What Really Matters?

Posted on April 24, 2016 by Reid Mukai

fms-act-love

By Zen Gardner

It’s amazing how the big questions in life are pushed to the end of the line. Sure everyone wonders about the “big stuff” on and off, but their lives are too preoccupied with other issues that they’ve been told are more pressing and important – when it’s nothing of the sort.

This applies directly to the on-going awakening and how to put our best foot forward in times like these. How best can we be used to effect change? What is the most productive and effective course of action in our personal lives?

With everything at stake at this crucial juncture in history these questions become profoundly important. And the answers just may surprise each of us.

The Preparation

I can guarantee that any real truth seeker is facing a lot of personal challenges at this time. It may be health issues, relationship challenges and perhaps changes, or finding a sound spiritual orientation in these rapidly shifting vibrations. A lot is going on, and this is as it should be.

We’re being honed and prepared for what lay ahead of us.

If our hearts are confused, anxious, distracted or over-burdened we won’t be much good to anyone. We may even be carrying baggage unknown to us that Universe is peeling away to free us for our next challenges. These can often be ingrained psychic and subconscious memes that keep playing out in our daily lives and reactions unbeknownst to us that are holding us back.

We may even be subjecting ourselves to triggers that bring on these attached, reactive behaviors while thinking these are necessary or even foundational influences in our lives. These are not easy to face up to, especially when it touches on things we consider dearest to us, but if we’re to keep progressing in truly conscious awakening face them we must.

It only stands to reason then that these have to be sorted out first if we’re to be the true warriors we are meant to be.

But it’s not easy.

First Things First

Anyone who has awakened has had this same fundamental experience: Everything began anew. Once we see the true bigger picture of who we are and what we’re here for, everything gets reset and we start on a brand new path in life.

However, we tend to emphasize part 2 of the above statement and look quickly for our role here and what we can do about this ugly matrix trying to control and close in on us. That’s very important, but we can’t short circuit part 1 too quickly. Who are we? This naturally continues to come up as we progress through the maze of rabbit holes and broaden our perspectives. The discovery and changes just occur, as long as we keep yielding to them and making the necessary breaks with our past programming.

But the personal challenges and realizations will get deeper and deeper, and they come with a price. It’s the same one every time – letting go – sometimes even of our most cherished beliefs or personal attachments. It can be quite painful, but it’s designed for our good, as well as the good of others whom we’ll be freer to help and influence with a truly clear signal.

The Inner Child

I’ve found for myself, with the help of very loving friends with whom I could open up, that issues that have been holding me back without my even knowing it have a lot to do with primal character traits that were formed since childhood. I’m intensely aware of so many aspects of this whole realm of study in personal attributes, societal influences and our spiritual path, but seeing these things in oneself can come as a real shock.

These realizations can come at a very dear price, but it’s a price worth paying. It’s obviously different for everyone, but if we don’t see in ourselves our reactive mechanisms that still need healing then we’re going to run into problems. Attributes like deep seated insecurity stemming from years of emotional suppression, neglect and feelings of abandonment develop very strong reactive defense and sublimated cover-up mechanisms that we accept as natural or “normal” when they aren’t in the least.

Most everyone raised in this world has been terribly abused at some point or other. The very nature of child and adolescent rearing in this callous world seriously wounds our spirits and forms habitual responses that can only be healed when we embrace that inner child and let it know it’s OK to experience and express that trauma as we truly face ourselves.

That’s when the chains fall off and the deep empowerment begins.

A Time to Draw Together

I’m no psychologist but human nature I know because I am human, and we all have profound commonalities both in this 3-D dimension and in the collective consciousness. We’re interwoven, which is why the matrix of deceit endeavors so hard to break up our honest and heartfelt communing with each other in every way possible, even pitting us against each other, when our closeness and shared experience is our very strength.

But we can only come together after we come apart from the old, including our old selves. We have to first get free of our previous mindsets, habits, emotional baggage and whatever is in the way or holding us back, whether we realize it fully or not. From there we’ll see more clearly, our motives will be more pure, and we’ll be much more effective in everything we say and do.

The price is everything, but the rewards and results are beyond comprehension. Those can be pretty difficult to see when you’re passing through the “valley of death” of the old but they will appear. You’ll get hints along the way. And the more readily we let go in full confidence that Universe is right there with us and that the experience is not a “bad” one or “wrong” at some level the easier it gets.

But it can be quite painful.

In True Unity There Is Strength

As the world turns darker people are naturally drawing closer to each other. No matter how much they fully grasp what’s going on in the world, people tend to pull together in small more tightly knit groups with those they love and trust.

This is a drawing for strength and support, which we all need, and now more than ever.

For the awakened this can be more challenging to fulfill. Most of us are scattered about and connected via the internet where we can find others with the same understanding and perspective. That’s our true family and fully drawing together may not be that easy.

Communities are forming across the world. We are finding each other and many of us have been developing wonderful relationships with others with whom we resonate. Now is the time to further cultivate those relationships and perhaps make some hard decisions to prepare for what’s ahead.

This does not preclude ongoing activism of every sort, in fact we need that more than ever, but most everyone can feel the shift has stepped up and is earnestly moving us in new and very challenging ways.

Letting Go

I’m reminded of the famous monkey trap analogy, where a box is baited with a treat with only enough room for the monkey’s hand to get into it. Once he grabs the treat he supposedly won’t let go of it and is not able to pull his hand out of the box.

Trapped by his own holding on.

We all do this. The point here is a tremendous change is taking place on many levels. The vibrational shift affects everything at every level and requires adaptation, movement and innovation, even if only on a spiritual level. But the key to freedom and being and expressing our true selves is letting go, detachment.

Therein lies our primary challenge. Will we be a landscape of willfully trapped monkeys not willing to let go of whatever it may be that we think we need, are attached to or stubbornly holding on to? Or will we be a liberated army of fully free warriors ready to do battle in this last ditch fight for planet earth?

It’s up to each of us to decide.

As for me, I paid admission to this a long time ago and have no intention of stopping short for any reason or cherished or coveted idea or attachment. It’s all or nothing. And that’s freedom, which only breeds more freedom, empowerment and alignment with Universe.

Onward. There’s really nothing to lose. Our need for attachments is illusory and what’s holding on to them needs to simply let go. It will probably be quite painful, but it will subside. Just don’t hurry out of the experience, that’s where the real learning takes place.

Draw close to loved ones during this time, but keep your pursuit hot and determination kindled.

Love always, Zen

A Crisis of the Heart

Posted on April 3, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By rahkyt

Source: Sacred Space in Time

The loss of life for any reason is always to be commiserated with and in instances of collective horror such as the terrorist attacks that have recently beset the West, the heart of oceanic humanity breaks a bit more.

With that said, our social media feeds become filled with national colors and heartful memes in solidarity with members of the human family hit by unthinkable tragedy. It is right to do so. But it is also right to understand that tragedies are occurring all around us, in our own nations as well as others, every single day. Middle-aged whites in the US are killing themselves with drugs and alcohol and poor eating habits at a rate never seen before. They are hopeless and despairing as the American dream fades. Blacks remain mired in the same hopelessness caused by the same reasons, economic and social, with the added addition of racism and eugenic tactics centuries in the formation. Native Americans on Reservations continue to experience the effects of genocide, a program running in the collective American consciousness since this nation’s inception. The deaths add up and fade into consciousness as the background cries of the disillusioned and dehumanized.

Inhumanity reigns and the statistics state that people have been growing less and less compassionate toward each other for decades in this nation. These computers and smart phones draw us together but also tear us apart, the virtual world is as real as the real one. People spend hours per day jacked into the matrix, seamlessly moving between one and the other. Death by texting is on the rise, porn increases objectification and consumer culture further consolidates the banality of social interaction and heart-based intimacy.

These realities indicate a crisis of the soul. Of the heart. When we are upset and outraged about one group of people but care nothing for others, something is very wrong. When there is compassion for those whom we might share something in common with and lack of compassion for those with whom we do not, there is a division of the heart, a dehumanization that speaks to the pervasivity of mainstream media programming of the mind.

Perhaps those who say humanity cannot change are right. Perhaps this is the best we can do. But perhaps it is also true that by consciously examining the memes and events and seeking to understand the issues at levels beyond those trumpeted in the mainstream we will come to realize that we have more in common with the Oppressed everywhere than the privileged so many of us wish to join in their glass mansions and private retreats. It is in the experience of self as seen through the eyes of others and experienced in the visceral engagement of souls on an eternal journey that true empathy and compassion are known.

When life ends, all that matters is the love. The love we give and the love we receive. The divisions dissipate. Living as if each one of us was from Beirut, or Paris, or Chicago, or Kenyan, every, single, day, and sharing our portion of love is how the dogs of war are banished. How the flames of hate are extinguished. The source is never what we are told and the cause goes back so far in the past that the effect is shrouded in mystery.

