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coolacourseinmiracles · 4 years

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A Course in Miracles: A Non-dual Path to Enlightenment

The path of A Course in Miracles is based on the one truth that only God is real. This means the duality of the world is false. This essential teaching is conveyed in both the Advaita Vedanta and in A Course in Miracles, with no contradiction, although the words differ.

Advaita Vedanta

God alone is real

The world is illusory

A Course in Miracles

God is real.

The world is illusion.

Let us go deeply into the mind until it is apparent that peace of mind is available to us this very instant. We want to take a close look at the false beliefs, presently held dear, that obstruct the awareness of True Self and God. We want to raise the false beliefs to the light and trace them back to their false cause: the belief in separation from God.

Let's begin by looking at restlessness, a common symptom that your mind is not at peace. The feeling of restlessness is related to choices that are varied and complex. Can you see that, if this is the case, you must believe that there are real future choices to make? What are these personal choices between? Aren't they perceived to be between options or alternatives within a dualistic world? Aren't they seen to be between two or more specific things? That's inherent in this concept of choice, isn't it? Now, what is the commonality of the choices in the world, the personal choices that we are describing? They are always choices between forms and specifics. Choice rests on the belief in a dualistic, linear, time-space world of opposites, including past/future, does it not?

So it comes down to this: the whole idea of choice between specifics must rest on the concept of linear time, as contrasted with simultaneous time: Now! Heaven is Eternal Oneness and has nothing to do with choice, since there is nothing to choose between in Oneness. One must see choice where it has meaning as a learning device, at the mind level, before there can be remembrance of choiceless Oneness. Just beyond all the things you think you have to do lies one simple choice. All you have to do is make one decision for peace! Really it's not even a decision; it's just an acceptance. What we want to look at is everything that seems to stand in the way of this acceptance. It's that simple.

We want to be so thorough in tracing specific personal choices back to the false belief that underlies them all, that there is opening for the grand moment that seems to change everything and yet is changeless: this Instant. The teaching I share is that Enlightenment is available this very moment. And anything in one's mind that stands in the way of that recognition of Enlightenment right now must first be questioned, and then seen for what it is: illusion.

Just say and mean: "I want peace! I want it more than anything else. I'm going to drop all my personal masks. In order to drop them, I'm going to have to look at them. I want to see them for what they are, to discern the false from the true." What a precious opportunity this is! Can you think of anything more important than looking at your own mind and examining the obstacles to this recognition?

The split mind is a context in which the idea of choice is meaningful as a metaphor or a steppingstone, a preparation for the last decision or final acceptance that brings an end to all decision. This final decision is a decision/acceptance of the content, or the purpose, of God. What if there is actually no purpose or meaning for anything in-and-of-itself? What if everything perceived with the five senses is simply the past? All the meaning that is given to everything is all based on the past. And the past is gone. When we talk about letting go of the past, we are talking about a necessary and fundamental unlearning of everything that has been learned, of time/space. It is letting go of the world perceived with the senses. The deceived mind thinks it sees meaning and purpose in the world. The teaching I am sharing is that purpose or content is of the mind.

There are just two purposes in the split mind: the first is the purpose of letting go of illusion and awakening to one's True Self. The second is the purpose of holding onto the illusion. From this perspective, would the idea that every choice you make brings everything to you or nothing seem meaningful? If we can just get really clear on the discernment between these two purposes in the split mind, then the simple choice for Enlightenment will be obvious. Consider that you believe your mind is full of real thoughts. What if you had a hint that this belief is not true? Then you would understand the need to take a look at every concept and thought, as basic as these that we are examining, and see that the beliefs about identity and the world that these thoughts rest on are untrue.

The whole idea of personhood has to be questioned very carefully. Every time someone seems defensive or upset, and the upset is traced into the mind, it always comes down to the concept of personhood. Even if one is offended at pollution being put into the air, it still comes back to the belief that one is in this environment and that pollution is an affront to oneself, a person. Every single upset can be traced to a basic subject-object split in which the person, the "me," is subject, and the rest of the cosmos is object.

The way this world/cosmos seems to be constructed is as follows: there is the subject (or person) and there is the object that is always the surrounding and separated other, be it time, space, object, person(s), society, world, or cosmos. Personhood or personal identity is based on this duality, this basic split. Every time you feel that frustration of thinking that there is something to do, it doesn't feel good, does it? There is an impetus for change, but the change seems to be too difficult or overwhelming to accomplish.

The deceived mind thinks that those beliefs are itself, having identified with them. What one mistakenly thinks one is and has to give up, doesn't exist. In other words, the True Self does not have to give up the person-self. The True Self has no other self, no deceived mind. There only seems to be coercion because of a belief that there really is something that one is right now that one has got to get rid of. But what if one is not that something?! In this realization, the feelings of coercion or of having to do something dissolve!

It gets back to purpose again. You need to get very clear in your mind about the two purposes. If you think you are imbedded in an illusory world of form and believe your life is a real person living in this world of nature, then your True Self is going to be perceived as very threatening. You will perceive God as asking you to give something up that is real, that is good, that is beautiful, and you will not want to listen to the voice of your True Self.

Just calmly look at the person-self and see its falsity. Light dispels darkness by its mere Presence: this is the whole message. There really is no life in the world of images. Images deny Life. Life is eternal and formless and changeless. All judgments are tied into the concept of personhood and the basic subject-object split. Unreal beliefs produce unreal appearances. If one can question the beliefs, then one can give up the entire belief system and the time-space cosmos it seemed to produce. Only then can one remember one's True Identity as One with God. Yet even to say "give up" implies that one had it, that the unreal belief system was real in the first place. It's a watching, seeing that all images are past, rather than selecting and sequencing the images into an ordering of objects and events. It is a state of stillness, of peace, and of joy!

The deceived mind believes that it is the person-self. That belief is a decision that must be reversed before God and one's True Self can be remembered. That belief is projected onto the screen of the entire cosmos as guilt attributed to a doing or a not-doing. But the guilt is never because of anything on the screen. The guilt results from choosing the wrong mind, from believing one is something one is not; a person in a world of duality. One can laugh at the idea of the person-self. That is how peace of mind is reached. One sees what one is not, and what one is then gently returns to awareness.

If one takes a higher perspective and sees oneself as the dreamer of the dream, one can accept a different purpose for the dream. It's quite a detached place to just see the false as false. One watches and observes the thoughts of the world. One no longer reacts to them. In worldly perception it still seems like the body speaks. It still seems like the body is active, at times walking or talking. But one's attention is so far removed from the thoughts of the world that one feels dis-identified from form and identified with the Self's purpose of transcending illusion. In the flow of this purpose there is no awareness of separate persons, actions, situations or events.

The deceived mind is full of unreal thoughts, which is not really thinking at all. Real thoughts of the Self remain available and can be heard if that is one's desire. Judgment denies Reality and therefore offers nothing. The release point is seeing the impossibility of judgment of anything in the illusion! If one can clearly discern between these two thought systems, then one doesn't fall for personalizing everything and making problems specific. When judgment is seen as impossible, and the mind no longer identifies with the images and characters of the dream, there must be peace!

The only way that it's possible to look at yourself and not feel wrong is to be looking with God, from the perspective of your True Self. In other words, there are two purposes: forgiveness of the illusion and choosing the illusion. If one is looking at the thoughts calmly with the Self, the purpose is forgiveness of the illusion. When there is complete acceptance of true forgiveness it is seen that there never was anything to choose between. All is One. As one steps back and defers to the judgment of the Self, one comes from a point of clarity or complete forgiveness and makes no interpretations by or of oneself. The individual perception dissolves into forgiveness.

The big insight that we are talking about is this: upset is never because of what happened to a person in a personal dysfunctional past. How one is feeling is the result of a present decision of mind, a choice of perception. That, and only that, brings peace or upset. Remember, the split mind has only two contents or purposes. The perception or interpretation proceeds from the purpose the mind chooses. If you are feeling upset, it is only because you are presently choosing personhood, choosing separation from God. You must still believe the past is present, instead of seeing that the past is gone. This is deception, for the past is gone! Upset is always a sign that illusions reign in place of truth.

So we are back full circle. If one seems to be upset, it's not because of what somebody said, or what somebody did, or because of the weather, or what might happen. The upset, regardless of the form or intensity, is always because one is presently choosing personhood, and therefore still valuing illusion. The wish to be separate from Oneness remains intact and needs to be questioned.

Tracing upsets from specifics to the false belief that produced them is the same as becoming clear on the distinction between form and content. Once this is clear, one is able to discern what comes from God and what doesn't, what is true and what is false, and thus realize that only the truth is true and there is nothing to decide.

—David Hoffmeister

For support in tracing back upsets David offers this free online tool: LevelsOfMind.com

#a course in miracles #a course in miracles teachers #a course in miracles teacher

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acimsouncloud · 4 years

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A Course in Miracles Soundcloud

Advaita Vedanta

God alone is real

The world is illusory

A Course in Miracles Soundcloud

God is real.

The world is illusion.

—David Hoffmeister

For support in tracing back upsets David offers this free online tool: LevelsOfMind.com

#A Course in Miracles Soundcloud

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shellofaretard · 5 years

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Incel Manifesto

I am the BIG INCEL. The perennial incel. I was a virgin before you were born. I was a virgin when the universe was formed. When i close my eyes the world dies with me its hymen still intact.

Incel has always been the default of western civilization. We are the inheritors of this w/o any disparity to what came before. Metaphor about ancient statues and their lil shrimp dicks.

Sir Isaac Newton was an incel. Nikola Tesla was an incel. Jesus Christ was an incel. Has anyone who’s NOT an incel ever created anything worthwhile??

soul

Ripped apart by natural selections icy north winds. Tossed around by autism chromosome waves. Mogged by 4/10 clouds. Masticated by roastie whirlpool.

The Incel project is an indictment of Creation that is, at the same time, rooted in an observant piousness towards its laws and the impossibility of moving outside its boundaries. The duty of Man to accept and affirm the inherent cruelty of the cosmos, and ponder his destiny within it.

For the <0.5/10 genetic sewage, to expose oneself to the flesh-burning mog radiations of the outside world is comparable to Julius Evola walking around the city during bombing raids.

body

Really hope incels start walking the walk and actually go ahead with those elaborate plastic surgery plans they love to talk about soon. In post-modern body modification culture, surgically administered transformations are seen as an ascent towards the narcissistic illusion of a more “authentic” self. We have understood that the vanilla modernist paradigm in which Man is assigned one body, whose form, “health” and integrity it is his duty to preserve unto death, was never going to work.

Until very recently, it was normal for bodies to undergo unwanted dis- and transfigurations due to war and disease, their personal notions of bodily integrity routinely subdued to the amoral whims of the medieval War God. It is this view of the world that the incels, these ferocious dreamers of Galilean proportions, these weavers of cruel, delectable phantasms after my own heart, are returning to, finding themselves thrust into a hostile universe whose rigid biological laws are stacked against them with no humanist justification of “fairness”.

Incel chin osteotomy is then a religious act completely removed from narcissism. It is done out of reverence for a cosmic order radically irrespective of the incel’s interests and feelings. The ontological conduit between God and man takes the form of a leash, one by which Man is dragged to the plastic surgery clinic precisely in order to serve God better. I would like to argue that Incel is the most legitimately religious (anti-humanist) movement of our time in that it is based on an acceptance of human insignificance in the face of the cosmic order.

will

Much has been said about the supposed ‘entitlement’ of incels, but this can easily be reframed in a different context. Incel is, at its heart, a radical human agency denialist movement, seeking to redefine the role of Man in the universe by finding spirituality and reverence in the acceptance of total biological determinism, and beauty in the order of chin curvatures, neural pathways and DNA spirals of differing quality. The total absence of free will means everyone is always already entitled to exactly what they get. Genuine incel is less about demanding more than what is deserved than a retreat into a meditative position, neutral like nature itself.

If you’re willing to sell your purity for some used up 3.5/10 roastbeef: fuck off. This is supposed to be a modern monastic movement, where disciples eventually achieve true serenity and a connection with supernatural powers (wizard) in studying the patterns of the cosmos, of God’s plan; taking in the thorny architectures of inherent hierarchy without ego. It is about seeing the face of God in the cute waterpolo boy who nearly bullied you to suicide in 4th grade.

If you believe such a thing as ‘volcel’ exists in this world utterly bereft of all and any free will, you have reasoning skills akin to a donkey, I’m afraid.

time

Incels see time as a byproduct of the sad compulsion of humanist perception to form linear narratives of ‘progress’ and change. Such narratives are to be deemed illusory and rejected to the best of our abilities. In the Incel conception of time, everything is always already happening at the exact same time, meticulously arranged into a rigid, immutable hierarchy by the will of God himself alone.

