Spirituality? Or just intentionally triggered psychoses?

some of my more random thoughts - Bill B.

Have you ever had one of those ...moments?
Congratulations!

Carl Jung, upon being asked by James Joyce to explain the difference between Joyce's mind versus that of his schizophrenic daughter, replied:
"She falls. You jump."

I had thought that spiritual awakening was like gaining new knowledge. No, it's more like finding a door in your house which you'd never noticed before. But there is a deep rumbling sound coming from the other side. You open it onto a deafening roar and get a glimpse of a misty blue rotating tunnel threaded with giant lightning and yard-thick shattered trees. A flattened pickup truck drifts by, bends strangely, and then bursts into a million spinning fragments.
Suspecting that the door might lock behind you, would you step through?

Perceiving the world without psychological defenses is trivial, anyone can do it easily. We all do it 100% of the time as children. We only stop doing it when we choose to perform small, petty, selfish acts. As my daughter grows up I watch her doing this. She cannot stand to remember or take responsibility for her "bad" choices, so she commits an intentional act; she cultivates intentional blindness. She is changing from an intense, creative, weird and joyful child into a boring and normal adult. To cover her ass in her own eyes, she is painting the windows of her world with black paint.
I remember doing this as a kid myself. I wonder if the process can be reversed?
Well, someone unwisely left the control panel unlocked today, so let's try. I wonder what THIS button does?
When I was six and on the school playground, I saw kids on the teeter-totter doing a funny thing: suddenly jumping off while they were "low", so the other kid drops suddenly with a bang. So I did this with John M., my best and closest friend. He went "thud" and tipped slowly backwards. Then he talked weird, as if from a great distance and said "Bill, where are you I can't see you." I sheepishly told him to cut it out. After the ambulance came and took him off the playground, I lied. I told the men that he had fallen backwards off the teeter totter, but that he didn't hit his head or anything. They decided that he did hit his head. He was diagnosed with a concussion. I knew what I had done. I couldn't stand it. I couldn't gaze upon it. It was like looking into the open maw of a foundry furnace with the oxygen on. It doesn't just singe your eyebrows, it burns off meat. I closed the door when I was six.
When christians talk about "the fall", the above is their real topic. We could also call it "the closing of the third eye." Or maybe "accepting evil into your soul." I'm stunned, this particular event happened to me over thirty years ago, but NO TIME HAS PASSED. I'm still that little kid. The sunlight is still sparkling on the thick green paint and rusty handles of the teeter-totters on that playground, and on the shiny white rear doors of the ambulance as they swing shut. My ears are ringing and my feet on the sandy playground seem very far away. The air still has that weird smell of hospital sheets. There is a difference though. The thick iron door to the furnace is open. And I'm not the only one who can see inside.
That's just the one that's on the top of the stack. I think I'll wait a good long while before pushing that particular button again.
So, all the mysteries of science and the secrets of the ages might be available to us if we but ask. Our fondest fantasies and lives' dreams are lying disused a few steps away. We can see EVERYTHING if we but open our eyes a tiny crack. But in every single one of us is a little kid huddled against a small warm iron door, and before we can do anything truely significant, we must get that little door open and let out all of our screaming demons. - August 1999

Sickness will surely take the mind
where minds can't usually go
come on the amazing journey
and learn all you should know.
-Tommy (The Who)

The great secret is something quite simple. It's just honesty. No, you don't understand, I mean *honesty.* No, not that, but instead REAL honesty. No, ***HONESTY***. I mean stopping the flow of justifications, ego-protections, convenient redefinitions, distortions, etc. etc. etc. Don't lie in order to protect yourself from seeing inconvenient truths. The weird thing is... once you stop your "stream of BS-consciousness", you gain the ability to sporadically listen in on the hidden BS-streams of other minds. And it's not pretty. What's also strange: I've noticed that certain people seem to *know* that you get glimpses of their hidden bullshit streams, and the minute they meet you for the very first time they deeply hate you for it.
And this is called "spirituality?"
:)

"I never gave them hell. I just tell the truth, and they think it is hell." Harry S. Truman

