I have stoic tendencies, so not so good at the consoling stuff —more like: “ok, so that happened, now what?” with that in mind…
how you feel about the pandemic seems to boil down to three questions…
how do you feel about risk and luck, your luck in particular, given your history, age, condition, beliefs, etc.?
how do you feel about your own mortality, or sense of immortality?
how do you feel about others you might affect, do you think they are on their own trajectories independent of your actions?
there are all sorts and sources of information, opinion, and on the ground reporting, which you may attend, or not —or just enough to get an assessment of the risk. But it all filters back to the same 3 questions, regardless of the source and content of your information, that everyone will answer for themselves, I think. And there are no wrong answers.
it may be a blessing or a curse, to be forced to clarify our stance. regardless, it is a wake-up call
I’ve been stepping up to a more subtle relationship with dreams. Instead of just stomping around trying to change stuff, leveraging or seeking entertainment like an ugly tourist, I’m transitioning to a better behaved guest. Realizing lucidity is not a gift but an obligation, to cultivate a consciousness in the waking state too, of the type of thinking and relating done in the dream world. To better understand the messages of both. The key is working with states of consciousness which come bundled with their own capabilities and limitations.
“Rather than act like the lord of the manor, I would rather behave like a guest.” — Lao Tzu
In waking, getting dreamy entails a shift of mindset from analytical/verbal modalities to other types of discourse with the body, for example, without words. And with the “field”, all those things “out there” seen and unseen. Images. Flashes. Felt sense. It’s like listening to a new, much fuller conversation about reality. Intriguing intimations flooding in. That I have no idea what to do with. But seems to make me a more trustworthy immigrant in the dream worlds, as I stop trying to over-analyze with waking habits. And I’m being invited to more dream scenarios now, and being less antagonistic.
I believe when the student is ready, the teacher arrives. Mine have usually been in the form of books. Sometimes movies. For others it may be music, synchronistic encounters. This dream world reorientation was nudged by a book from a talented and creative hypnotist, physicist and therapist from Canada with a unique approach and some incredible inductions on the tracks included.
I’m learning to draw, and the hardest part of drawing has little to do with the mechanics. Other than learning to use the shoulder more than the wrist or elbow. Nope, to unlock skills in drawing the key is seeing what’s there. Which I naively assumed I was already doing. I was wrong.
This has deeper implications than art but art is proving a visceral way of understanding it.
Perception and interpretation are deeply intertwined. This can be easily demonstrated by any number of optical illusions. Rather than seeing what’s there our brains reform perception to expectations based on habitual cues. It takes shortcuts, in other words.
When trying to draw something the brain seems to identify, categorize and abstract in ways such that we’re no longer looking at outlines, contours, shading and color. Even simple things, like a chair. Or our hands. In fact, it takes sustained effort to unhook our interpretation circuity and see the raw elements of what we’re perceiving. And, like optical illusions, we have to actively fight the tendency to snap back to what we think we are seeing instead of what we actually are.
There are reasons (and experiments) that demonstrate, as tenacious as this is at the sensory level, the habit can be even more insidious on the level of concepts, stereotypes and ideologies. In fact, we seldom realize that we’re usually looking at a map rather than the territory for just about everything. Maps are always condensations of what they represent. By necessity they leave out more than they portray. (Although one of Lewis Carroll’s characters in Sylvie and Bruno proposed a map where 1 mile would be 1 mile but it would be impractical to unfold!)
“The map is not the territory,” is a famous quote from the founder of General Semantics, Alfred Korzybski. He developed a system of mental checks and balances that work much the same way drawing does to keep our attention calibrated to what we are actually seeing. He warns against getting lost in our interpretations and mistaking them for perceptions (intensionality), and proscribes ways to maintain awareness through various tools for calibrating and correcting our maps.
A. Vogt, a famous science fiction writer, wrote about a time when Korzybski’s approach is taught in society at large, like grammar in grade school, resulting in a more sane population. Less susceptible to living in descriptions of the world rather than the world itself.
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.
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.
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 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.
Too lazy to be ambitious, I let the world take care of itself. Ten days’ worth of rice in my bag; a bundle of twigs by the fireplace. Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment? Listening to the night rain on my roof, I sit comfortably, with both legs stretched out. –Taigu Ryokan
