Great read Guy ... though my attention span is weeny-sized of late. That Martin Luther quote was a hoot, though maybe a disservice to those whores with a heart of gold. 😂
I sometimes attempt at using language and logic to point to the limits of language and logic, but usually end up collapsing into a black hole of contradiction and tautology.
I came upon a funny alternative in the form of a translated quote by Nietzsche ... "For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication."
But after that 2nd mug, I can't even see the damn keyboard.
Ah the old linguistic conflict existing between the dogma of analytical intellect and the natural fluidity of intuitive knowing. This is a beautiful topic.
Words of power can only encircle truth. They cannot ever apprehend it. For truth is unattainable to the mind, it is native to the undefined condition of Being. The closest thing we can do as humans to relate truth is through symbolism. That's why the earliest languages were written in symbolic form.
The mind is well suited for breaking things down into small pieces and cataloging them. The mind is like a knife, it cuts. If development of clear sight of truth can be considered as a cloth, can we weave it with a knife?
The mind is very good at controlling the pieces and cataloging them; when it is used to do that with truth, it falls flat footed. This is because the true nature of reality is not dualistic, it is One.
Though it can be experienced in the context of the human existence, it must be observed in perfect stillness, with a silent mind.
The physical world is in a state of Maya, not because of it being illusory, but because it is in a movement of "becoming," this movement towards Being is the purpose of Time.
Everything is One, when we look inward, we find it.
The intractable problem of using language to express what is beyond language. Language both frees and confines us - like anything we need to know when to pick it up and when to put it down. Whenever we get close to something more "true" - we end in paradox. Which tells us something.
"At its core the joyful defiance is against the story-structure stories of ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘mine’, epitomised by John’s cosmology. It is this path of truth that Krishnamurti and Gautama Buddha cautioned against, those predefined certainties that things like religious creation stories use to control thinking and feeling and which are the foundations of rigidity in belief that created the killing machinations of history, of which we are alive in one that is the most extensively and cleverly done."
Religions will by necessity also have to go - at least in current form - because yes, they've created rigidity of thought. We're bigger than any thing we can articulate.
Thank you, Guy. Always a pleasure to read. Look forward to more. Best.
Yes, religions will go. They are no longer aligned with the aquarian age energy paradigm of the planet and of human consciousness. They will fall away like leaves from an autumn tree. Lol! The old vanguard will fight that of course, which is what we are seeing. The interesting arm of that resistance are people like Jordan Peterson and Naomi Wolf looking to save us from the 'evil' of non-Christian consciousness by resurrecting the Christian religious energy that was an important part of extending or enhancing 'evil' from millennia. Fascinating times.
In conversation with a neuroscientist and psychologist that I knew, I asked about how the field views consciousness. She told me about the hard and soft problem of consciousness.
And then she told me about the most simple interpretation which knocked my socks off.
Paraphrasing here based on my understanding of myself.
-life is about motion (physical)
-intelligence (emotions, logic) helps motion
-consciousness is like an intelligence of the motion of that intelligence (emotions, logic)
So if we don't address motion, the body, we are stuck in levels of intelligence that can be delusional because they evolved to serve the body to help motion.
In the studio we talk about this quite often. Our access point is the body...it is much easier (simple) to make changes in the body than the mind.
As the body, so does the mind.
It never ceases to amaze me. Watching someone find space in their body...and then seeing how that space creates room in their mind.
Pain is something we have to define very early, usually during the first session.
Pain is a strong sensation with the motor intent to withdraw.
There will be many sensations. And they may be uncomfortable.
But discomfort is not something we necessarily avoid...
We tell the story of our son having a sore throat and gargling salt water.
He asked if it would taste good?
No.
Will it taste bad?
No.
It will taste salty.
And really, most of life falls into this category. Salty.
Funnily enough, developing tolerance for the saltiness, the unknowingness, the discomfort of life creates space for pleasure. In the body and the mind.
Yes, Sarah, this has been actually a relatively slow realisation that my almost 10 years of yoga practice was really about creating space in mind and body. At this time I am very specifically working on long term (3 yr +) chronic discomfort in my right hip in the last few weeks with *space* as the curing objective. I am focused on giving space in my body and mind for the pain and where it is located. OMG, it is working steadily and the discomfort is much diminished. A few more months at most, and maybe even a few more weeks. A really remarkable change for me.
I am glad you enjoyed the essay. Part 2 is another odd one. Just posted.
I am glad to hear that your hip pain is subsiding! Are you a side sleeper? If so, do you sleep with a pillow between your knees (long enough to support your knee and ankle)? Especially considering your substantial weight loss, your hip pain could be coming from an unhappy piriformis, exacerbated by a sleeping position that is not as ideal as it could be.
Another thought....if you favor one side, for something like pigeon, the imbalance could be causing some discomfort.
Or when you sit cross legged for padmasana, are you always crossing your legs the same way?
Do you cross your legs when you are seated at the table?
These are things you've probably already considered, I just thought I would mention some of the ones I see most often in the studio.
Speaking of space, I can't wait to read your next essay! I just know I have to wait until I have space....for thinking 🙏🏼♥️
Hola, Sarah! I really appreciate that you took the time to think of me and my discomfort. It began in June (?) 2020 shortly after an intensive meditative practice and big job change. I recognised immediately that it was somehow related to stuck energy from my past, most likely not physical. I have been surprised that I have not yet cleared it out.
I recently learned from an energy healer that part of the physical symptoms are likely the result of some kind of compensation, long term. It wasn't until I was writing about being hit by the car that taty may have been a beginning compensatory movement. Now compounded by years of other abuses, and an unbalanced mind.
I don't sleep on my side, or at least not significantly. I would love to know a bit more about the relationship between an unhappy piriformis and weight loss. Funny, when I went to the emergency for extreme pain in my abdomen in 2014, it turned out to be an umbilical hernia, likely congenital. (I now think my obesity exacerbated it or even created it because I didn't have symptoms until after losing the weight.) The intern blamed the hernia on my having lost all that weight.
Yes, pigeon and the like are uncomfortable on one side. Part of the energy healer's prescription was a particular set of poses and stances to balance out the imbalances. This has been very helpful and has become a central part of my daily practice. The process is very vivifying even though a few of the postures are nothing short of engendering swearing. All good though.
In padmasana I have been very conscientious of changing the crossing because when I began I couldn't do it at all and wanted to balance. Lord of the half fish pose is challenging me to be aware of balance and moving from compensatory easings and avoidances or too much emphasis in the 'easy' direction.
The healer wants me to do deer pose held for a few minutes and that one is – WAS! – off the charts f*g F*G painful. Now much much better.
I sometimes cross my legs when sitting at a table. Although since 2017 I rarely sit at tables except when in restaurants or when visiting people. I'm floor-sitting now, and am writing this from the floor with a couple of folded blankets to elevate my hips and put my elbows higher than the keyboard. (Old ergonomics class lesson.)
I think some of the awareness work I've done and written about on the substack with my father has been a great help. I am sure, now, that I was carrying in my body some of his war and family trauma.
Again, thank you for sharing your knowledge with me. I am curious about the piriformis. I really have done close to nothing formal on physiology or kinesiology.
And thank you for your support of my writing. I wonder, sometimes, at what I'm writing and if anyone would find it valuable. That someone with your quality of integrity reads it completes, in a metaphysical way, the process that my writing initiates. Blessing and muchas gracias.
The piriformis attaches to the sacrum and inserts at the greater trochanter of the femur. It is one of the deep 6 rotators . It is a pelvic stabilizer and an external rotator of the hip. Because it originates at the sacrum, if one side is tighter than the other, it can pull your sacrum off and cause pain - often in the low back and hip area.
Additionally the sciatic nerve runs right through there....so inflammation of the piriformis can potentially cause sciatic nerve pain as well.
Have you done any release work in your hip area...like with a lacrosse ball or something similar?
Other potential issues could be from the labrum or the bursa.
Any time I have a client dealing with pain in the pelvis, I think it's helpful to look at the emotional component, as it sounds like you are doing already.
Etymology...Pelvis, as you probably know, comes from Latin pelvis (“basin”), from Old Latin peluis (“basin”), from Proto-Indo-European *pel- (“container”).
The basin/container/bowl...that holds our organs AND our emotions. Looking at the function of the piriformis specifically...it's like the "seatbelt" - literally a strap-in for our root to maintain its center. If one side is off, so is our root...our base...our chi...kundalini...all of it. It supports our ability to ground ourselves and aids in our ability to feel supported, rooted, and safe. I would think that your intuition about your work around your father is likely spot on.
I'm sure that you are already practicing plenty of breath work...I would encourage lots of this. Breathing into where you notice the discomfort and leaning into that - contracting your pelvic floor and hips, then move up to the heart center, throat, and third eye as you inhale (create friction), exhale through the crown and release the contractions as you exhale. Inhale from the crown, pulling new fresh energy down your central channel, contract third eye, throat, heart, root; and then exhale down, releasing the contractions and returning that energy to be grounded. You could also do a variation, working only on the root and sacral chakras...the intention of INTEGRATING the energy that has lodged itself in your hip. Your hip pain certainly (and imho probably) could be trauma from long ago that your subconscious is still struggling with on some level (nod to Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score) - it doesn't matter though. If you deal with it at an energetic level, it will allow your subconscious to release this trauma and reintegrate into you. And it will allow/help you to release the stories, and the need for them, surrounding the issue. These stories create a feedback loop that can perpetuate and/or exacerbate the issue.
The breath work practice can be done seated, in bed, or in pose that feels appropriate. I lean heavily on The Energy Codes by Dr. Sue Morter for this work....and I think it's worth the read if you have space for it.
I have to get ready for my 2:00 client....all of this may not make sense - I'll happily clarify anything that doesn't lol.
This brings a slightly different eye to what I already mostly know, with some additional anatomy and a variation on my current breath practices. Wonderful! Thank you for the time you took with this.
Now I return to my sadhana and to incorporate the breath methodology you have suggested.
First, the playlist. I forgot to mention on the last one how much I'd been missing Peter Gabriel but this reminded me of another long-lost love, David Byrne. I hadn't realized he was so literary, as in literal, and not just evocative. In my stacked-up list of Subs to do is a response to James Corbett's interview of Neil Oliver. Something Neil talks about were architectures of memory, imaginary houses in which things were placed as mnemonic devices to keep track of them. But then, the proximity of one room to another would cause them to interact and create new ideas. Fascinating, eh?
I didn't know if it started generating new suggestions but I thought you'd like it.
I've copied your Theodore Dalrymple quote for my Anneke episode, which I plan to record before I turn on my internet. I think that's the only way.
I think you read my book chapter where I quote Susan George: "The ‘eco’ in economy and ecology refers to the same Greek root, oikos, the household, estate or domain. The eco-nomos is the rule, or the set of rules, for managing the domain. The eco-logos is the underlying principle, the spirit, the reason for it all—in the sense that Saint John affirms at the outset of his Gospel, “In the beginning was the Logos,” usually translated as the “Word.” https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/what-if-money-was-no-object.
So--play with me here--what if our collective identity in reality is the logos, the giver of shape, form, modulation. God is the breath, the spirit. Nothing can be formed from the throat alone, the tongue, the lips. It all starts with the breath. God gives essence but we give shape to the essense. Nothing can be made but what is made with God.
In this world of dream/ delusion, we're just mouthing the words. But there is no Word because there's no breath/ spirit to animate it. No wind blows through our reed. Somewhere in our memory is the song of breath that we gave voice. But we are dismembered until we remember ourSelf.
Hola, Tereza. I managed to get busy and put aside a reply for a while.
First, The Curse is *fantastic*. I discovered it several weeks ago. Thank you for bringing it back into my awareness.
I will certainly play along with this! My new friend Ian may enjoy your approach and I will share your 'play', which is the meme to catch the animate in the thing, perhaps. If that is okay with you.
lógos as collective identity. Devil's (Lucifer's? 😉) advocate here. 'Collective' meaning undifferentiated, ie, lacking the individuated or, perhaps, even the 'individual personality'. Is the collective able to differentiate? (Jung strongly argues that that is not possible. And it was Emile Durkheim, if memory serves, who argued that the only way for a large industrial society to function was to remove the individual into bureaucratic 'collectives'.)
I would argue that the collective as *the giver* of 'shape', ie a differentiated' state, is putting the cart ... not in front of the horse, exactly. Not in the right place, anyway.
As I have expanded my ability to see, I understand from experience, now, the basic correctness of Jung's contention that the individuated person is the rare one that manages to extract him or herself *from* the 'collective'. Covid mass-formation (psychosis?) is a wonderfully clear proof of concept: the collective showed itself as the monster it can truly be, and for a while expanded itself with the propaganda of fear campaigns.
