Reclusland

Everything is good.  Life bubbles up as goodness and mixes with allthatis.

While mixing, certain things are misunderstood, certain things seem to be blocked, and certain things are abandoned before they are resolved back into the goodness from which they come and which they carry within them.

There is not a weakness in this misunderstanding, in this blockage, nor in this abandonment.  Or, if there is a weakness, it is a weakness we all share.

But after a certain amount of time, these things that are misunderstood, blocked, and abandoned start to hurt.  They both are pain and cause pain.  To say that this is evil is to say that your hand should not burn when it is placed into the fire.

But how to respond to the pain, either our own or others?  We can become numb, or we can seek momentary pleasure (wait, same thing…)

Or we can give into the pain, and allow it to express itself through us, amplify it so that it’s voice is even more easy to hear.  And it is here that we appear evil.  But we are not evil, we are just in pain.  Because we are misunderstood, blocked, and abandoned.

There is no evil.  There is only ignorance, and the pain it gives rise to, and our identification with that pain, and our expression of that identification.  All else is always already good.

What else can we  do? Rest in this, and let (it) go.  It might hurt to pass the pain, a piece of spiritual kidney stone built up from the blockage, but don’t let that dissuade you.

God is love, because love is always open.  Alwaysopen, isGod, may peacebewithus…

A paradox, of sorts, for your consideration:

“I once ascended to the firmaments. I first went to see Hell and the sight was horrifying. Row after row of tables were laden with platters of sumptuous food, yet the people seated around the tables were pale and emaciated, moaning in hunger. As I came closer, I understood their predicament.”

“Every person held a full spoon, but both arms were splinted with wooden slats so he could not bend either elbow to bring the food to his mouth. It broke my heart to hear the tortured groans of these poor people as they held their food so near but could not consume it.”

“Next I went to visit Heaven. I was surprised to see the same setting I had witnessed in Hell – row after row of long tables laden with food. But in contrast to Hell, the people here in Heaven were sitting contentedly talking with each other, obviously sated from their sumptuous meal.”

“As I came closer, I was amazed to discover that here, too, each person had his arms splinted on wooden slats that prevented him from bending his elbows. How, then, did they manage to eat?”

“As I watched, a man picked up his spoon and dug it into the dish before him. Then he stretched across the table and fed the person across from him! The recipient of this kindness thanked him and returned the favor by leaning across the table to feed his benefactor.”

—

You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.

—

Buddha puts forth the absolute truth of anatta, not-self, and yet, his first words upon realizing enlightenment were: “I and all sentient beings on earth, together, attain enlightenment at the same time.”

Ego, the self-image, is a scarecrow planted in your garden.  Being too busy dressing it up, we miss the birds and the weeds.  Instead, turn your attention to the cultivation of your garden, and let scarecrow take care of itself.

To insist on the primacy of movement originating from the self-image is to mistrust something that is trustable to the absolute.  To cling is to trust in something other than what is.  Everything that springs from such behavior is, ultimately, tragically flawed.  It carries within it the seeds of its own failure.

“You can only hate yourself if you have some kind of stand point or some kind of idea about who you are supposed to be, and then who you are of course doesn’t measure up, so you hate that. You hate who you *actually* are, you hate your tenderness, you hate your light, you hate your darkness. So the more we let go of our story line, the less reference points we have to hate ourselves.” ~ Reggie Ray

Since one story is pretty obviously a bad thing, is it possible to live with multiple stories?  What would doing so do to our sense of identity?

All this talk of “animals” has got me thinking.  If our desires and thoughts can be compared to animals that, when seen clearly, run about fairly randomly within the wilderness of our own naked awareness, what does that say about the whole “free will vs. determination” debate?  When desires, which are the source of any “willed” action, are seen to be separate, impermanent, component “creatures” which come and go as they will, can the idea of a personal will even exist?

Gurdjieff would have said yes; BUT in his system, the ability to “will” or “to do” was something only possible for a very realized being, impossible for most of us standard grade three-centered-beings.  The Buddha (and please do correct me if you think I’m wrong on any of this) would have said no; no-self + dukkha + impermanence leaves little ground for a “will” to take root.  Christians have the whole “thy will be done” thing.  And Hindus, I believe, are sort of all over the map about that, depending on which school of Hindu thought one subscribes to.

