Dogged Dogma Dogmatism Perception Nuance Pt 2
When Gautama Woke Up Was His First Thought ‘OMG, Where Am I Now?’ Or ‘Who Are You, Really?’
Continued from:
‘Now, Where Was I?’ I Ask, Dazed, Confused Looking For My Pants Behind Me in the Middle of Life
‘Where am I now?’ I ask myself as one of the so-called convidiana awakened or probably more accurately someone partially or even minimally confusedly awakened. Maybe like me, those of us who think we have woken up from a certain level of the weird dream-life delusion of our official histories, aka our shared somewhat bucolic pre-convidiana gaslit personal and collective ‘pasts’, have seen many of our societal and personal truth-traps crumble or evaporate, poof, like magic. And likely, most of them we didn’t even know we had before they went bye-bye as our eyes opened to jabberwanker lunacy. And no, unlike Cypher in ‘The Matrix,’ I won’t miss them now that they are gone.
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It strikes me that this describes very well the yogic process of aparigraha (being expansively non-acquisitive) on steroids: the active letting go of that which no longer serves. When I was introduced to aparigraha almost ten years ago, primarily through The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali, the acquisitiveness of things slowly fell away from me with daily sadhana. And until convidiana I had absolutely no idea that aparigraha, the fifth Yama, which is ostensibly a simple and self-evidently valuable life-practice principle about the things in my life, was in reality more powerfully the preparatory practices for letting go of TRUTH. All the definitions of aparigraha that I’ve seen fail to suggest that the thing practice of aparigraha is in yogic reality preparatory practice for the no-thing part of letting go. The big part.
For my post-convidiana big hits of aparigraha anti-acquisitiveness see
Aparigraha Slaps me in My Face in Real-Fake Life in the Time of Covid
Like Being knocked over by a Sumo Wrestler, Aparigraha Throws Salt in my Face
Can It Be That The Truth Is In Truthlessness, That The Dogma Is in Dogmalessness?
Now, now I understand that any truth, all truths, create dogma. (And that’s the great nuanced truth! LoL!) And dogma is the human opportunity to rest comfortably for a while — whether a few years or a few millennia — albeit in an increasingly stultifying and/or samskaric obsessive habit or tyranny-like rut that initially allows us to relax from curiosity and to shelve imagination while we crow internally or externally with the delight of lazily growing our latest given truth as if that someone in authority whom we trust is the source or the conduit to the source of truth. Is this not cynicism, pessimism, scientism, the other ‘-isms’ and woke?
The ‘truth’ is that after I chose to let go of truth as an absolute tangible mind-thing I have found that I now create space for breath and life much much more easily than during the life I had when I was unnecessarily tightened around truthing my (mis)perceptions of life in various ways. As I wrote that I laughed with the new realisation of the extent that I had woked (yoked?) my past Self in life with having pasted, collage- or découpage-like, all those various truths on the surface of me. Some were conscious and tested to a greater or lesser extent and moved through my skin into my body as real-isations. The best example of one of those is the synchronicity journal I kept for years because, with my sincerity and diligence, it provided me with confidence — I was initially tempted to write truth and in the past that would have rolled off my pen easily. Now I realise that truth is actually the weaker sibling to confidence and trust. Truth and belief are the conjoined twins of not quite experiencing or realising life. And of course, the overriding truths in living my life were unconscious and therefore invisible to me except as projection in various guises. To what extent had I, like Don Quixote, lost my Self into the truth of words in books that glowed and charmed me like sirens? And with those lovely truth-gems how often had I tilted at windmills to justify my Self as worthy to my own anima version of Don Quixote’s Dulcinea of Toboso and to mask my overwhelming feelings of worthlessness in ill fitting and rusting armour?
Paradoxes Rest Easily in the Heart When Truth is Sleeping
That has brought to me the realisation that I’m living with odd paradoxes. With absolute truth having, ’truthfully’, fallen off of my shoulders and out of my fullmindedness like so much dandruff or hair that falls from my head, those wacky and mostly invisible dogmas have fallen away too. Without them dogging my delusions it now appears to me that I have begun to move in a paradoxical way that is both fast and slow at the same time. Or maybe it is just that it is now that I can see them with more seeing eyes.
The fast part, for me anyway, has been the rapidity with which everything I thought was solid has revealed itself to be either false or nearly completely insubstantial. I still write words as having substance, they being the spells of manifestation here in embodied life! That had a slow beginning and recent and current life-experience is making up for that now. This is what is accurately called an apocalypse §.
