Solo Moreno

Solo Moreno A Veces, La Verdad 2010-11-20T18:40:05Z User 522 http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v522/ OrgSpace NewsLog A New Koan: Pigs Can Fly

“I can’t believe THAT!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” said the Queen in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said, “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why sometimes I believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” ~ Alice In Wonderland

I taught music class the other day and for my Kindergarten class (6-7 yrs old),
we learned a nursery rhyme of sorts. One line in the nursery rhyme was "The pig
flew up in the air." Every single time we sang that line, there was immense
laughter and carrying on. Some of them would jump out of their seats they were
so excited by the image.

But why? They felt liberated by the impossibility of the idea. They knew the
nature of a pig. They knew that pigs possessed the innate inability to fly.
So, imagining an impossible thing shot them straight out the top of the Tone
Scale. They exteriorized from mind!

The name of the game here would seem to be literality. And the literality has everything to do with other-determinism. With the advent of literalism, everything has been already created, and a human's only power resides in listlessly re-arranging objects, like dead trinkets on a dusty shelf.

Many children do not suffer from this limitation. If one watches them play, it becomes obvious that their games are not pure imagination, but their games also do not involve pure physicality. They are a beautiful and exhilarating combination of the two. They LINK their imagination to the the physical world. Both are real to them. Interestingly, it seems easier for them to as-is their games when they are finished. There's no mess of MEST to push aside when they are done. Game over, game disappears.

There is one short but powerful process, more like an assist, that aims to dismantle literality. "Pick an object in the room. Tell me something that object could be."

Or just practice this koan: pigs can fly.

Oh Lord, from the mouths of babes. ]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v522/__show_article/_a000522-000022.htm 2010-11-20T18:40:05Z 2010-11-20T18:40:05Z The Sharpest Image

Why do we identify like objects when we know that each one is not the other, and that each is unique in space, in time, in essence? Here, in what Ibn 'Arabi called the sensible realm, and others call the finite universe of limited quantities,each man is that man, and not others; men are not "men," envelopes are not "envelopes," thoughts are not "thoughts," salutations are not "salutations." These identifications are empty, meaningless for the sole purpose of navigating an entire realm that is just as entirely meaningless. But we do this, pretending that an envelope is Just like the lie that Lincoln perpetuated, that the states were created by the Union, while the truth was otherwise. They are not known, and we do not become intimately acquainted with them individually, unto themselves but rather as an instantiation of a meaningless category. These arbitrary groups have no fundamental existence. What is alive, and what is connected to Source, is 'that' thing or 'this' thing.

These meaningless groupings and identification happen after the fact, or posteriori, i.e. after the individual things have been born into the world. Archetypes, or templates of creation, are not posteriori--they are a priori. They are present before birth, and never after. They themselves do not exist but are dark and only become illuminated and thus born, when God breathes through them, shining His Light behind their skeletal structures. Then that archetype arrives here, as itself but also different, as an individual object, either as a mere object in someone's personal universe or an object in the universe we all can see.

These archetypes are perfect,--perfect images. What makes them perfect?...

(To be continued...)]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v522/__show_article/_a000522-000021.htm 2010-09-11T17:48:26Z 2010-09-11T17:48:26Z Cartographers of No Man's Land

To take this or that turn, to form this relationship or that relationship, to thrust one's body toward the laboratory or the monastery...modifying all of that, are the machinations of the mind.

The mind itself does nothing. The mind is akin to the driver of a carriage. It is truly the horses that cover the distance. The driver can set direction and pace: to stop, to proceed, to turn left, to turn right. The mind--its ideas, conceptions, significances, associations, observations, lines of reasoning, computations--creates direction.

The mind receives information or signals from "out there"; think of the mind in that case as a camera that takes snapshots of the world "out there." From these snapshots, the mind commits its other functions, forms these snapshots into ideas, extrapolates, calculates, associates... But it all begins with snapshots of "out there." These snapshots function as an interface between a person and his or her reality. They are what passes from outside to inside.

It bears noting that a snapshot can never exhaust reality. Reality is much too broad, too deep for that. These snapshots are finite portayals of what is in its essence, infinite. The very word "perceive" means "through a filter." Some things come in, some things stay out.

Is the mind always and inevitably misleading then? By the same token, will the driver of a carriage always lead his passangers off of the edge of a cliff? Certainly not. Not if he is monitored and managed, scrutinized with an air of neutrality and clarity. Not if he is made to serve, rather than being made a master into which we put our most sincerest, and blindest faith.

These snapshots, or representations, or signals, are assumed to represent what is actually there, through passive reception. Gathering these impressions, we attempt to create a perfect reflection of what we see outside of ourselves. We attempt to craft a perfectly correlative model within our personal space of what is outside of our personal space. In short, we try to map the territory. We are the cartographers of no-man's land.

