Access to Dreamtime in a Capitalist Modern Culture
From Wikipedia: A religion is a set of beliefs and practices generally
organized around supernatural and moral claims, and often codified as
prayer, ritual, and religious law. Religion also encompasses ancestral or
cultural traditions, writings, history, and mythology, as well as personal
faith and mystic experience. The term "religion" refers to both the personal
practices related to communal faith and to group rituals and communication
stemming from shared conviction.
My own definition of religion looks at this mechanically:
To me religion is any technique for coping with the inevitable hysteria
and hallucination that results from melodramatic isolation, given that real
human emotional contact temporarily fizzles all forms of religious illusion.
Arnold Mindell has invented a sneaky religion that captured my interest
though as a good trick for getting otherwise timid people to explore and
understand basic spiritual effects, empowering them to express into real
society rather than tattle to authorities who inevitably force a heartless
expensive straight-jacket on creative diversity.
While it seems best to leave his program defined as a psychological
theory for political activist use, as he is doing with it, for my own
intellectual shakedown of it I need to be more rude and direct, so I call
it a Dreamtime religion.
Dreamtime Religion
Arnold Mindell speaks with kindness and naivete in behalf of those who
have found an easy focus of regular religious feeling in a modern form of
common religion that embraces the exacting double blind sciences. Unlike
the older religions, this one uses unverifiable, and thus quasi-religious,
parts of mainstream physics theory to gain sophistication and then exploits
the blinkering specialization of modern civilization to prevent scrutiny as
a non-science. He has apparently been successful at obtaining mainstream
cultural acceptance of his religion presented as a psychological theory for
wrestling with conflict resolution, both personal and political.
Thus he presents a language and a clear presentation of why I live and
relate to others the way I do. Though he's not like me at all, he aspires
to and explores the same kinds of experience and emotional development, for
similiar purpose.
He avoids the word religion but says only that his psychological science
echoes the recognized Dreamtime religions: Buddism, Taoism, and aboriginal
spirituality; religions that are related to as scientific psychological
theories in their native cultures. To his credit he says directly, in his
book acknowledgments, that he does not yet comprehend, from actual
experience or verifiable evidence, the nature of what he calls the Dreaming,
though I observe that his eyes have the absense of hysteria of one who does.
He defines all (emotional and social) issues as adequately resolvable
through conscious focus on the Dreaming background behind them. I have
noticed this that, while I'm focused from Dreaming, any political rage I've
been feeling becomes inaccessable; I don't feel it at all and it returns
only slowly when I re-engage my normal identity. It feels like a kind of
apathy, coming out the odd timelessness of Dreaming, as if my present life
is a time travel from a later age.
He describes the long faces and angry faces of modern city people as a
disease, a mental illness, rather than as the simple loneliness and
confusion that I believe we are observing. I presume myself lonely and
confused rather than mentally ill, and imagine my condition is common.
He recognizes the modern angst as being about something that's missing,
but sees the best fix as being a method of solitary spell-casting, the
regular religious approach, requiring no interpersonal accountability or
stewardship of anyone else; addressing the emotional symtoms without even
noting the social estrangement that attends it and I believe causes it. He
has a wonderful wife to handle the stewardship and emotional linking core
of his own life.
His institute in Portland explicitly rejects intimate shakedown in their
entry brochure, declaring in a section on student behavior that any
dissident must exit the school immediately, with or without tuition refund;
that even the conflict resolution training will not use any in house
genuine moral or emotional issues, or tolerate development of an actual
grounding anchor for any student, let alone coach tribal linking.
Therapy clients at the school are encouraged to curse their own cultural
or psychic linking with real associates in Dreamtime with random
destructive spell-casting. I note that regular television programing
facilitates this also. I am appauled. I believe this kind of play may be
the main reason that nonsexual adult intimacy is so uncommon where I live.
This may also be the reason for the apparent coldness about student
grounding behavior, the behavior rule being a ruse to fool people who are
inclined to use the student role for therapy, but with the reality being
that the faculty deliberately look for nonsexual love development and
encourage it.
His book begins with an introduction of the Australian Aboriginal word
Dreaming, with a capital D, referring to the condition of awareness most
familiar to modern people through LSD, psychodelic mushrooms or meditations
that create similiar effects. He recognizes an apparent causal link between
the Dreaming, or acid-like state as I call it, and the invention of regular
night or day dreams. My experience seems to show a causal link both ways;
that deliberately modulated dreams, whether asleep or not, appear to affect
the aspects of reality that are uniquely perceivable in the Dreaming.
He assumed in his youth that being in a city somehow killed the Dreaming
background and not just the perception of it. He writes that he believes now
that the Dreaming originates all human expression, and maybe all physical
phenomena; since my linear awareness is compromised in Dreamtime, I can't
say what precedes what.
In my experience it is actually privacy that kills my perception of the
Dreaming. That is, to block other people's perception of my Dreaming, so
that they won't freak out about the inevitable "contact high", I must block
my own perception of it as well, either through visual barriers or
choreographic disquise. The "head in the sand" approach is effective for
that. For my own sanity I have to keep the privacy effect short term.
The primitive people, the modern women who appear brainless, and the
modern street men are all kind and reverent about other people's Dreaming,
so privacy is unnecessary among them. Mr. Mindell sought the same effect
through an absense of other people (passive privacy), or a small highly
controlled isolated group (group privacy). I've only found that to be
effective if no spell of escape from the rest of humanity is involved, no
rejection of outsiders, only an acceptance of rejection by outsiders.
Hiding in any way from psychic predation by other people or police or
property owners also blocks my view of the Dreaming, so I and the
"brainless" women and the other street men establish psychic defense through
inspiring avoidance by the people who aren't cool, either through using and
feeding conscious paranoia or by appearing to be lame and stupid and
obnoxious; but never by overtly rejecting them. The easing of hysteria that
results from awareness of the Dreaming also lends literal invisibility by
reducing the unconscious kinds of paranoia in other people that draws their
notice.
I discovered the Dreaming by accepting being rejected by everybody else.
This appears to be the same for all the other street men who have discovered
it. None of us can visualize stewardship as a woman can, so we perceive the
Dreaming but at a terrible cost in lonliness and social vacancy. Through
drinking alcohol or experiments with collective squating we attempt
coalition, with occasional meager success.
Awareness of the Dreaming is very seductive, easily becoming essential
to a feeling of sanity. Most employment and most living arrangements force
use of privacy and so a loss of contact with the Dreaming, so my tendency
has always been to remain vague about residential boundaries of all kinds
and minimal about employment.
The "brainless" women cancel boundaries internally by avoiding all
conceptual initiative of any kind (boundary defining mental activity),
often resulting in absurdly chaotic technical issues in their lives, but
generally not lonliness. Mr. Mindell's wife described (on the internet)
orienting her life that way. The personal chaos appears to be quite
effective for psychic defense (prevention of "hurt feelings") but the women
also enlist associates or institutional choregraphy for defense as much as
possible, to avoid having to recognize and use overt boundaries.
I observe that domesticated men and sensible women also appear drawn to
Dreaming awareness but are highly confused about what is drawing them.
This issue of staying vague about boundaries appears to be the root of
most social conflict. Where cultural styles, such as quaker silence and
loud music, are unable to share the same physical space a boundary must be
recognized and honored by both sides, resulting in a loss of Dreaming
awareness and a feeling of waiting to die until one side can somehow
destroy the other. This could motivate conflict whether or not anyone
involved was conscious of the dilemma. By evoking a general recognition of
the Dreaming within a meeting, Mr. Mindell has been successful at diffusing
social conflict temporarily, and he hopes to sponsor a tradition of everyone
doing that continually; perhaps never actually fixing the trouble with
having boundaries, just having regular events of choreographed group
meditation, such as church attendance.
Mr. Mindell himself appears to come from a tradition of academic
stuffiness, politely at ease with the feeling of waiting to die, that
verbally denies the Dreaming entirely but intensely feels the abhorance of
social boundaries all the same, and dips into Dreaming awareness in special
spell-casting meetings, called classes or seminars, or similiar but solitary
events.
He writes that he learned in his youth to turn against or ignor his own
Dreaming soul. He was reprimanded or publicly humiliated for being or
appearing to be dreamy or meditative, and he accepted the validity of that.
He notes that this value inspired much of the disrespect by Europeans of
aboriginal civilizations worldwide, an outlook he names racism. I can't call
it that because I catch the same disrespect as a white anglo street guy.
Also, the general disrespect of women's intellect (sexism) appears be
inspired by the same logic. I call it a clash of aethetic or social values
or a real fear of sinister curiosity and invasiveness on the part of the
Dreamer. Maintaining Dreaming awareness conflicts with organized economic
endeavor because of the ignoring of boundaries and loss of timesense.
He quotes Chief Joseph as saying that "My young men shall never work, men
who work cannot dream, and wisdom comes (only) in dreams". I surmise that it
was the European trend toward specializtion of skills that the Chief was in
horror of, not of industrial activity, noting that specialists mainly dream
within their specialty and often create unintentional nightmares for the
realms they don't comprehend. The Chief expressed no horror about the highly
industrial indian women, though he could well have made a good case for
saying they work too much of the time and dream too little.
Mr. Mindell defines the Dreaming as the period of subtle moodiness that
precedes a clear decision or choice of focus, during which a person is
totally open to hypnotic or emotionally fierce suggestion. He does not
appear to be aware of using those moments in another person's awareness to
deliberately redirect their feelings and attention. He even seems to imply,
by his use of terms, that this subtle moodiness is not a consensus
phenomena, that only linear verbalizable consciousness is a consensus.
He expresses belief that this subtle moodiness is a root cause of all
physical phenomena, and not, as I believe, a confusing complex echo of
unreliable and modulated memory, and prayers from other people, with a
small but significant inpact on physical phenomena. He suggests a root
belief widespread in European culture, that consciousness is at the root of
all physical phenomena, that the physical world is like a watch rather than
like a salt crystal.
This is quite illogical to me, having designed and built innumerable
machines and repaired hundreds of devices. The complexity and size of the
physical world is way out of reach of any conceivable conscious oversight,
whether individual or collective, comparable to relocating Mt. Shasta with
a shovel and a wheelbarrow. To create the present universe, the managerial
challenge alone is entirely out of reach, even if we allow for an unproven
psychosomatic manipulation or creation of matter.
Nearly all of the devices that I've had anything to do with were too
complex and challenging for even a genius to totally create, and all of
them were child's toys compared to the simplest life form. I've also been a
participant in many negotiative group processes with groups on all scales,
clearly demonstrating to me that the larger a group the less self-aware it
becomes, in spite of having greater creative force. Though many people have
tried to convince me of the consciousness of various groups, no-one has
tried to use the State of Oregon or the people in a given neighborhood as an
example. Some managed nondemocratic groups of less than twenty people have
shown some indication to me of collective creative intelligence and
self-awareness exceding that of an average dog; but that's the best I've
directly seen. That a large group can have large scale and complex creative
effects is a bit frightening to me because of this; lending support to the
idea of the human race being like a serious infection of the earth
ecosystem, as unself-aware as a virus.
Thus I conclude that most of the technological wonder around us, such as
cars and telephones, is largely not the result of deliberate conscious
creativity either, but is instead a product of progressive random natural
effects, like a volcano going off. If some natural disaster blasts the earth
into the stone age but somehow leaves most of us alive and conscious, our
intelligence and consciousness would be unlikely to be able to recreate
hardly any of the present technological array or social order.
He introduces the idea of Dream Yoga, awareness of the sentient states
that "precede" (or co-evolve with) all kinds of thinking and perceiving. He
describes it as a lofty achievement rather than as a routine aspect of
feminine or character based identity. He does note that more matriarchically
based cultures, particularly in the ancient past, apparently included Dream
Yoga in everyone's development and basic belief system, but he fails to
note that all cultures still do include it, and in fact force it, in
development of girls; that women still obsess about psychic effects of
imagination and shame younger girls for being too casual with it.
He also describes two conceptual religious traditions, about reality
arising from the Dreaming of a deity. Oddly he writes as if in modern
organized religion the standard mainstream God is somehow presented
differently. His religious examples suggest to me that ancient men were
just as clueless about femininity as modern men, somehow believing that
regular people have only a minor role in reality creation, and inventing
verbal psychobabble about theoretical forces. I observe that women blighly
use these ridiculous deities right along with their own more cartoon-like
inventions (such as Santa and the Easter Bunny) for social unification.
He writes in the acknowledgments that his soul-mate wife virtually
co-wrote the book. She has written a lot independently for the internet and
in books, using his verbal handles in an overtly dreamy confusing way. In
one internet article she expresses that she has completely delegated to him
the role of verbal assessment and invention. In my way of speaking, she only
pretends to check his work to promote his enthusiasm; she has sincerely
overlooked his foolishness. She utterly believes that he is all wise about
verbal presentation and that the verbal exactness he aspires to is rather
silly and over-rated anyway, and so not important to question. Results are
what matters to her, and his words create very effective conflict and
paralysis resolving spells, so they pass. She sees his words as creating
truth rather than reporting it, and that that's all right.
His first example of a self-study process for Dreaming awareness is
fairly simple and straight-forward, with a little use of puzzling jargon
(unknowing, clouded, open, lucidity). The idea is to note subtle emotional
effects during a low key non-cognitive meditation, watching the emotional
effects passively until they morph into images or words or stronger
feelings or even motivation to act. He suggests theorizing about meaning
that may be involved.
Then he suggests recalling a dream and studying for any common elements
or possible imagery sources from feelings in the previous emotional
meditation. He makes no suggestion of noting influence from other people's
spell-casting or praying. I guess he presumes a reader without complex
intimacies or figures that won't become apparent right away; or knows
nothing about that.
I have never given the night time dream effects of Dreaming any
importance, because the relevance to the day was so much more immense. The
first discovery I clearly remember was the effect of the Dreaming on my body
smell in the high school locker room. By deliberately focusing on Dreaming
any time that I felt emotionally extreme, I found that I could take my body
odor any direction I pleased, and right away; and that showering had little
or no influence.
Study of night dreams has always struck me like study of one's own fecal
matter, perhaps medically useful but not near as compelling and useful as
noting athletic or digestive effects related to choice of food. I
occasionally dabble in dream study but never with much of value resulting.
He encourages the reader to track as much of their undefined fleeting
emotions and physical feelings as possible during the day, looking always
for causal connections or common elements between those fleeting
perceptions and dream activity or lines of concrete thinking. He gives an
example of one of his own dreams, assessing a possible emotional shakedown
origin from his self-centered choreographic focus the previous day. He uses
the term lucid to mean this kind of mental control, not necessarily of sleep
paralysis and ability to control imaging while dreaming but perception of
the root emotions originating (or co-evolving with) a dream or daydream,
whether asleep or not. Using an example of another fellows' dream, he
illustrates even more clearly how an emotional logjam in the fellow's life
evoked a dream storyline that shook down the logjam.
This kind of thing seems rather tedious to me, akin to marveling at the
effect of using soap when hand washing. Ever since I first had a wet dream
I have deliberately created night time dreams for emotional shakedown.
Mr. Mindell uses a term "the Big You" to refer to the emotional wash
around a person's psyche that men (but not women) don't directly own, and
are socially pressured to marginalize out of consciousness. He uses the term
sentient to refer to awareness of that emotional wash. He defines
consciousness as an ability rather than an awareness; an ability to evoke an
analytical knife into the totality of self, cutting it into parts of
concensus perception and parts of dream events; or as I would say it, an
ability to marginalize aspects of one's own experience, as a dog does when
it adopts a territory.
Thus in his mind sentience and consciousness are in opposition, similiar
to my perception of feminine consciousness and masculine. Strangely though,
he associates sentience with Asian and aboriginal tradition due to those
cultures' marginalization of individual initiative and experience; even
though the actual men in those societies, as described in National
Geographic, appear to marginalize sentience quite as much as European men;
but in a military style in which self-centeredness has to be disquised and
brutal dominance of others is admired.
He quotes some Japanese Zen rhetoric, "every day a fine day", roughly
similiar to the American idea of pursuit of happiness; empty nonsense in
my view on both counts, mere posturing to appear wise and important. I see
his Big You and the Asian hive ethic as totally unrelated, one a complex
self-centered node in a social network of feelings and the other a brutally
technical, fascist military idealism represented by the kamikaze pilots.
Mr. Mindell then relates two horribly mocking and simplistic Zen stories
intending to illustrate the benefit of perception from his Big You frame of
reference, but instead showing an apparent lack of recognition of genuine
nonsexual intimacy and character identification. I see intellectual mockery
as the Asian or Zen expression of what he calls "racism", or what I call
disrespect of genuine emotionally vulnerable nonintellectual Dreaminess;
disrespect of me, that is.
He seems caught in what is for me a familiar struggle with obtaining
verbal technical precision without being reduced to flying blind in
relation to a personal Dreamtime. Analytical thinking is a very emotionally
blinkering activity for me. His inventions for using terms are of great
value in effectively talking about this topic, but at the cost of him losing
his Dreaming awareness and getting off base, appearing a bit foolish to
someone like me who grew up socially feral and who dumped academia and
regular commerce entirely to keep a more direct link with Dreamtime.
