Blog - December
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Introduction
In this article, I show the various parallels between the nature of spacetime warpage and certain types of movements in consciousness, hoping to construct a psychological model based on discoveries in and related to Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
The Spacetime Fabric
Einstein's Theory of Relativity showed that space and time were part of one fabric, named spacetime, and that large bodies of mass warp spacetime.
One of the fundamental revolutions in science Einstein created was the way gravity was represented in contrast with the classical Newtonian model. In Newtonian physics, a large mass possessed gravity as a force which pulled other objects towards it. For a relativist, it was the bending of the spacetime fabric around a large mass which produced the effect of gravity on a neighboring object. Thus, planet Earth does not revolve around the Sun because of the pull of the Sun's gravity, it actually follows the equivalent of a straight line in the warped spacetime fabric surrounding the Sun. Scientific observations of Earth's orbit around the Sun have proven Einstein's equations to be accurate in this regard, whereas Newton's classic equations are off to a minor degree.
By solving Einstein's equations, scientists also discovered the existence of black holes, which is essentially an extreme level of warpage surrounding a single "point of singularity". Such a phenomenon could occur if a large body of mass collapsed on itself through its own gravity, or for the reason that "warpage begets warpage", as physicist Kip S. Thorne states in "The Future of Spacetime".
Also according to Einstein's equations, due to the constant speed of light, time slows down as one travels at faster velocities. (This has been verified by placing a highly accurate "atomic clock" on board a very fast jet plane and then comparing the time with another clock that remained stationary on the ground.) In addition, time theoretically slows down as one approaches the center of a black hole.
Constructing a Psychological Theory of Relativity
When I first started reading about black holes and Einstein's relativity theories a few months ago, I began to wonder whether one could construct a psychological model born out of an analogy to the spacetime fabric, let's call it "consciousness-time", and if so, whether or not similar laws would apply between the two.
For instance, when we concentrate on a single idea or visualized image or state of being, are we creating a point of singularity in the consciousness-time fabric? Does the consciousness matrix get warped so that we experience a psychological form of gravity that begins to accelerate us psychologically to the point of our focus?
The Warpage of Subjective Time
Despite being an old book, "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking still presents one of the best descriptions that I've read on this subject and I highly recommend it as a starter.
Usually, when I read a book, I not only pay attention to what the author is trying to say, but what life is trying to tell me through reading the book's message at that specific moment, in that specific state of mind or passage of my evolution. In a half joking manner, I would claim that I neither judge a book by its cover nor by its contents, but by the synchronicities reading the book produces.
In the case of reading Hawking's book, the synchronistic events were quite interesting. I had taken the train out to a part of the city (San Francisco) with which I wasn't very familiar. I had made this decision because that day, I had a distinct desire bloom within me to take a stroll through a specific neighborhood out there that I had only glimpsed in the past. I did so, and the winding streets left me entirely disoriented as to which direction I should take to head back home. I finally found a bus line that I recognized, but I took it in the wrong direction. By the time I realized I was going the wrong way, I had already traveled a half hour in the opposite direction of my destination!
Throughout the bus ride, I had been reading the section about the Theory of Relativity and the warpage of spacetime. While doing so, I experienced rather distinct fluctuations of my own subjective experience of Time, beginning with the shift from the impatient anticipation of getting home and then surrendering myself to patience and indifference to the length of my trip upon realizing that I had yet another hour on the road because I had been going the wrong way.
When I finally transferred to my usual bus line an hour later, the trip seemed to take the tiniest fraction of the usual time and I felt the world speeding by as if I were on a plane. Such a cluster of synchronistic events highlighted the fact that while the warpage of physical time requires extreme situations such as traveling near the speed of light or nearing the proximity of a large body of mass, warpage of time in consciousness is, relatively speaking, hardly an abnormal event. And in order to establish connections between the laws of spacetime warpage and similar patterns in consciousness, one should recognize the relative ease through which warpage in consciousness can occur. Finally, if there indeed does exist equivalent patterns, then understanding one discipline could provide insight into another, and the fluidity of consciousness can prove to be an aid in our understanding of the physical universe.
Many have claimed experiencing states in which the passage of time became significantly distorted. Although such states have been reported by mystics and near death experiencers, they most commonly occur during a traumatic or pseudo-traumatic event, such as a car crash. My own personal experience occurred when I once dropped a bottle of pepsi on the floor. Time was almost standing still as I watched the bottle spinning in the air in slow-motion, hit the floor and spew out a beautiful, circular fountain of bubbly brown liquid.
One could reason that the intense focus which results from a traumatic situation produces a "point of singularity" in consciousness and enough warpage is created in the consciousness-time matrix to result in a noticeably different experience of Time.
As if in response to these ideas I stumbled across an article on a news website a few days later, which can be found at http://www.livescience.com/health/071211-time-slow.html. It was about a group of scientists that wanted to test whether the subjective effect of the slowing down of time in people due to entering a state of emergency actually enabled them to read a monitor which flickered numbers faster than ordinary consciousness was able to register. The volunteers failed to read these numbers despite clearly feeling the time slowdown effect and the scientists claimed that experiencing the slowing of time comes from an excited portion of the brain registering an extra set of memories, and thus the effect was an illusion.
There are still, however, arguments that question the conclusions of the experiment. For example, perhaps the physical apparatus of vision remains fixed in its speed of receptivity. Consciousness, then, might be experiencing time more slowly but it would be out of sync with the physical process of registering the numbers on the monitor.
Secondly, let us suppose that the sense of emergency propels us into a dream-like state. If so, then just as we have difficulty remembering all the details of our dreams, if any at all, so would our memory be selective during moments of trauma. Had the flickering numbers been instrumental for the volunteers' survival, perhaps the numbers would have been registered accurately.
In any case, from this experiment whether or not consciousness does experience warpage in subjective Time cannot be concluded and while the warpage of time is a curious subject, my own focus is on evolution. And thus, the psychological movement which is interesting is that which ultimately results in higher states of mind. I, therefore, find the study of the malleability of subjective Time to be of limited use and I am more interested to see if we can come up with a model for "psychological gravity" that would help us understand the underlying nature behind the movement of consciousness over time.
Concentration and Meditation
A commonly practiced type of meditation involves establishing a very intense and unwavering concentration on a single point of focus. The ability to accomplish this is seen to be of high importance to Buddhist monks, for example.
Richard Davidson is a scientist famous for his research on emotions and the brain. He collaborated with the Dalai Lama and a team of monks to study brain activity while these experienced practitioners meditated. "What we found is that the longtime practitioners showed brain activation on a scale we have never seen before," said Davidson, the results showed an unusually high level of high-frequency gamma waves and brain synchrony. Click here to read the article in the Washington Post.
The monks were asked to meditate on unconditional compassion. It is a question in my mind whether the same brain activity would have resulted were the monks asked to meditate on something less transcendental in nature. From my experience, unconditional compassion, like unconditional love, like ecstasy, is an energy of a higher order. As I mentioned in the beginning of my October post, such states smooth out one's distortion and enable one to reach higher states of mind, having opened at least the heart chakra, or green ray. My own experience in October allowed me to detect synchronicities quite vividly, i.e. the harmonies in life, and my mind opened up to many new ideas and inter-connections. I experienced a fluidity of thought that was siginficantly different than my ordinary state of mind.
To return to the subject of warped consciousness-time, one way of explaining the process undergone by the monks meditating was that the point of singularity established was unconditional compassion. One can conclude that their concentrative powers enabled the practitioners to quickly arrive at this state, and the resulting brain activity showed significant difference from their normal state, which denotes a profound shift in consciousness.
Long Term Warpage
The monk example leaves one stumbling in the dark because one does not have a solid picture of what the monks were doing exactly. There is the argument, for example, that since unconditional compassion was a state they experienced often, that it took little effort to return to that state through meditation.
Let us proceed to another example. In my August post, I wrote about a fascinating vision I had that told me to "achieve micro-buoyancy". This message, coming from my deeper self I presume, seemed to suggest manifesting both the masculine and the feminine side simultaneously. I did not know what to make of this idea, and so I racked my brain on it for many weeks on end. In other words, it became my point of singularity. The result was a high level of synchronicities, dreams, and traversals in consciousness that were related to the subject of the feminine and masculine polarity. It seemed like life itself was warped to help me explore the subject. After a month or so, I had accumulated a database of events, which, if one were to lay out side by side at once, would look like a slow tornado of experiences that oscillated along the masculine/feminine polarity.
Such an example shows how the movement of consciousness over a long period of time can be affected by retaining a relatively unwavering point of focus. During the Hurricane Period, such exploratory movement occurred completely internally (psychologically), within the span of seconds at times, whenever I focused intently upon a particular subject. The relative increase of the speed of movement was regulated by the intensity with which I focused upon the subject of enquiry. When the Hurricane Thinking occurred smoothly, I would reach revelations concerning my point of focus in a very short amount of time, or rapidly reach a new state of mind that was related to the subject at hand.
Normally, our focus is diffused along the lines of many topics that hold our attention. Unlike when a single aspect of our evolution holds our attention, the resulting underlying order behind our everyday internal and external experiences becomes ambiguous and vague, to be compared to the difference between the ripples made by a single pebble thrown into a pond and the tumultuous ebb and flow when many pebbles are thrown in all at once.
Hallucinating the "X"
Many scientists theorize that at the other side of a black hole is a white hole, that a black hole serves as an entrance into another dimension, or a parallel universe.
One can graph a simple version of the warpage found near a black hole as the bottom half of an "X". And if it is true that white holes exist on the other side, you get a full "X".
In the Ra Material, an "X" is described as a symbol of transformation. It is used in one of the concept complexes that Ra presented as a description of one of the seven archetypes of the mind, namely the "Transformation of the Mind".
As I've stated in earlier posts, I've been hallucinating an "X" almost every time I close my eyes for the last ten years or so. In the beginning, I simply saw the image without any additional innerscape content. Over time, having manifested more curiosity as to its meaning, my visions began explaining this symbol. The first vision showed me that situated at the bottom middle portion of the "X" was the bulk of humanity, and in the top middle portion was depicted a paradise-like setting, complete with a rainbow, an ocean beach, and a palm tree. In other words, the purpose of the game was to go through the middle and into the paradise on the other side.
Over time, I learned that the two poles of the "X" represented the opposite extremes of a polarity. I suspected that it was the masculine/feminine polarity at the time. As one starts nearer the bottom, one's polarization can be quite intense. As one goes up towards the middle of the "X", one is forced to take the middle of the two extremes. At least this was my thinking at the time, which was influenced by popular Buddhist teachings that encouraged taking the middle path. I now see things quite differently, however. And my first explanation why this is not the case is simply that one can easily achieve the middle of the road while still at the bottom of the "X".
What seems to occur is more of a convergence of polarity, or a unification of the opposite poles. In the case of my "achieve mirco-buoyancy" vision, the suggestion was to manifest both sides of the polarity simultaneously. But, how is this is possible? My best answer so far: Through convergence, finding unity, and shedding the extra, unnecessary baggage which either side of a polarity offers.
If one were to take the model of evolution that I've presented in earlier posts to be an upward-spiraling movement that forever diminishes in oscillation (which makes the shape of a cone), the entrance into the next dimension involves the collapsing of the spiral into a single point of singularity.
The Tornado-Like Effects of a Black Hole
Kip S. Thorne, one of the leading theoretical physicists alive today, wrote a chapter in a book titled "The Future of Spacetime" (published in 2002) in which he stated the following:
Besides the bending of space and the slowing and downflow of time, there is a third aspect of a black hole's spacetime warpage: a tornado-like whirl of space and time around and around the hole's horizon [also called the hole's edge].
Now, compare this with a dream I had recently: I was in a room that was filled with boxes and strange furniture. I started climbing the boxes until I reached a height from which it seemed dangerous to come back down. This height represented a higher state of mind and my phobia of returning to a more mundane state. Someone in the dream suggested that I use a very sturdy, newly built ladder, of the latest technology. I started climbing down the ladder but it started oscillating. The lower my state of mind became, the more I orbited round and round.
Kip S. Thorne, in the same article, then states that as one approaches the point of singularity of a black hole, the tornado-like effect turns into an extremely chaotic warpage "on scales so extremely microscopic that they are profoundly influenced by the uncertainty principle [that is witnessed in quantum mechanics]."
Similarly, in my experiences in Hurricane Thinking, there is a shift from a spiraling motion to a seemingly chaotic motion as I approach a higher state of mind. As I wrote in my October post, before ever reading Thorne's words, "The higher the state of mind, the more [Hurricane Thinking] resembles electricity sparking about a neural network."
In my higher states of mind, I have no ego, therefore there is no spiraling motion. What I experience instead is what I call "cosmic thinking". I think a thought, or attentively fixate upon a specific proclivity, and, within nanoseconds or no time at all, I witness reactions to that thought or proclivity. I see them geometrically situated in a pattern similar to the spiraling motion in that I recognize them to be evolution-inspiring. But, I am no longer moving, I think and then witness. It is as if I am interacting with the mind of the cosmos, hence the name.
Converging Polarities
We see in nature that opposites attract, even though they seem incompatible. While "men are from Mars and women are from Venus", the attraction of the opposite sex is ultimately responsible for keeping the human race from going extinct, as is the case with most living creatures. The dynamics between the opposite sides of a polarity may create tension and disharmony, and yet there is an underlying drive towards unity. In the case of the masculine/feminine polarity, this unity is expressed in orgasmic sexual union.
It is only logical to expect that inherent in the makeup of our reality is the impetus to converge the opposite extremes of the various polarities. And as this convergence develops, we reach closer and closer to the middle of the "X".
The Transformation of the Quantum Particle
One of life's greatest and most widely appreciated mysteries is found in Physics, in the microscopic quantum world. There are many aspects of the behaviour of quantum particles which defy logic. I shall concentrate on one of them here, which is named the "wave-particle duality". In short, experiments repeatedly show that a quantum particle can behave both as a wave and as a particle, even though waves and particles have two distinct natures. Some physicists believe that consciousness, in observing or measuring the quanta, "collapses the wave" into a particle, or what is called an "eigonstate". Other physicists have their own theories, which I may visit later.
According to the Seth Material, quantum particles oscillate in and out of our reality, just as some physicists hypothesize that there are parallel worlds and that these particles jump around between them. Where I find the most interest, is that in Hurricane Thinking, the spiral (instead of the wave) collapses and that's when entrance into time-space is made available (which is the upper portion of the "X", or the end result of a transformation). So, perhaps a quanta only properly enters our dimension when the wave collapses into a particle. And, "collapsing the wave" could be an archetypal pattern of transformation, that in order to enter a new dimension a wave must collapse into a particle. In the Ra Material, a being's totality is said to begin to gain "spiritual mass" as it turns to enter the next octave of dimensions.
One can further ideate that the ego, which can be seen as order-creating and hardening energy borrowed from the unconscious, does not actually produce the psychological equivalent of mass in a personality, that mass is only manifested upon crystallization, whose intricate higher order occurs at the microscopic granularity. The ego, in attempting to emulate the hardening of crystallization, solidifies with a weak force at the macro level, but the solidification contains more of the properties of a wave than a particle (Crimson's dragon-ego is made of shards of light and light is a wave). As crystallization of the personality continues, the functions of the ego are required less and less. The personality is compacted and hardens into an ever smaller particle. One slips through the middle of the "X", and transformation occurs.
