Friday, July 11, 2008

Trying something new

I learned an interesting lesson yesterday. I was watching a dialogue on Youtube between Oprah Winfrey and Eckart Tolle, and Eckart was talking about his experience with writing his first book, The Power of Now. He described how one day he was going about his business and all of a sudden he got this sense of something needing to arise out of Oneness, or as he calls it Consciousness. (I like that term.) He could not put his finger on it but he felt like something had to be born. As he sorted it out and wound up moving to the west coast of Canada and the US, he started to write the book.

The point here is that he didn't write the book. The book wrote him.

When he was in the process of writing, as time went on, he sometimes did not feel much like putting anything down. However, each day he cleared some time and space for the writing, whether he wrote or not. He said he respected the space for it to do what it needed. (I'm paraphrasing and taking liberties here.)

Interestingly, I felt similarly when deciding to start this blog. One day I got this huge feeling of things within me starting to bubble up to the surface, and I got this huge push to start bloggin' what I new about this stuff. So I started.

On some posts, however, I am writing about what *I* want to write, and I have figured out that this is probably not as useful as letting Consciousness write what it wants. So here I am. Before I started writing this today, I sat quiety at the same time I usually post here, and I asked Consciousness, "What do I write?"

The answer is this post, but also this video. Watch the whole series if you like:

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Personal musings on development

In many ways, I think humanity is at a crossroads right now. Eckhart Tolle repeats some views about this. A long time ago, enlightened people, i.e. people who were able to step into the Present for prolonged periods of time, were extremely rare. Everyone was caught up in the swirl of chaos that was humanity, and they didn't know the chaos was their own doing, and that it was fake. Then you start having these enlightened people popping up in rare cases. Poof! There goes Jesus! Oops, no wait, they killed him soon after. Poof! There goes Buddha! Oops, nope, he didn't have an easy time with people either. Poof! There goes... You get the idea.

These rare people that popped up suffered greatly, which was part of their evolution, and ours. Then over the centuries, something started to slowly happen: the rate of enlightened people appearing began to increase. Thomas Aquinas... Shakespeare.. Meister Eckhart... The Baal Shem Tov... and more and more people. Still, you could make a list of them if you tried. There were only maybe a thousand.

Along with that phenomena, something else happened. The rate of insanity also started to increase. I'm using Tolle's definition of insanity here, to keep things consistent: insanity is identification with the ego instead of the Real You. In other words, insanity is getting wrapped up in past and future and not being Present.

Scarily, now we have a real case of both rates speeding up exponentially in today's world. There are now probably hundreds of thousands if not a few million enlightened people of varying degrees, but there are billions of insane ones. The more the world wakes up and disidentifies from the insanity, the more the insanity fights back. It seems like for every person that finally says, "I'm done with this idiocy." there are 10 fundamentalists that spring up ready to berate that person, or even kill them sometimes.

There really isn't anything you can DO about it except be here now, and know. Being aware of the insanity dispels it. The more people that are aware of it, the more it deflates those who aren't. There really isn't any other way to "fight" it.

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

For those just tuning in...

Unlike some other blogs, this blog is not really dependent on current events. In fact, if you just start out by reading the latest posts, you might be confused.

The best thing to do is not worry about the dates of the posts, but start reading from near the beginning. Think of it more like a book than a blog.

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Toolbox: The Trilogy

So here it gets a bit tittilating, or interesting, so hang onto your mammary glands.

We laid out the anatomy of a single person. Now I'll open it up and say that your IS can talk to any other IS, and in fact, they do that all the time. Whenever you come into contact with someone, there is an emotional dialogue that takes place without words. This is the communication between IS's. You can think of your IS as a little busy body that is always chirping away with others of its kind. A lot of the "static" in your head actually isn't yours. Some of it is the bits and pieces that your IS throws up to your OS, which it got from elsewhere.

Now another piece of the model: distance.

Distance is the space between things. Duh! However, also you should realize that distance only exists physically, i.e. on the physical plane. On the emotional, mental, and spiritual levels distance is irrelevant. It does not exist. So, your IS can talk to another IS that is thousands of miles away just as easily as it could talk to one in the same room right in front of you.

Another piece: IS's are active while you are awake, and while you are sleeping. They chatter away with themselves and each other in both states.

All this stuff is basically involuntary for most people. They do it regardless of being aware of it or not. On the other hand, all of this can also be controlled. Once you know how to talk to your own IS, you can make it talk to other IS.... which can be fun sometimes....

One evening Draja took me to a bar. He often took me on outings to "field test" things, and on this particular occasion he was teaching about talking to other people's IS's.

"Josh, you see that lady in the corner over there, with the red blouse?", he asked while pointing discreetly.

"Yes, sure. She's pretty hot.", I answered lustily.

