Reclusland

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…

Found this recently, although I can’t remember where.  Perhaps one of the people I’m following on tumblr..? (feel free to drop your name in the comments if you think it was you, I’ll credit accordingly!)

Anyway, it’s “A comparison between a flame on Earth and a flame in a microgravity environment.”:

Yeah, cool picture.  So what’s ‘the point’?

Well, flame has long been consider an symbol of creativity, assertiveness, and will power.   It’s associated with the wands suite in tarot, and it might also be seen as the original spark of mankind’s dominance over nature.  After all, it was fire that gave us the ability to cook food, keep away predators, and burn up underbrush (making travel, and therefore communication, much easier).

But it can be dangerous too.  It’s what Prometheus brought us from the gods, and look what happened to him:

And it was tongues of flame that descended on the disciples at Pentecost after Christ was crucified.

Whether it’s a Titan or a Son of God, it seems someone’s always had to suffer in order to bring down the holy fires…

So then, what conclusions can be drawn from the effect of weightlessness on that candle flame?

Well, the difference between the two flames is that the yellow flame on the left is subject to gravity’s influence, while the blue flame on the right is not.  And we first have to ask: To what can we liken gravity?

Wikipedia describes gravity as: “a natural phenomenon by which objects with mass attract one another”.  And yet, in the very next sentence, it is described as “the agency which lends weight to objects with mass.”  So mass, by itself, is kind of useless, unless there’s some other mass upon which it can act.

But if there is another mass, both of the masses act upon each other, and this gives them both “weight”.  And weight is a measurement of the speed at which each is attracted to the other.

So what causes that attraction?

Here’s how Sir Issac Newton felt about it:
“That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it.”

And it turns out that we still don’t really know how it works:
Today scientists describe the universe in terms of two basic partial theories – the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics… The general theory of relativity describes the force of gravity and the large-scale structure of the universe, that is, the structure on scales from only a few miles to as large as a million million million million (1 with twenty-four zeros after it) miles, the size of the observable universe. Quantum mechanics, on the other hands, deals with phenomena on extremely small scales, such as a millionth of a millionth of an inch. Unfortunately, however, these two theories are known to be inconsistent with each other – they cannot both be correct.

Well, since science is not too helpful, lets look at this a little more poetically. What seems to be the symbolic difference to be between the two flames?

To me, the one under the sway of gravity is standing upright, burning brightly, and so suggests a certain healthiness.  It seems livelier.

The flame in the ‘microgravity environment’ is spherical, suggesting a kind of perfection.  Yet, it doesn’t have the same range of color and, seemingly, would not have the same range of movement as the flickering, gravity-bound flame on the left.  The purely blue flame is still, lacking movement.

Wikipedia tells us that this is because: “In microgravity or zero gravity environment, such as on a circular orbit , convection no longer occurs and the flame becomes spherical, with a tendency to become bluer and more efficient.”

More efficient…   Because there’s no longer any convection causing the soot to rise to the top of a flame, turning the flame from blue to yellow as the soot trails away.  In zero gravity, any soot is burned off equally in all directions, and therefore, it cannot be seen and has no effect on the flame.

But when a flame burns within gravity, the soot is moved away from the source of the heat in a singular direction, making it much more observable.  This is caused by the attractive force between the flame and the earth, as it pulls the source of flame down towards a union with the earth.

Gravity is something we struggle against.  It’s the thing that forces us to keep our feet on the ground, the thing that makes us trip when we’re not paying attention.  Without gravity, we’d be able to fly.

But without gravity, we’d never be able to stop floating away either.  In the perfect sphere of flame, in the heaven of zero gravity, there’s no involuntary attraction or movement.   No connection, no convection.

And with no convection, how would we know where the soot was?

We are (at least) 4 dimensional beings moving erratically along a time-line, while consciously inhabiting only a 1 dimensional point of time-space.

When we act as if we are only 3 dimensional (trying to holdon to a particular configuration within that 1 dimensional point of time-space, seeking permanence, grasping, suffering), we are splitting ourselves, and painfully so.  Because we are trying to stay, while it is in the nature of all things (including our self) to move.

A fish trying to hold onto a single current in a rapidly flowing river is a good analogy here.  It is a false boundary that we create around our 1 dimensional point of time-space, in an attempt to keep some part of it as always-permanent.

Why put your lamp under a bushel basket that way?  You’re only blinding yourself to the true ways of things.

Let your mind flower and reach out into reality.  Be a lamp unto thyself.  There is no boundary, except that which you create for yourself.

Our other potential identities hover around us in time-space, quantum-super-position-future-selves, potential pathways through time-space. Other stations into which we can tune our awareness.

If we consciously accept that we are causing our own suffering, and acknowledge that we are AT THIS VERY MOMENT painfully splitting our self by trying to hold onto some fixed idea of what our “self” actually is, then we can begin to absorb these quantum-like-splits and come back again to whole-emptiness.

But this isn’t something you can just reach out and “do”.  You have to let things happen, observe them, and then engage them when you are confronted with an opportunity.  Only by letting go are we truly in control.

Don’t see any opportunities?  Are you sure you’re not holding on to a false image of your self as someone whom is never confronted with opportunities…?  Start small.  The opportunities are already there, or you wouldn’t want them in the first place.  You just have to make sure that you’re ready to take adavantage of them!

This is the act of observing our quantum potentiality that always-is in constant flux around us.  By engaging it and making conscious decisions as it flows, we begin to become more wholey a self, and more wholey empty.  We are born as a form (body) holding energy (mind), and as we grow, experience life, and learn through our sufferings, we pull ourselves together into a bodymind-energyform-identity that is both fully form and fully empty.

