The Soul's Perch

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 20:13:05 GMT

Well its kind of online, it is through e-mail.

One of the most beneficial things I have participated in was an online spiritual confrontation group lead by my friend Art Tick. I stuck with the group for a few years and went through many changes while participating in it. I would like to start a similar group with people from the west texas area.

Format of the Group

Every week, each person will email their reports to one person. That person will assemble the separate reports into a single report and he/she will then email that back out to everyone else. This reduces traffic flow in people's mailboxes to 1 mail out and 1 mail in per week.

The reports are setup in a 2-cycle. Week 1 will be different than week 2.

Each report will have 3 sections. The first section will be for people to talk about their lives or work through an issue in their mind. The second section will be either an excerpt from a spiritual (or otherwise interesting) text for reading or a response to the reading depending on the week. The third section will be for each participant to ask every other participant a question or to answer all the questions that they received.

Week 1
Section 1: Personal Report
Section 2: Text for reading is sent out
Section 3: Questions from previous week are answered.

Week 2
Section 1: Personal Report
Section 2: Response to Text from previous week
Section 3: Each person asks 1 or 2 questions of every other person.

The purpose of the group is to provide a context which encourages people to really focus on their spiritual search. Each person's report is private and confidential, only the participants in the group will be seeing them. People, if they so choose, will be sharing the issues they are struggling with, first and foremost to work through the issues themselves, and secondly to hear other participants' perspectives on the issues.

There is a reason that the word "confrontation" is in the title. The primary form of confrontation will be self-confrontation. The very act of talking about yourself and talking about where you are encountering snags in your life will cause you to confront yourself. The secondary form of confrontation will be from people asking you questions. Those questions might be simple and easy to answer, or they might be very challenging. I will be endeavoring to ask challenging questions. These questions can range across many subjects, from a person's psychology, to their philosophy and beliefs and to their way of life. The purpose of asking each other questions will be to help reveal the hidden assumptions which determine our actions and dispositions. The questions we ask of eachother will be in the spirit of friendship and understanding. Friends should not be afraid to ask the challenging questions.

The energy of the group will be intense. You will get out of it what you put into it, and I hope every participant will be able to put all of themselves into the group. The time commitment will vary from week to week depending on the time you take to reflect over the questions, the reading material and your personal reports. On average the time commitment is somewhere between 2-4 hours spread out over the week, so 20-30 minutes a day. If you are not having to go deep within yourself to participate then you're not putting yourself into the report and you won't be getting as much out of it as you could be.

Through all sections of the report you should be searching for new insights about yourself, human nature, reality, and spirituality. The texts for reading will come from sages, mystics and other wise-folk. But the real learning comes from your own observation of yourself, others and interpersonal dynamics. This group is not a classroom. It is about finding out who and what you really are. If you participate for any significant length of time, you will know yourself better and you will walk away a different person than when you joined.

If you have questions about the group of if you are interested in joining the group, please e-mail me personally "algebraicring" at "gmail".

Trying to get a forum started

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 23:33:02 GMT

The forum is for people who are interested in talking about intentional community and genuine interaction. Here is a flyer I made for the forums. Its the best place to get ahold of me or interact with me.

I will also be starting a site dedicated to philosophic systems and individual people's philosophies.

Another site in the works will be a site dedicated to the exploration of one's subjective reality. This is really a segway into all the esoteric knowledge which is generated through one's subjective experience and gnostic derivation of wisdom and knowledge.

But for now, its all happening at http://www.communitybrainstorming.net/forums

FLYER:

Got Community???

http://www.communitybrainstorming.net/forums

This link goes to an online chat forum dedicated to developing community in the local and regional area surrounding Lubbock and West Texas.

** If you are interested in developing intentional community or are looking for people interested in genuine interaction with each other, this forum was created with you in mind.

** If you are interested in discussing spirituality, religion or any kind of philosophy, this forum was created with you in mind.

** If you are interested in learning about how to maintain the health and well being of the mind, body and soul, this forum was created with you in mind.

** If you are interested in discussing and finding solutions for the current problems facing our society today, this forum was created with you in mind.

Get Connected!

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 06:58:20 GMT

I had someone ask me a few questions in comments, I replied in e-mail and decided to add it here as opposed to in comment. lets me collect my thoughts more appropriately.

I'd prefer to respond and correspond through e-mail. It would keep everything in one place as opposed to having to check an e-mail box I don't use much anymore for any responses and having that response spread out all over the place. Unless you object and request I respond there, I'll respond here.

(From BrainSpew)
Hello, i was just reading through your brainspew livejournal, and I just read this, and I was wondering, why are you going on a "talking fast"?

Is there something wrong with debates, and communication in general?

That's all, no big deal. Cya.

(www.brainspew.tk)

I do find something wrong with debates, and I find nothing wrong with communication. My primary interest is in discovering or revealing the truth. Most debates and arguments are not about finding or learning the truth, they are about being right and winning an argument. I don't have a problem when people have different points of view or different opinions, but I do have a problem when people stop actively listening to each other and are not considering the opinion and point of view of the other person. That said, I hope we can communicate with each other and evaluate each other's positions.

I took the fast for a very specific reason and that was to get some perspective on myself. The fast did two things for me. 1) It helped me cut back on the false talking and bullshitting myself and others and 2) I found out where I couldn't keep the fast up and why. There were some places where I broke my fast because I felt it was in the highest good to have those conversations. Even while breaking the fast I endeavored not to shoot my mouth of or spout junk philosophy. In the end I wasn't able to keep the fast for the length of time I said I would do it, but I learned a lot about myself from taking on the endeavor and trying to be serious about it. In retrospect I think 2 weeks is enough time for the experiment.

I can understand why the fast from talking has you curious and perhaps baffled. I looked at your website and it seems like you like to spout your opinions on things. :)

(From BrainSpew)
You made a lot of interesting points, however, you seemed to have strayed away from the initial thing you said that you would explain, which is the pen only being an experience of the pen. I'm not sure I understand how what you said ties in with that theory, though I do understand your theory on our perception of reality.
I believe that though reality can only possibly be our perception of was is real, our senses can be decieving and completely wrong. Therefore I acknowlege that the boundaries of reality can be deceptive as long as we are the people who are judging it.

(www.brainspew.tk)

Here is the fundemental problem: How do you know what reality is? How do you know when you are perceiving reality as it truly is?

We live in a perceptual envelope. Everything that comes into our minds comes in through the senses. What is beyond those senses or on the other side of those senses? The only honest answer I have is "I don't know". When do you know when your senses are wrong? The only honest answer I can give is "I don't know." Reality to me does not exist beyond the senses. There is no "real world" out there that objectively exists. I cannot tell the difference between a hallucinated "reality" and true experience of "reality". At best I can detect when my experience strays from the statistical norm of past experiences.

Let me try to explain a little more clearly the problem I see. I would like to say that when I look at a pen on the table, I am seeing the actual pen on the table. But is that true? The pen itself has a complex shape and pattern to it. Its shape cannot be represented by 2 or 3 bits of information. If we were to reconstruct a computer model of it we would need megabytes of information. I think its fair to state that there are megabytes of data coming into the eye when we look at the pen. Now lets look at what we know about the eye. The retina of the eye has millions of retinal cells which are sensitive (in most people) to three distinct wave-lengths of color. Each cell we can think of as an individual pixel, it fires and indicates how much color is present of those three basic colors, red, green and blue. I think its fair to assume that each cell fires individually and independently from its neighboring cells and there is a post-processing of the informaiton that takes place. There are meta-cells which take the firings of multiple retinal cells and combines the information in meaningful ways. There are meta-meta-cells which take the output of many meta-cells and again to a recombining of information. And the layers of "meta" continue to pile up. At some point there is a meta-meta-meta-...-meta-cell which recognizes that the inputs being stimulated amount to a pen on a table. This is the biological or physiological explanation of perception. In any physical account of reality, an explanation equivalent to this must be invoked. The eye gets hit with millions of disjoint and independent light signals, divided up by all the retinal cells. At this level there is no recognition of the pen going on, simply the individual firings of the individual sensors. This independent information must be cross-referrenced over and over again until the shape of the input is registered by some meta-meta-...-meta cell after tons of processing.

So where in all this is the experience of the pen? When I look at the table what am I seeing? If there is no light, I don't see anything. If I block the light from hitting my eye but shine light on the pen, I don't see anything. Its the light coming from the pen into my eye that matters. Does the object itself matter in the seeing of an experience and in the experiencing of objecthood and color? Suppose I put on some very high resolution VR goggles and rendered the exact same image through feeding each eye its own unique point of view. That will reconstruct the image of the pen and cause me to state "there is a pen there". So the object itself doesn't matter. All the matters is the appropriate pattern of light hitting the retinal cells. ojbecthood is a secondary phenomenon to pattern. So where is the experience taking place? Where do the colors and shape come from? When the light hits the eye, are all the individual retinal cells able to recognize the pattern of light coming in? No. One cell does not know what another cell is registering. So the experience of the pen cannot exist at that level. There can be no identification of pattern or object the moment light hits the retina. If processing of information stops there, nothing would be seen, nothing would be experienced. If you cut the nerve cells leading from the eyes to the brain, there is no detailed experience being created within the visual cortex, nothing is seen.

You probably agree with everything I have stated so far. Its the standard model that we've been taught about how the brain and eyes work. But what does not get explained along with that model is that our entire understanding of "reality" is false. What we see when we see objects and experience them is actually the firing of nerve cells. Our experience is consciously re-created from billions of independent inputs. That says that when I look at a pen, when I am seeing is the reconstructed image of all those teeny tiny inputs. I am not seeing the pen itself, I am seeing a reconstructed image of it. I am seeing a computer model built from the inputs. That is what I am seeing and experiencing. The pen itself lies in the realm of the unknown. Hell there might not even be an object to touch if I reach out my hand and try to corroborate what my visual experience is telling me. Where I differ in my understanding of reality than most people is that I know that what I am seeing and experiencing as "the world" is really a controlled hallucination created by the brain and its as real to me as watching a movie. I make no distinction between reality and virtuality. Both are created and experienced through the same neural pathways. The difference between the two is a social construct and completely arbitrary.

(From BrainSpew)
I can't stand any of that "giving yourself up to god" or a "higher power" bullshit. I believe in being a good person, and trying you best at anything you can. I believe you control how your life turns out, through your actions and attitude. To say you have a certain destiny and that your life is pre-determined is not only ridiculous but harmful.
To say that no matter what you do, you can't change your destiny is just ridiculous. That means there is no motivation for you to be a good person. The concept of any force controlling my life other than me is stupid.
And I don't want to hear about free will. Free will and destiny cannot coincide. Free will gives you the ability to change the outcome of your life and/or act randomly. If one can change the outcome of their life than noone can know your destiny. Unless he could know the outcome even if you acted randomly, in which case your life is predetermined and you therefore have no free will.
I instantly lose respect for someone who wants to "give themselves up to God". I hope you weren't being serious.

When I use the word God, it means something completely different to me than when you hear the word God. And you can't give yourself up to God unless you know what it is you are surrendering to. I mean know within your experience. So unless you experience God and recognize him/it within your awareness, you can't surrender to him/it.

I sense that there is room for much misunderstanding and argument in the topics you raise here. It is very important that we both be patient in our explanations and speak clearly. Because my notion of reality is greatly altered I also have a severely skewed semantic map providing meaning and understanding to my use of words. What I hear and what you hear from the same usage of words may not be the same. So let me take the time to try and explain what I mean by free will and choice.

I do not believe in free will, and after long deliberation on the subject I do believe in a limited notion of choice. Let me start with choice.

Limitations:

1) I cannot choose an option which has not entered my mind. If the thought of going to tahitti has not enetered my mind then I cannot plan my way to tahitti or consider it as a viable option and thus I will not be able to choose to go to tahitti.

2) My choices are directed by my desires. I cannot choose an option which goes against my character or nature, and this is context sensitive. If there is a context which would cause me to desire to murder someone then within that context I can choose to murder that person. If I am not in a context which triggers that desire then I will not choose to murder someone. The context triggeres the desire and the desire provides the capacity for making a choice. If there is no desire, then no choice in that direction will be made. Desires can be coerced. When faced with a bank robber taking hostages I will desire to give the bank robber money. The desire to save lives entails consequent desires and that is what it means to be context sensitive.