Yet, at some point, the mind no longer remains passive, it becomes active. No longer merely an instrument that receives signals of what's there, it decides what could ever be there. What one sees and does not see, becomes what one can ever see and cannot ever see.

Because from these snapshots, a person will form ideas about what to expect from reality. These ideas become fixed, or permanently held and consistently unchallenged. The person will cling to these fixed ideas about what is "out there."

This creates a feedback loop. A feedback loop is where the results of a process--that's the feedback--are fed back into the process whereby more results are gathered and fed back into the process. In our case, the mind draws in actualities. The contents of that reception, that is the feedback, the results of perception. Those signals are turned into fixed ideas about reality which are projected back upon reality, those projections are re-internalized, and so on.

This is what the Taoists called, "The mind becoming its own teacher." The mind first plays the role of the student, passively consuming information about reality. It then turns around and becomes the teacher of reality, telling itself what it can and cannot see. When the mind becomes both the student and the teacher of reality, much of reality can become...ignored.

Beyond missing out on much of what could truly be out there, there is another consequence that can devastate one's freedom and efficacy. The most dangerous of computations can arise from this error, when the mind becomes its own teacher. It is:

INABILITY = INCAPABILITY

What that means is that what you cannot do now, you can never do. There is another way to render this computation. It is:

WHAT IS NOT ACTUAL IS IMPOSSIBLE

What that means is that what a person has never done, or seen done, is impossible.

Now when applied to certain realms, this computation seems utterly crazy...and other realms, it seems to make perfect sense to people.

For instance, many people can drive a car. Not many people can drive an 18-wheeler. Many people have an inability to drive an 18-wheeler. Yet most of these people would never say that just because they have an inability to drive an 18-wheeler that that means they have an incapability to do so.

One difference apparently is that even if one cannot drive an 18-wheeler oneself, one sees others doing it all over the place. The notion that driving an 18-wheeler is impossible never becomes a fixed idea that people project upon reality. Seems rather silly actually...

In other realms, this computation makes perfect to people...or so it would seem. For instance, when it comes to viewing Time in its entirety, all at once, including all of one's past lives and future rebirths (asavakkhya); when it comes to reading others thoughts (Cetopariya); when it comes to communicating telepathically; when it comes to healing one's body without medication; when it comes to exteriorizing from space-time altogether--all of these are inabilities for most people. Yet, many would say that they are simply incapable of these certain...faculties. They might say that they are impossible. Why? What's the difference between operating an 18-wheeler and using these certain faculties?

First of all, again, people can see others driving 18-wheelers all around them--it is actual. Most people do not ever see others around them displaying these certain faculties of higher awareness--they are not actual. In accordance with that peculiar and inane computation, what is not actual is impossible, therefore they are impossible.

It's simple to understand. A little girl grows up never, ever seeing certain events transpire. Like, she probably never sees an ill person sit down with another person, and during the course of their conversation, the ill person becomes healed. In fact, that little girl grows up to see that the only thing "healing" people are chemicals. At some point, there are decisions made within her mind. This becomes a fixed and dearly held notion. That's the word belief means, "dearly held." She decides that the only means to heal one's body are chemicals.

These are the thought-patterns that people carry around with them, banishing so many possibilities from the realm of acceptable reality. For everyone, there is a line. A line at which inabilities become incapabilities. Yet under the light of honest inquiry, the computation proves to be pure nonsense. Simply because one does not ever observe others in their world committing this action or that action does not mean that that action is impossible.

The crux of the issue is perhaps that driving an 18-wheeler does not conflict with a person's worldview, a person's overriding idea of what shape the world should take. It does not conflict with many people's ideas about who they are, how their beingness as such automatically limits their perception. Those who would irrevocably identify themselves with their bodies may say that their identity as such renders certain abilities impossible; that the body is simply not capable of such awareness. Again, an inability is not an incapability. Merely because one is inside of a body and employs its limited channels for seeing and doing now, in one's current state, does not necessarily mean that that cannot change. It may very well be what-is, i.e. currently one is one's body. And if it is what-is, then it would detrimental and counter-productive to deny it. However, if it is what is, that in and of itself says nothing about what could be.

That truth alone is revolutionary. Actuality is not potentiality. "What is" and "what could be" should be held separate and distinct for they are separate and distinct. What mediates between the two is change. When they become collapsed in on one another, change gets crushed and change gets lost. Once that happens, one will have more and more of what one already has. What can one do to change any of the conditions of life is one's inabilities have been rendered into incapabilities?

