A Game of Masks: The Undertaker of Illusions, Satan’s Advocate, & Hell Maps Inner & Outer

Abstract:

Neurons that are suffering from chronic amnesia need reminding of what they are. They need to connect to other neurons that see their essential natures and remind them. By connecting into the original love field of one another, we are restored to our true nature and essence. Like the Hebrew prayer, “Listen: the Lord our God is one,” we are tuning back into a state in which all our parts are integrated as one thing, an original state of all-together. It is only our life force essence, and its potential for bonding to other life force essences, that can restore us to wholeness. And it is only by such a process of mutual remembrance that we begin to rehabilitate one another.

 

Hidden Stagehands

Some opening notes struck in the last Dave Oshana online event, Deep Dive into Humanity’s Matrix Mechanism: One Collective Hallucination at a Time:

Inside of ourselves are mechanisms that keep the illusion going. As on a theatrical stage, props are continuously being moved around to maintain the appearance of reality, by discreet figures in black—internal stagehands. These little men and women inside of us signal to one another to coordinate their movements, in such a way that: a) the set keeps changing to maintain the fantasy narrative; and b) we never notice who is doing it.

They also signal to the internal stagehands in other people’s backstage unconscious, creating cross-pollinated fictions. This is known as enabling, or enmeshment.

One of the primary ways we can be manipulated by the stagecraft of triggers, cues, and subterfuges is to be constantly made to feel afraid. If the body is stimulated to produce sensations of fear, the mind will interpret those sensations and invent reasons to be afraid. These self-fulfilling reasons will generate more authentic fear, and even lead to fear-based actions that augment the reasons to be afraid by affecting the behavior of those around us. (Franz Ruppert described this in the last podcast: those caught up in an internal state of war generate conflict around them.)

On Sunday’s online event, Dave gave the simple example of being doused in cold water, ending up in wet clothes, and feeling the cold damp soaking through to our kidneys, causing them to contract and our body to start to tremble. Sheldon Solomon, who coincidentally I have arranged to talk to later this week for the podcast, used a similar example in his findings around “terror management theory”:

In the October 24, 2008 issue of the journal Science, Yale University psychologists show that people judged others to be more generous and caring if they had just held a warm cup of coffee and less so if they had held an iced coffee. In a second study, they showed people are more likely to give something to others if they had just held something warm and more likely take something for themselves if they held something cold. (ref)

 

Internal Movies

Sensations in our body trigger interpretations of the mind; they bring up memories that we associate with sensations, and with feelings and thoughts, until we find ourselves reliving those early experiences stored in us as affect. Something as innocuous as ice in our drink has caused us to enter into unconscious reenactments.

The question is, or can be, at any given time, how does (or would) our body naturally feel, and how have we been conditioned to respond?

Dave described his perspective of how he perceives, inside a person’s body, something turning in a circle, like the cardboard reel inside a View-Master toy, placing alternating colored lens over our perceptions and taking us into specific, preordained states of mind with every click. Dave imagines reaching inside a person to stop the reel turning, between images, leaving the mind empty of false perceptions. 

This is tricky, however, because people are not accustomed to waiting around between illusions. The moment one illusion starts to dissolve, we automatically, instinctively click over to the next one (or back to an old one).

The example Dave used then was addiction to the news: how our daily newsfeed feeds upon our emotions, our fear, doubt, anxiety, and outrage, making it the primary way people’s minds are being infected. The daily news is feeding a worm inside us that demands its daily fear-fix.

This led us back to a central point from the last event: that most of us are motivated, most of the time, by an internal sense of discomfort. Every time we imbibe culture, whether it’s the news, movies, TV shows, or pop songs, we are essentially saying, “I don’t like my own internal movie”—or news stream—and asking for another one to replace it, externally located. We are subscribing to a Netflix-generated dream world.

 

Varying Degrees of Inner Disgust 

In my opinion, this is a case of Dave being absolutist in order to make a point. Dave watches TV shows, or has in the past (even recommended them to me), and clearly there are some forms of news that are worth knowing. More to the point, there are ways to receive, organize, process, and apply both real-life news stories and fictional narratives that makes our world more coherent, and that facilitates a gradual uncovering, exploration, and integration of the internal horror movies (affective imprints) we are trying so hard to stay out of. The main point, however, that we are all negotiating to stay out of “varying degrees of inner disgust,” including primarily self-disgust, is one I will not argue with.

Dave proposes three approaches to the problem:

1. Protection from the outside: wearing a condom, ensuring that nothing gets in or out.
2. Disinfection/purification: the attempt to clear stuff out and get free of all the nasty things that provoke our disgust.
3. Going inside to meet, face, and integrate the source of our discomfort.

This last, of course, is the option Dave recommends.

There are levers of control inside us that allow us to be controlled by others, whether directly through words and actions, or indirectly via the various media channels. If we see the things that are manipulating us and these internal mechanisms at work, chances are they will not be able to control us in the same way. But to see them, we first have to push through an innate and profound resistance to seeing or meeting those things.

The only way is in. But ironically, we are not looking for buried treasure, but for buried junk, for crap. You might even say we are looking for the thing we least want to find.

