A Guide to the Perplexed Interdimensional Traveler::
A Guide to the Perplexed Interdimensional
Traveler
©
2003, 2008 Jonathan Zap
An Invitation to You, the Interdimensional Traveler
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Interdimensional Passport collage © by Jonathan Zap
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Interdimensional Traveler collage © Jonathan Zap
This invitation is extended to you, the Interdimensional Traveler. Do you still doubt that this is what you are? Do you still believe the lie that you are only a citizen, a consumer, a gendered role-player in the soap opera/horror story known as the Babylon Matrix? Or have you already glimpsed that you emerged at birth from another dimension, and hurtle inexorably toward the event horizon popularly known as death — the emergence into another dimension? If these poles of incarnation seem distant, then wait a few hours till darkness falls and you become tired, sleepy. Lie down on a mattress, futon or sleeping bag and wait… Wait for the portal that opens for you nearly every day when the waking nightmare of the Babylon Matrix dissolves and you emerge, whether you wish it or not, into the other guaranteed dimension of all mammal incarnation — the dreamtime…
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black and white photo of Parallel Journeys collage © Jonathan Zap
Do you bother to remember this other dimension of your incarnation, or is the Babylon Matrix enough for you? Remembered or not, the daily rhythm of interdimensional displacement is fundamental to your existence like the systole and diastole of your heart rhythm, and your incarnation must oscillate between waking matrix and dreamtime or else unravel into madness. Interdimensional traveling is more fundamental to your existence than your heartbeat, because one day your heart will stop beating, but you’ll still be an interdimensional traveler.
Proof that you are an Interdimensional Traveler
And has no one ever told you the basic “facts of life” that to look into another’s eyes is to witness beacons from another dimension flashing across the night of time? Did you believe the Babylon Matrix lie that other entities were hottie objects with which you could have “casual sex” (dumbest of dumb oxymorons)? Didn’t you know that intimacy with the other is an impingement, an interpenetration, a merging of dimensions with consequences of cosmic proportions? Didn’t you realize that all relationship is interdimensional travel?
And have you not heard the poet/songwriter who sang that, “He who’s not busy being born, is busy dying?”
If you are passively, complacently adrift in the shifting tide of these dimensions then this invitation is not for you. If you are committed from the depths of your being to consciousness, non-harmfulness, compassion, empowered interdimensional travel and are busy being born, then this invitation is for you, an invitation to a secret room created by a fellow traveler. But before invitation, a question…
Who are You?
WHO ARE YOU? Are you a flower? Are you a tree?
Who are you? Who are you? Who are you?
Are you a snake? Are you a bird? Are you a fish?
Who are you? Who are you? Who are you?
Are you a monkey? Are you a pig? Are you a meat puppet?
Who are you? Who are you? Who are you?
Are you a mutant?
Are you a metamorphosing being seeking through your own transformation to catalyze the metamorphosis of this whole dark, distorted realm?
If you are, then your name is engraved on this invitation in antiqued gold… if you are. If you are, then this secret room is dedicated to you.
The Babylon Matrix
But if you are not…
If you are an Agent of the Babylon Matrix, if you are a reptile-brained meat puppet programmed for territorial aggression. If you are an angel card carrying New Ager willing to try anything so long as it doesn’t work. If you are sheep or carnivore, mechanical spawn of the dark puppet matrix. If you are, then even this antidedication is not for you.
Babylon Matrix, you poisonous, parasitic lattice of anti-life decrees, territorial aggression and evil hegemony of dominator primates, you far from equilibrium toxic patriarchy hurtling toward the strange attractor of quantum evolutionary change, you suffocating cocoon of shrinking parasite-ridden medieval leather bristling with the claws and stingers of puppet-headed warlike primates. You, Babylon Matrix, your darkness has metastasized through the skull shadows of our long descent into history. But your Gregorian days are numbered…
The Looking Glass of Ones and Zeros
Shimmering on the event horizon of this troubled species are living visions of metamorphosis, a metamorphosis that has already begun, sprouting upward from mutant psyches who rebel from gender stereotypes, fundamentalisms and territorial aggression, prohibitions against plants and spirit medicines, degradations of individual will and mutant eros, soulless consumerism and environmental destruction, religious and industrial programs of mind control, dominator/zero tolerance whip hands and bludgeons of strutting, reptile-brained politicians, mustachioed police-puppets, faceless government officials and bureaucrats.
This secret room is a sanctuary devoted to the mutants, the perplexed interdimensional travelers incarnating temporarily into the Babylon Matrix, but not of the Babylon Matrix, who seek greener worlds than these, who seek metamorphosis and the eruption of love/life/light/novelty/creativity into the dark coagulation of reptile-brained puppet magic.
In this secret room are glimpses, alchemical probes passed through a glass darkly beyond the acrid smoke fires of the decaying Babylon Matrix and into the event horizon, the approaching iridescent portal to other worlds than these…
These are the glimpses of one mutant, Jonathan Zap, but they are cast out into the expanding web of zeros and ones to fellow mutants, to fellow perplexed interdimensional travelers seeking companionship and transformation.
This room is still under initial construction and in the next few months will grow until it houses a lifetime’s work (in the form of words and images), a life time’s work glimpsing and probing into and beyond the Babylon Matrix and other worlds than these.[1]
Some of what’s in this room may become a book whose expanding title is (at this moment) — Casting Precious into the Cracks of Doom and the Fall of the Babylon Matrix (subtitled:) Urgent Messages of Metamorphosis from the Mythologies of our Time and a Guide to the Perplexed Interdimensional Traveler. And if this is too long and mutagenic a title to be published on the reconstituted hides of slaughtered trees, then it will gradually become an object of zeros and ones on the shelf of this room, an artifact of an ambitious and obviously narcissistic mutant trying to revolutionize my universe while writing from the edge of a free campground near Ione, Washington.
Although the fellow primates camped about me do not know of the messages I scribble here, and probably would not comprehend or sympathize, this work is not done in isolation because scattered out there somewhere are other mutants peering out of the…
[As I write this a butterfly, reddish-orange and delicately veined with black, lands on my right wrist, my writing hand, and remains there despite my movement for an improbably long time, seeming to my mind a living portent of hope and metamorphosis.]
…somewhere there are other mutants peering out of the widening cracks in the Babylon Matrix looking for the secret rooms, the portals, the fellow travelers… somewhere other eyes are gazing into the looking glass of zeros and ones, that cybernetic palantir so globed and multifaceted that even the evil eye of the Carnivore[2] cannot encompass its ever-changing depths. Somewhere there are other mutants, looking with the eyes of hungry tigers for those openings into other worlds than these…
You are the ones I call out to from the edge of the campground because this is the time when the individual, isolated mutants, like scattered embers glowing in the cold, dark forest need to gather together to create a blaze of many colors, the radiance of which will reach out to the four corners of this richly chaotic realm…
Casting Seeds and Emails
Jesus said (I’m paraphrasing) that if you cast seeds (or emails) out into the world, that some would be eaten by crows or spam filters, some would be deleted by the jaded, the bored, the busy, some would be gobbled by swine, choking on pearly vomit, sliding to nowhere on a purchased staircase to New Age heaven, but some few would be received into the fertile minds of actual mutants and propagate. If you are one of these then please propagate this forward to any mutants on your email list[3]. And if you are a mutant who has received this invitation as a forward (please continue the forward propagation) and would like to be on my email mailing list, please contact me at jonathanzap@hotmail.com and put “subscription” in the subject heading. And if you want to visit the secret room, look for it at zaporacle.com.