Did that monster fail to ‘breath’? LOL! Complicated, as I might argue that it was breathing the breath of death! And did so with the lips and throats that were, according to John anyway, God-given and by their collective size, powerful.
I would suggest that the 'lógos' is more likely a tool, or perhaps a pattern of ingested and partially(?) digested behaviour (a samskara) in the manner Byrne elucidated, that solidifies or perhaps even grows the collective because it can be a kind of individuation suicide/killer.
God, or the animating spirit, is the breath or perhaps the whisper for some of us, that asks or directs us to remove ourselves from the collective. Concomitantly, God is animating the collective.
I suspect, (maybe hope!) that God isn't actively asking people to remain gormless forms in a gollum-like 'collective' that, with the right conditions, become destructive zombies.
And yet.. if nothing is that wasn't created by the lógos/God, then even the collective is lógos/God, and ... well, does it matter, really, if there are individuated people distinct from the collective? And this also implies that the animating energy of God's breath is present in both collective and individual, the respiration that moves all of us.
“In this world of dream/ delusion, we're just mouthing the words. But there is no Word because there's no breath/ spirit to animate it. No wind blows through our reed. Somewhere in our memory is the song of breath that we gave voice. But we are dismembered until we remember ourSelf.”
By ’mouthing the words’ is that a metaphor for the members of the collective being *unaware* of their animating breath or *lacking* it, as you are suggesting? And that the goal is to re-member that anima/animus as some kind of divine awareness? That still suggests that the individuals of the collective are not without breath (Vāyu).
It is a strong and questionable position, that “there's no breath/ spirit to animate it”. I suspect that the opposite is true, that lógos/God IS the animation that powers the ‘dream/delusion’. At a basic level, how else would the dream/delusion exist?
And that takes us back to a more Taoist and Buddhist conception of ‘Life.’ It is. That’s all there is. And therefore self-so meaning that all is breath, or breath of ‘God’, ‘Tao’, etc. And with that we swing to Gautama’s and Patañjali’s observation that right-seeing is critical for the re-membering of the animating spirit within to that which is All. There is no path!
Oddly enough, something that came to mind was (linguistic) Chomsky’s revolutionary ideas about language and that *language* is a *characteristic* of being a human-socialised human. (Feral children do not properly learn language.) This is another echo of the Buddhist concept of interdependence, perhaps suggesting even the physic’s idea of ‘entanglement’, that the animating and voicing of that animation arise together and are not separated. What provides the nuanced distinction, maybe, is the quality of integrity, the resonance of the energy of the individual within the collective being enough to remove that person from an undifferentiated state to a nuanced and eccentric one. Jung and Gautama both puzzled over this, why it was that the many remained undifferentiated. Not without ‘spirit’ or ‘breath’; simply unrealised, and to be interacted with compassionately, for they are ignorant and know not what they do.
Thank you for that thoughtful reply, Guy. I'm thinking that I should have started by defining my terms. What I mean by the collective Self is at a right-angle turn from both the ego-self as individuated and the group of social selves as the crowd or mass. It's again the third paradigm. Someone else has been talking about communities as fractals, in which each smaller unit (family) contains the whole of the bigger communities moving outward. Maybe what I'm talking about is the fractal Self.
What the Course would say is that the dream was never created, it doesn't exist, in the same way your dreams have no reality. There is no sound of One mind dreaming. So no, I don't mean the lack of breath or spirit as metaphor. Do the figures inside your dream breathe? Can I go into your dream and change it?
If we, as the One mind, are having a nightmare, God is helpless to go into our dream and straighten things out. Nor can He shake us awake. The purpose of the dream needs to be fulfilled. The voice of God or wholly spirit can speak to us and help to shape it, but we need to be ready to listen.
And we don't need to agree on that, but I wanted to clarify the experiment I'm running. Now to listen to the song of the night!
Hola, Tereza. Your opening and closing have brought a nice smile to my face, and perhaps even a bit of laughter. Total ambivalenbe! And thus another dyad and so this became for me, the dance of the dueting dyads. (Song of the moment: Delibe’s ‘Flower Duet to Lakmi (Lakshmi?); https://youtu.be/H_PZ6IBCof4.) I love your argument as ‘the’ interesting part, perhaps even the pith, is the problem/non-problem of so-called ‘duality. So I will be a dualling/dueting ‘dualist’ and disagree with your feeling and agree with how you concluded your verbalised argument. (By the end, it was perhaps more like Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s long piece. Here is a short extract: ‘Knee Play 5’ https://youtu.be/afW7RGY-CQw. For full 3:40:00 production:
If I haven’t been clear, I have neither agreed nor disagreed with you. I was asking for clarification and then, perhaps arrogantly, describing what I inferred you *may* have been stating as an inquisitive exploration.
And now I’ll do the tertium quid tarantella aka the Third Paradigm tango and suggest that our being able to look at a pair of lines at 90° is to view 2-D polarised/polarising space from the 3rd set of eyes from a satellite view above or at least outside the plane. In some ways, this is analogous to the request in meditation-practice to become aware of the movement of thought from gestation (or even pre gestation) to manifestation and then dissipation back into the emptiness of mind/pre-mind. Michael Stone has heard it suggested that thoughts are to the mind what farts are to digestion: a by-product of being a physical being in the situation of digesting food for the body, and experience for … what? Mind? Before mind? After mind? Difficult. Surely not the ego, though, as the ego seems congenitally ill equipped to digest much, if anything, and relies tenuously for its insubstantial existence on the samskara grooves of the stories of ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘mine’.
At this point in this space-time continuum with its fractal-structure, perhaps in the emptiness that is a characteristic of matter, I would like to confirm that my drawing did in some way approximate the third paradigm idea you are expressing. Did it? I’ve inferred from your praise that it did. I have revised it in light of our continued open ended curiosity chase and chaser. Link to the revision is a bit into the discussion.
You have expressed concern about my being stuck in two space:
“Positing an arm of the third paradigm going down keeps it in two dimensional space. You can still, as you did, portray it on a flat surface. What I'm imagining goes off in a completely different plane, springs off the page, if you will, and opens up a new space. For whatever it's worth to you, if it's not a completely different way of seeing, you're not seeing it.”
I think I understand what you are saying here. I have some imagination to consider it in perhaps the 11-planes of existence some mathematical models suggest as the real world because the math gets easiest in 11 dimension. That is great for the theoretical mathematicians and perhaps equivalent physicists. And… it sounds a bit new agey to me. In other words, please describe how it can practically help you and me and all those interdependent with us to live better, meaning with less suffering and more joy with purpose, today. (Again, I am reminded of how I was enamoured of the New Age ideas that were, on hindsight, completely ungrounded.)
As to ‘the Course’ being simplistic. I have made a totally awesome sweeping generalisation sprung from your single reference to its dismissal of dreams, and perhaps from the *feeling* I had reading it so many years ago. And I think that this may be the entry way into your feeling of our disagreement and your argument towards our being in agreement. And perhaps it is also a doorway into why I was unable to complete the 1300 pages – or even more than 200: my perception of a ‘new age’ style of disconnection and way of disconnecting from the physical world.
"Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Therein lies the peace of God."
Hmmm. It has a New Age ’truthiness’ to it that does not address the ‘reality’ of an elephant or car kicking my ass, here and now, in the ‘real’ space-time continuum of somatic experience. Is it saying that my physical reality cannot be hurt? Nope, it is by omission or inference dismissive of the ‘reality’ of *reality*. This ideolism (yup, neologism) will contribute to the creation of disciples who get their ass kicked by physical reality if they do not heed things like ‘real world’ mahouts shouting, dreams arising from the body, or mindfulness of the body practices. From my having dipped my toes into the New Age ‘truthiness’ for a while, I know very well that it really does encourage a disconnect between this *idea* of truth and this reality of bodily truth I have been actively exploring for the last few years.
As you have likely inferred, what actually came to mind when I read your response, was that of the story of the disciple bowing towards the elephant. The elephant had no ‘awareness’ that as an element of the Cosmic Nous that the elephant as elephant was ‘supposed’ to have understood that the elephant and the disciple are one and therefore harmless to the bamboozled disciple. In my mind, that disciple could very well have read something like *the Aquarian Conspiracy* or that line from the Course. Yes, of course I read *AC*, and at the time-before-The-Course found it stimulating. Ultimately *AC’s* stimulation was unsatisfactory and so my quest continued with Jung (and some others) to find the source of the dissatisfaction: promotion of disembodiment. I wouldn’t have been able to articulate *that* in that way at the time of course. And whereas I was able to read 10 or 20 thousand pages of Jung, I wasn’t able to read 250 pages of the Course.
Side note: it is interesting that Jung gets dismissed, often, for being obscure or too spiritual or too intuitive, ie disembodied. He argued against that with, paraphrased, ‘I am not any those things. I am an empirical *scientist*. What I am sharing is what has actually worked to improve the lives of my clients. And the proof of my method is in how people’s lives have been tangibly, measurably improved in physical, psychological and spiritual well-being and their personal discovery that life is meaningful and purposeful for them.’ (LoL! I just realised that likely Jung’s dismissal in order to promote Freud’s sexualised disembodiment was part of the disempowerment dialectic the ‘the’ have been promoting for decades or millennia.)
An example from Jung:
“In elfin nature wisdom and folly appear as one and the same; and they are one and the same as long as they are acted out by the anima. Life is crazy and meaningful at once. And when we do not laugh over the one aspect and speculate about the other, life is exceedingly drab, and everything is reduced to the littlest scale. There is then little sense and little nonsense either. When you come to think about it, nothing has any meaning, for when there was nobody to think, there was nobody to interpret what happened. Interpretations are only for those who don't understand; it is only the things we don't understand that have any meaning. Man woke up in a world he did not understand, and that is why he tries to interpret it. (p. 316,
In the 1980s I dismissed Buddhism because of what I had been reading of it at the time: disembodied and disconnected from physical life. It has only been with my recent discoveries of what Gautama Buddha *may* have actually said that has re-ignited my interest in (so-called) pre-Buddhism ‘Buddhism’. And to my surprise he has many ways of thinking that correspond to what I have been moving towards! And that has been in large part a reflection of my reading of the Seth Books transcribed by Jane Roberts, a broad swath of Jung and other Jungian books, and in recent years a body-practice largely without words. These guides, supported by my physical experience and the manner in which I have been looking at and digesting those experiences, have ultimately brought me to my bodily experience of trusting my self as a physical embodiment of spirt-something. I am actually living bodily trust. I am trusting myself, and not some hypothetical spiritual or psychological or metaphysical self. I am trusting my bodily self with the choice of which path I take in the truth that ‘Truth is a pathless land’.
Hmmmm. That seems like a long circumambulation towards where I was thinking I was moving towards, which is the so-called ‘problem’ of duality that your response brought forward in my mind. Accompanied by, OMG, such a wonderful synchronicity with something Michael Stone said today:
~31:23 Reality is boundless, I vow to perceive it. [That is line 3 of his version of the Bodhisattva vows.] The word for ‘perceiving’ is ‘gaku(?)’ which usually gets translated as ‘I vow to *master* it. The word ‘gaku(?)’ means ‘to study.’ So ‘Reality is boundless and my practice of non-duality is the practice of not-knowing’, which is the practice of studying experience more closely. *Going all the way [in the physical experience of life].* And you don’t have to look very far. (Podcast: Intimacy, Transmission & Awakening The 10 Oxherding Pictures (Pt 5 of 6) August 28, 2015 https://podcasts.apple.com/mx/podcast/awake-in-the-world-podcast/id923427517?i=1000378241657, my emphasis.)
“Your continuum of undifferentiated self that's perfectly unaware to individuated self that's perfectly conscious is a value-based line, from bad to good.” Nope. I did not value it. I am describing what I see happening in the physical existence as an observing human: Nature appears to express itself with great comfort at all levels of consciousness, from less (minuscule although I don’t think there is total absence) to more consciousness. The amoeba is less conscious (it seems) than the amphibian, which is less conscious than the cat, etc. Within the human animal we certainly see evidence of that gradation of consciousness.(OMG has covid made *that* clear!)
So, for me, you are *maybe* projecting your own sense of valuation. For me it is more like looking at negative numbers and positive numbers: inherently they have the same valuation, and yet they are describing the nuance between them selves. Without differentiation numbers have no value, even though we are unable to judge one better or worse than the other. (Tarot, I Ching and all other divination methods practically and pragmatically rely on that differentiation without necessarily ascribing good/bad duality judgment to individual numbers.)