This also means that it is pedantic and somewhat shallow to necessarily equate Incel with total sexlessness. Since no narratives ‘connecting’ one moment with the next are real, technically, every man not currently experiencing (undergoing?) direct roastie friction in this very moment is an incel, with whatever horrible baggage that entails.

virginity

I’m a virgin myself but my impression is that sex probably isn’t as big a deal as elliot rodger thought it would be. I look at sex havers and don’t think they are truly happier than i am (I’m a pretty happy retard). They were just born with higher quality DNA but i’m not sure if that is correlated with happiness whatsoever. I hate and envy them because I must but there is no objective ‘truth’ behind my ostensible assumption of their having it better.

All partaking in an act does is destroy the soul and dream of that thing. Only virgins understand the metaphysics of sex, only incels are capable of having a soul. This is why elliot rodger was so dangerous to the system. He had dreams that were unquantifiable and untransferrable, and the system thrives solely on the quantifiable and transferrable. I know y’all want to fuck Elliot now but thats like wishing jesus had the chance to get into nintendo wii instead.

If elliot rodger’s ideas of what sex (and ‘love’) would have been like could somehow be quantified, externalized and turned into a reality for all to simultaneously experience, the entire world would collapse, submerged in the brutal, monolithic singularity of joy.

religion

There is a reason religious, celestial imagination is all over incel culture. Think of st. blackops2cel and compare it to the brash, earthy vulgarity of YASSSS KWEEN or something. It is st. blackops2cel whose hand i am taking. It is through him that i discover weightlessness and liberation from the ballasts of the body. It is with him that i dash through the firmament and enter the pearly gates. Perhaps in the near future, the only two ways to die will be euthanized by the state following a lengthy bureaucratic procedure (hell) or shot by a cute incel at school (heaven).

-------

Now awaiting my gentle ascent into wizardry. Male pattern balding. Hormonal makeup changing. Still worship sathanas and aktion t4 and cut myself under the full moon. Still loathe god for giving me the tard genes and curse the faggot christ for normalizing the enabling of retards. But also know this is definitely all there is for me to which there is a certain closure. Know this basement is, at the end of the day, safe. Know theres not that much left at least.

How does the eventual ascension into the more serene state of wizardry feel for you. My angry incels. My romantic incels. My aching incels. My defeated incels. My broken incels. My incels who just want to see the world burn.

#incel #incel theory #old

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liunaticfringe · 5 years

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(via Lucy Liu’s Joan Watson Was Elementary’s Humanistic Heart)

Beautifully written ode to Joan.

2:38 P.M.Lucy Liu’s Joan Watson Was Elementary’s Humanistic HeartBy

Angelica Jade Bastién

Photo: CBS

Recently, the BBC Archive shared on Twitter a 1977 clip of a middle-aged woman who was stopped on the street by The Viewer’s View to talk about her thoughts on television. In her tomato-red raincoat and delicately wrapped scarf, she cogently and movingly extolls the wonder of television. At different points she describes the medium as a “phenomenon” and a communal ritual for her family, which reminded me of the gentle awe television instilled in me when I was a child watching The X-Files and Star Trek: The Next Generation as my mom braided my hair, or obsessively taping Buffy the Vampire Slayer on my own. “It felt like we were escaping from that kitchen sink,” she notes about the transporting nature of television, its potential to be not just a mirror, but also a window — an escape. Watching this brought to mind how much can be said about the pleasures of televisual comfort food, those shows we slip into like a warm bath, letting them entertain us with their familiar rhythms and archetypes.

Elementary, the CBS procedural that ended its seven-season run last night, was a delectable example of the potency and wonder of televisual comfort food, wrapping within the folds of its procedural a tender argument that the families we craft ourselves are as important as the ones we’re born into. What elevated the series from the glut of procedurals on television (and its own uneven final season) was its adept performances, particularly Lucy Liu as Joan Watson, who created a layered study in empathy that suggests second acts are possible in life.

Trying to capture what makes a good performance is like trying to hold smoke in your hand, but when I spoke to Liu earlier this summer, she said something that captured the essence of it: “I do think listening is very key to directing, and I don’t think we all do it as well as we should.” This holds true for acting as well, and Liu proved over Elementary’s seven seasons to be an active, empathetic listener. But even the greatness of Liu’s performance couldn’t distract from how the final season failed her character, ending on a sour note that stains her legacy.

When we first met Joan Watson, she was a woman whose life had been undone by trauma. After a patient died on her operating table, Joan gave up her life as a surgeon, flinging herself into a new profession as a sober companion hired by Morland Holmes (later played by the inimitable John Noble) to help usher his son, the brilliant and difficult yet strangely beguiling Sherlock (an excellent Jonny Lee Miller), into the rigors of recovery for his drug addiction. When Sherlock saw the spark of ingenuity and potential in Joan, he aided her in taking on a new calling as a detective. What followed was a tender story not just of a nascent friendship, but what it means to rebuild oneself.

It became evident early on that Elementary was at its best when it used its procedural format to carefully nudge at ideas of family, both those we’re born into and those we make ourselves. For Joan, family is a knotted reality: We’ve seen her struggle with her mother’s Alzheimer’s, the memory of the father who ran out on her family and later wrestled with schizophrenia and homelessness, and the half-sister she only met recently as an adult. These rigors carefully revealed what justice and order means for her character, but Joan isn’t a harsh, brooding detective; she’s lightning-bright and boldly empathetic, listening with full-bodied attention.

As an archetype, detectives are a useful window into the moral dimensions of the society they are born into. They’re cinematic moral compasses tracking the interior and external reverberations of the choices we make and the often illusory nature of true justice. What does it say, then, that the most iconic examples of this archetype have been primarily white people? Perhaps this is one reason I’ve found myself pulled toward Joan, whose existence as an Asian-American woman shapes her understanding of the world and the justice she seeks. Perhaps the most striking development in this regard occurred in the show’s fifth season, when Joan approached a former patient fresh from prison, Shinwell Johnson (the late Nelsan Ellis), for information, but soon took him under her wing to teach him the detective skills she learned under Sherlock’s tutelage, which helped his own work as an informant. She and Sherlock increasingly disagreed on the situation until he was proved somewhat right about Shinwell’s moral character, but Joan’s decision to mentor Shinwell spoke to her empathetic ability to see the potential of someone whom the justice system may have failed.

When I spoke to Liu, she said it’s the episodes that peel back the layers of who these characters are that she cherishes most. “We do a lot of procedurals, obviously, and a lot of mysteries that need to be solved, but those episodes [like her first directorial effort in the show’s second season, “Paint It Black”] really stand out, and I love seeing those relationships. They are what creates the person that is presented and has so many layers,” she noted.

Joan is also one of modern television’s greatest examples of the characterization and storytelling that comes with great costuming. For Joan, fashion isn’t just a form of expression; it’s identity. One of the greatest pleasures of Elementary was in tracking the breadth of Joan’s arc through Rebecca Hofherr’s costuming. In the beginning, Joan wore casual clothing with loose silhouettes, but by season four her wardrobe had subtly shifted into impeccably tailored suits, echoing the evolution of her career as a detective. “The suit idea was not to sort of become more ‘masculine’ and have that kind of energy,” Liu told me. “It was more that she now conducted herself in a more professional manner as a detective, and so she then wanted to have more of a uniform.”

Yet some of the most indelible moments in the character’s history saw her in more feminine wear, like in season three’s “The One That Got Away,” in which Joan wears an elegant burnished copper and obsidian dress with a fur-trimmed coat to confront suspected murder and violent abuser Del Gruner (Stuart Townsend). When he viciously grabs her arm to level a threat, her posture strengthens and she looks him in the eye with an icy glare. “Get your hand off me or we’ll find out how well you do against a woman who can actually fight back,” she says, never breaking her gaze.

Joan’s clothing often acted as a window into how she saw herself. Her refined, immaculately tailored suits from the last few seasons spoke to her professionalism and comfort in her role as a consulting detective. Moments like her confrontation with Del allowed her contradictions to rise to the surface, contrasting the feminine quality of her dress with the steely aggression that allowed her to confront a man suspected of torture and murder.

But in the final season, Joan often felt like a splintered character lacking a secure through line, being pulled in various directions by the plot. This was evident in her clothing, which moved away from beautiful but not ostentatious suits to brighter clothing, busy with clashing patterns, ruffles, and an overall looser silhouette. The clothing was still gorgeous, but it didn’t track with the woman we came to know over the preceding seasons, and Joan wasn’t given enough to do in the final season to justify such a shift in wardrobe. This is a symptom of a larger problem: The series’s seventh season just didn’t work.

Elementary being cut down from 21 episodes to 13 put a strain on it, resulting in a final season that felt rushed and half-formed. That extended to Joan, who didn’t have much to do beyond support Sherlock until the finale, in which she became a vehicle for a maudlin twist that undercut the vibrancy of the character by making her a source for Sherlock’s pain (and a way out of the bind the writers found themselves in with trying to get him to stay in New York).

In the last few minutes of the Elementary finale it’s revealed that Joan has cancer. This leads to moving performances by Liu and Miller, who grant heft to this twist, but their tender chemistry isn’t enough to distract from the sense that Joan has been pulled in an unexpected direction that we aren’t given enough time to sit with, to fully feel the emotional weight of it. It’s a poorly sketched turn that misuses a star character who didn’t get many moments to shine in the final season.

I prefer to remember Joan as she was before the seventh season squandered her. I’ll remember the empathetic way she interviewed those mired in grief as a detective, how she carefully navigated the emotional strife of her familial dilemmas, and the gentle chemistry she shared with Sherlock, which demonstrated how a deep friendship can stir us as human beings. I’ll remember watching Elementary with my mother, feeling inspired by how Joan faced her future with a gimlet-eyed exuberance that made me believe that second chances in life are possible. I’ll remember all the times Joan chose empathy over being jaded, in a world where that choice remains preciously rare.

#Lucy Liu #Elementary #vulture #finale #wardrobe #humanist #essay

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uncle1milty · 5 years

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Being conscious

Illusion

Mystics talk at length about the illusory nature of this world and our existence in it. They use a variety of graphic words to describe it: dream, falsehood, shadow, sham, illusion, unreality, mirage. What do they mean when they describe our life and our world this way? Isn’t my body real? My house? My wife and children? Mountains and oceans?

Let’s look at the many ways in which the mystics tell us that everything we see, touch, and value so highly is, from their perspective, illusory.

The world is illusory because it’s impermanent

Someone once asked Hazur Maharaj Charan Singh:

Q: We are told that this whole business is a dream. Would you comment on that; what you mean by that? Master: Well, it is a dream in the sense that there’s no reality in this body – and so the dream consists of 50, 60, 70, 80 years. Where are our forefathers, where are they now? Haven’t they quit the stage? It was just like a dream; they came and went away. They don’t exist anymore; they don’t exist permanently. Anything which doesn’t exist permanently is just like a dream.1

That was always Hazur’s primary way of defining what made this body and our existence like a dream – that it was impermanent. He would say that, in contrast, reality or truth was permanent and unchanging. So this world and our life in it were obviously not real, because they’re so short-lived and changeable.

He continued:

Our past relationships, the role which we played in the last life as a husband, as a wife, as a child, as a friend, isn’t that a dream to us? Where are they? We’ve forgotten everyone. It was just like a dream. So this will also become a dream after we leave this body. There’s no reality. Saints say there’s no reality to that which you are attaching so much importance. A real thing always exists – it doesn’t perish, it is stable.

Then he said: “We’re all in a dreamland. We have to be awakened from this dream and find the reality, and when you are with the reality then you will know that you have got to get up from this dream – not before that.”

What does he mean by “when you are with the reality”? Perhaps he means in the Master’s presence, where the influence of the Guru changes our perception enough so that we can see this world more clearly? Or when we are able, in our meditation, to bring the attention higher and begin to escape from the world of duality? He says we only really understand that we have to awaken from the dream when we’ve at least temporarily escaped its influence.

Finally he concluded: “Mystics want to explain to us not to give so much importance to all these things because they’re not going to last. They’re going to leave you.”

The ego’s belief in its separate existence is an illusion Another key source of the illusion we live in is the essential error in how we see ourselves. At the deepest level, each of us thinks, “I am me and I am separate from everyone else and separate from God.” That is the ego speaking, a part of our mind that is responsible for creating an imaginary barrier between our soul and the Father.

