Nice quote from Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha

"Slowly the thinker went on his way and asked himself: what is it that you wanted to learn from teachings and teachers, and although they taught you much, what was it they could not teach you? And he thought: It was the Self, the character and nature of which I wished to learn. I wanted to rid myself of the Self, to conquer it, but I could not conquer it, I could only deceive it, could only fly from it, could only hid from it. Truly, nothing in the world had occupied my thoughts as much as the Self, this riddle, that I live, that I am one and am separated and different from everybody else, that I am Siddhartha; and about nothing in the world do I know less than about myself, about Siddhartha".

- Hermann Hesse 

Great quote on lay paths to the transcendent function from Abraham Maslow

"I wish to underscore one main paradox I have dealt with above which we must face even if we don't understand it. The goal of identity (self-actualization, autonomy, individuation, Horney's real self, authenticity, etc.) seems to be simultaneously an end-goal in itself, and also a transitional goal, a rite of passage, a step along the path to the transcendence of identity. This is like saying its function is to erase itself. Put the other way about, if our goal is the Eastern one of ego-transcendence and obliteration, of leaving behind self-consciousness and self-observation, of fusion with the world and identification with it... then it looks as if the best path to this goal for most people is via achieving identity, a strong real self, and via basic-need-gratitification rather than via asceticism."

- Abraham Maslow

So similar in tone to the messages in John Welwood and Robert Augustus Masters' on what they call spiritual bybassing, and evocative of my favourite Jack Engler quotes: "You have to be somebody before you can be nobody" and "Ontological emptiness does not mean psychological emptiness" (the last one I quote to myself endlessly).

I'm doing a mountain of uni reading on Carl Rogers and Abe Maslow, and it's such solid stuff for our ego-psychology. There'll me a lot more of Rogers on the way I'm sure. He has a dignity and virtuous, respectful regard for people and their process like few others I've studied. His is genuinely heartwarming stuff.

Just brainfarting a little more here while I'm on a plane from Argentina to Sydney... It's interesting too to think of a quote from Nathaniel Branden about how he frames presence of the ego:

"We can talk about transcending a limited self-concept. We cannot talk—rationally—about transcending the self. We can talk about transcending an overrestricted concept of ego. We cannot talk—rationally—about transcending ego (not if we understand what ego really is and don't associate it with vanity or defensiveness)....Being present to what we are doing does not mean "being in the now" in a way that drops all connection to past and future. Living consciously entails being in the present without losing the wider context. The context is there as background, and what we are doing is foreground. Then we are in the moment but not trapped in the moment. This is the state that makes optimal action possible. I stress this point because injunctions like "be here now" are sometimes interpreted (or misinterpreted) to mean a shrinking of awareness to encompass only the immediate moment, with the rest of one's knowledge cast into oblivion and with no concern for the future consequences of one's acts. The ultimate absurdity of this understanding of "be here now" is captured in the cartoon showing a man falling from a skyscraper who remarks mid-flight, "So far, so good".

Funny too how he and one of my heroes Ken Wilber battled this one out, as so hilariously captured by Ken's late wife Treya in her journal notes published as Grace and Grit:

"Nathaniel and Ken had the same friendly argument they always have. I don't think either of them will ever give up! Nathaniel: "I think you are the clearest writer on mysticism around, and yet your whole position is self-contradictory. You say that mysticism is becoming one with the whole. But if I become one with the whole, there would be no motivation left to me as an individual. I might as well just roll over and die. Human beings are individuals, not amorphous wholes, so if I succeed in becoming one with all, there wouldn't even be any reason left for me to eat, let alone do anything else."

Ken: "Whole and part are not mutually exclusive. Mystics still feel pain, and hunger, and laughter, and joy. To be part of a larger whole doesn't mean that the part evaporates, just that the part finds its ground or its meaning. You are an individual, yet you also feel that you are a part of the larger unit of a family, which is part of the larger unit of a society. You already feel that, you already feel that you are a part of several larger wholes, and those wholes – like your life with Devers – give your life much value and meaning. Mysticism is just the even larger identity of also feeling part of the cosmos at large, and thus finding even greater meaning and value. Nothing contradictory about that. It's a direct experience of a larger identity, it doesn't mean your arms fall off."

"And so it went!"

Osho in the Book of Understanding

"Man is not born perfect. He is born incomplete, he is born as a process. He is born on the way, as a pilgrim. That is his agony and his ecstasy, too; agony because he cannot rest, he has to go ahead, he has always to go ahead. He has to seek and search and explore. He has to become, because his being arises only through becoming. Becoming is his being. He can only be if he is on the move. Evolution is intrinsic to man's nature, evolution is his very soul. And those who take themselves for granted remain unfulfilled. Those who think they are born complete remain unevolved. Then the seed remains the seed. It never becomes a tree and never knows the joys of spring and the sunshine and the rain, and the ecstasy of bursting into millions of flowers. That explosion is the fulfilment, that explosion is what existence is all about—exploding into millions of flowers. When the potential becomes the actual, only then is man fulfilled".

- Osho, The Book of Understanding

Geshe Roache

These things often wind up being glib memes uncovered at some later point by pedants... but nevertheless, I dug the sentiment ;-D

"There's no word in Tibetan for 'guilty.' The closest thing is 'intelligent regret that decides to do things differently".

- Geshe Roache

Jiddu Krishnamurti

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society".

- Jiddu Krishnamurti

Samuel Beckett - "The old ego dies hard..."

"The old ego dies hard. Such as it was, a minister of dullness, it was also an agent of security. When it ceases to perform that second function, when it is opposed by a phenomenon that it cannot reduce to the condition of a comfortable and familiar concept, when, in a word, it betrays its trust as a screen to spare its victim the spectacle of reality, it disappears, and the victim, now an ex-victim, for a moment free, is exposed to that reality – an exposure that has its advantages and its disadvantages. It disappears – with wailing and gnashing of teeth".

- Samuel Beckett

Echo

"I would give my entire output of words, past, present and to come, in exchange for easier access to the world, for permission to state, 'I hurt' or, 'I hate' or, 'I want'. Or, indeed, 'Look at me'. And I do not go back on this. For once a thing is known it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten" 

- from Anita Brookner's, Look At Me (1980).

Carl Rogers speaking with a heartwarming love for people...