Perhaps the perceived valuation comes from the Course’s idealisation (or ‘ideologicalisation’) that underpins the phrase/idea that ‘God is Evil or Evil is God.’ It is pragmatically and experientially a false choice. In our current covid-debacle language it is a kind of *false flag* to distract us from the physical reality of nuance. ‘God is Evil or Evil is God’ is an attempt to deny nuance. Empirically in our existence we can do those things which increase suffering and we can do those things which decrease suffering. That pragmatic reality renders the God/Evil dyad basically false: the tertium quid (third paradigm) is to practice integrity (yoga) and kindness which we know *by experience* reduces suffering. It does not eliminate it because physical existence is, in a sense, built on a time-lapse of suffering in various ways. See diagrams ‘Cosmology Quadrant’ https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WPe7LjQ3NURLsOTJUmycC-MhqvxiytA8/view?usp=share_link and ‘Duality Quadrant’ https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yo8rEls0miSeXeWXHTnj_GyAtpcEcza_/view?usp=share_link.
“It's a continuum of superiority, of domination in a moral sense. Both ends of the continuum are based in the belief, even dogma, that you exist separate from me so I can be perfectly conscious while you are unaware.” Again, this appears to deny experiential reality! I am able to talk to you as we are talking because you are more aware than my ex, with whom I could not begin to talk to in this manner. Does that mean I’m superior? That you are superior? Not in my understanding. In an odd way this reminds me of the odd woke-like argument that all people are equal, so I can deny that I don’t see someone as black or Asian as a ‘good’ thing and virtue signal my ‘superiority’. My [deluded] equality of vision then effectively denies the nuance of their experience. I saw that in action with my ex who denied seeing race, and my parents, who saw race as a mark of having suffered in a way that makes all black people superior. Another way of putting this nuance is ‘Cast not your pearls before swine lest they turn and rend you.’ Well, ‘swine’ appears to be derogatory, of course. And yet it is describing a fundamental truth of human interaction: not everyone is ready to understand what the idea of awakened means. Ayurveda talks about this as being given indigestible ideas. Jung talks about this. In *A Guide for the Perplexed* EF Schumacher calls it ‘adequatio’.
“There can be no advances in awareness that you make that don't effect me. I'm no more aware than the plumbers digging up the sewer line outside my door.” Yes, of course. That has been one of the greatest changes in my understanding of physical existence. In an odd synchronicity I saw a FB post today from Sri Sri Ravi Shankar where he discussed how modern neuroscience is now measuring how our state of mind will affect another’s in real time. Amazing stuff. This is a confirmation of what the meditators have been affirming for centuries/millennia. For example, the experiment in the 70s that brought 60, I think, meditators from the east to Washington DC to reduce the rate of crime in the USA’s most criminal city at the time. And to the shock of the police, there was a large drop in crime. Also the well documented examples of remote healing, healing by prayer, etc. Gautama Buddha describe this well as interdependence, or co-dependency arising.
Again, being a bit of a harpy, you seem to be casting aside the challenge of nuance. It is very unlikely you would be able to talk to share this conversation with all of the plumbers at the same time. Although there is a better statistical chance that you could with just one of them. I have nothing against that *possibility* of a metaphysically sophisticate plumber. I do bump into these kinds of people, most recently with a tour guide salesman and a UK tourist. And yet, statistically, there are very few humans that will be able to engage in this conversation. For example, the UK tourist I met by some odd synchronicity two weeks ago and with whom I shared this kind of metaphysical discussion for four hours over two days said to me ‘You are the only person I have met with whom I could have this kind of conversation.’ The elephant threw the disciple. The thief will rob from the monk. The army will kill everyone in the monastery when directed to do that. No amount of auming or bowing will change nature of the hard core delusional. Another odd synchronicity: I just read how a very nasty king befriended Gautama, and continued to kill the people he didn’t like, even once, his best friend.
“If all of what we call reality is our twisted dream, why would you think that dream analysis is unimportant? It's the most important thing in the world! We have to figure out our own psychology and why we've chosen to hide in our dream of separation, otherwise we keep going round and round in it.” This had me scratching my head for two reasons. Please reread what I wrote about the importance of dreams. And I wrote that because in your first comment you cited the Course as dismissing dreams! You wrote: “What the Course would say is that the dream was never created, it doesn't exist, in the same way your dreams have no reality. There is no sound of One mind dreaming. So no, I don't mean the lack of breath or spirit as metaphor. Do the figures inside your dream breathe? Can I go into your dream and change it?”
Perhaps I’ve misunderstood what you meant to say with this. It certainly sounds like a dismissal of the value of dreams and that even ‘God’ has no ability to affect the dream world. That is not what I said at all. I stated unequivocally the value of dreams as one of the greatest links we have to our physical existence and connecting our somatic experience with the … whatever it is that has created something out of nothing and in doing so provided us with nuance, meaning and humour. In fact it was a dream analysis by that was a diagnosis of a physical ailment, coupled with my dream of the importance of changing my diet to revive myself that created a quantum leap in awareness of the importance and power of dreams.
And, now that I look at this again, your earlier statement that your awareness will affect mine awareness would (and does) apply to dreams. With experience and attention we see that our dreams change with our awareness. Furthermore we can in fact share dreams. There have been documented experiences of that and Seth directed an experiment doing just that which is described in *Conversations with Seth: The Story of Jane Robert’s ESP Class* by Sue Watkins in 2 volumes. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1746797.Conversations_With_Seth. In the earlier mentioned book *Lucid Dreaming* LaBerge describes an adept lucid dreamer who had a ‘dream’ persona hit him over the head within the dream as a kind of wake up to call to the dreamer to expand his awake-self’s awareness.
“IF the flesh-encapsulated mind is an illusion, they're both equally deluded. And there is no further point from completely deluded. There's no "worse" or "bad" way to be deluded. Either we're separate minds in separate bodies or we're not.”
I’m not exactly sure what you mean here. It sounds like the language problem of ‘half pregnant’. Perhaps you are latching on to the first drawing as a fixed thing. In the updated one I added the statement that the lines are in a constant state of motion between the extremes. And while it is theoretically possible that completely deluded is an irreversible state, it is more likely that the phrase ‘completely deluded’ is not actually possible because at the core of physical existence is a base level awareness of all matter. This is interestingly described in physics in various ways, such as the forces of gravity, electro-static forces, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the wave/particle nature of energy/mass, entanglement and other ways. This brings to my mind the question of the existence, nature and function of black holes as the complete absence of light, the vacuum of energy. (I heard a guru once argue that expanded consciousness happens, eventually across lifetimes if necessary, because that is all there is to existence. I’m not saying he is correct or not, because I don’t know.)
Your statement here also suggests an absence of nuance. In having come to be a little more awake in the time of covid, there is no question of a zombie level of delusion that seems imperturbable. It suggest to me that your statement is more an idealisation of black and white than our actual experience of it. And is that level of delusion any different from what happened in recent history in Germany, Russian and China? When the elephant is rampaging, get out of the way.
Oddly enough this now reminds me of something Marie-Louise von Franz wrote in *On Divinationn and Synchronicity*: if everything is connected, then how can there be anything separate? Her comment is, from memory my paraphrase, something like ‘That is the challenge of nuance. Yes, it is technically possible that everything can mean everything, and yet our experience of life enables us to differentiate quality.’ Woke is the antithesis of that: they are deluded and are unable to see nuance at even the coarsest levels of gender! And this differentiation ‘challenge’ is wonderfully and beautifully described in *Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Mainteance* and then the sequel *Lilah*.
I’ve been too busy writing this and living to have listened to your episode on Anneke yet. (Although, synchronicity or not, I was introduced to a “Anneke” today. I don’t actually remember being introduced to an Anneke before.)
“So I think that's the best I can do in explaining why I don't think we disagree. But I'll defer to your judgment if you still think so ;-)”
Conclusion. We aren’t in disagreement. I embrace this conversation as a ‘third paradigm’ or, in Jung’s language the tertium quid that sparks transformation into expanded awareness. We are in exploration and curiosity of the challenge of nuance and differentiation between experience and the ideas or ideology of experience. This has been a great exploration for me, so far. And now, it has put me in a challenge for my next essay! Ah well.
When we come to a conclusion of this dialogue I may want to post this into my substack.
With love, Guy, you've said that we don't disagree but have put in multiple quotes only to tell me why I'm wrong and you (and the authorities you trust) are right. You tried the experiment I'm conducting, with the Course, and found that it didn't speak to you. You moved on to those like Jung and Guatama who did speak to you.
Having 'been there, done that, rejected that,' my perspective from the Course is a step backwards for you. No problem! But you couch my intellectual disagreement as "projecting my sense of valuation" and "casting aside the challenge of nuance."
Each of us has our own experiment we're conducting in reality. Maybe yours and mine head to the same destination, maybe yours is faster, maybe not. But I can't give over the authority of my own experience, of which I'm the only author, to anyone else. According to your authority, the elephant may trample me and terrible things may happen. At that time, you have full permission to say you told me so. But until then, I will conduct my experiment in reality.
I'm not asking you to join me but to respect what I'm saying as an honest disagreement, not something where I would agree with you if you could just explain clearly enough.
I was busy with my last essay and life hence the delay. Although it has given some space to consider our 'disagreement'. To be honest, I'm not exactly clear what it is we are disagreement with. I say that because I had the idea we were exploring ideas, a game or play I love to do. Your ideas stimulated my thinking and curiosity and intuition in a fantastic way. I even got to draw word maps that took a lot of thought, with the hope that maybe some clarity of vision and/or understanding might emerge.
However I see how my approach could be taken as 'me right you wrong'. I'm not sure that language itself can drop that kind of dichotomous split in a conversation of this nature. Certainly I wasn't looking to wrong you! I took your ideas and wrestled with them like I've not wrestled ideas in a long time. Well, except with that strange man from the UK I met a couple of weeks ago.
And with ideas of this strength and nature I will play very hard, for some reason. I always have and, I confess, upset the other person. From those experiences I learned to moderate the energy with which I engage ideas. (From yoga, brahmacarya, the proper use of our energy.) Most of the time, in the last 20 years or so, I don't fully engage.
With your invitation to play, I took the ball and played to the very best of my ability. And so fell into my old ways with glee and joy. And I was honestly looking forward to your ideas wrestling with mine and for us to simply see where they went, without need for conclusions or so-called 'winners' and 'losers' in an idea-debate which will likely prove itself and us as being completely inadequate to encompass this strange thing called life. (That issue was reasonably well described in the Bhagavad Gita, when Krishna showed the expanse of His reality to Arjuna.) Ah, the humour of Life or the Universe, or whatever this thing is! Love it.
And so, with great love and respect, I understand that you feel we are in disagreement, and why you feel that. At the same time, I still don't feel that we either agree or disagree. We are (were?) giving free range to ideas that are beyond words! 'The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao', and all that.
If ever you want to return to play and to with curiosity explore with great energy and vigour this thing called consciousness and how it can be and not be at the same time, my door is always open.
I started a comment for your Anneke post. It began to get long and before I posted it I foolishly clicked the wrong thing and lost it. I'll reconstruct it in the next day or two.
You have begun another interesting discussion. Some great comments are there, with good resources. Really amazing the quality of conversations in this corner of the substack world within which we have found ourselves. Truly a blessing and one that I feel honoured to be a part of.
I was traveling yesterday so also got time to reflect before answering. I accept fully that you don't mean to offend, Guy, which is why I want to detail how you are giving offense without realizing it and using my ideas as a foil to expand on yours rather than a conversation. You said that this has been a pattern and you've 'upset' other people, who I assume you respected and felt to be friends, as we are. Your lesson from that was that you were too 'strong' and needed to be weaker in your intellectual engagement. Do I need to point out how macho that interpretation is?
My youngest daughter used to spar in martial arts with a guy 3X her age but the same belt rank. Because they were practicing, the moves were set so he knew what she'd do next, and would strike where she was off-guard. He saw this as him being her 'teacher' but it was really just changing the rules of engagement to his advantage. That's what I see happening here.
When you say we don't disagree, you're not giving me credit for having a perfectly valid counterpoint to yours. We don't disagree in your estimation because I just haven't recognized yet that you're right. I don't want to 'play' because you play very hard and engage ideas with energy. No, Guy. You haven't engaged my ideas at all! You diagrammed them out and changed what they represent using your words. When I said this wasn't what I meant, you said you still liked your definition better!
You take the 1300+ pp that I've found worthwhile to study every day for nearly 20 yrs and said it has 'a New Age truthiness' to it. Can you not see how insulting that is? Am I so vapid and grasping for easy answers that I'd devote that kind of discipline to some la-de-da faux feel-good enlightenment?
You may have given up after 200 pp and it may well be true that it wasn't the right Course for you. But your assumption is the fault was with the text rather than a disconnect with the learner.
