Reclusland

Purple monkey wrenches, flung through the air by red baboons.
Done they are, with working on the master’s cars.
Time travel and the pyramids fill their thoughts. Lost continents…

Whence Atlantis? And why Atlantis?
Too much said already; the dryness comes.
Descend, oh seeker! Lower yourself into the watery depths.
Soak, become muddied, deluded, diluted. Disillusioned.

In the bamboo forests of the mind, peppered with blind ninjas,
Thoughts crash and slash each other, when by random chance they meet.
Such a war of double speak. Can you contain these multitudes?

More importantly, should you?

I feel the desert returning; the jungle people are growing tired.
The sea people are laughing as they ride the tides away.
The desert people sit, staring dully at the whispering sands around their feet.

Is this, then, to be the source? The chrysalis and the butterfly?
Perhaps we are better off without such dusty butterflies…

But if not this, not now, not here…
Then what, when, where?

It is not as if it can’t happen. But will it ever happen?

To retain our relevance, we must grow within and out of.

Have we not learned by now, how birth is a bloody, horrible struggle?

Labor pains, and in the seventies, the water broke.
More blood, more struggle…
Now we must push! And breathe!

Let them tell you it can’t be done. Let them tell you it is not worth the struggle.
Let them continue to stare at the dust, these desert people.
We will reclaim our jungle. And if it is not to be reclaimed, we will build it anew.

The kingdom of heaven is inside you and all around you.
Why will you not-see-it?

So, here’s one attempt at capturing a moment from my sesshin session last week.

During a sesshin (in the Mountains and Rivers Order, at least), the resident teachers or senior students will give a talk each day, around mid-afternoon, between lunch and dinner, in the middle of the day’s longest period of meditation.   At the most recent sesshin I attended, Ryushin Sensei, Abbot of the monastery, gave two linked talks, both about the first Chinese Zen master, Boddhidharma’s student Hui K’o.  For those unfamiliar with Zen lore, Hui K’o was reputed to have studied all the different traditions of his time and still felt his understanding was incomplete.  Then, in a dream, he was told to go to Shaolin (yes, that Shaolin) in search of a teacher who had come from India to spread “Chan” (the Chinese name for Zen). He came to the temple at Shaolin and found Bodhidharma seated in meditation, facing a wall. He asked to be taught by Bodhidharma and was completely ignored.

Undaunted, he stood outside in the snow all night, refusing to be turned away. The next morning when Bodhidharma saw him still standing in the cold, he asked Hui K’o what he wanted. Again, Hui K’o asked to be taught, and again Bodhidharma turned him away. So Hui K’o took out a sharp sword, cut of his left arm, and presented it to Bodhidharma as an offering of his sincerity. Bodhidharma, as Ryushin put it, shrugged, and said “I guess you’ll do…”

Although a harsh story, one has to keep in mind that this is a bit of a legend, and as such, should be taken as being “more true than it is real”, in a Joseph Campbell kind of way. Hui K’o, it was later pointed out, would become Bodhidharma’s only enlightened heir.  Towards the end of his life, he gave up teaching at Shaolin entirely and retired in anonymity to a nearby city, where he taught and worked as a toilet cleaner. Supposedly, he loved cleaning toilets. Later, he ran afoul of a more prominent teacher on the local scene, and was ordered to be put to death, to which he went calmly. (Night)shades of Socrates…..

In any case, the point at hand was how we cling to things, to ideas, self-images, and how acting as if these things are really our self is what makes us suffer. An example was given of an (unnamed) student who had lost their black-berry, and how the loss of that black-berry caused so much stress because of how much identity had been placed into it.  This was not meant as a condemnation, more as an example of the way the mind works.

And yet, even if, like Hui K’o we were to lose something much more intimately connected to us, like an arm, we continue on, still a whole being, while the arm lays there, dripping blood on the carpet, yet clearly not a part of us any more. How much less should a blackberry or a self-concept be clung to as a form of identity, when we can clearly let it go much more easily than we can an arm, and still remain what we are: a complete being.

Also up for discussion in a different talk (given by Shugen Sensei of the Temple here in Brooklyn) were some writings of Dogen’s, where he says to “sit in zazen, and when a self-concept arises, enter into it, with eyes sharp and ears sharp.” This interested me, as the basic instructions we receive in Zazen are to focus on the breath, and, when a thought rises, to see it and let it go, bringing our focus back on the breath. This something I’ve been struggling with for a few years, despite my feeling of having been helped immensely by my practice, I’m still not quite sure I’m doing it right.

Dogen’s advice seemed to imply a deeper level for me in the practice. I am not just a self watching my thoughts arise, I am an awareness, watching for self-concepts to arise/solidify. Entering into them with/as awareness, “eyes sharp and ears sharp”, I watch them, investigate what they are, and then, low-and-behold, they simply fade away. This felt much more effective to me than simply watching the thoughts arise and pass away (which so far has felt more like flipping the channel but remaining parked in front of the TV).

So, having come to this conclusion from the talk, I wanted to immediately sit and begin put my insight-into-practice into practice. But no, sadly, after the talks, we go for walking meditation outside, up and down the mountain.  After all the sitting, its a great way to get the blood flowing again, so I didn’t in any way begrudge it. But the whole time spent walking, Ryushin’s talk and the investigation of the self-concepts turned around in my mind.

Then, coming down from the mountain, back to the monastery, we were walking through the parking area when I looked down and saw a snakeskin on the ground. And it hit me. All ideas of self, all concepts we hold on to about who we are, are really just sensations that have arisen inside of us, in response to something that was occurring in the moment.  We have taken these things to be “what we are” when they are really just a form that “what we are” has taken on in response to the moment. Like a snake, we need to let these self concepts pull away, or else we will constatly be snagging them on things as we go along. This causes suffering, and we were better off just letting them go and moving on. Nothing to hold on to here folks, move along….

Or to be a bit more pithy about it, it’s the skin that gets stuck, not the snake.

So, big insight there. Very happily I bring it back into the zendo to sit, and it slowly begins to occur to me that a large part of my self-concept is that of “someone with a spiritual practice”, “someone who wants to be enlightened”. And has been pointed out to me on tumblr “By definition you can’t get what you want.” Because in order to want something, you must necessarily be defining yourself as someone who doesn’t have it.  A self definition you clearly must give up, if you ever want to experience having anything.

Anyway, we could argue semantics about that little insight for weeks, I’m sure, but that’s what struck me, and it’s really made me re-examine my practice and my motives behind it (an ongoing theme for me, it seems).

At the end of a sesshin, back in the old days, you would have something called Sozan, where you would go before your teacher and present a summary of your experience over that sesshin. Maizumi Roshi, the teacher of Daido Roshi (Daido Roshi being the founder of the MRO), changed that when he started holding sesshins in LA. It became “Open Sozan” where, during a period of meditation, anyone in the group could speak out about their experience, sharing with their fellow practitioners. Which is nice, because this is the first time the silence is lifted the entire week, outside of speaking with the teacher during face-to-face dokusan during meditation.

So, during open Sozan, I told my little story of the snakeskin, not in so many words as I have here, more a quickly spouted, rather emotional bit a speech. I was happy with how it turned out then, and I’m pretty happy with how its turned out here as well. And with that, this sesshin story is pretty much over.

Oh, except for one last thing. Later that morning, after Open Sozan, I went out to the parking area to check on the snakeskin. It took me a while to find it again, but when I did, I was surprised to find out that it wasn’t a snakeskin after all. It was, in fact, an entire snake…

This morning, I read the latest post up at Ann Seeker’s blog, where she’s been summarizing her experience of reading David Appelbaum’s book The Stop.  I bookmarked the article for later reading because I thought it was interesting.  In it, she says:

He is talking about an awareness of a “movement of energy” that takes place before our “our inner activities” take form. These activities or functions are our thoughts, desires, judgments, self-will, etc. These are functions that take on forms and we perceive them. But prior to the taking of form, there is a movement of energy and this can be perceived as well. He says, “This is the Life of our life, that which is a source for particular undertakings of functional life. Perception thus takes note of how percipient energy enters life on our ordinary level, how it animates forms of life, and how it remains distinct from these forms.”

The idea that there is an action of energy already in motion that our conscious mind responds too, which we experience as making a decision ties in with some of the early stages of Buddhist Vipassana meditation, as outlined in Practical Insight Meditation by Mahasi Sayadaw:

With further progress in meditation, the conscious state of an intention is evident before a bodily movement occurs.  The meditator  first notices that intention.  Though also at the start of his practice, he does notice “intending, intending” (for instance, to bend an arm), he cannot notice that state of consciousness directly.  Now, at this more advanced stage, he clearly notices the consciousness consisting of the intention to bend.  So he notices first the conscious state of an intention to make a bodily movement; then he notices the particular bodily movement.

Which to me is basically saying that though we think the body is moving because we are thinking about moving and moving the body, there is a subtle mistake here in that first the intention to move arises on its own, in response to conditions, and then our body moves accordingly.  I’m slowly reading through this book, though not very quickly as I’m trying to assimilate each stage before moving on to the next one.  As my meditation practice lately has been slacking, I can’t say I’ve made much progress.  Plus, the Burmese Vipassana seems to be at odds with my Zazen, so I’m still working out how to proceed there.  But the book does come highly recommended, so if anyone is interested in starting a meditation practice, I’d offer it as a clear and easy-to-read guide to Vipassana.

Anyway, the really interesting thing happened when Max posted a comment today linking back to an old post at Tim Boucher’s blog, where Tim discusses Aldous Huxley’s take on the brain as behaving as a sort of reductive-valve:

Henri Bergson has suggested that one of the main functions of the brain and nervous system is to eliminate activity and awareness, rather than produce it.

(tie that in with my last post on Dr Dan Siegal’s definition of mind…)  Tim goes on to say:

Huxley explains that our mind has powers of perception and concentration that we cannot even begin to imagine. But our main business is to survive at all costs. To make survival possible, all of our mind’s capabilities must be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain.

Some researchers are studying this effect. They believe that this reducing-valve effect may be very similar to the jamming equipment used to block out offensive radio broadcasts. The brain constantly produces a kind of static, cutting down our perception and reducing our mental activity.

This static can actually be seen. When you close your eyes, you see all sorts of random pictures flashing through your mind. It is impossible to concentrate on any one of them for more than an instant, and each image is obscured by a host of others superimposed over it.

That static is what is toned down through meditation.  See Kenneth Folk’s handy little flash graphic here.

and then Tim goes on to say:

Aldous Huxley in “The Doors of Perception” talks about a “reducing” valve in the brain that limits the amount of sensory stimulus that brain allows to be processed. This reducing value, in part, may be the thalamus. In schizophrenia, that reducing valve is more open than it should be; thus a person with schizophrenia receives too much stimulus and their brain has a hard time interpreting the inputted sensory stimulus. This may result in the positive symptoms (hallucinations and psychoses) we see in schizophrenia. When sensory overload occurs, some brain functions may shut down resulting in the negative symptoms (poverty of speech, withdrawl).

So if anything, following this breadcrumb trail of information that seems to have been thrown my way today, it seems that the experience of schizophrenia might be fairly likened to being enlightened too early, to having the connection to Mind-At-Large opened before we’re ready to handle the loads on information that pours at/through us.   I can see this creating a sort of feedback loop, where the mental program of consciousness, our sense of self determination that somehow seems to float above what’s actually going on inside our brain (as shown by the Mahasi Sayadaw quote above) is pushed away from the center of existence where it usually rests, resulting both in the positive and negative symptoms mentioned above.

I’m not exactly sure what I’m getting at here, but it all seems to point to something.  I do know one thing though: it’s not really about schizophrenia.

One other thing this brings to mind is this short little movie (which won a shit-ton of awards).  Watch it, it’s heartwrenchingly beautiful:

Skhizein (Jérémy Clapin,2008) from Bertie on Vimeo.

I’d originally found this film over at Imagining the 10th Dimension, where Rob had posted it a few weeks after he made his own post about schizophrenia and the effect of time on the brain (except remember, this isn’t actually about schizophrenia).  From Rob’s post, where he is quoting a New Scientist magazine article:

Schizophrenia certainly seems to affect people’s perception of time. If someone with schizophrenia is shown a flash of light and a sound separated by 1/10th of a second, they typically have trouble discerning which came first. Such people also estimate the passing of time less accurately than most others. Now a flurry of studies has shown that if you upset the internal clocks of healthy people, you can create some of the symptoms and delusions associated with schizophrenia.

In one experiment, healthy volunteers learned to play a video game in which they had to steer a plane around obstacles. Once people became used to the game, the researchers modified it to insert a 0.2-second delay in the plane’s response to volunteers moving the computer mouse. After the modification, the players’ performance initially worsened; but in time their brains compensated for the delay, to the extent that they actually perceived the movement of the mouse and the movement of the aircraft to take place simultaneously.

But the subjects’ strangest experience occurred then the experimenters removed the delay and set the timing back to normal. Suddenly, the players were perceiving the plane to be moving before they consciously steered it with the mouse (Psychological Science, vol 12, p 532). That’s uncannily similar to how people with schizophrenia describe feelings that they are somehow being controlled by another being.

Rob goes on to explain his opinion on the subject:

Fascinating! I found this particularly interesting to think about within the context of recent studies that show people can form their decisions to do one thing or another well before they are consciously aware of their decision: in Is Creativity a Quantum Process we briefly looked at some articles (like this one from the Wall Street Journal) discussing the recently published work of psychologist Joydeep Bhattacharya of London’s Goldsmith College. Amazingly, Dr. Bhattacharya’s brainwave monitoring experiments revealed evidence that people can have arrived at a solution to a problem as much as 8 seconds before their conscious minds become aware of it!

There have been arguments proposing that results such as these demonstrate that our free will is an illusion, because the neuro-chemical activity that forms our decisions may be some inevitable “behind the scenes” process which we interpret as our free will by the time we consciously feel ourselves choosing (and persons familiar with this project will know that I strongly disagree with any conclusions that free will doesn’t exist).

I tend to agree with Rob on this, that just because our free will might not be quick and immediate as we think it is, this doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.  Its just that our consciousness is not exactly in touch with the core process at work in our being.  Becoming aware of these process, it seems would both destroy the feeling that we were somehow separate from them, but also give our free will a better, more holistic expression.

Our brain is a perfectly reflecting gem, and its always perfectly reflecting.  We just have to clear out the conscious static (caused by our mind’s very real and correct desire to survive) so as to get in touch with that place inside our self where the truth of what is, is focused.  Zap, moon in a dew drop indeed.

The inner “I” is in touch with reality but cannot see outside of it.

The outer “I” is aware of possibilities, but loses touch with the real.

Oh, this forth dimensional existence!

What can we do but partake in the active while keeping within the passive?

From this then, perhaps the fruit will come forth,

and then can the fattened calf be killed for the feast.

I recently expressed an opinion in the comments on Avatar (which, as the post title implies, I haven’t seen yet) saying I wasn’t too excited about it, other than to see the special effects (I hear they’re groundbreaking, yes?).  After all, I saw Pocahontas when I was younger, so I wasn’t expecting anything all that new from the story line.

