Zigzag Idiot

@Bill W you just applied some very good third force, bud. @remember I know what it feels like to branded. To have a label put on me. To have to endure an injustice. I bet Charlotte also knows how that feels. Learning to adjust your frame of reference,,,,, suddenly I hit complexity that won't fit into linguistic awareness. So like @Bill W said, hope you stick around.

@DrewNows Thanks for this one above. As the saying goes- I'm as busy as a one legged man in an ass kicking contest today. I feel we think similarly. If you could send me a short list of your favorites from him of what you've seen so far that would be great. Either here or PM. If not, I understand. I'll see them eventually. ?‍♂️

You make some good points. What follows are just my opinions: Patriarchy has declined into a camouflaged pathology. Matriarchy would be just as bad if it magically became rule. Matrifocal structures will evolve in the future. Women will move to the forefront in this new historical age. This will be part of a growth hierarchy which will encourage new ways of being and doing that will surpass more than you imagine in your wildest fantasies as a healthy virile male. And the same with women when they finally catch the idea and let go of the very things which are holding them back. This will be a shift from a dominator hierarchy to a new emerging growth hierarchy. Patriarchy is already dead and ideas of Matriarchy will become passé. Right now at the beginning of this 2150 year cycle of the Aquarian age ( Cosmic month) a Matrifocal world culture is on the cusp of our horizon. Let go and let love and prepare to be blissed out in ways you never imagined. ?