You psychoanalyze me as 'projecting my sense of valuation' between poles that you define as 'completely unaware' and 'perfectly aware.' Sure that's not a value statement, none of us would take offense to be told we're completely unaware. As none of us should take offense that we're 'casting aside the challenge of nuance.' In other words, if I don't agree with you, it's because I'm unnuanced and not up to the challenge.
My m.o. (I can't no longer say 'rule of thumb' and I appreciate that enlightenment from you) is that I can't learn from anyone who feels I have nothing to teach them. That's where I feel we are. You're looking to teach me from your perspective of those who you DO accept as teachers. But my role here is student and foil for your ideas.
Here's what I'd like to ask you. Share this with your partner (whose name I know but can't find in my memory or a quick scan of posts). If she says that I'm being unfair and taking offense where none was given, I owe you an apology. But I'd like the perspective of a woman who knows you and loves you for whether 'falling into your old ways with glee and joy' is a step forward or back.
And an odd but delightful synchronicity with my reading this morning of Stephen Batchelor's examination of what Gautama Buddha *may have actually said*, as per the Pali Canon, versus what *Buddhism* says he said. Goes to the story issue in my essay and a kind of story structure issue in your reply.
I will respond more fully later. I'm doing Sadhana now. Hint: the dream-nature of your idea is a poor foundation in that it has the smell of unreality in a 'New Age' kind of way. More on that and how that connects to my reading of someone's deep dive into Gautama. Fascinating stuff.
Also, may I share your argument with my friend? Or.... maybe this will become something I'll create an essay around. We'll see.
Yes, please do share. The more play the better! And I have very specific arguments for why New Ageism takes this idea and gets it wrong, or rather contradicts itself. Don't make ideas guilty by association ;-)
LOL! Okay. I know from reading you that you have questioned some of the tenets of 'New Agism.' Time to start sadhana. OMG, so easily 'caught' by the quality of conversations here. I just finished commenting on Mark Crispin Miller's confirmation that the Canadian Truckers were successful. A good read, affirming the power of protest! And a dip into the expanding protests, unreported of course, against CBDCs.
I’m going to be a bit of a language/idea pedantic here.
“What I mean by the collective Self is at a right-angle turn from both the ego-self as individuated and the group of social selves as the crowd or mass.” This would require some elaboration for me to understand. And to help me wrap my perception around your idea I resorted to drawing a cross. Yup, moved into the uneasy blend of word and lines. On the left x-axis I placed your ‘group of social selves as the crowd or mass’. On the right I put your ‘the ego-self as individuated’. (I like my language a little better, so put that there too. For the left side: “Undifferentiated Self. For both I attributed the characteristics of ‘Lack of Consciousness/completely unaware’.For the right I added ‘Individuated self / individual’ and attribute the characteristics of ‘Increased consciousness /Perfectly conscious’.
On the y-axis, your ‘right angle’ 3rd paradigm I put… On the top? What is it? You have used the phrase ‘collective Self’ with a capital ’S’. This is easily confused with ‘collective’ of course and I’m not sure that you can make sense of it. I look forward to your description.
I have taken it upon myself to assert the presence of the 3rd paradigm by defining the negative of those items already defined. Sort of. This is making me laugh, a little, because for some reason this reminds me of the mathematics of imaginary numbers. The don’t exist, and yet they help some aspects of math and physics work! Amazingly magical.
And I’ve expanded your terse description because you don’t reference to a ‘bottom’ in this case. My tendency, perhaps contaminated by Jung’s understanding and teaching that the psyche-somatic system is moving towards wholeness/integrity, and that that means towards a dynamic balance. A yin-yang quaternary-like structure or some kind of centring mandala or yantra structure. Your idea results in a triad structure, which is inherently not stable. (For a great discussion on the nature of numbers, see Marie-Louise von Franz’s book *Number and Time: Reflections Leading Towards a Unification of Psychology and Physics* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1948243.)
Anyway, I have defined your 3rd paradigm as ‘Not group/not individual’ as the y-axis to the above. And with it being a *line* with two ends, I’ve assigned two opposite attributes. For the top: “Energy or spirit that has the potential to animate or energise life / Light? /Sustaining Mother-Father Dyad?” On the bottom: “Emptiness or dark matter that has the potential to de-animate or enervate / Darkness? Devouring Mother-Father Dyad?”
It is possible that the ‘Mother-Father Dyad’ possibility to be truly metaphorical as used in the I Ching (heaven-earth or creative-receptive, dyads) to represent the energy of new metaphysical life; or metaphorically of the real requirement of mother-father to generate physical life.
“What the Course would say is that the dream was never created, it doesn't exist, in the same way your dreams have no reality.”
And I disagree with the Course, here! Absolutely false. Jung diagnosed a man with a pooling of the cerebellum fluid at the base of his spine from a dream. I discovered I had been hurting my body with a dream. Endless! Funny synchronicity. Earlier my friend was telling me his dream that corresponded to his life. He is a prolific dreaming and takes guidance of a ‘practical’ level, as well as spiritual and psychological. And, another synchronicity with another friend who is just beginning to explore Jung. (And, very humorously, I sent you the von Franz ‘Way of the Dream’.) And now I’ll be a total ass and send you this really find documentary, The Wisdom of the Dream. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1GEpBR-EkZdwWu2psblcI8iA1PqPdI1s
“If we, as the One mind, are having a nightmare, God is helpless to go into our dream and straighten things out. Nor can He shake us awake. The purpose of the dream needs to be fulfilled. The voice of God or wholly spirit can speak to us and help to shape it, but we need to be ready to listen.”
Nope. That hasn’t been my experience with dreams at all. Nor does it align with my multi-year research of dreams, including Jung and others. Here is a wonderful book! *Living Your Dreams: Using Sleep to Solve Problems and Enrich You Life* by Gayle Delaney. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7479737-living-your-dreams.
Your description (from Course?) is simplistic, very much aligned with how some eastern yogis often dismiss them. Dreams are so difficult that for many it is best to leave them untouched and, sadly to denigrate them. (Do watch the von Franz documentary ‘The Way of the Dream’.) Freud hurt their advancement as the single best tool to integrate our shadows and live our purpose, per Jung, by delimiting dreams with a dead mechanical linear association to sex. Another fascinating book is *Lucid Dreaming: The Power of Being Awake & Aware in Your Dreams* by Stephen LaBerge. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1794147.Lucid_Dreaming_The_Power_of_Being_Awake_Aware_in_Your_Dreams. I studied dreams intensively for many years. That observation from Course – if that is where it came from – completely discredits it, imo.
And now for sleep. Goodnight. Thank you for stimulating my intuition and thinking.
My feeling, Guy, is that you've decided that we disagree. I'm not so sure we do, and whether it's semantics tripping us up. But if you've made up your mind that we do, I'm not going to convince you otherwise. So I'll try again to express this using your lovely diagram (kudos on knowing how to do that! I tried to get diagrams into my book and didn't figure it out.)
I think you're the first person to ever call the Course simplistic ;-) It does start with a simple statement: "Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Therein lies the peace of God." Even though the whole Course is in that statement, it takes 1300 more pages to say it in different ways to get across a way of seeing that's completely contrary to everything we think we know. So you don't need to agree with it, but you do still need to tell me which of the alternatives you choose: God is Evil or Evil is God.
One of the statements in the Course is that darkness is the absence of light. Darkness doesn't exist. It's not real. It's like a hole that's the absence of dirt.
Your continuum of undifferentiated self that's perfectly unaware to individuated self that's perfectly conscious is a value-based line, from bad to good. It's a continuum of superiority, of domination in a moral sense. Both ends of the continuum are based in the belief, even dogma, that you exist separate from me so I can be perfectly conscious while you are unaware.
IF the flesh-encapsulated mind is an illusion, they're both equally deluded. And there is no further point from completely deluded. There's no "worse" or "bad" way to be deluded. Either we're separate minds in separate bodies or we're not.
Positing an arm of the third paradigm going down keeps it in two dimensional space. You can still, as you did, portray it on a flat surface. What I'm imagining goes off in a completely different plane, springs off the page, if you will, and opens up a new space. For whatever it's worth to you, if it's not a completely different way of seeing, you're not seeing it.
There can be no advances in awareness that you make that don't effect me. I'm no more aware than the plumbers digging up the sewer line outside my door. (I told them this morning I'd invented a new Zen technique--meditation with jackhammers. Enlightenment or your ears back!) This body, that body, no body.
If all of what we call reality is our twisted dream, why would you think that dream analysis is unimportant? It's the most important thing in the world! We have to figure out our own psychology and why we've chosen to hide in our dream of separation, otherwise we keep going round and round in it.
That's why, in my latest episode, I say that Anneke has spelunked into the darkest part of the nightmare and has brought it back and has done 30 yrs of deep psychological and spiritual analysis on it. So important!
So I think that's the best I can do in explaining why I don't think we disagree. But I'll defer to your judgment if you still think so ;-)
Synchronicity alert! Life (Universe/Whatever/All-That-Is) has a wonderfully wicked sense of humour.
My landlord had an electrician come to work at the cabaña today. While the power was off he worked on the panel on the outside wall. We wound up have a beautiful and deep conversation about 'truth' 'yoga', anxiety, energy, meditation, etc. Not at the deep philosophical depth of our conversation, one at a deep yogic somatic-awareness level of philosophy into life. At the end he said with a deep appreciation 'Wow! Thank you. I *really* learned something here today.'
A wonderful encounter with a delightful and enagaged/curious electrician.
Now back to open aired sadhana as the clouds darken and the thunder is really rolling. Amazing.
Hello, Tereza. Your fascinating reply prompted another huge writing fest of exploration for me. I have pretty much examined each of your statements in a lot of detail and 'nuance.' And I edited my drawing and to add nuance and added more nuanced drawings inspired by it and by my extended exploration of the ideas.
Just happened to be reading Zohar (so the Genesisian version of "in the beginning was the logos")
"With a beginning, (It) created God (Elohim), the heavens and the earth."
No Creator, just the constant unfolding of the Creating of Now (from God Is A Verb, by Rabbi David A. Cooper
It's reaffirming my belief that - as soon as you *name* the thing, it become man-made, not That which is Greater. For me - the *named* things are more like archetypes, not mysteries much at all.
Great read Guy ... though my attention span is weeny-sized of late. That Martin Luther quote was a hoot, though maybe a disservice to those whores with a heart of gold. 😂
I sometimes attempt at using language and logic to point to the limits of language and logic, but usually end up collapsing into a black hole of contradiction and tautology.
I came upon a funny alternative in the form of a translated quote by Nietzsche ... "For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication."
But after that 2nd mug, I can't even see the damn keyboard.
Cheers Guy!
Hola, Steve!
I really appreciate that you overcame bleary and weary to read even a part of this rather dense essay.
Loved that Nietzsche quotation!
"For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication."
Perfecto. I will find a way to make it into something somewhere.
Gracias.
Sounds like a grand toast for a great evening!
Cheers Guy!
Ah the old linguistic conflict existing between the dogma of analytical intellect and the natural fluidity of intuitive knowing. This is a beautiful topic.
Words of power can only encircle truth. They cannot ever apprehend it. For truth is unattainable to the mind, it is native to the undefined condition of Being. The closest thing we can do as humans to relate truth is through symbolism. That's why the earliest languages were written in symbolic form.
The mind is well suited for breaking things down into small pieces and cataloging them. The mind is like a knife, it cuts. If development of clear sight of truth can be considered as a cloth, can we weave it with a knife?
The mind is very good at controlling the pieces and cataloging them; when it is used to do that with truth, it falls flat footed. This is because the true nature of reality is not dualistic, it is One.
Though it can be experienced in the context of the human existence, it must be observed in perfect stillness, with a silent mind.
The physical world is in a state of Maya, not because of it being illusory, but because it is in a movement of "becoming," this movement towards Being is the purpose of Time.
Everything is One, when we look inward, we find it.
Wonderfully expansive comment, Nefahotep.
I will explore your response more fully as time expands in my day.
Muchas gracias.
The intractable problem of using language to express what is beyond language. Language both frees and confines us - like anything we need to know when to pick it up and when to put it down. Whenever we get close to something more "true" - we end in paradox. Which tells us something.
"At its core the joyful defiance is against the story-structure stories of ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘mine’, epitomised by John’s cosmology. It is this path of truth that Krishnamurti and Gautama Buddha cautioned against, those predefined certainties that things like religious creation stories use to control thinking and feeling and which are the foundations of rigidity in belief that created the killing machinations of history, of which we are alive in one that is the most extensively and cleverly done."
Religions will by necessity also have to go - at least in current form - because yes, they've created rigidity of thought. We're bigger than any thing we can articulate.
Thank you, Guy. Always a pleasure to read. Look forward to more. Best.
