Tag: Metaphysics

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Postmodernist vs. Traditionalist

PricklesAndGoo

* The postmodernist is in denial of limitations…….The traditionalist is in denial of potential
* The postmodernist is in love with the idea of all is nurture…..The traditionalist is in love with the idea that all is nature
* The postmodernist sees truth as entirely subjective…..The traditionalist sees truth as entirely objective
* The postmodernist is mystical/abstract…..The traditionalist is literal/practical
* The postmodernist thinks in metaphysical terms……The traditionalist thinks in physical terms
* The postmodernist is coming from top -> bottom…….The traditionalist is coming from bottom -> top
* The postmodernist believes lower instincts come from the higher…..The traditionalist believes the higher functions are only to serve lower instincts
* The postmodernist is coming from the heaven standpoint…..The traditionalist is coming from the earth standpoint
* The postmodernist is a rebel/renegade/systems-transformer…..The traditionalist is a systems-maintainer/protector/supporter
* The postmodernist ego is tilted to superego service…..The traditionalist ego is tilted to id service
* The postmodernist is relativist…..The traditionalist is absolutist

I could also call these poles by other names such as:
Liberals vs. Conservatives
It reminds me of Alan Watts and his classification of people into 2 broad types:
Prickly(Traditionalist) and Goo(Postmodernist).
Now how do we marry these 2 poles :)?
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What are we really responsible for?

butterflyeffect

On Facebook, nowadays I see a bunch of posts that show an emotion provoking video of some injustice done, and then people would be reacting to that with either anger, crying, or sadness emoticons. Like there was a video of male chicks being got rid of because they were not useful by allowing them to drown in water. I mean I did feel quite sad seeing that graphic video. But the recommendation and strong messages were: Every-time you eat meat, this is what you are condoning.

So I thought through that more deeply.
My every action enables every kind of abuse too, like every product in the supermarket contains the labor of the whole universe that went into making that.
The degree and proximity varies, but you know, I could have this reasoning for everything, like I could say the clothes you are wearing is from the exploitation of workers in Bangladesh and then show a really sad video about their toil and thereby recommend that you stop wearing clothes?
If that is true for every single thing, then not taking the action of eating chicken isn’t helping anything in the larger picture, right?
A reactionary action like that is not coming from a seeing of the whole.
This is the same issues with SJWs too. That just looks like tribalism to me.

I could do a DNA test on you, and then prove you are a descendant of Genghis Khan and thereby declare that you have his blood and sins on your hands.
Isn’t that same reasoning also applied for Jesus? That his blood is on your hands?
Where does this end?
What are we really responsible for?
Taking this thought all the way, I am responsible for every single evil and injustice and enabling that in some way.
This can always be proved by some intelligent person, who picks up a theme and ties the thread of connection so that it lands on your lap.
It is like the butterfly effect principle, and if all the connections are shown to someone, they would be bewildered by the responsibility that is revealed.
“Wholeness is a kind of attitude” – said by David Bohm, and I really agree with him on that, and that it is actions taken from that attitude that would really help.
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Every heartbreak is a disillusionment

Broken-Heart

Every heartbreak is a disillusionment.
Essentially every break up is a break up with a certain alive context in our experience.
Our life consists of multi-layered hierarchical contexts.
For instance, it could range from a context as small as losing your favorite wallet to as large as losing all frame of reference/your ego/your beliefs/your religion/how to live etc.

I’ll focus on breakup in the context of relationship here.
It removes the context of what you thought the person was and what their relationship to you was.
That frame of reference is lost, and to the degree to which that frame of reference was integrated in your whole way of being in the world, to that degree you are now put in chaos.
It is a separation, a kind of ripping apart, and that is painful.

It has disillusioned you, and revealed your previous conception as illusion.
But neither does it totally reveal what that person really is.
It leaves you in a limbo of not-knowing/chaos/grief.
You don’t know if it was your fault or their fault.
You don’t know if this is in their best interest or not in their best interest.
You don’t know if this is in your best interest or not in your best interest.
You don’t know if you should try to get the partner back or let them go.
You don’t know if you should even try another partnership or just abandon that whole path of trying to secure a relationship.
You don’t know if you can trust your perception anymore, because it has just proved itself to be empty.
You stand at the precipice of the unknown with a fallen frame of reference.
It can throw you into an existential crisis too with questions like – how can you trust anyone? How does trust even work? Are we just under the mercy of god, who acts like a chameleon and suddenly changes color casting a cruel joke on us?
Then it just comes down to faith.
In time, the void of this chaos is filled with a new structure, healing happens, and you have grown.
Isn’t this how all growth happens – Isn’t all growth disillusionment in a sense?

