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 7 Dec 2009 @ 15:17
Geoffrey Filbert says he always enjoyed good theater (he means life here), but most people just want to bitch about the agony. Denying or refusing or protesting suffering is a not-isness on the nature of life. It comes with the terrority...and if you look, suffering makes it a far more engaging and beautiful place. The point is to WIN. Of course. But, there ARE other people out there who may not be obsessed with your personal success...
People want life, but they only want the bright side, therefore they have to refuse the whole thing. Then they watch mock-ups of it on TV every night. Yet they wouldn't watch TV if there wasn't conflict, division, upheavals, disappointmenOr maybe their issue isn't suffering, it is...exit. They can turn off the TV. They cannot turn off life (that requires ofun). More >
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 13 Nov 2009 @ 04:07
"How strange it is to be anything at all!" -- Jeff Mangum
Feel that pressure to be just one, single, solitary, indivisible person? Feel the terror at finding yourself a completely different person? Feel that fear of failing to persist through time as...something? The fear of looking out from a brand new place, leaving the warmth of your former body behind?
Today I realized I possess all of these limitations, and they are highly charged. I observed a deep terror seething within me. I brace for total collapse, anticipating the horrible realization that I am someone else; that I am a different person, a different body, a gust of wind, a platypus egg, a negative thought existing somewhere between the Sun and Mercury, a memory, a spirit faking omniscience, a planetary entity arching my love across the plains of my home, a father without children, an orphan, daybreak.
I could be anything because I am nothing.
I am everything, any whole to speak of.
I made these observations of myself amongst a classroom of fifth-graders today. I found myself growing closer to them as result, and growing more comfortable taking responsible for the entire space. Why? I was less afraid to BE them!
We live in a society full of smiling people that worship Charles Darwin in their hearts, and Jesus on the streets. We poison the ones who find themselves without one single, dominant personality. We call them schizophrenics. The psychiatric chemical treatment starts with the contention that these people need help. I concur. But the only trouble is that they are not in control of who they are. They are not willing. They resist.
Resistance is always the first step to insanity. Surrender is always the first step to truth.
BE EMPTY. LET GOD LOOK RIGHT THROUGH YOU.
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 8 Nov 2009 @ 01:09
Creativity. It's one of the terms one always sees included in the conveniently marketable phrases hawked by those promoting the typical rainbows-and-sunshine, New Age self-help approaches. "Increase your creativity," they often say.
For the most part, people do not need more creativity. That's likely what got them in their mess in the first place. They need more destructive ability.
Potentiality and actuality are inversely related, i.e. the more you have of one, the less you have of the other. I discovered this as I contemplated the notion of "infinite potential" one day. The only way in which it is possible to have infinite potential is no have no actuality--no games. Another way of saying actuality is 'rules.' Thus, the more rules to which one has agreed, the less potential one has to play as one wishes. And this is typically why people seek help in the first place. They cannot move/play/create as they wish. Is the answer then creativity? Is the answer to simply create one's way out of the problem?
In a broad sense, this is exactly how one goes from being a god to a dysfunctional, unhappy, delusional homo sapien. For if one started out as such a god, then one's potential was huge, one could say infinite. Armed with omnipotence, a being goes about creating a game. But the game fails. The being created a game and it went awry. Considering the being's creative potential, this may not have seemed like an immediately pressing issue at the time. The being could simply turn around and create another world, another space, another scene, another game that was ALMOST as grand and majestic.
What cannot be ignored however is that the being withdrew from an area in which it was still responsible. It doesn't come as a surprise then that Geoffrey Filbert once wrote that entrapment results from withdrawing from an area in which one is still responsible. Entrapment is limitation, impotence. The fact of the matter is that there is still actuality in place. Since potentiality and actuality are inversely related, that being lost potential. One could even envision it as programming. The being programmed itself to play a game and instead of erasing and rewriting the appropriate commands, it left them in place and moved on to another game. Do this myriad times and one may see a god arrive as a maladjusted human being.
In summary, when one encounters a limitation, the answer is probably not to create one's way out of it. The answer is to destroy whatever is keeping that limitation in place. The weapon of destruction is truth. But one must know how to wield it. The "how," the method of truth, is the process one uses. The process, or group of processes, is the technique, or as it's usually referred to, the "technology."
If truth were immediately accessible, then looking out one's window would reveal the Kingdom of God. But truth is many times not immediately accessible. One needs a technology to access it. Technologies are designed to systematically cut away the chaff from the truth to reveal and then vanish the actual creation, that which was serving as a limitation upon one's potential.
