alrighty: I did my best to clear up as much confusion as possible as to the nature of fundamental wisdom, and the accompanying moral transfigurations made possible thereby. there’s some stuff dealing systematically with various kinds of objections and misgivings over the traditional conception of the fully enlightened, and other such goodies.
Podcast page here
Direct download: TME3.3-GM.mp3
We begin our ruminations on the human side of ‘the ultimate destiny of humanity’.
Constipated buddhists, reactionary occultists, and neurotic taoists.
Podcast page here
Direct download: TME3.2-OH.mp3
Direct download: TME3.1-TTAB.mp3
podcast page here
okay, in case you missed my initial offering via twitter, here is our return to the world of audio. I’m striving to bring up our production values, so I hope you’ll excuse the awkward bits as I get back into the groove. Had to essentially recreate my setup from scratch for this.
In any event: some considerations on barack in a spiral dynamics context, some ruminations on the cognitive dissonance of authenticity, deep ambivalence, and some denunciations of ‘consensus’ in the political arena.
for those of you who don’t know squat about spiral dynamics, or just want to hear me lose my shit over it, I’d recommend episodes 19, 20 and 20 1/2 of the mosaic effect.
onwards and upwards!
What most people who get into this game don’t realize is, you are already an incredibly accomplished adept in certain kinds of mind yoga. You have to be: the only way you could sustain such an aberrant and dysfunctional set of assumptions for your entire life, is if you had concentration that could crush diamonds, and withering commitment to various behavioral disciplines that borders on the suicidal. Maintaining anything resembling a stable identity for hours a day is a truly heroic feat of concentration.
This is both a good thing, and a bad thing: the good thing is all you have to do is slightly re-direct your focus and everything falls into place. Indeed, that slight alteration of focus is much easier that what you were probably doing before.
The bad thing is, if you don’t give yourself the proper directions, that power of mind that you’ve cultivated can turn on you in the most dire ways. This is why some people, particularly accomplished adepts, get really fucked over in the dark night. It’s not that they don’t know what they’re doing, but rather that they are too good at what they know and slight maladjustments are a big deal.
One of the things I’ve picked back up in the last week or so is giving myself a regular series of structured hypnotic inductions, to help reprogram my subconscious mind. This is probably a much faster and more efficient means of metaprogramming than whipping yourself, fasting or wearing hair shirts, but everything in it’s proper place.
I was very much into this a few years ago and it drove most of the alchemy for the braindamaged series and much of my best work of that time. When my machine died and took all my accumulated hypnosis recordings and whatnot with it, is when things started to go off the rails and I began focusing on things in a less productive way. I’ve just now begun to reconstruct my collection and get back into that kind of self-programming with vigor.
What it comes down to is that you need to give the mind proper instructions. Especially when you’re doing insight practice and taking out huge chunks of previously unquestioned material and replacing it with nothing, or sharpening your concentration to the point you can pick out the most abrasive sensations and turn them into what feels like an indestructible holding pattern. You need to tell yourself what to do, what to focus on and how to readjust your beliefs, or you are taking your life in your hands. It’s easy to get all gung ho on the simple and clear injunctions of vipassanna and samatha and get bent on becoming an arahat, but all that stuff has to fit into some kind of functional container, and that container is you.
Fortunately all that practice I’d done in the past was still laid in deep, and responded quite quickly to some new well-structured suggestions, such as one can now get on youtube. There are better ones to be had if you look, by better hypnotists, but it’s a fine place to start. One of my favorites, “major” mark cunningham, has said that at the level where the conscious meets the subconscious, problems don’t exist. That’s a pretty nice place to be, I’ll tell you that for nothing.
Now, disclaimer, I can’t pretend that I’m some schmuck off the street and this stuff will necessarily work for you the way it has for me. I’m about 15 years into various forms of mind and body training, and 10 years into essentially doing it as my sole vocation, so I’m a little farther up the curve than some of you lot, and it’s hard to know sometimes what is the practice and what is the conditioning. But I feel quite sure that it won’t hurt, especially if you’ve got some game in the altered states department already. It certainly can’t be any worse than letting CNN hypnotise your ass every day.
I’m going to do my best to drag this kicking and screaming back to my own practice, because that is, after all the point. Perfect mastery of insight, concentration and ‘morality’.
