The Listener

Image by Lucinda Horan

PART TWO

The Listener: Developing a Dialogue with Self

“In Genesis, Yahweh’s first instruction to Adam is not something practical such as how to make a fire or fashion a weapon. He teaches the first man to name all of His creatures. By this act, Yahweh emphasizes that naming is the most potent power He will confer on mortals. Through naming, Adam gains ‘dominion over all the earth.’ Naming confers meaning and order. To name is to know. To know is to control.”

—Leonard Schlain, The Alphabet Vs. the Goddess

It is logical to presume that, before words were ever written down, they began as sounds. While we can only presume this about the species, we can observe it first hand when it comes to individuals. When a baby learns to speak it doesn’t build a vocabulary word by word (a process which begins later), it starts by making unintelligible sounds in imitation of what it hears. Gradually, these sounds begin to resemble recognizable language and verbal communication begins. Soon after this, the child learns to read and write and language becomes fixed, not only as sound but as image. It becomes script, code. Writing then introduces a new possibility, that of words separate from direct communication, and the corresponding possibility of communication occurring, not only across space, but across time. As Leonard Schlain writes in The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, “The written word is essentially immortal. To a hyper-conscious primate who had become aware that death was inevitable, the discovery of a method to project one’s self beyond a single life span seemed nothing less than miraculous.”

There is another possibility which Schlain does not discuss, another purpose for writing which has nothing to do with immortality or even communication in the ordinary sense. That is the possibility of writing without any intention of ever sharing it with another human being—such as for example when writing a journal. Thousand, perhaps millions, of people do this every day (admittedly less so now that blogs and Facebook have opened up the possibility of communicating with strangers), and the assumed wisdom is that keeping a journal is a therapeutic process. If this is really the case, how does it work? The obvious answer is that writing a journal is a way to communicate with oneself.

*

“To start a dialogue,

first ask:

then… listen.”

—Antonio Machado

Short of talking to oneself (which creates a very different effect), self-communication is only possible via writing. Writing down an account of one’s activities or thoughts creates a distance between oneself and the raw material of one’s existence, and potentially between one’s everyday “motor” self and one’s consciousness. As in good therapy, one is talking to an impartial, disinterested, but wholly attentive other, the difference being that, in this case, the “Listener” is oneself. This Listener is something we can all develop within ourselves, without which no real communication is possible. Before we can begin to listen to others, we have to learn to listen to ourselves. Only then can we find our true voice, because real speech can only come about as a response to listening, whether internally or externally.[1]

We are all familiar with the phrase “to get something off your chest,” the idea being that, by talking about something that is causing us stress or discomfort, we can let it go, or at least see it in a less stressful light. The reason this works is that, by talking about something with a second party, we can see it from a different perspective, from the outside rather than the inside, and reduce its power to affect us. This can work when we have a sympathetic ear to vent our frustration to, but it tends to work better when we have a neutral ear, such as in therapy. Therapy allows us to re-experience our problem from the perspective of an impartial but curious observer who is devoid of any strong emotional reaction. This presence is the Listener, being at once both interested and disinterested, sympathetic but impartial, uninvolved. When we communicate with ourselves in this way, via writing, creative expression, deep thought or meditation, we bring forth The Listener—the part of us that is equivalent to a sympathetic but disinterested friend or a therapist—and can then reconceive the problem from a new perspective. The benefits of this are two-fold: not only do we experience our problem in a less stressful light, we also gain access to a part of ourselves that is able to rise above any problem because it is entirely uninvolved, while at the same time, privy to inside information about us. The Listener is our own inner therapist.

Whether by sharing with a neutral party or writing it down, what is occurring through the act of communicating is that we get to see what’s inside us in a way that feels safe to “take on board.” In terms of the issue being reconceived, if we are angry, we may describe our anger and the reasons for it, thereby seeing the shape of it and coming to “grips” with it. We can then own the anger in such a way that confronting the original cause of our anger becomes much easier and more straightforward. Instead of acting in anger, we “take” our anger to the person or situation and express it in a more balanced, less emotive fashion. Writing a journal, like talking to a therapist, is a way of testing the contents of our minds, both conscious and unconscious (writing will bring unconscious matter to the surface just as much as therapy), making sure that we have got to grips with it before letting others see it. It is a psychological rehearsal space in which we can see exactly what we are capable of and what we’re not—“where we’re at”—before going on stage and performing in front of a live audience.