Perhaps she is an embodiment of the message she brings forward. To go forward, despite fear and doubt. That is the Warriors way. For a sorcerer, reality, or the world we all know, is only a description that has been pounded into you from the moment you were born. The reality of our day-to-day life, then, consists of an endless flow of perceptual interpretations which we have learned to make in common. I am teaching you how to see as opposed to merely looking, and stopping the world is the first step to seeing. The sorcerer's description of the world is perceivable. But our insistence on holding on to our standard version of reality renders us almost deaf and blind to it. When you begin this teaching, there is another reality, that is to say, there is a sorcery description of the world, which you do not know. As a sorcerer and a teacher, I am teaching you that description. What I am doing with you consists, therefore, in setting up that unknown reality by unfolding its description, adding increasingly more complex parts as you go along. In order to arrive at seeing one first has to stop the world. Stopping the world is indeed an appropriate rendition of certain states of awareness in which the reality of everyday life is altered because the flow of interpretation, which ordinarily runs uninterruptedly, has been stopped by a set of circumstances alien to that flow. In this case the set of circumstances alien to our normal flow of interpretations is the sorcery description of the world. The precondition for stopping the world is that one has to be convinced; in other words, one has to learn the new description in a total sense, for the purpose of pitting it against the old one, and in that way break the dogmatic certainty, which we all share, that the validity of our perceptions, or our reality of the world, is not to be questioned. After stopping the world the next step is seeing. By that I mean what could be categorized as responding to the perceptual solicitations of a world outside the description we have learned to call reality. A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war, wide awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. Going to knowledge or going to war in any other manner is a mistake, and whoever makes it will live to regret his steps. When a man has fulfilled those four requisites there are no mistakes for which he will have to account; under such conditions his acts lose the blundering quality of a fool's acts. If such a man fails, or suffers a defeat, he will have lost only a battle, and there will be no pitiful regrets over that. * * * A man of knowledge is one who has followed truthfully the hardships of learning, a man who has, without rushing or without faltering, gone as far as he can in unravelling the secrets of power and knowledge. To become a man of knowledge one must challenge and defeat his four natural enemies. When a man starts to learn, he is never clear about his objectives. His purpose is faulty; his intent is vague. He hopes for rewards that will never materialize for he knows nothing of the hardships of learning. He slowly begins to learn--bit by bit at first, then in big chunks. And his thoughts soon clash. What he learns is never what he pictured, or imagined, and so he begins to be afraid. Learning is never what one expects. Every step of learning is a new task, and the fear the man is experiencing begins to mount mercilessly, unyieldingly. His purpose becomes a battlefield. And thus he has stumbled upon the first of his natural enemies: fear! A terrible enemy--treacherous, and difficult to overcome. It remains concealed at every turn of the way, prowling, waiting. And if the man, terrified in its presence, runs away, his enemy will have put an end to his quest and he will never learn. He will never become a man of knowledge. He will perhaps be a bully, or a harmless, scared man; at any rate, he will be a defeated man. His first enemy will have put an end to his cravings. It is not possible for a man to abandon himself to fear for years, then finally conquer it. If he gives in to fear he will never conquer it, because he will shy away from learning and never try again. But if he tries to learn for years in the midst of his fear, he will eventually conquer it because he will never have really abandoned himself to it. Therefore he must not run away. He must defy his fear, and in spite of it he must take the next step in learning, and the next, and the next. He must be fully afraid, and yet he must not stop. That is the rule! And a moment will come when his first enemy retreats. The man begins to feel sure of himself. His intent becomes stronger. Learning is no longer a terrifying task. When this joyful moment comes, the man can say without hesitation that he has defeated his first natural enemy. It happens little by little, and yet the fear is vanquished suddenly and fast. Once a man has vanquished fear, he is free from it for the rest of his life because, instead of fear, he has acquired clarity--a clarity of mind which erases fear. By then a man knows his desires; he knows how to satisfy those desires. He can anticipate the new steps of learning and a sharp clarity surrounds everything. The man feels that nothing is concealed. And thus he has encountered his second enemy: Clarity! That clarity of mind, which is so hard to obtain, dispels fear, but also blinds. It forces the man never to doubt himself. It gives him the assurance he can do anything he pleases, for he sees clearly into everything. And he is courageous because he is clear, and he stops at nothing because he is clear. But all that is a mistake; it is like something incomplete. If the man yields to this make-believe power, he has succumbed to his second enemy and will be patient when he should rush. And he will fumble with learning until he winds up incapable of learning anything more. His second enemy has just stopped him cold from trying to become a man of knowledge. Instead, the man may turn into a buoyant warrior, or a clown. Yet the clarity for which he has paid so dearly will never change to darkness and fear again. He will be clear as long as he lives, but he will no longer learn, or yearn for, anything. He must do what he did with fear: he must defy his clarity and use it only to see, and wait patiently and measure carefully before taking new steps; he must think, above all, that his clarity is almost a mistake. And a moment will come when he will understand that his clarity was only a point before his eyes. And thus he will have overcome his second enemy, and will arrive at a position where nothing can harm him anymore. This will not be a mistake. It will not be only a point before his eyes. It will be true power. He will know at this point that the power he has been pursuing for so long is finally his. He can do with it whatever he pleases. His ally is at his command. His wish is the rule. He sees all that is around him. But he has also come across his third enemy: Power! Power is the strongest of all enemies. And naturally the easiest thing to do is to give in; after all, the man is truly invincible. He commands; he begins by taking calculated risks, and ends in making rules, because he is a master. A man at this stage hardly notices his third enemy closing in on him. And suddenly, without knowing, he will certainly have lost the battle. His enemy will have turned him into a cruel, capricious man, but he will never lose his clarity or his power. A man who is defeated by power dies without really knowing how to handle it. Power is only a burden upon his fate. Such a man has no command over himself, and cannot tell when or how to use his power. Once one of these enemies overpowers a man there is nothing he can do. It is not possible, for instance, that a man who is defeated by power may see his error and mend his ways. Once a man gives in he is through. If, however, he is temporarily blinded by power, and then refuses it, his battle is still on. That means he is still trying to become a man of knowledge. A man is defeated only when he no longer tries, and abandons himself. He has to come to realize that the power he has seemingly conquered is in reality never his. He must keep himself in line at all times, handling carefully and faithfully all that he has learned. If he can see that clarity and power, without his control over himself, are worse than mistakes, he will reach a point where everything is held in check. He will know then when and how to use his power. And thus he will have defeated his third enemy. The man will be, by then, at the end of his journey of learning, and almost without warning he will come upon the last of his enemies: Old age! This enemy is the cruelest of all, the one he won't be able to defeat completely, but only fight away. This is the time when a man has no more fears, no more impatient clarity of mind--a time when all his power is in check, but also the time when he has an unyielding desire to rest. If he gives in totally to his desire to lie down and forget, if he soothes himself in tiredness, he will have lost his last round, and his enemy will cut him down into a feeble old creature. His desire to retreat will overrule all his clarity, his power, and his knowledge. But if the man sloughs off his tiredness, and lives his fate though, he can then be called a man of knowledge, if only for the brief moment when he succeeds in fighting off his last, invincible enemy. That moment of clarity, power, and knowledge is enough. Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if you feel you should not follow it, you must not stay with it under any conditions. To have such clarity you must lead a disciplined life. Only then will you know that any path is only a path and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do. But your decision to keep on the path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition. I warn you. Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. This question is one that only a very old man asks. Does this path have a heart? All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long long paths, but I am not anywhere. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you. Before you embark on any path ask the question: Does this path have a heart? If the answer is no, you will know it, and then you must choose another path. The trouble is nobody asks the question; and when a man finally realizes that he has taken a path without a heart, the path is ready to kill him. At that point very few men can stop to deliberate, and leave the path. A path without a heart is never enjoyable. You have to work hard even to take it. On the other hand, a path with heart is easy; it does not make you work at liking it. I have told you that to choose a path you must be free from fear and ambition. The desire to learn is not ambition. It is our lot as men to want to know. The path without a heart will turn against men and destroy them. It does not take much to die, and to seek death is to seek nothing. For me there is only the traveling on the paths that have a heart, on any path that may have a heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge for me is to traverse its full length. And there I travel--looking, looking, breathlessly. From: http://www.prismagems.com/castaneda/donjuan1.html That is why this woman gets it. It's not just about the men.