§ Note: There are peculiar-to-me Christians who actually celebrate the idea of the consequences of convidiana as signs that the arising of Godliness is imminent and with that the literal end-of-days and end-of-life on earth. These jubilant end-of-lifers have subverted the actual etymological and initial meaning of ‘apocalypse’. It means to uncover [what was hidden] and is therefore more akin to a revelation (revealing) than dystopian maelstroms and other physically destructive acts by God for our soul’s good. I would like to see its proper meaning uncovered and brought to light in the light of the convidiana apocalypse as its tyrannous monstrosity becomes in time a revelation of the consequences of unconsciousness and projection. At least to those who will to see instead of to those who will to die with resurrected smiles:
From Middle English apocalips, from Latin apocalypsis, from Ancient Greek ἀποκάλυψις (apokálupsis, “revelation”), literally meaning "uncovering", from ἀπό (apó, “back, away from”) and καλύπτω (kalúptō, “I cover”). (Wiktionary.)
The slow second part to the fast-slow paradox I’m experiencing is that with my expanded clarities I have come to see with equanimity the rapidity of death’s movement towards me — my own and others — even as my breath has substantially slowed down to help extend life as per yogic pranayama experience attests. I really didn’t see either of those realisations arising like a phoenix out of the ashes hiding beneath the ‘inexplicable’ increased and increasing rates of all cause mortality that clearly contradicts the rationalised life improvement narratives that argued for forced for-your-own-good injections.
And a third part, a tertium quid, of the fast-slow paradox has been the realisation that my expanding liberation to be and to see and to think has a clarity now that understands that my past ideas of clarity were those of looking through a glass of truth-trap-dogmas darkly. And, of course, I wonder to what extent my current perception of clarity is in fact another misperceived dream I will wake from. And I am at ease in that unknowing, a simple one in the infinities of the unknown that abound around me.
Properly practiced pranayama eventually leads to slowing the breath — Simon Borg-Olivier points out that the old yogic texts suggest that the real power of pranayama doesn’t begin until we are breathing once every five minutes. (Not there yet!) I have recently begun to experience that slowing my breath is the befriending of my mortality as a physical creature who has co-arisen in this conditioned and interdependent existence. Is this new relationship with death because I am no longer a ‘young’ human, some could ask? I say not because I have seen many people of all ages refuse to acknowledge death-in-life even into their late life. And it wasn’t until I was about 57 that I stopped hoping I wouldn’t wake up in the mornings. Perhaps the bizarre transhumanism ideology is a manifestation of that fear, the fear of death, and that a successful implementation of transhumanist ideals within the collective is grounded in that very fear. I see a connection between blood transfusions and body-part transplants as a form of predictive programming to create popular acquiescence, if not the actual embracing of transhumanism — one body piece or function at a time. See my essay “The Confession of a Blood Donor Abstainer: Transfusions, Transplants and Transhumans, How Are They Related?”
Nuance: For Example Gautama, Buddhism, and Religion
Yogi-Buddhist teacher, psychologist (ret.) and scholar Michael Stone made a similar observation when he examined the nature of religion in contemporary life and questioned its place and structure. Specifically the nuance between Buddhism as Religion and Gautama’s teachings before it became Buddhist dogma.
‘Buddha Before Buddhism 1: How I Stopped Loving the Ruling Class’
Religion
We’re born and die. [Sometimes we] have purpose and sometimes we don’t. We suffer pain and lose people we love. We don’t know what it means. Joy doesn’t last. And why do things get so bad?
Religious life is what connects us with the ultimate ground that is our lives. I’d like to make a distinction between religious feeling (the is-ness of being, the feeling of being entirely taken up in a moment) and religion – which is the structure that grows out of that experience [and becomes the cherished handed-down dogmas and dogmatic thinking practices within which many look for relaxation if not succour]. Buddhism has now turned into a religion. Its pope is the Dalai Lama. Probably every culture has had religion, it’s a symbolic activity, like language. As soon as there is language, there is religion.
[Gautama] was deeply engaged in his culture, and one of the principal means of engagement was through language. He was constantly reworking words so that familiar experiences and descriptions could be seen in a new way. If we want [Gautama’s] values, rather than [Buddhist ones, it is important to examine] the culture that holds and contains us. The culture is also inside you. The more you go back into the old texts, the further away you get from religion. What we don’t need at this moment is another religion. Instead, perhaps we could engage a living tradition, and uncover the values of these practices. This means having a conversation with the past, while being rooted in the soil of present experience.