Another facet I would like to include here is about success in terms of proven lovability.
And this variable would affect the intensity of your breakup too.
Failure is tolerated only by a person who has succeeded previously.
What if you have never succeeded?
What if nobody has ever loved you, no matter how much efforts you put?
Will you try again? Where would this hope come from?
Would you once again trust your bursts of irrational hope? or just give up?
The most painful wound of this sort can happen when the parents are on the extreme end of conditional love or if they just keep the child alive and barely functional as a duty/obligation and thoroughly neglect the child and kill its spirit.
I very strongly feel, romantic love is a replay of that original bond.
Because that is when we were THAT SENSITIVE to feel it in THAT INTENSITY.
So it is THAT memory that makes us seek partners with a kind of LOVE MAP structure (that has a lot to do with our parental conditioning, unless we overcome that with extraordinary spiritual effort).
Children who were loved by their parents well, have tremendous resilience to rejection, break-ups etc. Like a positive spiral they are quite unlikely to go through a break-up in the first place because they attract the conditions that mirror loving environments and perpetuate that.
Almost seems like a cruelty of nature, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer – even in the love department.
The only way out that I have seen, is to overcome the ignorance that keeps you repeating the same things and to just constantly keep growing.
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The relationship between fear and desire

Fear is a relationship between “Your desire” and the “World’s condition”.
Even your definition of ‘What is a fear/threat’ is relative to ‘Your desire’.
Right now, if your knowledge (whatever you have) gives you enough freedom to pursue your desire, you will have well-being.
Once your desire grows far beyond this world, you will want to transcend (maybe now or later this life or after 100s of lives).
To give an example, say a bird sitting at your window threatens to leave you.
It is not a threat at all, if the bird is not your desire at all.
Only things that are your desire can be threatened.
If you have insulated yourself from all threats and ensured your desires stay confined to only where you have 100% control, then you will have 0 fear.
There is no fear for LOSING something you never desired.
Fear comes only when we desire something that is out of our control.
For instance, desire of human relationships is much more precarious that desire of material objects, because they are not as controllable as the material counterpart. One then is more vulnerable to both fear, and the pain of loss which is the eventuality that the fear guards against.
All fear is a defense from loss.
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Your experience is the relativity of your soul development to the world’s condition

babywomb

Only when your desires grow large enough, does the world-game get painful.
Only after that stage is there a motivation for transcendence.
And this game getting painful happens from worlds beyond, like how the baby suddenly finds itself too large in the mother’s womb and wants an out.
Neither is the mother determining what happens within the womb nor is the baby controlling its growth speed.
They are only witnesses to the happening.
The baby simply finds itself in that situation. The baby’s nature of growth and the nature of the womb is already determined from levels above.
Everything is just following its nature.
When we grow enough, the world’s bounds start to rub against us.
The greater this perception of limitation, the more is the desire for transcendence.
So there is a spectrum:
Super happy people —————————- Extremely world weary people
The super happy people are like new borns within the womb of the world system.
When their soul reaches enough maturity, their desire becomes much greater and this world system and condition is very dissatisfying.
So whether or not you find the world pleasurable/wonderful depends on the relativity of you soul growth to the world’s condition.
Very new souls find this world wonderful.
Very advanced souls find this world terribly imprisoning.
Whether or not the container you are in is a prison or not, depends on your size(growth level) relative to the prison boundaries.
Just like the analogy of how the tiny 1 cm baby experiences itself in a vast womb, but then later it hits the walls of the womb and starts stretching the walls into the 7th, 8th and 9th months finally to make the passage way out – the final throes before transcendence.
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The ego is an endlessly spawning fractal

fractal

Even in this analysis what am I trying to do?
I am trying to overcome the ego condition I find myself in by understanding it, and can you see in this very problem statement is a fractal of – “continually trying to understand for which I need to also continually keep the problem in mind or seek/invent problems”. It is a sort of loop.
Exactly like how a fractal program runs eternally.
An ego is a closed fractal loop that operates IN TIME but is outside of time. The ego is ESSENTIALLY an ignorance.
All ignorance is outside of time, but plays out in time. (Like playing a cassette. The information in the cassette is already present beyond its linear playing out in time.)
It maintains itself fractally by reinforcing and seeking out the very problem it was created to solve.