Share this outpouring of love with the world. Feel the pain of all those sacrificed on the alters of political and economic gain. Those next door, down the street, in the next city and state, and even across the nation. We must stand in solidarity with those who’ve made the ultimate sacrifice, but the war is not just between nations and ideologies. The war is within each of us. Every, single day.

The Clock Inside Us

Posted on March 20, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Eman Shahata

Source: The New Inquiry

Once a weapon to combat idleness, the clock has become a prosthesis, augmenting the human body to override its need for rest

IF time is money, then sleep is theft. Today’s cult of busyness regards sleep as a defect that threatens to render people competitively unfit. In a recent article for the Guardian, Lucy Rock wrote about CEOs’ “competitive sleep deprivation,” with top executives sleeping for a mere three to four hours, mimicking Margaret Thatcher’s four-hour sleep cycle when she was in office. Similarly, Angela Ahrendts, head of retail at Apple and former CEO of Burberry, has claimed she “gets a headache when she sleeps for more than six hours.”

Such enthusiasm for sleeplessness seems to make an executive virtue out of a capitalistic necessity. But it has deep epistemological roots. In the wake of Enlightenment and in tandem with the emergence of capitalism, humans began to view nature as a pool of resources to be tamed, mastered, owned, and directed toward fulfilling human desires. It wasn’t long before this conquest of nature was redirected toward the intransigencies of human nature. Despite all the technological advances that positivistic science yielded, humans were still faced with their own physical limitations. They could build skyscrapers of glass and steel that defied gravity in the name of human reason, yet they could not tame the unreasonable demands of their own body for rest.

The attempt to tame the body of its unprofitable tendency to tire began as an effort to make “saving time” a moral issue. Sixteenth-century moralist and mercantilist discourses already regarded punctuality as a prerequisite for the conception of a modern man, the pinnacle of social development in an imagined context of linear progress. British historian E.P. Thompson points out in “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism” that toward the end of the 17th century, as wage labor relations began to become more prevalent, time began to be conceived as a precious commodity to be spent rather than merely passed. “Those who are employed experience a distinction between their employer’s time and their ‘own’ time,” Thompson notes. “And the employer must use the time of his labor, and see that it is not wasted.” Tolling bells and fines levied by employers taught students and workers that their time was being counted, that it was a regulated and regimented currency.

Moralists urged “time thrift,” and framed the waste of time as summoning divine punishment. As British nonconformist minister Oliver Heywood put it in the 17th century tract Meetness for Heaven, “This is our working day, our market time … O Sirs, sleep now, and awake in hell, whence there is no redemption.” Paternalist and colonialist discourses, whether in addressing the English poor or indigenous people from developing countries, represented idleness as a trait of those who are “naturally inferior.” For instance, as Thompson notes, clergyman John Clayton’s pamphlet “Friendly Advice to the Poor” urges the factory worker, whom he refers to as a “sluggard,” to use his time efficiently and refrain from “dulling his spirit by Indolence.” Similarly, where theories of social evolutionism gained prominence, time discipline was seen as essential for the transition to “mature societies.” Thompson notes how economic-growth theorists viewed Mexican mineworkers as “indolent and childlike people” because of their deficient time discipline.

Parallel to the rise of “time thrift” comes the monumental role of the clock. In 17th century Britain, clocks restructured work habits by materializing the ethic of time thrift, setting a clear demarcation between “work” and “life” and reminding workers of their tasks. The omnipresence of clocks was a guarantor of regulation, it ensured the institution of order in the workspace. The clock’s ubiquity legitimized time discipline and naturalized it, making it banal and commonsensical. It made sure that no one escaped the tempo.

One might say that the clock becomes a subject, with agency in its own right, shaping social customs and subjecting people to its rhythms. As anthropologist Bruno Latour has argued, technology and things are not simply animated by humans but also mediate human action. And as anthropologist Benjamin Snyder argues, clocks served the purpose of training and manipulating the body to accomplish set tasks, thereby “turning it into an inexhaustible source of energy.” The incessant sound of the ticking clock, the mounting anxiety it almost automatically evokes, has come to regulate the body and embed it within the culture of busyness.

If clocks are agents that shape human actions, is it valid to assume that clocks are an “other”? By making sure everyone maximizes their efficiency, clocks address the physical limitations of the human body, becoming a kind of prosthesis that pushes humans closer to reaching an “optimal” state of activity.

This is reflected in the late 19th century emergence of the idea of an “internal clock,” which exemplifies how biological processes can be redefined in terms of prominent material objects. By this means, the ideology of time discipline— inseparable from the clock—becomes seen as a natural imperative. In the wake of the clock’s ubiquity, positivist and scientific rhetoric began to depict the biological clock as an “endogenous” factor that operates according to “innate” biological rhythms, leading to medical advice shaped by the metaphors it employs: “how to reset your internal clock” and so on. Such advice points to the mechanization of the body, which now requires “daily maintenance.”

It may seem as if the presence of a master clock in our brains, which synchronizes and sets sleeping patterns on its own, means we no longer need an outside force to tame our bodies. Our bodies have internalized this systemic regulation, becoming in this sense, machinic. However, what implications arise from this? This mechanization of the body—a precursor and template for the ongoing reconceptualization of the self in terms of quantities alone—reflects how our bodies have become products, rather than agents, of a culture of busyness and rationality that glorifies productivity. Scientific discourses have succeeded in masking the way we’ve been clocked in and can no longer clock out.

Why Chaos Always Seems To Have Such Grand Potential

Posted on February 7, 2016 by Reid Mukai

tahrir

By Shauna Janz

Source: Collective Evolution

We have been experiencing “chaos as grand potential” throughout our entire history. From the first potential of life that exploded from the stars and hurled across a universe in chaotic fashion, to the evolution of all species on our Earth, to the splitting of cells that form life in a mother’s womb.

Growth and evolution emerge from chaos.

Another way of thinking about chaos is the process of positive disintegration – originally used in psychology by Kazimierz Dąbrowski, who viewed tension and anxiety as a necessary part of any personal growth process. This term has also been used by Joanna Macy to describe how living systems evolve; when continued feedback tells a system that it has become dysfunctional, the system responds by changing.

In other words, when old ways of doing things are no longer adaptive or effective, we are catapulted into a disintegration process, or chaos, so that new ways of doing things can emerge that are positive for a sustainable life.

Chaos is a necessary part of the process any living system, individual, or community goes through to adapt, evolve, and remain sustainable in their environment.

For people, that environment may be our own personal body/mind, our families, our workplace, our society, or our collective global community.

From the chaos, or disintegration, comes the grand potential for something wholly new to arise – something that surpasses the old way of being and has become a more inclusive and integrated way of being.

I am reminded of Pema Chodron’s book When Things Fall Apart, dedicated to finding hope when we are suffering from change or loss; when we are in the midst of disintegration. Through her soothing words, she assists her readers to remain open and aware through the confusion and anxiety of chaos.

Pain and grief often inhabit the space of chaos. As familiar ways prove no longer useful, we are thrust into a space of unknowing and chaos before new ways can fully develop.

I reflect on the grief I have experienced in my own life, and on the grief in others that I have witnessed and supported. When loss and change erupt in our lives, we are left in the emotional wake to re-create who it is we are in our changed world.

We are left to find a new way to make meaning and to find adaptive strategies to live on and continue to thrive. It may mean letting go of certain roles or identities, or it may mean embracing new ones and honouring the process.

This doesn’t happen overnight. Before new ways emerge, we are left in confusion. We are left in anxiety. We are left in pain and grief.

In this chaotic space we may feel fearful, uncertain, and out of control. We may react and grasp for anything that might give us a sense of comfort or control, or allow us to numb out from feeling at all.

We see this on a personal scale as well as on a global scale – whether grasping for escape through another drink, Netflix series, or new pair of shoes, or whether grasping for control through declaring another war or engaging in oppressive acts against others.

Positive disintegration can only happen if we stay aware, open, and conscious to see the potential that lies within the chaos, and to then act to create new ways that are sustainable.

If we learn to navigate our own personal grief and chaos in conscious ways remaining calm, open, and trusting, then we gain the ability to navigate the grief and chaos in our world in the same way.

Remaining conscious and open is absolutely necessary because globally we are in the midst of a significant disintegration process, and we need to change how we live.

We know that the capitalist industrial growth complex that currently defines our global economics and social systems has become dysfunctional. We are witnessing extreme abuses of power, violence. and tactics of separation – all rooted in fear and grasping for control.

We are all experiencing the impacts of this global chaotic time – grief, anxiety, uncertainty. We are also witnessing efforts to make changes for a sustainable and equitable future.

Joanna Macy calls this time “The Great Turning.” In her book Coming Back to Life – Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World she exemplifies many of the ways we are seeing the process of positive disintegration carry out in our world.

