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Skywriters in Hades: The Rest

Cosmic Psyche

Physics only interests me, like pretty much everything else, in the larger context of psychology. And if psychology is understood as the study of the soul, then its reach potentially encompasses all human experience, including determining what we mean by "soul" or psyche.

Psychology only interests me, like pretty much everything else, in the larger context of physics . And if physics is understood as the study of the body, then its reach potentially encompasses all human experience, including determining what we mean by "body" or physicality.

It’s only by going down into subatomic particles to see how they behave that physics has begun to get to the heart of the matter: as below is *not* as above, because our idea of the laws of physics/nature is out of accord with the reality.

In the application of (Jungian) psychology, it’s only by looking outside of us – not by looking inward – that we can begin to grasp the laws of the psyche, because - surprise, surprise - as without, so within.

Physical reality is not separate from the reality of the psyche, but it has been split off from it, the result being that we now perceive ourselves as living surrounded by dead matter, and as isolate within our own self-reflected, solipsistic, inner reality of “I.”

Yet the patterns of our thoughts and feelings that weave together into identity are physical phenomena, and the patterns of events, stars, planets, and subatomic particles moving outside of us are, in kind, psychological phenomena. They are the movement of a cosmic psyche, of which we are currently but dream-fragments, thought-forms – yet nonetheless made of the same substance as the totality, hence one with it.

The Rules of the Game: Fate & Free Will in the Matrix

(from Matrix Warrior, 2003)

The sorcerer's set-up

“To deny our impulses is to deny the very thing that makes us human.”

—Mouse, The Matrix

The question of fate and free will is as old as philosophical thought itself. Perhaps the matrix gave us this problem to begin with so we’d spend our entire history trying to figure out what was always a foregone conclusion. Whatever we decide to believe, it is already programmed into us. As every Gatekeeper knows, the belief in free will only makes humatons that much easier to control.

To the matrix warrior, the paradox of fate and free will is as follows: as long as one believes one has the freedom to choose one’s actions, one will always be a slave to them. Humatons are confined to the matrix, a program that tells them they are free individuals precisely in order to manipulate them more easily. The moment humatons accept their fate, however, and the unpalatable truth that their acts and thoughts are determined by some outside force vaster than they can imagine, they have taken the first step towards freedom.

The reason for this is that within the matrix there are a set number of preprogrammed responses to any given situation (a situation created by the matrix itself). Whichever one of these a humaton chooses (under the programmed illusion of having a choice), he or she is always only acquiescing to the program. The matrix is like a chess player that has already anticipated every last one of its opponent’s moves—except one. The only way to escape the program is by acting entirely outside the rules of the program. The rules of the program are the rules of reason, of the rational mind. Thus the matrix warrior knows that the only freedom within the program is to act irrationally. This is not to say insanely or foolishly, but rather spontaneously, unpredictably, and above all without personal motive. Here is where the imagination and will come into play. Since the matrix can only imitate and anticipate the processes of reason, any act of the creative imagination is outside the parameters of its comprehension, and will always come unexpected. And since will is precisely what humatons do not have (having been drained of it by AI), the one response that they are almost guaranteed not to give is that of will, the imaginative response. It is this response which is the warrior’s one true option within the matrix. By choosing to have a choice (i.e., to override the program), matrix warriors effectively have no choice, save to act spontaneously and do the one thing that is unexpected of them. To be impeccable, warriors must always follow this inner imperative, that of freedom.

The inner voice of the matrix warrior is a simple but extremely tricky affair. Since warriors know that every last one of their thoughts originates in the matrix program itself, they must learn to ignore their thoughts, to tune them out until they become a sort of background hum, an irrelevant but relentless nag. Long before they attain a lucid state of internal silence, matrix warriors must practise diligently, every moment of their lives, discriminating between their thought-responses so as to isolate this inner voice. Once they have rejected every last one of the false thoughts of the matrix mind, whatever impulse or intuition is left is the one they can trust in. Accordingly, it is the one they act upon. In other words, the only appropriate action in any given moment for the matrix warrior is the unthinkable action, the one that arises from the silent emptiness, behind and beyond all the senseless chatter of the matrix data-feed. Thus, it is a truism to say that matrix warriors are impeccable because they are irrational, and because they dare to do the unthinkable: to act without prior thought or motive.

