Boredom

I recall, as a child, occassionally encountering a strange sensation, usually the same peculiar sensation.  Complicated, as if splitting in two directions at once, paralyzing in its choice.  Allowing me to do nothing on the threshold of one or several things.  This uncomfortable liminal space where the picture gets larger.  Clearly there was nothing to do.  All I could say was "I'm bored".

I hear it often at my job.  We have a time set aside during the course of the day where kids can engage in a free choice inside.  The structure of their school day melts away into our own fabrication into what do you want to do?  We provide legos, blocks, board games, cards, drawing supplies, scissors, glue, paper, you name it.  Sometimes one of us takes them next door and watches them run around a bit, to get that out.  Invariably, even in the midst of all this choice a child approaches with that same song on his/her lips, "I'm bored, there's nothing to do."

Their boredom contains, at least, an implicit bifurcation of potential action.  The emotions and feelings that generate as a result of this bifurcation can seem quite alien, strange and unusual even to an adult. Humans require novel stimulation to keep interested.  Ideally this stimulation has an internal locus of generation.  One path to this has its end in the realization that every moment has little to no connection to any other moment, keeping every individual moment novel in its experience.  In this way one can do anything and enjoy it permanently so long as one follows a steady plan for the maintenance of its practice.  Along the way this practice begins to cultivate detail seeking behaviors, making it ideal for those with artistic and prosean leanings, I have encountered few limits in details, they seem always to lead to something smaller and something smaller, or something softer and something softer.

Getting there requires tremendous effort.  Working through this feeling time and again begins to beat the wrinkle back.  But the practice requires lots of heat and determination.  I recall, during my early experiments with discipline, the last youthful tears of boredom leaving my eyes, the last kvetching "I don't wanna's" leaving my brain.  This happened, happens, repeatedly.  I still have far to go. The emotional body holds great power over all the other patterns we find ourself interacting with. Still: disciplining oneself to keep interested seems a noble preoccupation to me.  By allowing the flow of emotion a proper and concentrated outlet, over time, clarity develops.

Illumination's hooks

Self-Discipline, at first,  can provide a critical foothold in the war against whatever habit (physical, emotional, mental, systemic) no longer serves.  Gradual synaptic change requires this humble strength, won through willful masochism.  The patterns of life largely find their creation in chemical reaction and the firing of neural pathways, the ensuing combination of neurotransmitter and hormone cascading into subtle, hidden sensation, floats upwards into the system of habitual process.  The impressions left in the matrix from moments and events become all the deeper when they seem to repeat, even if only in spirit.  Life resembles chaos, and the events often only have meaningful connection here in the broadest strokes.  External patterns provide security from either their predictable structures or from their simple beauty (essentially the same thing).

While appealing to this broader perspective provides a certain sense of calm and a feeling of rising above whatever discomfort the experience engenders, the habit of objective participation must first develop.  While some possibility must somewhere exist that accidental lifestyle and habitus themselves provide this critical habit, most of us require hard work.  This work all the harder because the work will not feel natural at first.  Eventually it gets better and larger more intricate patterns emerge from what seemed the aether, but now tangible connection.  As the altitude inclines the tendency towards uprooting and dispersal steadily increases.  Looking down provides practical solutions, but without great care the gaze moves up towards something wholly different.  Upon looking back down, the seeming mirage of details sweats away, lost in beauty all grounding vanishes.  This insipid dispersal has far reaching, hazardous implications first for punctuality (because time is not divine unless measured in days!).   As more awareness withdrawals from the body and pumps itself upwards into this newfound archon colds, flus, simple illnesses begin to occur more regularly, nothing terribly pernicious, but providing an oscillation of subtle and abrasive incapacitation.  All this while maintaining self-discipline.  Now the head expands, and the imagery and revery that fills where only emptiness provides liberation, seem more important than eyes-opened.  And when eyes-opened, an overlay of ever-increasing complexity falsely imposes itself over the most basic of events.  Two extremes either lost in the detail, or the largesse.