He notes this trouble himself from studying night dreams. If he gets
caught up in thoroughly analyzing the symbolism in a dream then he gets
more out of touch with his intuitive connection to the Dreaming that
comes with the dream. He writes that enlightenment means to him being able
to juggle both these kinds of awareness at the same time. This is my way of
defining androgeny, which I decided was not only very difficult but also
inevitably a poison to achieving striking brilliance in either kind of
focus.
In my life, competitive success within my conceptually based identity
has required my willingness to blinker myself in an extreme way; to
marginalize disheartening emotional data and controversial data to keep them
from spoiling efficiency and consistant focus. I think that this is
neccesary in the short run to achieve any sort of divine technical
brilliance, but that remaining blinkered in a stagnant way in the same line
of endeavor for several years, especially in the modern world of high speed
cultural change, appears to make an idiot out of me. I generally lose
interest in advance of that.
I've fairly often had competitive success that lasted long enough to get
socially recognized, and the resulting remarks feel for me exactly the same
as straight up intellectual mockery; an implied demand for me to present an
identity, and forsake Dreamtime. John Lennon apparently attempted to
directly buck this pressure, inspiring someone to murder him. Better to be
a loser, I think.
Mr. Mindell has an idea he calls not-doing, which is awkward for me
because, based on his description, he doesn't mean the opposite of doing, he
means what I would call the parallel to doing, in his parallel realm of
"sentience" or feminine awareness. Rather than "not-doing" I call it
expression. He notes that many practical ends can be achieved through pure
expression out of a Dreaming frame of reference, particularly the sort of
achievement that get routinely prostituted (done as false expression), such
as song writing and cleaning a living space, both of which he uses to
illustrate what he means by "not-doing".
He expresses the belief that action he takes is often, or even usually,
the result of pure autonomous intellectual intent, what he would call
conventional "doing". I have the impression that in my life true psychic
autonomy is always an illusion, though a useful one; that my awareness is
actually in a massive wash of outside data that I stereotype, and as he puts
it, marginalize to an unnoticed corner of my awareness, for efficiency of
analysis. He notes that a firm belief in actual autonomy can result in very
frustrating motivational paralysis; that I see people often break out of by
engaging any random or even destructive activity with a dreamy child or
spouse.
He makes no mention of deliberately creating the feelings to express as
action, suggesting instead that the reader go on hippy time, expressing
when the desired mood strikes, or rather in reality when those who take
initiative about such things notice the prayer and create the feelings. I'm
a bit puzzled how his wife can have nothing to say about that, since she
doesn't write as if she waits for somebody else's magic spell. My own wife
expresses frustration with being less than adept at this.
I believe that this feeling creation effect is what compells men (but
not women) to theorize deities, as the supposed choreographic source, hense
the joke about god being a black woman.
I've found that even dangerous activities and honest work can also
originate from expression, given that a tight choreographic boundary can
happen first, as in a factory; though of course that can't be on hippy time.
It has to be conscious feeling creation, deliberately honored, guarded and
overseen. Unfortunately the managers must be guided by faith, being out of
touch with Dreamtime while at work due to the conscious boundary.
Mr. Mindell notes that event timing sequence gets quite hard to track
while expressing, similiar to recalling dream images and then trying to
determine progression, or looking at a couple communing and trying to track
the sequence of choreography while sentient with them. This is what I
named the androgeny problem, linear time sense being a higher level skill in
conceptual consciousness that gets trashed by trying to be androgenous or
sentient. He suggests that time progression is actually "entangled" during
that time for everyone and not merely appearing to be. I don't know if
there is any way to really determine that. I have noticed though that any
conviction that I hold strongly enough for long enough I can eventually
evoke data to prove to myself, even if not to anyone else.
He notes that sentience makes location hard to determine also. I presume
this is familiar to everyone as a frequent aspect of night dreaming. In
Dreamtime I often relive the past or prelive the future in very remote
places, in near emotional totality, modulating into concrete dreams that are
likewise. But I can sense a difference in my ability to redirect the
course of and texture of events. Whatever is unfamiliar appears to
passively present itself without overtly forcing my focus or even
maintaining it's own nature against my will. The people and living realm
that shares a current parallel conceptual frame of reference with me,
though, is a major force to reckon with; still malleable in my dreams but
with a feeling of my being also the object of psychic force and overt
independent intent.
An astonishing amount of apparent time passes when I'm dreaming, with
a lot happening. During the two years I had a paper route, and the last
month or so of four hour polyphasic sleeping, my conceptual mind continues
to track real time while I sleep, with a bizarre impression of time
progressing at two rates at the same time, in a ratio of 15 minutes of real
time to 40 minutes or more of unbroken dream sequence.
In general I mistrust the reality of any data that lacks a second
independent source outside of my own perception. My religious or Dreamtime
experience is all suspect as wishful thinking rather than tuning in to
something, and also suspect as an echo of logical clues that my overt
conscious tracking hasn't identified. Other people's prayer and overt
suggestion directs a lot of my apparent Dreamtime initiative, so that I can
appear to create what is already there, or discover what I already know, or
observe emotional intent from objects that I have previously put spells on
that I forgot. The scrambled timesense and spotty memory effects of
Dreamtime can creates some striking and bizarre illusions of miraculousness
that Mr. Mindell would have his reader believe in, as the dreamer creating
something rather than them forgetting a subtle but captivating observation.
He relates a story of having an impulse idea about his wife that
apparently involved reminding her of a recent dream that she had forgotten
and he had no recollection of hearing about. This sort of bizarre apparent
telepathy has happened several times to me with intimate associates,
sometimes where my memory and their memory of shared events are clear and
vivid but track differently in unreconcilable ways, or where a repeat of an
event can appear to be new. My Dreamtime is very messy, I would even say
hopeless, as a precise data source.
He notes that aboriginal shamans make no attempt to track their
consciousness as separate from their associates, particularly children, or
even presume it located in their own body. He and they refer to this
fuzziness as a reflection of reality, actual physical location of
consciousness, rather than, as I see it, a reflection of how worthless the
Dreamtime can be as an objective data source. I believe that their
Dreamtime memory, and mine, will coalesce into whatever form the emotional
moshe we live in compells, validating whatever theory will suit the day.
Thus as I see it, a theoretical consensus physical reality is subject to
consensus perception, which is subject to consensus belief, which is
subject to whoever is able, in the emotional moshe of all of us, to
successfully hold contradictory convictions in Dreamtime. For example, I
believe there is logically nothing an airplane can do to a skyscraper that
can cause the building to pulverize and drop vertically at freefall speed an
hour after impact. Yet there is no recognition of that in mainstream world
discussion of the 911 event, not even a passing remark; it is not part of
consensus reality, so my belief is effectively wrong even if absolutely
true. Any conclusions that have no direct link to the physically measurable
world, such as ideas in subatomic physics or the descriptions of a community
emotional moshe, can carry the day if established with a powerful spell,
with all contradictory data going literally unnoticed or immediately
forgotten.
This has been a bizarre frustration for me as a street tramp at times,
with somehow being socially present in such an unconventional manner that I
literally cannot be physically seen by any passersby even if I am noisy and
in motion. The same thing happens routinely at my house, even with personal
associates. Somehow I often do not exist in conscious consensus reality, so
I suspect that unconscious consensus reality could get quite as dubious.
I think that Mr. Mindell and the shamans that he quotes are absurd to
suggest that a testable absolute physical reality where I always exist, and
buildings can only be pulverized suddenly by regular coordinated demolition
charges, is also illusion; though quantum physics seems to suggest that I
only exist when tested for, that my existance at any given moment is a high
probability rather than a certainty. Mr. Mindell also mentions that some
experiments in physics have run into puzzling apparent time sequence
anomolies in which two widely separate particles are expressions of a
single poorly understood phenomena, that seems to include the experimenters.
Mr. Mindell then launches into discussing his experience of therapy. It
is his primary career interest, and he notes how non-sentient it has been.
I've noted that also, that mainstream therapy is seriously anti-Dreamtime.
What little I have had to do with therapy in my life has been spooky at
best and seriously a nightmare at worst. I went as an observer to a
regression therapy session with one sister, participated in a week long
group therapy seminar called Lifespring Training, and heard many stories
about therapy from relatives.
My mother is a great believer in therapy, with a standing offer of
paying for any service I enlist that way, and at one time alluding to
obtaining an involuntary experience for me. Dreamtime focus was something
she painfully broke out of in my youth, in a major feminist struggle for
social dignity that could be recognizable by men. My deliberate embracing
of Dreamtime timelessness looks like mental illness to her, since it
apparently is for her; and her identity seems to be based in Dreamtime in
despite of a lifetime of resistance, whereas mine is not.
The main thing I learned from therapy was that my worst level of angst
is trivial compared to what the average other person wrestles with daily.
Mr. Mindell seems quite as taken with the possibilities of therapy as my
mother, though he suggests that the complete rejection of Dreamtime on the
part of the therapist is a mistake. He considers that conventional therapy
design is right but that once the methodology and choreographic skill are
established then therapy should be as much as possible like a Japanese tea
ceremony, with the focus on not-doing, or action as expression, as natural
as mindlessly riding a bicycle without a destination.
I noticed this in my youth in church services. My family religious
experience involved a whole string of petty contradicting protestant
denominations that nevertheless had this idea of Mr. Mindell in common. The
Christian Science church is purest about it, repeating the same 52 services
over and over every year, so that, especially for the older members, the
experience is entirely expressive, at least cathartic and at best
facilitating of great psychic insight. All the churches were as tedious and
predictable as possible. No-one ever described the scene that way though.
Inevitably I got confused by the bible study rhetoric into presuming
that the point was to learn new conceptual material and perfect lifestyle
design. I eventually gave up on organized religion as utterly ridiculous
and I remain dubious of it because of the confusion it seems to promote.
Mr. Mindell writes that he aspires to be choreographically graceful
enough as a therapist that a therapy event can evolve with a life of it's
own. He aspires to be able to tune into all the marginal emotional and
psychic data without being thrown off track from the original theraputic
intent. He writes that, to the degree he can pull this off, the session not
only functions far better but is also less stressful for everyone involved.
I imagine this is what someone is expressing when saying they are "so
grateful for Christian Science", a common remark in that church.
He then presents a chart of his western vs eastern ideas, showing the
verbal paradox of what I call the rugged individual vs the hive ethic. I
think he is fooled by the translation problem from oriental languages. One
of my sisters knows Mandarin chinese, and coached me in some I-Ching
translation that demonstrated to me the Dreamtime orientation of chinese
writing that nevertheless does nothing to prevent a brutal divorce from
Dreamtime by the men using it. Thus the conventional western hearing of
chinese translation sounds like an embracing of Dreamtime and English
sounds like embracing of cognitive focus, but both include both. Christian
Science (invented by a woman) has no more performance focus than a Japanese
tea ceremony, and the actual masculine verbal discussion about either sounds
as technical and brutal as a computer programming manual, in either
language.
One of my friends has studied oriental philosophy and military methods
exhaustively, often leaving related books lying around the kitchen or doing
impromptu lessons with others, so I have gotten steeped in the cognitive
brand of oriental culture. I would rewrite Mr. Mindell's chart thus:
Consciousness (Western) Psychic Dominance (Eastern)
------------------------------------------------------------------
Knowing, Working, Effort, Relaxed Wariness, Domination,
Study of Performance Obsession about Precise Form
------------------------------------------------------------------
Performance: Get Better Technical Mastery through Submission
------------------------------------------------------------------
Question: Did Things Improve? Question: Were You Duped?
------------------------------------------------------------------
Parts: Facilitator, Client, Seamless Integration Into the Hive,
Group, You, Me and Objects Everyone a Presentation of the Hive
------------------------------------------------------------------
Boundaries are Important Appearing Cool and Linked is Critical
------------------------------------------------------------------
Insight=Consciousness Being Cool=Insight
------------------------------------------------------------------
Or thus:
Self Awareness (Western) Lucidity (Eastern)
------------------------------------------------------------------
Paying Attention, Resilience, Sentience, Expression,
Delight in Majesty Awareness of Form
------------------------------------------------------------------
Performance: Discovery Sense and Follow
------------------------------------------------------------------
Question: What is Possible? What is Noticed?
------------------------------------------------------------------
Recognition and Respect Sense of the Whole
for All Roles and Items Each is Everything
------------------------------------------------------------------
Honoring of Diversity, Tao of People and
Tolerance of Separateness Things Happening
------------------------------------------------------------------
Awareness Develops Wisdom Lucidity and Consciousness
------------------------------------------------------------------
Mr. Mindell writes that the Budda Mind is what he is calling the Big
You. He relates to it as a nobler and saner broad view of one's own being
as opposed to the more narrowly defined Little You. I think of the Budda
Mind as a kind of animal mind, or awareness without domestic identity.
Rather than as nobler, I view the Budda frame of reference as a baseline, a
position outside of domestic illusions from which to assess reality, but not
a way to share life with anyone else. To me the Budda is grotesquely
heartless, more so than a burglar. The Little You is a person's gift to
their society, their role in the pagent of human sharing and their area of
experimental license, not something to speak of as a rude pathetic nuisance.
Being a consistant Little You is an essential part of the social gift.
The playful psychic ease of everyone is to some degree dependent on a
social moshe of Little You's that are predictable enough not to continually
force renegotiation about the details and symbolic meanings that are
critical to pagentry, and small enough to minimize accidental trespass. The
street man and the mindless woman are offensive to society because of their
delinquence about relating from a Little You.
In modern cultures that have very old unifying traditions such as in the
Soviet states, my reading suggests a very vivid and deliberate support this
way. The Soviet situation gives everybody a genuine melodramatic channel
for life. There is no begging to be heard or risking social isolation in
friendly reaching out. Community members invade each other's social
expression and development with enthusiasm, generally to the point of
forcing involuntary identity focus and thus addiction to drugs and
meditative activities that facilitate marginalizing of the invasive energy.
Soviet lovers can never really upstage the community for each other,
even for a couple who move to a new place. The ideal mate is one who has a
mutually annilating frame of reference, whereas an ideal friend or work
associate is one with an overtly similiar and supportive frame of reference.
A family member is thus generally not sexually arousing and not helpful for
spiritual discovery. A strong sexist arrangement can help a lot in keeping
these realities separate and nonconflicting.
In my understanding, falling in love means discovery, through eye
contact, of someone who evokes the Dreamtime spontaneously through their
presense alone. In a society, such as the Soviet one, in which technical
assistance, loneliness and encouragement of emotional expression are
entirely handled from birth by permanent non-sexual associates, and sexist
solidarity is strong, no-one will ever be inclined to focus those needs on a
spouse or lover, spoiling their Dreamtime awareness. The loss of sexual
intensity, the honeymoon effect, from a merging of frame of reference over
time, will be less likely.
My mother forbiding me to step out of Little You mode even momentarily
spoils the spirit of a gift and poisons my graceful adaptability to new
developments around me, but she feels compelled to enforce domestic
accountability on the part of her children. I think of the Budda Mind as a
kind of nudity, illegal and troublesome at the bus station and essential in
the bath or with a lover.
I presume the unconscious intent of rituals like the church service,
the family mealtime, the musical jam session, or a drug use party to be
like a public bath, an overt choreographic invitation for a group of
somewhat familiar people to be in each other's direct psychic space with a
temporary suspension of personal definition. There seems to be a modern
trend toward doing this in a restaurant, movie theatre or while driving a
car or else facilitating it using recreational food and drugs, all of which
appauls me more than church, but at least the rhetoric that attends the
activity applauds the Little You while offering a suspension of it.
Mr. Mindell seems to presume each person is locked into their Little You
tightly, so I guess he probably is able, like me, to flirt with Budda Mind
randomly with no risk of disaster, but not my mother or any of the
innumerable people I've gotten intimate with who have critical mixed
feelings about the identity they've built for themselves. From my reading
of National Geographic, I see this as a major drawback of social
splintering in American culture, that many people are driven to seek
identity encouragement from a lover, spoiling the sexual pizzaz and getting
feedback that has too little complex mirroring to be wholistic.
The Sermon on the Mount, with it's call be as the lilies of the field,
is a terrifying curse to most Americans, even if they agree with it. I
attribute the draw of socially linking without overt expression of an
identity, using recreational drug addiction, dietary insanity, military
interest, and guarded privacy, to this kind of feeble commitment to one's
own identity, and religious encouragement to blaspheme or even abandon it.
I can just imagine a course of Budda Mind focused therapy for such a
person, with the implied label of mental illness or nonfunctionality put on
their domestic identity, pushing them further and further into denial of
identity and obsession with bizarre ways to socially link without one.
In Dreamtime I also observe a democratic psychic undercurrent in America
that expresses, from most people towards the other people they know,
critical mixed feelings about virtually every identity, reinforcing any
personal self-doubt. I have never met anyone with better than a 90%
validation of their identity design from those people who deal with them,
and many are under 40%.
