The writer's block?

In the mandala of our consciousness we are all in a sense artists. This is something that Alex Grey has recognized in his famous "The Vast Expanse" psalm:

Create perfection wherever you go with your awareness. That is why this teaching is admired by artists—they sense the correctness of the response to life as creative. Life is infinite creative play. Enjoyment and participation in this creative play is the artists profound joy. We co-author every moment with universal creativity. . . .

Artistic response (rather than conditioned reaction) to life is at least one-third of what we are as human beings. Integral philosopher Ken Wilber points out that virtually every greatest thinker in the history of humankind (from Plato to Kant to Habermas) acknowledged the Big Three, the triumvirate of perspectives—the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the philosophy of Plato, for instance—to be the essential dimensions of our being-in-the-world.

Yes, it is important to subject ourselves to the oughts and shoulds of what must be done by us so as to fulfill our destinies (moral). Yes, it is important to subject ourselves to the truths and facts of coming to terms with the cruel reality—and not escaping from it into the vertigo of fantasies and illusions and false hopes (knowledge). But, as Kant argues in his concluding Critique of Judgment, without a cornerstone dimension of aesthetic response to life these other dimensions remain detached from each other. To embody our life as a play of creativity (as a form of art), as I see it, is a foundational component of a healthy and integrated existence.

Playfully writing one's own narrative of life and transcending a writer's block, the blockage that leads to copy&pasting of an old habitual storyline that we learned at some point and that makes us non-existent to ourselves, always looking for new ways of self-expression in the seemingly limited context of our life's framework, constantly searching for new tools for transcending that frame and finding new perspectives to it seems to be a way to balance the Big Three in one's own life. If I deny myself of this courageous creative response to life, I deny myself of life itself.

It is important to embody the Spirit's creativity in a canvas of the individual levels of our being, including the Soul, the ego, the adaptive personae, and the body. It is important to trust one's own artistic feeling that arises in the depths of the Heart. It is important to learn in action how to be a better artist of life than the moment before, to keep searching for new curves and touches in life, to keep looking for novel ways of self-expressing perfection while always already being a manifestation of the ultimate Stillness.

Otherwise life becomes a dull and in/efficient affair of a robot-like human mechanism that keeps self-replicating old constellations of patterns and occasionally passes the Turing test strictly by an accident.

And, as Elizabeth Gilbert wonderfully points out, when undertaking any form of art it is crucial to recognize that one's own creativity is not a private property or a selfish achievement, it manifests rather like a gift of Spirit. Even if your art is your life story (and it always is) the same writer's block rule still works; and you can get stuck, as we all do. Your life as a work of art doesn't belong strictly to your individual being, most certainly not to your personae or ego or even Soul, even though the latter comes closer to the essential Source. You can't force it, you have to let it grow.

P.S. And if you are forgetting both the dignity of being an artist and the humility of being a work of art by falling, e.g., into the dominance of either shoulds or facts I ought to wake you up by asking a simple question, the question that highlights the importance of your qualia or subjective joy of being:

"Why so serious?"

(A still from a highly recommended movie on the topic, The Dark Knight.)

Architectonics of the Self

If the sky were to suddenly open up... there would be no law... there would be no rule. There would only be you and your memories... the choices you've made and the people you've touched. The life that has been carved out from your subconscious is the only evidence by which you will be judged... by which you must judge yourself. Because when this world ends, there will only be you and him... and no one else.
— Donnie Darko (2001)

Who am I? There are always many ways to be answering this question. Every moment in life I am this or that, such and such, that's me, that's not me, this is mine, and this is not. Everywhere I go the sense of self follows my footsteps closely and generates the I-ness and the me-ness and the mine-ness of my being-in-the-world. The sense of identity can be very concrete for some people and it can be quite fleeting for others, but even when that which I am identified with changes rapidly there is always an intimate self-sense present to the sacrament of life, however big or small, strong or fluid, convenient or unconvincing, conscious or unconscious, personal or depersonalized and so on. It can be very dynamic, flaky even, and yet it undeniably exists.