Attachment to a set of actions eventually renders their ritual fruitless.  Mistaking discipline for the specific actions undertaken in its name occurs with great regularity.  A special type of staleness sets in, removed from normal resistance to change it will increase steadily with time.  Moderation in moderation.  The ability to recognize this only comes with prolonged exposure to and participation in attempts at self-discipline.  Once the actions are removed, discipline reduces quite simply: the ability to direct the entire capacity towards one particular thing repeatedly.  AND the ability to change this one particular thing with a minimum of concentrative dispersal.

The best practitioners maintain a defensible position by transmitting no sakki.  Preparation for events can only occur as they happen due to our constant inclusion and communication with the process of reality.

Memory Hopscotch

In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, during a specific stage of death, the psychopomp attempts to soothe the horror of the listener's departing entity when they visually encounter wrathful figures  with 12 arms and 12 legs.  These wrathful figures, the listener is reminded, are actually a virtue contained in themselves, a clear light.  When I visualize these figures, I tend to relate them to the pathways of memory, winding, labyrinthine neural structures with arms that reach everywhere, irrevocably altering and effecting everything they contact.  Memory ultimately fuels personality by way of indicating which habits have favorable results (lead to the release of pleasant chemical combinations, or produce states where unpleasant chemical combinations are no longer released).  What we experience alters and changes our processes.  Particularly during moments in time where an individual has a high sensitivity to imprinting.  In fact, imprinting events tend to affect many classes of later formed habits and potential actions.

These synapses have a high vulnerability to alteration, but meaningfully and willfully altering them either takes some degree of fortunate or 'lucky' circumstance, or many years of regular and seemingly tedious practice.  A fortunate circumstance would possess a critical mass of factors that either directly relate to, or are highly symbolic of, the same number of factors in the original circumstances surrounding the initial imprint or memory.  Years of meditative practices, particularly those involving the objective observation of the process of mind and a heavy emphasis on visualization practices can bring mental pattering to a similar state.  The former has fewer components of deliberate mindfulness and therefore a higher potential for a non-favorable outcome in the untrained.  Quiet and deliberate practice in directing the mind leads to a more disciplined outcome in either case.

Theoretically, when, through many hours of mindful practice, these imprinting or habit-forming events that occurred on some date previous to the present can project lucidly and clearly into the infinite space behind the eyes, a very powerful sympathetic magic can occur.  During this state the practitioner can play act within their own memory and alter not only their reaction to the event, but also change the way they participated in the event.  If an invocation to imprint vulnerability, performed just previously to this strong visualization, showed measurable signs of success then the memory of this evoked event will permanently change to adhere to the freshly visualized alterations.  If the preceding invocation did not achieve success, and continues to fail, then the end of altering the imprint requires many more subsequent successful visualizations.

Perhaps my work with children combines easily with my own memories of youth, but those memories, long buried, have crawled and clawed their way to the surface and into my field of vision with a reliable frequency.  The one that showed up this week occurred in Kindergarten.  The current version of the memory involves a young girl, a nun named Sister Julia, and me.  When someone raised their hand in class and had difficulty spitting out a correct answer, this teacher would look around the room and say "Can anybody help him/her?" before calling on someone else who would then give the correct answer.  We were each individually engaged in a math assignment, something having to do with circling groups of numbers in a specific pattern.  A girl in class was having trouble and the teacher asked me to help her.  I have no memory of how this came about, only that she specifically emphasized my helping her.  I did what most humans at 5 years old, only possessing those two basic pieces of information, would do.  I gave her the correct answers.  Sister Julia came over while I was in the middle of giving the girl the last two correct answers.  I remember circling a 5 and a 9 in some versions of the movie, and a 5 and a 3 in others.  She was infuriated by what she saw, pulled me aside grabbed and gripped the tops of both ears between pointer finger and thumb.  Then she pulled up hard.

In some versions of the memory my feet leave the ground, in others they don't.  I buried this memory, but not in the conventional way.  After I was about 15 I experienced no discofort talking about it, but I refused to re-experience it or reframe it.  In this way I convinced myself that it had no effect on me.  This, such a great conceit.  It began to come up in my seated practice every once in a while in my mid twenties.  When I experience the internal movie now  I no longer experience the pain of the event  and I no longer feel shame afterwards, just the wind at the top of the icy mountain.

Although, the we cannot change the things that occurred in our histories, the past has an equal flexibility and plasticity to the present, particularly through the lens of consistent practice.