Since there is no unity among the great religions and traditions, we standard level folk can’t point any fingers and say “well, everyone says it’s like that, so it must be so.  And it’s more fun that way I think (which might be why they’ve done us the favor of disagreeing).  However, while appreciating the fun that comes along with any good mystery, I also kind of have my own opinion on the matter, one that was recalled to mind recently by the quote on “animals” from Herbert and Daumal.

To whit: “free will” takes as its base the idea that we can do what we want.  Yet this doesn’t take into account that we do not choose our desires.  That is, discovering that we desire a certain outcome, we cannot then choose to change desires and begin to desire a totally different outcome.  We can choose to act on one or another of our many desires, and we can choose the degree of free rein we allow them, but this is not the same as choosing what it is that we will. Given that we cannot choose to will, I do not see how we can actually claim to have anything a personal will.  If anything, we are engaged in a supremely difficult balancing act of different desires while things change around us at a rapid, rapid pace.  Not a good basis for saying that we control our own fates.

For me, this pretty much wraps up the whole “free will vs. determination” thing, in a fairly logical manner, without resorting to any sort of dogmatism.  Total free will is impossible, but, at the same time, it does not follow that everything is already 100% determined.  It’s a false argument.  Stuff just comes up, be it “external” stuff or “internal” stuff, and all we can do is choose when and how they react with each other.  There is choice in that, and some room to exercise a bit of will power, but only within limited options.  And chances are, we are much more limited by the options than we care to admit.

If you realize that all things change,
there is nothing you will try to hold on to.
If you aren’t afraid of dying,
there is nothing you can’t achieve.

Trying to control the future
is like trying to take the master carpenter’s place.
When you handle the master carpenter’s tools,
chances are that you’ll cut your hand.

So yeah, that’s my thoughts on the matter.  However, I do think there’s a good chance I’m missing something in the argument.  Does it hold weight?  Is it water-tight?  Since I personally quite like the whole explanation, it says to me that I need an outside opinion on that matter.  So, what do you say, oh wise and learned readership?  Am I missing any logical circuits there?  Anything unnoticed dimensions that make the whole thing much more ambiguous than what I’ve laid out above?  I’d actually like to see this picked apart here, so please, do me the favor of doing so.

Typing this up in it’s entirety because it’s just that good.  Daumal’s perspective on Buddhism here is not one commonly found nowadays.  One must keep in mind that Daumal was a scholar of Sanskrit and the Vedas, and so would be more inclined to see Buddhism as a heresy, as I imagine it was seen by the Vedic sages.  Daumal also discusses, and seems to agree with, Mrs. David-Neel’s take on the concept of “anatta” or “not self”, a topic of deep interest for me.  I’m leaving this up for a few days, please do take the time to read it; and remember, this was written in France in 1936.  Western spiritual seekers along Eastern routes, this is the history of your people; learn it well.

“This would only be another book on Buddhism if the author had not been a Buddhist, had not lived a great part of her life in Buddhist countries, and had not already published four or five animated books which this one completes and illuminates on her life in Tibet.”

“Thinking and living as a Buddhist does not deny a deep sense of Occidental culture and a very critical spirit.  Mrs. David-Neel approaches Buddhism as a method, an art of living: true of all doctrines useful for deliverance – the rest is error or lost time.  The Buddha said it in similar terms.  Our century needs this shouted in its ears.  It would be desirable to shout, loudly, another Buddhist rule: be your own lamp and disbelieve everything that you have not actually experienced; for our “science” applies this rule exclusively to a knowledge of external objects.”

“The Buddhist doctrines, with their common base and divergences, are elucidated by principles of superior utility and direct experience.  Mrs. David-Neel shows this essential very clearly with a marked and justified preference for the oral doctrines of the “Great Vehicle,” which gives adaptations of the Buddhist teaching to the social and religious traditions of the northern Buddhist countries.”