Transformation Without Compaction
Astronaut X did not reach the moon through a proper compaction of his being. He did so by extreme methods, by what I call "extreme astronautics". Likewise, the Hurricane Period led me to higher states of mind and an overall transformation over time but it was mainly through the extreme astronautics of Hurricane Thinking. In "Human Erasure", Astronaut X "emerged out of a filter of stars, his battered body still sparkling from a celestial upbringing...the filter of stars disseminating him into a new form of infancy...he felt the sting of sparkling needles flash with undeterminate pain; the cry of a dream body."
In my September posting (under the title "A Simple Example of Oscillation"), I wrote of the very loud vision I had of helping others travel through the middle of the "X" through my writing. The vision remained alive within me, and changed over time to show vertical lines spanning both the top and the bottom portions of the "X" as paths of movement. But, the lines did not all go through the middle. I interpret the reason to be that I was filled with a profound sense of unconditional love for humanity at the time.
The Ra Material states that the next higher dimension relative to ours is the dimension of unconditional love. And, the primary requisite for transcending our dimension is to polarize at least 50% in the positive direction, which is also called the Service-to-Others path (as opposed to the Service-to-Self). It would seem logical, then, that the higher order of the energy of unconditional love configures us so that the passage through to the top portions of the "X" is possible. The Ra Material states the prerequisite for the next dimension in another way, as dependent upon the ability of an entity to accept or welcome the next degree of intensity of light.
Jane Roberts and the Seth Material
Jane Roberts was a mystic who channeled in the Seth Material, one of the most popular channeled materials to date. "Seth" was the discarnate entity she allegedly channeled on a regular basis, but she occasionally channeled a higher entity which she named "Seth 2" that seemed to be so far removed from her human self, that it was "devoid of emotion". When channeling Seth 2, she experienced herself going up through a cone or a pyramid. In the words of Robert Butts, her husband:
"I knew that subjectively Jane was experiencing the feeling of a ‘cone’ or ‘pyramid’ coming down over the top of her head. Jane often told me that whereas she feels Seth come to her in a very warm and alive and friendly manner, she feels her consciousness going out of herself to meet Seth 2 ‘up the invisible pyramid like a draft up a flue.’ She doesn’t
know where she goes or how she gets back. Her body seems to be left behind.”
Convergence and Dreams
Our dreams often express a confusing form of convergence, marrying aspects of our reality in a manner which does not make sense to our waking consciousness, although all seems normal while dreaming. Recently, I had such a dream.
In real life, I am a musician and I sometimes create abstract music purely out of sound and noise. In the dream, I was baking noise music (in the oven) and I was using it as a filling in a poptart-like recipe. Combining the noise music with that specific food texture and taste was, in the dream, a complete revelation of the highest import. I even vividly recall the specific fiberous texture of the pop-tart and its relevance to noise music. In addition, this food "pocket" was called "lava".
These concepts are utterly incongruent to my conscious mind. However, the dream seemed entirely reasonable while I was having it; nothing seemed out of the ordinary. I believe that this type of convergence in dreams is a form of psychological compaction that describes the nature of our experience of unity at the middle of the "X". It can also be used to denote the psychological equivalent of the profound forces of gravity at work near the point of singularity of a black hole, where there is a great diminution of matter.
Diminutive Journeys
Most creative people who lead busy lives are familiar with the frustrations of trying to find inspiration when free time finally comes their way. One cannot force oneself to be inspired at will; an inspired state should come naturally. A joyous, care-free, and selfless attitude is usually very helpful in maximizing artistic productivity and balancing this with our inner drive to express our vision is an art in itself.
The movement from an ordinary state of mind to one which is inspired is sometimes itself a magical transformation in consciousness and the analogy of going through the "X" is definately applicable here. As one embarks from the ordinary state of mind, one is usually in a state of expectation and anticipation for the creative outcome. Often, we are either egotistical with our self-confidence in our abilities or caught in a self-destructive state of self-doubt and low self-esteem. Sometimes we osciallate like a wave between the two.
All these aspects of the personality are extra baggage which must be stripped away in order to enter that high "quality of being" (to borrow the term from Carla Reuckert) in which creative work is possible. This stripping away, or diminution, of our selves enables the traversal through the middle of the "X" to the new, inspired state.
Oftentimes, I use various techniques to help me go through such a diminutive journey, such as telling myself repeatedly: "You are a dead man". Or, I would ask myself "What's your story?" and reply: "I have no story. I am a ghost." It is not always necessary for me to reach a completely selfless state before my inspiration kicks in, but if my own conscious thinking and aspiration is incongruent with the intentions of my deeper self, I have to reach rock bottom and surrender myself to a complete sense of giving up in failure before I begin to feel the resilience of inspiration once again.
Once I have been reduced to that infinitesmal minutia of existence, I detect faint glimmers of desire that surface ever so subtly, and these are the intentions of my deeper self speaking through. I then ride them and they typically take me to great places, i.e. the upper portions of the "X".
Such a description of entering an inspired state of mind is a simplistic one. Otherwise, anyone could instantly become creative through a selfless state alone. One factor which is basically missing is that there should be an intent towards a specific, creative aim. Such an aim, when focused upon to the point that it becomes a point of singularity, produces movement in consciousness.
At times, a momentum towards the point of singularity has already been developed but the necessary stripping away of the extra baggage of the personality has not been properly accomplished. This scenario can result in massive psychological dissonance, the equivalent of being ripped apart by a black hole. Many artists have written about such struggles in the past.
Like so many others, I focus upon my creative pursuits on the weekends. When such a short span of time is not enough to find inspiration, my efforts can turn into a crescendo of internal struggle. I have often returned to work on Monday morning practically deranged with psychological pain and confusion, only to return to a state of calm as my focus is diverted towards my job's responsibilities. And ironically, my return to selflessness slingshots me into an exaggeratedly creative state since the original creative point of singularity had as of yet not dissipated. Experiencing this pattern repeatedly, I have acquired habits that help me quickly become detached from the creative pursuits of the day, and thus minimize wasting my free time on the weekends.
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Spirituality and the Ego
Blog - November
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Sculpting an Initiation
It took many years for the stage of life to be set up just right so that the Hurricane Period would occur with the intensity that it did. Just when it began potentiating I cannot know for sure. To this day, it feels like it fit perfectly into life's pre-written script, sculpted outside of Time, and masterfully orchestrated.
There are many ways to tell the story, for it came about not for a single purpose but for many. Exactly what happened could also be interpreted in a wide variety of ways. Were all the perspectives to be seen at once, they might collectively make a circle. And so I shall continue telling the story in short spurts, so that I can circle around and around in the hope that, eventually, a 360 degree perspective is presented, which is what the story deserves.
The difficulty I have in explaining the Hurricane Period stems from the wide variety of experiences I had during the 3 weeks in which it occurred. This was, properly speaking, my Initiation as a Spiritual Seeker. I witnessed many portals opening up, many landscapes of thought flashing in my mind like lightning, vistas that I am still exploring to this day.
Spirituality and the Ego
From one perspective, the Hurricane Period was an unfolding of lessons illuminating the nature of the ego. There are many definitions of the word "ego" and quite often it is linked to matters of self-esteem, or too much of it. From my experience, I personally prefer to bundle such an interpretation of the ego with the function of maintaining one's integrity. More formally speaking, I would define the ego as the autonomous, largely unconscious aspect of the personality which is responsible for developing, solidifying, and upholding the integrity and the identity of the personality. As one lives a life and the experiences affect a psychological movement in the personality, the ego is what is responsible for solidifying the changes so that they are integrated with the overall identity of the personality.
The ego is usually defined as the inflated sense of pride with respect to others, but to me this is just one version that an ego can assume, usually because the ego, being largely unconscious, autonomous, and therefore susceptible to a high degree of influence from the emotions, is greatly influenced by the good feeling behind finding pride in the self. There are many spiritualists who make it a central point that the ego must ultimately be destroyed in order to achieve adequate progress on the spiritual path. A strong ego can be detrimental when it prevents movement where movement is due for growth and exploration. However, I believe that a weakened ego or a self-destructive one can be just as deleterious as an improperly configured ego, for it results in ambivalence, fragmentation, and the inability to build and grow in reaction to life's lessons. That the ego can be both detrimental and helpful on the spiritual path invites us to explore its nature in order to evolve.
The Emergence of a Dragon
The Hurricane Period marked the end of my employment at my first job after graduating from college. I joined just as the internet boom was beginning to peak and quit months before the stock market began to plummet, just before the year 2000. The company was at 30 employees when I joined, and reached 250 by the time I left a year and a half later, only to gradually return to its original size after the market crashed. Because of the rapid growth, people like me, who had hardly any work experience, filled leadership positions that would have ordinarily required much higher levels of seniority. We certainly worked hard enough to do the best job we could, but our professional roles, like the technology stock prices at the time, were inflated and thus they were subject to correction, just as a bloated ego invites itself to be put in check. My company was situated in the famous Multi-Media Gulch in San Francisco, and the entire area was bustling with internet startups trying to go public and cash out. One day, I had a vision of dinosaurs parading the area and this was my first hint of the up-and-coming collapse.
Around this time, I wrote a short story that depicted a group of highly reputable men that gathered together from throughout the land. The purpose of their meeting was to discuss a very startling new discovery; that a real-life dragon, hitherto thought to be a purely mythical creature, had been spotted in a cave.
My inner life at the time was taking on a strange shape. Due to the intensity of the workload and the resulting deeply personal involvement in the job, I was developing my identity largely around being a professional software engineer, while my deeper self had nothing to do with such a deviation from the spiritual and artistic life. A chasm within me began to pronounce its existence and I started sensing a self-destructive side of me develop.
One day, a message surfaced in my mind that said that I was a dragon slayer. I did not know what that meant. I asked a friend of mine and she said that I was battling the self, or the ego, that it was a commonly experienced passage of the spiritual path.
The Dismantling of the Ego
During one of my lunch breaks I met a fascinating character, who I will call friend s. He exhibited a high degree of intelligence and over time I realized that he possessed an enormous amount of personal power. We would meet from time to time for lunch and discuss various topics such as spiritual philosophy and art. These areas were not exactly his domain, for he was very business-minded, but he would take whatever idea I'd introduce and run with it to the far reaches of the earth, usually returning a week later with a magnificent response. Over time, however, I began to notice a dark side emerge in his character. There surfaced vague elements of competitiveness, machismo, greed, and a deeply felt dislike of others. My own character was not finely tuned, to say the least, at this time, and I naively resonated with some of these traits; they existed inside me to some degree and his influence made them come out. And in this manner, my ego moved further in a direction that was dissonant with the deeper parts of my psyche, as my own negative side became more and more accentuated.
My self-destructive side continued manifesting and, whenever I was alone, it was common for me to feel a strange pain that was not physical but one that I can only describe poetically to be a "laceration of my dream body". My solitude had always demanded a high level of purity in order that I reach my higher states of mind and it is still common to this day that a stretch of solitude begins with a period of discomfort, if not a full-blown, anxiety-filled struggle. But, the pain during this period was becoming unbearably intense and a profound sense of weakness began to overtake me. I had a vision that complemented my state, showing a large bridge-like structure whose steel hangers were being dismantled one by one. This was what my ego was going through. Another vision that stood out was of a snake made of blue light readying for the attack.
One night, I was in an especially visionary state. My visions opened up to a point of clarity and I was asked a question that went something like this: "Would you rather continue developing a work-related ego or would you rather return to being an artist?" My obvious response was that I wanted to return to my art. And the vision said: "In three months, you will experience your downfall at work, after which you will enjoy a year and a half of artistic creativity." I saw an image of two parallel lines, one representing the ego of the artist, the other representing the ego of my professional self. The line symbolizing the latter abruptly curved at one point to the line of the artist, as if depicting me slipping through a worm-hole.
Gradually, my relationship with friend s became subliminally confrontational and there were problems with some of the others at work as well, except at the job the negativity was even more hidden. My own ego transformed further into the negative, much like a puppet maneuvered by invisible strings, and my self-destructive side manifested exponentially as a result. My constitution became more and more frail until I felt like an open wound.
In exactly three months after I had my vision, the hierarchical structure of my department at work shifted and, as a result, I was suddenly completely stripped of my power as a technical lead. The blow to my ego was so acute and so threatened did I feel psychologically that I mustered up all my spiritual power in order to cope with the event. The Hurricane Period opened up with full force as a result. As I noted in earlier posts, I invited the movement so as to evolve as quickly as possible.
My ego now mutilated, I felt like a ghost without its shell of a body. The final release into a state of selflessness with respect to the job, however, took much spinning about in the hurricane for the ghost to really come out. The speed of the psychological movement was quite frightening since I sometimes went through hell and heaven in a matter of seconds. It took hardly a day or two that all sense of personal stability was lost.
My visions, however, were now full-blown. Whenever I failed to follow their instructions, I fell back into a hellish pit of turbulence, the oscillations now random, chaotic, and painful. Whenever I was able to pay close attention to my visions, I sped through insight after insight after insight, the oscillations taking the form of upward-rising spirals, possessing a poetic order, enigmatically intelligent.
In the movie "the Matrix", the characters while plugged into the matrix could ask people on the other side to download information into their brain. The download involved large amounts of data all jam-packed into their brain within seconds. This was similar to what I experienced but if the information came too fast, it wouldn't register consciously, so the speed rarely came anywhere as close. The form of learning was typically as I described in earlier posts, that of spiraling through oscillations centered around the subject at hand, combined with much synchronistic conditioning to help me interpret life's events as if I were in a dream.
Contrast Building
The Ra Material, which could very well contain the most advanced teachings on metaphysics readily available to the public today, upon discussing the steps necessary to understand mental discipline states that the self must be examined and the polarity in our reality must be internalized.
Where you find patience within your mind you must consciously find the corresponding impatience and vice versa. Each thought a being has, has in its turn an antithesis. The disciplines of the mind involve, first of all, identifying both those things of which you approve and those things of which you disapprove within yourself, and then balancing each and every positive and negative charge with its equal. The mind contains all things. Therefore, you must discover this completeness within yourself.
Hurricane Thinking took such exploration of polarities and accelerated the process to the nth degree, and it all came about instinctively. It is not a form of thinking I would advise, for it can rip apart a personality as it did mine. I am sure the Ra Material spoke of internalizing the polarities in a calm and meditative manner. But, one of the main benefits of experiencing the Hurricane Period was that I was able to see life's evolutionary process, which typically occurs over a long period of time, accelerated to the degree that the enlightening psychological movements inherent in life's evolutionary process could be traced and witnessed in action. The increased speed made the evolutionary process visible as an upward-spiraling movement.
A month ago, the following words surfaced in my mind: "contrast building". I will do my best to define the term: "contrast building" is the developing of biases through experiencing contrasting states of mind, perspectives, or processed catalysts of the mind. It is similar to the gathering of a group of individuals with contrasting views on a specific subject to debate relevant issues until a conclusion is reached, except that contrast building occurs entirely within the self as it travels psychologically over time.
