conskeptical

Recent Musings On Reality

Dreaming And Waking: The Canonical Mutually Inconsistent Realities

Isn’t it strange that every night in our dreams we visit a reality that operates radically differently from our waking reality… and yet while in dreaming or waking states, we rarely question the primacy of the state we’re in. We rarely even notice which reality we’re in. While awake, this is just how things are. While dreaming, this is just how things are.

Our memories of dreaming reality in waking life allow us to consider that maybe dreaming is not the primary reality. After all, it’s just a memory! And things don’t work that way right now.

While dreaming, I do not recall ‘waking reality’ as in those terms. I wonder if I would consider that waking reality is not the primary reality in that instance? After all, it would just be a memory. And things wouldn’t be working in the waking way while in the dream…

On the rare occasion that I have had lucid dreams, despite feeling elation at the revelation of knowing that I’m in a dream, I have not considered, from within the dream, the waking reality that the word ‘dream’ is defined in contrast to. I haven’t even considered my relationship to the lucid dream state, instead simply experiencing the wonder of it. I would like to in future. Right now, there is something fascinating about considering my relationship to the waking reality I’m in now.

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The Returns Curve

The idea of ‘diminishing returns’ [C] is pretty well known. This is a typical graph of ‘returns’ (something you want)* against ‘time effort’, a measure of the time and effort you put into getting what you want. It applies to individual effort as well as economic/industrial/social effort.

*this graph shows cumulative returns

The labelled graph segments are:

• A - incubation / activation energy / startup effort / inertia : any significant project tends to have a period of initial investment where returns are small compared to time-effort. The motivation for effort is in the future returns.
  
• B - accelerating returns / free expansion / beginner’s luck / growth : once the initial resistance is overcome, there is often a period of free expansion. Returns are high compared to effort. Everyone wants to be here. Over-investment here tends to starve A (for other projects), and cause excessive momentum into C and D. It also causes inefficient exploitation of B, because assuming B is larger than it is means wasted effort is put into infrastructure for exploiting an incorrectly assessed B, rather than having the optimum amount of infrastructure to exploit B as it is in reality. (Returns = opportunity - investment. Bigger opportunity warrants bigger investment; overestimating the opportunity will lead to an oversized investment that cannot be recouped as efficiently (if at all) as a right-sized investment.)
• C - diminishing returns / saturation : once the project is mostly ‘complete’, or the opportunity mostly exploited, the zone of diminishing returns can easily be entered. Effort goes up as returns slow down. This is a less attractive part of the curve to be on, but returns are still increasing.
• D - destructive returns : it’s possible to continue to put effort in beyond the point of diminishing returns. At this stage, extra effort is counter-productive, because it is destroying returns. This is a bad place to be.
• E - stabilised return : there may be a stable level of return that would require an ongoing maintenance effort.

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Love, Analytically, & The Acquisition Of Gender Attitudes Prior To Selfhood!

I’ve done no formal research to back this up, it’s just provisional, hand-wavy ponderings based on the various exploring in books, meditations and groups that I’ve been up to lately. I’ll leave that odious drudge of being ‘right’, and having the evidence to back it up, to other people! Enjoy the story, or relate to it as you will, if you wanna :) I’m most interested in your views, opinions and reading recommendations also.

This is the punchline, which I want to start with because the lead-up is quite involved…:

The subjugation of the feminine by the masculine is the first subjugation learned, and it is learned to some degree by almost everyone, starting from the very earliest stages of life. Subjugation as a general format is inextricably rooted in unbalanced masculine and feminine energy: it is assertiveness meeting yielding, that is masculinity meeting femininity, in an unbalanced, forcing way. Every kind of subjugation is a consequence of imbalance in the flow of masculinity/femininity, within both the subjugator(s) and the subjugated.

Please note that although I’ve tried to select the best-fit words from English here for my terminology, and hopefully your pre-existing ideas of what they mean serves to make understanding of the text relatively smooth, the intention is that I have redefined the words in the text to far more underlying fundamentals, so that they are still consistent with our pre-existing/cultural definitions (which tend to be very culturally/historically/personally/circumstantially specific cases of the fundamentals), but also give rise to a deeper understanding of the breadth and implication of what these things can really mean in our lives and the lives of those around us…

So here goes:

What is love?

