Understanding ‘Context’ is the antidote to madness.
Description of the realm of ‘dread, trance, and emptiness’
The dark night of the soul is the journey from:
Illusion -> Illumination -> Union.
During the ‘Illumination -> Union’ phase,
There are different bardo realms of experience to be passed through.
Here I’ll describe the bardo I am presently going through,
Which is of ‘Dread-Trance-Emptiness’.
The ‘dread-trance-emptiness’ bardo,
Has a lot of chaos, confusion, and disorganization
There is deep exhaustion,
In my ability to ‘be/become’ anything.
Like the king is unable to act anymore.
He is just a passive witness to his collapsing kingdom,
Which is falling into evermore chaos-confusion-randomness.
He has even lost interest/desire in it to keep it going,
And is simply now a passive spectator,
Of the spectacle of his kingdom falling into chaos,
And getting reabsorbed by all its surrounding forces.
‘Neglect’ and ‘Withdrawal’ of anything causes death of that thing.
So the process is very much like the process of conscious ego death.
This paradoxically feels like a descent and ascent at the same time.
The plunge into the depths is also the ascent to the heights.
To see everything from above is to see everything from below, and vice versa.
There is a process of passive purgation,
Of a journey into the purgatory playing/unfolding itself out.
I abide in this space passively,
In a ‘continuous falling’ into it.
It is like being in a kayak on a river current.
You cannot stop moving,
But you can influence the kayak with your paddles.
There is again a paradox here, that:
It seems deeply personal and yet so deeply impersonal at the same time.
Passions emerge, actions happen,
But the emptiness of all of it pervades my being.
Almost no experience is riveting enough,
To make me lose sight of the emptiness in the background.
I feel if I pass through all this madness,
I might bottom out and emerge on the other side.
This feels more like a time-energy thing,
Rather than a defined spatial thing,
Where there is a definite distance to cover.
The loss of identity,
Causes a fall into the shadows underneath.
Like sinking into the ground of chaos-filth,
From which the trees of identity spawn and return to.
This is a place where will/action are heavily suspended,
(Hanged man tarot archetype),
And one must mostly only abide/allow.
The only freedoms I have are to resist or allow.
And resistance hurts anyways,
So there is no actual freedom at all.
This archetypal chaotic dream madness (which is also the creative ground),
From which identities/egos in the world spawn,
Resembles the ’12th house’ described in astrology.
It is like the state of ‘dreaming and imagination’.
Waking > Dream > Sleep is what we ordinarily think.
But I think in the spiritual ascension path,
It is the reverse.
Being awake in ‘Sleep’ = Prajna (direct insight),
Being awake in ‘Dream’ = Vigyana (special meta knowledge),
Being awake in ‘Waking’ = Gyana (knowledge)
I feel like my awareness of emptiness is me being awake in the dream world/space/bardos.
This underground/underworld,
Feels like falling into a bottomless pit,
Where there is an infinite fall,
And where I am always in the center in spite of the continuously falling.
Only the scenery continuously keeps changing.
Sometimes I fall through clouds of scintillating mist,
Other times I fall through clouds made of acid.
The only way to communicate or share this experience with others,
Is through imaginative symbolic expressions.
A person going through a similar experience would probably instantly relate.
For others it may be a bit of a stretch to imagine/see.
Illusion -> Illumination -> Union.
During the ‘Illumination -> Union’ phase,
There are different bardo realms of experience to be passed through.
Here I’ll describe the bardo I am presently going through,
Which is of ‘Dread-Trance-Emptiness’.
The ‘dread-trance-emptiness’ bardo,
Has a lot of chaos, confusion, and disorganization
There is deep exhaustion,
In my ability to ‘be/become’ anything.
Like the king is unable to act anymore.
He is just a passive witness to his collapsing kingdom,
Which is falling into evermore chaos-confusion-randomness.
He has even lost interest/desire in it to keep it going,
And is simply now a passive spectator,
Of the spectacle of his kingdom falling into chaos,
And getting reabsorbed by all its surrounding forces.
‘Neglect’ and ‘Withdrawal’ of anything causes death of that thing.
So the process is very much like the process of conscious ego death.
This paradoxically feels like a descent and ascent at the same time.