Yes, religions will go. They are no longer aligned with the aquarian age energy paradigm of the planet and of human consciousness. They will fall away like leaves from an autumn tree. Lol! The old vanguard will fight that of course, which is what we are seeing. The interesting arm of that resistance are people like Jordan Peterson and Naomi Wolf looking to save us from the 'evil' of non-Christian consciousness by resurrecting the Christian religious energy that was an important part of extending or enhancing 'evil' from millennia. Fascinating times.
Gracias.
"The interesting arm of that resistance are people like Jordan Peterson and Naomi Wolf..." I note the same. Fascinating indeed.
I agree that the body is first in the process.
In conversation with a neuroscientist and psychologist that I knew, I asked about how the field views consciousness. She told me about the hard and soft problem of consciousness.
And then she told me about the most simple interpretation which knocked my socks off.
Paraphrasing here based on my understanding of myself.
-life is about motion (physical)
-intelligence (emotions, logic) helps motion
-consciousness is like an intelligence of the motion of that intelligence (emotions, logic)
So if we don't address motion, the body, we are stuck in levels of intelligence that can be delusional because they evolved to serve the body to help motion.
Hola, Rob (c137).
Wow, that also knocks my socks off! I had no idea that neuroscience had moved that far towards Taoism and Gautama Buddha's ideas.
Now more 'stuff' to research.
Great and expansive comment, Rob. Love it.
Muchas gracias.
🙏🏻❤️🙏🏻
She was always very curious and liked philosophy, so perhaps this is not as common as we think in the field. 😂
But it gave me hope that we're in for a future of learning so much about what being human is.
Yes! I have become increasingly optimistic now that the initial tsunami of delusion has come and gone and left me able to see better what actually is.
Thank you, good night.
In the studio we talk about this quite often. Our access point is the body...it is much easier (simple) to make changes in the body than the mind.
As the body, so does the mind.
It never ceases to amaze me. Watching someone find space in their body...and then seeing how that space creates room in their mind.
Pain is something we have to define very early, usually during the first session.
Pain is a strong sensation with the motor intent to withdraw.
There will be many sensations. And they may be uncomfortable.
But discomfort is not something we necessarily avoid...
We tell the story of our son having a sore throat and gargling salt water.
He asked if it would taste good?
No.
Will it taste bad?
No.
It will taste salty.
And really, most of life falls into this category. Salty.
Funnily enough, developing tolerance for the saltiness, the unknowingness, the discomfort of life creates space for pleasure. In the body and the mind.
Beautiful essay, Guy.
🙏🏼
Space!
Yes, Sarah, this has been actually a relatively slow realisation that my almost 10 years of yoga practice was really about creating space in mind and body. At this time I am very specifically working on long term (3 yr +) chronic discomfort in my right hip in the last few weeks with *space* as the curing objective. I am focused on giving space in my body and mind for the pain and where it is located. OMG, it is working steadily and the discomfort is much diminished. A few more months at most, and maybe even a few more weeks. A really remarkable change for me.
I am glad you enjoyed the essay. Part 2 is another odd one. Just posted.
I am glad to hear that your hip pain is subsiding! Are you a side sleeper? If so, do you sleep with a pillow between your knees (long enough to support your knee and ankle)? Especially considering your substantial weight loss, your hip pain could be coming from an unhappy piriformis, exacerbated by a sleeping position that is not as ideal as it could be.
Another thought....if you favor one side, for something like pigeon, the imbalance could be causing some discomfort.
Or when you sit cross legged for padmasana, are you always crossing your legs the same way?
Do you cross your legs when you are seated at the table?
These are things you've probably already considered, I just thought I would mention some of the ones I see most often in the studio.
Speaking of space, I can't wait to read your next essay! I just know I have to wait until I have space....for thinking 🙏🏼♥️
Hola, Sarah! I really appreciate that you took the time to think of me and my discomfort. It began in June (?) 2020 shortly after an intensive meditative practice and big job change. I recognised immediately that it was somehow related to stuck energy from my past, most likely not physical. I have been surprised that I have not yet cleared it out.
I recently learned from an energy healer that part of the physical symptoms are likely the result of some kind of compensation, long term. It wasn't until I was writing about being hit by the car that taty may have been a beginning compensatory movement. Now compounded by years of other abuses, and an unbalanced mind.
I don't sleep on my side, or at least not significantly. I would love to know a bit more about the relationship between an unhappy piriformis and weight loss. Funny, when I went to the emergency for extreme pain in my abdomen in 2014, it turned out to be an umbilical hernia, likely congenital. (I now think my obesity exacerbated it or even created it because I didn't have symptoms until after losing the weight.) The intern blamed the hernia on my having lost all that weight.
Yes, pigeon and the like are uncomfortable on one side. Part of the energy healer's prescription was a particular set of poses and stances to balance out the imbalances. This has been very helpful and has become a central part of my daily practice. The process is very vivifying even though a few of the postures are nothing short of engendering swearing. All good though.
In padmasana I have been very conscientious of changing the crossing because when I began I couldn't do it at all and wanted to balance. Lord of the half fish pose is challenging me to be aware of balance and moving from compensatory easings and avoidances or too much emphasis in the 'easy' direction.
The healer wants me to do deer pose held for a few minutes and that one is – WAS! – off the charts f*g F*G painful. Now much much better.
I sometimes cross my legs when sitting at a table. Although since 2017 I rarely sit at tables except when in restaurants or when visiting people. I'm floor-sitting now, and am writing this from the floor with a couple of folded blankets to elevate my hips and put my elbows higher than the keyboard. (Old ergonomics class lesson.)
I think some of the awareness work I've done and written about on the substack with my father has been a great help. I am sure, now, that I was carrying in my body some of his war and family trauma.
Again, thank you for sharing your knowledge with me. I am curious about the piriformis. I really have done close to nothing formal on physiology or kinesiology.
And thank you for your support of my writing. I wonder, sometimes, at what I'm writing and if anyone would find it valuable. That someone with your quality of integrity reads it completes, in a metaphysical way, the process that my writing initiates. Blessing and muchas gracias.
All the best.
🙏❤️🧘🏿♀️🙌🧘🏿♀️❤️🙏
I apologize that it takes me so long to respond some--most times.
Here's a dorky video about the piriformis...its origin, insertion, and function.
https://youtu.be/8kH9Dp02dBY
The piriformis attaches to the sacrum and inserts at the greater trochanter of the femur. It is one of the deep 6 rotators . It is a pelvic stabilizer and an external rotator of the hip. Because it originates at the sacrum, if one side is tighter than the other, it can pull your sacrum off and cause pain - often in the low back and hip area.
Additionally the sciatic nerve runs right through there....so inflammation of the piriformis can potentially cause sciatic nerve pain as well.
Have you done any release work in your hip area...like with a lacrosse ball or something similar?
Other potential issues could be from the labrum or the bursa.
Any time I have a client dealing with pain in the pelvis, I think it's helpful to look at the emotional component, as it sounds like you are doing already.
Etymology...Pelvis, as you probably know, comes from Latin pelvis (“basin”), from Old Latin peluis (“basin”), from Proto-Indo-European *pel- (“container”).
The basin/container/bowl...that holds our organs AND our emotions. Looking at the function of the piriformis specifically...it's like the "seatbelt" - literally a strap-in for our root to maintain its center. If one side is off, so is our root...our base...our chi...kundalini...all of it. It supports our ability to ground ourselves and aids in our ability to feel supported, rooted, and safe. I would think that your intuition about your work around your father is likely spot on.
I'm sure that you are already practicing plenty of breath work...I would encourage lots of this. Breathing into where you notice the discomfort and leaning into that - contracting your pelvic floor and hips, then move up to the heart center, throat, and third eye as you inhale (create friction), exhale through the crown and release the contractions as you exhale. Inhale from the crown, pulling new fresh energy down your central channel, contract third eye, throat, heart, root; and then exhale down, releasing the contractions and returning that energy to be grounded. You could also do a variation, working only on the root and sacral chakras...the intention of INTEGRATING the energy that has lodged itself in your hip. Your hip pain certainly (and imho probably) could be trauma from long ago that your subconscious is still struggling with on some level (nod to Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score) - it doesn't matter though. If you deal with it at an energetic level, it will allow your subconscious to release this trauma and reintegrate into you. And it will allow/help you to release the stories, and the need for them, surrounding the issue. These stories create a feedback loop that can perpetuate and/or exacerbate the issue.
The breath work practice can be done seated, in bed, or in pose that feels appropriate. I lean heavily on The Energy Codes by Dr. Sue Morter for this work....and I think it's worth the read if you have space for it.
I have to get ready for my 2:00 client....all of this may not make sense - I'll happily clarify anything that doesn't lol.
Love to you, dear friend.
♥️
Great reply and all makes sense.
This brings a slightly different eye to what I already mostly know, with some additional anatomy and a variation on my current breath practices. Wonderful! Thank you for the time you took with this.
Now I return to my sadhana and to incorporate the breath methodology you have suggested.
Excellent!
🙏🧘🏿♀️🙌🧘🏿♀️❤️🙏
oh one last thing what is in your second mug steve i could use some of that myself
Good question. For some reason I imagined coffee! And yet... what might it be? LoL!
great artical and very smart readers i am impreesed with everybody
Thank you for your comment! I agree, my readers are truly awesome. I have learned some much from them!
All the best.
great artical really deep and a hevey dose of sanity -------- thank you i needed it bad
Hola, Bradley.
So glad you found some needed sanity here. Thank you for reading!
All the best.
First, the playlist. I forgot to mention on the last one how much I'd been missing Peter Gabriel but this reminded me of another long-lost love, David Byrne. I hadn't realized he was so literary, as in literal, and not just evocative. In my stacked-up list of Subs to do is a response to James Corbett's interview of Neil Oliver. Something Neil talks about were architectures of memory, imaginary houses in which things were placed as mnemonic devices to keep track of them. But then, the proximity of one room to another would cause them to interact and create new ideas. Fascinating, eh?
Oh and on the playlist, was Agnes Obel's The Curse part of it? https://youtu.be/j1wgaFJ0750
I didn't know if it started generating new suggestions but I thought you'd like it.
I've copied your Theodore Dalrymple quote for my Anneke episode, which I plan to record before I turn on my internet. I think that's the only way.
I think you read my book chapter where I quote Susan George: "The ‘eco’ in economy and ecology refers to the same Greek root, oikos, the household, estate or domain. The eco-nomos is the rule, or the set of rules, for managing the domain. The eco-logos is the underlying principle, the spirit, the reason for it all—in the sense that Saint John affirms at the outset of his Gospel, “In the beginning was the Logos,” usually translated as the “Word.” https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/what-if-money-was-no-object.
So--play with me here--what if our collective identity in reality is the logos, the giver of shape, form, modulation. God is the breath, the spirit. Nothing can be formed from the throat alone, the tongue, the lips. It all starts with the breath. God gives essence but we give shape to the essense. Nothing can be made but what is made with God.
In this world of dream/ delusion, we're just mouthing the words. But there is no Word because there's no breath/ spirit to animate it. No wind blows through our reed. Somewhere in our memory is the song of breath that we gave voice. But we are dismembered until we remember ourSelf.
Hola, Tereza. I managed to get busy and put aside a reply for a while.
First, The Curse is *fantastic*. I discovered it several weeks ago. Thank you for bringing it back into my awareness.
I will certainly play along with this! My new friend Ian may enjoy your approach and I will share your 'play', which is the meme to catch the animate in the thing, perhaps. If that is okay with you.
lógos as collective identity. Devil's (Lucifer's? 😉) advocate here. 'Collective' meaning undifferentiated, ie, lacking the individuated or, perhaps, even the 'individual personality'. Is the collective able to differentiate? (Jung strongly argues that that is not possible. And it was Emile Durkheim, if memory serves, who argued that the only way for a large industrial society to function was to remove the individual into bureaucratic 'collectives'.)
I would argue that the collective as *the giver* of 'shape', ie a differentiated' state, is putting the cart ... not in front of the horse, exactly. Not in the right place, anyway.
As I have expanded my ability to see, I understand from experience, now, the basic correctness of Jung's contention that the individuated person is the rare one that manages to extract him or herself *from* the 'collective'. Covid mass-formation (psychosis?) is a wonderfully clear proof of concept: the collective showed itself as the monster it can truly be, and for a while expanded itself with the propaganda of fear campaigns.
Did that monster fail to ‘breath’? LOL! Complicated, as I might argue that it was breathing the breath of death! And did so with the lips and throats that were, according to John anyway, God-given and by their collective size, powerful.
I would suggest that the 'lógos' is more likely a tool, or perhaps a pattern of ingested and partially(?) digested behaviour (a samskara) in the manner Byrne elucidated, that solidifies or perhaps even grows the collective because it can be a kind of individuation suicide/killer.