Guru Nanak Sahib describes, from a very high perspective – one that is outside time and above this physical plane – how we cycle through life after life, caught in the delusion created by the ego. That delusion or illusion, though not real, still has the effect of binding us to this world. He said:

Each one from ego takes his birth, And clad in ego dies; And comes and goes, Gives and receives, and earns and spends, And deals in lies or speaks the truth, In ego all the while. 2

“In ego all the while”: Everything, everything we do, he says, is tainted by ego, that sense of being a separate self. But despite this powerful illusion and its repercussions, “we are in fact not separate from the Lord and never have been. But our mind and ego convince us that we are, and we have to escape that illusion before we can surrender our being into His.” 3

Maya draws its power from our unfulfilled longing for the Lord

For reasons we cannot understand, the Lord sent us out from his kingdom ages ago, into this strange existence we find ourselves in. We were given bodies and minds, and the ego developed. But underneath all those coverings, we have always carried deeply embedded memories of him. The mystics tell us that every desire, every need we feel is an expression of our native hunger for God, that yearning to end our separation and return to him. But our mind corrupts that pure longing and tries to satisfy it with impermanent and petty things.

Hazrat Inayat Khan says:

[A man’s] mind, his reason, always puts forward some other cause for his unhappiness rather than the real one, in order that he may be kept in illusion all his life, in order that all his life he should run after things which are not the real aim of his soul….And if the whole universe were given to him, his heart would not be satisfied, because the demand of his soul still has not been understood.3

And according to Idries Shah:

People, Rumi teaches, do not really know what they want. Their inner yearning is expressed in a hundred desires, which they think are their needs. These are not their real desires, as experience shows. For when these objectives are attained, the yearning is not stilled.4

So maya, in a sense, perverts our natural yearning for the Lord into lust, greed, gluttony and whatnot. The desires of the mind are all based on a false premise – that if we satisfy them, the craving will stop. But of course the mind is never satisfied, because it doesn’t get what it really misses. And the desires are almost irresistible. A disciple needs to beware of them his or her whole life.

The body is illusory Let’s look next at another seemingly solid pillar of reality – our body. The mystics see it as utterly ephemeral, nothing but a dream, and they encourage us to realize how short-lived it is and to prepare for its end.

The mystic-poet Eknath says, “Your body is the shadow of a cloud, the water of a mirage – passing, unreal.”5 And then:

The body goes in a moment, but we don’t believe it. A ripple on water – this is the world. A mirage of water is not water, the shadow of a cloud gives no rain. A statue of salt dissolves in water – this body is dying while you look at it, says Eknath.6

And yet we don’t believe we’re going to die. There’s a story about a minister who began a sermon on death by saying, “Everyone in this congregation is going to die.” As he scanned the audience to see the effect of his words, he noticed a man in the front with a big smile on his face. He asked the man, “Why are you smiling, given what I’ve just said?” The man replied, “I’m not from this congregation!”

We use any excuse to fool ourselves!

Saints see the entire arc of a body’s existence, from embryo to corpse, as the briefest flash. They also see the whole range of our past incarnations, all the many bodies we have inhabited. So how can they take this particular body seriously? They warn us to look higher and not get caught in the body’s dream.

Although the body is a dream, it is a magical gift Although the physical body can indeed be a trap and is an illusion, it also carries within it the secrets and power of the Shabd, the divine energy that permeates the universe, which transcends all illusion and is the ultimate truth, the ultimate reality. In a way, the body is a sort of Trojan horse. Kal, the negative power, created this creation so cunningly that every aspect of a human being is surrounded by maya, so the poor human is trapped. But the Lord hid himself within the human body in the form of Shabd, and is there to sustain the soul and, when a Master appears, awaken the soul and help it escape.

Hazur once said, “Sister, it is better to treat this whole life just as a dream and during the dream try to find out the reality which is within every one of us.”7

So during the dream, we need to discover the ultimate reality inside ourselves. The saint Bahinabai says:

Only within this dream of a body can you awaken to Truth and rest in the One.… If you walk the way of a teacher of Truth, you’ll reach the Real through the unreal.8

She’s saying that to reach the real (the Shabd, the Lord) we have to use the unreal (this body), and, of course, we have to have a Master. And the Master contains that same dichotomy – his Shabd form is real, but his physical form is unreal, is maya, as he has been saying. So again, we reach the real through the unreal.

Another mystic speaks on the enormous value of this strange lump of flesh we inhabit:

What a treasure has been placed in your hand! Unlucky souls turn this treasure to dust – this body that holds the essence of all goodness, this body that holds a library of scriptures, this body that breathes true holiness into holy places. Kanhoba says, Nothing can compare with being born human.9

So in this amazing device, this pot of filth and temple of divine love, we have to find the real while immersed in the unreal.

Are we wake or asleep? A story goes like this:

A disciple met with his Master to discuss the nature of liberation and to ask about the position adopted by those who attain it. The disciple asked: “Master, how is it possible that a liberated human being can remain at peace when faced with the tragedies suffered by humanity?” The Master said, “Imagine you are sleeping and that you dream that you are in a boat with a lot of other passengers. Suddenly the boat hits a rock and starts to sink. In your distress, you wake up. Would you go back to sleep in order to warn the other passengers that the boat is sinking?10

Now, this is not to say that masters aren’t compassionate. They are supremely tender-hearted and feel for the suffering that beings undergo in this world. But they have a higher perspective, which helps to answer the common question, “How could a loving God create a world that contains so much suffering?” They say that human beings are, in effect, dreaming their existence and their suffering. As Baba Ji has told us, only the Shabd is real; everything else is illusion.

Mystics say that the problem isn’t with the creation, but with our perception of it. Hazur once said that the creation looks perfect to the perfect one. The bottom line is that the masters are trying to wake us up from the dream so we can share their higher perception.

Science’s argument against the illusion of this physical world Let’s consider our situation from the perspective of a modern physicist. It turns out that physicists also argue that we are living in an illusion.

They say that each of us is made up of about 50 trillion cells. Each of those cells contains 20 trillion atoms. Each atom, when looked at closely, consists of a lot of sub-atomic particles, but each sub-atomic particle, if looked at closely, consists of nothing but energy. So, we are in effect, nothing but energy. What we see when we look at ourselves or at another person or object is just an energy field, an illusion of solidity that is in fact almost entirely empty space, with just a certain amount of energy creating the illusion of substance. 11

For example, if you expanded an atom to the space taken up by a football stadium, the nucleus would be the size of a marble sitting in the middle of the field, and the much smaller electrons would be whizzing around at the outer reaches of the stadium. Everything else would be just empty space. Not much there! But very convincing to our senses.

Hazur Maharaj Ji once had the following interchange with a disciple:

Q: Is this world really here or is it a dream world? Master: This world is perishable. You will not be able to stay with this world forever. This world is perishable.

Q: Does it really exist? Master: It exists in a manner of speaking. When you are in a dream, everything looks real to you. When you wake up from a dream, then only you realize that there was actually no reality at all. It was just a dream. While being in this world, we think it is absolutely real. When we leave this world, then we know it was just a dream.

Q: Are we in the world or aren’t we? Master: At this time we are dreaming! When we wake up from this dream, then we will know that this world is perishable. 12

So that’s a good transition from talking about all the different forms of illusion to asking why it matters and what we do about it.

Why do the mystics emphasize the illusory nature of this world, this body, this life? Essentially, they are trying to wake us up, to shake us out of this trance induced by maya, in which we’re completely seduced by the world – its pleasures; its promises of wealth, power, and fame; and its horrors, which fascinate us so intensely that we can’t take our eyes off them. The saints keep telling us not to get sucked into the show of this world: it’s only a very compelling reality show, but it’s not Reality. Turn your attention, they say, away from the reality show to not Reality. That’s why Baba Ji has told us to be serious about our meditation but not take life too seriously.

But we don’t want to wake up; we’re absolutely glued to the screen of life and can’t tear our attention away. And we’re so dead asleep that we don’t even realize it most of the time.

Fortunately, our master is not content to let us sleep. He will wake us up. And that’s the single most important lesson from this discussion – that we will never wake up from the dream, we will never see through these myriad layers of illusion, without the assistance of a living master, someone who is awake, someone who exists outside the fog of illusion.

In her book The Case for God, Karen Armstrong, a writer and former Roman Catholic nun, retold this famous story:

One day a Brahmin priest came across the Buddha sitting in contemplation under a tree and was astonished by his serenity, stillness, and self-discipline. “Are you a god, sir?” the priest asked. “Are you an angel … or a spirit?” No, the Buddha replied. He explained that he had simply revealed a new potential in human nature. It was possible to live in this world of conflict and pain at peace and in harmony with one’s fellow creatures. “Remember me,” the Buddha told the curious priest, “as one who is awake.” 13

So our master is constantly shaking us in various ways, to try to get us to open our eyes and wake up from this dream, this illusion. And he urges us, prods us, tries desperately to persuade us to do our meditation with all the intensity, love, and commitment that we can muster, as that’s the only path to awakening to Reality.

And what is that Reality? The Shabd or divine power or Name. The Shabd or Name is God in action, and it takes physical form as our master. The Shabd or Name is the power that will save us from this world.

As the mystic Narhari taught:

A painter strokes his brush on a wall – this is the world, nothing real here. Children build houses of sand, then knock them down and go home. Everyone does their work here – they love it as their own so they take it to be true. If you really want to achieve something real, just repeat the Name, says Narhari, and stay close to the mystics.14

Illusion - RSSB Satsangs & Essays

Mystics talk at length about the illusory nature of this world and our existence in it. They use a variety of gr...

Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, #39

Quoted in Divine Light, 7th ed., p.32-33

RS Greetings, Autumn 2001, p.9

Idries Shah, The Sufis, p.140

Many Voices, One Song, p.260

Ibid., p.208

Maharaj Charan Singh, Tape of 2 December, 1988, Question 10

Many Voices, One Song, p.147

Ibid., p.143

Quoted in Spiritual Link, March 2009, pp.24-25; from 101 Cuentos Clasicos de la India, comp. Ramiro Calle,

Much of this was drawn from a 2011 TED talk by Jeff Lieberman on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0--_R6xThs

Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I, #18

Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, p.330

Many Voices, One Song, p.166

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giftcardbest · 4 years

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A Course in Miracles: A Non-dual Path to Enlightenment by David HoffmeisterA Course in Miracles: A Non-dual Path to Enlightenment by David Hoffmeister

Advaita Vedanta God alone is real The world is illusory A Course in Miracles God is real. The world is illusion.

—David Hoffmeister For support in tracing back upsets David offers this free online tool: LevelsOfMind.com

#A Course In Miracles youtube #ACIM youtube videos #ACIM Spiritual Community #Spirituality Global Community #Worldwide Spiritual Community

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nealcassatiel · 7 years

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2. Allen Ginsberg, Castiel, and Buddhism: Cas in the bardo - an exploration of the Tibetan Buddhist death bardos and Castiel (I)

“Wanna drift off and become a newspaper headline, / what good favourable publicity in the bardo? Allen Ginsberg says, these words’ll get you nowhere / these jokes won’t be funny when everyone leaves the seven exits.” (Allen Ginsberg, Bowel Song)

Introduction

In my previous meta I discussed Cas in relation to Buddhism. In this post I will continue on this theme, looking specifically at Cas’s death state and the Buddhist concept of the bardo. I will be looking almost solely at Tibetan Buddhism which is in the Mahayana school of Buddhism. I have studied Buddhism for four or five years, however the subject is vast and please forgive me if my knowledge isn’t the best. If you have any questions about Tibetan Buddhism please ask them and if I can’t answer them, I’ll try and find out an answer from a teacher at my next visit to the Tibetan Buddhist Centre.

As a side note and personal note to this meta, I had intended to do more research on this as anything relating to theology, religion, or Buddhism is going to take a lot of research and understanding regardless of how much someone has previously studied the subject. My research was shortened and curtailed by the passing of a good friend. I had planned to write this meta about a month ago however the subject of death has been all too real for me since his passing. I apologize if this meta is too short or doesn’t go deeply enough and I will continue to write on this subject. Returning to the Buddhism and my meditations and readings this past week now that I am dealing with my grief better has been healing, and the insistence in meditating and thinking on death within Tibetan Buddhism has been a good thing to confront once more. I have been researching Tibetan Buddhist ideas on death specifically for the majority of the year for academic research, and I find solace that it has helped me in such trying times. To end this side note I would like to remind you all how loved you are and in the great words of great people; always keep fighting.

