As long as you think you need something, you are defining yourself as one-who-does-not-have-it. When what you are working on is a newer, better, emptier definition of self, thinking that something further is needed can cause some major problems.
Defining yourself as in need of something is to claim the-existence-of-a-lack as an identity. Even if that thing is emptiness…
Thinking the world needs to be fixed and going to fix it, is not the same as confronting a problem in the world.
Another thing I’ve been thinking about recently is focus and intent. I’ve been going through some rough shit, in my personal life, most of which I can attribute to an effort to re-engage my life. This blog’s a part of it, the zen practice is a part of it, and I’ve been trying to make other parts of my life fit into it too. Work, relationships, friendships (online and off). Everything.
What I’m looking for is this:
But more and more, what I’ve been going through feels like this:
So. Clearly something is still out of alignment, and I’m thankful that we’re built in such a way that when the wheels are out of alignment, they squeak. That way, we know where they are.
And this blog has been squeaking quite a bit lately. Not only do I find that I am rushing through posts, but I am not writing about the ideas that truly interest me. They’re around, some of them, saved as drafts or as collections of bookmarked links in various places, underlined passages in books, scribbles in notebooks. But I keep putting them aside for smaller pieces. Why? Because I’m too “busy”.
My mind is not focused on the blog, hasn’t been since the big organization post. Which is not to say I’m not proud of my other posts since then, but they are all diversions. There are issues I really want to get into here, but that I’m scared of picking up. I keep waiting for the perfect moment, the perfect time to really dig into the important stuff.
And it never comes.
And in fact, I am realizing that I never have time for the important stuff. That’s what happens when I think of something as important. It stops being real. Make something an absolute, and it’s really heard to find out where it begins…
Anyway, the long and short of it is that I am going to continue to post here, but it’s going to be a bit more sporadic. The focus will turn from consistent quantity towards consistent (I hope) quality. But first, I have to get this monkey mind of mine to sit down, shut the fuck up, and start doing what we both know we both want to be doing!
I think I’ve been pulled out of Plato’s Cave. At least for a little while.
Everything before was like an abscess, a hernia along the inner lining of my awareness, where I was tucked into because of certain things I was holding on to. Sort of a “stuck-in-the-backwash” kind of thing. Everything was going along through me, but I wasn’t going with it. I was holding back. Now, not so much.
Living in a echo chamber, or an anteway, rather than going out the door.
I am not naïve enough to hold tight to this. If it lasts, it lasts. If it doesn’t, well, at least I know it is a place to be gotten to, or something like that.
What a hellish day it’s been though. Horrible.
I was hiding, and now I am not. No decision was made, nothing was done. Thoughts went along both before and after whatever happened “happened”. But they went along. Experience was experienced, thoughts taken up, considered, released, with the knowledge that all true information circles back around. False knowledge fades when it is let go.
The idea of the exhaustion of karma makes a lot of sense to me at the moment. One day it’s there, the next, it’s gone. The thought of Divine Grace comes to mind, but karma works so much better. If this is divine grace, then so is the turning of water to steam by heat (actually, that probably is Divine Grace too, but I wouldn’t have thought of it before).
Don’t know if I would say anything is done. Probably not, probably more to do. But this feels quite nice after all the dukkha today.
Coughed up a big chunk, I did…
Gonna stop now, before it goes away. Time to go outside and play in the sunlight.
Been thinking about just what it means to stop thinking lately. At my zendo, I remember one talk where we were told that a great zen master had once said, “Make an iron wall against your thoughts!”. For a tradition that emphasizes direct experiential mind-to-mind teaching over linguistic forms, those zen masters sure had a lot of good sayings…
But this one I remembered because it didn’t really sit well with me. As has been pointed out here before, I do “have a desire to write down (my) thoughts and musings”. Still, I also really like the zen stuff, so how to reconcile the two? Well, in a book one of my roommates left in our bathroom one time, the Dalai Lama said something along the lines of ‘thoughts without emotion make us dead, emotions without thoughts makes us animals’. I can’t find the book at the moment to look up the specific passage, but it’s called “The Heart of Compassion”.
And I like that idea, that thoughts are not something to be gotten rid of, but more properly that they are something we do not use correctly. This ties in with what I was saying last post, and also with my earlier ideas about an “information body”. Not to imply that I’ve “got it all figured out” yet, but it does seem to be a key issue for me at this point of my development.