“After reading the book, and reflecting on its contents, I realized that these great principles have nothing which is especially Buddhist; it is only our civilization that ignores them.  Buddhism adopted them from the Hindu tradition, from which it later separated.  Why don’t we, then, take them from the Brahmanic sources, instead of searching for them in the Buddhist heresy?  The Hindu tradition, because it is a tradition, embodies all aspects of life, and in particular the stages, professions, ceremonies, and institutions.  The result is that the Brahmanical texts, with their purely Indian references, are not very accessible to the Occidental.  Whereas Buddhism, in separating itself from the social life of India, established a more universal expression; in appearance at least, for it will become truly universal only when it integrates itself into the quotidian life of the individual and his society: the Buddhist heresy becomes then a tradition culture, as in Tibet, in the form of Lamaism.  Heresy is the messenger of tradition: where it settles, it dies in fertilizing the seed of a new tradition.”

“It is necessary – and this is simply to take Buddhism to the letter – to judge the Buddhist teaching on its actual utility.  If not, certain of their formulas will be in great danger.  Thus the disdain of Buddhism (that of the South, at least) for social life; its mistrust (theoretically) of the old Hindu rule of the human stages, according to which a man could not “retire into the forest until having experienced a normal human life” and having seen “the children of his children”; and too, the formula of the “nonreality of the I,” which has lead unhappy theosophists to moral and spiritual annihilation.  A formula, so well corrected by this definition of nirvana, cited by Mrs. David-Neel: “Nirvana means the perception of reality as it truly is.  And when, by a complete change (a turning inside-out) in all methods of mental processes, there follows an understanding of oneself (by oneself) – this I call nirvana.”

“A philosopher might regret that the speculative doctrines of Buddhism, with its various cosmological and theological schools, have not been explicated by the author.  But this is of little importance, as it has been done in many other works.  Mrs. David-Neel, with good reason, wished to speak to us about Buddhist life and not about Buddhist “philosophy” (which thrives especially well in our European imagination).”

“In the appendix, the author gives numerous citations, translations from Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan; and several pages – one would have liked more – on the Zen sect.  A patriarch of this sect said:
To look for illumination by separating oneself from this world, is as absurd as to search for the horns of a hare.
And:
Do not think of good, do not think of evil, but look, in the present moment, at your original face – the one you had before you were born.”

“For this citation alone, the book is a treasure, a treasure difficult to find.”

The other day I came home from a grocery run, opened the door (somehow), arms full of bags, and was hit by a subtle scent of rot.  Seems the garbage was in need of taking out.  How had I missed that before leaving earlier?  The rot must have somehow gone deeper while I was out. No big deal, let me put these groceries down, and then away, and pour myself a glass of this newly-purchased milk, sit down to check the mail, first the snail variety and then the electronic kind, then all sorts of wandering of the electronic variety, then suddenly hours have gone by and its time to go out and meet friends for diner.  Coming back from diner, I once again notice the smell.  Why had I forgotten about it when I’d been home before?  How could I have missed that stench?  This time, I tie up the bag and leave it by the door to take with me the next time I leave the house.  I also open up a few windows.  The air is fresh and clean, and the source of the rot set up for removal.

What’s been happening with my meditation practice lately (and, to be truthful, is my usual base-level meditation experience) is that I’ll sit for the allotted time, watching my breath, or opening to the unknown moment of now, following my thoughts as they flow along, watching-accepting-releasing bodily tension.  And that’s it.  Nothing arises, nothing seems to want to present itself to my attention, nothing demands that my focus turn toward it.  Just is-ness doing its thing, in this little section of timespace that this body/mind/nervous-system I seem to be inhabiting has the honor and responsibility of experiencing properly.  Then, I get up from the cushion and go about my day.  And minutes, hours, sometimes even a day or two later, something does come up.  My conditioned existence jostles a bit of garbage loose from the tightly gripping mindhand and there’s that sudden subtle shift.  Rot is released for removal, and the fresh air pouring in the windows is free to enter the space newly emptied.

So, I guess what I take away from this is that sometimes we need to simply get out of the house so we can re-attune our senses to notice just where that garbage that needs to be tied up and put out for disposal.  Both need not happen together.  By leaving our house behind, we we return, we can notice stenches previously ignored.

I had a thought recently that all mythology can be thought of as a sort of Iron Chef battle.  On the show, different chefs have access to the same pool of ingredients and must make a series of dishes using these ingredients to be placed before the show’s judges.  By the end of the show, the dishes prepared by each chef are widely different, despite the fact that they start with the same initial ingredients.