But you can’t even begin to start this until you can accept that your present identity is still whole-yet-split, that it can be better and that you can make it better through your own conscious actions.  This is how we learn to let go.  As we do so, we begin to see that these false identities we hold onto are just splits in our already-truly-whole-and-empty-awareness-being.

If we get rid of these internal boundaries that both are our false ego-selves and that protect our false ego-selves, then we can begin to act from our true self, which is emptiness.  This is not your “center”, it is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.

We have to break down these boundaries in our minds, achieve one-pointed being-ness, solidify the emptiness of our information body, if we are ever to interact with reality on this level.  If your identity is still trapped in any particular component form, then it will be washed away with by the increasing flow of information around and through you.

Big rocks.  Small rocks.

For are we not “mind”? Are we not “awareness” attempting to take on form?  What else could we be?

And once we understand the form of our true self as only pure empty awareness, “what then can unsettle it“?

Lastly, some relevant, yet sadly unused, links:

- Even the pope agrees with me!

- “It was also a notable benchmark in the fast evolution of online video. At the time of the last inauguration, YouTube didn’t even exist.”

- “But must we all text, Twitter or IM during Obama’s inauguration? Can’t we just watch the event and enjoy it (or disparage the proceedings, depending on your political views) for the significance it represents? Must we broadcast to everyone in our social networks that we are witnesses to history?”  (Yes, we must.  Welcome to the echoing electronic tribal sphere everybody.  McLuhanism in action…)

- Mathew Honan on Location Awareness. (Knowing where you are, rather than being where you are… There’s a reason we have forms, in addition to awareness.  Pure awareness spreads out like water.  Existence as a form is needed to coalesce your true self out of the pure flowing awareness.)

We live in illusion
And the appearance of things.
There is a reality:
We are that reality.
When you understand this,
You will see that you are nothing.
And, being nothing,
You are everything.
That is all.
- Kalu Rinpoche

Here is part 3 of this little escapade.  If you haven’t already, you might want to read part 1 and part 2 first, as this basically concludes the thoughts from there.  Also, I have not yet read Tim’s major post on what looks to be this same topic, as I wanted to bring my own thoughts to a close first.

We’ve looked at surveillance as a means of potentially getting to know our split (quantumly-superpositioned) selves better, and we’ve inquired whether the ability to switch our experience of reality from one person to another would be at all a good idea, despite sounding like a whole lot of fun.  Now I’d like to tie these two ideas together, and try to answer some of the questions brought up by them.

It seems to me that the core problem inherent in switching perceptual fields is the possible loss of our identity while doing so.  If our sense of self is not combined and focused enough to survive moving from one perceiving center to another, then we may run into cases where the constant flux of information causes people lose their “self” and end up either insane or permanently stuck in a infantile state of mind.

Luckily, as explained in the first part of this series, a world of open ubiquitous surveillance (a proto-version of which we are already living in, due to Web 2.0 and social networking sites) is a place where we can observe ourselves and others objectively, and change our behavior in accordance with these observations.

Although I have not read the entire PDF, the recent publication of Dana Boyd’s PhD thesis seems to shed some light on this process as it develops:
“As teenagers learned to navigate social network sites, they developed potent strategies for managing the complexities of and social awkwardness incurred by these sites. Their strategies reveal how new forms of social media are incorporated into everyday life, complicating some practices and reinforcing others. New technologies reshape public life, but teens’ engagement also reconfigures the technology itself.”

Social networking sites (i.e.: voluntary open surveillance) as a way of learning about ourselves, and technologies reshaping people just as people reshape technology (in a quantum sort of ‘observing-changes-the-observed’ kind of way)?  Sounds like maybe someone’s been cribbing from my blog!  (she wrote that when? um…never mind…)

The digital world seems like a pretty safe place to learn about who we are and how to interact with others, something we need to do to develop any sense of a social self at all.  And since it’s not real, there is a much smaller chance that we’ll ever mistake that online persona as our own.  The ease with which online identities can already be created and changed should be a hint that we might be better off considering all identity creation as just a story that we tell ourselves and others.

At the crux of these two ideas is our sense of “ego”, how we choose to define our “self”.  The ego is necessary, to some extent, as a way of communicating who we are and what we want in order to successfully interact with others. But this success quickly changes into suffering as soon as we try to permanently base our sense of “self” in any one of these external “things” (whether this is a physical object or a set of conditions).  This is illustrated by the Buddha’s second noble truth: “The origin of suffering is attachment”,  and this suffering will become exponentially problematic in the world where bodes (i.e.: centers of perception) are interchangeable.  If our entire perceptual field is shown to be impermanent, on what can we place our sense of having any kind of self?

What is necessary, then, is a way to integrate the development of an ego as part of the process of becoming a complete being.  If we stop looking at “ego” as something bad that we need to transcend and get rid of and starting looking at it as something good that we need to develop and outgrow, we can create a worldview where ego growth is applauded as a step on the path toward true identification of the self-as-perceptual-field but is not confused as the be-all-end-all of identity.

Such a worldview integrates all the parts of our society which are based on supporting ego growth, while still allowing us a way to collectively move beyond the ego to a truer sense of self-as-beingness.  This is where we need people pursuing #whatworks, rather than #whatmerelylooksgood, so that proof of the value of developing and outgrowing the ego exists.