I have recently been scandalised by the baptists, who have evidently both become arahats in the last week or so, which, in the terminology they use, means they’ve achieved perfect knowledge of emptiness, and moment to moment insight into the three characteristics, but nothing about jhana or conduct. So I’m still safe in my tree house for awhile yet until these fucking brits start levitating and evidencing stigmata and performing miraculous healings or something like that.
But this is what I want to talk about, because I very much want to argue for what is considered an unrealistic, even unattainable standard of enlightenment, and see if we can’t reconstruct it for a more modern palate.
In my own practice I am finding that fairly extreme standards of morality training are what’s driving it right now. I have, after some peculiar distractions, that I alluded to a few weeks ago, finally settled down to my new status as a celibate renunciate. I never drank or did drugs before, and now my sex life is essentially terminated for the foreseeable future. In a larger sense, I am terminating the grosser forms of sensual lust and attachment, as well as any clinging to emotional attachments to people and their feedback. I am hoping to radically curb my use of unskillful speech in due course as well.
This is not precisely a moral stance. I do not do these things because they are ‘right’ but as a meta-programming exercise, to reformat my brain and nervous system. I find meta-programming a better description of what sila is than morality or conduct, because the idea is not just to change what you do, or why you do it, or adhere to some arbitrary standard of holiness, but reconfigure the body mind to better accommodate the cognitive apprehension of emptiness, and the energetic load of high concentration.
And here’s where we start to get a bit contentious, because in this day and age the fashionable models of ultimate realization are radically nondual. Maybe it’s due to the decline of conventional social standards, cultural relativism or whatever, but it is now quite common to hold that you can be perfectly enlightened, and not change your behavior one iota. Which, I suppose is a step up from most dharma conversation which is too timid to talk about actual enlightenment. So at least you get to be enlightened now, as long as you’re still a neurotic fuck-up like everyone else, it’s all good.
Which I don’t necessarily mind too much. It’s a step in the right direction. What does bug me a bit is the implication that nothing can or should change about the relative bodymind due to the enlightened state. This is, on the face of it, absurd, because to change from an unenlightened state to an enlightened state, something has to alter on the ‘form’ side of emptiness and form. Some people can get into semantic games and say that nothing really changes, there is only a realization of emptiness as ever present, but then you’re still changing from unrealized, to realized, and so on so forth, you can see where this is going. If you distinguish at all between being awakened and not, then you cannot evade that there is some quantifiable change that occurs and some quantifiable way of doing it. Yes the absolute remains absolute and does not change, but the relative does, unequivocally. Something does have to change, which implies that other things can change as well, even if they don’t have to.
So yes, by all means, you could be a perfectly realized arahat with flawless moment to moment understanding of the three characteristics of your nose hairs and still be perfectly capable and willing to murder hookers and molest children and form attachments of all kinds.
But really, if you are seeing what you say you are seeing, why would you argue for this position? It’s like arguing that growing from an infant to a toddler does not necessarily mean you stop shitting your pants. Yes that’s true, it doesn’t, but why argue for that? Do you enjoy shitting your pants?
The extreme nondualists like to attack such straw men as the limited emotional range or limited possible action models and dismiss them as unrealistic and unattainable fantasies, with no basis in real practice or experience. But I can prove in minutes that this is a crock of shit. It’s really just a way of evading the ongoing practice needed to raise your cognitive function to the point that it is pulling the weight of your realizations.
Let me give an example: one of the first insight knowledges is what’s called ‘mind and body’. You learn to identify and distinguish between what are internal subjective sensations and what are external and part of the body/environment. Let’s say for instance, the perception of a person ‘out there’ and the feeling about them that you experience ‘in here’. Now even the slightest investigation will disclose that these are two utterly independent things. You condition your feelings and emotions to external objects and images. They are not joined. They are not a ’self” entity.
If you seriously, honestly, legitimately saw that, and internalized that simple, profound truth, that anyone could prove in five minutes of very easy contemplation, then you have opened the door to eradicating in one fell swoop, about 90% of the emotional problems of human beings as we currently know them. Maybe all of them. Nobody and nothing makes you feel anything. You train yourself to do it and you can un-train yourself from it as well. You are acting in a profoundly hypnotic manner, and this profound hypnosis is supported in all kinds of ways by neurological and biochemical patterns, but you can wake up from this,and alter the underlying biological patterns. Clear insight makes this incredibly easier to do , if not instantaneous.
This does not turn you into a robot, or an unfeeling stoic. If anything, it frees your range of sensation from the socially programmed pavlovian responses of emotional fixation. Lust and ill will? Gone. Just gone. They have no basis is reality, to begin with, and even the most elementary understanding of sensate experience proves it.