But then, how do we stop misusing thought? Can we think our way out of it? Thinking about thinking can become quite an addiction, as has been pointed out…
“What’s the first step? Where do we begin? Have I only sunk deeper into the trap by even starting this conversation at all? What do you think and are you addicted to doing it? How do you stop it? Meditation? Masturbation? Do you even want to stop it? Are we all well and truly fucked, after all? See? See what I mean? This, this right here is the problem…”
I’ve also heard that “thinking your way out of thinking” can be compared to asking a corrupt police department to investigate itself. The whole enterprise is doomed before it can even start. Yet people still manage it, somehow…
To bring in yet another Buddhist master,Milarepa has said: “When you run after your thoughts, you are like a dog chasing a stick: every time a stick is thrown, you run after it. Instead, be like a lion who, rather than chasing after the stick, turns to face the thrower. One only throws a stick at a lion once.”
Which implies that you are not the one throwing the sticks. Figure that out, and you’re well on the way to having the whole game locked down. Of course, try not to think too hard about it…
But I won’t leave you with just that. Let’s go back to that book by the Dalai Lama for a moment. The only part of the that book that I can quote comes from the “Search inside this book” header on the amazon page: “The Tibetan word ‘chos’ is known as dharma in Sanskrit, and it means ‘to hold’…”
And this brings to mind another thing I heard at the zendo: that the entire universe is the dharma, and that all dharmas are forms of emptiness. If that’s true, then it must also pertain to our thoughts, because if anything is a “form of emptiness”, a thought is.
And this brings us back to what makes the difference between “good” thoughts and “bad” thoughts. What I think is meant by that “iron wall” that I mentioned in the beginning is not that we should not think. But that these thoughts should always be kept as outside the “self”. They’re still there, we just don’t have to use them as “holders” for our identity.
Because anything your mind can imagine is held by thoughts. And we take these thoughts and try to send them back and forth, from one context to another, from one time and place to another. Our thoughts are how we time-bind our experience. If we identify with them, if we allow them the permanence that really only belongs to our awareness of those thoughts, then the thoughts (and therefore we) become containers for unreal things, things from another time or another space or another reality altogether. They cease being the dharma-forms-of-emptiness and become ghosts to which we cling, notches in our potter’s wheel…
Time to repurpose those containers.
More on properly using the mind, from the Notes pages:
our brains are all about finding the patterns with the noise. Once we find those patterns, we tend to lock in on them and a feedback loop can make those patterns appear stronger and stronger to our pattern-recognizing minds.
&
Empathy is usually thought of as a one-way street – an empathetic individual tends to be more sensitive to the emotions of others. But the effect is even stronger when it works both ways: an individual performer who understands, through their own empathy, what affects the hearts and minds of others, can then use that awareness to make their performance that much more emotionally engaging for others, and the more empathetic the audience the stronger the feedback loop. When that loop is in place, both the performer and the audience become transmitters and receivers, both tuned into that channel we call empathy.
&
“It used to be we thought sensory systems were pretty passive – they took the sound and just passed the information to the cerebral cortex where all the hard work and thinking was done,” says Kraus. “But now we’re understanding that as we use our sensory systems in an active way, this feeds back and shapes the sensory system all the way down through the brainstem to the ear.”
&
the idea that learning music can rewire the brain and repair potential problems relates nicely to the newly growing science of epigenetics
&
like a performer and an audience, we’re transmitters and receivers of the patterns of information that we are all navigating through and traveling within.
Full article over at the Imagining the 10th Dimension website.
We are gods consciousness that has taken a step beyond gods consciousness, in order to assist it and make it better. More happily efficient (meant in the best way possible).
Getting back in touch with gods consciousness, to facilitate a flow of information between the two, is what we should do. We are god’s outliers, his satellites, his camera he has pointed at himself. Can we remember how to find our way down the cord, back out through the viewing screen, to identify again with the-one-we-are?
God’s consciousness is inside us and all around us.
We are separate from it. This is the dukkha that all life is. We can combine with it, which is nirvana.
When god’s consciousness is seen as higher than us, this is the gnostic archons. These are the rules we must obey. When god’s consciousness penetrates us and we penetrate it, we have risen above the level of demi-urge.
Thou becomes that.
Forms, attachment, and identification with less than the whole is what stops us from hearing gods voice/seeing the kingdom. It is what locks up our vital energy and keeps us from feeling as if we are acting freely (because we always already are).
