Just This Is It. What is This? - Tereza Coraggio Comment Thread

The Ocean, the Earth and the Sky are Big Enough to Embrace* Us All in this Pathless Landscape

Bonnie "Prince" Billy - One With The Birds

Bonnie "Prince" Billy - One With The Bird

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*Subtitle Inspired by a Chan (Zen) Koan studied at Oaxaca Zen Centre in July 2023

The hawk tears into the sky,
the fish leaps in the depths of the ocean.
The sky is very wide,
the ocean deep.

The world cannot be broken. 
                      — Oaxaca Zen 

(Note: this koan is comprised of a poem, the first 4 lines, and a comment on the poem. It appears that the poem was an adaptation from a longer poem from an ancient Chinese anthology of poems written between about 1100-600BCE and possibly collected or edited by Confucius. Shijing (Book of Odes). 

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Here is the ‘essay’ playlist.

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Writing these essays has helped me more clearly see the truths of my heart. The explorations have expanded my courage to be compassionate with myself and others. This has greatly improved my life. If these essays have given you some of these benefits, I would be honoured if you would support my work by becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you.🙏

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My second last essay prompted an extended comment-thread between Tereza Coraggio and me, Guy Duperreault, that takes a cursory interactive look at What is This ‘thing’ about being alive in the world and in the world of ideas? Is there a ‘real’ difference? The importance of nuance, differentiation and the possibility of a indifferentiation problem of non-duality. And since the world is big enough to hold all of this, does any of ‘this is it’ really land in matter?

Just This Is It. What Is This? Pt 1

Just This Is It. What Is This? Pt 1: “Truth Is A Pathless Land” So Where Can I See It? Language as the Prison and Warden to By-Pass Existential Confusion

Talented and idea-challenging substacker and video blogger Tereza Coraggio asked some questions about the nature of personal and societal/cultural reality after reading the above essay. Her ideas and questions generated a big creative — ‘autie-like(?)’ — surge in me that kept me up to 3am for two days. Great fun! Once I started to engage, to ‘play along’ in Tereza’s words, I became unexpectedly energised looking for my sense of what Tereza expressed and questioned. Of course, nothing was ultimately answered because, well, the truth of existence is ‘a pathless landscape’ that extends into infinity. For those of you interested in subtle arguments about origins and purpose in this strange fun-house of ‘life’ with its 5D+ mirrors and fluid, constantly changing playing fields, you may find this enjoyable. 

I’ve posted this directly from the comment thread, having slightly edited to fix odd typos, added hyperlinks, some graphics and arranged here for ease of continuity. And I included a new quotation, a synchronicity that arose as I was editing this.

For those of you unfamiliar with Tereza here she is:

Tereza Coraggio - Third Paradigm

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Let the comments begin:

TC: 2023.08.07

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 realised he was so literary, as in literal, and not just evocative. 

Peter Gabriel and David Byrne

Peter Gabriel - Blood Of Eden; David Byrne & St. Vincent - Who.

In my stacked-up list of Subs to do is a response to James Corbett's interview of Neil Oliver. Something Neil talked about was 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?

Agnes Obel - The Curse

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. [For Tereza’s interesting look at and criticism of the interviewer as an embodiment our society’s hurtful dualistic good-evil split, go to ‘Pedo-Sadist Cults & Anneke Lucas: and Whitney Webb on One Nation Under Blackmail.]

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.” [See ‘If Money Was No Object: Chapter 16 of How to Dismantle an Empire’.]

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 [to]. But we are dismembered until we remember ourSelf (my emphasis).

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GD: 2023.08.10

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 [Max Weber — falsely attributed to Emile Durkheim initially] 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’ [through the mask psyop]? 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. [And in covid, effectively muzzled.]

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 David Byrne elucidated [that I quoted in ‘This is It’]. It 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, becomes [comprised of only] 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 [to]. 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 separation, 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

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TC: 2023.08.10

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. [The Fractal Self: Science, Philosophy, and the Evolution of Human Cooperation by John L. Culliney, David Edward Jones.]

What A Course [in Miracles] 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!

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GD: 2023.08.10

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 a [substack] essay around. We'll see.

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TC: 2023.08.10

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 ;-)

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GD: 2023.08.10

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. [‘The Truckers Did NOT Lose in Canada. They WON. And So Can We, Wowever Wong It Takes (If We Don’t Let Them Panic-And-Divide Us’).

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GD: 2023.08.11

Hola, Tereza. You’re welcome.

I’m going to be a bit of a language/idea pedant 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. [Or see drawing ‘Group / Individual’ on Google.]

Group / Individual - First Draft

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 [so-called] imaginary numbers. They don’t exist, and yet they help some aspects of math and physics work [in the ‘real’ or tangible world]! 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.)

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.

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 [from his dreams] at 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, in another comment earlier I sent you the von Franz ‘Way of the Dream’ video link.) And now I’ll be a total ass and send you this really fine documentary, ‘The Wisdom of the Dream’.

The Wisdom of the Dream’

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.

Your description (from ACIM?) 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 within 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. I studied dreams intensively for many years. 