The plunge into the depths is also the ascent to the heights.
To see everything from above is to see everything from below, and vice versa.
There is a process of passive purgation,
Of a journey into the purgatory playing/unfolding itself out.
I abide in this space passively,
In a ‘continuous falling’ into it.
It is like being in a kayak on a river current.
You cannot stop moving,
But you can influence the kayak with your paddles.
There is again a paradox here, that:
It seems deeply personal and yet so deeply impersonal at the same time.
Passions emerge, actions happen,
But the emptiness of all of it pervades my being.
Almost no experience is riveting enough,
To make me lose sight of the emptiness in the background.
I feel if I pass through all this madness,
I might bottom out and emerge on the other side.
This feels more like a time-energy thing,
Rather than a defined spatial thing,
Where there is a definite distance to cover.
The loss of identity,
Causes a fall into the shadows underneath.
Like sinking into the ground of chaos-filth,
From which the trees of identity spawn and return to.
This is a place where will/action are heavily suspended,
(Hanged man tarot archetype),
And one must mostly only abide/allow.
The only freedoms I have are to resist or allow.
And resistance hurts anyways,
So there is no actual freedom at all.
This archetypal chaotic dream madness (which is also the creative ground),
From which identities/egos in the world spawn,
Resembles the ’12th house’ described in astrology.
It is like the state of ‘dreaming and imagination’.
Waking > Dream > Sleep is what we ordinarily think.
But I think in the spiritual ascension path,
It is the reverse.
Being awake in ‘Sleep’ = Prajna (direct insight),
Being awake in ‘Dream’ = Vigyana (special meta knowledge),
Being awake in ‘Waking’ = Gyana (knowledge)
I feel like my awareness of emptiness is me being awake in the dream world/space/bardos.
This underground/underworld,
Feels like falling into a bottomless pit,
Where there is an infinite fall,
And where I am always in the center in spite of the continuously falling.
Only the scenery continuously keeps changing.
Sometimes I fall through clouds of scintillating mist,
Other times I fall through clouds made of acid.
The only way to communicate or share this experience with others,
Is through imaginative symbolic expressions.
A person going through a similar experience would probably instantly relate.
For others it may be a bit of a stretch to imagine/see.
Madness is a distorted mirror
Madness is a distorted mirror.
For someone with a concrete identity, who is clearly identified with a specific structure of human experience and possibility, the mad person does not affect them much.
Because they do not identify with them at all.
We are not affected by things and people we do not identify with.
They see the mad person as totally separate from them.
However, for someone who is highly open, fluid, with vast vision and empathy, who recognizes in himself the potentials of the entire collective human consciousness itself, this witnessing of madness will hurt/pain a lot.
Because, here the deep visionary and empath can recognize himself in the mad person too.
It is like seeing a funky mirror at an amusement park, that distorts your face making your nose super large, eyes and chin super small etc.
For the person with a concrete identity, he just looks at it and flatly denies having anything to do with that reflection, he just says “this is not me”.
But for the deep visionary, it is trickier, because he is not identified with any fixed concrete identity as such, and sees himself with all possibilities of the collective consciousness.
So, when he sees the distorted mirror in the amusement park, he knows that, that is his face, a distorted version version of his original face.
The difference between the concrete person and the visionary is that, the concrete person believes the mad person is totally separate and has nothing to do with him, while the deep empath visionary can see the mad person IS HIM, in a greatly distorted form.
We are not affected by the things in which we cannot see ourselves in.
That is the root of empathy, is it not?
When your identity is sufficiently subtle, you see yourself in and as everyone and everything.
When you are young, you are mirrored in your mother’s and father’s image of you, which becomes your social identity (relational identity, ego).
If they mirror you in a seriously chaotic inconsistent mirror, then that becomes your “social identity/relational identity/ego”.
You are then never sure of your security, desirability, lovability, value etc.
Because the parent’s mad fluctuations keeps changing you from an angel to a devil randomly.
So then you start living in fear/anxiety all the time because you never know what wrong you have done, what punishment you are going to get, what expectation is going to be shoved on you etc.
They then keep you walking on eggshells all the time.
In order to adapt to those mad expectation projections on you from the parents, you have to keeping shaping yourself too accordingly.