Anti-Religious
[Gautama’s] stance is anti-religious in a certain way. He uses what’s in religious practice to undo religious belief. [Gautama] creates strategies, not dogmas. … If dharma is reduced to a set of [dogmatic] practices, we actually miss the heart of the anti-authoritarian nature of the teachings. [Gautama taught] that only a transformation of people from the heart out, person by person, was going to change society. [He also understood that] this personal transformation wasn’t possible without some basic justice and welfare for people. As long as human nature remained untransformed, [aka unconscious] any social structure no matter how well motivated, would eventually be subverted by human nature [and with the right conditions become a collective monster that devours itself, to paraphrase C.G. Jung with connections to Mattias Desmet and mass formation (from notes on a talk by Michael Stone at Centre of Gravity, Toronto, May 6, 2013. My emphasis and edits. For the Jung citation see ‘On the Psychology of the Unconscious’ (1912) in CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology).
“As Soon As There Is Language, There Is Religion”
At the end of ‘Dogged Dogma Pt.1’ I shared with you a kind of unspecified anecdotal reliving of what was a significant part of my childhood. I, and my sisters, spent most of childhood in that weird eggshell tip-toe fear of walking and talking survival mode that we adopted under the mostly tyrannous non-verbal and unspoken anger and shaming malevolent maternalistic state. The eldest sister had her own wake up to it about twenty years after leaving the family ‘nest’ when she watched a documentary on cults and realised that our family had most if not all the requisite cult attributes. For the curious you can read some of that childhood experience in my Epistles to Claude and Terry, my parents, here in substack.
Dear Terry: An Epistle My Dead Mother #1
Dear Claude: An Epistle to my Dead Father #1 (of 5)
For me I transferred that childhood oppression and denial of my legitimacy of being alive on earth into a scrupulous practice of hunched over make-my-Self-small physicality and with the carefully minimising of my language. With hindsight I see that my ‘escape’ into words was to seek from them the power they have and which I had unconsciously removed from my own body: I didn’t speak the truth and depotentiated my physical self to such an extent that I unknowingly took away from myself an actual voice. I didn’t know that until 2017 at the end of the seventh intensive silence retreat I had taken under the direction of The Art of Living Foundation. On that day when I broke silence and began to talk I was shocked to discover that I had a voice. I actually heard the sound of Guy for the first since early childhood, maybe, although it is one that I don’t remember. Before the yoga-initiated apocalypse of actually hearing myself, I had heard only my words. I intellectually understood the idea of tone and resonance because of music — which was very important in my life. I didn’t know that I hadn’t seen or understood that musicality was actually a feature of my voice naturally expressing itself. All that I heard from me up until then was a kind of flat monotone of words. In 2019 Yoshiko had a similar experience. One morning during yoga I heard her make various odd vocal noises. When I asked her what she was doing, she explained that she was discovering for the first time the sound her voice. Until then she didn’t understand my voice recovery experience of 2017 because like me, until she experienced the change of voice, Yoshiko didn’t realise that she had forsaken her voice too. Likely as a form of protection against her uniquely experienced hostilities in her own life, although she assures me she really doesn’t remember having those kinds of experiences as a child in a loving home.
Is this what Stone is obliquely referring to when he suggests that with the birth of language there is by some hidden necessity the concomitant birth of religion? How many of us who have been traumatised have actually in one way or the other removed from ourselves our most powerful creative tool, our voice? Some of us like Yoshiko and me dampen the voice and move through our lives oblivious to having muted our vocal agency even as we struggle with the frustrations of crippled creativity in outward life and with the development of various forms of dis-ease within our bodies. Others over-compensate for having disempowered themselves as their mechanism to survive the traumatic events of their young lives. These likely are a significant portion of the woke yellers and screamers who are going outside themselves for confirmation of the agency that has been hidden away by their younger Self who chose meekness at some point as the required survival tactic.
In part 1 of this essay I argue that the collective requirement by the Catholic Church fathers for everyone to believe the unbelievable is narcissistic gaslighting. And that it specifically and effectively creates a traumatic enough cognitive dissonance that it often disconnects people from reality and allows for the authoritarian imposition of belief and trust as surrogates to experience as knowledge. This is the power of words and suggests, perhaps, how language can become religion.