"Watch this..", he smiled.

A few seconds later, the woman casually reached up and absentmindedly undid the top button of her blouse! lol... Draja was GOOD, if a bit unethical.

However, the point was made. Communication between IS's can be mastered. BUT, any time you influence someone's IS to do something it normally wouldn't at the time, you are performing a type of black magic or mental influence. I am not saying it is bad, because I do not ascribe to the traditional senses of good and evil (more later.) However, you may want to weigh this yourself and think about it for a bit.

Personally, after spending months with Draja on that subject alone, and learning all the in's and out's of it, I found it to be a waste of time for mischievious uses, and more useful for learning how to deal with people and help them.

An ideal counselor would be able to talk to the patient's IS and relay that information back to them out loud so their OS can hear it. Good Tarot card readers should be able to do the same thing. However, if you know how to talk to other people's IS's, Tarot cards are also a waste of time because they are basically a crutch to put the reader in contact with the customer's IS.

People's DS's can talk to each other too. Really it's because there is only One, but for the purposes of this model, we'll say that on this level each person has their own.

A low level spiritual teacher is basically like a counselor. On the next higher level up, a spiritual teacher can make their own DS talk to the other person's DS. It goes like this:

Teacher's OS --> Teacher's IS --> Teacher's DS --> Student's DS --> Teacher's DS --> Teacher's IS --> Teacher's OS --> Student's OS.

That is one way for teaching to occur. Notice the Teacher is not giving the student his own crap to do. He's just relaying to the student what the student's own DS wants.

There are higher levels of teaching than that, but I'm not very familiar with them.

By the way, this seems to come out of Hawaian Kahuna tradition. You can read about it in Dan Millman's "Sacred Journey of The Peaceful Warrior". I thought it was hilarious when I first picked up that book because I never knew that it was Kahuna stuff, and I never knew that anyone else ever used this system. It was simply the system that Draja and my parents had taught me as a kid!

Monday, July 7, 2008

Toolbox, part 2

So, going forward here, and laying out some pieces of the illusion we think of as life...

The Outer Self (OS) is what relates to the "outside world", i.e. what "you" think of as the outside world. This is the mental voice in your head that thinks and speaks.

The OS is connected to the Inner Self (IS). The IS has been called the subconscious, and IS is really a broad term that encompasses your emotions, your ego, and other metaphysical anatomical structures, i.e. astral, etheric, id, etc. The IS and OS can talk to each other, but the problem is that most people's OS's don't listen to the IS. Their OS's ignore their IS's.

Ever see anyone who has no idea what they are feeling at any given moment? Are you able to answer that question yourself if someone asks you, "What emotions are you feeling right now?" An inability to do that is a symptom of blocked contact between the OS and IS, which is normal in all average people.

The IS is like the hub, so this is a shame. If your OS can talk to the IS, then it means your OS can indirectly talk to the Animal Self (AS) and the Divine Self (DS), which are both also connected to the IS.

Once again, the IS is conected to both the AS and the DS, and it talks to both of them readily (and it often ignores both of them readily.)

Notice something here. Your OS cannot talk to your DS. You can't "think to" God, so to speak. In order to get into contact with your DS, you need to have excellent contact between your IS and OS first. Once you do, then you can craft a message in your mind and send it to your IS and have the IS relay that message to the DS. This process is known by a few different names: prayer, meditation, and white magic.

In my experience, getting into contact with the DS can take years and years of work for the average person, because most people spend a long time simply trying to learn to get into contact with their IS's. Even more people just don't work on it at all.

That's it for today... next stop... the interrelation between IS's, OS's, and DS's among different individuals.

Friday, July 4, 2008

A bargain basement toolbox

"Truth has no form." is a quote from Idries Shah. This is a profound statement that is probably about as close as you can come to really describing your True Self, i.e. Oneness. Essentially, what it means that as soon as you try to put words to describing anything on that level, you are immediately wrong, just by virtue of using words. Anything that you can talk about in words is NOT the One. Even that last sentence is wrong. Do you feel a headache coming on?

However, Idries Sha went on to say that although Truth has no form, there are useful systems and tools for trying to describe Truth, or a part of it. Thus, you have the invention of many systems, like religions, mystical traditions, and practices. When used as tools, and remember the Plumber again, they can help someone realize Oneness. However, once you start to think the tool is Truth, you have become gripped by the ego.

I'd like to lay out a set of tools here, maybe more than one set. Over the years, I've gained proficiency with using a number of different toolboxes. Each one has a different vocabulary and approach, and all of them are artificial because they try to describe the layout of that which cannot be described. They are models.

The vocabulary is sometimes the most challenging part. About a year ago, I was at a conference, and I met a lady there who is a chiropractor. We got to talking and we soon "recognized" one another for our similar essences. The best way I can put this is that when we interacted with one another, it was very easy for us to detect the Oneness in each other almost effortlessly. Each of us was a natural at reflecting the other's divinity. (This stuff is hard to describe.)