In Talks on Beelzebub's Tales, Bennett distinguishes four types of suffering - Unnecessary Suffering, Unavoidable Suffering, Voluntary Suffering and Intentional Suffering. Lets have a look at each of these to see if they can help our understanding: The first is Unnecessary Suffering. This would be the type of suffering that we incur because of our unreasonable attitudes and expectations towards others, from our ill-will, hatred and rejection of others, from doubt, possessiveness, arrogance and self pity. In other words, suffering arising from our self-importance. The second is Unavoidable Suffering. This would be the type of suffering that comes to us by accident or from events beyond our control, such as interpersonal conflicts, war, disaster, disease or death. Third, we have Voluntary Suffering. This would be the type of suffering that we take upon ourselves in order to accomplish a personal aim, such as an athlete who disciplines himself to win a race, or a student who labours to get good grades. And finally we have Intentional Suffering. According to Bennett, this would be the kind of suffering that we take upon ourselves in order to accomplish an impersonal or altruistic goal, one that is directed more towards service to others or to the Work, and not for any personal gain. Bennett assumes that this is what Gurdjieff meant by Intentional Suffering. From an article on the second Conscious Shock https://www.endlesssearch.co.uk/philo_is_talk_ae2005.htm

Once you Witness your own projection, It no longer feeds the painbody as it did prior to that.

@remember You serve many here by providing an example of what projection is. Thank You.

There's a scene similar to this in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that always put me in stitches. I think I shared this Hunter S Thompson documentary a while back unless I just imagined that. Here it is again anyway. https://youtu.be/VlAZV_EsSSE It won't embed. Hope the link works.

A distinction needs to be made here. Two different usages for the word 'mind'. ACIM is not in contradiction with Dr. Robert Morse. They are in alignment. ?

@Bill W I failed the challenge. I'm inspired! ??‍♂️

D @DrewNows I just watched the interview with Dr Robert Morse in your Journal. I'm beginning to share your enthusiasm,,,, It feels like I have about 200 questions that I want to ask you all at once. I'm definitely going to watch more from him! Earlier this evening I watched this one on sugar addiction and it made me consider how much I need a three week retreat. At first I was sitting with my hypocrisy watching the lady above and associating her knowledge with Jana Dixon's Biology of Kundalini. Watching Dr Morse interview in your Journal helped me relax.??

Bump and adding name tags. @Leo Gura and @Emerald Thank you for your work,

Isn't that at least in some instances a form of Conscious Love?

@remember I don't feel understanding between us here. In the meantime, I'm pondering.

? @remember How is this not an example of feeding on negative emotions?

Currently watching although I've been pondering this phrase for the past few days. "The Transcendental Object at the end of time". Could it be the noosphere manifested through the internet? Multiplicity is unobserved, unintegrated, ship of fools. Is Integration the Pearl beyond Price? - authentic, natural, yet multifaceted in being. In shadow work I observe and process the Zen devil I became at times in the past. Eckart Tolle's use of the term painbody is so right on. Zen Devils are puppets of the painbody. They are not culprits. They are victims of an element within themselves starved of love and turned cynical and with me in the past, often vicious. Even an overcompensating viciousness. As a teenager, I completely traumatized close friends with visciousness which destroyed some old childhood friendships.

@remember without gravity, no one is home. When the belly center is fully inhabited and you are free to completely identify with whatever one chooses. You can truly care, if your informed by your embodiment otherwise, you can spin on a dime and let go and not give a shit but still perceive through a perceptual filter of love. Love with a big L. One can be free.

@remember I actually have some advice for you. Try being more lighthearted and not expressing your negative emotions. Don't shit on people. Stop projecting. Feeding on negative emotions and greivences will only increase discontentedness. life is beautiful.

If there is fear, one loses the capacity to play a role or have 3 centered awareness. (Fulasnitamnian awareness) I thought of this while watching both Leo's and Emerald's latest videos. Distinguishing Physical Sensation from Essential Substance The capacity to sense oneself must become so refined that the individual can discriminate between physical sensation and the sensation of essential substance. It is not enough that the mind be quiet. It is also necessary for the body to be sensitive. The mind can be quiet while the body is deadened. The body has to be awakened so that the center of sensing, the belly center, can be activated. The belly center, or what Gurdjieff called the physical center, is the center of sensing for all parts of the body. Its deepest function is the subtle sensing, the sensing of essential presence, that the Sufis call the organ for touch. Touch is, in a sense, the most intimate of the physical senses. The skin must be directly against an object to touch it. There is no intermediary medium, like sound for hearing or light for seeing. So this subtle capacity is a very intimate one. Accurately speaking, it is sensing essence by being essence. It is the most direct way of perception. This capacity of touch, connected with the belly center, is very intimately connected with the embodiment of essence. It is the body center; its mode of perception is embodiment. Here, perception as touch, and being, are the same act. So this capacity is the most important one. Essence with the Elixir of Enlightenment, pg. 130