This is the removal from the Garden of Eden. We are separate from god. But god wants it that way. The parable of the prodigal son… Our separation is our reward and also our cross to bear. God is not dead, we are just growing up. Our goal is to overcome the angel with the flaming sword (the idea of the demiurge) and reach the tree of eternal life (where we live forever each moment). When we left the garden, we were cast out. When we return to the garden, we come as welcomed victors, soldiers returning home after a long war.
Human beings will always miss home, unless/until they…
Perhaps we are mid-leap between two systems of interacting with gods-mind-reality.
In conjunction with that large quote I posted recently from Colin Wilson’s biography of Wilhelm Reich, check this out article that Klint Finley linked to over at Renegade Futurist:
When people are bored they have high levels of brain activity, Andrade says. “When you’re bored, you think nothing much is going on, but actually your brain is looking for something to do.”
Which ties in nicely with what I’ve been told is the standard classroom explanation for how quantum particles go from a 100% state vector to multi-state vectors when they slip into superposition. That is, what particles are doing when they go into a quantum state is getting bored and exploring other states simultaneously. And when they are observed via measurement, they drop back into a single state here and now.
What I think this points to is the fact that we are not using our brains at all as well as they could be used. What the mind is, I would hypothesize, is our way of exploring other states. Whether it’s day dreaming, hallucinating, or going on a shamanic journey, our mind goes into various superpositions throughout the higher dimensions (See the Imagining the 10th Dimensions animation to see what kind of higher dimensions I’m talking about here).
Our mind might be our way of exploring possibilities, but we have yet to full integrate this function of “mind” with the physical reality around us, upon which we depend to stay alive. Because, unlike those quantum particles, a large part of our existence is dependent upon our body. When the mind and body are more fully aligned, then we can act as the universe’s way of reaching into those higher dimensions of possibility and pulling down potential into physical consensus reality. We exist as a combination of two states: the lower physical realm of the body and the higher emotional->mental->spiritual realm of the mind. By aligning our mind with our body, we are serving to more fully integrate these two realms back into a ever-more-perfect whole.
Perhaps I’m confusing a few planes there, but I think it works as a jury-rigged way of explaining the mind body connection, why we need to get the two working together and how quantum physics might tie the whole equation together. It makes best use of our ability to think and imagine while not denying our ability to act from and enjoy the physical aspect of our existence as well. It can serve as a bridge between the patterns recognized in quantum physics, and those recognized in metaphysics, and gives us a different way of understanding exactly how the mind can and should best be used. Only by reaching a single-pointed awareness can mind act as a true portal of possibility, lifting the singular physical realm, via the pathway of the body, to higher and higher levels.
Just to show that this isn’t only some crazy idea I came up with, check out this article from Discover. I’ve cut out the best parts here on my of my notes pages. Read the part about the way energy travels through plant cells with 95% efficiency and try to tell me that “only when the energy had reached the end of the series of connections could an efficient pathway retroactively be found. At that point, the quantum process collapsed, and the electrons’ energy followed that single, most effective path” doesn’t sound a lot like an imaginative brainstorming session.
I sit in my office and I say “I shouldn’t have to do this!”.
But that is just the way of things.
Our ancestors, many years ago, when attacked by bears, or when their hut was washed away in a flood, or when their baby died of some unknown disease, all said the same thing.
And if they were alive today, they’d be right. Those things don’t happen anymore, not like they used to…
Is your attempt to make yourself feel shittier in real life than you do when you imagine facing something that you need to face.