From direct action and legislative work to slow down the process of environmental and social destruction, to academics and grassroot groups working to educate about the impacts of our capitalist industrial system, to the cognitive revolutions and spiritual awakenings that deeply shift our consciousness toward a sustainable way of being on this Earth — we have the ability to stand strong in the winds of chaos, to choose openness and compassion, to hold fast to our vision of a vibrant and sustainable future, and to act in loving ways, now.

We are seeing new forms of sustainable practices emerge, witnessing the resurgence of ancestral ways of knowing, and experiencing shifts of consciousness.

There is no one person that will save our planet or human family. It takes the whole global community to respond, which means it takes each and every one of us to step forward in our own ways to shine our light and hold hope, trust, and compassion through this time of chaos.

Each one of us has a gift – has words to share, actions to motivate, art to show, or ways of being that exude love, trust and connection.

There is a place for everyone – whether it is the frontlines of direct action and resistance, raising conscious and compassionate children, or actively healing your own wounds – these all contribute to the healing of our world.

Joanna Macy says, you cannot “fix” the world, but you can take part in its self-healing. Healing wounded relationships within you and between you is integral to the healing of our world.

Each one of us who chooses love over fear, feeling over numbing, and compassionate action over apathy, contributes to the emergence of a sustainable new way of being in our world.

I invite you to reflect on the ways you are responding in your own life to a global future of love and sustainability. What are the gifts you bring to this world? How are you actively living your gifts every day?

And I thank you for remaining open and compassionate amidst this time of chaos as grand potential.

2016 The Year Ahead

Posted on January 25, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Neil Kramer

Source: NeilKramer.com

2016 will rigorously test people’s readiness to embody their truth. Can we live the wisdom and transformation we’ve been cultivating over years of study, journeying, and contemplation? Can we summon the strength to have our outside accurately reflect our inside? Are we ready to run our own world yet?

In many schools of mystical study, polarity is a key principle. The student is taught that everything in life is dual. All phenomena have pairs of opposites, as observed in the primal forces of birth and death, day and night, order and chaos, joy and sorrow. Over time, through experientially mapping and understanding the interplay of each set of polarities in our own lives, we may gradually determine a point of equilibrium that reveals the hidden teachings of these mysterious fluctuations. What we must be careful to avoid, is clinging to just one end of life’s naturally divergent polarizations. And herein lie the trials set forth in the world’s current crises.

At every turn, the synthetic culture of Empire implores us to throw our hearts and minds into unconscious polarization. It wants us to radicalize ourselves to either patriot or terrorist, believer or atheist, white or black, liberal or conservative, strong or weak, and then embark on an endless crusade to reform, condemn, or destroy the other side. This one-way polarization renders all participants impotent, regardless of which side they pick. This subtle but devastating trick deactivates our will and we automatically forfeit our capacity to rule ourselves. Lost in unconscious polarization, we serve Empire.

Nevertheless, whilst Empire’s constant telegraphing of fear can be unsettling, its power to deceive is unquestionably failing to influence legions of honorable humans who refuse to hand over their discernment to the corrupt and compliant media. The sock puppet terror cells and fabricated economic cataclysms are fraying at the edges and their artificial nature is pitifully evident. The official narrative betrays only those who choose to hide from reality. For them we can do nothing, until they do something for themselves.

It is my heartfelt observation that a critical threshold of spiritually alive humans have grown so excellently in confidence and wisdom, that the old hierarchies must resort to ever more vulgar contrivances to preserve their reins of power. Understand then, that the daybreak of a new higher consciousness will be heralded not by gentle awakenings and well-mannered transitions, but by bewildering fragmentation. Just as these patterns of collapse were experienced in many people’s personal lives throughout 2015, so now they are shaking the very foundations of Empire. Towering ramparts that once seemed so impossibly daunting and everlasting, will soon be little more than forlorn ruins.

We are upon the eve of the grand winter solstice of Empire, and the longest darkest night will seem interminably protracted and bone-chillingly cold. But like all things, this too shall pass. And the daylight will lengthen and the new growth that we have envisioned for so long will blossom – if we let it. We made Empire and we must unmake it. As a thing is bound, so it is unbound. Deeds not words. Learn the art of depolarization and nothing can stop you.

Keeping The Portal Open: Erik Davis on TechGnosis and the Blurring “Real” & “Virtual”

Posted on December 13, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Michael Garfield

Source: Reality Sandwich

Erik Davis is the author of TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, & Mysticism in the Age of Information (recently reissued by North Atlantic Books with a new afterword). An investigation into how our transcendental urges play out in the realm of high technology, it is a rare treat – both an exemplary work of scholarship and also a delightful read – a florid, fun, and virtuosic play of language. Even more impressive is that in our metamorphic times, this book has aged considerably well. TechGnosis is in ways more relevant today than it was in the rosy dawn of 1998, before The Matrix and the iPhone, Facebook, and Edward Snowden. We’re living in the future. Read this book and learn the territory.

Over a glitchy Google Hangout (you can watch both parts on YouTube), Erik and I discussed our culture’s highest hopes and darkest dreams for our collective future, and how they’ve both become more complicated since the turn of the Millennium.

If you imagine browser windows as a kind of portal in between dimensions – if you wonder when the apes and whales will open social media accounts – if you believe that we can find a way to surf the turbulence of our connected century with grace and humor – then read on…

(Thanks to Terra Celeste and Ivan Marko for transcribing this! This is about one-third of the full conversation. You can also read the transcript in its raw entirety here.)

Erik: I apologize for our developing-world level of internet connectivity. Here in San Francisco! That’s right, folks, you heard it right: I live in the city of San Francisco, the absolute white hot center of the technological creative mutation, and yet my internet’s kind of crappy.

Michael: Well, you know, San Francisco was where Skynet was headquartered in the last Terminator film, so it may just be that your home is becoming ever-more inimical to human existence.

Erik: And the Federation, too! In a way those were the two models, right? On the one hand, you have the Federation from Star Trek, where it’s a liberal, UN, kind of globalist model – we’re no longer fighting nation states, we’re still human beings, we have desires, we get to drink tea and explore the universe. That sounds pretty cool from a humanist point of view, and yet on the other side we have Skynet, which is of course a whole other ball of wax. In a way, isn’t that it? It’s the struggle between the Federation and Skynet.

Michael: It’s funny, ‘cause most of what I wanted to talk to you about today was about how your book -– which is a brilliant piece of writing – has aged since 1998. The new volume includes a new afterword from the 2004 edition, as well as a new afterword from the 2015 edition. One of the things that you discuss is the way that the expectation that we had of boundary dissolution and transcendence at the turn of the millennium has become more complex. Now, it’s more of just a general shifting and metamorphosis of the construction of new boundaries. And so, like in the most recent Star Trek films and Terminator films, we now have good Terminators that believe they are people and are willing to donate their heart to the dying members of the human resistance. You know, the actual human heart that these Terminators possess, in order spoof human security systems. And then, in the latest Star Trek film, the threat comes from within the Federation, from a black box military program. Our culture seems to be getting more and more comfortable with these liminal zones and these ethical complexities. Less naïve with respect to that kind of simple dyadic distinction.

Erik: Techgnosis first came out in ’98. I talk a lot about gnosticism in the book and about these ancient Christian heresies about the spark in us that can escape from this prison that’s run by evil demons who are fabricating reality. That ancient model of mysticism and theology just fits like a hand and glove in our digital era. And then the Matrix films come along and I was like, “Oh my God, so beautiful.” It was just a perfect expression, and I wrote about that in the afterword for the 2004 edition. Nowadays a lot of the topics that I wrote about are even more available and perceivable through popular culture because popular culture has gotten weirder, more full of occultism, more intense, even as, in some ways, it’s become more ordinary. A lot of these sort of topics were very fringe in the ’80s or even the ’90s, in the sense that you had to kinda dig for occultism, for Satanism, for people who believed that they were channeling deities. All this stuff was part of a subculture, an outsider culture. Whether we believed it or not doesn’t matter. In a way, it’s not that there are necessarily more people who believe in these things. It’s just that they’re more available, because of the way that popular culture introduces these ideas. We become fans of shows. Fantasy and science fiction have become the norm.

Michael: I’m sure you remember when James Cameron’s Avatar came out, and the Avatar world immediately took off within the LARPing community. And so you started to see this foreshadowing of a new dysphrenia, a psychological disorder of the possible fragmentation of worldspaces that we seem kind of doomed to experience with the advent of the true landing of virtual reality. These people were so just morose and desperate because they became so immersed in the Pandora world that they couldn’t readjust to their life as human beings. It’s sort of akin to my generation’s wave of acid burnouts, maybe. As we invest more and more of ourselves into this increasingly popular and available and sexy because it’s not just animated by our religious impulses, but it’s actively being advertised, and commercialized and sold to us. We’re really being encouraged to throw ourselves into these alternative worldspaces. And then there isn’t a landing pad for when we get back. So I feel like one of the lasting lessons of your book, one of the reasons that I feel its resonance remains, is because it allows a person to integrate those experiences. In a way, it functions as a manual for understanding our drives and the larger emotional matrix in which we play with new freedoms to explore occult realities.

