Sacred space

[tsuki]

30 minutes ago, Bill W said:

I actually wouldn't mind if you defined highly conscious as I'm not sure what that is (genuinely question).

Hmmm... how about:

"People that I look up to and follow, but instead of becoming more like them, they make me become more like myself."?

[tsuki]

@Bill W @Zigzag Idiot Thank you guys for your recommendations. 

[mandyjw]

Yet another Thomas? He said that spiritual people (as opposed to religious) don't want be under an authority and they want more participatory kinds of teaching. Actualized.org is interesting because we have the lectures, and here on the forum is the participatory piece. I've always wondered why churches set themselves up for failure. The Pastor depends on the church for his monetary survival, and can never question his faith, therefore can never go deep with it. And the church goers are not encouraged to question their Pastor. 

[tsuki]

22 minutes ago, mandyjw said:

The Pastor depends on the church for his monetary survival, and can never question his faith, therefore can never go deep with it. And the church goers are not encouraged to question their Pastor. 

From the point of view of the Church as an organization, Pastors are like regular doorkeepers.
They are not supposed to be mystics, the conditions are not right for them. A monk is better suited for that.
A pastor is just as a businessman as he is religious person. He is to serve the people to the best of his abilities and to gather money in return. It is not easy to become a Catholic priest. Many people end their secular lives beneath the threshold acceptable for becoming one.

I agree that actualized.org is an unique place. Thank you @Leo Gura.

 

Edited July 2, 2019 by tsuki

[Aakash]

@tsuki you were right, it was highly embarrassing to be wrong. Hopefully I will learn from this 

[tsuki]

10 hours ago, Aakash said:

@tsuki you were right, it was highly embarrassing to be wrong. Hopefully I will learn from this 

I love you man, you are one of my favorite persons here.

[tsuki]

Quote

Matthew 8:5-13 New International Version (NIV)

The Faith of the Centurion

5 When Jesus had entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him, asking for help. 6 “Lord,” he said, “my servant lies at home paralyzed, suffering terribly.”

7 Jesus said to him, “Shall I come and heal him?”

8 The centurion replied, “Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word, and my servant will be healed. 9 For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and that one, ‘Come,’ and he comes. I say to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.”

10 When Jesus heard this, he was amazed and said to those following him, “Truly I tell you, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith. 11 I say to you that many will come from the east and the west,and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. 12 But the subjects of the kingdom will be thrown outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

13 Then Jesus said to the centurion, “Go! Let it be done just as you believed it would.” And his servant was healed at that moment.

Quote

Luke 7:1-10 New International Version (NIV)

The Faith of the Centurion

7 When Jesus had finished saying all this to the people who were listening, he entered Capernaum. 2 There a centurion’s servant, whom his master valued highly, was sick and about to die. 3 The centurion heard of Jesus and sent some elders of the Jews to him, asking him to come and heal his servant. 4 When they came to Jesus, they pleaded earnestly with him, “This man deserves to have you do this, 5 because he loves our nation and has built our synagogue.” 6 So Jesus went with them.

He was not far from the house when the centurion sent friends to say to him: “Lord, don’t trouble yourself, for I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. 7 That is why I did not even consider myself worthy to come to you. But say the word, and my servant will be healed. 8 For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and that one, ‘Come,’ and he comes. I say to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.”

9 When Jesus heard this, he was amazed at him, and turning to the crowd following him, he said, “I tell you, I have not found such great faith even in Israel.” 10 Then the men who had been sent returned to the house and found the servant well.

Ahhh, this just screams of the Hermetic teaching! Centurion was a Hermeticist!
Jesus is the key that locks down megalomania, as described by the Letter VII: The Chariot in Meditations on the Tarot.

[tsuki]

 

[tsuki]

I've been staying off the forum the past month, here are the things that have been happening:

I was reading Meditations on the Tarot and it is probably the best book I have ever read. It is just pure genius and world-shattering insights on every page. I stopped reading it at the letter IX: the hermit because I got discouraged by the resolution by the previous letter and the fact that the author started demolishing philosophical dilemmas that I didn't find relevant to my current situation. Still, outstanding book - I will get back to it at some point.