However, the vocabulary was a big barrier to having some fun conversations! When we first called each other on the recognition, the first thing we did was sit down and trade toolboxes. We taught each other our vocabs and belief structures for that moment. Then after that, we were able to talk about things using one of our sets.

So this is the toolbox I showed her:

People have what I call "spiritual anatomy". Your being is divided into components: a physical, an emotional, a mental, and a spiritual piece. Each one of these has a corresponding term.

Physical: The Animal Self - This is the part of you that is alive in the biological sense. It doesn't think so much as it reacts. Primarily, it is concerned with physical survival. It wants four things: food, sleep, sex, and warmth/safety. When one of these things is lacking, you get physically uneasy, and everyone wants a different amount of each.

Emotional: The Inner Self - Everything about you that is emotional is part of this self. People's inner selves have the thinking capacity of a one or two year old toddler. They want things beyond what the animal self wants. The ego is also part of this self.

Mental: The Outer Self - This is your mind. This is the part of you that you probably think is you. This is the voice inside your head. If you have ever been in a crisis situation, and you've realized that part of you is totally collected and unmoved because it is coolly logical, that's your outer self. When you do a math problem, you use this.

Spiritual: The Divine Self - This is the part of you that is less an illusion than the other pieces. It is the piece that knows it is part of the One, and it has a great view up there of everything that is going on.

Now it gets more complicated than this because each of those four things can further subdivide, but we won't get into that.

In our next installment we'll talk about how these pieces connect to each other.

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Grab a brush and start scrubbin'. Or not.

I love analogies! They all have their limits, but they can make things so easy to understand.

I've used an analogy containing a window before. Here's another one.

Picture a window. On one side are your mind and body, which most people identify with as being themselves. On the other side is the shiny presence of the Present moment, i.e. the Oneness of all things.

Now, this window has a problem. It's dirty. In fact, it is so dirty that your mind and body are unable to see any of that light on the other side. For the most part, many people do not even realize there IS any light on the other side. They do not question the dimness.

That dirt on the window is analogous to what we call our "emotional baggage." My own personal technical term for it is "crap."

So what is crap, exactly?

Two monks were once walking through a town. They came upon a woman who was unable to cross a mud puddle on the street. One of the monks saw this and picked up the lady and carried her across and put her down on the other side. Then the monks went on. Unfortunately, this action was against the philosophy of their Order, and the other monk who witnessed this became a bit upset. As they walked, he became more and more upset, until finally about 5 hours later he had to say something to his fellow monk.

"Why did you carry that woman back there? You know that is against our ways!"

The other monk replied, "Hey, I carried her back there, but you've been carrying her for the last 5 hours! "

That's crap. Whenever you have an emotional experience that you do not deal with in the Present, that emotion sticks around and scums up your window.

So, how do you get rid of this crap?

Well, there are two schools on this.

The first school (which is the one in which I did most of my training) says essentially that you need to go after that window with a scrub brush and a bucket of soap. By this I mean that you need to do things, like special exercises or counseling, that are designed to remove the grime. Most of these things involve looking deep down inside yourself, issue by issue, and reliving them to their fullest intensity until you are ready to burst... and then, basically, you do burst... the emotional bubble that is. Every time you build up that emotional bubble and then pop it, you remove some crap. If you spend a while doing this, you will eventually get little rays of light shining through the window from the other side. If you spend many years doing it, you can eventually get rid a lot of the crap, but there is always some left, no matter what you do. More is always forming every day, and there's always these annoying little specks of dirt that are tough to scrape off.

The other school is no easier, but no less interesting. This school says that you have crap. Accept it. The crap is there. It is what it is. What you REALLY need to do is realize that you exist on both sides of the window simultaneously. You are both the outside and the inside, so in Reality, what's the point to the window? There is none. You are the light on the other side, and really there are no sides either. All you have to do is be aware that you exist on both sides of the window. That's IT. The more you pay attention to the part of yourself that exists in the light, the more you will realize that the window is an illusion. When that happens, the crap becomes irrelevant, and it actually drops away on its own, about the same time the window does.

That second school makes it sound a lot easier than it is. Not many people are ready to do that. However, then again, not many people are ready to go the way of the first school either. In my experience, the first school is easier to start out. The only requirement is that you need to know how to talk to your own emotions and your subconscious self. Because of this, there is a lot of prep-work necessary, and the prep-work can take months to years depending on the person (since few people can already converse with their own subconscious.) By contrast, the second school doesn't have any prep work outside of life itself, but the route can sometimes be impossible to follow for people that are especially unconscious and not ready to step outside their illusions.