This sort of dialoguing with the self can have an accumulative effect: it creates a recursive feedback loop in which, the more we reveal the contents of our minds to ourselves and integrate them, the more we accept ourselves as we are, the more we can open up to others, and so on. Alchemically speaking, we are drawing the lead into the laboratory of our minds and transmuting it, via awareness, over a long painful process, into gold. By establishing a different way of relating to ourselves through on-going dialogue, we are establishing a kind of private social identity which, little by little, we can take with us into the world. By strengthening our individual sense of truth, meaning, and value, we are slowly “finding our feet” in reality.

Continue Reading

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[1] If we are too busy criticizing ourselves we won’t really hear what we are trying to communicate. In the same way, when we pretend to listen to others, we are actually too busy figuring out what we want to say next, and simply waiting for our chance to do so. This is not dialogue.

SKYWRITERS IN HADES

Image by Lucinda Horan

Mirror Neurons, Individuation Spellcraft, and the Art of Shamanic Writing

(with thanks to Mrs. Kephas: the perfect listener)

PART ONE

“Don’t scorn the word:

Poets, the world is noisy

and silent, only God speaks.”

—Antonio Machado

Pornography and Shamanic Healing

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”

—E.L. Doctorow

In 1992, Giacomo Rizzolatti and a team of neuroscientists accidentally discovered mirror neurons while experimenting on monkeys. The monkeys had their brains wired up in order to observe how motor neurons related to hand movements, and when a monkey picked up a peanut, the neuron fired. But to the team’s surprise, the same motor neuron also fired when the monkey was watching a lab assistant pick up the peanut. Apparently, to the monkey’s brain, seeing someone grabbing a peanut was a similar experience to grabbing the peanut itself. Action and perception were “tightly linked.” The neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran believes that the discovery of mirror neurons for neuroscience is equivalent to the discovery of DNA for biology, and that the “fifth revolution” is the neuroscience revolution (following Copernican, Darwinian, Freudian, and Crick and Watson’s discovery of DNA).

Before we look more closely at what mirror neurons are, I’d like to begin by citing an interesting demonstration of how they function, using for an example a subject we are all acquainted with—pornography. The following is from “Porn and Mirror Neurons,” by Jonah Lehrer.

“But how does porn work? Why do humans (especially men) get so excited by seeing someone else have sex? At first glance, the answer seems obvious: watching porn triggers an idea (we start thinking about sex), which then triggers a change in our behavior (we become sexually aroused). This is how most of us think about thinking: sensations cause thoughts which cause physical responses. Porn is a quintessential example of how such a thought process might work.

“But this straightforward answer is probably wrong. Porn does not cause us to think about sex. Rather, porn causes to think we are having sex. From the perspective of the brain, the act of arousal is not preceded by a separate idea, which we absorb via the television or computer screen. The act itself is the idea. In other words, porn works by convincing us that we are not watching porn. We think we are inside the screen, doing the deed.”

Now let’s reframe this argument and apply it instead to a shamanic healing ritual.

How does shamanic ritual work? Why do humans get healed by seeing someone else perform a ritual? At first glance, the answer seems obvious: watching a ritual triggers an idea (we start thinking about healing), which then triggers a change (we are healed). This is how most of us think about thinking: sensations cause thoughts which cause physical responses. Shamanic ritual is a quintessential example of how such a thought process might work.

But this straightforward answer is probably wrong. Shamanic ritual does not cause us to think about being healed. Rather, shamanic ritual causes us to think we are doing the healing. From the perspective of the brain, the act of healing is not preceded by a separate idea, which we absorb via watching the shaman. The act itself is the healing. In other words, shamanic ritual works by convincing us that we are not watching a shamanic ritual. We think we are the shaman, doing the ritual.