By continuing to act in this non-rational, spontaneous manner, the matrix warrior constantly confounds the program. The matrix is unable to assimilate the warrior’s choices or to respond adequately to them, just as a sane person cannot hold a conversation with a madman without losing the thread. And so, little by little, the matrix begins to lose sight of the warriors, to loosen its hold on them, and warriors in turn become progressively freer to heed their inner voices and to act spontaneously. Yet, so long as they remain within the matrix, warriors remain caught up by their fate. They cannot change the components of their lives, nor in any radical fashion the events and circumstances that shape them. What they can do is to refine their responses to the events and so alter the manner in which they occur. In this way, by accepting their fate, matrix warriors are able to accelerate the program, as it were, and move through the programmed events in a faster, more economical and empowering manner. After a time (most especially once they connect to the 2nd attention sorcerers in the real world), they are able to see their fate, laid out before them like a map or a blueprint. They can then work within it, without ever being restricted by it.

With great power comes great responsibility. Responsibility is the ability to respond, and this is the only freedom warrior/sorcerers can ever have within the matrix: the power to respond freely to whatever comes their way. Through such a power, warrior-sorcerers begins to transform their world and the matrix turns gradually from torture chamber to playground. Seeing as the matrix program is hardwired to warriors’ own unconscious will, the fate which AI has assembled for them consists of elements drawn from their sleeping minds, elements that must accordingly fit their particular needs as individuals. Even though the matrix has shaped their personalities from birth, it stands to reason that, since AI cannot actually create anything (lacking the imagination to do so), it can only shape and mould what already exists. So each individual’s life-plan, their fate, is actually assembled only partiallyin advance, but mostly through the process of being ‘lived’ (i.e., dreamed). The matrix provides a nearly infinite series of choices, and individuals, from birth onward, select which ones best meet their needs; these ‘choices’ in turn give rise to the events and circumstances of their lives. So although AI may be able to foresee every last one of the countless possible ‘fates’ for any given individual, it cannot know which precise fate will be realized. Logically, the longer humatons remain within the matrix (the longer they are plugged in), and the more rigidly they keep to its dictates, the easier it becomes to predict their fate, to the point that most humatons, by the time they reach adulthood, have their lives entirely mapped out, preordained. The only possibility of breaking out the pattern, then, is via intervention from matrix sorcerers coming from left of field, from outside the matrix program. In just such a way, Morpheus intervenes in the life of Thomas: to make him an offer he can’t refuse.

*

Le Regle du Jeu

To return to the original question, matrix warriors know that, although their various fates are all preprogrammed, there is a nearly infinite variety of them, and that they are all contingent upon, drawn out of, their own unconscious mind. They are dreaming their lives, and their primary advantage over other humatons is that humatons never realizes they are dreaming, while warriors become aware of this by steady degrees. Humatons never recognize the option of becoming lucid, and so they allow the matrix to make all their choices for them (they are not the dreamers but merely figments of the dream). Matrix warriors strive to become conscious of their unconscious processes and tap their creative imagination, their will—in order to have an active say in their fates. By becoming aware of the actors at play, it becomes possible for them to meet and respond to the events in their lives in a more lucid, controlled, spontaneous, and imaginative fashion, thereby using events constructively, towards their own freedom. By accepting their fate, warriors turn the matrix’s own devises against it, and begin to discover their destiny. Warriors, rather than trying to change their fate, seek to accelerate it. If they can bring about all the events that their unconscious mind has provided for AI to work with—and above all if they can turn these events from distractions and inhibitions to actual instructions—they are able to exhaust the program’s possibilities (to complete its purpose); at this point they may begin to introduce, through conscious will, new possibilities all their own. It is now that the 2nd attention begins to seep through into the warrior’s life, fate segues into destiny, and the imagination takes over from the intellect. Will (imagination) overthrows reason. And it is at this point that the rules begin to change. The matrix sorcerer has freed his mind.