The ego, in addition to its other functions, slows down the movement through the upward spiral (upward if indeed one is learning life's lessons and progressing in the subject(s) at hand) and, in doing so, anchors the individual and gives her/him time to more thoroughly explore the proclivity of any point in the spiral. The personality, then, having had the time and ego-based involvement to process, synthesize, and integrate the specific proclivity, or anchor point, then moves on to the next point in the spiral with a solid backing of experience when the next movement goes into effect. And thusly contrast building keeps adding to the foundation of the spiral so that one does not fall back and re-learn lessons that have already been experienced. In contrast, during the Hurricane Period, there were a number of lessons that I had to learn over and over again simply because the speed of the movement made it too difficult to assimilate and integrate the revelations.
Therefore, it is my opinion that, contrary to popular spiritual teachings that encourage the dissolution of the ego, the process of balancing which is central to spiritual development relies to a large degree upon a healthy ego so that the necessary solidification takes place that enables one to become deeply involved in the lessons at hand.
I currently view the ego as an aspect of the personality which attempts to emulate the process of crystallization, but typically does so in a clumsy manner, being largely influenced by the emotions. The good feeling of self-pride bloats the ego and the personality takes on an identity that goes beyond its true boundaries. The bad feeling of low self-esteem makes the ego cower inward and become self-destructive, causing the disintegration or fragmentation of the personality. Either state of the ego, or the oscillation between the two is the sign of an undisciplined ego and can indeed hamper spiritual growth. But, this is merely a sign that the ego needs to be better configured. The question is: How does one tune the ego? I believe the answer lies behind the fact that the ego responds to the emotions.
Max Freedom Long is the author of an excellent book titled "The Science Behind Miracles". In it, he delineates three separate aspects of a human being: the Higher Self, the Conscious (or Middle) Self, and the Lower Self. The Lower Self is comprised of the emotions and other automated, unconscious portions of the psyche. He then postulates that the middle, conscious self cannot directly influence the lower self in a rational manner, through logical communication. There has to be some sort of impact for the lower self to change its natural course. The communication must use to a certain degree the language of the lower self.
I believe that the ego can be placed in the same category as the Lower Self, and the methods of tuning are largely emotion-based. One can then infer that one of the reasons why living life intensely is so beneficial to spiritual development is that the ego becomes involved in life's lessons and not just the conscious self because life is lived out with a high level of emotional charge. Thus, the ego remains in tune with the lessons and aspirations of the conscious self and there need be no dissonance even when the main drive of the conscious self is towards evolution. The regularization of the personality is the result.
What are some of the feel-good experiences along the spiritual path? Ecstasy is one of them. Does not the feeling of ecstasy reconfigure the ego? In my own experience, it has. It replaces the desire for the relatively stale feeling of self-pride with a marginal flick of the wrist. My ego is driven towards spiritual development, mainly because it wants to experience the ecstasy again and again. The interesting thing is that when I go without experiencing ecstasy or similar feelings for a long period of time, my ego resorts to self-pride to get its kick. Take me back to a higher state of mind, and my ego quickly resorts to its humble configuration.
Archetypes and Power
Another point of interest I will add here with regards to experiencing life with an ego torn apart was that I felt as if I beheld the archetypes, which I can only describe as pure power, power that affects our every experience. My visions gave me protection from their power, but when my visions were absent I felt as frail as can be. When my visions returned I felt the power of the archetypes run through me, and thus my strength oscillated in and out.
Today, it is a prominent question in my mind whether the oscillations of the Hurricane Period came from the the visions themselves, or that the movement came from the archetypes while my visions directed me so that the influence of specific archetypes were called forth through my visions-influenced proclivity. I am beginning to believe that the latter is correct; in fact, a visionary message surfaced a few months ago saying: "we speak through the archetypes".
A Precursory Look at Building the New Ego
One night during the Hurricane Period, my visions told me to go see a movie called "Fight Club" which was playing at the theaters at that time. A part of me found that movie entertaining but in the middle of it, my visions suddenly told me to get up and leave the theater and I did.
A few days later, I was hanging out with a friend of mine at work on a cigarette break (the same friend who told me the meaning of the term "dragon slayer"). I mentioned the movie to her and she asked me how I liked it. I replied that it seemed well done, but I walked out in the middle of it because my intuition told me so.
"You mean you missed the ending? But, that's the best part!" She was practically shouting.
"Really? Perhaps, I'm supposed to hear the ending from you," I said.
The movie was about a bunch of guys who got together and formed a fight club, for the simple reason that they could meet up and get into fights with each other. It was about the wonders of male testosterone and all the derivative complications it could produce such as machismo, maintaining suppressed aggression, and the like.
My friend proceeded to tell me the way the movie ended. Do not read this paragraph if you do not want the ending spoiled. The fight club started getting out of hand and instead of containing the violent adventures amongst themselves, they turned into destructive exploits against public society. Right before the climaxing finale of the destructive behaviour (something about blowing up a bomb, I believe), the main character realizes that the other members of the club were but figments of his own imagination, that throughout the entire movie he was simply fighting his own self. Hmmm...very interesting.
The cigarette break was over and I went back to my desk. Right then and there, I got a phone call and it was friend s. He proceeded to tell me how he had wanted to punch me in the face earlier that day while we were having lunch because I had disclosed some secret I had forgotten about in front of his colleague from work. It was not my usual experience to hear a good friend talk to me like that. In fact, it was my first.
My instincts (or my visions) kicked in, especially having just been told the ending of the "Fight Club" movie (which was an excellent example of synchronistic conditioning), and I retained an immaculately positive demeanour. I had also just found out that day that the job he had had his friend offer me would entitle him to almost 20% of my rate per hour, instead of me pocketing all the money. Instead of being mad with him for his hidden intentions, I insisted that he stick to the same plan if I were to take the job. I emailed him repeatedly reiterating my insistence, even adding an "I love you, brother" in one of them, and he called me back in tears begging me to stop harassing him. I suggested that we get together for dinner later that evening in order to clear up the confusion between us. As I drove to the street corner where we were supposed to meet, my visions told me quite clearly that he wasn't going to show up. Nevertheless, I waited for an hour at the corner purely as an expression of my devotion, as a Gesture to Spirit, as Castaneda's don Juan would say.
(Were I to experience such an episode again, I might not take on the same positive stance, with such absolute purity. I now realize that I was playing with fire, for I was calling upon the Archetypes. This is the closest I've gotten to using sorcery with another human being, albeit unconsciously. I cannot say for sure that this is related, but he came down with an illness that lasted many months after this episode. I had a number of dreams that told me that I had caused his illness, albeit indirectly. One can either see it that way or interpret it as a mere coincidence. I, myself, commit to neither interpretation.)
I would describe this episode as being in the "Eye of the Hurricane", for this was when I was completely rooted to the spot, untouched and unmoving, as the positive and negative forces I was dealing with were completely out in the open for me to see, racing after each other like a dog trying to catch its tail. Such polarity builds much potential. It was not too long before I lost my foothold in the positive stance and I got swept back into the oscillation, and throughout the Hurricane Period I alternated back and forth between periods of extreme turbulence and periods of very solid stability. During those times that I was firmly rooted were critical periods that usually involved crucial interaction with others. For example, I was worried stiff that I would be caught in a bout of turbulence during my job interviews and thus have difficulty landing new work, but every time I really needed to be, I was solid like a brick. The "orchestration" of this period was impeccably tight.
I feel the need to reiterate that the degree of negativity that I was experiencing at this time was not so great when compared to what some people go through in more (much more) traumatic sitautions. The marked difference is the degree of intensity with which one lives life, and also to what extent one's most basic and fundamental proclivity strives for purity and the heights. Back then, I had just come out of a college life of sheltered purity in solitude where I kept up my intensity to the maximum, with little understanding of how or even why to tone it down given how fruitful life can be while retaining this proclivity, especially as an artist. Coupled with the necessity to retain my personal purity in order to reach my higher states, the slightest negativity which entered the circumference of my psyche had quite far-reaching, destabilizing effects on my ego, which, although I wasn't aware of it at the time, retained its heights largely through positive polarization. To state this more accurately: the solidification of any aspect of negative polarization as a part of my identity automatically started a dismantling process in which the ego started to crumble. As the Hurricane Period progressed, my personality started regressing to that of a child. And as I wrote in "Human Erasure" months later, I was reborn into "a new form of infancy".
The Philadelphia Experiment
In "L I F E and Extreme Astronautics", I mentioned the article titled "The Philadelphia Experiment" which David Wilcock had written. The synchronicities leading up to reading this article are worthy of note, which seemed to spotlight its contents so that I would pay close attention. Wilcock can be described as a type of theoretical physicist who was largely self-taught through massive research of the scientific literature, some of which is very cutting edge. Although Wilcock is someone I regard very highly, I am not sure how much of the scientific discourse in this article is in line with mainstream science and thus the reader's own critical discrimination is encouraged.
I came across this article a few months ago and I emailed it to myself so that I would skim through it at work if I felt the need to take a break. Earlier that week, I was contemplating the mechanics of Hurricane Thinking and I was wondering in which direction one is flung after experiencing a quick oscillation and why. There are some movements in consciousness that the psyche accepts so that they become sticky (in which case the ego solidifies around the new proclivity so that it becomes a part of one's identity); others are on some level rejected and swing consciousness back to the departure point or further beyond it. If all people oscillated in the same fashion over varying lengths of time, then the argument stood that the pendulum ultimately swung one towards the Truth. I focused on this question till my entire being resonated with the pursuit of finding the answer.
While at work, I was contemplating the issue when I got an image like a diagram that seemed to depict the roadmap for an arbitrary oscillation. The image then changed so that the skeletal arrangement of the paths taken could be seen to comprise a circular structure with one line that led up and to the right. In my lingo, a path to the right constituted the positive path, and also the final destination of the oscillation, the grand finale, so to speak. That very instant I glanced out of my office and saw a woman walking across the street. She was taking off her jacket and she did so curiously while her right arm was stretched up and to the right, in a very similar fashion to the image that had just surfaced in my mind. I then recalled the quote by Ra about shedding that which was no longer necessary as one progresses down the evolutionary path and she seemed to be symbolically doing just that with her jacket. My story "Human Erasure" was about deliberately escaping the human domain and it was born out of the Hurricane Period.
Perceiving the synchronized events, I remembered Wilcock's article since synchronicity was one of the commonly discussed topics on his site and user forum. I opened his article and one of the first words I read were: "...if you create a strong-enough flow of current between a negative and positive pole, you will get an anti-gravity ‘thrust’ that starts propelling your device in whatever direction the positive pole is pointing."
I have always been interested in seeking the parallels between properties and processes in consciousness and the scientific observations of our physical world. This seemed like a potential correspondence, especially if "the strong-enough flow of current" was seen to represent living life with great intensity and an anti-gravity effect was likened to the elevation of one's state of mind. In "Human Erasure", Astronaut X escapes Earth's gravity, which represents the Human Domain. During the Hurricane Period, the oscillations were rapid psychological movements between opposite polarities, and I experienced states of mind and psychic abilities that I never imagined to be possible, in addition to periods of profound enlightenment, ecstasy, and forms of mentation that I now like to describe as "cosmic thinking" (more on this later).
Wilcock explains how an aircraft that resembles a UFO would be constructed based on this anti-gravity effect. "...You’d have the entire bottom of the ship be a negative plate, and the small sphere at the very top of the ship as the positive plate. You can navigate the ship by breaking up the negative plate into a series of pie-shaped sections and varying the current flow between them." This explains why so many UFO crafts look like round discs. The picture below from the article looked remarkably similar to the image which surfaced in my mind when I was contemplating the mechanics of Hurricane Thinking (the similarity could have been due to the fact that I had glanced at the picture earlier that day (I don't remember if I did or not) and thus the re-surfacing of the image in my mind was a form of synchronistic conditioning that highlighted the connection):
The article proceeds to talk about what allegedly occurred at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard during the Second World War. Basically, "strange ‘warp’ effects were being observed" at an arc-welding facility which used extremely high voltage to weld metal plates. "What they saw was truly unprecedented. With the electrical blast came an equally intense 'optical blackout'. The sudden shock of the intense electric weld impulse was indeed producing a mysterious optical blackening of perceptual space...The more outrageous fact was that the effect permeated the control room, causing 'retinal blackout' even when personnel were shielded by several protective walls...Workmen began noticing that tools and other weighty items, left on the floor or around the chamber, were somehow 'misplaced' during the heavy arc discharge process."
The article then proceeds to discuss time-space, which I've already delved into in previous posts, but I will summarize the term again here as the flip-side of the space-time fabric through which we experience our ordinary reality. Instead of 3 dimensions of space and one dimension of time, time-space has 3 dimensions of time and one of space. Back to the article:
...with a strong enough high-voltage current, you can bend space PAST the ‘crossing point’ of light, and reach ‘crescendo’. At that point you have created a direct portal into time-space. When any person or thing in our reality transitions into time-space, it becomes invisible to our perspective.
A vortex into time-space may appear as a jet-black "hole" in the space in front of you, a slate-gray surface as in the case of certain stargate technologies, or as a mirage-like bubbling ‘lens’ effect within the room around you in other cases I’m aware of.
You can go THROUGH time-space to instantly travel anywhere in our space or time...
I wrote "Human Erasure" many years before I was introduced to the notion of time-space. Recall that Astronaut X awakes to find himself orbiting the moon, following an inevitable trajectory through Space, which is the flip-side of the way we experience our reality, in that we move inevitably forward through Time. He begins to go back and forth in time to recall parts of his life, and eventually begins to recall various versions of his life that never happened, or that occurred in parallel realities. This was where the story was becoming too complex for me to complete writing it and I eventually had to quit for fear of distorting the archetypal patterns behind the piece by using my own, all-too-human imagination to fill in the blanks.
In any case, since the story ultimately describes one man's psychological journey out of space-time into time-space, the question is: What did this man do in order to enter time-space? Keep in mind that this story is the fictional equivalent to my own real-life story of having gone through the Hurricane Period and, a few months later, slipped into the most ethereal period of my life, one which, without exaggeration, rendered all previous and later experiences pale in comparison.
The answer to the question can be summarized by the term "extreme astronautics". Just as extreme measures were taken to create the time-space portal in the naval shipping yard of Wilcok's article, Astronaut X utilized similarly extreme maneuvours to escape the human domain, just as I brought on the Hurricane Period to accelerate the evolutionary process to the maximum.
But, before I delve more into the "Human Erasure" story, I want to introduce my previous works of fiction. In most of them, the theme of invisibility (or transparency) is present as a highly enigmatic leitmotif, the mystery of which is un-penetratable. Invisibility in my fiction is what I now understand to be the entrance into time-space. Therefore, this theme existed since the early days, but it was not thoroughly dealt with until the story of Astronaut X emerged.
The discussion of entering time-space from a scientific perspective does not diminish the quality of mystery I find in this topic. And I believe that this observation stresses the enigmatic quality of our existence, especially when we research the far-reaching extremities of consciousness and our relation to the cosmos at large.
The artist in me wasn't truly active until my late teenage years. In a sense, that's when I was truly born. Quite appropriately, my first story was narrated in the voice of a child. The boy had a friend named Timothy who would grow transparent and disappear from time to time. At a certain stage of the boy's growth, he began to become transparent too and this signaled that it was time for them both to venture out into the great forest, where they eventually grew into the size of giants. (That my characters became giants when they reached the "other side" is a repeating theme and I will discuss this in depth over time.)