To recap on why I believe this is important, Cas is linked with Buddhism a fair bit. In The End his room was surrounded by Buddhist iconography, there were Buddhist decorations in his home when he was Emmanuel, and some of his beliefs and spiritual practices link as much to Buddhism as they do Christianity and Judaism.

The Empty and Death

At the end of 13x03 Cas woke up in what the writers are calling ‘The Empty’. It was mentioned by Billie in season 12. We don’t know much about the empty but Billie says this to Sam;

- ‘There’s one hard and fast rule in this universe: what lives, dies. So the next time you or your brother bite it… well… you’re not going to heaven or hell. One of us and I hope it’s me, we’re gonna make a mistake and toss you out into The Empty. And nothing comes back from that.’

So here we see the Buddhist thoughts on death. In Tibetan Buddhism, a well-known practice is to focus on death and to come to terms that everything which lives must die.

- ‘From the summit of the highest heavens to the very depths of hell, there is not a single being who can escape death. As the Letter of Consolation says: ‘Have you ever, on earth or in the heavens, / Seen a being born who will not die? / Or heard that such a thing had happened? / Or even suspected that it might?’’ (Patrul Rinpoche, Words of my Perfect Teacher: A Complete Translation of a Classic Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism, trans. Padmakara Translation Group, p. 41)

This is a major concept in Tibetan Buddhism which monks spend years focusing on in order to try to combat their death fear and help their passage out of samsara after death.

- ‘Meditate only on death, earnestly and from the core of your heart.’ (Patrul Rinpoche, Words of my Perfect Teacher: A Complete Translation of a Classic Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism, trans. Padmakara Translation Group, p. 55.)

Allen Ginsberg, Buddhism, and Death

Allen Ginsberg also had this death fear and tried to focus and accept his death, in fact his last collection of poetry entitled ‘Death & Fame’ focused a lot on him trying to visualize and accept his own death in multi-religious terms, but mainly in Buddhist terms. On his death bed he tried to focus on Buddhism and mantras and his Buddhist teacher was called to sit with him and recite death rituals before his death and after passing. Ginsberg had a Buddhist ceremony as well as one in a church after he had passed away in 1997. I mention this because Cas can be linked very well to Ginsberg (also because my grad dissertation was about Ginsberg, Buddhism, and death – hashtag spon to that basically unread thesis that I poured so much into).

Death, Rebirth, and SPN

Another thing to note is the concept of death and rebirth in Supernatural. The brothers have died a fair few times and come back, but let’s focus on Cas. In Buddhism, one’s rebirth is dependent upon their past life. One’s karma at the end of one’s life ensures the next life. In Cas’s deaths and rebirths he has changed from each one and his past life has influenced his personality after his next resurrection. An interesting thing to understand about karma is that it doesn’t affect you in your current life. Whilst bad actions may cause bad consequences, that is not karma. Karma only has effect on you once you’re dead, so any time someone ends a story about someone getting their comeuppance and says ‘that’s karma for you’, you can correct them and say that is incorrect if ya want.

The Bardos

So, onto the bardos.

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The Tibetan Book of the Dead, in brief, is a text which contains mantras to read before one’s passing and once one is dead. It contains many chapters detailing practices and meditations and yogas to do before one’s death in order to help prepare the oneself to escape samsara (the wheel of existence where one is caught in a cycle of birth and death and rebirth).

The first bardo is the chi kha and occurs immediately after death when a profound state of consciousness occurs, called the clear light. If one can recognise this light as their reality, they are thrown out of samsara (the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth).

If one does not recognise this light they are thrown into the second bardo, the bardo of reality called chos nyid bar do. In this bardo they are shown reality in a multi-coloured mandala of forty-two peaceful deities and a mandala of fifty-eight wrathful deities. These appear to the consciousness of the recently deceased in the days following death. If reality is not recognised here then they are placed into the third bardo – the bardo of mundane existence (sri pah bar do). In this third bardo they are rebirthed in one of the six realms of gods, demigods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts, or in hell. The karma (the wrongdoings of the deceased) in their past life will gauge which realm they will be rebirthed into.

Death holds up a mirror of our past life actions.

If recognition of death and the new reality does not occur immediately in the first intermediate state after death, then the deceased moves into the second intermediate state. This second intermediate state is called ‘the pure illusory body’, during which the consciousness achieves clarity even if the deceased doesn’t know they are dead. During this stage, if proper teaching is given, the deceased will no longer be controlled by past actions. ‘Just as, for example, darkness is destroyed by the light of the sun, the controlling force of past actions is destroyed by this ‘inner radiance of the path’ and liberation is attained.’ If liberation is not attained in this state, then the deceased moves onto the third intermediate state during which bewildering apparitions (which are the product of past actions) will emerge. ‘At around this time, the bereaved relatives will be crying and expressing their grief. They will no longer be serving the deceased share of food, they will have removed his or her clothes and stripped down the bed, and so forth. Although the deceased can see them, they cannot see the deceased. Although the deceased can hear them calling out, they cannot hear the departed one calling back so the deceased may turn away in a state of despaired. At this time, three phenomena – sounds, lights and rays of light – will arise, and the deceased may faint with fear, terror, or awe. Thus, during this period, the following Great Introduction to the Intermediate State of Reality should be given. Call the deceased by name and say the following words’.

“O, Child of Buddha Nature, that which is called death has now arrived. You are leaving this world. But in this you are not alone. This happens to everyone. Do not be attached to this life. Do not cling to this life. Even if you remain attached and clinging you do not have the power to stay – you will only continue to roam within the cycles of existence. Therefore, do not be attached and do not cling. Think of the Three Prescious Jewels! O, Child of Buddha Nature, however terrifying the appearances of the intermediate state of reality might be, do not forget the following words. Go forward remembering their meaning. The crucial point is that through them recognition may be attained. Alas, now, as the intermediate state of reality arises before me, renouncing the merest thought of awe, terror or fear, I will recognise all that arises to be awareness manifesting naturally of itself. Knowing such sounds, light, and rays, to be visionary phenomena of the intermediate state. At this moment, having reached this critical point, I must not fear the assembly of Peaceful and Wrathful Deities, which manifest naturally…. O, Child of Buddha Nature, if you do not now recognise these phenomena to be natural manifestations, whatever meditative practices you may have undertaken whilst in the human world, if you have not previously encountered this present instruction, you will fear the light, you will be awed by the sound and you will be terrified by the rays. If you do not now understand this essential point of the teaching, you will not recognise the sounds, the lights and the rays, and you will continue to roam within the cycles of existence. O, Child of Buddha Nature, should you have moved on, (without recognition), after having been unconscious for (up to) three and a half days, you will awaken from unconsciousness and wonder ‘what has happened to me?’ So recognise this to be the intermediate state. At this time the aspects of the cycles of existence are reversed (into their own true nature) and all phenomena are arising as lights and Buddha-bodies.’

Then a bright blue light will arise in the space. One should be drawn to it. There will be a dull white light of the god realms. Do not be drawn to that. It will spin you into the god realm and back into the cycles of samsara. Focus on the blue light. Other coloured lights occur and deities help to guide the deceased to the blue light. A dull blue light emerges which tries to call the deceased back to the human realm. Those with training will be more likely to walk towards the right light and take refuge in the Buddha to relieve themselves of being born back into samsara.

Within the bardos the deceased will be frightened and fearful. We see that Cas looks vulnerable and fearful when he wakes up in the empty.

Some Notes on the bardos and Cas in The Empty

- Normally people don’t realise they go into the bardo after death as they are normally flung back into samsara. Those who are spiritual or have undergone training will be aware of the bardo after death. (This is important with Cas because he is a spiritual person, and so if we liken The Empty to the bardo, he will fair better in this space because of his spirituality.

- In some folk, hindu, and folk Buddhist beliefs the last thought of the dying person is important and will help or hinder them in the bardo. (One of Cas’s last thoughts was probably saving Sam, Dean, and Jack, and so in The Empty these thoughts may stick with him all the more clearer (although they are pretty clear already. So his will to get back to Dean et al will be fundamental to his path through this in between place).

- For those who were spiritual in their lives, in the bardo they will be more likely to meet enlightened beings who will appear to them. (This is interesting because from what we know about the spoilers, another person is there with him. This could be another angel and chuck knows I’m praying for the return of Gabriel, or it could be another version of Cas. In the bardo, the beings/gods who appear to the person do not have to be literal. Many people within Tibetan Buddhism see the gods and spiritual apparitions within the bardo as manifestations of one’s inner self, whether that be the greed or the pride or the love or the kindness).

- The individual is also presented with a means of ending these encounters by paying attention to images and lights that feel comforting and familiar, and sometimes represent one of the passions that appeal to the person. This is where people's unconsciousness tendencies take control as they are variously attracted to jealously which can bring future lives of fighting and quarreling, pride which leads to another human rebirth, or aggression and violence which can lead to a rebirth in a hell world. Being attracted to these lights and images will cause the spiritual being to disappear and the opportunity to gain insight and enter their spiritual world will be lost. This is one of the important reasons for learning spiritual travel so that encounters with powerful spiritual states of consciousness become familiar and desirable instead objects of fear to be avoided.

- If the first bardo passes and attempts to access spiritual states were unsuccessful, the next bardo begins. The second bardo or the "bardo of becoming" is a stage in which the desires of the individual are said to carry the largely helpless soul through a great variety of intense emotional states. Good thoughts bring great bliss and pleasure, and hateful or negative thoughts bring great pain and desolation. The soul bounces from thought to thought as a torrent of thoughts and feelings come like a waterfall. Existing thought habits and desires are said to define the experience of the soul during the afterlife in this way. (Again, we see that the bardo is a space for the inner self to manifest around oneself. I think that in SPN, they will use The Empty in a similar way – in that it will be a space where Cas can understand who he is. It will be a mindful, meditative, and self-reflexive space in which he will understand who he is and the life he lead. He will see what is important to him and what he should cling to and what he should leave).

- The greatest problems of the soul in the second bardo are negative emotions like guilt and fear (which results from a lack of familiarity with the inner worlds), and lack of conscious control over its own experience. Fear is particularly harmful because it fragments the self making concentration on one thing difficult or impossible, and this can lead to confusion and loss of conscious control. (I think Cas will certainly explore these things within The Empty. He has been ridden by guilt for many seasons and I believe that he will feel the weight of his past actions even in death. However I think he will get through these and return to earth having done away with the negative emotions and guilt having worked through them all in the empty).

- For those fortunate enough to be more conscious in these bardo states, a petition to a god, guru, guide, saint, or intercessor can be made in hopes that the individual will be lifted or guided out of the bardo worlds by one of those entities. But here again, the call must be concentrated and the ability to ignore the surrounding chaos somewhat developed. When such grace is given, it is a form of salvation where the individual is saved from the discomfort and confusion of the "outer darkness" of the bardo by a powerful entity - usually one that individuals formed a bond with in their former life. (Cas’s devotion to jack comes in here. Jack guides him back. This is an interesting discussion of faith here, because Cas has faith in Jack. And whilst some people may be angry at Cas for following Jack and placing faith in him, many people need figures within their lives in whom they place their faith).

- This ability to choose a good incarnation requires discrimination, and a certain degree of conscious awareness. The new age approach to reincarnation which claims we choose our new incarnation is idealistic and not always true from this vantage point. Many souls whose thoughts in life were tinged with or dominated by negative emotions, or those who have repressed and denied such emotion through lack of awareness or an unwavering commitment to "positive thinking" will likely be desperate to escape the confusion of the second bardo. They are therefore likely to grab on to the first opportunity that presents itself like a swimmer who grasps a log in dangerous rapids in hopes of making it to calmer waters. Choosing the first object (or incarnation) that comes along may not be the wisest choice. (It would be interesting to see a kind of psychedelic/spiritual space in which Cas is drawn towards and away from things which distract him from his internal analysis and reflextion, or that draw him away from a mission to return to earth).

- The average person is said to spend a period of about forty-five days in the second bardo. However, passionate souls with strong desires or those responsible for evil acts in their most recent life are said to reincarnate almost immediately. In exceptional cases, the individual can stay in the bardo state for longer periods, and be drawn into its currents awaiting rebirth.

- One factor that helps the soul achieve the freedom of conscious control and spiritual travel during the afterlife is acceptance of death. Those who have not accepted death will resist the process of dying and introduce conflict into the bardo stages. This is why it is important for people to take care of any unfinished business as they near death so they can let go of life completely. (This will be interesting to see if Cas excepts his death. I’m not sure about this as he was in a depressive slump for a long while. But I hope that his want and love for Dean and the guys will make him not accept his new life in The Empty).