God, or the animating spirit, is the breath or perhaps the whisper for some of us, that asks or directs us to remove ourselves from the collective. Concomitantly, God is animating the collective.
I suspect, (maybe hope!) that God isn't actively asking people to remain gormless forms in a gollum-like 'collective' that, with the right conditions, become destructive zombies.
And yet.. if nothing is that wasn't created by the lógos/God, then even the collective is lógos/God, and ... well, does it matter, really, if there are individuated people distinct from the collective? And this also implies that the animating energy of God's breath is present in both collective and individual, the respiration that moves all of us.
“In this world of dream/ delusion, we're just mouthing the words. But there is no Word because there's no breath/ spirit to animate it. No wind blows through our reed. Somewhere in our memory is the song of breath that we gave voice. But we are dismembered until we remember ourSelf.”
By ’mouthing the words’ is that a metaphor for the members of the collective being *unaware* of their animating breath or *lacking* it, as you are suggesting? And that the goal is to re-member that anima/animus as some kind of divine awareness? That still suggests that the individuals of the collective are not without breath (Vāyu).
It is a strong and questionable position, that “there's no breath/ spirit to animate it”. I suspect that the opposite is true, that lógos/God IS the animation that powers the ‘dream/delusion’. At a basic level, how else would the dream/delusion exist?
And that takes us back to a more Taoist and Buddhist conception of ‘Life.’ It is. That’s all there is. And therefore self-so meaning that all is breath, or breath of ‘God’, ‘Tao’, etc. And with that we swing to Gautama’s and Patañjali’s observation that right-seeing is critical for the re-membering of the animating spirit within to that which is All. There is no path!
Oddly enough, something that came to mind was (linguistic) Chomsky’s revolutionary ideas about language and that *language* is a *characteristic* of being a human-socialised human. (Feral children do not properly learn language.) This is another echo of the Buddhist concept of interdependence, perhaps suggesting even the physic’s idea of ‘entanglement’, that the animating and voicing of that animation arise together and are not separated. What provides the nuanced distinction, maybe, is the quality of integrity, the resonance of the energy of the individual within the collective being enough to remove that person from an undifferentiated state to a nuanced and eccentric one. Jung and Gautama both puzzled over this, why it was that the many remained undifferentiated. Not without ‘spirit’ or ‘breath’; simply unrealised, and to be interacted with compassionately, for they are ignorant and know not what they do.
Some crude thoughts, late at night.
Song of the night!
Ghostpoet - X Marks The Spot feat. Nadine Shah
https://youtu.be/0OmtRTqeW2s
Haunting video!
Yes. It really caught me last night. I wound up listening to it three or four times in a row. (Haunting in a positive way, I've inferred!)
And a resonance with Kerala Dust, I think, in tone, repetition, voice and theme.
Thank you for that thoughtful reply, Guy. I'm thinking that I should have started by defining my terms. What I mean by the collective Self is at a right-angle turn from both the ego-self as individuated and the group of social selves as the crowd or mass. It's again the third paradigm. Someone else has been talking about communities as fractals, in which each smaller unit (family) contains the whole of the bigger communities moving outward. Maybe what I'm talking about is the fractal Self.
What the Course would say is that the dream was never created, it doesn't exist, in the same way your dreams have no reality. There is no sound of One mind dreaming. So no, I don't mean the lack of breath or spirit as metaphor. Do the figures inside your dream breathe? Can I go into your dream and change it?
If we, as the One mind, are having a nightmare, God is helpless to go into our dream and straighten things out. Nor can He shake us awake. The purpose of the dream needs to be fulfilled. The voice of God or wholly spirit can speak to us and help to shape it, but we need to be ready to listen.
And we don't need to agree on that, but I wanted to clarify the experiment I'm running. Now to listen to the song of the night!
Pt 1.
Continued from introduction below:
https://gduperreault.substack.com/p/just-this-is-it-what-is-this-pt-1/comment/22250195
Hola, Tereza. Your opening and closing have brought a nice smile to my face, and perhaps even a bit of laughter. Total ambivalenbe! And thus another dyad and so this became for me, the dance of the dueting dyads. (Song of the moment: Delibe’s ‘Flower Duet to Lakmi (Lakshmi?); https://youtu.be/H_PZ6IBCof4.) I love your argument as ‘the’ interesting part, perhaps even the pith, is the problem/non-problem of so-called ‘duality. So I will be a dualling/dueting ‘dualist’ and disagree with your feeling and agree with how you concluded your verbalised argument. (By the end, it was perhaps more like Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s long piece. Here is a short extract: ‘Knee Play 5’ https://youtu.be/afW7RGY-CQw. For full 3:40:00 production:
https://www.youtube.com/live/TiCH2WJ_lvY?feature=share
If I haven’t been clear, I have neither agreed nor disagreed with you. I was asking for clarification and then, perhaps arrogantly, describing what I inferred you *may* have been stating as an inquisitive exploration.
And now I’ll do the tertium quid tarantella aka the Third Paradigm tango and suggest that our being able to look at a pair of lines at 90° is to view 2-D polarised/polarising space from the 3rd set of eyes from a satellite view above or at least outside the plane. In some ways, this is analogous to the request in meditation-practice to become aware of the movement of thought from gestation (or even pre gestation) to manifestation and then dissipation back into the emptiness of mind/pre-mind. Michael Stone has heard it suggested that thoughts are to the mind what farts are to digestion: a by-product of being a physical being in the situation of digesting food for the body, and experience for … what? Mind? Before mind? After mind? Difficult. Surely not the ego, though, as the ego seems congenitally ill equipped to digest much, if anything, and relies tenuously for its insubstantial existence on the samskara grooves of the stories of ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘mine’.
At this point in this space-time continuum with its fractal-structure, perhaps in the emptiness that is a characteristic of matter, I would like to confirm that my drawing did in some way approximate the third paradigm idea you are expressing. Did it? I’ve inferred from your praise that it did. I have revised it in light of our continued open ended curiosity chase and chaser. Link to the revision is a bit into the discussion.
You have expressed concern about my being stuck in two space:
“Positing an arm of the third paradigm going down keeps it in two dimensional space. You can still, as you did, portray it on a flat surface. What I'm imagining goes off in a completely different plane, springs off the page, if you will, and opens up a new space. For whatever it's worth to you, if it's not a completely different way of seeing, you're not seeing it.”
I think I understand what you are saying here. I have some imagination to consider it in perhaps the 11-planes of existence some mathematical models suggest as the real world because the math gets easiest in 11 dimension. That is great for the theoretical mathematicians and perhaps equivalent physicists. And… it sounds a bit new agey to me. In other words, please describe how it can practically help you and me and all those interdependent with us to live better, meaning with less suffering and more joy with purpose, today. (Again, I am reminded of how I was enamoured of the New Age ideas that were, on hindsight, completely ungrounded.)
As to ‘the Course’ being simplistic. I have made a totally awesome sweeping generalisation sprung from your single reference to its dismissal of dreams, and perhaps from the *feeling* I had reading it so many years ago. And I think that this may be the entry way into your feeling of our disagreement and your argument towards our being in agreement. And perhaps it is also a doorway into why I was unable to complete the 1300 pages – or even more than 200: my perception of a ‘new age’ style of disconnection and way of disconnecting from the physical world.
"Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Therein lies the peace of God."
Hmmm. It has a New Age ’truthiness’ to it that does not address the ‘reality’ of an elephant or car kicking my ass, here and now, in the ‘real’ space-time continuum of somatic experience. Is it saying that my physical reality cannot be hurt? Nope, it is by omission or inference dismissive of the ‘reality’ of *reality*. This ideolism (yup, neologism) will contribute to the creation of disciples who get their ass kicked by physical reality if they do not heed things like ‘real world’ mahouts shouting, dreams arising from the body, or mindfulness of the body practices. From my having dipped my toes into the New Age ‘truthiness’ for a while, I know very well that it really does encourage a disconnect between this *idea* of truth and this reality of bodily truth I have been actively exploring for the last few years.
As you have likely inferred, what actually came to mind when I read your response, was that of the story of the disciple bowing towards the elephant. The elephant had no ‘awareness’ that as an element of the Cosmic Nous that the elephant as elephant was ‘supposed’ to have understood that the elephant and the disciple are one and therefore harmless to the bamboozled disciple. In my mind, that disciple could very well have read something like *the Aquarian Conspiracy* or that line from the Course. Yes, of course I read *AC*, and at the time-before-The-Course found it stimulating. Ultimately *AC’s* stimulation was unsatisfactory and so my quest continued with Jung (and some others) to find the source of the dissatisfaction: promotion of disembodiment. I wouldn’t have been able to articulate *that* in that way at the time of course. And whereas I was able to read 10 or 20 thousand pages of Jung, I wasn’t able to read 250 pages of the Course.
Side note: it is interesting that Jung gets dismissed, often, for being obscure or too spiritual or too intuitive, ie disembodied. He argued against that with, paraphrased, ‘I am not any those things. I am an empirical *scientist*. What I am sharing is what has actually worked to improve the lives of my clients. And the proof of my method is in how people’s lives have been tangibly, measurably improved in physical, psychological and spiritual well-being and their personal discovery that life is meaningful and purposeful for them.’ (LoL! I just realised that likely Jung’s dismissal in order to promote Freud’s sexualised disembodiment was part of the disempowerment dialectic the ‘the’ have been promoting for decades or millennia.)
An example from Jung:
“In elfin nature wisdom and folly appear as one and the same; and they are one and the same as long as they are acted out by the anima. Life is crazy and meaningful at once. And when we do not laugh over the one aspect and speculate about the other, life is exceedingly drab, and everything is reduced to the littlest scale. There is then little sense and little nonsense either. When you come to think about it, nothing has any meaning, for when there was nobody to think, there was nobody to interpret what happened. Interpretations are only for those who don't understand; it is only the things we don't understand that have any meaning. Man woke up in a world he did not understand, and that is why he tries to interpret it. (p. 316,
Jung, C.G. *Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious* from *The Basic Writings of C.G. Jung* ed. by Violet S. DeLaszlo). https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22454497-basic-writings-of-c-g-jung-modern-library-no-300
In the 1980s I dismissed Buddhism because of what I had been reading of it at the time: disembodied and disconnected from physical life. It has only been with my recent discoveries of what Gautama Buddha *may* have actually said that has re-ignited my interest in (so-called) pre-Buddhism ‘Buddhism’. And to my surprise he has many ways of thinking that correspond to what I have been moving towards! And that has been in large part a reflection of my reading of the Seth Books transcribed by Jane Roberts, a broad swath of Jung and other Jungian books, and in recent years a body-practice largely without words. These guides, supported by my physical experience and the manner in which I have been looking at and digesting those experiences, have ultimately brought me to my bodily experience of trusting my self as a physical embodiment of spirt-something. I am actually living bodily trust. I am trusting myself, and not some hypothetical spiritual or psychological or metaphysical self. I am trusting my bodily self with the choice of which path I take in the truth that ‘Truth is a pathless land’.
Hmmmm. That seems like a long circumambulation towards where I was thinking I was moving towards, which is the so-called ‘problem’ of duality that your response brought forward in my mind. Accompanied by, OMG, such a wonderful synchronicity with something Michael Stone said today:
~31:23 Reality is boundless, I vow to perceive it. [That is line 3 of his version of the Bodhisattva vows.] The word for ‘perceiving’ is ‘gaku(?)’ which usually gets translated as ‘I vow to *master* it. The word ‘gaku(?)’ means ‘to study.’ So ‘Reality is boundless and my practice of non-duality is the practice of not-knowing’, which is the practice of studying experience more closely. *Going all the way [in the physical experience of life].* And you don’t have to look very far. (Podcast: Intimacy, Transmission & Awakening The 10 Oxherding Pictures (Pt 5 of 6) August 28, 2015 https://podcasts.apple.com/mx/podcast/awake-in-the-world-podcast/id923427517?i=1000378241657, my emphasis.)
Pt 2 continued here:
https://gduperreault.substack.com/p/just-this-is-it-what-is-this-pt-1/comment/22250760
Pt 2
(continued from pt 1, here:
https://gduperreault.substack.com/p/just-this-is-it-what-is-this-pt-1/comment/22250856
“Your continuum of undifferentiated self that's perfectly unaware to individuated self that's perfectly conscious is a value-based line, from bad to good.” Nope. I did not value it. I am describing what I see happening in the physical existence as an observing human: Nature appears to express itself with great comfort at all levels of consciousness, from less (minuscule although I don’t think there is total absence) to more consciousness. The amoeba is less conscious (it seems) than the amphibian, which is less conscious than the cat, etc. Within the human animal we certainly see evidence of that gradation of consciousness.(OMG has covid made *that* clear!)