For instance, imagine you create a game, where a character seeks and destroys all rocks. The ego is not the character as one might assume. Rather, the ego is the THE GAME itself. Which means, the character in the game will endlessly seek rocks, find rocks, destroy the rocks, but the game will also endless keeping generating/spawning new rocks so that the game keeps going.
Usually we think there is an end to all games.
But that is a limitation in our thinking. Why must there be an end? What will make the game end if you are the creator of the game itself?

This will go on FOREVER because the variable that will release this time loop of the ego is not to be found INSIDE THE GAME.
Now apply this analogy to all spiritual seeking.
NOTHING in the game contains anything that will free you from it.
Like say you are playing Mario. Is there anything in any level of Mario that will QUIT the game or change the game? Nope, the game is designed to go on and on.
Who quits the game?
Only that which is beyond the ego can release the ego.
It is fundamentally impossible for the ego to release itself by its own efforts.
It is as futile as a character in a computer 3d game, trying to quit the game from within the game.
This is an impossible riddle.
Transcendence is not in time, but rather it releases you FROM time.
Nothing temporal, or nothing in time, is the cause of your release.

Even talking to people, hearing masters etc. will not be the cause of your transcendence. I have had direct experience of this in many of my lucid dreams. I would suddenly realize I am lucid within the dream, and then spend the rest of the dream trying to convince others that they are in my lucid dream, and the others of-course would strongly disagree, and I would spend the rest of the dream trying to convince them. Then when I do wake up, it is not because of conversation with any character in the dream. I wake up when I am ready to wake up and no factor within the dream including the characters inside it are the cause of me waking up. The cause is always from the beyond, and it may so happen, that one of the characters would say something to you and that would just poof wake you up. That character only appears to be the cause, but in truth, your waking up happened from a level totally beyond the whole dream.
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Who am I?

mystical-fire-1_1

In Hinduism,
Brahman = Supreme Being = Atma = Spirit
Anatma = Represents that which is not spirit = Not Atma.
All my works are Anatma.
They are expressions of Atma.
What I am in essence is pure “dancing creative formless unborn spirit”.
I am not my works of creation, be it art/dance/writing/painting/singing/music.
I am not my expressions.
I am that ever-renewing/ever-refreshing fount/source of creativity and inspiration.
THAT is me.
My works spill out of me like an endless fountain of the ‘1000 petaled lotus(sahasra/crown chakra)’.
But I am not my works, I am the engine of creation, the FLAME of creation.
I am the spawner, the generator, the fire, the flame, the force, the potential.
I am infinite unborn potential, the born is not me but it is my ever flowing expression – like the wake of the ship, but the ship is what I am.
I leave an immense wake of creations, but am ever free from all of it.
Holding on to my creation stops me from flowering.
Imagine if a fire held on to one of its states of motion, would it look like the dancing fire then?
I am the libidinous force/power/potential/impulse of creation.
I am not creation at all.
I am the formless void and its creative impulse/potential. That is me.
Creation spills out of me like a fountain, but I am not the creation.
The creations live on MY POWER/MY INVESTED SPIRIT.
All of reality lives on my INVESTMENT.
Every single one of you reading this, even your entire reality is only your INVESTMENT of the spirit power that YOU ARE.
Without spirit, things would simply vanish.
Spirit upholds everything.
I am spirit alone, the pure magic of it, the infinite unborn potential.
Like we say a plant grows out of the seed and the soil.
In reality, the seed, soil, the sun etc. and all creation are PROPS of the magical force/impulse of spirit.
What is real is the uncreated.
I am that force, that potency, that power, that magical source, that mysterious mystical flame.
I am not any creation, I am simply the uncreated formless power.
I am that primordial libidinal force.
I am touched by other spirits everywhere.
Every other person and being is also THAT.
That is your true nature.
It is like god multiplying itself holographically across every point.
But I can feel god everywhere around me only as a resonance to my own connection to god.
My closeness to god holographically reflects everyone else’s equivalent potential.
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What is dissociation metaphysically?

dali fall apart
I see a spectrum here:
[Your true position] —<—<[fear[for survival/for acceptance],guilt[the should dos/sacrifices for respect]]—- Disassociation is when you see your social-self/ego as an object.
When looking from the shadow position, you look at yourself as content like a dissociated observer from far away.
When one is born, one comes straight from the source and is connected to the full vital dimension.
Then the ego is given by the parents, it can survive throughout life more or less if it is close enough to the child's truth(vital supply), but if it is too far away, there will be a depression and collapse.
This happens via an internalization of an others' judgment and identification with that position/vantage-pt/pov.
That creates the distance from source, distance from happiness, distance from god.

