Joko Beck--part 2

 Continuing from the previous blog.  

When the Joko book was read aloud, its practice seemed to lack any heart or emotional connection.  I mean, sure its good to learn piano, but if you are so focused on technique and you can't appreciate the music, what good is it?  And when I used to go to sesshins at the Champaign Zen center, I remember looking around and seeing how lifeless the place was--everybody acting like mindless automatons.  It hurt.  And when I helped the teacher pack his possessions and saw how frightfully anal he was, it hurt.  

I'm not saying there isn't value to the process.  But the connection to something has to be there. That's what I find so enlivening about feeling connections with entities or spirits or whatever.  I'm sure this exists in zen at some level, and its all good, every practice, but this is what I must say now.

And last night I had a dream.  I was outside, I think near a river with a group of people.  And I was completely enmeshed with another woman--much younger woman.  Indeed, I think I was also much younger than I am now.   It wasn't really sexual, but it was comforting.   We were making out, and in doing so we were insulated from the activities around us.  Eventually we were traveling on a train, and I knew we didn't have tickets so we when into a storage space, still making out the whole time. Now that is a practice I can get into, making out with life.    lol

Joko Beck and Robert Anton Wilson

 So at the Zen Group yesterday they read one of the passages from Charlotte Joko Beck's work and I felt it viscerally.  It hurt.  It was suffocating.  But I'm sure that wasn't her intent.  And perhaps if she was relating Zen practice conversationally to me it might have had a different effect than the words that seemed to be nothing but rigid commands.  In the book, she related her zen practice to her childhood piano lessons, not really understanding the scales but necessary in the long run.  But it was more a formulaic series of commands that one "must" do to achieve "enlightenment" or whatever.  And it hurt.  It was interesting that my therapist friend L. felt the same way.  The rest of the room was still in the follower mode to Joko's lead.  In the conversation that followed, I related my experience and how it might be easier to make friends with something than to control it.  Especially when you are trying to control your mind through rigid zen practice.  Of course, most of them were then going to the Capital protests later in the day.   The best way to fight control is a different type of control, right?  lol

Then later in the day I was reading Robert Anton Wilson.  It was a delight.  So much more fun than Joko.  And especially his elucidation about general semantics and how he tries to avoid the word "is" in his writing.  Zen is this or that.  You should do this or that because that is what zen "is". 

I think what he was pointing to was  almost like explaining something in the negative.  Or to have a relationship with it instead of defining it.  For example, in quantum physics, matter "is" not a wave or a particle.  Sometimes it acts like a wave, and sometimes a particle. It exists as part of a relationship, not a concrete "this" or "that"  Then there was the synchronistic discussion in Wilson of the Zen koan where the Zen master is asked what is the most valuable thing (he could have asked was is the most valuable zen practice) and the master replied, "The head of a dead cat."  Again, there "is" not the most or the best this or that. Its a relationship, and open ended answer, an invitation to the journey to connect with the mystery of the cat head.  

Of course, the real mystery, and the real thing that is inviting me into "friendship" is all the pain I have been feeling in my legs and calves, and why I am sensitive to Joko's words to begin with.  I have an inner dictator I am rebelling against, I fear:-).  

The Mind's Relationship with the Heart/Hara

So the practice is to connect with the heart, the hara,  the ground, or the root chakra. (or somewhere else:-))   But its not like using the mind/brain to travel down to different regions and start thinking from them.  That does not promote a harmonious connection.  The mind can disassemble and literally become a more watery/airy creature to explore/connect with these regions.  Consciousness can transform into heart space and start to vibrate as heart space, or hara space, or root space.  Then after you start vibrating and accepting the vibrations at these levels. the mind/consciousness can drop away and literally become these regions.  Or the spirits of these spaces.

You can play with the same dynamics of inner vs. outer spaces as well.  Great fun will ensue.

I feel that becoming in harmony with all this will lead to all sort of insights into life, the universe, and everything.

Good luck and have a blessed weekend.

