By Dave Oshana & Jasun Horsley
As the above credit line suggests, today’s blogpost is another new departure. It attempts to take one step closer to synthesizing two sensibilities and perspectives, light and dark, enlightened and unenlightened, or perhaps, sensory and cognitive. This week, I have used notes from the last Oshana online event, “Paradise Lost, Eden Regained: The Disassociation and Return of Human Empathy,” as a crystal matrix out of which to grow my own essay. The piece is also a launchpad for the next online live Liminalist meet-up event, probably for Mon 27th April at 1 pm PT, 4 pm ET, 9 pm UK time, and 6 am Tuesday, Oz time. Contact me directly if you are interested.
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The nature of the enterprise at Auticulture is to discover and implement new and efficient ways of being. If we are to make it aboard the Starship Enterprise, we must be willing to let our senses boldly go where our cognitive faculties have never gone before. That’s the first job requirement. That is the prime directive.
Agencies of Discord
From a sensory perspective, our bodies are made up of bags of liquid. When we hear sound, it shakes our skulls and massages our brains. People go to rock concerts for an extreme version of what is really the most mundane and constant experience: to hear a voice vibrating inside of us.
What does Hell look like from the outside? This is where all of the mapping has led us. We have been fascinated for months, maybe years, maybe decades, with the contours of our cosmic jail cell, the mind’s conception of infinity that imprisons us. So what about the view from the outside? Are we ready for that?
The nature of trauma-based mind control is to combine extreme shocks to the nervous system with spoken language to reconfigure the neurons within the body, and turn it into a “program”: a carrier for originary trauma-sound waves. This turns us into replicators (and/or replicants) of trauma, reproducing it in and as forms of behavior that are deemed useful to agencies of discord.
There is a large spectrum of sound which the human body in its natural state is capable of receiving. For most of us, this natural state is something we only experience as babies, if then. When we experience some of those wavelengths in tandem with a traumatic experience—pain—we start to associate that “octave” with the trauma, and block it from our awareness. We erect amnesia barriers and our psyche becomes fragmented, giving rise to “alters.”
We become victims of “mind control.”
Yet this perception of fragmentation is itself the perspective of the fragment. The Map of Hell is the territory we call “hell.” Outside of mapping, there is no such thing as Hell; consciousness is by its nature a continuum that cannot be “mapped,” fragmented, or mind-controlled.
We are tricked into self-isolation and lockdown by the idea of a “virus” called original sin.
Internalized Voices
If as infants or young children we hear a particular tone of voice coming from someone who traumatized us, we will thereafter associate that tone with trauma. Whenever we hear a similar voice, our body goes into a fight-or-flight-or-freeze-or-faint reaction. We dissociate, tune out the voice, and supplant it with our own interior voice to drown out the discordant sound.
This is a way for abusers to fuse their voice with our internal voice and so “possess” us—to install their consciousness, like a viral program, inside us. This is something I became aware had happened to me with my brother: I had internalized his critical voice. Seeing this was the second turning point for me as a writer, with Paper Tiger, followed by “How Am I Not Myself?” (a long piece on Philip K. Dick), and finally, Seen & Not Seen. The first turning point, looking back, was in the period between meeting Dave Oshana and meeting my wife, in early 2008. This was when I was working on “Thru a Fractured Glass, Darkly,” a long analysis of Whitley Strieber. The piece was sparked by the cognitive dissonance of first hearing Strieber’s voice, the discord I felt between his writing and speaking voice.
At the same time, while Strieber’s voice repulsed me, and hence alerted me that something was wrong, it also fascinated me, hypnotized me. I listened to countless hours of Strieber over the subsequent years, as my investigation proceeded, eventually culminating with Prisoner of Infinity. This was not only for research, but because I found his weirdly unnatural, faintly hysterical tone of voice deeply relaxing—something that was and remains a mystery to me. Somehow, though at a conscious level I find Strieber’s voice repellent, my nervous system has positive associations with those particular tones and rhythms.
The Thing We Are Missing
The thing that we are missing is when we lost the treasure.
What if enlightenment is not, as I used to believe, awareness of the vast cosmos out there, but of the smallest, almost infinitesimal impressions of the body, such as the movement of liquid between the vertebrae of the spine? What if I have been seeking in all the wrong places? This is why, when I first met Dave, he did not measure up to my ideas about enlightenment: because I had my own cosmically inflated quasi-experiences of “galactic consciousness,” and Dave was embodying something immeasurably subtler and more grounded, something found in and through the senses, not the mind.
The mind is really the easiest thing to expand, as contrasted with an expanded heart or expanded senses. In fact, these deeper expansions may be even harder to achieve, once the mind has flown off into an imaginary infinity.
