I have this almost continuous sensation now, like everything is this huge knot, constantly constricting, and constricting and trying to close down ever tighter on absolutely nothing.

It even spills over into my dreams, in slightly absurd forms. Like trying to fill in a blank on a test form, and finding that nothing feels quite right, and that empty space is just so disturbing, and nothing can quite fill it. Or playing starcraft in my dreams and wanting to create that perfect formation, and yet that same sense of dis-ease, of absence that cannot be resolved.

and every so often, I snap out of it, and it’s just the play of sensations again. I am none of this, none of this… nobody home.

I try not too think too much about some of the neurological implications of all this on the enterprise of enlightenment. I mean, here we are trying to attain to the absolute, or ultimate reality, and we’re just encountering exactly what you’d expect, if you really thought about what a sentient mind that could only experience itself in terms of sensory impulses in the nervous system would be like. It’s as if you could create a perfect, real-time recreation of a human being in some kind of computer system, and that software hologram was perfect right down to all the subjective phenomena. but it’s not real. it’s a simulacra. and that’s what we are. we are simulacra of ourselves, created within ourselves, and taking it as the real. how very baudrillard. anything we know, or think we know, about ‘reality’ is just more stuff floating around in the nervous system, and it always will be. including all this ‘god’ stuff. and short of death, there’s no way of truly knowing one way or another.

don’t worry, it’s not a crisis of spiritual conviction or anything. sensations are just as much spirit as anything else. even if it’s all just noise on the wiring of our bodies, then so be it. another mountain to climb. people who are in it for ‘the goal’ are just tourists. nothing ever really ends.

it’s a very fractal thing: the more you do, the more you see, and the more you see, the more there is to do. I guess that’s why every true master I’ve ever met considered themselves a begginer. you will always have all your work still ahead of you, even if no one else can see it. you kind of have to make your peace with that at some point, no matter what your personal everest happens to be. if it’s really worth doing, it’s worth doing forever. comfort, conclusion, ’success’, ownership, status, identity…? throw them on the fire. they mean nothing. and throw yourself on the fire while you’re at it. burning forever is the only way to go.

righty-o. haven’t done one of these for awhile, and I’m not sure how ‘magickal’ this is, but I thought it might be useful to check in and take stock. feel free to imagine me in a robe made of human skin, slumped next to a bottle of absinthe, siguls painted on my upright ‘wand’, if it helps you get into the mood.

practice front: nice clean fruition this week. great sense of relief. incrementally increasing clarity and distinction in perceptual abilities. on the one hand, I’m getting a bit sick of being on the insight merry go round, but on the other, at least I’m getting a good look at the features of the terrain. no backsliding, and no messing about with claiming things I’m not able to back up. in all things, a firm foundation will serve you well. I’m getting a clearer and clearer sense of all things being the same stuff. ‘ditching the split’ as it were.

on the morality front, I’m once again firmly in the celibate column. and I can say that with some conviction this time, because I had every opportunity to get with a lovely lady and chose not to. I’m being pulled another way. I regret the hurt and confusion in that exchange, but at the very least, I can not squander the lesson.

for most people, the complex of emotional stuff that clusters around relationships is a big deal. being able to rise above it has some interesting effects. great clarity, sense of centeredness, unwinding of dependency and attachment issues. and I sleep like a baby, which hasn’t happened for a long time. win.

on the work side, I am well and truly done with security bullshit, once and for all. my last day is next week, and in september, I am back in school full time. I took the full damn year to upgrade some high school stuff and I can march into the halls of higher education well girded. I don’t care how much debt I have to rack up. I’m not coming out till I’m a theoretical physicist or biochemist. truthfully, after years of flailing meth-heads, schizophrenic homeless people, whiny clients, and incompetent bosses/coworkers, being able to put my head down and tend my own garden for a while feels like a blessing and time to heal. nearly ten years of being rubbed raw by the worst life has to offer, is enough for any man.

and on the physical side, I’m pretty damn fit these days. certainly more fit than I’ve ever been, I think. I run up to the top of a nearby hill twice a week, which is nice except for wanting to puke at the end. I still walk everywhere, I do a hundred pushups every other day, and will start hitting the weights at the campus starting in the fall. for some reason, my appetite has diminished so that I’ve lost about 5-10 pounds In the last few months. haven’t weighed myself, and not too bothered anyway. I actually started to feel a bit gaunt, so I’m indulging a bit more to put a little peak-oil-collapse insurance back on my bones.

website wise, I’m going to be doing something a bit different with my podcasts. I was planning to do one on the singularity, but eventually realized I was going to mostly retread thoughts I had here 4 years ago. I’m noticing more and more that I’m covering old ground, and part of that is trying to start at square one with people, but I’ve gotta take it up a notch or I’m going to keep being kinda bored with things.

So I’m going to attempt to clear the decks and cleanse the pallete, as it were. the next two or three episodes of the mosaic effect will not deal with distinct topics, but rather a kind of summing up and final word on things up till now. my meditation for this is to imagine what I would say or record if I only had three hours left to live. my half-assed legacy to suffering mankind. which at least ought to make whatever I do after that, a bit peculiar.

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’.