Forgiveness & Salvation

In The Tibetan Book of the Dead there are constant opportunities for enlightenment, both in life and in death. In the bardo one is given the chance over and over again to come to the light of the Buddha and come out of samsara. This is a key point in supernatural, that there are constant chances for good, for salvation, for forgiveness, for moving on a dropping the weights of before. Being in the bardo is a spiritual experience that shows you your inner thoughts, fears, and emotions. It is a liminal space which helps one to move on to the next realm or g to the light of the Buddha. Cas will be flung back into the world of samsara into another rebirth – although as he is being reborn as himself we stray further from Buddhism.

Conclusion

But what will be interesting in this upcoming episode is to see how many similarities there are between The Empty and the bardo – whether Cas will encounter a spiritual being, whether he will see his emotions manifest, whether he will be drawn to certain things, whether he will be drawn to good and bad light, whether he will be drawn back to the boys, whether he will accept his death, whether he will be able to look within himself and deal with the guilt and negative emotions he has been troubled by…. Who knows.

#my supernatural discourse #supernatural #spn #supernatural season 13 #season 13 meta #13x3 #spn meta #cas #castiel #Cas x Ginsberg #cas x spirituality #cas x buddhism #cas x ginsberg x buddhism #cas and buddhism #supernatural meta #castiel discourse

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soulsavvi · 5 years

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Pondering Death as a Spiritual Practice

Death...this word can instill an instant fear and recoil in many people. In society, talking about death is said to be 'morbid', but what about if not talking about death was actually what was morbid? The dictionary says morbid means "an abnormal and unhealthy interest in disturbing and unpleasant subjects, especially death and disease." Instead, I'm proposing here that speaking about death is healthy, and avoiding the issue of death is unhealthy - to our emotional and mental health, not to mention spiritual. Since I can remember I was intrigued by the rebirth cycle of life, especially stories I heard as a little girl of people who had remembered their previous lifetimes. I recall one of a young boy who took his current family to a house where he said he had lived in his previous lifetime, and sure enough the people in that house said they had lost a son, and the whole story seemed to fit. Later, I started reading books and watching videos about what happens after we die and people's near death experiences (NDEs). My fascination with death was and is not morbid, but rather the opposite - it's an impetus to understand the nature of life, this very thing we are living in this moment now....and who we are and what truth is. Intuitively I felt that to avoid facing that seemingly final event, was to understand a part of the whole only. Many people are not able to broach the subject of death, even as they lie on their own death bed. It seems death has become such a loaded subject and triggers our deepest fears, that discussing the subject means we must face these fears. This is of course hard to do, especially if physical pain and ill health might be taking most of the energy, leaving emotional and mental resources low. That's why it is vital to consider - and revise as we feel guided to - our views of death before we get to that stage. And what is in our heart and mind the moment of our death is critical to what happens as we move on from our body and mind into the spirit world as soul. If we remain in a state of acute fear and distress then the passage of the soul will be harder. Just over a year ago my father passed away - or as I prefer to say - he left his body. He had had several health problems for many years before. Death could have visited him at many points during his health issues, and was coming closer and closer all the time. I remember asking him one day during this period whether he wondered about what would happen after death. I wanted in some way to get closer to him, to have a real discussion about this impending event that was around the corner for him, maybe to be a support if I could; I was interested in what my father felt about death. He wasn't ready to discuss such a topic and he shut down the conversation. I realized it was a no-go area. I definitely feel that Dad is still around as opposed to not being in existence at all which many people wish to believe occurs after death. Many wish to think that after death they are going to be nothing, that they will just fizzle out and simply won't be - as if they can do what they like in life because 'it won't matter after I'm gone - I won't know.' But this is not how it works. It is not possible to go from being a human being with all the complexities to a big nothing after death. The universe cannot and does not work that way. Energy created must be balanced. Existence cannot become non-existence, for everything is alive. And everything is energy. There is nothing in the universe that is really nothing, for everything is energy, and energy is something. Even the void, nothingness, emptiness that are experienced along the spiritual awakening journey, are something. It's a full emptiness. This Source Consciousness is our ultimate and common DNA, and it cannot be destroyed. But it can and does take on shapes and forms that give rise to a perception of apparent existence, and death is but the transition from one apparent form to the cessation of that form, when we exist in a formless, but nonetheless conscious state. Conversely, some people are afraid that after death there is indeed a big black nothing, and want to be assured that they will still be. To those people I say read what the vedas say, or other spiritual materials, also NDE information. There is a vast amount of information that can be accessed about life after death. And what of the non-dual path of rising up out of the illusory self into the bliss of Oneness, vis-a-vis death and what happens after it? Union with God is the ultimate goal, and one where we give up all individuality and do not take on incarnations anymore...but this is not an easy thing, it is not easy to get off the death-rebirth cycle. I believe there is much karma to balance for most of us here on this planet. This may or may not be possible to balance in this lifetime. Every creature in the universe is subject to rebirth, Arjuna, except the one who is united with me. - Lord Krishna says to Arjuna, Bhagavad Gita

It is a useful exercise to get prepared for death by pondering it and working on unraveling and releasing fears and wishful beliefs about the subject - a deeply healing spiritual practice. Then the knowledge from deep within us can be made know to us - that we are eternal souls, and this soul is what continues to live after our body dies. For the soul there is never birth nor death. Nor, having once been, does he ever cease to be. He is unborn, eternal, ever-existing, undying and primeval. He is not slain when the body is slain. - Bhagavad Gita 2:20 I heard an apt metaphor recently (sorry unable to recall the source) of death. There is a play taking place and one of the actors decides halfway to simply walk out of his part and the play, and leaves the building. The remaining actors in the play get upset. But in reality he has only left the building. Annie Besant said in her book 'Death- And After?' (you can read a free copy online from this page): " And at last he grows to recognise that fact of supreme importance, that "Life" has nothing to do with body and with this material plane; that Life is his conscious existence, unbroken, unbreakable, and that the brief interludes in that Life, during which he sojourns on Earth, are but a minute fraction of his conscious existence, and a fraction, moreover, during which he is less alive, because of the heavy coverings which weigh him down. For only during these interludes (save in exceptional cases) may he wholly lose his consciousness of continued life, being surrounded by these coverings which delude him and blind him to the truth of things, making that real which is illusion, and that stable which is transitory." Interestingly, it was Sri Ramana Maharshi's dwelling on the question of death and his fear, that triggered his Self-realization, as he describes: The shock of the fear of death drove my mind inwards and I said to myself mentally, without actually framing the words: ‘Now that death has come; what does it mean? What is it that is dying? This body dies . . . But with the death of the body am I dead? Is the body I? . . . The body dies but the Spirit that transcends it cannot be touched by death. That means I am the deathless Spirit.’ All this was not dull thought; it flashed through me vividly as living truth which I perceived directly. . . From that moment onwards the ‘I’ or Self focused attention on itself by a powerful fascination. Fear of death had vanished once and for all. Absorption in the Self continued unbroken from that time on.” I hope that this post has been of interest and not too morbid : ) I welcome any views you may wish to share on this subject. Namaste,

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the-organizing-principle · 7 years

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‘Twin Peaks as Fugue’ Theory, Part 1: Who Is Margaret Lanterman?

Expanding on the theory I started to articulate in this post, I’ll focus now on what this might mean when viewed in light of specific characters and plot points. I’d like to start with Margaret Lanterman (The Log Lady), exploring what this particular character could represent if the theory that all of Twin Peaks was dreamed up by Dale Cooper/Richard holds true.

I think one of the biggest clues into this character can be found in the “Log Lady Intros,” a series of short vignettes written and directed by David Lynch for Bravo Network’s re-airing of the series in 1993. Consider that—for all intents and purposes—the show was over at this point; Lynch did not expect it to be revived. So this was probably his last chance to say whatever he might have felt was left unsaid after the season 2 finale, and with these vignettes he was able to add a kind of director’s commentary to each episode, however obliquely.

I’d like to look at the last Log Lady Intro, first:

"And now, an ending. Where there was once one, there are now two. Or were there always two? What is a reflection? A chance to see two? When there are chances for reflections, there can always be two--or more. Only when we are everywhere will there be just one. It has been a pleasure speaking to you." —Episode 29 / “Beyond Life and Death”

This line struck me as familiar: a few years later, Lynch would direct the film Lost Highway, in which a character known as “The Mystery Man” (Robert Blake) would have a spooky conversation with Bill Pullman’s character, Fred, wherein Fred learns that the man he’s speaking with is simultaneously in front of him and inside his house (the man hands Fred a phone, and Fred calls his house and speaks to the man, who answers). After failing to convince Fred that they’d met before, the man concludes the unsettling conversation with the line, “It’s been a pleasure talking to you.”

Lynch himself has confirmed that Lost Highway is a film about a character suffering a psychogenic fugue / what he describes as a “parallel identity crisis” (x). There is also evidence that Lynch considers Lost Highway and Twin Peaks as works that share some overlap in terms of the fictional universe they occupy. Furthermore, the Mystery Man character is widely believed to be a personification of Fred’s jealousy over his wife’s unfaithfulness (x).

Of course, these similar lines of dialogue aren’t obscure enough for it to qualify as direct evidence of a connection between the Mystery Man and Margaret Lanterman, but it was enough to draw my attention to a potential parallel even if it wasn’t intentional. The Mystery Man knows things that shouldn’t be known, especially by a “stranger.” Fred is afraid of him, and of his unsettling insight. Fred is trying to escape the truth of what he did. Meanwhile, Margaret also has preternatural insights. In the original series, I got the sense that Dale was wary of her whenever they were forced to interact. Remember the scene where Margaret first approaches him at the diner, with a message from her log? Dale seems distinctly uncomfortable, only humoring her at Harry’s nudging (unusual for Dale, who is normally so friendly). Why would the Log Lady make Dale nervous? If Dale/Richard is trying to escape a painful truth from his past via the conjured fantasy world of Twin Peaks, what might Margaret represent to him? In the same way that the Mystery Man personifies Fred’s secret, repressed jealousy, I think Margaret might personify Dale’s secret, repressed understanding of the illusory world he inhabits. Through Margaret, Dale receives coded hints about the true nature of this world.

We can find these hints all over the series, but they seem especially potent in the Log Lady Intros. Consider the very first one:

"Welcome to Twin Peaks. My name is Margaret Lanterman. I live in Twin Peaks. I am known as the Log Lady. There is a story behind that. There are many stories in Twin Peaks. Some of them are sad, some funny. Some of them are stories of madness, of violence. Some are ordinary. Yet they all have about them a sense of mystery – the mystery of life. Sometimes, the mystery of death. The mystery of the woods. The woods surrounding Twin Peaks. To introduce this story, let me just say it encompasses the all – it is beyond the "fire", though few would know that meaning. It is a story of many, but begins with one – and I knew her. The one leading to the many is Laura Palmer. Laura is the one."

I will go into more detail about Laura later, but for now, consider the theory that Laura is the central focus because she represents a distortion of Dale/Richard’s deepest pain and sorrow, repressed and kept secret from himself by his fractured psyche, likely originating out of some kind of trauma involving someone named Judy. Out of this trauma, Dale/Richard has invented an entire world to cope with his break from reality: the world of Twin Peaks, the “story of the many [various characters].” What is the obscure meaning of “fire” that the story of Twin Peaks is “beyond”? I believe that “fire” represents a catalyst; a force that can be destructive or cleansing; ultimately, the truth. In the context of the fugue theory, the “fire” Margaret refers to here might be the real-world incident that caused Dale/Richard to retreat into the fantasy world of Twin Peaks. More on this later.

Then there’s the intro to the third episode:

"There is a sadness in this world, for we are ignorant of many things. Yes – we are ignorant of many beautiful things. Things like the truth. So sadness in our ignorance is very real. The tears are real. What is this thing called a tear? There are even tiny ducts – tear ducts – to produce these tears should the sadness occur. Then the day when the sadness comes. Then we ask, 'Will the sadness that makes me cry, will the sadness that makes me cry my heart out, will it ever end?' The answer, of course, is yes. One day, the sadness will end."

Although this could be a reference to various characters’ sadness over not knowing the truth about what happened to Laura Palmer, it’s difficult to imagine how this particular truth could ever be considered “beautiful.” Neither would whatever unknown trauma Dale/Richard might have experienced prior to his retreat into Twin Peaks. So what “beautiful truth” is left to be sad about? I think Lynch is referring to a sense of understanding and acceptance that eventually follows a period of grief, even if it is only arrived at once a person has crossed over into a new awareness, beyond death. Remember, death is “just a change, not an end.” Although very esoteric, this message might indicate that Dale/Richard’s pain and sadness temporarily “ended” when he retreated into his fantasy world, but will never really end until he confronts the “beautiful truth” that is genuine understanding of his trauma and how it has affected him.