Not all experiences are encoded in language. Anyone who has ever tried to write a novel knows that some of the simplest, tiniest movements, of the face and body say, or unique features of a landscape, often refuse to submit to language. Things we experience daily and yet lack the language to describe. These things can take an enormous amount of verbiage, clumsily arranged, to even begin to capture. Even the best novelist depends on the reader’s visualization skills, and looks for simple phrases that will stimulate them, so the reader’s imag-ination does most of the heavy lifting.
This is also how cult indoctrination and “mind control” work. The matrix is generated via a combination of our life force with our sleeping imagination.
Words will not get us into the zone (out of the prison pods). The only thing that will get us into the zone is going back to the early learning and perceptual capacities we had as babies. This is the treasure that was trained out of us. As children, we knew how to make ourselves heavy when we didn’t want to be picked up, or wanted to make the experience more enjoyable. We knew how to be in our bodies and redistribute our consciousness so as to alter our wieldiness, and even our weight.
These are not “siddhis”; this is not sorcery. This is simply a matter of sensory openness that allows us to receive wave forms, a receptivity that determines the quality of our lives. Every particle is also a wave.
When babies are placed away from their mothers after birth, they reach out and find their mothers gone and their bodies go into shock. In a similar way, when we are grieving, we may awake and remember that a loved one is gone forever, and feel that shock of remembrance in our bodies. We are split into two: in one life we are connected to the loved one, as if they are still with us; in another, we feel only their absence.
This kind of dis-integration of consciousness from the life force occurs early, and it leaves us with the perennial unease of knowing we have lost something, yet not knowing where it is or how to find it—or even what we have lost.
So it is that a Map of Hell (the trauma imprint that causes alienation from the senses) becomes a living Hell.
On Facebook, No One Can Hear You Scream
As a child, Dave remembers feeling progressively less and less happy as he grew older, wondering where it would end. I remember the same. I even recall the very moment in which the full weight of existential unhappiness landed on me. It occurred in a moment of intense happiness. I was on my way to Hull fair, filled with excitement, when the realization hit that soon, we would be returning and it would all be over. An awareness of the future destroyed the joy of the present moment. I realized, in that moment, that nothing was real.
As humans, we have undergone a breakdown in empathy. For a baby, empathy means simply connecting to what is good and necessary. The problem appears when something unwholesome happens that causes us to shut down, after which we enter into a world of inner narratives.
It only takes one bad note to create an echo that ripples through our subsequent lives, until we are constantly hearing that same discordant sound. It is like a finger up our butthole that we have tightened the sphincter around so it can’t withdraw itself. But the finger, as they say, is not the moon.
It is—or will be—a shocking moment when we no longer have contact with the body. It is also shocking to consider that moment as an unavoidable one in our future: the moment when we go, boldly or not, into the unknown, where our physical senses can no longer follow.
At the same time, we experience separation from our body when our consciousness is shocked and withdraws from the physical. So here is Blake’s fearful symmetry at work: shock separates consciousness from the body, and the experience of being separated from the body is shocking to consciousness. This potentially creates an exponentially discordant feedback loop of shock and awe.
When human bodies are shocked at early ages, and/or in the womb, it prevents consciousness from entering all the way into the body. Our awareness gets only as far as our heads, creating “people” who live inside a fantasy bubble and who are unable to perceive existence through their senses. The world is now full of bodies that have been shocked into separating from consciousness—or prevented from ever possessing it—all trying to pull others into their isolate fantasy worlds.
These become active agents of influence, and of discord.
Dark & Light & the Babel Effect
As an example of such disembodied head-centrics, uninterested in full-body connections, Dave mentioned some of the commenters at this blog. This has also been my recent experience here, with one or two commenters. Such “heady” commentaries are more common at YouTube, however, such as the following, posted after my recent live talk about life in Hope in the time of covid-19:
Inte Dinensak 1 day ago (edited): Oh, Don’t go towards the light, it’s a trap! He who sits in the dark is the bringer of light. Light is something you bring in, not go towards. And the virus is very much real. It was released on purpose and it was allowed to spread world wide. So it’s not either or, it is both. Armageddon / Yawm al-Qiyāmah might be internal, But the apocalypse is external. The rest I agree with. Brace for impact! The crash has not even happened yet, this is just the beginning of the ushering.
I had to look up the Arabic phrase:
According to Islamic tradition, Yawm al-Qiyāmah (“the Day of Judgement”) is believed to be God’s (Allāh) final assessment of humanity. The sequence of events (according to the most commonly held belief) is the annihilation of all creatures, resurrection of the body, and the judgement of all sentient creatures. It is a time where everyone would be shown his or her deeds and actions with justice.
