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 8 Jul 2008 @ 15:35
The middle man is that which stands between you and the source. The middle man is the doctor, the medium through which one attempts to communicate with and care for one’s body. The middle man is the news media, the medium through which most people get their ideas about events in the world around them. The middle man is one’s mind, the medium through which one attempts to perceive one’s environment. The middle man is the priest, the rabbi, the imam, the supposed mediums through which one may access the divine.
The middle man’s worth is expediency. In other words, he saves us time and energy…or at least, he should. The news media filters out all of the ‘insignificant’ events in the world so that we do not have to travel throughout the globe, witnessing all events and having to decide for ourselves what’s significant. The doctor has spent at least seven or eight years in fervent study of the body. He knows what amino acids are and he knows what your spleen does. He knows your vehicle better than you do. The mind acts almost completely similar to the news media, filtering out events of which you do not need to be aware so as not to bog down your consciousness with trivialities. The priest knows exactly where you may find your Higher Self.
The middle man inevitably begins to appear a lot like the Demiurge in the Gnostic myth. The Demiurge is a false god, falsely believing that anything he creates come from himself, not knowing that things only emanate from the Father, the true God. The doctor believes that he creates your body, or at least, creates your body’s health. The truth is that you can create your body’s health, and that you merely delegate this power to him. All will be rainbows and sunshine if the doctor is decent, lucid and able—he will make your body happy. But if he were truly all of these things, his aim would not be your continued dependence upon him. His aim would not be your continued existence as a stupid, weak and disempowered child. His aim would be to gently push you towards being comfortable with allowing the Source to flow through you, i.e. his aim would be education rather just maintenance.
There is a saying in Zen Buddhism, “If you meet a Buddha on the road, kill him!” The meaning of this saying is obvious: even a Buddha can ultimately be an obstacle to obtaining truth for oneself. In a real world setting however, it could far more rewarding to sit with the Buddha a while, make a decision as to whether to trust him, and ask him if he would be so kind as to point to the truth. One could go to every door in the world and never know that the truth was actually just next-door. A Buddha could really save one some time.
Middle men seem to be particularly destructive when it comes to truth and divinity. Geoffrey Filbert writes in Excalibur Revisited that when L. Ron Hubbard ran the so-called Power Processes, Hubbard never actually “flattened,” or finished, the one that reads, “Tell me a Source.” Hubbard stopped at a half-truth, Self as Source, and never arrived at the other side, i.e. Self as not-Source. It’s interesting then that Hubbard and his church began to posit themselves more and more as the Middle Man when it came to scientology technology, going as far as to attempt to copyright the truth that had been obtained through years of arduous research by many, many gifted people. Geoffrey Filbert, in typically brilliant fashion, knew the higher truth and went about copyrighting and freely publishing that which the church attempted to own and conceal from the public. Geoffrey Filbert killed the Middle Man.
Max Sandor wrote recently in his blog that “there are strong indicators that the BASIC GLUE of non-optimal behavior patterns, some call it 'case', may in fact be based on what falls under the heading of the fuzzy word 'vanity.’” Through the lens of vanity, one could come to a better understanding of the problem of the middle man. Who cannot identify with a need to be needed? Whether it’s a friend, a child, a nation or a student that is in need of you or your expertise, it feels pretty damn good to know that you helped that entity reach a higher ground. Maybe it felt too damn good. It doesn’t take long to look into one’s environment and discover a mother or father who, because of vanity, has deliberately engineered his or her child to remain in constant need of his or her care. The need to be needed is the need to be Source. But, as was mentioned above, the truth is that everything is Source…and yet nothing is Source! It’s just another game, an extremely fun and rewarding one if one has the ability to play both sides (the definition of pan-determinism). It feels great to be needed and it feels different, but just as great, to be in need. There should no seriousness there, just a spirit of play.
It’s worth noting that a middle man, if he or she is not the truly nurturing, educational-type, will begin to produce the opposite of what he or she is supposed to offer. So parents, who are to some extent responsible for teaching their children how to survive, end up destroying their child’s capacity to survive independently of them. A doctor, if one were to take the multitude of pharmaceuticals he has prescribed for one, will end up destroying the body to which he has taken an oath to heal. A religious group will begin to suppress the truth, all in the name of truth, while offering lies to its adherents; all the while making it that much more difficult ‘to become whole again,’ (which comprises the real meaning of the word “religion”). The news media will claim to present unbiased coverage when the content of their reports is always anything but neutral. Could one imagine a world where before every newscast and on the front page of every edition of every newspaper there was this disclaimer, “According to principles ‘discovered’ by Alfred Korzybski, any content that you find here will inevitably amount to an abstraction, a half-truth. The word is not the thing. It is up to you, our viewers and our readers, to discover the whole truth for yourselves.”
