The Art of Psychological Travel

The Fade Out Room - New Album Release

2011-12-17T23:14:00.000-08:00

The Fade Out Room has just been released on the Test Tube netlabel. This is a sonic tale of wading through dimensions. Downloads are free under the Creative Commons license and can be found here. From the album description:

We think that fans of The Caretaker and Gutta Percha will love this.
Following are some words from the artists explaining their work:

«M A S (aka Makram Abu-Shakra) and Travis McAlister are two musicians who used to play in various improv bands together during the early 90's in Southern California. Roughly a decade after they went their separate ways, a visit to Travis' home in Portland, Oregon led to a recording of mostly improvised music, which was to serve as the raw material for a project of careful craftsmanship that took three years to complete.

The result is an exploration of the warm, organic, and faulty sounds of vintage instruments, as well as an attempt to seek out (or invent?) an ambient side of early music genres such as old school jazz and the dream-like reverie of early black and white cinema. This is done from a minimalist musician's perspective which repeatedly strives to return to a core, abstract expression. As such, there is a dynamic interplay between structured melody and pure sound textures.

One has a sense of layers being peeled back to reveal deeper meaning, underscored by a recurring tendency towards sonic diminution and the fading out to silence. Hence, the name "The Fade Out Room".
The exploration of varying musical styles gives a sense of transparency to the album or an unfolding of dimensions, the shifts in the music at times resembling the soft peeling or shedding of layers to reveal more essential expressions.

The instruments played in The Fade Out Room include an optigan, an assortment of bells, various synths, a music box, and a plastic trumpet.

Makram Abu-Shakra was born in Lebanon and is now based in San Francisco. He is also an artist and a writer. Most of his work can be found here. Look for his first book to be published sometime in the next six months.
Travis McAlister was born in California and frequently performs live in Portland, Oregon. He is a member of Nequaquam Vacuum and The Krebsic Orkestar. He has earned a reputation of being a multi-instrumentalist and he also builds his own musical instruments.»
- test tube

Thus Spoke the Eye - Part II

2009-11-03T21:09:00.000-08:00

Precognition, Synchronicities, and Existential Vorticity

2008-12-14T22:44:00.000-08:00

In my previous post, The "Law of Attraction" and Inner Purpose, I discussed my points of view on the "Law of Attraction", a phrase that has becoming quite popular in this day and age. "You get what you focus upon" is the essential gist behind this "Law", which I find to be an over-simplified way to describe how focus affects our lives in an a-causal manner.

In my previous post, I discussed some basic arguments that explain why the "Law of Attraction" in its simple form does not always apply. Readers of this blog should already be familiar with what I call "warping the existential matrix". This is my version of the "Law of Attraction" which takes into account some subtle observations on how the reality we experience is affected by our focus. For a quick introduction, please read Synchronicity Clusters and Warping the Existential Matrix.

As the title of this post suggests, I will try to show how the understanding of warpage can help build precognitive abilities. Before I can dive into such a discussion, however, there are some basic things to consider about the nature of warpage.

Synchronicities occur most often (and warpage is most easily detectable) when the warpage takes on the form of a vortex. When extreme vorticity occurs, it is as if everything in life were synchronistic (which is a state of mind attributed to insanity, although I call it enlightenment).

The amount of focus necessary to experience an extreme vortex is quite intense and rarely occurs except during traumatic or pseudo-traumatic situations. In my case, however, I achieve extreme vorticity from time to time because (1) I like to live life with utmost intensity especially when I have the opportunity to focus upon my evolution, and (2) I have learned how to harness and activate my will to affect the necessary focus which affects resonance in the deeper layers of the psyche.

The Motions of Existential Vorticity

As is similar to vortices found in nature such as black holes, hurricanes, and whirlpools, in addition to a pull towards the point of focus, there can occur a spinning or twirling effect. In existential terms, this translates into experiencing synchronistic events that oscillate between achieving or approaching one's goal and failing or distancing oneself from it.

If the focus is not on a specific goal but on, for example, understanding or exploring a certain subject, the meanings and clues behind the synchronistic events tend to invite varying perspectives surrounding the topic at hand, so that an inner debate is orchestrated until a sense of balance is achieved.

Being aware of this vorticity is not always easy, since life is already typically rich with events influenced by our conscious decisions and other cause-and-effect processes. And due to the spinning motions of vorticity, synchronicities often appear as if they were ordinary, unrelated occurrences even though a vortex has indeed taken shape, and this is because of the seemingly self-contradictory (and apparently "random") order that they follow.

Synchronicities are obviously most apparent when they involve coincidences that are meaningful. When the underlying a-causal order propels one this way and that, as if arbitrarily, we tend to lose sight of this order, and we fail to recognize the serendipity in our lives.

As we mature with respect to the point of focus or as life's events develop far enough in its direction, synchronicities become more blatant and easy to spot. It is as if one reaches the eye of the hurricane, or the apex of a cone where the space to oscillate has been minimized. I have discussed these ideas in different ways in various posts, but the diary entries of my first two posts illustrate this process relatively clearly. I invite you to read Synchronistic Conditioning and an Emerging Portrait of Vitality and The Poetics of Bipolar Oscillation.

Tips on Becoming Aware of Existential Warpage

There are some golden rules that I follow in order to remain aware of the warpage in my existential matrix: (1) Always be on the lookout for synchronicities, (2) try to remain aware of the underlying lessons behind life's events (what aspects of your evolution are currently active), (3) remain aware of the points of focus that run deep, that resonate at a deep level of the psyche (paying attention to dreams helps in this regard), and (4) try to guess to what degree you are mature with respect to the topic(s) at hand (since synchroncities become more obvious the more one matures.)

Warped Matrix by Example

Understanding the nature of warping the existential matrix is most effectively accomplished by example. Since my life is usually quite synchronous with my writing, I have a fresh new story to tell.

This weekend was somewhat unusual for me from the very start. Hardly any of my usual hangouts and routines were working out; the restaurants I liked were all full, so were most of the coffee shops where I go to write, and even when I was able to go where I wanted, something usually went wrong; I sat in an uncomfortable position, the music was too loud, etc. In short, life's events seemed to express the negation of my habitual lifestyle, as if I were approaching the end of a phase.

Earlier today (Sunday), I received a call from my family. Our cat of 13 years had just died. I was deeply moved. Two minutes after the phone call, I was driving down the road and I pulled up beside a congregation of police cars. Then, I noticed a body bag. Next to it was a walker for the elderly crashed on its side. (I don't even remember when was the last time I saw a dead person in a body bag just a few feet away.) On the phone with a friend 10 minutes later, he was telling me of a death in his neighborhood that he learned about yesterday. In the cafe, someone was playing a video of a cat on his laptop...

Why did so many synchronicities occur revolving around the cat's death? Because I was deeply moved by the incident, and my focus did not stop short on a conscious level, but resonated deep within.

Warpage Effects Can Begin Before a Focus-Funneling Event Occurs

What was even more interesting was that the synchronicities began before the cat's death, with my difficulties of following my habitual weekend routines since early Saturday, her death was late Saturday, and I was not told of it till Sunday. From my experiences, I usually associate this type of synchronicity, where all the usual habits suddenly seem forbidden, with the Death Archetype, signaling the end of a phase and the birth of a new one.

So, how is it possible that synchronicities begin occurring before the event which funnels in our focus actually takes place? My best answer to this question is the following: The deeper layers of the psyche exist outside of time as we experience it consciously (as evidenced, for example, by the abilities of our dreams to foreshadow the future). If the focus occurs at a deeper level, then the warp begins taking place before the actual event is experienced.

The Global Consciousness Project and Premature Number Correlation

The following link takes you to an article on how the Random Event Generators behaved during the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001: September 11 2001: Exploratory and Contextual Analyses. The correlations of the radom numbers started taking place hours before the first plane hit the first tower. We see a similar early effect during Obama's election on Nov. 4th: Barack Obama Elected President.

Voriticity and Precognition

Since warpage of the existential matrix can be detected before a focus-funelling event occurs, it is possible, upon understanding the vortex-like motions expressed in daily living and as one begins to intuit archetypal patterns at play, to predict the event before it occurs. And this is what I did with respect to the Stock Market in Market Turmoil Part II. Published on Oct. 25th, I wrote how a series of synchronistic events led me to believe that an upcoming turning point in the stock market would occur early on in the subsequent week.

As can be seen by the above image from Yahoo! Finance, there was a severe drop on Oct. 27th in the US stock market, followed by a sharp ascent that held steady till around Nov. 4th.

The synchronicities occurred at a time when I was deeply focused upon the turmoil of the economy, causing a vortex-like warp in my existential matrix that mirrored that of the nation and the world at large. By following the news intensely, I effectively activated a similar set of archetypes as that which the events on the news were activating, manifesting an existential vortex whose effects were similar. Thus, my own synchronicities took on meaning that went beyond the personal.

Here is a summary of what occurred to me personally; the text in italics was copied directly from my previous post:

Oct. 23rd:
On Thursday night, I had to take some work home with me. I was logged into work at home trying to figure out a problem that a client had with our software (one of the clients that we've had problems with off and on since the market's turmoil began). As I tried to fix the problem, some weird problems were blocking me from doing my work, as if my computer were jinxed. The rarity of these problems made me think that something synchronistic was going on. I glanced at the news and there it was: a headline showing that the Asian markets had suddenly suffered a severe drop.

Oct. 24th:
The next day, the morning news was that the US markets also dropped. I was planning on taking a blood test that day before work and I ran into great trouble trying to get to the hospital, and it felt like a continuation of last night's drama, that all these events were synchronistically connected to the economy's turmoil and that surely the market was going to crash violently that day. To my surprise, however, the rest of the day went smoothly: 1) I arrived at work perfectly on time, 2) The client was unusually satisfied and quiet the rest of the day, despite outstanding issues which they usually are very fussy about, 3) The market buoyed back up (relatively speaking) by the end of the day.

At some point during the day, I consciously felt as if I were witnessing an archetypal pattern that depicted reversal. When I recognized this, I got an image of entangled ropes that at first fell but then bent sharply upwards.

There are two things of interest here. Firstly, the detection that I was witnessing an archetypal pattern. The best way I can describe the feeling I get when I witness something archetypal is that it's like having a glimpse of pure power, or peeking into a realm of power as if through a peephole. I described my first experience with power in Shifting the Assemblage Point, but I sensed power on a regular basis during my Hurricane Period.

The second point of interest is that this vision surfaced from my subconscious only after I was mentally prepared to receive it, not only because of my own deductions about the synchronistic events of the last 24 hours, but also due to having detected the archetypal pattern at play. It could also be the case that a significant part of the preparation occurs because archetypes have such a profound effect on consciousness, regularizing or purifying one's state of mind with respect to the type of archetype(s) involved.

I commonly have such preparatory experiences before receiving a precognitive vision. During waking hours, the subconscious is usually tucked away beneath many layers of the psyche. Being aware of life's underlying order is akin to attaining a sense of balance and to coming face to face with the moment. In such a state, communication with the deeper levels of the psyche is made available.

The subconscious when accessed during waking hours has much more practical benefit than during sleep, or at least seemingly so. While awake, the subconscious is tuned to whatever in life we are focused upon. This focal vorticity dissipates during sleep, or it transforms into areas that we are less concerned with during our conscious lives.

The Continuation of the Rope Visions

The same vision of entangled ropes I had on Oct. 24th remained alive within me and I was able to call it back to surface for at least two weeks before it finally dissipated, even though I know from experience that such "living" messages from the inner landscape can resurface even after they remain absent for years.

By the middle of the week of Oct. 27th, the entangled ropes had become 3 discernible ropes that were heading upwards. I still do not know for sure what each rope represents, but I guess that one of them is the US stock market, and another is the gold stock that I personally own shares in. By the end of that week I started seeing them head downwards, and I knew that this was not the end of the market turmoil that I thought was possible. An optimistic outlook had proven to be false, which returns us to my vision of the very long steps of stairs going downward.

Notes and Scribbles: Visions of Gold

I had two synchronous events that dealt with gold on Oct. 27th, and both involved seeing pictures of a naked woman in golden color (one was wearing a transparent, golden dress, the other was a picture from the James Bond movie Goldfinger). Again, I detected an archetypal pattern at play; these pictures seemed to denote that the Gold stock had the grace and receptivity of the Feminine principle, and for two weeks I saw my GLD stock go up and down exactly in tune with the rest of the market, as opposed to inversely proportional as I had at first hoped. (I know now GLD is usually inversely proportional to the dollar.)

One night, also early on in that week, I had a vision of someone draped in silk scarves that were of a burgundy color. There was a type of struggle as the head tried to go through a minuscule hole and emerge out the other side (which suggested a black-hole-white-hole transformation). When it did, it was the head of an Indian woman wearing something on her forehead that was shining brilliant gold. I theorize this to mean that when we finally reach the next phase of the economy (after we hit bottom), that GLD will catapult upwards. This is in line with the vision which said: "They will counterfeit the fall."

More Notes and Scribbles: The week of Nov. 3rd

I had been asking for visions that foretold who would win the election and all my dreams, synchronicities, and other such data were entirely blank and hush hush about this topic until a couple nights before the election.

On Nov. 2nd, I had a dream that depicted Obama as president as well as a gay man who was extremely pissed off. The reference to the angry gay man was the winning of Prop 8 in California which banned same sex marriage. While African Americans have gone very far in overcoming racism, homosexuals are still a struggling minority.

As elated as I was that Obama had won, the evening of Nov. 4th still left me with a vague, troubled feeling. My computer at work was again "acting up" in strange ways while I was working from home. I glanced at the news only to read the headlines which said that the Asian markets soared due to Obama's win.

As I went to sleep, however, a strong intuition said the market will plummet. The next morning I read the inverse of last night's headline, which said the the US markets dropped because of Obama's win. The observation came with some archetypal power, which suggested that those who have influence on the market are opposed to Obama's views, and we shall see related conflicts during his presidency.

The "Law of Attraction" and Inner Purpose

2008-11-15T14:18:00.000-08:00

The "Law of Attraction" is a phrase that has become very popular lately especially in the New Age, or "New Thought" scene, and it deserves some attention. I will quote wikipedia's definition here:

...the Law of Attraction says people's thoughts (both conscious and unconscious) dictate the reality of their lives, whether or not they're aware of it. Essentially "if you really want something and truly believe it's possible, you'll get it", but putting a lot of attention and thought onto something you don't want means you'll probably get that too.

There is some truth behind this "law". Experience has led me to believe that we do indeed co-create the reality we experience, at least to a certain degree which varies from one person to another, from one moment to the next. We can influence our lives in ways that go beyond the usual laws of cause and effect (a-causally), and the nature of our influence largely depends on what aspects of life we focus upon.

However, the phrase "Law of Attraction" and the variety of writings I have read on the subject make the mechanics involved behind a-causally influencing our lives sound far too simple.

If you were to google the phrase, you would see quotes such as (my own emphasis added) "Learn the Secret to attracting everything you desire in your life using this Universal Attraction Law" and "If you focus on success you will attract success and repel failure".

I have at least two inter-connected observations that argue why the "Law of Attraction" is not guaranteed to work.

Firstly, the belief that we can attract "anything we desire" through our conscious focus does not take into account having an inner path or an underlying purpose in life, even if that purpose were simply to explore various aspects of human experience.

If the object or goal of our conscious focus contradicts this inner purpose, no matter how much we may believe in its possibility or how much we obsess over it, the goal in question will most likely either not be reached or prove to be a temporary achievement. What's worse is that it could prove deleterious to our path in the long run.

Thus, it is extremely important when practicing the "Law of Attraction" to establish ongoing communication with one's deeper aspects of self and to be aware of one's innermost desires, at least to a certain degree given how difficult this can be to achieve. Ideally, our innermost desires should be the fountainhead of our will and focus.

Secondly, it is from within the deeper layers of consciousness that we can affect reality a-causally. This is a downright magical phenomenon, although it may indeed work in certain circumstances with great ease, or apparently so. If one's deeper self does not resonate with one's conscious focus, and one is effectively derailed from the inner path in the pursuit of superficial goals, then conscious focus has little power beyond the usual ways that cause-and-effect laws operate.

(Naturally, conscious focus alone has great potential to change our lives and should not be underestimated. The "Law of Attraction" can be demonstrated as a mechanistic, causal phenomenon just fine. But, when the conscious focus does not resonate with that of the deeper self, it has little abilities to influence our reality in a-causal ways.)

I believe that the clearest indication that we are indeed affecting our reality in an a-causal manner lies in the awareness of synchronicities, specifically those meaningful coincidences that relate to the object(s) of our focus. And a penetrating scrutiny into the synchronous elements of our lives can illuminate what our deeper self is focused upon, which can almost be entirely out of sync with our conscious focus although synchronicities occur nevertheless.

A Real Life Example

The following story of mine illustrates what could occur when one consciously focuses on a goal that contradicts one's inner purpose. It is interesting to note that the related synchronicities were striking and they surfaced as messages that were in direct contradiction to my conscious intentions. The synchronicities did not occur while setting out to achieve my goals, but came as a slap-in-the-face wake up call once they started failing.

As should be quite obvious from surfing my websites, I busy myself with many creative projects. I simply have a ton of things to say, in varying modes of expression. Shortly after graduating from college and embarking on my professional career as a computer scientist, I became convinced that it was not my purpose to be spending 8 hours a day enslaved to work, the result of which only makes my rich boss become even richer. I was sure that there had to be a way to make money on my own so that I could free up my time and work on my creative projects full time. I was convinced that it was my purpose to find this way of making money.

What fell upon my lap at the end of the year 2000 was an idea for a website which once implemented would potentially generate all the income I needed in a relatively automated fashion, thus freeing up my time for my creative work. Even though I felt no inner drive that resonated with my goal, I dove into the website's implementation head first, working part-time at a regular job just to keep me afloat. My focus on my goal was absolute and I truly believed it would work because it was the only destiny which made sense to me.

Eventually, the website did provide 100% of my income and I was able to quit my job entirely. But, one evening, a few months later, I suddenly witnessed my website's traffic drop by 50%. This "horrifying event" was extremely synchronistic because it coincided with the beginning of a period of struggle for a number of my closest friends, one of whom had been informed by her doctor on the very same day that she was terminally ill with cancer and she had little chance of remaining alive for much longer than a year.

Around that time, I was told that Jesus Christ had lived till the age of exactly 33 and a 1/3rd. Not knowing or caring whether this were indeed part of the official story, I became intrigued to see what would happen on my own 33 and 1/3rd birthday which was coming up soon.