3) The loudest desire wins. If there is only one desire active then there is no choice but to act in accordance with that desire. It is only in the gap created by two competing desires that a choice becomes available. Once a single desire has conquered all other desires there is no more choice to be made. 95% percent of the time there is a loudest desire which directs our actions and 95% of the time we do not have the freedom to choose, we simply act in accordance with our natures, our desires.

4) I did not choose my desires. I choose my desires in as much as I chose to be born, which is equals nadda. I did not choose to be born. Nor did I choose to be hungry, nor did I choose to want to have sex, nor did I choose to want anything. Desires come from the body and the mind, they are conditioned socially and biologically, and they are not choosen. At most you choose to deny or go along with a particular desire and in order to deny one desire there has to be a louder or stronger desire to replace it with.

5) Free will deals with choice and that has been limited to the ability to choose between desires. At most free will comes into play when there is no clear desire or the pull between desires is equal. I have my own semantic meaning with the phrase "free will". To me free will refers to the capacity for the soul to evolve its decision making patterns. A free will is a soul which is free of addictions and of debilitating habits. A free will comes only after a lot of work has been put in to evolve and transmute one's desires. That evolution is a mechanical process for most people. Freedom in will is not something most people have, and it certainly doesn't exist simply because we live in a "free" or democratic society.

6) Lets look at the decision maker that is choosing between desires. When there is one loud desire, the decision maker will side with that desire. There are two ways that a desire can drown out all the other competing desires. 1) The desire itself makes a lot of noise, such as with hunger pains or with the need to piss or defecate. 2) There is a bias in the decision making system caused either by addiction or conditioning through pleasure/pain or social reinforcement.

Summary of Limitations:
A person cannot have a free will until they have alleviated themselves of their addictions and of their conditioning and have spent XX years seriously thinking about their ideals, about the decisions they are making and what is causing them, and about what decisions they should be making. In the end, most people do not have free wills because they suffer from addictions, conditioning, and a lack of serious thinking.

A few notes on Destiny and Pre-Destiny:
You will act in accordance with your nature. It is impossible to violate your nature. Does your nature change over time? yes. Is this change predictable? Thats a good question. From within this universe the answer is no. There are laws in place which govern action and reaction, but the interaction of those laws is of a nature that they cannot be equated they must be simulated. And in order to simulate those laws properly we would need to spawn off a new universe and run it in order to see the results. Essentially our present universe is one of those simulations running. Chaos theory shows us how it is possible to have a deterministic system which is unpredictable on a minute scale and quasi-predictable at a statistical level, but every change in state was determined by the previous state and the laws governing the system. Ignorance of those laws and ignorance of the current state does not magically allow non-determinism or room for what people popularly consider free-will to be.

Don't get me wrong. I think the idea of having a choice is critical. The idea that I am able to choose allows me to stop and actively engage the mechanical thinking apparatus. The act of thinking is a mechanical process which has an evolving effect on the decision maker's enacted choices. Thinking about what I would do and what I should do in a hypothetical situation will cause me to choose differently when that situation does occur. Processing past experiences also evolves or changes the decision maker's choosing mechanism. The idea of needing to choose or having a choice activates the thinking process in a critical way, but both are mechanical processes. Ideas are mechanical, they are like lines of execution in a computer program. And all mechanical things are deterministic. Most are actually chaotic determinism which is unpredictable and can only be simulated.

I hope that explains my notions of free will, choice and destiny. We are ruled by our natures and governed by our desires. Free will is pretty much an illusion or a pipe dream until you work your way out of being a slave to your desires. Everyone has a destiny which includes growth, evolution and maturation of one's soul. With complete knowledge we would see a giant clockwork in place. It is our ignorance of the whole picture which gives us the feeling that things are random or left to chance or that there is wiggle room. I personally experience the clockwork and see the synchronicity at play and I know there is something guiding the evolution, taking an active hand in shaping the world but at the same time it is acting in accordance with its own nature. That guiding mechanism has no ability to act in any other way. We are all being who we each are and it is not possible for any of us to play the role of another.

I use the words "soul" and "God". But the meaning behind my words is not the meaning you have when you read the words. God does not exist as a separate entity. I was once an atheist. When someone rejects what they grew up with they usually try out the opposite perspective for a while and then they usually end up somewhere in the middle. I turned atheist after rejecting my religion, infact I got into some Objectivism, but I matured out of that as well. As an atheist I argued a lot with religious people on topics like evolution. I got so good at arguing point and counter point that I could begin to see the assumptions at play in my "opponent"'s position. And I realized that I would be saying the same thing if I had the same premises or assumptions. That lead me to question and open up to the possibility of God coming into my life for real. He never did, not in the way any christian would expect at least. "God" is a word and like any other word it plays a role in a person's psycho-emotional-linguistic structure. The word "God" typically refers to a conceptual construct, image or picture, and there is a great deal of emotional relationship to that picture. I do not have a picture when I use the word God, instead there is a giant void which I also call the Unknown.

I am a Mystic. I am a linguist. I am a psychologist. I am a computer scientist. I am a philosopher. I study the mind and I study consciousness. I study psychology and the factors that contribute to the personal transformation of turning fear into love. I study epistemology and ask the question "How do I know what I know?" I ask questions end on end and I am open to receive the truth. I will always evaluate a situation looking for the right perspective, looking for communication and truth.

And what I have found so far is that God exists, but it is not the God we think exists and it cannot be conceived of or thought about. All concepts are pictures within the mind. God is beyond the mind and cannot be perceived or related to. There are christian mystics who say the same thing, Meister Eckhart and Bernadette Roberts. D.T. Suzuki tried to bridge between Christian Mysticism, Zen and Taoism and pointed out how God in the Absolute is identical to the Tao and how Zen Buddhism talks about the Absolute in awareness.

Humans are not in control. The idea of controlling something, controlling anything, is an illusion. People are not in control, they are caught in reactive systems. 1) I do not control the unconscious functions of the body. 2) I do not control my emotions (they have control of me) 3) I cannot control my thoughts and choose to have or not have particular thoughts. They come unasked for. If you don't believe me, try to actively have no-thought for a period of half an hour. If you were in control you would be able to stop and start this functions at the snap of your finger. Humans are not in control, they are a slave to the ideas flowing through their minds. They are slaves to the emotional reactions they have. The only way in which a human can obtain some modicum of self-control is to actually empty themselves and paradoxically surrender their endeavor to be in control. This concept is very difficult to grasp until you begin to see for yourself how not being controlling or in control frees you to flow with the blowings of the wind. The willow flows with the wind and stands while a stiffer tree is torn from its roots because it resists and tries to stay in control. The best way to be in control is to not need to control and to not control. Surrendering to the universe, trusting the universe, is a very difficult concept and a very difficult practice to master.

Let me explain a concept which Carl Jung really pioneered, which is the Universal Unconscious. I don't know if you have any experiences with Psychics or Psychic phenomenon. I can tell you its real, but until you experience it for yourself you're going to be skeptical of it and rightly so. But one of my models for God is that he/it is a gestalt product of all the human psychic waves. Essentially we humans are all networked through a mesh of psychic connections. There is constant communication along these connections which we are usually not aware of. Its a lot like the internet because we're not aware of the bits flying through the wire, we simply deal with the small portion of information which is presented on the computer screen which we then in turn have presented to our consciousness to react to. All of these minute psychic communications guide what Carl Jung calls Synchronicity and form what he calls the Collective Unconscious. The collective unconscious is basically a hive mind of default cultural patterns and interpretations of situations and also includes the pathways to communicate psychicly. Everyone partakes of it, most are not conscious of its existence in their mind.

Blah blah blah. This is all really nonsense until you create the concepts for yourself and begin to experience God directly. God is not some other being in a white robe that invades your consciousness and requires you to worship him. God is simply the highest part of yourself. God is you and you are God, there is no separation except for what the human mind creates in order to conceive of and understand the world.

But given what you wrote me and given what I encountered on your personal website you have not made these realizations for yourself and would not agree with what I just said. That is fine. If you are interested in making said realizations in a real and genuine way, if you're the least bit curious about it, then you might benefit from corresponding with me. If you're not curious or if you think you already know what the truth is, then corresponding with me would be a waste of your and my time.

Your biggest concern seems to be about making choices and having that be a real thing as opposed to pre-destined. My perspective is a very anterior perspective. I agree with you completely that it is very important to be actively making choices in your life and challenging yourself to grow and progress. But at the same time I have studied the choice making apparatus in the mind and it is completely mechanical. It functions like a machine and is very deterministic. The growth of the soul is really about becoming more aware. It takes a lot of work to become aware. Richard Rose, a zen master, noted that before you can achieve non-action first you must take lots of action. Before you can reach a position of effortlessness, first you must strive and apply effort. But at some point you realize everything is mechanical and that we humans are finely tuned machines. The most we can do to help the machine function properly is to cultivate our ability to be aware and consciously present. <-- that's the perspective I have grown into. All my striving has lead me to conclude this fact. Nothing is more important than being Aware. I did not create my awareness, it created me. And it is to Awareness that I surrender my need to control.

Let me know what you think and if you'd like to correspond. Again I'm not looking to argue. I value communication and clarity. I endeavor to speak clearly. If there is anything I am not being clear on, please ask me to clarify.

Where does your consciousness and awareness come from?

What are you in control of and what percentage of the world are you in control of and not in control of?

When you say "me" or "myself" what are you referring to?

Edward

A Talking Fast

Sat, 27 May 2006 02:40:51 GMT

Re. a talking fast:
Time Period: Now - Sept 1
Purpose: To abstain from speaking as if I know, to abstain from putting myself up as an authority.
Practice:
1) I can listen to other people talk.
2) I can ask questions of others if I am genuinely curious about what they think, and the subject has been raised already.
3) I cannot ask leading questions, or questions geared towards "getting a point across".
4) I will abstain from participating (i.e. just listen) in debates, arguments, and discussions.
5) I will not answer questions of a spiritual or philosophic nature except to give a response equivalent to "I don't know and I'm on a talking fast." during this time period.
6) I can respond to questions relating to my duties and obligations and to practical questions about my life so far.
7) I can ask questions of others about logistical matters related to my duties and obligations.
8) The above also applies to electronic interactions.
9) Exemptions to the above are given to discussing school related (minus philosophy and spirituality) subjects. There are a few academic oriented conversation I may need to have with professors and co-workers. I am also making an exemption for my monthly meeting with my psychologist. I am going to let that go however it goes, and he's the one that usually directs the meeting.
My Focus: is to focus on the practical and mundane aspects of my bodily existence, work, clean, eat, sleep, poop, exercise, meditate, etc.

Splitting Hairs:
A) I am allowing myself to question and engage Art under Item 2)
B) I am going to continue attending the meetings I go to and the groups I've started, but will reduce my interaction to what is consistent with the above. For the meetings I facilitate I will continue to function as the facilitator and answer/ask questions on logistical matters.
C) I'm going to lend people books provided they ask me for them or express interests in reading them, but otherwise book pushing will stop during this time.

Possible/Known Temptations
C) There's a girl (Lindsey) who I've been talking to about philosophy. I will have to table conversing philosophy with her.
D) The coffee shop I go to is like a red-light district for getting into debates/conversations. I do like to play scrabble and have a meeting there on saturdays, so I will continue going but will abide by 1-9.

Art's suggestion

Thu, 25 May 2006 04:07:51 GMT

Art suggested I take a talking fast, and a listening feast...

I wish I could shrug the recommendation off as a sly way of saying "Stop e-mailing me with your silly mind-dumps." But I think what he's recommending is that I focus on listening as opposed to speaking and that I'll get more value out of it. I know he's right, but doing it feels like I'd have to swallow some yucky medicine. My ego deflated for a day or so after the suggestion, but pumped back up after that. Maybe it really is something I would benefit from. I was thinking of a month long time-frame. I still need to figure out whether I just abstain from talking philosophically/spiritually or abstain from talking completely. I am leaning towards the former rather than the latter, if I choose to do it.

Chewing on reality

Thu, 25 May 2006 04:00:08 GMT

I would like to explain how I got to my position of believing that the pen on the table is an experience of a pen and not a pen itself. I think I would have to write a book to cover all the questions that come up. But the simplest way of explaining would be for me to explain why I make little to no distinction between the virtual and the real. What most people would call real, I would call virtual and what most people would call virtual I would call a virtual within a virtual or a mediated virtual. I will use an illustrative story.