Most of all don’t forget to overthrow the Babylon Matrix which does not necessarily require armed insurrection or battling artificially intelligent machines in a charred, post apocalyptic radioactive wasteland (unless you’re into that sort of thing and are really good at it). All it requires is that you follow your own highly individual path.
…Since it is now a new morning here at the Box Creek Canyon free campground near Ione, Washington and fellow campers — sixtyish folk caravanning in unstylish RVs — but salt of the earth good people (if not exactly mutants) — have given me strong coffee — I’m feeling a caffeinated expansive urge to tell you somewhat of the basics I’ve learned about following the path of the Interdimensional Traveler and will also throw in the Secret of Life.
On the other hand, I’m well aware that I’ve already exceeded the expected length (and density of content) of the email format by several thousand percent before I even decided to add a whole new section on the path of the Interdimensional Traveler. I’ll leave it to you to decide if you want to peruse this in one sitting or if you need to take a break, go back out into the Babylon Matrix and battle artificially intelligent machines in a charred, post apocalyptic radioactive wasteland (or whatever else you do to recharge your batteries) and tackle this later. But my goal here is to tell you in a few succinct paragraphs what I think the secret of human incarnation is and how to follow the path of the Interdimensional Traveler.
And since the strong coffee of sixtyish, salt of the earth, unstylish RV caravanning people is a stimulant, but not exactly an hallucinogen, the following will hopefully be grounded, practical and serviceable principles for the interdimensional traveler to keep as a hard copy near the top of their backpacks.
The Secret of Life
In the Sixties, aspiring young travelers set out to “look for the meaning of life.” Unfortunately, as someone once pointed out, they got the question backwards, because it is life that asks you in a challenging tone: “What is your meaning?” and you had better be able to supply the answer. Meaningfulness is what we need far more than survival; and anyway, as Don Juan put it, “There are no survivors on this earth.” Or, as a wise older man once told me, “Don’t do anything you won’t remember well on your death bed.” — a razor sharp way to cut out the trivia and superficialities to get at the meaningful marrow of life. Concentration camp survivor/existential psychologist Victor Frankel created a whole school of psychology (Logotherapy) based on the innate drive for meaningfulness[4]. The ones who could psychologically/spiritually survive the camps, Frankel observed first hand, were the few who could find meaningfulness in their experience.
A frequent theme reported by those who have had transcendent near death experiences is a revelation of a deep and unexpected meaningfulness in even the mosaic of small, seemingly unconnected experiences of life. Also revealed during many NDEs and other mystical epiphanies is that this plane of existence is something like a school where we signed on for extremely challenging learning experiences. This brings me to what I believe are the two sides of the “Secret of Life” magic coin.
The first side is self-development — to grow, develop, evolve, become more self aware and conscious in every way possible yourself. The other side of the magic coin is to help others, especially with the above. There it is, the secret of life. And notice that, unlike so many other things in life, this magic coin is always available.
But don’t take my word for it, go to the East and seek out a guru (who will probably hit on you and want you to sweep up around the ashram for twenty years), do whatever you have to do, but this is the secret of life that works for me and feels solid. And if you think, not unreasonably, that the point of view of a mutant living at the edge of a free campground is open to question (which it certainly is) I would also like to point out that the life stance I am espousing here is not my original fabrication (much though my narcissism might want to take credit for it), but is largely based on my twenty-five year study and practical application of the I Ching, the five to six thousand year old Book of Changes, on which Taoism (and much of Eastern philosophy, martial arts, medicine and culture) is based. And the I Ching doesn’t want you to have faith in it (uncritical belief) or doubt, but recommends an open, neutral stance. Take what resonates with your inner truth sense, what works for you, and leave the rest.
Returning to the two sides of our secret of life coin, notice that self-development and helping others are two sides of a single, integrated whole. But the first side, self-development, is the foundation, and it is only by developing yourself that you have the option and capability to help others with their development.
In fact, from the point of view of the I Ching, you have only one obligation in life, which is to get your relationship to yourself right. Fulfill that obligation and your relationships to others, to time, to change, to the universe will take care of themselves. But neglect or distort any part of your relationship to yourself and all these other relationships will accordingly be distorted and diminished.
Grasping for the Hottie
At the heart of healthful relationship to yourself is a stance
known as “inner independence.” You (but not necessarily your ego) are the
center of your own vortex, your own ever-changing equilibrium. Whenever you
fall into dependence — grasping for Precious like a hungry ring wraith, your
center collapses and you become an enslaved ring wraith of the Babylon Matrix.
A classic example of this is grasping for the “hottie” — that all attractive
person out there burning holes in your mind like Sauron’s one ring to bind them
all. Quentin Crisp put it this way:
“The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole
life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of
searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely
in moving toward self-sufficiency.”
Codependence or inner independence? The first step on the path of seeking
another to complete you is a supreme betrayal (the betrayal of your own soul)
so don’t be surprised if betrayal remains a central theme of that path.[5]
The Inner Marriage of Yin and Yang
Getting your relationship to yourself right means working to evolve the inner marriage of yin and yang, feminine and masculine within yourself. Get that right and as a whole person you have the ability to have spiritually transforming, life-affirming relationships. Look to another person to complete you and you become a wraith forever grasping for a Precious that forever eludes your grasp. And of course Precious doesn’t have to be a hottie person, it can be consumer goods, money, power, career, or whatever the Babylon Matrix can tempt you with that you believe you can’t live with out. But I particularly mention the hottie because this ravenous craving, which most of us know so well, is a pillar of the Babylon Matrix. In Plato's Symposium, Aristophanes states that before we were in our present, gender specific bodies we were spherical beings containing both genders. Jealous gods, wishing to punish and disempower us, fractured our spherical bodies so that we would lose touch with our androgynous inner wholeness. In this weakened state we were easily conditioned to follow gender stereotypes which reinforced the ravenous delusion that we needed sexual/romantic union with others to complete ourselves. Break the power of that ancient ruling ring (which in the darkness binds you) and you reclaim your own center of power, self-actualization and ability to love others as a whole person.[6]
Meeting Halfway — The Touchstone for Relationship
At the center of relating well to others, cautiously moving outward from your center of inner independence, is the I Ching principle of meeting halfway (Hexagram 44)[7]. Less than halfway would be, for example, to neglect others to whom we are connected by inner ties. More than halfway would be, for example, giving unasked for advice, proselytizing, self important intervening, life-guarding others, etc. So if you go to a party and see someone you’re attracted to, but you’re so shy that you hide in a corner and never approach them, then you have met less than halfway. Hitting on them (without some obvious encouragement from the other) would be meeting way more than halfway.
Even in the course of a conversation one needs to apply this principle of meeting halfway by keeping attuned to the moment, aware of the subtle minutiae of openings and closing in the other person. With the openings we advance, with the closings we retreat and yield space.