Now consider the fourth intro:

"Even the ones who laugh are sometimes caught without an answer. These creatures who introduce themselves, but we swear we have met them somewhere before, yes? Look in the mirror. What do you see? Is it a dream, or a nightmare? Are we being introduced against our will? Are they mirrors? I can see the smoke. I can smell the fire. The battle is drawing nigh."

Are the “creatures who introduce themselves” the various characters Dale encounters in Twin Peaks? Has he met them before, in that they are simulacra of people he has encountered in the ‘real world’ (i.e. the psychiatric institution, etc)? These characters could be mirroring real people, but they are products of a dream/nightmare in the world of Twin Peaks. Perhaps Dale/Richard can’t choose who enters this dream or what form they will take in here, and perhaps some are harder to obscure in the dream language than others, and their real selves slip through the cracks in small ways, causing stress on the fantasy’s foundation. Margaret is particularly savvy: she can see the “smoke” that indicates the “fire” of change: the fantasy can’t be maintained forever. The “battle” might refer to the struggle of his consciousness to keep the truth obscured in this unstable delusion.

This thread continues with the fifth intro:

"I play my part on life's stage. I tell what I can to form the perfect answer. But that answer cannot come before all are ready to hear, so I tell what I can to form the perfect answer. Sometimes my anger at the fire is evident. Sometimes it is not anger, really – it may appear as such, but could it be a clue? The fire I speak of is not a kind fire."

The fire is not kind: the truth hurts. Margaret’s apparent “anger at the fire” could indicate Dale’s unconscious frustration with his inability to face the truth. He’s not ready to hear it: not any of his various personifications are ready to hear that they don’t “exist” outside of his fantasy. The truth comes out in small clues that are made palatable to his psyche.

The fire thread picks up again in the intro to the twentieth episode:

"My husband died in a fire. No one can know my sorrow. My love is gone. Yet, I feel him near me. Sometimes I can almost see him. At night when the wind blows, I think of what he might have been. Again I wonder: why? When I see a fire, I feel my anger rising. This was not a friendly fire. This was not a forest fire. It was a fire in the woods. This is all I am permitted to say."

Again, we see secrecy surrounding the concept of “the fire” in “the woods.” Read on to see what I think “the woods” really is...

Now, intro to episode eight:

"Hello again. Can you see through a wall? Can you see through human skin? X-rays see through solid, or so-called solid objects. There are things in life that exist, yet our eyes cannot see them. Have you ever seen something startling that others cannot see? Why are some things kept from our vision? Is life a puzzle? I am filled with questions. Sometimes my questions are answered. In my heart, I can tell the answer is correct. I am my own judge. In a dream, are all the characters really you? Different aspects of you? Do answers come in dreams? One more thing. I grew up in the woods. I understand many things because of the woods. Trees standing together, growing alongside one another, providing so much. I chew pitch gum. On the outside – let's say, of the Ponderosa pine – sometimes pitch oozes out. Runny pitch is no good to chew. Hard, brittle pitch is no good. But in between these exists a firm, slightly crusted pitch with such a flavor. This is the pitch I chew."

I’m including this because it clearly speaks to my theory that all the characters in Twin Peaks are aspects of Dale/Richard’s dream/fugue state. Less clearly: if Margaret “grew up in the woods” and “understand[s] many things because of the woods,” the “woods” might represent the unconscious. Margaret is a link to Dale’s unconscious mind, hence her prescient understanding and Dale/Richard’s nervousness around her. He can only tolerate her veiled truths in specific doses, hence the “pitch” that is just right (neither too vague nor too direct).

Then, before episode twenty eight:

"A log is a portion of a tree. At the end of a crosscut log -- many of you know this -- there are rings. Each ring represents one year in the life of the tree. How long it takes to a grow a tree! I don't mind telling you some things. Many things, I mustn't say. Just notice that my fireplace is boarded up. There will never be a fire there. On the mantelpiece, in that jar, are some of the ashes of my husband. My log hears things I cannot hear. But my log tells me about the sounds, about the new words. Even though it has stopped growing larger, my log is aware."

Margaret’s fireplace is boarded up because her character is not permitted too close to “fire,” or the catalyzing force of truth. Her log is the conduit through which secrets from Dale/Richard’s unconscious mind pass; a method of limiting and regulating what breaks through Dale/Richard’s protective mental barriers. Margaret can help Dale/Richard, and he sometimes relies on her insight to solve problems in his dreamworld, but she can also harm him by revealing too much and breaking the illusion he wants to maintain. He doesn’t want to be completely divorced from his unconscious mind, but it contains repressed information that is dangerous to his illusory world.

Even more evidence! Episode nine:

"As above, so below. The human being finds himself, or herself, in the middle. There is as much space outside the human, proportionately, as inside. Stars, moons, and planets remind us of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Is there a bigger being walking with all the stars within? Does our thinking affect what goes on outside us, and what goes on inside us? I think it does. Where does creamed corn figure into the workings of the universe? What really is creamed corn? Is it a symbol for something else?"

This speaks further to my theory that the entire world of Twin Peaks could have been dreamed up by one man, i.e. Dale/Richard. His trauma has pervaded his mind, affecting his interior experience to the point that he has lost touch with reality. Creamed corn, we know, is a substance that represents “pain and sorrow”/”garmonbozia,” and is consumed by the lodge inhabitants (The Arm). We learn this in TP:FWWM. Why creamed corn, though? Maybe Lynch is just very creeped out by this food; also, maybe Dale/Richard has been fed creamed corn during his hospitalization, as this food would not be uncommon on a hospital menu. Maybe Dale/Richard hates it so much that his unconscious has incorporated it into his dream world as a particularly insidious substance.

Now, episode twelve:

"Sometimes nature plays tricks on us and we imagine we are something other than what we truly are. Is this a key to life in general? Or the case of the two-headed schizophrenic? Both heads thought the other was following itself. Finally, when one head wasn't looking, the other shot the other right between the eyes, and, of course, killed himself."

Is Dale/Richard “the two-headed schizophrenic”? This might seem like an allusion to Leland (who hadn’t been revealed as the killer yet at this point in the series), but Leland’s second head—i.e. BOB—was a separate entity, not just another “side” of Leland. BOB didn’t think “the other (Leland) was following [him]self.” Leland, unknowingly possessed by BOB, was unconscious of BOB’s presence. If the fugue theory holds up, then this Log Lady Intro could more accurately refer to Dale/Richard’s perception of himself as someone “other than what [he] truly [is],” and the projection of BOB (who he does, in fact, pursue, and who ultimately pursues him in return) as an externalized, evil force, could be Dale/Richard’s unconscious distancing himself from an internalized source of fear and pain. Remember, BOB is “with” Dale’s doppelganger, and the doppelganger is ultimately an aspect of Dale/Richard’s fractured psyche. Therefore BOB, however far removed, is ultimately part of Dale/Richard, too.

Without added commentary, let me share the following intro from episode thirteen, which should be self-explanatory now:

"Sometimes we want to hide from ourselves. We do not want to be us. It is too difficult to be us. It is at these times that we turn to drugs and alcohol or behavior to forget that we are ourselves. This is – of course – only a temporary solution to a problem which is going to keep returning, and sometimes these temporary solutions are worse for us than the original problem. Yes, it is a dilemma. Is there an answer? Of course there is. A wise person once said with a smile, the answer is within the question."

I swear I’m trying to skip over some of these but they just keep supporting my theory! Here’s the next one from episode fifteen:

"A poem as lovely as a tree. As the night wind blows, the boughs move to and fro; the rustling, the magic rustling that brings on the dark dream. The dream of suffering and pain; pain for the victim, pain for the inflicter of pain – a circle of pain, a circle of suffering. Woe to ones who behold the pale horse."

This has always been my favorite Log Lady Intro, but it wasn’t until recently that I began to think about the idea that Dale/Richard might be the “inflicter of pain” referenced here. Leland is an obvious alternative, and given the timing of this intro in the series, it probably does refer to Leland on the surface. But could there be a subtextual meaning, wherein the blowing “night wind” could mean dark, disruptive thoughts surfacing in Dale/Richard’s consciousness, and the “magic rustling” is the rearrangement of those thoughts into their distorted perversions, rendered psychically acceptable in the “dark dream” of Twin Peaks? Keep in mind that, although a fantasy world, Dale/Richard cannot control everything that happens in Twin Peaks; in fact, I think the whole series is about him gradually losing control over this unstable delusion.

From episode twenty three:

"A hotel. A nightstand. A drawer pull on the drawer. A drawer pull of a nightstand in the room of a hotel. What could possibly be happening on or in this drawer pull? How many drawer pulls exist in this world? Thousands, maybe millions? What is a drawer pull? This drawer pull - why is it featured so prominently in a life or in a death of one woman who was caught in a web of power? Can a victim of power end, in any way, connected to a drawer pull? How can this be?"

To me, this seems to emphasize the significance of the end of Josie’s arc as a literal “compartmentalization” of her character by her dreamer, Dale/Richard. Her story was spiraling out of control, and so the dreamer had her killed off and tidily packed away inside a drawer pull (the drawer being a symbol of a mental compartment). She wasn’t completely erased, though, as both Ben Horne and Pete saw her in various other wooden objects at the Great Northern in episode 27, and there was a cut scene from the finale wherein Dale was supposed to see her in the curtains of the lodge. I’ll have to go deeper into what Josie could represent in relation to Dale/Richard as the dreamer, later, but for now, consider the recurrence of Josie’s likeness in objects as a potential side effect of Dale/Richard’s compartmentalization; a kind of cognitive dissonance resulting from her erasure.

A big, self-described clue comes in the intro to episode twenty seven:

"There are clues everywhere, all around us. But the puzzle maker is clever. The clues, although surrounding us, are somehow mistaken for something else. And the something else, the wrong interpretation of the clues, we call our world. Our world is a magical smoke screen. How should we interpret the happy song of the meadowlark or the robust flavor of a wild strawberry?"

This significance of this vignette (in relation to the fugue theory) is so obvious that I wonder whether this was meant to be a big reveal on Lynch’s part... Does it even need to be explained? Out of context, it sounds like an esoteric rumination on the nature of reality. I think that this meaning could double as a direct reference to the world of Twin Peaks as a “magical smoke screen” for the harsh reality of Dale/Richard’s actual world.

...

That’s all on Margaret for now — stay tuned for more character / plot point analyses, which will hopefully be much shorter!

#twin peaks fugue theory #twin peaks #theory #analysis #the log lady #margaret lanterman #twin peaks: the return #twin peaks spoilers #david lynch #Dale Cooper #psychosis #fugue #explanation #lost highway #the mystery man #richard #josie packard #schizophrenia #log lady intro

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fredkreynj · 5 years

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3 Tips for Leaving Your Comfort Zone Regularly

A few weeks ago I chatted with fitness icon Tony Little on Twitter. Yep….the “Technique! Technique!” and “You can do it!” guy. He may have been the most energetic fitness guru ever. Plus he has inspired tens of millions of people worldwide to be fit. He is iconic. Tony and I exchanged tweets, and after chatting about success, he tweeted back to me…”Yeah, but it is SO hard sometimes.” There you go. One of the greatest icons in fitness, ever, who has inspired 45,000,000 people to be fit, according to his site, and this incredibly successful guy professes he still finds it difficult to leave his comfort zone, sometimes. Leaving your comfort zone helps you grow and succeed. Every dream manifests well outside of your comfort zone. No one succeeds unless they make freeing, fun, and sometimes highly uncomfortable choices consistently. But like Tony said, sometimes it really is SO hard to grow and succeed by exiting your comfort zone. Follow these 3 tips to see greater success by learning to leave your comfort zone.

1: See What You Are Getting Not What You Are Appearing to Lose

I had a blast today watching my 3-year-old niece. But after 9 hours of continual fun, laughs and yes, endless engagement, I feel a bit exhausted. Factor in how I wrote 4 blog posts while caring for an endlessly curious, precocious kid, and I feel like I got hit by a truck. At 9 PM, a part of me feels like I lost the opportunity to watch my beloved Netflix tonight for some R and R, but I know that in reality, I am gaining a chance to inspire you, to help Don with a guest post and to garner greater exposure by writing this guest post.

“Sacrifice is releasing something of a lower nature to make room for something of a higher nature.” ~ Leland Val Van De Wall

You may feel super uncomfortable right now because you appear to be losing something but what you gain through growth, service, and fulfillment means infinitely more to you and to people whose lives you touch. Focus on your goals, hopes, and dreams to leave your comfort zone more regularly.