.I know what it is and then I drink the water of forgetting. You're just like me. Love has no opposite. Love is experienced as Unity therefore nondual. A bit from the preface: The opposite of seeing through the body’s eyes is the vision of Christ, which reflects strength rather than weakness, unity rather than separation, and love rather than fear. The opposite of hearing through the body’s ears is communication through the Voice for God, the Holy Spirit, which abides in each of us. His Voice seems distant and difficult to hear because the ego, which speaks for the little, separated self, seems to be much louder. This is actually reversed. The Holy Spirit speaks with unmistakable clarity and overwhelming appeal. No one who does not choose to identify with the body could possibly be deaf to His messages of release and hope, nor could he fail to accept joyously the vision of Christ in glad exchange for his miserable picture of himself. Christ’s vision is the Holy Spirit’s gift, God’s alternative to the illusion of separation and to the belief in the reality of sin, guilt and death. It is the one correction for all errors of perception; the reconciliation of the seeming opposites on which this world is based. Its kindly light shows all things from another point of view, reflecting the thought system that arises from knowledge and making return to God not only possible but inevitable. What was regarded as injustices done to one by someone else now becomes a call for help and for union. Sin, sickness and attack are seen as misperceptions calling for remedy through gentleness and love. Defenses are laid down because where there is no attack there is no need for them. Our brothers’ needs become our own, because they are taking the journey with us as we go to God. Without us they would lose their way. Without them we could never find our own.

@okulele Thank you! I'll try to check him out soon. Like Marianne Williamson, Gary Renard, who I've both enjoyed plus others I can't think of at the moment who have really devoted large parts of thier lives to studying this. It seems to attract rogue seekers and students like I am with the Gurdjieff Work and AH Almaas Diamond Approach. I appreciate the mention. When I encountered another rogue student of the Gurdjieff Work, Ocke de Boer. I felt blessed 10 fold from his particular articulation of the Gurdjieff Teachings. ?

@Bill W As far as I'm concerned, I welcome all your thoughts and questions about ACIM here on this thread. The version you have seems to mesh nearly 100% with the original. The old original standard combined version was put out by. the foundation for inner peace. If I understood correctly a while back they also endorsed the newer annotated version put together by David Hoffmeister a couple of years ago. It's designed more for long time students but if you felt highly compelled to buy it, maybe you should. It's just that it's a massive book and not easy to carry around. The biggest controversies with a Course in Miracles come from books like long term ACIM student Gary Renard who wrote The Disaperance of the Universe which is a part biographical and intimately connected with ACIM ideas. I would also recommend reading the version you have or the old combined version first and decide for yourself whether to also do the daily practices or not. IMO the daily exercises represent a form of boot camp for strengthening continuity of consciousness. i would recommend looking at the urtext only after you have well begun or finished the edited versions. The interesting thing with it is commentary and critique by Jesus on Freud, Jung and others and the ideas they brought into the world. Other trivial stuff exist like the compulsions which bring about highly identified Quarter horse and thoroughbred race horse owners and enthusiasts and the phenomena underlying it. Hope this makes sense and is some help,,,,

@Bill W I was thinking about creating a Terence McKenna thread in High Consciousness Resources. He's a wizard with off the cuff humorous analogies and metaphors.

