Into the Void

Back in the late 1980s I trained to administer a process called a Transition Session. I didn’t finish the training because with my poor social skills I was unable to get enough clients. It’s too bad, because the Transition Sessions were a powerful tool.

I’m about to throw out all my notes, but first I thought I’d skim over and see how I have changed since then. And blog any nuggets I come across in the process. There is a lot of material so I’ll spread it out over a few posts. First I thought I’d start off with a couple of open-ended statements that can be used to help clarify goals.

Declaration
Out of my mastery of ______________ I can be counted upon to notice when I am inclined to flee the challenge; to acknowledge that avoidance to someone; and to get appropriate support, with the purpose of manifesting ______________________ in the universe.

Vision
Out of my mastery of ______________ I inspire and empower others to ______________ for the purpose of ____________________________________________.

Photo credit:
h.koppdelaney

I often sit out in my car at lunchtime and read. The book I’m reading here is (still) Clarissa Pinkola Estés “Women Who Run With the Wolves.” Dr. Estés covers many psychological topics from the anthropological or mythological perspective. If she isn’t a Jungian, she’s missing a great opportunity.

At home I’m reading “Spritual Emergency” edited by Stanislav Grof and Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” I would rather be home, but not because the books are any better. I ran out of an asthma med because my GP got strange about refilling drugs from a Canadian pharmacy. I did so much albuterol last night that I am still shaking.

I am so devoid of dopamine that my concern over my breathing is little more than an intellectual exercise. Y’all know the feeling?

The quote is about creativity, spirit, the river beneath the river. Many topics in the book refer to cycles or to seasons. I wonder as I sit in the sunshine whether I take psych meds to suppress the seasons of my soul.

In archetypical lore there is the idea that if one prepares a special psychic place, then the being, the creative force, the soul source, will hear of it, sense its way to it, and inhabit that place. Whether this force is summoned by the biblical “go forth and prepare a place for the soul” or, as in the film Field of Dreams, in which a farmer hears a voice urging him to build a baseball diamond for the spirits of players past, “If you build it, they will come,” preparing a fitting place induces the great creative force to advance.
Once that great underground river finds its estuaries and branches in our psyches, our creative lives fill and empty, rise and fall in seasons just like a wild river. These cycles cause things to be made, fed, fall back, and die away, all in their right time, and over and over again.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés in “Women Who Run With the Wolves.”

“Vocatus atque non vocatus… deus aderit
Called or not called , GOD will be present.”
– Inscription on Gravestone of Professor Dr. Carl G. Jung, Kusnacht, Switzerland
Quoted from Heaven’s Register

Have you read any Jung? Jung was a medical doctor whose father was a philospher and pastor. Jung believed that God is not “out there” but is inside us all. God is our subconscious mind! You feel deep down what is right, now don’t you?

Jung pointed out that God evolved morally over the course of biblical history. That’s right, God got better and better. He had to, to keep up with his children’s moral evolution.

Being the firstborn is a curse for a lot of reasons, and it didn’t start with that whole “Dad forgot to paint the lintels” thing.

It can be deduced from the concept of a morally evolving God that Jesus Christ was the manifestation of this evolution. the “God made flesh.” God hoped that a physical manifestation would convince the Pharisees, the NT version of the Religious Right, to evolve too. It didn’t work, though. The Pharisees, like any hierarchical structure heavenly or temporal, were notoriously inflexible. Anything the Pharisees disagreed with was a sin, Evil, abomination. As a child Jesus was almost stoned for breaking one of the old rules.

If God is within us, then the fight between good and evil is going on inside us too. In Jung’s words, “from the psychological point of view demons are nothing other than intruders from the unconscious, spontaneous irruptions of unconscious complexes into the continuity of the conscious process.”

Here’s a simplification derived from Alan Watts‘ Tribute to Carl Jung. Satan isn’t in me, it can’t be, because I am Good. The Evil and the hate must be over there in you! (That’s the non-self-aware speaking, the one with Blind Faith and no reason.)

Look in your heart. Both good and evil are right there inside your own subconscious, making you act out their presence. Like a projector you are shining your own ugly thoughts onto the blank screens of the A-theists. This is the psychology of evil.

And until you discover your self-contradictions, you will always hate anyone who disagrees with you.

As for me, I’m not afraid of the guru. I’m afraid of the people who threaten me with eternal torture in his name.

Fun conversation. Just wanted to share.

The boss sent me a geometry puzzle as revenge for one I sent him to solve. I shared it with my favorite philosopher. This conversation ensued.

ME, quoting the boss:

You have a rectangular piece of material out of which are cut two regular polygons of arbitrary number of sides, position and size. (Both holes are entirely contained within the larger rectangle.) Devise a method for dividing the remaining material into two equal areas.

Get back to work!

K: Slice it through from edge-on.

ME: The boss says “No.” He seems to think that the material can’t be split that way. Hmmmph. Where did he find cloth one atom thick? And why isn’t a nuclear blast a valid way of splitting it?