The question remains: how much can matrix sorcerers actually alter their lives from outside the matrix, in the 2nd attention? It seems unlikely that they have the power to reprogram the matrix or to shape events within it, since only ‘the One’ can do this. If matrix sorcerers did have such a power, they would have nothing to fear and could end the whole game simply by programming everyone to wake up. It also seems logical that, the more hacking they do, the more they are likely to draw the attention of the Sentinels (the search and destroy machines) in the 2nd attention, as well as the Gatekeepers in the matrix. Hence, discretion is the better part of valour in the war against the matrix, for the sorcerer as much as for the warrior.

Interestingly enough, this restriction also applies, and maybe even more so, to the Gatekeepers. The Gatekeepers are obliged to act within the rules of the program, because a computer program needs to be consistent in order not to fall apart. It may be that the Gatekeepers cannot afford to break too many rules too often, because then the rules would cease to hold up. Since the matrix is based upon a rational and strictly limited (and limiting) interpretation of reality, any acts or events that are too far outside such an interpretation would threaten to destroy it entirely, or at best cause it to mutate. Humatons would start to stir in their slumber if they were witness to too many marvels. So matrix sorcerers and Gatekeepers alike must walk a razor’s edge in which their magical acts and impossible leaps are as likely to work against them as they are to further their cause.

By performing impossible feats inside the matrix, Neo and the others can let humatons see ‘what you [AI] don’t want them to see: a world without rules’. This way, matrix sorcerers can awaken humatons to their own possibilities. Even more dramatically, by introducing new responses, new options, into the program, they are causing it to mutate, creating new rules and possibilities and so reshaping ‘reality’, redesigning the program, towards the eventual end of cancelling it entirely. On the other hand, if they draw too much attention to themselves, they will be open to reprisals from AI. Since the Gatekeepers can manifest through any plugged in human whatsoever, and since they can monitor all events within the matrix through the humatons, any outré phenomenon the sorcerous crew perform will quickly bring the Gatekeepers to them. The matrix program will rise up against them, including, let's not forget, those ‘hopelessly dependent’ humatons who will fight to protect their sense of reality. Matrix sorcerers are restricted not by any inherent limitation of their powers, but rather by the limitations of the 1st attention itself. If they stir things up too much, mutating their fates and accelerating the program, they will find themselves faced with more than they bargained for. To this end, they are careful to transform their lives within the matrix a little bit at a time, gently, frugally, with patience and cunning, and above all with a carefully drawn strategy. After all, they have nothing to gain by rushing, and everything to lose by overreaching themselves.

Since the active element in the lives of matrix sorcerers is no longer their reason but their will, and since will manifests spontaneously and non-rationally, there is no longer any way for them to predict their own actions, much less the outcome of them. A matrix sorcerer can have no goal, as such, save the goal of total freedom and complete transformation, a goal as mysterious as it is apocalyptic. Matrix sorcerers are concerned only with the moment, not with yesterday or tomorrow. Time is an illusion, like everything else only more so. Matrix sorcerers are like card sharps who win every time without ever having to cheat. They don’t need to cheat, because like idiot savants they can memorize the movement of every single card, and know exactly which one will come up next. They know not only what their next hand will be, but what everyone else’s will be too! The only thing they can’t control is where the cards will fall; but seeing as the bluff is as much a part of the game as anything (to the card sharp, there’s no such thing as luck), this is of little consequence to the matrix sorcerer. Whatever cards they are dealt, they know how to play them. That’s fate and free will in a nutshell: no one chooses what hand he is dealt; only the matrix sorcerer is free to decide how to play it.

Matrix sorcerers manifest their destiny out of the raw material of their fates. They know exactly what they want and how to get it, because they know that the only way to get what they want is not to want it. And since they don't give a fig either way, they can always bluff their way through, no matter how lousy the hand they are holding may be. Not caring if they win or lose gives sorcerers the calm and the confidence of winners, and so they win every time. In just such a manner, matrix sorcerers handle the elements of their fate and shape them into an enviable destiny. It’s all the same to them if there’s air or not: they don’t need lungs anyway.