This interpretative model can be applied to absolutely anything within the parameters of human experience; but what we are interested in applying it to here is writing, most specifically journal writing, which involves the observation of behavioral patterns. What are the ways in which writing can be used to hold a mirror to our psyches and develop empathy for ourselves, as well as for others? How is isolating ourselves from the input of others a means for self-examination and a way to become more integrated into the community? What is a group mind, how is it formed, what makes its hold upon us so complete, and how does writing help to break that hold? What is individuation, how does it pertain to finding our own unique “voice,” as writer-programmers of our reality—and what does all this have to do with porno and shamanism?!

Stay tuned, all will be revealed.

Reality as a Language-Based Construct

“The linking and relinking of objects by the Brain is actually a language, but not a language like ours (since it is addressing itself and not someone or something outside itself). We should be able to hear this information, or rather narrative, as a neutral voice inside us. But something has gone wrong. All creation is a language and nothing but a language, which for some inexplicable reason we can’t read outside and can’t hear inside. So I say, we have become idiots. Something has happened to our intelligence. My reasoning is this: arrangement of parts of the Brain is language. We are parts of the Brain; therefore we are language. Why, then, do we not know this? We do not even know what we are, let alone what the outer reality is of which we are parts. The origin of the word “idiot” is the word “private.” Each of us has become private, and no longer shares the common thought of the Brain, except at a subliminal level. Thus our real life and purpose are conducted below our threshold of consciousness.”

—Philip Dick, Valis

As many of us have long known (or are beginning to suspect), writing is a lot more than just marks on a page or pixels on a computer screen. Computer programming and html code are helping us to conceptualize reality as a language-based construct, and however foreign, even revolutionary, this idea is, it is not without its precedents. In fact, biology’s discovery of DNA and genetic code has already established this idea for several decades, but because DNA is something few of us have direct knowledge of, it remains a largely abstract hypothesis. With computer programming, however, the idea that a series of letters could give rise to material reality—image—is something that we get to experience for ourselves every time we boot up our PC. We all know that code creates images, and images reflect (and can pass for) reality.

Once upon a time this idea—and most of all the possibility of applying it—was restricted to the few. Once upon a time only initiates were privy to the occult knowledge required to activate “junk DNA,” raise the “Kundalini,” and recalibrate consciousness from human to divine frequencies. In Gnostic tradition, this self-activation process was symbolically described as moving up the chain of planetary “Archons,” using certain key words of power to get past each Archon or gatekeeper, until individual freedom was attained. These days, kids who don’t know an archon from their elbow are playing video games which require certain clues and passwords to get past a series of obstacles, or “gatekeepers,” in order to make it to “the next level.” Without digressing any further into the sacred science of occultism, you might say there’s been a progression from the magical tradition of spellcraft once reserved to the priestly caste, to government-sponsored biologists and neuroscientists tinkering with DNA and monkey brains, until today, when the oldest and most arcane art and science is being taught to pre-schoolers, and anyone with the time and patience to master computer-programming can summon occult forces and shape reality—via the power of words.

All of these various disciplines and media have one thing in common: language. Language is a series of symbols which only become meaningful once their meaning is agreed upon and they can be used to communicate. DNA, html code, god-names and video games are all metaphors, because in a reality that’s interpreted (and therefore shaped) via language, everything is metaphor. So what are they all metaphors for? In simplest terms, they are metaphors for the human psyche, and the process being described is that of individuation, or, to use another metaphor, the alchemical transmutation of consciousness. This is the “real life and purpose” which (writer) Philip K. Dick intuited as being “conducted below our threshold of consciousness.” It is happening right here, right now, beneath the surface and between the lines of our everyday narratives.

Part Two

The Ultimate Vice

(Going through the various "books" I never published; found this from Matrix Sorcerer, circa 2003:)

Reality is a “vice.” We, humanity, are held fast in the grip of this vice. Because we feel the external pressure, growing worse with every passing year, we assume that there is some force or power outside of ourselves that is trapping us. Hence, we have invented the concept of the Devil to account for the vice that enslaves and imprisons us. But, by doing so, we have only become more trapped within it.