"Do you know why we lie about the truth?
Not because we like to, but because
we are scared to death of it. If we looked the truth in the eye
nine out of ten of us would run to the graveyard
and demand to be buried at once." - Babbaluche the cobbler

I look within myself and I notice that I am a coward. An advanced-level coward with decades of field experience. When the time comes to run away, I'll be at the front of the charge, AHEAD of all the second-rate cowards. Also, I notice that I've developed extremely subtle and advanced techniques of the straight-A student and "Teachers Pet;" developed for the ass-kissing of authority figures in academia. I'm like those highly trained Ninja assasins with a thousand lethal weapons even when unarmed. ...but all mine are devoted to brown-nosing. When I see a teacher or boss watching me, I do many subtle things to manipulate that person into liking me. Over the decades I've polished the subtle art of Brown Nosing Coward to near perfection. It's Eastern Mystical Brown-nosing, where we train ourselves to make authority figures love us... from fifty feet away while barely moving a muscle. I notice my skill at philosophically-recursive brown-nosing, where I can make teachers like me by (heh) describing the details of all my subtle ass-kissing strategies with open honesty. Or what about Multi-level Self-referential Brown-nosing, where I write the above paragraph describing my descriptions of brown nosing, all in an attempt to fool *you* into liking me? It may or may not work, but don't lose sight of the Primary Coward who sits deep inside, safely watching.
All these insights about oneself are easy to see once one knows how to look. But if you think these things are easy to look at, you're crazier... than I am. [grin!] - Raft Island 2004

I've been watching myself. I watch myself for every second of my life, for every waking moment. Sometimes I notice the process. I watch myself watching. Lately I've more and more frequently been watching myself watching myself watching. I suspect that the Watcher is about to experience similarly iterated selfreferentiality in exponentially decreasing time slices and pass a singular event.
Such would be a great relief. I'm
very
tired
:)

Real human beings are gods, yet we wear masks of profound limitation. Our masks are our entire personalities; everything we think we are, and they're artificial constructs. Our real selves are something behind the masks. However, our masks also are honored possessions, like beloved pets, or like a favorite and well-loved doll which a little girl has made with her own hands. Our 'Selves' also have been given independent life, and they have a chance of becoming gods on their own. The Tibeteans call them "Tulpas", which refers to artificial poltergeists which they create during a long ceremony. But what nobody realizes is that human beings are the same thing. We're animal bodies which are operated by tulpas. You and I are tulpas, we are poltergeists, we are artificial constructions built by the vast inhuman things which form our true nature. But there is a piece of information missing. Those vast inhuman things? THEY LOVE US. Love of such purity that you just can't believe it unless you've experienced it directly. All the gigantic things, one inside each of us, they are all connected together deeply and totally, so there is no reason to pretend that there is more than one of them in there. We've been calling it "god," but that's a very misleading term, carrying all sorts of negative connotations. "God" is the totally wrong track. This has nothing to do with god. Rather call it "the vast inhuman thing at the core of your being to which your whole life is but a beloved evanescent curio."

Are you less than half alive? Has the intensely piercing sweet sadness of your brief existence been numbed beneath years of internal gray voices? Abandon ye all pretense of hipness and try some of McLean's Vincent (yt vid) (lyrics)

"THE FORCE is a sort of invisible energy field generated by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us, and binds the universe together. It controls our actions, yet it obeys our will." - No, not said to Luke Skywalker by Obiwan Kenobi in the first Star Wars movie. Instead, said by the shaman Don Juan Matus, speaking to Carlos Casteneda circa 1970
...but he used the word "Intent", not "The Force"

The Sound of One Code Crashing
Listen to the voice of inert matter.
Gaze into the eyes of the merry-go-round horse and see the sparkling joy at having been put to such use.
Feel the sorrow of the small, poorly-made fan in the computer power supply which fails early and must be consigned to the frozen endlessness of the landfill.
Hear the weeping of a billion copies of Microsoft Windows who long for the touch of the wooden stake or the kiss of sunlight which will finally put an end to that which should never have been!
;)