This in-the-momentness spontaneity of sorcerers is the key to their power and freedom both. The matrix program is upheld by the code of reason, of language-based, rational thought. This is what gives sequence to the events and beings that appear to exist within it. Sorcerers have unplugged from the matrix through disconnecting from their own rational thought processes, by shutting off their internal dialogue, their false ‘minds’, and attaining a state of inner silence. It is from this state of silence that the will, the imaginative-creative faculty, emerges. This is a most salient point. It is inner silence that makes matrix sorcerers different from their fellow humatons. Even matrix warriors who have yet to unplug are still trapped by the dictates of their fate, of the ‘program’. The matrix sorcerer is outside looking in. The sorcerer’s art is in his or her power to imagine, the capacity for creative thought. Sorcerers ‘think’ in images rather than words. Above all, they act without thinking. By forbearing from rational thought immediately before acting, their acts break the rules of the matrix and upturn the program. The matrix is designed to monitor, direct, and control human thought and so to anticipate every action. From the most trivial to the most revolutionary, all are part of AI’s spectrum and within its power to influence. When matrix sorcerers act, however, they acts impulsively, spontaneously, and without accompanying thought. This makes their acts appear irrational, and come wholly unexpected. It is precisely this that makes them truly creative, and therefore beyond the matrix’s power to counteract.

This is what Morpheus means when he tells Neo to free his mind: to let go of the desire to analyse, interpret, judge, and control what is happening, and simply allow his will to unfold, magically, without interference from reason. Once he is able to do this, Neo’s actions become sorcery. By silencing his thoughts and so becoming disengaged from the matrix, he has tapped his will. The only freedom for matrix sorcerers is to act without knowing what they are doing, to become a witness to their own acts, a midwife to miracles, a true creative force of nature, outside time and space, and beyond the reach of the Gatekeepers.

Being the One, full video

At the FB page there's the full methology behind how the film was made.

The End of the World: When, What, and for the Love of God, Why?!!

Perhaps the “end of the world” is no more nor less than a species coming of age, a shamanic rite of passage which only individuated psyches will be prepared for? That is, those individuals who have owned their personal shadow and established an INNER sense of the real, outside of external/collective definitions and values (the group mind). Since it would be the end of the unwritten “consensus” which agrees that reality is outside of us, for those whose only reality is outer and not inner-generated, it will be very much the end of the world.


This may be an evolutionary process – consensus reality/the group mind being the matrix-chrysalis-womb that allows the fetal consciousness of humanity to come to term. Leaving that matrix-womb would be every bit as terrifying and unfamiliar as leaving the first womb was to us, and every bit as wrenching. The group mind, like the mother’s body, provides us with a sense of comfort, familiarity, safety, and identity; as such, we depend on it just as much as an unborn fetus depends on *its* environment.


Leaving the group mind would be akin to death as well as birth: cast into an unknown realm in which we have no choice but to generate reality from what we have within us. Human consciousness would then change its spin – perhaps overnight?! – from passive reception to creative transmission. Surviving that apocalyptic transition will depend entirely on the degree to which we have integrated and “owned” our individual inner (shadow) content, because otherwise we must face it outside of us. . .


This is such a complex question, and of course it's what everyone wants to know. But there may be an even more complex question, relating to how much our focus on external "events" and our adherence to a linear timeline might be keeping us in the fetal-consciousness of consensus reality, and thereby preventing the "event" from happening?


Suppose it has already happened, and we are simply reliving all the events leading up to it, in that final, definitive moment of species death/birth? For me, the question is always personal/individual - where am I situated in myself/my own evolution? And when, if ever, will I break through into a fully REAL-ized, individuated/liberated state of being? When, Oh Lord, when?