When the other transgresses, invades boundaries or comes at us with false personality, we should never go along with it, should never do anything that compromises our inner dignity. We should withdraw energy from the person who is coming from their false self. This can mean anything from breaking eye contact (a withdrawal of energy), ending the conversation, or in some cases, going our own way for a lifetime. When we do withdraw we should do so lovingly, giving the other space to come to their senses on their own. We do not, in I Ching terms, “execute” them in our minds, which would be to view them as hopeless and unable to improve. This would only help to keep them imprisoned by doubt. We also don’t indulge excessive optimism that assumes they will become more conscious in this lifetime, or that extends trust where it is being abused. We step back to allow the creative to take its zigzag course. And for our own sake, as well as the others, we try not to carry “lawsuits” or ongoing grudges against someone. From the I Ching point of view, we are responsible not only for what we say or do to the other, but also for our thoughts, because these are communicated on the inner plane.
Psychic Filters and Inner Voices
Speaking of our thoughts, we need to watch them constantly. (I’ve decided to surrender to the nonlinear and let intuition zigzag between interpersonal and intrapsychic principles.) We need to recognize that different voices, often generated by distinct subpersonalities, speak in our heads, and we need a central, witness personality that observes those voices/subpersonalities without becoming them. Hexagram 27 reminds us not to nourish ourselves on negative, unnourishing thoughts and fantasies. Yes, that’s easier said than done, but here are a couple of psychic filters to keep online that are guaranteed to catch all the psychic allergens (all the negative thought forms) that all too easily pervade our inner world.
We’ll call the first of these the “tone filter.” As you listen to the voices of your inner world (or the voices in your outer, interpersonal world) refuse to believe any voices that aren’t calm, compassionate and centered. Listen to them, understand where they are coming from, but don’t become them, don’t identify with them or believe them. If a voice is nagging, carping, bitter, mechanically repetitious, whining, angry, self-pitying, hypercritical, etc. then it is not to be believed! By tone, you can easily distinguish the voices of false subpersonalities and the still, deep voice of the self.
Gerund Filter
A second filter involves a list of categories of thought that are indicative of the ego nervously trying to control the Tao. The position of Taoism (based on the I Ching) is that the universe is unfolding as it should. But the ego, like a nervous back seat driver clutching an imaginary steering wheel in its sweaty, white-knuckled grip, never trusts that nonlinear path of the creative so completely out of its control. Categories (presented as a list of gerunds) that indicate the ego resisting the Tao and/or trying to assert imaginary control over it include: WANTING, WISHING, WORRYING, HOPING, FEARING, DREADING, DESIRING, ENVYING, COMPARING, SUPERVISING, LIFE-GAURDING, JUDGING, COMPLAINING, SELF-PITYING, STRIVING, ANTICIPATING, EXPECTING, PRESTRUCTURING, CONTRIVING, FORCING PROGRESS, HEDGING, RATIONALIZING, CLINGING AND DOUBTING.
Yes, this is an intimidating list! It is an embarrassing revelation of just how often we default to the ego dominating our psyches. We’ll get into some of the nuts and bolts of how to change patterns of thought and the afflictive emotions that ride into town with them, but first I’d like to say a few more words about the ego.
Ego Bashing
In New Age and Eastern circles, ego-bashing and intellect-bashing are the norm, and it is often claimed that the only path to enlightenment is to eliminate ego completely. Unfortunately, they’re never able to actually show you people who are walking around and functioning without egos. Their claims are like a diet book filled with endless horrifying “before” photos, but without any believable “after” photos. To the extent that they have an “after” image at all, it comes into focus in the manner of an incompetent watercolor done in an impressionist style. And when they do claim to have an egoless guru to show you, it inevitably turns out to be a womanizer with fifty Rolls Royces and an immature, unruly ego so gigantic and off scale that the deluded disciples can’t see that the Emperor of No Ego is wearing only a loincloth while their ego projections clothe him in Saruman’s wizard cloak of many colors.
The Self-Organizing Principle of the Organism
Ego is so basic to our existence that one transpersonal psychologist defines it as “the self-organizing principle of the organism.” With no ego there is no self-reference which you need to do almost anything. An amazingly good discussion of the nature of the ego is to be found in the “What is Ego?” edition of What is Enlightenment magazine[8]. Everyone they interviewed had something fascinating and insightful to say about the nature of ego except for one famous female guru from India, who while claiming to be a divine being without ego, reveals the classic delusions of a sadistic, power tripping, gigantically inflated ego.
A Flaw in Many Eastern and New Age Paths
Eastern gurus with acting out, unruly egos have become such a classic syndrome that they deserve some special mention in our discussion of ego. Jung, who helped bring the I Ching and other Eastern teachings into the West, warned Westerners not to uncritically adapt wholesale Eastern practices of transformation that were designed in a different era for psyches very differently structured than what we usually find today in the West (and increasingly in the modern East). A classic flaw in many Eastern approaches to transformation (and also certain New Age and Christian permutations) is a one-sided emphasis on vertical spiritual transcendence, and a gross neglect of the horizontal plane of human incarnation — the engagement, the descent into the worlds of relationship, activity in the world and the details of how our personalities work and interrelate. Especially deficient in so many of these vertical transcendence sects is integration of what Jung called “the shadow” — the inferior and repressed parts of the personality typically hidden by a cloud of self-loathing, denial and unconsciousness. Hidden within the shadow are often unexpected talents and powers cast off with the rest of the unwanted aspects of personality.
Shadow Projection and Integration
When the shadow is unconscious and unintegrated, then it must be displaced, projected onto some despised person or group. For example, the Nazis projected their shadow onto the Jews whom they said were trying to control the world (while they attempted to establish a thousand year Reich). Typically, on the personal level, shadow projection is experienced as an intense dislike of some irritating person, usually of our gender and age range. Repulsion can be like attraction in reverse and we are often magnetized, like a gruesome car accident we can’t look away from, by the spectacle of someone acting out the inferior traits we fear and deny in ourselves. Integration of the shadow begins by reclaiming these despised traits, following the projections back to their source (our psyches) and recognizing that the shadow is part of us. This takes a great deal of moral courage and will. In the Star Wars fantasy this is what Luke must do when he is instructed by Yoda to go into the cave and face fear without his light saber. He ignores Yoda’s advice about the light saber, cuts off Darth Vader’s breath mask only to discover that his own face lies behind it.
The Wayfarer’s Path
Most people are not willing to face their own shadow and unconsciously make the choice of the Wayfarer in the poem of the same name by Stephen Crane:
The Wayfarer,
Perceiving the pathway to truth,
Was struck with astonishment.
It was thickly grown with weeds.
"Ha", he said,
"I see that none has passed here
In a long time."
Later he saw that each weed
Was a singular knife.
"Well," he mumbled at last,
"Doubtless there are other roads."
People who have sought out paths of one-sided vertical transcendence usually have done nothing to integrate their shadow, but instead form cliques, sects or cults where they can join with others in reinforcing each other in the delusion that they’re on a path of transcending their egos. Actually they to tend to form communities of immature egos, with grossly unintegrated shadows, which run around acting out all the inferior qualities they believe they have transcended. Any charismatic leader of the cult or sect will typically have complete license to act out compulsive sexuality, to power trip, dominate, seduce and financially swindle followers. The followers will feel an electrifying desire to proselytize. The need to proselytize is almost always a classic sign of an imbalanced psyche — the hysterical need to spread the psychic contagion and gain partners in vice while believing that you are converting the infidels. At the very least they will reek of spiritual affectations and more transcendent than thou attitudes.
