the mindful paradigm

Awe Is Neither Incidental Nor Accidental.

“History is a child building a sandcastle by the sea, and that child is the whole majesty of man’s power in the world.” —Heraclitus

There was a time, when I was in my early 20s, when I could hardly make sense of Heraclitus. I hadn’t lived enough, and I’d interpreted my experiences too narrowly. Now, as I craft my own observations and philosophies, I am startled to discover: Heraclitus made these very claims thousands of years before me.

This quote confounds readers, most being offended by some connection of man, history, and majesty, child. Christian theocentrists, prone to injecting Yaweh into everything, read it as an implication that Yaweh is a child. Heraclitus invites no such comparisons, and certainly does not entertain divinity so petty and uninspiring as Yaweh. What he’s seeking is beyond Yaweh; he is identifying Logos.

The thing about Heraclitus so many are confounded by is the nakedness of his observations. They are raw, direct, and beautiful in their clarity. Our contemporary understandings of the world are not naked—we are too absorbed and confounded by Maya (as orchestrated by Christian Yaweh obsessionists and Madison Avenue socio-consumer programming) to recognize Logos, let alone comprehend it and our relationship to it. We are never naked, and so we are bewildered by our own nakedness when we encounter it. We are even less equipped to experience the nakedness of the World—both the raw wilderness and the constructions and perversions we impose on it.

And it is those very constructions and perversions Heraclitus is telling us about in the confounding quote. Our majesty is in our catalytic capacity. We are the gods, the alchemists, the magicians, weaving creativity, deconstruction, synthesis with the very land itself.

Civilization is transformation—while its architectures may crumble, the impact of our chemical actions on remains imprinted on the land, sea, air, and more for many generations longer than our purposes held the forms we invented for them. Our artifice IS impermanent. Our creation/destruction is much longer-lived than we can envision. Trapped in a scope of culture, a sense of history constrained predominantly by the fact of our contemporary lives’ direct immediacy which overrides the the knowable experiences of prior generations and the knowable lessons of raw experience with Nature and Other, we see—like the child—only our intentions and their fulfilliments (sand castle). Rarely do we see beyond.

Yet artifice of man extends beyond his life’s ken, the creative/destructive impacts even further. We think we know the fullness of our power, but we are most often wholly ignorant of it.

We take pleasure in it, though, a delight informed by the hint of its expanse. The majesty is in our delight, in the exercise of our power, in our ignorance of it—like a king driven by blind purpose, divine in his intention and cause and will, magnanimous in his crusade and in its execution.

 

A Wrenching Matter

In a business trip to San Diego in 2004 or 2005, spurred on by the then radical-to-me notion of a final rejection of the Christian anthropomorphic “god,” and with it the asinine modes and assumptions of Western spiritual engagement, sitting in my hotel room, I entertained a simple intellectual game: How DON’T we know that consciousness and cognition and cogitation aren’t just limited to us—to humans?

To illustrate the example, I gave intelligence to a tool—a wrench—and then tried to understand its existential angst as it failed time and again to understand itself and its creator and know that it could be understood and known by its creator. It could not communicate with it’s creator (here I assumed: me) in any mode that the creator could recognize as communication. So, the creator could have no idea that it possessed consciousness, awareness.

The creator didn’t know to listen because it couldn’t hear AND didn’t hear because it didn’t know to listen, and couldn’t know what it should be listening for. It could only know to listen to and for sounds and signals that mirrored its own—it could only know to recognize symptoms of consciousness in other objects that resembled its own.

The exercise was meant to pantomime and essay human futility in communing with Yaweh/Jehova, and here my implication was: God doesn’t listen because God doesn’t know what to listen for.

But as I began to explore psychedelics, it became a different kind of touchstone. They revealed to me energy exchanges between minerals and organisms, and those exchanges were symptomatic of awareness as being imbedded in all things. I thought and think this revealed being and intelligence, and even intent, in all things. Not to mention symbiosis and an empirical basis for what we call “spirit.” I realized that many more things have consciousness (awareness) than I had previously considered and that there are many more kinds of consciousness than those we currently comprehend—and therefore know to listen for and know to recognize. There are, in addition to animal consciousnesses, mineral and plant consciousnesses as well. There is a cellular consciousness, and most certainly a fungal consciousness. And if the totality of individual consciousnesses gives rise to another consciousness in the next stratum up (i.e., nature is self-similar, so red blood cells to human, human to… Gaia?), one has to wonder if the telescoping echoes of that pattern called “consciousness” continues—and how far in either (macro and micro) direction do the echoes carry? Is there an Earth consciousness? A galactic one? How would we know to listen for such a thing? How would it know to listen for signs of our own consciousness?