"What is this book about? Let me try to give an answer which may, to some degree, convey the living experience that this book is intended to be.  This book is about the suffering and the hope, the anxiety and the satisfaction, with which each therapist's counselling room is filled. It is about the uniqueness of the relationship each therapist forms with each client, and equally about the common elements which we discover in all these relationships.  This book is about the highly personal experiences of each one of us. It is about a client in my office who sits there by the corner of the desk, struggling to be himself, yet deathly afraid of being himself - striving to see his experience as it is, wanting to be that experience, and yet deeply fearful of the prospect. This book is about me, as I sit there with that client, facing him, participating in that struggle as deeply and sensitively as I am able. It is about me as I try to perceive his experience, and the meaning and the feeling and the taste and the flavour that it has for him. It is about me as I bemoan my very human fallibility in understanding that client, and the occasional failures to see life as it appears to him, failures which fall like heavy objects across the intricate, delicate web of growth which is taking place. It is about me as I rejoice at the privilege of being a midwife to a new personality - as I stand by with awe at the emergence of a self, a person, as I see a birth in process in which I have had an important and facilitating part. It is about both the client and me as we regard with wonder the potent and orderly forces which are evident in this whole experience, forces which seem deeply rooted in the universe as a whole. The book is, I believe, about life, as life vividly reveals itself in the therapeutic process - with its blind power and its tremendous capacity for destruction, but with its overbalancing thrust toward growth, it the opportunity for growth is provided".

- Carl Rogers, in the chapter entitled 'This is Me' in his book On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy.

Amazing love scene from Zabriske Point (1970)

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Birthing the Man - By Robert Masters

Some men, recoiling from hardness, get stuck in softness and hypertolerance, drawing their soft-shelled carapace ever inward, ever tighter, squeezing the power out of their breath and the heat out of their anger and the meat out of their lust, trading in their power for approval and security, chronically caving in to prove their harmlessness, confusing surrender with collapse and emotional flatness with equanimity.

Now and then they lightly potshot raw male power, smudging and scorning its lyrics, fleeing its muscular intensity and no-bullshit solidity, scrambling to please yet another surrogate of their childhood's dominant parent, reducing themselves to not much more than psychologically sophisticated beggars for his or her multi-headed applause, little men to the end, their tears falling in deserted rooms.

In the vacuum often left by their fathers, the backslapping absence or sleepy hollow or dressed-up desolation or shaming blows or emotional constipation, the sloppy anger, the cement swirl of misguided challenge and disconnected care, the ethical sewage of buried shame, the slaps of far-from-fatherly touch... In that achingly crushed vacuum, that vacuum crowded with loneliness, that emptiness battle-numbed and flattened and silently weeping, such men ricochet rootless and anxious, bouncing around between a surplus of shoulds, castrating most of their passion and force, bottling the pain, sterilizing the screams, and storing the rest, leaving it in shadowed display in the secret museum of their gelded remains.

Fleeing their full maleness, they dwell in highrises of mind, worldly or otherworldly, greening their deserts of abstraction and self-contraction with oases of handy flesh, copulating with mirages of femininity, repeatedly sacrificing their anorexic inner warrior on cleancut toxically reasonable altars, offering his heart and belly to their deified fear while they march for peace, secretly designing and refining new weapons for their inner war, crushing their instinct to pass through a saner door, leaving their love puddling in lukewarm corridors.

Other men, hiding in the foxholes of their maleness, vacate their vulnerability and softness, paving the wasteland of their anesthetized torso, keeping a hotline open between brain and groin, a pornographic hookup of scantily-clad taboos and rising heat, their chest, inflated or deflated, a no-man's-land, their belly, flat or bloated, a meatiness of misaligned power, their jaw and loins obsessed with thrust, their flesh burdened by decades of split-level lust and a great subterranean sadness.

Talking too loudly as they race up and down the freeways of diseased boyhood, going nowhere fast, they allow their inner warrior to be exploited, to be reduced to little more than a fighting and fucking machine, an obsessive doer impaled on consistency, a square-shouldered puppet of industrial strength shoulds, self-sentenced to solitary, isolated even in womanly embrace, too lost to lose face.

They rationalize their self-mutilation, their self-rejection, their doing time in the troughs of unnatural selection, plastering siliconed pinups on their spiritual oblivion, turning away from the enemy's child even as they turn away from their own softness and innocence, running from the boy they once were, the broken boy still loitering in a toughened loneliness, emptied of himself, already hardened for the next command, steeling himself against feeling, against revealing and healing, thinking and shrinking himself into a logic of heartless survival and pleasurable distraction, trusting only his mistrust.

It is between these, between the overly soft and the too hard, the wimp and the bully, the strategically sensitive and the reasonably numb, the de-scrotumed and the pathologically penile, the bored room and the savage space, the terminally nice and the violent, the limp and the stiff, the gentleman and the tough, the nice guy and the jerk, that so many of us rise and stand, trying to anchor ourselves in a saner, more loving land, a place bright with true man, the man at home with all his qualities.

The arms of all men, however armored, flaccid, calculating, or committed to building mansions for their pride and cells for their dark side, carry a shade of reaching, a reaching prior to any teaching, a reaching straining with longing, whether encrusted by neediness, as in the neurotically soft man, or by roughness, as in the neurotically hard man, or by seductive slickness, as in the obsessively tailored man, or by indifference, as in the empathy-barren or spiritually over-ambitious man — this is a reaching rooted in both warrior and child, man and boy, outgoing and ingoing, thrust and welcome, a reaching for love, a love that does not have to be bought, but only lived, a love aflame with Awakening's alchemy, a love intimate with Ultimate Mystery, a love that's none other than our true ground, a love that fuels the greatest journey of all.

Yet still so many men fight their reaching, each the battleground for his interior wars, victor and vanquished sinking into bloody mud, crushed together flesh to flesh, cheek to cheek, yet still so far apart with so little shared heart, sinking into trenches, down and down, just about every woman who's even remotely attractive to them being both a choice hunk of real estate and a minefield, a luscious yet poisoned harbor, a red-carpet nightmare and a voluptuous suction, a dreamy promise, a hideout, a cultic sanctuary, a womb and a tomb, inescapable even for those who, fleeing the call of their flesh, chant, pray, meditate, fast, and concentrate upwards in the luminous cave behind their forehead, seeking immunity in Forever's infinite bubble, struggling to somehow permanently abide in the formless dimensions of the Supreme, separating themselves from the demands and dreams, sacred and otherwise, of their manhood, ever finding themselves brought back in the flesh by their avoidance of true manliness, suctioned toward the bottomlessly Female.