Erik: That’s very well said, actually, because in conventional society, even very recently, these things have largely been shuttered out. My generation grew up in the shadow of the hippies, and those things were around, but they were very much part of the counterculture. They were either mocked or ignored in the New York Times reality, which is still kind of a good symbol for consensus reality. I’m not even sure if we have a consensus reality anymore, or if it’s not some crazy topological knot, but in the old days, it had a little bit more stability to it, and you would never see these things acknowledged. Or if they were, they were pathologized – it was crazy, it was absurd, it was narcissistic and navel-gazing. This was true for a whole range of things – meditation, esotericism, UFOs, psychedelics, the whole range of extraordinary experience that people wanted to seek and experience.

As someone who basically keeps my feet on the ground, I’m largely skeptical in temperament. I’m very anthropological in my approach, which means I like to go into environments and participate as I observe, that classic stance of participant-observation. And what’s come from that is a realization that you can plunge very deeply into very interesting, rich otherworlds that are full of magic and enchantment and bizarre synchronicities and wonderful downloads, but at the same time you can also trust the ability to return to the body, to the ordinary, to the conditions of human experience in an everyday way, and that those don’t have to be in conflict so much.

I think that these experiences are not only really valuable, but they’re absolutely necessary to understand what’s actually happening. Whether people acknowledge it or not, a lot of the time we are driven by desires to be in dreamworlds, to achieve unusual-states-of-consciousness, to find them inside ourselves and see the way that they’re driving us. There’s a strong kind of rationalist technologized way of thinking about experience that’s very pervasive now, that’s actually carried like a philosophical virus through the widespread notions of tweaking and controlling your experience, of making yourself more efficient or powerful. So for me it’s really important to keep portals open to the unknown, to the mystery, to the bizarre, because it’s precisely in those encounters that we see beyond the rationalistic frame, which often is, in my opinion, benighted. Instead, we can adopt a more open-ended, but not necessarily mystical, attitude to the whole range of otherworldly experiences.

Michael: There’s a through-line here in one of the last chapters of Coming into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness by William Irwin Thompson, someone whom I know that has inspired us both immensely. That books last chapter a chapter is about how the Ramayana tells how humans and animals allied to expel the demons from what we now take as take as mundane, everyday reality. Bill Thompson’s view was that the Electrical Imaginary descending back into our networked global civilization is opening a portal, and that the screen is literally a shamanic window through which these spirits are granted fresh access to our world. And then in your latest afterword you talk about how the irony of these ultra-hyper-realist-skeptic-atheist-revenge-of-the-enlightenment types is that you can’t actually create a complete model of the mundane world. You can’t perfectly map the enlightened cosmos without getting into all of the weird stuff, the out-of-body experiences, the UFO abductions. These things have to be explained in order to cast out all of the shadows, but the naïve attempt to cast them out is really just an invocation. It’s like the topological knot you mentioned earlier, where merely addressing them makes them a more vivid part of our reality.

Erik: Absolutely. I think that that’s part of the deeper logic behind the renaissance of psychedelics. In many ways, “psychedelics” as a topic is a key site in understanding how modern technological scientific people recover, rediscover, and repackage, if you will, these kinds of liminal states and otherworldly encounters, with their potential sources of meaning and spiritual experiences. I also think that one of the reasons we have seen such an incredible renaissance emerge so quickly is because it was an inevitable part of scientific logic. Science has to take the brain seriously, it has to take the experiences in the brain seriously. Psychedelics are clearly physical, material agents that produce somewhat regular phenomenological effects. We have to understand that if we’re going to understand the brain. Any reasonable scientist is going to say that. And, whoa, lo and behold, it actually seems to do some good. So the genie is out of the bottle, and the genie doesn’t mean that we’re going to return to some kind of mystical worldview. I don’t believe we are. I think we’re in a state of tremendous mixing, of a multidimensional view where we have to learn how to move between different kinds of frameworks, including occult and animist frameworks, including mystical or religious frameworks, but also including secular, critical, analytic frameworks – scientific in that classic sense as well. How to do that I don’t know. But I do know that it’s a multidimensional field and I think that that’s why we see this turn towards the very multidimensional psychedelics.

Michael: Yeah, definitely. That is, in the sense of the original articulation of TechGnosis. You’ve got that chapter, “The Path is a Network”. There is something about the way the network allows for this manifold, multifaceted appraisal of reality, that really breeds and encourages and nourishes multiperspectivism. And so, in a way, I think the inherently psychedelic nature of our age, and what’s become really just like much more imminently and vividly obvious and easy to spot about the mainstream culture in general, is that we don’t all agree. It’s a much deeper revelation of the same kind of cultural relativism that we started to experience through the global interchange and commerce a couple hundred years ago, but now it’s to the point where culture has splintered to such an extraordinary degree due to the fact that everyone at the dinner table is occupying their own iPhone reality portal, that the main yoga of at least the first half of the twentieth century seems to be the psychedelic yoga, of being able to take our ontological conclusions lightly, and to be able to juggle them and to adopt them when they’re appropriate but to treat them with the kind of middle-way balance of skepticism and sympathy that you have modeled for your readers.

Erik: Yeah, that’s a really important thing for me. Also, itIt also plays an important role in a lot of the stuff that we haven’t been talking about, which is the dark side of the tale. Probably my proudest thing about TechGnosis is that it first came out in 1998, so the book was written during the first internet bubble. This was the time when a truly millennialist set of ideas were held by many people working in technology, the new rules of the economy of abundance. That kind of utopian thinking.was partly legitimately believed. I knew a lot of these people, I was kinda part of that world, of people who were imagining the potential of virtual reality, of new kinds of political formations, people drawn together in new forms of community, etc. At the same time those ideas were also ruthlessly exploited by capitalist forces, which created essentially a kind of ponzi scheme of IPOs. And so, the sense that something new and different was actually happening was simultaneously exploited.

When I was writing TechGnosis, it would have been easy for someone to write a much more happy, fluffy vision of the connections between spirituality and technology. “Here we are, just around the corner, just about to break through!” But for me, that sense of transformation was always accompanied by a shadow. If you open the portal and you accept the existence of these half-fantastic beings, there are demons there as well. In our future visions now we feel the presence apocalyptic energies. There’s the sense of mass breakdown, of ecological collapse, or the rise of a fascist surveillance state. On some intimate level we know that every time we’re using a device we’re moving through a shadow realm where we don’t know what sorts of agents – entities, algorithms, human beings – are perceiving and making meaning out of our operations. That is an unnerving, uncanny situation, and it’s one that we have to live with.

We have to acknowledge that we do have these fears and terrors, and apocalyptic presumptions inside of us, inside our imaginations, inside our hearts, inside our stories, inside our cultural traditions. And so we have to be very careful about where and how we mix the apocalyptic templates that we carry in our imaginations with the actual real conditions that we find ourselves in. It’s very tricky, but I suspect it takes that same sort of balance of skepticism and sympathy into the shadow realm as well as the utopian, or at least poetic possibility. And in a lot of ways I feel that’s where we’re at. That’s part of why I do what I do, is to try to kind of map that ginger, open, but questioning space, because it seems like one of the places to try to navigate these very difficult issues.

Michael: So many people worship the idea of the return to nature, or Terence McKenna’s idea of an archaic revival, this sort of forward-escape atavism where we go all the way around and end up back where we started, transformed. But we’re also naïve to the lived reality of not being on the top of the food chain, and that’s absolutely part of this that comes back, it can’t be divorced from the rest of it. We long for the community of the tribal life that we left behind, for the openness, the permeability of the self that we experience. The last experiment of civilization was profoundly dissociative, isolated, and lonely, and as consequence, we have a totally pathological relationship to the natural world. But in restoring that, in the humility of science recognizing its ultimate ignorance, we move back into an age where we’re no longer able to kid ourselves quite so successfully about the dragons that we have swept under the map. They’re still there, and they’re in a way even more alive for us now.

In your interview with Vice, you said a god is just a fiction that everyone believes in. So in a way – and this is kind of Information Warfare 101 – even if the NSA did not have supercomputers inside that Utah data complex, the fact that they built it, and that it can be observed on Google Maps, holds this profound power over the human imagination, and so we’re all having to catch up really quickly to these magical concepts. Even if they’re not clothed in the language and trappings of magical traditions, we’re being reacquainted with the power of the symbol and the power of ritual, and the sway that an idea has over the population when it becomes harder and harder to verify things beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Erik: You could call it conspiracy thinking, although that gets defined in all sorts of ways, some of which I think are themselves forms of mind-gaming. Either way, we’re in a realm of mind-games, where perception is reality, and where the crafting of perception takes place on multiple levels through multiple agendas. Multiple agents are crafting reality in a more and more overt way, even as we’re technically learning to craft subjective experience more and more. Here we’re getting into the edge of Virtual Reality 2.0. I think that, again, familiarity with these occult or even animist liminal zones will help us navigate through the jungle that we’re in. I mean, I can totally understand why people want to drop out of this thing. Like, fully drop out – whether into criminal underworlds, into darknet trafficking, or whether they go off the grid, or try to monkey-wrench the show. Those desires makes a lot of sense to me. It’s not who I am, it’s not where I am, but I can resonate with that. So, as long as I’m still participating in this network world that we’re sharing, that we’re fabricating, that the machines are fabricating, that we’re sharing with the machines, we have to develop that kind of light step.