Here's the story:
Start Story
My rich ecclectic friend John invites me over to his house for the first time. I come over and he invites me to sit in one of his sitting rooms which has a big window into his extensive backyard. He's rich, so of course his backyard is well groomed, and ecclectic, so there's labrynth made out of 4ft high hedges in his backyard. I walk to the window and look out into his backyard. As I get close to the window I notice the view distorts a little, maybe the glass is fuzzy. "Hey John, you're rich. I'd figure you'd be able to afford to keep your windows clean too." I say in a jovial and sarcastic voice.
John grins and sticks his hand in his pocket where he grips something. I look back out the window and stare off into the maze of bushes. My eyes catch on movement within the maze. There are some bushes rustling as if there were an animal stuck in them. And then a 7ft tall minotaur gets up from where he was taking a nap. "Oh SHIT." I exclaim. The minotaur didn't hear me, and it begins to wander the maze as if it was on patrol.
At this point I have to decide is the minotaur real, or is he virtual? If the minotaur is real then my friend is more ecclectic than I could have imagined, dabbling in the genetic recombination of man and beast. If the minotaur is virtual then the bushes around him are virtual, and the property of virtuality extends continuously until I find a boundry which is sufficient to act as a separater between the virtual and the real. My mind latches onto the boundry of the window as being a sufficient separater. Maybe its not a window, maybe it is a high resolution computer screen. But I've never seen a screen that was able to portray such a convincing illusion of reality.
"Geesus, John, I thought this was a real window and I was looking into your backyard. How does this screen work? My eyes are getting full 3-D depth form the picture."
John's explanation is as follows: "The screen is composed of millions of Points, and each Point is a variable light emitter which can emit light in any direction and have any wave-length. When you are in the room there are cameras which track your movement to determine the location of your eyes. Once the location of your eyes are determined, the light emitters feed each of your eyes a slightly different image to cause the stereoscopic effect of depth."
"But I thought I was seeing 100s of feet into your backyard. I mean that maze looked like it was 200 feet away. Do you even have bushes in your back yard?"
John laughs, "I don't have a maze made out of bushes in my backyard. Your brain takes the light coming into your eye and reconstructs the picture and adds the illusion of depth from the slightly askew images. It's all in your head, man."
End Story

I put the End Story and Start Story as distinct separaters between the "real" and the "virtual" in my writing here. If I had not told you that what I was about to write should be classified as virtual and given clear boundries between the virtual and the real, I wonder how long it would take you to realise I was telling a story as opposd to relating an actual occurrence. The virtual gets passed off as real so much that I begin to question the ability to distinguish the two. If I was a good composer of stories and able to make them believable, would you question its reality without being told it wasn't real? Like in the story, I think we automatically believe it to be real until something unreal happens and then our minds enter a crisis as reality is threatened by the existence of something unreal within its midst. The unreality must be contained or the property of unreality begins to spread like an infection, applying itself to everything through adjacency.

In going to the movie theatre, we label what happens on the movie screen as virtual and keep a safe separation in our minds between the real and the virtual. It is not a complete separation, however. Movies can manipulate our emotions and our dispositions. They can change our lives, even when the movies are complete works of fictions.

I have begun to see my own life as a story playing itself out for some yet unknown movie watcher. I don't feel like I am much more than a scripted character. I get fed my lines from off stage, I read them, and then I exit from one stage to go to another to read another set of lines which are fed to me from off stage. I am feeling virtual as well, no more or less real than a movie about some guy who is trying to figure out what reality is and in the movie he can't help but come to the conclusion that reality is fiction and fiction is reality. The story of me is as real as any other story, regardless of its classification as real or fiction. This doesn't mean that the universe falls apart, it just means to me that everything is virtual, everything is a story being told in the present moment.

I have tried to find the truth. Somewhere along the way I realised that my head was full of false theories. And in my theory abandoning I also abandoned the theory about there being an external world outside of my experience. I only know what I experience and nothing more. Even my mathematical knowledge comes to me through my experience.

I'm going to refine what I stated before in your office. I believe you have an experience, but the source of my belief is for the purpose of carrying on this conversation and dialogue. I believe you to be a conscious subjective entity which is having its own experience and our two experiences are similar enough to facilitate communication on some level. These are the assumptions that I operate on and form the basis of my automatic interaction. But when it comes to talking about the external world, and other people's subjective worlds, i.e. talking about them as if I know them, then I am speaking falsities. I have to remain silent on those subjects.

The world I live in is a virtual reality, I am only able to distinguish between the "real" and the "virtual" when I encounter a boundry which facillitates the distinction. Without that perceived boundry, I am not able to make a distinction. In my endeavor to speak as truthfully as I know how, the "real" is also "virtual". I've had it proven to me over and over again that the world I experience is a controlled hallucination, controlled by some other force other than myself. I call the controlling force "the brain" to be consistent with the knowledge of the world. There is a great deal of consistency in the hallucination, so much so that it becomes easy to call the hallucination "real". But If I was hallucinating my conversation with you in your office, it was just as real to me as if we had a real conversation. The hallucination is usually consistent to the point where I don't even think about it being a hallucination, that is simply how the world presents itself to me and I act consistently with that perception. I don't have hallucinations in the clinical sense, where I hallucinate something and report it but most other people do not hallucinate and report that thing. All of my hallucinations tend to be corroberated by other people. The "external world" to me is a construct in my mind that I create to explain the consistency in the hallucination. But I realize I am tacking it on, like a current-best guess, because it only explains a subset of my experiences and not all of my experiences. The "external world" is just an idea floating around inside the subjective experience of my mind.

Hell this sounds pretty nutty to me, and I'm saying it. But it is my current best guess as to what the truth is.

RE: meditation

Wed, 24 May 2006 17:54:22 GMT

All meditation revolves around asking the "Who am I?" question. This question breaks down into two prongs "Who do I think I am?" and "Who am I really?" Most of the progress on the 2nd prong is actually by working on the 1st prong and then realizing that I'm not what I thought I was, and then retreating from that faulty identity. Retreating from the answer to #1 turns into asking the #2 question. Sitting there and asking yourself "Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?" repeatedly is like revving a car engine in neutral, the gears are not engaged and there's no real movement.

The purpose of meditating on the past is to bring into conscious attention anything which might be determining your identity and behaviour at a subconscious level. As kids growing up we are very impressionable. In many of us there are 3-5 distinct events which have unbalanced our system. The events are usually emotional traumas which tie certain aspects of the psyche into knots. Our psyche then develops compensation mechanisms to circumvent looking at the traumas directly. Delving into the past and meditating on these traumas is one approach to untying the knots in the psyche.

You may or may not have repressed traumas. But you won't know unless you look and find out. Doing a life review, pulling it all up and laying it all out in front of you is one way to get distance from it and to weaken the identification with it. Conversely it will also help bring you to a greater understanding of what makes up you (the psyche).

Once you start pulling the little-s self out in front of you, you become aware-of it. I like the metaphor of tracking animals in this case. The little-s self is an animal. You begin to study the animal by the tracks it leaves. You study the foot prints, the waste it exudes, and the "damage" it has done to the environment as the animal passes through. If you're tracking the animal fast enough, you eventually catch up to the animal and can begin observing its activities directly.

In the same way as tracking and observing an animal you study your little-s self. The little-s self is basically the decision maker in the psyche and the thought-producer. There are a lot of little-s selfs fighting over what decisions are the right decisions. And there are a lot of little-s selfs which cause specific trains of thoughts or obsessive thinking. First level of tracking the self comes in by noticing when you've stepped into a self-dropping. On the thought level you notice that you are thoroughly "lost in thought" Thoughts are just passing by inside your head and you are not consciously thinking or actively paying attention. On the life-consequences level, we tend not to become aware of consequences to decision making unless they are unpleasent consequences. The pleasent consequences give us no reason to wake up and pay attention to who or what is making the decisions. After stubbing our toes on unpleasent consequences, we begin to ask "what is going wrong?", "why did it happen?"

At some point in the tracking process, you begin to feel like you're getting closer to being aware of the animal as he leaves its tracks behind. Pretty soon you're able to watch thoughts come to you and you can watch the decisions being made as they are being made. This is when the question "who am I really?" starts to genuinely be asked. Once you are aware of decisions being made and thoughts coming to you, you begin to see clearly that the things which have been making your decisions and the sources of your thoughts are not you. You are clearly aware-of them. And the distinction between you and them is poignant and real. From here on out, the questions of "who am I" takes on the character of "who or what is aware of all these nuts in my nuthouse?" But this mode of questioning is only real when you begin to feel like your psyche is populated by a bunch of nutcases which make your decisions and generate your thoughts for you. And you're not going to feel like there are a bunch of nut cases making your decisions for you unless you start paying attention to who or what is making the decisions. And most people don't pay attention, and can't begin to pay attention without a lot of miserable consequences in their life to stimulate the questioning. And even though most people have plenty of pain and suffering, they stick their head in the sand and say "Just give me the pleasure, all I want is pleasure. I don't want to see or look at why I have this pain."

As Art indicated in his notes (http://www.tatfoundation.org/forum2006-05.htm#1), Zen Koans are artificial traumas. A Koan is any question which is real for you. And it is real when it has a hook into your self-complex. Most Koans come from life. We get ourselves into situations which cause afflictions to our sense of self. Or as Art calls it, afflictions to the sense of individuality, of being an individual. And these afflictions generate three questions 1) What was the decision that lead to me being in a situation which caused an affliction, 2) Who or what in me is afflicted and why, and most importantly 3)Who or what am I apart from the thing that is being afflicted?

The whole purpose of meditation is to bring up these traumas, to figure out what the little-s self is, and then begin asking the question of who or what is aware of this nuthouse I call my head? Is there anything aware? Anyone? Hellooo?! Anyone home?

Pointers: In whatever meditation you choose to try, whether it be digging into the past, looking at the present, just sitting and doing nothing, be AWARE. First be AWARE then be Aware-Of other things. One technique for raising awareness is to, in your mind, become like a cat watching a mouse-hole, waiting for the next mouse to come through. Thoughts are mice. Sit and listen. Listen for the next thought to come through. As you are listening and paying attention you might begin to notice that the act of paying attention causes a pressure which prevents the next thought. When the next thought comes, pounce on it, say "AHA I see a thought!!" And then let it go and return to listening at the mouse-hole. What matters is that you are Listening. You can listen with your eyes as well. When you look around yourself, look as if you have never seen anything before, as if it was your first time looking and everything was fresh and new. Listen as if you were hearing for the first time.

Thoughts racing is an indication of self being out of control, there's not enough self-awareness inside your system. Figure out where racing thoughts come from. Practice awareness, Practice intentional and focussed thinking. Start looking at the content of your thoughts and ask what aspect of your psyche do they reflect? What obsession, what desire? Where did the desire come from? What are your real desires?

chatting with one of my favorite cousins. :)

Mon, 22 May 2006 15:38:50 GMT

My cousin,

I am not embracing life by re-entering grad school, I am running away from the fear of the unknown. Grad school for most people, and I think most people are willing to admit this to some extent, is an escape from the "real" world. You even hint to this disposition yourself when you say you turn to grad school to alleviate (read: distract) yourself from your struggles. And you even say that you would prefer to continue to avoid facing your struggles head-on.

I am guilty of turning to grad school as a means of escape. I admit this, but have not admitted it fully. If I was able to admit it fully, I would no longer be able to convince myself that grad school is an adequate means of coping with my fears and anxieties about life.

I have found that I believe there is a fate worse than death. I see this belief played out in my psychology, decision making and behavior. And I operate under the conviction that it would be better to die a coward, holding onto a false idea of myself, than to face the unknown and have my sense of self crucified and taken away from me. Grad school is simply the shelter beneath which I choose to cower under.

I am not alone, for I am surrounded by many confused and scared breathren, the least of which are the professors themselves. How many men turn to their status in the world to shield themselves from dealing with other men directly? How many professors are clinging to the blanket of the idea of being a professor? And if you were to rob these men of their security blanket, would they enter an existential crisis? Would the begin asking themselves the question of "Who am I?"

Acedemia is a sweet mother. She cooes, ooos, and tickles the babe and says: "this is who you are, come let me provide you security, relax and nestle in my bosom, sweet babe. Dream pleasent dreams. Lay your head on my breast and take your milk from my teet." And so the adolescent turns to the academic life as a source of comfort, a source of security, and as a means to regress back into the mentality of a babe, dependent on the care and nurturing of its mother.