Some men, determined enough to stop playing buddy to their armor, be it hard or soft, and gutsy enough to unpeel and reveal and fully feel without castrating their power, find a young boy crouched in the dark, the long dark, the orphaned dark, a half-sobbing boy, a boy crushed and bleeding, hammering against the inside of their chest, hammering and hammering with tiny stammering fists, a boy bruised and divided, shoulders sagging, throat and truth far apart, a confused boy with not enough father and too much mother, already either enemy or slave to the Feminine, just like Daddy, but still nevertheless hammering and hammering, screaming to be felt, to be touched, to be known, to be held, to be initiated into the truly Masculine, screaming and screaming, squashed by grownup silence, betrayed by negative associations between vulnerability and weakness, the ignoring of his voice a choice pushing us closer to a deadly edge.

And still the boy calls, calling for the jailer's love, the man's love, love plain and simple, love uncluttered by mind, love clear and direct and fresh and goddamn the paternal patter, the embarrassed impotence, the slamming doors and useless explanations, the flat eyes, the resignation, the sagging duty, the congealed cries, and goddamn the plastic sky, no more than the ceiling of Daddy's hungriest thought, and goddamn the lame acceptance of the knot pulled so tight between sternum and spine, shutting out the boy's calling, muting his message, his eyes clouded with smothered longing, his heart dropping between his ragged knees, his choice seemingly but to fight, flee, or freeze.

Men and men and men, do you not see the loveless shoulds so often framing your name, oozing with deadening collusion, well-dressed confusion, and slaveships of invasive expectations? Do you not sense the secondhand scent, the perfumed rot of romantic delusion, the ads of drive-through titillation, the addiction to making it big? Do you not feel the frozen or jellied jaw, the slitted or mind-fitted glance, the classroom drugging of upstart cries, the got-it-together disguise, the emotional hard-on? Or the haloed wimphood, the limping passion, the glorified sensitivity, the righteous flight from anger and lust, flashing a spiritual smile? Do you not long for more substance and less style, and to cease the denial, and to cut loose the shoulds that keep you on trial?

Men and men and men, do you not feel the unhealed hurt beneath your data-jammed mind, and do you do not feel the fear to openly confess what you're really doing, and do you not feel the innocence you will not bless, the pain of pretending that father knows best, the price of pretending that you are not pretending, the heartbreak that cries out for more than a superficial mending?

There's a fast-aging father staggering blindly through a maze of foggy streets, archaic avenues, degraded alleys, nylon labyrinths, bloody ditches, cement canyons, smoky hollows, pornographic wastelands, his paycheck in one hand, his despair in the other, his face a defeated fist or an optimistic list, his stride not his, his boyhood crushed behind his eyes, his pride trampling his cries, too much of his life a mechanical march, a dead-end trip with a blank epitaph, a buried cry for a truer life.

He lives in you, his muffled needs and suffocated dreams sculpting you, defining your stance, your cultural trance, binding you to a rigid dance, driving you into your headquarters to wage needless wars, and it is his chest, whether inflated or deflated, through which you wander and squander your juice, desperately searching for the treasure, the quick-buck or super-fuck grail, fighting false dragons, pursuing false maidens, living in castles of storybook maleness, seeding your sons with the same disease, the same old soul-freeze.

Must you wear his shoes, or the opposite? Must you submit to him, or spear him? Only in weaning yourself from his vision of you, only in intimacy with the authority native to you, only in claiming your own ground, only in the clarity and depth of your own spirit-land, your own heart's primal demand, can you really go past your past with him, both forgiving and outliving him, your stride lit with fierce compassion.

He wanders large but vague across a quivering snapshot pinned behind your eyes, and your mother, or someone like her, fills the foreground, however passively, her gaze brimming with promised milk and sweet bedtimes, her touch, given or not, craved, and her presence, dark or light, hard or soft, meek or not, made irresistible by an aura of eternal sanctuary, and there you linger at the bottom of the photo, no larger than a thumbprint, wearing a partial smile, your eyes belonging to two very different faces, your seedling grief but the faintest of smudges.

Men and men and men, listen to your cry, listen to both its earth and its sky, listen to its hidden strength, its noble core, feeling the music of what gives it a shore, letting your cry, your roar, your pure shout, run down through your legs and feet, letting its wild muscular roots plunge deep into moistly waiting soil, letting your cry grow wings until your forehead is an infinity of sky, and your flesh gleams with sinewy joy, letting your shout blast through the babbled clutter and clever mutter of your mentalizing, letting your cry open deep, ashimmer with the unbridled fullness of you, the power and grace and pain and sweetness of unadulterated manhood!

Give your inner listening a heart, letting inside and outside be lovers, transparently entangled beneath starry covers, and give your passion an eye both sensitive and gutsy, both tender and lusty, giving Tarzan room to weep, and giving the woman in you your full-blooded all, dying and exploding and loving through your surrender, your luminous rocketing, your sweating grace and ecstatic loss of face, your wholehearted embrace!

Eat these lines, bite deep, bite fierce, bite with more than your teeth, more than your mind, more than your constructed manhood, tonguing out the kernel and slowly crushing it, releasing and absorbing its sudden nectar, its bittersweet depths and wonder, knowing that is to your release, your freedom, that you are being invited. Brother, father, and son, boy and elder, newborn and dying, poet and samurai, far and near, foggy and clear, all in one, and I hear you calling, calling and calling, calling through all of us, all of this, ever birthing the man.

King and Queen

The King and Queen already know about love;
They search for each other through the whole deck.
While we play our hands, they are listening
- Robert Bly, Listening

(Thanks to Vid Deva for this one).

Gandhi's Seven Blunders of the World

1. Wealth without work
2. Pleasure without conscience
3. Knowledge without character
4. Commerce without morality
5. Science without humanity
6. Worship without sacrifice
7. Politics without principle

—Mahatma Gandhi

(courtesty of Simon Clark).

The Rock Against Which He Is Shattered

"In many cases in psychiatry, the patient who comes to us has a story that is not told, and which as a rule no one knows of. To my mind, therapy only really begins after the investigation of that wholly personal story. It is the patient's secret, the rock against which he is shattered".