Over the next few months, my website's traffic kept on diminishing, I lost all my savings, and I finally gave up and asked for my old job back.

Without intending it, I was scheduled to start again full time on the day before my 33 and 1/3rd birthday. As I was heading towards the office that day, my visions told me that I was to find something quite amusing when I arrived at work. When I got there, I found out that they were off on holiday that day. Thus, my official starting date was indeed on my 33 and a 1/3rd birthday.

The symbolism was quite striking. I gradually understood that rather than living a life of luxury in my freedom and solitary creative efforts, my inner purpose was to live life as the majority lived it, spending the bulk of my time and energy at work. This was my sacrifice; my hope lost, I died pyschologically, just as Christ was killed on the cross on his 33 and 1/3rd as a sacrifice to humanity.

Also synchronistically, my cancer-battling friend's date of birth was 4 months (1/3rd) before that of her boyfriend. (Not sure if anything special happened on exactly her 33 and a 1/3rd.) Her relationship had proved to be a failure, despite her complete focus upon it and the illusion that it would some day work out. Sadly, she passed away around the time I shut down my website for good.

What we had in common was disillusionment. And despite our belief and focus, the "Law of Attraction" did not materialize our goals. We were led to experience the tragedy of disappointment instead.

My upcoming posts will compare the "Law of Attraction" with my own ideas of "warping the existential matrix", what I call "existential vorticity", and how attraction should be understood in terms of desire/proclivity/focus in relation to archetypes and/or archetypal patterns.

Market Turmoil Part II

2008-10-25T21:50:00.001-07:00

I've been working on a large essay that will most likely be split into 3 or 4 posts, and I was very excited to dive into it this weekend. But, as soon as I began recuperating from the work week and gaining some foothold on my intuition, I was dismayed to find that instead of receiving ideas about my essay, thoughts about the market once again flooded into my head with the clear intuitive urge to publish them.

Ouch! I'm really not in the blogging business to make a fool of myself talking about my visions of the future online. So, this time, unlike a couple of Mondays ago when I wrote Market Turmoil: Synchronicities, Visions, and Dreams on the Economy, I stubbornly shut these surfacing ideas out in order to focus on my essay, but I slipped into a completely blank state of mind as a result.

After an hour of lounging around my house, waiting for some clarity of mind and focus to build up in me, I finally gave up and started browsing the web. I ended up on David Wilcock's website (which is quite common: http://www.divinecosmos.com) and lo and behold, his most recent blog was also about the current market turmoil and what he said mirrored the ideas that had just been flooding my own head.

Ok, that does it, so here goes: In my previous post, I had interpreted my visions to say that there would be a steep fall after that Monday, Oct. 13th. In order to peer into the future, or to gain a better understanding of the present, I use what I call "holographic vision" in order to detect similarities between two disparate events that hint at an archetypal pattern that is currently at play.

In that specific case, it was the changing volume of the piece of music I had been working on and the market's fluctuations. There was a definite similarity between a sudden exaggerated peak in volume with the market's spike that Monday (which I saw materialize after I had my visions) and since my song's volume suddenly dropped, I felt that the same drop would occur in the market. This was a stumble; holographic vision requires very sensitive detection of when two disparate events coincide and stop coinciding.

In any case, as if in response to my faulty interpretations, the next dream I had about the market showed a long, gradual decline. It showed me riding down a smooth decline with my own GLD stock investment (this came on Friday of that week right after the final GLD peak); while the rest of the market went down in steps, which more closely mirrored the volatile, up-and-down movement of the market in general.

The dream with the descending steps showed a very, very long descent, which gave me the conviction that we're really in for a long fall.

At the end of this week, however, something bizarre occurred that changed my opinion.

On Thursday night, I had to take some work home with me. I was logged into work at home trying to figure out a problem that a client had with our software (one of the clients that we've had problems with off and on since the market's turmoil began). As I tried to fix the problem, some weird problems were blocking me from doing my work, as if my computer were jinxed. The rarity of these problems made me think that something synchronistic was going on. I glanced at the news and there it was: a headline showing that the Asian markets had suddenly suffered a severe drop. Not good.

The next day, the morning news was that the US markets also dropped. I had planned to go do a blood test at my health clinic that morning before work. The bus arrived 30 seconds before I got to the bus stop, having trusted the projected arrival time posted on the bus system's website that I was actually several minutes ahead of schedule. I decided to drive to the clinic instead. I ended up looking for parking for half an hour, gave up, and then parked my car closer to work and rushed to get there on time.

I felt that all these events were synchronistically connected to the economy's turmoil and that surely the market was going to crash violently that day. But, on the contrary, 1) I arrived at work perfectly on time, 2) The client was unusually satisfied and quiet the rest of the day, despite outstanding issues which they usually are very fussy about, 3) The market buoyed back up (relatively speaking) by the end of the day.

At some point during the day, I consciously felt as if I were witnessing an archetypal pattern that depicted reversal. When I recognized this, I got an image of entangled ropes that at first fell but then bent sharply upwards. Till now, this intuition/vision stands its ground in my inner landscape.

In any case, these were the thoughts I had the intuition to write down, when I stumbled upon Wilcock's article. The title: "Is October 26th the Bottom of the Markets?" The article was dated "Friday 10 / 24 / 08", yesterday. He then lists various indications that the market will start lifting soon. http://divinecosmos.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=412&Itemid=70

What is strange, however, is how he talks about his "Still" vision, and the dream he had afterward of turning off a rogue computer. He proceeds to talk about the articles he read that said that "...computer-driven programs were ready to be used to stop trading on the markets in the event of a panic sell-off." This could be what my visions were talking about (in the last post) when they mentioned an upcoming "blank market" period...If our visions will come to be, then we should see a massive fall that triggers the computer shutdowns early next week, followed by immediate post-bottom recovery, as was depicted in my first cartoon-like vision.

---OR---

The markets will continue to fall or behave erratically and my visions and Wilcock's visions simply coincided through sheer synchronicity, mind field sensitivity, or our visions chose to follow a positively oriented probable path which won't turn out materializing in the end. Whatever the case may be, something strange is going on.

Market Turmoil: Synchronicities, Visions, and Dreams on the Economy

2008-10-13T20:43:00.000-07:00

What I present here are just some notes and scribbles concerning the dreams, visions, and synchronicities I've had lately that are somehow related to the recent turmoil in the economy. The purpose is not to try to provide some form of clairvoyant projection of the market, but to help illuminate the nature of prophecy in general if indeed the predictions in my dreams, visions, and my interpretations of them as written here come true. I have made predictions in the past that have come true, but for each hit, there's around a hundred misses. So, more than likely what is presented here will never come to pass but, for some unknown reason, I have an inner drive to publish this material and so here it is.

When I was in Paris this last April, visiting with family and friends, one of our conversations centered around the downfall of the company Bear Stearns. One of our friends worked at a French bank and he related to us how, in the last few days before the company went under, he and his workmates were told not to honor any requests from that company to borrow money.

I remember feeling deeply moved by his story so that I felt there was an archetypal pattern taking place that went beyond this relatively small circumstance. It is difficult to describe the feeling, but I felt beholding this archetype was pulling me into the future.

That evening, I had trouble sleeping, partly because of my jet lag, and partly due to a recurring vision that told me of an upcoming downfall in the U.S. economy that would basically collapse the market down dramatically. The visions kept recurring, and when I did get some shut-eye, my dreams echoed my visions entirely.

These visions may seem to be prophetic now, except they also told me to move a big chunk of my savings from Dollars to Euros, and that I had to do so immediately.

The Euro has since gone down, and had I opened an account at the time I was in Paris I would have lost quite a bit of money since the Euro was so strong at the time. The big hit on the U.S. economy did come to pass, however, or is still in the midst of materializing. But, it hit the entire world (as is logical). So, was there indeed any validity behind these visions that kept me awake that night?

According to the Ra Material, and various other spiritual circles, such channeled messages (if they were indeed channeled and not a product of the subconscious or the imagination) typically come from mixed sources; some sources are benevolent, some have negative intentions. Messages that begin accurate and informative can be hijacked by a source with bad intentions along the way that either predicts a doom-like scenario or provides a false prophecy to make one stumble. The proper way to channel is to ask the source a question that proves to you the purity of the source's intention.

I personally have very little channeling abilities so that even sustaining a specific contact is difficult. And thus, I am usually very skeptical of any future predictions that surface from within me, but I find them fascinating nonetheless because they do come true from time to time.

Having lost faith in the visions I had in Paris, I became confused when the stock market actually did fall recently. One morning while I was in an especially visionary state, I asked for visions concerning the future of the market. I got a very cartoon-like scene that I watched like a movie while I closed my eyes. Note that when I do receive a vision from a positive source that is illustrating a grave situation, it usually comes in a form that lightens the situation up so that it appears less serious and negative than one's typical reaction. Thus, a cartoon-like scenario was appropriate. Similarly, a vision from a positive source would report an upcoming difficult period as one of "growth and learning" rather than a period of "pain and darkness".

My cartoon-like vision began with a scene of a large, unmoving slab of rock that was being held up by several tall rocks. I later interpreted the slab of rock to depict the economy and the supporting rocks as the big 700 billion dollar bailout. I then saw the slab of rock fall down to the ground with a crash, meaning the bailout did not help, but upon hitting the floor, or ground zero, it immediately began to move on its own. Eventually, the rock started picking up speed and going uphill at a steady climb. The rock continued traveling uphill in a very stable manner, passing through forests and various types of vegetation until the vision finally ended.

If I were to take this vision seriously, I would expect that the market has yet to reach bottom, or from a positive standpoint, has yet to reach a level where it is grounded and sober so that it can start moving on its own without the overly volatile characteristics of loan-based securities trading. Now, do I feel confident enough to actually trade stocks on this expectation (such as purchase more gold and so on)? No, I do not. It is the psychological and archetypal observations which I find fascinating to watch as I scrutinize my predictions. If a vision were to come true, then the entirety of the vision would be used to collect clues that would illuminate one's current predicament.

This morning, I had more inner-scape data that suggested more economic downfall was on its way.

These last few months have been very busy with social activities and a heavy workload at my job. I have not been able to truly center myself enough that I have confidence in how I should proceed with my creative projects, a part of which is this blog. This weekend was my first three days off that I've had to myself for over three months, and so by this Monday morning, my subconscious and its function as a channel had finally become much more prominent and active.

While wading between sleep and wakefulness, my ears would ring, alternating back and forth between my left and right ear. For those familiar with the Ra Material, an important, if not paramount, aspect of the spiritual path is one's proclivity along the positive/negative polarity. Positive meaning service-to-others, negative meaning service-to-self. Polarizing in either direction comes with its own powerful charge, and I've learned to hone in on this charge in the positive direction to help me with my creative work.

One of the ways in which the subconscious or inner self can communicate one's position with respect to the positive/negative polarity is through the ringing of the ears, the right ear ringing means positive, the left ear negative. In most people, this could be random and simply a result of the health condition named tinnitus. In my case, I have deliberately asked my inner self to provide this ringing to help me measure my polarity, and the ringing comes about usually while lying in bed in contemplation/meditation, or when I'm about to do something unethical (left ear) or altruistic (right ear).

This morning, as is usually not the case, the ringing was predominately in my left ear, and I started getting concerned that these last three months of distractions have really derailed me off my path. I asked inwardly for help and a sense of direction.

When I fell back to sleep, I dreamed that I was reading the Ra Material and I reached a very important passage that told me I had to assume the stance of a hawk. I directly woke up and the internal push to visualize myself as a hawk seemed to persist. I instantly interpreted this to mean that I had to utilize my visionary powers to see into the future.

I then saw a cartoon image of half Tweetie the bird, half hawk and a muffled word was trying to surface: "rasdaq", "fandsak", "Nasdaq"! Then, the words "they will counterfeit the fall" (not sure what that means).

My attention wavered as I lay in bed, but whenever I thought of anything else than trying to see into the future of the stock market, the ringing in my ears would turn to the left ear. It would only ring in my right ear when I tried to see into the future. Nevertheless, nothing seemed to be working.

I seemed to get visions that encouraged me to visualize myself way up in the sky, so that I had a hawk's eye view of what's being going on in my life. I allowed my thoughts to waver while retaining some focus upon the future and my attention landed upon the song I had been working on the previous night (see below).

There was a section I was very meticulously working on for hours on end; it involved the beginning, introductory part of the song right before it was about to take off. The subsequent bulk of that song was very steady and unchanging, if not somewhat monotonous, and the initial opening was to be orchestrated just right so that the consciousness of the listener was prepared to appreciate the trance-like repetitiveness.

Then, in my half-dreamy state, it suddenly hit me that what I was really trying to do through my music was to meticulously mimic or reflect the specific archetypal pattern most closely expressed through that particular piece. It was my intuitive awareness of the archetypal pattern I was trying to reflect which allowed me to measure whether or not the introductory part of the song was appropriately orchestrated or not, whether it was finished or needed more work. And this particular pattern had to do with the setting up or preparation of a subsequent period of repetitious and steady rhythm and melody.

Suddenly switching back to the hawk's perspective, which can perhaps be more accurately described as a holographic perspective, I realized that the steady, monotonous section in my music actually corresponded to the steady climb of the slab of rock in my cartoon vision I had the other day, which depicted a very stable future elevating at a constant angle.

The intro section of my music, according to my hawk / half-awake / visionary perspective, was following the same archetypal pattern as the current phase in the stock market as it is going through its volatile period of adjustment. Composing the appropriate intro in my song, then, also functions as the short-term prediction of the current state of financial turmoil.

Now, you must be thinking: "Makram, have you gone nuts?!?" These kinds of ideas are hard to stomach, I know, but I truly believe that some pieces of music do indeed reflect archetypal patterns, and hence their power. Whether connecting the two particular patterns, stock market and my song, is indeed plausible is another question. The ability to see this demands a holographic perspective, with the ability to see all events as One, but also as different perspectives of the One. In fact, most of my predictions which have turned out true involved connecting the dots in this way, usually using my fiction or music.

In any case, my initial intro was one which led right up to the beginning of the repetitious section, flowing straight into it. But then, I realized this would not work, and there is now going to be, nay there has to be, a gap of silence before the beat starts. Which means, by the same logic, that there will very soon be a "blank market" period. What this means is open to interpretation; it may mean another hard crash, or simply things will be at a standstill as investors wait to see the market's reaction to the latest government efforts. Or, the absence denotes the government taking over the banks.

One rather haunting aspect of my story, is that the visions this morning specifically highlighted the final section of the intro, which had a sudden exaggerated peak in volume right before the abrupt drop into nearly a full second of silence. Similarly, the Dow shot up 11 percent today, "the biggest one-day rally since 1933", as was written in the article whose headline began with the words "Manic Monday". Indeed, this behavior is clearly a sign of a bipolar swing.

Another curious tidbit is that after I fell back to sleep I had an extremely violent nightmare of a father who was swinging his baby around in such a manner as to smash it against a window. Each time it crashed, the blood seemed more and more voluminous, its cries more haunting and disturbing. Whether the dream was influenced by an external negative source or not, it clearly denoted my own bipolar swing, a natural adherence to the laws of balance, and thus almost validating the positive nature of my earlier visions.

Well, I'll stop rambling now; this post is starting to get annoying to write. Here's the song I've been writing about, probably worth all these ideas put together times ten. Enjoy!

1 Year Anniversary Recap - Part II

2008-09-21T11:56:00.000-07:00

1 Year Anniversary Recap - Part I ended with a discussion of the EGG Project (also called the Global Consciousness Project) which I wrote about in detail in Synchronicity Clusters and Warping the Existential Matrix. The numerical data recorded by the random event generators can be visually represented as a bunch of dots in a given space. The ongoing experiment demonstrates that the dots are normally distributed uniformly, which is to be expected from random data, but that statistically improbable clusters (or correlations) form when world-wide events occur which cause a large percentage of the world's population to share focus, emotions, and intention. This finding suggests that global consciousness has an effect on reality beyond what is commonly known or accepted.

If one were to visualize the actual events in our personal (or collective) lives in a similar fashion, as dots in a given space, then we have what can be called the "existential matrix". These events, or existential dots, are not necessarily random for they are the products of our conscious decisions, habits, social norms, the physical laws of our universe, etc. But, if we remove all these factors which influence what we experience, there is typically very little evidence that an underlying order exists which gives our lives a deeper meaning or a higher level purpose. The events in our lives might just as well be considered random and uniformly distributed across an existential matrix.

When synchronicities occur, however, we have sudden insight into an underlying order, an order that may seem to possess a philosophical or metaphysical intelligence. A group of events, or existential dots, which in logical terms are entirely disconnected suddenly function synchronously as a group; the coincidence is so meaningful that it cannot be ignored. This is an unprecedented warp in the existential matrix. And when we experience this, we are naturally inclined to ask the question: When, how, and why do synchronicities occur?

One can ideate that one of the essential reasons behind the occurrence of synchronicities is the focus of our attention, just as focus is evidently one of the possible reasons behind the skewing of the random numbers in the EGG Project. On the other hand, one could argue that if this were true, then we should be experiencing synchronicities in a very predictable manner; whenever we focus upon something, a meaningful coincidence should occur. This is not commonly the case, however, or at least not obviously so. Indeed, the frequency and nature of synchronicities is very difficult to pinpoint, very hard to predict.

A couple weeks ago, while I was working on this post, I wrote that synchronicities occur most frequently for me when I am focused upon some aspect of my evolution, or when the current events in my life are crucial to my development. In contrast, my job, for instance, makes me focus on very mundane aspects of reality throughout the day, and it is very rare that a synchronicity occurs related to work. Thus, I thought that it was only the focus upon evolutionary matters which results in synchronicities.

Since writing down these ideas, however, life has proven me wrong. (That life would show me evidence to the contrary was itself a synchronistic event, and this happens quite often whenever I am about to publish ideas online that still require balancing.) There was a problem at work that was very difficult to solve and it funneled in my attention to the maximum degree so that even my dreams became involved. As a result of this intense amount of focus, I experienced a number of synchronicities, the most blatant of which had to do with how closely the events seemed to coincide with the stock market crash and Lehman Brothers going under; our dealings with the client who experienced the problem seemed to closely mirror the news of the market after-effects over the days. [09/28/08: The troubles at work persisted this week until Thursday. Only five minutes after reading the first news headline on the internet that spoke positively about the market's situation, our client called and we were able to overcome the technical difficulty with our software that he'd been experiencing.]