This cutting away can also be referred to as truth, but it is doing truth as a verb. Scientology only used one word to comprise both the verb and noun aspects of truth, and they called it "as-isness." Ed Dawson made this incisive discovery, brilliantly linking "as-isness" as a verb to the the concept of "ofun," one of the sixteen olodus found in Ifa, an ancient religion hailing from West Africa; and "as-isness" as a noun he linked to "oyeku," another one of the sixteen olodus of Ifa. Oyeku is, strictly speaking, infinite potential. What this means is that when one is doing truth as a verb, if one has the appropriate process in one's hands, one eventually arrives at infinite potential. At that point, one is then restored. Once that happens, one should very comfortable, and very ABLE, to create once more. Until then, be a student of Shiva.
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 28 Oct 2009 @ 13:44
Fragment entitled "The Eclipse"
“I can’t just go out and stare at the sun, now can I?”
“Well, you can Dierdra, but may want to bring some salt and pepper with you ‘cause that’ll literally cook your eyeballs!” Eerie fake laughter by both parties. The sound of it reverberates in the young boy’s head. “Just kidding of course folks. Now, there are basic precautions one should take when viewing a partial eclipse of the sun. First and foremost, do not directly stare at the sun. If you’ve managed to get yourself a pair of special glasses, then you’ll be okay. The best way to experience this monumental event…” The boy’s eyes, half-closed and covered in a feverish glaze, meandered slowly from the television and moved up towards the ceiling. Mounting anxiety had forced him to stop watching the newscast. The more he watched, the more the distance between himself and the world of that far-off studio grew less and less. He saw that small reality as one bud, among countless buds tipping countless skinny branches. He had felt himself inside the newscast, speaking the same words as that awful Weatherman who was so clearly faking it. The feigned laughter, the artificial setting and presentation, the plasticity of it all, it was too much. Waves of guarded panic began to roil in his gut.
He shot up from the couch, the blood flooding quickly to his head. He nearly fainted. His mouth was dry and the back of his neck ached. His head pounded and his sinuses felt severally desiccated. Unwinding himself from the sheet, he got to his feet. A moment of total disorientation ensued. How long had he been sleeping? Was this the same house had fallen asleep in? Panic finally seized him. Was he dreaming? He could barely discern the difference anymore. Pneumonia had wracked his young, eight-year-old body for a week now. In these few days, at the apex of his illness, he had lived swimming in and out of a hot and feverish delusion. One thing, and one thing only, kept him tethered. She was the only truth he knew. Praying she hadn’t somehow immaterialized, he set out to find her.
After scouring the house, he returned to the kitchen. He stood up on his toes and peered through the window of the door to the garage. There she sat, wrapped in her peach felt robe, fingers pinching a cigarette, phone pressed to her ear. She was somehow divine in this stark, mundane image: his mother, the Mother, ensconced among lawn mowers and bicycles. She tittered inaudibly through the glass. The young boy stood poised like this for a long time, enthralled and reinforced by the sight of her. It wasn’t enough though—she must see him too. He cracked the door and softly uttered, “Mom?”
“Hold on Sandy…Yeah honey?” She said this in covert exasperation. He tried not to notice.
“I didn’t know where you were…”
“Well, I’m right here. I’ll come inside in a second.”
“Okay.” He didn’t immediately shut the door. He needed her. If he demanded her attention, she would undoubtedly give it to him. But then it would be tainted by an air of annoyance and exasperation; he would be an obligation, not a love object. He wanted pure, single-minded attention, free of any taint of obligation. She must have time to herself…that is, if he wanted her abject care. He shut the door.
He didn’t move away though. There was nowhere to go. The rest of the house seemed too cold and too vacuous. He instead paced around the kitchen, biting his fingernails, a high-pitched longing in his gut. He had brief thoughts amid his frantic desire. The eclipse fascinated him. It sounded so magical. He could sense the rarity and preciousness of the event. Where was she? He thought it so unkind of her to make him wait for so long. Again, he peered through the window.
He watched her talk. She cocked her head back a bit from time to time, taking long, leisurely draws from her cigarette. She sipped her coffee. He stood transfixed. Watching her without her knowledge felt like seeing her…naked. He noticed that her robe had parted, revealing her thick but shapely upper thigh. A hot, sick thrill bloomed in his groin. An overwhelming feeling of wrongness seemed to fuel it. His breathing became short and erratic and he barely breathed, fearing somehow she might hear it. He was fully aroused now and could not wrench his eyes from that gorgeous leg. Everything that was happening was happening inside of a space that did not contain his moral, reasoning consciousness; he forced it to stay at the door. He was aflame now, sick in every way. He had just inserted his hand inside his pants when she turned her head and peered directly at him. In panic, he fell away from the window, beset by a shame and high fear. He was briskly escaping the kitchen when she entered.