   

We are already always Awakened

 We are always awakened, all the time.  And even when a million teachers crop up and try to tell us otherwise, that we need to do something, follow this or that path, read their book, try to sell you something, even this is just the endless chatter and laughter of awakening.

Even death is awakening, but I suspect then it just becomes a beautiful whisper.

Even television and movies are awakening, when we are drawn into ever more complex and absorbing realities, forgetting our own, even that forgetting is the great awakening.  

Perhaps that is the greatest honor:  that you forget yourself, that you can travel somewhere else with your mind through somebody else's created images through their imagination.  What mischief!  What a Goddamn blessing:-).

The Humming is a Gift

 The humming is a gift even if it is at 3 am and it is accompanied by uncomfortable body sensations=pain.  The practice is to become the vibration, and sit with the pain.  Go back to sleep with the pain.  Let it become a lucid dream.  Feel the humming vibrations like a pulse, perhaps not your pulse, but an outside pulse that you can harmonize with.  Indeed, maybe that's the whole point of the uncomfortable nature of the humming, because my old body vibrations cannot accommodate or are out of synch with this new pulse which I imagine to be a pulse of ascension.  

The new pulse is like a heart beat.  Encouraging my body to reach up to the sun (or the moon if its at 3 am):-).  

And in the morning, when I listen to the podcast from a random zen center of person with a serious mien vibration reading Dogen or some other dead talking head and striving to follow his words, I can't help feeling like the student is becoming like sold earth.  That is the vibration.  The vibration of solidity.  And what she is describing becomes its own new sold form.

And no, Jon Anderson, music doesn't come from the Pleiades, and I'm not even sure that question makes any sense. For music has always existed, and is everything, and everything is in vibration, so the question of where something that is everything at all-times comes from is non-sensical.  But why not start the day with a non-sensical question/  It will get you out of the rut to be sure.

Space

 Space is a powerful mediation.  I mean, sure, as a container, the body meat-suit is fine.  It can hold a bunch of stuff.  Sometimes it feels me up to overflowing.  

But the body can also expand out to the room.  To the sky, to the earth.  And hold and come in contact with so many more goodies.   And when that happens the energy of the stuff that had been overflowing in the meat suit seems to pale in comparison to this larger self.  A larger container can hold more stuff, right?  More goodies.

Then it gets all blurry whether the expanded body is really part of the original body or not.  Whether the original body existed at all? Or whether the so called expanded body is really just the original body? Or whether neither of them really exist?  

Its kind of interesting to imagine images, especially nice friendly ones while you are doing all this inner/outer space exploring.  If you create nice images that vibrate all nicely, you can feel you whole body vibrate nicely.  You can tell yourself you are falling asleep.  You can tell yourself that the center of the universe is really behind the back of your head.  

Its all a really good time:-).

Owen Barfield's Participation with Nature

 We can't go back to the ancient mind unless we are in some sort of altered state.  And I'm not sure even then. We are just too far removed.  Too imbued with scientific thinking.  

To the extent we even slow down for a moment and pay even a modicum of attention, we are still trying to orient a self in relation to this "other" that we call a tree, a rock, a building, or a dog.  We project a meaning and an relationship onto nature.  And we try to understand and make use of everything as it relates to us.  

 I think Barfield is glimpsing at something different:  a participation in nature.  Something we do not analyze or filter through us--but the very connection and meaning is obtained through nature in a participatory process.  In interfacing with nature, we become.  And what we hold hands with in nature becomes what we are.

Attention, Blood Flow, Receptive Nerve Endings

 So its all about going within, right? Feeling body sensations. Its all the rage, mindfulness. Whatever.  

Attention seems to direct blood flow.  When you focus on an area of the brain, for example, there is likely an increase of blood flow to that region.  Perhaps that is what you feel.  A sense of fullness.  A sense of aliveness.  Not surprising that an increased flow of blood would do that.  