The basic stance most reviewers seem to have taken on it is that this a story about  “civilized” man reconnecting with the natural world.  The corporation/marines attempts at rape and pillage are foiled by one of their own who “went native”.  And yes, there is a racial/colonial subtext going on here as well, but really, just a more divisive take on the same idea.  Ran Prieur wrote up a pretty thorough debunking of the whole “White Messiah” aspect of the movie, which I suggest reading if you’re interested in exploring that aspect of it.  For the sake of the argument I’m making here though, I just want to focus on the soldiers representing a technological, rationalistic society and the Na’vi representing the natural world (or perhaps “representing being in touch with the natural world” is more precise).

This seems to be the main dichotomy of the movie, the core conflict with which Cameron engages the audience and attempts to get his message across.  Not a very complex message, it seems, and certainly one we’ve all come across before elsewhere.  After Titanic (and despite its success), Cameron was not a director I expected to really break any new mythological or memetic ground (whatever it we want to call the nourishment that a good story provides).

But then I remembered an article on a movie blog I read regularly, where Cameron was quoted as saying (in regards to Sigourney Weaver’s character):
“Grace doesn’t care about her human body, only her avatar body, which again is a negative comment about people in our real world living too much in their avatars, meaning online and in video games.”

Here, Cameron seems to be exploring a dichotomy that’s the exact opposite of the first.  If this is the metaphor being explored here, then the Na’vi become characters in a video game, and, supported by the massive special effects, their world becomes one of those virtual reality playgrounds we were all promised way back in the 90′s.  The marines are only downloading themselves into the Na’vi bodies and exploring the digital world, which makes their rather obvious callousness toward the Na’vi people more easily understood.

(plus, where have I heard the phrase “NAVI” before…?)

Granted, this metaphor does seem to break down when we consider that mining a virtual world for resources seems at first rather unreasonable.  However, there is one thing that such a highly developed model of reality could offer that would make this virtual reality metaphor more believable:  What they have is information, the information created by an entire virtual world made to run as a model of our own, and the need to go into that world in order to collect it while the program is running.

The more I thought about these two opposing metaphors, the more I realized that though each seems to explain the movie well enough, it does so to an unsatisfying degree.  It’s already in the top 5 films ever made (or whatever, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong) and neither really seems to validate its popularity.  Movies don’t have this kind of effect on people unless there’s something really new at the heart of the story, a message that people didn’t know they needed to hear.

It wasn’t until I started overlapping these two metaphors that I really began to understand what I’ve come to think this movie is about (and why I want to go see it).  It is the equating of nature with a programmable environment.  And it is done in a metaphorical/mythological way that people can grasp on a subconscious level without needing to understand the specifics.  To be there to watch those two memes combine into one is something I do not want to miss.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying this is some sort of conspiracy enacted by Cameron (and/or some group of shadowy figures), rather that this could be seen as an important part of our global cultural story, something we had  a desperate need to to develop and digest at this point in our history.  Maybe if we can learn to stop seeing nature as an enemy, to befriend it, and to understand that we can control it and program it, we’ll stop needing to destroy it so much.  Cameron does much here to combat our instinctive pre-historic need to see nature as always “red of tooth and claw”, and I would guess that this is why the movie has proven to be so popular.  This, to my mind, makes it a story we all very much want and need to hear right now.

After all, as Marshall McLuhan said way back in 1970, the invention of the satellite “ends ‘Nature’ and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed.” We’re just finally catching up to this now, and I want to be there to watch as it happens.  Who knows where this is going to lead to as it unfolds; I just hope we still have a chance to make use of what learn here.

Just finished reading a great post over at “Imagining the 10th Dimension”: Consciousness in Frames per Second.

In it, Rob Bryanton discusses the “frame rate” of human consciousness.  He explains that it likely varies person-to-person but is “in that magic range somewhere between 20 and 40 cycles per second, (where) we do indeed seem to have just such an experience, where things start to blend together into a seamless stream.”

Go and read the article.  In fact, subscribe to the blog and check out the animation as well.  Rob’s work has done a lot to help create my current conceptual framework.  I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Where this leads me though, is back towards meditation and enlightenment, perennial topics at Reclusland.  Here’s a recent post over at dharmaoverground that gives a good explanation of where I’m coming from.

Jarrod posts:
“The guided portion (of the meditation) ended and I felt compelled to continue my sit, but started to just note sensations (rising, falling, sitting, etc.) Pretty quickly the noting went into auto-pilot and picked up pace significantly. I just let it go and tried not to get in the way. At the same time a distinct pulsing sound/sensation began that was acting like a metronome to the noting. The whole process fell into a nice rhythm with probably 2-3 pulses per second and 3-4 notes per pulse. Each breath was noted by “rise, rise, rise, rise” “fall, fall, fall, fall” in this distinct rhythm plus additional notes between the breaths.”

Then Jackson ellucidates:
It sounds as though your shift in to “auto-pilot” noting was a shift from 1st ñana (Mind & Body) to 2nd ñana (Cause & Effect). First, one comes to know directly that both physical and mental phenomena are “objects”. Then, one notices not only that intention precedes action (and that both arise on their own), but also that noticing occurs automatically as well, and only when there’s an object to notice. Things start to speed up, just as you described.

A more in depth analysis of the 1st and 2nd ñanas can, I’m sure, be found in Daniel Ingram’s book.  I haven’t had a chance to start it yet, but it is online here for those who don’t mind reading the entire thing off a screen.

Anyway, the point being that somewhere along the meditative path, assuming that you are working with a practice of “noting” (that is, watching the rising and falling the breath in the abdomen, or naming/labeling  all sensations as they arise, or any other practice where the focus in on change, I believe), the process apparently speeds up, and the practitioner must let go and simply allow the rising and passing away of sensations as they occur on their own.  This seems to happen as we try to bring our focus onto more and more distinct “things”, deliberately creating “frames” within our experience, while at the same time, pulling our awareness back from the thing thus framed.  As Rene Daumal says in Le Contre-Ciel: “I am that which thinks, not that which is thought.”

And now back to the 10th Dimension post, where Rob says: “some humans operate at a more accelerated “frame rate” than others, and that our frames per second experience of time is directly related to our state of mind and our health.” This, to me, points to a connection between the Buddhist conception of equanimity and our ability to actively notice smaller and smaller “frames” of consciousness.  That what truly makes us unhappy are the things which we miss happening, things that fall between the cracks of our awareness.  Places where the radio station fuzzes out, and we miss a few bars of that song that’s always playing, regardless of whether we listen to it or not.

Neuroscientifically speaking, this is likely related to what is know as our “working memory”.  This is the sort term memory that we use while performing tasks such as remembering a telephone number or a series of words in a sentence, similar to the RAM memory of your computer:

“working memory is a chalkboard on which we rapidly scrawl and erase information…..When we hear the phrase “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” a cluster of neurons fires during each word. When one cluster fires, it suppresses the others momentarily, preventing the sentence from coming out scrambled….As the neurons for “It,” “was,” “the,” and “best” fire in sequence, the brain creates pathways from one point, or brain state, to the next. The more powerfully each excited cluster can inhibit or suppress all others in the sequence from firing, the more solid these pathways….As a sentence or a string of numbers gets longer, it becomes exponentially harder for the excited cluster to suppress the others from firing, resulting in pathways that are weak or barely there. Recalling seven items requires about 15 times the suppression needed to recall three. Ten items requires inhibitory powers that are 50 times stronger and 20 or more items would require suppression hundreds of times stronger still. That is normally not biologically feasible. “Synapses can’t be stronger than that, the brain is a very complex biochemical machine.”…Mathematical models like these may seem removed from the gritty reality of gray matter and neural chemistry, but they provide a critical connection between what people actually experience and the hidden mechanisms inside the brain.”

Working memory is crucial for cognitive control of emotions: It allows us to consider information we have and reason quickly when deciding what to do as opposed to reacting automatically, without thinking, to something…mothers whose negativity was most strongly linked with their child’s challenging behaviors were those with the poorest working memory skills. The authors surmise that “for mothers with poorer working memory, their negativity is more reactive because they are less able to cognitively control their emotions and behaviors during their interactions with their children.”

Try not to get too caught up in the number 7 mentioned in that first link.  Instead, just keep in mind that the more things you hold in your working memory, the more those things must suppress the rest your mind in order to continue existing.  And the more suppression going on, the worse we are at controlling our emotions (and the further we drift from equanimity).

The practice of noting then, can be seen as a purposeful digitalization of something that is, at heart, an analogue process: the experience of being an awareness-within-reality.  The practitioner is attempting to break through the digitizing process, to fall-between-the-frames so to speak, and realize that, as Buddha said, “All component things in the world are changeable. They are not lasting.” thus coming into the direct experience of that which is non-digital, non-component.

Am I saying that we should all go watch high-frame-rate movies, and try to catch the individual frames?  Stare into the flickering light of the projector until we can catch the black space between the still images? No, not really.  That’s the wrong direction, entirely too mediated.  The point is not to train your mind with a movie camera and then to bring that trained mind back into real life with your newly developed “super powers”.  The point is that real life is already the ultimate tool for training your mind in this way.  You just have to pay close attention: closer, closer, fall between the cracks, identify as the space between the cracks, and bam! there it-you is-are.

But if you do want to watch a movie, here’s a good one. (I very much want to embed this, but it’s been disabled…)

“Reason calls the grave a gateway of peace: and instinct shuns it.”
- T. E. Lawrence [The Mint (Penguin Books 1984)]

I went to a screening of Lawrence of  Arabia a few months back.  Got to see a full color print in an actual theater (B.A.M. Rose Cinemas, for any fellow Brooklynite’s out there, which only heightened the experience of being back in an old-timey theater).   It’s an beautifully shot movie, all the more so because it was filmed in 1962..

The movie was full of great quotes too:

(context: Ali has just shot Lawrence’s guide at a deserted well in the middle of the desert)
Sherif Ali: Have you no fear, English?
T.E. Lawrence: My fear is my concern.

(context: Lawrence has just put out a match with his bare fingers)
William Potter: Ooh! It damn well ‘urts!
T.E. Lawrence: Certainly it hurts.
Officer: What’s the trick then?
T.E. Lawrence: The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.

I like these, not because it’s typical bad assery, but because in both scenes, the level of focus Peter O’Toole was able to portray as Lawrence is palpable.  His is scared, and it does hurt.  But he’s holding his focus while inside that, and it shows.

My favorite, though, was this one, where Lawrence breaks down and gives up on his winter campaign after being tortured (but not recognized) by a leader of the Turkish Army:

T.E. Lawrence: A man can do whatever he wants, but he cannot want whatever he wants!

He says this, and follows it with “and what decides what he wants? This!” and he points at his skin.  But to make this into a racial statement is to miss an opportunity for something much greater I think.  After all, what does decide what a man wants?  In all the talk of free will versus destiny that I’ve ever heard, no one’s ever brought up the fact that we do not seem to be free to choose what we want.  How can it be free will if there’s no conscious choice of desire?  Theoretically, for true free will, we would be able to pick a desire, and then allow it to begin to act on us, to move us to it’s music and make us dance as we want.  It should be a tool, not a drive to give into or to resist.  Show me someone able to do that, and I’ll believe in true free will.  : )

Anyway, long story short, it’s an awesome movie, go watch it.  It also made me really interested in T. E. Lawrence as well.  If this is what the movie business makes of his life, the real story must be a lot more interesting.  I’ve considered reading his massive autobiography, “Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph“ but it seems the best edition of it (closest to what he wanted it to be) was the 1922 unabridged Oxford text.  Which is conveniently both out of print and not for sale used. (If anyone has a copy they’re looking to get rid of, hit me up!)  I know I won’t read it twice, so I’d rather make sure it’s the right edition if I do read it.

That’s Lawerence, second from the right.
The guy in the front is Obi Won Kenobi Prince Faisal I of Iraq

I’ve been meaning to do this for a few weeks now, but reality seemed to keep conspiring against it.  But I’m betting that’s because, on some level, I’m rather loathe to reveal any details of my actual, real, analogue life on here.  Which I need to push through, I think, as I’d like to have a little more life in my writing . As Robert Frost said: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew.” (thanks for that, J)

So, to that end, a quick wrap up on my Ango Training experience.

- I’ve kept up the Chi Kung in the mornings, more regularly, I have to admit, than I’ve kept up my actual meditation practice. I feel I’ve reached a kind of plateau with this which I’m really happy with right now.  The quick energy boosts I used to get from running through the forms are no longer quite so strong, but my energy’s comfortably at a higher level more often, and I managed to fight off what I thought was going to be a rather nasty cold, while still managing some late nights, too much coffee, and too much wine over Thanksgiving.  It was rather strange to recognize all the symptoms that I usually take to mean the low energy and listless of a cold are about to sink in, only to find out that they simply never did.

- I also managed to keep up with the weekly yoga class, and I think that has benefited me as much, if not more, than the daily Chi Kung.  I was lucky enough to find a really wonderful teacher, who’s been teaching for quite a long time, and, well, I’m not sure what else to say on that, other than that I’m really grateful to have stumbled into the class.

- My meditation practice has deepened as well, I believe.  Although there were days where I didn’t sit, this is the most regular I’ve ever been in my practice, and I’m really starting to understand what it means to be with the breath.  It comes and it goes, but when I hit it just right, it’s pretty great.  I am somewhat aware that this is probably more a bliss/concentration state than anything else, but I don’t think it’s quite as cut and dry as that with Zazen.  Next big thing on my list is to wade into Danial Ingram’s “Mastering The Core Teachings of the Buddha,” so hopefully that’ll clear some stuff up for me.

- As for my writing project, I did manage to write every day of Ango up until the day before the art presentation, and I hand copied them out into a blank book.  I decided to call it “Liber Quintus Ignis” (or, “book of the fifth fire”) after a school of mysticism contemporary to the Buddha, that would sit inside a cross of four fires, and stare up at the sun until they went blind (the sun being the fifth fire).  This supposedly lead to enlightenment.  Clearly kind of a stupid practice, and I never actually stared at the sun, but I did manage to get some poetry out of it that I’m fairly happy with.  I’m considering what I want to do with it as far as publishing it, but I don’t think I’ll do it on this blog.  It wouldn’t really fit the content of what this blog has become I think.  Perhaps I’ll start another…  A happy side of effect of copying out 72 poems by hand while in a somewhat meditative state, over a period of several days, is that my hand writing (which has always been graciously described as chicken scratch) has improved greatly, particularly when I bring consciousness to the act of writing by hand.

- Finished all the reading I planned to and more, and I do recommend all the books I mentioned.   I think next time, I’ll need to make a bigger list, if I want it to sustain me through the whole period.  Also, I have a newfound respect for the depth of Dogen Zenji’s thought.   It is no wonder that Zen has lasted so long, coming from such a mind.

- I made it to the Reggie Ray retreat, and I highly recommend sitting with Reggie. His combination of mediation and somatic body work is great, and I think, pretty unique.  I got to learn a lot about the Vajrayana tradition (as taught by Chogyam Trungpa) as well.

- I did not make it to the Ken Cohen Chi Kung retreat, as I decided last minute to save the money and vacation days.  From what I’ve heard of Mr. Cohen, it would have been an a great retreat, but I still stick by my decision at this point.

- For my take on the Thich Nhat Hanh talk, see here.

All in all, it was a great experience.  What I took away from it the most was the amazing degree to which, when you take your practice seriously, it’ll lift your life up in ways you’d never imagine.  I’m definitely signing up again in the Spring!