This “ID” came in headfirst and concepts-waving. When they speak of light and dark, Armageddon and apocalypse, assuming they are not enlightened, they are speaking not experientially but conceptually. They are talking not just with but about words. By light, for example, they don’t mean it literally (I am pretty sure this person doesn’t sit in perpetual darkness and shun the sunlight, though we can’t rule it out entirely). Nor, presumably, do they mean it the way I mean it, in metaphorical human terms, equating with wholeness, health, benevolence, kindness, compassion, love, and life, since I imagine it’s even less likely that they conscientiously avoid these things than that they avoid sunlight. What they mean by “light” and “darkness,” then, is something that has no correspondence in physical reality or in human experience, but is meaningful only as a metaphysical concept.
The basis of their connecting—words that refer only to concepts—is itself disconnected from reality. Even to try and address their points, as I did at first, before I cast my own efforts into the outer darkness of footnotes[1]), is to become lost in a maze of unmeaning. This was also my experience with the commenter at this blog who I rather rudely “banished” recently, like Cain.
Language that refers to concepts is like printed money with no gold behind it—or a tower that aims to reach heaven. It’s a recipe for collapse.
The Pursuit of Memory
For our consciousness to fully incarnate depends on healthy conception, healthy gestation (womb-life), a natural birth, and a loving and nurturing infancy and childhood. It’s safe to say that no one currently alive enjoyed such a smooth entry to this planet. All of us here left much of ourselves behind; and many have arrived here with next to nothing.
The extent to which any of these stages of incarnation are compromised reduces the opening for consciousness to descend through and into form. What we are, as consciousness, gets diminished with each contraction of the nervous system; each narrowing of that perceptual bandwidth shuts down the senses by which we are able to perceive and connect to reality, contracting the musical scale on which our souls can harmonize. The further we are reduced, the more confined we are to the tiny head-space behind our eyes, the greater our sense grows of a lost treasure or garden of earthly delights.
The mind interprets experience always through reference to the old—maps that describe the territory—making everything a repeat of what came before, that we evaluate according to how well it measures up to our expectations and desires. We are constantly trying to get something from existence. Whether by fantasy or reenactment, or both, we are seeking to stir a memory that is locked inside our nervous systems. When we have sex, we conjure image-memories or previous delights and then try to repeat them. Addicts get hooked on drugs because they are a way to return, again and again, to the same feelings and sensations.
Our addiction to second-hand memories of experiences we once had but cannot recreate goes all the way back to the memory of the womb. Being in the womb was as close as most of us ever got to being in conscious harmony with existence while still having a body. Naturally, we are seeking to get back to that lost paradise (even if it wasn’t that great, as in my case): eating comfort food and watching Netflix; getting shitfaced; smoking marijuana; taking heroin or fentanyl; trying to lose ourselves in porn, or in mechanical, compulsive sex. Whatever shuts down our creativity, provides relief from the abyss of the infinite unknown that our senses, once fully open, open onto. The urge to merge with our mother’s body (return to the womb) is the flip side of the death wish. Thanatos, meet Eros.
Am I looking to relive memories, or am I looking to leave all memories behind and enter into an unknown infinity? Can I relinquish the memories that define me? How seriously do I take myself? How much weight is there on the words “I,” “me,” and “mine” when I speak about myself as if I were real? Do I believe it? Do you?
If it sometimes seems that Dave has no interest in affirming things he has said when people repeat them back to him, it is because he has no desire to reward anyone for regurgitating things they have heard in the past. Anything that our minds are saying about ourselves, any belief, is a hypnotic statement. It is a set of sounds, a programmed sequence, an echo of a traumatic affect.
Love Fields & Shit Streams
Psychic fragmentation due to trauma corresponds closely with the dis-integration of the life force within the body, by which our separate parts become “balkanized,” like independent nation states with tightly controlled borders. Since our consciousness never makes it into our bodies, we may never fully recognize this, in ourselves or in others.
What if every part of someone’s body has a mind of its own? What if, when we interact with others, our different body parts are also interacting so that, like Forrest Gump’s chocolate box, we never know who we are going to get? What we are experiencing is discordance: the impossibility of agreement, because no one can even agree on what they believe, because they have no integrity, no coherence, within themselves.
The only solution to this is connection. If we are able to connect to a body’s life force, however little of it there may be, we can amplify it and kick start the soul back into motion. Bringing our consciousness to what a person truly is, brings their consciousness to it also, so they can have a new experience of themselves. This requires us to see past the discordance, past the trauma, to the potential. Love is a field that draws the best of a person out of them.
