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From: Flash Light
To: Jamie Chiarello Subject: RE: Less depressing; to walk in spirals Date: 31 July 2007 Part 1 Every belief system tries to make sense of what your are observing. There is a shamanistic tradition that one must learn to turn off all thoughts through meditation first, before one can make progress. There are many levels to understanding this. In the west it has been common to think in terms of a body and a mind. Now the west further understands the mind as consisting of a right and left hemisphere cerebrum connected to a cerebellum. The cerebellum seems to be the ancient lizard mind we evolved from, and which in turn is connected to our central nervous system, which seems our common inheritance from the more primitive life forms the lizard evolved from. You can connect to your lizard mind when you enter a dream state. Think of vivid dreams and you might have some appreciation of the powers of your lizard mind. Normally during consciousness you can barely hear that lizard mind for all the thoughts coursing through your cerebrum as neurons fire off each other in a continuous chain reactions, connecting all your thoughts and memories. During sleep the cerebrum changes activities, and you can tune into the vivid dreams in your lizard mind. From this shamanistic perspective a goal of mediation is to turn off the cerebrum, as during sleep, in order to "consciously" reach the thoughts in the cerebellum and learn to "think sub-consciously." Just as you spent years in schools learning to think consciously, the adept may spend years studying under a shaman to learn to master his or her own lizard mind and command their dreams to take them where they want to go. The cerebellum's powers lie not in reasoning, as with the cerebrum, but in accessing feelings and whatever psychic powers the individual might be capable of.. "I just can't shake the feeling that in working towards things outside ourselves we are fighting something inside ourselves." A shaman might say there is nothing outside ourselves but the illusion sustained by our cerebellum. Science confirms what appears to be a solid object is mostly empty space occupied by widely spaced atoms. We inhabit a dream by day as well as by night. Our cerebellum evolved with our visual cortex and processes visual images both sleeping and awake; the difference is our waking dreams are more constrained by our cerebrum. The cerebrum maintains the illusion of solid objects around us; the unconstrained cerebellum can allow them to morph into the surreal. The world we think we know is an illusion sustained inside our conscious mind, and by pursuing it, we are missing an illusion which is deeper inside ourselves, and possibly more profound. Illusion is all we can ever hope to see, and myth is the only form of knowledge possible. On a purely cerebral level, it is useful to be able to shut down programs running in the mind just like shutting down threads on a computer screen before turning off the computer. You may have noticed that if you have a problem with a program, it may work better when nothing else is running, and it has sole use of the computer's resources. Similarly, if you can focus on one thought, you can bring more of the cerebrums' resources to bear on that one thought. You can then attempt to see every other thought from the perspective of that one thought, and thereby gain clarity about the thought. Artificial intelligence affords us a metaphor for understanding our thoughts: The spirals are all the sub-routines running their loops until they reach the conditional branch that causes them to call a different sub-routine which in turn runs its loop continuing that curve of the spiral. It is only if you can arrive at a blank slate, that you can begin to look at any one idea alone, and try to visualize its connection to all the other ideas. Part 2 While the west began philosophy with a mind / body duality (from the ancient Greek philosophers, through Descartes, to the beginning of "modern" philosophy), the ancient Egyptians began with a three state model: the body, represented in the afterlife by the mummy, the Ka - which was depicted as a small person sitting on one's shoulder speaking into one's ear, and which we might describe as "consciousness," and the Ba - which was depicted as a bird, and which we might call the "spirit." This has an interesting correspondence to the current western physical model: consider the body as the central nervous system, the Ba as the cerebellum, and the Ka as the cerebrum. I believe most ideas in Christian theology which do not come out of Judaism can be traced to this alternate school of philosophy. Christians may wonder where the idea of the trinity comes from: Think of Jesus as the physical body, Jehovah with His commandments as the Ka whispering in believers' ears, and the Holy Ghost as the Ba. The idea of a physical