So, for me, you are *maybe* projecting your own sense of valuation. For me it is more like looking at negative numbers and positive numbers: inherently they have the same valuation, and yet they are describing the nuance between them selves. Without differentiation numbers have no value, even though we are unable to judge one better or worse than the other. (Tarot, I Ching and all other divination methods practically and pragmatically rely on that differentiation without necessarily ascribing good/bad duality judgment to individual numbers.)
Perhaps the perceived valuation comes from the Course’s idealisation (or ‘ideologicalisation’) that underpins the phrase/idea that ‘God is Evil or Evil is God.’ It is pragmatically and experientially a false choice. In our current covid-debacle language it is a kind of *false flag* to distract us from the physical reality of nuance. ‘God is Evil or Evil is God’ is an attempt to deny nuance. Empirically in our existence we can do those things which increase suffering and we can do those things which decrease suffering. That pragmatic reality renders the God/Evil dyad basically false: the tertium quid (third paradigm) is to practice integrity (yoga) and kindness which we know *by experience* reduces suffering. It does not eliminate it because physical existence is, in a sense, built on a time-lapse of suffering in various ways. See diagrams ‘Cosmology Quadrant’ https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WPe7LjQ3NURLsOTJUmycC-MhqvxiytA8/view?usp=share_link and ‘Duality Quadrant’ https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yo8rEls0miSeXeWXHTnj_GyAtpcEcza_/view?usp=share_link.
“It's a continuum of superiority, of domination in a moral sense. Both ends of the continuum are based in the belief, even dogma, that you exist separate from me so I can be perfectly conscious while you are unaware.” Again, this appears to deny experiential reality! I am able to talk to you as we are talking because you are more aware than my ex, with whom I could not begin to talk to in this manner. Does that mean I’m superior? That you are superior? Not in my understanding. In an odd way this reminds me of the odd woke-like argument that all people are equal, so I can deny that I don’t see someone as black or Asian as a ‘good’ thing and virtue signal my ‘superiority’. My [deluded] equality of vision then effectively denies the nuance of their experience. I saw that in action with my ex who denied seeing race, and my parents, who saw race as a mark of having suffered in a way that makes all black people superior. Another way of putting this nuance is ‘Cast not your pearls before swine lest they turn and rend you.’ Well, ‘swine’ appears to be derogatory, of course. And yet it is describing a fundamental truth of human interaction: not everyone is ready to understand what the idea of awakened means. Ayurveda talks about this as being given indigestible ideas. Jung talks about this. In *A Guide for the Perplexed* EF Schumacher calls it ‘adequatio’.
“There can be no advances in awareness that you make that don't effect me. I'm no more aware than the plumbers digging up the sewer line outside my door.” Yes, of course. That has been one of the greatest changes in my understanding of physical existence. In an odd synchronicity I saw a FB post today from Sri Sri Ravi Shankar where he discussed how modern neuroscience is now measuring how our state of mind will affect another’s in real time. Amazing stuff. This is a confirmation of what the meditators have been affirming for centuries/millennia. For example, the experiment in the 70s that brought 60, I think, meditators from the east to Washington DC to reduce the rate of crime in the USA’s most criminal city at the time. And to the shock of the police, there was a large drop in crime. Also the well documented examples of remote healing, healing by prayer, etc. Gautama Buddha describe this well as interdependence, or co-dependency arising.
Again, being a bit of a harpy, you seem to be casting aside the challenge of nuance. It is very unlikely you would be able to talk to share this conversation with all of the plumbers at the same time. Although there is a better statistical chance that you could with just one of them. I have nothing against that *possibility* of a metaphysically sophisticate plumber. I do bump into these kinds of people, most recently with a tour guide salesman and a UK tourist. And yet, statistically, there are very few humans that will be able to engage in this conversation. For example, the UK tourist I met by some odd synchronicity two weeks ago and with whom I shared this kind of metaphysical discussion for four hours over two days said to me ‘You are the only person I have met with whom I could have this kind of conversation.’ The elephant threw the disciple. The thief will rob from the monk. The army will kill everyone in the monastery when directed to do that. No amount of auming or bowing will change nature of the hard core delusional. Another odd synchronicity: I just read how a very nasty king befriended Gautama, and continued to kill the people he didn’t like, even once, his best friend.
Pt 3 conclusion here:
https://gduperreault.substack.com/p/just-this-is-it-what-is-this-pt-1/comment/22250734
Pt 3
continued from pt 2 here:
https://gduperreault.substack.com/p/just-this-is-it-what-is-this-pt-1/comment/22250760
“If all of what we call reality is our twisted dream, why would you think that dream analysis is unimportant? It's the most important thing in the world! We have to figure out our own psychology and why we've chosen to hide in our dream of separation, otherwise we keep going round and round in it.” This had me scratching my head for two reasons. Please reread what I wrote about the importance of dreams. And I wrote that because in your first comment you cited the Course as dismissing dreams! You wrote: “What the Course would say is that the dream was never created, it doesn't exist, in the same way your dreams have no reality. There is no sound of One mind dreaming. So no, I don't mean the lack of breath or spirit as metaphor. Do the figures inside your dream breathe? Can I go into your dream and change it?”
Perhaps I’ve misunderstood what you meant to say with this. It certainly sounds like a dismissal of the value of dreams and that even ‘God’ has no ability to affect the dream world. That is not what I said at all. I stated unequivocally the value of dreams as one of the greatest links we have to our physical existence and connecting our somatic experience with the … whatever it is that has created something out of nothing and in doing so provided us with nuance, meaning and humour. In fact it was a dream analysis by that was a diagnosis of a physical ailment, coupled with my dream of the importance of changing my diet to revive myself that created a quantum leap in awareness of the importance and power of dreams.
And, now that I look at this again, your earlier statement that your awareness will affect mine awareness would (and does) apply to dreams. With experience and attention we see that our dreams change with our awareness. Furthermore we can in fact share dreams. There have been documented experiences of that and Seth directed an experiment doing just that which is described in *Conversations with Seth: The Story of Jane Robert’s ESP Class* by Sue Watkins in 2 volumes. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1746797.Conversations_With_Seth. In the earlier mentioned book *Lucid Dreaming* LaBerge describes an adept lucid dreamer who had a ‘dream’ persona hit him over the head within the dream as a kind of wake up to call to the dreamer to expand his awake-self’s awareness.
“IF the flesh-encapsulated mind is an illusion, they're both equally deluded. And there is no further point from completely deluded. There's no "worse" or "bad" way to be deluded. Either we're separate minds in separate bodies or we're not.”
I’m not exactly sure what you mean here. It sounds like the language problem of ‘half pregnant’. Perhaps you are latching on to the first drawing as a fixed thing. In the updated one I added the statement that the lines are in a constant state of motion between the extremes. And while it is theoretically possible that completely deluded is an irreversible state, it is more likely that the phrase ‘completely deluded’ is not actually possible because at the core of physical existence is a base level awareness of all matter. This is interestingly described in physics in various ways, such as the forces of gravity, electro-static forces, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the wave/particle nature of energy/mass, entanglement and other ways. This brings to my mind the question of the existence, nature and function of black holes as the complete absence of light, the vacuum of energy. (I heard a guru once argue that expanded consciousness happens, eventually across lifetimes if necessary, because that is all there is to existence. I’m not saying he is correct or not, because I don’t know.)
Your statement here also suggests an absence of nuance. In having come to be a little more awake in the time of covid, there is no question of a zombie level of delusion that seems imperturbable. It suggest to me that your statement is more an idealisation of black and white than our actual experience of it. And is that level of delusion any different from what happened in recent history in Germany, Russian and China? When the elephant is rampaging, get out of the way.
Oddly enough this now reminds me of something Marie-Louise von Franz wrote in *On Divinationn and Synchronicity*: if everything is connected, then how can there be anything separate? Her comment is, from memory my paraphrase, something like ‘That is the challenge of nuance. Yes, it is technically possible that everything can mean everything, and yet our experience of life enables us to differentiate quality.’ Woke is the antithesis of that: they are deluded and are unable to see nuance at even the coarsest levels of gender! And this differentiation ‘challenge’ is wonderfully and beautifully described in *Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Mainteance* and then the sequel *Lilah*.
I’ve been too busy writing this and living to have listened to your episode on Anneke yet. (Although, synchronicity or not, I was introduced to a “Anneke” today. I don’t actually remember being introduced to an Anneke before.)
“So I think that's the best I can do in explaining why I don't think we disagree. But I'll defer to your judgment if you still think so ;-)”
Conclusion. We aren’t in disagreement. I embrace this conversation as a ‘third paradigm’ or, in Jung’s language the tertium quid that sparks transformation into expanded awareness. We are in exploration and curiosity of the challenge of nuance and differentiation between experience and the ideas or ideology of experience. This has been a great exploration for me, so far. And now, it has put me in a challenge for my next essay! Ah well.
When we come to a conclusion of this dialogue I may want to post this into my substack.
Looking forward to your reply.
Song of the essay:
Nadine Shah - Kitchen Sink
https://youtu.be/9b0Lsu-T6YM
Back to the introduction:
https://gduperreault.substack.com/p/just-this-is-it-what-is-this-pt-1/comment/22250195
With love, Guy, you've said that we don't disagree but have put in multiple quotes only to tell me why I'm wrong and you (and the authorities you trust) are right. You tried the experiment I'm conducting, with the Course, and found that it didn't speak to you. You moved on to those like Jung and Guatama who did speak to you.
Having 'been there, done that, rejected that,' my perspective from the Course is a step backwards for you. No problem! But you couch my intellectual disagreement as "projecting my sense of valuation" and "casting aside the challenge of nuance."
Each of us has our own experiment we're conducting in reality. Maybe yours and mine head to the same destination, maybe yours is faster, maybe not. But I can't give over the authority of my own experience, of which I'm the only author, to anyone else. According to your authority, the elephant may trample me and terrible things may happen. At that time, you have full permission to say you told me so. But until then, I will conduct my experiment in reality.
I'm not asking you to join me but to respect what I'm saying as an honest disagreement, not something where I would agree with you if you could just explain clearly enough.
Hola, Tereza.
I was busy with my last essay and life hence the delay. Although it has given some space to consider our 'disagreement'. To be honest, I'm not exactly clear what it is we are disagreement with. I say that because I had the idea we were exploring ideas, a game or play I love to do. Your ideas stimulated my thinking and curiosity and intuition in a fantastic way. I even got to draw word maps that took a lot of thought, with the hope that maybe some clarity of vision and/or understanding might emerge.
However I see how my approach could be taken as 'me right you wrong'. I'm not sure that language itself can drop that kind of dichotomous split in a conversation of this nature. Certainly I wasn't looking to wrong you! I took your ideas and wrestled with them like I've not wrestled ideas in a long time. Well, except with that strange man from the UK I met a couple of weeks ago.
And with ideas of this strength and nature I will play very hard, for some reason. I always have and, I confess, upset the other person. From those experiences I learned to moderate the energy with which I engage ideas. (From yoga, brahmacarya, the proper use of our energy.) Most of the time, in the last 20 years or so, I don't fully engage.
With your invitation to play, I took the ball and played to the very best of my ability. And so fell into my old ways with glee and joy. And I was honestly looking forward to your ideas wrestling with mine and for us to simply see where they went, without need for conclusions or so-called 'winners' and 'losers' in an idea-debate which will likely prove itself and us as being completely inadequate to encompass this strange thing called life. (That issue was reasonably well described in the Bhagavad Gita, when Krishna showed the expanse of His reality to Arjuna.) Ah, the humour of Life or the Universe, or whatever this thing is! Love it.
And so, with great love and respect, I understand that you feel we are in disagreement, and why you feel that. At the same time, I still don't feel that we either agree or disagree. We are (were?) giving free range to ideas that are beyond words! 'The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao', and all that.
If ever you want to return to play and to with curiosity explore with great energy and vigour this thing called consciousness and how it can be and not be at the same time, my door is always open.
I started a comment for your Anneke post. It began to get long and before I posted it I foolishly clicked the wrong thing and lost it. I'll reconstruct it in the next day or two.
You have begun another interesting discussion. Some great comments are there, with good resources. Really amazing the quality of conversations in this corner of the substack world within which we have found ourselves. Truly a blessing and one that I feel honoured to be a part of.
Good night. Namaste.
🙏❤️🧘🏿♀️❤️🙏
I was traveling yesterday so also got time to reflect before answering. I accept fully that you don't mean to offend, Guy, which is why I want to detail how you are giving offense without realizing it and using my ideas as a foil to expand on yours rather than a conversation. You said that this has been a pattern and you've 'upset' other people, who I assume you respected and felt to be friends, as we are. Your lesson from that was that you were too 'strong' and needed to be weaker in your intellectual engagement. Do I need to point out how macho that interpretation is?