- Carl Gustav Jung

Epiphany

"The epiphany of that which had hitherto been hidden requires not only an ego to which it can manifest itself, but, to an even greater degree, calls for an act of attention and devotion on the part of the ego, an aptitude for being "moved", a willingness to see what wants to appear".

- Erich Neumann

Zorba the Greek

Young Englishman: "Are you married?".

Zorba: "Am I not a man? And is not a man stupid? I’m a man. So I married. Wife, children, house, everything. The full catastrophe". [belly laughs].

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Zeus Archetype

"In the Greek myths, Apollo is visualized as a golden man standing on an enormous accumulation of the dark, dangerous energy called Dionysus. There is a general assumption now that every man in a position of power is or soon will be corrupt and oppressive. Yet the Greeks understood and praised a positive male energy that has accepted authority. They called it Zeus energy, which encompasses intelligence, robust health, compassionate decisiveness, good will, and generous leadership. Zeus energy is authority accepted for the sake of the community". - Robert Bly

Braids - Plath Heart

Favourite tune of 2011 so far...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtube_gdata_player&v=VaipOk2Kino

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Interesting Passage From a Paper on Kohlberg's Stage Theory of Moral Development

Kohlberg, it is important to remember, is a close follower of Piaget. Accordingly, Kohlberg's theoretical positions, including that on developmental change, reflect those of his mentor.

Kohlberg (e.g., 1968; 198 1, Ch. 3) says that his stages are not the product of maturation. That is, the stage structures and sequences do not simply unfold according to a genetic blueprint.

Neither, Kohlberg maintains, are his stages the product of socialization. That is, socializing agents (e.g., parents and teachers) do not directly teach new forms of thinking. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine them systematically teaching each new stage structure in its particular place in the sequence.

The stages emerge, instead, from our own thinking about moral problems. Social experiences do promote development, but they do so by stimulating our mental processes. As we get into discussions and debates with others, we find our views questioned and challenged and are therefore motivated to come up with new, more comprehensive positions. New stages reflect these broader viewpoints (Kohlberg et al., 1975).

We might imagine, for example, a young man and woman discussing a new law. The man says that everyone should obey it, like it or not, because laws are vital to social organization (stage 4). The woman notes, however, that some well-organized societies, such as Nazi Germany, were not particularly moral. The man therefore sees that some evidence contradicts his view. He experiences some cognitive conflict and is motivated to think about the matter more fully, perhaps moving a bit toward stage 5.

Kohlberg also sometimes speaks of change occurring through role-taking opportunities, opportunities to consider others' viewpoints (e.g., 1976). As children interact with others, they learn how viewpoints differ and how to coordinate them in cooperative activities. As they discuss their problems and work out their differences, they develop their conceptions of what is fair and just.

Whatever the interactions are specifically like, they work best, Kohlberg says, when they are open and democratic. The less children feel pressured simply to conform to authority, the freer they are to settle their own differences and formulate their own ideas.

Our Garden

"What have you done
With the Garden that was entrusted to you?"

- Antonio Machado

Allen Ginsberg in No Direction Home

"Poetry is words that have a power that make your hair stand on end. That you recognise instantly as being some form of subjective truth that has an objective reality to it - because someone has realised it! ...Then you call it poetry later".

- Allen Ginsberg

America - Allen Ginsberg

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don're really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Liam Clancy

A phenomenal photo of Liam Clancy singing in the 60s. I grabbed it while watching No Direction Home.

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Keith Richards Reflecting on Motivating Mateship in a Band

He's talking about how he was at art school and how everyone had a Sword of Damocles hanging over their head about the inevitable years of National Service in the military afterwards. All of a sudden one day the Government relaxes the requirements, and he's left in a hilarious Stockholm-like limbo.

"Suddenly you felt like you had two free years, but it was a complete illusion, of course. You didn't know what to do with it. Even your parents didn't know what to do with those years, because they wee expecting you to disappear at eighteen. It all happened so fast. My life had been plodding along nicely until I found out there was no National Service. There was no way I was going to get out of this goddamn morass, the council estate, the very small horizons. Of course, if I'd done it, I'd probably be a general by now. There's no way to stop a primate. If I'm in, I'm in. When they got me in the Scouts, I was a patrol leader in three months. I clearly like to run guys about. Give me a platoon, I'll do a good job. Give me a company, I'll do eve better. give me a division, and I'll do wonders. I like to motivate guys, and that's what came in handy with the Stones. I'm really good at pulling a bunch of guys together. If I can pull a bunch of guys useless Rastas into a viable band [he's talking about the Wingless Angels] and also the Winos, a decidedly unruly band of men, I've got something there. It's not a matter of cracking the whip, it's a matter of just sticking around, doing it, so they know you're in there, leading form the front and not from behind.

And to me, it's not a matter of who's number on, it's what works".

Excerpt from Life, An Autobiography, by Keith Richards.

http://thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com/

Praised Be Man - Jack Kerouac

I came across these great lines by Keroac today while watching No Direction Home, Martin Scorcese's biographical documentary of Bob Dylan. The references to the symbolic ocean as eternity, source, dynamic ground, just keep on coming of late...

"Praised be man, he is existing in milk
and living in lilies -
And his violin music takes place in milk
and creamy emptiness -
Praised be the unfolded inside petal
flesh of tend'rest thought -
(petrels on the follying
wave-valleys idly
sing themselves asleep) -
Praised be delusion, the ripple -
Praised be the Holy Ocean of Eternity -
Praised be I, writing, dead already and
dead again"

- Jack Kerouac, Excerpt from Mexico City Blues, 228th chorus

http://www.youtube.com/v/aCV6UOi20Ys?fs=1&hl=en_US

http://thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com/

The Many...

Now I a fourfold vision see 

And a fourfold vision is given to me 

Tis fourfold in my supreme delight 

And three fold in soft Beulahs night 

And twofold Always. May God us keep 

From single vision & Newtons sleep

- William Blake

Dan Siegel's nine critical components of 'Mindsight'.

1. Bodily regulation.
2. Attuned communication.
3. Emotional balance.
4. Response flexibility.
5. Fear modulation.
6. Empathy.
7. Insight.
8. Moral awareness.
9. Intuition.

Now just gotta work out how to do it while still rocking out like Keith Richards! ;-D

Forgive me one Christmas indulgence...