I also began another story at around the same period about a woman named Thea who represented 'the most obscure form of night.' 'Tales of Crimson and the Child of Thea' followed; the anima gave birth to a baby girl. Crimson is an adolescent boy who in many ways represents myself a few years before and right after the Hurricane Period.
Crimson is a compulsive fire-spitter, in a magical way. His fire has the ability to transform a building or any other man-made structure into a giant crystal or crystalline sculpture. This only occurs when he is successful, however, and when he is not, the fire burns in a semi-magical way till it scorches the structure black. Crimson's fire-spitting is a metaphor for my art or music making and his tendency towards excess was similar to my own obsessive compulsion to always remain artistically productive.
The following excerpt is perhaps the most central part of the story and it was written after the Hurricane Period:
She found him grappling with a dragon; a luminescent dreamscape creature half-made of fire and the other half golden shards of light stitched together by some other-world god. Throughout the battle, it would oscillate between gaining and losing transparency, as if Crimson had deliberately snatched it from another reality in order to fight the monster in his domain.
Sparks shot out sporadically from the struggle with the beauty of a fountain of jewelry and electric noises whipped through the air with the potency of lightning. And then, a miracle occurred: out from the dragon's mouth, appearing like the masterpiece creation of a genius artist, a long thread of fire manifested and speared itself for hundreds of meters till it hit a tall building two city blocks away. The resulting explosion could scarcely be described in words. The ripples of fire that burst forth changed color and produced undulating waves in such a manner that the beholder of this sight could not help but follow the movement with his entire being. The far away ripples resonated in the Child of Thea's innermost foundations of sobriety to produce a massive shift in state of mind that tummeled her through long forgotten memories of her infancy. They strobed before her and died away almost instantaneously. Suddenly, with amazing swiftness, a sea-horse looking creature of green-hued effervescence flashed into eyesight and started darting about the streets, his eyes shifting back and forth in a wild, searching manner. A vaguely familiar feeling rose up inside of her and watching this creature move about so sporadically almost made her sick to her stomach.
"Was this a toy I used to play with when I was a baby?" she asked herself but the look it had was far too outlandish. Its crazed movements started getting faster and faster until she could only catch sudden glimpses of its whereabouts every few seconds. She felt her insides starting to spin and she instinctively decided to try to focus all her attention on Crimson's fight with his dragon. Gradually, she became more rooted. Her sea-horse looking friend transformed into a marginal oddity that flickered about the streets like a light reflected by the quivering diamond of a necklace.
In the meantime, the dragon had by now shrunk in size. Whatever Crimson was trying to do apparently seemed to work. It was not like its size had proportionately grown smaller, but that some of its limbs had doubled up and folded inward. She grew aware of the unsettling feeling that what she was witnessing did not take place in a manner of minutes, but spanned days or even weeks. She was riveted to her spot while the rest of the world sped by about her, hypnotized by what seemed to be an archetypal process. She felt aware that she was growing into a woman.
Finally, the dragon had been reduced to apparent invisibility and Crimson fell to the floor exhausted. He immediately tried to get up, but his ailing limbs got the better of him and he fell down once again. The Child of Thea left him in peace and walked back home.
The next day, she saw him walking about the streets without the slightest limp or sign of the wear and tear of battle. But, his eyes gleamed curiously with the strong, solidified color of a precious stone though she could not decipher which color it was. He disappeared around a corner.
And on the following day, she again saw him walking around, with the same gleaming eyes and their ambiguous hue. This time he wore a peculiar look of intent on his face so that he was absolutely beaming with energy. He noticed something about the neighborhood and stopped in his tracks. Looking around he seemed to be satisfied with some aspect of his surroundings as if having found a long lost secret garden. And he withdrew inward.
He suddenly took a deep breath and for a split second, nay a microsecond, he entirely disappeared before her very eyes. It happened so quickly that her awareness could barely register the act. To her profound surprise, When he flashed back into existence he was spitting a long line of fire from his mouth that extended smoothly through the air and latched on to a 5-story building. The entire structure lit up in one big burst of alternating colors, like molten jewelry exploding from a sacred volcano. It was a spectacular sight and it transformed the neighborhood into some prehistoric magic ritual performed by the gathering of sorcerers from throughout the land.
That fire-spitting corresponds to my creative projects here suggests that it is the projection of the ego which is responsible for a work of art, even a masterpiece creation. However, Crimson achieves a successful fire spit after temporarily disappearing into time-space (a meta-reality in relation to ours), which reconfigures his ego so that an ego projection can affect crystallization. Crimson first had to grapple with the dragon, to shrink its size. Thus, the ego had to be transformed into a state of relative selflessness and only then could he perform his disappearance act.
That Crimson's ego was a dragon and that of the Child of Thea a seahorse suggests that the nature of the male ego is different than that of the female. But, I would prefer to think of the Child of Thea as a character related to the anima. In my September posting, I wrote of how the anima was represented as a flying horse in my vision of the Pegasus that ultimately fell into the black hole. There is a correspondence here between a seahorse and a pegasus, but not an exact one, probably because the child of Thea is a child. That would also suggest that Crimson's ego represented as a dragon is probably the ego of an adolescent male, with a tad too much creative aggression, as is my character with respect to my obsessive drive to creatively produce.
It is interesting to note that in Freedom Long's book on the relationship between the Lower, Middle, and Higher Selves, The conscious, middle self is only able to communicate with the higher self through the lower self as mediator. In Crimson's case, it is the ego-dragon which is responsible for the fire-spitting. The dragon-ego along with Crimson still have to disappear into time-space, however, to be configured correctly in order to perform a proper fire-spit. Just how Crimson achieves the disappearance is still unclear, but, just before he does so, there is a great look of intent that Crimson exudes, as well as undefinable hue in his eyes.
Just how much the Crimson story conforms to archetypal patterns is a big question mark in my mind. The "Human Erasure" story came with a lot more inspiration. During the creation of some of the scenes, I was seeing the world in white, sometimes my being felt completely drenched in the white light. The merits of that story with regard to the subject of spiritual development in general is questionable, however, for Astronaut X uses sheer aggression (akin to Crimson's look of intent), coupled with what I will later define to be "extreme astronautics", in order to escape the pull of planet Earth, in a similar way as I used aggression and an "Evolution or Bust!" attitude to call forth the Hurricane Period.
Such use of unrestricted aggression to maximize the efficiency of evolution is not an appropriate way to develop oneself spiritually, as I've learned, largely due to the resulting fragmentation of the self, and the negativity that naturally comes with the pain from going through changes at a rate too fast to handle. And so the "Human Erasure" story ends almost nightmarishly.
Astronaut X follows his inevitable trajectory down into a bottomless crater and the story ends with him recalling a car accident he had experienced in his youth due to his reckless driving, an expression for his manic obsession for speed. The undulating lights of the automobiles passing him by while stuck in his wrecked car drive into him the appreciation of the endless oscillations and rythems that are inherent in life itself. Just as the recalling of the memory crescendos with intensity:
Like sharp, needlepoint spears, the vast field of stars broke the crust of his skin to suddenly desiminate him into an unfathomable expansion, the surging wind of a burst celestial body.
The following excerpt from the Crimson tales serves as a necessary precursor to the "Human Erasure" story:
She dreamt of him wedged in a man-sized chunk of crystal; in search for the crystal's fire, the dream said. Why? To melt himself free?
Crimson fossilized in bedrock, such were the perils of mining the earth. She found his manic, tormenting obsession with spitting fire very delusional, very silly. Yet, she was strangely attracted to him for his compulsion. That quality which she found childish also bound her to him with a strength that could only originate from the realm of the supernatural. She longed for him. She would forever stand by his side in hope that one day he would call for her, despite the isolation of his extreme narcissism. For, somehow, as he was held fast in his own festival of mirrors, she would emerge as one of the many stray reflections of his possible selves, the sudden materialization of a forgotten desire surfacing from that part of his depths that linked him with the external world. Yet, she feared that if they were to meet in his inner world, his version of her would suffice and she would at best become the mere replica of an underworld goddess, the stale icon of a living deity of love.
At the time this was written, I was still very much a solitary. There are many reasons why solitude was so attractive, which I shall not delve into here. One of them was that my regularized focus on evolution was simply unmatched by the others I met, and secondly even if they were, my own path was unique and I did not wish to be diverted from my 'work'.
Since much evolutionary catalyst comes from interaction with others, this missing aspect must be compensated in solitude. Crimson's extreme narcissism demanded the creation of his own internal gods and goddesses, his "festival of mirrors". What this translated to was the internalization of polarity. The catalysts that arise from interaction with other selves comes from contrasting views, beliefs, proclivities, and attitudes. In other words, each self has her/his own sets of balances with respect to the various polarities. Evolution in solitude, then, demands the manifestation of an inner dominion, prolifically rich with the contrasting multiplicity of the self.
If this is your first time reading this blog, it is recommended that you start here.
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Sculpting an Initiation
It took many years for the stage of life to be set up just right so that the Hurricane Period would occur with the intensity that it did. Just when it began potentiating I cannot know for sure. To this day, it feels like it fit perfectly into life's pre-written script, sculpted outside of Time, and masterfully orchestrated.
There are many ways to tell the story, for it came about not for a single purpose but for many. Exactly what happened could also be interpreted in a wide variety of ways. Were all the perspectives to be seen at once, they might collectively make a circle. And so I shall continue telling the story in short spurts, so that I can circle around and around in the hope that, eventually, a 360 degree perspective is presented, which is what the story deserves.
The difficulty I have in explaining the Hurricane Period stems from the wide variety of experiences I had during the 3 weeks in which it occurred. This was, properly speaking, my Initiation as a Spiritual Seeker. I witnessed many portals opening up, many landscapes of thought flashing in my mind like lightning, vistas that I am still exploring to this day.
Spirituality and the Ego
From one perspective, the Hurricane Period was an unfolding of lessons illuminating the nature of the ego. There are many definitions of the word "ego" and quite often it is linked to matters of self-esteem, or too much of it. From my experience, I personally prefer to bundle such an interpretation of the ego with the function of maintaining one's integrity. More formally speaking, I would define the ego as the autonomous, largely unconscious aspect of the personality which is responsible for developing, solidifying, and upholding the integrity and the identity of the personality. As one lives a life and the experiences affect a psychological movement in the personality, the ego is what is responsible for solidifying the changes so that they are integrated with the overall identity of the personality.
The ego is usually defined as the inflated sense of pride with respect to others, but to me this is just one version that an ego can assume, usually because the ego, being largely unconscious, autonomous, and therefore susceptible to a high degree of influence from the emotions, is greatly influenced by the good feeling behind finding pride in the self. There are many spiritualists who make it a central point that the ego must ultimately be destroyed in order to achieve adequate progress on the spiritual path. A strong ego can be detrimental when it prevents movement where movement is due for growth and exploration. However, I believe that a weakened ego or a self-destructive one can be just as deleterious as an improperly configured ego, for it results in ambivalence, fragmentation, and the inability to build and grow in reaction to life's lessons. That the ego can be both detrimental and helpful on the spiritual path invites us to explore its nature in order to evolve.
The Emergence of a Dragon
The Hurricane Period marked the end of my employment at my first job after graduating from college. I joined just as the internet boom was beginning to peak and quit months before the stock market began to plummet, just before the year 2000. The company was at 30 employees when I joined, and reached 250 by the time I left a year and a half later, only to gradually return to its original size after the market crashed. Because of the rapid growth, people like me, who had hardly any work experience, filled leadership positions that would have ordinarily required much higher levels of seniority. We certainly worked hard enough to do the best job we could, but our professional roles, like the technology stock prices at the time, were inflated and thus they were subject to correction, just as a bloated ego invites itself to be put in check. My company was situated in the famous Multi-Media Gulch in San Francisco, and the entire area was bustling with internet startups trying to go public and cash out. One day, I had a vision of dinosaurs parading the area and this was my first hint of the up-and-coming collapse.
Around this time, I wrote a short story that depicted a group of highly reputable men that gathered together from throughout the land. The purpose of their meeting was to discuss a very startling new discovery; that a real-life dragon, hitherto thought to be a purely mythical creature, had been spotted in a cave.
My inner life at the time was taking on a strange shape. Due to the intensity of the workload and the resulting deeply personal involvement in the job, I was developing my identity largely around being a professional software engineer, while my deeper self had nothing to do with such a deviation from the spiritual and artistic life. A chasm within me began to pronounce its existence and I started sensing a self-destructive side of me develop.
One day, a message surfaced in my mind that said that I was a dragon slayer. I did not know what that meant. I asked a friend of mine and she said that I was battling the self, or the ego, that it was a commonly experienced passage of the spiritual path.
The Dismantling of the Ego
During one of my lunch breaks I met a fascinating character, who I will call friend s. He exhibited a high degree of intelligence and over time I realized that he possessed an enormous amount of personal power. We would meet from time to time for lunch and discuss various topics such as spiritual philosophy and art. These areas were not exactly his domain, for he was very business-minded, but he would take whatever idea I'd introduce and run with it to the far reaches of the earth, usually returning a week later with a magnificent response. Over time, however, I began to notice a dark side emerge in his character. There surfaced vague elements of competitiveness, machismo, greed, and a deeply felt dislike of others. My own character was not finely tuned, to say the least, at this time, and I naively resonated with some of these traits; they existed inside me to some degree and his influence made them come out. And in this manner, my ego moved further in a direction that was dissonant with the deeper parts of my psyche, as my own negative side became more and more accentuated.
My self-destructive side continued manifesting and, whenever I was alone, it was common for me to feel a strange pain that was not physical but one that I can only describe poetically to be a "laceration of my dream body". My solitude had always demanded a high level of purity in order that I reach my higher states of mind and it is still common to this day that a stretch of solitude begins with a period of discomfort, if not a full-blown, anxiety-filled struggle. But, the pain during this period was becoming unbearably intense and a profound sense of weakness began to overtake me. I had a vision that complemented my state, showing a large bridge-like structure whose steel hangers were being dismantled one by one. This was what my ego was going through. Another vision that stood out was of a snake made of blue light readying for the attack.
One night, I was in an especially visionary state. My visions opened up to a point of clarity and I was asked a question that went something like this: "Would you rather continue developing a work-related ego or would you rather return to being an artist?" My obvious response was that I wanted to return to my art. And the vision said: "In three months, you will experience your downfall at work, after which you will enjoy a year and a half of artistic creativity." I saw an image of two parallel lines, one representing the ego of the artist, the other representing the ego of my professional self. The line symbolizing the latter abruptly curved at one point to the line of the artist, as if depicting me slipping through a worm-hole.
Gradually, my relationship with friend s became subliminally confrontational and there were problems with some of the others at work as well, except at the job the negativity was even more hidden. My own ego transformed further into the negative, much like a puppet maneuvered by invisible strings, and my self-destructive side manifested exponentially as a result. My constitution became more and more frail until I felt like an open wound.
In exactly three months after I had my vision, the hierarchical structure of my department at work shifted and, as a result, I was suddenly completely stripped of my power as a technical lead. The blow to my ego was so acute and so threatened did I feel psychologically that I mustered up all my spiritual power in order to cope with the event. The Hurricane Period opened up with full force as a result. As I noted in earlier posts, I invited the movement so as to evolve as quickly as possible.