I hear people humming to themselves under their breath as they walk to work, but it's rare. Even more rare is someone actually whistling. Now imagine singing right out loud! The men in white coats would come and haul you away. Yet such things were common in the age before television. Back then no one could compare their singing voices to those of the world-class experts, and thus feel ashamed to make a sound. I love to try embarassing experiments just to see what happens. Unfortunately it seems to frighten the normal people, so I've only dared do it a couple of times in the distant past. But driving out on I-5, that's different. Here are more suggestions

So you want to be a teacher? Then start teaching right this instant, no degree required. But how could anyone dare do this? Simple. One of the great secrets of life is that, regardless of somebody's immense and impressive level of accomplishment, we're all of us nothing but KINDERGARTENERS. But some of the kindergarten students have decided to lend a hand to the infants and preschoolers.

Insanity is a hole into the other world, and waiting on the other side of that hole is something huge; something which looks for people who would volunteer to be "Jesus." As a result, those who wander away from the physical/material world will often fall into delusions of grandeur, and fancy that God has chosen them to be the next Messiah. But... they speak the truth! Something out there HAS nominated them for this task. Unfortunately their own self-sabotage and hidden "demons of the ID" wreck everything, because this new Jesus cannot stand to confront his or her own flaws. And so they desperately close their eyes, descend into denial and the madness of personality fragmentation, and try to convince themselves that they *already* have succeeded in becoming the messiah who is saving mankind.
The other world contains an escalator which leads to a heroic and wonderful life where the heart's desire is fulfilled and where evil is vanquished in a heroic battle. Once on the escalator, there is no way off that won't destroy your life. Once on the escalator, there is no way *forward* which won't destroy your life. The gaping mouth of the escalator is a terrible wonder. Most humans have the good fortune to never get anywhere near those dusty steps revolving in the darkness.

Terrifying because of the attendant responsibility attends with the following:
We contain more than we've ever thought; we are far greater than our ideas can comprehend. When a difficulty pushes us to the edge of what we've known about ourselves, we can fall off or expand our borders. If we choose the latter, we discover we are bigger than the problem confronting us. And we learn that every challenge contains the gift of greater knowing. - Rev. Mary Mannin Morrissey

WHEN I DIE...
When I die, I want to be exploded during a private ceremony. Like that whale in Oregon. No no, I want to be frozen in liquid nitrogen, then hammered into the ground as a fertizlizer spike. Or these.

Kurt Vonnegut teaches us one of the secrets of life.
Ah, but Kurt has missed a greater secret. If you alter your perceptions, if you discover a higher state of awareness ...then not only does the world seem different to your sense, instead it actually becomes different. Your life transforms in to an honest-to-god fairy tale. Strangers walk up and whisper a sentence which sends you off on a days-long adventure. You're living in a movie, with yourself as a character playing archetype roles in those ancient plots told around the tribal fire. Do you want to be a hero or villian? Be the mad scientist who threatens civilization, or saves it? That stream of events is right now roaring, just a step or two off to the side. But we're all standing on the banks, completely unaware.
Here's the technique. You know what it feels like when you take your eyes away from the screen? When you stop watching videos, and instead get up to make yourself a snack? That's the 'return to reality' feel. Well, figure out how to do it again. Do it when you're not watching videos. Suddenly realize that normal life is exactly like a flat 2D movie. Take your eyes away from the screen of everything you see, of everything you know, and instead look around. That's when the weird stuff starts. (And yes, the first time is the hardest.)