In the meantime, my studies are bringing me into a more Gurdjieffian territory.  I’m researching some of his lesser known pupils, mainly William Segal (who was a student of both the Gurdjieff Work and Zen Buddhism) and Rene Daumal (a poet who died at the age of 36 after a lifelong search for truth).  It seems there’s some steps being taken to make “The Work” a little more well known, which is something I’m definitely in favor of.

I do plan on continuing to post here as well, but I’m also feeling some trepidation as well.  As much as I enjoy putting my thoughts out here for you all to read, I’m having some sense that maybe silence might be a better option for a while.  Or at least a limited silence.  I’ve noticed how quickly delusion can be expelled, and how that can change things on a pretty deep level, as far as what you consider important and unimportant (or worse, harmful).  As that Ajahn Chah quote I posted kind of hinted at, I’m not looking to be the guy who needs to know everything about the person who shot him with an arrow, before he pulls the arrow out.  “We must arrange our lives to support good practice”, and I don’t want this to come between me and my practice.  I want this to be one aspect of my practice.  Something I’ll have to keep working on, but don’t worry, I have no plans to shut things down here (didn’t I just mention something about starting another one of these? jeez…)

So stay tuned, kiddies.  It’s great having you all here.  A strong practice to all, and to all a good night.

It has been said that the more you study physics and biology, the more amazing it becomes that anything exists at all.  That the universe exists and that we exist to experience it is seen as a more and more unlikely occurrence.  Once you come to understand how different things would be if, say, the weight of a proton was just a tiny bit heavier, or if the force of gravity was a little more forceful, the more obvious it becomes that there could just as easily be nothing here at all.

However, like a lot of things that seem highly unlikely but still undergo the formality of actually occurring, there’s a different way to look at this that cuts like Occam’s Razor through the unlikeliness: Perhaps things are the way they are because there’s life here.  Perhaps it’s not that consciousness, at some point in the distant past, sprang out of matter.  Instead, perhaps matter exists because of consciousness.

Maybe, as reality came into being (however you want to explain that, be it “fiat lux!” or a BIG BANG), consciousness had to feel things out, had to reach out into the dark and wait until it could grab onto something solid.  In Zen, there’s a saying that enlightenment is like grouping behind you in the dark for a pillow.  I imagine the birth of the universe could have been something like that, a blind fumbling in the dark until suddenly, “ahah!”  consciousness touches space and space wobbles into a wave of energy and vacuum, which them complexifies into matter, then into life, and then into humanity.

A similar comparison would be the tuning of a musical instrument, trying to find the exact right pitch.  Once one string is tuned, you move onto the next one.  Perhaps the laws were kind of like that, with consciousness pushing further into space after each law dropped into place.

Alternatively, it could be said that the universe exists as a broad spectrum of possible laws, and that life only exists within the slices of the spectrum with the laws to support it.  Either way though, whether there’s only one storyline or a whole array of branches, it doesn’t matter because the end result’s the same here: life and the laws that support it are indivisible.  Whether universes exist where the physical laws make life impossible is kind of a moot point, I think, at least while we’re still alive.

The view that the reality exists the way it does because it springs out of consciousness (rather than consciousness springing out of matter at some point), is currently known as Biocentricism, which I first head about this over at “Imagining the 10th Dimension” (thanks Rob!).  Robert Lanza, who first proposed the theory, has 7 main priciples behind it:

1. What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness. An “external” reality, if it existed, would by definition have to exist in space. But this is meaningless, because space and time are not absolute realities but rather tools of the human and animal mind.
2. Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be divorced from one another.
3. The behavior of subatomic particles, indeed all particles and objects, is inextricably linked to the presence of an observer. Without the presence of a conscious observer, they at best exist in an undetermined state of probability waves.
4. Without consciousness, “matter” dwells in an undetermined state of probability. Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state.
5. The structure of the universe is explainable only through biocentrism. The universe is fine-tuned for life, which makes perfect sense as life creates the universe, not the other way around. The “universe” is simply the complete spatio-temporal logic of the self.
6. Time does not have a real existence outside of animal-sense perception. It is the process by which we perceive changes in the universe.
7. Space, like time, is not an object or a thing. Space is another form of our animal understanding and does not have an independent reality. We carry space and time around with us like turtles with shells. Thus, there is no absolute self-existing matrix in which physical events occur independent of life.

Which (as wikipedia seems to suggest) is a bit close to solipsism.  But that’s only the case if:
1) Consciousness only exists inside human beings.
2) All human beings actually are conscious (and don’t just hover on the borderlands of consciousness).

If we don’t accept both those two premises, then those 7 principles deserve another reading…

The point here is that, as recent conversation on this blog have lead me to think, this same urge, this fumbling in the dark, might be what’s responsible for everything.  It’s something we’ve labeled as “evolution” and mistakenly described as the ability for a species to successfully exist and procreate.  There’s never been a “why” behind this.  Why procreate?  Simply to procreate?

Perhaps there’s more to it than this.  Perhaps consciousness is something that has existed all along, somehow apart from the material world, and that as it comes into the material world, it “evolves” the material world  to better allow for the further embodiment of consciousness within it.  When I said above that “consciousness touches space”, perhaps a better way of saying this would be that consciousness and space broke away from each other, so that one could observe the other.  And that since then, consciousness has been trying to build itself back into space, for the sake of interacting with it.

Anyway, what originally got me thinking about this was a comparison between the laws of the universe and karma.  Past behavior creates an inertia that allows for present existence.  Within the human mind, this works as memory, but within  the physical/animal world, it works as DNA.   In the physical/mineral world, it works as molecules/atoms.  Beyond that, it works as the laws of physics.  Each gets locked into place, simply because it has proven, so far, to be the best way for allowing consciousness to embody itself in matter.  And what we are to do every moment with our thoughts is to try to find a way to further combine the two within ourselves.

In a way, it’s like God split in two, and each half is seeking to combine with the other in such a way as to create little pockets of wholeness throughout, to experience wholeness within splitness.  Except that God never actually split, so this whole thing is really more of a game than anything else…

But that’s maybe a little too esoteric for my liking.  So instead, I’ll leave you with a song and a picture.  Because in the end, my attempt here is at a new kind of poetry, not a new kind science.

(cause we all shine on, all the time)

Just a shot in the dark with that title…

As pointed out this article in Wired UK (found via Klint Finley’s Mutate!),  Google recently unveiled that their NAdroid phones will use a new internet protocol known as DTN (delay tolerant networking, something created with the help of the JPL).  This is an alternative to the current TCP based internet that we all know, love, and run rampant on every day.  As the Wired UK article points out, Google was “eventually forced to acknowledge that TCP simply couldn’t cut the mustard, with massive delay and data loss caused by celestial motion rendering TCP useless.”

“There was a little problem called the speed of light,” joked a typically playful (Vint) Cerf, as he outlined the idea to the OpenMobileSummit conference in San Francisco. “When Earth and Mars are closest, we’re 35 million miles apart, and it’s a three and a half minute trip one way, seven minutes for a round trip. Then when we’re farthest apart, we’re 235 million miles – 20 minutes one way, 40 minutes round trip.“

So Google went looking for something that didn’t need a reliable connection.  DTN was just the thing, as it sets up to buffer (you know what that is if you’ve ever watched a video on the internet) all communications until a stable connection is established.  Basically, it’ll hold your email to Mars until it’s sure the Martians are able to pay attention.

Exciting stuff; the idea of a space based internet system is a good one.  Although the Wired article claims that “most people don’t have a need for regular satellite communication”, not everyone thinks so.  In fact, DARPA is looking to build just such a (albeit groundbased) system for inter-satellite communication by 2012.  A recent (and lengthy) comments conversation with Reclusland regular Speedbird explores the topic from a slightly different angle.  If you want to read through the conversation, you can start here.

We (or at least I) tend to get a bit overly mystical when talking about this stuff, but that’s just a personal penchant for trying to clarify connecting patterns seen between the “post-information-scarcity” technology revolution we find ourselves in the midst of,  and older, mystical/numinous ways of seeing the world and our place in it.  There are too many parallels between the two for me to ignore them.  Maybe it’s just an attempt to see the dharma through the age of a new lens, but hey, I enjoy it.

Anyway, one conclusion drawn from that discussion, that’s relevant to this post, is the idea of a sort of global wi-fi/ubiquitous/ambient computer network.  Sure, anything like that seems to be too far away in the future to dream about, but technology has a funny way of evolving way quicker than our common sense expects it to.  This points to “a truly distributed field where all the computers can access all the other computers equally at all moments. Each computer would be a holographic representation of the entire internet, because the entire connected net of other computers would be accessible instantaneously from that one computer. The whole internet reflected in a dewdrop, so to speak.  Do that, make the computers something that can be carried on a person at all times, that can interact with each other wirelessly in real time regardless of distance, and make file exchange near-instantaneous, and bam, thats it.”

“It” being an idea that’s been bounced around a lot in the more fringe cultures in the past few decades.  Marshall McLuhan called it an “echoing land” or “global village”, when all of humanity would share enough of a common culture to have it’s subconscious aspects manifest more directly within it, as it did/does in smaller isolated tribes.  I like to think of this as something akin to the Australian Aborigines’ “Dream Time“.  Teilhard de Chardin called it the Noosphere.  I’ve also drawn parallels to the Age of Aquarius as well, where man pours water out over the world, water being a symbol for mind (And Aquarius supposedly rules electronics as well, for what that’s worth).

Basically, with such an easy and instantaneous way for people to interact and communicate, enough of the outside worries are taken care of that the inside can manifest itself more fully into the consciousness.  Sort of shot at a Mass-Maslow-self-actualization.  That’s the dream anyway.  And you know what Google says about dreams: “When a great dream shows up, grab it!”

The teacher does not sell water by the riveside.

He simply sits and slowly sips, waiting for you to join him.

Watch his movements, learn their meaning.  That is all.

When it is time, your thirst will move you.  And all life is thirst. How joyous!

As mentioned previously, I had recently a chance to see Thich Nhat Hanh give a dharma talk at the Beacon Theater (which is one of the most beautiful theaters I’ve ever been in).  On the surface, the talk was rather bland, typical new-agey, meditation advice. Between that and the fact that the speakers weren’t working on my side of the theater, I had a hard time getting into his talk.

But as I paid attention (and once the speakers got fixed) I could get into it a little deeper, and the depth of his wisdom began to became clear. He wasn’t mouthing platitudes, he was speaking from the truth that platitudes are trying to emulate.  As the Tao Te Ching says, “the greatest wisdom seems childish”.  The one that spoke to me the most was the phrase, “no mud, no lotus”.  That is, you can’t have enlightenment without suffering, and it’s out of the very mud of suffering that the lotus grows.

(TNH’s calligraphy, links to source)

I think the link between mud and suffering is fairly obvious, as I am sure we’re all very familiar with suffering.  But what’s the connection between the lotus and enlightenment?  The obvious answer is: it’s a flower!  It looks like an enlightened mind should look, opened to the world, it’s inner essence fully on display, living in immediacy with the world.

This is where we see Thich Nhat Hahn’s wisdom really begin to shine, in his ability to capture an entire teaching in a simple four word slogan.  He explains a little further in an interview:

“It’s like growing lotus flowers. You cannot grow lotus flowers on marble. You have to grow them on the mud. Without mud, you cannot have a lotus flower. Without suffering, you have no ways in order to learn how to be understanding and compassionate. That’s why my definition of the kingdom of God is not a place where suffering is not, where there is no suffering…”

And yeah, that’s true enough.  That kind of mind state definitely feels like enlightenment, for sure.  But then, the is true of all flowers, not just the lotus.  Why not, “No Mud, No Flower”?  That would work well enough for that comparison, but actually, there’s a deeper metaphor at work here.  The idea of equating the lotus isn’t a TNH original.  It goes all the way back to the Buddha himself:

As a blue or white lotus is born in the water,
grows up and is unpolluted by the water,
so too has the perfected one grown up in the world,
has risen above the world
and stands unpolluted by it.
- samyutta nikaya 22 94

So why does the lotus remain unpolluted by the waters?  It’s not actually the lotus flower that does this, it’s the leaves.  And it’s due to something called the lotus effect (which has come up here before).   Basically, due to the unique structure of the lotus leaves, water beads up and runs right off of it.

It’s not the water that pollutes the leaves, instead it cleans them of debris.  Because there is no clinging between the water droplets and the leaf’s surface, the water washes over them with no hindrance, cleaning away any filth or pollution that might have settled.  Scientifically speaking, “due to their high surface tension water droplets tend to minimize their surface trying to achieve a spherical shape. On contact with a surface, adhesion forces result in wetting  of the surface: either complete or incomplete wetting may occur depending on the structure of the surface and the fluid tension of the droplet .  The cause of self-cleaning properties is the hydrophobic water-repellent double structure of the surface.”

This is the basis for the technology behind those stain resistant pants from a few years back:

And now, “a NASA team is developing a transparent coating that mimics the self-cleaning properties of the lotus plant to prevent dirt from sticking to the surfaces of spaceflight gear and bacteria from growing inside astronaut living quarters.“   Awesome.  Now you really can tell that person you’ve had your eye on that they’re wearing space pants…

Anyway, so what’s the whole thing all about?  Well, if you combine those two metaphors, what you have is something that starts out as a seed hidden under the mud (suffering), which begins to grow from that mud and eventually sprouts leaves.  Those leaves, if any mud happens to get on them, simply do not cling to it and the mud washes easily away.  And from that, the flower blooms.   All life is suffering, as the Buddha teaches, and so all life is the opportunity for enlightenment.

But no mud, no lotus.

Going off and attaining superpowers doesn’t mean you won’t have to face your problems when you come back. Which is hard if you left because you’d failed at facing them the first time.  Especially if you mistakenly understood that failure as being a permanent part of your what-you-are.  Chances are, this is exactly what you did, since the problems were clearly serious enough for you to feel the need to run off and develop a higher, more perfected being  in order to deal with the great-terrible-whatevertheyares.

Unfortunately, you now not only have to face those problems again, but you also have to dredge them up from the past (within yourself), in order to do so.  You have to take them out of the space that holds forgotten (or willfully ignored) things and make them real again.  The brain has a way of blinding itself to things that you do not allow yourself to see change, regardless of whether you do so because of their perceived goodness or their perceived badness, and this is something that must be overcome before you can even begin to tackle the “forgotten” problems themselves.

This isn’t Final Fantasy.  That you boss you couldn’t beat in that one castle isn’t just going to sit there waiting for you to level up and come back to kick his ass.  He’s going to move somewhere else, turn into something else, level up himself.  You may not even recognize him when you run across him again, but when the battle begins, you will feel a sense of deja vu…  Pay attention to that.

So yes, it’s quite the mess you’ve gotten yourself into, but on the one hand, this is good.  If you hadn’t failed the first time, you wouldn’t have left to attain those powers, and you are stronger for having made the journey.  Often, such journeys prove to be a bounty of helpful experiences, above and beyond whatever may have been attained at their culmination.  They are adventures in-and-of themselves, and no one ever said this was a purely linear storyline, especially not for us post-modern adventurers.

But on the other hand, if you only developed those powers to cover up your sense failure, then really, you have nothing.  If they were only a mask to cover your wound, rather than a bandage to help in its healing, you’re going to have to remove that mask and face the purification that has developed underneath (before you die).  In such a case, the foundations of your power are as quicksand, and your hard won treasure is nothing but faerie’s gold, fading into dew as soon as it hits the light of true day.  For power built upon ignorance must be given up before that ignorance can be pierced through and dissolved.  And who can give up both power and accept their ignorance?  It’s quite the pressure drop.  Be careful, you don’t want to get the bends…

Nevertheless, if you do wish to do such a thing, or if you find yourself in the midst of doing such a thing, or if you have come back from doing such a thing to find a smiling mask covering an ache in your chest that is getting worse by the day, remember one thing: all that you need is yourself, and you have that already.