To be a whole person means integrating yin and yang, feminine and masculine, horizontal and vertical, shadow and spirit. This is not as easy as the vertical shortcut, the purchased stairway to heaven or satori, and that’s why Jung felt that crucifixion — being caught between the horizontal and vertical axis of life is a central metaphor for the human condition.
Mind and Ego in the Hierarchy of Psychic Functions
Eliminating the ego to resolve our troubled relationship with it is no more sensible than decapitation would be as a remedy for recurrent headaches.
Superstitious dread of the ego is almost always accompanied by a fanatical anti-intellectualism and disparagement of the mind. Mind and ego are not our enemies, it is where we place our mind and ego, and how we work with these priceless resources that often makes them our enemies.
In most I Ching hexagrams the fifth line is the ruler and the fourth line is the minister. This structure contains the secret of how to work with the ego and mind so that they become powerful allies instead of adversaries. In the place of the ruler in our psyche should be our higher self and global intuition.
True Will and Taoism
Taoism is often presented in a way that makes it seem that you are passively surrendering to an outside Tao. A way to pierce through this illusion is with a concept such as Aleister Crowley’s “true will.” Your true will is the will of your “higher” self (many object to the spatial metaphors of higher and lower), the will that arises out of the depths (another spatial metaphor) of your self. This true will speaks through the still, centered voice of global intuition and is often confirmed by synchronicities, oracle consultations, etc. This true will is your inner refraction of the Tao and is to be followed before anything else. This might require you to proactively overcome all sorts of inner and outer obstructions. You are not necessarily passively led by outside trends. As George Bernard Shaw said, “The mark of the reasonable man is that he adapts himself to the world he finds himself in. The mark of the unreasonable man is that he expects the world to adapt itself to him. Therefore all progress is made by unreasonable men.” Many would interpret the reasonable man’s position as Taoist and the unreasonable man’s position as egoistic and anti-Taoist. This would be true if the unreasonable man were expecting the world to adapt itself to his ego. But if the unreasonable man (or woman) is centered in their true will, then this is Taoist as compared to a “reasonable” person whose reason and rationalized ego are oriented toward accommodating the default parameters of the Babylon Matrix.
The Ruler and the Minister of the Psyche
With your true will and global intuition in the ruling place in your psyche, you can then appoint your mind and ego as ministers that follow the ruler and work as helpful subordinates. In this place ego and mind can, among other functions, act as skillful intermediaries between the aims of your true will and the outside world. It is only when the mind and ego are foolishly promoted above their capabilities into the ruling position that they work at cross-purposes and undermine everything we do. And yes, they can be foolishly ambitious in the way of the Peter Principle to rise to their level of incompetence. The unenlightened ego thinks it should be in charge. The goal is to develop a more conscious, evolved ego that knows its place. The mind can also be a brilliant amplifier and translator for global intuition and primal creativity among other useful functions. Try fixing your computer with your feelings or transcendent spirit!
I’m still working on the process of aligning these aspects of the psyche in myself. Consciousness is not something you arrive at, but that you have to earn and work toward moment by moment. I’ll use myself briefly as an example to ground this in a particular real life case.
Because I am (according to Jung’s typology) a thinking-intuitive type, raised by thinking types, people often have an understandable (but somewhat mistaken) impression that I am up in my head thinking of the things they hear me say or write. More often, the way I experience my psyche working is that there is a cascade of intuitions and my active thinking function works with that cascade analyzing, interpreting and typically turning the intuitive input into complex sentences that may give the impression they were “thought up.” Of course sometimes that’s true, sometimes I am calling up memorized raps on various subjects and reciting them. But originally these raps were sourced from a melding of intuition and thought. After the fact I can ask the thinking function to act as information minister and recite the rap, which has been processed (and sometimes distorted) by thinking, but not originally created by thinking.
My thinking function, working by itself, I experience as hollow, boring and incompetent (except to trouble shoot the computer and learn instruction manuals, etc). I can only feel enthusiastic about using my psyche when intuition, thinking and (often) feeling are all connected and working together. The difference is instantly discernable, like the difference between a stereo system where all the components are working together to create a full, spatial sound as compared to the tinny, irritating monophonic of an AM radio broadcasting a call in radio show. Of course, sometimes the ego can play tricks, like putting a grandiose symphonic sound track behind its irritating, hollow monophonic voice, but if you pay attention you can tell the difference.
The Power of Holding Back
Many people feel trapped by their mind and ego because they find themselves caught in an introspective hell of mental tape loops that often focus on alternatively self-degrading and self-aggrandizing self-evaluations. They come to feel that the inner life itself, self reflection, and meta cognition (the ability to think about thinking — a great evolutionary advance) are what are holding them back from an effectual life. They may even come to believe that the way to escape this inner turmoil is to become a thoughtless extrovert, a “man of action.” I came to realize this when I was nineteen and wrote a paper on Doestoevsky entitled, Doestoevsky and the Profound Egocentric, which I expect to get scanned in and on the site soon. Many Doestoevsky characters lament their internal consciousness as a liability, feel that reason makes them incapable of action and decisiveness and seek to become unthinking men of action. The narrator of Notes from Underground, for example, says:
…the direct, the inevitable and the legitimate result of consciousness is to make all actions impossible, or — to put it differently — consciousness leads to thumb-twiddling…
The earliest literary example of this syndrome I can find is in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Hamlet reproaches himself for being a “John-a-dreams.” In one monologue he states,
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied over with pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment,
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. (Act III: SC I, lines 83-88)
Hamlet eventually tries to rebel against his introverted state and become a man of action, "'O, from this time forth / My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth!'" (Act IV, SC IV, lines 95-96)
T.S. Elliot's J. Alfred Prufrock voices similar sentiments. Prufrock says, “time yet for a hundred indecisions,” and “there will be time/ To wonder, 'Do I dare?' and 'Do I dare?’” Prufrock would prefer to be thoughtlessly instinctual rather than in this state of ineffectual self consciousness, “to have been a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”
Like many contemporary persons, these literary characters falsely attribute their ineffectual indecisiveness to introspection, reason and self-awareness. What is imprisoning them in psychic entropy is not self-awareness, not reason or ego, but the hierarchy of psychic functions. They are living in an inner hell world where mind and ego are in charge of introspection. If intuition and the self were in charge of the process, and mind and ego in service of these higher functions, their experience would be altogether different in kind. When I was nineteen and wrote my paper on Doestoevsky I had a break through in this regard, I discovered that light could break through the shadowy mental prison when intuition took the place of recursive thinking. The inner process that used to torment me when it was conducted by mind and ego I now find to be entertaining, enlightening and forever providing me with exciting new material. Instead of mind/ego alliance playing the same old anxious tapes, my inner process is led by the muse[9], the ego and mind are very much at work in that process, but as followers, not leaders.