This is similar point to  one I made the day before, on Saturday’s YouTube event “16 Maps of Hell: The Final Countdown“:

Like the maze in the Overlook Hotel, the hell we are in is designed to keep moving so there’s actually no way out, because we generate our own hell. It is an internal hell that we’re generating externally, through compulsively reenacted behaviors. So the [only] way out is within. This has to do with resonating at a frequency, an angelic frequency, you might say, that doesn’t require the assistance of demons to find our way out. Essentially, it doesn’t need a map, but the map is a kind of pretext for discovering the exit. Hell is a map, hell is the way that we have mapped existence and that existence has been imprinted onto our nervous system in this hellacious fashion. There is no hell outside of the map, but that’s the function of the map: so we can see that the map is not the territory, that the hell we’ve mapped is not reality, but only a social construct.

 

Apokaraoke (Dave’s Mission/Jasun’s Book)

On Sunday Dave described himself as “an undertaker for people’s dead illusions.” Immediately after that he said: “My mission is to understand hell.”

Naturally, my ego pricked up, and so naturally he delivered a mocking qualifier, just in case my constructed identity might want to take credit for its excellence (especially on the morning after the 16 Maps of Hell campaign’s success). He said:

“I haven’t bought any dodgy maps from salesman at the leaning tower of Pizza.”

There were a number of sly references in that line, delivered rapid-fire and effortlessly, almost unconsciously, by Dave in full swing. Besides the obvious, Pizza is a reference to Pizzagate, and the leaning tower of Pisa points to unstable and “bent” structures that one would be unwise to stand too close to. Every map is dodgy when it comes to placing our feet upon the terrain we are talking of. It might get us close enough to take the leap, but it might also furnish us with the illusion of never having to do so.

This is an example of Dave both supporting me in what I do (the work itself) and undermining my identification with it (the tool set I am attached to, pen is mightier, etc.) Me juxtaposing things I said on Saturday to things Dave said on Sunday, without their being any conscious collaboration occurring (we don’t swap notes behind the scenes about the themes of our events), is a way, not to toot my own horn, but to show how it harmonizes with Dave’s trumpet. At the same time, “no hay banda”: the conductor of this symphony is not of this world, and to that extent, we are both doing karaoke of the same mysterious angelic chorus. The main difference, as far as I can see, is that Dave is considerably more comfortable in Hell than I am. This makes it clear to me that I can, in a very real sense, trust him more than I can myself.

Me on Saturday:

There are many distractions in Hell, but just bear in mind if you are the distraction, then something’s working through you; and that certainly is my concern: I don’t want to be a distraction to anyone who’s working their way out of hell, by offering fake maps. I have my own hooks still in me, and I’m not a hundred percent sure that having a success with this is going to facilitate my exit from hell. I’m counting on that, I’m banking on that, but I can’t be sure. I don’t know what viruses are running underneath my hard drive, and that’s why I have to be very careful to be aware of my motivations. And I know that one of my motivations in the past has been to get some sort of emotional, psychological need met, which could be vampiric.

 

Going Cold Turkey on Adrenalin

On Sunday, Dave took time to describe the adrenals as like little pyramids, sitting on top of the kidneys, squirting fear rhythmically into our veins, one injection at a time, until it is distributed throughout our body. Upstairs in our mind, meanwhile, we start having dissociated experiences, with no direct relationship to what is happening to our bodies. Our minds make up a story, and then—to ensure it keeps running—we cast ourselves in it.

The question of how our physiology can be artificially stimulated to replicate fear responses, and how this can then feed into the generation of internal narratives that support those sensations, is central to 16 Maps of Hell and the question of how movies, especially violent ones, affect us in both short and long term. Is our addiction to movies and TV shows partially due to a physiological addiction to adrenalin (among other chemicals) triggered in us by images and sounds? And if so, what kind of dissociative identity disorder might be the result of long-term exposure to such media?

A person who attempts suicide may think of it hundreds of thousands of times before acting. It’s only when everything lines up in such a way that they believe the story, that they act it out. If we don’t like the movie that’s playing inside us, Dave describes three courses of action:

1. Enter into the movie and change it—self-reprogramming.
2. Go and watch someone else’s movie—dissociation.
3. Abstain, go cold turkey, give up all movies, and become empty of false narratives—eventually. Unsuspend our disbelief, cease to believe the internal hype, sit tight in Hell until the exit becomes visible to us.

There is a silver lining in all this muck: the best protection in Hell, as in Nature, is to do exactly what you’re supposed to do. Salmon swimming upstream have the best chance of surviving, as compared to salmon who float about like jellyfish and wind up being eaten. When we are doing our purpose, nature is keeping us fit, energized, sharp, flexible, healthy and capable.

There are risks (e.g. JC); but death comes to us all. Isn’t it better to live fully and risk the repercussions, than to settle for an extended half-life?