With that thought I would suggest that Stone’s affirmation comes to exist in circumstances for which religion is the compensatory structure people both create and within which they congregate after they have given up their own agency, especially when young, as a survival mechanism. And with that substrate the church becomes the mother and its truth-dogma becomes the paternalist mechanism by which its members can remain irresponsibly unconscious of the realities of both their personal and collective human shadow, the shadow that “consists of much more than inconvenient little weaknesses and foibles, … that is actually a positively demonic dynamism’ (p35 C.G. Jung "On the Psychology of the Unconscious" (1912). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology my edit and emphasis).
Control the Narrative to Control the Voice is Narcissism, Religion, and Allopathy 101
In The Gnostic Gospels Elaine Pagels explores the Gnostic texts that were discovered at Nag Hammadi and their having been suppressed 1800 years ago and how that suppression and the gospels relate to the formation of the Catholic Church. And the purpose of the suppression was, of course, to consolidate the authority, the ‘apostolic’ practices, into the hands of the select (deserving) few. That meant that anything that suggested personal authority or agency was to be extirpated — and mostly was. Hmmm. And by no coincidence, I’ve come to realise that that is a pretty good description of tyranny and of what happened with convidiana: truth mongers with authority controlling the narrative and who used fear with threats to the undeserving non-compliant.
From Pagels’ Gnostic Gospels:
… The risen Christ explains to Peter that those who "name themselves bishop, and also deacon, as if they had received their authority from God," are, in reality, "waterless canals." Although they "do not understand mystery," they "boast that the mystery of truth belongs to them alone.'" The author accuses them of having misinterpreted the apostles' teaching, and thus having set up an "imitation church" in place of the true Christian "brotherhood." Other gnostics, including the followers of Valentinus, did not challenge the bishop's right to teach the common apostolic tradition. Nor did they oppose, in principle, the leadership of priests and bishops. But for them the church's teaching, and the church officials, could never hold the ultimate authority which orthodox Christians accorded them. All who had received gnosis, they say, had gone beyond the church's teaching and had transcended the authority of its hierarchy.
The controversy over resurrection, then, proved critical in shaping the Christian movement into an institutional [dogmatic] religion. All Christians agreed in principle that only Christ himself — or God — can be the ultimate source of spiritual authority. But the immediate question, of course, was the practical one: Who, in the present, administers that authority?
Valentinus and his followers answered: Whoever comes into direct, personal contact with the "living One." They argued that only one's own experience offers the ultimate criterion of truth, taking precedence over all secondhand testimony and all tradition — even gnostic tradition! They celebrated every form of creative invention as evidence that a person has become spiritually alive. On this theory, the structure of authority can never be fixed into an institutional [dogmatic] framework: it must remain spontaneous, charismatic, and open.
Those who rejected this theory argued that all future generations of Christians must trust the apostles' testimony — even more than their own experience. For, as Tertullian admitted, whoever judges in terms of ordinary historical experience would find the claim that a man physically returned from the grave to be incredible. What can never be proven or verified in the present, Tertullian says, "must be believed, because it is absurd." Since the death of the apostles, believers must accept the word of the priests and bishops, who have claimed, from the second century, to be their only legitimate heirs.
…
The conviction that a man who died came back to life is, of course, a paradox. But that paradox may contain the secret of its powerful appeal, for while it contradicts our own historical experience, it speaks the language of human emotions. It addresses itself to that which may be our deepest fear, and expresses our longing to overcome death (p24-5 my emphasis).
Why Not Use Fear to Rationalise Bully-Narcissism Blindness?
And I now suggest that Pagels has glided over the gnostics’ lack of, or much reduced, fear of death which I infer was the general sense from the Gnostic Gospels and details that Pagels included in her book. Furthermore within the Roman world the stoic philosophy was significant for an extended period of time (centuries?) and practiced by highly placed and influential leaders and teachers, such as Marcus Aurelius. Fear of death was minimal if not nonexistent in this philosophy and its practice, as was exemplified by the ease with which the high ranking statesman and influential stoic philosopher Seneca killed himself following Nero’s Imperial decree to do so.
There was most probably existential fear of death within the Jewish community as generally endemic to the Abrahamic religions with their at best ambivalent descriptions of God and God’s chaotic and destructive expressions of anger and retribution. That would have been mitigated to some extent by the Jewish religious and dogmatic practices forbidding with threat of death, I think, leaving Judaism.