“Noah?” The boy turned to face her.
“Yeah?”
“What did you need honey?” She said this with an amused, condescending countenance. He didn’t understand. Why wasn’t she upset? He had been spying on her! Her gaze drifted down. He looked down too and in horror, noticed what she must have noticed: he was still visibly aroused. He quickly looked back at her and saw the slightest, most vague triumphant smile touch the corner of her mouth; it suggested power, delight ….propriety.
“I want to go out and see the eclipse.”
“That’s too dangerous. You’ll go blind.”
“No. The weatherman. He said that you can do it safely, using a piece of cardboard and watching the shadow…” He looked down once more, crying. “I promise not to look at the sun.”
“All right. But let me take your temperature first.”
In defiance of the imminent eclipse, the sun shone fierce, reflecting strongly off of the rectangle of pavement that constituted the backyard patio. Cloistered inside all day, Noah was thrilled to breathe the outside air. A solitary bird traced a line across the blue sky. Noah stared at it, smiling, but whipped his head back down just as quickly. He must be vigilant! Within moments, he managed to convince himself that he had done no harm but admonished himself not to do again.
Recalling the task at hand, he leaned the piece of cardboard, pierced with an ice pick he had found in the garage, against the patio table. According to theory, when the partial eclipse occurred, one would see the small beam of light that shone through the hole in the cardboard disappear and then reappear. Noah waited, impatiently. Just to be safe, he stood with his back to the sun.
With one eye on the bright dot on the pavement, he studied his shadow. Extremely sharp, it made what looked like a human-shaped hole extending out from his feet. What if he fell through? It was a perfectly delineated hole, obviously made just for him. He imagined a stiff breeze blowing him over and he was sure if he did happen to fall, he would fall endlessly, turning head-over-heels for eternity. The sentiment reminded him of certain nightmares he had been having for years. These thoughts should have frightened him but in the midst of such a beautiful day, he couldn’t focus on them. Coming to consciousness, he started. The eclipse! He pivoted, looked up. Three seconds, maybe five minutes later, he brusquely tore his eyes away. Panic ripped through him. Rushing inside, he tore open the door to the kitchen and screamed for his mother. They nearly collided in the hallway. With only his scream to go on, she had become just as panicked as he.
“Oh my God, oh my God! What’s wrong honey?” The last few words came out through a whimper. She was cradling him. Noah just bawled—he couldn’t speak. This tormented his mother and in her fear, she became angry. “Noah, you have to tell me what’s wrong!” His face pressed to her shoulder, he tried to explain—it came out as unintelligible, muffled moans. She put his head in her hands and pulled it away from her shoulder. “What? Goddamnit Noah!” He told her, through the gasps and sobs.
“I’m going blind Mom. I’m going to go blind!” He could say no more and again buried his face in her shoulder.
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 26 Oct 2009 @ 16:19
Fragment entitled "Our Mother the Mind"
“I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?” --Chaung Tzu
Recently, despite my long and sober history, I decided to ingest a hallucinogenic beverage. It was not done at all for the sake of entertainment or amusement but was taken as a means to open up new channels of truth and communication for me. I can say conclusively that my experience, my "trip," was one the most educational and horrific experiences of my life. At the time, I wanted nothing more than for the experience to end. But the next morning, still trembling, I looked back and realized that something had been revealed. My resistance to the psychedelic experience was to a large degree or even wholly equivalent to my resistance of infinite life. That morning I may have felt despondent, but now I am for I did not lose, it's just that my win wasn't easy, and it wasn't pleasant.
The undeniable truth is that I had been offered a ride, a ticket to the otherside. I knew this, clear as day. Unfortunately, I was in no condition to uncover the motivation behind denying such an offer at the time of my experience. When I finally found myself alone, my only desire was to brace myself and remain immobile for the duration of the experience. I would stay put, until the effects of the drug wore off enough to permit sleep. But for the two hours before sleep came, I violently oscillated between two opposing realities, each one both alluring and terrifying; each side coaxing and begging me to embrace it.
One the one hand, I knew that the strange and powerful sensation in my body was a signal, a sign that intimate communication with the otherside was at hand. But, I couldn't grasp it, for fear of...something. Perhaps it was fear that I would see too much; that wherever I went, there would be too much to confront and I would be destroyed by the incoming force of excessive and overwhelming truth. Generally, it was a fear of loss, but loss of what? Stability, location, pressure, self, orientation.
Unable to ascend, my mind squirmed and fought tooth and nail for my protection. In its aim to help me cope and create order against the threat of total chaos, it produced a grand and unifying lie. This was the lie it told.