I’ve been listening to The Pleasure of Finding Things Out by Richard Feynman and also reading The Quest for Wilhelm Reich by Colin Wilson. There’s been some really good quotes in them both that kind of pertain to some stuff I’ve been exploring here lately, so I thought’s I’d type them up:
“Neurosis is basically a strain between the rational self and the instinctive self, with the rational self continuously interfering with the natural flow of instinctive activity. It can be caused by any type of anxiety that leads the rational self to over-react” – Colin Wilson on Wilhelm Reich (p 119)
“Such is the perversity of human nature that we seem to experience our freedom only when it is threatened; in circumstances where we ought to feel happy, we often to look around for minor anxieties to occupy our attention. And this odd preference for anxiety underlies a basic characteristic of human nature: that we operate at maximum efficiency only when we are loaded down by a certain weight - of interest, of responsibility, even of anxiety. This is only to say that man is basically a purposive animal; a man without a strong sense of purpose does not become neurotic. A man without a sense of purpose is likely to become neurotic even if he has no real problems. Any scheme for improving the human lot which merely concentrates on removing his problems will leave him dissatisfied as ever.” – Colin Wilson on Wilhelm Reich (p 119)
“You cannot expect old designs to work in new circumstances, but new designs can work in new circumstances.” – Richard Feynman
“People…are woefully, pitifully, absolutely ignorant of the science of the world that they live in. And they can stay that way. I don’t mean to say ‘the heck with them’, what I mean is that they are able to stay that way without it worrying them at all.” – Richard Feynman
“Mr. Bernardini said we shouldn’t teach wonders, but knowledge. It may be a difference in the meaning of the words, but I think we should teach wonders, and that the purpose of knowledge is to appreciate wonders even more. And that the knowledge is just to put into correct framework, the wonder that nature is” – Richard Feynman
Life path as quantum wave function. Started in the brain. Accessed and changed at will, sort of (by decisions). That is how it’s programed. No possbilty equals death. See also, “reality tunnel”.
“Any work that you do which involves interaction with other people is moral work, and any moral work depends upon practical wisdom.”
“People want to be allowed to be virtuous.”
One of the best TED talks I’ve listened to.
Sister in trouble in Japan (not really trouble, just youthful problems).
Twin seals swimming through an underwater city. First time they are enjoying themselves. Second time, they appear to be enjoying themselves, but may actually be dead and pulled along on strings… Seals are playfully escaping from things gone wrong. The dead part really scares me.
Meditation:
Dry, intellectual realization of dependent arising, realized that I have been trying to weight the way for way too long now. Then, towards the end, when wanting to slack off because it felt like I was done, I decided to try and follow through, so to speak, and push until the incense ran out. Came to not-so-dry realization that everything in my head was put there by reality, and so each thought and assumption, everything I could ever come up with, no matter the quantity of thought, weighed the same, had the same importance as reality. And that reality is interacted with through measurement, interpretation, and definition. It was a really emptying-out experience, which I am not decribing too well. Mostly that whatever thought I had was just as valid as the actual experience I was having, but that the experience could be redefined, while the thought could not. Sounds weird….
Invocations and vibrations of Tara (tara mantra) before and after meditation. Yesterday as well…
Although I’m not a traceur myself, but I do receive the American Parkour newsletter. As I’ve mentioned before, I think Parkour has at it’s core some important principles that can just as easily be applied across the spectrum of experience.
In the most recent newsletter, there’s a small article explaining what a practioner can do when a day they’ve planned on devoting to training turns out to be ruined due to bad weather. The full article is here, but the exercise they give sounds like a really good way to integrate the mind and body through the sense of touch. Most body practice is more focused on things like balance and movement, but sensitivity to texture is not often mentioned:
The above may take a small bit of practice to get the hang of but is well worth the effort.
I did a google search for “If You Meet The Buddha On The Road”, and I found this picture. I think it speaks more eloquently for itself than I ever could:
One a round trip bus trip from New York to anywhere in the US. Only a weekend trip. Me and two friends (the FedEx Guy from work and my friend Frank from grade school. Double F’s?), trying to decide where to go. I suggest New Orleans, but then remember that it’s a mess. My second suggestion is Memphis for the Blues (Beale Street). We decide to go away to pack and decide later.
Later I am explaining about it while on a amusement park ride with my family. We all go to get off the ride, and my plans are to go pack (afterwards, this seems like a situation where I was having empty fun when I should have been doing something else, due to familial obligations… Let the dead bury the dead…) But my mom can’t get out of her seat and gets locked back into the ride (not to imply that she’s going around again, just that we have to wait for her to figure it out. I get frustrated and do not stop or turn back. I continue walking out of the amusement park. Seems to be a sign that I can walk away if I think it is warranted.
