Seeing the Unseen

“Unequivocalness is simplicity and leads to death. But ambiguity is the way of life.” – Carl Jung “You’re either with us or against us.” – George W. Bush One of the greatest life skills and signs of maturity is the ability to live peacefully with ambiguity and ambivalence. The immature ego, however, wants an unequivocal world, and would like to regularize reality into unambiguous categories. If the world were less ambiguous, it would also be less complex and interesting. <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pong”>Pong </a> is a two dimensional world that is completely unambiguous but also not particularly interesting. Fundamentalists and absolutists of all kinds attempt to sterilize life of all its ambiguity. But at its most fundamental level, even at the quantum mechanical level, there is an uncollapsed wave function aspect of life, an irreducibly ambiguous aspect. Ambiguity is part of the mystery and beauty of life. Ambiguity keeps us on our toes. It can boost our awareness in the same way that when we can’t quite make out what someone is saying we start to pay closer attention. With less ambiguity there would be less need for free will, intelligence and discernment. The most potently ambiguous of all ambiguities we must [...]

“Unequivocalness is simplicity and leads to death. But ambiguity is the way of life.” – Carl Jung “You’re either with us or against us.” – George W. Bush One of the greatest life skills and signs of maturity is the ability to live peacefully with ambiguity and ambivalence. The immature ego, however, wants an unequivocal world, and would like to regularize reality into unambiguous categories. If the world were less ambiguous, it would also be less complex and interesting. <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pong”>Pong </a> is a two dimensional world that is completely unambiguous but also not particularly interesting. Fundamentalists and absolutists of all kinds attempt to sterilize life of all its ambiguity. But at its most fundamental level, even at the quantum mechanical level, there is an uncollapsed wave function aspect of life, an irreducibly ambiguous aspect. Ambiguity is part of the mystery and beauty of life. Ambiguity keeps us on our toes. It can boost our awareness in the same way that when we can’t quite make out what someone is saying we start to pay closer attention. With less ambiguity there would be less need for free will, intelligence and discernment. The most potently ambiguous of all ambiguities we must [...]

“Unequivocalness is simplicity and leads to death. But ambiguity is the way of life.” – Carl Jung “You’re either with us or against us.” – George W. Bush One of the greatest life skills and signs of maturity is the ability to live peacefully with ambiguity and ambivalence. The immature ego, however, wants an unequivocal world, and would like to regularize reality into unambiguous categories. If the world were less ambiguous, it would also be less complex and interesting. <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pong”>Pong </a> is a two dimensional world that is completely unambiguous but also not particularly interesting. Fundamentalists and absolutists of all kinds attempt to sterilize life of all its ambiguity. But at its most fundamental level, even at the quantum mechanical level, there is an uncollapsed wave function aspect of life, an irreducibly ambiguous aspect. Ambiguity is part of the mystery and beauty of life. Ambiguity keeps us on our toes. It can boost our awareness in the same way that when we can’t quite make out what someone is saying we start to pay closer attention. With less ambiguity there would be less need for free will, intelligence and discernment. The most potently ambiguous of all ambiguities we must [...]

We are pattern seeking creatures, and much of the quality of the life we live will be determined by how and why we seek patterns. Pattern seeking can lead us into delusion and dark obsession or inspiration and revelation depending on how we employ it. If you look online, most of what you will find about pattern seeking is posted by ersatz skeptics who view it as a disreputable, superstitious tendency. The original Skeptics were a school of Greek philosophers who felt that their powers of observation were increased by not arriving at conclusions. In other words, they consciously held back from fixing on patterns which would lead to premature closure of the discovery process. Ironically, most so-called skeptics follow the opposite of this philosophy and are more properly called debunkers. They begin with a rigid pattern fixed in their minds — their unproven notion of what’s possible and what’s not (anything paranormal). Typically, they do research by proclamation and rather than investigate the unexplained they explain the uninvestigated. Although their method of pattern seeking is intrinsically flawed, so also is the pattern seeking of many occultists and conspiracy folk. They too begin with patterns engraved in their minds and [...]