Love is the willingness to be.

• Lack of love is the unwillingness to be.
  
• The intensity of the willingness/unwillingness is variable (more or less dramatic).

Directed love is the willingness to be with an object of love. (Could be nonliving or living, or even abstract, eg a car, or a person, or a dream.)

• Objectless love is simply an undirected willingness to be.
• Similarly for lack of love.
  

Lack of love (unwillingness to be) is felt as desire, to not be this way, a desire to be some other way than is now.

• Lack of love is also felt as resistance, to being now, to what is now.

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The City Mirrors Us, The Jungle Mirrors Us

We interpret the world around us through the filter of our past experience. For most of us, the majority of what is happening now is lost through the fog of past attachments, and past attachments posing as desires for the future, including many which have been handed down for generations or longer.

As social beings this is especially obvious with the other people in our lives. It also stretches to the way we relate to animals, and also the environments we inhabit.

What happens when we interpret the environments we inhabit, seek, avoid, desire, fantasize, in terms of the way they mirror ourselves?

Firstly, we gain deep insight into ourselves. Environments are often more enduring than people, and less socially judgemental. When we choose to, they allow us to relatively easily reach right down into the foundations of our subconscious and collective subconscious. Secondly, as we get better at seeing our reflection in our environment, we can start to look through that reflection to look truly at the environment itself, with less of the personal baggage we unthinkingly dump on that environment. We take steps towards seeing the environment as it is to itself, to treating it as an independent existence, that exists for its own sake, not just for our own.

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Being In The Pocket and The Problem Of Competence

All actions and events lead us (back) to where we really are

• The more we allow, the more this is experienced as a tendency for life to balance itself out naturally
  
• The more we resist, the more this is experienced as a tendency for life to upset us
  

Perspective and attitude

Because all actions lead us (back) to where we really are there is no such thing as good or bad actions or events. Our perspective (level of ignorance as to where we really are) and attitude (degree of allowing/resisting) are what give rise to the ideas of good and bad.

• When we think we are further ahead than we really are, sooner or later we will experience being ‘dragged back’
• When we allow, this is often experienced as ‘relief’
• When we resist, this is often experienced as ‘falling behind’
• Before the ‘dragging back’ we may experience false progress or stability. The more mistaken we are, the more traumatic the dragging back.*
• The harder we try to push ahead the more resistance we encounter. We are not playing to the rhythm of (our) life.

• When we think we are behind where we really are, sooner or later we will experience being ‘pushed forward’
• When we allow, this is often experienced as ‘progress’
• When we resist, this is often experienced as being ‘unready’
• Before the ‘pushing forward’ we may experience false stability. The more mistaken we are the more traumatic the pushing forward.*
• The more extreme our underestimation of how far ahead we are, the stronger the forward current that we experience. We are not playing to the rhythm of (our) life.

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Consciousness Expanding Meanderings

These have been picking up pace for me in the last few years, and especially in the last 8 months since I started a career break to focus specifically on this, so here is a stock take, in chronological order of my first experience. Some I am doing regularly, some I have since quit, some I did just once or twice so far. All have contributed…

NB: for those of you with a scientific bent… note that many of the links below, and many of my own words, are not part of mainstream accepted scientific thinking: the ideas are more a rendering of personal/shared experience in metaphor. Some of the links contain pseudoscience… a shame but that seems to be a standard marketing ploy in today’s pseudoscientific world… in my experience not incompatible with deriving personal value - but a useful warning flag nevertheless.

Landmark Education

If enlightenment is about getting perspective on the pettiness of one’s personal dramas, to expand beyond the comparative nonsense of the concerns of a single individual, and into a more meaningful contribution of a life - from wherever one is currently standing - then Landmark scores full marks. Their initiatory weekend course. The Landmark Forum, gave me nothing less than a 6 month jolt of ‘WAHEY, life is SO MUCH BIGGER THAN I THOUGHT and I GET TO PARTAKE, YESSSSSS!!!’

Unfortunately, the nirvana that Landmark sets up for the post-egotist to wake up into is… one of unbridled dedication to the great Landmark.