My youngest daughter used to spar in martial arts with a guy 3X her age but the same belt rank. Because they were practicing, the moves were set so he knew what she'd do next, and would strike where she was off-guard. He saw this as him being her 'teacher' but it was really just changing the rules of engagement to his advantage. That's what I see happening here.
When you say we don't disagree, you're not giving me credit for having a perfectly valid counterpoint to yours. We don't disagree in your estimation because I just haven't recognized yet that you're right. I don't want to 'play' because you play very hard and engage ideas with energy. No, Guy. You haven't engaged my ideas at all! You diagrammed them out and changed what they represent using your words. When I said this wasn't what I meant, you said you still liked your definition better!
You take the 1300+ pp that I've found worthwhile to study every day for nearly 20 yrs and said it has 'a New Age truthiness' to it. Can you not see how insulting that is? Am I so vapid and grasping for easy answers that I'd devote that kind of discipline to some la-de-da faux feel-good enlightenment?
You may have given up after 200 pp and it may well be true that it wasn't the right Course for you. But your assumption is the fault was with the text rather than a disconnect with the learner.
You psychoanalyze me as 'projecting my sense of valuation' between poles that you define as 'completely unaware' and 'perfectly aware.' Sure that's not a value statement, none of us would take offense to be told we're completely unaware. As none of us should take offense that we're 'casting aside the challenge of nuance.' In other words, if I don't agree with you, it's because I'm unnuanced and not up to the challenge.
My m.o. (I can't no longer say 'rule of thumb' and I appreciate that enlightenment from you) is that I can't learn from anyone who feels I have nothing to teach them. That's where I feel we are. You're looking to teach me from your perspective of those who you DO accept as teachers. But my role here is student and foil for your ideas.
Here's what I'd like to ask you. Share this with your partner (whose name I know but can't find in my memory or a quick scan of posts). If she says that I'm being unfair and taking offense where none was given, I owe you an apology. But I'd like the perspective of a woman who knows you and loves you for whether 'falling into your old ways with glee and joy' is a step forward or back.
Hola, Tereza, great reply and clarification.
And an odd but delightful synchronicity with my reading this morning of Stephen Batchelor's examination of what Gautama Buddha *may have actually said*, as per the Pali Canon, versus what *Buddhism* says he said. Goes to the story issue in my essay and a kind of story structure issue in your reply.
I will respond more fully later. I'm doing Sadhana now. Hint: the dream-nature of your idea is a poor foundation in that it has the smell of unreality in a 'New Age' kind of way. More on that and how that connects to my reading of someone's deep dive into Gautama. Fascinating stuff.
Also, may I share your argument with my friend? Or.... maybe this will become something I'll create an essay around. We'll see.
Yes, please do share. The more play the better! And I have very specific arguments for why New Ageism takes this idea and gets it wrong, or rather contradicts itself. Don't make ideas guilty by association ;-)
LOL! Okay. I know from reading you that you have questioned some of the tenets of 'New Agism.' Time to start sadhana. OMG, so easily 'caught' by the quality of conversations here. I just finished commenting on Mark Crispin Miller's confirmation that the Canadian Truckers were successful. A good read, affirming the power of protest! And a dip into the expanding protests, unreported of course, against CBDCs.
https://markcrispinmiller.substack.com/p/the-truckers-did-not-lose-in-canada
Hola, Tereza. You’re welcome.
I’m going to be a bit of a language/idea pedantic here.
“What I mean by the collective Self is at a right-angle turn from both the ego-self as individuated and the group of social selves as the crowd or mass.” This would require some elaboration for me to understand. And to help me wrap my perception around your idea I resorted to drawing a cross. Yup, moved into the uneasy blend of word and lines. On the left x-axis I placed your ‘group of social selves as the crowd or mass’. On the right I put your ‘the ego-self as individuated’. (I like my language a little better, so put that there too. For the left side: “Undifferentiated Self. For both I attributed the characteristics of ‘Lack of Consciousness/completely unaware’.For the right I added ‘Individuated self / individual’ and attribute the characteristics of ‘Increased consciousness /Perfectly conscious’.
On the y-axis, your ‘right angle’ 3rd paradigm I put… On the top? What is it? You have used the phrase ‘collective Self’ with a capital ’S’. This is easily confused with ‘collective’ of course and I’m not sure that you can make sense of it. I look forward to your description.
I have taken it upon myself to assert the presence of the 3rd paradigm by defining the negative of those items already defined. Sort of. This is making me laugh, a little, because for some reason this reminds me of the mathematics of imaginary numbers. The don’t exist, and yet they help some aspects of math and physics work! Amazingly magical.
And I’ve expanded your terse description because you don’t reference to a ‘bottom’ in this case. My tendency, perhaps contaminated by Jung’s understanding and teaching that the psyche-somatic system is moving towards wholeness/integrity, and that that means towards a dynamic balance. A yin-yang quaternary-like structure or some kind of centring mandala or yantra structure. Your idea results in a triad structure, which is inherently not stable. (For a great discussion on the nature of numbers, see Marie-Louise von Franz’s book *Number and Time: Reflections Leading Towards a Unification of Psychology and Physics* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1948243.)
Anyway, I have defined your 3rd paradigm as ‘Not group/not individual’ as the y-axis to the above. And with it being a *line* with two ends, I’ve assigned two opposite attributes. For the top: “Energy or spirit that has the potential to animate or energise life / Light? /Sustaining Mother-Father Dyad?” On the bottom: “Emptiness or dark matter that has the potential to de-animate or enervate / Darkness? Devouring Mother-Father Dyad?”
It is possible that the ‘Mother-Father Dyad’ possibility to be truly metaphorical as used in the I Ching (heaven-earth or creative-receptive, dyads) to represent the energy of new metaphysical life; or metaphorically of the real requirement of mother-father to generate physical life.
I have no idea if this has any value. I will ponder on it with my drawing. And I look forward to your commentary/improvement. To see my drawing, here is the link. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1o05uaOW67qIAwy1G22zuyDnwHc-mUNhC/view?usp=share_link.
“What the Course would say is that the dream was never created, it doesn't exist, in the same way your dreams have no reality.”
And I disagree with the Course, here! Absolutely false. Jung diagnosed a man with a pooling of the cerebellum fluid at the base of his spine from a dream. I discovered I had been hurting my body with a dream. Endless! Funny synchronicity. Earlier my friend was telling me his dream that corresponded to his life. He is a prolific dreaming and takes guidance of a ‘practical’ level, as well as spiritual and psychological. And, another synchronicity with another friend who is just beginning to explore Jung. (And, very humorously, I sent you the von Franz ‘Way of the Dream’.) And now I’ll be a total ass and send you this really find documentary, The Wisdom of the Dream. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1GEpBR-EkZdwWu2psblcI8iA1PqPdI1s
“If we, as the One mind, are having a nightmare, God is helpless to go into our dream and straighten things out. Nor can He shake us awake. The purpose of the dream needs to be fulfilled. The voice of God or wholly spirit can speak to us and help to shape it, but we need to be ready to listen.”
Nope. That hasn’t been my experience with dreams at all. Nor does it align with my multi-year research of dreams, including Jung and others. Here is a wonderful book! *Living Your Dreams: Using Sleep to Solve Problems and Enrich You Life* by Gayle Delaney. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7479737-living-your-dreams.
Your description (from Course?) is simplistic, very much aligned with how some eastern yogis often dismiss them. Dreams are so difficult that for many it is best to leave them untouched and, sadly to denigrate them. (Do watch the von Franz documentary ‘The Way of the Dream’.) Freud hurt their advancement as the single best tool to integrate our shadows and live our purpose, per Jung, by delimiting dreams with a dead mechanical linear association to sex. Another fascinating book is *Lucid Dreaming: The Power of Being Awake & Aware in Your Dreams* by Stephen LaBerge. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1794147.Lucid_Dreaming_The_Power_of_Being_Awake_Aware_in_Your_Dreams. I studied dreams intensively for many years. That observation from Course – if that is where it came from – completely discredits it, imo.
And now for sleep. Goodnight. Thank you for stimulating my intuition and thinking.
Music:
Buckfast by Nadine Shah
https://youtu.be/V14wvFpDSOk
My feeling, Guy, is that you've decided that we disagree. I'm not so sure we do, and whether it's semantics tripping us up. But if you've made up your mind that we do, I'm not going to convince you otherwise. So I'll try again to express this using your lovely diagram (kudos on knowing how to do that! I tried to get diagrams into my book and didn't figure it out.)
I think you're the first person to ever call the Course simplistic ;-) It does start with a simple statement: "Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Therein lies the peace of God." Even though the whole Course is in that statement, it takes 1300 more pages to say it in different ways to get across a way of seeing that's completely contrary to everything we think we know. So you don't need to agree with it, but you do still need to tell me which of the alternatives you choose: God is Evil or Evil is God.
One of the statements in the Course is that darkness is the absence of light. Darkness doesn't exist. It's not real. It's like a hole that's the absence of dirt.
Your continuum of undifferentiated self that's perfectly unaware to individuated self that's perfectly conscious is a value-based line, from bad to good. It's a continuum of superiority, of domination in a moral sense. Both ends of the continuum are based in the belief, even dogma, that you exist separate from me so I can be perfectly conscious while you are unaware.
IF the flesh-encapsulated mind is an illusion, they're both equally deluded. And there is no further point from completely deluded. There's no "worse" or "bad" way to be deluded. Either we're separate minds in separate bodies or we're not.
Positing an arm of the third paradigm going down keeps it in two dimensional space. You can still, as you did, portray it on a flat surface. What I'm imagining goes off in a completely different plane, springs off the page, if you will, and opens up a new space. For whatever it's worth to you, if it's not a completely different way of seeing, you're not seeing it.
There can be no advances in awareness that you make that don't effect me. I'm no more aware than the plumbers digging up the sewer line outside my door. (I told them this morning I'd invented a new Zen technique--meditation with jackhammers. Enlightenment or your ears back!) This body, that body, no body.
If all of what we call reality is our twisted dream, why would you think that dream analysis is unimportant? It's the most important thing in the world! We have to figure out our own psychology and why we've chosen to hide in our dream of separation, otherwise we keep going round and round in it.
That's why, in my latest episode, I say that Anneke has spelunked into the darkest part of the nightmare and has brought it back and has done 30 yrs of deep psychological and spiritual analysis on it. So important!
So I think that's the best I can do in explaining why I don't think we disagree. But I'll defer to your judgment if you still think so ;-)
Synchronicity alert! Life (Universe/Whatever/All-That-Is) has a wonderfully wicked sense of humour.
My landlord had an electrician come to work at the cabaña today. While the power was off he worked on the panel on the outside wall. We wound up have a beautiful and deep conversation about 'truth' 'yoga', anxiety, energy, meditation, etc. Not at the deep philosophical depth of our conversation, one at a deep yogic somatic-awareness level of philosophy into life. At the end he said with a deep appreciation 'Wow! Thank you. I *really* learned something here today.'
A wonderful encounter with a delightful and enagaged/curious electrician.
Now back to open aired sadhana as the clouds darken and the thunder is really rolling. Amazing.
Nice, Guy. And I think I'll be having thunder rolling into here, in sync.
Hello, Tereza. Your fascinating reply prompted another huge writing fest of exploration for me. I have pretty much examined each of your statements in a lot of detail and 'nuance.' And I edited my drawing and to add nuance and added more nuanced drawings inspired by it and by my extended exploration of the ideas.
It is in 3 comments.
Pt 1 is here:
https://gduperreault.substack.com/p/just-this-is-it-what-is-this-pt-1/comment/22250856
Drawings:
1.R1) Cosmology Quadrant. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WPe7LjQ3NURLsOTJUmycC-MhqvxiytA8/view?usp=share_link
2) Duality Quadrant. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yo8rEls0miSeXeWXHTnj_GyAtpcEcza_/view?usp=share_link
Part 1 is linked here at a higher level in the chain, to make it easier to read.
https://gduperreault.substack.com/p/just-this-is-it-what-is-this-pt-1/comment/22250856
...
When we come to a conclusion of this dialogue I may want to post this into my substack.
Looking forward to your reply.
Song of the essay:
Nadine Shah - Kitchen Sink
https://youtu.be/9b0Lsu-T6YM
Just happened to be reading Zohar (so the Genesisian version of "in the beginning was the logos")
"With a beginning, (It) created God (Elohim), the heavens and the earth."
No Creator, just the constant unfolding of the Creating of Now (from God Is A Verb, by Rabbi David A. Cooper
It's reaffirming my belief that - as soon as you *name* the thing, it become man-made, not That which is Greater. For me - the *named* things are more like archetypes, not mysteries much at all.