And now for sleep. Goodnight. Thank you for stimulating my intuition and thinking.

Music:

Nadine Shah - Buckfast

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TC: 2023.08.11

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

Pedo-Sadist Cults & Anneke Lucas

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 ;-)

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GD: 2023.08.12

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. [For this document, I’ve collated and slightly edited them into just one part and I’ve incorporated the drawings.]

Drawings:

1.R1) Cosmology Quadrant

2) Duality Quadrant

Philip Glass - Knee 5

Hola, Tereza. Your opening and closing have brought a nice smile to my face, and perhaps even a bit of laughter. Total ambivalence! 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?)) 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 dualing/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’. For the full really great 3:40:00hr production: ‘Einstein on the Beach’.)

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 was at least in part to help promote Freud’s sexualised disembodiment as part of the disempowerment dialectic that 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).

Jane Roberts

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) 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 themselves. 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.

I Ching - Meaningful and Differentiated Binary 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. [Or see diagrams on Google: ‘Cosmology Quadrant’ and ‘Duality Quadrant’. ]

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[Synchronicity addendum, quotation from Gautama Buddha that infers the unimportance of the good/evil dyad:

From the texts of the Pali Canon, I also became familiar with the metaphysical questions the Buddha refuses to comment upon. These are some of the "big" questions to which religions claim to provide the answers: Is the universe eternal or not eternal? Is it finite or infinite? Is the mind the same as or different from the body? Does one continue to exist after death or not? The Buddha dismisses such questions, because to pursue them would not contribute to cultivating the kind of path he teaches [that of the means to reduce suffering in the somatic world of space-time existence]. He compares a person who is preoccupied with such speculations to a man who has been wounded by a poisoned arrow but refuses to have it removed until he knows "the name and clan of the person who fired it; whether the bow was a longbow or a crossbow; whether the arrow was hoof-tipped, curved or barbed." The only legitimate concern for such a person would be the removal of the arrow. The rest is irrelevant.

In another Pali discourse the Buddha compares people who are obsessed with answering such questions to a group of blind men who are summoned by a king to describe an elephant. Each blind person is invited to touch a different part of the animal. The one holding the trunk declares that the elephant is a tube; the one feeling the sides that the elephant is a wall; while the one holding the tail is convinced that says the elephant is a rope. Thus preoccupation with metaphysics not only fails to address the primary issue of suffering, but also leads to a partial and distorted picture of the complex totality of the human situation (p99 Confession of a Buddhist Atheist by Stephen Batchelor, my emphasis.)]

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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 with 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 seeing 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 the issue of ‘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 [Indian Guru and founder of the Art of Living Foundation] Sri Sri Ravi Shankar where he discussed how modern neuroscience is now measuring how our state of mind will affect another’s state of mind 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. [Here is an example from the 1993: ‘Washington Crime Study Shows 23.3% Drop In Violent Crime Trend Due To Meditating Group’.] 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. [The amazing story of Dr. Hew Len healing the inmates and guards of a prison for the criminal insane using a form of prayer from a Hawaiian indigenous practice called ‘Ho’oponopon.] Gautama Buddha describe this well as interdependence, or co-dependency arising. [For example, see ‘Radical Interdependence: Buddhist Philosophical Foundations for Social Theory’.]

Again, [I find myself] 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, or 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 sophisticated plumber. I do bump into these kinds of people, most recently with a tour guide salesman and a UK tourist. [The day after I wrote this I had a similar encounter with an electrician who came to the house to do some work.] 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.’ [And yesterday a friend in the city here said the same thing.] 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. [Covid police will shoot unmasked conspiracy theorists.] No amount of auming or bowing will change [the expression of the] 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, including his most trusted 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 that was a diagnosis of a physical ailment, coupled with my dream of the importance of changing my diet to revitalise my physical body, 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.

Conversations with Seth

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. 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 suggests 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 Maintenance and then the sequel Lilah.

Zen in the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance

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

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TC: 2023.08.13

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.

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GD: 2023.08.15

Hola, Tereza.

I was busy with my last essay and life.

And 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!

And I can 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. 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 I will play very hard, for some reason. Which is what I did, to the very best of my ability. I was 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.) Ah, the humour of Life or the Universe, or whatever this thing is! Love it.

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TC: 2023.08.16

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 offence without realising 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. 

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Karate

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 recognised 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 psychoanalyse 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 offence to be told we're completely unaware. As none of us should take offence 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 offence 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.

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GD: 2023.08.17

Hola, Tereza. Thank you for this great and heartfelt response. It has prompted me to look inward and with that to encounter some more awareness – whatever that is! – from within of shadow elements and with that light guides out from those shadowy bits. And it, along with this great dialogue, has provided me with the inspiration for my next essay/exploration.

I liked your suggestion to share this with Yoshiko as a kind of outside (female) voice. Unfortunately her English isn't strong enough to appreciate the conversation. So I've asked [an independent third party ITP] in Spain to look at it. She has a sophisticated knowledge of society and psychology and is well aware of the 'dark' underground of our culture for a long time. For example, she already knew about Lucas. From our past conversations I can assure you that she will be unbiased as she has been a great help to me with seeing elements of my shadow. She is sleeping now and so won't see it until our tomorrow. And I have no idea when she will respond, her being busy with setting up an alternative economy to the existing one

In the meantime, and before receiving [the ITP’s] reply and as a kind of preamble to my next essay, I would like to post our dialogue in 'my' substack. I think there is a lot there for people seeking meaning to chew on.