2 Aphorisms

AHE! AHE!

AHE! AHE!

AHE! AHE!

AHE! AHE!

39. Surgery

What fills space?

time to find an answer: 

7 days

Commentary:

The master finished leading a meditation high atop a mountain. A young student approached the master with a question.

Student: master, describe the spirit.

Master: nothingness, nothing

Student: then what does it mean to be spiritual?

Master: an attempt to convince the ego that nothingness has substance.

student: what is nothingness?

master: it is unimportant

with that the student was enlightened.

**********

55.When spirit is the only thing holding you down

Think carefully. 

What are you trying to transcend? 

Is having a body too much for you? 

Commentary: 

I heard a child say, "Pain is weakness leaving the body".  Upon hearing this, my person was seized with aggravation. Physical pain normally indicates a disease state, or some subtle or overt state of injury.  When pain presents itself, with a scream or a whimper, the signal often does not leave the body, but bounces around a neuronal trampoline, getting faster and faster and stronger and stronger with each successful leap.  A clear sign that whatever the body currently engages in should see soon its ceasing to prevent damage to its delicate structure.  This means that Pain can signal the beginning of a weakness caused by injury, which in turn indicates that the above statement, phrased with more accuracy would look like: "Pain is weakness developing in the body." 

Pain lingers after the activity (stretch, weight-bearing movement, etc.)  has ended.

Classically, self-inflicted pain (flagellation) has been used with various amounts of recorded and historical success in achieving a concentrated, reasonably empty state of gnosis.  This path has a tendency towards putting the physical body into some very peculiar and risky circumstances.  As the body/brain adjusts to the infliction of pain, (in most cases) the punishment must gradually increase in order to achieve the same or a similar state.  Discipline seems very important to such a practitioner in order that they may keep their body operational in 3 dimensional space.  In many of these practices, portions of the body rich in nerve endings are the targets, nociceptors (pain receptors) overload the nervous system ultimately causing stillness and emptiness in the mind.   

Nocignosis differs from other painful practices of gnosis in a few remarkable ways.  The pain applied in nocignostic practices produces the concentrated state without any other attached significance.  A sadhu decides to hold his hand in the air for the rest of his life in order to venerate god and achieve gnosis, as a penance.  Even though, initially, pain plays a critical role in this practice, instead of playing the role of  gnostic mediator, it plays the role of test and obstacle.  Ultimately this sadhu seeks to adjust to having his hand in the air, as such it gradually shrivels and loses its use and function:  transmuted into pure symbol.

The Nocignostic is more likely to walk with glass in their shoes or slap themselves with wet leather whips, or wear hair shirts or irritating needles in order to overstimulate nerve endings to temporarily short circuit the nervous system without causing any permanent damage to the structures of the body.  The sadhu has rendered useless a structure that human beings use vitally to interact with the environment and to express themselves, his austerity has its end in further separating him from the world of the living and reaffirming his vows of renunciation, a tool to achieve a permanent state of gnosis.   In this way he avoids the pitfall of pain addiction that many modern nocignostics suffer from.  He doesn't become attached to pain or endorphin, in fact, he works to divorce himself from it due to its very basic primal nature because in that way he further removes himself from the living.  

********

When I was 15 I met my first yoga teacher.  Until this time my yoga practice was out of library books with a childlike grasping of discipline and order .  I practiced postures and movements that I liked every day, relegating those I had tried and, for whatever reason, did not like to once a week or twice a week.  As a skillful teacher I like to believe that he keyed into this every once in a while.  We'd do postures in class that were very uncomfortable to me, every week.  I kept attending class.  He often would talk about the difference between 'pain' and 'sensation'.  

Many people lead relatively sedentary lifestyles, and normally when these lifestyles don't follow classical sedentary patterns they still contain a great deal of inertia due to comfort and habit.  A worthy occupation this, avoiding pain as best we can.  Hatha yoga causes a great deal of discomfort in its initial stages, as the body begins to adjust right down to the sinew.  After 20 some odd years of practice I still find its practice uncomfortable, but now: poses I dread doing I do often.  If you damage your body during an asana, the pain will linger and stay in there for some time.  Back off and rest for a while.  However, stretching, lengthening, altering tendons, and, less substantially, ligaments can cause many foreign sensations.  Because these sensations are localized and have a tendency towards intensity and overstimulation many regard them as painful.  After the stretch, this intensity dissipates and all that remains feels as a bowl of butterflies in a long and skinny shaft of sunlight.  