I still believe it's true that I experience much less synchronicities while I am at work but I believe this to be because the degree of focus is limited; generally I am only paying attention with my intellect and not with my entire being, unlike when I am involved in aspects of my evolution that interest me on a profound level. Thus, to achieve the level of focus that actually warps the existential matrix, one must involve more than just intellectual focus, but the emotions and the deeper levels of self as well. The various aspects of self must be in congruence and regularized to point in a single direction. In other words, a black hole in consciousness must be materialized.

Even when our entire attention is indeed funneled into one focus, however, the synchronicities are not always blatant because we may not recognize the underlying order behind life's events. This is especially the case when we are not familiar or mature with the subject at hand, not only because the underlying order makes little sense but also because our initial endeavor to understand the subject invites the exploration of widely varying perspectives. My first post, Synchronistic Conditioning and an Emerging Portrait of Vitality, illuminates the yin and yang oscillations which occur in dreams/syncrhonicities/ideas as a result of focusing upon an aspect of life about which we have little understanding, and little sense of equilibrium or balance. The synchronistic data, so to speak, seemingly illuminate opposing or antagonistic proclivities; the messages behind dreams and the "signs" behind the syncrhonicities seem contradictory. Only as we progress do the dreams and synchronicities become more obvious and orderly; life begins to shed its sense of randomness and arbitrariness.

As I've written already, one pictorial representation of our progress is the paisley pattern because it begins wide at the bottom and narrows towards the top. The essential form of the paisley pattern is really a triangle (or pyramid or cone), whose apex is located just before the twirl begins at the top. (I have preferred referring to the paisley pattern over a simple triangle because after an enlightened degree of balance is achieved at the apex, movement in the twirling section, which can be described as a recursive refinement, is no longer random but seems to adhere to strict archetypal patterns, or a form of cosmic thinking.)

The triangle is a common symbol which depicts the sacred concept of Trinity; it can also depict the reconciliation of opposites, or the coincidence of opposites (Coincidentia Oppositorium), a concept which is generally regarded as an essential aspect of many religious and mystical traditions. Similarly, the space-time fabric surrounding a black hole is cone-shaped, which is a 3-D version of a triangle. Whether we are speaking of a Coincidentia Oppositorium or a black hole, the triangle implies the coming together at the apex of two (or in the case of a black hole, any number of) separate components at the base. In mysticism, this is the convergence/collapse/synthesis of a duality into unity. In astrophysics, the black hole is an inescapable gravity well which pulls all objects into a point of singularity. My argument is that both the black hole phenomenon and the unification-based evolutionary process are derivatives of the same archetypal pattern and one discipline, namely science, can illuminate the other, namely mysticism, and vice versa.

When mystics speak of their feelings of at-one-ment with the world, it is this unification at the apex of the triangle which they are experiencing. Polarities are compacted and all is seen and felt as one. When mystics speak of unconditional love and compassion, they are referring to the necessary reconciliation of opposites that occurs archetypaly during enlightenment, which when translated into social/cultural/personal relations is that which brings all together in peace, harmony and love, unconditionally. When mystics speak of the importance of selflessness, they speak of the inability to reconcile the opposites due to the ego, which accepts this or that, not this and that.

In black hole terms, an object is ripped apart as it reaches the center of a black hole. And so the ego is the psychological equivalent of mass which blocks one's entry into the apex. In The Dimunitive Staircase, I wrote about a dream which a friend of mine had that illuminated in simple terms the inability of the ego to approach the apex of a Coincidentia Oppositorium. It simply depicted him going up a spiraling staircase which ended up wedged between two walls so that, due to the size of his body, it was impossible for him to proceed. He had this dream before I discussed with him any of these ideas which highlights the archetypal nature of this phenomenon.

In my past, long before thinking of black holes and their parallel concepts in psychology/spirituality, it was quite common for me, especially while seeking inspiration or simply a higher state of mind, to go through rather painful states of mind in which I felt myself being squeezed down to the size of a pea, psychologically speaking, best described as a form of regression back to childhood. After this process of diminution I would often feel myself slipping through some kind of tiny portal and suddenly find myself in a higher state of mind.

Conversely, many people have experienced firsthand the often devastating drop in spirits after temporarily soaring during a higher state of mind. In fact, I experienced this yesterday. While I was in a very inspired, selfless state, I had a phone conversation with someone which manifested a little anger within me. All of a sudden a high pitched anxiety flooded my system which left me breathless, an anxiety whose intensity I rarely experience while in a mundane state.

Anger itself is an inchoate, entropy-inducing form of energy (in contrast to how unconditional love can generate a higher order) and the tiniest focus upon this energy could swiftly secure a collapse from the heights. But, the experience can also be interpreted as my having quickly oscillated from a state of selflessness to that which was ego-driven due to the feeling of being threatened by the phone conversation to lose my higher state of mind. In black hole terms, it would be the equivalent of changing from a wave of light, selfless/massless, that is near the center of the black hole which suddenly manifests mass/ego and thus gets ripped apart.

I began hallucinating the "X" several years after first having the diminution experiences, the "X" being two triangles on top of each other. The middle of the "X" depicted a passageway that would lead from the bottom triangle up to a higher state of mind. The "X" also represents the space-time warpage of a black hole leading to a white hole.

If we accept as true that focusing with a high degree of intensity on an aspect of our lives materializes a trinity-like evolutionary path that resembles the attributes of a black hole, then there are two arguments which are implied:

1) Intense focus upon any aspect of life will automatically drive one towards a collapse of the duality or set of dualities involved. This is not to say that to follow through with this reconciliation into unity is inevitable with sustained focus, for it is typical that the ego or an arbitrary bias that has fixated will block the path towards this coincidence of opposites. But, in general, this spells out that all evolutionary paths ultimately lead to unity.

2) Intense focus on any aspect of life can lead to enlightenment, or at least a state of mind which transcends the mundane. This, I believe, is already a claim that many mystics make for enlightenment can occur under any circumstance. This would also suggest that all black holes lead to white holes. (Note that the existence white holes on the other side of black holes have not been proven, though I have read that they are "mathematically possible" according to some scientists.)

It is interesting to note that writing this very blog began, over the months, to develop the tension of opposites trying to converge when I started to introduce fiction into my writing style. The philosophical style of writing, which attempts to maximize clarity and illumination, is in direct contrast to my usual fiction style, which is naturally imbued in enigma and ambiguity.

I began writing fiction when I started writing the post about Kafka, Kafka, Enigma, and Mysticism. The difficulties of describing Kafka philosophically effectively gave birth (or rebirth) to the fiction writer that had been lying dormant within me since this blog was launched. Logic Dies, I am Sorry was a story written as a result of my failed philosophical writing efforts. The story tells of a "sphere of noise" that was rapidly approaching the main character, a lecturer, in order to consume him and silence his speech.

As the months passed, I kept oscillating between both styles of writing, which was an intriguing way to write and relatively easy to do while I was in an inspired state of mind, since this duality was relatively compact. But, it became increasingly difficult as my social/family/work life began to consume more and more of my free time. My inspired states became less accessible and during my more mundane states, I am naturally more ego-driven. As various aspects of my ego, the poet (fiction writer) and the philosopher are completely at odds with each other.

The poet wields the scepter of numinosity. With the ability to potentiate an uprooting of one's ordinary perception of reality in a relatively direct fashion, the poet as an ego feels superior to the philosopher who although can inspire and energize through ideas lacks the ability to affect a significant shift in consciousness in the same direct fashion. The philosopher, on the other hand, engrossed in the pursuit of truth and clarity, scoffs at the chimerical qualities of the poet's expression. The two, in short, as egos are incongruent while in the midst of their actions.

Had the duality remained comfortably compact, the resulting style of writing is what I would call "holographic literature", where each idea is presented more than once, each time from a different perspective and a different writing style. This is still my aim for this blog, but I've realized how difficult it is to do unless life affords me more frequent access to the heights, as in the past.

As is apparent with the frequency of my posts in the recent past, my writing productivity towards the end was grinding down to a halt, curiously like one would enter a state of timelessness as one approached a black hole. The final story was The Freedom of Wings and the Invisible Tides, the main character: The Ever Receding Man.

Coming up soon: Three essays in the works, as well as a short story about a shape-shifter, an upper-X character.

1 Year Anniversary Recap - Part I

2008-08-27T20:21:00.000-07:00

Today marks the one year anniversary of this blog.

Without my conscious intention, the first post was published on the same eve of the lunar eclipse of last year (which actually took place August 28th in the early morning to be exact.) Such a "coincidence" was actually quite symbolic and here's why: I come from a background of art, fiction, and music. My inherent nature is attracted to beauty, mystery, obscurity, and the poetics of life, all of which are qualities generally attributed to the moon. This blog, in contrast, began with the sole purpose of communicating in a straight-forward, intellect-driven fashion the philosophical ideas I have accumulated throughout my life as well as stories from my past. My desire was to write with detailed accuracy, clarifying and illuminating as much as possible, and such an intention effectively eclipses the moon. The poet in me was laid aside and put to sleep.

As months passed, I began to incorporate fiction or tidbits of poetic prose to illuminate the same ideas at first discussed philosophically, except now from the artistic side. The moon and the sun began to complement each other, to function in synthesis.

This eventual synthesis, or reconciliation, (there is no adequate word for it in my opinion) of two opposing sides of a polarity, in this case the sun and the moon, or the Apollonian vs. the Dionysian, was actually one of the central themes that was introduced in the first blog post, a leitmotif which remained a prominent source of inquiry up till today.

As soon as I started writing Synchronistic Conditioning and an Emerging Portrait of Vitality, I began receiving dreams, visions, and synchronicities centered around how to achieve a healthy relationship between the masculine and feminine sides of my own character (or the conscious self and the anima). The initial vision showed that both extremes of the masculine/feminine polarity should be accentuated. It took me many months to understand what this meant, what was involved, and how it was possible.

The early posts were in diary format because I wanted to show how the events in life come alive and visibly start showing evidence of an underlying, synchronous order when one focuses upon one's evolution with intensity and rigor (although this form of "interactive evolution", so to speak, between one's conscious focus and life's events is also a affected by other factors such as intuitive living and wanting to share wisdom with others).

Central to my early writing was my introduction of the term "synchronistic conditioning", which is a type of inner, psychological conditioning that occurs behind the scenes and serves to help one become consciously aware of synchronistic events in one's daily life. And this can be interpreted as a method of communication between the inner or deeper portions of self and the conscious self.

In The Poetics of Bipolar Oscillation I compare the process of evolving in any specific area in life to one's traversal up a paisley pattern. When one first begins to explore a certain subject, one tends to oscillate widely between one perspective and its opposite with little or no sense of balance; this is, of course, the case only if the ego doesn't instantly attach itself arbitrarily to one perspective. This beggining period can be described as starting one's journey from the lower portion of the paisley pattern which is relatively wide and affords room to maneuver. More importantly, the related synchronicities and dream/vision content also have the quality of randomness or confusion in the beginning which I showed in the diary entries of my first two posts with respect to exploring the meaning behind my masculine/feminine vision, a topic of which I had little understanding at the time.

As one progresses and matures in relation to the subject at hand, one symbolically travels up into the narrower portions of the paisley pattern, which, due to developing bias and acquiring a balanced perspective, affords one less movement and oscillation. Indeed, synchronicities become more orderly and more frequent (if the topic remains a point of focus); dreams are more in line with conscious thought as opposed to playing the role of devil's advocate. What I am implying here is that life becomes less random the farther one evolves.

This process which begins with a high degree of oscillation and then settles to a static calm was one which I experienced first hand and in an accelerated fashion during a three-week period many years ago that I call the Hurricane Period. My focus on my evolution was very intense at the time and every new subject which interested me automatically threw me into a spin of ideas, perspectives, feelings, and experiences. This was the initial reaction to a new topic, which typically developed into a balanced maturity over a short amount of time, having gone through the necessary oscillations.

In L I F E and Extreme Astronautics, I wrote about a vision I had a few years after the Hurricane Period while I was in a very high state of mind. I was experiencing much synchronistic conditioning and I utilized Hurricane Thinking (which can be described as very fast oscillation between perspectives on a single idea) in a selfless and calm manner. The result was the rapid absorption of insight after insight after insight. My visions, which were very strong at the time, showed me going through a circular tubing, or a torus, which I later theorized to be the psychological equivalent of the space-time warpage experienced as a result of traveling near the speed of light. (The torus is the shape of the space-time fabric about the electrons circling around an atom's nucleus at high velocities.)

I began to explore the theory that there were indeed parallels between certain extreme psychological processes and the nature of space-time warpage caused by large bodies of mass or fast velocities. This led me to write Black Holes and the Art of Transformation, in which I described my findings especially with respect to psychological transformation.

If one accepts the idea that the center of a black hole leads to a white hole, as some scientists theorize, then the resulting space-time warpage can be represented by the symbol of the "X". For many years, I have hallucinated an "X" quite commonly when I closed my eyes, and it was not entirely clear why until I began writing this article. The dream/vision content that accompanied this recurring hallucination showed the process of traversing up through the middle of the "X", from the bottom portion to the top, as the process of attaining enlightenment or higher states of mind.

The "X" symbol possesses additional meaning with respect to polarity. The two bottom lines of the "X" coming together in the middle denotes the convergence or synthesis of a polarity, which was what I was encouraged to do by the vision in my first post of manifesting both the masculine and feminine sides of my own personality simultaneously, that is to say, to heighten the electrical charge or power of both sides at once.

In Shifting the Assemblage Point, I discuss how the astral projection experiences I had in college gradually transformed over the years into my ability to shift the assemblage point, which can be described as a fully conscious astral projection. The act of shifting the assemblage point demands both extreme feminine and masculine qualities in order for the shift to occur and I explain why in that article.

After I began searching for parallels between black hole phenomena and everyday life I stumbled upon some startling ideas with respect to synchronicities, which I detailed in Synchronicity Clusters and Warping the Existential Matrix. As is evidenced by the "The EGG Project", when large populations of people all share the same sudden focus, there is a synchronistic effect that takes place which surfaces in random number generators set up to measure such skewing of the outputed numbers. In other words, while a uniform distribution of numbers is expected from a random event generator, a clustering of the numbers results during world-wide events. My interpretation of the results of this ongoing experiment is that this focus shared by many people develops a point of singularity, to use black hole terminology, and this warps what I call the "Existential Matrix". Similarly, when one focuses upon an aspect of one's evolution with intensity and rigor, the existential matrix is warped so that coincidences occur that are meaningful with respect to the subject at hand.

To be continued...

The Freedom of Wings and the Invisible Tides

2008-07-26T13:33:00.000-07:00

After bidding his final farewell to all his friends and family, the Ever-Receding Man withdrew to a spot by the sea. There, he built a home out of jagged rock and put together a sparse set of furniture out of wood. He planted trees for all the fruits and vegetables he would need to sustain him; the trickling spring nearby promised to be an endless source of water for him and his plants to drink. And once the practical and mundane aspects of life were taken care of and he was comfortably settled in, he began to gradually turn blind.

On the day that marked the very end of his eyesight - it had finally reached the point that not even the slightest blur of light could be discerned during the highest noon - he planted an acorn seed directly in front of the main entrance to his house, as he had long since planned to do on this momentous occasion.

Now that he was no longer aware of the coming of day or of night, Time seemed practically disabled save for the rhythmic sound of the waves of the sea crashing onto the shore. The acorn seed eventually grew into a magnificent oak that dwarfed the rest of its surroundings. Although he could not see it, somewhere in his perpetual nighttime he was aware of every inch of growth that the tree enjoyed. He could almost feel the water rising up its trunk to nurture its many leaves.

The modest home he had constructed while his eyes still possessed their vision had a design which he intuited one day while watching a skylark soar up into the sky. It consisted of many small rooms, all roofless save for the bedroom which stood in the center. The walls extended straight outwards, North and South, and then curved around the house to serve as the surrounding fence, the main entrance faced West.

Protruding from one corner of the fence was a statue that he had meticulously sculpted out of the same jagged rock that made up the walls. It was of a man with wings holding a staff of golden brass whose upper tip was in the shape of a large circle, roughly one foot wide. He had found this staff in a yard sale while in his early teens, held on to it and cherished it for its sheer simplicity.

One night he had a dream of himself sleeping in his bedroom, which was now circular in shape and was missing its ceiling. From the shining moon above hung a curtain of subtle, silver radiance, which draped around his bed and shifted about ever so gently. Near the foot of the bed, a miniature version of the oak tree grew out of the mattress. Its branches extended and curled about, exploring the space around it thirstily. Finally, one of the branches penetrated through the moon's curtain and out the other side. He woke up with a start.

What must have been months later, he started to discern tiny dots of light in his vision. Was this his inner eye finally gaining the prominence to replace his lost eyesight? No, his vision was definitely returning and it became clearer over time. He was soon to realize that these dots were the stars in the sky, only they were unusually bright as if he were standing on top of a high mountain on a clear day.

Not all things became visible, however. He could see the vague blueness of the sea, but not the water, the dark earth beneath the grass in his fenced yard; he could see the sun, but not the moon - how he longed for the moon - and the occasional clouds and fog provided a discernible fuzz against an absent sky.

His newly gained eyesight did not seem to add any practical advantage to his life. Or so it seemed...It did not take long before he realized he could see, albeit vaguely, the shifting tides of the sea in the evenings, by watching the dancing movement of the stars reflected upon the surface of the invisible water softly crashing upon the shore.

Somewhat revelatory was the realization that this was the only visible source of regular movement available to him. Every evening, when the sky was clear enough, he would sit out before the sea and watch the invisible tides. He danced inwardly to their movement and, over time, he externalized the dance to the subtle and slow shifting of his own body. At times, a single "step" took hours to perform - in no apparent way did his movement seem synchronized with that of the sea of stars - other maneuvers were more swift and direct in their expression.

One night, he found his dance to feel especially natural. He felt that his body carried no weight and that it had taken on a life of its own. As he was losing himself more and more to the swaying movement he suddenly realized that his feet no longer touched the ground. He could discern the outline of the water's blue receding and now watched the vague shore from a bird's eye view. The glittering stars remained by his side, however.

Transformative Music - Earning Serenity

2008-07-16T08:35:00.000-07:00

As I've written in the past, any analysis of music from a psychological perspective should be taken with a grain of salt, at least in my opinion. When I do write about music, it is ultimately to communicate psychological insights, more than to illuminate new perspectives on music. I never compose music while thinking about the psychological processes at work, and yet my songs and their arrangements naturally end up portraying inherent patterns of psychological movement from which one can attain insight into the way consciousness moves over time.