Similarly, any mythological system is taking the same basic ingredients, the human body, mind, heart, nervous system, and everything else that contributes to our subjective experience, and is trying to make a story out of it.  Originally, we all started out with basically the same thing.  Knowledge of the basics is often similar culture to culture, and while the basics can be quite powerful, they are often thought of as somehow “below” or “lesser” than more further developed systems.  And just as often ignored, to the detriment of those who do so.  One cannot remove the roots from a tree…

As these sort of “primitive” mythologies were further developed by different cultures, they became more and more complex and idiosyncratic.  Each culture developed their own distinctive mythological framework, and while certain myths are more readily comparable, this is only due to the fact that the respective cultures were already somewhat in tune with each other, having been acted upon by similar cultural and natural forces.

And from there, each mythic system breaks down further and further as time goes by, fragmenting and splintering, creating nooks and crannies, like some sort of fractal pattern.  And as Jospeh Campbell pointed out, all religions, all spiritual teachings, can be thought of as myths.  And so, by extension, all spiritual teachers can be thought of as myth-makers.   And we find ourselves right back at our original Iron Chef premise.  Each teacher takes the wealth of mythological systems accumulated over the centuries that humanity has been making such systems, and tries to prepare a dish that best pleases the palate of the modern spiritual seeker.  Except that, instead of just having their palates pleased, the best dishes are those that help the student to become a mythmaker themself.  And, at the ultimate end of the pattern of fractal splintering, we have each person, creating their own individual mythic structure with which to understand their life, and we trade different pieces back and forth between ourselves, each furthering the others development.

“And all cosmic truths become known to everyone on those planets because those beings who by their conscious efforts learn some truth or other share it with others, and in this way, little by little, all cosmic truths become known to all the beings of that planet, whatever may be their aspirations and degree of self-perfecting.” – Beelzebub’s Tales

“The true contemplative is not one who prepares his mind for a particular message that he wants or expects to hear, but is one who remains empty because he knows that he can never expect to anticipate the words that will transform his darkness into light.  He does not even anticipate a special kind of transformation.  He does not demand light instead of darkness.  He waits on the Word of God in silence, and, when he is “answered,” it is not so much by a word that bursts into his silence.  It is by his silence itself, suddenly, inexplicably revealing itself to him as a word of great power, full of the voice of God.”

(via Parabola’s email newletter.  Sign up here!)

I can see how a misunderstanding of this perfectly valid explanation of truth could lead to the impression that we are somehow unworthy of God’s love, or that we are somehow inherently flawed beings. Original sin rises from something like this, as does the first noble truth, but neither should be taken as a condemnation.  God loves us and wants us to be happy.  That is all there is.

If one is uncomfortable with the religious language, perhaps this could be another way to look at this same core concept.

Note on line 104: “‘Good’ and ‘Evil’ (literally ‘clear and not clear’) characterize the natural forces rejoined to their principle (the devas) or separated from it (the asuras).

The Natya Sastra is a Sanskrit text on the origin of the theater as a mystic art, attributed to the sage Bharata and considered by some as the fifth Veda.  It describes the creation of art of theater by Brahma, which he gives to the sage Bharata to be used to instruct people in the sacred.  The first play Bharata chooses to put on is the story of the defeat of the asuras by the devas.  He does such a good job that the asuras in the audience are offended and stop the actors in their tracts, necessitating an actual battle between them and the devas, in order to free the actors from paralysis.  Daumal, a Sanskrit scholar, surrealist poet, and student of Gurdjieff, offers his own translation this part this text with notes nearly as extensive as the text itself.  It is one of several works by Daumal in the above book.

What I find most interesting in the above note is the equating of “good and evil” with “clear and unclear”.  Elsewhere in the text, Daumal chooses to translate “devas” as “gods”, a common enough translation.  However, he also chooses to translate “asuras” as “titans” which, to me at least, is a new way of looking at the asuras.  In Greek mythology, the gods go to war with the titans, just as the devas do with the asuras in Hindu mythology.  Thus, this note shows points out a perspective that can take into account both the Hindu and the Greek mythological structures: that the natural forces rejoined with their principle (i.e.: the Absolute) are going to war with the natural forces who are not joined with the Absolute.  In this, one can also hear echoes of Satan’s “Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven” from Paradise Lost.