Absolutely worth engaging with, so long as you’re not vulnerable to being taken over by a very pushy organisation. They’re absolutely excellent for getting a super-loud wake-up call and some experience holding boundaries against double-edged organisations while still contributing, benefiting and participating.

Japanese Calligraphy

In some senses, this is where writing came from. Mixing one’s own ink using water and a stick of animal fat and soot. Applying the ink to paper made from wood fibre using brushes made of bamboo and animal hair.

Breathe in, allow the confusion to settle, breathe out into the brush strokes, feeling the ink and paper and form through the bristles, the muscles, the mind. There is only one chance to get the strokes of the Japanese characters correct. Nothing missed and nothing added. Purity of form, purity of mind.

And endless, endless mistakes. Under the tuition of a real life Pai Mei… (what I did to deserve this, I do not know, in both senses!!)

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Practical Lucid Dreaming

Of the four lucid dreams I can recall, two have occurred in the last 2 weeks, as a direct result of having watched these videos.

I’ve read a few books about lucid dreaming, and mostly they seem to recommend things like keeping dream diaries, getting plenty of sleep, observing good sleep hygiene (eg minimal audiovisual overstimulation such as TV before sleep), practising reality checks etc.

It’s all more or less sensible advice. But also relatively marginal, and requiring of significant effort for unreliable results.

Into The WILD

Turns out that the following steps (derived from the linked videos) work pretty well. I’ve had 2 intentional lucid dreams in 2 weeks from them so far. They describe how to have a Wake Induced Lucid Dream. In a WILD, you remain conscious while your body transitions to sleep, leaving your mind defocused/detached from sensory input, clearing the way for interesting, wakeful, dream experiences:

• Go to sleep around 10 or 11ish, with a gentle alarm set for 4am.
  
• Wake at 4am, remain awake for 20-60 minutes.
  
• Return to bed. Lie flat on your back, perfectly still. Gently relax and allow the relaxation to deepen as far as you can. Remain awake, and remain perfectly still: the goal is to have zero voluntary muscular signals going from your mind to your body. (Apparently the body registers the mind as asleep if it receives no signals from the mind, and consequently goes to sleep itself!)

• As time passes I become aware of more and more minute bodily sensations, and my relaxation aspires towards those levels of minuteness. After some time (up to an hour for me so far!) sleep paralysis settles over my body, accompanied by bodily sensations like intense pins and needles, and loud auditory vibrations.
  
• At this point I feel like I’m still in bed, but actually I’m in a dream version of my bed. I’ll pass in and out of other dreams, while my lucidity fluctuates.
  
• After a while I’ll wake up naturally, usually with a strong feeling of achievement and ‘life is awesome.’
  

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Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance - 
A Call To Selfishness Or To Evolved Relations?

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

Self-Reliance is the famous essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson, where he paints a tragicomic picture of the individual as a divine being who has misconceived of their self as a weak creature who must take refuge in a variety of ineffective crutches in order to survive.

These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. … But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

Emerson’s main calls are for us to live in the present and depend on our self, because these are our access to the divine, and therefore fullest, life. He shows us how we turn away from divinity by fleeing from the present into myriad illusory distractions, and by depending on (undependable) factors external to ourselves. He paints society as the main vehicle that calls us out of the present and away from self reliance, describing a wide variety of crutches and distractions that society channels, mostly in service of our conformity, which Emerson deplores. He describes divinity and the divine life, and gives an overview of how we might return to it.

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Passing Through A Gateway That Transforms

3 months ago I left my desk job of nearly 10 years. Something had shifted in me, and I made the decision to take at least a year of spaciousness to see what was going on. It represented a step change in my ability to trust that the flow of life gives us exactly what we need in every single moment.
Fairly soon after I left my job, an opportunity to spend time camping in the desert with a remarkable group of men came up. I jumped at it, this time using my intuition, rather than depending exclusively on my analytical mind, which I had relied on far too much historically. My tired, tyrannical, overdeveloped analytical mind was finally getting a rest, preparing to be an equal partner with my intuition, emotions and full self.

I learned some lessons in the desert. (And took some photos.)

Seek my physical edge.
Modern life overemphasises the analytical mind, and insulates the mind from the body. When the mind isn’t integrated with the body, we can’t explore our environments as freely, and are unable to feel as at home in our environments as is natural. We become alienated because we are disconnected from our only means of interacting with the environment, our bodies.
Clambering around in challenging and vertiginous desert environments was a thrill, an experience of inhabiting my body and feeling at home in the environment. Wow! Time for more!