My ego now mutilated, I felt like a ghost without its shell of a body. The final release into a state of selflessness with respect to the job, however, took much spinning about in the hurricane for the ghost to really come out. The speed of the psychological movement was quite frightening since I sometimes went through hell and heaven in a matter of seconds. It took hardly a day or two that all sense of personal stability was lost.
My visions, however, were now full-blown. Whenever I failed to follow their instructions, I fell back into a hellish pit of turbulence, the oscillations now random, chaotic, and painful. Whenever I was able to pay close attention to my visions, I sped through insight after insight after insight, the oscillations taking the form of upward-rising spirals, possessing a poetic order, enigmatically intelligent.
In the movie "the Matrix", the characters while plugged into the matrix could ask people on the other side to download information into their brain. The download involved large amounts of data all jam-packed into their brain within seconds. This was similar to what I experienced but if the information came too fast, it wouldn't register consciously, so the speed rarely came anywhere as close. The form of learning was typically as I described in earlier posts, that of spiraling through oscillations centered around the subject at hand, combined with much synchronistic conditioning to help me interpret life's events as if I were in a dream.
Contrast Building
The Ra Material, which could very well contain the most advanced teachings on metaphysics readily available to the public today, upon discussing the steps necessary to understand mental discipline states that the self must be examined and the polarity in our reality must be internalized.
Where you find patience within your mind you must consciously find the corresponding impatience and vice versa. Each thought a being has, has in its turn an antithesis. The disciplines of the mind involve, first of all, identifying both those things of which you approve and those things of which you disapprove within yourself, and then balancing each and every positive and negative charge with its equal. The mind contains all things. Therefore, you must discover this completeness within yourself.
Hurricane Thinking took such exploration of polarities and accelerated the process to the nth degree, and it all came about instinctively. It is not a form of thinking I would advise, for it can rip apart a personality as it did mine. I am sure the Ra Material spoke of internalizing the polarities in a calm and meditative manner. But, one of the main benefits of experiencing the Hurricane Period was that I was able to see life's evolutionary process, which typically occurs over a long period of time, accelerated to the degree that the enlightening psychological movements inherent in life's evolutionary process could be traced and witnessed in action. The increased speed made the evolutionary process visible as an upward-spiraling movement.
A month ago, the following words surfaced in my mind: "contrast building". I will do my best to define the term: "contrast building" is the developing of biases through experiencing contrasting states of mind, perspectives, or processed catalysts of the mind. It is similar to the gathering of a group of individuals with contrasting views on a specific subject to debate relevant issues until a conclusion is reached, except that contrast building occurs entirely within the self as it travels psychologically over time.
The ego, in addition to its other functions, slows down the movement through the upward spiral (upward if indeed one is learning life's lessons and progressing in the subject(s) at hand) and, in doing so, anchors the individual and gives her/him time to more thoroughly explore the proclivity of any point in the spiral. The personality, then, having had the time and ego-based involvement to process, synthesize, and integrate the specific proclivity, or anchor point, then moves on to the next point in the spiral with a solid backing of experience when the next movement goes into effect. And thusly contrast building keeps adding to the foundation of the spiral so that one does not fall back and re-learn lessons that have already been experienced. In contrast, during the Hurricane Period, there were a number of lessons that I had to learn over and over again simply because the speed of the movement made it too difficult to assimilate and integrate the revelations.
Therefore, it is my opinion that, contrary to popular spiritual teachings that encourage the dissolution of the ego, the process of balancing which is central to spiritual development relies to a large degree upon a healthy ego so that the necessary solidification takes place that enables one to become deeply involved in the lessons at hand.
I currently view the ego as an aspect of the personality which attempts to emulate the process of crystallization, but typically does so in a clumsy manner, being largely influenced by the emotions. The good feeling of self-pride bloats the ego and the personality takes on an identity that goes beyond its true boundaries. The bad feeling of low self-esteem makes the ego cower inward and become self-destructive, causing the disintegration or fragmentation of the personality. Either state of the ego, or the oscillation between the two is the sign of an undisciplined ego and can indeed hamper spiritual growth. But, this is merely a sign that the ego needs to be better configured. The question is: How does one tune the ego? I believe the answer lies behind the fact that the ego responds to the emotions.
Max Freedom Long is the author of an excellent book titled "The Science Behind Miracles". In it, he delineates three separate aspects of a human being: the Higher Self, the Conscious (or Middle) Self, and the Lower Self. The Lower Self is comprised of the emotions and other automated, unconscious portions of the psyche. He then postulates that the middle, conscious self cannot directly influence the lower self in a rational manner, through logical communication. There has to be some sort of impact for the lower self to change its natural course. The communication must use to a certain degree the language of the lower self.
I believe that the ego can be placed in the same category as the Lower Self, and the methods of tuning are largely emotion-based. One can then infer that one of the reasons why living life intensely is so beneficial to spiritual development is that the ego becomes involved in life's lessons and not just the conscious self because life is lived out with a high level of emotional charge. Thus, the ego remains in tune with the lessons and aspirations of the conscious self and there need be no dissonance even when the main drive of the conscious self is towards evolution. The regularization of the personality is the result.
What are some of the feel-good experiences along the spiritual path? Ecstasy is one of them. Does not the feeling of ecstasy reconfigure the ego? In my own experience, it has. It replaces the desire for the relatively stale feeling of self-pride with a marginal flick of the wrist. My ego is driven towards spiritual development, mainly because it wants to experience the ecstasy again and again. The interesting thing is that when I go without experiencing ecstasy or similar feelings for a long period of time, my ego resorts to self-pride to get its kick. Take me back to a higher state of mind, and my ego quickly resorts to its humble configuration.
Archetypes and Power
Another point of interest I will add here with regards to experiencing life with an ego torn apart was that I felt as if I beheld the archetypes, which I can only describe as pure power, power that affects our every experience. My visions gave me protection from their power, but when my visions were absent I felt as frail as can be. When my visions returned I felt the power of the archetypes run through me, and thus my strength oscillated in and out.
Today, it is a prominent question in my mind whether the oscillations of the Hurricane Period came from the the visions themselves, or that the movement came from the archetypes while my visions directed me so that the influence of specific archetypes were called forth through my visions-influenced proclivity. I am beginning to believe that the latter is correct; in fact, a visionary message surfaced a few months ago saying: "we speak through the archetypes".
A Precursory Look at Building the New Ego
One night during the Hurricane Period, my visions told me to go see a movie called "Fight Club" which was playing at the theaters at that time. A part of me found that movie entertaining but in the middle of it, my visions suddenly told me to get up and leave the theater and I did.
A few days later, I was hanging out with a friend of mine at work on a cigarette break (the same friend who told me the meaning of the term "dragon slayer"). I mentioned the movie to her and she asked me how I liked it. I replied that it seemed well done, but I walked out in the middle of it because my intuition told me so.
"You mean you missed the ending? But, that's the best part!" She was practically shouting.
"Really? Perhaps, I'm supposed to hear the ending from you," I said.
The movie was about a bunch of guys who got together and formed a fight club, for the simple reason that they could meet up and get into fights with each other. It was about the wonders of male testosterone and all the derivative complications it could produce such as machismo, maintaining suppressed aggression, and the like.
My friend proceeded to tell me the way the movie ended. Do not read this paragraph if you do not want the ending spoiled. The fight club started getting out of hand and instead of containing the violent adventures amongst themselves, they turned into destructive exploits against public society. Right before the climaxing finale of the destructive behaviour (something about blowing up a bomb, I believe), the main character realizes that the other members of the club were but figments of his own imagination, that throughout the entire movie he was simply fighting his own self. Hmmm...very interesting.
The cigarette break was over and I went back to my desk. Right then and there, I got a phone call and it was friend s. He proceeded to tell me how he had wanted to punch me in the face earlier that day while we were having lunch because I had disclosed some secret I had forgotten about in front of his colleague from work. It was not my usual experience to hear a good friend talk to me like that. In fact, it was my first.
My instincts (or my visions) kicked in, especially having just been told the ending of the "Fight Club" movie (which was an excellent example of synchronistic conditioning), and I retained an immaculately positive demeanour. I had also just found out that day that the job he had had his friend offer me would entitle him to almost 20% of my rate per hour, instead of me pocketing all the money. Instead of being mad with him for his hidden intentions, I insisted that he stick to the same plan if I were to take the job. I emailed him repeatedly reiterating my insistence, even adding an "I love you, brother" in one of them, and he called me back in tears begging me to stop harassing him. I suggested that we get together for dinner later that evening in order to clear up the confusion between us. As I drove to the street corner where we were supposed to meet, my visions told me quite clearly that he wasn't going to show up. Nevertheless, I waited for an hour at the corner purely as an expression of my devotion, as a Gesture to Spirit, as Castaneda's don Juan would say.
(Were I to experience such an episode again, I might not take on the same positive stance, with such absolute purity. I now realize that I was playing with fire, for I was calling upon the Archetypes. This is the closest I've gotten to using sorcery with another human being, albeit unconsciously. I cannot say for sure that this is related, but he came down with an illness that lasted many months after this episode. I had a number of dreams that told me that I had caused his illness, albeit indirectly. One can either see it that way or interpret it as a mere coincidence. I, myself, commit to neither interpretation.)
I would describe this episode as being in the "Eye of the Hurricane", for this was when I was completely rooted to the spot, untouched and unmoving, as the positive and negative forces I was dealing with were completely out in the open for me to see, racing after each other like a dog trying to catch its tail. Such polarity builds much potential. It was not too long before I lost my foothold in the positive stance and I got swept back into the oscillation, and throughout the Hurricane Period I alternated back and forth between periods of extreme turbulence and periods of very solid stability. During those times that I was firmly rooted were critical periods that usually involved crucial interaction with others. For example, I was worried stiff that I would be caught in a bout of turbulence during my job interviews and thus have difficulty landing new work, but every time I really needed to be, I was solid like a brick. The "orchestration" of this period was impeccably tight.
I feel the need to reiterate that the degree of negativity that I was experiencing at this time was not so great when compared to what some people go through in more (much more) traumatic sitautions. The marked difference is the degree of intensity with which one lives life, and also to what extent one's most basic and fundamental proclivity strives for purity and the heights. Back then, I had just come out of a college life of sheltered purity in solitude where I kept up my intensity to the maximum, with little understanding of how or even why to tone it down given how fruitful life can be while retaining this proclivity, especially as an artist. Coupled with the necessity to retain my personal purity in order to reach my higher states, the slightest negativity which entered the circumference of my psyche had quite far-reaching, destabilizing effects on my ego, which, although I wasn't aware of it at the time, retained its heights largely through positive polarization. To state this more accurately: the solidification of any aspect of negative polarization as a part of my identity automatically started a dismantling process in which the ego started to crumble. As the Hurricane Period progressed, my personality started regressing to that of a child. And as I wrote in "Human Erasure" months later, I was reborn into "a new form of infancy".
The Philadelphia Experiment
In "L I F E and Extreme Astronautics", I mentioned the article titled "The Philadelphia Experiment" which David Wilcock had written. The synchronicities leading up to reading this article are worthy of note, which seemed to spotlight its contents so that I would pay close attention. Wilcock can be described as a type of theoretical physicist who was largely self-taught through massive research of the scientific literature, some of which is very cutting edge. Although Wilcock is someone I regard very highly, I am not sure how much of the scientific discourse in this article is in line with mainstream science and thus the reader's own critical discrimination is encouraged.
I came across this article a few months ago and I emailed it to myself so that I would skim through it at work if I felt the need to take a break. Earlier that week, I was contemplating the mechanics of Hurricane Thinking and I was wondering in which direction one is flung after experiencing a quick oscillation and why. There are some movements in consciousness that the psyche accepts so that they become sticky (in which case the ego solidifies around the new proclivity so that it becomes a part of one's identity); others are on some level rejected and swing consciousness back to the departure point or further beyond it. If all people oscillated in the same fashion over varying lengths of time, then the argument stood that the pendulum ultimately swung one towards the Truth. I focused on this question till my entire being resonated with the pursuit of finding the answer.
While at work, I was contemplating the issue when I got an image like a diagram that seemed to depict the roadmap for an arbitrary oscillation. The image then changed so that the skeletal arrangement of the paths taken could be seen to comprise a circular structure with one line that led up and to the right. In my lingo, a path to the right constituted the positive path, and also the final destination of the oscillation, the grand finale, so to speak. That very instant I glanced out of my office and saw a woman walking across the street. She was taking off her jacket and she did so curiously while her right arm was stretched up and to the right, in a very similar fashion to the image that had just surfaced in my mind. I then recalled the quote by Ra about shedding that which was no longer necessary as one progresses down the evolutionary path and she seemed to be symbolically doing just that with her jacket. My story "Human Erasure" was about deliberately escaping the human domain and it was born out of the Hurricane Period.
Perceiving the synchronized events, I remembered Wilcock's article since synchronicity was one of the commonly discussed topics on his site and user forum. I opened his article and one of the first words I read were: "...if you create a strong-enough flow of current between a negative and positive pole, you will get an anti-gravity ‘thrust’ that starts propelling your device in whatever direction the positive pole is pointing."
I have always been interested in seeking the parallels between properties and processes in consciousness and the scientific observations of our physical world. This seemed like a potential correspondence, especially if "the strong-enough flow of current" was seen to represent living life with great intensity and an anti-gravity effect was likened to the elevation of one's state of mind. In "Human Erasure", Astronaut X escapes Earth's gravity, which represents the Human Domain. During the Hurricane Period, the oscillations were rapid psychological movements between opposite polarities, and I experienced states of mind and psychic abilities that I never imagined to be possible, in addition to periods of profound enlightenment, ecstasy, and forms of mentation that I now like to describe as "cosmic thinking" (more on this later).
Wilcock explains how an aircraft that resembles a UFO would be constructed based on this anti-gravity effect. "...You’d have the entire bottom of the ship be a negative plate, and the small sphere at the very top of the ship as the positive plate. You can navigate the ship by breaking up the negative plate into a series of pie-shaped sections and varying the current flow between them." This explains why so many UFO crafts look like round discs. The picture below from the article looked remarkably similar to the image which surfaced in my mind when I was contemplating the mechanics of Hurricane Thinking (the similarity could have been due to the fact that I had glanced at the picture earlier that day (I don't remember if I did or not) and thus the re-surfacing of the image in my mind was a form of synchronistic conditioning that highlighted the connection):
The article proceeds to talk about what allegedly occurred at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard during the Second World War. Basically, "strange ‘warp’ effects were being observed" at an arc-welding facility which used extremely high voltage to weld metal plates. "What they saw was truly unprecedented. With the electrical blast came an equally intense 'optical blackout'. The sudden shock of the intense electric weld impulse was indeed producing a mysterious optical blackening of perceptual space...The more outrageous fact was that the effect permeated the control room, causing 'retinal blackout' even when personnel were shielded by several protective walls...Workmen began noticing that tools and other weighty items, left on the floor or around the chamber, were somehow 'misplaced' during the heavy arc discharge process."