Some people who villanize the mind and ego as the problem, rather than the foolish placement of the mind and ego, even more foolishly believe they must get rid of mind and ego through a life time of meditation. Other people villanize introspection and believe that being a thoughtless man of action is the answer. For example presidents 41 and 43, Bush the father, and the son, frequently brag, “I don't psychoanalyze myself.” W. has even said more than once, “I only look in the mirror when I'm shaving.” But Socrates said, “Know thyself.” This world is dying from lack of effective introspection. Spend that inner time guided by your intuition, if you spend it alone with mind and ego then the inner temple will seem a prison and you will feel like the mind and ego's prison bitch.
This helpful alignment of higher self/ global intuition and true will with mind and ego is often especially challenged when we are caught in some dilemma and feel pressed to make a decision. The ego can’t stand the ambiguous, ambivalent situations that are so typical of human incarnation. It would like to force progress, come to some kind of clarifying decision and get on with its linear goal tracks. This can lead to some horrible choices. Alternatively, the ego and thinking function, sensing their incompetence as high level decision makers, will take the ambiguous situation and keep gnawing at it like a dog with a chew toy. Another metaphor is an endless ping pong match where different thoughts and possible scenarios get bounced back and forth forever. What is needed here, and mentioned throughout the I Ching, is the all important ability to hold back, to not go forward until we have been shown, till we have heard that still inner voice speak our true will or until a light has been shown through the unfolding of events of where we have to go. As Goethe said, “A master first reveals himself in his ability to hold back.” The Zen archer who hits the mark does so because she holds the arrow back until just the right moment.
Solitude as Default Position
One aspect of life that is a classic illustration of this principle is the choice of whether or not to go forward into a romantic relationship. Some people have an ego identity that requires them to be in a romantic relationship. It’s as if something in side them says, “I have to be going out with someone, might as well be this person…” Anybody who finds they are weighing this kind of choice by examining lists of advantages or disadvantages of possible mates is playing this sort of game. This is the merchant mind trying to evaluate where it can get the best deal. My personal point of view is that for the conscious person the default position should be solitude, but with a willingness to enter into romantic relationship and give it all the infinite care it deserves if, and only if, that is our true will, and we are called from the depths of our being to have a relationship with a particular person (and not an idealized projection). Although I am fanatically opposed to one size fits all formulations, especially about something as fantastically varied as human eros, this is what I believe can spare the conscious, evolving person from the suffering of messy karma. Hold back until you know.
Reticence
A woman I know has been practicing a wonderful inner discipline which accords with I Chinginner yes.” Until a choice lights up in her whole body and being as an inner yes than the answer is no and she waits. This takes patience, but saves her from many costly mistakes. principles that she calls something like the “
Similarly, the I Ching puts a high value on reticence, holding back with spoken words and other actions, until you are sure you have the inner yes. When you are dealing with a captive audience, for example while riding in a vehicle, I believe that a moral person should have strong inhibitory filters before they speak. If I speak to a captive audience I am usually blocking any members of that audience from being able to effectively concentrate on their own thoughts. So before I encroach on the perceptual space of the other I ought to be convinced that what I have to say is something they need to hear, as compared to me venting or indulging the narcissistic urge to capture attention.
Dealing with Afflictive Thoughts and Feelings
Earlier I promised that we would get more into the nuts and bolts of how to deal with negative thought forms and the afflictive emotions associated with them. The most comprehensive and effective approach I’ve found is in a marvelous book entitled Emotional Alchemy by Tara Bennett-Goleman. Tara, a Zen Buddhist psychotherapist, and her husband, Daniel Goleman, wrote the best-selling book entitled Emotional Intelligence. They’ve also collaborated with the Dali Lama on a book about overcoming afflictive emotions.
Emotional Alchemy
If you like this approach, I would certainly suggest reading Emotional Alchemy, which is now available in paperback at almost any large bookstore. The book is rather repetitive, however, and in a few pages I can probably tell you 80% of what’s in it.
The Golemans bring together Buddhist psychology, cognitive psychology and some recent findings from neuroscience into their groundbreaking work on afflictive emotions. “Afflictive emotions” is a Buddhist term that describes a general phenomenon that most of us are all too familiar with — the suffering, the affliction of negative emotions. There is nothing new about this problem, but it has also never been timelier with depression and anxiety disorders dramatically on the rise in the West, particularly in the U.S.
First we will take a look, through a synthesis of the three disciplines mentioned above (neuroscience, cognitive psychology and Buddhist psychology) at how afflictive emotions work, how they gain hold and easily dominate our inner experience, and then we will discuss the alchemy part, how to transform our relationship with afflictive emotions through methods that can dramatically reduce suffering. (I can testify from my own personal experience to the effectiveness of this method.)
Neurological Materialism
Part of the reason that afflictive emotions are so virulent, and so hard to change, may have to do with our neural architecture. I say “may” because neurology is in its infancy and has never been able to successfully explain the association of consciousness and the brain. A terrible delusion which I’ve written about elsewhere[10], and which I wish the Golemans had acknowledged, is the philosophical and pseudoscientific position known as “neurological materialism.” A neurological materialist believes that consciousness (if they admit consciousness exists at all — many don’t) is an epiphenomenon (a secondary effect) of biochemical process in the brain. Neurological materialism dominates the psychology departments of most colleges and universities in the U.S., and many ordinary citizens have picked up on this and taken it as a given, proven by “science.” But it has not been proven by science, quite the contrary. There is much scientific evidence pointing away from neurological materialism. Part of the problem is that in the “soft” sciences of biology and psychology, many have not been able to integrate the findings of quantum mechanics and are still pretending to do science while inhabiting an archaic Newtonian universe where everything is governed by causality. Physicists like Danah Zohar[11], Roger Penrose, Amit Goswami and Fred Alan Wolfe have proposed quantum mechanical models in which neurological process is a correlate, an analog, an acausal parallelism to a consciousness that is hyper spatial, nonlocal, not “in” the brain. Those who have had OBEs (I’ve had numerous) and NDEs have experienced that consciousness can exist outside the body and is actually greatly enhanced by being out of the body.
Neural Architecture and The Emotional Body
You do not, however, have to buy into the fallacy of neurological materialism to recognize that neurological realities — such as neurotransmitter levels and neural architecture — are huge players in human experience. So after this long disclaimer about neurological materialism, let’s take a look at what neuroscience can tell us about afflictive emotions.
The Low Resolution Amygdala
Now that we have the technology to do real time body imaging of live people, scientists are able to map out activity levels of different brain structures moment by moment. What’s been observed is that when people are exposed to an emotional trigger event, the amygdala, a brain structure somewhere behind the frontal lobes, goes “hot.” When strong emotional response is aroused, the amygdala lights up on the computer screen as its metabolism intensifies.
Neuroscientists believe that the amygdala evolved as an environmental threat detection monitor. They believe that it stores threat patterns (such as snakes, spiders, fire, predators) and when a trigger event occurs, when something is perceived in the environment that matches or seems to match these patterns, the amygdala turns on and triggers flight or fight readiness throughout the body. The amygdala, however, is no rocket scientist; its pattern recognition ability is crude, primitive, low resolution. As a survival strategy it’s safer to get a lot of false positives rather than to miss a single actual hazard. Better for a scaredy-cat (a domestic cat with overly strong startle reflex) to jump away from imaginary hazards then to miss one car. (The big cats I used to work for at the Prairie Wind Wild Refuge didn’t have this type of startle reflex because no one sneaks up on a six hundred pound tiger…) So, for example, an animal or person could have a powerful startle response to say a piece of rope dangling from a branch at the edge of peripheral vision that the speedy, but imprecise, amygdala may read as a dangerous snake.