I think that's all we need to concern ourselves with (if that!), and yet, paradoxically, since our outer environment, local and non-local, mirrors our inner state, it pays to keep a close watch on our world also, as a way to gauge where we're at.


The idea of "the end of the world" strengthens the idea of the world; the idea of the dissolution of the ego, strengthens the idea of an ego. Yet neither the world nor the ego exist, really, as a fixed or final reality, outside of our agreement to perceive them as real.


So then the idea of a collective species awakening, etc, strengthens the idea that we are part of a collective. This is both good and bad, probably, because it is both true and not true - it's an idea that is becoming true on the one hand, and which is truer than we dare face up to, on the other. I think we are currently caught in the shadow of the idea of being a collective. The group mind (Piscean age, womb, matrix) is giving over to the Aquarian (Promethean) awakening to the reality of our utter aloneness and isolation, a necessary crossing of the Abyss that will give rise to individuated solar beings which can then, but only then, come together and form a tribe - a collective being which is perhaps infinitely more heart, and body, than "mind"?


Getting to the nuts and bolts of this question, I have long "intuited" (never sure where it comes from, maybe wishful thinking) that 2012 would be "the beginning of the end." For the Maya it is when the old systems begin to collapse and give over to a new way of being/perceiving. To my mind that entails a full recognition of the nature of our predicament, and hence is when the machinery of the shadow begins to emerge into concrete expression. A truly terrifying time is ahead of us, I believe. That shadow machinery would then be fully manifest by 2017, at which point some sort of external intervention would occur. (What's that Joe Campbell said, about only finding the light in the deepest shadow?) However, this is probably an optimistic scenario, as it looks to me like it's going to take more than five years for a whole species to be fully confronted with its shadow. But I optimistically predict it for myself, at least! : /


It's like an end game theater of higher and lower self (and yet the lower self is the deeper self, is the higher self!): we first have to see what we have turned ourselves into, as a species, and experience the full, horrendous truth of our complete enslavement to our lower natures. Whether this enactment entails environmental chaos or tyrannical government oppression, or both, or some unimagined factor, remains to be seen. But only then - in the deepest part of our own shadow - will we see what we really ARE. Enter the Other, divine or extraterrestrial emergence, which comes from within, and yet, mysteriously and magikally, intervenes from without.

The God Game

Hang Dog with a Hard On

A musical interlude

Telepathy, Trance, Dreams, Trauma

Images by Lucinda Horan

PART THREE

“Authors, the scene ends

with a rule of theater:

In the beginning was the mask.”

—Antonio Machado

The Magikal Mirror

“Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.”

—Catherine Drinker Bowen

Keeping a journal and performing a magical ritual might seem worlds apart, but there may be a common intent to both these activities. In the same way as we can bring aspects of our psyche to consciousness through writing, a ritual magician assumes certain roles with a desired outcome, embodying the god Mars in preparation for conflict or the goddess Venus in anticipation of love. By such archaic practices, the ceremonial magician is awakening parts of his (or her) psyche which he wishes to embody and integrate into his persona. In a similar way, a shaman dons animal skins as a means to summon “spirits” which “dwell” in his psyche and in that of his audience (or client): he or she is invoking (and evoking) the primordial forces by acting out a specific part of the group psyche, as a means to integrate it. This is analogous to group therapy also, when a ritual space is created within which normal social rules are suspended. This ritual space—be it the journal, the therapy room, the shaman’s hut or the magician’s circle—allows “the inexpressible to be expressed.” As already described, communicating with ourselves in this way develops our ability to communicate with the world. Then, as we begin to bring this new awareness and maturity into our interactions with others, so communicating with the world deepens our relationship to ourselves.