Apparently the normal way to cope with this is to brutally limit
feedback, as with the behavior rules at Mr. Mindell's Institute, or by
having a minimal and controlled set of direct informal associates, who are
only allowed in after an overt pledge of alliegence of some kind.
I view the identity coaching of the junk food restaurants and movie
theatres as a huge boon to general kindness and sanity. Unfortunately, due
to aesthetic horror about the details, I can't participate; even with my
own kid, who at seven is deliberately and shamelessly honing an identity
with eyes wide open.
Mr. Mindell and I have had good success with getting a bird's eye view
of our identities by shifting what we call our "assemblage point", an
apparently imaginary place where our conscious awareness is located. he
relates a story from Carl Jung of an occasion when Mr. Jung was sitting on a
stone and had his assemblage point move spontaneously to within the stone,
creating a terrible unresolvable angst about whether he was a person or the
rock. A similiar quandry hit Mr. Mindell when he was researching quantum
physics, and he suggests to the reader that they deliberately visualize
orienting awareness from a nearby inanimate object.
My kid does this a lot, and presses me to do likewise with him. I am
more inclined to shift into living things, trees and other people,
particularly if I feel an opportunity for wonder in some way. It has been a
big help for keeping realistic about competitive challenges and failures to
connect socially.
Mr. Mindell has a term he calls flirting to refer to the psychic
prodding from inanimate objects. He makes no mention of the psychic
charging of such things by the triggered person. My own experience has been
that only objects or living things that I have overtly put into my Dreamtime
through a temporary assemblage shift can flirt with me, and I think of them
as expressions of part of my identity. I refer to them as progeny, partly
because this seemed so emotionally similiar to the result of common parental
focus.
This kind of "adoption" of stuff can be a mistake creating a kind of
neurotic territorial imperative in me (for identity defense) and requiring
some overt form of undoing for the sake of being able to take it easy.
Regular garbage is full of such things energized by other people who are
less careful about it than me, but quite as affected if I dig in their
garbage.
Anything I focus meditatively on for any reason I'm likely to adopt in
this way; so I make a point of never focusing in any sense on someone who's
likely to be an psychic antagonist or some object that another person is
already neurotic about. If possible I deliberately dismantle or destroy
objects that I need release from, and seek objects or people that can have
useful psychic power effects.
My young fellow also uses his "identity in the making" for psychic self
defense when being picked on or shamed, and endlessly play acts imaginary
dignity battles with other boys. This to me is the real point of identity
coaching and encouragement, to enable fielding a social presense that is
inspiring to actively share with other people, even if the only others
around are at odds somehow.
I know so many people of all ages who are in defensive psychic lockdown
in an identity that is painfully feeble, inspiring of harsh treatment, or
just loathesome to be inside of.
My first overt total identity suspension was quite scary, in spite of
fairly secure choreographic support. And social conditions were generally
better then. I was not under social duress or psychically feeble hardly ever
at the time. The common culture of my city has soured considerably since,
into psychic brutality. I've been arrested four times for inadequate or
missing identity in public. While there is no actual law against it, the
police are quite a nightmare for me, and I have no government ID. Two of the
times my kid was with me and he was too paralyzed to speak up when quizzed
about me. That didn't go over well.
So I think any constructive therapy program would have to include a
clear overt description of this risk, and any Christ Consciousness or Budda
Mind or identity suspension experiments would have to be in a real
stewardship context, not a business deal or legal relationship. I think
sexuality is the litmus test for this. I can only orgasm with a suspended
identity and cannot even get aroused while defending illusory dignity. I
would thus expect an explosion of sexual vitality in someone given an
opportunity for identity suspension after a long psychic lockdown. I don't
doubt this is what drives "child molesters", rapists, soldiers on leave and
overbearing lovers generally.
I would expect that an identity therapy program would have to require
and create a context for masturbation or intercourse in advance of any
identity release, on the part of people who are past puberty. Hense I
imagine that being successfully coupled would be a huge boon or even
essential for this kind of study. Even those prepubescent kids around me who
appear to still be able to refine their identity, openly refer to inducing
sexual arousal with their associates. This is somewhat frightening for me
due to the intensely vicious response the mainstream culture has towards
sexual play and arousal of children. One friend of mine had his whole life
shattered and spent three years in prison for being open with some girls
about this, and I occasionally read about similiar tragedy in the paper,
always from the viewpoint of the enforcers.
Mr. Mindell focuses his writing on inanimate things only. He is happily
married with apparently no roommates or dependents, leaving the
interpersonal worms in the can. He describes, in detail, assembly within a
flower or a chair and assembly in between objects into what I call the
nothing (from the book "The Neverending Story"). The "nothing" refers to
Dreaming focus without illusion, without identity or boundary. He makes no
mention of emotional inertia (psychic momentum) in exploring this, whereas
the Neverending Story does and exhaustively illustrates non-conceptual
(sentient or feminine) identity. I highly recommend reading it.
A person in an intense social whirlpool that applauds their identity,
such as Mr. Mindell, cannot have an issue with psychic momentum, but I have
often had a tame enough life that I end up floating very slowly in the
nothing, unable to re-establish social illusion until what little psychic
momentum I possess has brought my focus around to an object I've given
identity power to previously. In a new environment where there aren't any
such objects (as in jail) the risk of being labeled mentally ill, related
to as an animal and really attacked (for "my own good") is quite real. I
believe this problem arises because actual identity is an illusion that the
real world does not reinforce, and mainstream common sense assumes that a
person's identity is based on something real.
In exploring this as a street person I have evolved a domestic identity
that's relatively easy to recapture and is as uninspiring as a social
target as possible. Being a minimally competent but socially worthless,
relatively ugly person can be a real asset for this sort of exploration in
public or with potentially hysterical associates; due to being a less
inspiring target of supposed rescue or supposed protection from.
Mr. Mindell writes as if a flower or a rock has innate identity
supporting effects and does deliberate signaling to everyone's subconscious.
Aboriginal religious belief that he and I have read about echoes that. My
view is that the effect is similiar to the burning bush voice of god effect;
from my experience, an echo from a part of my brain, that my conscious
awareness isn't assembled in, being received like a ventriloquist trick.
That I can tell, all the feelings, signals and apparent interaction that I
observe originate from my own mind.
What I call living noise, the continual buzzing, color and smell sending
throughout the whole area around me, from industrial as well as natural
phenomena, gets modulated quite oddly after a few continuous hours in my
Dreaming mode. Sound becomes an undifferentiated mass that modulates into
endlessly changing orchestral music and choral voices that's quite
astounding to listen to. I think that that is what inspired the idea of
angels singing. Color takes on a striking radiance and fluidity that makes
most everything seem to be in constant motion or waviness. If I hold my gaze
steady, my peripheral vision becomes a white haze. Smell is something I
normally don't notice so I can't say if it becomes different in Dreaming
mode. There appears to be another class of radiation, that I receive like an
electric tingle over my whole body, that could be internally generated. It
modulates with the images and silent verbal impressions that appear to come
from familiar other people (present or not), and nearby plants and animals.
What of this actually originates externally I can't say for sure. The
concept of internal vs external gets very nebulous in Dreaming mode. In a
primitive culture where overt capitalist ownership virtually never happens,
it may well be psychically safe to take in literally everything as a
Dreaming object and as part of one's identity, massively overlapping the
illusory worlds of one's associates. Aboriginal environments tend to be
outside of buildings also. This is a way to make low momentum trips into the
nothing much less likely to be permanent.
I don't recommend it though. I've seen disaster erupt in many communal
groups (inside of buildings) from people taking this outlook, everthing
going just fine until an innocent capitalist gesture from an outsider
triggers emotional havoc from a sudden eruption of hopelessly entangled
boundary defending.
The aboriginal world also has few if any psychic poisons that a person
needs to deliberately marginalize to stay emotionally positive. Advertizing,
television, radio, magazine covers, calender pictures, children's toys,
food packages and the like press for attention with expressive enthusiasm,
the same as the flowers, but use the resulting identity effect to implant
symbolic images that become part of the observer's self-concept. Much if
not most of this symbolic material is cynical, nhilistic, intellectually
mocking or encouraging of self-abuse or cruel expression. The nightmares
that result are a major sabotage, for me, of constructive beauty and ease
in Dreamtime imagination. I attribute the harsher aspects of modern culture
to Dreaming within this kind of sinister identity; another motive for
creating one's identity deliberately.
Mr. Mindell extrapolates a quantum physics puzzle, about particles
somehow linked without an identified energy tranfer medium, to suggest it as
a proof of deliberate intelligent interaction between inanimate objects or
through them from a single astounding intelligence. He quotes some mystical
writing from the Kabbalah and Alan Watts to back up his idea of a conscious
inanimate universe.
When I was six I was completely disgusted with this. I could not imagine
how a majority of grownups could be so deadly serious about promoting such
an obviously ridiculous theory. At the age of fifty I'm a bit more
diplomatic but no less puzzled. It is still possible to quote many reputable
authorities writing that the entire universe is a mechanical device made
using a magic wand and some remarks by a single lonely creature even more
biologically astounding than a person, but whose origin we will never
discuss or even mention. A fellow with a flying sleigh visiting several
hundred million homes in a single morning seems maybe a little less
far-fetched.
What seems more important though with mystical remarks like this is the
author's apparent indifference to confusing, humiliating or scaring the
reader. Having courted what others described as madness, I am
hypersensitive to any introduction of hyperbole into this exploration. I
have read somewhere a theory that the original motive for inventing legends
about super-natural creatures was to control children and menial laborers
with fear of the unknown. It's certainly effective for that even if that
wasn't the intent.
I am quite unable to open up to Dreamtime while focused on defending my
intellect or dignity or any other boundary. It's like looking at getting
into a swimming hole in a place where someone's liable to snag my wallet
while I'm in the water. I generally feel compelled to trash the polite
dignity of a psychobabble scene, to force the potentially disorienting
mysticism out of the game.
I think any therapy intending to explore Dreaming had better stick with
the undisputed facts and descriptions of actual experience, introducing
quantum physics only to show what isn't conclusively understood (not to
pretend to wisdom) and introducing religious imagery as a psychic device
that uses stories to artificially create feelings, not to pretend to report
news.
Mr. Mindell discusses marginalizing of perception, but oddly with no
mention of using marginalization for psychic defense or to clarify thinking
or to prevent being programmed with a sinister identity. I have generally
assumed that the apparent need for therapy only arises from lack of
marginalizing of data when appropriate, forcing a marginalization of memory
to compensate.
He writes about marginalization as a device useful for better physical
endurance but otherwise an unnecessary neurosis that promotes physical
disease. He presents an energy flow diagram, of interactive expressive
effects between parts of a scene, as idyllic, free of competitive or
predatory elements, coalescing or "unfolding" into an apparently
disentangled set of parts and boundaries, with each part (whether animate
or not) marginalizing awareness of all the other parts in order to "reflect
on itself" (to become able to observe).
In the view I observe while Dreaming, only the people and domesticated
animals actually disentangle. All inanimate objects become my image of
them, and all other life stays with me in Dreamtime unless I overtly
threaten it. Some people and domestic animals are likewise seduced into
Dreamtime from my presense, a contact "high", like the birds roosting on
Francis of Asissi. This is my ideal form of domestication; an arrangement
of conscious mutual blessing without unconscious beligerence.
He suggests a divination scheme involving tiptoeing into recognizing the
psychic nature of one other item outside of oneself. The reader is to
overtly request permission from their own intellect to get dreamy and then
to choose a current life question and write it down. Then they are to close
their eyes, focus on observing breathing or something else to substitute for
feeding mental chatter. Once they have gotten a bit sleepy, they are to peek
out and allow their unbiased attention to alight on something. They are then
to observe the object for awhile without pondering it.
Then he suggests that they pick a stereotypic quality or tendency to
label the object with, based on rude intuition, and observe the resulting
imagery and feeling echoes, what he calls the "ignis" of the item, for
awhile, coaxing or encouraging a human face or form or voice to emerge; what
I would call the burning bush effect. The reader is then supposed to attempt
a reassembly into that new human form or voice, and attempt a simple
interaction with their other self. He then suggests doing some kind of
simple artwork to express life from the new assemblage point.
He suggests a barrage of questions to pose about the experience,
assessing how, when and why this focus is normally marginalized, whether it
warrants a less obscure role, whether it relates to the original written
question, and what role the reader's primary identity plays in the life of
the new assemblage identity.
He presumes that the reader will discover through this their tendency to
narcissism, to fall in love with theirself through seeking reflection from
nearby items and that they will find that opposing or combative feelings
won't be attractive to them at all. Both are certainly true for me.
I can't imagine a beginner focusing on one random item in their normal
emvironment though. I would presume a beginner would have a real need to
make a Dreamtime inventory of their entire normal environment, noting all
the symbolically charged items and people; and noting the feelings from
focus on everything else that carries no charge. Mr. Mindell suggests that
there are no unresponsive focus points but there certainly are in my life.
Inevitably, if I randomly choose only one item, it will be something
that I subconsciously already have in my personal inventory of symbolically
charged items. By studying the whole field I can observe that a lot of it is
uncataloged, and maybe better left that way.
His divination scheme may be a good introduction to what I referred to as
progeny, reproducing a modulation of oneself in an item. His description
shows more clearly my impression of the "ignis" arising out of psychic echo,
that originates in the observer taking psychic possession of an item. This
could be a very good way for someone to study their own capitalist hysteria
and their security links with the living realm. They may also discover the
possibility of greater ease with competing living expressions from other
people assembled in the same item.
The description also suggests that many people, maybe even most, are at
a very primitive level of conscious participation in the psychic dynamics
of regular capitalist sharing, a very serious handicap in a European
culture, and a hint that suffocating fear may play a primary role in
maintaining the apparent calmness of modern culture. Someone doing his
divination scheme at my house is quite likely to have their Dreaming focus
land on an item with two or three other peoples' identities incorporated,
the average chair having maybe 10 or more. My house also has a weed, insect
and item density that makes marginalization control quite gymnastic and
very necessary compared to the average bus station.
Mr. Mindell describes divination in a straight-forward helpful way. He
is clearly an advocate of using it, but not pushy about that. He even
quotes an Indian mystic named Patanjali as suggesting that the mental or
verbal products of divination are not the real benefit or even the point of
engagement, but rather that divinational questions are a way that the
random living realm seduces friendly encounter. Mr. Mindell also warns that
he has a tendency, which has been regretable, towards giving brilliant
answers enough importance that the sentience that produced them becomes much
harder to revisit.
This may be why tradition has generally gone the direction of having
divining activity always involve a separate questioner and diviner. My
older sister got quite inspired with the Tarot for awhile through
soliciting questions from other people. I have never been enthused that
direction but I've never been all that enraptured by the possibility of
divinational answers either, for myself or anyone else. I designed and
experimented with a tarot-like layout of regular cards for awhile, and a
vision quest sort of meditation evoking what I call the "voice of god", and
use of an I-Ching scheme that came to me in a dream. My impression though
has been that the answers come out of regular but unimpeded intellect with
access to data from the Dreamtime, a naturally balancing mental shakedown
effect that needs no conscious manipulation in a sane life. I view
deliberate divination as being the psychic equivalent of a laxative,
indicative of a compromised life engagement involving too much paralysis
from fear of hurt feelings.
He gives an example description of a divinational meditation he did once
asking about the best book writing mood, showing pretty well how childish
and absurd the process looks from the outside.
Mr. Mindell describes what he calls shapeshifting also, as part of his
divination scheme. He appears to use the term shapeshifting for the action
in imagination of conjuring a ficticious entity and then shifting
assemblage into it. I haven't tried this deliberately, as he suggests, but
it happens anyway occasionally and is a helpful reality check.
Then he writes about what he calls time travel. He starts with a puzzle
from physics, analysing the behavior of a regular electron passing through
a magnetic field, showing a redirection anomoly conventionally explained by
the presense of electron-positron pairs evoked by the field. In my
understanding of physics, an electron meeting a positron (an anti-matter
electron) mutually annilates into a photon (a unit of electro-magnetic
energy). It makes sense to me that an electro-magnetic energy field could
compell an oscillation of photons becoming electron-positron pairs
momentarily.
One physicist came up with an alternate explanation of the electron
going back in time briefly. Mr. Mindell uses this as what he call a metaphor
for a person entering a social or speaking situation, in which they
encounter devil's advocate sort of artificial conflicts of rhetoric that
they marginalize but which subconsciously redirect their life direction
anyway. He suggests that such a person could also allow a form of
spontaneous time shift experiment in their imagination that will likewise
redirect their life but with Dreamtime awareness.
I'm not at all clear about what he is describing. He gives a brief
cryptic description of a time travel experiment to try. It involves the
same beginning as the divination, with a period of non-mental, eyes shut
relaxation, focused on breathing, going into peeking out, choosing an item
to meditate on, and seeking an originating essense impression to relate to;
as an event creating the item.
He suggests to the reader that they come up with words to describe what
"time" is like in their initial and latter impressions, and also "space".