When life rears its ugly head, the babe turns to the shelter of the mother. "Oh mother, you are my sanctuary. You are my protection and my identity. You protect me from the threat of the vile demon called Life, and you shield me so that I do not have to face my own fears. Thank you mother. I will be a loyal servant to you. I will praise you above all others and tell other men about the virtues of academia."

But the adolescent, in choosing the life of the academic, rarely becomes a Man. Instead he regresses back into infancy. Academia is man's attempt to re-enter the womb, to find a safe-haven, a place of comfort and protection from his fears. That is my real relationship to academia, I see it as a shelter and a distraction from having to face my fears and enter the unknown. And I see that this is how my fellow students subconsciously relate to academia as well. I turned to grad school because I didn't know what else to do with myself. And the idea of not going to grad school was unbearable, a blow to my self-image...

Who am I? if I don't have a degree to mount on my wall? Who am I? if I don't have a title to present to other people? Who am I? if I don't have a picture of myself in my own mind? Who am I?

And grad school is an attempt to delay the inevitable collapsing upon my knees, raising my hands to the heavens and crying out: "I don't know who I am." Grad school is an attempt to run away from asking this question in any real way. Academia for me is an attempt at presenting other people with a fiction about myself. "Look at me, I'm a professor." When deep inside I feel like NOTHING. I try to fill the void with an empty image. But deep inside I am still empty.

If reading this bothers you, you'll have to forgive me. :) I treat all of life as psychotherapy. Every relationship is an opportunity to get some headway on the who-am-I question.

Growing up, you have been one of my mirrors. When I saw you, my cousin, I saw myself. I saw who I wanted to be. And now finally talking with you again after all these years, in a way it is being re-united with myself. And so I share with you my mind freely. I hide myself from none, and look for those who are brave enough to see and explore the unknown with me.

I have no idea where life will take me. My boat has been adrift at sea but I am beggining to take the helm and adventurously explore the waters around me. I only spend a portion of my time in the harbor of academia. Right now I am working on the character of my actions, both inside and outside the university. Through school, I hope only to learn to do work that I do not like to do. My real focus is on the mind and the psyche. But I do not feel like I fit into the world of academia. I am really a rogue in disguise, a wolf in sheeps clothing. My goal is to penetrate to the heart and cry out "This is not me, and it is not you either. So let us shed these games we play and commune with our hearts. Let us dispense with our pretenses and stop separating ourselves from eachother. We are all ONE."

Alright, my bag of steam has let itself out. :) Maybe I can try to give Kahlil Gibran a run for his money.

God didn't abandon me

Thu, 18 May 2006 16:38:28 GMT

It is me who has abandoned God.

That is the thought that came to me after the feeling of being abandoned wore off.

I've developed a very Christian mode of thinking/feeling. I feel like the Father dwells within me, and I dwell within him. I am not the source of awareness, I am not God. He is my light of consciousness, and my guiding intuition. But i have not surrendered my self completely to him and I still live in fear/avoidance and pride. I have no idea what God really is. I know him only through feeling and intuition. And I could be developing this idea of God in my mind to maintain myself and my individuality. I can see my self, and the self is not the seer, but I don't want to let go of myself, because then where would "I" be? I don't really have faith in the idea of me being the seer. If I did, I wouldn't be holding onto my self. I know both intellectually and deep down that this division is flaky and artificial. But I am still clinging tenaciously onto myself. I know where God lives, but I am scared and ashamed to be in his presence. I feel guilt and remorse for so much that I've done and been through. It no longer bothers me on the surface, but in my heart I know I've hurt people and been selfish.

I have felt resentful to God because I am ignorant, here in this world. I feel like I have been expected to make decisions while in ignorance and immaturity. And I have regretted making those decisions. I don't know how to live this life. I don't know what the right decisions are. I've been trying to control situations and act with pseudo-knowledge because I felt like that was what was expected of me, by God, by Society, by my parents. I don't know when I am making a mess of things. Or rather I don't know when I'm doing something right or beneficial.

While I have been running away from looking at this shame and remorse, I've denied God's existence. I don't know what God is, but there is something that lives inside my heart that doesn't come from me. And I feel shame, remorse and guilt rise up when I approach it. I spend much of my time avoiding things which bring up these feelings. I avoid God just as much as I avoid doing school work or avoid looking at afflictions to my sense of self.

GRR Tracking

Sun, 14 May 2006 06:46:06 GMT

I think having the tracking tied to journalling and updating this journal is interferring with both practices. I haven't update this journal in quite a while and I think the tracking is its own thing. I'm going to start tracking within my own excel spreadsheet. I will also update this journal upon my whimsey.

Lately I've been experiencing manic energy and a large degree of megalomania in the expression of my personality. Maybe it would be more accurately stated that I am finally admitting that I have a huge ego and a very high opinion of myself. Right now I feel like my ego is flaring unchecked. One of the things I am working on with a psychologist is how to properly value myself. I haven't been valuing myself intrinsically and have had a weird dynamic where I try to seek my own value through other things. At the same time I've also been devaluing myself, i.e. checking my own ego and being self-deprecating. I think part of what is causing the opinion of myself to shoot sky-high is that I am stopping the active devaluing of myself. I am smart. I don't need to prove it to anyone. But for the last 7-10 years I've been trying to prove it to everyone, you, me, my parents, my teachers, my friends, etc. I've been afraid of not being smart and I've been actively sabotaging myself to maintain the low-self-image. (as paradoxical as that sounds, I think that's what I've been doing.) So I cut loose on some of the ballast that was weighing down the expressed opinion of myself. Naturally the hot-air balloon is going to jump up until some of the hot air cools. Hence the manic energy, hot air energy in my mind which causes my head to swell. I feel like I'm at the epicenter of movement in the universe. Every story I'm aware of moves around me, and I feel like I have the opportunity to stick my hand in and dabble in things. The mania is like realizing that I'm the dreamer that's creating this whole dream and feeling like everyone and everything is just a pawn, knight or rook while I am the player behind the line of pieces. But the mania is still focussed on me. Its an inflated self-image. The only response I want to have to the mania is to watch dispassionately, to watch it bleed out of my system. If I try to fight it and bottle it in, I'm just delaying its eventually need to come out and bleed off the repressed high opinion of myself.

There are many many factors that are contributing to the mania right now. I think the excess energy which is fueling the ballooning in my mind is coming from my being celibate. The energy that would normally go into obsessing over sex, worrying over relationships, and having to replenishing the sperm cells post ejaculation and orgasm, is ambient within my body and is feeding into the psyche. Because I have a lot of excess energy, I feel a high, and from the high comes the feeling and self-opinion of being on top of the world and that my life is divine, being lead by God. Another contributor to the mania is the stress of having to do school work which rubs a sore nerve (writing english papers). When I sit down to work on my linguistics paper, I want to resist it. I get stressed and the stress causes an energy leak which frees up energy to seep into my psyche. I have to do real work when I write my english paper, and my self-perception of being so smart that I can shit pure gold from my arse-hole gets challenged. The shake up to my self causes energy flows to break free and pour into my mind, whereupon the challenged self-image tries to redirect the energy to convince myself that I really am as smart as I think I am regardless of whether or not I am able to crank out the paper.

There's something funky going on in my psyche. I don't know the cure except to watch it and admit that is what is going on. By admission, through observation, I think a distance develops from it. Being aware of it means it is influencing less of my decision making. Being able to talk about it is the first steps to not being ruled by it.

I have no idea if I will ever be fully free from this particular energy/psyche dynamic, where I have a inflated self-image due to compensating for an underlying fear of being worthless.

---------------

In other news, I have been sitting 30 minutes morning and evening since May 1st. Practice is continuing, but I feel like I'm white-knuckling it through my mania and emotional roller coasters.

Letter to Art: Wanting a little guidance.

Thu, 04 May 2006 05:01:06 GMT

AR: -
no overeat: +
school work: -
exercise: + -
celibacy: +
30 m alone: +
planning: +

Avoidance level 5
Anxiety: 3
Focus: 6
Decision making process (aka center of being): throat
Alignment: 5

NOTE: these numbers are skewed by the fact I am filling them out after meditation and refocussing.

Hi Art,

I'm practicing this 30 minutes alone business in the evenings and I'm noticing a huge difference between before, during and after, with respect to both my decision making (intention setting) and with my center of being (sense of self). I don't know if the meditation I'm doing is a way to control myself and counter productive, or if the meditation is in fact productive, so I am going to try to describe it as accurately as possible to you to see what you think of it.

The semester has ended in terms of classes, all that is left is a final on saturday and then I finish up two papers by the end of the month. I could have done work today, but I just let myself do whatever, which ended up being hanging out at the coffee shop and playing board games to alleviate the feeling of boredom without doing any productive work. My self-center was way up in my head as I was essentially in the avoidance state. I had the time to slack, so my decision making was made by the slacking mentality. Tomorrow starts my study time and I know my mindset will have to shift gears to focus on studying.

In my meditation practice I focus on observing my sense of self, which ends up being my emotions, tension and anxiety. I've found a kind of sink-hole or a gate-way through which I can push into what I am going to tentatively call a lower-register of being. I am pushing down through the back of my mind and sinking below the knots of tension. This "pushing" requires real effort on my part, it is like I am pushing on an elastic membrane as I reach downwards into my center of self . If I stop pushing, my mind pops back up into my head.

The thoughts that go through my mind as I push down into myself are related to acting on the intention to study. As I push into myself I am also experiencing a qualitative change in the decision making process, i.e. it begins to align with what I should be doing if I were to be working responsibly.

At the deepest level that I've been able to reach through doing this process, my sense of being entered my gut and I began to feel very directed and focussed. My gut also expanded to fill my muscle tissue and skin. I don't know that the physical expansion of the gut has any significance.

This is what I'm thinking, and what I would like your opinion on. I think I need to keep reaching down into my gut, stay focussed, and begin making decisions from that level of mentation. This is going to require a continual mindfulness to stay down there, or keep pushing down there. I don't know if this is just an endeavor to control myself, or if this is the proper next step. I am feeling like it is a real decision, and requires an active, intentional effort to literally change the basis from which I operate. To date, I've been expecting God to pick me up with his wheel barrow and carry me to where I need to be.

I'm asking your advice because it feels like what is called for is constant effort and constant awareness. I don't feel like 30 m in the evening is enough to pull this off, I would need to re-center throughout the day, but especially in the morning. This is not a journalling practice, it is not a review of belief practice, it feels like a shift in baseline which requires a literal push with my mind to cause to happen. This shift causes a huge difference in the quality of my subjective experience of my self.

Not to over-burden myself, I think I'm going to adopt a morning and evening practice of 30 m alone, where I push down into my center. In a week I would like to review the situation and see if anything shifts permanently or if all I'm doing is pushing on a piece of elastic that will always push my center back into my head after I stop pushing into it. In the morning practice I am going to focus my energy on making decisions to meet my obligations.

Edward

Wed, 03 May 2006 05:29:07 GMT

Egads,

I'm so far behind in updating this thing, I'm not going to bother with backdating the log. Suffice it to say that I've been in a large avoidance pattern as school has been coming to an end and I had 2 major projects due. I stressed out over a presentation in my english class. Now that all the classes are over, I have another presentation to give tomorrow for my comp sci peers. And I have a final on sat. I will start studying for the final on Thursday.

Post avoidance pattern, I'm deciding to practice emotional-awareness/ self-observation for another month. The practice is slightly different. In addition to 30 minutes alone at night I will also take 10-15 minutes when I detect fear/anxiety rising and observe it directly until it wanes enough to where I can make decisions which are not ruled by it. I am also going to continue writing down a schedule for the day but also indicate where I might encounter anxiety/fear.

AR +
Celibacy +
Exercise -
30 M alone +
planning -
no overeat +
schoolwork -

Fear/Anxiety 5
Avoidance 2
Focus 5
Determination to face self 5

I would still like to journal about grad school and what it means to me, i.e. where it fits into my current life plan. I am not going to do that tonight, but will hopefully do it within the next week. I listed the desires which are still getting my attention. I'm going to move forward on some of those ideas, I will journal about those in the future as well.

Hanging on.