On the other hand, it also draws their toxins out, since, for a person to be at their best, they have to be clear of all toxins, all discordance. When a body’s love field is working, it draws in whatever that body needs. When it’s not, the person becomes harder to love and they don’t draw in the help they need. They appear as increasingly unlovable. Many of my customers in the thrift store fit this bill, and it often feels like a heroic task for me to love them just enough to allow them to be the way they are, and not chase them away with a broom.
Most humans are shutting down each other’s love fields rather than amplifying them, because the toxins coming off are too overwhelming. The shit of the other that gets stirred up by our attention is too much for us to swallow, so we shut down before the love can start to flow. We end up with nothing but shit, with our eyes and mouths tightly sealed, sitting downstream from a seemingly endless ancestral line of arseholes.
The Final Convergence
Though everyone has, or once had, a love field around them, the more the different parts of our being enter into disharmony, the more the love field around human bodies disintegrates and becomes discordant. This is why, or how, the human race is dying: through the retraction of the human spirit, like how a limb dies and falls off once blood no longer goes to it.
In 2020 we have 7.8 billion bodies, emptied of consciousness, drained of juice. We have people running around that are really programmed automatons, a system running inside the body in place of conscious life force energy. (This is Dave’s enlightened version of what I once attempted to formulate as Aeolus Kephas, in the final Stormy Weather episode in March 2009: “The Sorcerers’ Revelation.” I attempted again recently while talking with Cedomir for The Liminalist.)
What’s the solution? What is required is a mutually incremental process of boldly going where we have not gone before, past our conceptual boundaries, into new and creative ways of being. Others can, and naturally do, follow suit.
What existed before the pain body was the love body. All sickness is the body’s attempt to regain health. If “love is pain” (and “the light is a trap!”), it’s only because nothing hurts so much as a love that’s betrayed, and nothing causes us to shut down our love field so effectively as pain. Hence we have a trauma-based world. Dave has said that his presence makes us aware of our pain; it is that pain that leads us back to the love body, the pain of awakening.
We can’t solve ten thousand years of history-as-nightmare. We can’t redeem endless darkness or map Hell forever. At some point, we have to trust our senses and start moving towards the light of the exit. Can we move collectively forward into a “harmonic convergence” of mutual love and respect? First, all our senses have to be open—this much is non-negotiable—until we have no more discordance within ourselves. The next harmony is between individual souls—neurons in the collective body of humankind. The third convergence is with Nature. The fourth and final convergence is with the Infinite.
To try and skip any of these stages is to try to reconnect to the divine while bypassing our bodies, our interdependency with one another, and our inseparability from Nature. It is to seek an expanded mind while staying out of the unmapped expanses of heart, body, and soul. It means to take the discordant traumatic implant of identity into eternity, and become a prisoner of infinity.
Do we really want to live and languish indefinitely on a dog-eared, coffee-stained old map called hell, when heaven is all around us?
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[1] They are referring to a map (Hell) and not the territory (the Garden). Hence the light is “a trap” and the darkness is the thing to head towards in order to bring light into it. If we were to stay at the head-level of philosophical concepts, I would agree with this person (and such “agreement” is the basis, even the condition, of their connecting), since they are echoing my own views from ten or twenty years ago. And their comment is meaningful in one sense: it underlines why some of my readers or listeners have been suspicions of Dave Oshana and of my turn towards “the light” (enlightenment). They see this new departure as a trap, but what they fail to consider is that the greatest trick of the dwellers of darkness is to convince us that, since fake light has been so widely disseminated, all that resembles light is fake, and that the darkness is where truth is found. They have tricked themselves into dwelling in endless darkness. Funnily enough, in a certain sense, they are right: the light is found in the apparent darkness of the body, where consciousness has not yet gone to. But the juxtapositioning of light and darkness is itself a mental conceptualization of something that, until it becomes experiential, condemns us to the darkness of a hungry arsehole and/or to the fake light of an inflated/expanded ego-mind.
The next online Oshana event is “Access Heaven, Unite Humanity,” on Sunday 26th April.
A Live Liminalist meet-up to delve deeper into the subject matter of today’s blogpost is currently scheduled for Monday 27th. Contact me directly if you are interested. This event will be by donation.
Cain likely never lived in the Garden of Eden, having inherited the family curse and multiplying it.
>”This is why Dave does not confirm his teachings when people ask him to: because we are always seeking approval by repeating things… ”
I reject conceptual regurgitation offerings as one would unclean rags.
>”Access Heaven, Change Humanity,” updated to ‘Access Heaven, Unite Humanity’.
>”By Dave Oshana & Jasun Horsley”
LOL! Further clarification:
“Contributors: Dave: love, light and mirth. Jasun: dark tones, tortured themes and lashings of pain.”