The article then proceeds to discuss time-space, which I've already delved into in previous posts, but I will summarize the term again here as the flip-side of the space-time fabric through which we experience our ordinary reality. Instead of 3 dimensions of space and one dimension of time, time-space has 3 dimensions of time and one of space. Back to the article:
...with a strong enough high-voltage current, you can bend space PAST the ‘crossing point’ of light, and reach ‘crescendo’. At that point you have created a direct portal into time-space. When any person or thing in our reality transitions into time-space, it becomes invisible to our perspective.
A vortex into time-space may appear as a jet-black "hole" in the space in front of you, a slate-gray surface as in the case of certain stargate technologies, or as a mirage-like bubbling ‘lens’ effect within the room around you in other cases I’m aware of.
You can go THROUGH time-space to instantly travel anywhere in our space or time...
I wrote "Human Erasure" many years before I was introduced to the notion of time-space. Recall that Astronaut X awakes to find himself orbiting the moon, following an inevitable trajectory through Space, which is the flip-side of the way we experience our reality, in that we move inevitably forward through Time. He begins to go back and forth in time to recall parts of his life, and eventually begins to recall various versions of his life that never happened, or that occurred in parallel realities. This was where the story was becoming too complex for me to complete writing it and I eventually had to quit for fear of distorting the archetypal patterns behind the piece by using my own, all-too-human imagination to fill in the blanks.
In any case, since the story ultimately describes one man's psychological journey out of space-time into time-space, the question is: What did this man do in order to enter time-space? Keep in mind that this story is the fictional equivalent to my own real-life story of having gone through the Hurricane Period and, a few months later, slipped into the most ethereal period of my life, one which, without exaggeration, rendered all previous and later experiences pale in comparison.
The answer to the question can be summarized by the term "extreme astronautics". Just as extreme measures were taken to create the time-space portal in the naval shipping yard of Wilcok's article, Astronaut X utilized similarly extreme maneuvours to escape the human domain, just as I brought on the Hurricane Period to accelerate the evolutionary process to the maximum.
But, before I delve more into the "Human Erasure" story, I want to introduce my previous works of fiction. In most of them, the theme of invisibility (or transparency) is present as a highly enigmatic leitmotif, the mystery of which is un-penetratable. Invisibility in my fiction is what I now understand to be the entrance into time-space. Therefore, this theme existed since the early days, but it was not thoroughly dealt with until the story of Astronaut X emerged.
The discussion of entering time-space from a scientific perspective does not diminish the quality of mystery I find in this topic. And I believe that this observation stresses the enigmatic quality of our existence, especially when we research the far-reaching extremities of consciousness and our relation to the cosmos at large.
The artist in me wasn't truly active until my late teenage years. In a sense, that's when I was truly born. Quite appropriately, my first story was narrated in the voice of a child. The boy had a friend named Timothy who would grow transparent and disappear from time to time. At a certain stage of the boy's growth, he began to become transparent too and this signaled that it was time for them both to venture out into the great forest, where they eventually grew into the size of giants. (That my characters became giants when they reached the "other side" is a repeating theme and I will discuss this in depth over time.)
I also began another story at around the same period about a woman named Thea who represented 'the most obscure form of night.' 'Tales of Crimson and the Child of Thea' followed; the anima gave birth to a baby girl. Crimson is an adolescent boy who in many ways represents myself a few years before and right after the Hurricane Period.
Crimson is a compulsive fire-spitter, in a magical way. His fire has the ability to transform a building or any other man-made structure into a giant crystal or crystalline sculpture. This only occurs when he is successful, however, and when he is not, the fire burns in a semi-magical way till it scorches the structure black. Crimson's fire-spitting is a metaphor for my art or music making and his tendency towards excess was similar to my own obsessive compulsion to always remain artistically productive.
The following excerpt is perhaps the most central part of the story and it was written after the Hurricane Period:
She found him grappling with a dragon; a luminescent dreamscape creature half-made of fire and the other half golden shards of light stitched together by some other-world god. Throughout the battle, it would oscillate between gaining and losing transparency, as if Crimson had deliberately snatched it from another reality in order to fight the monster in his domain.
Sparks shot out sporadically from the struggle with the beauty of a fountain of jewelry and electric noises whipped through the air with the potency of lightning. And then, a miracle occurred: out from the dragon's mouth, appearing like the masterpiece creation of a genius artist, a long thread of fire manifested and speared itself for hundreds of meters till it hit a tall building two city blocks away. The resulting explosion could scarcely be described in words. The ripples of fire that burst forth changed color and produced undulating waves in such a manner that the beholder of this sight could not help but follow the movement with his entire being. The far away ripples resonated in the Child of Thea's innermost foundations of sobriety to produce a massive shift in state of mind that tummeled her through long forgotten memories of her infancy. They strobed before her and died away almost instantaneously. Suddenly, with amazing swiftness, a sea-horse looking creature of green-hued effervescence flashed into eyesight and started darting about the streets, his eyes shifting back and forth in a wild, searching manner. A vaguely familiar feeling rose up inside of her and watching this creature move about so sporadically almost made her sick to her stomach.
"Was this a toy I used to play with when I was a baby?" she asked herself but the look it had was far too outlandish. Its crazed movements started getting faster and faster until she could only catch sudden glimpses of its whereabouts every few seconds. She felt her insides starting to spin and she instinctively decided to try to focus all her attention on Crimson's fight with his dragon. Gradually, she became more rooted. Her sea-horse looking friend transformed into a marginal oddity that flickered about the streets like a light reflected by the quivering diamond of a necklace.
In the meantime, the dragon had by now shrunk in size. Whatever Crimson was trying to do apparently seemed to work. It was not like its size had proportionately grown smaller, but that some of its limbs had doubled up and folded inward. She grew aware of the unsettling feeling that what she was witnessing did not take place in a manner of minutes, but spanned days or even weeks. She was riveted to her spot while the rest of the world sped by about her, hypnotized by what seemed to be an archetypal process. She felt aware that she was growing into a woman.
Finally, the dragon had been reduced to apparent invisibility and Crimson fell to the floor exhausted. He immediately tried to get up, but his ailing limbs got the better of him and he fell down once again. The Child of Thea left him in peace and walked back home.
The next day, she saw him walking about the streets without the slightest limp or sign of the wear and tear of battle. But, his eyes gleamed curiously with the strong, solidified color of a precious stone though she could not decipher which color it was. He disappeared around a corner.
And on the following day, she again saw him walking around, with the same gleaming eyes and their ambiguous hue. This time he wore a peculiar look of intent on his face so that he was absolutely beaming with energy. He noticed something about the neighborhood and stopped in his tracks. Looking around he seemed to be satisfied with some aspect of his surroundings as if having found a long lost secret garden. And he withdrew inward.
He suddenly took a deep breath and for a split second, nay a microsecond, he entirely disappeared before her very eyes. It happened so quickly that her awareness could barely register the act. To her profound surprise, When he flashed back into existence he was spitting a long line of fire from his mouth that extended smoothly through the air and latched on to a 5-story building. The entire structure lit up in one big burst of alternating colors, like molten jewelry exploding from a sacred volcano. It was a spectacular sight and it transformed the neighborhood into some prehistoric magic ritual performed by the gathering of sorcerers from throughout the land.
That fire-spitting corresponds to my creative projects here suggests that it is the projection of the ego which is responsible for a work of art, even a masterpiece creation. However, Crimson achieves a successful fire spit after temporarily disappearing into time-space (a meta-reality in relation to ours), which reconfigures his ego so that an ego projection can affect crystallization. Crimson first had to grapple with the dragon, to shrink its size. Thus, the ego had to be transformed into a state of relative selflessness and only then could he perform his disappearance act.
That Crimson's ego was a dragon and that of the Child of Thea a seahorse suggests that the nature of the male ego is different than that of the female. But, I would prefer to think of the Child of Thea as a character related to the anima. In my September posting, I wrote of how the anima was represented as a flying horse in my vision of the Pegasus that ultimately fell into the black hole. There is a correspondence here between a seahorse and a pegasus, but not an exact one, probably because the child of Thea is a child. That would also suggest that Crimson's ego represented as a dragon is probably the ego of an adolescent male, with a tad too much creative aggression, as is my character with respect to my obsessive drive to creatively produce.
It is interesting to note that in Freedom Long's book on the relationship between the Lower, Middle, and Higher Selves, The conscious, middle self is only able to communicate with the higher self through the lower self as mediator. In Crimson's case, it is the ego-dragon which is responsible for the fire-spitting. The dragon-ego along with Crimson still have to disappear into time-space, however, to be configured correctly in order to perform a proper fire-spit. Just how Crimson achieves the disappearance is still unclear, but, just before he does so, there is a great look of intent that Crimson exudes, as well as undefinable hue in his eyes.
Just how much the Crimson story conforms to archetypal patterns is a big question mark in my mind. The "Human Erasure" story came with a lot more inspiration. During the creation of some of the scenes, I was seeing the world in white, sometimes my being felt completely drenched in the white light. The merits of that story with regard to the subject of spiritual development in general is questionable, however, for Astronaut X uses sheer aggression (akin to Crimson's look of intent), coupled with what I will later define to be "extreme astronautics", in order to escape the pull of planet Earth, in a similar way as I used aggression and an "Evolution or Bust!" attitude to call forth the Hurricane Period.
Such use of unrestricted aggression to maximize the efficiency of evolution is not an appropriate way to develop oneself spiritually, as I've learned, largely due to the resulting fragmentation of the self, and the negativity that naturally comes with the pain from going through changes at a rate too fast to handle. And so the "Human Erasure" story ends almost nightmarishly.
Astronaut X follows his inevitable trajectory down into a bottomless crater and the story ends with him recalling a car accident he had experienced in his youth due to his reckless driving, an expression for his manic obsession for speed. The undulating lights of the automobiles passing him by while stuck in his wrecked car drive into him the appreciation of the endless oscillations and rythems that are inherent in life itself. Just as the recalling of the memory crescendos with intensity:
Like sharp, needlepoint spears, the vast field of stars broke the crust of his skin to suddenly desiminate him into an unfathomable expansion, the surging wind of a burst celestial body.
The following excerpt from the Crimson tales serves as a necessary precursor to the "Human Erasure" story:
She dreamt of him wedged in a man-sized chunk of crystal; in search for the crystal's fire, the dream said. Why? To melt himself free?
Crimson fossilized in bedrock, such were the perils of mining the earth. She found his manic, tormenting obsession with spitting fire very delusional, very silly. Yet, she was strangely attracted to him for his compulsion. That quality which she found childish also bound her to him with a strength that could only originate from the realm of the supernatural. She longed for him. She would forever stand by his side in hope that one day he would call for her, despite the isolation of his extreme narcissism. For, somehow, as he was held fast in his own festival of mirrors, she would emerge as one of the many stray reflections of his possible selves, the sudden materialization of a forgotten desire surfacing from that part of his depths that linked him with the external world. Yet, she feared that if they were to meet in his inner world, his version of her would suffice and she would at best become the mere replica of an underworld goddess, the stale icon of a living deity of love.
At the time this was written, I was still very much a solitary. There are many reasons why solitude was so attractive, which I shall not delve into here. One of them was that my regularized focus on evolution was simply unmatched by the others I met, and secondly even if they were, my own path was unique and I did not wish to be diverted from my 'work'.
Since much evolutionary catalyst comes from interaction with others, this missing aspect must be compensated in solitude. Crimson's extreme narcissism demanded the creation of his own internal gods and goddesses, his "festival of mirrors". What this translated to was the internalization of polarity. The catalysts that arise from interaction with other selves comes from contrasting views, beliefs, proclivities, and attitudes. In other words, each self has her/his own sets of balances with respect to the various polarities. Evolution in solitude, then, demands the manifestation of an inner dominion, prolifically rich with the contrasting multiplicity of the self.
Thursday, October 4, 2007
L I F E and Extreme Astronautics
Diary Blog - October
If this is your first time reading this blog, it is recommended that you start here.
Please visit http://shiftingshadow.net for my complete collection of music and artwork.
Wednesday, 10/03/07:
Ecstasy and the Awareness of Synchronicity
The other day, I stumbled upon the following sentence from one of my earlier diaries: "A cluster of synchronistic events is itself a crystalline structure." How true that is I don't know but the idea seems to possess a significant degree of potency. (Does potency represent truth? Again I don't know...)
Last Saturday, I was sitting outside at a coffeehouse when I naturally slipped into a state of ecstasy, albeit a mild one. The way I understand ecstasy these days originally came to me as a vision. I saw the self (not my self, but just a generic human being) whose embedded light (which usually lies dormant) was kindled like a fire until it resonated with the light throughout the cosmos, or for those who are not skeptics, the light of the Creator. This resonance can manifest into an intense white light which puts the self into a state of ecstatic union with the creation. The feeling of one-ness, or at-one-ment with the world is the simple, almost obvious, reaction to ecstasy, for the energy is at once both inside and outside the self, although this might only be intuitively grasped by the one having the experience.
Ecstasy is for me in the same family of experiences as alighting in unconditional love, of bathing in the white light, of brilliantly glowing with love-radiance. All these experiences come with an internal reordering of one's being, an unblocking of the energy centers, a smoothing out of the distortions due to the higher order of these energies. There have been so many instances when I have been in the worst state of emotional and/or mental health and the slipping into such an ecstatic experience instantly washed me clean and left me hoisted in calm and serenity, for ecstasy is an infinite reservoir of well-being. Depending upon the level of intensity, such experiences are truly miraculous in nature.
As I was sitting in the coffeeshop and enjoying the last dewdrops of my mild ecstatic experience, I realized that I had suddenly become much more aware and alert of my surroundings. And the seemingly trivial events going on about me took on meaning, an order that seemed to fit tightly into place.
An hour or so ago, I had asked myself the following questions: "Why the spiral tug? Why does the kundalini rise in the form of a snake? Why does the light spiral upwards as opposed to rise up in a simply vertical fashion?"
There was a baby crying incessantly at the far table to my right, as if newly born. In order to reduce the level of annoyance of the other customers at the coffeeshop, the father was tapping his hand rythmically on the baby's mouth so that instead of hearing a long steady wail like "WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH", it sounded like "WAWAWAWAWAWAWAWA". Most of us were laughing at the hilarious sound and someone to my left said "it takes the edge off." Oh yes, indeed it does.
Then I read the following words in the Ra Material, the question centering on the reason why "certain sacred Hebrew and Sanskrit words [were] powerful because they were mathematically related to the structure of Creation":
"...the linkage is mathematical and related to musical ratio...it is equivalent to types of rotation of your primary material particles.
A couple of hours later, my friends informed me that they were at the "Love Parade" in San Francisco, which is an annual outdoor party that featured a large group of DJs on parade floats pumping out loud electronic dance music. When I arrived, I felt my spirits lift instantly, as if I were riding the beat, which can be perceived as a sine wave that encourages one to vibrate with the same wavelength, i.e. to dance. I felt high and buoyant like a helium balloon.
The next day I was at a social gathering mingling with some friends. Sometimes our ideas come out in a surprisingly balanced fashion through the spontanaiety of conversation. One guy asked me what was my horoscope. "Gemini," I replied, "I deal with polarities."
"Oh, you're bipolar," he laughed.
"No, to be a gemini does not necessarily mean you swing about. But that you can balance the polarities. It's like having a pair of wings."