Co Author of CHANCE and CHOICE explains in a concise article the Gurdjieff idea of our multiplicity. The Problem of the Subtle Sybil Effect By: R.C.L. The underlying reason the big questions are so difficult to answer is ultimately personal ñ we are swamped in a plethora of identities, most of them false. These false personas were imposed upon us from the outside by society and from the inside by our own muddled thinking. For most of us there is no single unified self, no uniform field of continuous consciousness. Our "common sense" notion to the contrary, that we are one person with a singular identity, is based on a false assumption. In the words of psychologist Charles Tart, Ph.D.: We just assume that a given person is relatively consistent with himself, that he constitutes one person with various characteristics, traits, and so on. Thus you call yourself by one name, with the implication that you are indeed one person even though you have a range of moods and feelings. .... we actually have many quite discrete subpersonalities, each of which calls itself "I" when it happens to be activated by appropriate environmental stimuli, but we have no unity of personality at all except in the sense that all the various subpersonalities are associated with the same physical body and name. (1) As Professor Tart and many others have found, by the time we become adults our identity is disjointed, fragmented, perhaps even fractal, like a "Julia Set."(2) We have one series of identities and personalities inherited from our parents, fashioned to meet their expectations, or to rebel against them. There is another series of personalities acquired in the course of schooling, another while dating, another at work, another in a sport or hobby, etc. Close observation of yourself will reveal that you are different people at different times. There is precious little continuity between your different states of consciousness. When you are one person one moment, you have usually forgotten that you were a completely different person a few moments before, and will be yet another person later. You are consumed by the personality of the moment. The personalities are isolated from each other by barriers of unawareness. There are defenses or buffers between the many "I's". There is no underlying actor to play the part. No one who remembers and coordinates all of the roles. It's as if a series of different people - acquaintances, not friends - took turns inhabiting the same body. We are one person when we first wake up, another person to our children, another to our spouse, another to our boss, etc. One "I" may make a promise, but the next "I" will not remember to keep it, or will not want to keep it. We live in a chaotic world where an endless series of things happen to us that do not fit together, do not make sense. Many important things seem to be the result of chance or luck. There is no conscious being there to see the "big picture" so that it can all make sense. There is no center, no empty hub uniting the many spokes of the wheel, the many fragments of self. The conscious states alternate unconnected by inner silence. It is like hearing foreign words or sentences without any underlying comprehension. The underlying being who comprehends and integrates is unconscious. The actor is asleep. The play goes on mechanically, uncomprehendingly. For such a one the "scientists" are correct, man is a machine and enlightenment is impossible, or merely a delusion, another fleeting role. Since most everyone suffers from weakly-connected consciousness, this appears to be natural and normal. We only recognize it as a problem in its most extreme forms, where there is total and complete disconnection of the different parts of the self. These are the cases where the different people inhabiting the body are complete strangers to each other. This is the pathological disorder of multiple personalities made famous by the case of Sybil.(3) Sybil Dorsett was a woman with sixteen separate personalities. At first none of them knew or remembered any of the others. For instance, one personality named Victoria Antoinette Scharleau was a self-assured, sophisticated, attractive blond, and another named Mike Dorsett thought she was male, a builder and carpenter. With multiple personality disorders it is not uncommon for the shy personality to be shocked to wake up naked in bed with a man the sexy personality met the night before. One personality shifts with another and there is no recollection of the prior person. There is a complete discontinuity of consciousness. This kind of multiple personality disorder is often caused by extreme negative events as a child. In Sybil's case, she was tortured and sexually abused as a young girl. This caused her to break up, literally, because she could not bear the extreme abuse she was subjected to. Through years of therapy Sybil was able to confront the memories and eventually integrate the separate personalities into one. She became a whole person. INTEGRATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS Personality dissociation in its extreme form is obviously a problem which must be corrected. But the less severe manifestations - the "subtle Sybil" effect, wherein we are disconnected to a certain degree - is a problem unknown to most people. Psychology is just beginning to recognize this as a root problem which underlies many others.(4) Most people do not know they are shattered. They treat themselves and others as if they were one person, already fully integrated and whole. In fact, most people are just integrated enough to function in society. They are not solid enough to answer the big questions for themselves, to make sense of their lives, and know who they are and what they can do. If we stop to think about the discontinuity - the differences in our moods and personalities - we just assume it is natural and of no importance. For instance, who can constantly recall their dream selves, or who they were in deep sleep - unconsciousness? We accept the barriers between our waking and sleeping selves as natural, inevitable, just like the barriers between our left and right brains. We fail to recognize the significance of the basic discontinuity between waking and sleep. Even the lack of continuity in waking consciousness - which occurs to everyone in the course of a day, or even a few minutes - is accepted as natural. We are sad one minute, then the next we are happy, in the next reflective, in the next absorbed in music, in the next answering the phone. When we are with some people we have a submissive personality, with others a dominant persona comes out. Is there a conscious being underlying all of these different states of consciousness? Is there a center unifying the multiple personalities? For almost everyone the answer is no. Their consciousness is not fully integrated, and they do not even see this as a problem. How is the actor to awake? Recognition that "integration" of multiple selves is a problem is the critical first step in the solution. It is also the first step to answering the question of who you are. Only you can discover who you are, no one can do it for you. The discovery comes from observation of yourselves - all of them - and then integration into a conscious whole. This requires bridging the great divide between the waking self and the sleeping self. The