One of the limitations of human conception and perception that is tragic to me is that of our imagination: We generally imagine by extending from what we know. Our attempts at investigation traverse permutations of paths and approaches we already know. Scientific detectors expand on our five senses—opening our detection of visible radiation up so that our “eyes” can “see” broader and narrower wavelengths along that same spectrum. As we cannot fathom experience that is vastly different from our own, we cannot know what we are missing. Particle and wave physics might be two of a myriad of representational forms the fabric of the universe may assume. Consequently, viewing the universe through just those two facets of it isn’t likely to yield it’s total picture. Yet we presume that since that is all we can see that is all there is to be seen.

Similarly, we don’t know what we’re missing when it comes to other modalities of Being and Consciousness—we either miss that a thing is Being altogether or castrate its depth of Being in our evaluation of it. Plants, many will agree, have cellular responses to the sun and to temperature—and to seasons, which are complicated patterns and trends of sun and temperature. Is this not a kind of intelligence, of Being? Perennials have a complicated annual life cycle—where can we find the cellular-level mechanism telling a tree to change the color of its leaves? If we can agree that plants evidence—to us—a rudimentary-level intelligence, we have to consider the possibility that they exhibit a much deeper and more complicated intelligence—one we don’t know how to see. Perhaps tree consciousness occurs on a much slower timeline—thoughts, choices, responses forming slowly over decades and so-seeming to us unchanging and not-occurring?

 

The Matrix Really Is Everywhere

On the surface, the Matrix (film) had it right: What we accept as reality IS a construct manufactured by a power hungry elite that does not have our best interests at heart. But seeing that reality as it is—and finding a truer alternate reality—is not as simple as disconnecting from your pod and entering into the “desert of the real,” and somehow being shocked into enlightenment in the presence of the naked truth. In order to make sense of your experiences—which is required if you’re going to step out of cultural reality and into a “truer” reality, one that more closely reflects the actuality of what of the Totaltiy is experienceable by us, you have to do a lot of work.

Reality is practiced, habitual perceptual organization and interpretation, and its impact is sophisticated and leaves deep impressions on all levels of the psyche—with the majority of those impressions residing deep and stubbornly in the unconscious.

Getting “yanked out” as Neo does puts people in non-sensable positions where they attempt to use habitual perceptual mechanisms to interpret raw actuality. That condition is too overwhelming to be useful—the excess of new and unrecognized stimuli and their relationships to each other and to those stimuli we know is overwhelming, but what is also overwhelming is the volume of data that falls into our realm of experience which we are wholly unprepared to anticipate and therefore recognize the presence of—which is a prerequisite of understanding.

We must deliberately decondition and recondition ourselves—through art, drugs, unfiltered experiences—if we are to extricate ourselves from the Babylon Matrix (as Jonathan Zap regards it) and prepare ourselves to begin to make sense of and be open to the Actuality of “the desert of the real.”

 

Blind to Nature, Blind to Our Selves

We are a people who see but do not see—a people willfully blinding ourselves to the truth and complaining for it all the while. We see our artificial world—of vaporous imagery, mortar and glass, and other urgent, angry currencies—and miss entirely the world of water, flesh, and stone in which our roots are laid. In not seeing Nature, we can never see our Selves. By consuming Nature mindlessly, ripping her apart in senseless chunks, we consume our Selves—as we despoil and sicken and madden her, we grow rotted, sick, and mad as well. Yet we relish the complaining, relish the image of us as hapless victims to fate. We have created this fate, we constantly create it, we alone, and we can uncreate this fate if we chose to, but only if we have the courage to give up this made ruse, soberly survey the damage we have wrought, and grow the fuck up and clean up after our Selves, tend to the mess and let the planet heal. So strange that beauty and truth are everywhere around us, yet we construct so many perceptual rules we do not allow ourselves to see them, know them—and, so, see and know our Selves.