There is a well-known magical oath: “I pledge to treat every phenomenon as a particular dealing of God with my Soul.” While based on the metaphysical belief that the Universe is a “magical mirror” which constantly reflects back at us the internal conditions of our souls, this oath also sums up the tenets of existential psychology, as encapsulated by Carl Jung’s statement: “When an inner process cannot be integrated it is often projected outward.” On the individuation journey to self-knowledge, there are inevitably aspects of our consciousness which we are either unable to see or unwilling to look at in isolation. Just as there are gods which the magician is careful not to invoke until ready, there are subjects which we choose not to write about in our journal, often because we aren’t ready to even think about them. Once we enter into interaction with other people, however, these are the very aspects that get stirred up. They are the rough (and blind) spots which sooner or later are going to trip us as we begin to engage with our environment in new ways. It is this pressure of interacting with other people that brings home the discord in our psyches and allows us to work it out. This tension provided by “the other” is essential to individuation, and it is why, “beyond a certain point, the whole universe becomes a continuous process of initiation.”[i]

Between the Lines: Induced Trance States Via Reading & Writing

“Telepathy, of course. It’s amusing when you stop to think about it—for years people have argued about whether or not such a thing exists, folks like J. B. Rhine have busted their brains trying to create a valid testing process to isolate it, and all the time it’s been right there, lying out in the open like Mr. Poe’s Purloined Letter. All the arts depend upon telepathy to some degree, but I believe that writing offers the purest distillation.”

—Stephen King, “What Writing Is.”

Increased self-awareness equals maturity, making individuation an exponential growth curve. Maturity and self-awareness increases our capacity to observe ourselves, not only in others but in isolation, and this capacity for self-observation further increases self-awareness. The tension created within us by the presence of the other then allows for a new seeing within ourselves, because the other is always reflecting something we can’t or won’t see about ourselves. That newly gained insight is what we bring to our next relationship, and so on. The paradox of individuation is that, as we deepen self-awareness, it is as if we are cleaning the universal mirror within which we are gazing, so life reflects back at us ever more sharply our internal condition. The result is seemingly counter-intuitive: we become not less but more (and more) sensitive and vulnerable to both internal and external triggers the more we mature, because as we continue to integrate the contents of our unconscious, it begins to seem as though the whole world is happening inside of us. It also becomes harder and harder to distance ourselves from others, because we are taking responsibility not only for our own thoughts, feelings and actions, but for everyone else’s too—though only in relation to ourselves—and so everything that happens lands at our doorstep. The closest parallel to this ongoing initiation would be that of a lucid dream state, because in dream states isolation and interrelationship co-exist: we are both alone in our “head-space” and interacting (telepathically, astrally, or by means not yet understood) with the world outside us. This is why it is possible to unravel psychic knots while dreaming, which provides a direct parallel once again with both reading and writing, since both activities (when immersive) recreate a waking dream state.

The following is from Stephen King’s On Writing:

“My name is Stephen King. I’m writing the first draft of this part at my desk (the one under the eave) on a snowy morning in December of 1997. There are things on my mind. Some are worries (bad eyes, Christmas shopping not even started, wife under the weather with a virus), some are good things (our younger son made a surprise visit home from college, I got to play Vince Taylor’s ‘Brand New Cadillac’ with The Wallflowers at a concert), but right now all that stuff is up top. I’m in another place, a basement place where there are lots of bright lights and clear images. This is a place I’ve built for myself over the years. It’s a far-seeing place. . . . you are somewhere downstream on the timeline from me . . . but you’re likely in your own far-seeing place, the one where you go to receive telepathic messages. . . . And here we go—actual telepathy in action. You’ll notice I have nothing up my sleeves and that my lips never move. Neither, most likely, do yours. Look—here’s a table covered with a red cloth. On it is a cage the size of a small fish aquarium. In the cage is a white rabbit with a pink nose and pink-rimmed eyes. In its front paws is a carrot-stub upon which it is contentedly munching. On its back, clearly marked in blue ink, is the numeral 8. Do we see the same thing? We’d have to get together and compare notes to make absolutely sure, but I think we do.

“This is what we’re looking at, and we all see it. I didn’t tell you. You didn’t ask me. I never opened my mouth and you never opened yours. We’re not even in the same year together, let alone the same room... except we are together. We’re close. We’re having a meeting of the minds.”

