Danse Macabre

As I was writing a blog that explores my views on Self-system, itself a pretty elusory task, I realized that there was certain literature I wanted to read so as to deepen the vision I have prior to formulating the first written statement. So I have spent the entire month on reading some of the books, the result of which I will attempt to present in a future post. This theoretical research was the main reason for the large time gap between posts here.

Yesterday, my friend and I spent about an hour at the local History of Religion Museum, which is located very close to my house, just in 5 minutes of walk. Strangely enough, I have never been to that museum before. Although, in some sense, this is pretty explainable, given the case I live in the City of Museums, with literally hundreds of museums being unvisited by me. I wanted to see one Buddhist exhibition on Amitabha's Pure Lands, which is considered as an ontological variation of Paradise in Buddhism, whereas, as far as I understand, according to a post-metaphysical perspective the Pure Lands in question are in fact quite specific domain of altered consciousness tapped into by the means of meditative practice; it seems to be a foundational plane of realized, becalmed consciousness which can be reached during dying.

However I may be mistaken in my interpretation and its details; and it was only the superficial experiential impression I've got during a meeting with one Tibetan Lama who introduced some preliminary Vajrayana practices at a seminar I accidentally attended (it was organized as a preparatory class for initiation into Phowa practice, which I didn't go to anyway). Incidentally, talking to this Lama and witnessing his work was very pleasing. Very, very modest man, indeed. It was intriguing to notice that all the (archaic) rituals are needed mostly as an exterior appearance, a sleight of hand for entertaining the public's attention, while "all the true stuff" was done mostly by the contemplative and psychoenergetic activity of Lama's mind going into profound altered states.

Unfortunately, the Museum's Buddhist exhibition was closed that day, so we were limited to exhibitions on Shamanism, Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, Early Christianity, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Western Christianity, and Islam (including a tiny little section on Sufism, a very interesting esoteric contemplative discipline within the Islamic movement). We didn't think the overall impression of the exhibitions was satisfying: the most fun stuff in the history of religion, such as gnosticism and isichasm, wasn't even mentioned. The tiny section on Sufism was boring. Neither did I find anything on Meister Eckhart, my transpersonal favorite, although there were a few exhibits on Serafim of Sarov. There was also an exhibition of Viktor Vasnetsov's unknown religious paintings, which I observed with mixed feelings (this famous painter tended to paint faces with weird, bizarre, mad, hysterical eyes which seem to be very far from spiritual grace and peace).

The brightest experience of the Museum, however, was the picture of Danse Macabre, the famous Dance of Death, the great equalizer in the face of Non-Existence. This very notion is so wonderful, so powerful, so multifaceted, and in a way so liberating that I was reading some of the poems beneath the pictures of people dancing with skeletons with a joyful smile on my face.

Emperor, your sword won’t help you out

Sceptre and crown are worthless here
I’ve taken you by the hand
For you must come to my dance

Death and dying can be fascinating. Carlos Castaneda wrote in his books that death is always the best ally in living. In the face of death everything that you think you are and everything that belongs to you transmutates and shakes off its appearance, beneath which there is nothing but a grinning scull which then itself slowly decays until there is only the whisper: "I am no thing." The silence prevails throughout.

Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experientia fallax, judicium difficile

It is striking how ignorant you can be about the nature of your relationships with others. Especially with those who are close to you in some way. You can be in a very friendly relationship with somebody, a relationship that seems okay both to you and seemingly this other person, and yet, as, for instance, Freud noted, there is much more hidden beneath the surface of water; and the visible tip of the iceberg is just a partial and misleading appearance. Once you go deeper, once you dig up archeological remains of your past that resides in your life here and now and then, once you understand and appreciate yours and others' early traumas, you become both fascinated and terrified by what you have blindly denied, projected, swept under a carpet of your defenses.

In the early years life seems simple. There is Good, there is Evil, however you name it. The system you are identified with seems good to you, anything else is bad. People around can be good to you or bad to you. You define people through their relationship with you and your relationship to them. Psychoanalysis says it starts with the Mother: a caring Mother is the image of a Good Mother; a non-caring Mother is the image of a Bad Mother. The same mother manifests to you as two different persons: the one that is Good and satisfies all your needs, and the one that is Bad and doesn't. Sometimes this dichotomy seems to be able to follow you through life, perhaps dividing it into black & white stripes similar to a piano's keyboard.

Later in life the understanding emerges that not everything is about you, and your judgments are just judgments that can be right or wrong to some extent—or both, or neither. Some people are definitely more kind to you than others; some have a more negative attitude toward you; and most just don't give a shit about you. You look around yourself and can find no good, no evil in its absolute form. You still try to make judgment calls, but they don't seem solid to you. Everything looks relative, and you know you can be wrong, and you may even choose to look at things positively, to expect good from other people, and to blind yourself toward evil. This naivete can be very strong, until there is a crisis in your paradigm, the crisis of accumulated awareness regarding anomalies that don't match your expectations of being with others.

Everything looks relative, and yet there is human drama. There are no bad people, and yet the deeds of some of them are terrifying. In many ways, Hollywood has simplified it all extensively. Life is not a Hollywood movie, it is more like a Greek tragedy, it is more like the greatest play that could have ever been written by Shakespeare. In real life, in true everyday drama it is never obvious who your enemy is, for there are no villains with the letters E-V-I-L carved on their foreheads. (Well, some can have swastikas there… but this is just a sign; and the rest relies upon the one who interprets. Most are simply not fluent in psychopaths' language.) You can hardly make a definite judgment about the essence of a person, for human personality is so complex, paradoxical, and multifaceted. And yet once in a while your life depends upon your making a judgment call. It is not easy to know who are false prophets in your living, however "by their fruit you will recognize them." And, as I recently discovered, there is more to that advice than I thought before.

There would be no human drama, if everything were evident. If there were only the good, the bad, and the ugly, you would always know whom to shoot. But there aren't; and you don't. It is impossible for your enemy to betray you, you would expect that; and it would make no sense to call thy enemy's deeds "betrayal." In fact with an enemy you speak in terms of war, not betrayal. It's all quite sincere and straightforward. The very definition of betrayal is that it is done by those from whom you would never expect that. All human drama that directly involves you is created by thy neighbors. Look at the people who surround you. You would never see that coming, that is the point. Look in the mirror. Oedipus killed his own father and fucked his own mother, unknowingly. Stop fucking people close to you—or if you think you can't stop, at least do it consciously, sincerely, without deceiving yourself.

The very art of deception is in making you deceived. People are naturally two-faced, they tend to have many faces. Id, ego, and superego are just three of the most known subpersonalities. There have always been large amounts of data in clinical psychology on so-called manipulative and exploiting types of personality. All their life, from the early childhood (when this could have been important so as to adapt to a pathological social environment) these people have been trained to deceive others, to show them false appearances, to appear before you in sheep's clothing, to be your greatest friend, and to exploit you. In the field of human drama these are professionals. Such people consciously and unconsciously find your weak spots and use them, and one of the basic mechanisms for this is exploitation of transferential/countertransferential dynamics.