 

Conservative Libertarianism

Conservatism in its Libertarian guise is morally bankrupt from its roots up. This is because it is the position of deeply narcissistic, spoiled, greedy, wholly inethical, bullying teenage jocks who don’t want anyone who isn’t like them to have as much of what they want to have. It is the position of fascists and oligarchs, and they are interested in securing channels to power and wealth (which they correlate) so that these are only accessible to anyone with their ethnicity ad sociologic background. Regardless of their “rhetoric” and “platform,” they are wholly disinterested in the well-being of others, existing only to grossly advance themselves and coordinating their personal and public narratives to support that aim while only appearing to support the opposite. They do so by posing as “intellectuals,” when in fact they merely hack intellectualism by aping its manners. This is in direct reference for their repeatedly demonstrated utter inability to tolerate legitimate, informed criticism contrasting their falsely held ideological positions without resorting to ad hominem attacks and, when those fail, outright rabid derisions and condemnations.

And the thing is: They fool Liberals. Our weakness is that we are also idealists: We believe that a people all people are fundamentally reasonable and can be reasoned with. Historical evidence strongly contradicts this: Most people are unreasonable and it is up to the reasonable few to render experience sensible for all. Regardless, it doesn’t matter how smart we think we are, we want to believe these narcissistic amoral fucktards want to be reasoned with, so we fall for their appearance of reasonableness time and again.

Conservatives aren’t some prime motivating ideological engine. They have also been duped: by their Corporate Masters. The Corporations need the guys and gals who are smart enough to catch what they’re doing (Liberals) distracted and looking the other way, stumped and bewildered by these puzzling liars, so the Corporations can go on pillaging the American people in their insatiable quest to fatten themselves with something called “profit.” (And we shouldn’t be fooled: “Liberals” are now in on the action, too.)

We need to stop buying the images we’re sold and start paying attention to the events that spur their outrage and joy. These explain what’s really going on: They are threatened by good sense, socially equal positions like fighting poverty, setting limits on personal wealth, making healthcare and education accessible to everyone because in such a society they can’t possibly have more than everyone else, and because there are limits on how much they can have, and that is an insult to them.

This is not a truly conservative position. It is the radical position of bullies and gluttons—sinners. We should regard it accordingly.

 

Sex is Our Birthright

Sex is our point of origin and more than any other talent or passion we might pursue it is what we are literally born to do. It is our birthright. It is the basis of our existence and the celebratory act from whence our existence is magnified—and can be multiplied. It is a conduit to Other through the Self, and through Other back into Self. It is one of many trajectories a human can adventure on to advance growth and wellness of being in this lifetime.  It is our birthright—fundamental to our daily being—and to reject and demean and misapprehend it is to reject, demean, and misapprehend our very Selves and our very existences. 

Ritualizing sex is equally problematic as doing so places gross constraints, rules and pressures on it—constraints, rules, and pressures it does not invite, require, and benefit from. These exaggerate, distort, and ultimately derange sex—and us, in the final tally. Sex is our birthright and damning it to power plays, repression, derision and shame, ritual, and control ruins us.

Love: Drawing Ever Nearer To (2009-04-17)

I had a realization about Love in April 2009. So long as we engage love as a process of drawing-ever-nearer-to-but-never-reaching our loved one, our relationship remains lively, dynamic, living. The Universe is verbic--everything it contains and that gives rise to it is always changing position in relation to everything else, and even to itself. We can rest comfortably in knowing that the center of the loved one’s self is never static, always changing its position. We can never fully know the one we love, but we can always draw nearer to their selves, to their centers.

When we presume to have “landed,” that we have discovered “them” at last, we stop drawing nearer to them, ignore the truth of their shifting center. Eventually, we lose sight of them. Perhaps we even lose sight of our own losing sight of them? Too often, this is true: Love stagnates and dies in the absence of our journeying to the loved one, yes (and I would argue that is because love IS the journeying), but it is our short-sightedness of our own losing sight of our loved one’s center that perpetuates the journeylessness, the stagnation, the failed love.

I realized quickly that this metaphor of drawing-ever-nearer-to is not limited to Love, but extends to knowing our selves and to engaging the whole range of our experiences with this existence.