And there are many civilisations and cultures that do not have an overwhelming fear of death. For example here where I have lived for two years I see that the Mexicans have reverence and love for their dead and consider life and death to be a temporary separation of the family in the course of natural life. I have not seen or felt or experienced significant fear of death as a governing social behaviour here as I did in the gringo America I lived in for sixty years. What I am inferring, perhaps weakly although I think worthy of investigation, is the question to what extent was there an ‘undocumented’ substrate of the Roman society that for ancestral and familial or other reasons did not have a significant fear of death and so little interest in the ‘religious’ shenanigans that were going on? Did most of the population ignore it and then were swept up in a religious version of Mattias Desmet’s ‘Mass Formation’?
So why would fear have been successful then as it was with convidiana? It could well be that it was the narcissists who were primarily the fearful ones and in turn were the most fearful. And likely it was they who had already taken significant control of the leadership because of the fear-rooted compulsive need to be in control. Narcissistically compulsive fear management would have been a strong motivator for them to take control of the narrative and to implement controlling mechanisms beyond just the narratives. And as to ‘history’, the gnostic non-compliers had their history, and often their lives, effectively erased by the church-building and church-saving ‘founders’ who concomitantly vanquished independence, free thought and speech.
And that was what happened! The church fathers implemented the typical narcissistic behaviours including exaggerated caring, over the top gaslighting and compulsive narrative controls. (In time, money control too!) As Desmett has argued with mass formation, deep fear-based motivating energy in the few is able to cow the many. Yup I’ve seen that happen in our time with woke gender inanity threatening livelihoods and mutilating the bodies of youths; and in convidiana, of course, with mandatory experimental injections and the wearing of porous face cloths whose pores are at least tens times bigger than any virus. I haven’t seen Desmett connect the mass formed people he describes with narcissists. I suspect that there is a big overlap. Was this, like in Germany and in convidiana, really the success of a small minority who used narcissistic lies and subterfuge, fear and division, gaslighting and narrative control, to divide and conquer?
There is an interesting corollary from the east to this: in India when the moguls were directing their armies to kill in order to consolidate their kingdoms, they were distressed to discover that the yogis could not be coerced to comply with threats of death. And so the moguls made it punishable by death to the yogis to teach or practice Kundalini yoga in public. Hence it went underground and its ability to mitigate mogul blood lust was successfully reduced which abetted the warring moguls desires and actions.
Obedience to Authority and Narcissism: Chicken and Egg?
And from what I now understand more deeply from my own experiences and those of my sister’s in our processes of learning to thrive after healing from severe malevolent maternal narcissistic abuse is that the psyche’s split that is created by severe trauma creates a pervasive deep, often difficult to source, fear that is the dominant all-pervading emotional and psychological base from which life is created from the conscious and, more significantly, from the unconscious.
In a previous series of essays I argued that obedience to authority has been the dominant psychological social structure since the expansion of agriculture and with it the ‘natural’ creation of the haves and the have-nots. This physical reality of the existence of those who control the food and those who do not, compounded by a natural hierarchical ordering function in human genetic history, created a psychology of deservedness and undeservedness. See my series ‘On Obedience to Authority’ for more details, especially essay #6. The net result was the creation of our culture as fundamentally a bully one with most everyone unable to see it because we are living bully Stockholm Syndrome to fit in and survive. So we have adapted ourselves to it as if it was our own skin.
On 'Mass Formation', Woke and Corporatist News: Saviour from What?’
On 'Mass Formation', Woke and Corporatist News: Deservedness and Death in a Post Modernist Bully Culture’
I explore the evidence of our hidden bully Stockholm Syndrome culture in our openly ‘hidden’ language and how to disentangle ourselves from it in
Unseen Stockholm Syndrome And Other Oddities of Being Alive in a MisSpelled See of Words’
What I see now, with my recent exploration into narcissism, is that the creation of the deserving/underserving classes set the conditions for creating societal rooted and perpetuated trauma. In my essays I described our broad social structures as a bully culture. I now see more clearly that it is more specifically a narcissistically conditioned bully culture. And of course, they feed off of and perpetuate each other. The violence of the split between the deserving and undeserving created enough trauma to create psychic splitting in both ‘sides’. For a very good description of this splitting and its psychologic effects listen to Michael Stone’s podcast, @~34:30 ‘Mindful Breathing Part 4 (Anapanasati) 2015.12.06’. Stone does not discuss here (or elsewhere yet that I have heard) the possibility that some and likely many of the sufficiently traumatised children or infants develop some degree of narcissistic personality disorder. The narcissistic’s base playground is fear and the management of that fear by using and manipulating fear and that fear in the family creates difficult to heal psychoses. What is amazing is how resilient and unique each human is because no two people get hurt and/or heal, or not heal, in exactly the same way.
