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anarcho-shamanism, mountain spirits; sacred wilderness, sacred sites, sacred everything; psychonautics, entheogens, pushing the envelope of consciousness; dominator culture and undermining its activities; Jung, Hillman, archetypes; Buddhism, multidimensional realities, and the ever-present satori at the centre of the brain; a few cosmic laughs; and much much more....


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Tuesday 22 April 2014

Home Sweet Home



I recently engaged in some correspondence with an old friend of mine. He related to me how, for much of his life, he has felt out of place in this world; that he has been born in the wrong place or at the wrong time. This is an experience I am only too familiar with myself. The number of occasions I have been out and about, and felt like an alien, sharing little in common with the other people around me and the goings-on in 'the world at large'. I am a misfit who belongs in the stars, with the cosmos at large, not waiting at a bus stop while a parade of Highland drunks sways past, punctuated by groups of teenage girls laden with cheap clothes from Primark.

I replied to my friend, detailing my familiarity with this most uncomfortable feeling. I continued my letter, however, with two more sobering reflections. One is that this experience of being a misfit is actually based on 'perceptual selectivity'. When I look at the world around me as a whole - the plants, the birds, the sun, the hills, the stars - I feel very much at home and in the right place. It is only when I narrow my focus to the world of less-than-noble activities of average human beings, as Castaneda savagely refers to the mass of humanity, that I take on the guise of an alien visitor.

More to the point still is the reluctant realisation that, in terms of consciousness, I am in precisely the suitable place with precisely the most appropriate people. It cannot be any other way. Everything is, in a sense, completely perfect and as it should be. This is the inescapable and humbling conclusion to arise from seeing that consciousness is primary, the main determinant, and seeks out (or, less romantically, just turns up in) the circumstances with which it is familiar, and/or which it needs for the next stage of its sacred journey.

That consciousness is primary is, for me, a no-brainer. The contrary notion, that consciousness is a product of the material brain, seems to me stupid, as well as being coincidentally highly unscientific. While modern neuroscience is successfully mapping out a wealth of functions in different nooks and crannies of the brain, it has got nowhere in locating the place of origin of consciousness itself. That's because it's not there. Stack against this the plethora of reports suggesting that consciousness has a life of its own, independent of any current physical manifestation. Near Death experiences, verifiable reports of past lives, experiences in meditation and other technologies of non-ordinary states of consciousness, not to mention the testament from many traditions from around the world.

Consciousness is just that: consciousness. To consider that it is produced by the brain is akin to believing that television programmes are produced by a television set. The brain is more like a receiver or transducer of consciousness. This consciousness takes up temporary residence in a particular physical body, heading for the exit door when the time arrives. Only a science that is highly prejudiced and based upon fixed ideology - in this case of 'scientific' materialism - can fail to take this on board.

Consciousness cannot help but end up exactly where it should be - this is implicit in notions of karma and rebirth, for example, and is sound common sense. But this is, for me, a humbling realisation. All the silly stuff, all the apparently ignorant people, the entire parade of the surreal and bizarre at the bus stop, is precisely what I need for my own walk along the sacred path. It is not an accident or a cosmic mistake that I am who I am, where I am. I hereby confess my hubris, arrogance, and superiority. While  part of me does indeed fly through the sky and swim with the moon, there is another part that truly belongs in the muck, the confused, the vicious - and the plain humdrum.

This life of mine on planet Earth can serve a twofold purpose. One is to, for want of a better way of putting it, seed the akashic field, the universal consciousness, with constructive, positive stuff. You may hardly see another person in your everyday life, but if you are really doing your mystical stuff, your life needs no more justification than that. But this life also serves as a great learning opportunity. Everyday living is like boot camp training - as Neil Kramer says, if you can survive planet Earth, you can survive anything. And this perspective adds a new, rich gloss to everyday life. No moment need be wasted: every experience, no matter how apparently trivial, provides an opportunity for growth. Every day presents a myriad of choices. Act from truth or untruth. With a sense of rightness or wrongness. With a caring loving heart, or a cold, sod-you attitude. In the mundane lie marvellous opportunities. And if, as I have often done, you feel that the world is crap, and you don't know why you've ended up in this cesspit, there's only one thing to do: stop sulking, get over it, and get on with it......

Photo: bhmpics


        

Saturday 12 April 2014

The Prison of Thoughts


It can happen to anyone, at any time. It was on the banks of the local river that it all happened to me.....