Your recent acts of choosing who gets on and off the Auti Ark makes better sense after reading this blogpost. You do a good job deconstructing tricky, twisty commentators.
Will reread your pithy, rock-hopping post.
Jasun, you pack so much into your writing that I need to pause often and decide whether or not to integrate the thoughts into my psyche. Some ideas are shelved for later examination, of course and others slip in unaltered.
I enjoy our talks when I come into your store, as brief as they are, because so many are in desperate need of a shopping experience.
This ushering in of a tiny nano particle, called a virus, a non-living entity has been able to show the world who we really are, at least when we are in panic mode, and it’s just the beginning. Wise people have already made plans. It’s unfortunate than many are not wise. Since this alone is recent news to me, I’ve stopped attempting to seek out the wise among us. Life is much easier that way. No expectations. I’ve asked several people whom I know, if they know anything about the Georgia Guide stones and they look at me like I must be from another planet. So after a few niceties I retreat into my books and my head. It’s much less discouraging to remain with head ducked in a world of poison arrows. Thank you once again.
We are a ‘body of sea water.’
“According to H.H. Mitchell, Journal of Biological Chemistry 158, the brain and heart are composed of 73% water, and the lungs are about 83% water. The skin contains 64% water, muscles and kidneys are 79%, and even the bones are watery: 31%.” “Up to 60% of the human adult body is water.”
According to the BBC: “The human body contains many salts, of which sodium chloride (AKA common table salt) is the major one, making up around 0.4 per cent of the body’s weight at a concentration pretty well equivalent to that in seawater.”
Jews have the salt market cornered with their popular “Kosher Salt.” I prefer sea salt, myself. Salary is said to come from the word, salt.
Pontius Pilate ordered the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Savior………
Pontius = Pontus = Sea
Pilate = Pilot
I enjoyed this blogpost!
Your path leads to to same place as Daves path,
but the weight of your intellect slows you down.
Everything Is Best
When Banzan was walking through a market he overheard a conversation between a butcher and his customer.
“Give me the best piece of meat you have,” said the customer.
“Everything in my shop is the best,” replied the butcher. “You cannot find here any piece of meat that is not the best.”
At these words Banzan became enlightened.
DG
No path. No, no. No path.
Wow, your answer confused me a lot!
First thought was:
No path? No way!
But if there is no path, how can there be a place?
So there is no place also…?
Everything moves on a path, willingly or not…panta rhei…
Which path is leaving hell then?
I Have to think more about your answer….
Do you see a path before you?
No. No path.
Very liberating!
Thank you
Brilliant.
“But the finger, as they say, is not the moon.” Wonderful homage to the one and onLee.
JaHo leveled up on wordsmithing with that iconic line. Finger wasn’t the only wordplay. Go figure.
My childhood was a hellscape. My parents hated each other, school was a prison filled with bullies, and my sister was a literal sociopath. The best thing remaining from that time was summer on my grandparents farm. Warm sunshine heat waves, buzzing insects, a warm breeze, cooled under trees, and no people around. Quiet. When I am stressed now, 50 years later, I journey back there, to heaven.
It seems to me that you are creating new shadows on the cave wall to try and get others to turn around and look outside the cave. A very hard task, specially since you are so good at making interesting shadows.
the notion in the paragraph under “the thing we are missing” was completely new to me. What if our many methods of becoming aware of the macrocosm are misunderstood by us? Are we actually penetrating the biological, physical microcosm? This would perhaps explain some peculiarities. Why do most yoga systems end up as fornication fests? Is Lululemon cooperating with this direction when it produced transparent yoga pants? Does this extend to the ufo field? The ascended masters who have become our wise space brothers would thus be expected to center alien abductions on rectal probes. The mind reels. I shall contemplate my navel, or something.
I think you need to realize that there are always two views to things, by which I mean, Self and Being, Eternity and Time, The Sun and Moon; yes, the underlying reality is being, but Being, as God, is basically the template former, and if you are to engage in the process correctly, you have to map the template in your cognitive, conceptual mind.
Keep in mind, the external world already transcends our bodies, which means it shares a very basic relationship with the ego: they are both transcendental, and thus, both are able to meet upon the same stillness that breathes through the cosmos. The scaffold metaphor is useful here, but it can give one the impression that after the building is erected, we can throw away the scaffold just like the way we do when we build buildings. On the contrary, the scaffold is more like the molecular and structural dynamics of the cell, which leads to the regular control of the genetic components of the cell. That is, the controller – the gene – is itself controlled by the epigenetic mechanisms. The two processes meet at some invisible point between them.