My teacher would emphasize the importance of practicing poses that you hate more often than those you love.  Hatha yoga wants you to Develop the ability to clear your mind in the midst of enduring discomfort and uncomfortable stimulation.  The individual that exerts will and moves the body, causing these uncomfortable states, then clears his mind and continues to breathe slowly and softly will eventually, after many regular applications of this exercise, suffer from the delusion that all external stimulus that cause discomfort also stem from their individual will.  Thus they will then have the ability to breathe deeply and softly and watch even that discomfort disappear.

Stimulus Overload

"This point of view assumes that if one plugs in the proper beliefs into the metaprogrammatic levels of the biocomputer that the computer will then construct from the myriads of elements in memory those experiences that fit this particular set of rules.  Programs will be run off and displays made that are appropriate to the basic assumptions and their stored programming" ~Programming the Human Biocomputer, John C. Lilly, M.D.

Lately, an almost insurmountable feeling frequently overtakes me during seated or lying practice.  I feel as though I have to get up immediately.  It takes a tremendous amount of concentrated effort to stay the course and then to banish this particular thought so I can resume effective practice.  Not certain if herein lies a sign of true progress, but I take it as one regardless. 

It got me thinking.  Every time I feel like I have to get up, my brain shows me a potential short term future scenario that either it finds appealing or stresses about.  Something it would rather engage in, or something it HAS to engage in.  Anything other than laying down or sitting and being bored with nothing going on.  These scenarios enter my visual and emotional space like whispy phantoms, makes it interesting to think my brain can make anything out of them at all.  Perhaps they are only the product of my brain assigning meaning and attaching bits and pieces of stored memory and thought to some biochemical process that is the result of either prolonged practice or my new and still stressful job situation.  The chicken and the egg.

Interestingly, as soon as these future stresses or amusements are banished I almost always get a very clear moving image of something that occurred in the past that went well.  The whispy phantom replaced by something clear and memorable.  Once this is banished my state of concentration usually improves until some external stimulus distracts me. 

I have a need to go deeper.  I want to know what lies beneath all of these things.  Yogis and Shamans have long traditions of cave-dwelling.  Caves are completely insulated places:  no light, no sound, constant temperature.  Sensory deprivation seems a viable answer to my need.  What lies underneath?  How do I experience my brain/mind without any external stimulation?  Does it possess a natural state?  I get glimpses of these states every once in a while and truly extraordinary things inevitably accompany them.  ‘Modern Life’ makes it extraordinarily difficult to spend days at a time in either a cave or a sensory deprivation tank, this next experiment seems sufficient to building a habit of deconstruction and disintegration.

Liber 333 part 1

Experiment #1 An Attempt to Discover the Metaprogram

Procedure: Prior to the performance of the experiment, earplugs should be worn for up to 1 hour, this provides time for the body to acclimate to the sensation of something in the ears. 

Create a dark environment by blocking out windows with tin foil. 

Lie in bed for 4 hours trying not to move, only breathing. Do not sleep.

Repeat experiment every 2 weeks for 8 sessions. (this seems almost impossible as well.  Maybe 8 sessions in a six month period)

Record results, visions, etc.

Future experiments will implant predetermined phrases, cantos, etc by playing them on repeat for the duration, in order to facilitate reprogramming.

These methods seem potentially very powerful to me.  Ultimately my goal is to increase my focus and my (very poor) visualizing skills.

Granted this experiment has a relatively small scale and duration,  never-the-less I enjoy sudden and dramatic insight.  I'm a big fan of the lightning bolt.  I do not anticipate the discovery of a 'soul'.  Some Tibetan buddhist monks go on a 3 year, 3 month, 3 day retreat that involves sitting in a small hut on a bed of grass and meditating on a fixed image for about 18 hours a day.  A volunteer slides food through a small slot in the door twice a day and takes away the bucket those on retreat perform their ablutions in.  If they perform this very serious sensory deprivation procedure and not emerge knowing the soul, then there remains little hope for its objective discovery.