2: Know How Every Successful Human Feels Uncomfortable Sometimes

I mentioned Tony Robbins as a prime example of an iconic person who struggles to leave his comfort zone sometimes. I once read how the Dalai Lama shared how he felt genuinely sad after his brother’s passing. Imagine an enlightened being who freely admits he felt upset. Of course, he would feel upset; he’s human. This proves he feels uncomfortable sometimes. But His Holiness also made a joke about how if you think you’re too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito in the room. I found this funny and also indicative that an enlightened being gets annoyed, agitated, and disturbed by a buzzing skeeter. He feels uncomfortable, like any human, when a mosquito buzzes by his ears in darkness. If the Dalai Lama gets uncomfortable sometimes, so will you. The man began his spiritual training at 3 years old and meditates 8 hours every day. You better believe you will leave your comfort zone, again and again, to grow and progress in life.

3: Understand the Illusory Nature of Fear

A Course in Miracles teaches how only love is real. This teaching also stresses how fear is an illusion. Fear is not really there. The next time you leave your comfort zone and feel some mild, moderate or deep fear, repeat the mantra to self, “Fear is an illusion. Only love is real.” I experienced a few death-defying situations during my 8 years of circling the globe. I almost died from dehydration after suffering through giardia in India, I faced down a spitting cobra in Bali, and I sat in a cage with three, 400-pound tigers in Thailand. Each experience made me exquisitely intimate with my deepest terrors, my most horrifying fears. I felt the profound grief of life leaving my body in India, but in the same breath, I observed the illusion that a soul in a human body can actually die. After the initial fear of being attacked and eaten by the massive tigers subsided, I felt the illusion vanish, being replaced with the idea that if I had no fear of the cats, and just love for the cats, that it would be impossible for them to harm me. Every animal we fear just mirrors our fear back to us. No wild animal can harm you if you have zero fear of the wild animal. Again; this shows fear is an illusion, and only love is real. Every being simply reflects your predominant fear or love, back to you, being a mirror. Note; do not try this at home. Minus a few enlightened humans who have conquered fear, I do not suggest facing down a spitting cobra. Simply know that I have read many encounters between fear-less holy men and allegedly deadly wild animals, and the creatures never bothered a fearless, poised, calm, serene, loving, enlightened being.

Do NOT try facing down a cobra at home

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

Fear is not real. Fear is something the mind makes up to pull you away from who you really are. Knowing the illusory nature of fear makes it easier to leave your comfort zone consistently. Leaving Your Comfort Zone Is 100% Worth It Every Time. Always remember why you leave your comfort zone. Punishment is not the end game. Being terrified is not the goal. Remember why you leave your comfort zone. Following your dreams, having fun, helping people, and being a bright light for humanity is 100% worth the discomfort.

About the Author: Ryan Biddulph helps you become a successful blogger at Blogging From Paradise.

Via https://www.personalgrowthchannel.com/2019/07/3-tips-for-leaving-your-comfort-zone.html

source http://personalgrowthchannel.weebly.com/blog/3-tips-for-leaving-your-comfort-zone-regularly

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annietlee90 · 5 years

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3 Tips for Leaving Your Comfort Zone Regularly

1: See What You Are Getting Not What You Are Appearing to Lose

“Sacrifice is releasing something of a lower nature to make room for something of a higher nature.” ~ Leland Val Van De Wall

2: Know How Every Successful Human Feels Uncomfortable Sometimes

3: Understand the Illusory Nature of Fear

Do NOT try facing down a cobra at home

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

About the Author: Ryan Biddulph helps you become a successful blogger at Blogging From Paradise.

source https://www.personalgrowthchannel.com/2019/07/3-tips-for-leaving-your-comfort-zone.html source https://personalgrowthchannel.tumblr.com/post/186304327184

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acimblog · 4 years

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A Course In Miracles Spiritual Community

A Course in Miracles: A Non-dual Path to Enlightenment

by David Hoffmeister

Advaita Vedanta

God alone is real

The world is illusory

A Course in Miracles

God is real.

The world is illusion.

—David Hoffmeister

For support in tracing back upsets David offers this free online tool: LevelsOfMind.com

#acimyoutubevideos #A Course In Miracles youtube #Acim Spiritual Community #A Course In Miracles History

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personalgrowthchannel · 5 years

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3 Tips for Leaving Your Comfort Zone Regularly

1: See What You Are Getting Not What You Are Appearing to Lose

“Sacrifice is releasing something of a lower nature to make room for something of a higher nature.” ~ Leland Val Van De Wall

2: Know How Every Successful Human Feels Uncomfortable Sometimes

3: Understand the Illusory Nature of Fear

Do NOT try facing down a cobra at home

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

About the Author: Ryan Biddulph helps you become a successful blogger at Blogging From Paradise.

source https://www.personalgrowthchannel.com/2019/07/3-tips-for-leaving-your-comfort-zone.html

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quacinema · 7 years

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‘Envers’ in F is a •reverse• in E, 2017 1. THE REVERSE

In 1896, Louis Lumière produced an actuality named Demolition of a Wall.The movie presents actuality as revisable: it includes a reversal of motion.

Does this film contain one or two shots? One can count the entirety of the film as one shot, or one can claim that at the point of the reverse a second shot begins.

What we traditionally call a shot-reverse-shot is the same as a shot-counter-shot: one actor looks at another, who may be off screen, and after a cut, one sees the other character looking back at the first. Actors face opposite directions and eyes are aligned, so one gets the impression theyʼre looking at each another. This technique is often used in dialogue sequences and is a hallmark of “invisible” editing in the classical continuity tradition.

If we count Demolition of a Wall as a shot-reverse-shot/shot-counter-shot because the two shots unfold in opposite directions, we can say that the image is in dialogue with itself. In film terminology we have two terms for the same technique. For the purposes of this essay I reserve “shot-reverse-shot” to refer to Demolition of a Wall as one shot (there is a shot and a reverse, which is a continuation of the same shot), and “shot-counter-shot” to refer to Demolition of a Wall as two shots (we count the reverse as a cut).

All the frames in the movie appear twice. When considered in the order of their appearing, one particular frame is repeated beside itself. This is the moment of the reverse. These two frames produce a freeze, however brief. When movement moves in an opposite direction, it also produces what is opposite of movement itself: stasis.

The brief stasis appears in the midst of consistent motion: the appearance of the single frame is bracketed by two identical frames. Within the intermittent, illusory motion, an opposing stasis also appears. This binary stems from an internal split: the same image appears in two different frames identical in content, but in minimally different places on the film strip. This minimal difference of the same frame, twice placed, forces the frame to appear as a frame.

The difference is crucial: we cannot conflate the frame with reality itself. One cannot conflate sensing with thinking nor watching a frame with watching as a frame.

Watching Demolition of a Wall as shot-counter-shot, the first shot appears natural and the second shot conceptual in its point-by-point reversed repetition of the demolition.

As shot-reverse-shot, Demolition of a Wall has the initial natural appearance pointing to itself in the reverse, and in this self-referential activity navigates away from what appears as naturally given towards the conceptual. What appeared as a natural image in the world of physical laws becomes a semiotic, historical image. Our immediate perception of causes passes into a mediated sign of reasons constituted by the same frames. The distinction between the natural image in the manifest direction and the historical, reversed, conceptual motion is a matter of organizing the frames. The dualism between natural and historical appearing is formal, rather than substantial.

An editor who runs their rushes back and forth sees this movement often. The frames of what is can be transformed to what ought to be. An editor can give reasons as to why to cut into the order of manifest appearing, and propose a different order. The rationality of this order can be judged by anyone who watches. By witnessing a reorganization of our natural frame, a viewer can reason whether the connections and disconnections between single frames take place within rules that one can follow, or not.

What is implied in our linguistic considerations when watching a movie can be further explicated by allowing those thoughts to follow the patterns of framing and cutting that ensue.

The shot-counter-shot between nature and history also takes place between the movie and the viewer, where either can be speculatively reversed as determining the other. Where the switch of the cut takes place, and whether the cut is by the editor that separates or the intermittent mechanism that holds together, cannot be known in advance and is an object of careful study of the concrete movie.

2. THE REVERSE OF THE REVERSE

Related to shot-counter-shot is the Kuleshov effect, which preceded it. In 1921, Lev Kuleshov completed an experiment in which a shot of an expressionless face alternates with other images, including a plate of soup, a girl in a coffin, and a woman on a divan. Audiences project different emotions dependent on what shot follows (or precedes) the face, which remains constant. In principle, the shot-counter-shot and the Kuleshov effect are the same, as they rely on eye-line matches, and implicitly the 180-degree rule (though not necessarily at a close or face-to-face distance; the effect works for any distance between subject and object). One can imagine a face talking and a cut back to an expressionless face and we can infer that the face is listening, or reacting, especially if we hear dialogue as well. The audience often projects its subjectivity into the visible human figure, especially the face.

However, why must this logic of dependence, entwinement, and the back and forth find its anchor only in the expressionless human face? The face can also be smiling in each shot and yield a similar differentiation in reception. What is crucial is not that the face is expressionless but that it is the same. And if what matters is that the frames are the same rather than expressionless, do we need a human face to inscribe this pattern of thinking?

At the moment of reversal, I marked out that the same frame was repeated side by side in order to change direction. If we see Demolition of a Wall as a shot-counter-shot, the cut would place itself in this stasis. If we see Demolition of a Wall as a Kuleshov effect, we can place a viewerʼs projection of subjectivity not onto a consistently expressionless face but instead onto the cut itself: the cut appears the same in every iteration and expresses nothing. The de-naturalization of appearances is found not only in the visibility of reverse motion, but in the dis-identification of subjectivity with the human figure in the frame, moving towards an identification with the cut.

The subject, determined by the spiral of nature and history, is not given, but must be found in the trajectory of the reversals. If the cut is the appearance of negation, and an editor decides where to place the cut by playing rushes backwards and forwards, frame by frame, then one of the origins of cinematic negation can be found in Demolition of a Wall. This is to say: even if one reverses the reverse, and an editor makes no cut, we are not simply back to a “normal” motion. Classical logic does not hold. The cut carries the phantom of the reverse in all its incisions, even when no incision is made.

The appearance of the reverse motion does not mirror natural laws, but its motion is embedded in real physical patterns. If we count the moment of the reverse as a cut, then the cut can count as an instance where a concept is sensed. Similar to the positing of “invisible” theoretical notions and entities to explain our phenomenal perception in the natural sciences, the cut is a governing principle that grounds what is visible to us in cinema. In this sense, the “invisibility” of the shot-counter-shot within classical continuity editing can be taken up as a challenge to not only make visible what was once invisible, but to produce a new “invisible” edit: a non-classical continuity editing that invents a new manifest image of the world.

The recognition of the similarities between shot-reverse-shot, the Kuleshov effect, the parallel edit, and the match cut, as they link to the idea of the cut, is to understand that these concepts link to one another and form a material pattern anchored in natural processes.

To continue this investigation, we can see Demolition of a Wall through additional techniques (seeing the movie as parallel editing, as match cutting, etc.), expanding our notion of cinematic subjectivity as an event in the cut. The cut need not only apply to a frame rate of twenty-four frames per second in forward or reverse motion. For instance, in the way reverse motion produces stasis, acceleration of the frame rate produces slow motion, rather than speed. Acceleration of the frame rate allows for the analysis and pinpointing of various pivots in movement, slowing down the appearance of the world in order to study how movements occur and how it can be redirected, repurposed, and re-cut. The gesture of relating to a human figure in frame to the cut itself in our renewed understanding of the Kuleshov effect repeats in a shift from the primacy of the “human” frame rate of twenty-four frames per second towards a primacy of accelerated rates.

By combining variations of cutting and frame organization, we can rediscover our history and find our framed, natural, manifest image transformed. Cinema can present our sense experience as conceptually tractable in the rational subtraction of the cut. Demolition of a Wall will be subject to revision as we continually revise the nature of our subjectivity in the unfolding of cinemaʼs history.

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illapa-greybane · 7 years

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The Nightmare Arc: IV

Or: Illytar Is Too Good For Stairs

A single lamp flickered upon a single doorstep, the door itself beaten down and lying in jagged shards of shattered oakwood. The three-story house was an old-fashioned country-style dwelling, likely built centuries past, and its distinctly Elven architecture had its own southern Thalassian accents and mouldings that were less gratuitous and formal than the ostentatious gold and arcane stylings of Silvermoon City. It would have been inviting and cheery in daylight, surrounded by a well-tended garden, but now the flowers hung limp from dying stems and stalks, their petals falling away one by one. Two empty pits, half the size of a grown person, stood out against the garden’s grass and flowers, the soil dark and damp.