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Where My Story Starts - Broken Shelf

This is a link to a song I wrote and recorded with Simon Clark and Adam Gaensler when I was a youngster. Ah, memories! ;-D

http://zaphodb62.tumblr.com/post/2422914147/a-little-tune-written-by-adam-luke-and-i

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Anamnesis, or The Psychoanalysis of God - by Ken Wilber in One Taste.

(It is worth noting that this entry was written before Ken began differentiating structures and states (a la the Wilber-Combs Lattice) and instead stacked psychic, subtle, causal, and nondual states on top of magic, mythic, mental, and vision-logic. I don't think this alters the significance of this piece very much at all, however, but it may be useful to imagine this sequence as moving "diagonally" up and to the right through both structures and states, without necessarily differentiating between the two.)

1

Push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . . push pull crash . . .

2

Yearning, yearning.
Hunger, thirst, hunger here.
Swallowing, to swallow.
Must have, must have, must have.
Move toward, run away.
Fear, fear, fear, here.
Anger, rage, explode, swallow, grasping hard, terror.

3

I see, hear, feel. I am not alone. There are others here, of my blood, and we are one, against the others.

Nature sleeps with us, and rises with us, and we are sometimes bright, sometimes frightened, by this power over us. Our strong desire is not strong enough, many times. Earth, air, fire, water, follow no course, sometimes they help, many times they hurt.

Life is short, following the way of all blood on earth. There are others here, some are bright, some are dark. Those of my blood are with me. Those who are not, are not. Death is with us, and we put death on those who are not.

Family is of blood, and is with us. I am four in this family. Eighteen suns have brought me here. Now the moon is putting death on me. The moon, the snake, the water, they are one.

All things touch all things. There is no separation here on earth. To touch a thing is to be that thing; to eat a thing is to be that thing. We do not touch that of the other, we do not eat that of the other. Life is on this side, of our blood. Death is on that side, of the other. We do not touch the other, we do not eat that of the other. Now the moon is putting death on me, because the snake, the moon, and the water are one. When the snake bit, the moon entered me, and now death is entering me.

I have learned these things, from those who know. My family goes on, our blood mixed with this earth.

4

Boy and girl together are killed, we roast them and eat them carefully, for they are of the Mother. Blood is of the Mother, and we offer blood to Her, which comes back as our food.

I am Tiamat, of the fifth house, planter of the seeds that were brought to us by ancestors in the days before time began. My blood is of the Mother, my bones are of the Mother, my heart beats with the time calling us to Mother. My body mixes with earth, which is the Mother.

Few understand Mother. She is Life, her blood makes life. We offer her blood, the boy and girl are killed together, which we eat for the Mother, or else the seeds will not bring forth. Each four moon season, we sacrifice for Mother, which comes back as our food. If we do not sacrifice, we all will perish. I, Tiamat, know this, from the ancestors who brought us the seeds, in the days before time began.

5

My father's father descended from the Creator, whose abode is not here, but Heaven, and His ways we cannot know. In our city, the priests have means to contact our Father, but my family does not understand them. My father's father understood the Father, for they were kin, but we have forgotten. It does not matter, our lives are in His hands. There are many gods and goddesses, and He is just the leader of them all, though we do not know how.

The priests tell us that there was a time that our ancestors walked with the Creator, but then something terrible happened. We pray twice daily to be returned to before the mistake. I pray very hard, but the last time I prayed hard, my sister died anyway. My uncle said I must pray harder, so something must be wrong with me.

I am being trained to be a potter, because I am very good with my hands, and I see things about making. My brother was a potter; my other brother plows. One of my sisters died; they will not tell me what happened to my other sister.

We are fortunate, for we have a strong house. This is because my father's father was descended from the Creator. Also, in the blood fight that took this city from the others, our family fought well, and so we have this house.

The day of sacrifice is the best day, because everything comes from the Creator and we must give some of it back. My family sacrifices beautiful birds, which we raise for this. There are dark rumors about what goes on in the Temple, but I don't believe them. We see the sacrifices here, with the birds. The blood of the bird returns to the earth. Blood is the life we are given, so we give it back. To eat a thing is to be that thing, so after the bird is blessed by the priest, we eat it, because now it is food of the gods, and the gods are in it. So in this way we become strong, and the elements leave us alone. And yet, the last time I prayed for my sister, she died anyway, so there must be something wrong with me.

6

This world makes sense, obviously. And I am constantly struggling with those who want to hide the light of rationality under some obscure basket of deceit. UFOs, astrology, alchemy, astral travel, Eastern mysticism…. What a mess.

Most of these people, however well intentioned, don't seem to realize that they are living in a relatively safe and protected world precisely because of rational science and its fruits of medicine, dentistry, physics, economic production and abundance, the extension of average life span from thirty years to seventy years. The critics condemn that which shelters them. I've been an electrical engineer for over three decades, because it works, it is verifiable, it betters human lives. There is a real world out there, with real truth in it, and real hard work required to dig it out. You can't just contemplate your navel and hope to find out anything worth anything.

The fortress of science, is how I think of it. It will stand forever, constantly updated. That is, as long as the antirational inmates don't take over the hospital.

Perhaps I shouldn't get angry, but I do. Ever since my son died last year in an automobile accident, things have been a little rough. But running to a pie-in-the-sky God does no good at all. We human beings, for good or ill, are the only gods in existence, the only force of rational intention and good will. And we will save ourselves if we can be saved at all. The Bible is right about one thing: the truth will set you free. And science is the only path of discovering truth. What else could there be?

I'm not worried, anyway. Oh, once in awhile, I can't sleep, you know. I lie awake and stare into the darkness, and wonder.

7

All things are related to all things. When I first had that realization, perhaps when I was a young girl, maybe fourteen or so, it completely changed my life! I would later learn names for this—holism and so on—but at the time, all I knew was that all things were related to, connected to, all things. Twenty years, two husbands, no kids, three jobs, and one National Book Award later, I still believe this firmly!

My book, To Re-weave the Web, is a detailed account of this holistic view, based not only on all the late-breaking scientific discoveries—and oh there are so many! from chaos theory to quantum physics to complexity theories and systems theory, my head just spins, it's so exciting!—but we also have the holism of the indigenous peoples of the world over, who knew all this stuff way before modern science stumbled onto it. The Great Goddess returns! Gaia is alive! All things are related to all things.

This is wondrous, isn't it? Now that science is catching up with this holistic interwoven view—why, I was writing about this years ago!—I am looked upon as something of a forerunner. So I have become a heroine, imagine that! I've been asked to be on this board and that, serve on this journal and that, go to this conference and that. Me! Imagine that!

