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.

Tunnel of Demons

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Within the space of our own minds there lie mysteries.  Why can’t I seem to stop eating candy?  Why do I dislike others so intensely?  Why do I get sad when it rains, and happy when its sunny (or the reverse)?  The simplest explanation for all of these phenomenon lies in the neural circuitry itself.  These things happen because certain circuits are fired in response to certain stimuli.  When these circuits are fired often enough, we begin to develop an aggregate personality based on their habitual firings.  Our personalities largely derive from our habits, our exposures and our imprints.

In the parlance of forgotten shelves and dusty grimoires demon has the definition of some external entity in some overlapping subtle realm that has the power to possess and control our behavior when undignified, and to grant us suprahuman abilities and knowledge for a price when dignified or contained.  Among many dualists, the word demon connotes a class of such entities that are somehow evil or malign in direct opposition to forces of good and ultimately humanity.  An earlier definition, the greek: daimon, latin: daemon, refers to any divinity, or lesser spirit, or tutelary deity. 

The elaborate procedures utilized in order to either affect a possession experience, or communication with a specific entity turn on specific neural circuits in a specific sequence so that they either override the ‘normal’ map of personality or project themselves onto the screen of external reality.  A certain program, enacted in the physical world, increases the likelihood of execution of certain other embedded programs.  These strange programs can aid in rewiring the mundane habits of circuitry.  They  seem to have their best effect when used in the short term and many (not all) long term users tend to develop unpleasant side effects from lengthy ritual procedure.  Due to the habits of common ancestors the anatomy of each homo sapien has enough similarity that most of us contain the capacity for many of the same connections in circuitry.  Modern science indicates that humans have grown all of the neurons we get for an entire lifetime either before birth or shortly after being born.  The combining and synapsing of these billions of circuits occurs until the day we die.

‘Demon’ conveniently classifies certain neural programs as those which are most effective at ripping old circuitry apart and forcefully plugging in and making new circuits in somewhat unpredictable sequences of predictable patterns.  Agony, obsession, anger, strange sensations, unusual thoughts, and feeling of other can occur as a direct result of these unpredictable sequences and will remain if the chosen program is aborted early and not completed.  Discipline and trust in one’s person, as well as a firm situating in the buddhi are a solution to enduring this process.

Just as each cell has a program for it’s death written in its dna, human beings have circuits that, when fired in a series or consistently fired, have a tendency toward enacting destructive behavior.  These destructive circuits exist within all of us to some extent.  The skillful practitioner, long in the tooth in the practice of external visualization can work himself into a trance state, fire a demonic circuit and project it outward, giving it a physical appearance.  If the practitioner, after much hard discipline, can remain detached from the experience, and is well situated in the buddhi, this experience can give much insight into the inner workings of his own person, can alight intuition, etc.  By externalizing this force, the beneficial aspects of the circuitry can be exemplified, while the destructive aspects are mitigated.

I followed Crowley’s structure and as I worked I mutated it into my own utilizing intuition.  Success was determined by a certain series of specific sensations during ritualized movements that I was able to replicate each time.  I convinced myself that these sensations meant it was working and that I would then have the ability to visualize my circuitry and affect forceful changes.  These changes were intuitive and therefore logically unpredictable, the space they took place required there be so little normal consciousness that the changes dripped their way onto my internal screen as shadowy figures, women with swords and bloody hands that threatened to cut off my head if I couldn’t remain still.  I trusted that whatever changes took place were necessary and wouldn’t turn me into some type of human disaster.  I think maybe it worked, but still often feel like a human disaster.

After many months of finally, successfully, enacting the firing of this strange circuitry it seemed as though I had some clairvoyant ability, saying what someone else was thinking frequently, having the ability to tell who was about to arrive, like I was just above and able to view the horizon from anywhere.  That a specific series of circuits were consistently fired in my neuroanatomy during this period I have no doubt.  That I possessed, for this time, some ability above and beyond?  Strange circuit firings will alter one’s lookout, or process of perception.  The program that ran could have enabled my belief in these things so strongly that it seemed they occurred while back in consensus reality… 

Tunnel of Belief

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Every new impression that enters the sensory apparatus alters the structure of the nervous system in some small way.  We have the capacity to take part in these changes by utilizing a symbolically structured approach to temporary or conditional truth known as belief. What we, as humans, believe shapes our notions of reality by coloring each of our perceptions and impressions through belief’s filter.  In essence, practicing a belief reorganizes pieces of the nervous system in some small way so that these connections occur with each new sensory or other input, thereby reinforcing the initial belief.   From this perspective, belief, in particular its capacity to alter the nervous system, has its place among other immensely powerful tools for engendering transformation, fluidity, and experiences of “the other”.