The overall pattern of the self's manifestation as it is seen by a witness looking from the outside can be called personality (in a somewhat narrow meaning of this term); the overall pattern of the self's manifestation as it is seen by a witness objectively looking inside can be called self-system. The total kaleidoscope of fluctuating identities and self-perspectives I would call architectonics of the self, and it is a penetrating look into the mystery of the architectonics of the self that could bring forth a first glimpse for a satisfying answer to the question of self-identity. This is even more evident if one encounters the complexity dilemma of simple, however experientially grounded, answer "there is no I" being as much unsatisfactory as defining the self-sense in a reductionistic static way as something concrete—indeed, as some thing at all.

When one attempts to speak of the architectonics of the self, it is absolutely crucial, in my opinion, to mention the name of Vasily Vasilyevich Nalimov (1910-1997), a truly unsung hero of our time. In his numerous works, published in Russian, English, and German, Nalimov was tackling different issues all related to the basic question of science, existence, personality, and consciousness. A member of a Moscow mystical anarchist circle back in 1920s, ex-prisoner of Stalin's concentration camps, the last and lonely knight of the Eastern wing of Templars; a renowned mainstream mathematician and a physicists who worked in the laboratory of A. Kolmogorov; an influential transpersonal philosopher, a gnostic, and a truth-seeker, he shined throughout his life with profound intelligence, adamant will, and a commitment to knowledge, honesty, and freedom. In 1970s and 1980s, many years before Soviet people were able to learn about the West and its recent cultural trends, he was writing about such transpersonal authors as C. Castaneda, S. Grof, Ch. Tart, and K. Wilber; in a thoroughly fundamentalistic-atheistic society he was openly asking the questions of meaning, life, God,  the universe, and the Ultimate Reality—something that had long been forbidden in the USSR and, probably, is still unprecedented in the Post-Soviet countries. (For more information on Nalimov see, e.g., Wikipedia article, Eugene Garfield's web page, and Thompson, 1993.)

In his book The Spontaneity of Consciousness (Спонтанность сознания [Spontannost' soznaniya], 1st Russian ed., 1989/2nd Russian ed., 2007), Nalimov attempted to draw what he called  architectonics of personality or self. Now, in the Russian language the word personality (личность [lichnost']) has many meanings; and it can be translated to English basically both as a personality and as Self (in its broadest sense). Most certainly, Nalimov's probabilistic vision of language would require taking into account the total variability of the word's semantics.

Nalimov writes the following about the intention of the book in question:

In this work we want to focus on the problem of architectonics of the Self with the hope that this way the nature of the Self will appear before us as an ultimately accessible manifestation of reality—the manifestation in which reality discloses itself through ourselves. First of all, we will consider the Self to be a carrier of meanings, thus exploring its linguistic (semantic) nature.

We fully recognize that any attempt to build such a model of the Self includes not only and mainly knowing but rather not-knowing. The deeper and clearer we are drawing an image of the Self, the clearer the patterns of that which we do not know appear. Not-knowing is always richer than our knowing. Not-knowing—the not-knowing contours of which we can delineate—provokes us, makes us seek, makes us look at the World and our own being with wonder. In this wonder life becomes full of meaning. That which modern psychiatrists tend to call existential emptiness disappears.

Before we continue I should note that it is always very hard to describe views of a thinker of such high altitude and magnitude as V. Nalimov in a short essay. He was a strong proponent of postformal thinking (which he called a probabilistic vision); he was a founding father of the field of scientometrics; he developed a probabilistic view of language that includes both discrete and continual aspects; he tried to create a postformal panoramic view of the universe and consciousness so as to find meaning in the fact that there is something rather than nothing. In his writings he was dialoguing through books with Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Buddha, Christ, St. Augustine, Meister Eckhart, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida, Popper (with Sir Karl Popper he actually exchanged correspondence), early Ken Wilber, and so on. In an oppressive state of the Soviet Union he was a liberated thinker, a free soul whose transtemporal and transspatial flight couldn't be held by physical or social restrictions and boundaries.