I had 2 week vacation, half of which I spent at my mother-in-law's that lives in the countryside. I was under the influence of Meditations and had a lot of insights about interconnectedness of the world. I talked to my mother in law a lot, she seems to be spiritually inclined, but lacks knowledge on the subject. I helped to soothe her worries about her partner's misuse of alcohol and her family dynamic in general.

While staying there, I suddenly became inspired to code again. My python project was on hiatus for almost a year. I'm creating a program that automatically translates CNC programs between various languages. It started as a toy project to amuse myself at work and learn some python in the process, but after many iterations grew into something that I'm quite content with (even though It's yet to translate anything). The program is implemented with two libraries that I wrote in this project: Babel and Hydra.

Babel is a parser generator that is somewhat unique in that one grammar definition can be used to both read and write the language that was being described. I developed it independently from the ground up, but it turned out to be similar to something called parsing expression grammar. This "invertibility" of the grammar is crucial for my project because I don't want to write programs for reading and writing independently. Currently, commercial translator programs are one-way only and they only work from one set language to another set language and it's impossible to mix them. My program reads the CNC program, 'understands it' by simulating the CNC machine state and outputs from that simulated state. This is the trick that allows for translation, the intermediate 'meaning' of the program that is machine-dependent and preserved between languages.

Hydra, on the other hand, is the library that I created to implement the 'meaning' of the program, the state of the CNC machine. The machine that runs the program is described by the tool position and orientation expressed in various coordinate systems that are linked by transformation functions. The translated program is interpreted as a set of commands to update the state of the machine, and Hydra calculates the entire new state given partial information (using the transformation functions). I tried to do this by simple numerical solvers in SymPy, but it turned out to be too slow for my purposes. Hydra is much more generic than that, it can be thought of as a discrete dependency solver.

So, in the past 2-3 weeks I've been writing Hydra from the ground up and developing the conflict-solving algorithm which was pretty daunting, to be frank. Actually this is the ting that has been stalling my project for the past half year and the result is very, very interesting. Hydra is, hmmm... let's say alive. It is a tree-like organism that rebuilds itself after being disrupted by the update. it traverses the dependency hierarchy and produces parts of itself and checks if they are not in conflict with each other to maintain the set constraints. it's very beautiful and has a kind of its own intelligence. While testing it, there were many cases where I thought that it should be able to reconstruct itself when it actually failed and I spent hours looking for bugs only to be proven wrong in my assumptions. I'm very pleased with how it all turned out, the only downsides are that the Hydra user code is difficult to write (many complexities in solving) and it's getting slow again. I'm considering rewriting the program in C++ for this reason and started to dabble in my other C++ library too.

For now, I implemented Heidenhain language in Babel and described a 3-axis milling machine in Hydra. Heidenhain can only read programs for the time being and is yet to feed them to Hydra for processing. I've been testing Hydra in isolation thus far.

In the meantime, in the second week of my vacations, I tripped on LSD again - 100 ug. I wrote a mini trip report on the consciousness forum, so I won't repeat myself here. In short, I experienced the active coherence of the present moment as infinite love. I understood my own stupidity on a whole new level and bonded with my wife tremendously. We had a few fights in the meantime, but there's been great progress in how we understand and appreciate each other. After many heated discussions we finally decided to share our finances fully and merged our bank accounts. This got a LOT of burden off my shoulders and relieved many implicit tensions between the two of us. She also decided to actually start being responsible with our money and educate herself in this manner and I'm absolutely astonished with the results! So far, no fights about money! Yay!
I also started to actually cook instead of just helping in the kitchen, so it also took some burden off her. Win-win overall.

