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.

The second dragon

"Tell me... 

At what precise moment... 

...does an individual stop being who he thinks he is? 

You know, I don't like complications. 

Cut off my arm. I say, "Me and my arm." 

You cut off my other arm. I say, "Me and my two arms." 

You...take out... 

...take out my stomach, my kidneys, 

assuming that were possible... 

And I say, "Me and my intestines." 

Follow me? 

And now, if you cut off my head... 

...would I say, "Me and my head" or "Me and my body"? 

What right has my head to call itself me? 

What right?"

~The Tenant, Polanski, Brach, Topor 1976

Old challenges rise up.  The same complex interactions that allow for habit and breaking habit, the firing of neuronal sequence, can, sometimes, push old connections and patterns to the surface.  The game seems stacked against having a body in the first place.  What with its two brains.  Old habits die especially hard with a greater number of champions, lying in wait.

If you look at an image of the human intestine, particularly the small intestine, it bears a striking similarity with its winding, labyrinthine convolutions to the gyri and sulci of the brain.  It comes as no surprise then that this part of the body contains its own, partially separate nervous system.  Although it still receives a great deal of enervation from the CNS it contains its own patterns of learning and development, habit.   These habits and mostly private impulses direct everything from peristaltic rate (through Basal Electrical Rhythm), to secretion of intestinal and stomach juices.  Having a nervous stomach.  Even when the brain's bravery waits manifest.  Seems like a cruel joke.

Clearing out the brain's, and even the body's,  habits of nervousness and tension may not be enough if there are deeply engrained patterns of illness and violence lurking somewhere beneath the abdomen's surface.  The gut has a delicate sensitivity, too much of one secretion or too little of another and you get to know the feeling of cool porcelain on cold/hot sweats.  If a body habitually vomits due to some pathogen for a long enough period of time, it will continue to vomit long after the destruction or removal of the violator unless some other intervention occurs.

The sneak in your head, you do well for years and years, then the smell of hospitals or roses triggers some long dormant pattern of neuronal chaos and you find yourself back where you began or even worse off than you started.  Most of the time, with your brain, its relatively simple to determine what caused the downfall.  Who uses the gut as the primary center of consciousness?

What factors contribute to the firing of old habit in the gut?  The factors from the CNS can be mitigated consciously and easily enough, but what internal factors contribute?  Textures?  Chemicals?  Without concise consciousness in this vital center this may never be known.  While some say "open this chakral center" that phrase has no real meaning.  Directing awareness in this place seems a simple solution for experiment.  Awareness will accrete where the breath directs, does a sentient sensation follow or does the mind, as usual, play tricks?

The vagus nerve, so called due to its wandering, like a vagabond, down from the brain to the heart and to the gut.  Due to its location and structure it contributes signals to heart rate and the perstaltic, digestive, movements of the gut, all this from the brain.  The vagus nerve passes through the diaphragm, the primary muscle of respiration.  Ideally, and with training, breathing occurs almost solely through this mighty pump.  As this muscle rises and expands laterally, sensory portions of the vagus nerve receive stimulation.  When this stimulation reaches threshold, the nerve sends information about respiration rate to the brain.  Slow and deep, and the brain begins to turn on the parasympathetic circuits eventually triggering a rest and relax response, slowing heart rate (remember the vagus nerve enervates the heart?) and easing peristalsis.

While this may not cure a closed system gut freak out, remember that in this battle, you have powerful allies within your own body.


 Counting from the first, this post IS post #39. How appropriate.

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.

Habit of Heart and Lungs

That (Asana) Having Been Perfected, Regulation Of The Flow Of Inhalation And Exhalation Is Pranayama (Breath Control) 2.49

That Pranayama Has [1] External Operation (Vahya-Vrtti), [2] Internal Operation (Abhyantara-Vrtti) And [3] Supression (Stambha-Vrtti).  These, Again, When Observed According to Space, Time And Number Become Long And Subtle. 2.50

The Fourth Pranayama Transcends External and Internal Operations. 2.51

By That The Veil over Manifestation Is Thinned. 2.52

The Mind Acquires Fitness For Dharana [Concentration]. 2.53

~Yoga Sutras of Pantajali, Samkhya-yogacharya Swami Hariharananda Aranya

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The skillful magician often fits the description: low tension/high energy.  Although most of the rest of us achieve moments of this which contribute to flashes of insight and occasional smooth transitions during life changing situation, the magician cultivates this state so that it may be more permanent, useful and ultimately predictable.  The rest of us tend to move between high tension/low energy and low tension/low energy (archetypes of the hanged man, and the hermit) some are fortunate enough to excel to high energy/high tension (the emperor archetype).

The push and pull of tension can be useful in some practices, specifically those involving ecstatic movement, but the goal of ecstasy is essentially to overwhelm the senses to a degree that tension is completely impossible and these senses then collapse inward on a single point of focus.  However, The outcome of these practices has a tendency toward greater result if the practitioner begins at a low state of tension then consciously or unconsciously directing their flow of tension into ecstasy.  So willful tension seems good in some cases.