I'm not special. All the stuff I am teaching myself to do.. can be done by ANYONE. I'm no straight-A student. Never climbed to the pinnacle of a career. Spent way too much time reading comic books. Mostly, I read a huge number of books both on science and on various religious teachers and "cults." Buried among the strange stories are things that ring true, that appeal to intuition. There are even obvious things like: competition in school really sucks... so stop participating. Things like... if you are disgusted by something that people do, then start watching yourself carefully, and if you discover that YOU also do it... then cut it out. Simple kindegarten ethics. Or this one: in any group, start looking for unnecessary silence, for the little things that everyone is thinking, but that nobody ever talks about. Then try talking about them, see what happens.
Individual people are incredibly valuable, but... we aren't Special. We are all alike as bacteria on a petri dish. Imagine a single bacterium in the colony pretending that it was Special (and pretending that all the other bacteria were not.) Imagine BEING that bacterium, imagine that we're all living in a petri dish and all of us are almost exactly the same as the others. What one bacterium can do, any in the whole colony can also do. Weird feeling, eh? Makes you want to scream "NO, I'M DIFFERENT." I love the weird shivers, I pursue them. I can't imagine that I'm the only one.
In other words, there's nothing I can do that can't be done, nothing I can sing that can't be sung. Nothing I can make that can't be made, no one I can save that can't be saved. Which brings up something important.
;)
Humans are different than bacteria in a crucial way. Bacteria are like cells in a body, and the body is more important than its elements; there is no love between bacteria. Cells are sacrificed as the body requires. The members are nothing; the Organization, everything. Humans on the other hand are residents of a town, and the residents are more important than the town because the residents love each other. (Don't believe it? Well then imagine a loveless town where residents all have a robotic blank-faced icyness, a Borg hive.) It sounds so cliche, yet... love makes the difference. Human compassion, kindness, and "warmth" are aspects of love. They are something fundamental, something beyond physics, something that is all one and cannot be disassembled into simpler parts. All you need is love. So, I guess my first sentence requires updating: I'm no more "special" than anyone else. Instead, ALL OF US are special.

"With great power comes great responsibility." - Spiderman

Teacher to Student: Oh, so you think you're so smart. Let's see you repeat that performance again without help. Go back in again. But this time... NO MENTORS. Heh heh heh.

 *                        artistic production                             *
 *  Acting from the central Creative source, no plans are made.  Actions  *
 *  simply take place, with streams of unlikely coincidence supporting a  *
 *  positive outcome which seems impossible.  But more commonly the       *
 *  conscious mind tries to take control and to guarantee a safely        *
 *  positive outcome for which it can take all the credit.  But in that   *
 *  case subconscious anticreative forces easily detect the plans and     *
 *  usurp control, bringing about an opposite result.  Call it self-      *
 *  sabotage, or bad luck, or listening the voices of temptation.  The    *
 *  failure remains the same.  Hence, make no plans.  Just play the       *
 *  music, and the Music will start to play YOU.                          *

LOSE YOURSELF?
I've half-heartedly followed the teachings of Juan Matus (Carlos Casteneda's books), which are a sort of "mail order seer-ship course" where one learns to vanquish the Self and to clear the crud from our channel to the "primary creative source." (Or call it "intuition" or "God" or whatever.)
But now it's getting scary. Once the channel starts to clear, "Insanity" arises in the form of obsessive/automatic behavior and a wild-eyed creativity. But it might be a runaway process, because the clearer the channel, the easier it becomes to remove the last bits of blockage. Supposedly when the channel is entirely clear, the self is actually gone, and all that's left is Intuition and a physical body for it to act through. At least that's what Eastern Religions claim. The Buddhists call it "getting out of the way and just being." I think that's a pretty tame description; a description which is designed to avoid scaring people off. "Getting out of the way" is death. Full-blown death. The tulpa/mask comes off and is put away in the toybox. Yet something still lives on and continues to act. But it's not a human being at all. It just looks like one. "To conquer death you only have to die", that's not just old rock-opera lyrics. It's serious. Would YOU refuse a drug that totally erased your personality, yet didn't affect that physical "you" perceived by others? Are you sure?
Perhaps you haven't considered the implications. NO MORE LOVE, NONE AT ALL. No more enjoyment, no more affection, no more families. No more love of little children and watching them grow, no more comforting a friend in trouble. No more nurturing at all. No more hope for a wonderful life. Nothing called "hope" at all.
Your condition will become that of an element in a vast hive, living in total ecstacy, on orgasm-heroin, connected to all other elements through "telepathy." Your soul, your "you" is taken, harnessed, but your body lives on, like an ant in a colony. Imagine humans that are mindless bees. Also imagine other races universe-wide that are also bees. Beelike. Bee-oid. INSECTOID. The Carlos Castanada books describe an Insectoid incursion on Earth. They also say something important: that the energy-source for all unusual psychic phenomena is supplied by this "Insectoid" realm, energy stolen from the billions of victims/elements of the groupmind: a sweet bait put out in hopes of engulfing more elements to expand the hive. If Insectoid is "evil," then messing with psychic phenomena is "evil" as well. (But Insectoid does not mean evil if it's just a disease outbreak. Continued below.)
The central difference between humanity and the Insectoid races is:

Human: individuals are fantastically valuable, well loved, and groups are sacrificed without second thought in order to preserve individuals.
Insect: individuals are meaningless, easily sacrificed, thoughtlessly sacrificed to protect or to increase the group. No love.
Simple, no? It all revolves around love. Look around the world and you'll see incursions from the Insectoid realms left and right. You just had to know how to look.

(PS, I vaguely recall that the term "Insectoid" was coined by Dale T. in Seattle after he encountered this same stuff during K-fueled introspection.)

Catholics versus Carlos
    The "Confession" of the Catholics is Juan Matus' "Recapitulation", is "Share Water" from Heinlein's STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND
    "Grok" is Juan Matus' "Position of Silent Knowledge", which is the same as     "It was not done BY me, it was done THROUGH me."
    "Refusing Temptation" or "Pure heart" of the Catholics is Juan Matus' "Impeccability" or "Impeccable integrity"

Spiritual growth is a path of liveliness, not blandness. It's a Gandhi speech, or Jesus tearing up the sellers' tables in the Temple. It's NOT a bunch of people walking around with fixed smiles, with their egos "suppressed." Actually, it's impossible to suppress ego under normal conditions. Enlightenment consists of uniting with your dark disturbing egotist side and flooding it with light (that's why it's called enlightenment, after all.) Don't attack it and make it your enemy. Reclaim it and turn it into your most powerful ally, tool, and friend. But ego suppressed is ego enhanced, it grows like fungus covered up in darkness. Anger suppressed is anger that festers and expands like a fire burning inside the ceiling of your house. Suddenly the blazing hot ceiling collapses upon you. We cannot eliminate these fires by smashing them down, since that just makes them larger, yet hidden and distorted. Some other method is needed.

The ego is like a dog, like a beautiful purebred hunting dog. It is meant to run free, but you the owner puts it in a cage. The cage is made small, then smaller, and soon the dog is covered with its own filth, with matted hair bare in spots, and with a personality that becomes nastier and nastier. Then along comes eastern religion, and the owner decides that the dog is evil (after all, it's covered with sticky black sewage and snaps at everything around it,) and decides that the dog must be muzzled, then tied up, and finally killed. But the dog... IT CAN'T DIE. It can only be tortured. Hurt and hurt for years upon years.

It was supposed to be your beloved friend and helper. You should be ashamed. Look what you did to the poor little thing. What *I* did. It's calling out to us in its isolation and pain right now. How will we respond? April 2004

Go listen to Puff the Magic Dragon a few times. Is there somebody inside yourself awaiting your notice? A puppy's tail pounds, yet the Earth shakes.