If one, for example, has an especially pathological narcissistic personality, that person will easily find ways how to make others serve him or her. Sometimes they do it unconsciously for their egos; in many cases, they learn how to manipulate their unconscious so as to create extensive networks of lies. They can build cults and/or businesses around it by being a "charismatic" leader and making other people do hard work for them through finding weak spots in their personalities. The transference-based deception may last forever, especially if you yourself have serious unsolved issues (such as victim patterns); but when you become aware of the transferential phenomena and break up the pattern, this person will instantaneously recognize the danger you bring to his or her system's stability; and you will be immediately discarded from it by the narcissism's immune system, without any mercy and self-doubt whatsoever. Furthermore, if that person, in addition to being narcissistic, is also highly dissociative, he or she may as well simply dissociate the entire narcissistic schemata, rationalize a sudden loss of a close one, and eventually maintain a good self-image (or at least persona).

How to recognize such a person? Look at the deeds of the overall self, not just the words of his or her persona or social mask. Look both closely and from distance. Look into yourself as well. See the relationship dynamics between you and the other, especially it relates to those who are most important to you. Feel into the body sensations and gestures that you engage in. Hear the words and the inner dialogue spoken. And finally awake to the pattern.

Brian Eno, "How Many Worlds"

Thinking of a world and the light of the sun

And all the many lives that were ever begun,

Ever begun.

Our little world turning in the blue

As each day goes there's another one new,

Another one new.

How many people will we feed today,

How many lips will we kiss today,

If we wake up?

How many worlds will we ever see,

And how many people can we ever be,

If we wake up?

Thinking of a world in the light of the sun

And all the many lives that were ever begun,

Ever begun.

PricewaterhouseCoopers' economic crime report on Russia

PricewaterhouseCoopers published its report (entitled Economic crime in a downturn: The 5th Global economic crime survey: Russia) that is worth to be mentioned, given the fact that I spend a lot of time analyzing Russian mentality in this blog. Unsurprisingly, according to the report Russia ranks first among 55 surveyed countries in terms of economic crimes related to business (the major problem is stealing).

The survey of more than 3,000 respondents in 54 countries, including 86 respondents from Russia, is the most comprehensive study of its kind, and was conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers in conjunction with the INSEAD business school.

The survey found that 71% of Russian respondents had experienced some form of economic crime during the last 12 months. This is a 12 percentage point increase compared to our last Economic Crime Survey in 2007 (59%). 43% of those said that the cost of fraud had increased since this time last year.

The current economic climate has affected individuals’ view on fraud risks, with 51% of respondents reporting that they believe their organisation currently faces a greater risk of economic crime. 86% cited heightened incentive or pressure to commit fraud. (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2009)

Bribery and stealing have been the biggest pathologies of Russia for centuries. The reasons for this are numerous, and it takes nothing less than a comprehensive multidimensional inquiry in order to start at least appreciating the overall complexities of the sociocultural problems exhibited in this country.

Some notes on importance of experiential pluralism for democratic societies

One of the most important features of a contemporary democratic society is its allowance of pluralism of perspectives. The term perspectives designates various viewpoints through which we are looking and co-constructing the world. The great postmodern revolution of the recent times includes dramatic deepening in our understanding of how pluralistic systems of society actually are beneficial for its growth and development towards greater goodness.

Human rights movement of 1960's liberated human consciousness for more encompassing modes of interrelations among people of different sociocultural, psychological, and biological backgrounds, with an emphasis being made on equality among people no matter what their social status, race, creed, etc. are. Recent trends in social sciences, hopefully, point towards emergence of even more sophisticated forms of liberation that emphasize equally both individual differences and commonalities in coherent fields of global unitas multiplex. These newly emerging systems of perspectives allow complexities to appear in people's judgments regarding relative depth and value of various occasions. They increasingly take into account developmental data that points to the fact that human beings and, hence, societies are not simply heterarchically-organized entities (where everyone is absolutely equal in all aspects to everyone else); humanity also develops hierarchically, with each new level in its evolution becoming an even more liberated opening towards both autonomous freedom and active social inclusion simultaneously.

This hierarchical nature of evolution, which dialectically brings new freedoms and challenges, can be illustrated by the very history of the humankind. For instance, slavery blossomed in the premodern epoch as a necessary evolutionary adaptation for various human societies to survive in the times when there was main emphasis on agricultural modes of production and the societies themselves had not developed complex sociocultural structures to support individual freedoms yet. Later on, when modernity was brought forth by the Age of Enlightenment, the development of machinery allowed more evolved industrial modes of production to undo the adaptive necessity of slavery, which freed space for new insights into the nature of individual freedoms (hence the famous "all men are created equal"). With the information revolution of the postmodern turn, humanity's capacity to linguistic self-reflection once again was deepened; and the basic notions of what being human actually means underwent the process of major re-visioning, resulting in conscious expansion of freedoms toward groups that previously were minorities and whose interests did not count at all in the eyes of the dominating sociocultural structures. "All men are created equal" now is interpreted not as "all white men of European descent are created equal" but as "all men and women, regardless of race, creed, color, nationality, political standings or personal background, are created equal."

The next step in the liberation movement is going to be the emergence of capacity to make complex moral judgments so as to preserve and encourage these newly developed freedoms. That is, on the absolute scale all men and women and phenomena are equal, but on the relative scale in order to preserve these newly achieved freedoms we, the people, have to coordinate and manage historically more ancient worldviews, which according to developmental science are still present throughout the world and in your very own development (every person in his or her development has to go through narcissistic clan-mentality stage first, then through mythic-sociocentric slavery stage, then through rationalistic stage, then through pluralistic stage, and so on), from unrestricted self-expression because it would limit others and eventually undo the hard-won freedoms of increasingly pluralistic society, which by definition allows these various worldviews and worldspaces to exist without oppressive discrimination. Therefore, everyday we have to make quite sophisticated moral judgments and apply complex forms of non-oppressive discriminating wisdom so as to support healthy equilibration of the entire (hieroheterarchical) evolutionary spiral. (For further information see, for example, works of J. Habermas and K. Wilber.)

Sociocultural liberation that includes increasing openness to pluralism brings forth multitudes of lifestyles and worldspaces, with each of them being a domain of relatively unique experience shared in the consciousness of those who co-enact this particular worldspace. Emergence of pluralism of perspectives means inclusion of pluralism of experiences into the system of experiential phenomena that are allowed to be experienced by today's human beings. In contemporary forms of democracy I am no longer obligated to exercise and publicly worship a single system of beliefs and dogmas, and I am given the right to publicly defend my perspectives in the face of my community (even though, developmentally, some of my higher intentions can be interpreted as lower ones). Had it not been the case, it would have been a characteristic of a totalitarian society. Any worldview that I exercise includes certain attitudes and perspectives molded by the meshwork of intentional, biographical, biological, social, and cultural influences. These perspectives shape my consciousness; and the more open the system of my beliefs is, the more open I am to different phenomena in consciousness, and the more abundant my being-in-the-world becomes.