The other thing that happened is that a Zen master was giving a lecture in my town and I showed up to see him. It was around the time when I was reading Meditations and was looking for someone to humble myself back to normality after my latest awakening. it was just spot on, his presence just floored me. Amazing person, soft and firm at the same time. I kind of crashed the party there, but they were really nice and did their best for me to feel welcome and hold their curiosity at bay. Last Thursday I went on the meeting of that group and had a great one hour zazen sit. After that we were discussing the five skandas and I had an opportunity to deepen my knowledge about Buddhism.

Very,very,very busy. I was actually feeling a little down today, but writing this made me realize just how amazing of a person I am. Keep on rockin' tsuki.

Edited August 19, 2019 by tsuki

[mandyjw]

Awesome! 

[tsuki]

I'm reading The Nine Stages of increasing embrace in Ego Development Theory and the 5th person perspective summarizes pretty well my last 3-4 years of development. I do not feel comfortable saying that I'm at Unitive stage stably. I still want to transcend the ego, I still want to climb the spiritual ladder and I still see it as a limitation. I will continue to work on satisfying this need until I master this domain. There is some progress here as I'm beginning to recognize that my ego is starving and I'm doubling down on keeping it this way. Just how crazy is that? I progress spiritually by enabling my ego. What the actual fuck?

Quote

(The 5 th person perspective and beyond)

It is a fact of life for persons at the 5 th person perspective that there are few other people like them.
They may fear that almost nobody understands them in their complexity and can sympathize with their
experience. Fearing this, they wonder whether they are culpable of hubris, of feeling “better” than
others. They also observe their own self-attachment and their need for a permanent self-identity by
means of ever more comprehensive self-theories. On the other hand, they truly appreciate others’ need
to make sense of their lives within their own means, values and mindsets. They therefore have a much
deeper toleration for others’ solution to life without being blind to the possible shortcomings and
limitations of such solutions. Sometimes Ego-aware folks express a sense of envy at the simplicity of
earlier periods because their own world is experienced as so complex. However, given their ego
maturity, most are capable of arriving at a dynamic and hopeful balance within these fundamental
conflicts: They fulfill their perceived or chosen destiny independently and courageously in full realization
of their basic despair and aloneness. When they cannot integrate this awareness, their depression is
about man’s essential aloneness and inability to create lasting meaning through the rational enterprise.

The underlined paragraph perfectly summarizes the situation that I'm constantly finding myself in.
It has always been the case, to the point where I simply never learned to expect from others to understand me and if they did, I considered them to be friends regardless of the actual quality of our connection. That has to stop, I need to find people to connect with and actually be the one that is admired for a change. If I start talking about things that interest me with random people, they are terrified. I need to find my equals, but how do I do that?

[tsuki]

There are days when I'm having so many mind-blowing realizations that I find it impossible to write them down in the journal.
There are also days when I'm lost in peculiarities of everyday life and suffer because I shoulder the responsibility for all of the world's problems. That is usually when I forget that I really am amazing and suffer because I want to be better than I already am.

Ego in its finitude is just absurd. Woof!
I feel like everything I'm saying about the world, all of my deepest understanding turns to ash in my mouth.
That does not, however, going to stop me from speaking any longer.

Edited August 22, 2019 by tsuki

[Zigzag Idiot]

Me too. Very much so. 

[tsuki]

This is such a rollercoaster to watch.
The brilliance of the rational mind backed up by emotional maturity mistakenly frames God as a the spirit of humanity.
I really love Jordan's lectures but this one tells me that he has never had a deep mystical experience.
With all of his understanding of the various religions and Jungian psychology, he is such a fertile person to experience one.
His philosophy of life is so deeply rooted in suffering that it even shows in his teary voice.

You can't manufacture Grace, Jordan! Stop trying to be an Antichrist.

Edited August 23, 2019 by tsuki

[tsuki]

Oh shit, I just became conscious of the fact that my self-doubt and self-criticism stem from the inability of my ego to embody what I know to be possible. Self-doubt and self-criticism are an inner call to expand in consciousness.
I'm doing that for my own good, but I don't get the message. Woot?!