Once we acknowledge that the “vice” is God, and that God is us, we can begin to loosen its hold (fixation of assemblage point), and be free of “reality.”

The Devil is a lawmaker; hence he has to believe in himself and only himself. Hence, he must reject God. His power, then, is in his blindness.

Those who exist least, believe most firmly in their existence. This belief is the only thing that establishes them.

A God is a self-aware individual who has realized his non-existence and embraced it to the fullness.

Devil is finite, then; God is infinite. For only the finite can “exist” in isolation. The infinite, by definition, is One with All, and therefore, None at all.

The Imaginal is All For You

Here's a mini essay I just posted at RI.

Strieber (like Castaneda) had some profound personal encounters with Imaginal forces. When I read his books (and Castaneda's), the accounts resonated, profoundly, with my own, forgotten or fragmented experiences with the Imaginal. In a word, I recognized "truth" in them (I use "'s because I'm at RI, normally I wouldn't bother).

I am and always have been a very credulous and impressionable person, and as is my wont, I took both these authors' accounts literally, at face value - as they themselves seemed to - even knowing (at least later on) that Imaginal experiences aren’t "literal" so much as metaphorical (but then, so is ordinary reality once we scratch the surface, right?). Point is, Whitley's and Carlos' experiences were filtered through their individual psyches and written out in linear (literal) language, so those are the versions of Imaginal reality which we got “fed.” And then, insofar as we are left-brained and literal-minded creatures, we can only take them at face value, or reject them in the same way. (For the left-brain something is either true or false, it cannot be both/and. First mistake.)

The point is that these writers share their truth, not the Truth, but as readers, if we identify with and relate to the stories (while taking them at face value), we are going to try and make it our truth – more or less in the same way that people who follow gurus try to twist themselves into the right shape to match their guru's truth. If we do this, then sooner or later we are going to get disillusioned – as soon, in fact, as we realize that the other guy’s truth, however good it might have seemed, it’s not gonna be our truth. Why? Because it’s not our experience of the Imaginal, divine, or whatever. Sooner or later, something in there is going to “not fit,” because the only reality that fits us is, you got it, our own. So that’s the test and the opportunity of every “guru” - and every literary genius or rock n’ roll idol or whoever we look up to & whose ideas or work we follow, whose path we wind up trying to walk down or whose “being” we want to emulate. It never works.

The test and the opportunity is to save the baby and toss out the bath water. If we wind up rejecting everything about the person, IMO, we’ve missed the opportunity and flunked the test – maybe (I don’t want to impose my version of reality on anyone, but for me that’d be true, though God knows it’s tempting). True skepticism is learning to discern truth from delusion, starting with our heroes or teachers, and ending up with our own. The “believer” swallows the story (aliens, sorcerers, democracy, whatever) whole, gets drunk on it, becomes sick, and then the “skeptic” comes to the rescue and tries to vomit everything back up and swears never to touch the stuff again (but usually he finds another vice). This isn’t skepticism so much as cynicism, overcompensation for feeling like a sucker. It denies whatever is in us (or in Strieber, or whoever) that responded to truth, and focuses only on the part that managed to turn a little bit of truth into a great big delusion. It’s not lies that fool us, IMO, it’s truth taken too literally, or too quickly to heart. It’s truth which we invest in and build a whole edifice of delusion out of.

Imagination – that’s the key, but not in the way most people think of it, as a polar opposite to reality, so much as what underlies all of our experience. Keats compared the imagination to “Adam’s dream: he awoke and found it truth.” Blake believed the imagination was “not a State: it is the Human existence itself.” These guys weren’t slouches. They were as rigorous as they were intuitive. Personally, I’m willing to take their word on that.

Like Castaneda, Strieber got abducted by his own unconscious, whether it was aliens or elementals, angels or demons or govt mind control operatives. Whatever the agents that “came for him,” that’s not a desirable state of affairs. What’s desirable is for us to venture willingly and open-eyed into our unconscious, exactly like the Poets did.