Said otherwise, if feeling, and reasoning, are two sides of the semiotic process, then the true reality is something beyond conceptualization, yet a conceptualization, in both body (as feeling) and mind (as logical symbol), as a corporeal representation of connection-with-world, and a semantic reflection on the organisms-existence-in-the-world, are what hold up that deeper level of awareness.
In fact, shadow or unreal realities, realities borne from trauma that derives from our earliest moments of intersubjective development, are not something that can be outgrown. Indeed, if there is one logical rule of time and reality, it is this: the past cannot be undone. The past and its structure is a necessary constraint on the functioning of the semiotic animal in the present. The logic of their self-organization therefore follows times arrow. It must; the develop of the physical body and its continuity in time [i]necessitates it. [/i]
Please so not take this to imply that we cannot grow, because this is not what I mean. I mean that if you have personally been traumatized, then your perception of semiotic realities of a transcendental source – and therefore, of the enigma that is the non-temporal basis of existence – is likely to traumatize you, and your are also likely to become entrained by the semiotics of the ‘evil’ ones – or memes that move through our sociocultural dynamics that exist as “narratives” of reality that circulate between occultists, mystics, and other spiritual types. Since the experience ‘sits’ so strongly within the self, its sheer physical dynamism leads to the typical result of making a person dissociated, or depersonalized, from being an individuated self in the world. Complementarity between the spiritual, non-temporal experience of self, and the individuated, temporal self, which forms from realities interactions, is an always, continuous reality. The primary self is attuned to its senses and therefore to reflexive corporeal representations of itself-in-the-world. An occultist, for instance, is the sort of type who cannot discern the difference between ‘being glued to-the-world’ in a primary feeling sense, and the normative sense where we reflect on ourselves-in-the-world, are both representational processes; that is, the body is ‘representing’ the geometrodynamical flux of its body-with-the-world; that is, a primary, temporal representation of reality exists in the very body we experience, and therefore this body holds the ‘meaning’ of our being-in-the-world.
Next is simply to reflect and notice that the honing of this perceptual, affective awareness [i]depended on the perception and deduction of the connection between myself and the world. [/i] That is, the lower reality ‘supports’ the higher reality; self complements, not completely symmetrically, but still sufficiently, the coherent [i]meaning of the world. [/i]
This is why understanding reality in the mode of ‘other’, as ‘fundamental other’, is such a fundamental precept implied by realities structure: when you can acknowledge the morbid feelings we have and the conceptual confusions it can give rise to – not necessarily in you, but in a person suitably disposed to be taken in by a false narrative – that the breakdown of language, the disparaging of language, and the loss in a sense of a very real importance to things (externally), feelings (in the body) and concepts (in the mind), when operating in a tight circuit, correlate us to the essence of things, which of course, is about a feeling: it is not apocalyptic, or deadened, or denigrating language, or failing to see the complementarity which realities structure literally manifests from the three quarks at the center of a boson to the nucleon/electron relationship which creates every atom, to the structural coupling between a cell and the nutrients (as attractors) and toxins (as repulsors) in its environment, we are in a dance with nature, which is also a dance with ourselves.
The self, an awe, is always the guide; this is where what I term “self”, which is an experience-of-a-state-of-self, and hence, qualifies as a self, acts as the framework and template which the mystery of finitude, of form, imposes its life-giving structure.
The Other is thus very Big; it is the physical world itself, the magistrate of the human being. We fuck ourselves, to put it bluntly, when we resist the truth that the world is God, and God, because the only meaning of life we can have is one which derives from a coherent conceptual attunement to the World, via a conceptual attunement to our bodies. The world thus gives us life, and if we are smart, and not being led by our fears, anxieties, and other attachments, we will just say, I think the world knows best.
Somewhere along here I did mention epigenetics – and if not, I’ll talk about it now. Epigenetics is the process by which molecular markers such as methylation and demethylation of histones, DNA guanine methylation, and acetylation of histones, among other processes, make specific DNA sequences ‘exposed’ to the surrounding gamma wave radiation (which derives from the big bang) and thus causes the cell to mutate in ‘random’ ways. This process is governed by systematic attachments between organism and its environment; for a cell, if glucose is present, then the glucose is gene is flicked to ‘on’ by the epigenetic environment (which itself is continuous with the nutrients/toxins in the environment). If glucose is gone, then the cells own intrinsic biodynamism will lead to the spontaneous flipping of an ‘on’ switch, in which, for instance, the search-for-galactose will click on. If the environment has galactose, good for the cell; if not – and nature always seems to produce nots – it will become naturally ‘deselected’. Nature kills, but it kills for the purpose of promoting the most coherent structures.