Oh, I forgot. Not just the indigenous beliefs, but Eastern mysticism, too. All saying the same thing, about the web-of-life, all things and all things and all of that and so on. So I don't see why those Zen people keep annoying me and asking if I meditate. What difference does it make?, I keep asking them. If you believe that everything is connected to everything, what else is there? You do it your way, which is meditation, and I do it my way, which is called holistic thinking. They said, that was just an idea and could I show them this oneness right now? And that made no sense to me at all. They're just being obnoxious, I think, like they know it all. Imagine that!

8

The hike through the mountain with my fiancé was everything I wanted. Madly in love, slightly crazed, we both were babbling fools. More like children, but it didn't mater. For an hour John had dutifully carried the picnic basket on his back, kidding all the time that it was only fitting that he should carry the food of the CEO of Digital Data Corporation, and I said, No, it's only fitting for a love slave, and that would be you. And I wasn't even finished with this sentence when suddenly I disappeared, and there was only the vista in front of me, and John, and this body… but no me, or no I, or… well, I'm not sure. I was one with all of this scenery, one with the mountain, one with the sky, it was exhilarating, a little scary, but mostly completely peaceful, like coming home. I've never really told anyone about it, because on Monday I was back at the office, running Digital, and who would have believed me anyway?

It never happened again. I sometimes read about things like this, oneness and whatnot, cosmic consciousness, but none of the words sound right for what happened to me. I hear that some people can stay in this state constantly, but I don't see how, I really doubt it. You'd lose all sense of orientation, I think. Anyway, it came and went. The more I think about it, the more I think it might have been something like a small seizure. It didn't seem like that at the time, but now it does. After all, what else could it be, seriously?

9

It was just the other day, I can still remember it as if it's happening right now, vivid, electric, weird. I was sitting alone, at home, and it's late, around midnight maybe. I have the distinct feeling that somebody or something is in the house—you know that feeling? Well at first it really scared me, I was really scared. I finally got up the nerve to go through the house, checked it really well. I sit back down and it happens.

This really intense fireball, I don't know what else to call it, simply materialized right there in front of me, right there in the living room. I know this sounds crazy, but this has never happened to me before, I don't see things, you know? But it wasn't just an electrical thing. I know this sounds crazy, but it was alive. Well, I'll just say it: it was Love. It was a living fire of Love and Light. I know this as sure as I'm sitting here. It sort of moved from in front of me to on top of my head, then back in front of me, then on top of my head. When it sits on top of my head my whole spine begins to vibrate, and shooting currents run up it, right to the top. Pretty crazy, huh? And then as soon as I knew that this was Love, it just disappeared, just like that. It just went away, but it scared the daylights out of me. But then it didn't, I mean it didn't scare me. It made me feel completely safe, I've never really felt like that.

I've heard about, you know, that light at the end of the tunnel? Except I wasn't dead. But I know what I know, and I know that Love is somewhere out there. My entire body feels different somehow. My spine hurts, like somebody plugged it into the wall socket, I don't know exactly. But the truth is out there. I know that. Oh, and I know I've started praying, just to say thanks.

10

Nature retreats before its God, Light finds its own Abode. That's all I keep thinking as I enter into this extraordinary vastness. I am going in and up, in and up, in and up, and I have ceased to have any bodily feelings at all. In fact, I don't even know where my body is, or if I even have one. I know only shimmering sheaths of luminous bliss, each giving way to the next, each softer and yet stronger, brighter and yet fainter, more intense yet harder to see.

Above all, I am Full. I am full to infinity, in this ocean of light. I am full to infinity, in this ocean of bliss. I am full to infinity, in this ocean of love. I cannot conceive of wanting something, desiring something, grasping after anything. I can contain no more than is already here, full to infinity. I am beyond myself, beyond this world, beyond pain and suffering and self and same, and I know this is the home of God, and I know that I am in God's presence. I am one with Presence, it is obvious. I am one with God, it is certain. I am one with Spirit, it is given. I shall never want again, for Grace abounds, here in the luminous mist of infinity.

Around the edges of this love-bliss there are tender tears, the faint reminders that I have so wanted this, so longed for this, so desperately yearned for this—to be saturated to the ends of the universe, to be full and free and final. All the years, all the lifetimes, searching for only this, searching and suffering and screaming for only this. And so the tender tears stand at the edge of my infinity, reminding me.

Out of this Light and Love, all things issue forth, of this I am now certain, for this I have seen with the eye of my own true soul. Into this Light and Love, all things will return, of this I am now certain, for this I have seen with the eye of my own true soul. And I have returned with a message: Peace be unto you, my human brothers and sisters; and peace be unto you, my animal brothers and sisters; and peace be unto you, my inanimate brothers and sisters—for all is well, and all is well, and all manner of things shall be well. We are all of the same Light and Love, of this I am now certain, for this I have seen with the eye of my own true soul.

11

Exactly how long I was Light, I cannot say. How long Form existed, I cannot say. How long I have been neither, I cannot say.

On the other side of Light, the Abyss. On the other side of Love, the Abyss. How long, I cannot say.

I once was a rock, I remember that, and push pull crash, I remember that. I roamed the universe of myself in slumbering abandon, and truth be told, it was humorous, always.

I once was a plant, then an animal, and thirst and hunger, I remember that. I ran toward, and ran away from, the forms of my own lust. I wandered driven, starving, dying. But truth be told, it was humorous, always.

I once awoke as human beings, and entered into the school of my own becoming. I first worshiped myself in the form of my other, I worshiped my slumbering self. I moved toward my own skin, dear nature, and I approached me now with wonder, now with terror, and did unending trembling and ritual pleading to deal with the terror I induced by my own sleep. But truth be told, it was humorous, always.

I once awoke as human beings in search of me as heavenly other, in my own form as misty mythic mystery, still asleep, but barely. I sacrificed aspects of my still slumbering self in order to appease the terror that my own twilight still evoked. But to awaken all at once, you see, would have ended the game right there. And truth be told, it was humorous, always, even as I cut into myself.

I soon awoke as human beings who, in striving to be a light unto themselves, were dimly on the trail of the Light that I am, even in my otherness. In one great move I stopped looking for me out there. In one great move, I awoke to the consciousness of light. In one great move, I turned within, or began to, and I could sense that this game was getting old, because I was now on the trail of I. Truth be told, it was humorous, even as it was starting to end.