You also mentioned a sense of the larger ecological framework that we’re in. As we look at what’s happening with technology, as we try to understand what’s happening with communication and human civilization, it’s impossible to extricate it from this larger ecological condition of crisis and no-going-back. It really feels like what we’re being asked to do, ethically and imaginatively, is to extend our ability to sympathize, to engage with, and even just to leave a space open for that which is outside of us, outside of the human frame, outside of the human story. That Outside may be technology, in the sense of the algorithmic intelligences that are already beginning to swamp our world, as well as the complex institutions and networks that are distributing these things. But that Outside also supports a more ecological and even cosmic view. We’re on a planet, the planet’s changing rapidly, spinning in space. All of those larger views, I think, are what we’re called upon to connect with.

I think one of my greater fears or concerns – I mean, I have so many, but just talking specifically about technology, and how people use it – is that it’s very easy to stay within a kind of human narcissistic world through media, especially social media, and the internet. I see people putting their energy into virtual or technological information circuitry, getting absorbed into a mass-cybernetic web of media, with its transmission of human stories and human perceptions and human egos and identification and projection. The whole game is so absorbing, so seductive, so fascinating, so enervating, that it can drown out our ability to wrestle with the non-human – whether it’s technology, geology, animals, capital flows. We need to become better post-humans, not narcissistic post-humans seeking our pleasure buttons, figuring out the best way to design some kind of crazy experience. That’s great, it’s part of the whole picture, but we have to also really think about what does it mean to live in a profoundly interwoven cosmos that necessarily draws us out of our narrow human egoic frame.

Michael: I totally agree. So, in light of that, I’m really fascinated by what you might have to say on recent developments on the interspecies internet – have you heard much about this? There was a TED talk about it a year or two ago.

Erik: I think I know what you mean. Why don’t you set it up?

Michael: A couple of years ago, Vint Cerf, Peter Gabriel, and a couple other people – dolphin researchers, bonobo researchers, and technologists – came forward at a TED conference to launch the idea that we can get into the sensorium of other animals and understand the way they experience things well enough to create computer interfaces for them that perform something like “Babel Fish” or Google Translate, so that we can communicate – whether it’s through music, symbols, or something else – with some of these other animals that we know have high intelligence and a sense of self.

I was really excited about being a part of this in some way, just throwing my bid into this process, and then I started thinking about how it got more complex. Because, what’s really going on here is that we can scarcely recognize a world beyond ourselves without immediately attempting to colonize it with our technological bid for control. To reference George Dvorsky of io9, there’s something really beautiful in his fascination with animal uplift, and his vision of our ethical responsibility to involve non-human species in the fate of the planet – which is currently being decided by human parliamentary action. The dolphins should get a vote. The gorillas should get a vote. And the only way that they can get a vote is to involve them in the technological infrastructure that we’re creating that is allows us the hope and the opportunity for that Star Trek world government. At the same time, it enfolds them into our own personal and transpersonal nightmare that we just discussed, and ultimately they may not want to participate in our uniquely human breed of insanity.

Erik: Yeah, that’s very well put. You know, we keep stumbling onto this Faustian bargain. It increasingly seems to describe these kinds of situations. There are people who believe that we can design a good enough system where, even despite its flaws, we’re drawing in others to decisions about the best and most ethical thing to do. And at the same time you’re going to have people who are just, like, gagging in their throats. It’s like, after all of the violence we have exerted on the animal world, to do this is the final, most nihilistic violence – to draw them into this madness! And you could have the same discussion about the desire to colonize planets. How could we not get excited about the idea of human beings on Mars or even robots landing on asteroids? It’s just totally fascinating and wonderful, and yet it’s pretty easy to see what that would look like as an industry, and the kinds of problems that would arise in the way that seems stitched into the nature of human beings. Sometime you can almost be Christian about it. It’s a kind of original sin, a way of, like, always fighting and competing and outmaneuvering and exploiting and trying to create elites. All these things that civilization has been doing since the get-go, since we stepped outside of the Paleolithic life and made a pact with writing and social organization, with pyramidical structures. It’s an old, old, old pact, and it’s deeply religious. Our religion is fundamentally bound up with the mythology of the state.

And so, where I stumble now is…where is the state? Is it everywhere? Is it nowhere? Are we at a point where that whole relationship is shifting? Is it worth extending hope into these things, or is it reasonable to say, “Look, we just keep doing the same horrible thing over and over again, so let’s just tear it down.”

Getting back to the specific question about animals, though. I really buy that radical democratic notion in a lot of ways. Turning to the Outside, whether it’s animals or elements of technology or geological forces, is part of what democracy means. Part of the constitution in Ecuador recognizes the rights of nature. Not just nature, but “Pachamama” – and, as people who are interested in medicine work and indigenous worldviews know, Pachamama is a goddess. It’s a way of understanding and relating to the fecund, beneficent giving quality of the earth, in a spiritual light, or a personhood light, or an animist light, whatever you want to call it. And that’s part of the constitution, part of a legal document. The thinking behind that document is, “Look, it’s just extending the idea of rights, which is a modern construct. The notion of inalienable rights emerges at a certain point in Western history, it gets installed into governmental and legal forms. Initially it’s just for white men with property, then it’s just for men, then women get it, then people of color, whatever – you have this spreading of the notion of rights, so that now we are called upon to spread it into the environment as well.” Very tricky, very complicated, very confusing. What does it mean, to give nature a voice? Is “nature”, or Pachamama, even the right word? And at the same time, that seems like a very vital and significant mutation in the operating system of the state. You’ve got to factor in these others, even though exactly how that happens is so difficult to understand. So again, here we go! Plunging into the Faustian bargain!

Michael: It’s very much related to a book that I feel stands in a fun balance with yours. It came out this last year by Christian Schwägerl. It’s called The Anthropocene, and if you haven’t read it I highly recommend the read (editor’s note: Shwägerl has a number of excerpts published on Reality Sandwich). It ignores the mystical dimensions of things. Schwägerl lives in Berlin, and he’s very much operating from a secular, European Union, modern global ecological sensibility. But the whole idea of his book is that the last remaining wild places are, in a sense, artifacts, because they only exist due to the determination of the human hand to preserve them. That there is no real wilderness anymore on our planet, at least in the natural world. Everything is indoors, and we have to find a way to first recognize that the so-called “Human Age” is actually tilting us into this much more profound, complex, and difficult relationship with the non-human world.

But we do have to find a way to express that world in our own language and our own systems – for example, by honoring what he calls “ecosystem services” in our economy, not factoring out that the water cycle, the carbon cycle, and all of these supporting systems that have an order of magnitude greater economic value than anything we’re trading on the stock market. They must be preserved at literally all costs. But he is ethically divided by the question, “Do we have to talk about the rainforest in terms of its monetary value in order to save it?”

Erik: That’s the crux. I’m glad you brought up this topic of wilderness, because I think it’s a good way to reflect on one of the problems we face. On the one hand, we have the wild – what the wild represents, what it means to be wild, what it means to stumble across the wild in your life, We are talking the unknown, the mystery, the chaos, a kind of Dionysian encounter, an intensity that takes you beyond reason, whether it’s experienced in a natural environment or in your head, or in the city. There’s something about wildness that’s profound to human beings. It has a lot to do with what people seek when they’re spiritual seekers, when they’re religious, when they are plumbing the depths. When people question the autonomy or imperial demands of reason, it’s often in the name of some kind of wild – whether it’s the sacred or the archaic or the nonhuman.

At the same time, you can sit down and go, “But this whole idea of wilderness, of natural wilderness, well, it’s a construct, it’s part of the European imagination, and that imagination is over. It’s not doing anyone any good anymore.” Some very serious environmentalists will argue that ideas of wilderness or even “nature” are actually in the way. The argument is that the religious and spiritual ideas about nature that were such an important part of twentieth century environmentalism actually get in the way of the process of introducing these non-human factors into the system in a way that would actually force the system to recognize and negotiate with them, rather than pretending in this abstract, insidious way that they don’t exist. And I don’t know what to do with that tension between these two “wildernesses”. All I know is that it’s incredibly vital in whatever way that we keep a portal open to the wild.