Much of my music naturally progresses towards a place of meditative peace and simplicity, the Abstract, but such a domain must be earned. It is a destination that is difficult to reach. I am not speaking of one's usual state of calm and contentment, but that deeper state of serenity that can be attributed to higher states of mind.

Music works on consciousness through psychological resonance. If one does not jive with the music, one is effectively refusing to actualize the potential journey which the music offers.

There are two factors that determine resonance. The first can be called "psychological proximity". It is easier to attain a state of bliss if one is already in a state of joy, as opposed to in a state of anger or frustration. Similarly, if one hears music that is playful and light while one feels heavy and morose, the music is less likely to resonate with the listener.

The second factor can be called "inventory of experience". If one is currently in a state that is heavy and morose but is usually playful and lighthearted, then light and playful music is more likely to quickly snap one out of the heavy mood. This is an over simplification, of course. Typically, my songs try to evoke moods that are very unique in character and therefore most people do not find an entry point with which they can identify.

With respect to attaining a deep sense of serenity, if one has just gotten off from work, for example, after a hectic day dealing with aggressive clients and upper management, then soft, simple, abstract music is typically not going to resonate with the listener; in some ways the sense of calm that could be attained can be termed hypocritical, or repressive of the underlying tension that has not been resolved or shaken out from its roots. There must first be an entry point that makes the listener jive with the music and from there one is led to gradually travel towards the realm of inner peace, by going through the rounds that unfold or unweave the knots which have developed.

Even if one doesn't live a busy and fast-paced life, one's conscious mind typically does its best to clutter itself with all kinds of thoughts, desires, and concerns. That's what meditation is for, to empty oneself out, but the proper music can work as a natural aid.

The path of psychological travel from point A to point B is rarely, if ever, a straight line. The path to a meditative serenity can be especially complicated. One typically experiences much oscillation through various moods and perspectives before a higher, more restful state of mind is reached, and to trace the path one took involves awareness of at times highly subtle internal processes at work.

"Equinox" is a collection of my songs that serves as a sonic essay or a musical portrayal of the wide array of psychological movement one experiences before being released into a sea of calm. The progression towards the inevitable serenity is a natural one, which cannot be explained in words but should be experienced directly through the music.

Click here to listen to "Equinox".

If the reader would rather just sample "Equinox" to get a feel of what I'm talking about, the following song represents the turning point between the turbulence and the calm. It is a rather extreme example of what I've been talking about, because it begins in a rather aggressive and dark manner. But, this only serves to illuminate one out of many natural psychological progressions from a state of turmoil to a state of inner peace. It can be argued that perhaps the greatest purpose of music is to sublimate the lower states of mind into higher ones.

Another aspect of reaching a calm, meditative state through music is that the entry point used, that with which the listener can resonate, should nevertheless invite the intellect to a quietude. The intellect is typically, and naturally, on overdrive. Music that is catchy serves to keep the intellect going. A meditative calm is thus difficult to attain.

While "The Reversal" begins busy and interesting, and emotional, it is deliberately un-catchy and thus the initial busy-ness does not "bind" the listener's intellect. Secondly, the complicated sound textures that directly precede the period of calm can serve to massage one's intellect to a quietude by being overly complex to follow consciously, just as water trickling through a stream in "hyper-"stereo is also calming to the nerves because there are so many drops of water emerging from many places all at once.

In Equinox, "The Reversal" then leads to songs that are more abstract in nature, having finally arrived at a place of serenity.

Precision and Ambiguity - Excerpt from "Tales of Crimson and the Child of Thea"

2008-07-06T09:16:00.000-07:00

Crimson stole through the streets before the break of dawn. He climbed the staircase of an abandoned building to the roof on the 21st floor. There, he perched himself cross-legged on the edge and peered out onto the city.

He watched the day break into light, watched the sun slowly float above and beyond and into the Great Sea of the West, that strange mystery to which he knew he would one day belong.

As the night settled upon the city, he gazed at its shimmering lights in the distance. A breeze lapped upon his face from time to time. He closed his eyes and waited for the breeze to hit his face at the specific angle of 39 degrees from top left. When it finally did, he uttered the following words into the nighttime: "I represent the dissonance of a solar wind."

Sparks flew in a power plant nearby and ignited a fire that resulted in an electricity outage throughout various contours of the city. Crimson wandered through the darkened streets and withdrew into the shadow of an alley. He stood motionless against the wall, having first measured exactly 42 feet from the main street.

The Child of Thea had a dream in which a winged statue emerged out of the soil of a mathematician's backyard, despite having planted an acorn seed.

Crimson emerged out of the darkness floating two feet above the ground. His velocity quickened as he transformed into a cocoon of light. Almost instantly, he was reduced in size to a tiny incandescent iota that shot through the wilderness of the urban jungle.

Drawings from the Old Notebooks

2008-06-22T21:13:00.000-07:00

Snippets from the Old Notebooks

2008-06-22T13:43:00.000-07:00

Browsing through my old notebooks, I gathered together the following snippets:

And what if we were to shine our thoughts through a prism?

He would spend an entire afternoon trying to achieve a body posture that precisely reflected the thought patterns flitting through his mind.

Time was defeated, drained out some hole in the sky, where alternatively the void of space was allowed to seep in.

The broadening of the innerscape

The open sky left the earth unprotected.

That vague, endless imperceptibility.

He maintained an interstellar proclivity.

His insides shifted harmoniously with the slowly rotating superstorms of Jupiter. He peered at his earthly surroundings like a secret agent of the galaxy, his purpose long forgotten.

Dissolution Harmonics

And the child opens its arms to embrace the world, expecting the world to embrace it back.

I have destroyed the ground beneath my feet in order to discipline myself to learn how to fly. [Speaking of the Hurricane Period.]

Androgynous associations

Space-man Acrobat

Now squint at life as at a blaring sun!

I am strength, and I am weakness, simultaneously.

[Post-Hurricane Period:]There is nowhere to turn but backwards towards infancy, despite my continuous longing to march forward. When I finally let go, I feel innocent bliss. I look up to everyone with love and happiness, as if each stranger would offer me a piece of candy. At times, the joy makes it hard to breathe and I sigh an infant's ecstasy. But, where are my parents? The playground is still filled with monsters. The embrace, which every child needs so much, comes from the flicker of a candle's flame, from a ray of sunshine, or the water lapping in the bathtub. And with every embrace, I am pulled back still further towards infancy. It feels as if, in this manner, I can ultimately negate my birth.

It will take me a year perhaps to understand my new personality.

As a rule, there are no bones,
for bones are too rigid.
As a rule, there is no flesh,
for flesh is containment.
As a rule, there are no lies,
for lies cannot span
the stretch of infinity.

Lit candle after candle after candle to proliferate an abundance of light and shadow in the room, the radiant dance of multiplicity.

Beauty coiled about itself and produced Harmony

To find the mark of divinity in a simple act of understanding.

I like to set a limit to the number of buckets of blood I shed for the sake of art.

One must endure pain without suffering.

What is it about Time which holds Wisdom back till it feeds it ripe?

Alternating between the Lion's Roar, a sweet child, fear, and a softly crumbling death by sadness.

A cloudless sky, a looming void over the inhabitants of the city. The rhythms of nature only expressed themselves in soft gusts of invisible wind, derelict air gasping for permanence.

I am drinking in a bar. It is the vessel of a ship which is sinking. It does not matter that the exit leads right out into the street. We are submerged, and we are sinking with ever increasing speed. Tomorrow, when I awake, I will have lost yet another self to the water's depths.

"Do your figures lose body?"
"No," I said. But, he did not seem to react to the answer, upon noticing that he had become a little transparent. In sensing his embarrassment, I averted my eyes.

The ocean tells me I am a lie.

The need to huddle up in a narrow alley, a fissure in the mind.

Time became resonant.

I have kept over two hundred diaries, all in parallel, with zero entries each.

Woke up dancing to the waltz of a dream.

I am a weak yet monstrous creature who sits cuddled about itself in the farthest proximity of a corner, hoping that the walls would let in a little further. And if I were to use my sharp claws to defend myself, I would only resolve, in mid-swing, to puncture my own flesh, and moreover to reopen the freshest wound.

"I do not understand." If only the night air would accept these words and absorb them. Instead, they bounce back lifeless and empty.

At times, a feeling of great sadness overtakes me right before it begins to rain. It is similar to the enormous psychological pressures I sometimes experience just before the break of dawn. The sensitivity of the artist lends no mercy.

It is difficult to live wisely because wisdom tells you that Truth is bound to movement.

Wisdom has found me superfluous and thus fled.

When even a plain white wall has character, looks at you, smiles at you, then you know life has a lot to offer.

So Spoke the Eye - A Collection of Photographs and Artwork

2008-06-14T16:24:00.000-07:00

The picture above has always been especially enigmatic to me. I took the picture without paying too much attention during one of my nocturnal wanderings through the city. I am not sure if the furry figure was indeed a dog or just some furry, inanimate object. The ambiguity creates an internal oscillation between two vastly contrasting interpretations of the image, one of a dog, with all the meaning and life that a dog represents, and the other a non-descript object of abstract form.

The Prelude to a Coincidentia Oppositorum - A Mandatory Scribble

2008-06-12T08:01:00.000-07:00

I felt somehow obliged to publish a post of the notes below that I jotted down last night. Their relationship to the previous post, in the way one references the other but as if from a different dimension, is not dis-similar to the relationship between a dream and an associated waking experience, although both posts have dream-like qualities. Is the relationship to the previous post truly meaningful and harbors the potential for knowledge, or am I seeing too much into it? Well, this sounds like the dilemma one typically experiences when interpreting a dream, and how we feel more and more out of touch with a dream the further we psychologically travel back into our waking lives...

Out with a friend.

"Ah yes, Kafka. A great beginning."

The remark withdrew into a crack in the wall.

(And so the fire subsided.)

The Withdrawal

2008-06-09T21:55:00.000-07:00

A child sat before a pond.

The mountain - its dark, barren rock painted white by snow in patches, its massive bulk majestic against the backdrop of a deep, deep clear sky blue - could not be seen except as a reflection in the pond.

The child gazed fixedly at the mountain, and without removing its gaze, slowly stood up, walked toward the pond, and in one swift motion dove in, back first, having twisted gracefully in the air.

The world now inside out, the child suddenly found itself standing upright and straight, on the other side of the interface.

Its body elongated with a ripple, its head towered above the mountain, the neck swayed back and forth, the legs like tall trees danced slowly in the wind. It peered down far, far below at its feet, which were still immersed in the water of the pond at the toes.

Slowly the child retreated; it withdrew further and further away from the pond and as the final drops of water dripped off its skin, its entire body grew more and more gigantic. The mountain was now like a tiny crevice in the ground.

The child took one step forward and plummeted outward from the earth, growing till it became everything and thus altogether disappeared.

The Writer's Sketchbook - April - June '08

2008-06-07T15:19:00.000-07:00

Just as a painter's sketches are at times especially appealing due to their playful spontaneity, so can a writer's marginal notes possess a raw vitality that beckons exploration. The following collection of disparate notes are the byproduct of writing a number of essays and short stories over the last few months. While most of these snippets are simply islands of thought that could not find their place in my larger projects, some are the coming to a form of closure on difficult concepts through the soft precision of poetics. Others are like tiny portals to new avenues of thought that will most likely materialize over the next few weeks, months, or even years.

Her features were thrown asunder. Her smile propagated, began to revolve around the room.

Within the circumstance, there is only enlightenment. But, we are always standing on the outside peering in.

To mimic life is to bestill it.

Find the question to this answer:
"Because your body cannot speak this form of wind."

Misplaced.

I sit at the interface between two worlds. Pondering the reflections.

I ponder the thought of pondering only to find the thought in the shadow of itself.

The thought in the shadow of itself.
The thought in the shadow of itself.

Reflections like a tide.

I live within a tiny speck on the magnifying glass.

Earth Diminutive

Always, always, always, there is the melancholy before the birth.

The deep blue of dusk permeates the house.

And I have withdrawn into a vague siren that threads through the night.

The Distribution of a Progression

Always to return to the bookstore, to leaf through the books, only to find nothing, to feel the rising sense of despair, to begin searching frantically, and then finally to let go and give up, for it is my own book that I seek.

A dream can indeed be interpreted, but the heart of its mystery can never be plumbed. So is the case with a synchronicity.

An enigma opens a gateway, presents a passageway which ever deepens till depth loses meaning.

And were my wings to be clipped would I not simply fall upwards?

The logician says:
For the sake of happiness - for is happiness not important? - let Truth come more slowly so that one is not devoured by it.

The artist says:
The magician speaks with the speed of lightning. It is like the worshiping of the winds.

Enigma is a cloak of protection.

Enigma is the artist's avenue towards mysticism. The artist who crafts an enigma potentiates a mystical experience in his work, to be actualized by an audience through psychological resonance and abandoning the self to an uncritical appreciation of the work.

I am now imperceptible.

The spiral is a booming trumpet.

Perhaps. Perhaps, the intellect would be adequate were it omni-articulate.

An alternative introduction to Kafka, Enigma, and Mysticism:
This post is at once an essay and a homage to Kafka. Similar to how his two most prominent novels The Trial and The Castle were left unfinished when he died, this work is also presented in its incomplete form, not out of a desire to emulate Kafka but because I arrived at the inevitable conclusion that any analysis of his work cannot, and is even obliged not to be, complete. Otherwise, the reader is falsely lead to a sense of closure about his writing. Thus, the more fragmented and even self-contradictory my writing is presented, the more I remain true to my admiration of his writing. Indeed, just as the greatest responses to Zen koans have been equally enigmatic and defiant of reason, I believe there is no way to truly talk about Kafka than in responding to his fiction with more fiction. "Logic Dies, I am Sorry" is a short story I wrote while struggling with this post. It is perhaps my real essay.

For, to stumble upon myself in the darkness...there is nothing more frightening.

I would expect my fiction to be taken seriously, although there can be found no answers therein, and my essays and their "answers" to be taken with a grain of salt, if not immediately mutilated in order to see if they withstand the test.

And then the nighttime lay dusk on its shoulder.

The shadow playing on the wall is your great-grandfather pleading to come to your aid!

How I would have loved to declare the following to my boss:
"To me, what I worry about are the archetypal patterns at play in this endeavour."

An often overlooked, yet significant, aspect of spiritual advancement is the reaching towards a finer granularity of one's insights.

One can view the positive path (of unconditional love and acceptance) from a purely mechanical perspective. You may have every excuse in the world to be pissed off at someone. But, it doesn't matter. The negativity will still weigh you down. "The sin is forgiven before it is committed", such an attitude is inevitable.

Tidbits of thought, merrily blows the night air.
Marginal to be sure, almost parenthetical, yet varied in scope, like the outstretched arms of Atlas.

In enigma craftsmanship, the avenue to infinity must be setup and protected. There should be no dead end closure to any idea.

Always utilize life in its entirety!

I appreciate everything.

...And so the tears may suffice. So the tears may suffice...

Were I to Finally Arrive...

2008-06-05T08:58:00.000-07:00

Were I to finally arrive at the temple to meet with the Zen master, I would most likely drop to the floor and fall asleep at the very instant our familiar smiles greeted each other. There I would lay huddled for many days and nights till the curvature of my body resembled perfectly the special roundness of the moon. Upon awakening, I would stand up slowly, my eyes faded inward and gray, the fingers of my two hands interlocked behind my back forevermore. Thus I would be lifted by the monks to a tower balcony, to dissolve into the night by the break of dawn...And I shall resurface briefly as the nameless gestures of a thousand-folk unconsciously moving in unison. The fleeting breeze of life whistles its esoteric tune.

The Enigmantra

2008-06-02T08:40:00.000-07:00

Many years ago, in me sparked the desire to write a book, a novel. The characters and scenarios began unfolding in my head. But, as I busied myself writing paragraph after paragraph, I started feeling the need to write in a more terse manner. I saw my work shrink and over time the entire book was reduced to the following two words: "Ocean Ghost". My work was complete, the book was finished. In no way could I add a single word.

Over the years, most of my fiction of the poetic kind would go through a similar diminution, a compaction that prompted me to call this type of writing "crystallized literature", which is also befitting for, just as one handles a crystal, it is well to closely (but not analytically) scrutinize these tiny, literary parcels of thought, and to shine the light through them from various angles. The term still applies but the style of writing has for me taken on more meaning.

I found that concentrating on these small phrases that I constructed helped me reach higher states of mind and thus I now playfully call them "enigmantras". Similar to zen koans, they are typically not meant to be decipherable by the intellect and yet they can be intriguing. In addition, they are either poetically enigmatic or they simply possess the power of sparking the imagination in a way that evokes a sense of beauty, sacredness, and/or ethereality.

I present some of these "enigmantras" below. The sequence is unimportant, although they can play off each other. I recommend not trying to analyze their meanings, but living with the words in your intuitive realms.

Twilight Absorption

The Embrace of a Cosmic Flux

A Spectrum Discharged

The Luminous Floods

The Voyage Behind a Nameless Gesture

To Conjugate Existence

The Color of Twilight Supercedes the Eye

The Sudden Illumination of an Inner Metropolis

Obscured by a Windscape

Poignant Light

Jovial Heartbeat

An Undefined Sunrise

Time's Condensation

Where Shadows Shine

The Visual Matrix of a Capsized Dream

Burst Meadow

The Holographic Pivot

The Immeasurable Distance of Shadow

Archetypal Flora

Reduction Symphonic

Color Reversal Anatomy

Motion Wings Distributed

What is enigmatic to one person may not even be slightly interesting to another. I would be interested to see if anyone else out there resonates with the above words like I do. Your feedback would be greatly appreciated, as always...

Kafka, Enigma, and Mysticism

2008-06-01T20:25:00.001-07:00

Those who have embarked on a spiritual path may or may not recognize specific individuals who have helped them jump start their inner adventure. My early spirituality was not at all influenced by Eastern philosophy or New Age writings, at least not directly. Instead, it was solidly rooted in the realm of modern art, music, and literature, with the idea firmly planted within me from a young age that I will be climbing up "the other side of the mountain."