So the end-result is, even your structure will mirror the mad parents.
The interesting thing to note here is that, madness at this intra-family level is only related to “inconsistency”.
A consistent interaction pattern no matter what it is, within the family, will be coherence and sanity. It may be totally mad with respect to the outside world however.
That is why the tyrant is a particular adaptation to madness, where he creates some arbitrary pattern and then stays ultra consistent in his investment to that, forcing others to abide by the same too, punishing them whenever they don’t.
A second adaptation to tolerate madness would be, to completely sacrifice yourself to the other and always changing yourself to match and harmonize with the changing random moods of the mad person.
The third adaptation I can think of is to completely isolate yourself, so that the self-other “painful difficult dynamic” can be totally avoided.
These 3 types of adaptation are essentially the: fight, fawn, flight responses.
If nothing works, and you are stuck in a inescapable situation, then the freeze response happens, where you lose consciousness of the entire self-other dynamic and float away in some out of body dissociated state.
At the societal level, the macrocosm mirrors the microcosm, that is:
The 4 categories of fight/fawn/flight/freeze form:
tyrants/followers/outcasts/hermits
The insight I get is: “People see me as they are, not as I am”.
But then it is also true that: “What I know as myself is only the internalized reflections from others”.
Because one cannot know oneself any more than a candle flame can burn itself.
So this is part of the “self-other” interdependent matrix.
Disharmony/Distortion/Projection = madness —vs— Harmony/Clarity/Independence = Sanity
Madness is always relative.
It is the discordant note in the symphony.
If you were born in a mad family, then the structures that you form mirror that circumstance and outcast/separate you too.
The same can be said about the parents themselves.
Maybe they themselves were the effect of mad circumstances.
So in this way, madness propagates itself in the genetic chain.
The way I deal with madness is, I work to transcend it.
By understanding the higher laws/dharma/truths beyond the madness, I work from that footing on fixing the madness in me and others.
For someone with a concrete identity, who is clearly identified with a specific structure of human experience and possibility, the mad person does not affect them much.
Because they do not identify with them at all.
We are not affected by things and people we do not identify with.
They see the mad person as totally separate from them.
However, for someone who is highly open, fluid, with vast vision and empathy, who recognizes in himself the potentials of the entire collective human consciousness itself, this witnessing of madness will hurt/pain a lot.
Because, here the deep visionary and empath can recognize himself in the mad person too.
It is like seeing a funky mirror at an amusement park, that distorts your face making your nose super large, eyes and chin super small etc.
For the person with a concrete identity, he just looks at it and flatly denies having anything to do with that reflection, he just says “this is not me”.
But for the deep visionary, it is trickier, because he is not identified with any fixed concrete identity as such, and sees himself with all possibilities of the collective consciousness.
So, when he sees the distorted mirror in the amusement park, he knows that, that is his face, a distorted version version of his original face.
The difference between the concrete person and the visionary is that, the concrete person believes the mad person is totally separate and has nothing to do with him, while the deep empath visionary can see the mad person IS HIM, in a greatly distorted form.
We are not affected by the things in which we cannot see ourselves in.
That is the root of empathy, is it not?
When your identity is sufficiently subtle, you see yourself in and as everyone and everything.
When you are young, you are mirrored in your mother’s and father’s image of you, which becomes your social identity (relational identity, ego).
If they mirror you in a seriously chaotic inconsistent mirror, then that becomes your “social identity/relational identity/ego”.
You are then never sure of your security, desirability, lovability, value etc.
Because the parent’s mad fluctuations keeps changing you from an angel to a devil randomly.
So then you start living in fear/anxiety all the time because you never know what wrong you have done, what punishment you are going to get, what expectation is going to be shoved on you etc.
They then keep you walking on eggshells all the time.
In order to adapt to those mad expectation projections on you from the parents, you have to keeping shaping yourself too accordingly.
So the end-result is, even your structure will mirror the mad parents.
The interesting thing to note here is that, madness at this intra-family level is only related to “inconsistency”.
A consistent interaction pattern no matter what it is, within the family, will be coherence and sanity. It may be totally mad with respect to the outside world however.
That is why the tyrant is a particular adaptation to madness, where he creates some arbitrary pattern and then stays ultra consistent in his investment to that, forcing others to abide by the same too, punishing them whenever they don’t.