Now, I do not mean that a complete, 100% conscious understanding of the self-as-perceptual field is required, but without injecting at least a subtle intuition of what this means into the culture, we risk being dissolved by the deluge of information that the future presents us with.

As we become more and more aware of the fact (whether consciously or subconsciously) that our identities are malleable, we become that much less likely to confuse these identities with any kind of “true self”.  What we’re left with is either a screaming trip into the void as our “self” is sucked away from us, or a blissful state of true-self as-emptiness if we can let it go.  This is our original face that we had before we were born.

As Master Dogen says:
To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things of the universe. To be enlightened by all things of the universe is to cast off the body and mind of the self as well as those of others. Even the traces of enlightenment are wiped out, and life with traceless enlightenment goes on forever and ever.

So, from the looks of things, the internet is our way of training ourselves to take our “selves” a little less seriously, and by doing so, it is preparing us for the coming “rapid descent into novelty”, whatever form that may take.  Let’s work to make it a good one, cause at this point, no one has any honest idea as to how this will all turn out anyway.

(Part one can be found here)

For the second part of my three part series, I had planned on discussing some recent experiments where people’s recognition of their own body or face, which we imagine as key components of our “self”, were shown to be easily distorted or displaced.  Once again, however, Tim Boucher has beaten my to the punch.  No matter, I still want to pursue the topic as it relates to the themes I am exploring here, and a crossing of ideas never really hurts anything anyway.

The first I heard of this was an experiment mentioned on physorg (my best source for all science news):
In the first experiment, the head of a shop dummy was fitted with two cameras connected to two small screens placed in front of the subjects’ eyes, so that they saw what the dummy “saw.” When the dummy’s camera eyes and a subject’s head were directed downwards, the subject saw the dummy’s body where he/she would normally have seen his/her own.

The illusion of body-swapping was created when the scientist touched the stomach of both with two sticks. The subject could then see that the mannequin’s stomach was being touched while feeling (but not seeing) a similar sensation on his/her own stomach. As a result, the subject developed a powerful sensation that the mannequin’s body was his/her own.  “This shows how easy it is to change the brain’s perception of the physical self,” says Henrik Ehrsson, who led the project. “By manipulating sensory impressions, it’s possible to fool the self not only out of its body but into other bodies too.”

The strength of the illusion was confirmed by the subjects’ exhibiting stress reactions when a knife was held to the camera wearer’s arm but not when it was held to their own. The illusion also worked even when the two people differed in appearance or were of different sexes. However, it was not possible to fool the self into identifying with a non-humanoid object, such as a chair or a large block.

This was also soon reported on by the NYTimes, which has this to add:
“The brain is so easily tricked, they say, precisely because it has spent a lifetime in its own body. It builds models of the world instantaneously, based on lived experience and using split-second assumptions — namely, that the eyes are attached to the skull.”

“Similar studies have found that people agree to contribute more to retirement accounts when they are virtually “age-morphed” to look older; and that they will exercise more after inhabiting an avatar that works out and loses weight.

Adding a physical body-swapping element, as the Swedish team did, is likely to amplify such changes. “It has video quality, it looks and feels more realistic than what we can do in virtual environments, so is likely to be much more persuasive,” Dr. Bailenson said in a telephone interview.”

Now, this seems at first to point to a way to experience others as our “self”, that is, to take on others appearances as our own identities.  Tim has done some work on this as well.  The idea appeals to me almost as much as it seems to appeal to Tim, particularly as he describes it.

However, another article from physorg reveals some of my concerns on this topic:
The study reveals that recognition of our own face is not as consistent as we might think. The participants’ ability to recognize their own face changed when they watched the face of another person being touched at the same time as their own face was touched, as though they were looking in a mirror. Specifically, when asked to recognize a picture of their own face, the picture that people chose included features of the other person they had previously seen. This did not happen when the two faces were touched out of synchrony.

Sharing an experience with another person may change the perception we have of our own self, such as the recognition of our own face. “As a result of shared experiences, we tend to perceive other people as being more similar to us, and this applies also to the recognition of our own face. This process may be at the root of constructing a self-identity in a social context,”

If we believe ourselves to be what our sensory input tells us we are experiencing, what happens when we can control that input to such a degree that we can cut ourselves off completely from the actual lived experience of our bodies?  If we can fail to accurately identify our own faces after tricking our brains in such a manner, what happens when our entire sensorial experience becomes interchangeable with someone else’s?

If we can fully experience someone else’s reality, would we have any reason to come back to our own?  Would we slowly begin to lose our ability to function on our own, to recognize and find meaning in our own lives?

What I fear is a world where, instead of reading about celebrities in a magazine and living vicariously through them via the paparazzi, we can actually live vicariously through their broadcast experience.  True reality entertainment, ala Strange Days or Existenz (from all the way back in the 90′s, no less!).

And if we are able to slip out of our reality, how are we ever going to learn from confronting and dealing with our own problems?  Is there a chance that reality might lose all it’s meaning for us altogether?

After all, one way to separate humans from animals is by our highly evolved ability to recognize patterns and attribute meaning to them.  This pattern recognition ability, in conjunction with our memory (and later with writing, which was our first “external hard drive” for the brain) is what allowed us to capture and hold beneficial elements of the world and transmit them on to future generations through the use of culture, ritual, and law.  And in fact, this pattern recognition habit of ours might even be looked at as an extension, or an ephemeralization, of the same workings behind biological evolution, in that these beneficial traits are now passed on and developed at a much faster rate than mere biology could ever handle.