Also, to put the amygdala in the context of neural architecture, it has strong neuronal connections to the neo cortex in human beings. This may explain how the amygdala, which is fast, but low resolution in its discriminations, can easily dominate our higher thinking which is higher resolution but much slower to react. Therefore we experience a second or two when we actually think we’ve seen a snake until our neocortex can reassert itself and reinterpret the sensory information with higher resolution discrimination.
It is also believed by neuroscientists, that in this phase of evolution where most human beings are more threatened by emotional trauma in early childhood than by snakes or fire, patterns of emotional trauma are now what is primarily stored in the amygdala.
Schemas: Stereotyped Patterns of Emotional Reactivity
Following that glimpse at the amygdala from neuroscience, we switch to cognitive psychology which contributes a finding that there are classic, stereotyped patterns of emotional reactivity that it calls “schemas.” These schemas (and here you would do well to go to the Emotional Alchemy book where they are individually discussed) include very familiar afflictions such as: abandonment fear, low self-esteem, deprivation and entitlement. When trigger events occur, these engrained patterns of emotional reactivity click in and we typically have disproportionate, inaccurate, stereotyped responses, while the higher resolution discrimination and more reflective aspects of higher thinking are overridden by an intense emotional funk.
Trigger Events And Storylines
Let’s ground this in an example so we can see how all this comes together in a typical case. Our case involves a young woman, an office worker, who was raised by narcissistic, rather unloving parents. As a consequence of her early childhood experience, she is especially governed emotionally by the deprivation schema with generous helpings of the low self-esteem and abandonment schemas thrown in. One of her coworkers goes out on a coffee run for everyone and when he returns, as a random accident, her coffee was forgotten. This minor accident is a trigger event for her deprivation schema. Almost instantly, in less than a quarter of a second, her amygdala lights up and catalyzes a cascade of pronounced physiological changes — her face flushes as capillaries dilate, heart rate increases, body temperature elevates and breathing becomes fast and shallow. The amygdala sends strong signals to her neo cortex causing her thinking to fall into line with disproportionate, inaccurate, stereotyped thought forms coalescing into a storyline which helps to perpetuate the trauma and reinforce the schema: They forgot mine on purpose. I’m always left out. No one ever gives me my fair share. I knew they didn’t like me. He’s just like my father. Etc. This funk could continue for hours, or continue almost perpetually in the background, especially as internal perturbations — traumatic memories, negative thought forms and fantasies can be internally generated as trigger events to perpetuate the misery.
The Law of Dependent Causation
Buddhist psychology now comes into play with suggested methods of self-liberation from afflictive emotions. The Buddhists have a concept variously translated as the law of “dependent origination” or “dependent arising.” There is a chain of dependent, causally related events that creates the suffering of afflictive emotions. In the case of the schema attack described above, for example, we have trigger event linked to neurological response linked to physiological response linked to cognitive response (the storyline). Break any part of this chain and you can break the whole cycle.
Breaking Inner Tape Loops with Numbers Exercises
For example, an elegantly simple method to break the cognitive link involves occupying your mind with simple numbers exercises. This method is not in Emotional Alchemy and the particular numbers exercises come from a book of psychological techniques and exercises designed to support a Gurdjieffian approach to consciousness[12]. Use this method especially when you find that your mind is “looping” — playing the same negative storyline tapes again and again — “he said she said” etc. When you focus your mind on the numbers exercises you will stop the looping, stop the storylines stone cold dead in their well-worn tracks. True, numbers exercises may not be very entertaining, but I’ll take nonentertainment over looping storylines that create the suffering of afflictive emotion and thereby degrade bodily health as well.
The first numbers exercise, which demands focused attention, is to count up by 2s from 1, and down by 2s from 100 in an alternating sequence:
1, 3,
100, 98,
5, 7,
96, 94,
9, 11,
92, 90,
13, 15,
88, 86, etc.
This gets a little tricky when the two streams of numbers cross, but you’ll find that you get into a rhythm with it and it gets a lot easier with practice. Your mind will want to default back to storylines, day dreams or other distractions, and if it succeeds, it will break the numbers exercise at which point you just pick it up again, from the beginning if necessary.
The second numbers exercise is much easier and can be done partly on autopilot which presents a great temptation for your attention to wander and for you to lose track of the numbers. It’s designed that way to train you to maintain focus, to have power over the default mechanism that wants to switch you back to storylines, daydreams, etc. It also trains you to divide attention as you can easily do this exercise while doing laundry, driving, manual chores, etc. This time you count up by twos in an ascending/descending sequence that keeps growing like a ladder that you climb up and down adding a new rung with each ascent. The top number is always repeated and is 2 higher than the last top number. It looks like this:
1 3 3 1
1 3 5 5 31
1 3 5 7 7 5 3 1
1 3 5 7 9 9 7 5 3 1
1 3 5 7 9 11 11 9 7 5 3 1
One more part of this easy sequence is that whenever you hit the number 11, coming up or down the ladder, you do some sort of bodily movement — snapping your fingers, blinking an eye, etc. You’re doing well with this exercise if you can make it into the 70s without losing the number stream by defaulting into tape loops, daydreams, etc. Like push-ups and sit-ups, numbers exercises may not always be fun, but they are an effective and direct way to become stronger.
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle And Self Observation
Now we’ll return to the Emotional Alchemy approach that centers on the Buddhist practice of mindfulness. I’ve been practicing mindfulness techniques for years and have found them to be very effective in everything from dealing with bodily pain (mindfulness pain management), every day tasks and even getting more enjoyment out of eating food. We know from physics (Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle) that to observe a thing is to change a thing. The maximal case of this effect is when the human psyche is observing itself.
Mindfulness Pain Management
Mindfulness involves sustained investigative awareness, a persistent witness consciously observing what’s going on (inner and/or outer) with great presence moment by moment. To practice mindfulness pain management, for example, I focus in on the pain sensations. The pain I feel in my recently dislocated thumb seems to radiate outward in pulsing concentric waves from the center of the knuckle. I observe and map out its periodicity, its ebb and flow, when it is peaking and when it is subsiding. I don’t shrink from it, I welcome it into perception and carefully observe its modulations. When I do this it becomes an interesting energetic phenomenon happening in my perceptual universe. Emotional funks and negative thought forms can also be studied with this careful, impersonal observation.
Mindful Self Observation
When I hear a voice speak in my head I can welcome it into my perceptual field, the inner theater of my mind, and ask it to step into the spotlight of attention and show me who it is and what it really wants. By mindfully observing the emotions and storylines, we cannot be identified with them, we have an outside witness observing, so they cannot think us, as they did to the young woman office worker in her schema attack. You can observe them with a cool, neutral, compassionate observational stance. Instead of shrinking from them, welcome them into attentional space. The metaphor I’ve used for myself is that I am a butterfly collector in the Amazon where a rare, interesting butterfly has flown into my net. Aha, here’s a live one I can study. As you work with this practice you will find that your mindfulness will have less discontinuities and you will catch schema attacks sooner.