A second adaptation to tolerate madness would be, to completely sacrifice yourself to the other and always changing yourself to match and harmonize with the changing random moods of the mad person.
The third adaptation I can think of is to completely isolate yourself, so that the self-other “painful difficult dynamic” can be totally avoided.
These 3 types of adaptation are essentially the: fight, fawn, flight responses.
If nothing works, and you are stuck in a inescapable situation, then the freeze response happens, where you lose consciousness of the entire self-other dynamic and float away in some out of body dissociated state.
At the societal level, the macrocosm mirrors the microcosm, that is:
The 4 categories of fight/fawn/flight/freeze form:
tyrants/followers/outcasts/hermits
The insight I get is: “People see me as they are, not as I am”.
But then it is also true that: “What I know as myself is only the internalized reflections from others”.
Because one cannot know oneself any more than a candle flame can burn itself.
So this is part of the “self-other” interdependent matrix.
Disharmony/Distortion/Projection = madness —vs— Harmony/Clarity/Independence = Sanity
Madness is always relative.
It is the discordant note in the symphony.
If you were born in a mad family, then the structures that you form mirror that circumstance and outcast/separate you too.
The same can be said about the parents themselves.
Maybe they themselves were the effect of mad circumstances.
So in this way, madness propagates itself in the genetic chain.
The way I deal with madness is, I work to transcend it.
By understanding the higher laws/dharma/truths beyond the madness, I work from that footing on fixing the madness in me and others.
Illusion and Madness are relative
What is reality? What is sanity?
What is illusion? What is madness?
The cultural/social/political/consensus way of seeing/interpreting existence forms the core of [REALITY and SANITY].
The most solid/enduring/unchanging formation (relatively speaking).
To diverge from this [consensus state of consciousness] and explore other states of consciousness is referred to as exploring [ILLUSIONS].
Illusions are by definition more fleeting because they are not reinforced and commonly held by the collective.
When this feedback mechanism stops, reality becomes illusion.
The sensory world gives the most consistent and enduring feedback and it is shared by all other sensory creatures. So we feel comfortable to call that the REAL WORLD.
Like you have a dream at night.
It is considered to be the most illusory thing because it is not validated/shared by ANYBODY around you and neither is that validated by the sensory input that kicks in the minute you are awake.
So it seems to me that [ILLUSION/MADNESS] represents reality that is [NOT SHARED], while [REALITY/SANITY] represents reality that is [SHARED].
Like if you imagine a BELL CURVE, anything at the ends of the bell curve slides into ILLUSION/MADNESS, while the CENTER of the BELL CURVE represents the CORE of SANITY/REALITY.
Another way to look at this from the personal level is to look at your own personal conditioning.
When you are in a state of mind that is fully in alignment with your DEFAULT MODE OF EXPERIENCE (CONDITIONED BY YOUR CONDITIONING) – you say you are SOBER/SANE/REAL.
Whereas, when you are in a state of mind that is very different from your usual mode/structure of perceiving existence – you say you are in an ALTERED STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS/IN ILLUSION OR FANTASY.
Like say, to feel HUMAN (the experience of being human in a body) is normal/ordinary/sane/real.
Now, how will you interpret an out of body experience, say you feel like a bird and you are flying? Is it real? Is it an illusion?
To me, this question of real or illusion is more related to SOLIDITY than its PURE REALITY.
It also ties to the question:
What is more real? the visible or the invisible?
OR What is more real? – SOLID? OR LIQUID? OR GAS?
OR What is more real? – PHYSICAL BODY? OR HEART? OR MIND/IMAGINATION?
Suppose I release a bunch of smoke and it looks forms a figure.
Would that be less real, than if I showed you the same figure made in stone? or sand?
Usually what I notice is that – the reality of something is associated with its ENDURING-NESS and SOLIDITY.
What is fleeting, relatively unformed/fuzzy/wispy, is referred to as illusion.
In summary, what others call reality and illusion, I see it as:
PERSISTENT ILLUSION(Reality) ———-vs———- FLEETING ILLUSIONS (Illusion)
This is if I consider everything to be an illusion of different degrees.