Then, 2 hours of meditation this morning. Once I get deeply into it, I have a couple of chakra experiences. First the root chakra seems to stir, but no major effects or visions. Second, the second chakra seems to have a feeling of welling up from below, as water seeping upward from underground. It breaks the surface and I am filled with a pleasant tingling sensation in that area. This was preceded by a feeling of tension and convulsions (minor) in that area. Next, the third chakra, same tension and minor convulsions. A feeling of an empty room that was barred by someone scared, but someone who is no longer (or never was) present. A pressing need to break the door down from outside (police, knights, something is outside trying to get in). I force myself to switch sides, to the side of the knights, long enough to allow the door to be broken down. A feeling a warmth and tingling fill my upper abdomen. The knights have entered and are happily abiding. There is the feeling of a sun, but I have already implanted in myself an association of the third chakra with the sun, so it could just be suggestion, perhaps a slight corroboration, but just as likely my “conscious” mind (that lives off of memories and plans) struggling to catch up and claim credit for the event. No reason it can’t be both, I supposed.
Then more tension and convulsions in my chest. Slightly more intense, or a different vibrations. It suggests more pain, although none of this is actually painful. The feeling of a thin line being worked up into the heart. Fear. I imagine feathers coming from above and below the heart, tickling it lightly but just to relax it. An implied association of softness and ease. There follows a small flood of warmth, the feeling of flame and feathers mixing but not consuming. Not a feeling of completion. Will likely have to revisit this area.
Double F’s, flames and feathers in the heart… Strange.
Followed later by depression and angst at work. Eventually worked out that these are useless and groundless feelings, as they do not suceed in creating anything in my other than stagnancy. They are designed, on the surface, to make me move, but my actual response is stillness. Will have to learn to communicate better internally…
Recently, over at The Links, I got into a brief back and forth (one back and one forth, actually) with someone named Ledgergermane on an article I’d posted. The article was about scientists removing the parts of a rat’s brains where traumatic and fearful memories are stored. I’ll cut and paste so you can avoid the Tumblr layout:
Original quote from article:
“Scientists used to “delete” large parts of mice brains trying to remove fear memories. Now they are instead targeting specific neurons called known as the lateral amygdala. And they’re having some success…”
And an added description, again from the article (emphasis mine):
“Our experiences, both good and bad, teach us things,” said Josselyn. “If we didn’t remember that the last time we touched a hot stove we got burned, we would be more likely to do it again. So in this sense, even memories of bad or frightening experiences are useful. However, there are some cases in which fearful memories become maladaptive, such as with post-traumatic stress disorder or severe phobia. Selectively erasing these intrusive memories may improve the lives of afflicted individuals,” she said.
And my reply:
“Yeah, I completely agree. Seems as if we just want all bad results of things to go away, instead of taking them for what they are: experimental results. If bad things happen, it’s because bad things went into their making. From one way of looking at it, all life is suffering, and that suffering is there to be seen through, not to be turned off!”
Now, I’m not just sharing my conversations from other sites with you here; there’s more to it than that. I found some information on a different study that ties in pretty closely with this one, and I think that the two combined warrant some further exploration. I don’t like exploring ideas on the tumblr site, so I’m moving it over here.
From the second study (which I found via Futurismic):
Before fear memories are stored in the long-term memory, there is a temporary labile phase. During this phase, protein synthesis takes place that ‘records’ the memories. The traditional idea was that the memory is established after this phase and can, therefore, no longer be altered. However, this protein synthesis also occurs when memories are retrieved from the memory and so there is once again a labile phase at that moment. The researchers managed to successfully intervene in this phase.
This seems to point to an entirely different way of looking at the exact same problem. Rather than removing the offending neurons that held the traumatic emotional memory, we open up those neurons to the same traumatic experience and make sure that this time, there is a way remove the negative emotional response associated with that memory. As Ledgergermane points out, people throughout history have developed many ways of doing this throughout human history, but in this case, that removal of the fear response is accomplished chemically.
And this, I think, points to one thing that science has over all the other great traditions of humanity: that science’s accomplishments can be given to others without their ever needing to learn how to create those accomplishments themselves. This aspect of science is not always well used, and it can foster a lot of laziness, but I think it is an important distinction to make. It’s happening anyway, better that we are at least aware of that fact. The more aware we are, the better we can make use of it for the good, and to be honest, people are going to be lazy anyway. We might as well do what we can to help make them suffer a little less.
The wikipedia article on beta blockers says:
“Some people, particularly musicians, use beta blockers to avoid stage fright and tremor during public performance and auditions. The physiological symptoms of the fight/flight response associated with performance anxiety and panic (pounding heart, cold/clammy hands, increased respiration, sweating, etc.) are significantly reduced, thus enabling anxious individuals to concentrate on the task at hand.”