My first spiritual guru was not a figure like Krishnamurti or the Buddha; it was Franz Kafka. He was what I would call one of the godfathers of enigma craftsmanship. Some of my earliest and most memorable altered states of consciousness came as a result of dream-wading my way through the mystery corridors of his writing. The enigmas he presented, coupled with the sense of purity and human warmth in his writing - or perhaps just his highlighting the beautiful and mysterious aspects of being human and accentuating them to the nth degree - opened doors that eventually led me down the path towards my mystical experiences.

Since Kafka's time, there have been quite a number of artists of many mediums that focused on the enigmatic side of creativity. Names such as Harold Pinter, David Lynch, the Brothers Quay, and Francis Bacon are but a few. One can argue that they've gone to far greater lengths than Kafka in this regard. And yet, as is usually the case, the early pioneers of a specific style or genre tend to breathe an unusually strong sense of life into it, with a purity that remains memorable and worthy of exploration throughout many generations.

To be profoundly moved by a mystery which can neither be explained nor scrutinized by the intellect, this is the proper form of an enigma. Some enigmas point to insights which lie just beyond the horizon of conscious understanding, and poetics can also come in such a form. Yet, the true enigma stubbornly shies away from conscious analysis while retaining its intense sense of profundity. One can circle about it with ideas, but to plumb and articulate its depths is not possible. One is moved, deeply moved, yet without knowing exactly why.

What does enigma have to do with spiritual awakening? It kindles the spirit to life with wonder. A powerful enigma is a slingshot into the Unknowable. There, with our eyes closed and our hearts fully observant, we behold the touch of infinity. Beckoned by awe and wonder, the yearning to grow and evolve unfolds. We return to our daily lives feeling enriched, albeit in a vague way, having briefly visited with the mystic inside of us.

The Art of Enigma Craftsmanship

Kafka's writing, in its more magical moments, typically held a certain level of fidelity to poetic obscurity, so that the intellect had nothing to which it could cling too strongly when it came to the enigmatic parts of the story. The conscious, analyzing self is put to rest to a large degree and mysteries are crafted into being with a sense of unapproachable purity. Today, nearly a century after his death, one commonly finds a written summary of his work which states that much of his writing was open to endless interpretation. From my perspective, this is the essential mark of Kafka's genius; that his tales forever escape the slice and dice and the compartmentalization of logic.

In a similar manner to how the intellect can only circle around an enigma and can never penetrate its depths, the main character in the Castle, in his endless attempts to approach the castle in the middle of the city, finds the act to be ever more difficult. Likewise, K. in The Trial can never get to the heart of the Law in order to resolve his case, whose details are never explained. Both books mirror the reader's own inability to find a concrete interpretation of the mysteries they present. While it seems like metaphors are at play, so that whatever seems out of the ordinary becomes a beckoning riddle, and while at times it feels like the deepest wisdom is being communicated, one can at most describe the tales as dream-like and any further interpretation usually comes with the feeling of having explained too much.1

In a letter from Kafka to the publisher of Metamorphosis, the story of a man whose body had transformed into that of a giant insect, he wrote about his concerns over the book's cover: "the insect itself is not to be drawn. It is not even to be seen from a distance." Why? Such a statement suggests his concern over retaining a handle on what is to be rendered concrete and what is to remain obscure and ambiguous.

If one compares the art of writing fiction with the art of making a film, one of the essential differences is that a writer has the advantageous ability to describe, and thus render concrete, only those details which s/he finds necessary to communicate, leaving the rest up to the reader's imagination. A film, on the other hand, typically has little choice but to present a character or a scene in its entirety. As soon as a character's face is shown on the screen, the ears, the mouth, the eyes, the nose, the cheekbones, the hair, all is presented at once. In writing a story, the writer begins with a blank slate, the world is a mystery, and every word is carefully chosen to gradually construct the scene. In this manner, much of the elements of the story are held ambiguated until they are described, if they are described at all.

In crafting an enigma through writing, this negative space is purposefully utilized to keep that part of the story which is mysterious vague and undefined, as much as it needs to be for the enigma to be presented with full force and for the subtleties to come forth unclouded by unnecessary distractions that the intellect is bound to latch onto.

There is a balancing act between defining too much and keeping too much obscure, and this balance is superbly demonstrated in Kafka's writing. While obscurity is useful to keep the intellect at rest and encourages an enigma to be appreciated in the intuitive realms, the true master of enigma does not purposefully obfuscate her/his ideas just to be obscure. This would violate the laws of reason. Obscurity without meaning creates confusion and is relatively fruitless. There is no reason for enigma to contradict the natural order of conscious thought; reason and enigma can live harmoniously in parallel. In this area Kafka shone, for his writing would always tread that fine line between falling over the edge of obscurity and retaining the purity of the enigmatic aspects of his stories.

Being aware of this fine line is not easy and what makes it even more difficult is the varying reactions different people have towards the type of mystery which is unapproachable. Several people who have watched David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, for example, told me that they felt Lynch was simply messing with their heads in the final (dreamy) section of the movie. I personally do not agree, but this highlights the potential downsides of presenting an enigma to an audience. The intellect, as soon as it distrusts a work's integrity with respect to meaning and worth, works overtime to demystify the enigma being presented rather than letting go and appreciating the enigma in the intuitive realms.2

Similarly, many have brushed away Kafka's books because they were "too difficult to read" and, again, this is because the intellect wants to make things concrete and to get to the bottom of the mystery, when in reality the value of Kafka's work is that it expresses the "unfathomable depths", as Kafka himself once described portions of his writings (found in "The Stoker").3

Intersection Point - Enigma in the Creative Arts and Koans in Zen

A koan is a concentration device used by students of Zen Buddhism which typically comes in the form of a story, question, or statement that defies or perplexes rational understanding. Koans are meant to be concentrated upon for long periods of time and they can sometimes be understood through intuition. Concentrating on a koan can lead one to an awakening or a state of enlightenment. According to D.T. Suzuki, "the idea is to unfold the Zen psychology in the mind of the uninitiated, and to reproduce that state of consciousness of which the statements are an expression."

An example of a koan that defies logic: "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" Other examples can be enigmatic, such as "Not thinking of good, not thinking of evil - tell me, what was your original face before your mother and father were born?"

James H. Austin is a neuro-scientist who wrote a book titled "Zen and the Brain". He describes his experiences in Kyoto, Japan, in Zen meditation and his interactions with a roshi, a Zen master. He was given a koan to ponder by the roshi and after a number of months when he had to leave Japan, he confessed his disappointment in his lack of progress. The roshi replied: "Stay with the koan itself. Break down through the where of the koan, and it will open up."

He illustrates. He points down and in, extending both arms into a long V. But at the bottom, he leaves a gap of three inches or so between the tips of his outstretched fingers on both sides. "A deep valley of the mind will open up like this," he explains. "Once you've gone through one of the experiences, a valley is cut in the mind, and it will stay open. Go into that opening...Keep on going like a train in a tunnel, and you will finally reach the daylight at the other end."

In earlier posts, including "Black Holes and the Art of Transformation", I discussed how the letter "X" can be interpreted as a symbol of transformation. I first became interested in exploring this symbol when I started hallucinating it on a regular basis whenever I closed my eyes beginning around a decade ago. By that time, my life was centered largely upon the mechanics of reaching higher states of mind and the object of the game seemed to revolve around going up through the center of the "X", from the bottom middle part through the tiny center and out the top. When I read Austin's book, I was startled at how similar was the roshi's description of coming to an understanding of the koan as going into a valley of the mind in the shape of a V and reaching enlightenment on the other side.

How does this valley of the mind come into being? Through meditation, one can clear the clutter of conscious thought so that there is no ripple in the pond of consciousness. The stillness spells regularization and concentrating upon a single point of focus causes a regularized bending of the mind towards that point of singularity just as a black hole warps the space-time around it inviting all neighboring objects to get pulled in.

With respect to working with a koan, the combination of concentrating on a koan and the baffling of conscious thought into a meditative quietude due to the koan's contradictory nature produces a single-pointed state of mind with a high degree of regularization. In this manner, transformation occurs; as a valley of the mind opens up, it is my theory that the movement in consciousness through this tunnel becomes at some point automatic, just as how the warping of space-time around a black hole generates the gravity effect that pulls all objects into its center. (There are many parallels between the nature of space-time and the way consciousness moves over time (see earlier posts) and this is but one of them.)

Similar to the act of probing a koan, an audience appreciating an enigmatic work of art or literature opens up a valley in the mind. The profundity of an enigma produces a yearning to understand the mystery behind it and this serves to accentuate one's purity of concentration. The impossibility of conscious understanding, outweighed by the intrigue and the yearning to understand, stills the intellect, especially if the rest of the work surrounding the enigma is kept vague in poetic obscurity. One's state of mind becomes empty of the intellect's distracting thoughts just as during meditation. A regularized bending of the mind towards the enigma produces movement in consciousness through what I like to call the "Enigma Chute". If the intensity of the transformation experience is high, one finds oneself in the mystery-realm of the Unknowable, the world alive and full of wonder.

Addendum - Kafka Koans

While there is no evidence that Kafka studied Zen, he has some quotes which possess a remarkable level of similarity with koans. I am currently in the middle of writing another post that explores this topic, in addition to his relationship with the Coincidentia Oppositorum found in the Kabbalah. In the meantime, here are some examples of "Kafka koans":

"My life is a hesitation before birth."

"The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler."

"The Messiah will not come until he is no longer necessary; he will not come until one day after his arrival"

"It is comforting to reflect that the disproportion of things in the world seems to be only arithmetical."

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1. Of all the essays on this blog, this one has been the most difficult to write. I have been working on this essay for over a month now and the closer I got to (understanding) Kafka, the more difficult it was to write about his work from an intellectual perspective. I was tempted time and time again to stop trying, for the fiction writer in me had surfaced instead. Indeed, the only way one can write about Kafka and do his work justice is through fiction, just as some of the best documented responses to koans themselves defy reason. "Logic Dies, I am Sorry" is a story I wrote as a result of laboring on this essay, and it initially surfaced in my mind as some kind of sequel to "The Castle", where the Distinguished Gentleman is an heir of the land surveyor position, only he is depicted as a lecturer instead. The "sphere of noise" in the story threatens to destroy the ideas in this very essay and as I type these very words now I feel my inner being in a state of revolt. As Kafka himself once said: "No more psychology!"

2. I find it unfortunate that while David Lynch has proven to be remarkably talented and influential in depicting dream-like and unapproachably enigmatic states on film, his use of fear and other related elements of negative orientation render the effects of his film rather weak when it comes to positive spiritual transformations in the audience. His talent, as he has especially proven in "Inland Empire" is quite remarkable and were he to devote his work more to the light instead of the darkness, he will most likely introduce the experience of enlightenment to many of his viewers, and thus he holds a great potential power in his hands. As it stands, the mystical experience simply does not jive with the dark side, except perhaps for those whose evolution has taken them very far in the negatively oriented direction. Same goes for Francis Bacon before him.

3. Interesting stories of Kafka that demonstrate enigma craftsmanship include "Before the Law", "The Knock at the Manor Gate", "The Cell", "The Spring", and the last chapter of "The Trial", amongst many others, including Kafka's diaries, which can be quite exceptional.

Logic Dies, I am Sorry

2008-05-25T10:23:00.000-07:00

Caught in mid-sentence, the Distinguished Gentleman, while speaking and also fumbling through his notes, was taken by surprise by a deep bass rumble. It was a rolling sound, one that seemed to approach, yet whose volume remained steady.

He did not stop to ponder whether the audience of 50 to which he was lecturing heard what he did. It was quite clear to him that they did not. He did, however, wonder what the rumbling would translate to in their world. He was now aware that the noise suggested a great degree of speed, as if its sole purpose were to engulf and consume.

A young woman stood up to ask a question. Actually, she had been standing there from the second the noise had interrupted his train of thought. He now mechanically asked her to voice her concern, and it seemed to the audience that the pause in his speech was normal, that nothing out of the ordinary was occurring.

As she spoke, the way the slight breeze in the stadium brushed through her hair - and swept it ever so slightly - made an impression on him that swallowed his conscious attention whole. Now, from far, far away, he heard himself replying to her question with great ease; he was speaking calmly and fluidly and while he watched his hands gesticulating animatedly, he continued probing his inner reaction to the movement of her hair, an event so commonplace and familiar that it scarcely should have been noticed.

The rumble was approaching. Now, he could sense it as a sphere of noise, which seemed to put forth some kind of light. It was indeed getting louder, but he certainly was not frightened by its intruding presence. In fact, instinctively he welcomed it. He knew it will consume him but he longed for it nevertheless.

While conversing back and forth with the young woman, he had taken off his spectacles. His pen fell to the floor and suddenly the sphere exploded into the room. His notes flew off his desk; the young woman had walked toward him and picked them up. She wanted to explain that he had contradicted himself while lecturing and she was searching for the old notes that would prove her point. As she stood there accusing him, he became enamored by the energy she exuded and distributed throughout his many worlds, like flooding water that spread throughout a sinking ship. He was ready to put his life to rest. And thusly, the sphere blew him into a form of dissipation. "Ah, yes. Thank you," he said, and the young woman returned to her desk, relieved that he had finally agreed with her about his contradiction.

Now that everything was calm once again, he stood in his place for a minute, silenced by the storm. After a long and slow sigh, he forced himself to reassemble his entire being into that point of focus so carelessly called "a lecture". Fully conscious at last, he opened his mouth to speak: "I..." and there was a sudden loud rap that came from the back of the stadium. Each and every student quickly turned around in their desks and the sound of their whispering grew louder and louder until the room overflowed with the clamor of their voices. The words he had attempted to speak were "I have nothing more to say".

And, from the back of the stadium, a figure emerged from the darkness to approach the students.

Contemplating Enigma - Part IV

2008-05-23T18:09:00.000-07:00

A green sky was the backdrop to a darkened landscape. The old man bent ever closer towards my face. His features were rounded, his head like a globe. Tiny discs of milky azure were his eyes: the corridors to infinity.

"There are no ancient scripts," he whispered to me with a strong sense of urgency.

Then, the return to silence, save for the fire crackling in the background, feeding itself strong throughout the night.

The Repellent (Contemplating Enigma - Part III)

2008-05-21T20:01:00.000-07:00

On the wall, a painting, a very large painting. Standing before it is a man dressed in tight black clothing, his arms folded, clasped hard, the muscles bulging in an exaggerated manner. One would naturally think that he is the guard of the painting. Yet, his body is tilted significantly to the right, and stands thus unmoving, suggesting a large degree of stamina and purpose.

It is a wonder whether the light hanging from the gallery's ceiling - with a brightness that seems to fade in and out, but this is uncertain - is also a necessary part of the artist's vision, for the shadow of the man cast by the light is far more alive, far more expressive, and far more vibrant than he. The shadow flickers behind his unmoving back. And this flickering is in unison with the letters that strobe on and off in the painting.

One feels inclined to come closer, and, despite a growing sense of embarrassment, so that one almost begins to flush, one feels almost drawn forward by the unyielding hands of fate to ask the man the ever tired old question: "What does the painting say?"

And upon finally fixing one's gaze upon the man's face, one finds the pupils missing, replaced by the picturesque scene of a blue sky with white clouds, inviting one to travel deep into that open sky upon realizing that this is the centerpiece of the artist's work. But, then...and then instantly, the inevitable deep and fierce growl of the man bellows forth: "It says nothing!" - like a slingshot that snaps one back home.

Contemplating Enigma - Part II

2008-05-20T08:21:00.000-07:00

I was threading my way through my backdoor neighborhood. I reached the edge of a large park whose trees stood tall and dark, as if to refute my entry. I walked along the row of houses and came upon a fenced area where there was nothing but shrubs and grass. And as I looked through the barbed wires, a question surfaced in my head on its own, and not without some force: "What is the language that you speak?"

(Never mind that I was dancing.)

Transformative Music - Appreciating the Indecipherable

2008-05-18T14:18:00.000-07:00

In my music, I sometimes add the sound of someone speaking with the intention that the words are indecipherable. Thus, I use samples of people speaking, if not in a muffled tone, then in a foreign tongue. Those listeners who happen to speak that tongue are out of luck. For, to be spoken to while there lies no hope of understanding the intended message can feel as if the realm of the mysterious were knocking on one's door.

I here present a small collection of my music that utilizes this technique to provide the effect of mystery.

The Diminution of Suffering in the Face of Infinity

2008-05-16T08:02:00.001-07:00

My vacation in Beirut, Lebanon, ended just a few days before a wave of violence hit the streets last week, forcing the airport to close and killing or wounding hundreds.

Since the two opposing factions have little common ground upon which to agree, it was certainly plausible that the country would plunge back into a long civil war. There is no greater fear for the Lebanese people than for Lebanon to become a blood bath like Iraq, with suicide bombers blowing up at random targets and claiming innocent lives. Already, the terrorism related websites were urging the killing to transfer to Lebanon but a few days into the fighting last week.

My own concern over my loved ones in Lebanon gradually grew over the days, especially since many of them work in the line of journalism, which forces them at times to follow the action rather than to hide from it. The worry ate at my being and I slowly saw my integrity slip, my spirits sink, the world growing black all around me. A veritable black hole of existence is the result of war. It is a traumatic shredding of the very fabric of one's being.

As I saw myself falling I made a resolution to put a stop to my fears and worry and to shift my state of mind to what Castaneda used to call the "Point of Indifference". In the past, this has been very helpful when I found myself apparently sinking to a place of no return. There is no easy way to do so, especially when one feels heavy and weak already.

I happen to believe in reincarnation and that we live on beyond physical death ad infinitum. My beliefs have been fairly strong since my teenage years when I was first waking up to my own maturity that I seemed to be born with.

I began to envision myself experiencing lifetime after lifetime after lifetime, and thus I began contemplating the breathless incomprehensibility of infinity. In comparison, this life of mine is nothing more than a blink of the eye. Were the worst to happen, it will only roll over with time...

With this meditation constantly in the back my mind, my spirits stopped sinking and I once more had a foothold on my bearing.

Contemplating Enigma

2008-04-21T12:26:00.000-07:00

Lately, I have been preparing a long post about art, enigma, and mysticism.

Yesterday, I was taking a stroll through the streets of Beirut while contemplating enigma. Specifically, I was wondering why I had not been experiencing synchronicities on the subject despite having been concentrating upon it for a number of days. As if in response, I experienced the following synchronicities:

First, my uncle-in-law, who has been writing a movie script filled with enigmatic scenes, called my cell phone and his voice was very, very low so that the words were sometimes entirely obscure and indecipherable.