corpus callosum dividing the left and right brains must be transformed from a wall into a highway. Then you can start to understand who you are, and begin to integrate all of the many snapshots of your life into a flowing movie. Until you attain this continuity, your true identity will elude you. The meaning of life will remain an enigma wrapped in a mystery. Your true desires, your real potential, will remain hidden between the intervals of your many selves. You will be incomplete, asleep. One reason most of us fail to notice the lack of continuity is that one or two personalities - and the states of consciousness that go with them - tend to dominate the other weaker personalities and their consciousness. They hide the gaps, cover up the problem. Frequently the dominant personalities are imposed upon us from the outside. The strong alien personalities - the dominant consciousness states - frequently overpower and sublimate the other parts of our self, the other states of consciousness we experience. The weaker states are then forced into subconsciousness or unconsciousness. They are forgotten, disassociated from the conscious identity. One or two of the many personalities act in place of our overall Self. We do not know the plethora of possible personalities, unified and integrated in one being. We do not experience a healthy variety of conscious states. As a result our potential is artificially limited. We experience only a small slice of life. We see the rest as if through a glass darkly. Consciousness of the other parts of our self eventually becomes forbidden. They are not even recognized when experienced. If they are consciously experienced, they are promptly forgotten. They become "altered" states of conscious, momentary lapses of character. This dissociation and imbalanced dominance of one personality and consciousness over all others - a kind of psychological cancer - frequently leads to illnesses, psychological complexes and neurosis. The underlying being aware of the many sides of self is asleep, relegated to the unconscious. The strong role has taken over the actor and prevents him from waking. For most people the dominant personality is not even their own. It is a false personality imposed on them from their parents, friends, job or society. The false personality is a muddled thinker, with no connection to the other innate capacities of the whole being. The false persona is not linked with the true Self, it is not naturally a part of the underlying being. It is instead linked to the cultural consensus, the mass hypnosis and pseudo-thinking. If the actor should awaken he would not play that role, he would not accept that thought. People dominated by false personalities are usually weak, with little energy or vitality. Usually, only personality which is in connection with a person's potential - their true inner Self - can vitalize and naturally make room for the whole Self. Only a real persona can accept and try to integrate "altered states". The false, unconnected personalities only block energy. They act as a negative mask to hide true potential, instead of expressing it. The recognition and dropping of such lifeless personalities is the first step in discovering who you really are. It is the first step in "waking up". As you wake up you begin a conscious journey to realization of your full potential. There are many ways to wake up, many procedures. You need to find a procedure which is good for you. In that way you can move beyond legal study into the actual "practice of the Law." With an effective method, and adequate teachers and counselors, you may be lucky enough to wake up. You may be able to tap your inner essence and develop a true personality. That is just the beginning, however, not the end. At first, there are many dangers. You can still be dominated by the first real aspect of your self that wakes up. The first strong fragment personality to awaken may try to block the awakening of the rest. Still, it is easier to awaken to the full dynamics of yourself from out of a true personality than a false one. The actor once stirred may awaken. Once awakened, the road to self actualization may be traveled. Another danger that remains after the journey has begun arises from cultural restraints and muddled thinking. This can cause you to awaken only certain socially-acceptable sides of yourself and repress the rest. You may be afraid of parts of yourself or be prejudiced against them. For instance, you may have been taught as a child that sex was bad and so refuse to awaken that part of your human nature. If the real and awakened personas don't know any better, the phony censor persona may continue to have real power. Objective, holistic thinking is the answer. It can counteract the censor, the cultural restraints and inherited beliefs. Once your real personas are taught to think straight, they will see through the muddled thinking inherited from the past. Unlike the false personalities, the real personalities have the power and courage to act on their thinking. They can transcend the hindrances of the past. Armed with true thinking, they can overcome the cultural censor, and liberate all parts of your human potential. THE CASE OF CHARLES T. TART v. NORMAL CONSCIOUSNESS Professor Charles Tart is an American scientist and academic who has thought deeply about these topics. More importantly, he has taken action and tried hard to clarify and solidify his own consciousness, to take it out of what he refers to as the "cultural consensual trance" of so called normal consciousness. His careful scientific research has shown that what passes for normal or average consciousness is just one possible form of consciousness among many. He found that normal consciousness is actually quite limited, subject to many artificial constraints and disruptions. Professor Tart is one of the pioneering scientists in the new fields of altered states of consciousness, hypnosis, cultural consensus trance, multiple personalities, transpersonal psychology, being and the procedures or technology of "waking up". Born in 1937, the son of a musician, Charles Tart grew up as a Lutheran with deep religious convictions and intellectual interests. As a precocious teenager his eyes opened to science. A strong conflict then developed in his soul between the differing world views of science and religion. The resolution of this conflict has proven to be the driving force of his life. As a teenager looking at the hypocrisy he saw in religion, and the strength and elegance of science, he went head-strong into the modern scientific world. He became particularly fascinated with electronics, earning a first-class radio telephone license while still in high school. He also began to read widely in the field of psychic research or parapsychology. In this one field of science he found some kind of a link between his new found love for science and his earlier, deeper thirst for spirituality. In 1955 he was admitted to the premiere engineering school in the country, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Then he ran into calculus and his enthusiasm for engineering began to flounder. At the same time his high school interest in parapsychology blossomed. He started a psychic research club at MIT and connected with the dynamic cultural life of Cambridge. He then had an opportunity to meet