There is a strong chance that one’s middle man will refuse to be killed. He has enjoyed the feelings of godliness he has gotten because you have needed him. “You want to kill me? How disrespectful! I have made you what you are. I HAVE CREATED YOU.” The truth is that you have trusted him, he has helped you. Perhaps you were once dependent upon him, but now you stand educated and you have gained your independence. You say, “Before, I almost regretted having to kill you. But now I am going to enjoy it.” More >
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 1 May 2008 @ 23:43
The plot of these dreams was that there was two elements that could not be one. It was inside the reality of these dreams that impossibility, a seemingly wholly intellectual notion, became a feeling... More >
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 27 Mar 2008 @ 05:18
Not really. I wasn’t born in what we Ohioans call “the county.” In fact, I lived only on the edge of it from the ages of seven to twenty-four. Yet, it is in my blood…and I forgot. More >
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 28 Aug 2007 @ 16:21
“Yes, sire.” One may be familiar with this form of address, which usually took place when a servant interacted with English royalty. Implicit within the address is an acknowledgment of the supposed divine nature of the royal personage, as the word “sire” means heavenly body or star. It’s in this way that the word “desire” means, at least etymologically, ‘away from heaven.’ If one posited that heaven was some vague refuge of pleasure, then this etymological ‘discovery’ offers little insight. However, posit that heaven is this case signifies Wholeness and the word “desire” becomes a key that unlocks truths about life and the pursuit of happiness.
Games are created through desire. One has to want the goal; one has to want to win for there to be a game. If one did not care in the least, no game would ever be created or played. And one cares because there is a lack. One has to be in some sort of a state of unwholesomeness to conjure the concern or desire that a game demands. Geoffrey Filbert once told me that with anything there is the positive and the negative…and then there is how much one really cares. In other words, there is the goal, the anti-goal and desire.
Is one innately deficient? To put it another way, does one have no choice but to care? One idea that may prove otherwise is the notion that a restricted state can only originate from a state of greater freedom. Ibn ‘Arabi, a Spanish Sufi, spoke much about the fact that determined things can only originate from non-determination. With this in mind, it could be said that one is actually innately Whole and that one creates deficits for oneself in some effort to participate in game play. From a certain perspective then, any belief that one is in any way deficient, and that one is need of anything, would amount to a LIE. This may explain the recent findings that Max Sandor published on his blog at sandorian.us. Max writes: “In short, ANY ATTACHMENT to a desired object will result in that object to go AWAY, and NOT to be attracted.” Perhaps this is because one’s Higher Self will not tolerate such a lie, the lie that one needs anything. Max goes on to mention a “winning strategy.” He writes: “Relinquish attachment to the positive pole and resistance to the negative and ACT as if the result wouldn't matter!” One ‘acts’ as if the result wouldn’t matter because the result really doesn’t matter! At least, it doesn’t matter as far as one’s eternal happiness is concerned.
It’s been my experience that whenever I find myself attached to something, there appears a Voice that demands my flight from it. It’s as if this Voice will not tolerate such a substandard condition as being in need; it seems it cannot stand my harboring such a false belief in the face of Reality, the reality that I am Whole. Hate may begin to come into play as hate becomes a propellant. One may begin to hate that to which one is attached, as a means to better achieve a “freedom from” and thus ultimately a “freedom to.”
It seems everyone is engaged in the pursuit of Wholeness but it’s this wrong belief, the belief that it’s what’s “out there” that will bring one wholeness, that prevents them from truly achieving what they ultimately already have and ultimately already are. Deciding that heroin, sex, procreation, wealth, etc., will bring them everlasting happiness, they pursue these things of the world with uncontrollable fervor. Yet the most they can hope to achieve is temporary wholeness, a brief pleasurable union as they fall back and as the chase begins once again. In the Pali Canon, someone once asked Siddhartha Gotama why anyone would want to achieve Nirvana. He said essentially it’s because people shun woe and embrace weal. So once a person comes to fully understand that it’s no object of the world that will bring them true weal, and that there is a path that bears the potential to do so, they can shed their false ideas and look to that which may actually bring them eternal wholeness. But there is no reason why they couldn’t enjoy the temporary pleasures of the earth in the meantime!
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 9 Aug 2007 @ 14:44
Many people seem to be quite miserable on this planet, some more than others. Yet an interesting and for some a surprising feature of this misery is that when thoroughly examined, it seems it’s there because people want it to be there. People want to feel bad. This is quite obviously insane but as with any insanity, there is order to it, there is a noble spiritual goal in its midst. Gurdjieff commented on this seemingly strange state affairs when he said that man will give up his pleasure long before he’ll give up his pain. His contention was that perhaps this results from man’s desire to be noble. His explanation may be a specific instantiation of a more general truth: people want to be miserable because it’s beautiful. Aesthetics may answer the question of why people are seemingly drawn to pain, confusion, helplessness and failure.
