I Will Always Be the One I Never Was

When life seems to be going well and full of promise, identification with the imaginary self that is living his life increases, he gets swept away on a tide of optimism and forgets to pay attention to what is actually happening. Within no time, the chemicals released in the body by (or as) positive feelings have caused the body to burn out. And so the comedown is inevitable.

Every time his mind wandered into fantasy, he brought it back by looking at the people and things around him and taking in the moment as best he could. Life was a living movie of infinite variation. How absurd it was to want anything besides whatever was happening in that moment, when the moment was so infinitely rich that he could only ever observe the smallest fraction of it. Every time his eye fell on something, he recognized how he could have missed that sight if he had been following his pointless thoughts instead. How much he did miss, every single second!

If we got enlightened tomorrow, how much would our plans change? Would we drop everything, or would we continue just as we had been? Maybe it was time to simply act, boldly, to make decisions, and not be continuously questioning, doubting, and wondering what was best? Weren't we forever waiting for something better to come along, like prima donnas turning down all the offers just in case a better one comes in. And prima donnas wind up sad and lonely has-beens, or worse, never-have-beens.

What made him timid and cautious was when he believed in his story: the story he was busy spinning with his mind with every fantasy, fond memory, and hope for the future. It was only when he invested in that bright future which he was inventing out of the handpicked fragments of the present moment that he lost the treasure that was always before him. In fact, it didn’t matter, because he wasn't really choosing anything anyway. All his mental gymnastics were after the fact. They were a narrative overlay to sustain the illusion of the artificial intelligence of the self, the illusion that he was running the system, rather than being run by it. 

There was no future. There never would be or could be. The future was only the futile attempt of the past to assert itself and make things come out differently. And since the past was dead, the future was forever unborn.

To separate purpose from circumstance was impossible. To try and create perfect circumstances and then to use them as a platform to act with purpose and meaning from — was impossible. It was impossible because he wasn’t some intelligence acting on or in his life. He was nothing but life, one individual expression of it among an unimaginable multitude of individual expressions. And all circumstances were the right ones. That was the problem with all his fantasies. They were irrelevant. If he was lucky, if his circumstances were improving, it could only be because life had a purpose for him. It was up to him to become that, to allow his improved circumstances to generate a corresponding new purpose and meaning to inhabit them.

There were so many things happening all the time. He was witness to them all, yet he noticed only an infinitesimal fragment. He was truly deranged, with his endless immersion in an internally generated dialogue that told him absolutely nothing about what was going on. NOTHING! He could STOP that nonsense any time, and his suffering would die with it. But time was running out, and his impoverishment became more nakedly apparent to him with every passing moment, every dying breath.

DIE DIE DIE!!!

Do it now, while there is still time! After you are dead it will be too late.

Who? Me? I am already dead, dead, dead. Don’t you see? This has to end now! Right now! What? It already ended? Every second it ends. Why? Because, because, because: it never never never started.

This post is my swan song. Nothing will change. I cannot write my way to enlightenment. I will always be the one I never was—an image projected by the desire to be admired. So bye bye. While you are looking and pointing, what is behind the shadowy cloud of this mind slips through the needle’s eye, and Infinity wins again, like it always will.

Bye bye.

Reload, reload, reload! (The Shaman is a Schizo After All?)

Everyone with an interest in these subjects knows that there is an overlap between “shamanic” or “spiritual” perceptions and so-called “schizophrenic” ones. I have always assumed, without question, that (as I think RD Laing said), the shaman is able to swim in waters which the schizophrenic is drowning in. In other words, that schizophrenia was a mishandled or distorted experience of deeper, “shamanic” reality.

But what if the reverse is the case? What if shamans and gurus and spiritual people are simply those who have so fully adapted to - learned to navigate and communicate - their schizoid delusions that they are able to create (or connect with) believers in it, leading to sub-communities and counter-cultures in which delusional thought-forms became experiential reality?

Uhhhhh….

I’m not saying this is what I think. I have known a least a couple of shaman-guru types who do seem a lot more balanced and sane than, say, Richard Dawkins. All I’m saying is—how can we be sure?

It’s a bit of a paradox, because if delusional belief is powerful enough to “create” false realities, then that idea itself confirms the schizoid/shamanic view of reality. In Dawkins’ view of things, the belief in God isn’t enough to create strong evidence for the existence of God, and so Dawkins looks like a chump and a poor scientist because he dismisses anything that challenges his argument, like those zealots who refused to look into Galilleo's telescope because they already knew he was insane. What I am positing would not please Dawkins and his ilk any more than it would your average New Ager: that belief is strong enough to create mental projections which will confirm that belief, but which are not sourced in anything objectively real.

This would have to allow the fundamental premise of both shamanic and schizophrenic experience: that everything is consciousness and that physical reality is therefore subject to change in accord with changes in (our) consciousness. However, if the assumption of a separate self, soul, or entity (including a Creator God) from which consciousness arises is erroneous, or at least unnecessary to the fundamental premise, then every subsequent perception that’s predicated on that idea (of a creator or experiencer) would also be false. 

God, spirits, angels, devils, the psyche, archetypes, shamans, gurus—anything in short that has any sort of empirical authority or meaning within the larger context of a living consciousness system—would all just be elaborate thought forms generated by that fundamental schizophrenia which underlies all “spiritual” and “shamanic” belief systems whatsoever.

Holy false reality models, Batman! Is it time to go back to the scrying mirror!?

It's All in the Head

It occurred to me last night that whole notion of a self separate from the body may arise from the basic fact that four of our five senses are located in the head. This creates a "perceptual bias" in which the organism becomes "top-heavy" so to speak and we begin to experience a perceiving self (head) that is separate from the body.