In my opinion, the best of his approach that we can take may not be the concrete ideas themselves but the span and the depths of the questions and problems he inquires into. In The Spontaneity of Consciousness he quotes Maeterlinck: "The greatness of a human being is measured according to the greatness of mysteries that perplex him or that make him surrender." (I didn't find the quotation as it is translated in English, so I translated it from Russian; the phrase in original Maeterlinck's language and the way it is translated to English can differ significantly.)

When contemplating such complex subject as what the actual meaning and structure of the Self is, I believe, it is absolutely crucial to adopt the most panoramic and integral vision one can, otherwise the attempts of knowing would be childish and reductionistic. In the spirit of this approach facing reality means facing its ultimate mystery and pure silent not-knowing which is the ultimate knowledge itself. Immanuel Kant said: "Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me." Gazing at the stars and contemplating the depth within can bring nothing else but the state of profound awe and not-knowing, not-knowing that is self-liberating. I resonate a lot with this stance of Nalimov and most mystics, the perspective that sees and feels the universe as a constant unfolding of the Mystery.

The first Mystery that we encounter is the mystery of our own existence. Most people in the world go on in their lives ritualistically thinking and perpetuating the thought that what they think is what they are. In fact, as long as they continue ritualistically doing whatever they are doing without asking this profound question of who am I and what does it all mean in some ways they don't even exist. By saying that they don't even exist of course I don't say that they are zombies without consciousness, what I am saying is that they are not fully aware of their existence. Most of our adult lives we are running away from the very fact that we are here, from the fact that there is the starry sky above us and the moral law within us, we are numbing ourselves to our being. We constantly dissolve ourselves in our personalized me on, which is Greek for non-being, by habitually pursuing the games we learned to play and telling each others limited stories we learned to narrate.

The most obvious example of this running from one's own authenticity can be encountered in a therapist office (and actually in any occasion where there is an opportunity for a field of intersubjective resonance to arise). Sigmund Freud was one of the first to show that we are not what we rationally think of ourselves or even how we feel about ourselves, that there is much more in our personalities, in our selves hidden beneath the iceberg of that which we are used to be aware of. Further advancements in the science of therapy and healing demonstrated that most of our lives we live according to a matrix of experience that has been forming during the early and not-so-early years of our lives. In fact, our life is grounded in the illusory feeling of knowing, in a feeling that we know what our life is about with all its upsides and downsides. We think that this—whatever this that happens to be entering our conscious awareness—is what life is about. We constantly run in circles in the self-built corridors of our "known life" and recreate on multiple levels the limited story that we learned about ourselves and the world; and there is no space for not-knowing in this story. The basic mystery of existence is something that shatters our house made of cards and brings terror to our life because in our selves we are used to identify with a limited range of possibilities and experiential realities.

And then suddenly it strikes us that we are getting divorced three times in a row, that we keep losing friends and alienating people, that our beloved children don't want to talk to us, that we have cancer, that we are going to die today—and then, at the moments like this, we look into the face in front of us with awe and not-knowing-ness: who is this person in front of me, whom I have always thought I have known? At whom does this face look? Who am I, really?

Something else can happen that will disclose this basic gap between our conscious self and the overall self, between the relationships that we picture in our minds and actual totality of processes happening around us, involving us as participants and transforming us constantly, every minute, every second, every moment of Kosmic existence. A policeman takes a gun and kills ten innocent people in a supermarket; a schoolboy does the same at school. Anomaly arises in our minds; something tells us that we are not seeing a crucial aspect of reality and it is killing us or makes us anxious and we desperately want to wake up. As we are gradually waking up we look in astonishment at the unconscious processes, scripts, stories, and scenarios we were so used to follow, the patterns that constantly recreate and magnify suffering in us and others. The emerging sense of amazement and wonder brings us closer to the determination to become truly liberated, truly conscious, truly wise so as to participate fully in the festival of life and co-creation.