And then one day, sitting alone as my otherness, I saw myself as a ball of Light and Love, and knew the Great Awakening was upon me.

In the next move in the school of myself, I entered into Me, as that Love and Light itself, and I was with I to infinity. And this I recognized altogether, in a whisper of a breath that embraced all space, and a flash of Light that contained all time.

And then, the Abyss beyond all beyonds. Some would call it radical Freedom, infinite Release, ultimate Liberation, the great Redemption, boundless Being. I wouldn't know, for there is no I to know, in any form, sacred or profane, and so there is only this radical Formlessness, which remains its own remark. It is not bliss, it is not God, it is not love. It is not holistic, it is not Goddess, it is not interwoven anything. It is not infinite, it is not eternal, it is not any conception or object or state whatsoever. I-I am not light, am not love, am not spirit, am not bliss. I-I am not bound, am not free, am not ignorant, am not liberated.

But this much be said: where there is not this Emptiness, there is only suffering.

All this I remember, in the school of myself. All this I have seen, in the history of my own discovery. All this I sing of now, to the audience of myself. All this I promise to others, who are the forms of my own slumbering. All this others will also see, as they awaken from their otherness and return their slumbering selves to the Wakefulness that has always existed, undiminished and untorn, in the heart of what they are.

Exactly how long I was Light, I cannot say. How long Form existed, I cannot say. How long I have been neither, I cannot say.

On the other side of Light, the Abyss. On the other side of Love, the Abyss. How long, I cannot say.

But I know I will empty even this emptiness, and therefore create a Kosmos, and therefore incarnate as the world of Form, and enter with Wakefulness the children of my own Awareness.

12

Around the sea of Emptiness, a faint edge of bliss.
From the sea of Emptiness, a flicker of compassion.
Subtle illuminations fill the space of awareness,
As radiant forms coalesce in consciousness.
A world is taking shape,
A universe is being born.
I-I breathe out the subtlest patterns,
Which crystallize into the densest forms,
With physical colors, things, objects, processes,
That rush upon awareness in the darkness of its night,
To arise as glorious sun, radiant reminder of its source,
And slumbering earth, abode of the offspring of Spirit.

13

The phone rings and I run to pick it up. "Yes?"

"Hi, it's Marci."

"Hi sweetie. What's up?"

"I think we should go on a vacation, spur of the moment. Just do it."

"Um, well, I've got all this work, you know, it's sorta…"

"Come on, it won't kill you to take a few days off."

"Okay, okay. We've never been to South Beach, and we wanted to give it a try, so we might as well do it now, yes?"

"Yes!"

Two weeks later, here we are, in South Beach, Miami, of all places. And resting in the ocean, dipped into the sea, I find glimmers of One Taste everywhere.

Emptiness, clarity, and care, are the names of this present moment, exactly as it is arising, now and now and now. The bodies of Buddha, the hands of Christ, the faces of Krishna, the breasts of the Goddess, the aspects of this very moment. I know that all of that is somehow tied to a pledge that I have made, deep in the heart of my very soul, how or where or when exactly, does not really matter. It is just that, for those who remember the course of their own consciousness—from mineral to plant to animal, from magic to mythic to mental to supramental, from body to ego to soul to Emptiness to radical One Taste—there is an extra duty asked of them, and that is to communicate what they have seen, and what they have remembered, and what they have found—what each I has found in the school of I as it returns to itself, shining and free, empty and bright, called and caring, just so, and again, just so.

And truth be told, it was humorous, always.

14

Marci is swimming. I finish my Coke and my sandwich. It is noon. The sky is clear, the ocean is blue, the waves surge freely on the beach, wetting the soft white sand.

Sources:

http://integrallife.com/learn/deep-end/anamnesis-or-psychoanalysis-god

http://www.amazon.com/One-Taste-Reflections-Integral-Spirituality/dp/1570625476

http://thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com/

Interesting passages from Donald Kalsched's The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Encountering resistance to encounter groups

Over the years, I've been involved in a range of groups where psychologically-informed people crack the living shits at those who try to engineer closeness at the expense of individuals showing up as they are first. From at least three of these people, I've heard the breathy protest: "It's just like a fucking encounter group". Not having been around in the dusty old days of 70's and 80's psychotherapy, I haven't had the foggiest idea of what an encounter group is, and why it seemed to provide such an allergic reaction to these folks. My disinterest was also fed by wanting the experience that they were seeking to deny.

Today, with my psychoanalyst, I again suffered the protest - but this time with more conversation around what she meant. Boy, oh boy I wish I'd understood this sooner.

While there's a range of encounter group configurations, the simplest form comes from Carl Rogers, and he calls it "basic encounter". I found this excellent short summary at the link cited below: 'Here people sit in a circle, usually on chairs, and interact almost entirely at a conscious verbal level. The role of the leader is simply to "facilitate what is going on", to participate as a "full human being", and to encourage people to be "more honest and more self-disclosing". The leader sets up three conditions - empathy, genuineness and non-possessive warmth".

Now, while this may sound all warm and fuzzy, in integral language, it's about as green as it gets. Oddly enough, in most of the integral groups I've been part of here in Sydney, some form of this encounter is what we've unknowingly gravitated towards (notwithstanding the aforementioned protests). Fundamental to this "sensitive self" is the interpersonal cultural norms of lateral bonding, permeability, the superseding of emotions and caring over rationality, and sensitive communitarian self-dissolution.

I'm supposed to be an integral superhero, right? So this shit is supposed to humor me, right? Wrong. Massively wrong. Despite remaining critical in many facets of interpersonal life, I was completely shocked about the extent to which I try to make this form of encounter happen in my every day life. This has been one enormous blindspot in my self awareness. I might as well have sensitive self tattooed on my forehead!

Further, beyond the mere abstract colour coding, a juicy personal perspective for me in dealing with my psychoanalyst's challenges was coming to realise the repetition compulsion I've had around forcing my intimate relations to pursue ever more fine gradations of "fair" and "open" communication to sate my endless howling into the wind - a grasping sense of never quite merging. Not just green behaviour. Sort of borderliney, absence of self stuff. Eek! The lessons of alterity and intersubjectivity are fucking hard won, and today, I felt one step closer to a genuine understanding of their value.