 

Trip to the Underworld

Dave began Sunday’s event by saying that we were going to journey into the unconscious. The night following the event, I had a series of dreams that left me rattled and weak. The dream series involved the following elements:

• Stephen King and The Shining (a novel and movie in which the father tries to kill his son).
• An office meeting between a father and his son in which the father makes the son fight him to the death, and the son kills the father by bashing his head against a stone.
• A white stone bust of Aleister Crowley, shoved into a corner on the floor.
• Speaking to the father character, who was also Satan, about words that came to me one morning on awakening, at the age of twenty:
• The devil is a dark point on the horizon approaching. Until that time, this point above your arms will remain like a flat pole on your chair of despair.
• The Satanic father said the words had to do with the necessity of ascension, of reaching the “devil-point” in order to go beyond and be looking down on Satan. I had my doubts.
• Reliving memories of the time in my late twenties, living in Northern Spain, when I found myself face to face with Satan in the form of an inverted pentagram etched into the shape of dark matter. (It seems I have never written about these encounters in all these years.)
• Re-experiencing being so in tune with Satan’s awareness that even the slightest emotion or thought I had was instantly known to Him/It. A terrifying predicament
• The onus was to stay focused on Satan’s pain and sorrow and my empathy for it. Should I become afraid or repelled, Satan would sense it instantly and become fearsome and terrible.

On waking, I recalled how, also in Spain, I was told by a Spanish healer that my physical affliction (the Grinch) was due to my having seen the devil as an infant, at the age of one.

I thought of Dave’s talk of the original wound, how we had to go deep inward to meet it.

 

Tainted Love

So many points swirling around, trying to land into some sort of coherent order, to form some kind of map. So many different possible angles of approach, and only a few can be incorporated. So random and yet so meaningful, like a thousand monkeys in my unconscious, typing for a million years, until they produce . . . one line of Shakespeare?

Our worst nightmare is to be unlovable. The original wound inside us reverses the natural flow of love and causes us to reject the thing we most want. It drives us into behaviors that make us extremely hard to love.  Our every attempt to get love then pushes it further away from us.

This is a complex I revealed also on Saturday:

Is this a book to rescue lost souls? Because of a realization of something correlating with my brother and what trapped him, in some sticky ancestral swamp that may or may not be in the netherworld of Bardo realms, but certainly is still in my psyche? Is it a way for me to resolve a self-sabotage mechanism that has prevented me from achieving some sort of legitimate worldly success, one that isn’t about trying to get the world’s validation but delivering something through the world to the souls trapped or embedded in it, who are looking for the exit?

For that thing to happen, I have to neutralize that thing in me that is self-sabotaging, because it’s trying to get validation from dad, from brother, from the world, in order to feel good about itself. This always self sabotages because it’s sticky, and because you, the sensitive soul that you are, would feel, “Oh Jasun, he’s not just trying to publish a book, he’s trying to get my love.” And it repels us: when somebody is trying to get our love in all the wrong ways, and they’re not conscious, there’s something repellent about it.

So what’s the solution? How do we dissolve this ugly façade we compulsively create, out of a mixture of self-disgust and self-denial, to keep love away? Dave’s answer is that the only thing that works to restore the flow of love back to its natural, original state is for someone to see past that ugly façade, to see through all of the muck, the movies we make and project outward, to our essence. By seeing through our disguises, seeing them but not believing them, we cease believing in them too. When we are seen as we are, and realize that we are loved as we are, only then can we can start letting go of this endless game of masks.

Dave’s work is largely about handling people’s crap (rather like the thrift store, I thought). One participant has even told him, “That’s why you get paid, Dave!” Yet since becoming enlightened, he doesn’t relate easily to people’s suffering. “Ask Jasun,” he said, then he added, “He didn’t complain.”

I relate easily to people’s suffering. I even relate to Satan’s pain. Sometimes I think I relate too easily, and that it is because I take my own suffering too seriously. On the other hand, my affinity with hell may be what makes me a suitable ambassador between enlightened and unenlightened, and a reasonably effective conveyor of Dave’s heavenly transmission. Like a dentist, a writer needs to be sensitive to pain ~ but not so much he can’t keep his hand steady!

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Next online Oshana event: Zero Point Return: The Time Before the Original Wound, Sunday May 31st, 9am Pacific/12 noon ET/5pm UK.

Accompanying online piece: Inner Archaeology: Digging the Internal Past for the Cause of Human Extinction.

Live Liminalist Meets in the near future

A special meet for people in Oz who are interested in Dave Oshana. Open to all, but timed to suit Australian body rhythms without excluding UK ones: around 7 am, Sydney time, which is 2 pm Pacific time, 10 pm UK time (midnight in Finland, so Dave is unlikely to attend). By donation, weekday or Sat (in Oz). Sign up by emailing me with subject “Oz Meet.”

A special meet for those interested in exploring Christian questions. Note, I am not a Christian so this might seem a bit audacious, but I am sure that, if enough Christians or Christian-leaning souls attend, I will keep to the straight and narrow. By donation, probably around noon Pacific time, weekday. Sign up by emailing me with subject “Liminal Christian Meet.”

Regular weekly affinity group for regular (or new) attendants of Dave Oshana events, Wednesday at 9 am Pacific, 5 pm UK time. Free. Email me if interested.