Once one beholds and embraces the notion that change is real and at hand, that the conditions of now, be them any limitation or condition need not be inaccessible and never-ending, then one has truly opened one's mind. Once one fully realizes that inability does not equal incapability, that actual does not mean forever actual... Once one illuminates these blind and unconscious computations, these inane beliefs that work their silent doom in the background of our lives, then...change is real.
Then, it becomes not a question of action, of whether one can do or not do. Through the immense power of honest and unbiased inquiry, the clouds of doubt will dissipate revealing a new and exhilirating curiousity. The true seeker does not ask whether it can be done or not. The true seeker asks only , how can it be done.]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v522/__show_article/_a000522-000020.htm 2010-07-22T13:16:47Z 2010-07-22T13:16:47Z Burn the Motes From Thine Eye

People seem to be so contaminated by their body and body systems that they insist truth can only arrive as MEST appearing inside the cone-shaped wedge of physical perception in front of their bodies. Having been contaminated so, they live out their existence in doubt and denial. Like peeling apart a sticker from its backing, one's powers of perception can be freed from these limitations. Looking at what what might create these limitations...

There are a number of computations.

The first is:

TRUTH = DENSITY.

In other words, for something to possess truth, or have a bearing upon the games of life, it must be dense, and dense enough for the human eye to perceive it. When fully examined, this computation will prove absurd. There are vectors hidden to the human eye that DIRECT, MOTIVATE and COMPEL game-play. Call them absolutes. Although these vectors cause dense objects to move here and there, these vectors themselves are not dense at all. Sit and watch a child play, or a musician finger his guitar, or lovers kiss--can you "see" the hidden vector directing them, carrying them along in its pursuit of fulfillment, like a puff of air directs a falling leaf to and fro?

TRUTH HAPPENS IN FRONT OF THE BODY.

Although this sounds absurd, this computation is ubiquitous. In front of the body exists a cone-shaped wedge of perception. Simply because the body gleans its information from this area does not mean that in this area all truth is found. In fact, absolutes are underneath physical life. Or, outside of physical life. While not IN the physical universe per se, they press their faces through the fabric of physical life, as if behind a sheet of linen. Can you "see" their faces in the mist?

Not to suggest the body is useless, it can be trained, its latent capabilities activated by certain techniques and practices. Only, its capabilities have been turned OFF by thousands of years of non-use. Its perceptual impotence has been reinforced by collective agreement regards its inability. Addiction to beauty and aesthetics (read: mystery) could be blamed for these inabilities. The overseers could be blamed as well (the elitist shadow governments of then and now).

What's fascinating though is that the body can be made to speak words beyond its own perception. The rub of it is that these words must be connected to true realities. Enter Word Clearing. As Chris Melchior says, effective word-clearing amounts to developing the ability to CREATE, or DUPLICATE, the reality behind the word. When that is achieved, it is safe to use the word. If that is not done, then talk has been veritably rendered cheap. The word may not be the thing, but it can point to it. Funny how lies can illuminate the path to truth. ]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v522/__show_article/_a000522-000019.htm 2010-07-20T04:01:11Z 2010-07-20T04:01:11Z Notes On How To Act

"Potential is the eternal element in all experience." --JG Bennett

The facts ma'am:
1.) One perceives actualities
2.) All actualities are potentialities; all potentialities are NOT actualities.
3.) All things potential and all things actual are both conditions that do NOT permit game play.
4.) Potentiality and possibility are NOT synonymous.
-- Possibility is defined by what is agreed-upon as allowable action, i.e what COULD be actualized.
-- Potentiality is defined by what possibilities CAN be actualized.
-- Example: Because one COULD write a novel, simply because that is allowable action, does not mean that one CAN write a novel. Most people do not honestly distinguish between possibility and potentiality because they cannot confront the discrepancy. Nor would they know how to reconcile such a discrepancy, i.e. enlarge their potential.

Outside of any system, all events are possible within that system. Limited possibility only arises WITHIN systems. To play strictly within a system is to not only agree with its laws but to agree that those laws are irrevocable, unalterable and untouchable.

]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v522/__show_article/_a000522-000018.htm 2009-12-15T16:36:11Z 2009-12-15T16:36:11Z Two to Tango

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).]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v522/__show_article/_a000522-000017.htm 2009-12-07T15:17:41Z 2009-12-07T15:17:41Z Schizophrenia, or The New You

"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.

]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v522/__show_article/_a000522-000016.htm 2009-11-13T04:07:22Z 2009-11-13T04:09:47Z You Gave Destruction A Bad Name

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.

]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v522/__show_article/_a000522-000015.htm 2009-11-08T01:09:54Z 2009-11-10T04:14:15Z The Anointment of Noah Drake: "The Eclipse"

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.
]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v522/__show_article/_a000522-000014.htm 2009-10-28T13:44:49Z 2009-10-28T14:08:51Z The Anointment of Noah Drake: "Our Mother the Mind"

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.
]]> http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v522/__show_article/_a000522-000013.htm 2009-10-26T16:19:34Z 2009-10-28T14:08:06Z