It was hard to tell which sets of gorestained footprints went into and out of the house with its broken door, but one set – the newest set, smaller than most and lined with charred soot – went in and only in. Whoever had been wearing those boots had not left wearing them.

The song quieted, the air around the old house becoming thick and stifling once again.

It was almost eerie just how familiar a scene it was. The battered door, the gardens wilted by ambient necromancy, the freshly-dug graves.

He stopped in the shadow of that once-inviting house, straddling the last line of soiled footprints. The Scion trailed behind, orienting its eyes in several directions around itself as it took in the scene with detached curiosity.

“I am here,” Illapa said into the quiet that followed the silence of the song. “Is this what I am meant to see? Am I where I am meant to be?” He half-turned in place, twisting his narrow shoulders to cast around for signs of anything not long-dead.

There was no answer, at least nothing in words anyone could understand.

The song then died entirely, and was replaced by the sound of weeping. A wretched, grief-torn sound, and in a very, very familiar voice. It came from somewhere in the upper levels of the house, where a large central living area was encircled by three sets of rooms, a sturdy half-wall preventing any unlucky or clumsy Elves from falling from the upper floors. The lower level appeared to be the basics – kitchen, dining room, sitting room, fireplace. All of the furniture, however, was in disarray. What was not overturned had been torn apart, drawers dumped on the floor. A cabinet full of a generational set of porcelain dishes had been smashed, shards of white and gold and flower-painted pottery littering the floor through nearly half the lower level of the dwelling.

This was all visible from the doorway, and the sickly-sweet stench of death and early stages of putrefaction was frankly obvious without the door there to hold it inside.

There was a momentary pause in the sobbing as Illapa and the Scion approached, growing briefly more distant, but it then continued as if nothing had happened.

A warm breeze, unusual in the cool mist hanging over the town like a funerary shroud, gently fluttered past Illapa and the Scion, caressing their backs as it seemed to try and push them physically into the ruined house.

Illapa caught himself stepping foward as that warm breeze gently caressed his back, and he stopped with one polished boot in front of the other. He had no way of knowing if the seemingly benign forces guiding him to the heart of Solarine’s personal nightmare were duplicitous or not; he knew only to be skeptical of everything he saw and encountered.

But what he had to remember was that this was a nightmare – and to counteract that, he had to be the opposing force. The Nightmare’s tools were grief and fear and paranoia that rendered the dreamers vulnerable and pushed them into its uniquely twisted madness. He had to subvert it, loosen its oppressive grip so that Solarine herself could see it clearly for the fabrication it was.

Here in Solarine’s nightmare, she – or the facsimilie of her – was lost and alone and grieving. So he put one boot in front of the other and entered the ravaged house, the mourner’s grief-stricken cries echoing through the once-homely halls.

Just as it had been in the forest along the path leading into Tranquillien, there were no signs of life. Overturned and ruined furniture littered the floors and hallways. Near a broken coffee table and shredded sofa was the remains of a beribboned wicker basket and bits of coloured paper – a gift basket, surely. A single chocolate wrapper sparkled on the floor at the base of the staircase leading up to the second and third levels of the cozy old house.

Mindless, insensate sobbing echoed through the central room, seemingly coming from an open door on the third floor.

There was something about it that might seem, to practiced ears, hollow. As though it came from a recording of sorts, played through the bell of a Goblin gramophone. And yet, even still, it was unmistakably Solarine’s voice.

His steps crunched on colorful tinfoil and the numerous white shards which were all that remained of a set of heirloom china. Despite the stench of death and early putrefication, there were no signs of life, or of death – no bodies sprawled, no splashes of blood or gore. Only the ruined trappings of a family’s stable, happy life and the inconsolable sobs from the upper floors.

Illapa had heard Solarine weep in joy and sorrow, and it was unmistakably her voice, her hiccuping sobs. He could even picture the way her nose and cheeks turned strawberry-red from the effort of crying.

But something about it was off. There was a mockingbird quality to the sound, too perfectly replicated.

His busy mind offered up a handful of possibilities. A predatory figment of the Nightmare, luring him in with Solarine’s sounds of grief. A memory of loss, trapped in a loop like a ghost. A manifestation of psychological trauma, roaming her dream-world.

Illapa glanced over his shoulder to where the Scion stood, gleaming ivory and red, serene as a saint. It uselessly returned the “look”, turning the eyeless planes of its half-face toward him in a mirror movement. It 'stared’ back for a long moment before turning its face upward, toward the sobbing emanating from the top floor of the house.

“The barrier erected at the border of this settlement does not allow sufficient extension of Our perception to be certain of the nature of this illusion.” It sounded almost… annoyed? As if determined not to be thwarted by the efforts of a simple mortal, the Scion’s handsome mouth set itself into a familiar hint of a stoic line. The top of its head nearly scraped the ceiling as it finally decided to approach the stairway leading upward… and stood there, blocking the way.

Carefully, it settled a single foot upon the first step. The illusory reality shimmered, and suddenly the monster disappeared.

And then, it peered down upon Illapa from over the half-wall separating the walkway of the third floor from the open center of the house, looming and strange. The sobbing continued, and now the Scion gave Illapa what could only be assumed as a “what do We do now” sort of look.

Illapa gave the Scion, two floors above, a look of faint reproach as he, too, placed a foot on the stairs and began to climb, stately and unhurried. “She is trying to keep the corruption at bay. She must be protecting this place. She knows it is vulnerable.�� A hand strayed to his breast pocket, where he’d tucked the feather he’d plucked from the path, gleaming on a square of colored silk over his heart. What a feat it must have been to shelter even a small part of herself from the encroaching Nightmare while it ravaged her mind and body. She was not entirely lost, then. It was not too late. But it was not something she could conquer alone, as she must have realized when she bid him find the Scion.

“She is strong to preserve this small piece of the Dream,” the Scion agreed above him. He was uncertain whether it was inferring his thoughts or sensing them. He’d never spent time in its physical presence since they had given it autonomy, never observed its mannerisms, the way they mirrored his own through a distorted lens. The way it echoed his movements and responded to his actions with perfect synchronicity, perfect anticipation. There was a connection there, a deep and intrinsic one.

He stepped onto the second floor landing, continued up. “So this is not a dream. This is the Dream.”

“The metaphysical imprint of this world’s origination. Yes. Our Beloved’s impression on the impression. Yes.”

Something about the stairs changed, subtly and almost imperceptibly, as Illapa climbed the stairs rather than wasting his own energy and magic by teleporting to the third floor. His limbs and size were, of course, more suited to climbing them without hitting his head on the ceiling. It was a good height for a tall Elf to have plenty of room left over, but it seemed the home’s millennia-old builders had not thought to design it for an eight foot tall eldritch monster.

For shame.

The change as he ascended the stairs was not as marked as that crossing the bridge between Val'sharah and the dreamed version of the Ghostlands. Darkened, peeling wallpaper and paint subtly mended itself, regaining some illusion of life and occupancy. The dry, splintered wood of the stairs themselves became healthier, glossier. The centers of the steps were still worn from ages of boots stepping upon them, however, and a subtle scent of baked goods hung in the air as it brightened from dull, sickly green to the golden glow of early morning. It wasn’t clear where the sunlight was coming from, for the windows on the shared wall of the central chamber were still dark and curtained.

A single feather glowed near the end of the hallway balcony, in front of an open door. The magic contained within that feather was palpable even at a distance, perhaps even uncomfortable for a creature born of the Void.

The hallway, lit by golden morning sun and that single feather, was oddly silent. The sobbing had ceased.

In the third floor hallway Illapa turned in place, his stark silhouette and silvered hair edged in the gentle light of dawn, to find the Scion still on the stairway landing, unmoving. Though not prone to, and in many ways incapable of expression, he could still read the discomfort in its body language – in the way it held its four arms, the set of its incongruously handsome mouth. (His handsome mouth, in all fairness.)

“Are you coming?” he asked – not kindly, but not unkindly, either.

“It would be… difficult for Us to proceed,” the monster answered. Its lower pair of hands fidgeted together, dagger-like fingertips clacking quietly in succession.

“Wait there, then, but keep an ey– uh.” The Scion’s array of crimson eyes glimmered at the edge of the light. Illapa pinched the bridge of his nose. “Keep a… just… be vigilant.”

He turned quickly and could swear, just for a second, he heard a familiar giggle at the edge of hearing as he took the last few steps into the hallway and ducked into the open door. Assuredly just his imagination, stimulated by the ambiance of Solarine’s magic around him, as familiar and comfortable as the priestess’ physical presence.

Though Illapa had never been inside that bedroom before, it was still familiar, in a way. The warmth of light and magic, an antique four-poster bed that she still used on those occasions when she needed one of her own, familiar furniture from the little house in the hills, and a painting he had seen a few times before. A handsome, well-built man with a summer tan and golden hair, a small and somewhat plump woman with pale skin and raven-black hair, an angelic blonde toddler, and young girl of perhaps seven who looked very much like the doe-eyed woman, save for the dimples that mirrored those of the blonde man. The painting was idyllic as it hung in the middle of a ray of sunlight that poured in from nowhere.

Solarine, aside from the little girl in the painting, was nowhere to be found.

There was, however, an open door into the next room. It was more of a suite than an individual room, and the furnishings in the next room were much like those in this one. Something felt off about that room, however. The edges of the doorway shimmered with just a little bit of warped magic, and if Illapa looked at it through the corner of his eye, the illusion began to unravel.

The frame’s paint, through the corner of an eye, at the very edge of the gaze, began to peel, the room began to darken, and the scent of copper wafted through the air along with the dust particles that swirled about in the golden light.

Illapa paused for a moment in this golden oasis of memory. He recognized some of the furniture in the room, things the present-day Solarine had scavenged from her family’s home and still used. And the painting, of course, one of her most cherished possessions, if not the most cherished. It looked glossy and new in this vision of the home of her youth, lacking the scuffs and signs of age that had crept in over the years, despite the painstaking care she gave it.

There was another doorway leading into another room. Not an individual room but a bedroom suite, something that a pair of elven sisters close in age might share in their familial home. But looking at it, he felt none of the security he did standing in this golden-lit room, though it stood there innocuous and seemingly normal. The unease crept in around the edges, betraying the ominous details in brief and subtle flashes when he turned his attention away from it.

This is a nightmare, he reminded himself silently as he stepped cautiously through the doorway. Be the dream.

The scene Illapa stepped into, through that doorway, was truly something out of the most terrible of nightmares. The sobbing they had followed through the entire house had begun again, but nobody was there in that room. Everything from the floor to the ceiling had been scorched, charred almost beyond recognition in some places.

Blackened bits of feathers from a down-filled pillow littered a torn-apart mattress so covered in bloodstains that it could hardly be recognised as what it was. The blood was somehow still almost-liquid, despite the ozonic char of what could only have been holy fire that had burnt the room’s contents to peeling cinders. The wallpaper curled away from the walls in blackened scales, and a mirror atop a ruined dresser had been melted into a glob of ugly, brownish glass and drips of silver.

On the floor, though, was where the nightmare truly had taken hold, even in Solarine’s protected little corner of the dream.

Half-eaten, mangled bodies lay in a pile of gore, glistening and wet. Flies circled and buzzed overhead, but no maggots yet crawled in what were the remains of two small children. Somehow, they had remained untouched by the holy fire, and instead of flame or maggots, a frothy bunch of what looked like violet and crimson bubbles had begun to creep forth from the cavities where their ribs had once protected vital organs.

Except, of course, upon closer study, the froth was not made up of bubbles. It was thousands upon thousands of tiny, staring, lidless eyes.

And then – something began to happen, to both Illapa and to the Scion as the former observed the horrifying scene and as the latter kept watch outside, at the top of the staircase. A sensation that would now be terribly familiar to both of them, the very fabric of space and time began to warp around them, pressing in on their chests and forcing all the air out of their lungs as they were forcibly yanked out of the house, away from the creeping Nightmare that had begun to infest Solarine’s dream-within-a-dream and erode away at what little part of herself she had managed to preserve.

As soon as it began, it was over.

With a POP, both Illapa and the Scion were deposited atop a blank, glossy, black plane that hung suspended nowhere. Everywhere. The stars shone all about them, glinting off the obsidian-like platform at their feet.

#my writing #rp log #plot: the nightmare #gore cw

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