I am walking along beside the water. Ducks swim playfully on the surface, and sunlight penetrates deeply the clear waters, creating patterns on the stones below. Trees sway in the wind, seagull chancers hover close by in the hope of scrounging some free goodies. I become aware of the stream of thoughts coursing incessantly through my mind. It consists of words uncalled for, and completely unrelated to the present situation. There is also playing intermittently a song that I haven't heard 'live' for weeks, and which I do not particularly like.

A few days later I am walking alongside the same stretch of river. I am once again conscious of a similar theatre acting itself out inside my mind, except that it's a different song playing repeatedly, and different random groupings of words. And that I'm beginning to find the whole thing quite irritating.

Some time later, I take the same familiar walk. On this occasion, the full force of what's going on hits me. Jung talks about thoughts as a bunch of wild animals running amok through a forest, and he is right. These words and songs that seem to come and go unbidden have nothing to do with 'me' in the sense of my conscious will and purpose in life. It's all just random rubbish clamouring for my attention. I become keenly and painfully aware that these thoughts are not harmless, neutral entities. Instead, they have an energy to themselves. A strong thought can knock you off your feet; and this torrent of stuff surging through my mind can leave me drained and exhausted. Conversely, even a few moments of freedom from the cascade releases a great surge of energy.

Let's leave aside the question of whether these thoughts are energetic food for archon-like entities or not. Whatever its precise status, this torrent of thoughts forms, for the aspiring mystic, a crux. The alchemical process of purifying the vessel, thus making it fit to receive higher dimensional wisdom, consists in good part of removing these obstructions to direct experience from our mental sphere.

In Castaneda, this process is described in terms of 'stopping the internal dialogue'. '.....The internal dialogue is what grounds us' Don Juan said.'The world is such and such or so and so, only because we talk to ourselves about it being such and such or so and so.' Don Juan explained that the passageway into the world of sorcery opens up after the warrior has learned to shut off the internal dialogue. 'To change our idea of the world is the crux of sorcery' he said. 'And stopping the internal dialogue is the only way to accomplish it.' (Tales of Power, chapter one).

If we succeed then, in the words of Don Juan, we can 'stop the world'. Stopping the internal dialogue is not, however, so easy. Who we think we are, and the world we identify with, depend on the constant narrative we automatically tell ourselves about how and what things are. In other words, our ego depends on the internal dialogue for its identity and survival; any attempt to quieten the internal dialogue will also threaten ego. It follows that strategies set up by the ego are doomed to failure: its not going to vote for its own abolition. As Victor Sanchez points out in 'The Teachings of Don Carlos', 'It is not possible to stop thinking by thinking about it. Western rationality simply does not work as a method for achieving inner silence.' (chapter six). Even Hindu and Buddhist-based techniques for 'quietening the mind' and developing samadhi can suffer from this problem, and therefore are sometimes of limited value. Stopping the internal dialogue may require more the approach of a trickster, creeping in sideways, obliquely, sneaking in without the ego cottoning on to what's really happening.

To repeat: stopping the internal dialogue is the key. And I'm in no position to prescribe a ready-made and guaranteed formula for success. We're kind-of out there alone. But here is an outline of a few strategies that I find personally helpful:

Listening to sounds. In 'A Separate Reality' Don Juan advises Carlos Castaneda to listen to sounds. Certainly, I feel that meditation techniques which focus too much on the subject will only fail in attempts to stop the dialogue. Sounds are clearly 'outside' us, beyond the clutches of identity and ego, beyond ownership. Our ego identifies far more readily with sights, which are often the predominant conscious sense input for humans. Adopt a meditation posture if you wish, or do it any way you want. Close your eyes and pay attention to all the sounds. Birds, wind, voices, traffic, whatever turns up. That's all you need to do.

Another meditation posture strategy: turn thoughts into concrete visualised words. See the wild animals running through the forest as actual words. They dissolve and disappear.

And the classic techniques of 'being in the here and now'. Be in the physical body, the physical sensations, not in the head. Go out into nature or any other uncluttered situation. Work on experientially distinguishing between thinking and perceiving. 'We modern humans live as prisoners in a reality constructed for us by our thoughts.' (Victor Sanchez again, chapter six). It's time to break out.

And a brilliant quote that is obliquely related to the theme:
                      'There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil
                       to one who is striking at the root' (Henry D. Thoreau)

Go for the root, dear friends, go for the root.......