Commutative tension

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Driving on a highway, somewhere.  The small specter warm on my nostrils then cool, lungs slowly fill and empty in soothing rhythm.  The slower it goes: sleep may pull down already heavy eyelids, or pull awareness so far back into that open-eyed white velvety darkness.  "A darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend".  An opening for an overlap: smashing metal, scraping skin, slow-motion cartwheels, shattering glass, a sharp blow, sleep.  These things I know.

Bright lights batter, I don't like them.  Under my hands, the steering wheel sheds epidermal layers.  Sweat, white knuckles, this despite deep breathing.  Strands of overworked muscle hook higher up the chain, my shoulder hurts at the end of the week and I can't figure out why, even though I watch it build up.  Energy used for tension.

On a cushion, pull my legs into an unusual shape for this side of the world.  Lately my legs fall asleep only a little after half an hour.  I consider this progress, at least in so far as it keeps things interesting.  Back takes a long time to fatigue now, not sitting on my 1st lumbar vertebrae anymore.  All is vanity.

Eyelids light, like they want to open.  Body tall, like a radio antennae.  Toes hold the lower pentagram's tendons.  Knees stay loose, but regular and organized. Sinking bones, expanding breath.   Tongue tip back two front teeth.  What will I do after I sit?  Remember... Sinking bones, expanding breath. Bottoms of the thighs are pushing the right side of the pelvis, relax.  This story should really...I think I see something.  Sinking bones, expanding breath. A ball, rolling up and down the ghost ladder.  Cut body lines.  Energy used for awareness.

A blank white space.  Needs some order?  Based off the last one?  If a ruler keeps a line straight, why can't I draw a straight line with it?  This one will fill one blank white space.  Get out of my way.  Out of the whale?  yes.  Then he will walk in the woods?  Yes!  Maybe he sees three paths? Which one will he take?  His brain, his process, the place where the process stands to grip the lever.  Clear sight after years of preparation.  The world behind the tree will begin its slow creep in no matter which one he picks, as he digs deeper and deeper.  The path of the priestess through Daath.  Will he pass through and discard knowledge?  Breaking through the rough soil of the underearth.  Yes.  Pencil to paper.  Maybe like this.  Like this.  Just like this.  Up for air, did I breathe?  Energy used for work.

Spine bent uncomfortably for 8 hours? 10 hours? 3 hours?  Hand gripping the pencil, body curling up like a drying leaf, crumpling.  Gripping, this energy whips through, fire extinguishing fire.  So many physical signals demanding attention.  Some of work's energy, misappropriated.  Tiny screams all over.

Hot water loosens up my hands.  Devoting awareness to work: Sit up taller, breath softer, less tension.  How can I hold a pencil or a pen, making marks without hurting my hand? This way?  Yes...no.  This way?  Yes...much better.

Shoulder shrugs, fist gripping, legs taught, tension.  Take a deep breath, grip with a muscle in tandem, stronger grip: deeper breath.  Open up and say ahh.  deflate and relax.  That sighing ahh, drops the weight of the world.  The weight of the car keys.  Tension to energy.

St. Catherine of Alexandria's Demon

******** The myth of individuality must see defeat.  The ego, constantly confronted begins its steady recoil, its steady death.  It becomes a puppet.  What speaks through this puppet?  Anything but 'you'.  The pretentious baptismal blasphemy of identification.  The wretched flagellate fights, devoting the sinful body and thus the will with constant blood.   Sleep comes in a barrel of wine.  The pain means distance, separation, hierarchy, definition.  This too, must end.

The passing hebdomad: a swollen knee, a bent shoulder, some additional tension.  Must not have trusted the inside all the way, applied too much outside, too much me.  A jagged yellow rises up the middle column, devastation pays tribute to king 'I'.  Eventually this passes, and the teacher begins learning again.  Practice with them, with 'no-mind' and eventually practice-itself, with those people, develops sentience.

We receive billions of signals from the environment in every moment, most don't make it past the receptors, not strong enough to create action potential and reach the brain. Of these, thousands remain.  I contemplate them, stumbling to figure out who they apply to, what they mean, how to use them, a stasis of recursive interpretation.  Listen with the whole body and don't stop.

Instead of doing what you can do, or doing what you think others should do, or doing what you prepared for these specific people.  Every resistance in front of you, every groan and grunt, every eye rolling, every hard face, every blank eye scrutinized, the yellow streak never ends.  Armoring the inside against discomfort dulls the connection, makes a mind of no-mind.  Breathing through doubt, paranoia, guilt, shame, fear transform their tension into time.  Every decision in the space of 7 deep breaths.  Practice with them. Observe closely and learn, let go.  Stop thinking.