This also brings to mind something Ran Prieur had linked to a while back:
A long time ago, so long that I can’t remember the source, I learned that if you stub your toe, all you have to do is repeat the same action several times, without quite stubbing your toe again, and the pain will go away. I used that a lot unthinkingly, but in later years I studied the process in detail and began teaching it in my courses, suggesting that the students try out variations. The concept I developed was that by re-creating the pattern and changing the ending, you were, in effect, giving the ku [subconscious] a new memory of the event, requiring the ku to change the body state in conformity to the new version of what happened. The sooner you could do this after the event, the sooner the body would get back into harmony.
That apparently comes from a book called “Urban Shaman” by a man named Serge Kahili King who practices a Hawaiian form of shamanism known as Huna. More info on Huna is available here (although, caveat lector, from wikipedia: “Many Native Hawaiians resent the representation of Huna as being Hawaiian and regard it as an invention with no Hawaiian basis.” Also, wikipedia ties Huna in the New Thoght Movement…)
What all this points to for me is twofold. First, the idea that a large part of our suffering is caused by assumed connections between physical experiences and emotions responses, with the retention of those assumptions in our memory as permanent aspects of reality, irregardless of whatever new data we might receive on the matter.
And two, that these misunderstandings of reality can be overcome by retraining and rewiring the brain (be that surgically, chemically, medatatively, or any other way). What better way could we have to describe the neuroscience corresponding to dukkha?
The quote from Urban Shaman seems to imply that this can apply to physical pain as well, which is arguable. But really, how much of physical pain is actually physical pain, and how much is merely memory? Think of children. Everyone knows that children, when they fall down, will get right back up and start playing again unless an adult gives them some indication that they could be hurt (“oh, baby, are you OK?”). Then they start crying, because that’s the role they’ve been given to play.
I’m not saying pain doesn’t exist, but a differentiation needs to be made between the actual experience of pain and the suffering caused by the memory of (and our identification with) that pain. And I’d much prefer chemicals over surgery, if only because in surgery, you can’t ever put those neurons back in. Of course, I’d also prefer mediation over chemicals, but I think that should be obvious to by now…
And to end up, I think I will bring in a little quantum physics as well. I linked to it before, but here’s that MP3 of Alan Wallace discussing free will, where he mentions Steven Hawking’s take on how the entire past might always be open to reinterpretation. After all, what are memories but past measurements we have made permanent?
The collapsing of the walls we use to separate ourselves from reality. Reality washes over us, refreshing and renewing. Self disappears in the sea of everything, to be born again.
Dying before we die…
Found this article on Physorg about metal becoming transparent under great stress:
“It is well known that at sufficiently high compression all materials must go metallic,” said Oganov. “This is seen in the metallization of hydrogen at high pressures and temperatures inside planets Jupiter and Saturn.”
It’s a little confusing, because the caption under the accompanying picture (which I’ve swiped and displayed here) says:
“Sodium, a white metal at pressures below 1.5 Mbar (left — picture at 1.1 Mbar, 1 Mbar = 1 million atmospheres), turns black at 1.5 Mbar (center — picture at 1.56 Mbar) and becomes red transparent at 1.9 Mbar (right — picture at 1.99 Mbar). It is predicted to become colorless and transparent like glass at ~3 Mbar.”
So maybe it turns clear, maybe it doesn’t. But either way, it’s pretty cool, and it got me thinking about classical alchemy. I don’t know much about it, but I do know that part (or maybe all) of the “Great Work” of alchemy involves the stages of “Nigredo“, “Albedo“, and “Rubedo“, that is, black, white, and red. Now, sulfur doesn’t go through the colors in this same order, and after doing further research, wikipedia says that there’s actually a fourth color, between Albedo and Rubedo, called “Citrintas“, or yellow.
So although there’s a correlation there, I don’t think there’s much too it:
Alchemy: Black, White, Yellow, Red
Sulphur under pressure: White, Black, Red, Clear
Still, kind of neat, yeah?
Also, while looking up these alchemical terms, I found a pretty direct explanation of these terms that goes a bit deeper than the wikipedia articles. I won’t go over the whole thing, because it’s worth reading through yourself. But there’s a few parts that very clearly say something along the lines of what I was trying to say in that post from late last week:
Well, I am definitely guilty of being distracted by “Makyo”, and for a while I even mistook it as the fruit of my mediation practice. I am not trying to get all high and mighty here. But that last bit, the one I highlighted, really hit home for me as far as the (lack) of usefulness of visions of beings and higher dimensions and stuff like that. I’m not knocking it as being potentially useful for other people, but for me, it’s just another distraction.