More on this idea of the evolution of pattern recognition can be found from Michael Shermer here:
In my 2000 book How We Believe (Times Books), I argue that our brains are belief engines: evolved pattern-recognition machines that connect the dots and create meaning out of the patterns that we think we see in nature. Sometimes A really is connected to B; sometimes it is not. When it is, we have learned something valuable about the environment from which we can make predictions that aid in survival and reproduction. We are the ancestors of those most successful at finding patterns.

Michael’s article brings up the fact that, as useful as our ability to create meaningful patterns is, sometimes we also get it wrong.  This is called pareidolia, as Rob Bryanton says:
“Where is the dividing line, then, between pareidolia – sensing things that aren’t really there – and the leaps of intuition that allow us to see things that are hidden from view? This is a very blurry line indeed. If any of us can look at a picture of a particular mountain or a particular piece of toast and very clearly see the face of Jesus, does saying “but that’s not Jesus, it’s just some coincidental shapes” make us stop from seeing the face? “

If we’re already so bad at finding accurate meaning in our normal, moment-by-moment time-line existence, what will happen when we explode into a time-space existence, where the information presented to us by reality is no longer restricted to just the area of time-space in which our consciousness happens to exist, via our body?  With such an immensely greater data set from which to pull information, are we more or less likely to continue to find patterns of useful meaning in it?

And how are we to put those meaningful patterns into action, without a contextual grasp of actual reality within which to do so?  “I have no mouth, and I must scream” indeed…

A flood of information and multiple perceptual realities may soon be unleashed upon the world.  Will we be able to swim in it, or will our consciousness be torn apart by the deluge?

More to come (possibly some answers!) in the third and final part of this three-post piece…)

‘For now, surrendering personal information is the cost for asking questions and getting answers quickly. All of the privacy measures are cumbersome…There’s really no solution now — except abstinence. And if you choose not to use online tools, you’re not a member of the 21st century.”

TMBCHR ‘s recent piece on surveillance as a key factor of ubiquitous computing sparked what was a large pile of undifferentiated research I’d been hauling around in my online presence of email, google toolbar bookmarks, and unfinished wordpress posts.  Here is the first of what I hope will be another three-part-series of essays on the topic.

To start off with, surveillance is only a bad thing if you don’t trust the people doing the surveilling.  Given the popularity of social networking sites, blogs, and pretty much all of web 2.0, we actually do want people to know what we’re doing.  We just also want to have a little more control over who sees it, and what it is that they see.  However, at the same time, we are totally fascinated with being able to see what other people are up to.  Like animals in the zoo, our own unique experiences are becoming things of fascination for others to immerse themselves in.  See the 80′s “Cult of Personality”, or any of today’s reality TV shows for evidence of this.

The true desire I see manifesting itself in these different ways is, in the end, to have an honest objective view of both the self and of others.  Sure, people tend to lie on their myspace or facebook accounts, making themselves out to be better than they are.  But really, they’re lying to themselves just as badly in real life.  If we were to get to know them, we’d become aware of this pretty quickly, and once we see through their fakery, we realize that what is actually being shown is that person’s own conflicted view of themselves.

What we’re slowly beginning to realize is that it’s in our best interest to give up any kind of false pretenses.  This can be seen, for example, in the world of the lesbian porn/female MMA fighting circuit:  “In my own fighting career, I was initially asked by my manager to keep the queer porn under wraps because a lot of the MMA circuit is run by pretty conservative and homophobic people, but we both soon realized that in this day in age with the internet that really isn’t possible. So now, I am pretty out about it all.”

And we realize that this feels good!  The truth is a much easy foundation for the self, because “Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self-sustained. “

In a larger, more social sense, truly representing ourselves to others will allow for the best possible decisions to be made by everybody.  Good decision making is based on truth, on knowing what is actually going on around you.  It is in your best interest to portray your self as accurately as possible in the world, because it allows others to react to you honestly (and also because it encourages them to be just as honest).

Honestly reflecting the view of reality from within your own perceiving center for others to reference is how we all get to know each other, and how we get to know ourselves.  This is how we can find the splits in our own quantum-like-self, the flaws within our interpretations of (and passage through) informational reality.  It is a higher-dimensional echo-location-sonar type of thing, closely related to Marshall McLuhan’s echoing tribal space.  And it’s base function is honest representation at every moment.

In a world where surveillance is ever present, we will all be on our best behavior.  Because not only is “Big Brother” watching us, but so is everyone else!  And in the end, if we’re all watching each other, than we will all also be watching out for each other.

We might see someone we dislike, yet who interacts with many other people, and who seems to get along with all them.  This makes us think, “hey, maybe I’m wrong about that guy”.  And the same goes for seeing someone we like behaving badly towards others.  This leads us to give them honest feedback on how their behaviors effect us, and allows them to adjust themselves accordingly.  It almost forces us to move toward better behavior, as long as the channels of communication are kept open in both directions.

This might not sound like a lot fun.  After all:
“The only way to prevent reputations from being damaged in the process is to always “be on your best behavior” in public. Frankly, that’s no fun. No more wild boys nights out? No more getting silly and stupid with your friends? No – not unless you’re willing to live with the consequences of having it plastered online in the morning.”