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Responsible Spirituality

I’d never previously considered that spirituality even could be irresponsible, but this theme came up twice recently, in a meditation group and while reading Michael Brown’s The Presence Process. The responsible spirituality part kicks in at point 7, points 1-6 apply to everyone all the time.

1. We tend to bring our concerns to the people and environment around us.
   
2. So if we’re in a bad mood (or any mood), people we come across will end up dealing with that.
   
3. Often we project our concerns onto the people and environment around us.
   
4. This means that we can tend to interpret the people we come across as embodying those concerns. We can tend to blame them for bringing those concerns into our lives. We are often unaware that we are projecting.
5. This can be uncomfortable or unhelpful for those people.
   
6. This is one meaning of passing on karma (allowing circumstances to propagate themselves).
   
7. When we deliberately choose to work on integrating buried emotions, so as to emerge lighter and freer from the integration, we will have those buried, often uncomfortable emotions on our mind.
   
8. We should take extra special care to be mindful of our tendency to bring and project these concerns onto the people and environment we come across.

Chilli Submission
Using Fire To Stimulate Your Present Moment Awareness

Eat some spicy-hot food, or even just a straight chilli, if it’s a reasonably hot one. Notice the burn. Notice how you’re probably resisting the burn in some way, even if only subtly. Let the burn engulf your entire mouth. Sink your entire awareness and intention into the sensation of your entire mouth on fire. Breathe deeply. Stay with the burning until it subsides. Notice any discomfort, notice any exhilaration, notice any sensation at all that comes up. Notice if you start to notice sensations and feelings and emotions in your head, your mind, your belly, elsewhere in your body. The chilli burn! Chillies can wake us up!

A Dream On The Edge Of The Forest

Out of one corner of my eye, I started to glimpse a strange, infinite wall of stubby tentacles, like some grotesque planar starfish extended out of all reasonable proportion. It was a vertigo-inspiring wall. Like swimming underwater, and the bottom dropping away into inky nothingness, and the wall following that nothingness into infinity. How weird is it to be close to that wall, something comprehensible that drops away into sheer, infinite, incomprehensibility? How can the starfish wall seamlessly bridge the impossible gap between comprehensible and incomprehensible? And what kind of fearsome, humbling perspective do you endure from being within touching distance of something so nonchalantly reality-defying? That kind of vertigo. Nauseating.

Naturally, I turned away from the wall. It didn’t trouble me again.

Later, I realised that the wall was teaching me something, and had a lot more to teach me, if only I didn’t naturally turn away.

The wall had visited me before. Quite a long time ago. Except last time it wasn’t a wall, it was a pataphorical road, metaphorically along which I was a small band of little forest critters on a merry reckoning with the forest and the wondrous mysteries of the lurching passage of time. An urgent, troubling thought popped into my head. ‘If I continue down this road, I’m never coming back.’ That was a state of affairs I found unacceptable. I mean, just how many degrees removed from reality is it reasonable to get before the breadcrumb trail just gets unnavigably munched upon by the less mindful aspects of your forest-critter-party self? (It never occurred to me that if I really was that many degrees removed from reality, then my logic itself was probably about as trustworthy as my breadcrumb nibbling component selves…)

So, naturally, the wall didn’t come back to visit, for a long time.

In life, there are large forests full of magic and treasure, and fear and danger. When we have spent our whole lives in the village, even the edge of the forest can feel like an intense wilderness, and in those circumstances, it is. Then, if we allow our senses and our bodies to embrace the extended environment, we can enjoy new skill, courage, trust and responsibility to venture further into the forest and taste and share in the delights on offer within.

Om nom nom.

The Presence Process, by Michael Brown

Most books that are effectively not written for the thinking mind vibrate at far cruder frequencies than this one. This one, on the other hand, is explicitly written for the non-thinking mind, and is a call and helping hand to waking up to the full splendour of the present moment. There is a bit to reassure the intellect and keep it from sabotaging the whole process, but mostly this is a repetitive ‘healing’ song for the emotional mind.