In that sense I’m very different than rationalist people who think we just need to introduce everything into the system – that it has to be drawn into the logic of capital, it has to be commodified, it has to be seen. That the way to deal with pollution is to create carbon debt and to introduce it into the financial system. But that solution is a house of cards. I have a slightly, perhaps darker view that whatever tumult lies ahead, whatever sorts of forms of chaos we confront, whether they’re through a highly developed technological society that manages to keep things going, or whether society is forced to reorganize in the face of a major hiccups and breakdowns, whatever the thing is, the more that we are actually able to handle the wild, the chaos, the unknown, the mystery, the others, the whispers on the edge of our vision, the better we’ll be able to actually navigate that situation on an individual and a cultural level. There is a problem with the rational, reasonable, incorporate-everything logic, with its call to squeeze everything for its monetary value, to quantify everything, to quantify the self. All of that may be fine and well, but only as long as it keeps a space open for those kinds of encounters, for that kind of imagination, for that kind of risk and vulnerability.

But that’s often what doesn’t happen. So, in a way, my work, not just in TechGnosis, but in all the writing and conversations that I’ve done and continue to do is about riding these edges. I just want to keep those portals open, to keep the spaces open, so that people don’t feel like they have to be fools in order to engage these broader ways of seeing the world. That’s why it’s really important to keep those portals, those edges open.

Read more by Erik Davis here.

Read more by Michael Garfield here.

Buddhism and the Brain

Posted on November 22, 2015 by Reid Mukai

Many of Buddhism’s core tenets significantly overlap with findings from modern neurology and neuroscience. So how did Buddhism come close to getting the brain right?

By David Weisman

Source: Seed Magazine

Over the last few decades many Buddhists and quite a few neuroscientists have examined Buddhism and neuroscience, with both groups reporting overlap. I’m sorry to say I have been privately dismissive. One hears this sort of thing all the time, from any religion, and I was sure in this case it would break down upon closer scrutiny. When a scientific discovery seems to support any religious teaching, you can expect members of that religion to become strict empiricists, telling themselves and the world that their belief is grounded in reality. They are always less happy to accept scientific data they feel contradicts their preconceived beliefs. No surprise here; no human likes to be wrong.

But science isn’t supposed to care about preconceived notions. Science, at least good science, tells us about the world as it is, not as some wish it to be. Sometimes what science finds is consistent with a particular religion’s wishes. But usually not.

Despite my doubts, neurology and neuroscience do not appear to profoundly contradict Buddhist thought. Neuroscience tells us the thing we take as our unified mind is an illusion, that our mind is not unified and can barely be said to “exist” at all. Our feeling of unity and control is a post-hoc confabulation and is easily fractured into separate parts. As revealed by scientific inquiry, what we call a mind (or a self, or a soul) is actually something that changes so much and is so uncertain that our pre-scientific language struggles to find meaning.

Buddhists say pretty much the same thing. They believe in an impermanent and illusory self made of shifting parts. They’ve even come up with language to address the problem between perception and belief. Their word for self is anatta, which is usually translated as ‘non self.’ One might try to refer to the self, but the word cleverly reminds one’s self that there is no such thing.

When considering a Buddhist contemplating his soul, one is immediately struck by a disconnect between religious teaching and perception. While meditating in the temple, the self is an illusion. But when the Buddhist goes shopping he feels like we all do: unified, in control, and unchanged from moment to moment. The way things feel becomes suspect. And that’s pretty close to what neurologists deal with every day, like the case of Mr. Logosh.

Mr. Logosh was 37 years old when he suffered a stroke. It was a month after knee surgery and we never found a real reason other than trivially high cholesterol and smoking. Sometimes medicine is like that: bad things happen, seemingly without sufficient reasons. In the ER I found him aphasic, able to understand perfectly but unable to get a single word out, and with no movement of the right face, arm, and leg. We gave him the only treatment available for stroke, tissue plasminogen activator, but there was no improvement. He went to the ICU unchanged. A follow up CT scan showed that the dead brain tissue had filled up with blood. As the body digested the dead brain tissue, later scans showed a large hole in the left hemisphere.

Although I despaired, I comforted myself by looking at the overlying cortex. Here the damage was minimal and many neurons still survived. Still, I mostly despaired. It is a tragedy for an 80-year-old to spend life’s remainder as an aphasic hemiplegic. The tragedy grows when a young man looks towards decades of mute immobility. But you can never tell with early brain injuries to the young. I was yoked to optimism. After all, I’d treated him.

The next day Mr. Logosh woke up and started talking. Not much at first, just ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ Then ‘water,’ ‘thanks,’ ‘sure,’ and ‘me.’ We eventually sent him to rehab, barely able to speak, still able to understand.

One year later he came back to the office with an odd request. He was applying to become a driver and needed my clearance, which was a formality. He walked with only a slight limp, his right foot a bit unsure of itself. His voice had a slight hitch, as though he were choosing his words carefully.

When we consider our language, it seems unified and indivisible. We hear a word, attach meaning to it, and use other words to reply. It’s effortless. It seems part of the same unified language sphere. How easily we are tricked! Mr. Logosh shows us that unity of language is an illusion. The seeming unity of language is really the work of different parts of the brain, which shift and change over time, and which fracture into receptive and expressive parts.

Consider how easily Buddhism accepts what happened to Mr. Logosh. Anatta is not a unified, unchanging self. It is more like a concert, constantly changing emotions, perceptions, and thoughts. Our minds are fragmented and impermanent. A change occurred in the band, so it follows that one expects a change in the music.

Both Buddhism and neuroscience converge on a similar point of view: The way it feels isn’t how it is. There is no permanent, constant soul in the background. Even our language about ourselves is to be distrusted (requiring the tortured negation of anatta). In the broadest strokes then, neuroscience and Buddhism agree.

How did Buddhism get so much right? I speak here as an outsider, but it seems to me that Buddhism started with a bit of empiricism. Perhaps the founders of Buddhism were pre-scientific, but they did use empirical data. They noted the natural world: the sun sets, the wind blows into a field, one insect eats another. There is constant change, shifting parts, and impermanence. They called this impermanence anicca, and it forms a central dogma of Buddhism.

This seems appropriate as far as the natural world is concerned. Buddhists don’t apply this notion to mathematical truths or moral certainties, but sometimes, cleverly, apply it to their own dogmas. Buddhism has had millennia to work out seeming contradictions, and it is only someone who was not indoctrinated who finds any of it strange. (Or at least any stranger than, say, believing God literally breathed a soul into the first human.)

Early on, Buddhism grasped the nature of worldly change and divided parts, and then applied it to the human mind. The key step was overcoming egocentrism and recognizing the connection between the world and humans. We are part of the natural world; its processes apply themselves equally to rocks, trees, insects, and humans. Perhaps building on its heritage, early Buddhism simply did not allow room for human exceptionalism.

I should note my refusal to accept that they simply got this much right by accident, which I find improbable. Why would accident bring them to such a counterintuitive belief? Truth from subjective religious rapture is also highly suspect. Firstly, those who enter religious raptures tend to see what they already know. Secondly, if the self is an illusion, then aren’t subjective insights from meditation illusory as well?

I don’t mean to dismiss or gloss over the areas where Buddhism and neuroscience diverge. Some Buddhist dogmas deviate from what we know about the brain. Buddhism posits an immaterial thing that survives the brain’s death and is reincarnated. After a person’s death, the consciousness reincarnates. If you buy into the idea of a constantly changing immaterial soul, this isn’t as tricky and insane as it seems to the non-indoctrinated. During life, consciousness changes as mental states replace one another, so each moment can be considered a reincarnation from the moment before. The waves lap, the sand shifts. If you’re good, they might one day lap upon a nicer beach, a higher plane of existence. If you’re not, well, someone’s waves need to supply the baseline awareness of insects, worms, and other creepy-crawlies.

The problem is that there’s no evidence for an immaterial thing that gets reincarnated after death. In fact, there’s even evidence against it. Reincarnation would require an entity (even the vague, impermanent one called anatta) to exist independently of brain function. But brain function has been so closely tied to every mental function (every bit of consciousness, perception, emotion, everything self and non-self about you) that there appears to be no remainder. Reincarnation is not a trivial part of most forms of Buddhism. For example, the Dalai Lama’s followers chose him because they believe him to be the living reincarnation of a long line of respected teachers.

Why have the dominant Western religious traditions gotten their permanent, independent souls so wrong? Taking note of change was not limited to Buddhism. The same sort of thinking pops up in Western thought as well. The pre-Socratic Heraclitus said, “Nothing endures but change.” But that observation didn’t really go anywhere. It wasn’t adopted by monotheistic religions or held up as a central natural truth. Instead, pure Platonic ideals won out, perhaps because they seemed more divine.