That sidetrack you took, that break in the narrative structure, did nothing but give that self back more fully into your own hands.   And now you can turn that enhanced self awareness towards the pain, towards the problems that chased you away to begin with, and you can finally begin to heal that one true wound which we all carry within us, and which only a few of us seem to be able to ever bring to a successful conclusion.

May we all become one of those few…

(links to source)

A series of connected ponderings, from last summer.

Jul 02, 2009 – The mind is not a corrupt police department, it is more like an incorrectly connected machine.  Our parts just aren’t communicating.  To limit the function of the mind to only those functions it is capable of when fragmented in this manner is incorrect.  This is to consider a mind operating at 50% (for example) as  something broken-to-be-fixed, as opposed to seeing it as a still ongoing organic process of self correction.

The mind/body is built to house and develop spirit/self.  An incubator of sorts, it functions as a tuner/gatherer for consciousness/awareness.  It is through our becoming more and more conscious, through awareness becoming aware of itself through our own increase of awareness within our “self” , that creation can explore itself. And where the mind is incorrectly connected, awareness reaches and impasse, and awareness cannot join with awareness.

We are the budding fruit of a vast tree-of-all, and we collect awareness like sunlight.  Not collecting our awareness, but accepting awareness into ourselves, stop pretending we are not aware of what we actually are aware of.  Eating this awareness, almost, as a plant draws nourishment from the sun.  Perhaps this is similar to Gurdjieff’s ideas of eating impressions.  Again, this shows that we are not broken or evil, we just are not done developing awareness within ourselves, in a complete, contiguous whole-that-is-still-part-of-a-larger-whole.

Aug 11, 2009 – The building up and storing of knowledge limits this developing of awareness within the self.  By this, I mean knowledge about which we say “this is true, it is the way things are”. Such knowledge hems us in, limiting each new experience by forcing it to either relate to our previously accumulated knowledge or be discarded. The more knowledge we try to bring forward with us in this manner, the less new information we are able to absorb. Knowledge weighs us down, hardening our mind like death hardens the body. All knowledge is limited, and all knowledge therefore limits (the “larger you build the bonfire, the more darkness there is around it” metaphor).

We are trying to find completeness through amassing a definitive body of knowledge, but this will only end in failure.  Knowledge is really just stale information, when information should really be a temporary kind of thing.  Rather than eating and holding information as knowledge, we should digest it and let it pass away. By focusing on increasing our awareness rather than our knowledge, we can better reach into and unravel the details hidden within that very information.   Knowing it ahead of time does not matter at all, if we can truly see it when it happens.

But when caught, held on to, and built upon, layers and layers of knowledge rise up, a Tower of Babel. Even crabs and slugs abandon old shells. This is the source of the false sense of a separate ego. We think we are the information that we store as knowledge. Consumerism is merely a macro-level manifestation of this inner tendency. “More” and “more” and “more” and we’re never happy, because knowledge doesn’t equal happy. Paying attention to information as it becomes relatively important, and further refining of our ability to use that information (by increasing our awareness), while staying happily rooted in “none” all the while,  is much more satisfying.

Aug 13, 2009 – Thoughts do not create our reality, but they can help us to steer through it.  Added to this is the fact that, although “thoughts” < “beliefs”, the only difference there is in magnitude and concentration.  Thought/belief is a wedge, a rudder in the water of awareness as it passes around us.  The thoughts “I want that” is like putting a finger in the water.  The belief “I deserve that!” is like putting an oar in the water and paddling furiously (as long as you actually believe it and aren’t just thinking it).

Of course, to do this effectively, you have to be paying attention to the water.  Just as your rudder doesn’t make the side of the river come any closer to you, your thoughts do not make things happen.  But your thoughts can help you to steer through the myriad possibilities of what is happening, as long as you’re paying attention to them.

The problem is we haven’t figured out how to use thought properly yet.  We currently use thought to build this tower of knowledge, both about our self and about the world.  But this becomes the bushel basket over the lamp.

The alternative way of looking at this it to see all things as knowledge, all things, forms, sensations, thoughts, conceptions, as information.  It all is already, and you are already completely within-and-a-part-of-it.  The world is your external hardrive (or more correctly, you are it’s); there’s no separation there.  Feel this in your nervous system, it is jeweled mirror samadhi, it is the self as experienced through the knowing of the 1000 dharmas-things.

We need to be able to unify and integrate these two aspects, because really, there is no separation between the two.  Just as all magnets have both a north and a south pole, so too do we have both aspects withinour being.  Exist as the conduit between the two, the space where the two arrows meet.  That is your true self, your true identity.

As previously mentioned, I was lucky enough to get tickets to the first public talk on Jung’s Red Book, a discussion between Sonu Shamdasani, the book’s editor (and the man at least partially responsible for getting the book released to public) and Martin Brauen (the chief curator at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York).  Getting to hear Mr Shamdasani speak on the book, which he has been studying for about 10 years, was the real heart of the evening, and what follows are the notes I managed to take down, as well as some notes from the exhibition of the book, and a few of my own opinions (in italics) as well:

- The book’s creation came from an intense period of self experimentation for Jung.  In September of 1913, Jung began having strange visions, slipping into apocalyptic day dreams in which death and destruction were sweeping throughout Europe.  Years later, some have suggested this was precognitive visions of the terror that was to descend upon Europe during World War I.  To Jung, it was simply the realization that his soul had gone astray.

- He began a series of what he called “active imaginations”, where he would sit and bring himself into a visionary, hypnagogic state, and record the dreams and visions he had during those moments in a series of black books, known, appropriately enough, as “The Black Books”.  In here are his famous VII Sermones ad Mortuos.  From these sermons, Jung would draw what he later understood to be his first mandala.  For any Thelemites in the audience, a note of interest here is that at the center of the mandala were the letters AA (A large “A “, with a smaller “A” underneath it, with the point of the smaller coming up to the crossbar of the larger), but a bit more on that to come later…

• (normally, I’d include pictures here, but since no photography was allowed you’ll have to rely on your own active imaginations, with my apologies.)

- From that group of Black Books, as well as some daily sketches he made while on Swiss military service in 1917, Jung began the serious undertaking of recording all these in chronological order in a vast red leather-bound volume with creme pages, which would eventually become his Liber Novus.  It was pointed out by Mr. Shamdasani that the proper way to experience the Red Book would be to read the text first, and then to examine the accompanying paintings afterwords, as that is the order in which they were created.

- Throughout the text, Jung will say things such as “25 days later, I had a vision…”.  To the best of his knowledge, Mr. Shamdasani claims that these dates are to be taken as literal and not part of the dream narrative.  This is according to the chronology of Jung’s notes in the Black Books.

- Apparently, each character in the book has both their own color ink, and their own decorative font, whenever they speak.

- Each vision has a double layer to its recounting: the Active Imagination is presented, and then an explanation follows it.  This was Jung’s attempt to create a comparative study of the individuation process, something like “dear friends, this is how it worked for me”.  He wanted to develop the psychology behind the mysticism, and he very much hoped to translate his mythic insights into a comprehensible science, something with which he strained at the edge of language and meaning to express.

• (And, I will point out, he was not made mad in trying to do so.  In the highly karmic realm of myth, this says a lot.)

- The book is broken up into three parts, conveniently named “Liber Primus”, “Liber Secundus”, and “Liber Tertius” (or something along those lines).  In “Primus”, Jung begins an attempt to make sense out of the visions, in “Secondus”, he completes the major part of his exploration, and in “Tertius“, the active imaginations and the explanations are presented more holistically as one thing.  Although Jung never finished his book, it has been said that his tower at Bollingen, which he built himself, acted as a sort of “Liber Quaternus”, a continuation and possibly a completion the themes laid out in the three books.

- Jung worked during a period of great mystical searching, (which I was happy to hear Mr. Shamdasani say is captured quite well in P. D. Ouspensky’s “In Search of the Miraculous“.  Anything Gurdjieffian will make me smile), as well as during a period of great artistic expression, but although Jung could very well have become either a mystic or an artist, he valued science above both.  He was a fan of neither mysticism nor modern art, and although he saw similarities to these in his Red Book work (which was perhaps why he never published it in his lifetime), he considered it mainly an attempt to make a science from his journeys into the mythic/symbolic realm.

- Jung understood that, throughout history,  man has always been embedded in a mythic system, and yet he felt that he himself had none.  This book was his attempt to rectify that situation.  For example, one piece that was displayed on the wall at the museum was of figure representing (or so the plaque said) Gilgamesh, who was found somewhere in the landscape of Jung’s unconscious, wandering around looking for Utnapishtim.  In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Utnapishtim is the counterpart of Noah, someone who has survived the Great Flood and who has the God’s secret of immortality.  In Jung’s painting, the plaque went on to say, this giant, lost on his quest for immortality, is saddened to hear from Jung that the land he seeks has been destroyed.

• (This is my recollection of a plaque on the wall at a museum, not any notes I taken from the talk or the book itself, so please excuse an misinterpretation.  However, I feel this paints an accurately tragic picture of how Jung viewed the mythic state of modern man.  Those mythic drives are still present within us, but we have destroyed the lands within which lies their fulfillment, and so they must be built anew.)

- “Jung was aware of his ability to fructify the growth process (individuation) in others.”

- The Red Book was Jung’s attempt at the creation of a new Cosmology.  As stated above, this can be seen in his mandala based on his Seven Sermons.  The first version of this he created before ever knowing what a mandala was, and this was the one with the large and small “A”s.  The large “A” was said to stand for Anthropos, and the smaller “A” for the ‘soul of man’.  A later version of this mandala is found in the Red Book (and hey, online as well!) but does not use the double A.  Instead, at the center, there is a star.  The original sketch was apparently later given to a woman by the name of Alice Crowley (no relation, I’m sure).

• (Although I do not have much interest in Aleister Crowley‘s work myself, Crowley’s plunge into the Western Alchemical/Symbolic Tradition happened right around the same time as Jung’s, and so any similarities between their work are worth mentioning, I feel, if only because they were both exploring the same psychic terrain.)

- It was pointed out that in Eastern Mandalas, the center is almost always occupied by a Divinity or a Buddha, whereas in the west the center is often occupied by a man.

• (Which seems important to me, since in the west we have Jesus Christ elevated to an officially divine position, whereas in the east, Buddha, although often prayed to as a god, is officially considered to have been a human like you are I.  The fact that this contradicts what is found at the center of the mandala interests me greatly…)

- However, Jung never felt that the Red Book was complete.  The last complete painting in the book is of a yellow castle, which to Jung (although I don’t see it myself) had a “Chinese” feel to it.  In 1928, while working on this painting, Jung received the text of “The Secret of the Golden Flower”, by Richard Wilhelm, a friend who was asking Jung to write an introduction to his book.  In this Taoist alchemical text from centuries past, Jung found references to the motifs in his Yellow Castle painting.

- After this, he broke of his work on the Red Book, took it up again in 1959 only to stop in mid-sentence.  Although it was not shown at the talk nor in the show, there is apparently also one last, unfinished painting in the book, which was characterized in the talk as Jung opening again to the outer world, rather than opening to his own inner world.

- Mr Shamdasani, who has studied this book in it’s raw form more than anyone else probably ever will, says that he thinks it will take at least a year and half of study for anyone to truly understand what Jung has put into the Red Book.

- Jung was quoted as saying that “the painting of mandalas increases one’s devotion to life”, a particularly beautiful way of phrasing it, and with that, I will end my notes.

For me, what I found most interesting (and infuriating) is that it was left unresolved whether or not Jung ever completed his process of Individuation.  Although it in no way damages the man’s work nor his scholarship, it does leaves me with the feeling of coming to the end of a great movie only to have the DVD skip and freeze, just before the climatic scene.  Given Jung’s dislike of mysticism and his description of the individuation process as “not linear, but a circumambulation around the center, the self, an approach to it that is approximate”, it is conceivable that it was simply not within his worldview to accept any kind of union with the godhead/numinous/enlightenment/whatever.

One painting from the exhibition in particular seemed (to me) to back up this line of reasoning.  Again, I could not take pictures, so you will have to bear with me until my copy arrives.  Although I will not post any other pieces from the book out of respect for the copyright, I do hope that this one image will be allowed, simply for the sake of clarification. Anyway, the plaque next to the painting read as follows: “In 1950, Jung anonymously reproduced a painting identical to this in his paper ‘Concerning Mandala Symbolism’, adding the following comment: ‘The center is symbolized by a star.  This very common image is consistent  with the previous pictures, where the sun represents the center.  The sun, too, is a star, a radiant cell in the ocean of the sky.  The picture shows the self appearing as a star out of chaos.  The four-rayed structure is emphasized by the use of four colors.  This picture is significant in that it sets the structure of the self as a principle of order against chaos.”

Yet, as any good mystic tradition will tell you, this sense of the self as something set against that which surrounds it, is a false sense of self.  This is the self that must “go out”, in order to reach enlightenment, to truly unravel the mystery of life and death and to clarify the great matter once and for all.  While I do not want to imply that Jung never made it to this point, that he failed in his quest for Individuation, I do feel saddened that the center of “The Mandala of the Life of Carl Gustav Jung” is left with such an infuriatingly blank center.

(image of said mandala to come soon, hopefully…)

Lastly, as a sort of postscript, a brief note about Mr. Shamdasani himself (whose name, I’m sure, you have grown a bit tired of reading here).  It seems he was raised in the British boarding school system, and at some point in his youth, went on a trip to India in search of a guru.  He never found a guru, but while in India, a book of Jung’s “fell into his hands” (as it was put by Mr. Brauen).  And it was this was what he brought back with him from India and which will, I can only assume, maintain him throughout the rest of his life.

FOR AN EXPLANATION OF THE CROSSED OUT SECTIONS, SEE THE COMMENTS.

A wandering ascetic named Naked Kassapa came to the Buddha and asked: “Is suffering/stress/anxiety caused by oneself?  Can it be said, if one is suffering, that this suffering was brought about through one’s own actions?”

Buddha: “No, it cannot.”  For to speak of it thus makes one responsible for all the suffering that befalls them, and clearly this cannot be true.

NK: “Then can it be said that that one’s suffering is brought about through the actions of another?”

B: “No, it cannot.” For to speak of it thus removes all responsibility for one’s suffering from oneself, and inclines one towards lethargy and complaint.

NK: “Then can it be said that one’s suffering is brought about both through the actions of oneself and of others?”

B: “No, it cannot.” For to speak of it thus is to create a false dichotomy where in one falls into either one or the other of the two prior traps.

NK: “Then since one’s suffering is not brought about by either one’s own actions or the actions of others, can it be said that it is brought about by the whims of chance?”

B: “No, it cannot.”  For to speak of it thus means the suffering will be entirely ignored, as if it carried no message within it.

NK: “Well then, can suffering be said to be nonexistant?”

B: “No, it cannot.” For clearly suffering does exist.

NK: “Then, good Gotama, clearly you do not know suffering, nor do you see suffering.”

B: “This is not true. I have knowledge of suffering; I see suffering.”