But in the end, the more open we keep the lines of communication, the more quantum-like our behavior will become:

“When we reach the point where online anonymity has ended, instead of getting to be who we really are, the fact that we’ve become so aware of the fact that we’re always being recorded, photographed, tracked, and traced, will have actually created a slightly altered personality instead. Like reality TV show contestants, the act of being observed will change our behavior. Our personal brand image will become our public identity and therefore our identity.” (emphasis mine)

Being watched will force us to justify our behavior, like photons in a double slit experiment.  We change based on observation anyway, and more observation simply means we will change more quickly.  As we all begin doing so, we will discover that those who behave honestly and openly are those who are actually happy, because again, “Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self-sustained. “

As our desires are made manifest, and their results are shared with more and more people, we will be forced to begin to heal the splits in our personalities.  Why do we work hard to get something that doesn’t make us happy?  What does actually make us happy?  Don’t know?  Look up people on the internet who truly are happy, who are voted by the global tribe to be examples of the best humanity has to offer.

Think that this just means we’re all going to eventually become like vapid debutantes and celebrities?  Well, that’s only going to happen if no one steps up and does it the right way.  What do you think works better, someone who’s actually happy and satisfied in their life, or someone who only reflects others false goals back at them?  Eventually, #whatworks will always triumph over #whatmerelylooksgood.

We are all already super-empowered individuals.  So, if you think you’re better than some of those celebrity types, prove it!  We have reached the most technologically advanced, richest state of civilization in recorded history!  START MAKING USE OF IT! (peak oil and collapse of civilization aside, we are still culturally richer than any past civilization has ever been)

And the coolest thing?  This isn’t something we have to put into action.  It’s something that has already begun, and the best way to deal with it is to accept and help bring it into being.  As McLuhan said years ago: “We (must) comprehend the process of decentralism and retribalization, and accept its outcome while moving to control and modify the dynamics of change.”

(on update Jan 18th: Just a little editing, plus corrected the link to Global Guerrillas, had the wrong article previously…)

(on update Jan 21st: A little more editing, plus: “oooh! pictures!”)

(part 2 is available here)

Our current educational system focuses on learning facts, retaining information, and completing a full “body” of knowledge.

And this is definitely not what I mean by the phrase “Information Body”.

I’m not exactly sure what I do mean, but I hope to work on that on this site with your help (thanks for the many helpful comments and conversations thus far), and also in conjunction with Tim’s work on the MandalaOS over @tmbchr, which is what started my thinking down this path in the first place.

(In fact, a recent post from Tim included “I’ve learned that the best way to learn large sets of information isn’t necessarily through wrote repetition…”)

In our current way of looking at reality, we think of knowledge as fuel-to-burn, so that the more info we have in our brains, the better we’re able to function.  But this comes from a component, plug-in type of thinking where information is removed from reality, put into our brains, and then recalled at a later date, information thought of as something apart from us that we have to later consciously recall in order to make any use of it.

But as the amount of information available increases, the simple accumulation of knowledge will only serve to weigh us down more and more, especially when it becomes dead weight as things change with more and more frequency.

Perhaps this misguided attempt to hold as much information as possible is what is causing Alzheimers, senility, and even those simple “senior moments” where the memory simply, and momentarily, fails.  It’s because we’ve burnt out certain regulatory functions in our brains through the accumulation and retention of too much knowledge.  A poisoning we brought on ourselves by the long-term mis-use of the drug “information”, which we have been continually refining for aeons and aeons (and which the universe was refining long before humanity came on the scene).  It has reached such high levels of concentration, that consuming it is no longer an option.  Time to start mainlining….

John Robb over at Global Geurillas points out that our current system of, as he puts it, Industrial Education, will be made obsolete by the coming collapse(ed), and the rise of resilient communities.  In fact, he repeats a lot of my arguments there, under a slightly different context.

My main claim here is that rote memorization the not the most efficient use of the brain’s memory-function, and that the alternative is to focus instead on our ability to handle and manipulate information, to increase our motivation and our ability to learn, rather than focusing solely on increasing our knowledge base ad-infinitum.

It takes longer to get this kind of mental functioning to work properly (and reliably), but the momentum and motivation of our thoughts won’t slow with our increasing ability to handle information, as they slow when we try to store and recall more and more information on command.

It’s like an electro-magnetic field: the more electric power is put into it, the more the magnetic force can push or pull.  And it’s a wholistic way of thinking, where all things are connected in the present, and a total understanding of the present (and whatever the present contains), is therefore valued over and above the accumulation of past knowledge.

This is seen by the popularity of advertising certain video games as brain trainers.  These games do not require the accumulation of much information, as they are quite simple to learn and to play.  Rather, the focus is on the processing of new information as it comes up.

If applied across the board to all puzzle/stratedy type games, we can propose that video games are training people to create sets of rules in their minds for faster and faster the processing (or ‘through-putting’, to use a bit or corporate speak) of information.  The information being handled becomes of less importance than the skillful means used to handle that information.

And so I say that we have been using the brain wrongly.   Memory is only one of its functions, and it’s a function that we would be better off using in a more subconscious manner, given the vast amounts of information that are readily becoming available.

To continue to spend time forcing more and more information into our memory-storage for later conscious recall will only serve to stress this function of our brain unduly, leading to it’s early burnout and senility.

Because really, our current way of describing our “interaction” with reality is actually pretty stupid!  We think that we have to take information from our data-rich reality, extract certain facts which we consider to be important, and record them for later use (and in doing so, separate them from reality).

Then we repeatedly expose ourselves to this captured (dead) information, as a substitute for real experience.  This stems simply from our own lack of faith in reality and the mind to meet and combine as necessary when necessary (because it’s always necessary!).

When the memory function is placed in direct contact with reality (instead of being used as an information storehouse that is separated from reality), it works more as a reality augmentator (that is, a creator of an augmented reality).  It functions similarly to the way hyper-links work on the internet (which I think is training our minds in order to bring back this connecting function).