Please let me know if that is okay with you.

Thank you, with peace, respect, love and gratitude. Namaste.

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GD: 2023.08.17

Oops! I forgot to include some music with my comment. What came to mind while I was making my late lunch early supper. was this Canadian duo, so maybe you haven't heard of Kata and Anna McGarrigle.

Kata and Anna McGarrigle - Love Over and Over

And with that, up popped a couple of more songs.

And, for some reason, this version of an old Paul Simon song done in jazz: ‘Can't Run But’.

Some tango! ‘La Yumba’ by Osvaldo Pugliese.

And more contemporary and very fun ‘La Yumba’ by Tango Crash.

Enjoy! (Maybe! 😉)

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TC: 2023.08.17

That all sounds fine to me. In synchronicity, I was just looking at a digital marketing company in Valencia with my daughter, who's considering doing an internship there. And economics, of course, is my jam.

So yes! And I may well be overreacting. Please do post at will. And thanks for the music and conversation!

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GD: 2023.08.18

Hola, Tereza. The ITP [independent third party] came back with a very interesting look. She liked our discussion.

Wow! What a fascinating conversation! I think JBP could make much of it - lol!  I loved how you provided a soundtrack to - that provided a lot of depth of meaning that otherwise would have been absent I think. So I made some notes and have a few things to offer...

She pointed out two particular phrases a I used as being offensive. And I apologise for that. And thank you for your push back, as that is how I continue to learn.

She added:

But as for you being macho in your argumentation - as opposed to being "toxicly" masculine - well, yes, perhaps, but not that that's bad but maybe misplaced. I think men do tend towards differentiating and insisting on precise definitions whereas women tend towards emphasising agreement and likeness. JBP has spoken (written?) about this quite a lot. Women are high in trait Agreeableness, is how he puts it.  

He's also said that a feature of female tyranny would be lack of differentiation, or something to that effect. I could look for the links for you if you want to look into that further?

In sum, a man would recognise this as being deeply respectful, but a woman is unlikely too.

So, that is what I see on a surface level - just the differences between what men and women focus on, consider important and how they communicate.

The ITP observes that I may have exhibited some 'autismocalidoscious' [her neologism]. She and her husband are autistic — she didn't speak until she was five — and has observed/suggested that I have shown that characteristic on occasion. 

She was a little surprised that 

[Tereza] didn't really attempt to push back against your rigorous argumentation. After so many years of study, you'd have thought she'd have plenty of strong material to counter your positions with.

As already quoted, she really liked the playlist, and late in her reply she added:

I was really struck by the juxtaposition of these two performances:

Flower Duet.

Knee Play 5.

In the first, the two performers are in complex and intimate relationship with each other as they express the song - communion is happening. In the second, the principals are isolates, they are present but not together and though the chorus expresses in communion, it as a whole is disconnected from the principles.

This has been a great exercise for me, in a number of ways. Thank you for your endurance through this, and I doubly thank you for helping me wrestle with ideas that were jumbled and incomplete in the play box called the unconscious, you opened up that Pandora's box. Great stuff.

And a lesson on communication, thank you ITP. 

I've set to post the slightly edited comment post for Monday morning. I've added a couple more songs to the playlist.

I still haven't got back to recreating my comment for Anneke's post. I'll see about doing that not next, then maybe the next after the next. 

The ITP included a video about communication. I started to look at it and it is interesting and worth the time. Every Argument Is an Opportunity to Rule.

And some music from the ITP:

So I put together this progression for you - from an individual expression to a mass communion - to see what you think. Or feel:

Bonnie "Prince" Billy - One With The Birds.

Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - We Are Unhappy.

Bonnie Prince Billy - Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You.

James - Sometimes (Lester Piggott).

Thank you Tereza, for bringing forth this engagement of ideas. Thank you, everyone, for having read this exploration. I really enjoyed it.

Writing these essays has helped me more clearly see the truths of my heart. The explorations have expanded my courage to be compassionate with myself and others. This has greatly improved my life. If these essays have given you some of these benefits, I would be honoured if you would support my work by becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you.🙏

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Here’s the ‘essay’s’ Playlist.

And the closing song:

Carl Orff - O Fortuna

Lyrics:

O Fortune,
like the moon
you are changeable,
ever waxing,
ever waning,
hateful life
first oppresses
and then soothes
as fancy takes it;
poverty
and power
it melts them like ice
fate – monstrous
and empty,
you whirling wheel,
you are malevolent,
well-being is vain
and always fades to nothing,
shadowed
and veiled
you plague me too;
now through the game
I bring my bare back
to your villainy
fate is against me
in health
and virtue,
driven on
and weighted down,
always enslaved.
so at this hour
without delay
pluck the vibrating strings;
since Fate
strikes down the strong man,
everyone weep with me!