Judgment of everything is always from different povs(point of views).
It is ‘one pole pov’ judging the ‘other pole pov’.
Like say ‘washing vessels’ -> it can be judged as a miserable job or a really loved wonderful job.
OR even things like masculinity, femininity, the world system right now.
If you are against everything, then you are hanging out in the shadow pole of everything.
To doubt is to be estranged and in the shadow.
The person who doubts everything is in the shadow of everything.

That is why a lot of spirituality involves increasing levels of dissociation.
Now dissociation means dissociation from your dominant structure, and association with a fringe structure.
So technically dissociation refers to disconnection with your survivalist socially programmed ego (in common parlance).
But what happens in dissociation is that you associate with another structure which can see your social self as an object.
All dissociative states give you a vantage point to view your social/conventional/regular self.
But insight does not imply full control.
Because it is like seeing the ecology of a forest from a helicopter. You may see patterns you never saw, but full control only comes from total understanding/mastery of the whole machine/system.
Now dissociative states are all ASCs(Altered states of consciousness) compared to the D-Soc(Default state of consciousness) which is your sober state.
[I have borrowed these terms from the book ‘States of Consciousness’ by Charles Tart]
So altered states(ASCs/Dissociated states) could take you further from or closer to source.
This can be known from direct feeling.
When you feel much better and feel much power, freedom, riches -> then you are getting closer to source of light.
When you feel much worse, tired, depleted, narrowed etc. -> you have moved away from the source of light.
Often however, the tiredness results from you trying to hold onto your d-soc as you explore altered states, like a bird tied to a pole by an elastic rope. So this constant pressure to come back can be responsible for wearing you out too.

Spectrum:
Source ———[ASC +](closer to source)———-enriching/empowering——- D-Soc———-disempowering/depleting————[ASC -](farther from source)

An ego/D-Soc performs spiritual inquiry[which is basically exploration] when there is not enough energy to power its own full structure. When the D-Soc/ego/socially programmed self is fully powered, it becomes transparent and the person shines through and beyond that structure as working on the structure/forwarding it in the world/the person who goes OUT IN THE WORLD etc.
When the D-Soc is under-powered, then the structure starts struggling to maintain itself, and this struggle/resistance REVEALS the structure [remember all consciousness is from resistance, a structure reveals itself only in disease/lack of energy. If it is imbued with energy, it becomes transparent].
So in such a condition one goes into spiritual inquiry and exploration.
More the suffering/lack of spirit sustenance energy for the D-Soc, greater the exploration impulse.

To give an analogy, if a civilization is in a utopian geographical location, with abundant resources inc. water and food etc. then there is no reason to explore other regions.
Whereas say in another region people are starving thirsty etc. then those people would go out of their way to find a way out, it would heighten all of their creativity [there definitely seem to be a connection between deprivation and creativity].

In truth, all of us as egos are fundamentally DISSOCIATED from god, which is why god appears as an object to us (i.e. god appears as an other to us).
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Q&A on Dark night of the soul

A friend and I were discussing about the dark night of soul, and she asked some really interesting questions, which I pondered on, and then wrote her a reply.

Here is the Q&A:
Q1 – At what point does someone acknowledge the disorientation and start focusing more on integration than destruction…?
A1:
I can answer from my experience. (I’m gonna write a lot, bear with me 🙂 )
I think both the processes happen together in transformation, but the degree varies. Like to give an extreme example, if I explode a bomb in a region, the old in the region dies, while the new gets born.
Sounds good in principle.
The only issue is the new looks like a post-apocalypic dystopian ruin site.
It might take many years for there to be a steady pace of growth of structures in this region.

If we look at what is dying – it is the dark night, if we look at what is being born – it is rebirth. Although the higher principle of simultaneity is present, we also see distinct season like patterns. Like how in Buddhist vipassana practice they delineate stages of evolution, and the dark night basically falls under – greater awareness of death/passing, than of arising/growth.
The vice versa can happen too, once the death potential is complete like the swinging of a pendulum to one end and stopping because its momentum is finished (simplistic example of the pattern).