So what’s the deal here? Well I think our understanding of how to re-pattern the nervous system has lagged behind the technology of insight and concentration, no question about that. And certainly it’s much faster to do fundamental insight than change your complete cognitive organization. The limbs of yoga, in some sense are means to comprehensively reformat the body/mind on every level. Breathing, asana, pratyahara, these all help break up the conditioned responses and install new ones, at the same time as you develop samatha, and profound insight into the divine. it all works together. You can indeed take them separately, but why would you, and why would you argue for it? It all sounds a bit evasive.
It’s rather convenient to be able to note the three characteristics of your nose hairs and become an arahat and be ‘done’ but this is just fantasy. You see the absolute perfectly? Good for you, you have a window. What do you see, and what do you do about it? No you don’t have to stop shitting yourself and acting out the same pathetic fixations and emotional dramas, and letting the earth turn in it’s confusion and stupidity, but really…why not?
I think we can more carefully redefine the old models into something we might call a non-proclivity model. No, you never lose the ability to have certain emotions, or evidence certain behaviors, but you can from a certain platform of ultimate insight, re-program the bodymind so thoroughly that certain proclivities are essentially eradicated. Just like you don’t crawl on all fours and shit yourself, just like you tie your own shoes and don’t cry for mommy to do it, you can grow beyond the neurotic, contradictory and destructive emotional patterns and conditioning you have now. Anyone can. Especially an arahat.
Well, I could probably take an hour or so and collect at least a dozen examples of occultists, yogis, meditators, alternative analysts, and esoteric investigators who evidence all the signs of chronic dark night insight cycles. Myself included, incidentally.
Now why would that be? The answer is quite simple actually. Once a particular person passes the threshold of what they call ‘penetrating the object’ in terms of investigating reality, they’ve essentially ruptured a dam holding back the sum total of ultimate reality, and from that point on, are engaged in a progressive process of death-rebirth, carried out at the basic sensory level on up.
That is, once you have the experience of knowing, not thinking, but knowing, that things are slippery, inconsistent, not as they appear to be, subject to definition or re-definition, fundamentally not satisfactory, or any number of other ways of experiencing the fundamental nature of reality, the mind is forced into a crisis of reorganisation that has only one real end.
The problem comes on two fronts: one is where people want to arrest the process of the mind in some final resolution, and the other is where people fail to reverse the figure/ground relationship of the mind to it’s object.
What I mean is, insight is, by definition, finding out something you didn’t know before, and that’s impossible unless you relinquish partial or incorrect perceptions in favor of more comprehensive and correct ones. That’s all well and good when it’s something trivial or with no personal significance, but nobody really wants to overturn their perceptions of self. This is akin, psychologically, to death. That means that the would be enlightened chronically either dig in and try to reify some view of what’s going on with them, or they focus too much on stuff out there, instead of looking inward at the sense of the observer.
You combine that with the ever intensifying sense of anxiety that I mentioned before, and you hve a recipe for all kinds of embarrasing flame outs, paranoid episodes, manic pronunications, manichean schema for interpeting reality, reversals and re-reversals of opinion, ecstatic bouts of relief from terror and confusion, and other increasingly desperate efforts to either arrest the process or redirect it from oneself and one’s deep sense of that self.
One of the most pernicious aspects is thinking that there is nothing else to do, nothing that can be done, or no way to do anything. Internalising the perception of impermanence means knowing that the mind is constantly reinventing and reorganising itself. Any section of belief or understanding that appears static is a delusion. The mind is a door that opens and opens and opens, forever. The moment it appears to not be opening in the slightest, is a sign that delusion has taken root. This is a hard thing for anyone to cope with, and especially for anyone who builds their self image around being enlightened or awakened. This is where the syndrome of the perpetual dark night basket case comes from.
You develop profound spiritual convictions or ultimate insights, but they’re always, always, unfinished. The part that can be finished is not the part that thinks, feels, or expresses itself. The self that has come this far must in turn be discarded. To actually finish this process requires that you let go of the exact thing that you’ve been leaning on up until that point, and most people can’t or won’t or don’t know to even do that. So you end up with a kind or relapsing sequence of near misses at true understanding. To make sense out of that cycle of being profoundly right, followed shortly by being profoundly wrong, requires a certain kind of deviant psychology that unfortunately infests the occult scene in general, and the occult internet, quite specifically.