This set of events can itself be perceived as a piece of music, and my focused attention, intrigued appreciation, and emotionally-charged involvement in the rythem and the flow as a form of dance. Watching people dancing passionately without hearing the music can make them look awkward and amusing. In a similar fashion, listening to someone's synchronicity story lacks the underlying order of the movement that accompanies living out those events personally. However, those who know synchronicity well are already dancing.
Thursday, 10/04/07:
Strengthening the Grace of Multiplicity
Whereas an ecstatic experience can help one grasp the concept of oneness on an intuitive level, it was the Hurricane Period which provided my conscious mind with the opportunity to witness all human beings as one, doing so by shifting my state of mind in ways that moved me psychologically closer to whichever person held my attention. Until then, I thought my own concept of oneness, which stemmed from my mystical experiences in college, had been partially developed as an influence from popular spiritual teachings.
Once the knowledge that we were all one became well integrated with my outlook on life, I was able to recognize consciously that I had, indeed I've always had, before me a pallette of selves from which to choose. With the proper degree of selflessness as well as looseness of my ego, that which I beheld before me was that which I became. This was true only to a limited degree, of course, but for all practical purposes a full becoming of another is neither necessary nor desired for inherent in the self is the essential melody, the proper leitmotif.
The term "Hurricane Thinking" is elusive in that the overall trajectory of movement is indeed circular, or spiral, in shape but each actual movement is best described as a jump from one prespective to another. When seen in its proper complexity, hurricane thinking is a dance whose movements bounce about points on a set of axes of polarities. The higher the state of mind, the more this resembles electricity sparking about a neural network.
In order to get from point A, my self, to point B, an other self, there is a specific set of intrinsic points to which I can psychologically traverse in order that the appropriate new sympathetic state of mind is reached. My selflessness must be absolute especially if the other self's character is not harmonious with my own normal character. And the looseness of my ego, which is to be differentiated from selflessness, also must be maximized.
One of the main things that the Hurricane Period did to me can best be described in Carlos Castenada's terminology: the magnificent oscillations of that period "dislodged my assemblage point". The assemblage point of an individual at any specific point in time is that state of mind or being which determines how s/he perceives the world. An average adult naturally gravitates back to what can be called their assemblage point of normalcy after any temporary shift in consciousness. Dislodging my assemblage point meant that my point of normalcy to which I always returned was uprooted and I found myself forever floating around. In other words, the ground was pulled away from beneath my feet.
Seen from another angle, my ego, that which held me together, was shattered to pieces. Any attempt I made to resolidify my ego was followed by a return to a child-like state. At times I felt like an infant, with the mood swings of an infant.
In my higher states of mind, oscillation was lubricated by unconditional acceptance, selflessness and an all-encompassing sympathetic affirmation of life in both macro- and micro-cosm. In my more normal states, there was always the fear from the uncertainty of the movement. Any intervention on the part of my conscious self produced the friction and dissonance which made the movement painful, deleterious to my well-being. The extrinsic destination of the oscillation was not reached and I felt the pain of fragmentation as a result, the movement tore apart rather than transformed. Thus, grace in movement had to be learned.
I used to listen to some fast, high-energy drum and bass music while driving my car and I would visualize myself flying through the air and transforming into many selves. This adrenalin-infused imaginary game was a slightly different version of one of my favorite pastimes when I was a kid. There were specific ways of transforming which were graceful and smooth, while others produced a 'crashing effect' which would force me to restart my aerial flight. Such visualizations helped me understand the archetypal patterns inherent in some movements in consciousness, albeit at the intuitive level, because of the spontaneity demanded by the speed of the music. This was only one of many examples of how I was able to learn to follow my oscillations with greater ease even in my more normal states.
Saturday, 10/07/07:
There were many reasons why the Hurricane Period hit me when it did, and one of the most important of them was that I needed to switch paths from one that was based on my professional career to a path based upon my artistic pursuits. I had worked for a year and a half at an internet startup which had really burnt me out with its long hours and it was time for me to find another job that gave me the free time I needed. By the time the Hurricane Period ended three weeks later, I had successfully set off on a new career path which was to enable me to work a total of 9 months out of 12 for that year and I ended up more than doubling my salary.
This was during the internet hype right before the year 2000. At the time, nearly everyone in my company thought it was going to go public and we were all going to become rich. I had written a short story a year earlier which possessed some archetypal themes. I noticed the parallels between the story and the current state of the company and I therefore deduced that it was a sinking ship. I recall during the last week I was there, the CEO of the company sent out his first email that their going public will have to be delayed. The company was eventually to shrink back in size to below thirty employees, hardly keeping its ground.
Everyone I knew at work asked me why I was leaving the company, and to each person I concocted a different reason, each specifically tuned for his or her ears. In my heart, however, I wanted to write my farewell email to everyone in the following manner: "The real reason for leaving this company is because I want to become an astronaut. I know this may come as a surprise to you all, but I have already made my decision..."
After the Hurricane Period ended, I went through the most difficult period of my life mostly because of my incessant mood wings; any negative judgment I harbored about my self, an other self (which at this stage was but a reflection of my own self), or about life in general or in particular had the potential of sending me straight to a psychological hell. Even though there were some beautiful moments and I was still absorbing so many insights, at times I was convinced that I was staring face to face at the archetype of self-destruction. My only salvation was to adopt and regularize a thoroughly affirmative attitude towards life and everyone I knew. I kept a diary and the time when my struggles started to lift coincided with when my diary writing turned into fiction. I started to write a science fiction story; the first sentence surfaced completely on its own and it went like this: "There was a flash and Astronaut X found himself floating high above the moon."
The Science Fiction Period
The story was eventually named "Human Erasure" and it was about escaping or transcending the human domain, depending how you look at it. A month or so after I began, my spirits were reaching heights that were out of this world. There came a week when I had to take time off work because of some minor ailment. I was euphoric practically the entire time and the world about me seemed to be bathed in white light. As I was writing my story, I had visions, dreams, and inspired thoughts that were so profoundly moving that they outshone every single experience I had had before then. Like my astronaut character, I had truly left the planet and found a dimension that was unfathomably beautiful. Everything in my past was nulled out and void, and I say this without exaggeration. And I have yet to experience states of mind that are in any way comparable.
After returning to work the next week, I could no longer keep up with my inspiration and writing and I felt as if I was half in this world and half outside it. Finally, one night I had a nightmare that I was stuck on Mars all alone and so my writing ended, leaving the story unfinished. I returned to my old, turbulent self, but eventually I regained my stability to a certain degree and the hurricane movement mostly occurred during my higher states of mind.
Sunday, 10/08/07:
Those who have a deep appreciation of abstract art have the knowledge, even if it is only at the intuitive level, that a mere set of lines can produce an enlightening transformation in consciousness through witnessing and absorbing their specific configuration. Great works of art are of a higher order, and they help the viewer evolve by imprinting their special intelligence into one's psyche for possible integration. This usually happens at the unconscious layers and the effects are subtle and vague.
Abstract artists, through the repeated process of adding, deleting, fading and enhancing abstract forms on the canvas, develop the ability to look at aspects of their surroundings at any point in time and highlight with their inner eye those forms which produce an inspiring effect. In some states, I can do this with ease and it is as if whatever image lies before me begins to speak; at times, my surroundings come alive and it is as if the world is smiling at me.
Abstract musicians, through the repeated use of raw sound and sound textures also develop the ability to hone in on the sounds of everyday life and to harmonize themselves with it, allowing them to appreciate the soundtrack of everyday reality as if it were a symphony. I often concentrate on the sounds of my surroundings as a method of meditation, and at times this alone hoists me into an ethereal state.
Being in tune with one's surroundings in this manner is in no way limited to artists and musicians, however. These experiences are shared by mystics, or by those who approach being mystical, through their at-one-ment with the world and their deeply rooted appreciation of the magic behind everyday life.
Just as an ecstatic experience brings a higher order into a personality's configuration, so does the mystical appreciation of life in its raw form, its core experience, provide for the necessary tuning to behold the archetypal order behind life's events. And this is why, in general, I like to integrate my ideas with my real life story, for without attempting to express the archetypal order beneath life's events that originated these ideas, they would seem to the reader to float about without solid foundation. This goes for my music and art as well. It is a wonder why I waited so long to start this blog, perhaps a distortion towards shyness...
These psychological phenomena highlight the intense potential for a human being to gain inspiration from life at any given point in time, and shows each moment to be pregnant with possibilities for our evolution. Add to this the wide variety of catalysts that is born out of everyday human interaction, the synchronicities, the dreams, the ideas running through our heads, and already life can be seen to be overflowing in potential.
We seldom, myself included, utilize each moment for our betterment, however. Usually, the moment, as pregnant with power as it is, passes us by, missed like an unwanted train.
In my past, there was a night which I vividly remember, in which my pores were completely open, so to speak, to absorb the wisdom held in each moment. I was actually at a bar at the time, which is typically full of life, usually obnoxiously loud but not for me at this time. I will try to be accurate in describing my state of mind:
First, there was the aforementioned appreciation of abstract form, so that every visual aspect of my surroundings came alive upon my focused attention.
Secondly, I experienced an extreme amount of "synchronistic conditioning", which I desrcibed in my August blog to be the conditioning of one's state of mind by deeper portions of the psyche to better perceive synchronistic events. But, it was to the point that I would think a thought or recall a memory (or rather a thought or memory would surface on its own) and I then would witness something or hear lyrics in the music that ping-ponged a meaning at me through the relative contrast between the inner and outer event.
Thirdly, my thoughts were jumping around like electricity in a selfless form of Hurricane Thinking and sweeping in insight after insight through the use of polarity, a delightful orchestra of revelation conducted by the synchronicities I was witnessing.
Altogether, my mind felt like it was speeding faster than a space rocket.
At one point in the night, I perceived a very loud vision which showed me traveling through a circular tubing, shaped like a donut. Each moment in time was represented by a flash of one solid color, and this color was full of intelligence and meaning. I was being shown the power in the moment and how much wisdom was integrated in every second of our existence.
This circular tubing shape, I was to find out many years later, is called a torus. I was first introduced to this shape in the article below, to be found on David Wilcock's website, DivineCosmos.com, but I'm sure it's a common image amongst physicists. It discusses what occurs when you travel close to the speed of light based on Einstein's Theory of Relativity although I believe the ideas discussed here were an extension of Einstein's thoughts. (I could be wrong, however. Please do not think I have any degree of proficiency in the field of science!)
http://www.divinecosmos.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=337&Itemid=30
Here is an excerpt from that article:
...Einstein’s discoveries that space and time are part of one unified ‘fabric’...
Space-time starts out ‘flat,’ without curvature, and as you accelerate it towards the speed of light, the curvature increases. This curvature bends gravity along with it...
At the speed of light you create a torus as you see in the next image. Space could now be thought of as the outside surface of the torus, and time as the inside.
What happens when you accelerate the curvature PAST the speed of light? The torus unrolls again -- but now it is INSIDE OUT.
Time, which was on the INSIDE of the torus, has now moved to the OUTSIDE of the torus -- the SURFACE.
What was once time has now become space.
Everything inverts. And as your velocity further increases (from our perspective) or decreases (from the other side’s perspective), the torus again flattens out, becoming a stable, inhabitable plane.
You have just created a gateway into ‘time-space’ -- a parallel reality in which there are three dimensions of time (as we think of it) and one dimension of space (to our perspective.) Over there, the three dimensions of time become the space you move through, and experience as space -- and the one dimension of space (to us) becomes the steady flow of time.
Could the torus shape in my vision correspond to what occurs when our evolution reaches that extreme level of acceleration? Now, you might be saying: "Yo Makram! You really think your consciousness traveled the speed of light? You must be crazy!"
Indeed, but here is another piece of the puzzle: Just as I had no idea when I had the vision of the torus that it was the shape of space-time as one travels close to the speed of light, similarly, when I wrote my Astronaut story, I had also yet to be introduced to the space/time vs. time/space relationship. As David Wilcock explained above, in time/space, space becomes a constant, similar to how time is a constant in our space/time in that we forever only perceive the current moment. And in time/space, time takes on 3D characteristics that we can explore just as we explore 3D space in our space/time reality.
What occurs to Astronaut X when he finds himself floating above the moon? His body follows an inevitable orbiting trajectory but he cannot help but forever float motionless in the air. In other words, he is fixed in space. And throughout the story he recalls alternate periods from his life on Earth, i.e. he moves himself through time.
So what am I trying to say in all of this? Only that which has already been stated in the Ra Material. The main point I am trying to make is that there is a threshold in consciousness which when transcended takes us outside of time as we know it so that we are no longer stuck in the moment but capable of moving around in time, both into our past and into our future. In Ra speak, through transcending "space/time balancing", we "enter the combined realms of space/time and time/space."
In my opinion, this is an extremely important model of the human psyche and it serves to explain the reasons behind so much psychic phenomena that most scientists refute solely on the grounds that these phenomena, despite being witnessed over and over again, do not fit in with any scientific explanation. Predicting the future is no longer a mystery when we accept the fact that consciousness can tap into time/space; the only question is how we can reach time/space.
If we take the emergence of the story of Astronaut X, which was just a fictional extension of my diary writing, as the point in time when I switched over to time/space through "transcend[ing] space/time balancing", the most significant personality shift or tuning I underwent was the adopting of a thoroughly positive attitude. And this goes in line with Ra's statement about the Transformation of the Mind archetype. Speaking of the "the pull towards mental polarity" of the conscious mind deciding between the positive and the negative: "In order for the Transformation of Mind to occur, one principle governing the use of the deep mind must be abandoned."
If this is your first time reading this blog, it is recommended that you start here.
Please visit http://shiftingshadow.net for my complete collection of music and artwork.
Wednesday, 10/03/07:
Ecstasy and the Awareness of Synchronicity
The other day, I stumbled upon the following sentence from one of my earlier diaries: "A cluster of synchronistic events is itself a crystalline structure." How true that is I don't know but the idea seems to possess a significant degree of potency. (Does potency represent truth? Again I don't know...)
Last Saturday, I was sitting outside at a coffeehouse when I naturally slipped into a state of ecstasy, albeit a mild one. The way I understand ecstasy these days originally came to me as a vision. I saw the self (not my self, but just a generic human being) whose embedded light (which usually lies dormant) was kindled like a fire until it resonated with the light throughout the cosmos, or for those who are not skeptics, the light of the Creator. This resonance can manifest into an intense white light which puts the self into a state of ecstatic union with the creation. The feeling of one-ness, or at-one-ment with the world is the simple, almost obvious, reaction to ecstasy, for the energy is at once both inside and outside the self, although this might only be intuitively grasped by the one having the experience.
Ecstasy is for me in the same family of experiences as alighting in unconditional love, of bathing in the white light, of brilliantly glowing with love-radiance. All these experiences come with an internal reordering of one's being, an unblocking of the energy centers, a smoothing out of the distortions due to the higher order of these energies. There have been so many instances when I have been in the worst state of emotional and/or mental health and the slipping into such an ecstatic experience instantly washed me clean and left me hoisted in calm and serenity, for ecstasy is an infinite reservoir of well-being. Depending upon the level of intensity, such experiences are truly miraculous in nature.
As I was sitting in the coffeeshop and enjoying the last dewdrops of my mild ecstatic experience, I realized that I had suddenly become much more aware and alert of my surroundings. And the seemingly trivial events going on about me took on meaning, an order that seemed to fit tightly into place.