This is what is meant by the diamond mind, the vajra thunderbolt, and ITS SOMETHING WE ARE ALREADY CAPABLE OF DOING, we just have to stop not doing it.

Right now, we think of the conceptual-mind->reality relationship as a type map-and-territory relationship.  One represents-but-is-not the other, and we create the map in our heads by learning about the territory through direct experience.   Now I agree, “the map is not the territory“, but honestly, we only function from a map.  We can’t even SEE the territory (it’s an at-least-5-dimensional time-space, a much too large data-set of information).

Therefore, we must give the map up to the territory, and allow the territory to fluxuate the map.  For more on this, see Alan Chapman’s Coments on the use of the Holy Guardian Angel in his variety of Magick:  “I’ve said it is important not to end up focussing or holding on to a certain feeling/sensation/experience, but the act of genuine surrender or devotion is to allow whatever sensations to come and go as they might, because you are no longer a concern. You have given yourself over. This mediation is not on one feeling, but all feelings; not one sensation, but all sensations. In order to do this, you must get out of the way whilst remaining aware of the present. “  A useful metaphor, in the very least, although how much so really depends on your own feelings about Magick…

Computers, the web, electronic media, it’s all been designed by our subconscious to massage us back into McLuhan’s echoing tribal electronic syaestheticsphere.  “History” or “dominator culture” only happened so that we could develop memory as a tool of the whole.  Because conscious memory is necessary for traversing a fourth dimensional time-line, but not so important for navigating fifth dimensional time-space…

Lastly, Overcoming Bias’ Eliezer Yudkowsky has a recent post regarding regarding his ideal AI as something that “set(s) up a world that works by better rules, and then fad(es) into the background, silent as the laws of Nature once were; and finally fold(s) up and vanishing when it is no longer needed.”

This, I think, is exactly the type of behavior we want from our own consciousness (and, I would add, might be the whole reason-for-being-conscious in the first place), and I think that we can achieve this kind of consciousness through making information storage more (but not completely) unconscious and training our mind to process information straight from realty more and more efficiently.  And I don’t think we need a computer to do this for us, but that’s just my take on the matter.  AI is definitely not my area of expertise, so, take that for what it’s worth.

This, then, is more what I mean by the information body.  It is something that we use to move through information-space, rather than something in which we store any information.  And in the end, it’s something we’ve been capable of doing all along.

This is acting from within the realm of no-thing.  It is knowing the male, but keeping to the female.  It is being negatively capable.

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

1) Meditation:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2) Back story (a touchstone):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4) Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I open my eyes to find that I am blindfolded, a gun in my hand.  Not knowing what else to do, I fire out into the unknown, hoping to hit something, provoke a response.  Perhaps hoping to be stopped.

Shots echo around me and fade back into silence.  Nothing.

I pull the blindfold off of my eyes and let it drop around my neck, but there is only silence and darkness.  I squint out into the darkness and wonder about the existence of the gun, when clearly there is nothing for me to shoot.  Discomforted by the darkness and the purposelessness, I yell out for light.

And there is light.  Bright whiteness all around me; again I am blinded.

Objects fade slowly into existence around me, only vaguely geometric.  Pyramidal, rectangular, spherical, but having no distinct qualities.  They sit in a grid-like pattern around me, fading away into the distance.  I turn, object to object, rotating slowly in place.

Given the fact of the gun’s existence, I feel the only option I have is to make use of it.  And all the objects are valid targets, I suppose, but at which should I aim?  Except for the varieties of shape, there is little to tell them apart.  Undecided, I begin to fire at random again.  When hit, the objects disappear in a shower of bright sparks.

“Bang!”

“Crash!”

The “oomph” of air rushing to fill the newly voided space.

But as the objects disappear, more are revealed behind them, and these slide silently forward to fill the newly voided spaces.  I watch the objects move towards me as I continue to destroy them, one by one.  Over time, I become aware of a pattern to their movement, a direction from which the new objects seem to be coming.

I walk towards what appears to be their source, creating a path by destroying the objects in front of me.  Yet the further I move from my original position, the faster and faster the new objects appear.  After only a few minutes of walking, I am overwhelmed and pushed back.

I give up any attempt to find the source, nearly retreating back to where I began.  But I stand a bit away from the center, to allow for a slow trickle of objects in my direction.  I sit down and shoot them one by one as they move up to me.  I am still.  I wait.  I think.

I appear to have worked in tandem with some undiscoverable source to build a system in which objects are created and then destroyed.  I give these objects a purpose for coming into being: to be destroyed.

And they, in turn, give my gun (and I) a reason for being: to destroy the objects.

So the objects, my gun, and I, are all interdependent, each creating a purpose for the others.

And yet, this system seems so empty.  Objects come into existence only so they can be destroyed.   My gun exists only to destroy.  It leads to nothing, creates nothing, and depends entirely on a source I know nothing about for the constant replenishment of objects to be destroyed.  The only motivation to continue in this way is to avoid growing bored.

As I ponder this state of affairs, continuing to destroy new objects as they appear, I notice that the objects are beginning to take on more distinct shapes. In some way these shapes seem to reflect the patterns of my thoughts, although I can’t predict or control their appearance in any way.

Occasionally an object will appear that I decide not to destroy, if only because I find it interesting.  These objects pile up around me. My aim with the gun becomes necessarily better, as I have to shoot around them.