Just as certain political or philosophical attitudes and perspectives can be favored (encouraged) or prohibited (discouraged) in a certain society, any other experiential phenomena whatsoever can suffer the same fate. Some of them are quite obvious. E.g. various criticisms successfully showed that the worldview of extreme scientific materialism, that is scientism, that is physicalism, is a system that favors solely extroverted formal-operational cognition and the myth of the given in its modern form (the latter means ignorance of the tetra-constructed nature of reality and lack of linguistic self-reflection and self-criticism about one's own foundational scientistic beliefs). Scientism can be characterized by rigidity, sometimes pathological, in the way how a person perceives the self and the world while being unconscious about his or her exclusive attachment to that particular worldview. Usually, such an individual does whatever he or she can so as to stay agnostic (i.e. unknowing) about one's own limitations, fixating at the rational structure of consciousness and doing the best at attaching to it. That person harshly attacks and ridicules anybody else who doesn't exhibit the same beliefs he or she identified with. Such kind of people tend to form their own societies and social groups and strive for obtaining dominance in the sociocultural sphere. 

When they actually start dominating, as it happened with psychology during its unfortunate regression into naive behaviorism and reductionism in the 20th century, this may result in a dramatic narrowing of consciousness towards its most materialistic and gross appearances. Anything resembling psyche, soul, and even consciousness fearfully disappears from the discourse; and the system of scientistic totalitarianism starts to prevail. Charles T. Tart in his recent book The End of Materialism explores this kind of worldview which he calls the Western Creed, for it is a type of worldview that is largely practiced in the today's society. He even provides a very simple exercise that brings more awareness to essential aspects of this point of view (it can be accessed online). This simple exercise experientially demonstrates that attitudes and perspectives we entertain directly influence the state of consciousness we are in. And here we probably come to the main reason why I started writing this post.

A truly democratic society allows multiplicity and pluralism of perspectives to be exercised. Perspectives include not only ideas and political gestures but also states (and structures) of consciousness. The more a given society is tolerable to varieties of expressions of consciousness, the more it is democratic in the best sense of this word. On the other hand, if a particular society chooses to cultivate a limited and outdated perspective on allowed states of consciousness, this may limit a lot of its creative potential and negatively affect its overall health. Historically, experiencing altered states of consciousness has been a crucial component of human life and growth; furthermore, it is dynamic variability of states of consciousness that significantly facilitates the process of dis-identification from earlier stages of development, thus allowing new, more evolved perspectives to emerge (e.g. see a useful article on the higher stages of human development: Hartman & Zimberoff, 2008).

It is interesting that just as we can speak of an individual psychograph, we can probably draw a psychographic portrait of a culture in terms of average states distribution. In Russia, for instance, there are very few socially legitimate sources of altered states of consciousness induction. The only consciously encouraged states of consciousness are the state of gross wakefulness (which has very limited creative potential) and the state of alcohol intoxication (which is the only allowed widespread mind-altering drug). In terms of illegal drugs, there is a catastrophic epidemic of heroin consumption (there is a lot of corruption in police related to illicit distribution of opiates, which is a huge illegal market). Even though opiates are as illegal as other psychoactive substances in Russia, it is unfortunately the most common drug. 

Basically, what we have in Russia is the lack of culture of altering one's own consciousness by safe means. The only two accessible and widely used psychoactive substances are alcohol (legal) and heroin (illegal). (Of course, poor-quality illegal hashish is also widespread.) According to some estimates, these are in the top 5 most dangerous and harmful drugs to consume (along with cocaine and some other substances) (Science and Technology Committe, 2006; see also the 31 July 2006 BBC article). So if we are to draw the cartography of drug-induced altered states of consciousness that are allowed in the Russian culture, we can actually deduce some of essential features of the average Russian consciousness out of our knowledge of these substances' psychopharmacology. Let's look at a very useful diagram (© David McCandless, informationisbeautiful.net):

Alcohol is considered a sedative hypnotic; heroin belongs to the category of narcotic analgesics. Both substances are depressants (the yellow circle) and that means that they diminish certain aspects of mental and physical functioning. Alcohol intoxication is considered a socially accepted norm in Russia (cf. information on long-term effects of alcohol, especially on the nervous system); heroin intoxication is more in shadow but nevertheless pretty common, too (the statistics is devastating [cf. Rigbey 2009; Illicit Drug Trends in the Russian Federation (UN Report) 2008]). Therefore, as we can see, the band of accessible drug-induced states of consciousness is very narrow. This is very sad because Russia actually has a good tradition of altered states and psychedelic research (Spivak 1991), the knowledge of which could be put into good use (while the current social politics concerning drugs is too simplistic, unprofessional, ignorance-based, and indiscriminate).

Now, doesn't it make you wonder how this rigidity in terms of accessible altered states shapes  consciousness of a common Russian and contributes to the sociocultural catastrophe in that culture?

Neruda's mysticism

The perception of the world as a mystery is that which some poets intuit and cultivate in their writing. I stumbled upon a very beautiful poem by Pablo Neruda yesterday.

Poetry

And it was at that age... Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke free on the open sky.

On December 13, 1971, Pablo Neruda gave the Noble lecture. In it there are these especially remarkable lines:

There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song—but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny.

Such is Neruda's gentle mysticism.

Dialectics of sawubona

In the previous blog I occasionally mentioned a reference to the word sawubona and its meaning. Here is the video I linked to.

Sawubona, a Zulu greeting that means "we see you," is the essence of mutual resonance in the intersubjective domain of being-in-the-world. And while Orland Bishop in this video (somewhat romantically) explains sawubona as something that we had lost at some point in the history, I believe the imagination and visionary capacities he describes are potentials of our future unfolding which are yet to be established.  Established through a collectively interlocked network of individual practices.

The nature of mutual seeing and recognizing each other in the gesture of sawubona is dialectical. I recognize you as the embodied, impersonated, incarnated soulful Spirit manifested in this very occasion of the recognition, with all its multiple dimensions of intersubjective communion, which brings my own self into resonating with yours… and into the glory shared.

We grok each other in a multilevel occasion, and for this grokking to happen in a complete way (according to tomorrow's standards) my self and your self have to be transcendental; they really ought to unfold dialectical reason—and then further modes of consciousness—with a mature ego being a catalyzing structure for the union of mutuality.

In order for this mutuality to emerge we indeed have got to ask ourselves the question: "How do I have to be, as a human being, for you to be free?" If I attempt to restrict you, in this restriction I am limiting my own self because I focus my intentionality and will at narrowing the opening of the miracle called We—the opening that is inherent to our being and to emergence and deepening of our self-awareness.