Mon, 24 Apr 2006 04:27:54 GMT

Tracking

	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun
Acc Report	-	-	-	+
No Overeat	+	-	-	-
School Work	-	+	-	+
Exercise	+ -	+ -	+ -	+ -
Celibate 03/29/06	+	+	+	+
30m with self	+	+	+	+
5m cleaning	-	-	-	-

Anxiety Level 5
Avoidance Level 2

Crunch time is hitting pretty hard. I did a lot of work today, but I have a week to finish half of a compiler and to put a presentation together for my english class. I'm planning to crank out the compiler in the next 3 days and then dedicate the rest of the time to my english class. In two weeks this semester will be over. In one week my classes will be over. I am soooo looking forward to it.

The minuses in the above are coming from stress and pressure.

I'm going to see if my brain will chew on commitments some more. Perhaps the biggest quagmire is that I'm in grad school but I'm not able to say I'm committed to grad school. And I mean that quite literally. I am not able to say I'm committed, even though I am. I just spent 10 hours today cranking out a semester project for my logic class. I've got the next week or so to crank out the other two projects, and it looks like I'm geared up to do it. My only problem to actually saying in words that "I'm committed" is my idealism about what it would mean to be committed. In my head, the idea of being committed to my school work is that I choose to do my school work first, before anything else. The idealism says I should use every free moment to be doing the school work. Lord knows I could benefit from it. But I'm just not able to live up to that projected ideal. I can't guarantee perfect work, and I can't even guarantee that I will be working on my school work when I have a large block of time. It is very much a mood driven event.

I can commit to focussing on and doing school work, when I am in the mood. I can commit to admitting when I enter an avoidance pattern. But I don't think I can commit to go straight from the admission of avoidance to doing the school work. The balking is simply that I get really muley and I end up digging in my heels and resisting the reprimanding thoughts. I've got the parental voice inside me chastising my avoidance pattern and I have the rebellious teenager getting resentful and stubborn. I still have this dynamic playing out in me that has its roots in junior high.

Yegads, there are so many themes pointing back to that erra in my life. This is one of them, the rebelling against the parental voice. Another theme is attention seeking. And the third theme is needing approval from father figures. Maybe I can hope my regression is more in line with getting over the syndrome, i.e. that these patterns have to come up and get expressed again so I can see them consciously and then get over them. That period in my life was emotionally chaotic and I think some trauma prevented me from maturing properly. I'm 27 and some of my emotional patterns are that of a 15 year old. Its time to grow up and become a man. And that's a fourth theme in my life. Trying to figure out what it means to be a man.

These things still attract my attention. (ordered by time occupying my mind)
1) The idea of becoming enlightened.
2) The idea of becoming a video-game console programmer (PS3).
3) Pretty college-age girls.
4) The idea of doing yoga and other exercises to become limber and agile. (This primarily to show off on the dance floor, but also as a meditative practice for improving body and mind awareness.)
5) Taking more lessons at the Tracker School.

These things still attract my attention. (ordered by their gravitational pull when they are in my awareness)
1) Pretty college-age girls.
2) The idea of becoming enlightened.
3) The idea of becoming a video-game console programmer (PS3).
4) Taking more lessons at the Tracker School.
5) The idea of doing yoga and other exercises to become limber and agile. (This primarily to show off on the dance floor, but also as a meditative practice for improving body and mind awareness.)

Intellectual Ego Preening

Sun, 23 Apr 2006 16:43:03 GMT

RE: Seeing outside vs. Seeing inside

Before you read any further, answer this question for yourself: I'm curious as to what your answer is before I start talking about what my current answer is.

Q: What makes you think there is an inside?

----

"Logically" if there is an oustide, there must also be its opposite, called inside. But I am not able to find or see "inside". I've tried. I've crossed my eyes trying to pull attention backwards. I've pointed at my eyes trying to see where my finger pointed to, but all I ever saw was one of two things: 1) my finger or 2) a roaming focal point of attention trying to follow where I thought my finger was pointing, but never getting anywhere towards that goal. The focal point of attention was always "in front of me". I could see it. And if I can see it, then it is "outside", right? So the seeing never got reversed to where I could see "inside". Does this make sense? Everything I see/experience is in front of me, and I literally mean everything, including my mind and anything I would call a self. It all sits in front of my awareness. If I can look at it, it is in front of "me", or in front of attention.

My current stance is that in terms of perception, and in terms of consciousness itself, there is no outside and there is no inside. At this point I have a lot of explaining to do. Not just to you, but to myself as well. Why in the world did I ever believe there was an outside and an inside? And if I did believe in an outside and an inside, what was it that made me conclude that my belief was false? (These are brand new thoughts to me, I never realized until now that I no longer believe in having a perceptual inside.) I will explain the loss of belief first.

Are you familiar with Douglas Harding style exercises? Here's one that's similar that I just came up with to illustrate my reasoning. Stand in a room, 3 feet away from a wall, and with your back to that wall. Call everything you see in front of you "outside" and call everything that's behind you "inside". Now go "inside". Turning around to face the wall is cheating. Turning around places the wall in front of you and everything that's in front of you is "outside". By turning in the world, you've also turned around "outside" and "inside" relative to the world, but not relative to you. "inside" is still behind you. So face back into the room and put your back to the wall, cause cheating isn't going to help solve this riddle. With your back to the wall, take steps in the "inside" direction. That means you step backwards and get closer to the wall. If you just took one step, that's fine. Get your bearings straight and take another step "inside". Now keep taking steps... What's that? You can't? There's no more room? You've hit a wall? Well shucks! At this point the spiritual ego starts talking about how he needs to find a way around this wall so he can keep making spiritual progress. Well, lets table that ego's babble for a while and see if we can't make sense of what this going "inside" business is.

So we've taken steps in the "inside" direction. What's the difference between the before and after? Before stepping "inside", everything was outside. After stepping "inside", everything is still outside, but the perspective is slightely different. We have a slightly anterior perspective and there's a little more detail of the room that is visible. Funny... Nothing has really changed from going "inside" except that you became aware of some new things that you were not aware of before and the relationships between the things that you see might change slightly from the added content and the slightly different perspective.

Now lets hear what the spiritual ego has to say. "I've got to find a way to keep going within." Alright ego, what's your recommendation? "Well let me see if I can push through the wall." So as you are standing with your back against the wall you try to push your way backwards. Maybe you start putting your weight behind the push. But sure enough, its a wall and you didn't push through it. All you succeeded in doing was creating a localized spot of pressure where your weight hit the wall. Funny... that sounds like the localized focal point of attention that tried to follow where the finger was pointing. Just like pressing against the wall, the focal point of attention didn't get any further to going inside. Ego: "Maybe I can slide along the wall until I find a gap in the wall!" Nice try ego. Go ahead, slide along the wall until you find where the wall ends and then keep taking steps backwards. But wait, you hit another wall and encounter the same problem. Or maybe you keep going back infinitely... yeah right. Even if you do keep going back, everything you see is still in front of you and "outside". You're never getting to see in the direction called "inside". You can only "move" in the direction called inside.

But wait! If your intuition is able to pick up on Douglas Harding's message, _YOU_ NEVER MOVE. Even when you're taking "steps" in the "backwards" direction, you don't move, the world moves. And this solves the riddle of how I lost my belief in there actually being an inside to see into. By going in the "inside" direction, what I saw shifted slightely in my vision and I became aware of some things I was not aware of before. I don't even think I moved in the "inside" direction. I either became 1) more aware of things or 2) aware of more things. The direction of awareness has never changed, and I am beginning to believe that it can never change, it is always "outward" and this outwards is not relative (having an opposite).

So I am deciding that going "inside" through seeing is not possible. There are other insides within the realm of consciousness, and there might be an inside that is outside the realm of consciousness. Pulyan talked about his recommended practice, a practice of being aware of awareness. This might be perpendicular to consciousness, but awareness of awareness has no directionality to it in any kind of spatial dimension, so inside and outside are not really appropriate terms to apply to it. Within consciousness there is an "inside" associated with self. "Outside" is anything outside the sense of self, and "inside" is what is at the core of the sense of self. "going within" in this sense would be analogous to psychological integration, or finding bernadette robert's True Self. But at the point of complete self-integration, the "inside" direction again disappears. I am definitely working on integrating my sense of self, and going within on that level. In terms of trying practice being aware of awareness, I don't know exactly what that practice is. I know how to move my arm to the left and right, but I don't know how to be more aware and less aware of awareness. It would be helpful for myself to figure that out and see how far I can take that. I also expect there to be a point at which someone cannot be more aware of awareness and the "inside" direction would disappear there as well.

I don't know if you're able to follow or even agree with what I wrote, but maybe explaining where the idea of "inside" and "outside" came from would be helpful. There are two major modes of interpretting perception. 1) I move through the world. 2) The world moves through me. We start out in the second as children but we are quickly educated into believing in the first interpretation. As kids we were oblivious to what was going on outside of our awareness. One of my professors remarked how he used to think as a kid that people died when they left his awareness. He even got into an argument with a friend when his friend claimed to have watched a tv show. My professor said that he thought the other kid was lying because he (the professor) had watched the tv show and didn't see his friend there with him watching it. This kind of attitude (that all that exists in the world is what I see) doesn't go very far in society. In order for the child to survive he has to adopt the language and interpretation of the world that the rest of society has, or risk being ostracized and ridiculed. While children are not aware of a world beyond their experience, Adults can't stop thinking about it.

So how does the switch from 2 to 1 happen? The switch is baked into the fabric of socialization and education. The key rests in the difference between subjectivity and objectivity. Lets say we have an adult and a child. The adult subjectively experiences the world and in particular they are experiencing the child as an object in the world. When the adult gives instruction or direction to the child, more often than not, the adult addresses the child as if they were an object and tells them how to move themselves relative to the world. The adult also begins to tell the child about things which are outside of the child's experiene and expects the child to keep track of these things and believe in them when the child has never experienced them. History and Religion are the two major fictions that are passed this way. Everyone who encounters the child treats the child like an object instead of a subject. To survive, the child begins to build notions which help him cope with other people. First he develops a sense of self and begins thinking about himself as if he were an object in his own experience. Second he begins to develop notions about the world and begins to worry about how he (the object) is relating other objects in the world. In this way the child hypnotizes himself into believing he is an object moving amongst the other objects of the world. His objective frame of reference is his mental understanding of the world and he must navigate the gauntlet of his own mind to survive in the world his mind has created.

There is one more step in the explanation of how "outside" and "inside" came to be. And that is that the world is called "outside" while thoughts, emotions and other "internal" sensations are labelled "inside". The child has learned to classify one part of his subjective experience as "outside" and another part of his subjective experience as "inside". This is THE fundemental mistake in perception and one that ultimately leads to the feeling of being lost in the world. The truth is that there is no difference between "outside" and "inside". Both are occuring "inside" from the frame of reference of the world, and both are occurring "outside" from the frame of reference of the subject. Whatever you want to call them, both "inside" and "outside" are on the same plane of existence. They are both experienced subjectively. A person simply thinks they move through the world because their mind is trained to interpret their experience in that way. Douglas Harding's experiments and books are all dedicated to undoing this error of interpretation. (at least that's my error prone interpretation of his work. :)

I'm Hyper

Thu, 20 Apr 2006 04:37:37 GMT

Planning: /
Acc Rep: +
No overeat: +
Schoolwork: +
exercise: + -
celibate: +
30m Alone: +
5m clean: -

Anxiety Level: 5
Avoidance Level: 2
Focus: 3

commitments:
1. Planning Day in Mornings
2. 30m Alone

The energy in my body and mind is percolating. It's hyper bubbly. I suppose this is what happens when someone has a lot to do and instead of avoiding it, they embrace it. There's 2 weeks of school left and I have 3 major projects for classes due and a few other side projects. I'm am under lots of pressure. But instead of having the pressure push me away from work, the pressure is pushing me into work. And that is leading into a hyperactive state, something I have rarely found myself in.

I think the commitments I have so far are good enough until the end of the semester. I don't want to put more on my plate and find myself collapsing. The drive is kicking in to finish my school work. I don't know whether or not I can say I'm committing to finish my school work, its simply something I'm doing right now and not something I'm committing to get done. And that's a nice segway into chewing on what exactly a commitment is.

What is a commitment?