…3 golden lamps surround a curled up fire hose.  The fire hose, both the tube and the nozzle, is blindingly white.  It is impossible to make out the material from which it is made…

…A metallic owl with lifelike eyes that emits a horrible machine-like screech.  Every time it does so, its eyes fill with hatred.  It sits on the branch of a dead tree.  Around the tree, poppies grow…

…A pile of shattered glass. Inside each piece of glass, a wisp of smoke can be seen slowly curling around itself.  Extending from the top of the pile is a sparking wire, which jumps around rapidly.  As the wire touches the shards, they fuse back together and a face appears briefly in the smoke, contorted by laughter…

…Icicles on a cliff overhanging a small fire.  They are at the very edge of the fire’s heat, and they melt very slowly, drops of water slowly coalescing at their tips.  The longest icicle, closest to the fire melts faster than the others, and a drop falls from it.  The fire fizzles low for a moment, and in that moment, the drops on the other icicles re-freeze. Then the fire rises again, and new drops begin to form…

As more and more complex things appear, I begin to arrange them around me in a pattern.  As I place them behind me, and the objects behind me move outwards and away, making space for their new, more complex cousins.  I am proud of the objects I have brought into being, and I find that the more I keep, the fewer I want to destroy.  The source seems to be learning from  my choices and adjusting it’s output accordingly.

Eventually, I am surrounded by these unique objects, and once again, I decide to try approaching the source.  My objects move with me, forming a pattern around me and carrying me (or am I carrying them?) towards the source. And this time, as the objects come faster and faster, each new object is immediately integrated into my pattern as it appears.

They swirl around me faster and faster, and the pattern grows larger and larger.  I place my now useless gun on the ground, and it is swept away by the tide of objects, itself becoming part of the pattern.  I move with the objects, dance within the pattern.

Objects surround me on all sides.    I am engulfed in them, lost in them.

I become a part of the pattern.

I become one with the source.

And all becomes still.

My question to you:

Was it important to stop destroying objects, before I could begin moving toward the source?

Or…

Where did the gun come from?  It was the only other thing to have existed prior to the appearance of the objects…

No answers?  Then I will tell you a secret instead:
There was never any gun at all…

But how does this tie into my recent series insights? (continued from here)

Nice of you to ask…  =)

What this all boils down to is the realization that the best way to prepare for future problems is to practice being as aware of the present moment as possible.  It is only in the present moment that any “true” anxiety/fear/suffering arises, and it’s only in dealing with this “true” suffering that we can ever hope to find its roots, detach them, and begin emptying our “glass”.

But if creating illusory experiences with the mind is not helpful, is the mind good for anything?  Should we just go back to being animals?

No.  I’m not saying imagination/memory is a bad thing, just that it needs to be repurposed.  We haven’t yet been able to successfully integrate our mind with our other sensory apparatus.

The mind is meant to be used to become aware of the potentials around us. When we are fully in touch with the information streaming at us from our present reality, the mind falls into the background and keeps track of the pathway-possibilities that arise outwards through time-space, away from the matrix of information that makes up our here-and-now reality.

When we are fully present, the mind is freed to track the potential quantum possibility waves around us (which exit in the 5th dimension outside of the linear 4th dimensional time-line) and we can more accurately guide our awareness-vehicle through time-space toward ever improving possibilities.

It is a continual cultivation of potential that, when properly used, builds a wave which lifts us (and everyone we’re involved with) in the direction of God/truth/goodness/beauty, all of which, I maintain, can best thought thought of as a direction within the higher dimensions, and that the movement in this direction is what fulfills the task for which all of creation was brought into existence (whatever that might actually be).

To be prepared is to be aware.  Nothing else matters as much as that.

So, a personal example… (continued from here)

A few days after listening to Dr Hyatt’s lecture, I was walking out of the office to lunch, thinking about his glass-nearly-full metaphor.  That is, in what ways do I unknowingly carry around anxiety and tension within me?

I began having a sort of mental conversation with myself, where I debated different potential examples and the various positions one could take on them:  “Oh, I am anxious because I am worried that I am wasting my life in an office job,” yet on the other hand, “it pays well and doesn’t require that you take work home”.   Or: “oh, I am anxious because of bad relationships in my past“, but “you have handled them to the best of your abilities at the time, and it’s not worth beating yourself up over it”…

It’s a favorite game of mine for exploring ideas and situations, but as I watched myself doing it in regards to my anxiety levels, I realized that, really, it’s something I do all the time in pretty much any situation.

I noticed that I spend most of my time imagining different potential fear/anxiety/discomfort producing scenarios that could possibly arise at any given time, whether that’s imagining the outcome of talking to someone at a party, or hearing footsteps coming up behind me when I’m walking home late at night

That is, I’m using my memory/imagination (there’s not much difference, in my opinion, but more on that some other time) to create illusory scenarios where I confront anxiety/fear/suffering, and I do so in order to develop a skill-set for dealing with these things in the future.  The problem is, it doesn’t work.  And the reason is two-fold.

First, and more obvious, is that imagination never lives up to reality, especially when it comes to our emotional responses. We can never react to an imagined scenario as well as we would to a real one, because we simply have too much control over the variables.  Our subconscious will generally take over and steer the scene to a quick resolution, usually one that ends in our favor.

It’s hard enough to maintain fully conscious decision making in a stressful situation in real life. In the imagination, once fight-or-flight potentiality kicks in, your subconscious will easily find a way to change the scenario to your advantage.  It’s basically mental masturbation, and in the end, it’s about as satisfying. We can still work ourselves into a state of anxiousness, but it is response to no real cues, only ones we’ve created based on our own desires at the time.