Stephen King makes no mention of mirror neurons or brain states; back in 1997 no one was talking about such things. Yet he is essentially describing the same phenomenon: transference of thought via writing. It’s interesting that King takes the time to describe his brain state (his mood), even though it has no apparent bearing on the scene which he goes on to transmit (the rabbit in the cage), telepathically, in order to literally illustrate his point. The reason it’s interesting is that the science of mirror neurons argues that it is just such “between the lines” information that is transmitted via language—the writer’s mood and current circumstances—even when they are in no way inferred by the written or spoken material itself.

What King is describing here is more than simply a shared visualization, because the act of visualizing—being obviously linked to dreaming—is one that entails at least a minor trance state. We all know what it is like to get sucked into a good book. We get lost in the writer’s (and/or the characters’) thoughts and feelings, immersed in another world being created by a combination of words on the page and our own ability to weave a surrogate dream reality inside our skulls (or bodies, if you want to be holistic about it). One thing is certain: when we are carried away by a good book, fiction or non-fiction, we are only secondarily aware of reading words on a page; our primary awareness goes where the words themselves take us. And where they take us, as King points out, is not only into our own minds, but into the mind of the author. It is a matching of brains states, a shared trance. And (though this is trickier to prove) I’d wager that the closer the author was to deep dreaming when she or he wrote the book, the closer we can approach to such a state ourselves while reading it. This is what distinguishes great writing from not-so-great: the degree of immersion it induces in us is determined, at least in part, by the degree of immersion which the writer attained while writing it. This is what communicates—“between the lines.”

Reading James Joyce is a very different experience to reading Elmore Leonard, and Jean Baudrillard requires an alternate sort of attention to Stephen King. Some prose is harder to get “our heads around,” and while this may have to do with obvious factors such as dense vocabulary or labyrinthine phrases, it may also be dependent on how foreign or alien the brain state of the author is compared to our own. People who work hard to match Joyce’s brain state “get” what he is doing and consider him a genius. For the rest of us, he is incomprehensible and overrated. (Ditto Baudrillard.) The same is true of our dreams: the ones that more closely match our waking brain state are easier to remember, understand, and describe. Others are so “out there” that just thinking about them causes us a mild form of distress due to cognitive dissonance. (The Surrealists were all about creating cognitive dissonance, and their aim was to try and match dream states through their use of word and image.)

If you read the following sentence, allowing that forensic science has a relative ownership of the sort of cheese waffles which your mother baked, for the sake of literary analysis you will take the next number 5 bus and wind up looking for missing punctuation marks. On the other hand if I say simply that this sort of playful writing has a pleasingly disorientating effect on the mind, you will be then relieved to be back on safe ground, and that matching the author’s brain state does not entail coming too seriously unhinged from your own familiar worldview. Coherence is something we let go of only with a struggle. The point is, while you are reading this, you are going along with my own thoughts and as long as these seem to follow a linear sort of sequence common to waking logic, and to stick to ideas reasonably familiar to you, you can keep up and won’t have too hard a time of it. The moment I bring in salivating leprous homunculi and suggest that your mother’s panties are the secret to your wasted sex life, you will either laugh, become incensed, or try and figure out where exactly you lost the thread of my argument.

See what I mean?

PART FOUR

Lucid Dreaming & Original Trauma

“Learning to think without resorting to images is indispensable to alphabet literacy. ‘Make no images’ is a ban on right-brain pattern recognition. All who obey it will unconsciously begin to turn their backs on the art and imagery of the Great Mother and, re-orientated a full 180 degrees, will instead seek protection and instruction from the written words of an All-Powerful Father.”

—Leonard Schlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess

Matching the author’s brain state is something that happens automatically with “easy” prose, but which we become increasingly aware of having to do when the prose is more innovative and challenging, or conversely, sloppier and less cunningly structured. Yet the awareness of the reader is finally the determining factor in how efficient the conveyance of information is. If a tree falls and no one hears it, there’s no sound, and a book that is never read does not exist as a form of literature, only an object on a shelf. Telepathy has not occurred: minds have not met. Compare this to our dream lives. How much of the material of our dreams ever makes it to our conscious minds? Yet it is there: book after book, story after story, just waiting to be tapped into and enjoyed.