I was pondering today that the personal, egoic, light (illumination) is waaaaaaaay smaller than the personal mind and that I know so many things that I constantly forget them. So much pointless suffering stems from identification with what is illuminated by that light. Like: why don't I remember that I can go much deeper into (what appears to be) the darkness and bring the light with me to seek resolution?

The insight about ritual and its place in anchoring important things in the vicinity of that light is whizzing by from time to time.
I know that I should have rituals for that purpose, but I choose be fluid, formless. Why do I do that? Hmmm....

The only reason I can think of is simply that there is so much stuff going on every day (around me and within me) that I can't seem to fit that anywhere.
The things I do are important and I don't want to lose them. Maybe they actually are a ritual, or maybe I should recontextualize my perception of them so that they remind me of something beyond? Hmmm...

Edited August 23, 2019 by tsuki

[tsuki]

Mmmm... this feels like an awakening.
Waking up tired despite having 8 hours of sleep? Check.
Energy through the roof in the morning? Check.
Browsing forum like a maniac? Check.
Contemplation insights? Check.
Having weird-ass perceptions that twist my mind into a pretzel? Check.

Universe, I'm not seeking anymore. Stahp, it tickles!

Edited August 23, 2019 by tsuki

[tsuki]

Recent changes I've been going through include:

I decided to quit listening to music after my latest breakthrough. Because of silence, the mind became so sensitive to it that I just can't stomach it.
I somewhat miss this because it has been the fuel for my programming for many years. At the same time, over the years I became slowly aware of the fact that the mind is in a terrible state after long hours of this kind of work. Right now, if I listen to a catchy song, it gets stuck on repeat every time I think with the inner voice. I can listen to any song at will, but the only thing that brings me to silence is awareness of the present moment, which is really fucking annoying because sometimes, you want to be an idiot that knows no better and actively think for a change.
So, no more music for me (as long as my pea-sized brain can remember, that is).

I became acutely aware of just how much of an idiot I am. Like, compared to other people that I know of, I'm pretty smart, but having witnessed intelligence far beyond anything imaginable, I am really fucking stupid. I know for a fact that despite being this awesome, my idea of awesome is really not all that impressive. Not only that, but it is actually better for me, and other people, to be this fucking stupid. This is weird because this actually allows me to talk about myself in an unrestrained manner while not losing respect for other people. In my pea-sized brain I had an idea about what humility is and tried to conform to it hahaha. Nope, that is just a contraction of the ego and not genuine humility. The mind is relative and needs a point of reference in order to appreciate things.

Appreciation of hierarchies of consciousness. The order of the world is maintained by freedom.
Beings lower in the hierarchy unconsciously obey those above in pursuit of their own flourishing and genuine growth.
The higher you are in hierarchy, the more harmony you understand and are in tune with. Climbing the hierarchy requires increase of frequency that can go beyond physical death. Sudden jolts of frequency are interpreted as fear, or terror, but this feeling, upon inspection, is nothing other than relaxation, surrender - surrender to the Law, harmony, Tao, etc.. Everyone is bound by the Law, but the further you are from the source, the more free you are to diverge from it. That is Ego, God within God, and ground upon which human condition arises.

Edited August 23, 2019 by tsuki

[tsuki]

There is a part of me that is mute, but it has (it is?) an interpretative faculty.
There are times when I am acutely aware of it, but most of the time it's working somewhere in the background, subconsciously. The moments when I am in touch with it the most, are when I am engaged with art and are open to perceiving its, hmmm... beauty or depth of meaning. Maybe, it is something in lines of aesthetic sense and it is one of the deepest parts of me that I enjoy cultivating a relationship with.