many of the leading psychics and parapsychologists of that time. When he discovered that you could actually make a living at psychology, he decided to change career tracks. His ideal was to try to apply the methods of science to the general field of religion. He wanted to use science to start separating out the superstitions and nonsense in religion from the core of important truth. That ideal fired him then and has remained as one of the main guiding principles of his life. His opportunity to change came from famed parapsychology scientist Dr. Rhine, who helped Charles transfer to Duke University in 1957 to major in psychology. In the parapsychology labs at Duke he met Judy Bamberger, the girl who would later become his wife. A few years later at age 22 in these same labs Charley became the "first American psychedelic guinea pig", taking mescaline for the sake of science. It all came about quite by accident. Dr. Ivo Kohler, a Professor from the University of Vienna, was one of the first scientists in the world to experiment with psychedelic drugs. He began experiments with mescaline in Vienna, Austria in the nineteen thirties. These experiments were unknown in the United States. Professor Kohler was visiting the Duke parapsychology laboratories and there started talking to a young graduate student named Charley Tart. Charley had read Aldous Huxley's book on taking mescaline, The Doors of Perception and was curious about Dr. Kohler's experiments. The Professor mentioned that although he had tested many subjects from all nations in Europe, he had never seen any experiments with an American. Professor Kohler was curious to see if an American would have any different psychological reactions than Europeans. Charley bravely volunteered to be the first American test subject. In 1959 psychedelic drugs were almost totally unheard of (these substances were not outlawed until the mid nineteen sixties) and the good Professor happened to be traveling with a large quantity of chemically pure mescaline sulfate. After some preparation Charley was given a large dose of the mescaline which he says tasted like vomit. He sat with Professor Kohler for two or three hours and nothing happened. The Professor was beginning to think that Americans were indeed quite different. They were ready to call it quits, but as one last try, Charley took still more of the drug. That put him over the edge and all at once his psychological resistance to the drug broke down. A few moments later he went directly into the peak of a psychedelic experience. His consciousness expanded tremendously and he had a deep and profound experience which totally changed his life. Professor Kohler found that Americans were just like Europeans. A small step for science, but a giant leap for Charley Tart. A few years later while a graduate student at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, Charles again had an opportunity to participate in one of the first scientific experiments with LSD and psilocybin. A private foundation began funding a series of experiments with psychedelic drugs. Naturally enough he volunteered for many of the tests. Again he had deep and profound experiences with artificially induced altered states of consciousness. The conflict in his soul between science and religion was bridged in these scientific experiments. This proved to be the guiding light for his later scientific work, where he became the unquestioned leader in the scientific exploration of spiritual experiences. Only years later did Professor Tart learn that he had the CIA to thank for all of the LSD he ingested in those experiments. In the early nineteen sixties the CIA had set up dummy foundations to secretly fund research into psychedelic drugs. They wanted to know if there was any military potential to these strange new psychological drugs. They found the drugs were powerful, and potentially dangerous, but the experience of God was found to have no military value. Although not all unwitting government guinea pigs were as fortunate as Charles Tart, he, at least, was eternally grateful to the CIA. In 1963 Charles Tart received his Ph.D. degree from Chapel Hill. His special interests then were research into personalities, dreams and hypnosis. Dr. Tart was virtually alone in these fields at the time. His work has pioneered what has since become known as the study of altered states of consciousness, consciousness other than the average consensus trance. By 1969 Charles Tart edited what was to became a landmark book in consciousness research Altered States of Consciousness. This was the first publication to bring together scientific research on dreaming, hypnosis, meditation, yoga, psychedelics and other expanded states of consciousness. He has since written many other books, including: Open Mind, Discriminating Mind (1989); Waking Up: Overcoming the Obstacles to Human Potential (1986); States of Consciousness (1975); Transpersonal Psychologies (1975) (1990). When not writing books and researching into these fields, Professor Tart has been a teacher of Psychology at the University of California in Davis for over thirty years. Tart transcends the narrow confines of academia and science, and uses the scientific methods and independent thinking to tackle the really big questions. In the process of formulating his own answers, he has gathered information which helps us realize that "discontinuity of consciousness" is the essential threshold problem. The problem must be addressed - we must "self remember" and wake up from out of the cultural consensual trance - before we can ever know ourselves and find the answers within. One of the basic procedures he employs is called "self remembering" or "self observation". It is a process where you impartially and dispassionately observe the false personalities in action. His quest for answers necessarily led him beyond the confines of academia and science into the martial arts, where he now holds a black belt in Aikido. It also led him into the world of esoteric spiritual philosophies and psychologies, exemplified by the work of the great Russian mystic and philosopher, G. I. Gurdjieff.(5) It was Gurdjieff who first brought the "self remembrance" procedures to the West. Charles Tart discovered that there is a basic resistance in our culture to self observation. We tend to equate self observation with judgmental self criticism, with feelings of inadequacy, punishment, shame and guilt. To be effective, self remembrance procedures should be devoid of all judgments and criticism. It should be a neutral process of objective, detached observation. This requires tremendous commitment and honesty. In self observation you essentially try to observe yourself and your world, no matter what it is, good or bad, ugly or beautiful, happy or sad. You don't just observe yourself only when you happen to be doing something you like, or in order to support something you already believe in. You try to observe yourself in your world to see what really is. To convey the kind of commitment required to remember to observe yourself in all situations, Tart likes to quote a famous American spiritual leader of sorts, Patrick Henry: Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. Tart found from his own experience and from working with hundreds of others, that if you aren't vigilant about yourself - with a