Now, if we apply this perception of order in the external, physical world, to the way we govern our embodied-relations-with-the-world, and understand the feeling state as a semiotic state, or an ‘object’ with significance for the mind, then mind, or the observer within, is the third part in a three part relation between body-world (as feeling state), conceptual reflection within ones language-based-semiotics (itself a fundamental network for meaning to form), and the observer within, beyond all structure. We can also add the physical world as an abstract object, as ‘container’, but that would seem to make things too abstract, ignoring the fact that the body reports the authentic importance of this connection. Be that as it may, the physical world, as a visual percept (and audition, tactility, and kinesthesia, offer their own version of it, but with less resolution) informs us that symmetry matters, so we better take our eyes very seriously, because seeing is indeed believing, and what our eyes show us is not a lie, but a metaphor of the eternal truth of things. Symmetry petrifies, or disturbs, those who engage in political games, and subscribe to a dualistic order which is dualistic by virtue of the non-acceptance, or semiotic dissociation, of the orthogonal relationship between feeling as sign, and the reflecting, language based mind as sign. The two cannot be aligned, and thus behavior cannot be effectively guided, without the conceptual clarity, or semiotic pronouncement, that meaning matters; As so: “meaning matters”. The words I use matter, and so, as I convey my feelings to you accurately, its because of my words being useful reporters. It is because the animality of my social body, my feelings, are being properly named and tamed by the right sorts of concepts, by a truthful connection with reality, because my mind is operating along the right constraints.
Anyone who is organized by love is doing that; but the saint, lets say (and this is the only word I can think of; please don’t hold it against me) is a person who is allowing his feelings to be corrected, if necessary, by reflective processes.
Since the world is always so messy, so unpredictable, so unknown-until-it-happens, we are always needing to adjust, and hence, to invoke the conceptual constraints which keep us aligned with the flow of things. This means the self is always necessary; in fact, it is this experience of selfhood which gives life its meaning – its “selflyness”; it is when we live within the world, knowing our source, and our deepest nature, that the self is working properly, and we can therefore feel the right feelings in the world.
I should add, the person organized by love but without the guidance of reason, or who does not submit himself to the evidence of the physical world itself (as reported by the eyes primarily, but not totally; all senses matter), is a person who becomes bifurcated between acting for the good of the other, and acting for the good of the self despite telling oneself the dissociative fib that they are really acting rightly. Logically speaking, since disagreement exists, it must be that someone is wrong; it needn’t mean, and although its often taken to mean in todays nihilistic world, that everyone is wrong, because there is no conceptual truth. But such a person is a sloppy reasoner, deriving from them having a sloppy connection to their phenomenological experience of being-a-self-in-the-world. Every word in that hyphenated mega word matters. Being, A, Self, etc, refers to a real contributing dimension to the experiences we all have. It is a complex network.
Hmmmm so much headiness. NOT a complaint, a mere observation that at some point, my eyes and heart ears glaze over. BUT reading about the incarnation not fully taking place if trauma was early, I flashed back to when I first heard about this. Anecdote ahead: I used to go very often to a Catholic cemetery in my town near San Francisco. Many family members buried there. I paid homage but mostly went to commune with the profound energy I found there. I would go to sit in a chair, deep inside the Mausoleum (which also doubled as a church because Mass was said in the middle of the Mausoleum each Saturday). This chair was situated next to a statue of the Virgin Mary. I would meditate there. One day I reached out to hold her hand. Right after I did so I “heard” her say to me: “You are not fully incarnated in your body.” What??? What did that mean? I then “saw” (inner vision) that “I” had only come down to about my navel. I then saw that I was being “run”. by the DNA of my mother and the DNA of my father like an automaton. I saw how both of their DNA converged in me and I was pretty much running on this, unconsciously. She (BVM) wanted me to see this. The way out of this situation was for me to become completely cooperative with the Divine Impulse. To align my will with the will of the Divine expression TRYING to express through my body/mind and only then would I really be “myself” as intended. I have attempted to grok this and only since I returned to the Catholic church in January of 2019 have I really fully come alive. I have had so many “mini-mirs”. ( some small some big miracles) that I have begun to write them down. I will be in morning contemplative prayer and suddenly an influx of LIFE comes in to my body and I will feel as if I am floating in a sea of joy. Tears of joy come and I just feel incredibly close and intimate with Christ. I can ask questions and an answer will come, many times in the form of a memory. Then the rest of the day will be filled with outer confirmation in the form of synchronicities that are so abundant that I am constantly chuckling to myself and simply buoyed up into gladness and gratitude. PLUS I am very healthy, my body feels full of health and vigor. I really relate to St. Augustine when he says: “Enter into the Joy of the Lord!” To which I say “Amen brother!” So I can relate also to part of your article about what being not fully incarnate felt like and what it feels like NOW is so different. Big part of my transcending being run on parental DNA was to forgive them FULLY and loving them almost as if I were the parent now and they were a little bit wayward, but incredibly precious, children. Peace.