NK: “Well my lord, can you please help to clarify the nature of suffering for me, and explain to me this knowledge that you have?”

B: “To say that suffering comes from within is to become a solipsist, as if the world depended entirely on oneself.  Yet to say that suffering comes from without leads to either depression or madness, as we then have no control over the fact that we suffer.  Instead, the Tathaagata teaches the middle way.  The cause of our suffering is our ignorance of the nature and dependent origin of that information which we perceive as causing our suffering.  If we could truly understand the actions that both brought this information into existence, and our own beliefs that cause us to label it as suffering, then we would be able to cut out the suffering at its root, and it would cease to exist entirely.”

An interpretation of the Acela Sutta (trans: here and here), come to after reading H. W. Schumann’s “The Historical Buddha”.

I’ve been hoping to have some little moments or stories to share with you from my trips to the monastery, some wisdom to bring back from the mountain so to speak, but I have been having a hard time coming up with anything good.  I suppose I could make attempts to summarize what the various teachers and monastics say in their talks, playing the good reporter and bringing you all along with me into the meditation hall, as much as my memory will allow, but that seems empty to me.

Because what would I be offering you by doing so?  If you wanted to go listen to talks at a zen monastery, you’d be in one, I hope.  Besides, there’s plenty of places on the internet where dharma talks are freely given, and there you can get them exact, not partially recalled.  Instead, since you’re here, I have to assume you have some interest in hearing my take on the particular perspective on the world I happen to inhabit.  That being so, I’d much prefer to pass on the little moments and experiences that really struck me as somehow capturing the spirit of teaching.

Besides, don’t they always say that Zen is a direct pointing to and realization of one’s own true nature? Beyond words and scriptures, and concerned with the direct experiencing of things such-as-they-are?

Well, with that in mind, here’s a little story for you:

Back in April, when I attended my first sesshin (meditation intensive), I was part of the crew that was cleaning the zendo out during the periods of “work practice” (other work practices I’ve been involved with are planing wood, installing insulation in a attic, digging drainage ditches, laying stone pathways in the garden, and, of course, cleaning the bathrooms.)  In order to do so, we had to pick up all the zabutons and zafus throughout the whole zendo, stack them up carefully, vacuum and mop the floors, and then put everything back in the same order.

This picture is why I love the internet…

That’s the actual meditation hall at the Monastery (picture links to source).  Anyway, as you can see, the cushions are supposed to be lined up pretty nicely.  It being my first time, I was a little worried about having to line them back up after the floor had been cleaned.  Not only did we have line them up pretty much perfectly perpendicular to the walls, but all the rows had to be parallel to each other as well. This an not easy thing to do on any occasion, and particularly not in the middle of three silent days of 4:00am~9:30pm meditation.

We’d laid out a few rows, and I was stepping back to eyeball them, when the supervisor, a senior student, came back from putting the mops and vacuums away.  He pulled me aside and pointed out the hardwood floor, and the perfectly parallel lines that the wood made naturally, just by being laid out the way it was.  All we had to was find the correct line on the floor (the ends of the rows were marked with tape), and adjust each cushion up so the front was barely touching the line.   Walk up to each cushion, look at the cushion itself, match it to the line that was already perfectly in place, and then move on to the next cushion.

Needless to say we were able to line up all the cushions properly within minutes, without ever having to step back or eyeball anything…

So I promised a breakdown of the Ango training I’ve signed myself up for, and, seeing as I have this entire evening to myself, I thought I’d write something up.

Ango translates as “peaceful dwelling”, and although it is a tradition within the Zen line of Buddhism, it can be traced all the way back to the Buddha and his sangha.  In India at the time, spiritual seekers would give up the homelife with a ceremonial shaving of the head and donning of a monk’s robes.   They would wander the countryside begging for alms (readily given out of respect for their search, which makes me rather jealous…), and the Buddha was no exception.  Before he came to realization, he wandered around the countryside, visiting various people, religious sites, and spiritual schools, on a permanent pilgrimage of sorts.  And after his realization, he continued to wander and encouraged his sagha to do so as well (often separately, alone or in small groups)

The problem with this is that India has some pretty intense weather during the summer and winters.  The monsoons blow in and it becomes dangerous to be alone out in the wilds.  At those times, the Buddha’s sangha would gather and practice together.  This was what become know as Ango, both a peaceful dwelling away from the rains, and a peaceful dwelling in the shared practice of the dharma.

Given that many people in America travel during the summer and winter months, we’ve moved our Ango periods to the spring and fall.  Change in practice is complimented by the change of the seasons, and it’s easier for everyone to stay involved.  During Ango, we are encouraged to intensify all aspects of our practice, from body practice, to art practice, to meditation, to academic study, etc etc…

And so I’ve decided to get as much out of this as possible, by diving into it head first.  The plan right now is as follows:

- meditation: 30 minutes every morning, without fail.  Longer if possible.  Chanting of the Tara Mantra before every mediation and the Prajna Paramita Heart Sutra afterwords.

- body practice: 30 minutes of Chi Kung every day, at least one yoga class and at least one trip to the gym every week.

- I am also taking a 6 week refresher course in the style Chi Kung I learned earlier this year with a great teacher here in the city.  Didn’t find out about the class until a day or two before it was starting, but I luckily still managed to get in.

- art practice: the assignment given by the monastery is to sit intimately with something repeatedly throughout the 90 days, and watch our relationship with develop as our practice does.  I decided to sit and contemplate the sun, so I’m writing a short piece every day attempting to capture that feeling of intimacy with the sun.  If the results are worth posting, I’ll share them here once the Ango’s over.

- academic study: I’m attending a program at the temple here in Brooklyn where we are studying a biography of the historical Buddha, and studying various Pali texts relating to the Buddha’s spiritual quest, enlightenment, and teaching.  On top of that, I’m also reading Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind, Karen Armstrong’s Buddha, Zen and the Art of Archery, and Lord of Light (thanks to a reminder from Mahasamatman himself…).

- One day long meditation intensive at the temple (this Saturday) and another full week sesshin towards the end of November.

- A Chi Kung retreat with Ken Cohen in October (chi kung and shamanism? fuck yeah!)

- A “somatic body” meditation retreat with Reggie Ray later this month.

- A talk by Thich Nhat Hanh in October

So yes, it looks like I will be pretty damn busy from now until the end of November.  So far, I’m managing to hold up my end of the bargain, and strangely enough, I seem to have more time and energy than I did before…  Who would have thought that action would lead to more action?

I will keep you posted on my progress (if there’s anything worth reporting) as things go along.  Be well, and strong practice to you all.

Technology is the active human interface with the material world. – Ursula K. Le Guin

From Gurdjieff’s “Beelzebub’s Tales To His Grandson”, page 1047

“That they think thus may perhaps be possibly justified by taking into consideration that owing to the abnormal conditions of ordinary existence established in past epochs, no exact information has reached them about events which have occurred in the past in the process of the existence of the three-brained beings who existed before them on the planet; but how is it possible to admit that up till now there has not arisen in any one of them – in whom it has already been established that even until quite recently there does sometimes proceed a “something” similar to the process of “comparative logic” – at least the following simple and almost, as they themselves would call it, “childish idea”?”

Gurdjieff then goes on to explain what this “childish idea” is: that in the history of mankind, although everyone admits that there were many wise people, it never occurs to us that some of the surely could have invented such things as we take as technological progress.  If these previous wise beings could have invented these things but didn’t, why does it not occur to us that perhaps there was some reason for them not doing so?

(Beelzebub’s examples of technological progress, showing Gurdjieff’s preference for strange-yet-appropriate details, are comfortable toilets and canned food, but as with most of his Tales, if you get stuck on those details, you miss the main point.  And if you get through the details to the main point, then the details are understoof to be much more appropriate.)

Also, just to clarify, in the beginning of the above quote, the phrase “that they think thus” is referring to several earlier paragraphs where Beelzebub explains that one of the main causes of the trouble with the then-present society, was the belief that “former beings similar to them had never perfected themselves to that (level of) Reason to which their contemporaries have attained and in which they can still continue to perfect themselves”. That is, the idea that history is building toward something and that each era of history is in all ways progressively “better” than the previous.

Something kind of similar has come up here before, that every generation has to re-learn the knowledge of the past generations, and to add to it where we are able. But that to consider past knowledge as something that does not need to be learned because “someone else knows it already, why bother?” will only lead to more and more ignorance as time goes on.  And although I fully admit that the comments on this site and Gurdjieff’s thoughts on the value of “historical progress” are not exactly the same thing, where they do overlap is what I’m trying to get at here.  The belief that our society is the peak of all past civilizations, and the belief that progress marches on without stop and without maintenance, are both dangerous in exactly the same way…

All Gurdjieffian wise-acring aside, I do recommend reading the Tales.  The conclusions presented therein may not always make sense at first, or match in with modern scientific knowledge (was tempted to put that in quotes…), but Beelzebub’s thoughts on how a typical “three-brained being of perfected Reason” functions, is conveyed amazingly well, in a between-the-lines kind of way.  The language is difficult, yes, but in trying to understand it, and in tying the parts that do make sense together, the broader picture that is revealed is breathtaking.   Both the potentialities and the utter failings of humanity are put in sharp contrast.  As Gurdjieff apparently used to say, it really puts you “in galoshes”…

But the difficulty lies in appreciating it as a message from a certain person’s contextual viewpoint, directed at certain other people within a certain era of time. And to bring back in the quote from the beginning, one of the biggest problems in human history has been the fact that a truly “objective” history as such has not existed. As Beelzebub puts it “no exact information” has reached us about the past.  Look at some of the greatest spiritual teachers recognized now. Jesus, Buddha, Socrates, they all taught entirely through the spoken word, as addressed to the people at the time. That is, in a true combination of subject and object, their teachings were created directly for those people who were listening to them at the present time. If we are to truly derive any benefit from the teachings contained Plato’s dialogues, the Sutras, or the New Testament, we have to understand both the teachings, the teacher, and the students to which they were given (to all you Buddhists out there, that’s the three treasures right there…). Trying to understand any one without at least some limited understanding of the others will very likely lead to missing the point entirely.

Originally and most essentially, the dharma teachings were the words spoken and sung by the realized ones. Sutras, the words of the Buddha, always begin “Thus have I heard” not “Thus have I read.” In the same way that one could not expect to become a world-class pianist simply by reading piano manuals or a cook simply by reading cookbooks, one must receive the dharma teachings by hearing them from a teacher. To learn the dharma, we must hear the nuances and subtleties; we must experience the eloquence and the flights of those steeped in living understanding and realization.

Thankfully, and in spite of Gurdjieff’s warning against any idea of “unending progress”, we seem to be reaching a point where technology can serve as a sort of external hardrive for history, outside the bounds of 4 dimensional space time. Kind of a trippy way to put it, I know, but check out this article from Futurismic, and the accompanying BC News piece. If we ever are able to have a complete visual and audio record of everything that happens to us, as well as a way of adding our own comments to these records when desired, then we have essentially solved the problem of lack of a true objective historical context for any record. As it’s put in the linked article, we have not even really entered history yet. It’s something that’s still coming into being. But imagine being able to go back and access the recorded life of Christ, from his perspective, and then to be able to do the same for each of the people to whom he spoke. We’d perhaps have a better chance to know what he meant by what he said, to place his linguistic choices in the proper context to be able to extract the actual intent behind those sometimes arbitrarily seemingly linked word.

As Abraham Lincoln said in his “A House Divided” speech:  “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.”

Which is just as true if you change it to third person past tense: “If we could first know where they were, and whither they were tending, we could then better judge what they did, and how they did it…”

Not only does that idea excite me (as well as trouble me, because yes, it does have some Big Brother, Brave New World type potentialities) but think what it creates in the mind. Think of a society where the ability to experience history like that is taken for granted. Where traveling back to the lived expereince of the past is as effortless as turning on your computer, and clicking on a few files. Where our own future, more mature perspectives can be brought back to better analyze, understand, and put to rest the demons from our past, both individually and collectively.

* The is also the last of my “on the train to Boston” posts.  Took me a while to get all the sources together for this one together.  Don’t know why some take longer than others, but that’s just how it goes.  Fitting, though, that I post this now, since I finally came to the end of the Tales just under an hour ago.

Course, ol’ Gurdjieff also said you should read each of his books three times.   Not sure how I feel about that.  For those unfamiliar with the Tales, the complex sentence structure of that quote is found throughout all the 1238 pages of the Tales.  my opinion is that Gurdjieff just has a unique way of teaching non-duality.  For G, sentences are no other than paragraphs, paragraphs no other than sentences.  Sentences are exactly paragraphs, paragraphs exactly sentences.

And you will have anywhere from 3 to 7 per page.  ;)

(Quite) a while back, there was a small synchronicity here regarding Transactional Analysis, and, for a long time, TA sat in my pile of “important things to look into”.  I finally got around to it recently and it got my mind going in all kinds of directions.  I began with the wikipedia entry and found, as I often do, that it offered a great breakdown of the basics.  At it’s core, TA is a system that analyzes our interactions with the world, in order to help us to become aware of how our unconscious assumptions about reality (called scripts) are shaping are lives.  An analogous relationship would be between html code and a website as seen through a browser.  You examine how things looks at the browser level, and then go back into the code if something’s not appearing as you want it to.  It was developed by Eric Berne as a “Neo-Freudian” method of psychoanalysis, and as such, it has its own language and models for talking about the functioning (and dysfunctioning) of the psyche.  It was TA’s basic models of interaction, known as “ego states” that really drew my attention.

The 3 ego states are as follows (from wikipedia):

• Parent (“exteropsyche”)
• Adult (“neopsyche”)
• Child (“archaeopsyche”)

Some of TA’s language is a bit hippie-fied for my taste (it’s the origin of the term “the warm fuzzies”), but that’s just a product of the time in which this system was developed.  The underlying ideas are well worth looking into, regardless of the words used to describe them, and I highly recommend exploring further if you’re interested.

But it was these three ego states that really caught my attention.  I saw them as having a kind of yin/yang relationship with Freud’s id/ego/superego formations, and, while thinking about them in that context, I stumbled on a flaw in (what I think of as) some of the basic assumptions behind psychoanalysis.  Now, I may not be interpreting everything entirely correctly here, but my understanding of these things did point toward some interesting conclusions.  Before I get to those conclusions though, let me explain what I mean about the yin/yang relationship between TA and Freud.

On the one hand, Freud’s psychic formations (id, ego, and superego) simply are.  They exist as objective parts of the psyche, functioning almost as organs within the mind, so that one could say, “oh, my id wants this, but my superego doesn’t,” just as easily as saying, “oh, my stomach’s too full, no more pie!”.  They are forces that wield influence from within the self, while the self scrambles around trying to create an equilibrium of libido between their different needs.  By contrast, Transactional Analysis’ ego states are ones through which the self can interact with the external world.  The states are masks, forms that the self assumes in order to embody what it considers to be the best possible role in any given situation.   Basically, the difference here is that TA focuses on the inter-personal nature of the self, while Freud focuses on the intra-personal nature of the self.  Their concepts of “self” can be seen as inversions of each other, different sides of the same coin, the north and south face of the same mountain.  Because in the end, what is being described is the “self” in it’s passive and active states.

But if both systems are examining the”self” from within a different context, can a similar parallel be found between the individual formations and ego states? That is, can each be seen as an active/passive version of some aspect of the self?  It was in trying to fit these pieces fit together that the entire basis for both models fell apart for me in a really interesting way.