Update 8/2008:
The material is probably a monoatomic-thick graphite substance called “graphene.” No idea where he found it.

K: I like nuclear blast; you collect the fallout into two buckets of equal volume.

ME: I made an infinite number of radial folds so that it was made up of an infinite number of layers of rhombi of width zero. Then I cut it in half radially.
He didn’t like that answer either.

K: Well, isn’t he special? Isn’t it bad for engineers to be rigidly wedded to a single answer when other solutions might be available?

ME: Yeah, really. You have to think outside the box, something bipolars are really good at. LOL!!!
Did I mention that after I came up with a truly ugly solution for the trivial case he told me oops, that should have been ONE polygon? Sheesh. So I choked him. I wonder who will sign my paycheck next time?

geometry think outside the box engineers

Referring back to Shamanism and Talking to Dog.

We have the ability to perceive *everything* until our society teaches us to block out of our minds what’s happening on the other side of the door. Privacy is how it starts. Later it becomes political. This is the definition of sanity, sharing a world-view.

My cat always has a complete aural picture of the world outside the house because her hearing is much better than mine. Her visual concept of the world is limited to what she can see by running from window to window – a very disconnected picture of the world, don’t you think? Now substitute the word “psychic” for “aural” and “sensory” for “visual.” There is nothing mystical about it. You know what you are taught to know and you de-reify what you aren’t taught.

I have no problem with concepts that lie outside the limitations of our technology. Not until some shady character tries to take my money. New Age practices, in general, are when a bunch of slightly better educated people try to sell the rest of us something that doesn’t really step outside consensus reality. Magic, after all, is nothing but a technology that you don’t understand.

I’m also an Electrical Engineer and I graduated with a minor in mathematics. I had 4 years of science and 5 years of math in high school alone. And I’ve forgotten more philosophy than most people ever read in the first place. I can tell bullsh*t from a new way of looking at reality. I’m a reiki master, by the way.

The first thing you learn in logic is that you can’t prove non-existence. Psychic ability requires breaking your mind so that you can see the things you were taught to make non-existent.

Society has a vested interest in controlling the hidden information, and quickly punishes those who step outside what is considered sane. Therapists, then, are the gatekeepers of consensus reality.

The moral? Don’t complain about your psychic abilities to your therapist unless you want to get rid of these abilities.

About schizophrenia – schizophrenia does not equal psychic ability, though a broken brain is more likely to take a big step away from consensus reality. Schizophrenia, they say, results from an inability to categorize the world in the same way the rest of us do. Imagine if your grocery store sorted things by the size of the package instead of putting sugar in the spice aisle and dryer sheets in the laundry section. Now imagine that when you complain to the manager, he sends the cops and psychiatrists over to your house to rearrange the furniture.

Next, said I, here is a parable to illustrate the degrees in which our nature may be enlightened or unenlightened. Imagine the condition of men living in a sort of cavernous chamber underground, with an entrance open to the light and a long passage all down to the cave. Here they have been since childhood, chained by the leg and also by the neck, so that they cannot move and can only see what is in front of them, because the chains will not let them turn their heads. At some distance higher up is the light of a fire burning behind them; and between the prisoners and the fire is a track with a parapet built along it, like the screen at a puppet-show, which hides the performers while they show their puppets over the top.
I see, said he.
Now behind this parapet imagine persons carrying along various artificial objects, including figures of men and animals in wood or stone or other materials, which project above the parapet. Naturally, some of these persons will be talking, others silent.
It is a strange picture, he said, and a strange sort of prisoners.
Like ourselves, I replied; for in the first place prisoners so confined would have seen nothing of themselves or of one another, except the shadows thrown by the fire-light on the wall of the cave facing them, would they?
Not if all their lives they had been prevented from moving their heads.
And they would have seen as little of the objects carried past.
Of course.
Now, if they could talk to one another, would they not suppose that their words referred only to those passing shadows which they saw?
Necessarily.
And suppose their prison had an echo from the wall facing them? When one of the people crossing behind them spoke, they could only suppose that the sound came from the shadow passing before their eyes.
No doubt.
In every way, then, such prisoners would recognize as reality nothing but the shadows of those artificial objects.
Inevitably.
Now consider what would happen if their release from the chains and the healing of their unwisdom should come about in this way. Suppose one of them set free and forced suddenly to stand up, turn his head, and walk with eyes lifted to the light; all these movements would be painful, and he would be too dazzled to make out the objects whose shadows he had been used to see. What do you think he would say, if someone told him that what he had formerly seen was meaningless illusion, but now, being somewhat nearer to reality and turned towards more real objects, he was getting a truer view. Suppose further that he were shown the various objects being carried by and were made to say, in reply to questions, what each of them was. Would he not be perplexed and believe the objects now shown him to be not so real as what he formerly saw?
Yes, not nearly so real.
from THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE,
The Republic of Plato,
Francis Cornford, trans.