resurrection and the requirement to embalm the body after death seem clearly connected to the ancient Egyptian beliefs. P. D. Ouspensky wrote, "In Search of the Miraculous," an account of his studies under a shamanistic teacher, Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff claimed to teach truths found in ancient religions, and I believe the connection to the ancient Egyptian beliefs is apparent: Gurdjieff taught there are three centers in humans, a physical center, a spiritual / emotional center, and an intellectual center. He said each person is based primarily in one center. For example: athletes in the physical center, mathematicians and scientists in the intellectual center, artists and warriors in the emotional / spiritual center. Problem are caused when activities originate in the wrong center. If you try to walk using your intellectual center, you have to think about raising your foot, where to put down, when to raise the other foot, etc. Movement becomes awkward and difficult, whereas when you allow your physical center to control walking, it's effortless. Zen was the religion of the Samurai, the warrior class in ancient Japan. If the warrior thinks about how to react to his opponent, his reactions will be too slow, and he will lose. Through Buddhist mind tricks such as the koan, the Zen masters taught their followers to abandon the intellectual center and operate from the emotional / spiritual center where reactions are instinctive and much faster. Gurdjieff taught that various religions can be seen as operating in different centers. The fakir, lying on a bed of nails, or walking over hot coals, seeks a path through the physical center. A monk devoting himself to silence and prayer seeks a path through his emotional / spiritual center. A priest, such as Thomas Aquinas writing "Summa Theologica," seeks a path through his intellectual center. Gurdjieff taught there was a "Fourth Way." Like the ancient mystery religions, one was supposed to study under him to eventually learn this path. It's commonly explained that the Fourth way involves developing all three center simultaneously, but from Ouspensky I had the impression it also involves using psychotropic drugs. Carlos Castaneda wrote a series of books about his studies under a Yaqui shaman whom he called don Juan. The first book, "The Teachings of don Juan," primarily deals with using peyote, magic mushrooms, and jimsonweed to attain visions. Only later in the series does don Juan explain that the drugs are not even necessary; sorcery is about learning to control what he calls the "second attention," which seems to clearly correspond to the lizard mind. Castaneda claims to have mastered the dream state so well he could visit another apprentice in his dreams and carry on conversations they would both remember upon waking. Castaneda describes experiences which violate all laws of physics: don Juan could walk through walls. Many people believe Castaneda simply invented don Juan to sell books, however I believe it's possible that Castaneda actually "saw" such phenomenon. What Castaneda seems to miss is that the Yaqui masters could not just read minds, and transmit their thoughts, they could project thoughts into the apprentice's minds so intensely as to appear as vivid hallucinations. It was not don Juan walking through a wall, but a hallucination of don Juan which Castaneda mistook as real. Don Juan tells Castaneda it is the obligation of the master to trick his apprentices into awareness. When witchcraft was legalized in England in the mid 20th century, Gerald Gardner wrote a book purporting to describe a Celtic tradition of witchcraft which had been passed to him by his mother, and which he called Wicca. Today it's one of the fastest growing religions. It's similar in many ways to the sorcery of don Juan, however don Juan tells Castaneda that the Yaqui traditions of sorcery under went a reformation, and the use of spells and incantations so dominant in Wicca, were given up as unnecessary. Don Juan has also given up worshiping gods, and in this respect he resembles Buddha, who exhorted his followers to leave the gods behind. From all of this it appears to me that as tribes migrated out of Africa, the shaman or witch doctor, was an important tribal leader carrying forth a tradition of medicinal and psychic knowledge which we see in the ancient Celtic traditions, the Zen Buddhist traditions, the Yaqui traditions, the ancient Egyptian traditions, etc. Common to all is an appreciation of the powers of the lizard mind, which is largely ignored in "Western" philosophy and theology, which seem to have lost sight of these origins. Suggested reading: Alan Watts, "The Way of Zen," P. D. Ouspensky, "In Search of the Miraculous," Carlos Castaneda, "A Separate Reality," and "Tales of Power." I hope this recitation of ancient thoughts pertaining to the issues you mention will prove of some use to you. Peace, Flash |