Reclusland

Finished reading Frank Herbert’s Dune a while ago and wanted to gather my underlines passages here.  A really great book, and a source of much knowledge hidden in there behind the words…

On logic, and the times we catch ourselves being irrational:
“Anything outside yourself, this you can see and apply your logic to it.  But it’s a human trait that when we encounter personal problems, those things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan.  We tend to flounder around, blaming everything but the actual deep-seated thing that’s really chewing on us.”

On intuition, the Invisible Landscape, and the “safety” of plans:
“Muad’Dib could indeed see the Future, but you must understand the limits of this power.  Think of sight.  You have eyes, yet cannot see without light.  If you are on the floor of a valley, you cannot see beyond your valley.  Just so, Muad’Dib could not always choose to look across the mysterious terrain.  He tells us that a single obscure decision of prophecy, perhaps the choice of one word over another, could change the entire aspect of the future. He tells us “The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door.”  And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning “That path leads ever down into stagnation.”

On evolution and involution:
“Life improves the capacity of the environment to sustain life.”

On the lessons of the space fire:
“…that metaphysical realm where all physical limitations are removed.  And he knew fear at the thought of such a place, because removal of all limitations meant removal of all points of reference.  In the landscape of a myth, he could not orient himself and say “I am I because I am here .”

On the need for dualities:
“When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully conscious, fully aware of yourself.  You are always a little less than an individual.”

On the staleness of life, leading to war and destruction:
“The race of humans had felt its own dormancy, sensed itself grown stale and knew now only the need to experience turmoil in which the genes would mingle and the strong new mixtures survive”

because there can be no plan for life.

And vice-versa.

A life wrapped up entirely in plans is an unaware life is death.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

Time disappears into outer action or inner impulses. Into doings, cravings, or dreamings. But human time is conscious time. And this has been lost, destroyed.

In its place there is now animal time (doing, moving about, preying on others, eating, building, killing, etc. ); plant time (dreaming, languishing, imagining); or “mineral” — that is, mechanical — time: the time of devices such as clocks and computers. What we call logical thinking is often just an internal version of these lifeless machines. Implicitly, we even take pride in the mechanicity of our thinking when, forgetting the metaphorical origin of the usage, we refer to a computer’s “intelligence.” This is mental time, “mineral” in its rigidity and sterility. We lay this logical cement over organic life out there and in ourselves. Carried to its extreme, this becomes the mindset that measures the whole of human life solely by the “bottom line.”

In the Old Testament the lower world is called Sheol. Here there are no images of raging fire. No cacophonous sounds. No sulfurous fumes. Sheol is simply and solely the place of shadows, dark, weak existence, continually fading, ever-paler life. Sheol is the realm of diminishing being.

(from here)

The whole path to awakening consists of sticking to the most skillful desire; you progress along the path as your sense of ‘skillful’ gets more refined. If you act on an unskillful desire, take responsibility for the consequences, using them to educate that desire as to where it went wrong. Although desires can be remarkably stubborn, they share a goal—happiness—and this can form the common ground for an effective dialogue: If a desire doesn’t really produce happiness, it contradicts its reason for being.

The best way to make this point is to keep tracing the thread from the desire to its resulting actions and their consequences. If the desire causes suffering to others, notice how their corresponding desire for happiness leads them to undermine the happiness you seek. If the desire aims at a happiness based on things that can age, grow ill, die, or leave you, notice how that fact sets you up for a fall. Then notice how the distress that comes from acting on this sort of desire is universal. It’s not just you. Everyone who has acted, is acting, or will act on that desire has suffered in the past, is suffering right now, and will suffer in the future. There’s no way around it.

(from here)

->

Nine in the third place means:
He who does not give duration to his character
Meets with disgrace.
Persistent humiliation.

If a man remains at the mercy of moods of hope or fear aroused by the outer
world, he loses his inner consistency of character. Such inconsistency
invariably leads to distressing experiences. These humiliations often come
from an unforeseen quarter. Such experiences are not merely effects
produced by the external world, but logical consequences evoked by his own nature.

Six at the top means:
Restlessness as an enduring condition brings misfortune.

There are people who live in a state of perpetual hurry without ever attaining
inner composure. Restlessness not only prevents all thoroughness but actually
becomes a danger if it is dominant in places of authority.

Anywhere you go, there you are.   Don’t seek out adventure for the sake of restlessness and escape…

In the Buddhist tradition, enlightenment comes first; confusion is an afterthought.

(from here)

Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at unfamiliar things
Because you are only one of many things.
And someone who can look that way at himself
Will heal his heart of many troubles,
Perhaps without knowing he has done it.
Then Bird and Tree say to him, “Friend.”
And then he’ll want to use himself, and things
In such a way that each one glows, fulfilled.
And if sometimes he finds he doesn’t understand,
It doesn’t matter. His task is just to serve.

(from here, image links to source)

Through the practice of meditation, we gradually begin to relate with our world, our friends, and other situations. And slowly we begin to trust the world as well. We begin to feel that the world is not as bad as we thought — there might be something worth learning. However, we cannot just go out and love the world. We have to start with ourselves, because the world is our world. Running away from ourselves into the world would be like trying to accept the rays of the sun while rejecting the sun itself.

(from here)

In my wanderings over the interwebs today, my mind spun me a little story that I think might be worth sharing here.  I don’t know why this happens, pattern recognition gone wild, perhaps.  But its fun to sense this sort of hidden thread and use the format of a blog post to line up the pieces.