___________
PS: if any of you deviant scum use twitter, I’m now parading my psychosis there as well.
Right: so probably the simplest way to describe insight practice is that it revolves around a clear observation of sensations. Since everything a human can experience is sensations, a clear observation of sensations emanates into a clear observation of everything. The perceptual habits at the smallest microscale reflect those at the grandest macroscale. As above, so below.
Now sensations, by their nature, are empty. That is, they have no inherent meaning or interpretation built into them. They are essentially bits of static, which, when taken together, coalesce into a picture that we can project meaning upon. The early part of every infant’s life is learning how to decipher the ‘blooming buzzing confusion’ of the senses.
The thing you can say is that every sensation has similar features: each has a definite beginning, a definite end, and some kind of afterimage that persists in consciousness in the form of other sensations, which also have beginnings, endings and afterimages. Based on that, you might surmise that human consciousness is mostly composed of afterimages, with a minimal awareness of primary sensations. The fog of afterimages blends together to create the illusions of solidity and continuity that we tend to cling to so much.
The early part of insight practice usually revolves around clear perception of the beginnings of sensations, and this tends to be mildly interesting, moving towards a kind of profound euphoria, as we see how things appear out of nowhere. The underlying vibe, which not everyone can articulate clearly, is a kind of overwhelming abundance. There’s just more and more and it’s all just appearing out of nowhere and it’s pretty ecstatic. This gradually transitions into a a clear perception of the endings of sensations, and this is where it gets tricky.
At first it’s profound and liberatory: all the stuff that bothers you. limits you, and confuses you just vanishes. yay! …however, it quite quickly tips over into things that you’re kind of attached to. Sense of self, ego identifications, familiar body sensations, emotional resonances, all this stuff starts to take on a certain precarious tenor, as the underlying sensations just kind of drop out through the trapdoor and vanish. The best way I can describe it, is that your whole life starts to feel like walking on thin ice. The ice never actually breaks, but a part of your awareness is always tied up in the feeling that it might, at any moment, crack open and spill you into the same nothingness that’s seething underneath all your experience.
Most people experience that underlying vibe as various degrees of anxiety, terror, despair, disgust, depression, anger and hate, desperation, etc… as you consciousness ( hopefully) processes the awareness of the true nature of sensations that you built yourself up out of.
Bit rushed today, but I’ll get into my own mileage with this next time.
So yeah, I took a pretty good shot at ‘letting go’ of attachment to relationships for a few days there.
It was partly an insight thing, as in ‘ this is inherently unsatisfactory, impermanent, and does not itself generate the state I’m looking for’ and partly a concentration thing where I was running a jhana state that was strong enough that I felt like I could happily renounce human attachments forever, at least at the time.
And then the tricky bit: because, when you get into states like that, the things you used to want, and let go of, frequently start showing up. Those of you who play on the sorcery side of the fence will be more familiar with this ( hopefully. provided you aren’t just a dark night basket case wanking over your star trek-based magickal paradigm) , and it’s basically the textbook buddhist style magick thing. ie; you rise to a jhana state of perfect equanimity, exit it, and form an intention, then the intention happens. Or in my case, the intentions that you formed carefully before and then let go of start to happen. This is pretty much what uncle al meant by ‘avoid lust of result’.
Which is neither here nor there, but just shows that letting go can throw up it’s own kind of distractions, because you will be tested on whether or not you really are letting go, or just practicing sorcery. Not that sorcery cannot be used as a valid source of insight, just most people don’t do it that way. If you do sorcery as a means of demonstrating the emptiness and transitory nature of phenomena, or developing insight into cause and effect, then great. If you renounce boys/girls as a step towards making them appear in your life, this is sub-optimal, from a perfect realisation point of view, because it throws up all kinds of paradoxes in terms of intention.
The tension of using renunciation this way versus how you actually live can become quite abrasive, even if you’re doing it by accident. You might very well intend to renounce shit, and yet not be able to help getting caught up in it again when your sorcery skills keep drawing it to you. It’s kind of playing out the karma you set in motion. There’s a story about a murderer who became an arahat and people who recognised him threw pottery at him. He couldn’t figure out why being enlightened didn’t make people hate him less. Similar kind of thing.
So shifting topics, dealing with that abrasive quality brings up a more detailed discussion of the dreaded ‘dark night’.
Okay, so lets talk about ‘letting go’ for a minute, because it’s probably the most powerful tool in the box as far as rapid changes in conduct and insight go, and can have quite a bang for the buck when used as an object of concentration.
