard to figure out…

All in all, I think this only went on for a few weeks.  Then I was sent home with a good dosage of antibiotics.  And granted, this is really nothing that extraordinary (many people go through much worse as children), but it was by imagining how this would have been experienced by my infant-self (who had no real language skills, barely any motor skills, and very little sense-of-self) that I came to understand it as a core element of my being which needed to be released.

The fears I imaginatively attributed to that 6 month old child still felt particularly strong and real for me when I thought about the event, and these feelings also had a lot in common with my current fears, which I was growing more conscious of through the therapy.

3) The actual experience (and the whole point of this post):

One day recently I was sitting in meditation when some thought-content arose about this experience of my former child-self.  As I acknowledged those strong feelings of loneliness and abandonment, they became more and more real to me.  I did not push them away, which I won’t say was difficult, but I also won’t say was easy.  I felt that they were something that had to be dealt with, and so I delved deeper and deeper into them, letting the emotions rise up and out of my hara.

(Even before the mediation training, during the therapy sessions, I would notice that when a particularly heavy topic was first brought to light, a tension would become noticeable in my abdomen.  I came to look at this as a sign that I was onto something.  Once the topic was fully understood and resolved, I would feel an easing of tension, and a warmth and relaxation would rise up from my abdominal area toward my heart.)

This time, what arose while meditating was not simply a tension, but a real feeling of fear and loneliness.  I could feel my child-self’s desperate need for reassurance, and its horror at not receiving any acknowledgment of this need.

Figuring that if anyone had a right to reassure my younger self, it was my older self, I tried to communicate feelings of love, acceptance, and reassurance back to my child-self.  I knew exactly what he was going through, and I also knew that in reality, he had nothing to be afraid of.  I tried to communicate this through my hara, back in time to that small child, and it seemed to work.  The fear subsided and was replaced by a feeling of child-like peacefulness and love.

Ever since then, I haven’t been able to summon up that same feeling of real fear and panic when I bring that event to mind.  It feels like those demons, at least, have finally been laid to rest.

4) Conclusion

How does this tie into my explorations of the self/identity/higher dimensions/quantum metaphysics?

You might notice that I said “I tried to communicate this through my hara, back in time to that small child”.  The obviously response to this from psychology would be, “You didn’t send anything ‘back through time’, you just recovered and processed some repressed memories”.

To which I reply:  “Why can’t the recovery and release of repressed memories be seen as way of journeying “back” in time?  Why aren’t memories considered to be true pathways (in a subjective sense) back to our earlier experiences?”

The problem lies in their interpretation of memory, not in my interpretation of time travel.

If time is just another spatial dimension, then our memories are simply reference points of consciousness in the time-space “behind” us, which we can make use of in our current position.  And if there is a reference point which we are not aware of, but which still affects our current behavior, then in becoming aware of it we can correct for its influence and move that much more accurately through our current state of being-in-reality.

It is only when we see our past self as unchangeable and constant that we are unable to release its troubles.  By understanding the present as part of a spatial dimension that also very much contains the past, we are able to use our memory-consciousness-connections to effect changes in the past.

From my future perspective, I was able to reach back to my past self and tell him that he was loved.  That whatever fear he was feeling was completely illusory and everything that was done had been done out of love all along. And because I could honestly be aware of his feelings, and honestly relay back to him feelings of acknowledgement and safety, I could bring into consciousness and resolve that particular unconscious split-of-mind that I had been carrying around.  I was able to put that part of my “burden” down.

This is a meta-perspective.  I had to recall, interpret my childhood experience from clues within my own behavior, as evidenced over many years experience.  Then I had to hold this current mental/intellectual/linguistic interpretation in my mind, and go searching through my emotional memory for corresponding feelings.

By comparing the intellectually/linguistically understood solution to my various problematic emotional memories, and adjusting the intellectual thought-form to better align with my past emotional interpretations of my experience, I was able to create an entrainment between the two that “gave birth” to a feeling-hologram of my child-self, which I could then reassure and love.  And when the intellectual thought form came close enough to matching the feelings, when they were both tuned into the same frequency, the suffering was released.

What I did was reach back with my mind along the 4 dimensional snake of my body to help loosen a part of myself that had been emotionally constricted due to a false interpretation of reality (or if multiple interpretations or reality are allowed, then it was due to a contradictory interpretation of reality).

If everything exists all at the same time, increasing our inner awareness should allow us to take better care of our 4th-dimensional-flowering-energy-entity-self.  But it requires a 5th dimensional perspective to be able do so…

Let it go, put down your burden.  You need carry nothing, everything is whole and complete and singular already, and you are already a part of it.  Observe the splits in your quantum self, collapse the multiple/contradictory positions into one true/acceptable position, and you will end all your sufferings.

A whole lot of different sculptural interpretations of St George killing the dragon have been put up for a vote.  Winner gets the commission from the cathedral.  Check out the entries here.

If you’d like my recommendation, vote for Martha Walker.  She’s a great lady and a wonderful artist.  More of her work can be seen at her website.

I just put the number for my zen temple into my cellphone and did a bit of a double take.  Something about entering “Fire Lotus Temple” into a piece of everyday electronics was just awesome.

My life has become a video game.

In addition to the goddess video, my sister was also kind enough to use her photoshop expertise to put together my Ganesh pictures for me.  I thought I’d share the results with you.

That last one would make an awesome t-shirt, yeah?

It will remain broken.

And I’m tired of it.

A quick note for “future generations”, I’ve been meditating pretty seriously for the past few months and have had a lot of good come from it, the (relative) productivity on this site is just one example.  Recently though, this past week, I seem to have hit the wall. I feel under an immense pressure to concentrate but cannot easily do so, and have been going through some pretty intense emotional lows as well.

Towards evening today, I was able to sit and concentrate (seems to work better for me in cold, dark places, ie: the stairwell in my building) and I felt some sort of something pulled out, or through, or maybe some kind of connection made between things in what (in Zen Buddhism, at least) is called the hara (a point about 3 finger widths below your navel).  There was a feeling of recognition between my desires and my intellect, or my guts and my brain, that hadn’t really been there before.  The pressure released, and that relief felt joyous.  But soon I was back inside, so was the pressure and tension, and that connection seemed to fade back into it.

I’ve long felt that I should be doing something more, or something else, or something better with my life, but I always put it off.  Well, I’m sick of it.  I’m sick of telling myself that my life would be better some other way.  If part of me wants to bitch and moan about things, I’m going to make it keep bitching and moaning until it decides to actually tell me what it wants, instead of just telling me what it doesn’t.  Some more intensive meditation is order, I believe.  Luckily, the Zen temple I attend is having an all-day (10 hour) sit next weekend.  Consider me there.

THIS is how God works:
http://www.wimp.com/greatshow/

An awesome video sent by my sister.  I would perfer to embedd it, but can’t figure out how (and it’s late and I’m tired…)