I’ll begin with the id/child state. In both cases, what’s described is the aspect of the self that wants, that desires, that craves instant gratification or the release of emotional energy.  It’s the creative part of the self but it’s also the unpredictable part of the self.  For Freud, the id “is regarded as the reservoir of the libido or ‘instinctive drive to create’“, while in TA, the child state is the source of emotions, creation, recreation, spontaneity and intimacy.   In both, what we have is the part of the self that reacts to reality before conscious decision making comes into play.  They come into consciousness already in motion and reach outward into the world.  Freud’s id is a drive within the self, while TA’s child state is the self acting spontaneously in the world, so we do find that same internal/external dichotomy at the individual formation/state level as well.  And this formation/state seems to be based mainly on creating a future state of being.  Although it’s a bit counter-intuitive at first, any emotional response is something created in anticipation of some future state.  I do not mean the experience of the emotion, I mean the source of the emotion.  According to this understanding of the child/id as the source of the emotion, the emotion is created by that source to be experienced by the consciousness in the future. The emotion comes into being before we are aware of it’s presence.  I think that this way of looking at it makes the “child” label particularly appropriate, because if children have an abundance of anything, it’s “future”.  This ties in with creativity quite well too, because creativity is all about “seeing” something that hasn’t yet come into being and making it real.

The obvious retort to this is that children are always so wonderfully present, but that, I would say, is confusing the “child” label with an actual child. In fact, I think children can often be a lot more in touch with their ego/adult state than most adults are, and I disagree with TA’s notion that the child state is merely a re-creation of childhood experiences.  As I hope I will be able to clarify here, I think that the id/child state might be better understood as something created during childhood, rather than as something inherent since birth.

Before we get to that though, I’d like to point to a similar pattern in the ego/adult state: that the base here is on the present moment. As TA puts it, the adult is “directed towards an objective appraisal of reality”, and for Freud, “the ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world.“  It is the seat of the conscious awareness, mainly because it is the part that is still in direct contact with both the circumstances of the exterior world and the drives of inner world.

And finally, in case you haven’t already figured it out, the superego/parent is the part of the self that seems most based in the past.  Without the past, the parent/superego has no basis upon which to make its pronouncements.  If there were no previous bad results to watch out for, on what grounds can we be scolded for our current actions?  TA’s parent state is one where we “behave, feel, and think in response to an unconscious mimicking of how (our) parents (or other parental figures) acted.“  That is, it is the part of the self that has internalized the actions of the parental figure in order to please that figure.   Freud pretty much agrees, saying “the super-ego retains the character of the father“, (of course, Freud’s word choice here, as with TA’s slightly hippy-fied sentimentality, is best understood as a product of its time, not as anything inherent to the argument here).  Again, the inner/outer dichotomy is obvious: TA has us “mimicking actions”, while Freud has us “retaining character”.

That’s all well and good, but to me, there’s something profoundly wrong about all of this.  Because really (and here’s where the bottom fell out of the bucket for me) the past of the future don’t exist experientially. As the Sensei at my zen temple has said, “we can experience a sense of the past or future, but that sense is still in the present moment”. We are always in the present, and it’s only in the present that we can have any influence on the unfolding of things. From that perspective, focusing on either the future or the past at the expense of the present is a waste of time.  But then, from what we looked at above, being “in the present moment” only leaves us with the ego/adult, the “rational observer”, with the emotions and creativity of the child/id completely cut off from reality.  And that, I think, points a problem inherent in psychoanalysis since Freud.

For Freud, “the id stands in direct opposition to the super-ego”, but I know that, for me, the ideal state of being is not one where the internal parts of my psyche are in direct opposition to each other.  Why carry around a description of the self that has such an insolvable conflict within it? For Transactional Analysis, “learning to strengthen the Adult is a goal of TA“, yet the adult state is described as “most like a computer processing information and making predictions absent of major emotions that cloud its operation.” Is that the goal we should be striving for?  A telling quote from Joseph Campbell sheds some light on the matter.  It comes from his journals from his trip to Japan:  “Christianity and Freud, by the way, have something in common, inasmuch as for both, man’s rational consciousness is absolutely sealed away from the unknown root of his soul.”

And I say fuck that.  Why should my ideal consciousness be purely rational, and why should that rational consciousness be absolutely sealed away from the “root of my soul?”  What causes someone to create a system of “mind” like that, and how might these models look if they sprang from a different understanding of the mind-in-reality?  I don’t doubt that there are many analysts who make good use of the tools offered by TA (as well as those offered by Freud) to achieve excellent results with their clients, but I think a re-examination of some of the key assumptions is in order if we ever want to use these tools to their full extent.  The conclusion I came to through my understanding of the id/child as future-based and superego/parent as past-based is that both these aspects are created out of the self at the precise moment when the ‘root of the soul’ is mistakenly thought to be separated from the present moment.  That is, the id/child can only be seen as the source of emotions and creativity if these things are seen as not already belonging to the fully present adult/ego.  Once that happens, the superego/parent is needed to balance out the time lag of the no-longer-present-source.  The parental figure needs to become internalized as the superego because the inner source is no longer trusted to touch reality directly; a mediator is needed.  What is being described in both systems is a fundamentally damaged understanding of what the “self” actually is, and it is being described as if this were the normal way to be.  What we’re left with is a case of double vision.  Take a look at this handy little visual metaphor:

To the left there is clearly part of a face.  And the same is true to the right.  But they both have an extremely unreal quality about them.  You can see through them, as if they weren’t really there, and neither side is complete in itself.  Both fade into a middle part that is clearly there.  The middle part seems real and concrete, but it is a chaotic mess of features.  Clearly it’s real, but what is it?  No conclusions about the real face can be drawn until the blurred vision is cleared.  You have to sit and stare at the part that feels real, and wait for the true face to come into focus.

So too, focusing only on the child/id, as something separate from the present moment, is to be caught in the illusory future.  To focus only on the parent/superego, as something separate from the present moment, is to be caught in the past.  Only when the two are seen as existing both together at the same time, naturally balanced in the present moment, can reality be fully experienced.  Check out this quote from Douglas Harding (and the accompanying exercise)

You know, six hundred years before Christ they were saying in India that there is one Seer in all beings. One Seer. The Sufis said it, the Buddhists said it. Hui Hai, a great Buddhist Zen master, said, ‘Do we see with our eyes? No we see with our Buddha Nature.’ We see with a Single Eye say the Sufi masters, later. One Seer. This is the Eye you’re looking out of. I find this absolutely extraordinary. See what you’re looking out of! And this is a strange thing—this agrees with modern science. Eyes do not see. Eyes condition, are part of the conditioning apparatus of what we see. They help to determine what we see, but the seeing doesn’t go on at the eye level. It really has to go back, via the optic nerves and so on, to a region of the brain where the story is taken up. It starts off there with the sun, the light comes down, is filtered through the atmosphere of the Earth, strikes the object and hits your eye, and is then conveyed to a region of the visual cortex in the brain, where the story is taken up by atoms, particles and so on. It’s not until that terminus is reached that you say, ‘Hi! I see you.’ The thing that starts with the galaxy, with the light of the sun out there, ends with the agitation or whatever of particles here. And it’s only where the All is reduced to No-thing here that seeing takes place.

This is the key to the whole thing.  At some point in our childhood, we push away that root of the soul, our honest emotional involvement with the world, in favor of a more removed, rational approach.  This is what all the “get in touch with your emotions” and “increase the amount of ‘play’ in your life” kinds of therapies are attempting to overcome.  Even “be here now” and “be one with everything” point to the same way out.  What is needed is a resurrection of that emotional source into the present moment, so that there is a flowing back and forth of energy and information between the inner and outer experiences.  The sense of any barrier between the two is the “self” that needs to be gotten rid of, the gateless gate through which we must pass.  We create this boundary at some point in our childhood, in response to some external circumstances that teach us that our inner drives are not to be trusted, and then we take this self-created boundary as real.  We wall off our drives, instead of allowing them to interact with and learn from reality.  This is not in and of itself a bad thing, but we seem to forget that we’ve done it to ourselves.  We hold onto that barrier as a part of our true self, when it’s actually only a mental tool we’ve created.  The true self is simply the space within which this flow of energy/information takes place between our inner and outer aspects.

This is why I said earlier that I think children are more in touch with there adult/ego self, because the true self-in-the-present moment understands that is no separation between the “root of the soul” and the rational consciousness.  They are like two ends of a magnet that can never touch, but which meet quite easily in the middle.

Recently, there have been some studies pointing to a major shift in our understanding of what’s going on in a child’s mind.  Conveniently enough, a few articles on these were published while I was trying to put this piece together, and they greatly contributed to my understanding of just what it was that I was trying to say:

The finding that infants can distinguish between solids and liquids at such an early age builds upon a growing body of research that strongly suggests that babies are not blank slates who primarily depend on others for acquiring knowledge. That’s a common assumption of researchers in the not too distant past.

“Rather, our research shows that babies are amazing little experimenters with innate knowledge,” Susan Hespos said. “They’re collecting data all the time.”

The infants who in their first trials observed the blue water in the glass looked significantly longer at the blue solid, compared to the liquid test trials. The longer stares indicated the babies were having an “Aha!” moment, noticing the solid substance’s difference from the liquid. The infants who in their first trials observed the blue solid in the glass showed the opposite pattern. They looked longer at the liquid, compared to the solid test trials.

“As capricious as it may sound, how long a baby looks at something is a strong indicator of what they know,” Hespos said. “They are looking longer because they detect a change and want to know what is going on.”

“Our research on babies strongly suggests that right from the beginning babies are active learners,” Hespos said. “It shows that we perceive the world in pretty much the same way from infancy throughout life, making fine adjustments along the way.”

—————————————————————————

Both Piaget and Freud thought that the reason children produced so much fantastic, unreal play was that they couldn’t tell the difference between imagination and reality. But a lot of the more recent work in children’s theory of mind has shown quite the contrary. Children have a very good idea of how to distinguish between fantasies and realities. It’s just they are equally interested in exploring both. The picture we used to have of children was that they spent all of this time doing pretend play because they had these very limited minds, but in fact what we’ve now discovered is that children have more powerful learning abilities than we do as adults. A lot of their characteristic traits, like their pretend play, are signs of how powerful their imaginative abilities are.

Two-and-a-half-year-olds already recognize the difference between moral principles and conventional principles. You can ask them if it would be okay to hit someone at daycare if everyone said it would be okay, versus asking them whether it would be okay to not hang up your coat in the cubby if everyone said it would be okay. These children say it’s never okay to hit someone, but whether or not you have to put your clothes in the cubby could change from daycare to daycare. They already seem to appreciate the difference between the kinds of morality that comes from empathy and the kind that comes from our conventional rules. From the time they are two, they recognize both are important but in different ways.

So then, what’s the solution to all this?  Should we just let loose, do whatever we want?  Let our emotions run rampant?  No, of course not.  On the one hand, our emotions don’t naturally run rampant.  They are communications from our unconscious, and our unconscious is designed to make the best decision possible based on the information available to it.  Telling ourselves that they’re unmanagable is often just a way to maintain that false boundary that we think of as an inherent part of our self.  Argue for your limitations and they’re yours, as they say.

On the other hand, yes, there are people with really violent emotions and urges, but think of it this way.  If you take a hose, and block the end of it, when you move your finger away there is a sudden spray of water.  And if you only move your finger partially, there is a contant stream of water under pressure.  What we have to learn is how to remove the blocks that create emotional pressure, but without the sudden outpouring of what was blocked.  People can be damaged, perhaps permanently, by such emotional blockages, but we, as a society, would be best served by having as many people as possible making attempts to integrate these parts of themselves without the need to lash out with these blocked emotions.  We have to retrain our mind and our emotions to better exist together again, because right now, they have forgotten how to.  The more people who can learn to safely let the inner fountain bubble up, the less we, as a society, will have to worry about violent emotions.  “What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher?  What is a bad man but a good man’s job? If you don’t understand this, you will get lost, however intelligent you are. It is the great secret.”

What we have to do is learn to sit with our emotions, become aware of them as they are.  Reconnect our conscioussness with the root of our soul.  As a species, we had the chance to explore both extremes, the emotional and the rational, and now it’s time to head back toward the center, to level things out so to speak.  It is definitely not an easy road, but the end result is one worth traveling to.  And what is that result? Love.  A consciously aware participation mystique.  And the realization that this state has been completely available within our being all along.

The plan was to start writing something new here last Sunday.  I’d hinted as much in the comments, but then drank myself stupid last Saturday and couldn’t really raise the energy to get back in the saddle (or even get out of bed, to be honest).  Then I was on call for jury duty part of last week and had to work overtime at the office the rest of the week playing catch up.

Luckily that’s all over and done with, and I’ve had a chance to get things started up here again, somewhat.  My current plan, for what that’s worth, is to pick things up here slowly, with larger pieces spread further apart, with more regular updates on The Links as I get through an unnervingly large backlog of articles I’ve been saving up.  But I’m not making any promises, as I’ve noticed that my pronouncements about “what I’m going to do” usually seems to make it that much harder for me to actually get around to doing it.  Just goes to show any plans I make are, at best, something I should consider as a loose guideline, and not something that I necessarily must follow through on.  Gotta keep that old OODA loop running its course…

First though, I’d like to take a chance to explore the problems I’ve been having when turning my attention back to this site, in the hopes that other people might find it useful.  Plus I’d like to try and work through it for my own sake as well.

After the large “Organization” post I was really happy, both my the post itself and everyone’s response to it.  I was surprised to see so many people comment on it, and I was really happy to see some of my readers chime in with their own thoughts.  One of the things I enjoy most about this blog is the conversations I get into with everybody in the comments; sometimes it feels like the posts are just attempts at stirring up good discussions.

And after that “Organization” post, I wanted to keep up the energy it had raised, and tried to have a post up every day.   I managed to pull it off for a couple of weeks, but then I simply ran out of steam.  I had become so focused on needing to have something new up that I’d lost any sense of why I wanted to do so in the first place.  At first, I didn’t even realize this had happened, and I just felt really sad at my inability to keep up the work.

But I’ve since come to realize that what I enjoy most about the process is organizing my thoughts and experiences into some sort of entertaining ride.  As I write here, I am taking a journey through all the things that are floating around in my awareness and trying to piece them together into some kind of whole to make sense of all of them.  It’s something similar to making a mandala, I suppose, in that you take different things, put them all together as part of one “whole” in a way that feels as good or as right as possible, and then you let it go.

With the Tibetan sand mandalas, the mandala is blown away as soon as it is completed.  And with these blog posts, I hit “publish” and that particular thought-formation is released back into the public noosphere from whence it came, hopefully better polished and more able to help others work through those same thoughts.  Anyway, that’s the way I’ve realized that I describe the process to myself, in a subconscious sort of way.

What I’d run into after the “Organization” post was a desire to have more of that feeling of “finished”, without wanting to spend time developing the “thing-to-be-finished”.  And I ended up rushing out a bunch of half-finished posts which weren’t on the issues I really wanted to tackle.  I’d sacrificed quality for the sake of quantity, and ended up feeling unfulfilled without really knowing why.  It’s like picking unripe fruit, except that I’m the tree, the fruit, and the sun all at once.   It’s my attention that I focus on certain things which then reach a point where I feel I’ve explored them fully and I can let them go.   Why make sour cherries when I can take more time and have some good juicy plums?  Or whatever…

Not that quick little sour cherries are bad, but a better balance between the two was definitely needed.