Taking that breath of fresh air, (sort of sheepishly) looking at my lover's eyes afresh and being hugely grateful for the wise elder who has passaged me through this difficult year of deep psychological growth, I'm warmed by the last two paragraphs I read on more developed encounter groups and the injunctions they hint at for widening my embrace:

"Because of its emphasis on directness and openness ("say what you mean and mean what you say") the encounter group quite often leads to experiences of getting in touch with the real self, which we saw before tend to be ecstatic. This is why Schutz's own groups were ofen called "joy groups". Unfortunately, some leaders have occasionally tried to go direct for joy, by emphasising peace and love all the time. This does not work, because the joy has to be real spontaneous joy if it is to be genuinely experienced at all. We are not in the peace and love game, we are in the reality game; and if we do justice to the reality and the real self, joy will come in due course, in its own way.

This also applies to spiritual experience in the group. It is not uncommon for people in encounter groups to have deep spiritual experiences, which show them that the boundaries of time, space and the self which they have taken for granted are questionable. But to aim deliberately at giving people such experiences is not wise. The basic value in an encounter group is truth, truth to one's own experience. Anything which interferes with this is less good in this context and is not real encounter".

Source of quotes:

http://www.ahpweb.org/rowan_bibliography/chapter8.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encounter_group

http://wakingdownintegral.com/category/integral/

http://www.fudomouth.net/thinktank/now_integralvision.htm

http://thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com/

Sacral Pump

I found this on a website about practices for lifting the sexual chi through the body and getting in touch with the sacral pump's relationship to the head.  In addition to the work of Mantak Chia and David Deida, I'd read about this in an excellent article in Reality Sandwich recently.  It's great stuff!

... and I couldn't help but leave in the final cheeky line!  ;-D

Testicular Breathing

The first thing an initiate has to learn is testicle breathing. This is done by inhaling, directing the breath down to the testicles so your balls rise up. As you exhale your balls fall back down.

This cools down passion and stimulates sexual chi in a yin mode. Exhaling gets out accumulated wastes.

After a while a cool/cold chi is felt inside the scrotum between the 2 balls. You next "sip" this coolness to the Hui Yin (perineum) thru an imaginary straw. Once the Hui Yin is cold you next sip it through the tip of the spine to the coccyx. This step is difficult and important. There's a lot of bone that has to be broken through.

Now there are pumps in the body. One very important one is the sacral pump. When moving chi from the perineum to the coccyx it helps to activate the sacral pump. It pumps sexual force up the spine and transforms the energy at the same time.

The sacral pump is activated by humping -- i.e., moving the sacrum down and then pulling it up.

There's also a cranial pump in the back of the head. A sexual master activates both to pull the chi to the brain.

After moving the cold chi to the coccyx it is next sipped to T-11, the 11th thoracic vertebra, behind or opposite the solar plexus.

There you let the sperm force accumulate till it's ready to move on its own. Flexing that part of the back will help it travel up.

By the way, this movement of sexual force (kundalini) up the spine to the head is called "raising up the salaat" in Islam. In esoteric Christianity it's known as "uplifting the Christ."

The sperm force is next drawn to the Jade Pillow (back of the head) between C-1 (1st cervical vertebra) and the base of the skull.

Pressing the chin to the chest activates the cranial pump and moves the chi to Pai Hui (crown of the head).

The chi in the head should then be circulated inside the brain 36 times clockwise and 36 times counter clockwise. This vitalizes the brain.

After some practice you can draw the sexual force from the testicles to the brain in one long draw.

After filling the brain, press the tongue to the palate and let the sexual force flow down the front to the lower Tan Tien and the sexual center.

These are preliminary practices to mastering Sexual Kung Fu.

Source: http://amirfatir.tripod.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/Testic.htm

Litany Against Fear

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain".

—Bene Gesserit "Litany Against Fear," from Frank Herbert's Dune

Reminders...

As you might have noticed from some of my posts either on this blog or on Facebook, I've been besotted with the insight of attachment theory recently. Apart from the obvious clinical upsides of solidly grounding my new career in this discipline, it has had strong breakthrough implications for my worldview, therapy and insight into the trials of the relationships i've had through my life. In particular, i've been able to see deeply into the ways that my secure approaches have been frustrated resulting in anxious and, at times, disorganised patterns. Simply having knowledge of the interactions of these constructs has given me a tremendous grounding anchor in times where the chaos of life and relationship has been too strong. I've also been able to notice the predominance of avoidant strategies in those I've shared relational settings with. This excerpt from George Hardwell in particular has spoken to me at great depth, allowing for legitimacy of the projections which have silently pervaded many of my interpersonal and intrapsychic relations. I post it here both in the hope that someone else may one day also find it useful, and also as a symbolic gift to myself marking the boundaries which I have improperly allowed to be breached in the past and should never breach again.

What does the avoidant personality look like, and why does this result in silent divorce?

There is a personality type that is associated with avoidance of risk. Such persons are basically in flight from life and use manipulation and control to consolidate this flight.

One rule of life is that the greater our fear of life the greater we need to control. Frightened and insecure, such people will control in order to remove the risk of living. They will control appearances to ensure approval. They will control their family members to reduce risk.

A less extreme Avoidant Personality brings death to the marriage relationship, and their partner's self-confidence and identity, over longer time with less obvious abuse. This person may be male or female. Female patterns are often more subtle; not in the open, harder to detect. Husband may not know what is going on. She can quite easily keep up appearances while avoiding intimacy, undermining the individuality of her partner and escaping true marriage into silent divorce - a pretend marriage.

Silent divorce is fine with the Avoidant Personality. In silent divorce they have the emotional stability they desire - without intimacy. They have the status and safety of being married. If her partner stays in this silent divorce it could become the death of him. He will be trained to avoid expressing emotions, confronting issues head on, talking about 'negatives,' raising any objections to their life style and her increasing control of their life. This could manifest in him with emotional problems such as depression and 'an anger problem'. It may manifest as physical disease - some sickness. It might increase any tendencies in him to find escape in drinking, drugs, gambling or sexual addictions.

In a marriage with an Avoidant Partner both of the partners begin to deaden within, the heart sickens, the spirit languishes, one lives with constant residual depression and a search for life outside of the marriage becomes as search for life, love at the emotional and spiritual level. One strongly hungers and thirsts for that which will lift one spirits, heal one's heart, rekindle one's passion and bring the experience of community and intimacy to one's soul.

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com