The difficulty with belief lies in the time it takes to develop it enough to begin its alterations.  Daily practice of a belief, walking down the same neural pathways, will eventually yield the desired changes, but has the drawback of being harder and harder to return from the deeper one plunges into the rabbit hole.  Each belief system one travels down creates a map of reality that, upon return remains accessible to the “meta person”.  The “meta person” can be defined as the position of belief and personality from which one began the journey down a particular rabbit hole, ideally this position is similar each time one embarks on a journey of belief and remains as close to a passive observer as possible given one’s current state of practice.  In Yogic philosophy this “meta person” has a name: Buddhi.  A passive observer of the state of the mind.  Great care must be taken so that the Buddhi does not become an aggregate of bits and pieces from the various beliefs that are undertaken.  

The goal lies in continuously sculpting and changing the brain and nervous system in order to create flexibility holistically.  An example to help explain: Crowley’s method involved picking a god or goddess to worship, surrounding himself with the incense, ritual objects, etc of that god and goddess.  Constructing rituals to evoke and invoke them and having mental exercises, habit exercises follow him out of the temple to continue patterning his behavior and funneling it into a self-created reality tunnel where the specific god he was worshipping (creating) was the penultimate force in the universe.  He would undertake these experiments, and once he achieved a super-real experience of the entity he was worshipping, he would switch to a different god or goddess.  He would create an elaborate tunnel-reality, plunge himself into it, and return back via the anchoring effects of his journal.

With some practice in belief, the meta person has the ability to select at will from any of these prebuilt meshes of belief.  Each representing a “lookout” or perspective from which our participation in reality unfolds.  These maps are useful for understanding perspectives other than the ones that are developed through pure chance, habitus, early socialization, trauma, etc.    They are also useful for remaining fluid and low tension even during challenging situations. 

I worked in a woodshop for several years, ripping, cross-cutting, planing, assembling, finishing, installing cabinets and heavy appliances. The shop was in Greek Town in Baltimore in a decaying turn of the century (20^th century) industrial complex.  In the summer we’d open the doors and turn on all the fans in an attempt to gain respite from the boiling temperature.  Despite our best efforts it was always at least 15 degrees hotter inside than out.  There were 3 heaters we’d use in the winter, but the place was so big everyone had to intermittently go without heat depending on where they had to move around that day.  A strange and insidious black dust fell from the ceiling constantly, filling our lungs along with saw dust and whatever finishing chemicals were in use that day.

I am a small guy, this seeming and self-imposed limitation was very difficult to overcome on my own.   I did a lot of heavy lifting, a lot of applied force in cramped places.  I’d come home feeling like the outside of my body had been boiled and toughened like leather, beaten and battered.  I practiced hatha yoga, tai chi and qi gong every day after work like clock work to keep my body from giving up and to keep it adaptable.  But my mind kept hitting the wall and I became more and more disgruntled every day.  Anger and woodworking go hand in hand, it’s part of the process of wood working for most it seems, small rages while assembling seem to help the beetle kephra jump to an obvious solution.  At the time I didn’t understand that, I didn’t like being angry so much that it made me more angry.

I was working in the back with a guy I only passingly got along with, because we worked together.  One day we were joking around and I said something to the effect of, “wood working is devil worship”.  I had made many off-color jokes with him over the year we had worked together and most were accepted with at least a little smile, I had mostly learned his language and although I never made racist jokes or jokes about women, I learned how to speak to him.  This joke, however, was met with wide eyes.  That was enough to provide an impetus for action and transformation.  

I investigated Satanism, Luciferianism.  They both seemed too dependant on a binary proposition for me to engage in, I was deep into tai-chi and qi-gong which has mostly ruined me for duality (that is to say it would take me a long time to erect a belief tunnel around a dualistic cosmos).  I settled on a general diabolism and my practices followed suit, I walked down the tunnel and after a few weeks work got easier and I had transformed into something more than slightly sinister, even becoming more capable of using my left hand dextrously.  The co-worker and I joked, but now he no longer lingered, and I became capable of objecting to his off-color jokes and my objections would shut him down completely.  The aches and pains my body would suffer over the course of the (sometimes 17 hour) day that initially and for the first year were horribly demoralizing became like a badge of honor for having survived hell every day, they were a method for bringing me one step closer to demonhood.  I left this job after another couple of years.  I think that because I was practicing meditation, qi-gong and hatha yoga every day I was able to walk right out of this tunnel easily.  Flexibility in the body can indicate flexibility in the mind.  But you have to practice that way.

I believe many other unusual things today. These days I try to remain more practical with my beliefs (although, this itself grows wearisome).   I like to think that emotions can get trapped in the physical body.  This belief of convenience makes practicing stretching that much more useful because I can root out stuck emotions in my body.  This phenomenon will probably never have a scientific explanation or examination to verify its veracity, but that doesn’t matter.  I often explain to students that Qi-Gong acts as a psychosomatic exercise, literally.  If you are able to imagine hard enough that you are holding some type of warm energy ball in your hands that you experience physical sensations than you are more likely able to fool your body into not feeling pain when you experience pain.  Does that seem useful?