perchance

Dreams, dreams, dreams. So many…

Last night an elf commented on my scalp. Asked me how long it had been like this? I told them a few years, maybe? They put their hand on my crown, fingers sunk into my skull, wow, that felt good. They said do this… and moved them clockwise, a few inches circumference from the crown. Start at 8 o’clock. But their fingers started at 4. I guess it would be 8 from the inside looking out. I’ve been trying it throughout the day.

Another was in a family home. Lots of kids and relatives. Trying to find privacy, I needed a shower. One cousin had a strange hummingbird, colorful. It was a type of device, like a drone. He could see from his eyes wherever it flew.

Then on a crazy car ride, trying to flee Oklahoma?! Trying to get my GPS to work, trying to figure out how to use my phone. We were escaping the apocalypse, but it could only be seen through the phone, like an augmented reality game. Like Pokemon Go. The phone was showing all sorts of destructive things happening, overlaid on the landscape we were passing, invisible to the naked eye. I was suspicious. Was it actually there, unseen, or was this some game that had enthralled the populace? Are we being invaded on the astral planes?

I was Johnny Depp at a club, dancing, both of our bodies were phosphorescent and psychedelic colors. She was painting something on me with a brush, intimately, and it was almost impossible to get a beer before the show.

Game Changing

Not a review but this book is riveting. The title really does not do it justice, nor indicate its scope. It goes far beyond “smart note taking” and provides a fascinating way to approach learning and leveraging what we already know. The system explored in the book below comes from a public administrator named Niklas Luhmann who was interested in sociology as a hobby. His family ran a brewery. He created a system he called Zettlekasten, German for “card box” which refined a non-linear way of taking notes and thinking about stuff. In the evenings, after his 8-5 at the office, he read up on his interests, made notes (in a specific way) and navigated this system for exploring and connecting ideas.

He ended up writing a paper on sociology that was noticed by a prof at a prestigious University who immediately offered him a job as a professor. For which he had no qualifications. He then took a semester of Sociology and, using his system, Luhmann spun out a couple more papers: a doctoral thesis and a second publication required to formally fill the job requirements in less than a year and was officially appointed as a professor. During his next 30 odd years, as almost a byproduct of engagement with his system, he published more than 70 books and several hundred of papers. His works rocked the field of sociology and brought in new ideas from widely disparate fields. But he never considered the system “work.” For him, it was a creative extension of the mind: discovering, connecting and understanding ideas that fascinated him at the time. Today he is considered one of the most important social theorists of the 20th century

So far I’ve been struck by the approach he uses for learning and thinking which are quite different from anything taught about learning in school. His system is simple, can be implemented with pen and note card like he did, or any electronic system (I’m using Evernote.) Amazing stuff. And practical for anyone who likes to think, who has a variety of interests and wants to explore new ways of understanding. And perhaps publish a book or post or two someday.

Pioneers

Like early pioneers, I wonder as we learn to venture inward, if we will have to cultivate similar skills and resilience as those brave and desperate souls. If the physical is the start of a trail-head, as many believe, then how amazing is it to be stumbling down this byway that will be the “camino” of future historians of consciousness. With tourists flocking to re-experience the wilds their ancestors traversed. And to marvel how they found their way using only primitive instruments like drums and plants.

Anthropology may recount the weird Polynesian-type navigation of reading waves, processes and currents rather than geometry of the stars, the aborigine messengers walking in dream time collecting sign and landmarks. The psychedelic shakedowns stripping stories and personal history. The wyrd sisters, weaving rainbow fabrics of time with chords of runes like streaming divas.

Life goes on in the settlements for now, but there is wilderness all about our sanctuaries. And strange noises break from the jungles and the darkness. “Here be Dragons” has always been our demarcation for the edges of our maps. And the song of our people.

Shielding

Shielding is a thought form with energetic properties that can be easily learned and calibrated.

It has bells and whistles but it’s essentially expanding a spatial feeling-sense in a sphere around the body at about arm’s length or further. This sphere contains one’s energy within defined perimeters while simultaneously deflecting other, undesirable energies, from without.

It is especially valuable for natural empaths and those dealing with the public on a daily basis. But it assists in other contexts as well.