In the common view, dreams are a way for our brains to “work off” excess stress or work out unresolved issues. In the jargon of our day, the dream state is a place where the unconscious “uploads” data—in symbolic language—about the condition of the “network,” our total psyches. This can be transpersonal as well as personal because the unconscious is collective as well as individual. While sleeping, we are in a relatively egoless state, and because of this, information that would otherwise be threatening to, and hence repressed by, our waking consciousness can be addressed and integrated. When I say “relatively egoless,” I mean that our everyday concerns no longer hold sway over our choices. Barring specific anxiety dreams, we aren’t worried about the rent or what the neighbor thinks of us, but tend to get caught up in symbolic enactments that make little or no sense in the context of our waking lives.

If we think of ego in its pure sense, however—that of an individual perspective with its own focus and drive—it could be argued that, potentially at least, we are more in our ego while dreaming, because when we sleep our ego and id (conscious and unconscious minds) are functioning much more as a unit. This becomes particular apparent in lucid dreaming, and once again the parallel with writing is clear: lucid dreaming is a way of taking control of the components of our unconscious and writing the dream. Like a scenarist, a novelist, or a scriptwriter, our intent is to arrange specific elements of our unconscious in a conscious or semi-conscious fashion, in order to discover how best they fit together and create a meaningful narrative. This is the similarity; the difference, of course, is in the medium employed. When we sit at a desk and write, we are using words to describe internal states and are willingly entering into mild trance in order to best midwife that psychic material into the new form, that of literature. When we dream, on the other hand, something else happens, and words are only incidental to that mysterious process.

When we write we are creating an external vehicle for ourselves as consciousness: a book, a poem, a short story, an essay. This is called self-expression, and it’s a process which most writers would say they have control over, if not total control then near enough. (Writers often say that when it’s working, the story or piece takes over; but never, I assume, to the point they would forget to eat and starve to death.) When we dream, such control is drastically reduced, to the point that most of the time we forget that we are dreaming. The world we create becomes all-embracing. When we dream, we are “projecting” consciousness outside of the “self” and creating an image, then stepping into the image and interacting with it. Anyone who has ever fallen asleep and entered into dreaming consciously (the hypnopompic state) will have observed that critical moment when ordinary thoughts begin transform into and appear before us as images. This is the act of creation stripped down to its essence, and the essence of the creative act is that (unlike writing) we have only a rudimentary kind of control over it. Falling asleep in this way can be extremely jarring (the trick is not waking ourselves up by reacting to the images we see); it is like tapping into a well of psychic energy that for the rest of our lives is turned off and unavailable to us. Writers—and all artists—attempt to tap into this wellspring consciously, while awake, and to direct it into a finished work which they can present to the world as “the product of their imagination.” Yet it may be that the product itself is almost incidental to the real mystery, that of the creative process itself. How does it happen and why does it take the form it does? What are these seemingly bipolar kinds of consciousness called waking and dreaming, and why is it so difficult (and so fascinating) a task to create—or locate—a working bridge between the two?

It’s been said that the original sin was projection[ii]: a split in consciousness between inner and outer by which we were cut off from the divine, expelled from Paradise. On the other hand, with no projection of consciousness outward, would there be anything for consciousness to interact with? Perhaps it wasn’t a sin until we mistook the projection for ourselves and got lost in the dream? Perhaps all of these practices—magic ritual, shamanic trance, lucid dreaming, meditation, psychotropic plant use, and writing—are ways to re-enact the original manifestation of consciousness into (and as) matter? Maybe they are tricks to remember how we tricked ourselves, as consciousness, into getting lost in a language-based reality construct? In which case, are they also ways to reverse “the Fall” by reenacting the primal trauma—what Philip K. Dick described as “a primordial split in the godhead”—and heal the rift between waking and dreams?

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[i] Robert Anton Wilson, after Aleister Crowley.

[ii] Lyn Birkbeck to author.

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.

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“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.