The Buddhist’s have said it best though: “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill the Buddha!”
I was going to write some thoughts I had on reading a little of Michael Topper’s system of metaphysics. I was pulling from an article I got from fellow internet traveler Ted.
It starts off with:
“Many of you have probably heard that our planet is about to advance from “3rd density” to “4th density”. So what is this “density” about? Density in our special context doesn’t stand for inertia or opacity in the normal physical sense, but “Density” corresponds with subtlety, especially in its psychic sense (i.e. perceptual or cognitive subtlety). “Third density” (the one we are presently experiencing) tells you that things (objects) are fixed and solid; 4th density allows us to perceive such “solidity” as an energetic kind of fluid/kaleidoscopic “coagulation”
This seemed to be a more complicated way of talking about a move from 3 dimensional moment-by-moment awareness, that is likely to grasp onto things, to a more fluid 4 dimensional awareness that understands the impermanent nature of all things because everything changes constantly as it moves through time. “To be attached to things is illusion” and all that.
But the more I read of his stuff, the parts that float around the internet, the more sick I get of a system that tries to create a new explanation of “how it all works”. I think the last thing we need is yet another system of explaining “higher realms”. We have too many already! And we have enough trouble going on in our everyday reality.
We should instead try to start finding ways that they overlap, commonalities. When multiple ideas from multiple traditions can be compared to each other, we might be able to come up with a consistent language for describing these kinds of experiences.
Instead of reaching up higher and higher, trying to see how far we can get, I think it’s time to see what real work can be done to raise the base level of awareness. Are there ways to encourage people to grow, to explore these things? To stop all the overly complicated nonsense and begin to enlighten everybody, from the ground up?
The only reason I’ve ever heard given for the complexity of these kinds of esoteric teachings is that it would be dangerous for them to get into the hands of everyone. But so what? What’s so bad about that? If these wise people who have an understanding of these secrets and know how to use them, why are they worried about people who have these understandings but don’t know how to use them properly. If there’s no difference between the two, then what’s the point of having them? Increased knowledge and awareness of the way things work should equal increased ability to put that knowledge to use. Otherwise it’s just daydreams.
I can hear it now:
“This power shouldn’t be given to THOSE people, they wouldn’t know how to use it! But I’ve got it!”
“Now what do I do with it?”
“Oh, life is so boring! All my whims are granted immediately… Boohoo, you can never understand how I suffer (or don’t suffer as the case may be).”
Hey, here’s an idea. Teach people openly, so that everybody has that power. If some people misuse it, then and it’s up to the people how know how to use it properly to fix their mistakes! Bingo. Open source wish-fulfilling jewel with proper guidance and feedback from above! The flowering of humanity.
Maybe it’s because I’m of a generation so many years after the atomic bomb and the cold war. Maybe it’s because of the lack of good, trustworthy leadership in the world. Maybe it’s because of the increasing feeling that NO ONE KNOWS WHAT’S GOING ON ANYMORE.
But whatever it is, I am sick of the secrecy, sick of the idea that any kind of spiritual knowledge shouldn’t be openly shared as an aspect of your personal reality. And rather than developing radical powers, or extreme esoteric understand, we should work instead on developing your self in increasing communicable ways. Take one step a hundred times, until you can communicate that one step to anyone watching by merely performing it once. Work on craftsmanship, the ability to provide reliable quality. Work on making all this secret esoteric shit a little more open source and understandable!
Damn. I’ll admit, I’m a bit drunk. Perhaps I should call it a night…
A few things about the Michael Topper stuff from that article, though. There’s all these series of increasingly complex entities, the higher up the “densities” you go. And as you read a little farther:
“One thing remarkable and noteworthy about this “density” concept, is, that the difference between the “good guys” and the “bad guys” in higher densities becomes ever larger. The “Good Guys” in higher densities are supposed to be really extremely benevolent, whereupon the “bad guys” in higher densities are true personifications of cosmic evil itself, with ultimately one evil hierophant (known as Satan) on the top. Bad guys in higher densities prefer consciously (and have freely chosen to prefer) to play dominion and enslavement-based “games”, and they tend to organize themselves in a military hierarchy with a very strict pecking-order.”