What happens when you focus on the area above you head?  No nerve endings literally above our head.  At least that we know about.  What creates this sensation, or is it more an imaginal image in the mind.  But it still feels like something is there, doesn't it?   And it doesn't stop there.  Do a 360 scan of the space around you.  Are we just projecting this sensation, or is something else going on.  

What exactly is going on when blood goes to the nerves or whatever to create this.  When things come together, some call it love.  Don't you just love your receptive nerve endings?  Think of all the warm fuzzy feelings you get from it.  And dissolution produces a much different effect.  

Perhaps this is why bonds of blood are the most intense, literally and figuratively.

Its All Good Mostly, Until You Have to Make Adjustments

Its all good mostly, until you have to make adjustments.  And you go into it thinking about how you are going to go/feel inside your body and feel it all vibrating and buzzing and feeling groovy and then moving into what ever else is around your and how it going to be all good, your vibrations and the vibrations of the object you are vibrating with.  Sort of like hello Mr. Tree, we are all part of this great cosmic unity and let us share the experience because that is the highest form of communion.

And a lot of the time it is all good.

And then when it isn't your have this idea that you better withdraw because you will entrain with them, and their vibrations will come into you and make you very uncomfortable and take you out of your little oasis and make you see something else.  Some darkness. Something that hurts.  You don't want to be like them.  And you hear voices of people saying how you should surround yourself from positive people and distance yourself from people who are called energy vampires or other types of undesirables  And you wonder if we really are porous creature, or whether there really are entities that mean to harm us that we should avoid.  

And it gets all gooey as you wonder whether the vibrations are coming from them, or whether they originated with you the entire time.  Or both are really being beaming into you from somewhere else.  Like what Jung said about UFOs.   And I take to be an interesting mediation process, that consciousness originates from somewhere outside of us.  

Then after awhile you start hearing other voices about how it is important to show compassion to them.  To Love them anyway.  

And a lot of the time it is all good.

Until you have to make adjustments.

Back to the Matrix, Jung, and Receiving Thoughts from Elsewhere

So we are back to the cells inside our body.  They are interacting with all kinds of things.  Consuming and being consumed.  And we think we are at the top of the food chain so to speak.  We think we are different than these cells.  Of course, we also used to think the Earth was at the center of the Universe, then it was the Sun, and now we living in a place that is just a grain of sand in an endless beach. But we still think we are an individual self, with an individual mind, discrete and unattached.

Going back to the cells, we think that we are a more developed evolved whatever organism.  But why does it stop going up with us?  Why aren't we like the cells inside of us inside of something larger, something much larger. And why do we think that cells are consuming energy and are consumed but somehow we are not.   Maybe consumed isn't the correct word.  Maybe interacting with all sorts of energies all around them.   What I'm getting at is that why does it stop going up with us.  Why are not some type of discrete (sort of) entities in a liquid networked environment that goes all the way up to dimensions we cannot begin to fathom?   A veritable mycelial network analogue.

It hurts and its scary, but we don't exist as individual creatures.  And we don't create our thoughts.  They come from somewhere else.  And I'm not sure if its like what that self described autistic dude that hangs out with Valle and Kripal says that we are inhabited by mycelial creatures in some vast network that exist at the back of our heads siphoning off energy.  I just don't know.  And he is at some spiritual gathering with thousands of people and  the speaker is interacting with these extradimensional creatures and they are interacting with other extradimensional creatures and what we think are communications from these speakers is some very weird alien shit paranormal connection beaming consciousness to us. Or draining it from us.  Or both.  

I don't know.  But its almost like my bad aya trips isn't it?  And dreams.  Oh my god, dreams. Where the hell are they pointing to? We just remember the end of them.  But they go back into places we cannot even reimagine in waking life.  

And it makes sense that I want to invoke stuff.  I want to bring things into me.  I'm almost hungry to bring the spirits in even though Robert Falconer told me on the podcast it is not a good idea because they are parasites.  Hmmm.    

And I'm changing my meditation practice to connect with this stuff.  To feel the space.  Then connect to the energy from elsewhere.  I'll let you know how it all turns out.