A caveat though, that, while the Greek, Hindu, and Christian depictions of the forces of good and evil are similar when looked at in this way, one cannot say that they each play the same larger role within the overarching mythic/social structure of the three cultures.  The stories, exploits, and explanations of the various divine and demonic beings clearly all come out of very different cultural contexts, and so cannot and should not be held up as “the same”. In the very least, if one looks at the chronology of the relationship between the two groups, one finds major differences, which, because they have to be dealt with in a logical manner, do much to color the relationship between the two groups, and between the concepts of “good” and “evil” within these mythic structures.  The devas and asuras are children of the same god, making them fairly equal in stature.  The greek gods, however, are children of the titans, meaning that “good” sprang out of “evil” and defeated it, while the Christian demons are fallen version of the angels, showing that “evil”, in fact, came from a movement away from “good”.  This is the power of the stories we tell ourselves…

However, while these beings all play different roles in their respective cultures, we can also look at mythology as a stage upon which humanity watches its own internal motivating forces as if they were external objective beings.  From this viewpoint, what becomes important are the places where the different mythic structures overlap, as it is there that we can hope to find ground common to all humanity.  Therefore, the myth of “good” and “evil” can been seen as the conflict between that which is “clear” and that which is “unclear”, or as that which is “connected” with the absolute and that which is “not connected”.  Evil, then, becomes not a fault or a sin or an inherent baseness, but rather a blindness, an unheeded loneliness, or an ignorance to be outgrown. The various forms of divine and demonic can be seen as these inherently human traits given regional clothing according to the style of the times, so to speak.

And so we have a battle between those internal motivating factors of humanity which are “connected with their principle” and those which are “not connected with their principle”.  It is telling, then, that in this text, the asuras are also called “obstructors”, “hinderers”, “prisoners”, “the cut”, “the separated”, “the bound”, and “the end”.  And it is also telling just how easily they are defeated by the devas…

Not from the Natya Sastra, but an interesting picture nonetheless.

When discomfort occurs, we often process some of it, not all.

Comfort also occurs, but soon thereafter, discomfort from the past arises with it.

This is because in the comfort, we have reached an equilibrium, and the past discomfort we could not process now demands our attention.

Discomfort in comfort is our chance to deal with the past.

Do not make the mistake of running from it, seeking further discomfort in order to escape the safety of equilibrium, hiding once again from the past.

You are only digging yourself deeper.

Scientists allowed one group of rats to run. Another set of rodents was not allowed to exercise. Then all of the rats swam in cold water, which they don’t like to do. Afterward, the scientists examined the animals’ brains. They found that the stress of the swimming activated neurons in all of the brains…. But the youngest brain cells in the running rats, the cells that the scientists assumed were created by running, were less likely to express the (stress). They generally remained quiet. The “cells born from running,” the researchers concluded, appeared to have been “specifically buffered from exposure to a stressful experience.” The rats had created, through running, a brain that seemed biochemically, molecularly, calm…. “It looks more and more like the positive stress of exercise prepares cells and structures and pathways within the brain so that they’re more equipped to handle stress in other forms.” – From the NY Times

Contrary to previous research, the study found that people who engage in behaviors that increase competency, for example at work, school or the gym, experience decreased happiness in the moment, lower levels of enjoyment and higher levels of momentary stress. Despite the negative effects felt on an hourly basis, participants reported that these same activities made them feel happy and satisfied when they looked back on their day as a whole. This surprising find suggests that in the process of becoming proficient at something, individuals may need to endure temporary stress to reap the happiness benefits associated with increased competency. – From Science Daily

Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are. — Chinese Proverb

To exert control, you must create a solid place of tension from which to generate that force. Feel this in your mind and body when you try to “take control” of something.  And in fact, this solidification may lead to change in the world.  But, “know the male, yet keep to the female“, holding that force in place will not hold the change in place.  This is to confuse cause with effect.

“All composite things pass away…” – Buddha (famous last words…)

“By your belief in granular singularities, you deny all movement – evolutionary or devolutionary.  Belief fixes a granular universe and causes that universe to persist.  Nothing can be allowed to change because that way your non-moving universe vanishes.  But it moves of itself when you do not move.  It evolves beyond you and is no longer accessible to you” – One of Frank Herbert’s Zensunni admonitions.