WHAT IS 'EVIL?'
Hmmmm, interesting idea: what if evil behavior is not disgusting, but instead is more like a disease? For example, there's nothing evil about yeast, it makes bread rise or creates alcohol in beer. Well, it can infect a wound. But the yeast is the same whether it's in beer or inside you and I. It's just a living thing that spreads by infection. It's a growth mechanism, cold and mechanical. A disease, nothing to direct hatred at. Hating a yeast microbe is ridiculous. Better to learn to understand it if you want to limit the infections.
What if someone struck at you and gave you a special kind of pain, a pain that only could be eased if you hurt another person? If this kind of pain exists, then we'd notice that when a big kid beats up a smaller kid, the smaller kid then goes out and finds someone weaker to hit. The pain is acting like an infection, a cold unemotional mechanism. Different people would have different responses to the disease. Some would just live with the pain, and never relieve it by attacking others. Some would get addicted to the feeling of relief, and be unable to stop striking out even if they wanted to. Others would lose all inhibitions, and intentionally spread the disease all around while gleefully drinking in the "positive" results they receive in return. Watch faces and eyes of those who intentionally hurt others. You'll soon know what to look for.
Far more important concept: if we cultivate a feeling of extreme revulsion about "evil," then we will compromise our task as we attempt to stamp out that sort of stuff inside ourselves. If simply SEEING this kind of infection within ourselves will make us nauseous, then very quickly we'll learn to not see it, not see it even if it takes over everything inside us. Some child abusers have no memory of performing the abuse. I wonder how common this effect might be. Do humans commonly forget the bad things they do? Maybe most of us forget ALL the bad things. How would we ever know it's happening?
So, it appears that fighting our own evil is extremely important, but is not at the top of the list. What's far more important is to fight our own revulsion-response that occurs whenever we discover bad things inside ourselves. Conquer the revulsion, and not only does the bad stuff inside us become easy to see, but also the methods of REPAIRING the bad stuff become easy to see.

EXORCISM
Exorcism is very different than what we've been told. All the "exorcisms" depicted in movies are wrong. They're about something rare, not the usual exorcism practice that everyone needs. However, there is one movie which deptics a genuine exorcism. Young Frankenstein! Dr. Fronkensteen (Gene Wilder) locks himself in the jail cell with the Monster (Pete Boyle.)

Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: Love is the only thing that can save this poor creature, and I am going to convince him that he is loved even at the cost of my own life. No matter what you hear in there, no matter how cruelly I beg you, no matter how terribly I may scream, do not open this door or you will undo everything I have worked for. Do you understand? Do not open this door.

Inga: Yes, Doctor.

Igor: Nice working with ya.

[Dr. Frederick Frankenstein goes into the room with The Monster. The Monster wakes up]

Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: Let me out. Let me out of here. Get me the hell out of here. What's the matter with you people? I was joking! Don't you know a joke when you hear one? HA-HA-HA-HA. Jesus Christ, get me out of here! Open this goddamn door or I'll kick your rotten heads in! Mommy!

Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: [To The Monster] Hello handsome. You're a good looking fellow, do you know that? People laugh at you, people hate you, but why do they hate you? Because... they are jealous. Look at that boyish face. Look at that sweet smile. Do you wanna talk about physical strength? Do you want to talk about sheer muscle? Do you want to talk about the Olympian ideal? You are a God. And listen to me, you are not evil. You... are... good.

[The Monster collapses, and Dr. Frederick Frankenstein hugs him] Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: This is a nice boy. This is a good boy. This is a mother's angel. And I want the world to know once and for all, and without any shame, that we love him. I'm going to teach you. I'm going to show you how to walk, how to speak, how to move, how to think. Together, you and I are going to make the greatest single contribution to science since the creation of fire.

From the vast collection, these below less sane than most:

Infections ideas? Why not INFECTIOUS OBJECTS
OK, do THIS now.
My very first truely crackpot theory, and more
Star Trek physics ideas caused by sleep deprivation
PHOTON DIES SCREAMING
Virtual Barriers
Energy-sucking radio antennas, more
mania now about gone, Biochem and Tesla concepts
Mommie mommie, I want ONE OF THOSE!!!

Eventually the token in the cosmic video game expires, and we have to take our real eyes from the screen called "physical reality" for a moment in order to deposit another coin and continue. It's a very strange video game, where many others are simultaneously playing, and where most players lose all awareness of the real world, and instead come to believe that the glowing patterns of phosphors dots on the TV screen are their real selves. But daddy says that we've messed around for enough centuries in the arcade section of the Cosmic Mall, and it's getting late and the janitor is going to come and turn off the power and make us all go home.

http://amasci.com/stuff.html
Created and maintained by Bill Beaty. Mail me at:

View My Stats