They are to focus on their intuitional image of the item origination,
attemping an identity shift into the emerging object "essense", and coming
up with words to describe what that is like, determining any significant
roles for that identity, evoking an imaginary story if possible and a name
for the identity, and looking at their normal identity from that other
place, noting similiarities that may be part of their immortal nature. Then
they are to carefully assess to what degree they marginalize these aspects,
that are potentially so important not to marginalize, and look for regular
current life issues that may be related.
My Dreamtime doesn't have any time or space reference points from which
to determine if traveling even happens. If I relive a past event, or shift
assemblage somewhere else and relive an event, I don't have a feeling of
actually existing in a different time or being somewhere else, only of
remembering, like watching a movie.
Attempting his meditation sequence I observe nothing in the item that I
could call it's essense, or have any impressions of it's origination. I
don't know what he is describing. The words suggest that his imagination is
able to fabricate a fairly complex experience on demand.
I have been mostly shy or uninterested in pressing my imagination to
conjure experience, having too much confusing data from natural sources
already, and seeing little value in the idea. Some of my associates have
expressed the view that all of what we experience is fabricated, and thus
useful to deliberately practice fabricating, and gain some measure of
control. I have taken the opposite approach of shattering all Dreaming
imagery that can be shattered, and taking a closer look at what survives.
Mr. Mindell next goes into advising about studying physical medical
issues, like a headache, using his divination and shapeshifting method,
making clearer the use of experience fabrication as a way to amplify
otherwise too subtle of data and to redirect attention to personal drama
that is creating the problem or making it worse. That seems like a useful
medical approach, for those who can live with the inevitable confusion of
melodramatic data. I've read many accounts, such as those of Whitney
Strieber, of people conjuring demons and aliens and fairies, evoking much
worthwhile development of wisdom, but at the cost of having serious
confusion about what is real. I have been loathe all my life to go there,
though quite interested in the wisdom of those who have.
I have had several fairly serious medical issues that demonstrated the
gross narrow-minded inadequacy of modern doctors and dentists. Though I am
convinced of their good-hearted sincerity and real competence in the
subjects that they have studied, the simple fact that white sugar is
seriously poisonous has elluded the mainsteam medical understanding.
Virtually no doctor or dentist studies basic nutrition, basic emotional
influence on disease, or the use of any non-mechanical or unsophisticated
methods of remediation. They all easily meet a common definition of being
quacks.
It has been a serious bummer in my life to have discovered and wrestled
with this. Mr. Mindell himself is a head doctor, a therapist, and
convincingly describes his own profession as narrow-minded quackery. And
unfortunately his upgrade still strikes me as quite as blinkered, still
leaving me on my own doing basic research, with nothing from him but a few
ideas of what I could try. Like so many medical professionals, he can
competently point out serious flaws in the blinkered approaches of other
medical professionals, while doing no better himself, though all the
mud-slinging provides useful data through noting what ideas or methods
remain unlampooned.
Mr. Mindell gives an example of a woman with a muscle cramp in her back
that exhaustive study had determined was emotional. He and his wife
successfully coached the woman into creating an hallucination of being an
emotionally affected flower, in order to have a means to suspend her normal
identity when assessing and realigning her life during a period of facing
tramatic loss of a lover. The woman has since found that hallucination idea
to be a life blessing to hold on to and use for that, instead of addressing
the basic insanity of living without committed non-sexual intimacy. Mr.
Mindell and his wife have a very successful conventionally isolated marriage
to encourage her with, but I am unimpressed. I've been twenty years with the
same woman and still see that as stupid to base emotional grounding on, not
a dependency to prop up with spell-casting.
He writes about shakedown of somebody's angst about their associates
using formal therapy. In a similiar focus I would walk on the bikepath
alone, conjuring a lively imaginary debate with the people I have angst
about. The descriptions he gives of theraputic assessment strategies strike
me as unbelievably cold, what I call "white ratting", or making an
experimental object, of the person identified as a client; putting an
intellectual knife into their Dreamtime that I cannot imagine doing without
inadvertantly creating innumerable nightmares for everyone involved.
He gives examples of using the same knife with various one on one
therapy events with people I would call "non-intimate" (no shared sleeping
space or toilet), raising complex feelings and creating very profound
shared history, easing one mental scramble at the cost of creating a new
one. I have a clearer picture now of the incompatability of therapy, with
it's emotionally deadly intellect, and what he is calling sentient
exploration. Even in stories in which he is the client, he does not appear
to recognize how someone who is the object of this analysis will create
new blinkering to preserve the dignity of their identity.
He discusses doing artistic expression out of the Dreaming. I've done
that spontaneously quite a bit and I think perhaps maybe most artists can
only produce that way. He suggests art of this sort as a way of
comprehending the root of one's addictions or addictive tendencies. He
describes a theory of hard-wired drives to study alone but I don't
experience any drives to speak of from actual solitude. I believe that
independent addiction would have to be illusion; that any addiction must be
an expression of friendliness of some kind, poorly chosen perhaps but not
destructively based or an expression of something negative.
I've lived personally with many addicts and participated in their
struggles to bust loose. Food is my only identifiable compulsion but I've
spent a year and a half eating only raw food, and a few months during that
period eating only four days out of every week. The past month I've fasted
one day a week. So I've studied compulsion a little. I attribute my lack of
comventional addictions to having a generally validated identity that I am
easy with using for social linking.
Studying addiction in Dreamtime has only shown me feelings of longing
and welcoming and general friendliness being the root of all the consumptive
drives, including those related to acquiring things or creating a mess. I
see no hope of breaking addiction without a move towards a colder heart in
some sense, unless another drive can be substituted that serves as similiar
enough expression of friendly feelings, and is physically and emotionally
possible for the person to incorporate into their identity.
Mr. Mindell notes that an addictive tendency can emerge stronger in a
particular context and suggests focusing Dreamtime imagination on pretending
to be in that context and modulating the dream. I've done that a whole lot
in reference to all manner of behavior in myself, with much helpful
shakedown, though sticking as close as possible to actual personalities and
actual resource possibilities. I was inspired towards the acquizition of my
house out of that kind of study. For someone wrestling with social confusion
entangled with self-destructive addiction I can imagine that that could
would be a good idea.
He spooks the game though by suggesting a finale of imagining inviting
others to a group psychobabble and improv theatre about "creating a new
atmosphere", based on a fantasy of a cultural expressive context that
excludes the troublesome drives. This inevitably means attacking the
illusory identity dignity of some or most of the others and inviting them
to do the same in return. I've only seen and heard stories of that
resulting in a conversion of one kind of stupidity into a more intrenched
and just as regretable other form of stupidity, that maybe can be made to
sound better but leaves me totally disappointed, looking from the outside.
To me, addiction of any kind is friendly cultural expression, not to be
mocked even if it's as ridiculous as Santa Claus and ugly as a war. Like
Krishna in the Bagavad Gita, I would recommend leaving the expression to run
unmolested unless I can invent a genuinely dignified redirection of the
collective spirit that validates the former friendly initiative.
Like Krishna and Arjuna, I'm a pretty poor source of choreography, but I
have the sense to know there is no cultural expression so bad that I cannot
make it more horrible through feeding a dignity panic. Alcoholics Anonomous
succeeds from the drunks' and the police viewpoint; but I'd rather live
with the drunks, if I have to choose. A savior is a jackass to live with at
home, and I sure don't want to live inside of one.
Mr. Mindell describes subconscious nonverbal communication between
intimates, creating what I call telepathic concurrence between them. He and
Carl Jung only related it to sexual intimates but living intimately
(sleeping and toilet in common) appears to do the same thing in my life.
Having such deep rapport with only one other person has been a spooky
mistake though; I think four is minimum, and ten or twelve is better, to
avoid development of unnoticed dream barriers against neighbors and
visitors, and the big scale society.
Mr. Mindell puts an emphasis on overtly asking a stranger for permission
to touch, when the person is a subject of theraputic study. This is
evidence to me that Mr. Mindell has accepted unnoticed dream barriers that
make him unable to meet the stranger in Dreamtime, right then, and know the
right moment to invade or see clearly that he shouldn't. He has convinced
himself that to ask does not introduce an unspoken threat of mockery, a
demand for identity defense, because the guard on his own dignity is not
relaxed ever in that kind of encounter; for me a little like having someone
answer my knock on their front door with a loaded shotgun in their hand,
just in case.
This same difficulty shows up in the routine question "how are you", the
first phrase I learned in spanish class. The word "you" is a demand for an
identity presentation of a sort that I never got a grip on as a kid. The
adults I knew all overtly dodged or ignored the question, so that's how I
answered it, and still do. If a friend asks I generally frown at them and
they say something else.
More the point, I see a major offense in an implied demand to someone
else that they abandon Dreamtime. Mr. Mindell laments that his culture has
established rejection or denial of Dreamtime, but in these subtle jabs at
his associates he enforces the same denial. Even if the other person has a
preplan for fielding the remark, they must live with the high status doctor
putting a curse on their secret unprogrammed dreaminess.
I have unresolvable heartache in my life with intimates who condemn my
unprogrammed dreaminess, or plead for me to abandon the Dreamtime to
participate in some kind of brutal efficiency of supposed importance. Some
will even request that I take on a temporary management role specifically
breaking up other people's Dreamtime to milk more efficient if miserable
work out of a worker or create a more docile or tidy appearance in some
children. The demand is frequently from people like Mr. Mindell who are
pining for shared Dreamtime but horrified by how a society looks when
that's happening.
That I've seen, a worker in Dreamtime looks like they're getting nothing
done. Their body moves in a flowing way that's almost hypnotic to watch and
they fail to notice or respond to political threats around them. They have
complete emotional tolerance of filth and chaos and goofy behavior, at
least within the culture they call their own. Everyone seems to drift this
way as they get older (even if they are against the idea), estranging the
younger generation by being resistant to technical study or innovation that
cannot be assessed in Dreamtime, and by being resistant to having fun due
to the powerful expression of identity that goes with it.
The absense of identity expression in Dreamtime is for me the most
striking aspect of it and has made me loathe the idea of having fun all my
life. I have only recently even pondered fun at all, at the age of fifty,
and still without much warmth about it.
I associate fun with my introduction to using identity as a child in a
new nursery school. With no significant identity development, I was
suddenly without any of my family, cut off in a room full of complete
strangers, mostly my age. I cried and screamed in fear but quickly realized
that the angst I was evoking in the strangers only added new potential
danger. I studied the other boys, to see how they were coping with the
disaster. I came up with a similiar portrayal, simplistic but fairly
charismatic, that enabled me to survive in reasonable equilibrium til I was
rescued. After that I was spooked, and practiced my new portrayal at home
somewhat.
My sudden loss of Dreamtime put a permanent curse on the cathartic
necessity for fun. I had to do it to cope with my hysteria, but it had all
the attraction of sneezing from hay fever. I felt horribly mocked by the
overseeing women so I marginalized them. Believing that my prediciment was
an inevitable feature of normal life, I did my best to adapt, with a better
and better refining of my portrayal, and an embracing of sharing it with
other children in the school setting where I had designed it.
At home I failed totally in my few attempts at intimacy with other boys.
I think I was too boring for them. With only two sisters and my mother to
be intimate with, my conceptual style of fun inspired mostly silent
tolerance and occasionally derision, so I oscillated between attempts to
embrace melodramatic or sensory fun and attempts to find meaningful
independent conceptual exploration.
Maintaining an identity without personal encouragement was quite grim
and my failures at being personal continued into adulthood. I established
many associates through shared intention only to tragically lose them to
novelty or better offers. By the age of thirty I had researched my social
threats enough that I could spend my days almost entirely in Dreamtime
again, so I dropped any further interest in shared intention or social
integration. Many other people over forty that I've gotten to know could
tell a similiar story, though maybe with more feeling of regret and shame.
Mr. Mindell introduces Mr. Jung's idea of a coupled man and woman each
having an inner spirit of some sort (like a split personality), oriented
from the opposite sexual frame of reference, which had a coupled relation
to the equivalent inner spirit in the partner. Mr. Mindell postulates a
less defined "inner companion" in each person that maintains a hidden
relationship with inner companion of anyone they partner with.
My bias, from having failed at finding value in social integration using
an identity, is to presume that the "outer companion" is imaginary. What I
observe is massively intertangled multiple unconscious relationships
involving several people who have established historical memories with each
other, whether voluntary or not. That kind of unrecognized complex linking
being my only clear successful link to other people, I'm inclined to see the
more politically recognized negotiated relationships of common couples or
friends as a phenomenon that I don't yet relate to as an actual sharing.
That is to say any negotiated expression or behavior is by definition not
spontaneous and I would say prostituted, insincere and often invisible in
Dreamtime.
For example, if one partner expresses apparent interest in the other's
hobby of a certain sort but has no detectable Dreamtime component of it
then I doubt their interest at all. Mr. Mindell describes a theory of
subconscious momentary "flirts" of expression between people that
profoundly affect the resulting sharing of expression or choice of clothes
and such. I observe instead flirts of overt expression coloring a continuous
wash of Dreamtime interactive expression that often isn't clearly
originating in a single individual. In fact the expressions that appear in
the Dreamtime to erupt out of several people at once are far more real to
me than any solitary expression.
In a conventional party scene with friends or strangers I just feel
numb, like I'm sitting in a cloud of octupus ink. I have no faith in any of
what visibly occurs there and can't see the Dreamtime then so I'm inclined
to just be a spook around a party event, pretending to sleep or physically
hanging out far enough away to be invisible in the way I often am in public.
Mr. Mindell expresses belief in the sincerity of overt signals and
remarks of intended communication between specific people. I can believe the
sincerity of broadcasts from someone with no specific intended recipient
and no warp from commercial motive, such as this article. But I am too
heartbroken and jaded about overt directed messages to even give them
recognition anymore, whether towards me or towards someone else.
He describes doing a divination-like encounter with another person,
having them be the object to peek out at after getting dreamy, and
conjuring an imaginary interaction involving a shape-shift into something
called an essence of a flirt, or a characteristic, from the other person.
The hope is to play act a committee meeting between oneself and the
shape-shift identity, shaking down a policy or aesthetic remark of some
sort.
He suggests afterwards having an actual committee meeting with the other
person about why the other meeting doesn't normally get recognition. I
cannot abide meetings anymore, whether real or imaginary, but when upset by
someone, either positively or negatively, I often fall into shape-shifting
into a virtual being that is them, and have a lively discussion, sometimes
literally out loud. To try to provoke this kind of event deliberately seems
like a mistake though, like making a date for a sexual event; better to
leave it at establishing a context that allows it.
He remarks about a supposedly common assumption that a person is
attracted to opposite dispositions in other people. I am perhaps pretty
culturally out of touch that way and I haven't noticed that belief, but I
believe it. I have observed people being drawn to sexual contact with
someone having a mutually annilalating identity so as to successfully get
into sexually aroused Dreamtime. This also works for nonsexual intimates or
even associates in a fairly mindless workspace such as sorting laundry off a
conveyer belt, that Dreamtime can be more assessable when two identities
meet that have no illusions in common, but where both people are able to
share Dreamtime.
Some people are perhaps too ashamed or frightened of Dreamtime to share
it with anyone, or may restrict it to sexuality only. I go into Dreamtime on
my own, drawing others with me without being deliberate about it. In my
youth I unconsciously sought girls of opposite nature to facilitate my
relaxation into Dreamtime, which worked in the short run but was far too
heartbreaking, due to technical clash with their real life.
I've noticed two distinct classes of sexual identity opposites. One
pairing involves an organized self-disciplined woman like the stereotypical
black woman and a man who is a heedless self-centered lush. The other
involves a mindless friendly random girl who "just wants to have fun" and a
man who engages in major technical achievement. I have seen many couples
struggle with a sexual rapport that fades when one or both morph into a "new
improved" identity that fits better in the opposite class.
I haven't noticed much actual interest of one person towards another
unrelated to sharing Dreamtime. If I was more socially integrated I might.
What people remark about or get irked by in roommates inevitably is some
disposition or focus choice that they have in common. For example one fellow
trying to stay off heroin expressed a desire to kill another old associate
who was casually using it. But genuine Dreaming stewardship interest from
one person to another looks really rare and feeble generally (what I would
call love). Non-Dreamtime focus on another person nearly always looks
predatory or reactive to me, either seeking a payoff or coping with an
angst.
Mr. Mindell promotes deliberate study of these dynamics with anyone who
permits it. He suggests just dropping into Dreamtime like I do, whenever
one can get away with it, and adding as much of that brand of insight to
one's engagements as possible. That seems like a sentiment common to a lot
of people generally, though described in a multitude of ways. It's for me
a pretty hopeful note that a mainstream Phd therapist encourages the idea
of Dreamtime, even if not the non-competitive cultural underpinning that
makes it accessable.
The internet stories of his mediation activities suggest that he
embraces incorporating of Dreamtime awareness while under stiff character
attack. He has a book called "Sitting in the Fire", which I haven't seen
but can quite imagine. I think he compromises too much though, sabotaging
his own access to Dreamtime terribly and setting an example that only the
very robust and clever can follow.