And now, when I ask myself this question, I ought to find out what your structure of consciousness is like. You are a sentient being who inherited free will; you can be free, however, only within the limits of your mind. When you are not free, when I breach the boundaries which are not yet to be breached, it is simply not fun anymore. Now, of course, it goes both ways. Think about me being a partner in dialogue, too: what do my wave-like patterns of consciousness behave like? And what are some of the corpuscular freeze frames of my mind? How can you help me help you help us?

Interiors of consciousness are engaging exteriors

Even though this blog is presumably devoted to explorations of interiors of consciousness, at some point the so-called "interiors" start to include pretty much everything, for the phenomena in the exterior world start to touch something deep inside you. It happens when your self-identity transcends an exclusionary identification with a more limited perspective on yourself and the world and goes beyond into the worldcentric and even Kosmocentric kingdom of perspectives.

You spontaneously begin to discover universals that are shared among all human beings of any race, ethnicity, creed, sex, faith, and so on. You begin to realize that all sentient beings share the same basic taste of duḥkha—or uneasiness, disquietness, anxiety, soreness—which is the Buddhist term for the basic sliding condition of one's unknowingness about one's own exclusive preconscious attachments to certain subjects-and-objects interrelations in the overall stream of phenomena that flows through all domains of the experiential matrix. All experiences and all perspectives are impermanent in that they actually seem to be vibrating and dynamically changing currents of dialoging aspects of the Kosmos. And even the most stable ones, such as certain physical laws of the universe, are considered by such brilliant folks as Charles Peirce to be more or less stabilized habits evolved through aeons of cosmic evolution:

For Peirce, the entire universe and everything in it is an evolutionary product. Indeed, he conceived that even the most firmly entrenched of nature's habits (for example, even those habits typically called “natural laws”) have themselves evolved, and accordingly can and should be subjects of philosophical an scientific inquiry. One can sensibly seek, in Peirce's view, evolutionary explanations of the existence of particular natural laws. For Peirce, then, the entire phaneron (the world of appearances), as well as all the ongoing processes of its interpretation through mental significations, has evolved and is evolving. ("Charles Sanders Pierce" in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

If you are unaware of the sliding nature of the phaneron (as we naturally are more or less most of the time), then you tend to attach yourself to this or that experiential leaf that is being carried by the seemingly chaotic current in the ever-pervading ocean of global awareness. You are preconsciously attaching yourself to the plenitude of your adaptive personae, to your constructions about your own identity, to your intuitions about what it is like to be your own self, to your current state (or dynamic systems of states) of embeddedness with this or that whirlpool in the great matrix (mātṝkās); and when this or that aspect, or perspective, on reality transmutates, with you being unable to consciously follow its transformation by transforming yourself, you experience dying and suffering and soreness and pain and grievance—and you might even become attached to this newly-formed state of condition once again, indefinitely.

But when you become increasingly aware of the sliding nature of the world of appearances, you cannot help but start experiencing profound compassion and care for each and every aspect of it, for each one of them is so aesthetically perfect, so ethically tender (cf. the meaning of sawubona), so structurally unstable that even a slightest glance at a phenomenon makes it move beyond itself into the next stage of transformation. Compassion is the foundational artistic tool with which the superconscious artist constantly paints new panoramic snapshots of being. It helps to preserve, to cherish, to nourish, and to prepare for further stages of transformation.

That's the thoughts that emerged during my acquaintance with the recent story of Aleksey Dymovskiy, a detective officer of Russian militia, who has single-handedly attempted to voice (to cry out loud, actually) his concern regarding corruption and catastrophic condition in one of the local law enforcement units of the Department of Internal Affairs by courageously posting two videos on YouTube in which he stated that he just "had enough" of local corruption, fabricated cases, and working in an extremely stressful environment without holidays, without being paid, and without any health care. (See also a Times Online article.)

Even though Dymovskiy spoke about the state of art in the local unit, it is no secret to anyone who lives in Russia that precisely the same points apply to virtually all the departments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and militia (militsiya) in general. In St. Petersburg alone there has recently been numerous cases when militsiya members (of very high ranks) were caught at doing serious crimes (involved robbery and serial murders, not to mention the common practice of bribery that is widespread everywhere and became a cultural norm long ago). For instance, last year there was the notorious case of "black realtors" when some high-rank members of local militsiya were involved in murdering dozens of lonely people so as to sell their apartments (real estate prices in the major Russian cities such as St. Petersburg and Moscow are extremely high—dozens and in many cases even hundreds times higher than the average income of an average Russian). In another case a criminal investigation department was found guilty of creating a widespread system of drug trafficking and distribution (which seems to be a common practice in Russia; the pandemic is systemic). Their name is Legion, for they are many.

Sadly enough, long time ago law enforcement system became the most feared seat of uncontrolled criminal pathology in the post-Soviet societies. Every day thousands of people all over Russia get abused, beaten, and killed in the streets by local patrolling militsiya whose vertical center of gravity seems to generally revolve around the opportunistic stage in ego development theory; red (power-driven) stage in Spiral Dynamics/Clare Graves's theory of values development; and preconventional stage of Kohlberg's moral development. In the psyche of a common Russian, any communication with militsiya is fulfilled with the fear for potential massive abuse. And all of it is just one, if all-pervasive, aspect of the ongoing sociocultural catastrophe in the Russian Federation and some other post-Soviet states.

Life is pretty in Russia

Arguably, the most widespread mistake of a foreigner coming to Russia is thinking that the culture of this country (and the other post-Soviet states, such as Ukraine or Georgia) has a lot in common with that of the West. Such an attitude is an example of cultural insensitivity and inability to recognize that, despite the fact that on the outside Russians look like Europeans, deeper inside they undergo the process of growth and maturation in a completely different sociocultural environment. Russia is neither Europe, nor Asia (neither it is a healthy synthesis of both in an entity called "Eurasia"), it is historically a totally self-contained space-time continuum with fewer ties with the West than one may think. In fact, it seems that of all the places in the world a country that (socioeconomically) has the most similar characteristics to those of Russia is… Nigeria.

A year ago the Russian edition of the Esquire magazine offered a comparative analysis of Russia and Nigeria. That article demonstrated the sad truth that (no offense to Nigeria) both countries are amongst the worst environments to inhabit in terms of life comfort, ecology, corruption, average income, safety, mortality rates, employment, and other indices. The following table (taken from the aforementioned article) vividly illustrates what, I believe, can be called a sociocultural catastrophe that is going to affect not just people in one country, but the entire planetary system (the idea that Russian problems are not just Russian problems will become self-evident to any citizen of the world, if he or she recognizes the fact that the most striking difference between Russia and Nigeria is that the former has a huge arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, not to mention the humongous quantities of indestructible and irrecyclable weapon-grade plutonium, vast amounts of which are lying around relatively unprotected and tiny amounts of which, if accidentally released into the atmosphere, are enough to destroy all complex life on the planet Earth).