commitment to knowing reality as it is - you build up fantasies. You forget yourself, like the actor asleep. You live instead in what he calls "consensus trance". You are lost in fantasies widely shared in the culture. Tart's research has shown that although everyone thinks they are normal, they are actually seriously cut off from the world around them. As a result people do a lot of stupid things. Observing the great difficulty of the self observation process, especially at first, Tart emphasizes the importance of personal training and group work to begin to use this procedure effectively. But once the skill is learned, Tart and others have found that it is a powerful tool to awaken the actor. With it you can begin to integrate the many roles - the many personalities - into a play where life has meaning. The actions of the moment then begin to make sense by relation to the overall drama. The actor begins to know herself, to know the myth of her life, the plot and potential destiny, and then to write her own script. Without such an awakening the actor meanders aimlessly through life. They keep repeating a few lines, a few roles, over and over, never realizing their full potential. Tart found that self observation can awaken us from consensus trance. It allows us to get a much wider idea of who we are, and to dare to fulfill potentials and dreams we never even knew we had. This is because the consensus trance into which we were hypnotized as a child significantly narrows our human potentials. We could be so many things, but society tries to fit people into preconceived molds. Our self-concept gets narrow, squeezed and tight. Tart likes to quote Gurdjieff's observation that a lot of people you see walking around in the street are dead. They have been so squeezed in terms of their inner psychological self, that it is all habit and conditioning, and the essence - the vitality - is dead. Tart was first exposed to Gurdjieff's ideas in 1966 and his ideas and spiritual practices of self observation have had a continuing influence on him ever since. Tart says that he still uses Gurdjieff's "trying to remember yourself in everyday life" as his principle spiritual practice today, even though he is no longer involved with Gurdjieff groups. In my interview with Charles Tart in late 1993, he described in some detail the process of how as young children we are entranced into the local cultural consensus in which we were born: When we are born each of us has the potential to be a human being which means thousands and thousands of things which could be developed. But each one of us is born into a particular culture, and a culture is a group of people who know about certain human potentials which they think are good and they cultivate them. They draw them out of people and reinforce them in people. So when a little baby looks at its mother and its starting to make sounds like "ma ma ma," people smile and encourage the baby. A given culture knows about other potentials which they consider animal or evil or something like that, and they actively discourage them. So if the same little baby looks at its mother and starts to go "shi shi shit", he doesn't get encouraged, and that kind of thing. Any particular culture is also ignorant of all sorts of human potentials and they don't draw them out of people simply by neglect. They have no idea its even possible. In order to survive you have to fit into your culture. The adults who only want a certain set of potentials developed keep pressing on you, drawing those out and discouraging the ones they don't like. In a very real sense, the "essence" of what we are when we are born, to use a Gurdjieff term, gets shaped and shaped and shaped and eventually evolves into what Gurdjieff called "false personality." That means as part of defending yourself against the pressure of adults you come to adopt their way of thinking. A baby can't really say, "Gee, I've been born into a weird tribe this time, here's how I'll have to act in order to get by, but I don't believe a word of it." The baby is pretty helpless, absolutely dependent upon the giants, the gods and goddesses, for its survival. So the baby and the child internalize these things, they start thinking like the culture expects people to think. To the extent they don't, they feel guilty about it and hide it. We develop what I call "consensus consciousness" to reflect the fact that our so-called ordinary state of consciousness, or "normal consciousness" (which is a culturally-relative term of course) means we have actually constructed the habits of our thinking and feeling and perceiving to reflect the consensus of what our culture thinks is important and good. It is an altered state of consciousness in the sense that it is not natural. Our ordinary state is not simply the way consciousness is, it's a semi arbitrary construction, so that you fit in as normal, bound by the rules of your particular group. When I talk about this in a neutral way, and want to use this information scientifically, I use the term "consensus consciousness." But when I want to emphasize the cost of this process, that there is a lot of important stuff left out, then I say "consensus trance." I am using "trance" in the negative sense of the word: a state of less animation, being controlled by others and what not. I also asked Professor Tart what methods he had found work best to allow people to overcome their natural resistances to self observation, and enable them to awaken from the consensus trance. His answer expounded upon the theme developed by Gurdjieff as "intentional suffering." There are lots of ways [around the resistance to self observation]. Most of them depend on suffering. When things are going well, you don't tend to question the structure you're locked into. When things start going badly, usually we blame somebody else: "Its those damn republicrats in Washington." But when you get a little more mature, people begin to realize that "maybe I bring something to my suffering, just maybe its not all the fault of the outside world, but that I contribute something to it." When people are ready to work with their suffering like that, when they are ready to look at it more closely and see how they are creating some of it, then you have an opening for people to learn things. The suffering can motivate people to observe themselves, to take mental snap shots of themselves, and try to figure out what is going on wrong, what internally is producing the suffering. In self observation you will undoubtedly see many habits, attitudes and other things about yourself that you do not like. From an attitude of intentional suffering and responsibility, these insights into your mental machinery provide you with the opportunity to change, to escape from your suffering. As Tart says, we create a lot of our suffering quite uselessly. Suffering motivates you to change, to escape from the mental conditioning and false thinking which keeps you entranced, keeps you in needless suffering. Suffering thus opens up the possibility of real change. Charles Tart also speaks of another major way of escape from the culture trance, the method of "altered states of consciousness". If you think of your ordinary state of consciousness This article is from http://www.lawsofwisdom.com/course-overview/opening-statement/the-problem-of-the-subtle-sybil-effect/