For starters I'm going to say that a commitment is anything to which someone utters the phrase "I commit to do X (by Y time-frame)". I do not think having the energy, intent, nor ability to do something makes that person committed to doing it. Nor do I think the mere fact that a person is managing to do something makes them committed. A commitment requires a consciously stated intention. It is like a contract to abide by a code of conduct until the terms of the contract are fulfilled. The contract requires certain actions and those actions require a certain amount of energy. In order to fulfill the contract appropriately a mindset is needed which will alot the required energy and resources to fulfilling those actions. Without such a mindset the terms of the contract will not be met. A commitment requires a lot of mindful attention to ensure the fulfillment of the contract.

Good so far, but when is a commitment appropriate? Making a commitment to do something which is already an established habit seems superfluous. Making a commitment to do something which cannot reasonably be expected is counter-productive. Making a commitment to do something which one does not want to do and will subconsciously or consciously find ways to avoid fulfilling the commitment is useless. A commitment is best made to something which is reasonable to expect of oneself, is something one wants to do enough to be able to put the required energy behind it, and is towards something which is not a habit (yet).

A commitment is an energy contract. And with pretty much all energy matters, the energy to do something is only available when one wants to do it.

Where I have failed with Commitments

* I have made commitments to things which I did not really want.
* I have made commitments which have been unreasonable to expect of myself.

How I can turn the situation around

* Start with small commitments to establish the mindful attitude
* Build a self-awareness of what directions I can and cannot put my energy in.
* Get in tune with my genuine desires, and not just my ego-projection desires.

Paying Attention

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 06:18:34 GMT

tracking
Planning: +
Acc Report: +
No Overeat: +
Schoolwork: +
Exercise: + -
Celibate: +
30m Alone: +
5m Cleaning: +

Anxiety Level: 3
Avoidance Level: 2

Commitments
* Planning each morning
* 30m Alone

I'm starting to plan in the mornings tos chedule how my day is going to go. I will chew on commitments in future journal post. This journal post is to capture my current understanding of consciousness. I wrote this to a friend who is trying to play around with paying attention to the content in her peripheral vision. She noticed a decrease in thought content and an increase in energy.

A Few Pointers on Attention. (forgive the length)

1) Don't move your eyes, move your attention.
You should not be moving your eyeballs much at all. What I do is stare straight ahead and lock my eyeballs in place (relative to head position). Once the physical perception mechanism is fixated, I move my awareness or attention onto the part of the movie screen which is on the periphery. Here is the attention Hokey-pokey:

You put your attention on the left,
You put your attention on the right,
You put your attention on the left
and blink once or twice.
You do the attention hokey pokey
and move it all around,
that's what its all about.

Now put your attention on the top,
Now put your attention on the bottom,
Now put your attention on the top
and blink once or twice.
You do the attention hokey pokey
and move it all around,
and that's what its all about.

Put your attention on everything at once,
Put your attention on the center,
Put your attention on everything at once,
Now blink once or twice.
You do the attention hokey pokey,
and move it back and forth,
and that's what its all about.

2) Looking is listening with the eyes.
When you are beginning to expand what you are aware of, you do have to focus on those regions of your perception which you have not payed attention to. Because you have not been paying attention to these regions of perception, the brain's automatic filtering mechanism has decided to not access data in these regions automatically. You are not even aware of the fact that you are not getting content from these regions. It takes time and practice, but once you retrain the brain to pay attention to these regions the brain will get the hint and start querying incoming data automatically. After the training period is over, you should be able to look and listen at the same time. Looking and Listening are actually one and the same. There are more than just 5 dimensions of sensation, and you can experience more than one of them simultaneously. Focusing is what causes the attention mechanism to pay attention to 1 data stream to the exclusion of the others. If you can learn to relax your focus you will be able to pay attention to multiple data-streams at the same time. The retraining period requires you to focus on those regions you have not payed attention to until the brain gets the message that these regions are now important and worth paying attention to normal processing. The attention hokey pokey has you focussing on different regions and then attempting to focus on everything at once. This is how you tell the brain to start paying attention to more than one thing at the same time. You can do this across all dimensions of sensation. Focus on one thing, Focus on everything, relax and don't focus on anything. Rinse, Repeat.

3) The Creation of new Neural Pathways.
What follows is a visual metaphor for what is going on.

       Content
Amnt.  movie
Attn.  screen   <---  Looker  (No-Content)
---------------------------------
Least  |         -/
Less   |     -/
Some   |  -/
Most   |<-Focal Point of Attention
Some   |  -\
Less   |     -\
Least  |         -\

The parts of the movie screen which are getting the least amount of conscious attention are blank or have low sensory content. These are weak or dormant neural pathways in the brain. The movie screen is not the world, it is the brain's reconstruction of the world after the eyeballs have pulled in its data. This is why the eyeballs must be kept still while attention is pushed around inside the brain. Attention is what fuels the strength of the neural connections. We must rebuild the neural pathways that access the sensory data that is getting the least of our conscious attention. This requires our moving around the focus of our attention into those regions within our conscious experience. (moving the eyeballs or head changes the location of the images on the screen but does not get us to change our focus off from the center of the screen.)

       Content
Amnt.  movie
Attn.  screen   <---  Looker  (No-Content)
---------------------------------
Some   | ------------
Some   |<-Focal Point of Attention
Some   | -\
Some   |   -\
Some   |     -\                      (Focussing Top)
Less   |       -\
Least  |         -\

       Content
Amnt.  movie
Attn.  screen   <---  Looker  (No-Content)
---------------------------------
Some   |         -/
Some   |       -/
Some   |     -/                      (Focussing Bottom)
Some   |   -/
Some   | -/
Some   |<-Focal Point of Attention
Some   | ------------

       Content
Amnt.  movie
Attn.  screen   <---  Looker  (No-Content)
---------------------------------
Some   | ------------
Most   |<-Focal Point of Attention
Some   | >
Most   |<-Focal Point of Attention    (Focussing Everywhere)
Some   | >
Most   |<-Focal Point of Attention
Some   | ------------

These diagrams are not accurate and are meant to be purely suggestive of what would be consistent with the subjective experience that results after practicing the attention hokey pokey for a while. The more attention that is poured into the perceptual faculties, the more detailed our picture of the perceived world becomes. The latest theories of consciousness indicate that our perceived conscious experience is a combination of memory + incoming data. The perceptual neurons light up under stimulus and our brain tries to pattern match our remembered patterns on top of the incoming data. Most of what we see is triggered memory of past experience. The more we look at an object from all angles, the more refined of a memory imprint we make for it. Thus in future viewings we will be able to see more detail. I think of the brain as a tuner. We are always trying to tune into the most clear picture. The more time we spend actively looking with our conscious attention, the more we're able to tune into a clear picture.

4) Triangulating to No-Content
At some point, after pouring your attention into your entire visual field, seeing the entire panerama at once becomes effortless. You simply look forward, and you will see most of what is in your peripheral vision because you've habituated the brain to pulling data from the whole field of data. Now it is time to learn to relax into a mode of active listening/seeing. In moving the focal point back and forth, you should pay attention to the whole process. When we focus we are narrowing our vision and pushing "outward" with our attention and scrutinizing faculty. If you learn how to focus at will, it is only a few practice sessions to learn how to un-focus. Relax, tighten, relax, tighten, and eventually you'll learn how to trigger the relax signal directly. I will use the first diagram to model relaxation.

       Content
Amnt.  movie
Attn.  screen   <---  Looker  (No-Content)
---------------------------------
Some   |     -/
Some   |    -/
Some   |   -/
Some   | <-Focal Point of Attention  (Relax 1)
Some   |   -\
Some   |    -\
Some   |     -\

       Content
Amnt.  movie
Attn.  screen   <---  Looker  (No-Content)
---------------------------------
Some   |    <-
Some   |    <-
Some   |    <-
Some   |    <-    No Focal Point    (Relax 2)
Some   |    <-
Some   |    <-
Some   |    <-

What follows is a hypothesis I'm playing around with. A possible reversal in the flow of attention. Motivating this hypothesis really requires first hand experience with the malleability of attention. It also helps to realize (first hand) the futility of trying to "observe the observer" through the means of focussing attention.

       Content
Amnt.  movie
Attn.  screen   <---  Looker  (No-Content)
---------------------------------
Some   |    ->
Some   |    ->
Some   |    ->
Some   |    ->    BernRob's gaze fixed on the Unknown    (Relax 3)
Some   |    ->
Some   |    ->
Some   |    ->

5) Why thoughts disappear
Thoughts can be watched. They occur within a dimension of perception. They also require conscious attention in order to play themselves out. If you stop giving your attention to your thoughts, the obsessive thinking will die out. When you consciously focus your attention on other dimensions of perception, the thought dimension goes silent because it is not getting attention. The ego doesn't like this, of course, and will eventually take back the reigns of attention so it can think its thoughts.

6) Doing and Non-doing
What I have found is that the brain is always in a state of non-doing, i.e. doing without a doer. We just think we did something because our thoughts come in and claim that "I saw myself do X" and we pay attention to these thoughts as if they were true. Going through the above exercises, especially while doing something (like driving, eating, talking, weight lifting, cleaning house, etc.) will show that we do not have to think our actions out before hand. The brain has already unconsciously processed the incoming stimulus and has a stored reaction. That reaction will emerge spontaneously. If anything our thinking interferes with the natural wisdom of the body.

7) A new kind of thinking
As far as I can tell, thinking still plays an important role in the operation of the robot. But the character of thinking has changed. What is important is that the mind have a sense of clarity, of seeing clearly. Knowing is more of an intuitive reaction. Knowing = Seeing. When the mind can react directly to the immediate perception, it will have broken free of its conceptually based shackles. But beyond this is the Unknown, a territory I have little experience with (apart from that which revolves around my retreat from the known).

Important Reminder:
It's all ONE conscious experience. There are all sorts of sensory dimensions, but they all get fed into one consciousness-rendering-chamber, the output of which is your immediate conscious experience. You move your attention within this conscious rendering chamber and you can pay attention to any channel or all channels of data coming in (provided you can recognize them). After you have played around to your hearts content in the consciousness rendering chamber, you might begin to wonder "who's seeing all this going on?" For that I have no clue yet. :) But I surmise the answer is best experienced first hand via the reversal of our seeing/knowing faculty.

Tue, 18 Apr 2006 03:40:54 GMT

Tracking

	Fri	Sat	Sun	Mon
Acc Report	-	-	-	-
No Overeat	+	-	-	-
School Work	-	-	-	-
Exercise	- -	- -	- -	- -
Celibate 03/29/06	+	+	+	+
30m with self	-	+	+	+
5m cleaning	-	-	-	+

Monday
Anxiety Levels: 5
Avoidance Levels: 3

There are a lot of minuses because I was out of town at the TAT meeting. The worst minus, however is the one where I forgot to spend 30m alone. I was thinking about it earlier that day but did not schedule a set time in which to be alone. Consequently by the end of the day I had forgotten about it and was lost in the scenery. On Saturday and Sunday I got up in the morning and spent time alone. On Monday I walked around the pittsburgh airport for an hour or more and considered that my time alone. This is one issue I'm going to have to consider: Can I simply take an unscheduled 30 minute downtime as counting for my time alone? Or does my time alone need to be a premeditated event? The purpose of the time alone is to let my mind rest and to feel my body. Any 30m inutes will do during the day. But I've noticed there are extra psychological and physiological effects from going through a premeditated down time, especially with picking a set place. I wonder if I would want to take these effects into consideration. One thing to note is that if I do not plan ahead in a premeditated fashion, then I pose the risk of forgetting about fulfilling the time alone commitment. It looks like I'm going to have to plan each morning about when my commitments will get filled.

Chewing on Commitments
Another aspect of failure to keep commitments is that I am not really giving enough fore-though to what I say I will be committed to. The mode in which I've verbally expressed "I am going to commit to X" has typically been situations where X is something I wished I could do but not necessarily something I could seriously stick with or live up to. If I put a little more fore-thought into things, two things would happen. First I would make less brash and boastful commitments. Second I would actually prep my energy to fall into alignment behind the activity. I think this lack of forethought combined with fearing being trapped or losing conrol has left my ability to pay up on the checks my mouth writes close to zero. To turn the situation around I'm going to have to do many things: 1) I am going to have to figure out what a commitment is and when it is appropriate to make them, keep them and break them. 2) I am going to have to figure out what I need to be committed to, what I want to be committed to, and whether or not I will realistically be able to keep those commitments. 3) I will have to tap into the part of me that has a desire to make and keep commitments, the part of me that is a genuine desire. 4) I will have to gestate on a commitment before making it, and gestate for a long time on serious commitments.