Western thought is hardly monolithic or simple, but monotheistic religions made a simple misstep when they didn’t apply naturalism to themselves and their notions of their souls. Time and again, their prominent scholars and philosophers rendered the human soul exceptional and otherworldly, falsely elevating our species above and beyond nature. We see the effects today. When Judeo-Christian belief conflicts with science, it nearly always concerns science removing humans from a putative pedestal, a central place in creation. Yet science has shown us that we reside on the fringes of our galaxy, which itself doesn’t seem to hold a particularly precious location in the universe. Our species came from common ape-like ancestors, many of which in all likelihood possessed brains capable of experiencing and manifesting some of our most precious “human” sentiments and traits. Our own brains produce the thing we call a mind, which is not a soul. Human exceptionalism increasingly seems a vain fantasy. In its modest rejection of that vanity, Buddhism exhibits less error and less original sin, this one of pride.

How well will any religion apply the lessons of neuroscience to the soul? Mr. Logosh, like every person who’s brain lesion changes their mind, challenges the Western religions. An immaterial soul cannot easily account for even a stroke associated with aphasia. Will monotheistic religions change their idea of the soul to accommodate data? Will they even try? It is doubtful. The rigid human exceptionalism is cemented firmly into dogma.

Will Buddhists allow neuroscience to render their idea of reincarnation obsolete? This is akin to asking if the Dalai Lama and his followers will decide he’s only the symbolic reincarnation of past teachers. This is also doubtful, but Buddhism’s first steps at least made it possible. Unrelated to neuroscience and neurology, in 1969 the Dalai Lama said his “office was an institution created to benefit others. It is possible that it will soon have outlived its usefulness.” Impermanence and shifting parts entail constant change, so perhaps it is no surprise that he’s lately said he may choose the next office holder before his death.

Buddhism’s success was to apply the world’s impermanence to humans and their souls. The results have carried this religion from ancient antiquity into modernity, an impressive distance. With no fear of impermanent beliefs or constant change, how far will they go?

Catalyzing the Shamanic Archetype

Posted on November 1, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Paul Levy

Source: Reality Sandwich

The following is excerpted from Awakened By Darkness: When Evil Becomes Your Father.

Spiritual awakenings oftentimes get precipitated by experiences of wounding, abuse and trauma, which is to say that in a genuine spiritual awakening there is often a co-joining of healthy and pathological factors. The idea is to nourish the healthy aspects of the process so that they become stronger, while allowing the pathological factors to naturally fall away as they become integrated into the wholeness of the newly emerging psyche. To quote the great Hindu saint Ramakrishna, “How to get rid of the lower self? The blossom vanishes of itself as the fruit grows, so will your lower self vanish as the divine grows in you.”

Being wounded almost always initiates and catalyzes the “shamanic archetype” to begin to form-ulate and crystallize itself in the unconscious. Shamanism is the root from which humanity’s various spiritual disciplines have issued; the earliest origins of modern psychotherapy known to history lie in archaic shamanism. When the shamanic archetype is activated, it precipitates a deeper part of the psyche to become mobilized, as people enacting the shamanic archetype journey deep inside themselves, flying on the wings of their creative imagination to become familiar with and address what has gotten activated within them. The shamanic archetype becomes catalyzed in us by a severe emotional and spiritual crisis, oftentimes organically growing out of unresolved abuse issues from childhood—this was certainly true for me.

The shamanic archetype is one of the major processes currently animated in the collective psyche of our species. We’d have to be truly “disturbed” if our emotions aren’t disturbed by the diabolic and dark shadow forces playing out their polarizing, manipulative and exploitive agendas in our world. How we hold what has gotten triggered within us as we both witness and participate in these distressing dramas determines whether the latent shamanic archetype within us manifests in service of our—and our planet’s—healing or not. Just as dreams are the unconscious’s way of balancing a one-sidedness in an individual’s psyche, the shamanic archetype is the dynamically evolving pattern of healing that is being constellated in the collective unconscious as a compensatory response to the trauma and abuse playing itself out on the world stage.

A person would never—if they were in their right mind—choose to be a shaman. It’s not the sort of thing that someone takes a weekend workshop or a class and then becomes a shaman. Becoming a shaman is a vocation, which is to say that it is something one is “called” to do; this calling is typically conceived of as coming from the spirits, i.e., from an autonomous spiritual factor deep within the psyche. Etymologically, the word “calling” has to do with hearing a voice—the voice of the other within ourselves—with which, like a living person, we develop an ongoing and deepening relationship. This inner figure has from time immemorial been referred to by a multiplicity of names—our muse, ally, guiding spirit, angel, genius and daemon, to name but a few. Attracting many names to itself is typical of something numinous; one name doesn’t quite “do it.”

If it is a true calling and we resist, however, we can fall ill, go crazy or even die; the point is that the stakes are high, and being called to shamanize is something to take seriously. It necessarily involves making a descent into the underworld of the unconscious—into the netherworld of the shadow—where we have to confront our own dark side and madness; this is why in a shamanic initiatory experience, the potential shaman looks like they’re having a psychotic break. A Siberian shaman reminds us, “If you find the spirit of madness, you will begin to shamanize.” Becoming a shaman is not for the faint of heart; the initiate typically has to go through a death experience, whose other side, if all goes well, is rebirth. The suffering involved—which is actually a purification—is intense. Speaking of what he calls “shamanic suffering,” Holger Kalweit, author of Dreamtime and Inner Space: The World of the Shaman, writes that the suffering a potential shaman goes through is “a suffering intense enough to kill.” I can totally relate; after the abuse from my father, it was as if the doors of my unconscious opened up, unleashing formidable energies that easily could have killed me.

A key part of the shaman’s initiation is to come to terms with evil. Mircea Eliade refers to shamans as “pre-eminently the antidemonic champions; they combat not only demons [who Eliade refers to as “the true enemies of humanity”] and disease, but also black magicians…. What is fundamental and universal is the shaman’s struggle against what we could call ‘the powers of evil.’” In my life, my encounter with the evil that came through both my father and psychiatry were the forms that my descent into the underworld took; if I hadn’t re-contextualized these experiences as being part of a deeper shamanic initiatory process, I would have been stuck in and personally identified with these experiences in their literal rather than symbolic form, possibly for the rest of my life, which would have been truly tragic. Von Franz wrote, “The symbolic inner experiences which the Shaman lives through during his period of initiation are identical with the symbolic experiences the man of today lives through during the individuation process…curing the soul of individuals and collective states of possession is really the principal task of the Shaman.” The mission of the shaman is to heal—both individually and collectively—the state of possession by unconscious psychic forces of the members of their community, as well as the community as a whole.

In indigenous, shamanic communities, the role of the shaman does not exist in isolation, but as a role that the community collaboratively dreams up for the health and sanity of the wider community. The role of the shaman is relational in nature—only taking on its meaning in relation to others as well as the surrounding environment—not something that exists independent of the field in which the shaman lives. Being a role in the field, in the ideal sense the position of shaman need not be monopolized by or restricted to one person; a shaman is a role that any and everyone can pick up as we become more creative and fluid within ourselves. In a genuinely healthy community, roles are very fluid, which is to say—in a form of “collective shamanism”—the role of the shaman can potentially be played out at various times by each of its members. Because the role is being shared by all of its members, different people can play the shamanic role without necessarily having to descend into the depths of hell; they are required, however, to self-reflectively deal with how their own unconscious darkness is contributing to the collective shadow that is getting dreamed up in and through the community.

We are all potentially “shamans-in-training,” in the sense that we are all being called—both individually and collectively—to deal with the darkness that seems to be ruling our world. The formless archetype of the shaman/healer is thirsting for sentient instruments to express and actualize itself in embodied form. Recognizing, and saying “Yes” to the deeper shamanic calling that is pulsing through our veins inspires us to breathe life into and incarnate the figure of the shaman who lives within us. We are being invited by the universe to step into our shamanic “garments” and consciously participate in our own evolution. Instead of our ritual implements being drums and rattles, however, as “modern-day shamans” our accessories might be something like the keyboard of a computer or the tools of multi-media, as we work to inspire change in the underlying consciousness of the field by a keystroke or the creative use of a video camera or website. Co-operating with our deeper shamanic calling constellates the universe to support us in our endeavor, as the universe itself is the sponsor of our calling. Assenting to our calling gets us “in-phase” with ourselves such that we become our own best ally.

The psyche is easily dissociable; due to trauma it can readily fragment into seemingly separate parts. Being wounded creates a dissociation in us, in the sense that we dis-associate from and lose connection with parts of ourselves. People of shamanic temperament, however, are able to turn the psyche’s natural ability to dissociate to their advantage. They are able to purposely dissociate, which is very different from the unconscious pathology of dissociative disorder. The shaman’s ability to dissociate, and fluidly travel between different reference points within themselves helps them to re-member their dis-membered selves, as well as to retrieve the split-off, and hence unconscious, soul of the community.