In the recent ‘Thriving After Narcissistic Abuse’ on-line summit I attended with 25 speakers, the vast majority of the guests commented on several big challenges to extricate oneself from an abusive narcissistic relationship. The first is the emotional and psychological full understanding in heart and mind that you have been the target of a narcissist. Narcissism exists and being nice to a narcissist it putting fuel on an out of control fire! After that there is the problem of safely exiting oneself and any children that may be there. That can be huge, and several guests addressed that. And adding to that is just how oblivious are the various legal, social and therapeutic agencies and people to the reality of the possibility of the existence of narcissism as the root cause of the troubled person and/or relationship.
Several of the guests observed that narcissistic abuse is much more common than people acknowledge. One presenter sited an official statistic that 25% of the general population is narcissistic to some degree while anecdotally suggesting that in her experience she estimates it being closer to 50% and that the truly malevolent narcissists are likely around 12%. She may have proximity bias because of the nature of her work. Even so general obliviousness or outright denial, even with the mental health ‘experts’, is a rampant common big problem.
For example, in a short dialogue Sheri Heller cites the case of well known Saturday Night comedian Darrell Hammond who struggled for many years with serious mental health issues. They were severe enough to include hospitalisation on more than one occasion. After ten different therapists he came to one who recognised that he had suffered a childhood of severe maternal narcissistic abuse. With that understanding and awareness healing began for the first time after fifty years of suffering. See the documentary of his life by Michelle Esrick ‘Cracked Up’.
Woke and the Malevolent Gynarchy Masked as Malevolent Patriarchy
The story of Hammond includes a slightly tangential aspect to this discussion and yet it is somehow related enough to include because it provides a subtle example of how woke-controlled and gyne-biased are our ‘female’ narratives. When I researched the Hammond documentary ‘Cracked Up’ none of the six or so ‘top’ returned reviews mentioned that it was the mother who had traumatised him. All the reviews I looked at cited his recovery as being from ‘family abuse’ or ‘family trauma’. I know from personal experience that the bad mother has become a woke untouchable or even taboo subject.
And with a weird synchronicity the day after I looked at Hammond’s bio I received and watched Jasun Horsley talking about his latest book Big Mother: The Technological Body of Evil in which he makes a cogent argument that we have actually entered a softly whispered malevolent ‘gynocracy’ as distinct from jackboot malevolent patriarchy. No more do we have a boot to the head as described by Orwell. Rather, we are softly coddled into restriction and death in order to be kept safe from the big bads of world, specifically the world, men, or man-made viruses. It is a far less obvious tyranny because it hides behind the façade of loving kindness while using guilt shame and fear to emasculate the males, isolate the females and tyrannise the society. For an interesting interview go to Jasun’s substack
We, the Awake are All Being asked to Dare to Live Gautama’s Middle Way; With Parable
How to continue from within this rather delicately balanced position. I am awake enough to be aware that my position, like many awake, is logistically tenuous. The sleepers, the really asleep, don’t want to wake up and are oblivious to how close the society was to turning nasty to me and my partner, two of the dirty underserving. {{Let sleeping dogs lie.}} For now, the sleepers are mostly comfortably asleep. Mostly comfortably asleep, the comfort displaced by the vague feeling of a need to wait for the next pieces of kibble and bits and then to jump into mindless action. {{Let sleeping dogs lie.}}
By this time in the convidiana I have talked with a few dozen people at most. And most of those were already mostly or fully awake. {{Let sleeping dogs lie.}}
The awake enough to know know that the deep sleepers are likely less safe than a clunky Manchurian Candidate assassin waiting for the code words to machine-like complete the preprogrammed mission, whatever {{Let sleeping dogs lie.}} that happens to be. The sleepers have been programmed to be frightened, very frightened, of a vaguely defined something unnatural and vaguely selfishly undeserving. {{Let sleeping dogs lie.}} The programmed action is vague, like a beagle or bloodhound before the start of the hunt: there’s something somewhere and they will find it even before knowing the itness of it to be found. {{Let sleeping dogs lie.}}
And then I blink my eyes and wake up. I look around to see if I had been in a three or four level dream. {{Let sleeping dogs lie.}} Yes, yes, yes! I snap at that voice barking at me about lying sleeping dogs.