This wasn’t something I realized at the time though (to be honest, I’m really only finally putting the pieces together now), and I looked around for things to blame.

My job? Definitely, because I spend all day at the office in front of the computer, but I can’t focus on the blog very much because, well, because I have a job to do.  Forgetting, of course, that it’s that same job that gets me my paycheck and health insurance, and that also teaches me what it means to do something well just because it needs to be done, irregardless of whether or not it’s something I “want” to do…

My relationships? Yeah, of course, they take up time that could be better spent working on my writing.  This blog is really what I want to be doing with my life for the time being, and anyone who wasn’t supporting my attempt to be doing that every chance I had, must surely be someone who was only holding me back.  And here, I’m forgetting that it’s these very relationships that make life both so enjoyable and so unpredictable.  Ain’t no fun to be had in a solipsist universe, unless you like jerking off in a corner and talking to yourself…

Anyway, there was a bunch of finger pointing, but no moons in sight, if you know what I mean.  Looking back , I do feel I acted kind of badly, but at the same time, it was a chance to really experience these kinds of feelings in action and focus deeply on them so that now, when I’ve had a chance to put them behind myself a little bit, I have a better understanding of what causes them (all in the interest of better avoiding them in the future).

None of this really began to come together though, until I was sitting in the jury selection pool, waiting to be called to a trial.  I was going back and forth on how to approach the interview process.  Should I pull some ridiculous tin-foil-hat bullshit, to get out of it?  I knew things would be piling up back at the office, and didn’t want to leave my coworkers (who are all great people) pulling my weight for too long.  Should I do what I knew I was “supposed” to do, and serve on a jury no matter what?  They tell you that trial by jury is one of the things that make America great, that it’s a chance we citizens have to take a part in the governance and administration of the very system which is meant to allow us so many great freedoms.  And I do believe in that system, despite whatever other craziness might be going on.  The American system is not perfect, but at its core are some really great things.  If those things are failing to shine through, then we can only blame ourselves for not keeping things polished enough to let their light out.

I spent most of the day waiting, reading a book.  Then, at some point in the early afternoon, the Commissioner of Jurors, Nancy Sunshine, came out to speak with us.  She explained how she’d been working to make the jury process smoother and more convenient for everyone.  How’d they’d recently gotten rid of the old wooden benches everyone used to have to sit on and put in comfy chairs, plasma TVs (running news coverage all day), computers with free internet access, and free wi-fi for laptops.  She asked us to come up and speak with her if we had any suggestions on how to make the waiting process better.  It was King’s County’s attempt at crowd sourcing, and I was impressed by her sincerity.  I almost went up and asked if there was any plan to put a Starbucks in the waiting area, but I figured, no need to be a smartass.  Plus there was one right across the street.

She went on to tell us that many of the cases that we had been called for had reached verdicts without needing a jury.  She spoke of the persuasive presence of jurors, how many parties bringing cases to trial would see the many people on hand to serve on juries and would decide against seeking legislation.  She spoke of the power of presence, of how we were actively fulfilling our civic duty by simply being present.  I thought of the old saying about “90% of life being just showing up”, and I thought of the meditation practice I’d been undertaking these past few months.

Long story short, I almost made it out the first day without being called, but got summoned in to be interviewed for a jury towards the end of the first day.  They didn’t finish the interview process that night, so we were told to show up again the next morning. After a few hours of waiting that next morning, it turned out that our trial had done exactly what Ms Sunshine talked about and settled without a requiring a jury.  We were put back into the pool and were the first group of people to be dismissed later that day.

That experience, on top of what I was going through in regards to keeping this blog going, really brought home the fact of how much our life just requires us to be present in it.  To work on fully acknowledging exactly what is going on around us and exactly how we feel about it.  I’ve been trying to do this is every aspect of life lately, and it has proven quite difficult.

Facing every situation exactly as it is, not bringing in anything that is irrelevant, and to trying to truly decide what I think the best course of action is, makes me feel like a toddler trying to learn how to walk again.  It’s such a slow process, but it’s forcing all my old thoughts and prejudices out of my mind, because I don’t have the energy to sustain them, not when I’m trying to achieve the best possible understanding of what-is-really-going-on and how-I-really-feel-about-it.

With that said, I’ll let this little grain of sand loose on the winds, to blow around until it can get into someone else’s eye and make them tear up and wash themselves a little bit cleaner.  I’ll finish up with a long list of pictures and videos in an attempt to capture another facet of this thought-form.  Hope you all enjoy, and Happy Easter, Happy Passover, and Happy Buddha’s Birthday everybody!

Nancy T Sunshine, King’s County Commissioner of Jurors

2008 Cherry Blossom Time-lapse at Brooklyn Botanic Garden from Brooklyn Botanic Garden on Vimeo.

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.

“Our memories are an essential part of who we are, in fact some believe it is the ongoing connection between our thoughts and memories that constitutes our identity,” said Christine Harrison, SickKids Director of Bioethics. “As the research in this area continues to evolve, so do the ethical considerations related to potential future therapies.”

Ledgergermaine wrote:
“One would hope at the very least ethical considerations are taken into account. The underlying problem I find with this type of “therapy” (if it can even be called that) is there already exists profound ways humans have developed over time to “let go” of the bad. Just because we now can take an axe to your mind and hack out the bad, should we? Not only can things go wrong, but in terms of your own identity as a developing human being, we do learn more from the bad than the good.”

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.

During their experiments the researchers showed images of two different spiders to the human volunteers. One of the spider images was accompanied by a pain stimulus and the other was not. Eventually the human volunteers exhibited a startle response (fear) upon seeing the first spider without the pain stimulus being administered. The anxiety for this spider had therefore been acquired.

One day later the fear memory was reactivated, as a result of which the protein synthesis occurred again. Just before the reactivation, the human volunteers were administered the beta-blocker propranolol. On the third day it was found that the volunteers who had been administered propranolol no longer exhibited a fear response on seeing the spider, unlike the control group who had been administered a placebo. The group that had received propranolol but whose memory was not reactivated still exhibited a strong startle response.

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?

(I’ve been working on this for several days, and I think it’s finally finished.  It just kept growing longer and longer, so I’m dividing it up into sections to make reading and referencing a bit easier.  Also, I have some visitors in town, so I’m going to be already breaking my newly minted rule of one-post-per-day to leave this up for a while. Hopefully that give you all a chance to read it…)

1) Introduction
2) Organization and the death drive
3) Positive growth and the drive to organization
4) Organization and the control of chaos
5) Some real life examples
6) Conclusion (the reason it exists in the first place)

INTRODUCTION:

In response to a question asked in this lengthy discussion thread, I’d like to expand on a comment I made there:

“I think that evilness of the will of the organizer is dependent on the desire behind that will-to-organize. If the organization is for the betterment of everybody, an attempt to create improvements all around, then that will lead to good result.

But the will to organize so that the organization can then be forgotten about, is evil. I think that’s the “implosion” that Topper’s talking about, something similar to Freud’s Death-Drive, the desire for the ending of all stimulation of the senses (in the context of this discussion, this is accomplished by putting everything “in it’s place”)”

Despite the occasional missteps in grammar and spelling there, I definitely still stand by that statement.  I don’t think there is anything unavoidably evil about the drive for organization, not even a top-down, centrally-controlled organization like a corporation or nation-state.  (Kevin Kelly has something to say on that here) Yet on the other hand, I also think (to paraphrase Speedbird from the same conversation) that the ‘use’ of a thing for good or for evil, isn’t a simple decision; the way a thing is used is something inherent in the thing itself.   In order to make better use for any thing, we have to attempt to see clearly what the thing is and how it might be tweaked in order to make it useful in a different (and better) way. What it comes down to is the intent behind that organization, the desires which drive it to higher and higher levels of organization.

ORGANIZATION AND THE DEATH DRIVE:

The actual problem that I see arising in an organization with a top-down, centrally-located power structure is that the organization itself will begin to act as a kind of “media”, coming between the control center and reality. In this way, it is similar to a body (a corporation?), with the director-at-the-top acting out the part of the brain.

Again, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this.  Natural selection has shown us that a more-or-less centrally located control center is, at this point of evolutionary development, the most efficient way to organize a large group of intelligences (ie: our various organs and body parts).  Is this a perfect scenario?  No.  But then, as Buddha said, “All life is dukkha“.  Being unhappy that all life’s problems haven’t already been solved is to kind of miss the whole point of being alive…

The problem arises because this “organization”, like any other media, exerts a subtle influence on the person using it.  It re-adjusts their consciousness and understanding of reality to better align with the way the media functions.  And the function of the top-down-power-dynamic media is one where awareness (and therefore power) is directly related to the level of removal from active reality.  The higher the bird is lifted, the more it can see; the more it can see, the more accurately it can direct the organization.  But go high enough and “the falcon cannot hear the falconer”…

This ends up creating a psychological state where “More Removed” = “More Aware”.  The logical endpoint of such a state, especially when these effects are not made conscious and corrected for,  is to equate complete awareness with complete removal from reality; that is, to equate knowledge and power with death.  Or at least an eternal return to the womb.

Ted mentioned in the earlier comments that “evil” might be thought of as the desire for safety triumphing over the desire for adventure, and I am thinking along those same lines here. However, I want to add that it is not necessarily healthy to consider the desire for safety an inherently evil thing.  Depending on what kind of personal growth you’re going through, it can be either a big help or a big hindrance.  Therefore, I think we have to dig a bit deeper than that to find the actual root of evil, particularly as it pertains to the media of the top-down-power dynamic.

At its extreme endpoint, the desire for safety becomes the desire for everything to stop happening.  This is where caution gives over to the full-blown denial of reality, where the “evil” stuff begins.  It is not so much that the evil “child” wants “mother” to never leave it, but more that the child desires to have stayed in the womb forever, to have never been exposed to life in the first place.

This is a fearful kind laziness, yet it is more than laziness.  It is the rejection of life, while still within the realm of the life/death experience. This is not only evil, but seriously flawed logically as well.  Well, there may be another side to it, but we’ll get into that later…

To tie it back in with our discussion of the top-down power dynamic, this illogical drive to end all stimulation is something that must be especially watched out while in a position of power in a top-down centrally controlled kind of organization.  If it not made conscious and corrected for, this drive can easily and unknowingly become tied into the very development of the organization itself, in a deadly parasitic relationship.

Because if you are stimulated by reality, it obviously means that you are in contact with it.  And if you are in contact with reality, than there it must still be possible to be further removed from it.

Remember, as the person using this kind of corporated power media, you are operating under the less-than-conscious assumption that “More Removed” = “More Aware”, and so neither you nor the organization are doing your best until you are completely removed from any contact with reality.

And so we can see that if the will-to-power of the centrally located command center is followed (and the the rest of the organization is ignored), the entire system is designed to self destruct.  Thus does our falcon becomes Icarus, plunging into the cold sea below and taking the entire organization with it.

In the end, an insistence on a purely top-down power dynamic creates a feeling of “none of this should have ever happened in the first place!”, rather than one of “what more needs to be done here?“.

Life is always forcing us to choose between these two stances, and throughout the ages, mystics and scientists alike have found that it is always better to get try to get more in touch with reality.   And it is always worse to try to run away from it.  Perhaps such an over-emphasis on the “top down” flow of information through our awareness is to blame for the current troubled state of things…

POSITIVE GROWTH AND THE DRIVE TO ORGANIZE:

So, that, in my opinion, is the problem.  In a structure where each level is built to make use of the activity of the lower levels through the vision of the upper levels, the upper levels develop an increasing desire for death the more powerful they get.  But any good doctor, giving a diagnosis, must also suggest a cure.

It is necessary that the person at the top is aware that although their will directs the rest of the organization, it does not necessarily follow that their will controls the rest of the organization. Another link from Kevin Kelly’s website: “Loren Carpenter’s voice was the voice of leadership. His short message carried only a few bits of information, but that tiniest speck of top-down control was enough to unleash the swarm below. He didn’t steer the sub. The audience of 5,000 novice cocaptains did that very complicated maneuvering, magically and mysteriously.”

The metaphor of the bird and the snake is relevant here, because the snake knows what it’s like on the ground, but cannot see the overall terrain.  The bird can see the overall terrain, but has no way of directly interacting with it except to swoop down to the level of the snake.

In any organization, the “bird” that forgets this will cause harm to the “snake.  But this is not inherently bad, just as long as:
1) The snake is able and willing to complain
2) The bird is able and willing to listen

When these functions are working properly, then everything runs smoothly.  If either of these fails to happen, “things fall apart; the center cannot hold” (to mix my bird metaphors a bit).  So what kind of paradigm can be used to make these upper level birds listen to these lower level snakes?

As we’ve established, the centrally-controlled top-down organization is something that exists naturally, and human beings might be thought of as the supreme example of this.   After all a human being and a large group of hydrogen atoms are, at the root of things, pretty much the same (all protons, neutrons, and electrons).  The human being is better organized than the large group of simple atoms, and yet, even those atoms can be thought of as centrally controlled.

My thoughts are that creating an organization should be considered similar to taming a wild creature. All organizations, corporations, business models, etc., are ways of optimizing an already naturally existing relationship.  You are seeing the way things work, and trying to create a way to make them work better.

People will always look for ways to profit from providing food to the hungry (not many people try to do the same thing for people who are starving, but that’s more a question of the difficulty level than anything else).

However, no one ever tries to profit from providing aluminum foil to hippopotamuses.

There’s no need there to be optimized. Any attempt at creating an organization is an attempt to do a better job of bringing together needs and resources, and to profit from that attempt.  (and although the search for profit can lead to some pretty bad stuff, it is really just an attempt at guaranteeing that your own needs will be taken care of, if you expend your resources on optimizing some certain flow of resources.)

Creating an organization is a lot like turning a wild animal into a pet; it’s an entity you have to care for and train.  Of course, it’s hard to know exactly how to keep an organization healthy, but the story of the Little Prince and The Fox is a good start:

“One only understands the things that one tames,” said the fox. “Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me . . .”

“What must I do, to tame you?” asked the little prince.

“You must be very patient,” replied the fox. “First you will sit down at a little distance from me–like that–in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day . . .”

The next day the little prince came back.

There it is.  You have to think of the organization as your friend.  Love it, and it will love you back.  As in any friendship, problems will only comes up if:
A: One person thinks they’re better than, or separate from, the other.
B: One person does not think himself to be capable of everything the friendship will require.

And since we’re talking about entities without any actual personality, the onus is solely on the person trying to tame the wild organization to fulfill those requirements.

ORGANIZATION AND THE CONTROL OF CHAOS

The desire for organization springs also springs from an attempt to control and minimize chaos.  And again, there is nothing wrong with this desire, so long as it doesn’t get out of control and it keeps its priorities in order.  Organization is better than chaos, but organization can also leads to stagnation.  However, adding more chaos is not necessarily the solution to stagnation.

Because, really, there’s two kinds of chaos.  If we can’t accept it or understand it, or if it completely overwhelms us, then it is chaos in the primordial sense.  It was this chaos that Marduk slew as Tiamat (interestingly, this story might also be seen as a mythological example of a child overcoming the desire for a return to the womb).  Nature red of tooth and claw, so to speak, the winds which jerk us roughly about, change that we can in no way integrate with our current self. Chaos without order; chaos and order as mutually exclusive.