Current Commitments Im Okay With
1. 30m alone a day for two weeks, starting last monday. 1 week left.
-- Progress: I forgot on one day due to lack of pre-planning.

Current Commitmens which need serious attention
1. Grad School -- Why am I here, what do I want out of here?
2. Spiritual Search -- Am I committed? What am I committed to on this issue?

Commitment

Fri, 14 Apr 2006 05:04:14 GMT

Tracking
Acc Rep: +
No Overeat: +
Do Schoolwork: -
Exercise: +
Celibate: +
30m Alone: +
5m Clean: +

Anxiety Level: 3

Chewing Cud
The theme for the last week has been commitment. Not relationship commitment, but energy commitment. I have a long history of being non-committal. I get involved with this or that project and more often then not, back out before the project is finished. In school and in the jobs that I've worked, if the going got tough I would miraculously lose interest and then find a way to back out of the job. Even now I talk about my problem with commitment but never get around to making or verbally owning up to any commitments. There are a couple issues I would like to cover: Why am I non-committal, what is a commitment, what is worth committing to, and what commitments can I make and keep?

Why am I non-committal?
I think this is pretty much a control issue. I want to stay in control of a situation or be able to assert control in a situation. If I feel like I might become trapped, i.e. not be able to assert control, then I will become mulish and refuse to enter into the situation. If I find myself in a situation which is feeling out of control, I subconsciously start heading for the nearest escape route. The root of needing to maintain control is because I essentially feel powerless or incapable at my core. For one I do not trust my own ability to make the right decisions, and for two I am conditioned into thinking that I am incapable by a long history of pain, guilt and beating myself up. If, for some reason, I were to find myself being able to commit to something and see it to completion, I would no longer be able to hold onto a self-image of being incapable or helpless. Ironically, being capable also means owning up to the decisions I make and taking on the responsibility for them and the responsibility for the state of my life. When I believe myself incapable, it becomes easy to passively blame my failures on this "I'm weak and incapable" thought pattern. Perhaps that is in part why I have turned to it and been so non-committal. I'm afraid of being responsible for the decisions I make and owning up to their consequences. On top of wanting to stay in control, I am probably non-committal as a way to protect my self-image. If I owned up to my decisions I would have to examine them more closely and let the shock of making crappy decisions sink further into my psyche and sense of self.

to be continued
I will talk about the four issues over the next few journal updates. I am leaving on a plane tomorrow. I expect the next update to be monday.

Thu, 13 Apr 2006 03:59:38 GMT

	Mon	Tue	Wed
Acc Report	-	-	+
No Overeat	+	+	+
School Work	+	-	+
Exercise	+ -	+ -	+ -
Celibate 03/29/06	+	+	+
30m with self	+	+	+
5m cleaning	-	-	+

Tracking
Tuesdays and Thursdays I don't get much work done because I have all my classes and then I have group meetings those nights. I don't mind this even though I could be using those times to work on my school work. I spend a total of 3+3+4 hours in group meetings a week.

I have been thinking about adding cleaning my room to the list of things to track, implying that I would do that regularly enough to track. I don't know if I want to add that yet becuase I would have to intentionally carve out that time... Hmmmm. 5 minutes isn't that much on a daily basis and it could be adjacent to the 30 minutes I'm carving out for myself. Alright I'll add it.

On monday I met with my pscyhologist and I talked about my avoidance pattern. The session was very productive in turning my attitude around. I've been running away from looking into my self. Talking about it on here, in my acc report, and with my psychologist has made me realize that I don't want to be anywhere else. I want to look into the unknown and see what's at the core of me. I've been scared, and I've let the fear push my attention away instead of acknowledging the fear and looking past it.

For the last three days, I've taken the time to sit with myself for at least 30 minutes. I clear my mind by letting go of holding onto anything. Initially there was what I would call diffuse tensions causing thoughts which were trying to distract me from looking at myself clearly. Ignoring the thoughts, I looked at myself in tension and then intensionally relaxed and let go as much as I could. The diffuse tensions boiled away and underneath it I encountered a solid tension. I'm taking this to be a layer of my mind which is knotted up so tight that I can't descend through it. Its kind of like sitting on a table, knowing there's space underneath but not sinking down into it. This is at least my current hypothesis, that this tension will eventually change form, most likely becoming diffuse, and I will be able to sink into myself further. No clue as to what the magic trick is. Currently I can sit with little thought-content, mostly looking, but the tension in my mind takes up half my awareness. The other half oscillates between thoughts and no-thoughts. If I focus my gaze on my mind, the thoughts recede and I focus on emptiness more.

This weekend I'm going out of town to west virginia. Most likely I will not be updating this journal during that time. I will still take 30 minutes out of the day to be by myself and gaze at my mind directly. I plan to do homework on the plane flights between here and pittsburgh. Hopefully the environment is conducive.

Avoidance Pattern is back

Mon, 10 Apr 2006 05:15:11 GMT

Tracking:
Acc Report: +
No overeat: -
School Work: -
Exercise: + -
Celibate : +
Avoidance: 8 (0-10) (0=None 3=Some 6=Moderate 9=High)
Anxiety: 5

I am back in an avoidance pattern. I was stressing out earlier today and couldn't focus on work. I left school and went to my apartment where I watched TV for the remainder of the afternoon and stuffed my face.

Things started to go downhill yesterday. The trend so far has been that I was coming into a stability of doing work, and then I felt like I was able to focus more on the accountability report and my spiritual search. I've been reading "Experience of No Self" by Bernadette Roberts and its been putting pressure on me. I work on the Accountability Report daily. The spiritual search seemed to be looming over me, and the thought of when I was going to commit to it weighed upon my mind. I felt like I was on the verge of making the commitment, but I didn't. And things started to backslide from there. It was subtle, but essentially I couldn't focus on school work, so I went home and indulged in avoidance and a mild self-pity.

I am very scared of going all the way on the spiritual search. Although my mind is flat and much of it is empty, I still have a mind. I feel like to go further, especially to see the spiritual search all the way through to the end, is the death of my mind. I am having trouble facing that. I fear that what I will have to do is commit to going down into a region of my own being where I do not know what exists or what might happen to me. I fear that if I go down there, that I might never come back. I could die a permanent death, and I don't know that I'm ready for that.

This could be a hypnotically induced fear caused by reading BR's own account of her own journey into her innermost core and having her self annihilated. I could be imagining it, but I feel like I know what direction I would need to move in in order to reach that core. But I am afraid of going there. I'm afraid of leaving behind my security blankets: What I know, My life situation, being a human, my self...

I haven't made the commitment to go down there. And I know that the rest of my life is one big avoidance pattern until I make that commitment. Its either that, or wishfully pretend that an accident will happen to me where despite my avoidance, my life circumstances conspire against me to force me down there kicking and screaming. I can keep pretending or hoping that will be the case, but I know that I'm leaving in fear of actually facing the Unknown head on. Because I am not facing this core fear, I can't help but be in avoidance.

I have my meeting with my psychologist tomorrow and this is what I'm going to talk about. I missed last monday's meeting because I was absorbed in the flow of getting my work done. I don't know what its going to take to face the unknown, but I do know that a commitment to face it is required. And I haven't made that commitment yet. But even after I make that commitment, I feel I might spend years just working and struggling on a day to day basis to get my work done.

But I face either a life of avoidance, or a life of willingness to struggle. And the choice is sitting before me.

Saturday

Sun, 09 Apr 2006 07:37:11 GMT

Tracking:
AR: +
No Overeat: +
School Work: -
Exercise: + +
Celibate 3/29: +

The - in school work was expected. I slept in, went to meetings, hung out with family, and then friends. The family ate out, and I managed to not eat appetizers. I handled the meal well. But I ate two grapefruit and a couple packets of pudding after getting back to my apartment. I talked to my parents some, but not as much as I had in mind. There wasn't much time before the meal to talk.

I think there was some anxiety and stress in me. I've been reading a few chapters in "Experience of No-Self" by Bernadette Roberts. She's a very articulate writer and is able to portray subtle psychological states very well. The book is about her experiences as she was going through her loss of self transitions. Now I'm thinking about my own state of affairs and where I stand on the path. I still have a mind even though most of it is absorbed in the function of seeing. I still have a sense of self. When I contrast my state to what she must have gone through, I've got so much to self I could stand to lose and work through. Its quite a feat to be strong enough to look at your sense of self enough to have it disappear on you. I guess I've just got the spiritual search on my mind and wondering about my own level of commitment to it. I feel like I'm going to have to make a choice pretty soon, a pretty serious choice to consciously committ to the spiritual search. Everything else would be placed below the search in priority and in concern. And what I take the spiritual search to be, for me, is to see myself clearly. I suspect I would have to go through what bernadette roberts writes about, losing mental faculties and eventually losing self-consciousness. It feels like there's a lot of layers of mind I would have to work through still. I fear making that conscious committment. <-- I want to talk about that more tomorrow or in the next couple days.

Sat, 08 Apr 2006 06:05:01 GMT

Tracking
Acc Rep: +
Exercise: + +
School Work: +
No Overeat: +
Celibate 03/29/06: +

I stopped school work at 6:00 pm. I was thinking about cracking a fantasy book, but instead erred on the side of Bernadette Roberts' "Experience of No-Self". That was probably the best expenditure of my time. I had to set the book down every other passage and let the statements gestate in my mind.

The Eating situation is going really well. I ate normal portions for all my meals. I'm giving myself some lee-way because I'm a big guy, but when I over eat, I cram until the esophagus is overflowing. The kryptonite comes when I eat with my parents. Scheduled meal Saturday (Tomorrow). What usually happens is that we eat at a restaurant and I order as much as my father if not more. I try to eat food the whole time we're seated there so that I spend less time in their heads and having them in mind. I think that's pretty much why I eat so much when I eat around my parents. I guess I'm trying to block them out of my awareness by absorbing myself in food. Possible outs for this pattern: 1) Actively embrace my parents and bring them into my awareness. 2) Do not eat anything (chips, appetizers) and only eat the main course. Instead spend the time doing (1). 3) Order a plate that has no more than 3 items on it for the main course. 4) Talk about these options with my parents before the meal. Now here comes the moment of truth: Can I commit to doing this right now? Can I center myself and align my intention with these courses of action? The past says no. When I am sitting there in the restaurant the compulsion to snack and put food into my mouth is pretty strong. I'll be caught in an over-eating cycle and I'll know I'm caught while overeating. But knowing that I'm caught hasn't been enough to snap me out of it. Once I'm in, my mind is completely enmeshed in the compulsion and I say to myself "Oh well, maybe next time I'll take myself out."

The problem is that if I'm going to quit, I have to quite "right now". Even if I manage to quit 2 years from now, when I actually muster up the courage and strength and will to do it, it will be a decision made "right now". So if I'm ever going to quite its because I've turned "I can do it in the future" into "I'm going to do it right now." I want to stop over eating. I'm basically a slave to a habit pattern and a psychological hangup if I don't stop. I either have to stop eating more in the moment, or I have to develop a mindset prior to entering the situation that will last through the situation. This mindset has to have staying power.

I think I have a quasi course of action. I'll talk to my parents about the situation before hand and talk about all the issues. This will bring me into the mindset of abstaining, hopefully that mindset will be anchored by telling my parents, and that all of us can help me stay conscious through the meal. This I can commit to: That if my parents and I spend time tomorrow that I will talk to them about my eating disorder before we sit down for the meal. This should be enough to get me through the meal. I already feel in my a kind of "but I want to eat a lot of food" sentiment in my mind. This one is going to be a tough bugger to weed out of my psychology. I have not yet tapped the root of this weed.

Overall: Tired, ready for bed.

Thu, 06 Apr 2006 03:26:54 GMT

HMMM. looks like the free account doesn't have a way to delay posts until a certain date. This entry is a work in progress.

Hmmm, this isn't going to work very well where I'm updating an old entry for a week solid. I guess I'm just going to update daily. I'll leave this entry as is. and create a new entry.