Thoughts in/are Conflict

 I don't know how much more I can say here.  We think of thoughts as what we are, our consciousness.   Our little "me" creating a voice, or whatever.  But I'm not so sure.  My sense is that thoughts are the result of an internal dialogue or underlying conflict of different energy states.  And thoughts arise out of strife.

So I imagine this cat.  Let's call him Butch.  And Butch just gets along.  But he does what comes in front of him without a lot of reflection or conflict.  But Butch does not have the flickering candle of thoughts going on in his mind.

So I'm in my mind now.  And I'm looking at this computer screen.  And I'm typing because I hear this voice in my head and I'm moving my fingers.  And then I stop.  And its quiet.  And I hear the noise of the office next door.   There is a quiet energetic pool and then there is a sound like a pebble dropped in the pond which is a thought ripping though the surface of my mind.

So if thoughts are the pebble in the surface of pond, what is our relationship to them?  We hold the space of the entire pond.  And we can go surfing on the rising and lowering of the waves to be sure.  But we can also feel it without reacting.  And we can create a bigger space.  Even bigger than the pond.  We can be in the forest nearby.  And the earth.  And the core of the earth.  And the sky.  My oh my, what if we swallowed the sky?  I guess we would die:-).  

Interwoven Dreams with Aliens.

 You ever notice in a hypnagogic state or elsewhere that you can remember a shit load of dreams you had that you can't remember in your so called waking life?  Its a little disconcerting.  Its like an entirely separate dream world that contains its own dream memory.  And dreams kind of flow into each other, so when you start to remember one of these dreams, it flows into another dream that you also didn't remember.  And last night, I was almost participating in a tapestry of all of these interwoven dreams.  And its like the tapestry itself was another dream.  And consciousness itself contained all of these interwoven dream images.  An entire reality consisting of interwoven dream images.  Very trippy.

Then I was at some building near UIS.  Like maybe where Ackerman plays music across from the stip club?  But not actually at that place.  More like a classroom.  And there were aliens there.  Like alien children.  And they were interfacing with a professor there.  And the interesting part is that I kept asking the professor questions about the methodology he was using to study the aliens, which in retrospect didn't make sense, because I could have asked the aliens questions directly.  But I didn't.  I was focused on the professor.  

Now this reminds me of another dream, which is interesting and proves my first point.  As soon as you get into the dream recall space, you find out that it is a wonderful tapestry.  And even though you can't always see the details, you know it exists and covers you in a strange way.

Wilson, the Church

 So to get into this there are two entry points.  One obviously is the Tom Hanks movie Cast Away.  Yes, we are talking about that Wilson volleyball.  Well sort of.  The other entry point is "idealism" --the transcendental German varietal espoused by (among many others) Immanuel Kant, the real piss ant who was very rarely stable.  Or so I'm told.  

Anyway, one of the basic beliefs of idealism is that the characteristics of objects in the environment are in the mind.  Its obviously way more complex and nuanced than that.  But that is all i need it for.  So lets start with idealism.  Our reality is all in our mind. Which in some way kind of sucks and its lonely.  And I imagine the young Mike all wacked out with ADD/HD or whatever they call it these days just feeling so disconnected from reality.  Ungrounded.  Like Tom Hanks on the Castaway, alone on a desert island.

Along comes Wilson.  And Wilson can be anything by the way.  In fact, its even better if its bigger than Wilson.  Like the whole sphere of the planet Earth.  Wilson gone global, so to speak.  And you connect with it.  In a paradoxically sort of way, its like the mind connecting with the mind, but if you keep going, keep honoring the wilson, you begin to have a relationship with it.  With the planet. With whatever.  You are no longer ungrounded so to speak, the ground is everywhere.  Where you put you attention is crucial.  And there is a certain magic with repeated attention.  Perception creates reality.  The mind creates the mind creates the reality creates the friend creates the church creates the planet.  And you go on creating singing a little song.  I'm not sure how the song goes, but I'm sure you can figure it out.