Every human being has a profound depth hidden in his or her consciousness and self. An old homeless person taking care of her pushchair with bandboxes and empty bottles that for months has been her last resort. An imprisoned oligarch who declined to leave the country because of his pride and dignity. A president who looks sicker and sicker with every year he is in power. A young university teacher who keeps wondering about her life while living in a dry academic environment. A psychiatrist who suffers more than some of his patients. A schoolboy who passionately fell in love with the Goddess for the first time. A detective who ruins his career because he can't stand corruption anymore...

The architectonics of the Self that I am talking about includes not only what we think of ourselves in our minds. We ourselves are a mystery. We are what we eat, we are what we talk, we are what we think, we are what we see, we are how we move, we are what we feel, we are the scripts we play, we are the light we shine, we are the darkness we emit, we are everything that happens in this particular manifestation of our individual being-in-the-world. Our self includes everything, from the birth to the death; it goes through time and space; it weaves together aspects of  Kosmic being and experience like wind gathers together clouds in the sky. We are the Witness and the Witnessed in its many ways of manifestation and interconnectedness.

Privacy versus openness

I have noticed many times that when I (and, of course, others) attempt to raise an important or sensitive issue to discuss a graveyard silence starts to prevail throughout, especially when communicating with people from the West. I have not inquired deeply into this particular issue yet, but I tentatively connect it to a Western tradition of privacy, with its explicit and implicit cultural agreements. In Russia there is considerably less sense of mental boundaries and rational taboos (taboos and boundaries are multiple but more premental-rational).

By being a creature of a postcommunist country sometimes I realize that the notion of capitalist/individualist privacy seems to avoid my immediate conscious grasp. And sometimes I am just left astounded by the fact that my Western friends and partners in communication suddenly become silent or say a very superficial remark to a question that I am wondering about as of crucial and related straight to the matters of life and death, even if psychological. At times like this I am left thinking, "Oh shit, did I again address an issue too directly?" Also, I start to feel some kind of sorrow regarding the fact that this particular intersubjective space somehow self-contracted and closed from being dialogical.

And now I am perplexed in regards to one question: where does a sense of authentic privacy ends and a cunning mechanism of self-defense against the truth, the truthfulness, and the goodness starts? In therapy when a therapist addresses a sensitive trauma-related issue, the client does everything to build up resistance and avoid looking and feeling into the issue and recognizing it as one. He or she invents numerous ways of escaping the cruel reality. One of the ways to defend oneself is to simply ignore the therapist's provocations and invitations to exploration of transferential systems.

There is a striking drive in a person who was brought up in the West not to get involved and to keep distance. "This is not my business." "I have lots of, lots of things to do, no time for discussing this." In some cases it seems to result in an impulsive/compulsive reaction of building excessive boundaries and closing one's own eyes with one's own hands so as to keep ignoring a delicate but important issue; especially in the cases that require making a (even if workable) value judgment regarding, e.g., other person or community and so on.

What somehow relates to this is my increasingly growing awareness that the idea that one has first to take care of one's own backyard before doing the global work is utterly failing in the context of the global crisis. Among some of American conservatives there is an idea that USA should withdraw from any involvement with the world problems, conserve itself, solve its own problems, and only then go to take care for the world. (The same basic view, a kind of "we should take care of our asses first," is widespread around the world.) There is an important part of the whole picture in this point of view: when taking into consideration an integral picture and doing integral action one is ought to take oneself into account; if one secludes oneself from one's care, it may lead to a catastrophe or at least significantly diminish the effectiveness of actions.