I can remember being in class in college and announcing to the students around me that I had discovered the answer to the age-old paradox, the one that asks how God can create a rock He cannot lift. (For those of you unfamiliar with the paradox, if God can create a rock that He cannot lift, well, then He cannot lift it and He is thus not omnipotent. If God cannot create the rock, then He is obviously not omnipotent. This paradox presupposes that for God to be God, He must be omnipotent). My answer was that He could do it through a lie. He could create the rock, knowing full well that He is able to lift it. Then, He could “forget” or make Himself unconscious. He could somehow, through some mechanism, repress this knowledge. Outraged, the other students around me claimed that I had not solved the paradox because the ultimate result is that God is unable to lift the rock and is thus no longer omnipotent. False. He can lift the rock, He is still omnipotent but He can’t because He has chosen to forget or repress his ability. If God is omnipotent, He must also be completely free, free to choose whether or not to lift the rock.
This paradox is really a question of how a God may become a creation or how a God may become human. In “The Phoenix Lectures,” Hubbard describes just how this change may occur. He says it comes about through altering one’s creation. Yet simply practicing what he refers to as alter-isness does not necessarily cause one to lose control of one’s creation. It’s in altering a creation to the point that one’s role in the creative process goes out view that can make a God into a man. Hubbard discussed at length what he called The Legend of the Creator: persistence is created when a being alters a creation by postulating that it was in fact created by someone else. Such an action, making someone other than oneself responsible for one’s creations, brings about persistence as well as a plethora of experience that must be inherently foreign to a being with endless potential creative power. Weakness, desperation, helplessness, anguish, really a whole host of experiences and sensations become available to a being when it loses control over creation. It’s quite possible that this may explain why beings are ‘down here’ in the first place.
In his essay, “The Subtle Choking-Chains of Aesthetics,” Max Sandor suggests it is through the use of aesthetics, as an alter-isness of creation, that can make a god into a man. He writes: “How can an almighty Being with limitless potential degrade to a completely other-determined entity? The only way, it seems, was the voluntary attribution of an aesthetic to a 'lower' state of sensation.” Sandor is answering the paradox in the same way that I did above, except his answer is more specific. I said it could happen through a lie. He said that lie is aesthetics. He goes on to explain that when a being introduces or injects aesthetics into an event, terminal, phenomenon etc., this introduces high-frequency energy. Ultimately, this introduction obscures the so-called truth of the phenomenon and if one cannot see the truth of it, one certainly will not be able to control it. One ends up with a beautiful mystery, which may describe what life looks like to most inhabitants on this planet.
Spirits seem to have an innate attraction to beauty. They love it. When a being makes things like pain, loss, failure and misery beautiful, it has set quite the trap for oneself. When it introduces this high-frequency energy (aesthetics) into an event or terminal, it can no longer see how it may have created this event or terminal in the first place. The result is persistence of that particular condition. In the end, this means that an important step in restoring one’s power is developing the willingness to see life as less than beautiful.
As an example, I had a friend who according to my perception, had clearly become a weak, selfish and emotionally manipulative person due to decisions he had made in his childhood. Yet I can remember as I described the less-than-ideal conditions of my own childhood, he said to me, “I never had that experience. My parents were great. I had no problems.” In other words, he is telling me that he had a beautiful childhood. In my own life, I’ve noticed that in a recent break-up with my girlfriend, I was experiencing feelings of loss and longing. They were quite powerful, even paralyzing at times. Concurrently, these feelings were quite beautiful to me, stuff of which a million love songs have been written. When I ‘spotted’ the aesthetics in these feelings, the fact that I was creating them and desiring them would naturally come into view. Most of the time, I would choose to divorce these feelings from the aesthetics and the magnitude of the feelings would drop to almost nothing. Sometimes though I left the aesthetics there and simply enjoyed the beautiful sadness.
Standing behind the pursuit of truth and beauty (or lack thereof) is an inappropriate identification of certain goals with others. The average person seems to fear the truth as they fear it will destroy their beautiful life. They see the only way to create a beautiful life is through beautiful lies. They do not want to analyze the reality of their relationship with their spouse or the genuine intentions of their governments or their placement here in the physical universe because as they have charged these things with aesthetics, they naturally don’t want to see their work of art desecrated. The truth is that truth is destructive, but to build something with true foundation, one has to clear out any substandard structures first. So it seems that the ability to create beautiful truth is a sign of real spiritual maturity.
* Go to [link] for a great drill to get one in touch with one's use of aesthetics More >
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