At the early phase of the practice you might notice that you had a schema attack after it's over. Why did I get into that silly argument? Oh, I see, it was my deprivation schema triggered when she said… Another time you might catch a schema attack while it’s happening, while the butterfly is in the net. If it is happening just internally (not an interpersonal argument) you can observe without direct interference and learn something about what type of schemas you have and what type of subpersonalities come forward to speak for them. See how long the schema attack lasts, when does it peak, when does it start to taper off, what was the trigger event, how is your body being affected — breathing, muscle contractions, etc. After you have felt that you’ve sufficiently studied who the voices are and what they want, etc. you can choose in a later stage of the practice to actively intervene. The numbers exercise is one way to do that.
The frightening looking deities seen outside of some Buddhist temples are supposed to be entities of “wrathful compassion.” At this phase of the practice you can be wrathfully compassionate and intervene with a ferocious act of will. I used to visualize a glowing magical sword hovering above an old reel to reel tape recorder I used to have, the moving reels of tape playing the annoying thought forms. When I summoned my will the sword would come slicing down into the tape, cutting it in two so that the reels would begin to spin quickly in opposite directions.
Another visualization I’ve used comes from the first two Lord of the Rings movies where we see Gandalf facing down the Balrog on the Bridge of Kazadum in the Mines of Moria. I see Gandalf activating his staff and luminescent sword, Glamdring, and saying with all his might “You cannot pass. I am a servant of the secret fire… You cannot pass.” A simpler technique I recently came up with that seems quite effective is that when I notice my mind picking up a dumb tape loop I just say to myself in the tone of an irate, protective mother watching her two year old pick up a dog turd and about to put it in his mouth, DROP IT!!! DROP IT!!!!! Get creative and use whatever works for you.
The Magic Quarter Second
Finally, if you really want to go for the Olympic level of this practice, you will try to derail a schema attack in what neuroscientists call “the magic quarter second.” If you were able to recognize that a trigger event is catalyzing your amygdala to launch a schema attack in the first quarter second, before it has gained a physiological hold on you, then you could knock it off its tracks, nip it in the bud before it can do any damage at all. Usually you don’t know if a trigger event is coming. But in some cases you do, let’s say you have to make a phone call to that difficult parent or problem person you know is likely to trigger you. I had a great opportunity to try the Olympic version when I was canvassing for a wildlife refuge. In certain yuppie neighborhoods I knew there was a high probability of getting a nasty response. As a former, recovering New Yorker, who was also a school teacher for 14 years, six in the South Bronx, my whole being is conditioned for the high speed come back. I might have needed that back then, but with canvassing that can get you and your organization in trouble. So what I would do is ring the bell, take a couple of deep breaths, center myself in my body and wait like a tennis player for the ball to come across the net and a golden opportunity to catch the magic quarter second. But even though I knew the trigger event was coming I often couldn’t help but to react anyway.
It should go without saying that what you especially don’t want is to allow a schema attack to control your actions, decisions or spoken words. There is a well-known Samurai story where the Samurai has a duty to assassinate the assassin who killed his master. Methodically he stalks the assassin and at the right moment approaches with drawn sword. The assassin spits on him. The Samurai sheaths his swords and walks away. The idea is that he became emotionally agitated when he was spit on and now if he used his sword it would no longer be a pure, impersonal act. Words are often swords. When we are emotionally agitated we should sheath our tongues and hold back from actions and decisions.
Dealing with Shock
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Satan Smiting Job----William Blake
But how do we deal with the shocks that appear outside as fate, the curve balls chucked at us by the Tao that sometimes seem to smash us right in the face? How can the Interdimensional Traveler work creatively with the “Slings and arrows of outrageous fortune?”
Since I’m undergoing a series of shocks in my own life right now (and shocks like earthquakes and their aftershocks tend to come in a series), this is no academic exercise, but a challenge to see how well my philosophy of shock can hold up to the real thing.
The Necessity of Shock and the I ChingFirst, in order not to take shocks personally, we need to acknowledge that they are both inevitable and necessary. Shock is such a well-recognized principle in the I Ching that it is not only one of the 64 hexagrams (hexagram 51, Shock, Thunder, the Arousing) it is also one of the 8 trigrams out of which the 64 hexagrams are built. Shock is a crucial alchemical ingredient needed for evolution.
Homeostasis and Punctuated Equilibrium
Why? One reason is that all organisms are conservative. They dial in an equilibrium, what biologists call homeostasis, and they seek to maintain it. This is a crucial life function, because organisms are generally complex, fragile processes, which require relatively narrow parameters of environmental conditions — such as oxygen levels, temperatures, food sources — and inevitably, the environments in which they occur have destabilizing, chaotic elements which frequently threaten them with death or even extinction. Organisms work indefatigably to try to dial in their niche, to maintain the homeostasis that keeps them going. You don’t want your liver enzymes, heart rate or blood sugar to fluctuate wildly, that would threaten your survival, you want them dialed in, rolling along on an even keel. The human psyche is an organism, the most complex we know of, and complexity often means fragility. What both Freud and Jung recognized, what anybody looking about themselves should recognize, is that the human psyche is also highly conservative.
Contra Naturum Development
Conservatism can be good for homeostasis, but can also, if it is excessive, put a ceiling on development and evolution. To evolve means to change, and we don’t always want to change. The two most conscious and compassionate people I met at this campground both told me at different times, and without mincing words, “I don’t like change.” I told them that I could sympathize because change is usually precipitated by shock, often unpleasant shocks (which I’d been experiencing myself so recently) but to dislike change is to create inevitable suffering because change is the only constant we have.
You may have heard of the story of the ancient emperor who challenged the wise men of his court to come up with a statement which would be true at all times, in all circumstances. What they came up with was, “And this too shall pass.” But when we inwardly resist the passing, the change, then we are more likely to experience it as an outward shock acting as fate.
The conservative tendency is so strong that many will resist change, even if they are in a bad situation that is attempting to get better. You may remember the Morgan Freeman character in Shawshank Redemption who is unable to adjust to life as a free man and wants to get locked in at night. I’m also reminded of a newspaper photo I once saw of a young girl who had been horribly abused by her mother who had broken many of her bones. The photo was of a court hearing and shows the little girl being led away by some kindly looking matron while she is screaming to be reconnected with her mother. Better the devil we know, than a devil, or even an angel, that we don’t know.
The average person tends to tread water, seeks to maintain status quo, homeostasis, and will change inwardly only in response to drastic outside shock. When shocks occur they take no responsibility for them (especially if they are negative shocks), instead they believe they are the victims of “bad luck” or forces beyond their control. This may be true, of course, especially when the shock is a macro geophysical or nation state effect like flood, earthquake or war.
Shocks, it should be pointed out, can be “good” or “bad.” Winning the lottery or suddenly falling in love are shocks just as much as a car accident or economic crash. Shock just means the equilibrium has experienced a perturbation or disturbance — a sudden disequilibrium. Don Juan said (I’m paraphrasing), that for the average man everything is either a blessing or a curse, but for the warrior everything is a challenge and a learning experience.