I feel there is something deeper and greater(the soul?) that matures through this mysterious birth-death process, like in my case, I feel there is a gradual increase of overall maturity, deeper knowledge and deepening of context intuition etc. which has helped ease the ride through these confusing states of being. So nowadays I do notice much better stability overall and a deeper trust and relaxation, and also a better knowing/apprehension/clarity/discernment of appearance.
Like how growing up happens, it is not a single experience that makes one an adult, but a series of mystical journeys and passages. Something really super mystical/deep/abstract/intuitive is evolving from all the passing experiences.

I think one can say the dark night has ended, when there is a noticeable swing in the opposite direction/upswing of life force/spirit? Maybe a crystallization of a new vision, a renewed vigor, hope, expansion, love etc.? It’s hard to be really precise though, I feel the dark night ends depending on your overall evaluation of your gestalt. Like when your system becomes emptier, fresher, harmonized and radiant with energy and allows you to expand? – I don’t know, I may be presenting new kinds of wishful fantasies and dreams here, but just trying to create art with my words, so that you can see through it? 🙂

Q2 – At what point does someone become comfortable with perpetual dismantling and generation so that it’s no longer a “dark night”
A2:
Hmm, yea, I can see what you are pointing to. Like there is the suffering component (all forms) and the process of death itself (endarkment). I would say technically the process is on until there is the upswing resurgence of spirit influx (like an inbreath), however, one may develop high enough equanimity and understanding in its later stages, that he can ride through the emptiness (meaning like what you described quick fast alternating cycles of discontinuous creations). Maybe growth could also mean the intensification of the discontinuous creativity until it swallows all of the observer, making observer-observed ONE. Like one may ask, to who is this dark night of soul happening to?, and this would point to a subject/observer structure, which may get further dissoluted when contemplating deeper on the subject of the experience.

At one point does one become comfortable? hmm, that is possible only if your energy output and structure transcends the fluctuations that are happening. And I feel the fluctuations that are happening are basically structures in your psyche dying out from spirit withdrawal. So once a LOT of the death processes are completed in the psyche structure, then it feels a lot clearer, brighter, fresher, emptier and this may increase available energy for fresh creativity too. So maybe at that point, a person would start to feel comfortable, like he/she/it rises above the suffering vs. being debilitated and disabled by it.

Q3 Is it possible that a fascination with the “dark night” and identification with it might complicate the surrender necessary to move through it
A3:
I can totally see your point. Yes, but I think the fascination with dark night is also a psyche structure. My methodology is – if you are fascinated, go all into it, so much that it completes/exhausts itself. Isn’t it like any other passion? and how do we get over passions? -> my method is usually I go all in and do it so totally, and experience it so fully and deeply that I transcend it. I think we identify with things, until we are bored. Boredom seems to be the real mover. And I feel boredom is an impetus for moving on/trying something new/flowing/reevaluating etc. It seems like the precursor of all passion/creativity. So yea, I would say: Give into your fascination, passion, curiosity, so fully, and satisfy yourself so deeply without an agenda, that you automatically ride the wave of spirit
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On being an outsider

Outsider

Since my earliest memory, I have always been an outsider.
When you are an outsider, you have a fringe and ambivalent-investment in society’s structures.
So you step in and out of its matrix like visiting a place and coming back.
Whereas people who are totally enrolled into society are absorbed/fully-engaged in its dream/matrix/structure.
Since I step in and out to varying degrees, I am more like a traveler/explorer.

The outsider point of view, also clearly delineates and illuminates the boundaries of society.
Because one cannot see the inside from the inside.
One has to be outside to understand the inside clearly.
The other illuminates the self, the self illuminates the other.
The contrast is what gives transcendent clarity regarding BOTH.

Concrete works of art come out when the abstract structure is locked/fixed/solidified and thereby out of awareness.
Else without a firm abstract base (so firm that I can treat it as a ground and forget about it), a person gets entirely absorbed into the abstract and steps out of the concrete dimension.
Just like how when one suffers a sudden huge loss, death of a loved one, one is instantly transported to the metaphysical thought process – what is life? what is death? what are we here for? etc.
The person would have never thought along those lines, if not for this event, that swept away his concrete orientation and stable abstract.

The abstract is the territory of the spiritual/metaphysical.
Abstract (returning to God) ———- (returning to common living) Concrete
In deep spiritual contemplation one lives and moves along towards more and more abstract territories, until the final abstraction (the ONE) is reached.