There is a conspicuous massing of religiously interested on nearly every page of this blog. Time for communion, JaHo?
Those who put their Christianity front and center of their identities make a belief in salvation something to be saved from… A tricky enterprise.
Can there be communion where there’s dogma?
That’s only one kind of Christian. I sense there are different kinds here. There are also some monotheists, people of The Book and anti-Anti-Christs.
yet at the end of The Day, there are only souls with outworn identity tags.
A very different set of conversations will happen on that day. Blog-in-transition.
Well I can sure see how some people might question whether there can be communion if they think about christianity. For me, Christianity is the form with which I commune with the All in All. Just as a surfer surfs a wave in the Ocean. Some people might swim in the ocean, some people might fish on the ocean, some people might sail or drown in the ocean. I did not choose Christianity, it chose me. I was going along, having my own private depression and angst and all of a sudden “I was overcome by a Presence and the powerful movement of Unconditional love that smithereened me body/ psyche/ emotion and soul which completely revolutionized me. I don’t need a dogma. You see, nobody “converted” me. by a teaching or a system or a satsang or a dharma you see? No Advaita ( followed an Advaitist Advahoot for 13 years). no Zen practice. Nothing like that. A PERSON, interfered with my life. I have a relationship. Communion? OF course communion, why NOT? There IS no “them”. It is al ONLY us. I see no obstacle to communion. I preach no dogma. I only report what I’ve seen and heard and done. Your mileage may vary. It’s all limitless see? Boundaries are illusionary and can be overcome in a flash of recognition eh? Like “I’ve know you forever!” You’ve been my dearest intimate FOREVER. There has never been a time when I did not know you. There has never been a time when I did not love you. Look for dogma if you must. I”m just grateful.
Trudy: Can I ask how you came upon this blog? A lot gets lost when we rely on language, but for me the many grand statements, the use of capitals for emphasis, and the insistence of the delivery seem to contradict the spoken meaning of the message. So on this end, it doesn’t feel like an invitation to dialogue, much less any sort of communion. This could be a superficial thing, however, based on different styles of communication; I can’t tell, which is why it might help to know what brought you here, and what you are hoping to experience by commenting.
Ah. all good questions! You know, I was asking myself that yesterday? How the heck did I get on to this blog or website? I really can’t remember, honestly. Isn’t that a thing…. I guess my capitals come from thinking as I type, how I would sound if we were sitting together over a cup of coffee. I just naturally tend to be an exuberant person, if I’m to be honest. Honest, is what I always try to be. Too exhausting to be anything else. What am I hoping to experience, as I comment? Jasun, I can’t say, other than to say I think we are all expressions, and we transmit who we are. I think what happens is that I read or hear something (or some ONE, hopefully, such as yourself) and enter into dialog. I love connection at the level of real. I bet you do too. This medium is difficult. I bet also that if we WERE sitting over a cup of coffee (there goes those caps again) we’d connect more via eye contact and get the truth of each other. if you prefer that I leave or unsubscribe I certainly can. I remember hearing…..oh that’s it….I remember hearing on a podcast this blog, but how I came across THAT, i’ve no memory. But I heard it and thought it was quite intriguing, that is how I came to subscribe. But if i’m not of the sort you are looking for in subscribers, I can easily unsubscribe. No harm, no foul, as my husband would say. As a matter of fact, perhaps I will take that route. I’ve been too much Martha, not enough Mary anyway lately. (Christian reference about the two sisters). Someone said on this blog that there are many kinds of Christians and boy is that ever true. There are the Christians (?) like the Westboro Baptist church people crazy with hate and then there are Christians like St. Philip of Neri, crazy with joy. Thank you for thoughtful dialog and respectful questions.
You are quite welcome here, Trudy. My aversion to Christians who lead with their belief extends to all other forms of ideology also: I find that conceptual frameworks for experience are like prophylactics that may make people feel safer but prevent real contact – which makes me feel less safe, and a bit impatient. I want to meet YOU, not your beliefs, arguments, or your experiences, just the raw you that, as you allow, is wandering around entering into strange encounters with familiar/unfamiliar souls wondering how we got here.
My view on being a Christian, in a nutshell, is that it’s not up to us to say if we are or not.
Trudy’s experience is also a message to you, Jasun.
I wonder if water has anything to do with beginners mind?