The psychic inertia that resists change is so strong that Jung described the path of individuation, or unique individual development, as “contra naturum” — contrary to or against nature. Gurdjieff, who so eloquently described man’s mechanical nature, called the change to unmechanicalness “against God.” Their point was that to generate your own internal change meant pushing against such vast inner and outer inertial force that it was as if you had a whole universe resisting you. Often it is us, our own neurotic homeostasis and passivity, our false ego, that provides the resistance. And as Jung said, “Man’s greatest passion isn’t sex, love, money or power — it’s laziness.”
So shock can be like a divine gift, a catalyst for evolutionary change. After all, if it wasn’t for shock in the form of a giant asteroid hitting the earth sixty-five million years ago and flattening everything larger than a chicken[13], there might be a velicoraptor strolling through tropical foliage instead of you sitting there reading this over the internet. Our incarnation began with birth shock and often ends with a shock too. Shock is our constant, if unpredictable, and often unwelcome, companion.
Thought Experiment In Subcreation
Try this thought experiment. You are the author (the equivalent of God) of a novel about a young person who in the course of your story is going to develop greatly as a person — psychologically and spiritually. Would you as God/author provide them with the perfect, peaceful relationship, the perfect career and a tranquil, happy “successful” life? Not unless you wanted to create a boring story and a boring character. What you will probably find is that as God/author you are going to have to create “evil,” you are probably going to have to hurl at that young person some gigantic shock, right at the limits of what they can handle, to get them out of the door and on their quest. If you are writing a screenplay you better do this in the first ten pages (the equivalent of the first ten minutes of screen time). This is called the “inciting incident,” and if you don’t have it, unless you are an absolute master with a cult following, you will probably lose much of your audience. There are classic, archetypal elements to story structure because story structure parallels life structure.
Tolkien called fantasy writing “subcreation” because the author is acting as a subset of God in creating their own world. What would the Lord of the Rings be if Tolkien hadn’t subcreated evil in the form of Sauron, Saruman, ring wraiths, orcs, etc? Hobbits going on dates with other hobbits? Boring. Nobody wants to watch Frodo eating second and third breakfasts every day while getting fat and complacent in Hobbiton. No, we want to see him at the cracks of doom tormented by evil temptation. We want development in our stories, not stagnation; we want shock, change and lots of it. But when it comes to us, no way, we want predictability, we want a world where we get what we want when we want it — and what we want is to get dealt the royal flush and with no jokers or wild cards.
The message of hexagram 51 is that shock can be developmental. What counts is our stance in relation to the shock. We need to accept shock, even welcome it as a learning challenge.
Many shocks we experience involve relationships. Our voluntary relationships (such as romantic relationships), by an almost invincible psychological principle, reflect where we are inwardly. So instead of going into he said/she said mode and creating a schema-driven storyline bound up with the particulars of that episode of the soap opera, you can instead ask yourself this question: When have I been here before? When have I felt, in different circumstances, what I am feeling now? If you are honest with yourself, you’ll probably recognize that this isn’t the first time. So pull your gaze off of the present overly charged situation and look at these parallel points on your inner map, especially if they are points involving other relationships. Take a step back and see if you can find a pattern. Is there a mistake here you’ve made before? Are certain schemas activated? Remember the principle that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and especially if it is relationship history!
Subtle and Gross Shocks
The way things often work is that we are first given a chance to learn from a subtler shock, but if we don’t learn from it, don’t answer its demand for change, we get more powerful shocks. Our bodies teach us through shock, and so do our psyches as well as the force vectors of seemingly outside fate. For example, a man poisons himself with too much alcohol and his body sends him a self-protective shock. He finds his head in the toilet in a violent spasm of vomiting and he wakes up with a horrible hangover. That’s actually a subtle shock, way too subtle for some people. The man works through that subtle shock and a few more like it while he develops his “acquired taste” for self-inflicted punishment and he even comes to take pride in his tolerance for poison, “I can really hold my liquor. I may be fat and impotent, but I can drink these young punks under the table.”
When subtle shock doesn’t work, then you get big shock. Instead of nasty symptoms, your body presents you with a major disease like cirrhosis of the liver. Still, some will disown responsibility for the shock, “I ought to sue those liquor companies.” Feeling a victim is indicative of refusing to rise to the learning challenge of shock. If you are a victim of your personal history, than you are bound to remain one as history repeats itself, because a victim is the opposite of a learner/warrior.[14]
Catching Things Before they Exit the Gate of Change
The conscious person prefers to learn from the subtle shocks rather than getting hit over the head with a two by four. Instead of waiting till we have a major disease we can pay attention to our bodies, notice the subtle shocks that tell us we’re doing something harmful and make corrective adjustments. The idea is to, in I Ching terms, “catch things before they exit the gate of change.” If you can notice the subtle pre-signal shocks you can sometimes avoid the need for full-scale shocks. For example, if your observation of body language signals tells you that your approach toward a certain person is creating resistance in them, you can back off and avoid the shock of argument and conflict.
Attuning to Subtle Shocks
Some ways to become attuned to subtle shocks include paying attention to intuition, considering synchronicities as possible signs or portents, remembering and interpreting dreams and consulting with the I Ching or other oracles.
In his potentially life-saving book, The Gift of Fear, security consultant Gavin de Becker provides numerous case histories that demonstrate that most victims of violent crime rationalistically overrode distinct intuitions warning them of impending danger. Our intuition is much more acute (and so much faster) than our conscious thinking, especially in rapidly unfolding life or death situations. Many of Gavin de Becker’s clients, often celebrities, are being stalked or harassed by anonymous threats. Gavin discovered an intriguing and effortless way to find the identity of an anonymous harasser. I don’t have the book in front of me but it goes something like this:
Gavin: Who do you think it could be?
Client: I have no idea.
Gavin: OK, just as a game I want you to pick the name of anybody you know, anybody, right off the top of your head.
Client: OK — Bob.
Gavin: Any reason to think it might be Bob?
Client: Oh, no way, it couldn’t possibly be Bob; he’s such a nice guy, so polite, he sent me a dozen red roses last week.
Almost inevitably the person they pick off the top of their head will turn out to be the harasser.
Dreams, especially nightmares, can be subtle shocks seeking to awaken us to inner (and much more rarely, outer) problems giving us a chance to learn and make adjustments so that we don’t have to get whacked over the head by fate or develop full blown diseases, “mental illnesses,” etc. Oracles, especially the I Ching, The Book of Changes, can give us a heads up about a problem that if neglected may become shock. Sometimes it can give us an early warning radar blip that shock is coming. If the shock has already arrived it can advise us on how to weather the storm.
Choosing Shock through Self-Initiation
Some people seek to generate their own shocks to stimulate development. Since we live in a culture that does not provide the developmental shocks that in traditional cultures are provided by initiation, we may seek to create our own initiations. Self-initiations, voluntary shocks, include things like fasting, heroic doses of hallucinogens, mountain climbing and extreme forms of travel, sports or adventure. These self-initiations can go amiss if they serve to build up false ego rather than collapse it. I might, for example, undertake these extreme practices so I can build up a prideful identity for myself as a master of asceticism, an hallucinogenic test pilot, a daring mountain climber, etc. If the means of initiation becomes an end in itself than it is being abused and has depotentiated as a developmental shock.
Traveling, for example, can be a great way to stir up change, to shock your complacent equilibrium, but as Emerson put it, “The problem with traveling is you take yourself with you.” Traveling can be a real secular pilgrimage, a transformational journey, b