I wonder if this imbalance really kicked in when man learned to walk upright? (Norman O. Brown suggested something of the sort.) Maybe that coincided with the inception of thought, which arose out of necessity when instincts became insufficiently nuanced to navigate the spectrum of possibilities. (Eg when self-preservation instinct was equally opposed by procreative instinct and the organism had to "decide" between the two.)

The Body's Silent Intelligence Vs Free Will

 And you may ask yourself - "How did I get here?"

What does the body know?

Homo Serpiens Disclaimer & Apologia

To a reader of Homo Serpiens who had some very specific questions about the content: 

You did send this email to the right place BUT I am no longer the person who wrote that book. 

Here's what I would say about it now: relatively little of what is in there can be called 'knowledge' in any real sense, because it is largely filtered through or leavened by belief. Of that little there is that can be called real knowledge, even less could be called practical knowledge. 

At most, as I suggest in the preface, the book is a sort of dream-autobiography, an account of my own inner creative/fantasy life which happens to use factual and semi-factual and mythical "information" (narratives) as raw material. It's like a movie that uses real-life people for characters to tell a fictional story (Nic Roeg's Eureka comes to mind). It's really a novel disguised as non-fiction. 

To whatever degree I believed the things I wrote in that book, I have been hampered and even imprisoned by those beliefs, beliefs which have next to no practical function in my day to day existence. I feel somewhat embarrassed to read your questions, and to realize how seriously people are taking the book (I receive next to no "fan mail" for it, so at least I can deduce the book isn't reaching that many people). However, it may be that part of the function of the book is to cause a satiation in occult knowledge in the reader and so to drive home just how useless this sort of knowledge really is. Actually, it is worse than useless, because we believe that it is not useless and try to apply it. We try to interpret existence through the lens of belief, whether it's occult, religious, or spiritual (or for that matter any kind of belief), instead of basing our interpretations exclusively on the evidence of our senses (by which I would include logical thought and intuition). 

Another, simpler but more poetic way to say this is that none of what is described in the book is true because it is based on the false premise that we, as human beings, exist as separate individual identities. Homo Serpiens is a book about ideas, not facts, but to some degree this is true of any historical account, since people do not exist, only the idea of people exists, and so on. That's all that matters, waking up from the personal and collective nightmare of history which tells you that you exist, and that's the only thing to gain from staring at the details of the dream state. If you become fascinated by the content rather than tracing it back to the source, that will only take you deeper into the dream state. 

And what is the source? Where do these dreams come from? The same place thought comes from, which is the same place the idea of "you" comes from. Nowhere. 

There is thought without thinker, dreams without a dreamer, and a story without a storyteller. All that is happening is life and all there is to life is this present moment. Knowledge refers to the past, and so unless it has some immediate practical application (how to open a can of beans), then it cannot help us to navigate the present. 

Therefore I suggest that you forget all your questions and forget all about the ideas in Homo Serpiens, and ask yourself the only question that really matters. 

What am I?

Cesar Teruel's Laughter of Not-Knowing

See here for my impressions of Cesar

You Too Can Be An Enlightening Transmitter!

As the new look and title of this blog suggests, it’s time for something completely different.  The above video was made by Sanna, a Finnish friend whom I met on a recent Dave Oshana retreat in Finland called “Ego Death.” I haven’t talked about Dave or the Enlightenment Transmission at this blog until now. (I wrote an account of my relationship with Dave a few months back; I may post it here in a little while.) Partly I kept my silence because I wasn’t sure how people would react to my finding another spiritual teacher so soon after the last (you might start calling me a spiritual slut). But I guess now is the time to let the secret out, especially since I am currently living in Estonia, which is next to Finland, having attended the Easter E.T retreat (which Sanna also attended), and planning to go to the Summer one in July.

When I saw Sanna’s video I liked it enough to want to share it with other people, which gave me the idea to post it here. That then gave me the idea of changing this blog into something different. Funnily enough, the last re-name I gave the blog (in a seemingly endless series of re-names) was “Exquisite Corpse,” which comes from a Surrealist game of group-creativity. I liked the phrase, even though it didn’t accurately describe a one-person blog. Now, “coincidentally,” I am thinking about using this space to host creative work and personal expressions besides my own, starting with Sanna (and I hope other members of the secret “E.T” team).

After however many years it’s been of banging my own drum, tooting my own horn, and grinding my axe, I feel ready to place whatever skills I have learned in service of a more collective endeavor. Team work.

It’s pretty hard to teach a dog new tricks or to get a leopard to change his spots. Even writing this post is proving pretty difficult. But I aim to follow through as best I can with this intention. So — if anyone has any work they’d like to see at this blog, that they think would be well placed here, let me know.

Of course, everyone has their own blogs now, and it’s not as though you’d be getting into Rolling Stone magazine or anything. So why would you want to put your stuff here rather than at your own space? Well for one thing, I have lots of followers (mostly silent ones). But more importantly,  there’s the potential for blogs to become more community-oriented spaces, which might meet the demands which are currently being “served” (i.e., exploited) by sites like Facebook and Twitter. Maybe, instead of getting sucked into one great corporate space and fleeced and fattened by Mammon, we can start creating our own specialized communities, inside of which we can co-create, communicate, and interrelate?

That’s my idea anyway, loosely improvised as a way to introduce and give context to Sanna’s lovely video above. I encourage you all to go and make your own version of personal expression, and, while I can’t promise to put it at this site, I can promise to watch it. Some of it anyway. In Sanna's video, in my opinion, there’s nothing superfluous, so be sure and watch it all the way through, especially since otherwise you may miss seeing Black Superman!! & I assure you, that's an experience you would not want to miss.

And if you think you qualify for active participation at ET Anonymous, send me an email, or post at the comments section below, and tell us why!