I know that “the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing us he didn’t exist”, but still, this kind of worldview just isn’t healthy! My attitude toward good an evil is much more taoist in nature. One supports the other, but both are part of a larger whole. And that whole is what is important. Focus on that and you can see how good and evil flow one into the other, not how they get more and more extreme!
No surprise then, that he disappeared because he was being attacked by negative entities from a higher dimension.
“As you sew, thus shall you reap” His karma caught up with him, perhaps…
And yes, before anyone argues with me about it, he does go on to say in that earlier article that you don’t create your own reality:
What makes the You Create Your Own Reality evangelist fatuous (rather than a demonstrable God of the most egregious solipsism) is precisely the fact that all such “personal decreeing”, “positive thinking” and confident imagining takes place in an inevitable context. There are implications! There are repercussions ! No one decrees in a personal or private, solipsistic vacuum. There is a variegated World of myriad “pulls” and “claims” coexisting along with the private desires and designs of the given ego-subject.”
We don’t create our own reality. We are within a context. But the way we interpret that context is up to us. We do define our own reality, and it’s completely open-ended.
Ahh, to post or not to post? that is the question for this drunken Thursday evening… Well, it is going to be up on Friday, so hopefully people get a good laugh out of it is nothing else! Don’t worry, I am hoping to get back to some more indepth stuff for next week…
Oh yeah, and one more thing from Uncle Terence:
He called the greys an intelligence test, you know…
I don’t want to spend the rest of my life
Looking at the barrel of an armalite
I don’t want to spend the rest of my days
Keeping out of trouble like the soldiers say
I don’t want to spend my time in hell
Looking at the walls of a prison cell
I don’t ever want to play the part
Of a statistic on a government chart
There has to be an invisible sun
It gives its heat to everyone
There has to be an invisible sun
That gives us hope when the whole days done
Its dark all day, and it glows all night
Factory smoke and acetylene light
I face the day with me head caved in
Looking like something that the cat brought in
There has to be an invisible sun
It gives its heat to everyone
There has to be an invisible sun
That gives us hope when the whole days done
And they’re only going to change this place by
Killing everybody in the human race
And they would kill me for a cigarette
But I don’t even wanna die just yet
There has to be an invisible sun
It gives its heat to everyone
There has to be an invisible sun
It gives us hope when the whole days done
from the album Ghost In The Machine
(video available here, embedding disabled)
These systems of ideas are all just myths. That’s all they are. They are ways of aligning information so as to move through reality in a more complete manner. When you get to higher level maps, the systems of aligning information with which you are playing are those that exist for whole societies.
But what must be kept foremost in mind is that all these things spring out of the void. If you take any system as your foundation, instead of void, then you leave no room for growth and change. You are always dependent on that system, and that grasping creates dukkha.
Void is primary, all else springs from void. All dharmas are forms of emptiness. The entire physical universe is the dharma. Without seeing the root of everything as “void”, you allow yourself no way of uniting “self” and “other”, no way to realize “thou art that…”
We are all trying to create a system of thought that gets us in touch with our true nature as quickly as possible. That’s all this is, with each of us as the first test subject of our own systems. What we have to remember is that the system we create is NOT our self, and that it can (and should) always be able to be changed. And we must rely on our gut instincts for this. They are closer to the void than we could ever be.
In five separate studies, the researchers found that better judgments can often be made without deliberation. In the first study, participants rated Chinese ideograms for attractiveness. In a following study, participants were asked to judge paintings that were widely considered high- or low-quality. Subsequent groups of participants rated jellybeans and apartments. In all the studies, some participants were encouraged to deliberate and others to go with their gut. (I deeply dislike the conclusions they draw from this last one. Let’s take it from them and use it for truth.)
(the good stuff is from about 6:30 to the end)
No gate. No pen. So never any bull at all.
Internal<->External : Sensations<->Reality
When one of these is focused on it is made absolute, while the other becomes abstract and relative. Our peripheral vision allows for the “awareness” of motion much more than our central focus does.
But when was the last time you saw something change? Moment to moment, what moves, the flag or the wind?
Focus on the breath, experience the breath, be the breath… (the in and the out, that which is of you and in you and becomes it’s opposite without pause, still fulfilling the same function)
Thus our awareness spins one to the other, inner to outer to inner to outer, around the empty still point at the heart of it all (you). It flows between the two because there is a distinction of “self” by which it can polarize itself. Realize the truth of that still empty point and all collapses together in one massive (w)hole.