“Peace is Letting Go-Returning to the Silence that cannot enter the realm of words because it is too pure to be contained in words. This is why the tree, the stone, the river, and the mountain are quiet.” -Malidoma Some (via Parabola Magazine‘s FB page)

(I)t’s not logically consistent that things are exactly perfect in this moment, and there is endless room for self-improvement. Those are contradictory statements… But I think here’s the thing about that paradox: if you fall into either side of the paradox, you fall from grace…. (I)f you fall into the addiction of self-improvement, then you really never enjoy this moment because you’re always trying to fix yourself.   On the other hand, you can fall into the other side, into the delusion of everything is perfect.  And that I would say is the delusion of enlightenment, which is very common in Advaita, nondual circles. This idea, “Well, there’s nobody here, there’s nothing to fix.” Well, how come your life looks so broken then? How come you’ve got relationships that don’t work and you can’t pay the rent if everything is perfect as it is? So…both are the truth: things are perfect and you are in a dance that is evolutionary. And when you are actually willing to be in the evolutionary dance, you can see there are endless things to fix and improve and work on as an art form—but it has no end. You’re in an endless process of upgrading that really has no final point of arrival. – Arjuna Ardagh (from IATE)

When Hyakujo Osho delivered a certain series of sermons, an old man always followed the monks to the main hall and listened to him. When the monks left the hall, the old man would also leave. One day, however, he remained behind, and Hyakujo asked him, “Who are you, standing here before me?” The old man replied, “I am not a human being. In the old days of Kashyapa Buddha, I was a head monk, living here on this mountain. One day a student asked me, ‘Does a man of enlightenment fall under the yoke of causation or not?’ I answered, ‘No, he does not.’ Since then I have been doomed to undergo five hundred rebirths as a fox. I beg you now to give the turning word to release me from my life as a fox. Tell me, does a man of enlightenment fall under the yoke of causation or not?” Hyakujo answered, “He does not ignore causation.” No sooner had the old man heard these words than he was enlightened. – The Gateless Gate, Koan 2

Let us play, but in reverse,
the Waltz of Eden’s Fall.
Perhaps we’ll yet regain that Garden,
coming through its Western wall.

“At this time of life, one has already been wounded many times by love; it no longer evolves solely in accordance with its own unknown and inevitable laws, before our astonished and passive heart. We come to its aid, we distort it with memory, with suggestion. Recognizing one of its symptoms, we recall and revive the others. Since we know its song, engraved in us in its entirety, we do not need a woman to repeat the beginning of it—filled with the admiration that beauty inspires—in order to find out what comes after. And if she begins in the middle—where the two hearts come together, where it sings of living only for each other—we are accustomed enough to this music to join our partner right away in the passage where she is waiting for us.”

(via a friend)

I wonder, can it work this way?  With either love of another person, or love of God, can we fill in the blanks with memories of past experiences?  Or must each new moment be lived as it is born and dies within and around us?  Although each moment is new, can memory serve any useful purpose, or is it only a stone which trips us up?  How to keep the levels separate, so that truth and memory can dance together, allowing truth to always and in everything trump memory, but without cutting away the nuance and skill which memory allows?

To the world-explorers, the myth-true lay over the horizon, or amongst the mountain peaks. Those of action sought the unknown there, and confronted truth and beauty.

Now, all horizons are inhabited by us, all mountainous values are known. What little empty spaces are left are dried up veins of pyrite, seeds spat out after the fruit has been devoured, for we know the ripe and golden flesh is long gone.

Where can we turn, to find our myth-true? Where is our unknown self? Where it has truly been all along. Within. The vast and ever-undiscovered country.

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, — act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Let us then be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

The past is dead wood, and perhaps the present grows best with our mere attendance.

We are the soldiers, despising the mentality of the settler. Yet why colonize if not to settle? We have fought against nature for many eons, and it was the earth’s resistance that made us strong.

Yet, though nature can be cruel, we don’t have to be. When we think that we can be, or that we should be, then the terrors of the third Reich rise up again, within us.

Fighting such cruelty in ourselves will only give rise o more cruelty. Resist not evil, simply seek to understand it.

Red of tooth and claw perhaps, but we are all part of the learning. Let us not repeat the lessons of lower grades too much, else we tumble back into them.