Then, after I had just gotten off the phone and put it in my pocket, it started ringing again. I looked at the name of the caller and it said: "Mystery". It turned out to be the name of the currently activated ring-tone (I had not known this because it was my brother's phone) and I must have accidentally triggered the ring-tone selection feature when I put the phone in my pocket.

As I stood on the corner to write about these synchronicities in my PDA, I suddenly heard a "What are you doing here?" It was a friend of mine who, it turned out, lived a couple of blocks away. This sudden meeting was a meaningful coincidence in that it highlighted how my trips to Beirut were always full to the brim with socializing, which in turn explains why I have not been able to detect many synchronicities. Gregariousness can sometimes dissipate one's focus and therefore the warping of the existential matrix is reduced. (See Synchronicity Clusters and Warping the Existential Matrix for a related discussion). On the other hand, a gregarious lifestyle presents more opportunities for meaningful coincidences due to the increased richness of external experience. One's faculties of observation should remain on high alert despite the distractions from socializing.

In summary, within the span of no more than a couple minutes of wondering why synchronicities were not surfacing about enigma, I experienced three meaningful coincidences.

Childhood and Integration

2008-04-19T00:23:00.000-07:00

I am currently on vacation in Lebanon, staying at the apartment in which I grew up as a child. I typically come for a visit once every year or two.

On a visit three or four years ago, I found they had moved the heavy furniture around in my bedroom after painting the walls. And my childhood bed now was located at the opposite side of the room. I had massive difficulties sleeping there.

One night I decided to move the bed as close to the original position as possible (there was a heavy bookcase in the way). When I did so and turned off the lights (I was totally sober, mind you), I started hallucinating thousands of shards of light going everywhere all at once, some of them were stationary as if they represented fixated thought complexes. The hallucinations were so bright, they blocked my vision of the darkened room. Quite scary, actually. I left the bed and came back and they returned once again.

What do these hallucinations mean? In the least, they suggest the special power of a place frequented during childhood.

Any ideas?

Travel and Integration

2008-04-17T02:12:00.000-07:00

I've been on vacation since last Friday. I am currently stationed in Lebanon, my country of birth, but I stopped in Paris for a couple nights.

Sitting in Cafe Hugo in Place des Vosges...reading the biography of Robert Walser backwards...one paragraph at a time...

When I finally made it to Montmartre, the hilliest part of Paris, a deeper part of me let out a sigh of relief. My being felt integrated with my surroundings.

In the picture above, this tiny dip in the road followed by a symmetrical climb caught my attention and gave me comfort, perhaps because it represented a common psychological pattern of movement. The coming and the going...the falling and the rising.

In the middle of the valley there is a road that leads to the right. From my point of view it was hidden, and it represented a mystery. Did I walk down this road to find out where it lead? No. I much preferred to leave it a mystery, so that the feeling of enigma bloomed within as I walked further through the winding streets.

I have always found wandering through the streets of an unfamiliar city quite fascinating, for the act resembles dreaming one's way through the maze of consciousness. This is especially the case when the landscape is hilly, for it more accurately represents the valleys and peaks of the mind.

The Intersection Point - Art and the Paranormal

2008-04-15T13:29:00.000-07:00

The Writer, shown above, is one of my earlier works of art. It was drawn during one of my dry spells as a writer. The figure is shown doubling up on himself with his right foot resting on his book, keeping it tightly shut.

The image has much more meaning to me than can be discerned from the picture alone, however. Drawing this piece resulted in one my earliest and simplest psychic experiences and the story demonstrates how the creative act can help enhance an artist's sensitivity not just to the visual image on the canvas but also to the world at large.

I completed the drawing in an hour or so. The main outline of the body was drawn quite rapidly and I spent the rest of the time finely tuning the piece. Every line I drew or faded out, no matter how tiny, produced an effect in me psychologically as I reached for the precise overall effect that I wanted.

After I was done and I washed up, I walked outside my apartment for a breath of fresh air. Standing there was a girl I'd never seen before, no doubt house-sitting for my next door neighbor. We exchanged some brief words and both of us went back indoors.

As I was readying myself to go to sleep, I began feeling an extraordinary sadness swell up inside me. It gradually took me over completely and I finally found myself imagining that I was at a doctor's office being told that I had only a short time left to live. Right when I felt my sadness had reached its peak, I suddenly heard the girl next door burst into a flood of tears from behind my bedroom wall.

Synchronicity Clusters and Warping the Existential Matrix

2008-03-31T21:25:00.000-07:00

The Global Consciousness Project

What I find to be one of the most interesting scientific experiments being conducted today is named "The Global Consciousness Project", also called "The EGG Project", based in Princeton but conducted throughout the world. It involves a global network of machine-driven, random event generators which record randomly generated numbers on a second by second basis. The experiment demonstrates that coherent thoughts, emotions, and/or intentions shared by a large group of people (which typically arise as reactions to the occurrence of major global events) actually affect the outcome of the random number generators, despite the fact that the machines run entirely independently of human contact and they have no physically apparent link whatsoever with the people reacting to these events.

Statistically, one would expect a normally distributed set of numbers to be generated over time and indeed this is usually the case. But, when global events have occurred in the past, such as September 11 and the embassy bombings of 1998, the resulting data are skewed, at times to the degree that the odds that the fluctuations were random were one in a million. (Please visit http://noosphere.princeton.edu/ to learn more about this ongoing project.)

Such findings suggest that consciousness can have a direct effect on our reality, that the participation of our consciousness extends beyond mind and body to affect the world about us in a seemingly acausal manner.

Acausal Phenomena

The outcomes from this experiment add an interesting new perspective to other acausal phenomena such as the meaningful and highly unlikely coincidences we call synchronicities, in addition to mysteries of the quantum world such as the baffling observation of synchronous behaviour between quantum particles that are displaced at great distances from each other.

Since I am no quantum physicist, I have much to read and study before I get enough of an awareness of the quantum world to start theorizing about acausal phenomena in that realm. Instead, I usually concentrate on the world of synchronicities, especially since I've experienced so many of them in my day. I am, however, very fascinated with how many analogies can be made between psychology, if not the very nature of our existence, and Einstein's theories of relativity and related scientific observations. Specifically, the way black holes or large bodies of mass warp space and time can be used to construct analogous theories of how we psychologically move over time in addition to providing a background to understanding the nature of synchronicities.

Due to the limitations of human consciousness, it is difficult to truly pinpoint the general mechanics behind the various types of synchronicities. However, it is worthwhile to come up with theories which one can test over time. Over the years I have found increasing subjective evidence that a synchronicity typically does not occur as an isolated instance which by itself expresses an underlying order behind life's events. It is more as if life temporarily warps to take on a deeper meaning. A blatantly obvious synchronicity is sometimes clearly accompanied by other synchronicities which are meaningful to a lesser degree. Similarly, a group of synchronicities may also come as a self-referential cluster.

If one were to visualize the events in our everyday lives as arbitrarily scattered about an existential matrix, then synchronicity demonstrates the bending and stretching of this matrix so that the randomness is skewed to take on an orderly from. Life is no longer random and haphazard but suddenly seems to be driven by a hitherto undetected force, a new pattern of existence that straddles the usual cause-and-effect flow of our daily lives to form seemingly acausal relationships that actually make philosophical sense, at times profoundly so.

One of the main, burning questions behind synchronicities in general is: when and why do synchronicities occur? I believe that taking a look at the nature of space-time in our physical reality can lend some light on this subject.

A Space-Time Analogy

Let us take, for example, a spacecraft floating in outer space somewhere very far away from any solar system or black hole. Due to the lack of gravity, the spacecraft moves entirely according to the volition of its captain.

Let us now imagine there is an entire society of spacecrafts going about their business in the same vicinity of space. Although there are underlying reasons why each captain may decide to pilot her/his ship in the direction it is going, such as going to visit other spacecrafts for a celestial coffee break, the overall patterns of movement of all the spacecrafts combined would seem for the most part to be arbitrary and random, just as how one witnesses a haphazard traffic of pedestrians at a busy square in a city.

If, however, the society of spacecrafts were heading towards the vicinity of a black hole, we would suddenly find a new order behind their movement, which would at first seem to be acausal, and this orderly skewing of the overall random patterns of movement is caused by the pull of gravity towards the black hole. Just as gravity is an invisible force, so is the underlying order which threads together various sets of experiences in our lives so that they appear to us as synchronicities.

A black hole is essentially a tiny point of mass whose density is so great that the space-time matrix around it is warped to the point that objects within its vicinity cannot escape its pull. A black hole can be compared to what occurs in consciousness when one develops a high level of concentration upon a single object of focus. Especially with the help of meditation which clears away dissonant distractions, the act of concentration can produce a regularized, single-pointed state of mind which enables a transformation in consciousness, or a psychological movement towards a point of singularity.

The Global Consciousness Project has shown that after the occurrence of a global event, the coherent reactions of a large and wide-spread group of people affect the outcomes of random number generating machines. Thus, we can infer that there is a warp in the existential matrix when so many people are all focused upon a specific point of singularity, which is in this case the global event and its derivative mental/emotional reactions.

Synchronicity Clusters by Example

In my personal experiences of synchronicity, I have witnessed that synchronicities cluster about areas in my life upon which I am intensely focused, especially when the subjects at hand are related to my personal growth or evolution.

In Synchronistic Conditioning and an Emerging Portrait of Vitality, I wrote about a synchronicity cluster I experienced over several weeks. Such a cluster demonstrated how synchronicities can come inter-related to one another and how the power of concentration held over long periods of time cause a cluster to occur. You may wish to read this post in its entirety to get a better view of the underlying order, but I shall summarize my experiences here for the sake of brevity.

My life at the time (August 2007) was centered around the pursuit of understanding a vision which came to me after a dream about a group of orange-robed monks. These monks were portrayed as extremely masculine and assertive, almost relentlessly dominating, which is generally untrue of their character in reality, although I now wonder if there is any connection with the latest uprising in Tibet as the monks try to fight for their independence from China.

The vision directly proceeding the monk dream said to "achieve micro-buoyancy" and this message addressed the question of how to deal with the mundane, or micro, aspects of life such as my job and other superficial portions of everyday existence. Specifically, it urged me to achieve buoyancy even when my attention was held by the mundane, and thusly retain the higher states of mind I typically enjoy during my spiritual and creative pursuits. I knew that the masculine/feminine polarity was involved and the dream at first seemed to suggest a very masculine, domineering or unmovable attitude.

One night, during a visit to New York City, I was sitting at a bar which had a loud television blaring from a corner. I have always regarded the realm of television as that which glorifies the superficial and the mundane. I found myself forcefully trying to tune it out when I noticed a large red painting against the wall with the title "Gentleman", depicting a bunch of men in a bar. I found the coincidence to be rather meaningful and I decided to take a picture to document the synchronicity. By the time I readied the camera and clicked the button, the bartender had suddenly come into view, picked up the remote control, and pointed it at the television, symbolizing control over it and thus accentuating the synchronicity.

This was the first synchronicity which was linked with the orange-robed monk dream. The second synchronicity occurred the day after. I was eating breakfast in a restaurant while a couple of girls sat next to me who were discussing their love lives with great animation. Again, I found myself in a similar situation as with the television the previous evening and I was forcefully trying to tune them out. I picked up a book and started reading. I was surprised to find that the story depicted an orange-robed monk who picked up a remote control and used it to turn on the television as a way to demonstrate the existence of magic!

These three "events" were the essential building blocks of the synchronicity cluster, but for weeks afterwards I experienced synchronistic events which dealt with the same subject, focusing on the proper configuration of the masculine/feminine polarity. (The resulting insights generated ideas I have been focused upon till now, regarding what I like to call "the convergence of polarity".)

In summary, I was focused upon the "achieve micro-buouyancy" dream/vision with a level of intensity that was unusually strong because it had developed into the basic skeleton of my blog post and the subject became a point of singularity in my consciousness. Life took on order and my experiences revolved around this subject.

Inner Conditioning, A Story

2008-03-27T05:35:00.000-07:00

One formal definition for the word "conditioning", when used in a psychological sense, is "the process of behavior modification by which a subject comes to associate a desired behavior with a previously unrelated stimulus". Usually, in conversation, this word is meant to convey how one can be deeply, at times unconsciously, influenced by their family or culture to think or behave in a certain way with respect to various aspects of life and people.

The term "inner conditioning" can be used to denote the type of conditioning that surfaces naturally from the depths of our psyche such as how we are mentally and emotionally influenced by our dreams or the deeper thoughts and desires that surface on their own. (Synchronistic conditioning, which I spoke of in my previous post named Synchronicity, goes one step further by highlighting the synchronistic events we experience in our daily lives.)

This weekend, I experienced a simple form of inner conditioning. There is a restaurant in a part of the city I live in, San Francisco, which I am extremely fond of visiting these days. Throughout the week, I dream of going there because of the inspiration that naturally arises by dining in its special atmosphere.

This last Sunday, as I parked my car a few blocks away and started walking towards it, I realized that I suddenly felt no desire to go to that restaurant. Instead, I felt the need to visit another one which I used to frequent regularly many months ago. I decided to walk by my original choice just to see why my desire had suddenly left me and I found out that it was closed for Easter Sunday.

One way to look at it is that my inner conditioning helped divert my feelings of disappointment of dreaming about this restaurant all week only to find it closed when I finally got there. This little help or nudge is a very simple story but I believe that it points to a very fundamental aspect of our inner development, that our inner perspectives and desires shift and turn almost unconsciously according to an underlying order that is beyond our own conscious understanding. This generates a naturally flowing psychological movement which is constructive to our development over time, informed by the supracognitive abilities of our inner selves.

The question is: How much of our lives and our perspectives are influenced by this form of conditioning? My guess is: Quite a lot, especially if we allow ourselves to live intuitively and freely go with the ebb and flow of life. Sometimes, the tiniest of whims which surfaces on its own can serve as a thread which, once pulled, produces a constellation of experience essential for our personal development in the long run.

Synchronicity

2008-03-23T16:48:00.000-07:00

Synchronicity is defined as a coincidence that is so meaningful and unusual that it can hardly be attributed to chance alone.

What could very well be the most famous tale that illustrates synchronicity is Dr. Carl Jung's story of a patient who was recalling to him a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. As he was listening, Jung had his back against the window of his office, when a flying scarabaeid beetle came knocking on the window right behind Jung's back. "I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in." The scarabaeid beetle was the most closely resembling insect to the scarab in the patient's dream that lived in their physical proximity and the coincidence ended up helping Jung's treatment of his patient.

What is even more interesting is that the scarab in ancient Egyptian mythology was a symbol of rebirth and his patient needed a transformation, or rebirth, in consciousness in order for her treatment to be successful. Specifically, her difficulty was related to her inability to accept the irrationality of the unconscious. And the blatantly meaningful connection of the synchronicity was enough to sway her perspective.

I personally believe the synchronicity phenomenon to be an essential bridge between the perspective of a skeptic, who sees the world as largely mechanistic and random, and an awareness of the interconnectedness of life and what is considered to be paranormal phenomenon. Thus, I am always on the lookout when I am around a skeptic to introduce the concept when I feel an internal radar going off to give me the go ahead. In addition, there is a concept called the "synchronicity of synchronicity" (Alan Vaughan) which states that when one becomes interested in synchronicities, they are more likely to occur. Thus, introducing someone to the concept typically causes a synchronicity to be experienced in the near future if the individual is interested.

From my own experience, when I introduce synchronicity to someone who is not at all open-minded about such subjects, and indeed a synchronicity does occur, it often surfaces in a very obvious manner, just like Jung's scarab example, for his patient was quite close minded about such phenomena.

One evening, I was hanging out with someone who was very much a skeptic at the time. I had just had some very profound series of synchronicities occur to me which I was dying to talk about. So, I decided to tell my story to him, since it was a good way of introducing him to the concept. I will not recount the entire story I told him, but it involved reading a line of poetry on a bathroom wall which was incredibly meaningful in relation to what I had been going through. To the best of my abilities, I recited the poem from memory to him.

Later that evening, we decided to go have a drink at a pub and, to our surprise, as we walked in we found the same line of poetry etched in gold at the top of the bar!

Over the years, I have come to perceive synchronicity as a blanket term that describes a wide variety of unusual phenomena with a coarse granularity. For example, with the case of the line of poetry etched into the bar, I had been to that pub before, perhaps a couple times, but I never consciously noticed any poetry for it was close to the ceiling and I had sat in a different section. It could very well have been that the poetry had been unconsciously registered in my psyche and this bloomed within me the desire to visit that specific pub that evening.

Similarly, in Jung's story, the dream of the scarab could be interpreted as a divination of the future. The patient's deeper, unconscious self could have been aware of the future event of a scarab-like insect knocking on the window behind her psychiatrist's back and therefore the dream surfaced as an opportunity to demonstrate the potential interrelatedness between the unconscious and physical reality we perceive while awake.

In Synchronistic Conditioning and an Emerging Portrait of Vitality, I used the term "synchronistic conditioning" to denote the mental and emotional conditioning we receive from dreams and by living/thinking/acting intuitively that helps us perceive synchronicities more clearly and more frequently. For example, Jung's patient, having dreamed of the scarab, received the mental conditioning of giving the scarab a degree of importance. Had the scarab-like beetle entered Jung's office without his patient having dreamed about it, Jung may or may not have discussed the scarab as a symbol of rebirth. And even if he did, the patient would most likely not have been convinced of the relevance of the coincidence to her treatment.

Similarly, in my story of finding the poetry in the pub, it could have been synchronistic conditioning that led me to suggest to my friend that we go to the specific pub in question that evening, because somewhere in my subconscious I knew that the synchronicity would help my friend develop awareness of the inter-connectedness inherent in life.

Synchronistic conditioning can help explain the mechanics behind many synchronistic phenomena, given that we find it plausible that the future can be intuited ahead of time. Lately, I find the act of divination to be nothing out of the ordinary, especially if it originates from the unconscious realms where time seems to take on a non-linear form. I have been finding a large number of parallels between the nature of consciousness in relation to time and the space-time fabric Einstein's theories explain (in addition to all the various phenomena such as time wormholes that the coupling of space and time theoretically creates). (Please visit Black Holes and the Art of Transformation for an in-depth discussion on this lengthy topic.)

In earlier posts, I have written about reaching states of mind in which there is an ongoing dialogue between my conscious self and visions/intuitions originating from the depths of my being which shift my perspective or feelings in such a way that I see synchronicities left and right as if they were an integral part of the "discussion". In normal states of mind, such conditioning is less frequent and the number of synchronicities I detect similarly decreases, but much can be explained when exploring the mechanics of each synchronicity while looking inward for subtle shifts in perspective and intuitive/creative thinking.