Our reality is defined not by singularities (the self, a flower, a doorway, an atom, a supernova, etc.) but by the relationships these singularities develop between one another. Existence of one thing does not occur in the absence of Other, nor does existence occur in the one thing or in the other. Existence is the totality of relationships and of relatings. Existence is relating.

When we relate, we draw-near-to (or orient-our-selves-in-some-fashion-to) the Other, but we never arrive at/become/subsume/are-subsumed-by the Other (without being destroyed in the process).

Finding the Self, an other’s Self, “God,” the zero-point field, a Higgs-Boson, whatever—these are not, ultimately, matters of consequence. We will never hold these in bare attention for long, we will never touch their centers long enough to matter.

The journey is the destination, to quote Dan Eldon. The dialog, the questioning, the drawing-nearer-to. If we can savor our searching, find better and better ways of being mindful of our drawings-nearer-to, we will find ourselves engaged.

There is another component to this journey-process: Distance. If in our relating to a thing we find our distance to it change—particularly if we find ourselves somehow farther away from it—it presents us with a circumstance that is both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is to find our way back to the nearer distance again, perhaps via the original course that took us to it in the first place. The opportunity is for us to change our approach—and, so, change our understanding (vantage) of our relating to that thing/Other. This applies particularly when we are relating to our Selves: Inevitably, we get so caught up in our pursuits we lose sight of ourselves. Doing so (resuming our distance from a new vantage point) presents us with a chance to really refresh self-awareness.

Again, it all comes down to how we engage things, how we chose not only to draw nearer to, but how we chose to orient ourselves to that process. If we want to find the thing we seek, we have to remember that the closeness isn't in the finding but in the seeking itself. 

Perception is Primary

We know for certain that we enter life naked and equipped only with a basic set of perceptual functions. The notion of conscious thought at immediate infancy is uncertain to us, though it's clear the ego follows after too long. Mothers will assure children, years later, that essential qualities of their children were quickly apparent as well. As none of us recollects those early days and months, the presence or absence of organized thought--of ego--is only debatable. I'm guessing infants have little egoistic thought. I'm confident, in fact, that they're experience is one of pure awareness and reactivity. 

 

Imagine being cocooned in quiet warmth and knowing only a few basic stimuli--a thrumming heartbeat, a jostling of your environment as mom tips too and fro, perhaps the muted sounds from the world outsider her, maybe her emotional state, and perhaps even darnkess. Now try to imagine emerging from that and being bathed in overwhelming stimulations. Your entire body, your entire sensory array--both internal and external senses--overwhelmed by alarming, acute, and wholly foreign stimuli. That, I imagine, is the shock of birth so many children emerge screaming into.

 

As the shock cools, we must reconcile ourselves rapidly to our helplessness: Our bodies do not obey our commands, or, perhaps even more appropriately, we cannot comprehend the limits of our selves and the notion of what we are capable of doing within those limits has yet to be discovered by us. At best, we react to passing stimuli--both in our awareness and, as we soon discover, in our bodies. 

 

We happen: Our arms and legs thrash when something unsettling occurs in our environment. Breathing, an activity that is wholly new to us, comes in uncontrollable waves, each breath scathing our lungs with a chill we will rapidly grow accustomed to. Sometimes, our out breaths are accompanied by squeaks and cries. Sometimes, when we are gripped by urgent confusion, those squeaks and cries become overwhelming. We discover our digestive track and our helplessness in relation to it as we feel it expel effortlessly substances from within us. All of these things we must seem to ourselves to be relatively helpless to, if we have any kind of sense of self at all.

 

I will return to the notion of awareness later. What I want to impress upon readers now is what I believe to be our most essential nature: We are born and remain through out lives perceivers. Perception is the first thing we are capable of doing, it will be our last as we face death, and it will be the undercurrent we  are largely unaware of that motivates and informs everything we do in between. 

 

We quickly mistake the significance of ego and enshrine it as key to our purpose in this lifetime. We mistake it as our soul, our essential nature, something that existed always, even before our mother and father's genetic material merged and began to mitose into the cluster of cells that would eventually become us. Yet we have no empirical proof of that presumption--no ability to test for the existence of a "soul." We do have the ability to observe our children--closely--and see what they do, how they react. In so doing, if we avoid anthropomorphosing our egos onto them, it becomes apparent that any transcendent character they have is just as unstable, nascent and rapidly coalescing as their bodies are. It is apparent, also, in their grasping hands and darting eyes, in the ease with which they are startled, that they are largely vehicles of perception, moored much more in the immediacy of their experience than in any context of time and categorization their egos will inevitably provide.