I admit (I already did) that I’m a credulous person. (That's why I'm an odd fit with RI.) There’s no way to be open-minded without being credulous (or if there is, I haven’t found it). I am susceptible to the spells cast by other people’s convictions - and/or delusions - ask my wife if you don’t believe me (rhetorical suggestion). But the alternative to being credulous isn’t being cynical (which is what most skeptics are, IMO), because that just amounts to being closed-minded. The solution is to learn discernment about what we let all the way in and take to heart, what we take as our own truth, as opposed to what we let flow through us and out again, checking it thoroughly on the way. To quote Keats again: “The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing, to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.” That means to believe without believing, to disbelieve without dismissing, to make up one’s mind about nothing. In the words of Whitley, it means we get to “Learn to live at a high level of uncertainty.” (Bleh)

Who the hell wants to do that? In this world, certainty is power. We’re taught and bred to make up our minds about everything, and dismiss anything we can’t make our minds up about. The trouble is we are also told, subtly, which conclusions to reach (drink Coca Cola), so then, when we make up our minds, we’re really giving them over to someone (or something) else’s influence.

For me that’s the proof that Strieber’s doing something that’s worth paying attention to: he raises a lot more questions than he provides answers.

That, and I have a big soft spot for the guy.

Here We Go Again?

Why Do We Want Enlightenment?

Living for others is true living. If we want to be enlightened, there's two main reasons: one is to be invulnerable and beyond pain and the reach of others; the other is to be able to fully connect to others and be of real service to them.

Which kind do you think most spiritual teachers attained?

I had a thought today, the sprout of a theory perhaps: that if a spiritual teacher (mentioning no names) used enlightenment as a means to create distance and avoid pain, that would prevent him from enlightening anyone else - self-quarantine - because it's a spurious (self-serving) enlightenment and so it wouldn't be allowed to "catch". At the same time, people would get hooked on proximity, because it's what everybody wants from enlightenment: aloofness and invulnerability.

I wondered then if most of us are prevented from attaining enlightenment for this reason: because we want it for the wrong reasons, to become invulnerable? Perhaps certain individuals slipped through the net, and in the case of JDR, it happened to him at the age when we most desperately want to be invulnerable (adolescence). Yet according to Joseph Chilton Pearce, this is also the time when it is naturally supposed to happen, and maybe the reason it doesn't is because we have been traumatized and already started building our personal defense system; so, again, we can't be trusted with enlightenment.

What if enlightenment is a start point and not an end point? A cracking of the chrysalis of the constructed identity and false self that allows us to begin to move and flower with the flow of life instead of cut off from it? If so, then enlightenment is the most ordinary thing, and it is the rest of us that are the freaks. But somehow the ratio got reversed.

Watch the Skies

It's coming from down below...

Pyjama Surfing

I'm writing a regular (monthly) column for the Spanish-language site, Pijama Surf - the first piece is on "Why We still Need Gurus."

The original English version of this piece is linked at the bottom of the article.

May Day's Marital Advice for the Shipwrecked

your partner is your mirror

getting away from the mirror for a time can be healing - and necessary - for both when the pressure and pain of the cooker gets too great.

but thinking that it will be ANY DIFFERENT with a new mirror is a mistake

marriage is when you commit to not changing the mirror, no matter how awful what you see there

when i found out, really found out, that i wasn't going to get what I, my little wounded lower self - wanted, i was ready to bail

but where was i gonna go?

after all the illusions die, that's when relationship really begins

when the ship of alchemical marriage is sinking it's because there was an agreement to go all the way into the depths together

my marital advice is: burn all lifeboats, and prepare to sink

Well, What DO You Know?!

How many times do we mistake a powerful combination of thoughts, passionate feelings, intuition, and so forth, for a knowing? In my (extensive!) experience, today’s “knowing” is tomorrow’s delusion.

To stand on my own two feet means to follow my own truth, not someone else’s. Doubt has led me to that knowing, and if I had rejected it as a hindrance and banished it as a lie, I would still be trapped in the illusion that truth can be found, or recognized, anywhere outside of my own heart.

So doubt has set me free.