	Wed	Thr
Acc Report	+	+
No Overeat	-	+
School Work	+	+
Exercise	+ -	+ -
Celibate 03/29/06	+	+

Wednesday

Overall: Very even keel.
Tracking: The - on the no overeating is coming from having snacks in the office. I'm planning to get rid of the snacks. This thought is coming after I have eaten everything I've deemed worth eating. This is one of those patterns that I have not been able to weed out yet, rationalizing on food consumption. It will be a significant measure of progress to be making proper food choices. Part of the pattern is that I eat to numb the body sensation of being stressed. I don't think relying on myself getting to a position of being stress free is the ideal solution. Prior attempts at controlling food intake have been marginally successful at best. I would like to start incrementally taking back territory from my bad habits. STEP ONE: Throw out the snacks. Review on Thursday.
Reflection: When I came home I was mildly anxious for not having anything I needed to do. I would like to use this time better to calm my system or do something productive. I spent the time looking at news sites and chat forums. Options for nights like this are to meditate, or take the time to review where I'm at in the things I need to get done. (school, primarily.) Catching up on sleep is another option. Most of all I want to stop avoiding things and there's no real way to be sure I'm not avoiding something if I'm browsing news and chat sites. When I come home, I'm in a different psychological state from being at school. If I come home late (after 8:00) then perhaps I can relax, exercise, meditate, or journal as perparation to close the day.

Thursday

Overall: Tired.
Tracking: The only minus I put down was for not exercising in the evening, I did some stretches and some pushups and sittups in the morning. Thinking about just getting rid of the exercise in the evening requirement. Eventually I would like to work on getting a more rigorous workout every other day, but for now school is my priority. Working toward controlling what I eat should be doable, however. Today was a success in that department. I had 3 meals and they were all pretty much normal portions. I'm also taking citrucel to try to keep things moving. I'm optimistic about food levels now. The real test is going to be eating with my parents at a restaraunt or even at home. If I eat at a restaraunt I'm going to need to get my parents in on keeping my ordering down to one medium or small plate, and if I really feel like I want to more then I can order more afterwards. Infact if the restaraunt serves chips I should probably just get something small for the main course and maybe a soup before. If I'm eating at home, I think the trick is to not get caught in the idea of staying at home for 3-4 hours. If I'm just home for 1/2 to 1 hour I can keep myself from entering an avoidance pattern slump which would have me eating as I watch a movie or something. So no movies if I go to my parents house this weekend. Hope I can remember this all, my intention is to not overeat and I can aid this by doing homework proactively and not spending too much time at my parents house.
Reflection:Stress levels are above average, but I'm more tired than anything else. I think that what is helping is that I'm not avoiding school work like I would normally do. I went to bed early for me, 10:30 or so. I woke up 4:00 in the morning with my brain plugging away at school problems. I wasn't wide awake, but I felt like going back to bed would be a disservice to the moment of inspiration, so I did some work at the house, went to walmart and then went to my office early in the morning. I was there at 7:00. But I got some really good ideas down for a presentation I'm giving in a few weeks. I think what I want most right now is to sleep. There's some tension in my head, but I think I'm going to classify that as energy depletion from less sleep and being so mentally active today.

Spring is the Season for Change

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 09:15:12 GMT

I found myself emotionally manipulating Laura. I wasn't able to admit that too her on the phone when I broke up with her, but after the fact I could say it without trying to avoid saying it. This pattern has existed in every relationship I've participated in. I thought I had gotten over it, but appearently I was more wishing I was over it than actually over it. I wished so hard that I could easily believe that I was.

The Pattern as I see it:
If a woman shows interest in me, something inside of me takes notice. I begin to push buttons which stimulate the "show Edward attention" centers in her brain. I begin push my way into her awareness until she sends me more and more of her attention. It doesn't matter if its good attention or bad attention, I seem manipulate the situation so that she's giving me attention. This is an subconscious pattern, and I have subconsciously tried to keep it subconscious.

Support Pattern:
I have a very passive attitude about life. I do not engage life, and when I talk about it I tend to use passive language like "I'm just stuck with it" "That's the way things are" "I have no choice." This passivity is both my real shackle, and my means of attempting to control my life-situation. When it suits me, I play the passive card. When I want to get out of something (usually work) I put on the passive avoidance routine. When something needs to be faced within myself I passively sit back and refuse to look at it, even when what I need to look at is inside my mind and inside my heart.

Meta:
This journal post is an attempt to break down these two patterns by looking at them head on. The support pattern is going to do what it can to look at as little as possible.

How it played out with Laura:
Two months ago I decided to be celibate for three months. That was enough to tip the scales for Laura and we broke up then. We didn't speak to each other for a while, but she was still in my mind. I was growing a beard for Laura before break up and I continued to grow it. Something in me knew that my beard was a tie back to Laura and a part of me still knew I was tied to her in my mind. But I didn't let her know that. We talked some online and I tried to keep myself separated in my mind. When I interacted with Laura I tried to stay practical and address issues practically. But there was still something in the back of my mind that kept her in my mind. As we continued talking, we gravitated towards each other. Pretty soon she was telling me that she still loved me and cared for me. Soon after that I started telling her a line "Do what you want to do" all the while knowing that what she wanted was to be with me. Here is where both the passivity and manipulation come in on my part. I was passive in that I never stated "I want to be with you". What I was saying implied it, and even in my mind I was telling myself that that was what I wanted. But I could not get myself to say it without feelings of fear, guilt and disingenuity rising. Maybe its as simple as a fear of intimacy and a fear of commitment, the fear of losing myself to another person. Or maybe I'm just a schmuck getting high off of someone else's attention. I was manipulative because I knew what effect telling her this would have on her, it would draw her closer and make her more emotional towards me. When I say I knew, I mean I was half conscious about knowing. I knew I had a prior history of doing this and I was trying to keep myself from seeing that I was doing it again. The thought patterns were skittering just outside of conscious awareness. I could hear them, but appearently hearing them is just like hearing the TV playing in the next room, you have no idea what's being said unless you're PAYING ATTENTION. And I was blissfully not paying attention to what my subconscious/unconscious behavior patterns were doing. The manipulation continued until Laura came down and we spent the weekend together. Everything seemed fine, once the hurdle of having an older girlfriend (20 years) was pushed past. I kept telling myself in my head that I could do this, I just needed to work at it. (Another support pattern for the primary pattern in question.) After Laura left, I felt relieved to see her go. Not out of resentment or anything overtly negative. I appearently was looking forward to time by myself. Its awkward for me to have another person so close to me, it takes up mental processing cycles. Half a week later we were talking about when Laura would come down next. By this time there was talk about how Laura would move down and we would live together, etc. I was telling her how what I wanted from the woman that I was with was that we stood together side by side. So I was pushing Laura to stand by my side. It was a very one sided proposal, she would stand next to me. Everything about this wreaks of my own ego being stroked. Laura could sense my attitude shifting. I started pulling away from her in mental-energy-space and she could tell over the phone. She asked me to decide when I wanted her to come down, and that's when I started realizing that I've been feeding Laura and myself a line.

I've been seeing a psychologist for a couple weeks. The issue I went to him with was school and job related. I was avoiding work and feeling like I was losing my interest in computer science. I was starting to project a new identity as a psychologist myself, so I decided to stick myself in therapy to see if any of this was real or just a result of me being stressed and behind in schoolwork. The shrink is getting me to see that I am very repressed. My body knows what my emotions are, but I've been overwhelmed by my emotions in the past to the point where I stuff my body sensations down, ignore them and stay inside my head. This is a clever trick to keep myself unawares of my true feelings, especially the feelings of guilt, remorse, anxiety, hurt, etc. Bacuase I'm able to stuff my real feelings, I'm able to "tell myself" how "I really am". Because I cut myself off from my body, I cut my self off from the source of Love. I no longer felt Love, or a sense of wholeness. This lead to me trying to fill the void in many ways. I developed grandiose self-images: huge egos about how smart I was and what I would accomplish. Another way I tried to fill the void is through the love of women. (Women loving me.) I even did that with Laura. She genuinely did love me. But no amount of external love is going to fill a cup with internal holes. It leaks out like it was held in a sieve. Seeing the psychologist has helped me pay more attention to what's going on inside my body, my true feelings.

My true(r) feelings were that I wanted to be alone. I didn't want to be in a relationship with Laura. I was doing that to try to fill the void inside me. When Laura and I talked on saturday, I had been walking down the path of trying to face what I was avoiding enough to realize my true feelings. I feared to high heaven the conversation that I would have to have. This post is just the first step in exploring what is really going on inside of me. I did not tell Laura any of this, I wasn't willing to see any of this. I initiated the breakup. She knew I was emotionally manipulating her. She accused me of it half a week earlier and I passively dug my heals in, refusing to admit it or even look at it clearly.

I am still infected by this unconscious behavior pattern. These are its support struts:
1) I am cut off from myself and am not able to function as a source of Love.
2) I am passive to avoid seeing myself clearly and in denial about my emotional problems.
3) I seek external sources of self-worth and love.
4) I am willing to delude myself and others in order to get them.

I have no idea what a healthy psyche would be like. There is an emotional knot inside me that I take to represent part of the pain that separates me from Love. I think that if I work to clear myself of such knots, and have them go away, things will be better. No idea if I'll be "cured" or still susceptible to making bad decisions.

Its time to stop seeking external sources of validation. I have to find the source of Love within myself. I have to clean my psyche and my energy.

To Laura:
Should you ever read this. I am sorry for what I put you through. I appreciate having had you in my life, but you can't love me enough to fill the void caused by my own lack of love. I was using you to try to fill that void, and I am sorry for that. I wish you a safe journey Home. You hold a special place in my heart, but I am choosing to be alone. Goodbye, my heart.

I need an outlet

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 06:18:29 GMT

I am under the most pressure I've ever been in my life, and not in a positive way. I basically set myself up for failure in multiple ways. First I put too much on my own plate, 3 hard classes and research to boot. Second I procrastinated in my classes. Third I procrastinated so much that I started to feel overwhelmed and then turned to time wasting activities like reading fantasy novels and watching movies. Now the pressure of deadlines is coming up quick, like the shockwave of tension that travels from the top of the hangman's rope to the bottom as the poor soul looses his footing and pulls the noose tight around his own neck. My body is tense and my energy is constricted.

Because of my pride, I assigned myself too much responsibility. Because of my arrogance, I neglected taking care of that responsibility. Because of my pride, I don't let go of holding myself to those responsibilities.

I've had this pattern since at least Junior high. One of the most defining moments for me back then was when I went to class and had to get up and announce that I didn't have my homework to turn in. I felt like everyone was laughing at me and that I was the class clown. As of right now, i feel like I'm going to do the same thing tomorrow, announce to the class of 5 that I basically don't have my homework done. And maybe for the same reasons. I didn't want to do the homework. I didn't feel like I knew how to do the homework. I didn't give one thought to asking for help, most likely because I feared looking like a buffoon and appearing helpless, lost, and confused.

I am not helpless, but I am lost and confused. I've been following my pride and my ego into new disciplines. Once in a discipline, however my imagined future was punctured by reality and instead of taking the ego-blow fully, my ego projected that it would find fulfillment through some other discipline. So I chase my projections, find out their not real and then immediately by into the next projection I come up with. I feel like I'm at the end of the road, there's nowhere left for me to go next. I'm having to face the cold hard reality that even though I am smart and intuitive, I am a spoiled kid who has never had to really work for anything and fight for something. Instead of digging in and saying X is worth fighting for, one the road to X becomes tough the desire for X gets replaced with the desire for Y. I avoid the fight and the struggle in the X direction loses meaning and energy.

I don't know that I even want a grad degree in computer science any more. But what I do know is that I can't keep running away and chasing after Y's. I feel like I've pretty much fucked myself over X. It's now damaged goods, i.e. the mediocre performance I could manage to pull through with is sounding like complete and total failure in my mind and confronts my pride and arrogance head on. The pattern has to stop. I'm tired of trying to trying to reinvent myself in a new Y, but I haven't found the strength and desire to move forward with my energy commitment to X. I'm locked and shut down. I was thinking about switching to Psychology to reinvent myself in a new discipline, but that's just my ego trying to salvage itself. So my energy is not committed anywhere and I'm basically in the midst of a constant panic attack, which for me is just a constant tension.

No solution. Just description. I can hold the tension and watch my projection crumble around me. But its the most painful thing I have ever experienced. Its not an emotional pain, just a complete and utter resistance to seeing myself and my situation clearly. Even now my ego fights to keep from taking the massive blow headed its way.

Going to bed.

Ed