I was always thinking that it's a kind of a separate thing from which the regular discursive thought can be 'drawn' to from stories about what is perceived, but my recent LSD trip brought new understanding to the table. My awareness expanded to the point where this mute interpretative faculty was blown waaaay out of proportion and my thoughts were being "drowned" in it. The movement of that faculty was so pronounced that thoughts were 'swept' along with it and it informed everything in my perception, including visuals. What was very apparent in this mode of being, is that my inner emotional landscape is the reflection of my surroundings, and that my surroundings are the reflection of my responses to those emotional images.

What I suspect is the case, is that actually, that mute interpretative faculty is the basis for discursive thought in my 'sober' mode of operation. With ego death, "my" intelligence was freed from its usual self-other-world loop and directed itself towards its origin. This origin is the 'field' from which thoughts arise and it is 'stirred' by the "hardware" of the body. I'm using these terms borrowed from technology, but it's definitely not the case that this field is 'dumb' in contrast with the discursive thought. If anything, the brilliance of discursive thought permeates downwards and explodes, or implodes in its origin, this, hmm... primordial soup that is the interface between the ego-bound "subjective" and the "objective" world that starts at the 'unconscious' parts of 'my' body.

This gave me a new appreciation, and maybe - reassurance, in spending my life simply caring about my most basic needs despite having intellectual capability for being someone that is perceived as greater in the social sphere.

Edited August 25, 2019 by tsuki

[tsuki]

Today, I am very much in touch with this mute interpretative faculty - maybe because I've been watching movies for the past two days.
I'm aware of how I'm in contact with it and I usually leave it be, by itself, passively, and use it as a kind of radar for various everyday situations. For example, I was going to the grocery store and I noticed that my attention was shifting towards the buildings and my own body and I understood that that 'thing' was feeling small, fragile. The cities make people feel insignificant because of how big the buildings are, and how they represent the sheer scale of the collective effort to survive. I noticed that I instinctively retracted back to my own body and balanced this feeling of insignificance with acute awareness of the complexity of my body, as if I was reassuring myself that I am not, in fact, small. I am a very complex creature, very similar to a tall building, and started to notice small details of life scattered across the pavement.

Like I said, this faculty is very active during my interactions with art, recently with movies. First, I watched the third John Wick movie, which apart from being a great spectacle, was also an exercise in body awareness and relaxation. If I fully immerse myself in the movie, my various body parts tense up instinctively and make me feel uncomfortable. It is not the emotional charge that disturbs me directly, but my bodily responses. Then, we watched Lord of War, which was a commentary on violence, and a critique of the green's attempt to scapegoat dysfunctional orange, when really - systemic solutions are needed.

Today's movie, was really good. We watched Vanilla Sky which was about enlightenment with a meta-narrative story that talked about the subconscious mind! So, in a sense - as an awakened person with the intent of understanding my subconscious - I was watching a movie about a person that is awakening and battling with his unconscious mind! What the fuck?!

It was mainly an exercise in not losing my shit and doubting my sanity, while watching another person doubting his sanity during his awakening.
The ending *spoiler alert* brought me to tears, when the awakened protagonist understood that it was just a dream, and decided to resurrect his dead girlfriend for a last kiss. What brought me to tears was the realization that he knew that she wasn't real and he knew that she was a projection of his subconscious mind, but it did not stop the love. So, in effect, he was loving his incompleteness that was projected outwards, as a perfect person to fill his brokenness. Very, very bold. My subconscious had a feast in reading symbols, mirrors and looking through the smoke in this film.

There is actually one instance when I know that I'm not using this faculty passively - it is when I'm trying to understand something that eludes me. I'm meddling with this field to recontextualize symbols used by another person, and forming a language, code, that 'makes sense'. The key component here is the willingness to abandon my understanding of his words that are usually experienced as "negative emotions". It is very dependent on Ego's willingness to stay malleable and flexible. For a very long time it had me bound in a perpetual 'understand everything' mode where I did not know when is the right time to listen, and where it is the right time to exercise my knowledge and stand by it firmly.

Edited August 26, 2019 by tsuki

[tsuki]