An hour or so ago, I had asked myself the following questions: "Why the spiral tug? Why does the kundalini rise in the form of a snake? Why does the light spiral upwards as opposed to rise up in a simply vertical fashion?"
There was a baby crying incessantly at the far table to my right, as if newly born. In order to reduce the level of annoyance of the other customers at the coffeeshop, the father was tapping his hand rythmically on the baby's mouth so that instead of hearing a long steady wail like "WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH", it sounded like "WAWAWAWAWAWAWAWA". Most of us were laughing at the hilarious sound and someone to my left said "it takes the edge off." Oh yes, indeed it does.
Then I read the following words in the Ra Material, the question centering on the reason why "certain sacred Hebrew and Sanskrit words [were] powerful because they were mathematically related to the structure of Creation":
"...the linkage is mathematical and related to musical ratio...it is equivalent to types of rotation of your primary material particles.
A couple of hours later, my friends informed me that they were at the "Love Parade" in San Francisco, which is an annual outdoor party that featured a large group of DJs on parade floats pumping out loud electronic dance music. When I arrived, I felt my spirits lift instantly, as if I were riding the beat, which can be perceived as a sine wave that encourages one to vibrate with the same wavelength, i.e. to dance. I felt high and buoyant like a helium balloon.
The next day I was at a social gathering mingling with some friends. Sometimes our ideas come out in a surprisingly balanced fashion through the spontanaiety of conversation. One guy asked me what was my horoscope. "Gemini," I replied, "I deal with polarities."
"Oh, you're bipolar," he laughed.
"No, to be a gemini does not necessarily mean you swing about. But that you can balance the polarities. It's like having a pair of wings."
This set of events can itself be perceived as a piece of music, and my focused attention, intrigued appreciation, and emotionally-charged involvement in the rythem and the flow as a form of dance. Watching people dancing passionately without hearing the music can make them look awkward and amusing. In a similar fashion, listening to someone's synchronicity story lacks the underlying order of the movement that accompanies living out those events personally. However, those who know synchronicity well are already dancing.
Thursday, 10/04/07:
Strengthening the Grace of Multiplicity
Whereas an ecstatic experience can help one grasp the concept of oneness on an intuitive level, it was the Hurricane Period which provided my conscious mind with the opportunity to witness all human beings as one, doing so by shifting my state of mind in ways that moved me psychologically closer to whichever person held my attention. Until then, I thought my own concept of oneness, which stemmed from my mystical experiences in college, had been partially developed as an influence from popular spiritual teachings.
Once the knowledge that we were all one became well integrated with my outlook on life, I was able to recognize consciously that I had, indeed I've always had, before me a pallette of selves from which to choose. With the proper degree of selflessness as well as looseness of my ego, that which I beheld before me was that which I became. This was true only to a limited degree, of course, but for all practical purposes a full becoming of another is neither necessary nor desired for inherent in the self is the essential melody, the proper leitmotif.
The term "Hurricane Thinking" is elusive in that the overall trajectory of movement is indeed circular, or spiral, in shape but each actual movement is best described as a jump from one prespective to another. When seen in its proper complexity, hurricane thinking is a dance whose movements bounce about points on a set of axes of polarities. The higher the state of mind, the more this resembles electricity sparking about a neural network.
In order to get from point A, my self, to point B, an other self, there is a specific set of intrinsic points to which I can psychologically traverse in order that the appropriate new sympathetic state of mind is reached. My selflessness must be absolute especially if the other self's character is not harmonious with my own normal character. And the looseness of my ego, which is to be differentiated from selflessness, also must be maximized.
One of the main things that the Hurricane Period did to me can best be described in Carlos Castenada's terminology: the magnificent oscillations of that period "dislodged my assemblage point". The assemblage point of an individual at any specific point in time is that state of mind or being which determines how s/he perceives the world. An average adult naturally gravitates back to what can be called their assemblage point of normalcy after any temporary shift in consciousness. Dislodging my assemblage point meant that my point of normalcy to which I always returned was uprooted and I found myself forever floating around. In other words, the ground was pulled away from beneath my feet.
Seen from another angle, my ego, that which held me together, was shattered to pieces. Any attempt I made to resolidify my ego was followed by a return to a child-like state. At times I felt like an infant, with the mood swings of an infant.
In my higher states of mind, oscillation was lubricated by unconditional acceptance, selflessness and an all-encompassing sympathetic affirmation of life in both macro- and micro-cosm. In my more normal states, there was always the fear from the uncertainty of the movement. Any intervention on the part of my conscious self produced the friction and dissonance which made the movement painful, deleterious to my well-being. The extrinsic destination of the oscillation was not reached and I felt the pain of fragmentation as a result, the movement tore apart rather than transformed. Thus, grace in movement had to be learned.
I used to listen to some fast, high-energy drum and bass music while driving my car and I would visualize myself flying through the air and transforming into many selves. This adrenalin-infused imaginary game was a slightly different version of one of my favorite pastimes when I was a kid. There were specific ways of transforming which were graceful and smooth, while others produced a 'crashing effect' which would force me to restart my aerial flight. Such visualizations helped me understand the archetypal patterns inherent in some movements in consciousness, albeit at the intuitive level, because of the spontaneity demanded by the speed of the music. This was only one of many examples of how I was able to learn to follow my oscillations with greater ease even in my more normal states.
Saturday, 10/07/07:
There were many reasons why the Hurricane Period hit me when it did, and one of the most important of them was that I needed to switch paths from one that was based on my professional career to a path based upon my artistic pursuits. I had worked for a year and a half at an internet startup which had really burnt me out with its long hours and it was time for me to find another job that gave me the free time I needed. By the time the Hurricane Period ended three weeks later, I had successfully set off on a new career path which was to enable me to work a total of 9 months out of 12 for that year and I ended up more than doubling my salary.
This was during the internet hype right before the year 2000. At the time, nearly everyone in my company thought it was going to go public and we were all going to become rich. I had written a short story a year earlier which possessed some archetypal themes. I noticed the parallels between the story and the current state of the company and I therefore deduced that it was a sinking ship. I recall during the last week I was there, the CEO of the company sent out his first email that their going public will have to be delayed. The company was eventually to shrink back in size to below thirty employees, hardly keeping its ground.
Everyone I knew at work asked me why I was leaving the company, and to each person I concocted a different reason, each specifically tuned for his or her ears. In my heart, however, I wanted to write my farewell email to everyone in the following manner: "The real reason for leaving this company is because I want to become an astronaut. I know this may come as a surprise to you all, but I have already made my decision..."
After the Hurricane Period ended, I went through the most difficult period of my life mostly because of my incessant mood wings; any negative judgment I harbored about my self, an other self (which at this stage was but a reflection of my own self), or about life in general or in particular had the potential of sending me straight to a psychological hell. Even though there were some beautiful moments and I was still absorbing so many insights, at times I was convinced that I was staring face to face at the archetype of self-destruction. My only salvation was to adopt and regularize a thoroughly affirmative attitude towards life and everyone I knew. I kept a diary and the time when my struggles started to lift coincided with when my diary writing turned into fiction. I started to write a science fiction story; the first sentence surfaced completely on its own and it went like this: "There was a flash and Astronaut X found himself floating high above the moon."
The Science Fiction Period
The story was eventually named "Human Erasure" and it was about escaping or transcending the human domain, depending how you look at it. A month or so after I began, my spirits were reaching heights that were out of this world. There came a week when I had to take time off work because of some minor ailment. I was euphoric practically the entire time and the world about me seemed to be bathed in white light. As I was writing my story, I had visions, dreams, and inspired thoughts that were so profoundly moving that they outshone every single experience I had had before then. Like my astronaut character, I had truly left the planet and found a dimension that was unfathomably beautiful. Everything in my past was nulled out and void, and I say this without exaggeration. And I have yet to experience states of mind that are in any way comparable.
After returning to work the next week, I could no longer keep up with my inspiration and writing and I felt as if I was half in this world and half outside it. Finally, one night I had a nightmare that I was stuck on Mars all alone and so my writing ended, leaving the story unfinished. I returned to my old, turbulent self, but eventually I regained my stability to a certain degree and the hurricane movement mostly occurred during my higher states of mind.
Sunday, 10/08/07:
Those who have a deep appreciation of abstract art have the knowledge, even if it is only at the intuitive level, that a mere set of lines can produce an enlightening transformation in consciousness through witnessing and absorbing their specific configuration. Great works of art are of a higher order, and they help the viewer evolve by imprinting their special intelligence into one's psyche for possible integration. This usually happens at the unconscious layers and the effects are subtle and vague.
Abstract artists, through the repeated process of adding, deleting, fading and enhancing abstract forms on the canvas, develop the ability to look at aspects of their surroundings at any point in time and highlight with their inner eye those forms which produce an inspiring effect. In some states, I can do this with ease and it is as if whatever image lies before me begins to speak; at times, my surroundings come alive and it is as if the world is smiling at me.
Abstract musicians, through the repeated use of raw sound and sound textures also develop the ability to hone in on the sounds of everyday life and to harmonize themselves with it, allowing them to appreciate the soundtrack of everyday reality as if it were a symphony. I often concentrate on the sounds of my surroundings as a method of meditation, and at times this alone hoists me into an ethereal state.
Being in tune with one's surroundings in this manner is in no way limited to artists and musicians, however. These experiences are shared by mystics, or by those who approach being mystical, through their at-one-ment with the world and their deeply rooted appreciation of the magic behind everyday life.
Just as an ecstatic experience brings a higher order into a personality's configuration, so does the mystical appreciation of life in its raw form, its core experience, provide for the necessary tuning to behold the archetypal order behind life's events. And this is why, in general, I like to integrate my ideas with my real life story, for without attempting to express the archetypal order beneath life's events that originated these ideas, they would seem to the reader to float about without solid foundation. This goes for my music and art as well. It is a wonder why I waited so long to start this blog, perhaps a distortion towards shyness...
These psychological phenomena highlight the intense potential for a human being to gain inspiration from life at any given point in time, and shows each moment to be pregnant with possibilities for our evolution. Add to this the wide variety of catalysts that is born out of everyday human interaction, the synchronicities, the dreams, the ideas running through our heads, and already life can be seen to be overflowing in potential.
We seldom, myself included, utilize each moment for our betterment, however. Usually, the moment, as pregnant with power as it is, passes us by, missed like an unwanted train.
In my past, there was a night which I vividly remember, in which my pores were completely open, so to speak, to absorb the wisdom held in each moment. I was actually at a bar at the time, which is typically full of life, usually obnoxiously loud but not for me at this time. I will try to be accurate in describing my state of mind:
First, there was the aforementioned appreciation of abstract form, so that every visual aspect of my surroundings came alive upon my focused attention.
Secondly, I experienced an extreme amount of "synchronistic conditioning", which I desrcibed in my August blog to be the conditioning of one's state of mind by deeper portions of the psyche to better perceive synchronistic events. But, it was to the point that I would think a thought or recall a memory (or rather a thought or memory would surface on its own) and I then would witness something or hear lyrics in the music that ping-ponged a meaning at me through the relative contrast between the inner and outer event.
Thirdly, my thoughts were jumping around like electricity in a selfless form of Hurricane Thinking and sweeping in insight after insight through the use of polarity, a delightful orchestra of revelation conducted by the synchronicities I was witnessing.
Altogether, my mind felt like it was speeding faster than a space rocket.
At one point in the night, I perceived a very loud vision which showed me traveling through a circular tubing, shaped like a donut. Each moment in time was represented by a flash of one solid color, and this color was full of intelligence and meaning. I was being shown the power in the moment and how much wisdom was integrated in every second of our existence.
This circular tubing shape, I was to find out many years later, is called a torus. I was first introduced to this shape in the article below, to be found on David Wilcock's website, DivineCosmos.com, but I'm sure it's a common image amongst physicists. It discusses what occurs when you travel close to the speed of light based on Einstein's Theory of Relativity although I believe the ideas discussed here were an extension of Einstein's thoughts. (I could be wrong, however. Please do not think I have any degree of proficiency in the field of science!)
http://www.divinecosmos.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=337&Itemid=30
Here is an excerpt from that article:
...Einstein’s discoveries that space and time are part of one unified ‘fabric’...
Space-time starts out ‘flat,’ without curvature, and as you accelerate it towards the speed of light, the curvature increases. This curvature bends gravity along with it...
At the speed of light you create a torus as you see in the next image. Space could now be thought of as the outside surface of the torus, and time as the inside.
What happens when you accelerate the curvature PAST the speed of light? The torus unrolls again -- but now it is INSIDE OUT.
Time, which was on the INSIDE of the torus, has now moved to the OUTSIDE of the torus -- the SURFACE.
What was once time has now become space.
Everything inverts. And as your velocity further increases (from our perspective) or decreases (from the other side’s perspective), the torus again flattens out, becoming a stable, inhabitable plane.
You have just created a gateway into ‘time-space’ -- a parallel reality in which there are three dimensions of time (as we think of it) and one dimension of space (to our perspective.) Over there, the three dimensions of time become the space you move through, and experience as space -- and the one dimension of space (to us) becomes the steady flow of time.
Could the torus shape in my vision correspond to what occurs when our evolution reaches that extreme level of acceleration? Now, you might be saying: "Yo Makram! You really think your consciousness traveled the speed of light? You must be crazy!"
Indeed, but here is another piece of the puzzle: Just as I had no idea when I had the vision of the torus that it was the shape of space-time as one travels close to the speed of light, similarly, when I wrote my Astronaut story, I had also yet to be introduced to the space/time vs. time/space relationship. As David Wilcock explained above, in time/space, space becomes a constant, similar to how time is a constant in our space/time in that we forever only perceive the current moment. And in time/space, time takes on 3D characteristics that we can explore just as we explore 3D space in our space/time reality.
What occurs to Astronaut X when he finds himself floating above the moon? His body follows an inevitable orbiting trajectory but he cannot help but forever float motionless in the air. In other words, he is fixed in space. And throughout the story he recalls alternate periods from his life on Earth, i.e. he moves himself through time.
So what am I trying to say in all of this? Only that which has already been stated in the Ra Material. The main point I am trying to make is that there is a threshold in consciousness which when transcended takes us outside of time as we know it so that we are no longer stuck in the moment but capable of moving around in time, both into our past and into our future. In Ra speak, through transcending "space/time balancing", we "enter the combined realms of space/time and time/space."
In my opinion, this is an extremely important model of the human psyche and it serves to explain the reasons behind so much psychic phenomena that most scientists refute solely on the grounds that these phenomena, despite being witnessed over and over again, do not fit in with any scientific explanation. Predicting the future is no longer a mystery when we accept the fact that consciousness can tap into time/space; the only question is how we can reach time/space.
If we take the emergence of the story of Astronaut X, which was just a fictional extension of my diary writing, as the point in time when I switched over to time/space through "transcend[ing] space/time balancing", the most significant personality shift or tuning I underwent was the adopting of a thoroughly positive attitude. And this goes in line with Ra's statement about the Transformation of the Mind archetype. Speaking of the "the pull towards mental polarity" of the conscious mind deciding between the positive and the negative: "In order for the Transformation of Mind to occur, one principle governing the use of the deep mind must be abandoned."
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