Know that there are always the blind spots, the parts of yourself you cannot see. Summon the courage to see them. Most human beings are a host of sub-personalities each of which calls themselves “I” when they take over, though they may have quite different agendas and modus operandi. The process of self-unification usually involves the creation of a central witness self that observes the sub-personalities and is aware of their comings and goings and how they vie for control. The voices that speak in your head are of various kinds — some are nagging, fearful, needy, strident, insistent, arrogant or filled with self-hate and so forth. The voice of the Self, however, is calm, clear and compassionate. But we may have trouble hearing that calm and quiet voice from the depths when our inner space is dominated by the clamor of competing subpersonalities. That’s the short version; here’s a bit more: We tend to think of ourselves as a single coherent personality, and expect the other to be a single coherent personality as well. But a single human being can support many personalities. The dramatic example is Multiple Personality Disorder, which is extremely rare. The familiar example, which is [...]

Few things take as much courage and are capable of producing such valuable results as exploring the unconscious. Nothing could be more crucial than Socrates’ great commandment: “Know thyself.” Those who don’t know themselves act out their unknown contents in the world, and often with disastrous results. Explore the unconscious with the courage to see the horror and beauty of the endless diversity of elements. But don’t explore as a tourist, as a psychedelic thrill-seeker or dilettante. If you enter the unconscious without a moral purpose, as Jung pointed out, you are asking to get wrecked. You would not go deep-sea diving without some training, tools, discipline, and a support network. Shamans don’t travel into the unconscious to have fun or hang out, they enter with respect, usually for the moral purpose of healing, and they get in and get out as quickly as possible, well aware of the dangers. Another moral purpose to enter the unconscious is to expand consciousness and to share that expanded consciousness with others. Sometimes we are in a state where we are consumed or obsessed with some outer controversy, but actually what we are experiencing is much more fundamentally an agitation happening in the [...]

Ready to travel beneath the surface. The Babylon Matrix would like to keep you focused on surfaces and appearances, but this is a propitious time to pull back the veils and look beneath the surface. We are many-layered beings living in a many-layered world. If your gaze is arrested by a particular layer, then you are relatively blind to the other layers. Some are captivated by the he said/she said soap opera layer. For others, the money layer is predominant. For still others, some particular layer of the internet or certain video games or a certain genre of pornography or an academic specialty are the supreme layer. But to bind ourselves to any particular layer means living in a flatland, and we are capable of much more than that. No matter how many layers we pull back there are always more. Exploring the multiverse is like trying to peel the layers off of an eleven dimensional onion. As British Astrophysicist Arthur Eddington put it: “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.” Consider this a propitious time to recognize that there is more going on than meets the daylight eyes of the [...]

As Arthur Eddington put it, “Reality is not only stranger than you think, it’s stranger than you can think.” Don’t cringe from the unknowable strangeness; embrace it. It is what gives your existence an edge of mystery; it is what generated your existence. Leave space around your certainties for all those unknown X factors potently operating outside the box of what you presently comprehend. And remember that as you expand the sphere of your awareness you will also expand the circumference of the unknown that surrounds you.

Toys in the attic — what is happening in your personal unconscious? Few things take as much courage and are capable of producing such valuable results as exploring the unconscious. Nothing could be more crucial than Socrates’ great commandment: “Know thyself.” Those who don’t know themselves act out their unknown contents in the world, and often with disastrous results. Explore the unconscious with the courage to see the horror and beauty of the endless diversity of elements. But don’t explore as a tourist, as a psychedelic thrill-seeker or dilettante. If you enter the unconscious without a moral purpose, as Jung pointed out, you are asking to get wrecked. You would not go deep-sea diving without some training, tools, discipline, and a support network. Shamans don’t travel into the unconscious to have fun or hang out, they enter with respect, usually for the moral purpose of healing, and they get in and get out as quickly as possible, well aware of the dangers. Another moral purpose to enter the unconscious is to expand consciousness and to share that expanded consciousness with others. Sometimes we are in a state where we are consumed or obsessed with some outer controversy, but actually what [...]

In order not to live continually clouded by the many wizards of deception, you must keep your will focused on pulling back the curtain. First you must never lose sight of the curtain and the awareness that there are forces just out of sight, manipulating our perception, even constructing the reality we perceive. We look about at a world of seemingly solid objects while intellectually we know it is mostly empty space inhabited by subatomic particles, some of which are clouds of probability not to be located in any particular place. We tend to experience our bodies as a coherent whole when we are actually a cooperative network of fifty trillion cells, each of them like a small city with numerous processes going on simultaneously. There is, in other words, a curtain hiding vast complexity and strangeness from all of our sense perceptions. For example, a living, breathing person enters my perceptual field and stands before me. I do not see his fifty trillion cells. I do not see the bizarre world of subatomic particles or vibrating multi-dimensional super strings or whatever it is that makes up those cells. What I do see is ambient light reflecting off the topography [...]