It’s also a handbook for going through a 10 week journey of integrating one’s experience of life so as to improve one’s ability to enter the present moment as fully as possible and choose not to retreat (as we all do, more or less of the time) into the past/future in the desperate, and ultimately futile, bid to avoid experiencing what’s going on right now.

For many/most people: forget what you know about reality and experience, this book turns it all upside down. It doesn’t invalidate what you know already (unless you choose to read it that way), but it does provide a parallel alternative that can unlock different doors.

I’ve read through the book, to curious and ongoing effect, and am getting ready to immerse myself in the 10 week process. It promises to be a wild ride. This book appears to be an invaluable companion for those of us who wish to turn towards life as fully as possible.

No-nonsense, and filled with compassion, there is one little poem that I particularly love:

As we reawaken,
Let us gently leave the bed,
Quietly tiptoe out of the darkened room
And into the morning light.
Let us play here.
Let us not shake others in their beds.
They are sleeping because they require rest.
When they reawaken and hear us playing,
They shall come and join us.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying - Marie Kondo

The title of this book might sound a little hyperbolic, but Marie Kondo has developed tidying into a Zen art, and with that, into a potentially life-changing, magical skill. She’s also pretty funny:

At that time, one of these [books] was The Art of Discarding, which first opened my eyes to tidying, although I no longer have it.

Our possessions aren’t just inanimate material crowding our lives. They deeply reflect our personalities, as well as grounding us in whatever functional and dysfunctional patterns we have created for ourselves:

During the selection process, if you come across something that does not spark joy but that you just can’t bring yourself to throw away, stop a moment and ask yourself, ‘Am I having trouble getting rid of this because of an attachment to the past or because of fear for the future?’ Ask yourself this for every one of these items. As you do so, you’ll begin to see a pattern in your ownership of things, a pattern that falls into one of three categories: attachment to the past, desire for stability in the future or a combination of both.

We also manifest our masculinity and femininity through our belongings and relationships to our belongings:

Incidentally, there is a noticeable difference in the way women and men treat loose change. Men tend to put coins in their pocket or to place them in plain sight, such as on a dresser or table. Women, on the other hand, tend to put them in a box or bag and stow this away in a drawer. It is almost as if the male instinct to be ready for action in response to danger and the female instinct to protect the home manifests itself in their treatment of loose change. This thought causes me to pause and ponder the mystery of life and DNA as I spend yet another day sharing the magic of cleaning.

I’m currently putting the book into practice. Releasing loads of excess stuff is a really great feeling. I absolutely recommend this book if you have trouble with clutter or accumulating unneeded possessions.

And if you take issue with a tendency to anthropomorphise inanimate objects, I urge you to read this essay first, which will help you to receive useful messages from many of the more wacky sounding passages in this book:

Once my clients have learnt to treat their clothes with respect, they always tell me, ‘My clothes last longer. My sweaters don’t pill as easily, and I don’t spill things on them as much either.’ This suggests that caring for your possessions is the best way to motivate them to support you, their owner. When you treat your belongings well, they will always respond in kind. For this reason, I take time to ask myself occasionally whether the storage space I’ve set aside for them will make them happy. Storage, after all, is the sacred act of choosing a home for my belongings.

Gut - Giulia Enders

A remarkable book about… the human gut. Click through the picture or the title to see an interview with the author which gives a great flavour. For me, the main points from the book are:

• The gut represents are remarkable boundary between our self and our external world, in that it transforms the external world into ourselves, and the reverse as well. The discussion gives a lot of food for thought :) re our relationship to our environment, both macro and micro scale.
  
• The gut has a rich, autonomous neurology, which works in tandem with, rather than under direct control of, the brain. The gut is a gigantic sense and control organ operating on the boundary between our external and internal, which influences us hugely (including in terms of emotions and feelings), and mostly subconsciously…
• Our bodies are made up of 90% non-human cells… microbes outnumber us 9 to 1 (but by weight human cells are far dominant…)
• The gut flora (bacteria/microbes) living in our gut are arguably an organ unto themselves, made mostly of non-human cells, but providing vital immune, nutrition and other functions.

This book is absolutely worth a read, it gives a whole new perspective on the body, what cleanliness and health means, and how we feel and sense the world in and around us. And it’s very accessible too.