The horizon up here is red as well, topped with a band of gold, and beyond that, an endless expanse of rising blue, which holds within it both the blue of day and the blue of night.

If we define ourselves by only what we have known, the best cannot be yet to come. Only the embrace of our own ignorance can save us now.

At the recommendation of a friend, I am posting a small excerpt from a chain of email correspondence we’ve been having…

One common motif I’ve noticed in the “secret societies” is one of bees and the a hive. This makes sense to me. Those who work this metaphysical/mystic stuff reach into that empty space and pull back what is needed, distilling the honey for the support of the hive. We all need the hive, but at the same time, the hive is really just an after-product of explorations past. The hive cannot support itself. Only the doors into emptiness support the hive…

I have to remember to be sure to taste my own actions, fully.

If I cannot taste them fully, then I do not know their root.

If I do not know their root, I cannot know their result.

If I do not know their result, I am acting blindly.

If I act blindly, then who knows what will be put into play by my hand?

Everything should be made to taste as artfully as possible.

But only “as possible”, not beyond.

This entire life is a breathing-in, stuff added upon the essential, as a beard upon the face.

It is already in movement, already stepping forward.

Rest in that, put your weight in the rear foot.  All goes well.

What’s left but celebration?

The states along this samatha continuum, from superficial calming to total trance, are known outside Buddhism. Indeed, they are central to the systematic cultivation of mystical experience in all religious traditions. For example, in the Roman Catholic Church, cover terms for such states are oratio quies (prayer of quiet) and recollection.

Recollection: Meaning not “to remember” but to “collect back” or gather in the mind. From Latin re-con-ligere “back together tying”. Compare Sanskrit sam-a-dhi “together-back-putting”.

And also, compare this from wikipedia:

Religion, entymology:  Modern scholars such as Tom Harpur and Joseph Campbell favor the derivation from ligare “bind, connect”, probably from a prefixed re-ligare, i.e. re (again) + ligare or “to reconnect,” which was made prominent by St. Augustine, following the interpretation of Lactantius.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.  All the kings horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again….

Time to break the wall down King Humpty, the men and the horses ain’t gonna do it for you.

After all, Humpty is an egg.  Though it might have been better to make him an avocado seed!  In either case, such things do not belong on the tops of walls, no matter how many men or horses they might have at their disposal…

that only works reliably when you do not doubt it?

How do you test something that responds to doubt with failure, but at the same time, does not reliably respond to belief with success?

You cannot test such a thing through attempts at making it fail.  It will respond to your attempts as inputs and fail accordingly.  Garbage in, garbage out.

Not being able to test it in this usual way, how can one learn more about it?

How can one learn whether it can be improved upon?

If it turns out that it can be improved, how does on learn to go about improving it?

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.

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.

A long time ago, before it ever got released, I’d heard about CG Jung’s Red Book and got a little obsessed with it.  Fascinated by what it represented, I scoured the internet, looking for any images from it that were available.  I found of few, one of the most fascinating of which was this one:

This, supposedly, is an image of Jung’s “Shadow” archtype, right when Jung finally cornered it.  Note the hat, wing-like robes, and checkerboard floor, as well as the overall colors.

Then, recently, someone on tumblr posted some work by Remedios Varo, a Spanish/Mexican surrealist active in the mid 1900′s, right around the same time as Jung.  I was fascinated by the piece I saw and decided to go looking for more.  And then I came upon this piece:

The same flowing clothes, the same checkerboard floor, the same hat (or close enough), the same color scheme, the same weird ambient lighting, and the same hallway leading to the suggestion of a doorway behind the figure.  The same symmetrical layout of the robes, with the split down the middle.

I suppose there’s a slim chance Remedios Varo saw Jung’s piece, as they were active around the same time.  But Jung was notoriously secretive about his Red Book (hence it only being published now) and Varo was based in Paris and then Mexico after the nazi’s took Paris.   Jung was also not a big fan of the surrealists (a fact I learned a talk given by the curator of the Red Book exhibit at the Rubin Museum, which I’ve written about here) so it seems pretty likely that the Varo would never have had a chance to review Jung’s private paintings.

But the similarities here are striking, and given the realms of exploration of both Jung and Varo, I think this says a lot about the underlying layers of the psyche and the idea of thoughts being just another thing we perceive “out there”.  If only we could figure out what this “out there” is…