Low tension allows for greater powers of fixed concentration.   Fluidity in life requires low tension, otherwise disease (physical or emotional) infiltrates through the holes in the human matrix.  A skillful magician should be able to shift his or her unwavering concentration from one thing to the next without batting an eyelash or crashing the car.

There are many methods by which a practitioner can begin to cultivate this state of low tension/high energy.  As a trained hatha yogi and qi-gong man the ones I will herein describe require no additional esoteric equipment, no knives made of strange metals, no pentagrams etched in wax.  All you need is your hands, your body and your heart beat.

When someone experiences prolonged unhappiness and depression they tend to breathe quickly in and very slowly out.  When angry the breath comes out quick and goes in harsh, but stays shallow.  When surprised or shocked the breath comes in deeply and sharply then comes out quickly.  How someone breathes indicates a lot about their emotional state and therefore their state of tension.  Consequently, how someone breathes also has the tendency to change his or her emotional state. 

Patanjali,  paraphrased heavily here, indicates that the simplest technique towards Samadhi involves watching the breath and keeping it even and smooth.  The more conventional, traditional (?),  modern teaching has it that breathing slowly, deeply, without pauses, smoothly, and softly will get you there. 

The Vagus nerve (cranial nerve X) travels from the brain down most of the trunk of the body.  On the way it innervates  heart and many of the organs, therefore speeding up or slowing down our heart rate dependant on internal and external environmental factors.  Because of this action it serves as the most easily accessible switch between the parasympathetic nervous system and the sympathetic nervous system.  The sympathetic nervous system provides us with the fight or flight stress response and the parasympathetic with the rest and digest response.  The diaphragm, our primary breathing muscle, may actually massage and stimulate a sensory portion of the vagus nerve if we are breathing very deeply.  After prolonged, controlled breathing of this nature the parasympathetic nervous system transitions on and the heart rate slows and tension diminishes.

So the first key to the magician’s state of low tension/high energy is this sensory portion of the vagus nerve.  Breathing deeply.  This also has the result of bringing more oxygen into the body and releasing more carbon dioxide resulting in more energy.

LIBER CCC part 1: Deconditio Prefundis

Preliminary practice: (breathe only through the nose)

(A) Establishing a Baseline

       1. Place one hand over the navel

       2. Place the other hand over the heart

       3. Breathe normally and notice which hand moves more

(B) Deepening the Breath

       1. Breathe so that only the hand over the belly button moves, practice until the hand over the heart
           does not move at all for 30 minutes, then continue to step 2
       2. Breathe deeply into the belly then continue to breathe until the ribs expand laterally.  Allow no
           movement in the upper chest,  when you exhale: close the ribs first, then allow the belly to fall
           back towards the spine as you allow the breath to leave. When you can do this for 30 minutes
           move to step 3
       3. Breathe deeply into the belly, then continue to breathe until the ribs expand, and now finally
           continue to breathe so that the chest (energetic heart) expands and lifts towards the sky (ceiling,
           whatever). Lower the chest,  then close the ribs, then allow the abdomen to fall as the breath
           leaves. When you can breathe this way for 30 minutes continue to C.

       Congratulations on breathing deeply!
   
(C) Softening the breath
       1. Breathe as in (B)
       2. Focus your attention on your nostrils and feel the breath moving in and out here, when you can
           do this for 10 minutes continuously go to 3
       3. Consciously soften your breathing until you can feel a cool touch against your nostrils as you
           breathe in and a warmer touch as you breathe out.
       4. When you can do this for 30 minutes continue to (D)

(D) Evening the breath
       1. Breathe as in (B) and (C)
       2. Count your heartbeat to see how long it takes to breathe all the way in slowly and deeply,
           while still noticing the touch of breath against the nose
       3. Match this number to your exhalation so if you breathe in to 5 you breathe out to 5
       4. Increase the duration of the breath incrementally until you reach 20
       5. When this can be accomplished continuously for 30 minutes move on to (E)

(E) Demiurgic Breathing
      1. Lie on the floor or sit in a steady asana
      2. Work your way into breathing as per the end of D, then discontinue counting
      3. Continuing to breathe deeply and slowly remain as still as possible
      4. Use as little muscle as possible to breathe in and out, keep the breath soft
      5. Try not to think
      6. Practice this for at least 30 minutes daily, record results, visions etc.

        Congratulations!  You have successfully begun the process of self-deconditioning and tension reduction that is essential to success.

        At first the breathing may stop and start and not feel very continuous, or you may have an easy time for the first few breaths then they become labored and uncomfortable with constant stops and starts.  Focus on each breath individually and just try to do your best.  With practice the kinks, as they say, work out.

      (RUACH)