But if one actually forces this idea of self-conservation into reality as the only means to fight against the crisis, this will actually lead to serious consequences. The world is highly interweaved nowadays; and one's attempts to seclude oneself from global action will not succeed; for instance, most Americans consume products manufactured in China; and this is one of the world powers to dialogically come to terms with (and we do not to mention here lesser powers such as Somalian pirates imprisoning American cargo ships or Russian leaders not being able to take care of the weapon-grade plutonium waste lying near Ural mountains in huge amounts—enough to destroy the entire world several times in a row).

There is no way to avoid the world and to become autistic and private again; there is no way for America or any other country to retreat into its previous monological autism... We are all too interconnected now. No freaking way you can take care of your own backyard before you take care of the planet; you have to do it simultaneously with setting priorities that are actually global (and highly sophisticated), otherwise everything built without a necessary awareness will fall apart (in a sense, your backyard is a part of the global backyard called the Earth). It especially relates to the US because it became so dominant in the world in the second half of the 20th century; there is just no way to regress back into the cave after Americans have engulfed the entire world with their capitalistic system, worldview, and action.

(I would add here that one of the examples of everything falling apart is contemporary Russia which is said to be reigned, as Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, somewhat biliously formulated, by a "bunch of cowboys," the cowboys, I would add, who are basically incapable of single-handedly tackling the complex societal issues; hence, the suffering of the entire nation and a demise of an important, if neglected, sociocultural part of the European civilization. It will probably take the entire world to rebuild Russia and re-integrate its people into the global community; and now I sense that Russia is predominantly seen as a mean but persistent distraction and disturbance to the Western rationalistic plans for global peace and paradise. So much attention is paid to Africa now; but doesn't Russia deserve an equal amount of attention—or even more attention, given its difficult history, its influence in the world, and the multiple ways it is still being marginalized/ignored/oppressed both by the West and the East? I remind you that statistically and qualitatively Russia is probably not in a better shape than Nigeria; right now people are suffering in both places enormously—more than any human being in the world deserves—even if they are suppressing the suffering into the personal and collective unconscious and making themselves numb to and detached from their own pains.)

The global economic crisis as well as the global climatic change as well as many other global issues are positively not the national-level issues. They may have causes in each country's poor and imbalanced choice of politics and strategy over a certain period in history, but the systemic resolution of the global economic crisis requires a paradigm of global actions. Global climate change, or in general a worsening of environmental conditions due to industrialization and natural disasters that is undeniably occurring, is a vivid example of why taking care of one's own backyard first doesn't work: there is no point of trying to save your attachment to your home if the entire world is going to collapse. You can take care of grass in your backyard but the acid rain or radioactive waste will prove all your private efforts futile.

We ought to let go of being so much obsessed with privacy.

Transformations of consciousness towards wisdom and compassion

Pain.

It is overwhelming.

We constantly live lives of others, holographically dreaming collective dreams, and sometimes attempting to make our dreams dominate over those of others or submitting ourselves to others' dreams. When a client visits a therapist or a healer or a shaman, two life stories meet, and these stories are shared both in gross and subtler dimensions of being-in-the-world; and the shaman's job is to emphatically embrace the totality of suffering in the other, virtually live it through in some translocal and transtemporal realm of one's own embodied universal consciousness as a sum of perspectives that are available so as to look and feel into the being of the individual, not get convinced in a false idea of the person that his or her life story story is absolute truth of what the world is (the myth of the given), offer in exchange one's own story of truth and liberation that at some point must be wide enough so as to embrace the entire Kosmos, and to be completely liberated from the story itself while fully embodying it as profoundly as one can. You need to be liberated in order to give space for the story's healthy development and evolution; and you need to be fully present as an embodiment of this story in order to support creation of the morphic field of such an altitude of consciousness (and actually have fun). And if you are good and honest with yourself, you can offer nothing nothing else than the story of integrally liberated universal being.