He expresses the belief also that Dreamtime awareness survives death and
is actually permanent, based on the Dreamtime feeling of someone's presense
being quite as profound even if they're dead or hanging out somewhere else.
I am not so convinced that we are observing concrete phenomena. To say for
certain that Carl Jung is aware still and conscious of Mr. Mindell, rather
than that Mr. Mindell is able to very effectively conjure Mr. Jung, seems
like believing in Santa Claus, though I don't prohibit the possibility and
I'm quite as much a wishful thinker as the next guy.
I have read, from many sources, accounts of phenomenon that virtually
prove that some kind of psychic or energy form survives death, but not
necessarily the actual life spirit of the person. A meme-like "imprint" of
some kind may survive in the collective Dreamtime awareness moshe of those
still living who had an empathic link to the person while they lived, or
are able to channel a second hand empathic link as in a seance.
The exact nature of what sort of energy form exists, that manifests my
self-awareness while I am alive, is poorly understood, much less what
remains of it after death. My Dreamtime evidence suggests a hive effect,
similiar to the social process of construction of advanced technology,
wherein some aspects of my personality originate as an energy pattern prior
to my birth, collectively held by those already living. Thus some of my
life expression is programmed into me in my youth by my cultural Dreamtime
context, both the other people and the natural world of rocks and
vegetation. My own personal creativity may play a fairly minor role and may
disappear at my death with no-one hardly able to really tell for sure.
Perhaps that collective energy pattern (meme personality) may take
centuries to die out after loss or redirection of the person expressing it,
or may invade a new person, in a manner similiar to a virus; but in a meme
style, a resonant echo of telepathic prayer signals within living people
rather than as a living personality and autonomous awareness. The
personality I have developed with my present life may also establish a
profound enough collective psychic presense to leave a persistent echo after
I die.
I have a theory of reincarnation related to this. My divinational
"voice" told me that each newborn person, and many of the more mentally
able animals, begin life with an intense Dreamtime emersion in the prayers
and musings of the whole cognitively active living realm. These
subconscious and spontaneous expressions hammer their imagination with the
identity meme echoes of countless former creatures of a similiar genetic and
environmental root. The voice called this a part of the akashic record. It
said that I was strongly influenced, in my life vision design, by the
akashic memory of Mr. Gurdjieff, and that that sort of influence was the
origin of reincarnation memories, wherein the echoing memories are so
technically detailed that someone tracking a substantial portion from one
previous life could convincingly portray the former person, even believing
that they are the former person.
The voice said that each new person who grows up developing advanced
cognitive ability, as Mr. Gurdjieff did, will commence adding a new psychic
wave to the akashic din while still alive, promoting yet another identity
format that others with similiar developed cognitive ability will
subconsciously muse about and respond to with their own prayers and dreams
into the Dreamtime sharing. The voice said that this has been happening for
several million years, with the collective living human and intelligent
animal moshe preserving many memories for the whole period of intelligence
development on Earth, in a manner that could rightly be described as a
single continuously living creature, with people being like cells.
I have done some "astral" traveling; meaning that on several occasions I
deliberately flew out of my body while apparently still awake but with my
body in some sort of trance. Exactly where my conscious presense was located
during those periods is open to debate; what I saw looked like a normal
view of where I was, outside of my normal body and moving like a ghost. I
have no idea what part my physical brain played in those events, or what
would change if my body lost heartbeat and brain activity but still had
living cells metabolizing for say twenty minutes, during which I could
imprint my local Dreamtime with prayers from that orientation.
Thus a dead person could appear to continue living and evolving without
having any actual existance outside of the subconsciousnesses of other
living people. And unresolved relationship issues with them could continue
to shake down and evolve in Dreamtime long after they are gone.
In cultures in Brazil and Africa that I've read about that are more
Dreamtime focused, a regular communion with deceased ancestors is not only
a believable experience but even expected of everyone, as if basic to a
sane life. Mr. Mindell quotes one psychically hard hitting Vietnamese mystic
warning that he was "still arriving" long after his physical arrival or even
his physical departure.
Mr. Mindell discusses using Dreamtime awareness in a combative meeting
to find unifying feeling focuses to remark about. He gives a horrifying
example of an imaginary Patty Hearst sort of group psychic rape event where
a facilitator uses traditional Christian symbolism to create a unifying
feeling. Mr. Mindell calls the Christian bell sound a "hot spot" of group
attention. The facilitator offers the bell sound as a conscious group focus
to help the main group of black people shatter the outside cultural identity
of the solitary white woman that they are attacking. In the story the ploy
succeeds and she completely forsakes her originating cultural reverence, at
least for the period of that meeting. His apparent heartlessness worries me
some.
I read on the internet of a similiar account of a real event that he
actually facilitated, where there were several white people, many of them
men. Several of the black people came out with brutally childish angry
perspectives that inspired similiarly blinkered remarks from the white men.
Eventually they all relented from senseless brutality and had a group cry
for all the self sorry feelings among the people in the room, having
established plenty of current tragedy to base it on. Mr. Mindell calls this
unconditional embracing of pettiness "deep democracy". I cringe to imagine
technical political consequences based on that meeting. I would call it
instead a "degeneration into democracy".
Mr. Mindell is apparently embarrassed and confused about the economic
dominance of his wealthy white academic social class. Being a fairly
athletic, non-drug using, white street vagrant, I have no respect for the
lame Dreamtime junkies I known who whine about the wealth of people like
Mr. Mindell; someone who has almost no access to Dreamtime. I have only
seen whiners in my life get even more crippled and self-destructive from
successful predation episodes like the racism discussion. The squeaky wheel
gets the grease. But the genuine invitation to have dignity and become a
source of grease requires becoming economically competitive, so they turn
it down, as I have.
I know if I was willing to forsake Dreamtime as much as Mr. Mindell does
I could amass a lot more wealth than I have, and I believe that anyone
willing to join the group identity of those who have forsaken the Dreamtime
will be accepted and supported by the others, regardless of skin color, sex,
manner of dress or even choice of associates. When I was saving for my
house I was shooed right in, shaggy hair and beard, torn dirty clothes and
sleeping in the city park.
When busted by the neighbors (using the building department), I have been
unable to make peace with my antagonists. I've always been able to warm up a
reasonable rapport with the government people though, with no change in my
vagrant appearance and troublesome Dreamtime associates, generally
obtaining overt permission from them for my neighborhood expression.
From my National Geographic reading I have the impression that the
societies that embrace Dreamtime and get access to modern equipment go
berserk with jealosy and lust and rationalized viciousness, if they try to
mix the two. The oratory attributed to Chief Seattle expresses this most
plaintively, with his wisdom being quite inadequate to cope effectively,
particularly with the young men of his group getting self-righteously
destructive. Certainly my associates, nearly all of them living in an all
day lucid daydream, can be quite a managerial challenge for me with petty
insanities about resources, that the more polite if barren academic society
I grew up in never got lost in.
In groups of ten to twenty that I have been in meetings with, I've
actually done the Dreamtime trickery that he describes, of drawing attention
to unifying feelings already present or noting evidence of someone's greater
nobility since a previous encounter, that get people to convulsively embrace
each other's beings and get along. I did that for about a decade. Now I'm
disgusted.
I was motivated by a need to get the emotionally infantile jerks to quit
throwing curses into the spirit of the meeting, and I was totally
appreciated for doing that, by everybody involved. But my eventual
conclusion was that democratic group meetings are a mistake that just feed
idiocy; that any business or household or political action group that I'm a
part of will have no meetings at all, and no honoring of imbecilic
expression ever. I have decided to live under rule established by
charismatic dominance and beligerent force, not negotiation.
I see the role of democratic meetings as solely a trick, by actual
leaders, to redirect imbecilic violence into convulsive whining, a way to
prevent riots. But I call it a lesser evil, not a solution. The better
trick is to arrange to have the trigger symbols that spark jealosy and
greed be hidden or disquised so that they don't "flirt" with anyone's
attention anymore.
Mr. Mindell writes that for him the democratic trickery requires
deliberate self-control, that he gets fascinated by the perspective of the
"little you", like someone playing a video game. My "little you" was such a
lonely social disaster that it never came up for me to focus on petty
things, with a divine opportunity right around me.
Being a democratic trickster had appeal to me for many years while the
game was challenging. But looking back, the destructive behavior of other
people that I prevented might have compelled some actual emotional
maturing on their part, whereas what I did postponed that, perhaps even
making the eventual eruption of riots even worse.
One business I started, and managed democratically for a month or so,
looked real hopeful but degenerated into irresponsibility and tragedy after
my exit. If those people had been forced by fate to seek a less creative
but more stable existing business, they would have faired better than they
did under my guidance (in the long run).
Mr. Mindell and I are what I call whores; someone who steps in just long
enough to tantalize with what seems possible, and set people up for a
crash that compromises their courage to face themselves and really develop.
At least though, what I did was good for me, good for my spiritual courage.
He describes the same drive as I had. He was hopeless about the violent
racial political idiocy he read about; he had to act, try something. Not
instantly successful, he was put down for trying by his colleagues. He
organized messy groups and studied the details of emotional atmosphere,
group root aesthetics, issue definition, spontaneous melodramatic roles,
evolving scapegoats, and people who inspired his beligerence.
He daydreamed imaginary encounters where he tried various choreographic
ploys or "shape-shifted" into the role of someone who he disputed. He sat
in meetings, utterly forsaking identity, watching the divine puppet theatre
yank participants this way and that. He noted unrepresented parts of the
living realm such as children or trees, proposing or arranging
representation.
He tells a story of a meeting in Ireland, a place oddly named, that
resulted in a totally real Hatfield-McCoy standoff evolving into a hug when
he drew two key antagonists to focus their self-pity on their own ill
health instead of the deaths of their families. The only viewpoint he
expressed at the meeting was that everyone there was worthy of recognition
as human, even if they talk like a monster instead of advocating formal
prosecution of their opponents. Two days later a major peace accord was
signed, perhaps made more possible by his choreography.
I doubt I could've been as diplomatic. He faced an amphitheatre of some
two hundred people representing either murder in defense of industrial
predation or murder to terrorize people into abandoning their property.
That I know of, there has never been a concrete declaration, anywhere in
the world, that industrial predation is a crime or even an offense (though
I would certainly call it that). My neighborhood strife could be described
as partially rooted in the same issue, without the violence. I'm
compromising the businesslike appearance and property values of the people
who want to play the neighborhood like stock market commodities, instead of
permanent reverent homes where people bravely explore life's possibilities.
He became so mystically detached from actual technical issues that he
convinced himself that all enemies are fictious, that no-one is out of reach
of his stewardship, at least the imaginary kind. That was certainly true
for me while I remained a spiritual vagrant, owning nothing, charismatically
borrowing everything I used. I have little respect for that now. I have
taken on an actual, non-illusory, social role with my community, with
clearly identifiable possessions and ego impact, setting example for real,
not in empty but high impact rhetoric.
So I have what I call enemies who overtly advocate serious air pollution,
industrial pollution of the yard grass, use of world resources at the
maximum possible rate, backstabbing political manuevering, preservation of
emotional immaturity through permanent privacy and sterility of aesthetic
presentation, and use of jailed chidren and animals for vicarious lecherous
expression.
I view big scale politics as a generic confidence trick accountable
to no-one, played out by predatory rascals and self-righteous whiners who
all want to load the world ecosystem at the maximum possible rate. In my
youth I had a period of political activism, and did some study of state and
county politics. I concluded that there was no constructive role for me.
My enemies are not unconscious in their choices of life direction, any
more than the drunk buying today's fifth of vodka. As I did in the
democratic households, businesses and committees, I convince my antagonists
that they are prevailing against me, so they will lose heart, settle into
lower key though maybe permanent degenerosy. I encourage my associates, or
anyone, to referee or try to be friendly in any way they see fit, but I
don't kid myself or anyone else about the nature of the challenge.
I remain readable. My life expression is direct, not symbolic, I have no
slogans or affiliations. I speak politically only to an overt listener and
speak only to their actual interest, promoting my viewpoint mostly by
living it.
The plants in my yard are cast like a living tarot layout, minimizing
human artifice to maximize the plant frame of reference, mowing enough to
prevent a call to the land use people. The 30 foot ship in the yard has
enough decay that it has no element of avarice left; it can be pure
symbolism shared easily with anyone, like a sculpture in a park.
The entire household apparatus is setup to welcome children, drunks and
petty thieves so the regular roommates and friends aren't too emotionally at
risk of accidentally offending me or each other. What they add to the mix,
and regret, they can withdraw at whim. By forcing adaptation to a dirty
house, and arranging some simple and handy cleaning devices, the toilet,
tub and kitchen remain passable to most people without any onus of duty or
negotiation, or much effort on my part.
To minimize neurotic privacy and emotional idiocy, at least for myself,
I keep the household as numerous as legally possible and sharing equipment
as much as possible, though without campaigning about it. Between the wild
expression of the yard plants, and the Dreamtime sincerity of the roommates
who's life expression is visible to me, I can pretty easily find a focus at
home that can be what I call a view of the divine expressive background of
my life. Through interaction while in Dreamtime, with either the yard or
one of the roommates' life expressions, I am politically and emotionally
mirrored in a very helpful way also.
I'm guessing that a focus providing me a view of the divine is what Mr.
Mindell means by the term "convergence point". His use of poetic or
allegorical language leaves me behind. He writes that "all the little things
that catch your attention converge" on one physical place that as a result
will feel very attractive.
I believe that this kind of divine mirroring is what Mr. Mindell refers
to as seeing one's "double", a term used also by Carlos Castaneda. Both of
them describe a fairly rocky emotional result if a person engages this kind
of attention while self-centered or committed to a petty focus. I wrestle
with that occasionally from building maintanence issues, or being late to
pick up my kid from school, coinciding with the mirroring. Generally my
desperate loneliness prevents any possibility of petty focus, so other than
a mild foreboding I have no significant experience with the demons that
other people have told me stories of conjuring up while observing that sort
of psychic mirror.
Mr. Mindell gives a fairly exhaustive description of studying the
double, though with pretty disheartening allegorical words that would leave
me at a complete loss if I no experience with this. Again, because it
inevitably looks ageless and hopelessly intertwined with whatever life
spirit is providing the mirror, he expresses the conviction that the double
is my immortal awareness rather than a nonliving meme echo that I am
temporarily embodying while alive.
His descriptions of meditations to try for experiencing one's double
seem pretty worthless for a fellow like me. He uses a bunch of poetic
imagery words and advocates deliberate visualizations of imaginary
impossibilities. He writes about lucid daydreaming in what I call a Book of
Revelations style. When I was in the throes of conventional teenage hysteria
I had grown up with innumerable poetic versions of spiritual discovery, most
of which make sense now, but which seem unnecessarily obscure and were
worthless at the time, like describing a television as being like a box
with small people doing a portrayal inside it behind a window.
When I saw a large poison oak bush burst into apparent flame and advise
about what I had been in a mental quandry about, it was helpful to have
read Moses' story to have for comparison; but I believe that I was way
better off that day having not done any confusing visualizations to warp
the appearance of what hapened.
I created my access to the double through deliberately redefining my
actual social presense, for a single afternoon downtown in the city, to be
as close as possible to the style of living focus that I presumed to match a
theoretical sexual lover for me (a woman). I did not know at the time that
when I broke the spell to return to my normal frame of reference that my
consciousness would go through a period of identity suspension, but that is
apparently what happened; I became the double and then my regular self.
It was mechanically similiar to Mr. Mindell's shape-shifting
visualization, but done in the real world with real feedback from strangers
and associates engaged in a regular day. There was nothing fake about my
portrayal of a girl-style frame of reference. I copied the apparent frame of
reference of real girls around at the time (those who were not being
expressively frozen). It was not complex and involved no guesswork or
verbal trickery. I was, as best as I could be, an entirely unremarkable
friendly person.
No-one of either sex appeared to notice anything odd about me. I
sincerely became one of the girls, as I had done in becoming a boy in the
nursery school in my youth, but apparently most people have no recognition
of the difference in frame of reference. Everyone, including Mr. Mindell,
appears to believe that their frame of reference is universal, some even
theorizing that plants, animals and inanimate objects hold it also.
Mr. Mindell invites his reader to attempt a visualization of their
double using a conjured image of a sunrise in a wilderness, absent any
social reference points. He suggests humanizing the sun, a spooky
visualization for me but probably similiar to what I spontaneously did with
the poison oak bush. Next he suggests shifting assemblage into it, looking
back at oneself. He notes that success at that causes an identity annilation
similiar to what happened with my return from the girl frame of reference.
He quotes Meister Eckhart saying "the eye with which I see God is the
same eye with which God sees me", to back up his humanizing of the sun. In
my logic Meister Eckhart is suggesting that something other than him, that
he calls God, is aware of it's own existence in a manner similiar to his
awareness. Mr. Mindell writes that, from the viewpoint of the Dreaming, the
eye in him that sees someone else's sentient (or feminine?) essence is the
same "eye" in them that sees his sentient essence.