A brief comparative table

RUSSIA		NIGERIA
Population
142 021 thousands		140 003 thousands
The Gini coefficient* (according to CIA)
40.5		43.7
The degree of corruption (according to Transparency International, 2007)
143rd rank in the world		147th rank in the world
Environmental pollution as a result of gas flaring (according to the World Bank, 2007)
1st rank in the world		2nd rank in the world
Leading suppliers of liquefied natural gas by 2030 (according to Gazprom)
1st rank in the world		2nd rank in the world
Rate of increase of gold reserves (according to Bloomberg, 2006)
73,5% (1st rank in the world)		73,4% (2nd rank in the world)
Average life expectancy for men
58 years		52 years
The number of citizens confident in the superiority of democracy (according to World Values Survey, 2006)
47,8%		44,2%
The level of protection of property rights (according to Property Rights Alliance, 2007)
63rd out of 70		64th out of 70
Rating of the most dangerous places for recreation (according to Economist Intelligence Unit, 2007)
4th out 10		5th out of 10
Number of people who are sure that stability is more important than freedom of speech (according to GlobeScan Incorporated, 2007)
47%		43%
Place in the ranking of media freedom (according to Reporters without Borders, 2007)
144th out of 169		131th out of 169
Mortality (according to CIA, 2007)
16,04 per 1000		16,68 per 1000
Migration rates (according to CIA, 2007)
0,28 per 1000		0,26 per 1000
Unemployment (according to CIA, 2007)
6,6% [10,2% in 2009, according to International Labour Organization]		5,8%
Place in a rating of "Ease of Doing Business" (according to World Bank estimate for 2008)
106th out of 178		108th out of 178
The level of economic freedom (according to The Wall Street Journal and The Heritage Foundation, 2007)
120th out of 161		131st out of 161
Place in the Global Peace Index (according to Economist Intelligence Unit, 2007)
118th out of 121		117th out of 121

* The statistical measure of the degree of social stratification in terms of annual income.

Here is just one episode (of many) that may illustrate how aggressive the social environment in Russia is. A few weeks ago when I was returning home from a gym, I had an encounter with a Dagestanian right in the downtown of St. Petersburg, on a corner next to the main street (it was around 8 pm, which is early evening in Russia). He was giving brochures that advertised an illegal prostitution service to people who were passing by. After I refused to take a card with a prostitute's phone number, he pulled out a gun, jumped to me, and pointed the gun at my head. I felt metal touching my right temple. In order to prevent any further foolish moves from that man, I quickly took the card he held in the other hand and continued to walk as if nothing happened, at the same time reaching for my cell phone (I was going to call up my friend and tell him about what just had happened). A minute later the same Dagestanian ran to me probably because he thought I was going to call police or bratva (an organized crime group of some sort) to "take care" of him and offered apologies, saying that he was new to the city, he just came here from Dagestan, and he shouldn't have acted like this. I put my arms on his shoulders, looked into his eyes, and told him that in the future he should avoid behaving like this in the downtown. Although I talked calmly, at that point I was so angry that I had to force myself not to punch the guy in the nose. Had I impulsively punched a potentially gun-armed man, this could have led to some unpredictable consequences. I haven't seen that person ever since—and I don't mind it.

Academic relief

Sweet. It seems my endless quest for a field in academia to fit myself into finally brings forth results. Today, I had a meeting with my professor; and we almost spontaneously (well, it takes long practice to be spontaneous) came up with a topic for my graduation work in clinical psychology. Ironically, the topic ended up being the one I have pursued for all the time: altered states of consciousness (ASC)—and, therefore, basically everything related to dynamic patterns of consciousness; psychology, neuropsychology, neurophysiology, and sociology of whatever it is that is included into the domain of the consciousness studies. The difference was that this time the professor really got inspired, and the ASC theme emerged dialogically (instead of my trying to covertly sneak this or that topic of interest into my study). I had been worrying about my graduation work for a long time, because I spent a lot of time waiting for any insight to emerge about what could possibly be done for my final research. I've looked for something meaningful and resonating with my strive for complexities; and what can be more complex and immediate than consciousness?

Now, when this area of life is clear and I hopefully know what to do, the next important challenge is about inviting more financial abundance and sustainability into my life. Apparently, research will take most of my time this year, but I still ought to occasionally eat something, drink something, even go out for a date once in a while, and of course I like to travel a lot and attend various seminars, not to mention buying expensive books. Guess what, it might come as a shock to you, but it really takes money to live. There are a few projects going on, some minor results, but still much work to do in this area.

Incidentally, it looks like in this country good money comes primarily to psychopaths and sociopaths of various sort, to those who are able to survive in an extremely hostile (psychologically and even physically) business environment, constant governmental and administrative pressure, needs for extensive bribing, lie, manipulation, and so on. I already had quite a broad experience of tasting the psychology of Russian business from the inside and looking closer at some of the exemplars of it… and, oh boy, it is so scary—even when you speak of an enterprise that seems innocent (and even "spiritual" or "selfless") to an outsider. No business, if it is successful, is "innocent" in Russia; and it is hard to meet a businessperson who wouldn't present some considerable pathological condition (exceptions, as it seems, are extremely rare). The disturbing list of clinical psychology of Russian business includes serious cases of dissociative identity, narcissistic personality, psychological abuse, borderline states, and existential emptiness (not to mention common neuroses). Psychology of Russia is destined to become one of the recurrent themes in this blog, so you'd better buckle up for this refreshing crosscultural perspective.

Inland Empire

David Lynch is my favorite movie director; and INLAND EMPIRE is the only movie I've watched for a good dozen of times, always finding something that my consciousness had previously missed, always constructing new meanings, always challenging my own mind to attend to perfection of this and every moment.

This is the rare masterpiece that engages you as a spectator in the process of intersubjective co-creation of meaning and meaningfullness with a Rorschach blot test of seemingly chaotic kaleidoscope of primordial consciousness in background. It is an art of finding the ever-present Witness in the labyrinths of the individual soul, a kind of dialectical art that is worth silencing your ego for three hours. This movie dialogues with you; and you had better be its equal in the dialogue.

If you consider yourself aesthetically gifted, use this movie as a test; and the result of it will tell what's the actual worth of your aesthetics. Out of the dozen times of watching INLAND EMPIRE, I have watched it in a cinema for 4 times. Every time a half of the audience left the cinema after the first hour; and the other half stayed till the end, enthralled by irrational visions and joyfully crying because of the genuine hope and liberation the story unfolds.

I dare you to watch INLAND EMPIRE. If you're among those who prefer to keep boundaries between your ego and the art you observe, you will probably not make it to the end of the movie. You won't have an intimate encounter with the beauty, and you will miss one of the profoundest experiences you can ever enjoy in life. It is not a simple walk, it is a challenge (just as life is not all joy and pleasure), but successfully confronting this challenge bears fruits of self-liberation.