Meeting John de Ruiter has been a wonderfully transformative experience, but one that was only complete when I was ready to turn away from him. This has been my coming of age. For many people in his Oasis community, turning away from John is regarded as the equivalent of turning away from truth. For me, it has been the very opposite experience.

What I got from John that I think was of unquestionable value was a letting go of the need to do anything, to prove or accomplish anything; the acceptance that nothing needs to be done, ever. From that place of knowing that nothing needs to be done, it becomes possible to determine what needs to be done. Without John, I might never have emptied my cup as quickly as I did. My mistake was trying to use him to fill it up again. The filling has to come from within.

But it seems as though John has encouraged people to “fill themselves up” with him. He is living truth, after all. . .

*

Most people around John can be defined as believers or non-believers, those who are “in,” and those who aren’t. The assumption of those who are “in,” the believers, seems to be that anyone who was in and is now out, has turned away from truth and is mistaken or deluded. I know that I dismissed all arguments against John simply by saying, “I KNOW he’s for real so that’s the end of it; all your doubts are based on NOT-knowing he’s for real and if you knew him like I did, you wouldn’t doubt him.” That was my line of reasoning, and amazingly, I never really questioned how subjective and totalitarian it was. I am embarrassed by it now.

It’s true I don’t know who or what John is at this point. What I do know is that, back when I thought I knew, I was wrong. I only believed, and I believed because I wanted to believe. Maybe I even needed to believe.

If we let ourselves be conned on a street corner by a grifter, it’s true that we have only ourselves to blame. But going to the cops and giving a description of the thief might be part of how we take responsibility for our own stupidity. That’s not just because we are pissed off and want to blame someone. Isn’t the con artist accountable too? Mightn’t we want to protect his future marks, in the spirit of community?

Good marketing always makes it look like there are “no strings attached.” De Ruiter may say that we should only trust what we know, but he also implies that he knows best, and has even stated it outright in various ways. Many people in his group perceive John as “the way, the truth, the light.” Direct knowledge is a term John uses, but as with many or most of his terms, it has never been defined or fully described. Many in his group believe they have experienced direct knowledge of truth, specifically concerning de Ruiter, and therefore have graduated from belief to knowing. I believed that too, so I know that no one can tell anyone that it isn’t so.

But not only can we not believe what we hear, we can’t believe what we see, think, or feel either. We can only believe what we know. De Ruiter has posited a “knowing” that is sourced in neither thinking nor feeling nor intuition nor bodily sensation, and in the process he has presented himself as the master of that knowing. People around him (including myself) have experiences that are so profound that they seem to go beyond thoughts and feelings (even though that’s still how we experience them), and so we assume this MUST be “a knowing.” But I have noticed how people (including myself) need to defend their “knowings,” which suggests they are not so much knowings as heartfelt convictions—which is something quite different.

Convictions make convicts. Besides basic facts (like the fact we are going to die some day), I no longer believe we can know anything except how we feel.

*

The amount of concealment I have encountered around John’s private activities, and around Oasis in general, is disturbing. There is no possible way for me to reconcile a message of truth and honesty with all of the concealment and dissembling I have encountered. A proponent of truth must be an open book. The book of John de Ruiter is not only closed, it is sealed tight with cobbler’s glue and buried somewhere deep in the forest. Then I am told there is nothing to know about a Master because “there is nothing there.”

It’s the oldest trick in the book!

Having spent the last four months researching John’s past and speaking to as many people as I could, there is no longer any room for doubt— in my heart or mind—that he is concealing aspects of his behavior, and that his teachings are not what they appear to be. The element of deception I have come across time and again is absolutely irrefutable: it is a fact. I have remained as open as possible to the idea that such deception might be somehow sanctioned by Higher Truth, but the more I tried to keep that possibility in play, the more acutely aware I became of having to practice doublethink, foregoing all logic or common sense, and abandoning what I knew to be true—just to try and make sense of what I was discovering.