This post is about an off-label use: containing our own stuff. At an energetic level this helps keep our attention from being snagged and pulled into external considerations. I sometimes catch myself, in subtle and not so subtle ways, looking for various types of validation from others. Be that approval, attraction or just positive reaction. This reeling of energy out is reaching for something, outsourcing, what I already have within. Shielding takes back this agency, calling back what was unmindfully given away, squandered.

And not just interpersonal exchanges; consciously containing energy assists in another type of pushy derailment. One where things skid into working memory, displacing that last cool and interesting thing with the next cool thing that surfaces in the feed. Memory never gets a chance to consolidate and deepen. It feels like covering ground, accumulating information, gaining insight —but it is not. At the end of the day, most of what is unskillfully attended has frittered away, and the constant swapping slots has left us drained.

Shielding is an energetic construct, an intention and a thought-form which resonates with our deeper mind. It is a pattern that activates skillful attention and influences reality on several levels, including the physical. Shields tend to fade like any thought-form, and their effectiveness diminish, if not maintained consciously —at least daily when first establishing a practice.

Next post on the on-label uses 🙂 Or not.

Weird

it is weird to be a grandfather
but no-longer a grandson
and probably weirder still
to be a great grandfather
but no-longer son
and maybe no-longer brother
and maybe no-longer husband
to have a son
that is a grandfather
as the cycle trundles

our identities both fade
into inconsequential history
and simultaneously thin
into time and future
until we are light as feather
and can go where we please
with neither baggage
nor fixed destination
and the wind that sung
in our no-longer childhood
sings to us again
songs of carriage and passage
and we must relearn
the old language we spoke
before speech

on posture

“You’ll have to be a warrior in the sense of remaining awake and alert even while you sleep, like a soldier in the midst of battle. Whatever form of interaction you’re engaged in, whether with a person or group of people, for social, economic or sexual commerce (offline or on), whether with an object (a steering wheel for instance), whether with your own internal fantasies and projections, you train yourself to remember to stay mindful of the presence of spirit.

By simply visualizing your spine lengthening upwards and your shoulder and hipbones broadening outwards, your entire physical form will actually expand and grow.

Once your bones have been arranged to allow optimum expansion of the form, it is easy to relax the flesh, by simply visualizing it softening on the bone and sinking towards the ground, counter to the upward pull of the spine. Hence the bones create the shape you want to make, whether in stillness or in motion, and the muscles, tendons and ligaments merely move the bones. This saves you inordinate amounts of energy normally squandered on the muscular strain of holding the body together around a misaligned skeletal structure. Moreover, with the skeleton arranged to facilitate optimum expansion of form and the muscles working more effectively, the increased chi, or energy, in your system can flow freely bringing you the instant benefits of a healing and self-protective energetic ‘sheath’.”

Tao of Internal Alchemy by Barefoot Doctor




Force

Force is very important because the Work says that to do any conscious work on our development, we have to accumulate it. If we constantly use force up by becoming angry, being in arguments, taking everything personally and always being identified, we will have no force to work on our own development. Moreover, by always wasting our force we will be exhausted, find it difficult to do the things we have to do to get through the day, and have no force left for the things we want to do.

Gurdjieff by Gil Friedman

New Year

Niken Anindita aka megatruh is Jakarta based, self-taught digital artist.

I like new years; I like the ritual of pivoting to review the past 12 months and starting anew with minimal baggage.

Some baggage, like habits developed over the year, are valuable —good habits are wise investments. Projects, however, may or may not hold relevance depending upon deliberation.

For some things this annual ritual is about tweaking priorities, for others it’s something new, or something old revisited. But the ritual usually starts with dropping everything carried the year before. A total reset.

Each year ends with a harvest of what came from previous efforts, which may be meager, and a planting of the new year’s seedlings with what was gleaned. And learned. With no regrets for anything incomplete or undone or missing. It is finished. I may restart it, but as something new. The field starts cleared. A system reboot.

Some magical disciplines carry this approach into a daily practice. Before sleep each evening, they review the day in reverse unwinding all the events, watchful for lessons. Leaving the mind ready for restorative sleep with a clean slate. An adjunct practice then imagines the most beautiful image, whatever that might be at the time while drifting off to sleep. Talk about your sleep hygiene!