Chrysta Bell – Polish Poem

from the INLAND EMPIRE Original Soundtrack

I sing this poem to you...

On the other side, I see…

Shall you wait, glowing?

It’s far away, far away from me,

I can see that —

I can see that —

the wind blows outside and I have no breath,

I breathe again and know I’ll have to live

To forget my world is ending.

I have to live…

I hear my heart beat,

Fluttering in pain, saying something,

Tears are coming to my eyes —

I cry… I cry…

I cannot feel the warmth of the sun

I cannot hear the laughter

Choking with every thought,

I see the faces,

My hands are tied as I wish —

But no one comes,

No one comes,

Where are you?

Where are you?

What will make me want to live?

What will make me want to love?

Tell me… tell me…

I sing this poem to you… to you…

Is this mystery unfolding

As a wind floating?

Something is coming true —

The dream of an innocent child…

Something is happening —

Something is happening…

The wind is blowing

When I look at you, multiple perspectives converge in the same moment. All these perspectives point to different planes of being; and the same action is reflected in all the dimensions simultaneously.

On the level of the bodily self, when I look at you, I feel my heart is pumping; and—say, you're a beautiful girl—I feel warmth all over my body and an unbearable attraction towards yours, the unmistakable desire to touch your skin and smell your hair and give you a hug and cuddle with you right now. On the level of the emotional self, I'm overwhelmed with experiences of joys and sorrows and fears and amusements and (dis)satisfactions and pleasures; and if you reciprocally express some emotions to me, I feel emotionally connected to you: I smile. On the mental level, I want to communicate and compare my concepts and networks of ideas about the world against yours, so that the opposites meet and syntheses emerge; I want to verbalize my worldview, resonate with yours, dive into your conceptual systems and understand them both from within and without; and on that level there's nothing sexier than if you do the same for me. On the level of the soul, it's the light that I feel inside myself and yourself; it's the ever-changing dance we are both enjoying in the reflection of each other... and yet at the same time it is the ultimate supraprofessional poker tournament, when we sit at the poker table in front of each other, looking eternally after each other, smoking cigars and impartially bluffing while playing our card and staking multiple universes of experience and individual lives against each other. And when you playfully bluff, I look into your eyes, and the keyless gate opens, letting in the space that flows through me as I disappear into the spectrum of infinite humming Light pulsating in the void of cessation. The ever-present Silence knocks me out. And then, during the infinity of non-being, I playfully re-emerge as the eternal recurrence into multitudes of selves here and there. And still there's no wind, there's only the blowing.

On freedom of speech and modern Russian history

If you read today's news in Russia, you would find out that today, October 30, is officially the Day commemorating the victims of political repression. Sixty years ago, had I written about the things I write (and about to write) today, I would have probably been imprisoned and killed. Thirty years ago I would have probably "only" been talking to KGB and having trouble in my everyday life. Awareness of that fact sends chills of self-reflection down my spine. 

I remember how on my freshman year in university (2005) I protested against being taught the Lenin's theory of reflection as a foundational worldview in our general psychology class. At the time I was naively into constructivist epistemology and thought that naïve materialism was too ancient to be seriously taught as a basic foundation for general psychology. For me it was like, "Come on, I went through so much trouble and self-sacrifice to get the scholarship; and now what I get is studying Lenin? You gotta be kidding. No, it seems you're not. You're absolutely serious. Oh. My. God." (And that's when my total disillusionment with the Russian academia began. Given the fact that I had almost no illusions regarding the Russian academia, it wasn't coming down to earth, it felt more like coming down six feet under earth altogether.)

I found the imposed ideology to be quite outdated and was sincerely struck by the cruel reality that almost twenty years after the Soviet Union collapsed many of the faculty members still (successfully) tried to teach psychology the way it was taught in the communism-dominated past. That time I just had a "serious talk" with a teacher who strongly advised me against undermining the dominating paradigm as I would get into a big trouble at my exams. I didn't take that too seriously, but still decided not to stir up a hornets' nest and let it go. The point here is: in the early 1980s, I would have probably provoked something bad to happen to me in terms of academic career for such remarks.

Given the cruel history of the totalitarian regime in this country (which itself is grounded in the history of Czarist Russia), no wonder that, historically, Russians have so much trouble of directly and honestly assessing and addressing the problems of the way we currently live. For many decades, survival has depended on one's capacity to doublethink. Truthful self-reflection was a dangerous trait that may have triggered serious anxiety. Through generations this became an unselfconscious cultural norm; and some complex sociocultural defense mechanisms emerged over the centuries to perpetuate the cultural morphic field of this frequency.

Now it pervades the society as a hidden factor; and not many people are actually aware of how this cultural background works in themselves. Most attempts to take a different perspective on life trigger vicious self-defense as the center of developmental gravity in the population seemingly tends to self-defensive and conformist selves (in terms of Susann Cook-Greuter's ego development theory). Instant gratification under the condition of stressful chaotically-changing environment is the dominating mode of discourse in Russian business and politics; and there seems to be no space for complex systems solutions in the Russian mind. Collective reflexology at its best.

Losev's dialectical phenomenology

Here is why you have got to love Aleksei Losev. A section from a book on the history of Russian philosophy (it's a very nice section, even though the book itself totally transcends the meaning of the term outdated in that it says that Losev's fate remains "wholly unknown"):

"Husserl", [Losev] writes, "went only halfway; he has no relational eidetics. <…> I must admit that there are points at which my methods will never tally with those of pure phenomenology <…>; I consider the purely dialectical method my principal method. <…> "Meaning" must be explained in its own semantic relations, in the structural interconnection and self-generation of meaning."

These last words express the point of departure of Losev's theoretical constructions, and his basic intuition, very well. For him the "meanings" which are revealed in phenomenological analysis are connected in a kind of semantic unity; it seems likely that this basic intuition is a reflection of Solovyov's doctrine of "total-unity". Losev, like Frank and Karsavin, is guided in his reflections by an intuition of "total-unity", he is profoundly convinced that "dialectic is the sole method capable of grasping living reality as a whole." This primordial perception of reality as a "whole" is not itself derivable from the "phenomenological reduction". And it is prior to the dialectical method, i. e. it is not derived from dialectic but, on the contrary, this "interconnection and self-generation of meaning is presupposed in dialectic itself. <…> Losev, however, supplements phenomenology with dialectic because he is a metaphysician prior to any "strict" method. Such in essence is the meaning of Losev's assertion that "dialectic is a genuine realism, the only possible philosophic realism." <...> [B]ut, of course, Losev is speaking not of the purely empirical "realism" which is sanctified by the doctrine of Neo-Marxism. The following words are characteristic in this connection: "Immediacy alone [i.e. purely empirical material] is not enough." (Zenkovsky V. V., 2003 [The rest of the section can be read in Google Books.])