Even though I am in the initial phase of the practice in some ways, as I increasingly get in touch with subtle dynamics I start to feel the totality of blockages and pains and sufferings of sentient beings around. I feel how we virtually strangulate each other, inserting one another into one's own partial and limited life story of who we are as human beings and what life is about. All I can do is giving space to these sufferings in my own consciousness because there is ultimately no separation, we are all intertwined. And often it is overwhelming; and there is nowhere to hide from the fiery light of truthful seeing, hearing, feeling, and being.

I offer my Soul to the path of liberation of the Kosmos as a living total-unity; and I silently pray to the Divine for the grace and grit. I need to embody courage, strength and will as well as compassion and wisdom to manifest the deepest potentials of consciousness that offer treasures beyond any price.

I conclude with my favorite quotation from the splendid American Beauty movie that one is ought to watch at some point in life.

Ricky Fitts: It was one of those days when it's a minute away from snowing and there's this electricity in the air, you can almost hear it. And this bag was, like, dancing with me. Like a little kid begging me to play with it. For fifteen minutes. And that's the day I knew there was this entire life behind things, and... this incredibly benevolent force, that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever. Video's a poor excuse, I know. But it helps me remember... and I need to remember... Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it, like my heart's going to cave in.

Nothingness

Last night as I was falling asleep I had an interesting experience. I was lying on my back, with awareness being expanded to embrace my entire body and vision and hearing and thoughts. I was giving space to whatever was arising. At some point I crossed the unseen border between waking and sleeping; and I appeared as some kind of enormously light space with no boundaries. For a few moments it was as if I as pure consciousness-awareness was floating in a dark room of nothingness; and there was infinite release and expansion all graspable at the same moment as pure space. There was nothing but a total freedom from anything; as if it was this empty freedom that experienced anything else; and yet at the same time there was nothing else that could be spoken. Last thoughts dissolved. And then the dreaming caught me into its visions; and out of nothing there was manifestation again in which I became involved.

Embracing the Divine in the mundane

I meditate daily using a special integrated approach. The point of this approach is to develop a contemplative attitude and ground myself in awareness while doing ordinary deeds so as to make the entire life an endless meditation. I have been working specifically on that for a year; and for the last few weeks my presence has rapidly grown stronger and stronger. Combined with constant self-therapy mediated through communication with the self and others it liberates various aspects of my being, various hidden subjects, to be incorporated into my overall self-system; moreover, the same liberation can be seen in the being of people around.

I still don't have that many lucid dreams (it is the kind of dreaming in which you are aware that you are dreaming) and conscious awareness in something similar to the deep dreamless sleep state has happened to me only probably once. I certainly hope the translucence will be entering more and more into the dream realm. But the waking state is becoming more and more a lucid dream itself; and my perceptiveness into the many ways we touch (mostly, by attempting to persuade, to bribe, to manipulate each other into believing a circumcised and castrated story of how it is to live; and rarely, by sharing simple presence and encountering authenticity) expands enormously.

Still, I find it useful to do an intensive sitting meditation and inquiry into the present experience at least once a day for about 1 hour. It is like brushing your teeth in the morning and taking a shower: wakes up the entire system of being towards its more holistic mode. The whole point of the meditation is giving the awareness space to everything that occurs in all five senses and beyond. I distribute my awareness through all channels and modalities I have—seeing, hearing, bodily sensations, movements, thoughts, subtle anatomy, soul being, and so on. The result of it is usually an increased awareness of the awareness itself. It is grounding oneself in the basic fact of the Ultimate Reality that cannot be denied or doubted, Descartes' brilliant cogito ergo sum, "awareness therefore existence."

Everything that is before me is a fleeting dream of which I AM aware. Everything disappears and only the Unborn remains the same. This is all-pervading Silence, quietude that speaks through the spaciousness of awareness which is pure consciousness as it is. The Silence integrates all being into the One conscious manifestation of wisdom and compassion. I am slowly shifting towards disappearance and unity with all perspectives that enter awareness which is no longer mine, which is aware of me right now. The same transcendental observer that looks through my eyes is looking through yours. This is why we are closer to each other than we could ever think of or imagine.