My “judgment” of John based on this wasn’t that he was a bad guy. It was that he was just a guy. But when I took into account the fact that he has persuaded however many people that he IS more than just a guy, that he is in fact “the living truth,” unfortunately that opened a whole new can of worms whereby I had to consider that he is not “just a guy,” but a very deceptive (or deceived) guy. This, in my opinion, is why so few in the group are willing to question John’s behavior, or his obvious concealment and dissembling around it, AT ALL: because it is a ball of twine that, once you pick at the first thread, will come totally unraveled, forever.

No one can ever be right about another person when it comes to casting judgment on them. That’s why facts are so important, not to judge but to discern. If people wish to see de Ruiter as “living truth,” that’s fine; but if they are refusing to look at certain facts in order to maintain their belief, that’s not so fine. That’s crazy-making. Based on the evidence, de Ruiter is not what he and Oasis’ PR claims him to be, and a lot of work seems to be going into maintaining that illusion. It doesn’t mean people aren’t receiving positive experiences around him—I know I did. The question is, at what price?

*

John has also talked about (it’s even a long quote at his website) how it is possible for a person to use an awakening in order to become invulnerable and then get “trapped” in an “enlightened ego” identity. This would be very hard for anyone who hadn’t experienced something similar to recognize, and the person in question, by definition, would not be aware of it either. (The trap is in the very certainty of having attained “mastery,” to be fully conscious and free from self-interest, “mastered by Truth”). The danger of a “blind spot” is the fact that we are not aware it is there, and often can’t even entertain the idea it might be, because then we would have to stop everything.

“The deep” is unmapped terrain. Staying in what you know is easier said than done. How hard is it to have a complete knowing about oneself, much less somebody else? Faith, belief, trust, loyalty, commitment, devotion, emulation, worship, love, submission—none of these are the same as knowing. But together they can make a highly convincing alternative to it.

A common experience of people around John is of receiving a blissful dose of energy that is “like a drug.” This was my experience also. However, a bit like drugs, I also noticed on occasion a sort of deflation after the meetings. Did John’s “truth” give me temporary refuge from the pattern-prison of my own wounds? I felt acutely when we left Bristol (in 2010, after my first seminar) that John’s energy was like a “nest” around us, soothing and protective, like a cocoon. I think maybe John offers a kind of psychic pain relief, balm for any psychological wounds which a person is not ready or able to go into. I also realize how “okayness” can be used as the supreme tool of avoidance.

Nests are necessary for a chick to grow in; but until the chick leaves the nest, it will never learn to fly. For me, de Ruiter was like a powerful hallucinogen: useful to see that such states exist within myself, but not to be relied on to “get there” once I’ve found that out. Otherwise, it becomes more about the drug than the experience.

Not that it’s been easy to get clean. I’m still in the process of it. Coming clean here, with my old audience, is maybe the last phase of that process. I am admitting that I was wrong, powerfully deceived and deeply deluded, about John de Ruiter, and probably about everything else too.

If anyone still wants to listen to me after that, God help you!

Defying Dad At Last

Better late than never, fellas! (and ladies)

Graphic art by Soundless Dawn. Thanks Steve!

Toe in the Implicate Order

Urmmm...

Is anyone still here?

Galactic Raffle Over

No more submissions, thanks, winner/s has/have been selected and has been/will be notified (soon?).

thanks to everyone who submitted and also to those who did not.

Who Knows?

I won't be taking down all the sites as promised, at least not today.

Simple explanation: it is no more up to me whether I quit than it is to continue. Erasing the sites and announcing my disappearance is just the flip side of the same coin to that of my compulsive creativity. Extremes of behavior sustain one another. Also self-erasure can be slightly pathological (Carlos was obsessed with it).

For now, I will just say that I may never post or podcast again. But then again, I may. It's not up to me, so I am content just to say, who knows?



If not, then consider these various sites exquisite corpses.

In passing, I found an interesting definition yesterday in Doug Coupland's dictionary of the near future:

DESELFING Willingly diluting one’s sense of self and ego by plastering the Internet with as much information as possible. (See also Omniscience Fatigue; Undeselfing)

Consider me de-selfed.

Adieu or au revoir to all my faithful readers.