In the previous post I have written on the importance of the immediacy in communication; and what I meant was this kind of phenomenology supported with dialectical analysis. My own experience tells that immediacy alone is not enough, for in the phenomenological stream the importance of an opening towards authentic encounter tends to fade away when consciousness gets flooded with secondary material (such as psychodynamic transferential systems that distort communication to a great extent), especially when the structure of consciousness is not capable of simultracking both constant phenomenological and dialectical/structural flows of reality co-enactment.

Beautiful moment, do not pass away!

This magic moment
So different and so new
Was like any other
Until I met you
And then it happened
It took me by surprise
I knew that you felt it too
I could see it by the look in your eyes...
— "This magic moment" by Lou Reed 

This fleeting moment of the few seconds when you encounter a particular person for the first time is evasive. And yet such a moment seems to convey much more information on the potentials of your relationship with that person than we used to think. In fact, it seems likely that the first moment you encounter a person is the most telling (and precious) one, given the unconscious way we follow through most of our social life. I would argue that it might be a source for holographic representation (proconstruction and prognosis, to be more precise) of that person and his or her current & hidden potentials (and dangers), at least in terms of the multilevel space that you share with the individual. And, luckily enough, the potentials of the first encounter can be unleashed in enhanced states of consciousness through certain kinds of integrated awareness training, which makes this notion a very useful and powerful tool in communication.

Two months ago I stumbled upon a book that supported my longterm intuition that in many cases the power of the first impression, the moment of first seeing the face of the other, looking into her or his eyes, hearing the voice, touching the skin provided all the necessary information so as to predict the generalized trajectory of the relationship with that individual. The book I'm speaking about is Blink by Malcolm Gladwell; and it is quite a short account that explores different aspects of rapid cognition, "the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye." One might agree or disagree with certain interpretations that are given by the author, but for me the book was a treasure of anecdotal and experimental evidence for finally letting myself into a more conscious applying of this fleeting (holographic and dialectic) rapid cognition. In my opinion, this is a kind of intuition one is definitely advised to exercise and find practical application in everyday life.

And, of course, there are some dangers of misinterpreting culturally- and biologically-conditioned biases for genuine rapid cognition that provides accurate first impressions. The moment of authentic encounter, which seems to require being in stillness for accessing it, is very fleeting; and the conditioned reflexes are quick to jump in. Moreover, the way we ordinarily interact with each other tends to belong to a very limited band of the spectrum of consciousness that we have access to; instead of multidimensional communication we are usually confined to a very narrow kind of everyday awareness that reduces the quality of our intersubjective modes of being indefinitely. The less we are aware of the communication that we are open to, the more it is that we talk to mannequins instead of people; and the easier it is for (conscious and unconscious) tricksters to manipulate us into situations we would normally avoid being involved with.

In my own experience, I found that one of the common and widespread traps in everyday living that activates our unconscious reactivity (rather than responsibility) seems to be psychodynamic transferential & countertransferential communication loops. Freud fairly believed that unsolved transferences seem to be the phenomenon that permeates all human relationships; and sometimes a relationship among people can be limited to that ancient and dusty transferential/countertransferential struggle. It is important to train awareness of transferential relationships in one's own life so as to therapeutically resolve them and bring forth more mature and integrated modes of being.

By the way, in the very first paragraph of this post I used the term holographic as a metaphor in order to evoke a certain attitude of perceiving the world as vast integrated networks of interconnected and dynamically-unfolding occasions (and perspectives on those occasions as well). Another useful metaphor for the potential of the holographic immediacy is the notion of the Indra's net, which is described by Francis Harold Cook as following:

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each "eye" of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring. (Cook F. H., 1977)

 Image created by Charles Gunn of the Technische Universität Berlin. It is a still from the movie Not Knot!, published by A K Peters Ltd. (Source)

Interestingly enough, the perspective on the moment of encounter to be a source of multidimensional potentials that can be tapped into in enhanced modes of being and awareness seems to be that of a dialectic, if nondual, perspective on the nature of the Kosmos as it is, which is reflected in the kosmology of Ancient Greeks. Aleksei Losev, who becomes one of my favorite philosophers to quote, in his philosophical study (dated 1927) of the ancient views on the Kosmos and their relationship to the contemporary science describes the first basic foundation of a dialectic formulation in the antique kosmology:

First basic foundation. The Kosmos is indivisible, i. e. it has a becoming, or continually changing, intensity of itself as of a oneness of some kind. <...> The first basic foundation of the antique Kosmos maintains that, however much you divide the Kosmos, the smallest part you would get could be in turn divided into as many parts as one wishes. If the Kosmos, taken as a whole, consists of the infinite amount of parts, then any part of it also consists of the infinite amount of parts, and in this regard the entire Kosmos and any part of it are absolutely identical. <...> This means that the Kosmos is both divisible, for any parts of it are possible to exist, and indivisible, for in every part of it the Kosmos is manifested in its entirety, and, again, one could divide it as much as one wishes. (Losev A. F. Antichniy kosmos i sovremennaya nauka [Ancient Kosmos and the contemporary science], 1927)

I find that this paragraph functions as a very solid formulation to illustrate how the realities in question may be grounded in a dialectical perspective on the Kosmos. I would note that it might be important to stand on the shoulders of giants in order to at least partially ensure the validity and reliability of both theoretical and empirical accounts; and, also, the feeling of resonance with some of the greatest minds in the history of mankind (such as the greatest of Greeks) is inspiring.

The Kosmos experienced is the Kosmos experiencing

In the cartography of my experience there is one that I treasure much. What I speak about is an experience of the Kosmos—at least that is so in my interpretation. It should be noted right away that in contrast to cosmos, the term Kosmos describes not just the physical world, or the physiosphere, but rather the entire universe of phenomena, which includes physiosphere, biosphere, noosphere, and pneumasphere.

For Ancient Greeks, at least for some of those, who were savvy enough to leave a philosophical legacy, the fabric of the Kosmos was that of objects in all those realms: physical realities (of the physiosphere), biological realities (of the biosphere), mental realities (of the noosphere), and spiritual realities (of the pneumasphere). Greeks maintained that there was nothing outside the Kosmos; and the entire world of sensibilia, intelligibilia, and transcendelia in the broadest sense of those terms was something that is inherent to it. A. F. Losev, a brilliant Russian dialectical philosopher, has spent almost the entire 20th century on studying and interpreting the ancient kosmology; and in his own words:

So, there is nothing besides the Kosmos? Indeed. Then the Kosmos depends only on itself? Yes, it does. Then it is liberated? Sure, it is. No one has created it, no one has saved it, no one has been watching it. <...> If everything exists only in the Kosmos and there is nothing besides it, if it expresses itself, and if how it expresses itself is the Absolute, then it is not simply the Kosmos, but... a creation of art. In terms of the entire aesthetics of Antiquity, the Kosmos is the best, the most consummate creation of art. (Losev A. F. "Dvenadsat' tezisov ob antichnoy kulture [Twelve theses on antique culture]." Studencheskiy meridian, 1983, N9-10. [Note: This paragraph is translated by me; the academic translation is accessible here.])