Second, and more subtle, is that by creating these imaginary anxiety producing scenarios, we believe that we have confronted the problem and will be better able to deal with it in the future.  But, as I just explained, this is simply not true.  No matter how we imagine a scenario, our imagination is not going to match up to a real life encounter.  Because a large part of  anxiety in real life comes from NOT BEING IN CONTROL…

Therefore, whatever false confidence we feel is destroyed as soon as it comes into contact with actual anxiety producing situation, and this produces even more anxiety (the bigger they come, the harder they fall…).  Plus, until we’re aware of this negative feedback-loop, the destruction of our false confidence just leads us to create MORE anxiety-producing thoughts in order to make that false confidence stronger “next time”.

Since we’re gaining no actual confidence here, do we gain anything from all these thought experiments?

Yes.

We’re gaining more anxiety, the subjective experience of anxiety, repeated over and over and over!

By giving attention to it, by feeding it and making it real for a moment, we are also making it a part of the information contained in our history/memory. And THAT is the real source of the anxiety that we carry around with us.

We hold onto the memory of illusory anxiety in order to convince ourselves  that we can better deal with future, real anxiety. And then, when that real anxiety becomes present, our almost full-glass overflows…

So it seems that 90% of anxiety is pretty much an illusion based purely on the mis-use of thought.  And really, I bet we would find that the same is probably true of actual anxiety, once we take the opportunity of experiencing it in real life as a chance to examine its root cause.

I’ll try it out next time I’m at a party (or, the next time I get mugged!), and let you know how it goes. =)

(and an explanation of what this leads to follows here)

Recently, as you may know if you follow my research links site, I’ve been reading an online text that does a great job of breaking down Reichian-type body therapy (pun intended) for those new to the subject.  My only previous knowledge of Reich came from Zac’s experiments over at Alchemically Braindamaged (which, upon review, seems to be where I found that Reichian book to begin with…)

I like what I’ve been reading and (since I get pretty focused into whatever informational flow I am following) I’ve been much more conscious of the energy blocks in my body, now that I’m aware of what they can be and how I might visualize them.

In the interest of further exploration, I “found” disc 1 of a recording of Dr. Hyatt’s, called Shotgun Tantra.  And after listening to it, I have a much greater appreciation of the sarcasm evident in the comments regarding Hyatt in the AB post…

However, despite the heavily edited female “interviewer”, and Hyatt’s impressive ability to draw out a string of tangents until you think he’s made a point (i.e.: bullshit), there were a few good ideas in the mix.

The best one, in my opinion, was Hyatt’s critique of “stress/anxiety management”.  He compared trying to ‘manage’ your stress levels to trying to avoid overfilling a glass that is already 90% full of water.   Sure, you can try to avoid any “water” getting dumped on you, but miss even just a few drops and you’ll quickly spill over.  As Hyatt points out, it would be much better to start with an empty  glass, giving yourself the ability to “hold more water” as it arises.

And while I agree with Dr Hyatt’s diagnosis here, and I appreciate the other stuff I’ve been reading online, I’ve also noticed what seems to be a sort of blind-spot in the explanation of armoring and its function.  I don’t mean to imply that these people are unaware of this blind-spot, just that, for me, it should be one of the core components of any explanation of Reichian therapy, and I didn’t hear it explained as such in either source.

To whit: you have tightened your armor in order to block your awareness of the internal surging of emotional energy (aka: orgone) because (for whatever reason) you can’t accept it.  By loosening the armor you can once again let that energy flow, and become aware of what your body is telling you.

But this, I think, is only half the battle. Once the energy is flowing, if you don’t use your new-found emotional orgone/organ knowledge to modulate your behavior and “empty your glass”, so to speak, you’ll be stuck in a never ending (and draining) loop of misused energy. It similar to opening up the cupboard below your sink, noticing a puddle caused by a leaky drain, and only wiping up the puddle without fixing the drain because “water is supposed to flow”.

I understand that it’s hard to address this in a book or lecture, because any misuse of body energy always has a very personal and idiosyncratic cause. However, I just want to place a little more emphasis on the removal of armoring as a tool for understanding and mastering the self, rather than as an end in itself. The point is not to open up to the pain and hurt inside, but to open up and REMOVE it.

Perhaps I misunderstand Reichian therapy all together.  Feel free to tell me so in the comments.  However, I think we should keep in mind that Reich had a notoriously short fuse , and that he died of a heart attack in prison.   Hardly the description of a freely emotional energetic being, if you know what I mean…

(a personal story illustrating this comes next)

Purple monkey wrenches, flung through the dawning air by red baboons.
They are done, working on the master’s cars.
Time travel and the pyramids fill their dreams.  Lost continents…

Whence Atlantis? And, Why Atlantis?
Too much! Already, the dryness comes.
Descend, oh seeker! Lower yourself into the watery depths.
Soak, become muddied. Deluded, diluted, disillusioned.

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 multitudes?

More importantly, should you?

I feel the desert returning, the jungle people are getting 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.

This is to be the source? The chrysalis and the butterfly?
Perhaps we are better off without such dusty butterflies…

But if not this people, not here, not now…
Then whence?

It is not as if it can never happen. But will it ever happen?
To retain our relevance, we must grow within and out of.

Has anyone ever thought that birth is a bloody, horrible struggle?

Labour pains, and in the seventies, the water broke.
More blood, more struggle…
Now we 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 cultivate it.

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