Still, the question remains: "Can we attribute all synchronistic phenomena to synchronistic conditioning and divination on the part of our deeper selves?" My answer is that we can't. Synchronicities sometimes point to a far more mysterious and enigmatic order that underlies our reality.

Take, for example, the following story my uncle recently told me. While at home one day conversing with a friend, whose name happened to be the same as his, Nadeem, another friend who he has not seen or heard from for a long while popped into his head. He even asked his wife to phone his friend's wife in order to enquire about his whereabouts, he lived overseas and he wanted to know if he was coming home for vacation any time soon. Minutes went by and another Nadeem showed up at his house so that there were now three Nadeem's. Neither do these three men normally meet, especially not simultaneously, nor was the name common in his culture. Just a few minutes later, the friend he had been thinking about who lived overseas actually arrived at the scene completely out of the blue, unannounced, unexpected, and unexplainable.

In this story, it would be perfectly plausible to consider that my uncle intuited the future appearance of his friend at his house and that was why his friend popped into his head out of nowhere that day. But, how would one explain that, while this synchronicity was brewing, there happened to be two other men visiting him with the same name as his, especially since the symbolism of such a rare coincidence points at the inherent interrelatedness of all things, that which synchronicity symbolizes as well. In a similar way to how the people and the objects in our dreams can be interpreted as projections of our own psyche, so does the meeting of three men with the same name suggest the mirror-like projections of the self in our physical world.

In Michael Talbot's classic of a book, titled "The Holographic Universe", synchroncities are discussed from the point of view that the physical reality which we perceive, also called the explicate order, unfolds from an implicate order which is interconnected like a hologram. Our apparent separateness is an illusion and synchronous occurrences serve as evidence that the physical world and our own inner psychological processes are interconnected. In the words of physicist F. David Peat, when we experience synchronicity, we are really experiencing "the human mind operating, for a moment, in its true order and extending throughout society and nature, moving through orders of increasing subtlety, reaching past the source of mind and matter into creativity itself."

In the mysterious world of quantum physics, scientists have observed quantum particles behave in coordination with each other in a manner that defies the laws of physics in that the effects suggest movement faster than the speed of light, which is considered by scientists to be the upper speed limit, hence the name "non-local effects". Physicist Paul Davies states: "These non-local quantum effects are indeed a form of synchronicity in the sense that they establish a connection--more precisely a correlation--between events for which any form of causal linkage is forbidden."

Synchronicities in our everyday lives can be seen as non-local, yet related, events at the macro-cosmic level and that was why Jung labeled the concept of synchronicity "an acausal principle", since synchronous occurrences lack the usual cause-and-effect relationship.

In conclusion, synchronistic phenomena points to an underlying order beneath life that is highly elusive and enigmatic. What is the nature and purpose behind this order? When do synchronicities happen more frequently? Do we affect the frequency of synchronicities? These are all questions to ponder...

Transformative Music

2008-03-22T10:31:00.000-07:00

This post is to be part of an ongoing series that focuses on ways that music can serve as a vehicle for psychological travel. I have more than ten hours of my music recorded digitally and I will be picking out songs that sonically demonstrate various forms of movement within consciousness. Most of my exploration of the psychological mechanics behind reaching higher states of mind has been rooted in music.

Essentially, I subscribe to the point of view that music should speak for itself and it doesn't need to be explained. Understandably, there is an inherent difficulty of speaking about music due to the very nature of this medium. However, I still feel that discussing the various techniques that I have naturally developed over time can be instructive, as long as my ideas are presented, and taken, with a grain of salt. I would like to emphasize that I never try to analyze my music while composing. The songs simply come out with an inherent order that expresses transformative movements in consciousness on their own.

One's reactions towards a piece of music can be highly subjective, piloting the emotions is indeed a clumsy affair. For example, my music generally puts people in a deep mood. Many associate being deep with being serious, whereas I couldn't disagree more, since depth elevates my state of mind so that I become light-hearted and carefree, while being superficial snaps me back to the mundane states that are heavy and rigid. Such an example helps elucidate why so many people have such widely ranging tastes in music.

As I wrote in The Making of "Hieroglyphics", the Movie, the primary drive behind most of my creative pursuits is to move the audience at a level that can be called the "level of spirit". This is subtle work and thus the distractions of the intellect must be minimized. When my music does possess a catchy tune or beat, in other words, when it does cater to the intellect, it is generally for the intrinsic reason of appeasing the conscious mind until it relaxes and enters a meditative state. I call such portions of my music "entry points" to the real work. Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule and I am only speaking in general here.

My music is quite often abstract, vague, and minimalist, if not purely textural. This is because movement at the level of spirit tends to be subtle. Thus, any distractions on the part of the intellect throws the true purpose behind the music out of wack. One can almost compare working with the spirit as dealing with the quantum world, where one has to be microscopically precise, everything is obscure and unpredictable, and there is a fine granularity of attenuation involved. This is starkly contrasting with the macrocosmic world of the intellect where any well-made, catchy tune on top of a beat can begin moving the listener.

Those who are not familiar with my style of music, often called experimental music, usually mistake it for sounding like a movie soundtrack. My first reaction to that is: "Great! Life is indeed a movie!" Ultimately, the difference between my music and most movie soundtracks is that I go to great lengths to finely tune sonic landscapes so that they affect a highly refined feeling. I like to think of such feelings as having been derived from the sacred realms.

The first song I will talk about is a part of one my earliest recordings, mostly composed in an improvised manner during my late teenage years. I choose this song, despite the poor quality recording, because it is relatively easy to compare the way it unfolds to patterns in consciousness movement. Press the play button to hear the song; my suggestion is that you listen before you continue reading.

At first, the tune is vague and shifty, almost without purpose, like wallowing in the dark. Over time, a tension develops (at time 2:34), a struggle seems to take place and then a complicated interplay of sounds provides the backdrop to a sonic interpretation of enlightenment (at time beginning 4:00). This is a brief up-shoot into ecstasy, after which a simple melody with a simple beat playfully unfolds until the song ends (beginning time 5:10).

Perhaps to this date, I have yet to create a song which more clearly portrays the ability of this style of improvised music to express the inner dynamics of the spiritual path, expressions that illuminate archetypal patterns of existence, of movements of consciousness over time. The sequence depicted, of tension/struggle producing the impetus for aspiration, then ecstasy, followed by simplicity/playfulness against a backdrop of a newly found order, proved to be a blueprint for my experiences for the many years proceeding the recording. In fact, I experienced this pattern repeatedly on a weekly basis. During my solitary college years, I used to return to my home town on the weekends and let my inner exploration fly loose during the week in hopes of reaching an enlightenment-like state by Wednesday or Thursday. The pattern depicted by the song perfectly matched my inner endeavours as I embarked on a fresh struggle at the beginning of every week to reach the heights.

Click here to preview the complete recording to which this snippet belongs.
Click here to read the full essay describing the complete recording.

My subsequent musical recordings which were composed with a similar level of inspiration continued to accurately portray my internal wanderings but they are a lot more vague and difficult to explain, which only makes sense since my own spiritual advancement led me deeper into more and more mysterious realms.

"Sad Song for Iris" demonstrates some basic psychologically transformative techniques that I use rather commonly. Again, click on the play button to listen. This song is best heard with the intimacy of a pair of headphones, since its effects are far more subtle. Click on the following link to listen to the full CD: The Fade-Out Room

The song can be described to be comprised of three parts: First, we have a tune which repeats itself and ultimately fades away. Like a repeating drone, it lulls the listener into what I like to call a "poetic diffusion". Then, (at time 4:44) a repetitive textural rhythm accentuates the drone-like effect but without a tune that the intellect can grasp. And the abstract rhythm gradually accumulates resonance. The shift into resonance affects the listener in a manner that evokes the feeling of expanding beyond the usual conscious boundaries and becoming dissipated as in a timeless, dream-like realm. The fading into the third part (at time 5:50), from resonance to a straight-forward, new rhythm feels like a sudden materialization of, or a holographic pivot into, a new reality.

In short, this is the depiction of a two-step transformation process, the second step leading to a newly materialized reality.

Given the symbolism of the "X" in previous posts, the first part is a diminution of the intellect which allows the self to shrink and pass up through the middle of the "X". The second part is a journey into resonance which evokes the expansive process as one enters the upper portion of the "X". Finally, the transformation is complete as the newly reality has been materialized.

The Dimunitive Staircase

2008-03-21T17:38:00.000-07:00

In numerous posts on this blog, I've discussed why the letter "X" was a symbol of transformation. Going up through the middle of the "X" from the bottom triangle can be interpreted as a representation of transcendence into a higher state of being. Such a passage suggests the psychological shrinking of the self in order to attain the heights, a selflessness, or a convergence of polarity within the self.

A friend of mine was visiting me from out of town the same night that I was finishing up my previous post, The Making of "Hieroglyphics", the Movie, which actually mentioned one of the "X"-related dreams I've had in the past. Without having discussed this symbolism with my friend, he had a dream that night of being in a pyramid-like structure. At first, he had entered a normal looking building. But, as he climbed up a spiraling staircase, it became narrower and narrower till he couldn't climb any further because he found himself wedged between two walls.

The Making of "Hieroglyphics", the Movie

2008-03-17T14:16:00.000-07:00

Click on one of the above images to preview "Hieroglyphics", a video art project, 2001.

By the time I began exploring video as a creative medium in my early 20's, I was single-minded in the pursuit of expressing the ethereal side of experience in artistic form.

It was not uncommon for me, while alone and free from the mundane concerns of the daily life, to slip into heightened states of mind that were full of bliss, lucidity, and feelings of being one with the world. Those who know such moments are also intimately familiar with the need to somehow share these states of mind with others, as difficult as that might be, given that such experiences are typically seated so deeply within the subjective.

Video art seemed to be a promising medium through which to communicate the ethereal qualities of my higher states. I believe it to be especially suitable because of the ease with which the moving image can funnel in the attention of an audience. When the essential purpose behind the work depends largely on effects on consciousness that tend to be subtle in nature, the immersive qualities of the moving image serve to enhance and magnify these effects.

My goal led me to seek imagery that was abstract and non-representational. Sequences of imagery that could not be interpreted, parsed, and scrutinized by the conscious mind can settle the intellect into a quietude, thus relaxing the viewer into a meditative state.

Furthermore, as with all my other creative pursuits, I try to move the audience at the depths, at the "level of spirit" one can say. And this is subtle work. Any distraction on the part of the intellect easily overtakes the vague movement, or resonance, of the spirit.

It quickly became obvious that the most readily available subject to film that was abstract in form and movement was water, an especially appropriate subject to film due to its inherent spiritual properties and beauty. That type of body of water which in my experience provided the widest variety of imagery was the stream, due to the complexity of factors which influenced the moving image.

After shooting and editing hours of water stream footage, I began to envision the possible ways of affecting an ethereal experience in the viewer. One night, having reached a certain level of maturity in my endeavours, something clicked inside me while I was video editing and, although I was entirely sober, I began to literally hallucinate scenes of water stream footage whenever I closed my eyes.

Each hallucination was a few seconds long, depicting its own unique combination of imagery typical of a water stream. Each scene was immaculately beautiful and perfectly arranged, as if I were being shown the highest order of the different possible stream footage that I could capture.

I expected the hallucinations to last only for a short while but I was wrong. They lasted throughout the night. I fell asleep and woke up many times and the visions always returned, always unique, always immaculate. It felt as if I were being trained on how to film and how to edit the perfect scenes.

I would like to make one point very clear. I had been an artist and a musician for more than a decade before I had this experience. I now believe that this type of assistance from the other side (whether it be from the unconscious, the Creator, the inner self, or whatever else) came to me because I had finally reached a high level of purity of wanting to help others, of wanting to show others the ethereal side of existence.

I had scheduled my next big video shoot on my 30th birthday a few days later, at a national park. When that morning came, I woke up drowsily to a golden glow in my room. Upon opening my eyes, I saw that the sunlight was reflected upon the closet in such a way as to glow brightly with a strong golden hue.

I got out of bed still in a sleepy state and I settled for a short nap on the couch in my living room. Again, I awoke to a golden glow, now settled in a radiant pool of light on the carpet, but this time it reflected gold on the soul of my foot dangling over the edge of the couch. This felt like a great sign of promise and hope, giving me much confidence and purpose. That day I went to the park and shot almost the entirety of the raw footage for "Hieroglyphics".

Click here to go to the video art page of my main website and watch various excerpts from my work.

These video excerpts are mere teasers of the full movie, running time more than 20 minutes, which is ideally watched on a large television screen, or projected on the wall at a width of at least 4 or 5 feet. If you would like to obtain a copy of your own DVD version, please email me at makram@shiftingshadow.net.

Epilogue (or "now for something (seemingly) completely different"):

One of the curious aspects of my experience the night I had my hallucinations was that I also had some dreams that were very nightmarish, as if to complement or balance the privilege of beholding the beauty of the water imagery. One dream was especially interesting, in that I saw an image of myself with my flesh torn apart, hanging, not on a cross, but a structure in the shape of an "X".

Such symbolism further strengthens the analogy I discussed in "Black Holes and the Art of Transformation" between the nature of psychological transformation and what would physically happen were one to go into a black hole and out a white hole, which can be pictorially represented as an "X". In effect, the enormous gravity at the center of a black hole would tear one apart before one slips through to the white hole portion.

The Story of an Assistance

2008-03-08T22:15:00.000-08:00

In the early stages of embarking on the spiritual path, one quickly realizes that dreams can offer help in the questions which naturally arise in this domain of exploration. Over time, one may or may not discover that one can establish an interaction with one's subconscious, that the desires of the conscious self, its points of attention and proclivities, affect the dreams while one sleeps; even asking for a specific dream can sometimes work.

Some hone in on this kind of communication and at times actually receive messages while fully awake. At this point, the further development of such interaction manifests an awareness that can differentiate between various types of communication, whether it comes from the depths or the shallower self, if the communication comes with certainty and illuminates an unusually perceptive insight, or if the message was marginally created through wishful thinking or as a result of fear.

As the internal "feelers" are further developed, one can sense the vague manifestation of energy, or feelings that are obscure and hitherto not experienced consciously. At this point, something very bizarre can occur: one recognizes the energy and/or the message to come from an external source, as its quality is thoroughly unfamiliar to the self, including dream experiences, or it comes with a charge which feels like sticking one's finger into an electric socket. This usually prompts the realization that other entities, in whatever form they are alive, can communicate to us and thus the whole idea of medium-ship and channeling is understood and accepted as a viable form of communication.

Some readers in the know may wince at this overly simplistic description of the complex process of spiritual maturity that leads one towards the spirit world. In any case, this was the way I experienced it. I remember having my first full blown channeling experience a few months before I started reading the Seth Material (a series of books channeled by Jane Roberts). Soon after receiving bizarre words such as "I am the Power of Silence and the Silence of Power", I became filled to overflow with a very strange energy. When I opened my eyes and looked around me, my reality had become very alive and very different than I've ever seen it. The amount of power running through my veins made me feel as if I were about to burst.

While Seth presented great eye-opening material on the nature of the metaphysical planes, psychic abilities, and our relations to the subconscious realms, the Ra Material, channeled by the folks at llresearch.org, presented a body of work so metaphysically advanced and well balanced that I would recommend it to anyone on the spiritual path.

Let's move on: The main purpose behind this post, as suggested by the title, is to tell my story of an assistance from the other side, and to illuminate some of the mechanics behind asking for help, the type of help typically received, and how it aids over the long term.

In the Ra Material, this kind of assistance from another, usually discarnate, entity is called a "psychic greeting".

First, a quote from Ra:
"The development of the psychic greeting is possible only through the energy centers starting from a station which you might call within the violet-ray [crown chakra] moving through the adept’s energy center and therefrom towards the target of opportunity. Depending upon the vibratory nature and purpose of greeting, be it positive or negative, the entity will be energized or blocked in the desired way."

My story took place more than a couple years ago, and the long term effects of the greeting was pivotal to my development. At the time, I was getting easily burnt out from work and I was at the mercy of the cycle of falling from grace on Monday and beginning my climb towards grace on Friday night.

One Saturday, I was trying to calm down from a busy work-week and to find some inspiration to make music. I remained in a funky state throughout the day and I began to get frustrated, my emotions got caught in a knot. That evening, I woke up from a nightmare that admonished me not to bring any more negative energy into this world. I sat up in bed and asked internally for help, as I had done repeatedly throughout the day without a discernable answer. After about a half hour of oscillating between frustration and prayer I finally sensed an external presence.

There was a feeling of slight pressure at the top of my head, the position of the crown chakra or violet-ray energy center. I quickly arrested all my thoughts to be aware of what was happening. I audially hallucinated the following words:

"We request permission to perceive this instrument." [the word 'instrument' denotes a channeler]

Seemingly instantaneously, another voice answered that sounded like me but was much softer. I guessed that it was my inner self: "You are perceiving this instrument."

I remained still and simply waited for something to happen. Nothing apparent seemed to occur, although I continued to feel the slight pressure on the top of my head.

Over time, this sensation faded and I went back to thinking my usual thoughts. But, I was able to do so much more fluidly, and I now believe that the help I received was a balancing and/or unblocking of my energy centers. I started to glimpse the reasons behind the specific type of catalysts I had been experiencing at work, to behold their poetic nature, so to speak. I went to sleep and had a prophetic dream:

I was at my desk at work which now had a large sign that was labeled the number "5" (in the Ra Material, the number 5 denotes a level of vibration corresponding to freely given communication, which also applies to myself as a musician). Two people came into the office and they started rearranging where people sat; instead of sitting in my usual spot beside a window and a view, they moved me to a closed cubicle. I became quite angry but the two people simply stared back without emotion or negative intent in their faces, and they seemed to represent very straightforward, average-looking people. Over time I interpreted this to mean that there was no divine order behind the contemporary workplace being so energy- and time-consuming. that this was simply the product of combined free will.

Monday came around and I was sitting at my desk pondering the events of the weekend. I was marveling at the beauty of life's catalyst and how they affected the movement of my psyche in ways that were enriching and downright poetic. I thought to myself that I'm ready and capable of whatever comes my way, and not a few minutes later did I hear my boss yell for me from across the office. It turned out he was on a conference call with a client and he demanded that the project I was working on be finished in half the time it would normally take.