It is hard for me to describe the Kosmic consciousness in terms of experiences and states. These words are somewhat deceitful in how they convey the phenomenon, as if you were the subject experiencing the object (the Kosmos), while this entire subject-experiencing-object schema exists in the space which is the face of the Kosmos itself. 

It is awareness of the oneness with the entire manifested universe that is aware of you at this moment; and not the opposite, for the moment it is the opposite, the opposite transfigures. You are the object of this awareness; and the moment you become aware of it you realize an ever-present condition of being what you truly are, infinite, joyful, and encompassing Kosmic consciousness. What follows is the experience of understanding that, if paraphrasing Meister Eckhart, the Kosmos is closer to me than I am to myself. I am nothing but a spark in the vortex of the living memory of that which is always already closer to me than my fleeting identity will ever be.

And here, in the very heart of the Kosmos, which is the very heart of yourself, everything vibrates with love, passion, and devotion.

Catching really big fish

If it were not for various states of heightened creativity and flow, there would be no underlying reason for starting this blog. In fact, this journal is rooted in altered states of consciousness. The very process of writing brings you into a different pattern of being and dialoguing with reality. If searching for heightened states in some ways can be likened to fishing, then this blog is devoted to catching really big fish. (For those interested in further exploration of this metaphor, I recommend a beautiful book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity by David Lynch.)

The big fish of this blog is any states of profound appreciation and curiosity for whatever is arising moment to moment in the ocean of experience. The states in question correlate with radical deepening of one's own capacity to make sense of existence. Whether existence makes sense or not seems to depend upon qualitative features of the state of consciousness you are currently in. It is not just that an altered state helps you look at the same situation from a different angle, thus bringing, say, insight instead of despair; it is more likely that a change in functioning of consciousness helps to (partially) construct a different occasion as it literally enacts a new worldspace. A worldspace always has an array of features attached to it; and one of those features can be a degree of whether (and how much) I feel my existence makes sense or not.

This is not simply a shift in subjective (mental or emotional) processes of assessing the world, for (as it became clear in the 20th century) dynamics in consciousness corresponds with dynamics in the objective brain and behavior. Any shift in the pattern of subjective functioning correlates with some change in the objective brain state and other components of the overall organism system (such as endocrine regulation and so on). Furthermore, as shown by research, if plugging into an altered state is done repeatedly over a long course of time (e.g. in longterm meditation training), this may even lead to morphological change in the brain structure (in case of meditation there is evidence for increased cortical thickness [Lazar S. W. et al, 2005]).

Thus, there is something intrinsically and crucially real to the very fact that we can cultivate a habit of plugging into (and co-creating) certain domains of experience (by tapping into various states of consciousness). If we habitually tap into meaningful modes of being, we actually affect our biology. (And our subjective attitudes can do both good and harm; for instance, a recent study [O’Donovan A. et al., 2008] has shown that dispositional pessimism may contribute to telomere shortening, which increases risk for disease and early mortality in post-menopausal women.) This also influences the quality of our interaction with others, thus helping to engage in a more healthy kind of relationships with our sociocultural environment.

Epistemologically, in the course of perceptual microgenesis we, the subjects, do not just reflect a pregiven world, the objects; in broad terms, we actually co-construct the stream of objects while similtaneously being co-constructed ourselves (through, for instance, self-reflection, our relationships with others, and even food that we eat) as we're naturally immersed into the vast fields of our sociocultural environment. It is worth mentioning that Ken Wilber speaks of this construction process as of tetra-construction, because such a process always involves a matrix of subjective, objective, (intersubjective) cultural, and (interobjective) socioenvironmental dimensions—and not just the good 'ole pure subject and object dichotomy. (Of course, these constructed matrices seem to behave as resonating fields of various degrees of complexity, flexibility, and structure that may be more or less crystallized through conditioning and reinforcement.)

Ironically, by the 21st century we've become extremely adept at both individually and collectively deconstructing our flows of experience into the sense of dullness and despair. In some sense, these socially-reinforced habits of deconstruction, depersonalization, and derealization are our constructions, too; this understanding makes them objects of our awareness, which is important in order to use those as a means to fulfilling our dreams rather than enforcing nightmares. This might be a propitious time for bringing more mindfulness to the patterns of being that we construct in the dynamic multilevel system of our existence so as to enable a space of more creative ways to making sense of whatever it is that we are.

Pandorum as a real pathology

Spoiler alert: The reader is advised to watch Pandorum (2009) prior to reading this psychological interpretation of the movie.

Pandorum is a fictional psychopathological syndrome induced by prolonged space travel. Its symptoms include severe paranoia, vivid hallucinations, and homicidal tendencies. The onset of pandorum can be triggered by psychological trauma under stress conditions of space flight.

In the movie, one of the characters experiences acute pandorum when receiving the shocking news that the Earth has been destroyed. He kills other crew members and single-handedly takes charge of the giant spaceship that has been launched to colonize an Earth-like planet locating far from the Solar system. He decides to play God and wakes up thousands of colonists from their hyper-sleep and locks them away into the darkness of the spaceship. When the spaceship finally reaches the destination planet, he prevents colonization of the land by not initiating an ejection of the last hyper-sleep cameras with colonists aboard onto the planetary surface. He is stuck with himself; and he chooses to continue the pathological self-play, even if that means destruction of the last remnants of mankind. He has fostered creation of a dark pleromatic world inside the spaceship; and he makes the choice to reign in Hell, for this artificially-created hell provides comfortable boundaries to his personality. The boundaries that, as he hopes, are never to be breached.

Even though it is a work of fiction, it might be the case that cinematically-described pandorum accurately reflects the psychological reality of one commonly-shared developmental pathology. Psychological development runs as a series of disidentifications from old ways of being and subsequent identifications with new ones. When the old world is lost and the new world isn't found yet, the sense of disorientation arises. "I have lost everything; and in the world of nothingness I may do whatever I want," and that's when the self falls prey to the infinite loop of pandorum. I bound myself to playing a very limited game. I do my best to prevent the change of that condition, for the status quo lets me stay in the trap of the self-contracted ego. This is the trap I'm adapted to, while the perspective of an unknown world is uneasy. Here, in the self-created hell I feel powerful; "I am a spider and this is my web, the web that I weave."

And once the pathological condition is set—once the web is finally woven—the self is going to defend it at all costs. Salvation is so near; and yet I'm so afraid to let go that I use all my powers to enforce the current disposition, both consciously and unconsciously. Instead of using my potential to explore the land of the new, I focus my energies on sticking to the present condition. There's nothing more important than my current zone of comfort; nothing else matters. In order to defend itself, the pathological condition creates its own immune system. The fixation occurs. I'm getting lost in myself; and others bring danger. ("Wherever there is other, there is fear," as the Upanishads put it.) The pandorum's box is open, all evils are unleashed. Pathology's perpetuated, development's deceased.