For every person a complaint.  A desire.  An expectation.  These things separate them. If you spend more than 20 hours practicing with someone recovering from shoulder surgery without developing a certain specific tightness and pain in the shoulder pay closer attention to them.  If you spend the next ten hours without every idle moment apart resulting in a constant fidget in an attempt to dispel that affliction, pay closer attention to your body.  Yog means "yoke" or union.  Learn patience, to teach patience.

Knowledge has no use.  Fold knowledge into the body, wring knowledge out of the body.  Daath's crown shines in the thick dark.  Wearing it, become king of the dark, blind but the length of one foot.  Forget knowledge, sentience means listening.  Just listen, practice listening.  Hold the singing bowl up to your chin after dragging the stick across the lip.  Listen, how long until the reverberation passes completely?  You can do better than that.

The nether vertex of a descending hexagram plunges into the heart of a rising pentacle, piercing through Tipareth and filling the hollow with the flood.  A yantra steered by padmasana.  I saw the subtle body in this shape.  "The best teaching: Practice with someone."  Stop teaching.

All symbols empty

11

We join spokes together in a wheel

But it is the center hole

That makes the wagon move.

We shape clay into a pot,

But it is the emptiness inside

That holds whatever we want.

We hammer wood for a house,

But it is the inner space

That makes it livable.

We work with being,

But non-being is what we use.

~Tao Te Ching

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With the exception of the Tao-Te-Ching, reaching through the mires of layered symbolism and occult blinds in attempt extract functional techniques for deconditioning and reprogramming requires herculean effort.  There is some good reason for this in older texts, a good example being the use of alchemical symbolism to describe ‘deviant’ sexual practices in the middle ages that would have engendered executions.  Crowley’s blinds when writing about homosexuality and sex magick carried this common thread into the new millennium where the thread will hopefully reach an ignominious end.  Crowley also blinded some techniques with poetry in order to prevent the uninitiated from attempting what he called ‘dangerous practices’, more likely, however, it was to foster an elitism and exclusionism.

Authors like Peter Carroll stripped everything down to bare technique and simple language to describe not only the skeleton of technique (just add your own beliefs!) but also to describe the effects of the technique and their usefulness and practicality.

Once one steps out of the magickal world and into the mystical or (God forbid!) religious world, this cutting away of the fat to get to the meat becomes more and more difficult.  “A Shaivite pilgrim walks around mount Kailash and sees Shiva at the summit, a Buddhist sees Buddha, a Shaktist sees the goddess, a yogi sees all those things and maybe also his or her mother”(1).  Yoga has long borrowed gods from both the vedic religion and Hinduism to describe complicated experiences and techniques for achieving them.  The play of Shiva and Shakti (form/inertia, emptiness/energy) represent the creation/dissolution and the universe itself.  This is remarkably similar to the Yin and Yang of Daoism or Caroll and Spare’s Kia and Chaos.

In the womb, as embryos, the structure that serves a precursor to the spinal cord and brain is called the neural tube.  If you want to think about it as the site where intelligence and sentience first form as well it shores up reasonably well with preconceptions about the CNS.  Our spinal cords form first.  In yoga the chakras although not being part of the body, are lined up with the spine.  These ‘energy centers’ are fundamental symbols involved in most yogic schools and none of them can decide on exactly how many of them we have in our bodies.  There are sounds associated with them, gods, animals, colors, soon it becomes as complicated as the Golden Dawn model for anything in particular.

To cut the fat away: the chakras represent places where, during intensive concentration on either nothing in particular or stillness, awareness accretes naturally and can be moved from one to the other.  Maybe doing this will help heal you or grant you secret powers of love (if enough awareness accretes in the heart) or speech (the throat), but maybe its just a good exercise in controlling your concentration and focusing awareness.  The more you pay attention to something the greater is your capacity to change it.  When seeking these experiences, cancel dogma, find your own way.

Next time you are concentrating and still, try to focus all of your awareness on your right big toe, once you have a breakthrough experience where you feel your awareness accreting there, see how long you can keep it there.

Instead of interpreting the symbols you encounter in an experience, try to think in terms of what the experience symbolizes.  What does your body symbolize?

(1) Rolf Sovik said this during a slideshow of a pilgrimage to Mount Kailash that he and several other chelas undertook.