When I went out for lunch that day, I saw a truck with a large sign that said "PIVOT: The Turning Point in Office Interiors".

Over the next month, I averaged 50-60 hours per week. Having had a dream which prophesied my increased workload at the job, I was more capable of accepting and affirming my situation. I was also thus given the opportunity to focus entirely on balancing my frustrations at work since there was no hope for any other aspirations.

Near the end of my project's completion, I worked through the weekend. Sunday evening came around and I remember a very powerful sunset. Having spent the last two days by myself in the office, I was left alone with my own energy and the space around me started to take on the air of being sacred. Gradually, the objects in my surroundings became more and more expressive, putting on a collective smile. This expressiveness with time turned into an actual glow of life resonating from everything around me, so that the world felt fully alive. And finally, this living-ness began to exude love, a love that bloomed with bliss. I slipped into a form of ecstasy. And I remained in that place of bliss in varying degrees while I worked.

The long term result was that the office had transformed into a sacred place and from then on I've been able to psychologically revisit a milder form of such a state at will whenever things got too hectic and this helped me accept and enjoy my job from that time on.

Understanding our Innermost Desires

2008-03-02T13:06:00.000-08:00

If there is a discernable, underlying order behind life's events, it follows not our conscious desires but those that come from, or are consonant with, our deeper selves. Being aware of our innermost desires lends a handle to understanding why life is heading in the direction it's heading and at times enables us to predict the future. As I wrote in Shifting the Assemblage Point, this awareness also enhances our ability to activate the deeper, or magical, portion of the Will.

Many years ago, I was experiencing the psychological weariness of a difficult period. Deep inside, I longed for the rain to come. Somehow, I knew that the rain would provide a specific, though vague, therapeutic effect on my psyche and would help me live my life with greater ease. This was during the early Fall of 1999 in San Francisco, way before global warming really set in, when this part of the year very rarely produced rain.

Somehow one day I intuited that on an upcoming Thursday, a couple weeks later, the rain shall come. And there wasn't the shadow of a doubt that this would happen, simply because my need for it came from the very depths of my being.

That Thursday came along after ceaselessly dry weather throughout the two weeks of waiting. The sky was perfectly blue with neither cloud nor fog to be seen. Still, my confidence was not shaken, for my need for the rain was blooming in anticipation. The afternoon came along and still no sign of any clouds, though my resolve remained absolute. It was close to sunset when the dark grey clouds started floating in, like the messengers from another world. And the rain poured down as if it was the dead of winter. Scarcely a few hours went by and the sky became clear once again.

That evening I happened to be in a bar that had a television showing the local news. Their top story was how a flash storm had unpredictably hit San Francisco that evening during the normally dry Fall season.

Shifting the Assemblage Point

2008-03-01T17:30:00.000-08:00

The Debate

Most people who have embarked on the spiritual path have stories to tell about early experiences that sparked the desire to seek Truth and Wisdom. One of mine took place in my early 20's.

One evening, my friend and I were debating the existence of God. At the time I naively prided myself for having stopped believing in God around the same time I stopped believing in Santa Claus. Yet, I still had a part of me that entertained the possibility of His existence, unlike my friend who was adamantly sure that God did not exist and that any belief in the supernatural was born out of the human need to have a sense of purpose in life or to explain the unknown.

His absolute refusal to accept an agnostic position bothered me and this highlighted my own ambivalence in the matter. Our conversation manifested a strong desire in me to come to closure on the question and I started seeking an answer quite actively. Gradually, all my attention, desire, and focus in life became fixated upon the question, so that it became a point of singularity about which the rest of the world revolved. Roughly two weeks after the conversation with my friend, I finally got an answer, albeit in an unexpected manner.

Lightning Strikes Tower

I was having a dream that depicted a struggle and I woke up from it as if it were a nightmare. Although I was fully awake, there was a part of me that retained a link to the unconscious. I still had my eyes closed and I was consciously observing images that had a quality and level of life-like detail that differed greatly than any dream I could remember (I later read that this activity is called "remote viewing"). It was as if I were walking across the lawn of a house with someone else next to me; we knocked on the door and we were welcomed in. While this was happening a voice popped into my head and said with great clarity: "Mak [my nickname], you are astral projecting."

I started panicking when I realized what I was doing and I pulled myself out of the experience completely by simply opening my eyes. What followed was equally bizarre, however, for my bedroom felt completely alive and there was a sense of Power in the air that was both awe-inspiring and frightening. In addition, I was further disturbed by the sudden annihilation of my deeply rooted view of the world as a stable and predictable reality without much hidden mystery. Such a perspective when compared with realizing the existence of the supernatural world was like living in a nice little cubbyhole of safety, knowing that only that which was seen, felt, or heard actually existed.

When I went back to sleep, I dreamed another nightmare. My disturbance had penetrated to such a depth that I woke up opening the front door of my apartment having sleep-walked my way out of my bedroom and down the flight of stairs, fully naked!

Before I continue I would like to highlight one of the main points in this story. My first astral projection experience was my entry point into the domain of the supernatural. I believe quite strongly that had I not asked for an answer to the question of God's existence with all my being, had I not made the question my top priority and focus for two weeks on end, the experience would not have come. Many skeptics remain skeptics throughout their lives because the questions are not asked with enough of a will to get an answer. Sometimes, it takes a strong pounding at the gate before it opens up.

The second main point is that I did not get a direct answer to my question "Does God exist?". This is quite typical of what happens when a question is asked internally. The specific answer that comes back is based upon one's evolutionary needs, and not necessarily the desires of the intellect or the ego. Consequently, it is of great benefit to be aware of the path one treads in order to ensure one looks for answers in the correct places.

In the case of my astral projection experience the lesson was rather obvious. In general, however, communication from the innerscape occurs with great mystery-generating subtlety. It is my opinion that one of the reasons for this is to produce the effect of awe and wonder, to manifest the feeling of enigma in order to activate the will to seek, to grow, to aspire.

Experiences in Astral Projection

After that initial experience, my conscious self became fully engaged in reorienting my view of the world around a new perspective.

When compared with the stories of others in the domain of astral projection, mine are rather dull and uneventful. I've never really been the type to be interested in deeply exploring this realm, since I find art-based exploration much more fulfilling. Nevertheless, I believe that one of the most important outcomes of my astral projections was that they fully convinced me that a significant part of ourselves can fully thrive outside the physical body.

Many scientists, even today, attribute projection experiences to hallucinations and the like. Those who have experienced them usually can recall feeling extremely close to being entirely consciously awake while outside the physical body. I say "close" because I believe one cannot experience our ordinary reality completely naturally unless we are thinking within and through the physical brain. Thus, once outside of it, there is necessarily bound to be at least some dream-like quality in the experience despite feeling fully awake and in control of one's actions and thoughts.

Most of my astral projections occured during my college years. They started to turn sour just as I was graduating. I knew that I was going to have to take on a full-time job that would take most of my energy and time, making my higher states of mind inaccessible. The part of me which astral-projected simply wanted to escape this dimension. Somewhere inside me I was convinced that I did not belong to this world, that I belonged to another, far more ethereal existence that was unfathomable to my human mind, but utterly real. Taking on a job would fixate me in the trenches of the mundane.

Often when I went to sleep during this period, I would astral project, become conscious, and not be able to return to my body and wake up. I would sometimes remain paralyzed for many minutes, which was most uncomfortable, feeling as if another force was snatching me and pulling me farther and farther away.

After I had settled into a full-time job, I had such an experience once again. When I woke up I turned inwards and deliberately asked my inner self to end all astral projections. To my request there was actually a reply in the form of a vision. It said something like the following: "You will learn how to project with your entire being, and thus be protected."

I did not understand what these words meant. And it took me years to find out.
Before the Hurricane Period occurred, I was never an avid reader of spiritual texts. I always knew that I was spiritually focused, but I wanted to develop my own philosophy without any influence from others, especially because I felt most of the books out there were ridden with fallacy.

The Hurricane Aftermath

After the Hurricane Period hit, I was scrambling to find out what exactly happened to me. I rummaged through one book after another without any luck. Finally, I landed some interesting books on shamanism and I recognized my experiences as a form of initiation, even though the initiation was not led by anyone like a medicine man but entirely orchestrated from within.

I finally settled on reading the books written by Carlos Castaneda and to this day I do not feel at home with any group of people like I do with his characters. They were like a family that went far beyond human ties.

Castaneda wrote about his alleged apprenticeship with a sorceror named don Juan. Many believe the books are fictitious and I am not one to judge. There are numerous claims he made which seemed to most people to be pure imagination, but I believe a lot of these claims point towards the truth.

One of the main subjects concerned "shifting the assemblage point", the assemblage point being the center of one's energy. It is basically responsible for shaping one's mode of perception of the world.

Upon shifting the assemblage point, one experiences a noticeable change in one's perception of reality. The change can allegedly be significant enough that an entirely new reality is assembled, as if one jumps straight from waking consciousness into a lucid dream, body, mind, and all. Or, it can be minute enough that the only thing detected is a change in mood or the arrival at a new mental perspective.

Unlike that of an infant, the assemblage point of an adult is typically fixed and thus movement is usually subtle. Dreams can shift our assemblage point and so can the use of intoxicating substances.

When one undergoes a significant shift of the assemblage point, it is usually the case that the experiences before the shift cannot be recalled. The most common example of such an occurrence happens when one wakes up from a dream. One could be fully immersed in very intense dreaming activity and yet remember nothing upon waking up. It is possible upon awakening to retain a meditative state so that one begins to recall the dream once again and this is an example of deliberately shifting the assemblage point, back to where it was located during the dream.

When one wakes up and quickly slips into the habitual patterns of thought, dreams become difficult to remember. This is why Castaneda's don Juan stressed the importance of arresting one's self-reflection in order for shifting the assemblage point to occur. Self-reflection keeps our assemblage point riveted to our point of normalcy.

Dislodging the Assemblage Point

In Castaneda's books, there is the concept of dislodging the assemblage point which essentially involves shaking the assemblage point out of its position of normalcy to the degree that it becomes ever fluid, ever moving. Once this is accomplished, this spells insanity for the average person. For a sorcerer, this fluidity has the great practical advantage of enabling the exploration of other worlds, and to study the ins and outs of this form of exploration.

The Hurricane Period fell neatly into such a category of experience. The oscillations in my states of mind completely dislodged my ordinary state of normalcy, and these violent shifts continued of and on over a period of three weeks. I watched the ground beneath my feet crumble and finally disappear altogether.

After it was all over and my visions were gone, I was left with a personality which was extremely fluid, whose circumference (or inventory) of experience had suddenly expanded to hitherto unimagined realms. It was not only my emotions that forever ebbed and flowed without anchor, but my mental perspectives as well.

At times, all I needed to do was turn my head a fraction of an inch to the right or to the left and I would go through what could best be described as a complete mental and emotional holographic pivot. The simple act of walking down the street possessed the potential of catapulting me through what seemed to be an intergalactic traversal.

The most difficult aspect of the Hurricane aftermath was that both heaven and hell were always right around the corner. Life became very precarious and there was always the fear that I would suddenly experience a hellish drop into a pit of depression. It was not uncommon for me to suffer from anxiety attacks that lasted days, keeping me up almost throughout the night. I would often hallucinate blood and severed limbs in the morning. I had never imagined that psychological pain could reach such extremities.

Activating the Deeper Will

There was one great advantage, however, for undergoing such a painful phase: It forced me to develop my will, to activate areas of my will which were hitherto dormant, to illuminate functions of the will whose very existence were yet to be discovered.

Our ordinary, conscious will is capable, for example, of thinking specific thoughts, of moving our hands, feet and the rest of our limbs. We also have the ability to suppress our emotions at times and of calling forth memories from our past. We do not, however, have a conscious, direct handle on our emotions, nor on recalling all portions of our memory, nor on regulating certain bodily functions such as our blood pressure and heart beat. We are also not blessed with the ability to shift our states of mind deliberately to any significant degree. When we are depressed, we remain depressed, and it is only through indirect means that we attain happiness once again. The deeper aspect of the will, however, once surfaced, has a handle on such abilities.

From my experience, the deeper (or as it is called in the Ra Material, the "transdimensional") portion of the will is like an unused, dangling muscle and our abilities there start out very clumsy and vague, if not completely missing. It is only with much practice and experience that one develops the awareness of a musculature in this arena, that one finds the equivalent of a set of fingers, an arm, a leg, etc., so that the will takes on its newly added dimension of maneuverability and control.

Unfortunately, the early, sleepy-eye-opening lessons in such a domain usually come during times of extreme hardship; only when we are desperate and find ourselves forced to stretch the boundaries of our will do we activate portions that have hitherto been undiscovered. The unbearable psychological circumstances that I found myself in during the Hurricane Aftermath did just that. And with the help of possessing a fluid personality, I learned how to to use my will to shift my assemblage point in order to avoid the hellish states of mind that kept recurring.

Once I was able to shift my state of mind to a significant degree and to begin assembling a different reality, I understood the meaning behind the vision I had received after deliberately requesting to end all astral projections. To project with my entire being was to shift my assemblage point to a new reality. And, indeed, such a shift came with a feeling of security because I was projecting while entirely intact as opposed to just with the astral body. I never moved very far, however, nothing like Castaneda's wild stories. I will speak of my experiences in depth in future blog posts.

The Will and Energy

Utilizing the deeper portions of the will requires varying degrees of energy expenditure. Castaneda's don Juan spoke of ways to acquire and to retain energy. I prefer to switch to referencing the Ra Material on this subject.

In the Ra Material, there were three categories of energy levels that were discussed commonly when the instrument's (the channeler's) condition was queried. They are the vital (basically that of the life-force), the physical (typically in abundance in males), and the mental/emotional (typically in abundance in females). It was cautioned not to use the will when energy was lacking, for "...the use of the will in the absence of the physical energies, and...the emotional/mental energies requires vital energies."

More importantly, the will, when focused on goals that coincide with the intentions of the deeper self require less energy. "...the use of this energy of will, mind, and spirit for the things of the physical complex [the body] causes a far greater distortion in the lessening of the vital energy than would the use of this energy for those things which are in the deepest desires and will of the mind/body/spirit complex."

I experience the coming and going of the deeper will fluctuate tremendously depending on both my energy levels (which are very difficult to consciously ascertain) and to what degree I feel connected to my deeper self and its intentions. I have learned to become aware of when the deeper will is "activated" and it feels just as if an arm were suddenly extending out of the conscious will and reaching down into the deeper portions of the self. It is best described as the hardening of a portion of my dream body towards a specific intent, just like a musculature.

Measuring the Deeper Will

I quit smoking only a few years ago. Before then, I used to carry with me what I considered to be my one and only prized possession: a yellow lighter which did not work properly.

It held more than enough lighter fluid to ignite the flame. But, there was something wrong with it so that it only randomly worked once out of, say, thirty or forty times. When I felt my deeper will activated, I knew I could make it ignite and so it did. Curiously, whenever I wanted, say, to show off this ability to others, it would not work. However, when I wanted to demonstrate the power of the will to alight the desire to evolve in others, the flame usually sparked to life. And this exemplifies the contrast between my conscious desires and the desires of the deeper self.

The Masculine/Feminine Polarity and Shifting the Assemblage Point

With respect to using the will to shift the assemblage point, where the assemblage point will end up should also coincide with the aspirations of the deeper self. Otherwise, the will will fall short, if high energy levels are not available. It is customary for me, therefore, to listen closely to the whisperings of the deeper self before hardening the will in a certain direction. What does that entail?

We return once again to the vision I had many months ago which said to "achieve micro-buoyancy" by manifesting both the feminine and masculine sides simultaneously. The feminine principle possesses the qualities of malleability, the receptivity to the unconscious, and the sensitivity to the internal whisperings which are necessary to establish the link with the deeper self. The masculine side, after becoming aware of the intention of the inner self, hardens the entire self with firm authority so that every fiber of the self is single-pointedly bent towards this intent. A point of singularity is born, and movement is thus affected.

The Convergence of the Masculine/Feminine Polarity

Here, we see the necessity of the ennoblement of the feminine side by the masculine, and the ennoblement of the masculine side by the feminine. The two work hand in hand, converge to an ever closer bond, making transformation possible.

That the masculine and feminine sides need to work cooperatively within the selfclearly leaves no room for the extra baggage one finds in culture of being polarized one way or another. For instance, machismo in the male is utterly obstructive, and any feminine indulgence in subordinance to the male is equally stifling. Nevertheless, there is a powerful charge when a male closely approaches the masculine principle, just as the very feminine female possesses her own form of power. Such a charge should not be sacrificed in the convergence of the polarity. And this is where things get tricky. One must possess the best of both worlds, or at least be able to oscillate between the two sides of the polarity with the grace, surety, and strength of a gymnast.

The Voice of a Hidden Past

2008-02-22T22:51:00.000-08:00

Tonight, I was having dinner in a restaurant that reminded me of the old days when I used to paint. I would dine there almost religiously every Sunday night when my innerscape was brimming with the artistic ventures of the weekend.

The mood this evening was different, however. The people all around me were having animated conversations about nothing and they mirrored my own sense of emptiness from a draining week of work.

By the end of the night, one of the local Mexican musicians had slipped into the restaurant to play his guitar and sing, as was custom in this part of the city.

His voice bellowed with a magnificence that spanned the dimensions as he stood right behind me, like a ghost of my own self suddenly bursting forth into full blown glory. People continued with their conversations and their laughter as the booming man filled the atmosphere to the point of overflow.

The man's face: weathered and old, beaten, yet full of life!

The Yearning

2008-02-22T22:21:00.000-08:00

I lead a life so busy, so endlessly busy.

Between work, and writing, and people, and work, and music, and work, and work, and art, and work, and while dreaming...my sleepy arm extends forever outwards, far, far into the night comes the outstretched hand of the somnambulist grasping the air, reaching for Time.

The tears shed rhythmically with the breath of my lungs, absorbed by the spirit world, wiped away by the ebb and flow of dream after dream after dream.

Tonight, during a phone call I was urged to buy a new car, to replace my old, leaking, wreck of an embarrassing vehicle.

The writer in me was too tired to speak. He speaks now: "Money is my blood, forever dripping away. Why would I funnel my blood into a brand new car?"

Black Holes and the Art of Transformation

2007-12-15T13:29:00.000-08:00

Blog - December

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.

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.

Spirituality and the Ego

2007-11-29T13:52:00.001-08:00

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.

L I F E and Extreme Astronautics

2007-10-04T07:41:00.000-07:00

Diary Blog - October

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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."