Now, you have to be careful talking about this because most people’s idea of ‘letting go’ consists of pretending they don’t care about something anymore, and doing their best to avoid having to prove it. Moving to another town to avoid your ex is not ‘letting go’. Neither is never going to the mall because you can’t help buying fried chicken at the local KFC. The two applicable words are ‘avoidance’ and ‘denial’.
Letting go means that it does whatever it wants to do and it doesn’t affect you, no matter how close or far away it happens to be.
The easiest way to do this is contemplate deeply the downside of all the things you really want, and understand that they always go together. Phenomena are always dualistic presentations. If you contemplated the negative as deeply as you did the positive, you’d have a lot more equanimity towards the whole complex, rather than chasing the head-side of the coin all the time and pretending there is no tail.
The truth of it is, that nothing ‘out there’ makes you feel anything. Feelings/emotions come from your brain and nervous system. You condition them to external objects and their behavior. And external objects will behave in a pretty inconsistent and taoistic fashion. Get a copy of the i ching. if you’re super skilled, you might get an object to behave in a way you are conditioned to ‘like’ about 70% of the time. And that’s pushing the envelope. If you’re a taoist master or anthony robbins, you might be able to ramp that up to a marvelously flowing 80% or 90%, but that 10% will be a motherfucker when it comes.
It’s really a lot more sensible to decondition as much of this stuff as you can, and learn to intelligently manage the rest. This is one of those macroscale applications of fundamental insights. If nothing out there is really a source and is not stable even if it were, then why is it leading you around all the time? and if you can see this, then what is the appropriate stance towards the external world?
The all star champion sweeping method for this is either to cultivate profound selfless love, or to meditate on your eventual demise for a long time. Both will have a similar effect of causing you to drop a lot of dead weight. It will also profoundly change the dynamics of your relationships for the better, without the nasty aftertaste of your neurotic attachments.
I’m sort of in the middle of a major experiment on this subject, so I’ll hold off until it’s a little more clear how it plays out, before I discuss it.
Things are going to get a bit less new-user-friendly around here, I think. If you get really lost, ask a question or do a search. It’s all here somewhere.
When you’re dealing with the interlocking nature of prajna, sila, and samatha, the question arises; which one first? Which is preeminent? Of course, the answer is situational, and not really linear, in any event.
True, it’s pretty cut and dried that you need a baseline level of conduct to achieve a baseline level of concentration which is needed to achieve any kind of stable insight. But beyond that rudimentary level, it gets complex quickly.
To get stable changes in behavior or conduct usually requires some kind of insight into one’s situation to really make definitive change. To hold those changes requires concentration. It’s hard to make real life changes when you have the mind strength of a crack baby raised on kraft dinner, and the psychic hotline is your idea of ‘insight’.
Likewise, although jhana practice isn’t exactly an investigation-intensive enterprise, you do from time to time have to make certain observations that will fine tune your understanding of the object that forms your concentrative focus. It’s quite possible to take a very dry perception based approach to jhana, but I don’t recommend it, as it’s very abrasive. Feeling your way is best, generally, but even so, you do need to occasionally peek your head out to survey the terrain.
So really the whole process feeds backwards, forwards and sideways. The best bet is to work on the one that complains the most, or gets in the way the most. When in doubt, do some mindful investigation and if you immediately start crying, or your nervous system feels like uninsulated wiring sizzling in the rain, you might need to do some emotional housecleaning or chill in the second jhana for a bit.
For my part I’m dealing with lot of relationship stuff right now. There’s all this deeply rooted rubbish relating to self worth, loneliness, love and being loved etc. It’s very tempting to look for a solution to all this, particularly an external one, but 9 times out 10 when it comes to emotional stuff, looking for a solution is exactly the wrong thing to do. There isn’t one. There never will be one. Looking for solutions to emotional problems is how you perpetuate the mindset that creates emotional problems. It’s pretty much exactly like a gambling addict: you keep wanting to double down at the table, in hopes that it will all come up even in the end, but it never really does. There is no break even, there is no winning these games. They were never meant to be won. When you figure that out, and why it’s true, you’ve got some real insight going.
Emotional stuff all flows out of species of attachment. You can dress it up in any number of ways, but the end truth is that you have these emotions because you are attached to the phenomena they relate to. Anything you do in relation to that can only reaffirm the attachment. It’s like one of those monkey traps. The only way out is to let go of the thing and pull out your hand. Full Stop.