OR I can also put it as:
PERSISTENT REALITY ———-vs———– FLEETING REALITY
UNCHANGING REALITY ———-vs———– CHANGING REALITY
This is if I consider everything to be reality in different degrees of enduring-ness.
This kind of breaks the duality between illusion and reality.
Illusion is real and reality is illusion.
What is illusion? What is madness?
The cultural/social/political/consensus way of seeing/interpreting existence forms the core of [REALITY and SANITY].
The most solid/enduring/unchanging formation (relatively speaking).
To diverge from this [consensus state of consciousness] and explore other states of consciousness is referred to as exploring [ILLUSIONS].
Illusions are by definition more fleeting because they are not reinforced and commonly held by the collective.
When this feedback mechanism stops, reality becomes illusion.
The sensory world gives the most consistent and enduring feedback and it is shared by all other sensory creatures. So we feel comfortable to call that the REAL WORLD.
Like you have a dream at night.
It is considered to be the most illusory thing because it is not validated/shared by ANYBODY around you and neither is that validated by the sensory input that kicks in the minute you are awake.
So it seems to me that [ILLUSION/MADNESS] represents reality that is [NOT SHARED], while [REALITY/SANITY] represents reality that is [SHARED].
Like if you imagine a BELL CURVE, anything at the ends of the bell curve slides into ILLUSION/MADNESS, while the CENTER of the BELL CURVE represents the CORE of SANITY/REALITY.
Another way to look at this from the personal level is to look at your own personal conditioning.
When you are in a state of mind that is fully in alignment with your DEFAULT MODE OF EXPERIENCE (CONDITIONED BY YOUR CONDITIONING) – you say you are SOBER/SANE/REAL.
Whereas, when you are in a state of mind that is very different from your usual mode/structure of perceiving existence – you say you are in an ALTERED STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS/IN ILLUSION OR FANTASY.
Like say, to feel HUMAN (the experience of being human in a body) is normal/ordinary/sane/real.
Now, how will you interpret an out of body experience, say you feel like a bird and you are flying? Is it real? Is it an illusion?
To me, this question of real or illusion is more related to SOLIDITY than its PURE REALITY.
It also ties to the question:
What is more real? the visible or the invisible?
OR What is more real? – SOLID? OR LIQUID? OR GAS?
OR What is more real? – PHYSICAL BODY? OR HEART? OR MIND/IMAGINATION?
Suppose I release a bunch of smoke and it looks forms a figure.
Would that be less real, than if I showed you the same figure made in stone? or sand?
Usually what I notice is that – the reality of something is associated with its ENDURING-NESS and SOLIDITY.
What is fleeting, relatively unformed/fuzzy/wispy, is referred to as illusion.
In summary, what others call reality and illusion, I see it as:
PERSISTENT ILLUSION(Reality) ———-vs———- FLEETING ILLUSIONS (Illusion)
This is if I consider everything to be an illusion of different degrees.
OR I can also put it as:
PERSISTENT REALITY ———-vs———– FLEETING REALITY
UNCHANGING REALITY ———-vs———– CHANGING REALITY
This is if I consider everything to be reality in different degrees of enduring-ness.
This kind of breaks the duality between illusion and reality.
Illusion is real and reality is illusion.
Madness and Belief
Madness is basically the breach of integrity between the lower reality and the higher, and initiated by the lower.
For example: To believe in separation (the core madness).
Because that belief is out of integrity with the higher reality and therefore veils the higher truth.
Another example: Belief that there is nothing higher than mind blocks all of the higher reality beyond it.
So each belief is a veil.
Belief is madness, and madness is relative.
Every breach between the lower and higher reality is madness.
The worst prison is a closed heart.
It closes itself off to all of the higher reality/field and veils it.
Infinite/Unlimited [A] —-[B]—–[C]—–[D]—–[E] Finite/Limited
B is mad wrt. A
C is mad wrt. B
And so on.
Because B is only one of the possibilities of A, while A is far more expansive.
B looks like a narrow reality tunnel to A.
I could also refer to this as a recursive tunneling of contexts.
Infinite/Unlimited [Universe]——[Galaxy]—–[Solar system]——[Planet]—–[Island] Finite/Limited
Journey to the Abstract 