A shaman often suffers from the plight of their people. Due to their “standing” at the gateway between the conscious and unconscious aspects of their own mind as well as the community at large, they are able—like a healing enzyme—to act as agents transforming and raising unconscious contents into conscious awareness, making these contents available to the community. I think of Jung—a deeply shamanic personality—who was afflicted with dreams and visions of bloodbaths and catastrophes in Europe which he wasn’t able to understand until soon thereafter the First World War broke out, and he realized that his personal experiences reflected the collective situation that was brewing in the cauldron of humanity’s unconscious.

People going through a spiritual awakening/shamanic initiation find themselves, as if living in an archetypal fairy tale, inhabiting a deeper mythic realm where everything that happens is in-fused with deeper meaning. This deeper meaning doesn’t come from outside of us; we are the arbiters of meaning—“meaning-generators.” Instead of being mute and having no say in things, our world is always speaking to us symbolically, speaking “through” things (so to speak); this can take a little while to interpret, integrate and to learn to navigate. The goal is to bring together the two worlds so that we can fluidly travel between the everyday world of ordinary reality and the deeper mythological, symbolic realm, a dimension which is always having its say—the question is whether we recognize what is being said. This is analogous to having a fluid back and forth, give and take relationship between the conscious and unconscious minds within ourselves.

A key part of the shaman’s vocation is to be able to “see” the spirits, which is to be able to recognize and develop relationship with the forces of the unconscious. Wetiko can be thought of as having its own spirit; this is why I am continually pointing out the importance of “seeing” how this spirit operates—out in the world, through others, via our relationships and within our own mind. Seeing “the spirits,” which von Franz points out is today simply called “the unconscious” takes away their autonomy and seeming power over us, while expanding the light of our consciousness in the service of individuation. The more individuated we become, the wider is our consciousness of the realm of the unconscious which spreads out before us in, as and through the world. To wake up to the dreamlike nature of reality is to realize that we are surrounded on all sides by the unconscious; dreams themselves are the unmediated expression of the unconscious. The process of becoming conscious doesn’t banish the unconscious, but rather, aids us in developing the trust to give ourselves over to it time and again, thereby learning how to receive its gifts of wisdom. When we shed light on the darkness of the unconscious, it’s not that all of its contents become illumined; rather, there becomes a more permeable boundary for the unconscious contents to emerge into consciousness, as well as for consciousness to step into the world of the unconscious.

The shaman is akin to and a kin of the figure of the artist. To quote anthropologist Carlton Coon, “Whatever else he may be, the shaman is a gifted artist.” Mythologist Joseph Campbell draws a parallel between artists and ancient shamans when, speaking about modern artists, he says that “the whole unconscious has opened up and they fall into it.” We continually deepen our individuation only insofar as we don’t cling to our conscious experience, but allow ourselves to submerge into the depths of the unconscious however and wherever it shows up, trusting that we will be able to creatively express—and hence, become conscious of—what is moving us. As Jung points out, “The unconscious no sooner touches us than we are it—we become unconscious of ourselves.” This ongoing dynamic of falling into and giving shape and form to the unconscious, then stepping out of and contemplating what has just come through us—going back and forth between the subjective and objective domains—furthers our realization of the unconscious, both within ourselves and in the world at large. Through this process, the shamanically-oriented person is adding consciousness to and assimilating the unconscious in the field, while simultaneously metabolizing the unconscious parts of themselves that have been activated.

The shamanic personality’s ability to fluidly navigate back and forth between the conscious mind and the deep waters of the unconscious contrasts with people who fall into their unconscious and, unfortunately, become overwhelmed by the experience, losing both the ability to creatively express their experience, as well as their sense of self. The shaman learns to swim, surf and snorkel in the waters of the unconscious while the failed shaman, whatever label we call them by (schizophrenic, bi-polar, etc.), drowns in the depth of its waters. This is why it is profoundly important, as Jung realized, to have a strongly developed sense of ego when we encounter these deeper, more powerful realms, for if we don’t we can easily get swallowed up and lose ourselves. We need a strong sense of self in order to get in relationship with these powerful energies.

As the shaman travels between the worlds of the conscious and the unconscious, the boundary between these two worlds becomes more permeable. There is no clear demarcation point between the conscious and the unconscious; an un-boundaried continuum, one starts where the other leaves off. In their journey, shamans create a bridge so that the conscious mind and the unconscious can more easily pass between, influence and illumine each other, which transfigures everything. Over time these two seemingly opposite realms begin to become indistinguishable from and turn into each other, while at the same time, paradoxically, becoming more distinct from each other. Inseparably and reciprocally co-arising in their interaction, both the conscious and unconscious minds are dynamically contained within the wider totality of psyche.

The psyche is simultaneously “historical”—in the sense that its development can only be understood in the context of its personal and collective past—and “trans-historical,” which is to say that the psyche atemporally abides outside of linear time, yet simultaneously generates events experienced by humans in historical time. Though within its very structure is written the whole history of humanity, the psyche is at the same time teleological, in that it is purposeful, seeking its own actualization. Jung writes, “Anything psychic is Janus-faced: it looks both backwards and forwards.” The psyche is like a pivot through which, both on the individual and collective levels, we choose either to look backwards and re-create the unhealed past, or step into consciously participating in our own creative future evolution in the present. In a spiritual awakening/shamanic initiation, it is as if we are connecting with a healed, whole and awake part of us that, atemporally speaking—outside of linear time—has always existed. We begin to cooperate with and surrender to a deeper impulse within us, as if we are allowing ourselves to be drawn into the strange attractor that is ourselves, a process which can only take place in the present moment. By becoming aware of and stepping into this higher-dimensional part of ourselves, we are attracting this particular part of ourselves, with its corresponding universe, into materialization; this is the sacred power of dreaming.

This seemingly bi-polar process of oscillating between the polarities of the conscious and the unconscious is an apt description of the shaman’s journey between the worlds. As this process unfolds in and over time, a center or mid-point emerges, which contains, embraces and unites the opposites: this is, in Jung’s language, “the Self.” The Self is an expression of the intrinsic wholeness within us, a wholeness which already exists but is paradoxically brought forth into consciousness via this process of collaboration with the unconscious. At points this descent can be experienced as if we are just recursively playing out our unhealed abuse issues (the iteratio stage of alchemy), but is in actuality a deepening descent down a spiral, a circumambulation which ultimately illumines the center point—the Self. Transforming consciousness, the Self acts like a magnet, attracting to itself that which is proper to it. Jung comments, “We can hardly escape the feeling that the unconscious process moves spiral-wise round a center, gradually getting closer, while the characteristics of the center grow more and more distinct. Or perhaps we could put it the other way round and say that the center—itself virtually unknowable—acts like a magnet on the disparate materials and processes of the unconscious and gradually captures them as in a crystal lattice…. Often one has the impression that the personal psyche is running around this central point like a shy animal, at once fascinated and frightened, always in flight, and yet steadily drawing nearer.”

As the shaman’s accomplishment deepens, they are able to tap into and participate in the primordial, timeless source of creativity itself. A person’s ability to heal and facilitate healing for others depends upon their ability to link to the larger world of the “pleroma” (a field of abundant potential, boundless luminosity and creativity, and infinite sentience). Approaching the numinosity of the pleroma is therapeutic at its core—what Jung calls “the real therapy”—as it releases us from what he calls “the curse of pathology.” Connecting with this more expanded perspective within us alchemically transforms what seemed to be pathological into something expressing and leading us closer to the numinosum.

Archetypally, shamans take on and into themselves the illness of those they are working with, falling ill themselves. As a result of the abuse from my father, I feel like I have been sick for years, suffering under the burden of a shamanic sickness. The wetiko bug that used my father to get into me has activated my psychic immune system to go into overdrive to deal with this toxic invader. I have “taken on” my father’s pathology, which carries a double meaning: to “take on” means to confront, as well as to take within myself (so as to suffer with). I’ve been slowly transmuting the virulence of the wetiko germ that I “caught” from my father; this book is my latest attempt to shed light on—and “make light” (of)—what has gotten triggered within me. What makes a shaman an accomplished shaman, however, is that they are somehow able to work with and metabolize the illness, integrating it into the wholeness of their being and subsequently finding their way back to health; this process nonlocally helps the person(s) who were originally ill. In addition, this helps the whole universe, by eliminating that personalized quanta of sickness from the collective field—“lightening” the shadow in the collective unconscious ever so slightly.

I am in no way claiming that I am an accomplished shaman—this is true only in my wildest dreams—but what I am saying is that the archetype of the shaman—which is related to the archetype of the wounded healer—is one of the deeper processes that has shaped and given meaning to the experiences in my life. In addition, the shamanic archetype is one of the fundamental underlying patterns that is informing all of our processes, both individually and collectively, as a species. Humanity as a whole is going through a profound shamanic initiation of epic proportions, writ large on the world stage as well as within each of our hearts and minds. When we realize this, we can connect with each other so as to collaboratively help each other successfully pass through our shared ordeal. What a radical idea!

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After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Tag Archives: Consciousness

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The Preparation

First Things First

The Inner Child

A Time to Draw Together

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Letting Go

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