What I presume they're both alluding to is what for me is the puzzling
fluidity of my own awareness location. I would say that when Dreaming I
become stupid and highly suggestable rather than say that this proves that
my awareness location is actually that vague. After 25 years of
experimenting with this I still can't say what my awareness even is; or
whether or not it even exists at all while I am asleep and not self-aware.
My article seems to be evolving out of a clumsy concensus of multiple
voices in my mind, most of which appear to be from someone else's prayers or
psychic musings that I allow in; but I can return to deliberate assemblage
into an awareness that feels and appears to be utterly independent of all
of them and hard-wired to my body, but has none of the pettiness or
hysteria that Mr. Mindell and these other philosophers attribute to a
personal ego or identity. As best I can describe it, the Dreaming awareness
is the condition of normal perception without normal cognitive processing.
Mr. Mindell calls the "same eye seeing from everywhere" idea lucid
psychology, and notes that all the familiar mystic versions of common
religion describe it and use that frame of reference. The contradictory
logic of this appears to escape him and the religious mystics, but, from my
reading, the main religious authorities do note the illogic and take
exception. They and I observe that if the identity of a god can mutually
annilate or merge with the identity of someone reporting direct observation
of that god then both the personal identity (that the regular society
requires for reference to a citizen) and the god are illusory, they are both
bullshit invented for choreographic effect.
The logic implies that what I did in the nursery school was establish an
intense enough belief in a portrayal that the other human animals around me
were emotionally caught up into relating as if the portrayal were somehow
intrinsic, hard-wired, more permanent than a suit of clothes, when in fact
I was still an animal with no hard-wired frame of reference at all. Meister
Eckhart's remark suggests that the God identity is an hallucinatory echo
caused by this trick of using belief to create emotional confidence and a
socially linkable frame of reference. The hard-wired linking of actual
familiarity with my family was not as psychically flexible and robust as
the portrayal of a boy frame of reference.
I, and I believe also Meister Eckhart, would rather establish emotional
security and social linking on the firmer ground of genuine familiarity
with living people and territory; a group of seven to 20 other people who
minimize use of privacy. My term is direct animal social linking.
Mr. Mindell lives with only his wife on a large rural property. He
remarks that the common (I presume monastic) mystic experience can make a
person oblivious to social conflict and presumable social responsibility.
When I lived alone in the woods the Dreamtime images from the big scale were
far more intense. Being tribal certainly makes me less tuned in to world
scale angst, perhaps because the local human data is so dominant.
Mr. Mindell describes what it is emotionally like for him to wake up in
the morning to show another way he studies the double, still without
blowing the religious confidence game. He has discovered that he can stay
seamlessly in dream mode right into the beginning of his day, that his
animal functionality requires minimal oversight and can permit a wandering
of his assemblage point even outside of his body, allowing an extended
Dreamtime frame of reference.
I define this condition of consciousness as the default normal animal
condition of having no metabolic imbalances (to compell the sleep trance)
and no psychic threats (to compell conventional dreams or the use of the
confidence trick of presenting identity). This condition is normal and
common in my household, and I believe it is actually quite normal and
common for anyone who's life is in order and not under pressure. This could
be described as the "life before coffee". I would venture a guess at
estimating that about 20 percent of Americans and 40 percent of people
worldwide spend part of their day this way, most of them not giving the
condition the significance that he does.
From that perspective he feels compelled to awaken as an animal in the
morning by a universe with a "self-reflective" drive of some sort. Or as I
would say it, he has established and reaffirms each morning a belief in a
motivated universal consciousness bigger than his "little you" and
manipulative of it using the alarm clock, the dog or the like. I think
he perceives reality this way because he always goes into the identity
confidence trick in the morning using a conceptual frame of reference,
evoking the god identity or "double" that then conceptually processes the
data from the Dreamtime period into a conceptual frame of reference.
During the three year period that I spent portraying what I call a girl
identity, the god identity or double was likewise a girl-style identity. It
was not conceptually oriented and bloodless, promoting of ghastly wars and
the like. It was a nonverbal, apparently deliberate, artistic expression
expressing out of the living realm like a piano player out of a piano. It's
influence on me was similiar to an orchestra conductor, encouraging
emphasis or serenity of expression of various dramatic components of my
life at the time, in an apparent coordination with it's own dramatic
intent. I had no free will in relation to it. It ruled my life expression,
choice of momentary focus, who I noticed or ignored. It was Gaia instead of
Jehovah.
I could still evoke the "voice of god" effect, with or without a bush,
but the result came through with the feeling and appearance of a channeling
of another regular person or some kind of mundane mental processing on my
own part, and often included images of pictures and diagrams. The voice was
actually more productive and useful during that period than it is as a man.
By being mundane it was much easier to control, more like steering a
vehicle.
It was very different to come out of Dreamtime into normal cognitive
processing without the aura of importance on it that an identity reference
gives. My ability to think was like my finger dexterity then, a mere
functional device to call in when needed and otherwise leave in storage.
I perceive that what compells me to awaken is that an animal body
defaults to the condition of being awake unless forced by internal
imbalance to pass out. Once internal balance is adequately restored I
awaken. Nowadays I never sleep longer than three hours but nap frequently,
ideally every four hours, so I am really studying this effect of defaulting
towards being awake. I am convinced that I awaken due to an absense of
something keeping my animal body asleep rather than a presense of something
waking it up.
Mr. Mindell presumes a greater animal capacity for observation than I
do. From his viewpoint of the double, the "big you" is deliberately
evolving a multitude of "parts" sharing a hard-wired conceptual frame of
reference, that he presumes his present awareness is able to adequately
determine to exist for real, for all of us and all of the universe around
him. He presumes that he could not be fooled about this.
He presumes that an individual animal is innately caught in a "little
you" frame of reference that thwarts the "ability" to awaken in the morning;
that only the "big you", and not a totally unconsciously evolving
hard-wiring of the animal, can orchestrate being awake.
He writes that the feeling of competitive loss is an illusion, a
fictional result of failing to observe the whole picture rather than as I
view it as an actual animal experience of living expression being genuinely
blocked, creating genuine inescapable though quite deniable feelings. He
gives an example of the Turkish poet named Rumi playing a game of chess with
a friend with both men abstracting the encounter to dodge the inevitable
tragedy of the game creating emotional loss.
I played chess an enormous amount as a child, studying this phenomena
exhaustively. I was able to convert the tragedy of the game into a
progressive honing of skill instead of loss when playing with an opponent
willing to have the game conceded in advance. Nearly always I could
determine the eventual winner after four or five moves. I was such a
powerful player I was generally able to make the challenge into something
on a scale of one to ten rather than win or lose, with charismatic
cheerfulness that really did seem to make my win into something entirely
different. The goal was to see how few times the weaker player could make
a move that the stronger player determined was a ridiculous ruin of their
position. The game was over when all respectable moves had been exhausted.
We became animals in a friendly dance of real chess involvement. In my
earlier years the chess focus was totally amateur, so my idea was quite
welcome.
My approach failed in tournament chess where most of the other players
were disgusted with what they viewed as my mockery of their intent. If I
insisted that my opponent take back what I identified as a clearly bad move,
the response was horror that I would propose muddying the distinction of who
was playing each side. Very few would ever suggest I take back a bad move.
That outlook dominated and eventually drove me completely out of chess
playing. I felt too much the pain of loss regardless of who was the victor.
Though I usually won, I felt spiritually quite unencouraged by most of the
others.
I needed every game to have both players be lively participants in the
logic of both sides. Rumi and his friends' abstraction of the encounter only
made it pointless for me, a mockery of genuine athletic striving. I thought
of chess as a form of learning to think logically for the purpose of
evolving greater collective divine intelligence. I thought of learning chess
as like learning to sing, honing ability to create wonder; not seeking a
momentary opportunity to humiliate through "lucking" into a marginalized
feebler opponent.
Mr. Mindell suggests in his writing that any emotional significance a
person holds onto related to their identity development or egoistic
striving of any sort is a problem, and one to be fixed by tuning into the
double. I tend to agree that most of the artificial emotion origination
that is simple enough for men to creatively participate in, such as
gambling, is pretty stupid and petty, and not something to preserve if it
becomes a nuisance. But most older cultural expression that I observe, such
as Halloween, is only simple to a casual observer and has a quite astounding
and complex divinity of sentient identity ("feminine little you")
development that is well worthy to call a noble ambition rather than a
childish problem.
This difference in perception makes facing one's own death quite
different. He discusses facing physical death with no mention of
deliberate sentient history creating, Mr. Mindell recommends responding
to someone saying they will "miss you when you die" by telling them to
forsake all romantic historical development among their fellows and become
an autonomous mystic, an identity dead before it's time just to avoid having
something to miss. He quotes the poet Rumi a bunch, with advocacy of nhilism
this way.
Rumi writes "in this world of trickery, emptiness is what your soul
wants". He's not speaking for me. He had no subtle melodramatic imagination
and I presume none of the complex sort of love feelings that result from it.
He wanted to die broke and idiotic, and he probably did. He probably
believed that civilization was created by melodramatic monsters like
Alexander the Great, rather than in spite of them I as believe.
Mr. Mindell describes similiar childish confusion on the part of
theoretical physicists, trying in complete sincerity to fathom the observer
effects on supposedly isolated phenomena, instead of looking at
melodramatic meme effects of living systems, like the hundredth monkey idea,
as a major source of interference in observational mechanics. Rather than
lending validity to Mr. Mindell's Dreamtime religion, his references to
theoretical physics only seems to show an embarrassing clumsiness on the
part of mainstream science, similiar to my frequent success at repair of
appliances by accidentally bumping something (with no clue what I did).
Mr. Mindell notes that the physicists have this same tendency as he does
to give undo importance to the phenomena of conscious awareness, viewing it
as somehow fundamental to a functioning universe. He notes that the
evidence from Dreamtime suggests that conscious awareness is a spontaneous
consequence of apparently naturally occurring conditions, but since literal
dream events only happen within a conscious awareness he gets into fretting
about conditions with a lack of any consciousness. This is stupid to me,
like the magical god creation theories. I presume that consciousness is as
naturally spontaneous as star formation and as unimportant as the color of
the gravel used in a building foundation, emotionally divine but technically
unimportant or irrelevant.
One of the bizarre quirks of consciousness is the creation of tragic
emotion about competitive striving. Mr. Mindell remarks that his death,
from his "little you" perspective is an example of a kind of tragic
competitive striving. I have never viewed life expression as a kind of
striving, due perhaps to a lack of masculine intimacy in my formative years.
I was worthless as a player in school sports programs. Thwarting another
fellow's initiative struck me as absurd, a needless creation of tragedy out
of an otherwise friendly encounter.
I view Mr. Mindell's relation to his own death as a similiar needless
creation of tragedy, like boys playing with guns and pretending to maim each
other. He relates easing that through convincing himself that the double,
with it's feeling of timeless immortality, is actually his real living
nature. My double relates to me as a pure conceptual awareness, brilliant
but emotionally sterile to a degree that I believe is only possible in a
non-living phenomena. It expresses just like an intelligent computer, with
full sentient data access, bloodlessly.
Mr. Mindell describes the tradition of using a mandala picture to
promote visualization of this and shift assemblage into that computerlike
viewpoint. He writes that Hindu and Buddist belief considers that
orientation to be the only real living perspective, that a conventional
animal assemblage is pathetic and stupid. I become that view also when
assembled as the double, but that shows to me that the double is blinkered
also, not even observant of my animal melodramatic complexity, only the
echoes of it that can be conceptually described as "problems", devoid of
genuine emotion.
For me the formal court system asprires to express this orientation as
purely as possible, and illustrates really well how blinkered and deranged
that can be, and yet how divine an assistant a visit to that view can be. I
have exhaustively researched the Soveriegn Citizen concept out of a
fascination with this.
Mr. Mindell tells a story of a similiar revere settling his angst about
a legal battle he initiated to get some native american neighbors sharing
his water to chip in on the cost of a well that he had had drilled. He was
initially ashamed of calling in the court system, since it seemed to
indicate a failure of his mediation ability. I have wrestled recently with
a similiar disappointment about my own mediation ability in the handling of
my neighbor dispute.
He sleeps on his problem. While they are both half asleep, his wife
pulls him towards a Dreamtime bird's eye view of his melodrama by holding
his hand and letting him perceive her vibe. He doesn't say, but I presume
she had entirely delegated the matter to him, and so retained a margin of
emotional indifference that emerged later that night in him also. In my old
age I no longer go there. Knowing that I could, I nevertheless view doing so
as a childish copout, a forsaking of stewardship of the neighbors as
maturing humans. Ironically he begins his story by relating how the same
native american society had given him and his wife the real estate where
the well was located at no cost, as an expression of tribal stewardship of
his life.
A coalition of my neighbors did the same thing he did, in formally
calling in the authorities to attempt enforcement of a marjority view of
right living where they stood to politically (and in resale value) profit
from the selective enforcement. The actual result pleased only some of my
personal associates, who more closely represent the actual citizen majority
tyranny. I was shocked at the sinister vibe that emerged in me and them
with both the neighbors and my friends. Except for my relation to one of my
direct antagonists, we all brutally withdrew psychic support for each
others lives. I was really by myself, friendless.
Today I see that as an unavoidable feature of living in a combative
society, without a friendly guaranteed social role for hardly anyone. Like
Mr. Mindell, the people living near me and with me value a legalistic dog
eat dog relationship with their associates and neighbors, involving a
heartless battle of the wits for personal profit at any social or
environmental cost. They openly exploit any opportunity to engage predatory
economic activity in violation of the land use and building code. They call
the authorities on me, or any other target, "anonomously" in a bid to
curtail competing creative social or expressive development because it
unnerves their wish to remain strangers or inconveniences their real estate
ambition by unnerving potential customers.
Their specific complaint said that I was welcoming use of my property by
too many people, and that my property was unsightly due to me and my
associates using cast off household goods, cobbled building construction by
unskilled people, and wild vegetation, to minimize the subtle interpersonal
politics that compromise Dreamtime sharing and exploration. Being fairly
adept at the psychic joust of land use, I incured no fines, kept most of my
associates and most of my debris, and obtained a building permit to
escalate the already riotous creativity in and around the house.
The real challenge was the building code enforcement people demanding a
fairly expensive electrical and structural polishing of the property.
The consequences are invisible to the neighbors but a welcome relief to many
of the more conventional people using the house. Learning all the new battle
of wits elements, involved in the new structural complaints, heavily
preoccupied more than six months. I learned architectural drawing from my
older sister and established Dreamtime rapport with a mainstream
electrician, a structural engineer and a number of building department
workers.
My rapport with the backstabbing neighbors is altered now. I don't
express welcome to them anymore. Mr. Mindell encourages a millenial
(looking at eons of time) orientation to the social tragedy of being
enemies, quoting Oscar Wilde's remark, "their poison is part of their
perfection", about people who betrayed him. For the most part my outlook
goes that way to, accepting as a normal blameless event the week of 21 hour
workdays, six months of building department hassles and $1400 that the bust
cost me. My Dreamtime view of the neighbors has them fixed on a multidecade
pursuit of political dignity at any cost in health and sanity, and I study
that like studying an unstable volcano. I call their action their vision, a
"better life" through empty symbolism, like children squabbling over the
toy of the moment.
It appears that no-one is inspired to secure a house except as a vehicle
for competitive striving and a place for relaxing of identity defensiveness
using media devices, dependent animals or children, sexuality, meditations
(religion), and mind altering substances; all of which facilitate Dreamtime
awareness for me but with a seriously confusing warp.
That I know of, no-one but me deliberately invites other autonomous
adults to use and share a house non-competitively. Some of my roommates
continue to unintentionally initiate identity evoking psychic brawls through
submissive or dominating remarks, some in the past so relentless I had to
evict them.
I have generally figured that my uniqueness this way was not a sign of a
mistake on my part. But at times my attempt at a residential sharing has
seemed as problematic as my former chess involvement, and potentially as
hopeless. I have had only limited success conveying to anyone else the
nature of my hopes about life. Other people seem similiarly handicaped
discussing their hopes so I figure that's to be expected.
Mr. Mindell relates that he used his poetic and descriptive language in
his court session about the well expenses. As I did with the building
department, he melts the resolve of his opponents by sincerely taking their
side, even though he initiated the costly court session and is still
requesting money for the well. He makes it clear that he is fine with losing
the case but he needs for his outlook on the well issue to be recognized (he
is whining politely). His purpose with the court action is soley to force
recognition of his feelings by the culturally opposed neighbors.
His hope is a long term friendly outcome but unfortunately the neighbors
are not as articulate as he. Their outlook will not come across to him,
through no fault of anybody, and their feelings will get trampled. They may
accept that but it's doubtful that genuine warmth will emerge. Since his
intent is to remain isolated, from everyone but his lover, by a mile of
forest, that is probably sustainable in an uncrowded world. But it's not a
sane constructive arrangement for my life, given that I am going to live
tribally, intimate with more than a sex partner.