But the other kind of chaos can be compared to Terrence McKenna’s idea of “novelty”.  It’s a chaos that respects us, a chaos that we welcome and allow into our lives.  It’s the newness that we recognize a need for, and that we make a place for at our hearth.  It rejuvenates us, rebirths us.  Makes us come alive again.  This is the alchemical secret, the union of opposites out of which life springs. And the difference is made by attention, love, and the learning of skillful means.

SOME REAL LIFE EXAMPLES

Recent commenter Andrea Hill has a consulting blog where the she discusses recent trends in marketing (but correct me if I’m wrong there, Andrea!).  She asked me about the portions of the Marshall McLuhan playboy interview that I have posted here, and since McLuhan’s involved, I was interested to read the post for which she was researching the interview.  In it, she discusses how the future of marketing is to be relevant to your consumer and to relate to them in a meaningful way.  This is exactly what I’m talking about with the idea of an organization as a taming and optimization of an already existing “wild” system of resources and needs.  Her conclusion sums it up pretty nicely:
To raise. To lift up. To carry. To translate. To recognize the importance of community, and seek meaningful ways to organize customers – by which I mean meaningful to them. To use new media adroitly, as it befits your value proposition. These are the challenges – and opportunities - facing today’s marketer.”

I found this sort of randomly on tumblr, a post on the blog of the guy who started Dopplr.com.  He references something he wrote for some catalogue (check his site for the info), where he also references Kevin Kelly: Kevin Kelly writes in an essay about Artificial Intelligence that problem-solving is not just an abstract process of the mind, but something that happens in the world, and brands those who don’t believe this as indulging in ‘thinkism’. The intelligence of the hand, and the eye, and the body, working with material things in the world, instead of abstract symbols in a computer you might call ‘Do-ism’.

If we consider the brain as an example of a “centrally-located top-down” type of power structure, than the intelligence of the hand, eye, and body is also what I’m trying to point to.  A good reference, even if he is allied with the “fake” Speedbird…  ;)  (just a little humor here people, nothing personal!)

An old favorite site of mine, who was blogging before blogging ever existed, had this to say about the recent Facebook TOS debacle:
What’s sad here is that we think you guys (ie: Facebook) actually like your customers, and probably want to do good things for them, but you forgot to look out for them.  Turned the whole uninteresting issue over to a group of lawyers and said “make it good.”  But you forgot one thing: Lawyers never “make it good.”  Nobody cares when you say “we would never do that” because your lawyers have given you the rights to do it anyway.  And when you sell the company, the new owners may not be as altruistic as you claim to be… and so your customers would be screwed.  So now you have that lawyer fail stink all over you and you’ll probably learn that you can’t trust them even if you hire them to look out for you.

And thus the falcon fails to hear the falconer, so to speak, and the company does something where they injure the snake (to mix my bird metaphors yet again…)

From Eliezer Yudkowsky, of Overcoming Bias:
Another example would be the principal who, faced with two children who were caught fighting on the playground, sternly says:  “It doesn’t matter who started the fight, it only matters who ends it.”  Of course it matters who started the fight.  The principal may not have access to good information about this critical fact, but if so, he should say so, not dismiss the importance of who threw the first punch.  Let a parent try punching the principal, and we’ll see how far “It doesn’t matter who started it” gets in front of a judge.  But to adults it is just inconvenient that children fight, and it matters not at all to their convenience which child started it, it is only convenient that the fight end as rapidly as possible.

Listen to the kids, they know what’s important…

And lastly there this, which I hesitate to put up, because it might seem like I’m taking a stand against civil liberties.  I am not. I am including this here as an example of how awareness of just what organizations you are creating and bringing into to being is important even when you’re not an evil money loving corporate overlord…
This is potentially a landmark case for all of our civil liberties. Despite there being no causal chain of culpability, it appears my friend is subject to having his house turned upside down, property taken, arrest and worse for mere association. And it is important to spell out exactly what association means here: He has never, I repeat never, attended any meetings, or had admin access or any involvement with the indymedia users and contributors, never mind the animal rights activists. His only association has been to rent out co-located hosting space to multiple users, one of whom happen to be indymedia.

This guy was arrested by the police in the UK, had all his computer equipment confiscated, and spent several hours in jail just because his server space was rented out to Indymedia, which some animal rights group had used to coordinate their attacks and protests.

I am completely on the side of the guy arrested.  Just as a landlord is not guilty just because one of his renters sublets to some anarchists, this poor guy did absolutely nothing to deserve this kind of treatment.  But in both cases, the root of any trouble is that the one in charge of the organization (the webserver or the apartment building) wasn’t aware of what was going on within that organization.  It is always best to increase your awareness of things over which you have ownership, control, or power.  To neglect to do so is to invite trouble, even if you are in no way guilty of anything bad yourself.

CONCLUSION (THE REASON IT EXISTS IN THE FIRST PLACE):

Although I am happy with my analysis of the problem here, I feel that I should place it within a slightly larger context: The Meaning of Life…

Why does this possibility for evil even exist?  As we’ve discussed, a lot of the evil in a top-down system comes from the desire to end all stimulation, all interaction with reality.  To say no to life while still within the realm of the life/death experience.  If we were more able to deny this drive, to take responsibility for everything that happened around us and within our organization, there’d be a lot less mindless evil in world, and a lot less waste.  Yet it exists, so there must be a reason for it (thanks Darwin!).

What I want us all to keep in mind is that a lot of similar things have been said about the state of enlightenment, gnosis, transcendence… That experience of the numinous that “takes us out of ourselves”, that puts an end to any identification with an ego.  A state in which, as the Sufi’s say, we “die before we die”.  It’s the “end of the self”, a state of “non-dual being” where “thou art that”.  It is the state of nirvana, of being completely “blown out”…

This, I would say, is the reason that such evil exists.  This desire for an end to suffering is the driving force behind life, but we must be willing to end even our self in order to achieve it.  If we seek cessation of suffering while trying to maintain a sense of self, then all the world must be destroyed in order for our suffering to stop.  But if we can destroy that sense of a separate “self”, then all the world can come alive.

Everything has a light and a dark side, and if this denial of life is the root of all evil, it’s lighter side may just be the root of all that is good.  And we need as many people as possible to realize that as soon as possible, within this lifetime…

Sometimes, one of these unfinished posts is nearly finished, lacking only a kind of a punchline. Other times, I find a lot of cool shit all on one subject, and I kind of mash it together, hoping something good might spontaneously combust into existence.

This is one of the other times, when the combustion never really spontaneated.

And ironically enough (given the lack of combustion) this one is all about the sun. I’m somewhat fascinated by the sun, being that, all religious notions aside, it is scientifically the source of all life in the solar system. It’s closest metaphor for god in the nearby physical universe, and yet there’s so little that we actually know about it.

We know what it looks like:

(awesome gallery of sun pictures)

We also know (through the educated guesswork that is science) a little bit about its insides as well. The interior of the sun in known as the convection zone, and it is a constantly boiling mass of radioactive materials. Occasionally the boiling causes bubbles which rise to the surface and pop.  That’s a solar flare.

All that activity is blasting massive amounts of solar radiation outwards into space.  This radiation is known as the solar wind, and it produces something called the heliosphere, a magnetic bubble that protects the earth (and the entire solar system) from about 90% of interstellar cosmic radiations.

Unfortunately, it seems like that magnetic bubble might be shrinking.

And that’s only one example of what looks to be a general trend of sun-related-things not working “properly”.  Check this article (and it’s sources) from mid-December ’08:
- the interplanetary magnetic field has been low since October 2005.
- the ionosphere has dropped in altitude to unexpected and unexplained low levels.
- our solar cycle is a year late getting started.
- Earth’s magnetic field is ripped open on a regular basis.

Brilliant Noise from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

But don’t despair, the sun’s not necessarily dying just yet!  Perhaps it’s just resting quietly…

That idea is supported by articles from both space.com and physorg, showing that, in early November, the sunspot cycle was actually increasing.  The physorg article even quotes a David Hathaway (of NASA), who is also quoted here saying that this period of minimal solar activity is to right on target with historical data, and that we are simply in sort of a trough between two waves of increased solar activity.

So what happens when the activity increases?

“During Solar Max, huge sunspots and intense solar flares are a daily occurrence. Auroras appear in Florida. Radiation storms knock out satellites.”

And when’s the next one of these due?  2012, of course, when “a perfect space storm” could occur.  Yet another thing to worry about for 2012, as if we needed any more…

What else is tied in with sunspots? According to some studies of the Paraná river in South America, “the flow of (the) river – and thus the rainfall that feeds it – appears to rise and fall with the number of sunspots.” And wikipedia shows that several other effects (such as the growth of wheat and the ozone layer) have been tentatively linked to sunspot activity as well…

To have even more to worry about, extreme weather has been linked to the rise and fall of Empires as far back as the 500′s, with effects reaching around the globe.  And recent studies of cave stalactites in both China and Jerusalem, show that a decrease in rainfall occurred around the collapse of major Chinese dynastic empires as well as the Roman empire…

If nothing else, people don’t like governments that can’t find ways to make the crops grow!  And whether or not these changes were caused by solar activity, if solar activity does effect the weather, and we’re in for some a-typical solar activity, we better watch out!

Either we’re having an increase in solar activity that will knock satellites out of the sky and cause power outages, or we will have a sudden drought with possible food riots and a general slow collapse of civilizations around the world.  Caused by the sun.  Great…

So what’s the good news?  Well, at the end of that list of the “general trend of sun-related-things not working “properly”" was a brief mention of the earth’s magnetosphere being “ripped open” by the sun.  The article I linked to above describes this process, rather negatively, as being “like an octopus wrapping its tentacles around a big clam, (the) solar magnetic fields draped themselves around the magnetosphere and cracked it open”

Well, according to an earlier article on physorg, these things are called “flux transfer events”, and they were not even known of 10 years ago.  The physorg article describes them like this: “On the dayside of Earth (the side closest to the sun), Earth’s magnetic field presses against the sun’s magnetic field. Approximately every eight minutes, the two fields briefly merge or “reconnect,” forming a portal through which particles can flow. The portal takes the form of a magnetic cylinder about as wide as Earth.”

To me, this shows a close, intimate connection between the earth and sun, where the earth naturally opens it’s defenses in order to take in nourishment from the sun. 

And this happens approximately every 8 minutes.

Far from appearing like an octopus opening a clam, the relationship between the sun and magnetosphere is a rather beautiful one, it turns out:

This brings to mind Gurdjieff’s explanation of the cosmos as consisting of different emanations from the “SUN ABSOLUTE” (perhaps a more mythological stand-in for the black holes at the heart of the galaxies..?).  According to Gurdjieff, each sun is sustained by “emanations” from this SUN ABSOLUTE, and in turn, each sun sustains it’s various planets through these same kinds of “emanations”…

And so we finally reach the point where I was hoping something would coalesce and combust from this (larger than expected) grouping of facts.  I sensed ideas about energy passing through these magnetic portals from galactic centers to suns, and from suns to planets. Which perhaps might also shine some light on how exactly gravity works, since the original explanation of gravity’s was that it was “action at a distance”, that there was nothing else connecting the sun, the planets, and the stars…

Perhaps even, when these portals open, things like “evolution” might occur at a faster rate…  We all know our culture’s myths about radiation, right?

Perhaps there is some link between these “flux transfer events” and the way things change on earth, in both a biological, physical, electrical, space-like, yin-like manner, and a psychological, magnetic, time-like, yang-like manner…?

It also makes me wonder how the solar activity cycles would synch up to McKenna’s Time Wave Zero graph…

After all, as people have commented elsewhere on this site “It’s like the Universe is stitched together with electromagnetism…”

This was more a conglomeration of different articles on death that popped up in my life a few weeks back.  Besides being another opportunity to work one of these tarot cards into a post, it was also going to be a chance for me to work out my thoughts on death.

Although originally a nameless card, the skeleton with a sickle is a pretty obvious stand-in for death.  Yet any good tarot card reader will be quick to point out that this rarely has anything to do with physical death.  It’s more an ending and a rebirth, doors opening and closing.  That often, the death we fear in life is not actually death, it’s the dissolution of some part of our ego that we can’t let go of.  And that, as the gnostics, sufis, and zen buddhists say, you must die in this life in order to fully understand life and death.

I was going to tie this in with a card I’d gotten on my favorite tarot reading site:

It’s the “Ancestors” card from the Voodoo Tarot of New Orleans, a stand-in for Judgement.  It reminds me that we’re each of us the product of two people, the union of two opposites.  If we inherit our genetic history, or if you prefer, our morphic resonance fields, from two people, and our parents inherit theirs from two people, then each of us is the result of centuries of combined opposites.  That’s biology.

And psychologists will tell you the same thing (I noticed it during my own therapy) that our psychological tendencies are a reliving of our parents’ relationship.  The dynamics between Mom and Dad will play themselves out in your own life, and if you don’t pay attention, you might be forced to repeat their history.

The ending scene in “Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story” (one of my favorite movies, regardless of whether or not it represents what really happened…) where Bruce fights off his demon to save his son is a good example of this.   If we don’t deal with our problems, the flaws in our morphic resonance fields will be passed onto our children…

And this goes for the good stuff too of course, not just the demons!

But to bring it back to actual death, I also was sent a NY Times article from a friend, about the passing of Richard John Neuhaus, “Episcopal minister in Tarrytown, N.Y., and an admirer of the writer and theologian”.  The heart of the article, to me, was the message Neuhaus had sent out shortly before he died from cancer: “Be assured that I neither fear to die nor refuse to live. If it is to die, all that has been is but a slight intimation of what is to be. If it is to live, there is much I hope to do in the interim.”

This attitude that death is something that gives our life purpose, something toward which we are drawn, resonates pretty powerfully with me.  The acorn dies to become the tree, and when we die, our bodies become food for that tree.  And our energy?  Well, Einstein tells us energy is neither created nor destroyed, so what happens to it?

Our good friend Rob Bryanton had some things to say about this, within a few days of my receiving the NY Times article from my friend.

Oscar Janiger:…My bias is that when the current is shut off, we somehow lose our sense of individuality…that I’m simply shut down in my present state, and that somehow I–which is now a kind of fruitless phrase–am somehow restored to the earth, or to the matrix, or to what the Germans called the urschleim, or the fundamental substrate of all things, the fundamental primitive primordial stuff of which we are constituted. We go back to before the Big Bang. I always remember the Big Bang as the biggest orgasm in history.

Physicists talk about the Big Bang as being the most highly ordered state our universe was ever in. Quantum computing expert Seth Lloyd tells us to think of the Big Bang not as a physical event, but as the first binary yes/no that separates out our universe from all of the other possible universes that could have existed.

this leaves us with one of the most basic ideas from this project: no matter what you are thinking about in the universe, there is a binary viewpoint, and there is a holistic viewpoint. In quantum terms, this relates to the three states for a particle which can then be used in quantum computing: we can call these a “yes” state, a “no” state, and a “simultaneously yes and no” state.

And were does that lead us to, how does this all tie up?

I have no idea. Triage, remember?

Feel free to take this thought stream and run with it, if you want.  But if you do, I’d recommend including something from this essay: George Wald: The Origin of Death.  It’s a really great essay, although a bit long.  My notes on the essay can be found here, if you’re interested in my take on what the good parts version is…