The first part of this comes from a new post over at Imaging the 10th Dimension.  As any longtime Reclusland readers know, I am a big fan of Rob’s 10 Dimensions framework, and I think this is one of his best posts.  Anyway, go read the whole thing, but the most relevant part is as follows:

The Universe Loves You
Ultimately, the distinction between past, present, and future is meaningless. This means that our universe’s basic physical laws and locked-in fine structure constant have already created a set of versions of the universe that are each part of its wavefunction of all possible outcomes. From our spacetime perspective, this means that the version of our universe that lasts the longest already exists, while the version of the universe where some science experiment goes wrong tomorrow and destroys all matter is a much tinier part of that fabric. Which version exerts more gravity? Why, the one that has greater mass within the fifth dimension. The low probability science-gone-wrong scenario may exist, but it’s not the one with the greater mass because it soon ceases to be part of our 5D spacetime tree, so to speak. In that sense, the universe that lasts the longest is the one that is drawing us forward just through the weight of its existence within Everett’s Many Worlds.

Your body’s natural inclination is to want to heal, to want to thrive.
Likewise, the version of you or I that dies tomorrow in a car accident must exist, but exerts very little influence compared to the versions that continue. With this project, we’ve talked a lot about addiction and negative loops, and how so many self-help systems work because they rely only upon a person’s willingness to embrace the better version of themselves that already exists. Are you doing things to yourself that you know are keeping you from getting to the healthiest, happiest version of you? Then stop! It really is that simple, you just have to say to yourself “now is the time that I make the change” and the rest can follow. Meditation, positive visualization techniques, drinking more water, eating more fresh fruits and vegetables, getting more exercise – changes like these allow you to tap into the better version of you that already exists, and the science of epigenetics confirms that these changes are real right down to the way our DNA is expressed, and what DNA patterns we pass on to our offspring.

I like this a lot, but we have to keep in mind that it doesn’t necessarily follow that because the happy scenarios have the most 5th dimensional mass, we are necessarily going to be drawn to them 100% of the time.   We often fight such things (or don’t bother to put the necessary work in) because we simply don’t see that they’re possible.  As Rob says, it’s simple to avoid this, just stop doing them!  But the key is, we have to see that we are doing them, in order to stop.  Even on the basic level of eating right and exercising, which seem easy enough, we won’t really be able to avoid them until we see what brought those 5th dimensional branches into our tree, so they can be cut off at the root.

Rob’s article was followed a little later by a comment over on Kennth Folk Dharma, on a long thread regarding something called Actual Freedom.  The debate over Actual Freedom is an interesting one, but it has a LOT of back-story so I won’t be going into it here.  Feel free to head over and read it, but the comment that particularly caught my eye was this one from betawave (comment 137 on this page):

(I)t’s good to hold off conclusions about causes of depression/angst as much as you can and keep going… Having a “on its own” reason for why something happens can sometimes lock you into a sense of fatalism that might prevent a whole hearted commitment to naturally changing and evolving over time. My own experience is that it happens from having expectations that don’t mesh with the complex nature of the world and then solidifying that into some kind of personal character flaw. Some weird kind of identity gets built around that. And it sets up it’s own negative feedback loop… and then depression is kinda locked in. Conversely, as you get more distance, you can see that they do have a cause and and they aren’t just gratuitous excretions… and then you avoid the causes and sometimes even a new positive feedback loop sets up. This is just my experience, for what it’s worth.

Another little thing: a lot of these practices (“meditating, surrendering,” etc) seem like phenomenal >things< but they are actually much more like openings that are walked through. Like doors that disappear when you step through. The experience is more of a dropping away of something but not another thing that gets added on.

Here we see another mention of “negative feedback loops”, which , as betawave points out, are often caused when we misunderstand reality and then base part of our identity on that misunderstanding.  How can our “identity” cause us suffering?  It can’t, not really, because suffering is a response of our self to something, that is, there is something at odds with what we are (or, for the non-dual, something at odds with what is).  Yet we hold onto that false identity, not knowing the suffering we’re causing ourselves, like a frog in a slowing boiling pot.

Until we see through that misunderstanding, we’re steering head toward those lower-gravity future “branches” of the 5th dimensional “tree” that result from our negative self image, giving rise to the negative feedback loop.  Which does a lot to explain why people often seem to face the same problems over and over again (such as “why do I always date losers?” or “how come I can’t hold down a job?”).   This might also be compared to the idea of karma, how our past thoughts and deeds give rise to future life situations.  It is only in the now, in this present moment, that we can affect our karma, and its only in the present moment that we can make decisions that  effect the probability space of our fifth dimensional “tree”.

As betawave goes on to point out, once we come to see the root of the negative identity/understanding/feedback loop (in this case, through a contemplative practice), we cut off those negative “branches” and the higher 5th dimensional gravity of the happy potential futures can draw us onwards with less resistance.   These dropping away moments are the openings we walk through, the gateless gates of meditative practice.  Consider here the translation of the word “dukkha”, the original word that Buddha used when he said “all life is dukkha”. It has been translated as “suffering”, but it carries with it the association of an unbalanced potter’s wheel that squeaks while it turns.  We are drawn on by the rotating potter’s wheel of the universe regardless, but it is up to us whether the wheel turns smoothly and sweetly, or creaks unevenly while it goes.

So that’s my little thought trail.  What it all boils down to is just another reason to get your ass on the cushion and investigate the hell out of the present moment.  Cause that’s the only place that change happens, here in the presence of the infinite.  Practice well everybody.

We can say that Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn.  And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn.  It is shocking to find how many people do not believe that they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.  Muad’Dib knew that every experience carries a lesson.