His indian neighbors and I need access to Dreamtime awareness through
direct non-combative human mirroring in a living sharing without
boundaries. We need for economic and technical accountability to be
entirely a conscious voluntary gift of inspired reverence. We must retain
the right to trespass, to be disorderly, to mirror all associates without
the warp of "correctness", of supposed negotiated verbal understanding; and
we need to be able to offer that, even though the result is that we get
"oppressed" by commercially oriented people. We need interpersonal
understanding to be entirely real, not a pretense motivated by fear of
psychic attack. We need an absense of psychic attack for any reason among
our direct associates. We need commercial boundaries to be expressed as
impenetrable walls and fences, not horrible character assassinating signs
and verbal democratic "agreements".
We need access to Dreamtime awareness without the data warp of drugs and
other mechanical illusions, that solitary or commercially regulated living
makes neccesary (to prevent psychosis). Mr. Mindell represents really well
the confusion about how Dreamtime oriented cultures end up "oppressed". He
believes that an immoral outlook on the part of the "oppressors" is what
causes it, but the view from the inside is quite different.
There is a story in an anthropology book called "Conformity & Conflict"
that illustrates this. The story relates a researcher's confusion when she
attempts to block some white visitors from borrowing some canoes from the
Eskimos that she has been staying with. She knows that previous similiar
borrowing has resulted in tragic damage to the canoes, so she steps in the
way and says the canoes cannot be borrowed. To her surprise two of the
Eskimo men buck her action, gently, with progressively stronger and stronger
expression, until one of them bursts out in a mean whisper "let him (the
white fellow) have his way!", and she withdraws from the matter, baffled. In
telling her story she expresses that she still doesn't understand what was
going on there.
The Eskimo men must preserve, at any cost, the spell of no boundaries on
their canoes. The canoes must be related to as belonging equally to any who
would claim them. Likewise with indian land. Any kind of boundary puts a
curse on the defender, which the Eskimo men have not come up with a way to
cope with, so they would rather unconditionally loan their canoes, and
continually relocate to more and more inhospitable territory.
The Rainbow Family ethics express a similiar outlook, probably for
similiar motive. Various modern cultures have deliberately arranged areas
of commercial value that are traditionally related to without boundaries,
such as family mealtime among French people or mechanics tools among red
necks, in a bid to promote genuinely shared Dreamtime.
I let young children in my life establish the parameters of commercial
organization of my assets, since their naivete prevents confusion of
feedback. They show what items or activities I need to hide, disquise, or
lock. If they are jealous they will say so. If they are drawn to something
they will fuss with it in a fairly heedless way and leave smaller items in a
random place. Where they can make a mess, they will, and won't repair the
damage. If I tell them my feelings without threatening them they will honor
my concerns but only on very simple obvious terms. They will speak to
strangers and neighbors guilelessly, flushing out the true spirit of those
other adults.
If I can successfully welcome the children then my Dreamtime relation
with the other adults is handled, in spite of confusing feedback and a
tendency to dangerous beligerence, on the part of the adults. Hense I (and
the Eskimos) worship the young children, grant them any license, never
prosecute or lecture them ever; and encourage their initiative if at all
possible.
To preserve sanity and allow divine development, my life requires easy
direct access to unwarped Dreamtime and identity flexibility.
Thus the collections and meditations on garbage and filth, the welcoming
of vagrants and neighbor children, the lack of meetings, the minimization of
declared duties, the crowding of living space, the use of primitive
equipment, the avoidance of employed time, the riotous vegetation, the
tolerance of decaying materials and structures, the complete lack of
television, radio, newspapers and magazines, the absense of materials and
debris with commercial logos, the prolific array of musical instruments and
art supplies, the lack of pets, the precise and minimalist organization of
tools and resources, the intolerance of begging or poverty or spirit of
rescue, the disinterest in travel, parties and wealth, and the appearance
of rarely actually being busy.
The unmodulated, even impolite, countenance of a street drunk has often
been a welcome anchor for me in an otherwise sterile modern setting. Any
non-combative person (or dog or duck) willing to look at me without fear or
confusing artifice is a blessing this way. Discussions about right and
wrong, promises about time, something to accomplish, or assistance
with anything can make trouble though. Almost everyone launches into
confusing artifice if I establish a negotiated agenda with them, so I go out
of my way to avoid initiating any negotiated relating.
It seems to go okay if someone else initiates and I can stay
non-adversarial, but I generally just dodge all negotiation, brutally
dominating where I have any view at all. People who are committed to
presenting confusing artifice to me I avoid being near at all, or failing
that, I psychically accost them with some focus that they would rather not
be spiritually corrupt about. Fortunately I rarely have trouble with
anyone as long as I stay out of tightly choreographed commercial pagentry
(high class restaurants, formal doctors, police etc.).
A friend of mine described to me his capture by authorities for drug
induced public autism. Fortunately he was able to recapture his identity
memory once the drug wore off, but he related having serious concern that
the examining people would be unconvinced of his obviously contrived
identity portrayal. I would expect that the extreme attention to
mechanistic protocol and sterility with the police and medical people would
make it the most challenging possible environment for identity recall,
unless in a room full of sincere inmates, as at the day care center where I
originally invented mine. Thus I feel more at risk of psychic attack by the
authorities when alone and far more at ease if I am around social outcasts,
children or people unable or unwilling to present what I call a second
order identity, a mechanistic emotional pretense over their true fantasy
self image.
My garbage fetish comes directly out of this also. If I am around
equipment, materials or organized living space that has potential to cause
serious hysteria in the owners or responsible people from my natural
expression or that of my preferred associates then I get quite fatigued
from anxiety. Conversely if I am in an area with very little technological
materials, then what I have with me becomes more an object of avarice and
playful lust on the part of my normal associates, so having a sea of
potentially useful debris all around us is a marvelous addition, inspiring
much harmless goofy play with little risk of hurt feelings or
combativeness. Children can also fit in to my garbage environment much
easier, so my need to include them whenever possible is facilitated.
The natural decay of buildings and vehicles likewise contributes to a
reduction in the dogmatic rule oriented outlook that arises about them from
association with more conventional people's similiar possessions. Oddly
another kind of reverence emerges instead with the decayed structures that
isn't based on conscious thought that I can tell. It is more like a pause
from divine wonder, like of discovering ancient dinosaur bones or a huge
hidden ant colony. The veneer of polish on most large structures makes the
average person unable to really understand the nature of what they are
looking at compared to seeing the same thing with a mycelium growing in it
or some of the parts removed.
Some of my roommates have made a huge effort to talk me out of my
garbage fetish, expressing an equally intense horror of it. They generally
speak of it as a problem of influence. Being impressionable beings, they
say they will tend to trash and neglect their own stuff in an environment
with decay, clutter and refuse. They also find the image depressing, a
reminder of people not caring about themselves or each other. Their concern
is not petty or stupid to me, and I don't doubt the neighbors who did the
bust could echo the feeling.
Oddly, a similiar chaos in a natural wilderness, involving only
non-human structures and materials, has the opposite effect on the same
people. I think that may be related to not being dependent on the system
involved, at least not directly. Or perhaps they simply don't observe how
brutally indifferent the wildlife and vegetation is because the clutter and
pollution they leave is so familiar and their competitive beligerence tames
right down when a person shows up.
I had an experience of objecting to human chaos during a brief visit to
a Rainbow Gathering around 1980 outside of Roseburg Oregon. I was living at
a forest camp nearby, working a slash piling contract. Me and several of my
coworkers visited for a couple hours, wandering an area about a quarter mile
from where we found a parking place. Everywhere we went were clusters of
seriously deranged people, many looking overtly predatory. We had not come
prepared for that at all. We feared for our supplies, particularly our
water. The chaos of the woods was no issue. We were all living camped out,
but the presense of hundreds of people with crippling lack of basic supplies
and an apparent indifference to anyone's ultimate well-being was too
horrorifying for all of us. We saw no sign of any deliberate elegance or
organized presense of any kind, so I guess we didn't hike far enough. We had
a short discussion about it and went back to our own well organized camp.
Over the years as a street vagrant I adapted to living among the same
sort of people who had appaulled me then. I also developed an appreciation
for the natural cleaning done by ants, flies, dogs, birds, fungi and
invasive plants. Life was so easy as a tramp. The ground was generally
clean enough to eat off of but absorbed anything spilled. If I took a dump
I could use the same place over and over because something always came and
took my previous deposit. Containers in the brush were free to use and
leave dirty. If my bicycle needed some wire for a repair I could generally
find a coathanger or bit of wire fence soon enough on the roadside. I got
adapted to simpler and simpler equipment, so the risk of theft mostly
subsided. By climbing a difficult tree I could stash supplies safely. Money
was hardly neccesary for anything and there was hardly ever anything to
negotiate. High overhead living completely lost it's appeal.
It may also be important that I have a very intense inner orderliness. I
have never had a tendency to lose tools, or run out of basic resources or
money. If my bicycle got a flat I always had the repair kit and pump with
me, and did the repair right then. If I was in the city and near a public
toilet I would use it, well in advance of needing to.
But more important, as a tramp I got very familiar with the industrial
detritus that modern living inately creates, seeing far more appauling
pollution coming from the autos and ambitious activity of domestic people
than from the other street people. While both were equally indifferent, the
street people had far less means to trash the world around us, so the ants,
dogs and vegetation could keep up. I see the street drunks and their
campsites, with the same feeling as the regular folks admiring and
appreciating the sight of wild ducks fighting over bread and a squirrel
spreading debris as it peels a filbert husk.
The commercial media is another kind of domestic pollution to me. A
machine or printed art expressing intense contrived emotion is highly
confusing to me, especially if I'm trying to tune into the actual feelings
of the people around me. I have hardly ever known a street person with no
musical ability and unique style, and no physical art. Likewise, the
spontaneous choreography among them is easily a match for television drama
for someone able to cope with being actually at the scene, and it's real.
The insight into the human condition that it suggests is not imaginary
propaganda, such as inventing evil in forms that don't exist.
Free internet publishing and the cheap digital camera has blown the
media image of being a reliable source of data. Commercially motivated
information can now be contrasted with egoistically motivated material on
the same topics. All of my roommates have their own computers (and I have
nearly twenty), with high speed internet, so the commercial media thing is
entirely personal, paperless and shared only voluntarily.
And the silence of the shared space draws people to play the piano,
guitar, or drums; and generally emotionally real improvisation or homemade
songs. Music conveys a lot to me that conversation cannot, if the source is
someone I actually know.
The spirit of rescue is confusing between the tramps and the domestic
people also. Twice I've been accosted by an older woman in public who
wanted to give me a ten dollar bill, and was flabberghasted to be refused.
The presentation of being down on luck looks to me like it's always false.
The few people I've ever met who actually were doing their best and took a
serious blow from fate were always quite subtle about it, kind of sad and
paralyzed, and quite inspiring to help out. None of them were street people
though.
Travel and parties are hard for me because of the danger from the
nothing. People who don't know me are often afraid of me or motivated to
present a confusing pretense of feeling, so, in the absense of a familiar
setting and familiar readable associates, I can get very disoriented and
highly at risk of forgeting myself.
Wealth looks like a major motivator for pretense also. Owning a house
has inspired a lot of people to social engineer me for a place to live.
Greater wealth promises greater problems and I have nothing I want or need
to buy that costs a lot. The $3500 for photovoltaics, the $1400 for the
bust, and the $1700 for the remodeling permit came out of unintentional
savings that I'd had on hand for many years. Likewise the $200 per month I
average in materials cost on the remodel.
Even doing the remodel I avoid appearing busy. Spiritually disconnected
achievement is a tragic spell to me, so if anyone hints that they feel
cursed by the project then I relocate my attention appropriately.
Mr. Mindell writes at the beginning of his book that at the end he will
address the moral considerations of Dreamtime focus. Since he is what I
would call a dabbler, he hasn't seen any straight up evil created in his
awareness while in Dreamtime. I tend towards optimism to a fault so I've
been blindsighted fairly often this way, but worse yet, I would have to echo
an Australian fellow he quotes at the beginning who told him even the city
center they were looking at came out of the ancient local Dreamtime. That I
have observed, no evil choreography happens independent of Dreamtime; all
nightmares are artificial creative consensus in Dreamtime.
Many people will even cheerfully tell me of the curses they've conjured,
unaware of their impact. My kid even does his curses overtly out loud. I
try to convince him how effective he is and that he will curse himself
later. I witness many adults doing that, especially the curses later. I
have seen much encouragement for creation of curses in stories and media
reports, with sometimes pretty convincing if blinkered logic. "When you
can't win you can always curse". Whole classes of poorly understood
cultural expression, such as heroin use, inspire dire stories of imagined
evil that must be cursed for the good of everybody. Memes like that run a
riot in the Dreamtime.
Mr. Mindell focuses his moral concern on redirecting overt political
discussion between dangerous antagonists towards humanizing the others that
would otherwise draw curses (or gunfire). He is like a forest fire fighter
to me, suppressing the little obvious disasters from careless campers and
lightning strikes until a real tinderbox has had a chance to accumulate
that will do far more than clear the underbrush and chase away the animals.
To bring the Dreamtime out into plain sight like he does as a mediator
seems unquestionably magical and probably inspires a lot of people to try
studying it some themselves. I'm not inclined to try and talk him out of
it. But I see a lot more real benefit resulting from prayer directly within
Dreamtime.
I observe a whole lot of peacemaking prayer already happening in
Dreamtime from countless accidentally beneficial friendly people who appear
to believe their goofy psychic gestures don't impact anything. The
religious people who express belief in their effectiveness ironically seem
inclined to curse, or rather grumble. What I observe in Dreamtime is a
massive wash of all sorts of imagination, far braver and diverse than shows
in the public. It seems that for every significant action or expression with
direct impact, there are a thousand dramas played out in Dreamtime with
equal or greater force, from all outlooks.
I study this in the play of the children around my house. They study and
portray the current popular dreams of the media and their parents,
modulating the images into something that feels great to them. Some of the
other adults are real fiends but most have a lighter side that the kids find
more delightful to portray and thus amplify. I think Mr.Mindell is unduly
impressed with the visible iceberg.
The book called "The Neverending Story" addresses this also. The author
presents the nothing as by far the greatest threat, relating to the minor
curses and practical joking as a way to guard against the approach of the
nothing. Curses and trouble evoke emotion in a social system rendered
dramatically uncreative by fatigue or euphoric contentment. In the feminine
world view of that book nobody creates emotion by reinventing the wheel, as
happens among men.
Women routinely chastise me for it. It is forbidden to even invent new
stuff that embarrasses the elders. The current world culture has gotten way
out of hand this direction, with an attendant massive reduction in warfare,
which used to be required in order to open an arena for masculine
invention. The world "thing" supply is getting a bit frightening but at
least there's no worry about the nothing. It's handled.
The animal kingdom seems to be okay with the nothing. Overly contented
animals just go along with the social disintegration it causes. The younger
ones invent practical jokes or explore new territory, but the adult ducks
and cats and elephants just settle into listless solitude if their lives
get too serene.
Adult women on the other hand have an artificial identity based on the
presense of a continuous personal storyline that must have ongoing emotion.
After three days of true social independence I have no emotion left at all.
I read an account by a woman called "the Experience of No Self" describing
her doing a period of social independence and going right into the nothing.
She did alright, it was not a disaster. The complete lack of interpersonal
mirroring did shut down the ficticious life story of her identity or self
as she calls it, but the underlying actual story of her life unfolding was
still there and still emotionally sustaining.
Her courage is unusual though. The women I've known avoid getting
anywhere near the nothing and will conjure and pray for whatever is
neccesary to keep the people around them in a rolling drama. Some conjure
commercial ambition or goofy pagentry but too many conjure righteous causes
to evoke curses about or get into secret story telling in their self-talk
of developing a grudge or entitlement rationale to invoke curses about.
Since wealth and pagentry are far more seductive than revenge or
conquest of recognition through hurting a legitimate scapegoat, women would
tend toward being harmless if it weren't for another problem: most men find
women's commercial ambitions and goofy pagentry to be tiresome and stupid
and embarrassing. They dodge it all as much as possible. But some men take
charge of the matter to create a "better world" for everybody.
George Gurdjieff represented the sentiments of many less powerful men in
declaring to P. D. Ouspensky that "Imagination is one of the principal
sources of the wrong work of the thinking center... Daydreaming is
absolutely the opposite of useful mental activity." I read also of an
account of Mr. Gurdjieff deliberately evoking false sexual feeling in a
woman at a restaurant to shatter her equilibrium, apparently because she was
promoting goofy emotion.
He spoke of having a very dim view of the mechanistic nature of the
natural world and especially people. Some of my friends have seen this also
and been seriously bummed by it, wishing with all their hearts that they
could somehow awaken the response ruled people around them into being more
at cause. But I don't believe that Mr. Gurdjieff was actually unaware of
this tragedy as an illusory trick of the conceptual entity double failing
to perceive the thoughts and inspiration to astounding beauty that can't be
seen from that view. I think he was suggesting to Mr. Ouspensky that to
develop perfection as a man required avoiding all deliberate invention of
dream images of the sort that Mr. Mindell describes for his meditations and
divination. I am inclined to abhor the muddying of the already confusing
Dreamtime myself.