{{Let sleeping dogs lie.}} Shhhhh! Stop it!
The sleepers remain uncomfortable in the certainty of something true resting on what they cannot define. Often fingers and/or feet and/or limbs compulsively enter and exit a frantic kind of twitching, as if the uncertainty of their certainty might fly from the them. Sometimes the feeling of anxiety grows strong enough that it isn’t easily assuaged by booze, sex, pills, news, food or TV.
And then I wake up again. I blink. Everything here is as it is. I blink. No one was able to forcibly change me and I have been unable to forcibly change anyone. {{Let sleeping dogs lie.}} Oh Shut up!
What was the first line again, of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy? Was it ‘Don’t panic!’ or was it ‘Mostly harmless?’ {{Let sleeping dogs lie. Neither, numbskull!}}
And with that I woke to the realisation that I was the dog, sniffing around striving to catch the chase of a sure fire wake up pill. I feel the tension leave my body and with that a sigh of relief. I turn to the door and walk away in bare foot, stepping outside onto the grass with care to avoid the dog shit. I release the imaginary leash and let my dog sleep as I sit under a large pine tree.
OMG, I just realised that to some extent that being an awake makes me, and the other awakes like me, in some small way Gautamas! Why? After his seriously dedicated austerity practises, the last one which almost killed him, his awakening was to the realisation that everyone around him was asleep and that that to which he had become awake was incomprehensible to those people, his extended community, because they were asleep. {{Let sleeping dogs lie.}} After his awakening he almost didn’t teach it because he was aware that his ideas went against the stream of the orthodox dogma of the day. {{PSSSSSSSTTTTTT! Let sleeping dogs lie.}}
So do we let sleeping dogs lie?
It’s not the sleeping state that is the problem! It is the triggered sleeping state that is the problem and who knows the when or the who that will trigger them. {{Dependent Origination.}}
Where did that come from? My eyes blink. Not again, not another waking up — or fake waking up! And I continued to sit, puzzled. Dependent origination?
{{Let sleeping dogs lie.}}
And I remembered a story and smiled at Gautama’s sense of humour: he was making a point with an arrow story! And I took the liberty of paraphrasing it. Okay, okay, it is a complete rewrite.
Here goes: The sleepers have an arrow in them. It is an arrow made of many smaller arrows. Each arrow came from one of a myriad of sources and it has been there for a very long time. The sleepers have become mostly numb to the feeling of it being there unless it gets bumped or if another smaller arrow joins it and so grows the big arrow a little. They do not know that they have the choice and ability to remove the arrow. Or to avoid most of the new arrows. My wish was to help them remove the big arrow and whenever I touched it the pain of the touch was so horrific that they misunderstand the action and thought that I stabbed them with a new arrow. They do not see the little arrows.
I saw. And I stood and then noticed that an arrow case full of arrows had fallen off of me. Until then I didn’t know it was there. I let it go and turned, arrow free, to return home aware that now I could see the other little arrows and so I would be able to deflect some of them harmlessly away.
Thank you for reading.
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Turn turn away From the sound of your own voice Calling no one, just a silence Run to see you at the edge Fall off the avalanche Turn away Hold hold the light That fixes you in time Keeps you under Takes you over The wall that love divides, between waking and slumber Turn away Turn turn away From the weight of your own past It's magic for the devil And betray the lack of change Once you have spoken Turn away
I also love Elaine Pagels. I just picked up her Gnostic Gospels again when I was moving my library and thought of you. The Origins of Satan is the one I most often quote from.
My hospice mentor, who was a Zen Buddhist, told me that Christians have the most fear in dying, in his experience. That makes sense to me. Even my dad, who'd lived a blameless life as far as the Church was concerned, figured he'd be spending some time in purgatory. No one escapes.
Thanks for this!
As layers peel away it is both more challenging and also easier. Challenging because with each layer there seems to be less people on the same layer so finding guidance is challenging. Easier because everything simplifies so that finding guidance is not needed. As you say, confidence and trust in self, innate trust of body, because the mind too often creates other layers where none are needed. Keeping an open mind to my self is more difficult than I imagined. Thanks for another great essay, I enjoyed it this morning and have been musing all day. I like that!