 

This is largely what Buddhists and students of mindfulness rediscover after enough practice with meditation. In stilling their minds, they come to the pervasive unstoppability of perception. We can quiet our thinking, quiet our emotions, but our senses are always sensing, always engaged, unable to be turned off. And in the absence of ego, our bodies' awareness of those sensory inputs is overwhelmed. I remember reaching this experience a year ago: It was a revelation to discover the depth, tenor, and noisiness of my perceptions in the absence of ego. Sirens several city blocks away were deafening, as was the feeling of cool evening air lifting my arm hairs and the taste of my mouth... 

 

After just a few minutes of pure sensory experience--the simplest and most essential of our very being--my ego reasserted itself. Delighted with its discovery, a thought emerged: Of course. I laughed uncontrollably. The sound of my laughter broke the spell. My conscious mind, thrilled by these revelations and dancing in the delightful delirious depths of my senses, charged back in to do what it does: categorize, contextualize. My senses immediately went back to their dulled states as thinking resumed full-bore.

 

In the year that's followed, I've been unable to re-attain this experience. I've wanted to very much, but in my eagerness to detect it, I've been unable to shake my yearning ego completely, and so I have been unable to re-enter that state of pure perception, which I've come to know as the state of pure being.

 

 

When we contemplate the importance of certain things in the natural sphere of experience--in what we call Nature, which is everything that occurs outside the human context in its own context--we tend to judge them not by their intents and potentials but largely--perhaps only--on what they do. On how they behave, how they act, specifically in relation to us, to our selves. We tend to look most closely at the things these devices and entities do most, and usually most easily, even automatically. We call these steady, effortless (seeming) happenings their "nature" and we categorize them in relation to us according to their natures.

 

We do not engage in similar evaluation when we evaluate our selves.

 

It is a matter of clear-seeing to properly assess the nature of a thing and of perceiving its environment and so observe its significance in relation to its context. One of the ironies of ego is that, as a device of measurement, it is limited by itself. Or its' self. That is to say, it can measure other happenings fairly well, but measuring itself and measuring other parties with recognizable egos is much more difficult for it. This is largely because it's very difficult for our egos to get out of their own way. We can't see them, for starters. We also behave as though they're awfully big.

 

As I pointed out earlier, and as Buddhists and other men and women we call mystics who've contemplated our Being well before me have also stated, we as a species grossly oversignify the importance of ego. We mistake it as primary when nothing of the sort is true of our bodies. Setting aside the notion of meditation for a moment--because it is regarded with suspicion by a great many in our culture--let us examine the primacy of ego versus the primacy of perception in a very different way: general anesthesia.

 

A patient under general anesthesia experiences a pause in ego--for the time one is under, unless one is very fortunate to dream, one's ego simply ceases to exist. However, one's body is in a constant state of perception. We may not recall any record of acute inputs from our external senses, but important internal senses such as proprioception, pain and organ performance monitoring, and so forth are still in-place and very actively engaged. If our lives were predicated solely on the existence of our egos, under general anesthesia our bodies would detect the absence of our ego and die. But this is not so. Our bodies do not die, and they go on perceiving without us.

 

Consider also the act of sleeping and dreaming. In both states, your ego seems wholly detached from your body and immerse in an inner space. You may or may not be aware of the ego's activities in various dream states, but your body is undeniably still fully engaged in perceiving--itself and its environment. Sharp noises detected by your body will startle itself into wakefulness and yank your ego back into the full of its awareness. So will a change of light. And the emerging need to go to the bathroom to take a piss or get a drink of water. Your ego is somewhere else, but your body is still fully engaged with itself.

Ego is certainly important. It is dear to us because, as far as most of us know, our egos are our selves. I do not seek to undermine the importance of our egos to ourselves. I do, however, seek to present us for a new context for understanding our selves, our place in existence, and, so also, the significance of our egos. It is perception that is primary, though, not ego. I intend to show that, and to show also that far, far more things are imbued with perceptual abilities than we have supposed, and that our understanding of the universe--the real, physical universe--can be profoundly expanded by this realization.