A few self-righteous "wise" men with this concern about escalating
Dreamtime confusion can seed a lot of psychic attacks on women who create
overt ridiculous drama, driving them to focus on the complaining or vengeful
forms of dramatic invention that are more politically acceptable to the
intellectual men.
Mr. Mindell has found an intellectual basis for encouraging ridiculous
imagination, for use as a device to amplify subtle emotional data. His wife
of course jumps right on that but her writing indicates a goofy relation to
the imagery and the analytic process. She is primarily an artist. Perhaps
she doesn't question any of his theory partly out of worry that the
wonderful window of permission for goofy imagination might close.
Mr. Gurdjieff focused the creation of emotion on achievement of technical
divine wonder, which was also fairly benign, but his program required a
senseless amount of psychic and physical stress and "struggle" (as he
called it) against the natural mechanics of being alive. He spoke quite
rudely of natural mechanics in human life, as if someone focusing on
expressing beauty and elegance at a childish level of technical
sophistication was polluting the proper relation of people. He spoke of the
two world wars that happened right around him as being unimportant idiot
machines killing other machines; as if someone letting their mechanistic
aspects, like heartbeat and the like, run undirected was no more alive than
a toaster, and not a tragedy of consciousness when they died.
His own father was a casualty; dying defending the farm Mr. Gurdjieff
grew up on, from the heedless marrauding soldiers, while everyone else
abandoned the area. Mr. Gurdjieff made no apparent remarks assessing the
inspiration or origin for warfare, or overtly expressing the right place of
dream development, and beauty development in human sharing.
I see a moral prerogative to contradict the harsher logic of fellows
like Mr. Gurdjieff, and to explore and seed the Dreamtime with imagery and
action that promote humor and kindness and pleasure and welcoming of
displays of untrained divine mechanical wonder. I need recognition of the
real contribution to the quality and delight of human life made by the
people choreographing emotional expression through the biological human
mechanism. I also see a moral prerogative to contradict the shaming and
mockery directed at the innovation and wild technical theorizing that Mr.
Gurdjieff and I and my male associates engage in. In the straight-forward
orientation of my own father, I see a moral prerogative to be friendly.
That I can tell, all of nature and all of life is a riot of unneccesary
ridiculous emotion, including the work of Mr. Gurdjieff and the growth
patterns of old growth trees and everything I've written. From my view in
timeless Dreamtime, only the friendly positive emotion of the distant past
is actually sustainable to remember and relive in detail. The wars and
tragedies are too painful for more than brief or vague recall, and only
inspiring to remember at all in a bid to prevent a replay. Whatever logic
made the violence or the friendliness a good idea at the time has no
apparent staying power in my current recall.
The logic is quite vital to me, as a psychic anchor for masculine
dignity, but not at the expense of friendliness. In the short run, logic
can prevent a dissolution into hysteria when faced with mundane technical
challenge. But I arrived once at a calm logical conclusion of suicide with
sleeping pills and alcohol, logic being only as good as it's data set.
Only friendliness stays with me in the long run, so I class apathy,
anger and conquest as expedience, a dodging of the tiger so to speak. I am
not really at the top of the psychic food chain apparently. Analytically
unified groups of people are a like a large carnivorous dinosauer to me,
lean on basic intelligence, a force to reckon with, and extinct in my
timeless Dreamtime. In my Dreamtime I am connected to other people by our
accumulated friendliness, so I seek to accumulate more of that.
One of the fellows in the neighborhood coalition that busted me spoke to
me on the day of the bust, remarking some regret about it. In our banter we
arrived at a conclusion that the truckload of "weed infected" garden dirt
that he was removing that day would be a huge blessing in my world. While
he put the final touches on his ten foot high visual barrier fence, I and
his friend with the truck (who I also had a rapport with from elsewhere)
loaded my wheelbarrows several times and put his living dirt into the world
he needed to shut out.
The tidy zen sterility he and his associates require in their normal
visual field that motivated their ghastly betrayal to the authorities didn't
derail his root sanity about his human underpinning, and so we share a
memory that we won't need to suppress, ever. He seems to track the Dreamtime
quite well from his environment of Starship Enterprise like industrial
domestication, so I guess it can happen. He said he's autistic, defined in
my dictionary as a "state of mind characterized by daydreaming,
hallucinations and disregard of external reality", that is, trapped in the
nothing.
I was like that while alone in the woods, during periods of complete
social isolation. So perhaps the zen sterility is both the cause and the
medicine to cope with his autism, like the immune system failure from too
few germs. Born into a sterile industrial environment, with even the direct
human expression forced into polite channels of predictable if deranged
behavior, he was psychically rootless from birth, no Dreamtime anchor in the
living realm.
The shocking complexity of the genuine living realm presents a
managerial insanity to him. He can tell from his immersion in Dreamtime,
that the living realm is a mindless machine, a juggernaut of predation and
riotous competitive expression to which there can be no appeal for clemency.
My utter welcome of it puts him into a panic; an oscillation between rage
and longing for communion with me and my kinder Dreamtime oriented friends,
who are the only part of the riot I live in that demonstrates the kind of
friendly aware intelligence that is the origin of all the pieces of his
entire normal environment. I think he lives alone though.
Though the creation of the whole universe may be logically too much for
a single friendly intellect to achieve, the world he embraces is a real
possibility as the product of a single lonely diety, expressing stewardship
towards him and his associates. But it looks like the Borg (from Star Trek)
to me, a product of a different class of feral forces that has it's own
patterns of predation and competitive expression that I am ill adapted to,
and not anchored in. It appears to be eating my world. Perhaps that is the
true root of his panic, that I and my environment are headed over an abyss
into oblivion, perhaps about to be rounded up by a newer form of Gestapo in
his imagination. Like a tree on an ocean cliffside, I look really tough but
my fate seems precarious.
He also expressed that he gets stuck for awkward periods in the nothing.
The psychic momentum from his familial associates is too feeble or absent.
When I first finished my house I had that problem. Inside the building I
would get politely left alone. Being inclined to fall into Dreamtime, I
would get stuck in the nothing unless I had other familial people's energy
in the same space. While I was still working on installing it after the
house move I only entered it to work. I slept and ate outside where the
living realm and passersby and the neighbor kids could access me
continuously and keep bringing me back.
So I guess the Dreamtime becomes a disease, a mental illness, for people
committed to living independent of all other people. Mr. Mindell might not
do so well dabbling in Dreamtime without at least his wife. One spiritually
exploritory fellow I got to know even decided that a house was just too
spooky to sleep in, so he and his wife and kids spend every night in the
backyard under a tarp. I definitely get a bit edgy with fewer than three
roommates myself. I set up a permanent sleeping space for myself in the yard
under a fairly dry tree, though I haven't been driven to use it much. I've
almost never have had fewer than six roommates for the last twenty years of
having the house.
I'm not sure I have an upper limit. I had up to 22 for several months
with no sense of excess. Most of my roommates have been easily describable
as feral humans, fairly unresponsive to any house rules concept, and all
but one of them have shown some large component of predation or competitive
expression or both. Perhaps someone with an aversion to wildness would have
real slim pickings for roommates unless the group could be in a very
organized institutional framework like an intentional community or a school.
I've been quite loathe to leave the house to deliberately go somewhere
far away, particularly if the destination is a building, unless on a
practical mission guaranteed to get me back out of the nothing. Going with
a few others has been better, but my dependence on them worries me, given
how indifferent they seem. Most of the others stay preoccupied all the
time, through nonstop chatter or smoking cigarettes or traveling at high
speed. An intense self-study fellow like Mr. Gurdjieff would probably be no
better. I think that to travel I would need at least five other people who
are also relaxed enough to be concerned about escape from the nothing.
A friend of mine had a brutal reality check this way recently. She had
had one mixed drink in a restaurant with one other woman, a friend of hers
who is polite to a fault. As they were finishing their meal she lost her
cognitive ability for just a moment, probably facilatated by alcohol, and
dropped right into the nothing. She told her friend that she felt like
taking a short walk outside so her friend settled the bill while she went
out.
Outside alone in a strange commercially developed sterile neighborhood,
with barbed wire and desperate blackberry vines on the edges, she still
remained unable to reground. Though still awake, she wasn't very lucid at
all, and could not find any identity anchors to use to return. It was like
she was asleep and dreaming but her body was still awake and physically
expressing her dream feelings. She fell several times, crawled quite a bit,
leaving all her stuff in random places. Two fellows discovered her and
initiated the usual drug and straight-jacket and hospital nightmare where
after a visit by her friend, expressing overt genuine emotion, she finally
escaped the nothing.
That is what I'm at risk of when entering an industrialized area by
myself without a clear mission. That was her only mistake. She'd probably
done it many times before without mishap. She's such a busy person that
maybe she always had enough psychic momentum before. I generally don't.
Keeping access to Dreamtime is a risky mixed blessing for real. She
expressed embarrassment, even shame, about the incident, like she'd wet her
pants. I don't view it that way at all. I'm straight up afraid of this
quirk of modern society, of deliberately creating and living in
environments that can so easily leave an otherwise sane normal person
flailing like a beached fish, unable to find anything to focus on that can
rekindle her sense of self, remind her of the identity pattern she has
developed and used for five decades.
Intuitively recognizing that outdoors she has a greater chance of
finding an appropriate memory trigger, she tells her friend she needs to
take a short walk outside. But outside is just as devoid of living identity
expression. Everything visible is either homogenized, completely inert or
an expression of violent invasion. The grass and vegetation is either
hacked into brutal geometric forms or expressing warlike hysteria in a
rebound. A gentle friendly identity has few echos there, and so she failed
to find one before the thought police put her in a padded cell, to wait
until some other familiar people with intact gentle identities could find
her and give her a deliberate psychic echo.
People who are behaving in this way all the time are apparently defined
as "low functioning autistics". Because of the mechanical narrowing of
attention involved in computer use, the internet has accounts of people in
that condition who are successful at a close approximation of conventional
self expression while still Dreamtime oriented.
A woman named Amanda Baggs has several YouTube videos of herself, and
three of her interviews with another autistic woman. She speaks through
high speed typing into a device that converts the words into a mechanical
voice. She described her normal frame of reference as involving what I call
wide angle perception, unconditionally taking in data from all sources and
all senses at once, without cognitive processing. She demonstrates in one
video how she is inspired to use her face to feel the paper of a book as
well as look at it, or taste a pen as well as hold it. At one point she
stares directly into the camera with unusual fixation and emotional
intensity.
She has people who are paid to assist her whose crass outlook about her
frame of reference is quite humiliating to her. They routinely speak about
her as if she weren't there, and taunt her about her attempts to cope with
simple challenges like getting a glass of water. She defines that as
relating to her as a nonperson. In her videos she makes no suggestion of
awareness of what technical stewardship of another person would be like,
but she does appear to offer a form of deep communion to the other autistic
woman she interviews.
Her account on YouTube about being a nonperson is very insightful, but
in a way she does not appear to intend. A nonperson in the form she
illustrates is to me an animal, which is the way I believe myself to be
best described while I am in the Dreamtime focus, as she is all the time.
The other woman, after many years of practice and study, has been able
to achieve a fairly normal level of sentence construction ability, as long
as the scene she is in is emotionally low key. She can also focus
successfully on food preparation, or similiar technical achievement, at
least by spells, and has been successfully employed in the past. She
describes how her life focus led to being motivated to establish cognitive
skill, lending considerable insight into why regular animals would be
unmotivated to speak, even if they physically could. The autistic people's
complete acceptance of their Dreamtime frame of reference as normal and
even preferable is profoundly important to me as encouragement for how I
live. There are in fact several political advocacy organizations pressing
for social acceptance and adaptation to the presense of uncontrolled
autistic people.
Both women describe their dependency on people, with conventional
cognitive ability, as not being a basis for assessing them as a lower form
of life; though one other autistic internet writer described their frame of
reference as very helpful in being able to manage and empathize with a herd
of cows, due to having a similiar cognitive disability.
One father, who has some minor autistic neurosis himself that he likes
in himself and his son, described considerably easing his son's severe
autism through better nutrition.
One mother gave an account, to an interviewer on YouTube, of
successfully coaching her son, over a four year period, into being able to
cognitively process and organize his attention. He became thus more
deliberate in the resulting spontaneous expression, similiar to training to
be able to handle being tickled without flinching. She gave him an ongoing
opportunity to be in a simple enough environment that he could successfully
do a complete cognitive assessment of his entire sensory field of view. The
boy is present at the interview and is clearly still expressively responsive
to far more sensory data than the other people present, but apparently not
overwhelmed.
The mother's initial coaching approach involved hanging out, with the
then four year old boy, in an empty plain small room, where her presense was
virtually the only actual stimulus. After many weeks he was apparently able
to maintain a deliberate friendly stewardship focus on her at the simple
level of the expression in his eyes and face, and where he put his apparent
attention. Later she could bring more items into the room and let him slowly
regain mastery of his attention and mechanistic response in spite of the new
complexity of sensory barrage. Now a teenager, he shows no difficulty in a
regular very complex setting and in encounter with several other people at
once.
In discussing Mr. Mindell's meditation protocol with a friend, I
recalled doing a similiar study alone in a space I deliberately set up the
same way, when I was 19 years old. I was speaking with my friend in a place
that he had likewise made for himself, apparently for similiar purpose. The
space I made was a large fabric tent in the public woods near a river,
hidden from sight, with very minimal but adequate camping supplies inside.
The woods and riverbank outside were likewise very tame in appearance and
rarely involved other people. Over several weeks I gradually increased the
complexity of the scene as I gained greater and greater psychic mastery of
my focus and expression, becoming less and less mechanistically ruled by
unconscious spontaneous emotional responses or psychic reflexes. As I was
able, I would visit friends in the town nearby or go to the grocery, still
focused on deliberate mastery of my focus and expression with the extra
element of accountability to one or two other people, and later even larger
groups, always in unchoreographed encounter.
My friend with the similiar simple hut has studied Mr. Gurdjieff's frame
of reference fairly thoroughly, directing me particularly to last parts of
chapters one and six in Mr. Ouspensky's book, presenting a suggestion by
Mr.Gurdjieff, of doing the kind of personal study that I and the autistic
boy had done.
I recall spontaneously facilitating a similiar study with my kid, when
he was one and half years old and quite unable to cope with the massive
overstimulus of my house and household. He and I would go for long walks in
the neighborhood, going very slow, him being very unstable on his feet. The
stark simple street and the stark yards of some of the neighbors were
helpful for his primitive level of self study, and I kept my own presense
very simple as well. At seven he is unusually socially adept now and more
resilient to massive stimulus, far better than even I am.
The clear conclusion I come to, from this line of assessment, is that
everyone is on a continuum of ability level for cognitive resilience,
breaking into an inability to do a conventional identity portrayal at a
certain level of environmental complexity and real or perceived danger. The
level of social predation and perceptually triggering material at my house
is greater than pretty much anywhere that I have ever been, affecting even
passersby. In social conversation away from home I note that roughly one out
of three people I mention my house to is already familiar with it, though
knowing no-one there. Quite a few passersby who are neighborhood people make
a point of avoiding eye contact, in an echo of the classic autistic
tendency.
I have set up my living space to be easy and developmentally stimulating
at my level of cognitive control. My bed is right inside the front door
partially behind a tall shelf, five feet from the piano and the shared
answering machine. Two other people sleep in curtained bunk beds overhead.
Most of my days I'm on the front porch or in the front yard. The quantity
of decorative items and stored toys and materials is huge, and creatively
packed in. The few fights I've refereed at my house were not emotionally
upsetting, except when one fellow grabbed a knife to attack me. At home,
only the police, building department people, and roommates presenting
continuous pompous sarcasm, are emotionally stressful for me, motivating
control of any kind.
The austere bare room required for the autistic boys' introduction to
life or the simplicity my kid maintained for himself when he was two years
old was quite emotionally stimulating enough at the time to be safe going
in and out of the nothing. Today it would be totally inadequate for either
of them, or for me. That I commenced that study at the late age of 19 seems
a misfortune in retrospect. That many other people never do at all seems
insane, permanently infantile.
Though I am appaulled at the crass heartlessness of the attendant people
that mock Ms. Baggs, I am in agreement with them that Ms. Baggs is an
animal, who perhaps has the potential to grow up into a technically adept
human being, but doesn't make an effort that direction. Her apparent
choice to remain dependent on those of us who have faced the managerial
challenge of being the zookeeper seems weird, even criminal, like something
to formally demand remediation about.
I have the same feeling about my neighbors. I see them as emotionally
and technically stunted, and unwilling to take real responsibility for the
complexity overhead that being a sovereign participant in human society
requires. They demand permanent baby-sitting and diapering. They need their
trash and effluent removed invisibly, their associates to be kept anonomous
by tight choreography, their view to be the raked gravel and bonzai of a
zoo diplay. They are quite willing to work within the starkly choreographed
economy, accepting the terrible financial cost and biosphere loading of
their zoo. This looks to me to be a social adaptation similiar to heroin
addiction, which I can tolerate living nearby but cannot imagine
participating in, even if it is legally and socially required.
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