Every religious figure was and is a clinically imbalanced and insane maniac. Jesus, Gotama, Gurdjieff, Eckhart--they were all insane. And in an effort to reinforce and justify their own insanity, they attracted people such as myself, people who were just as insane but who were, unlike them, not leaders themselves. They attracted people who were weak and looking to be led.
This collective insanity that certain people felt, issued from the experience of the horror of meaninglessness existence. As my mind so eloquently concluded at the time, the universe is a material accident. It is cold, lifeless and strictly mechanical, through and through. The human machine happens to be physically arranged and constituted in such a way that it produces mechanical consciousness. It's this mechanical consciousness that sadly allows for the human machine to be aware that it is a helpless and impotent wanderer in a dead and hopeless nightmare. The shock of such a realization is what leads the religious and spiritual types to fabricate their fantastic notions of truth, eternal life, spirit, God, the unity of being, etc. I also knew this shock, this existential terror, had known it intensely since I was a child. This shock is what led me to ingest this awful substance in the first place.
Even though at the time, I entertained this great lie, I knew the implications of accepting it. And I didn't completely accept it. It was clearly and obviously wrought to lull me, to comfort me, to create a soft womb to rest inside while I waited out the experience. Out of desperation, I did make attempts to stretch and embrace the lie, but when I did, I would reel in disgust and shame at my own weakness and self-deception. Yet when I turned away from the lie, I would come face-to-face with the the fact that I was amidst a divine opportunity...and that I was denying myself that opportunity.
In the end, I did not come away empty-handed. I came away with a distinct view of the motivation and workings of mind. It works by obfuscation, insulation, alteration, occlusion, distortion; its motivated by the need to protect, secure, make safe, and in an odd sense, love. It very much acts like a love-drunk mother, a mother who cares so much that her love perverts and inverts and becomes a detriment, preventing her child from directly feeling and knowing the depth of life and existence. This maternal perversion continues to enforce the womb experience, seeking to shield and protect her child from the sharp edges of life. Intoxicated on her love, she fails to see that it has become the greatest sin: it has become blasphemy, robbing her child of the richness of experience, experience that is so vital and necessary for her child to grow up, to gain both physical and spiritual independence, to become its own maker, to reclaim its inherent sovereignty. This love-drunk mother acts with the same intention as our minds do, repeating and dramatizing that sin that so-called God perpetrated against Adam and Eve in the Garden.
The mind prevents a person from directly touching, tasting reality. It prevents direct and complete communication with our environment, with all of the spaces we as beings inhabit, spaces we actually find ourselves in, but from which we remain insulated. The author and researcher Ed Dawson writes that the mind is an energy-field. It is a medium through which all perceptions must pass and in their passage be altered and made easily assimilable. It takes events, experiences, creations, and leeches them of their depth, literally their space and their life, in order to make them into subjective realities, into self-serving images and movies. This chitta, or mind-stuff, is made into anchor-points, making it so that a person can feel order and can feel that he or she is located. The mind's goal is to finitize what is inherently infinite. Infinite life is objective exchange of absolutes or whole creations. The truth is that this is going at all times. The trouble is that people cannot have infinite life. This could be because it appears as total chaos from a firmly-established physical universe viewpoint. It appears to be overwhelmingly and permanently disorienting. Therefore, they alter it, and one significant means of alteration is mind. For the fearful, infinite life is inescapable disorder. This should come as no surprise, that people can't have, or more appropriately, be infinite life. For if they could, why on earth would they be here?
It should be said that the great lie fabricated by my mind during my experience (or rather, my denial of experience) is not utterly untrue. It is rooted in a valid half-truth. This half-truth is what reality looks like when it is viewed from a particular perspective (remember, perspectives can never be all-encompassing). This perspective reveals life as evolving from the Deep, from the Bottom, from nothing. It sees life as evolving from cold, dead matter into higher, more complex and more sophisticated organisms. Again, this view is valid, it's just that it is only half-true. So in essence, my mind took this half-truth and fleshed it out to apparent completion. This gives one another clue as to how the mind works. Although it can and does for the extremely insane, e.g. schizophrenics, the mind doesn't seem to create actual hallucinations but rather delusions, the difference being that hallucinations are purely subjective while delusions are distortions of perceptions. One is reminded of the philosopher Immanuel Kant's notion that all anyone can perceive is the representation of truth, that the thing-in-itself lies beyond apprehension. This is a classic case of someone being something, in this case the mind, rather than exteriorizing from it in order to see its possible transcension.
And it seems that this was what my psychedelic experience afforded me: a new-found ability to perceive the mind itself, to transcend it, to exteriorize from it so that I may better understand it. And in understanding it better, I may finally learn to acquiesce and fully embrace the endless rebirth of infinite life.
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