The ground for conscious being

It is both fascinating and frightening how lost we can be in the world of apparitions due to subtle contractions and attachments of our psyche—the phenomena of which we tend to be unaware. We get used to a limited perspective on ourselves and on others; we develop some basic agreements with the world during the process of growth and interaction with the other, we co-create the worldspace where we live that includes our thoughts, things that we say, things how we say, our memories, visions, sensations, body movements, chronic energy fixations, and the totality of it all is our self which we present to the loved ones and the hated ones and the world at large.

It is dramatic that our self, as it constantly grows towards more maturity and embrace and experience and becoming more aware of itself by including more and more entities into its space of being-in-the-world, at earlier stages can learn and adapt to the world, construct the basic sets of its elements in a way that in the future would become self-evident as self-contractions and subtle attachments that hinder liberation and hide essential qualities of one's own human being, of one's own profound truth under limited adaptive masks or personae of which we are not aware for initially and genealogically these masks were developed in order to comply with the requirements and agreements that the other and the environment told us, showed us in the days when we were just starting to make first steps towards self-consciousness and conscious liberation. And these masks of which we are not yet aware, the shadow patterns of our co-existence contaminate our whole life and communion with the ones we love and prevent us from being fully and self-recognizably who we are, radiant blissful fluctuations of the Spirit's meaningful, passionate, unlimited unfolding, the unfolding that is personally embodied in the Soul, the ego, and the bodymind.

The Spirit is always present in our life as the very fact that we are aware. In fact it is the space of awareness, of consciousness that is aware of us and all our life right now. In this space the wisdom and compassion grow and stabilize as structures, as fractals, as flowers. Giving space to yourself the way you fully and deeply are in your true embodied nature means grounding yourself in awareness and putting everything that exists in life into this ground, washing with its liberating rain the basics presets of your tetra-constructed¹ being and knowledge of the world and how to engage with it. In the space of awareness the spontaneity occurs that breaks ice of the old and allows novelty to emerge, and the novelty brings new excitements and flow of life and the conscious awareness always liberates them from attachment, for the attachment per se is something of which we can become conscious in the space of awareness.

The names of attachments, fixations and repressions are Legion. They hide everywhere in your private and public worldspace and they cause you to develop a false concept of the self, a false self. You get used to move in a certain way and not the other; and you unconsciously consider these movements to be the boundaries that divide the territory of your self from the foreign land of not-self, the unknowing land that brings anxiety by its very existence. Thus, you get a limited perspective of your self embodied in movements. You get used to have certain sensations and feelings in the body; and you may not even be aware of the fact that these are only sensations and feelings that emerged in the process of growth; and you just take them for granted. Thus, you get a limited perspective of your self embodied in how you feel your body. You get used to have certain thoughts and preconceived ideas in your mind; and these ideas are always more limited than the mystery of the world and your self. Thus, you get a limited perspective of your self embodied in how you think about yourself and existence.

You get used to hearing a limited spectrum of sounds, seeing limited things, enjoying limited moves, experiencing limited emotions, playing limited roles, having a limited diapason of dreams, and living a limited range of possibilities of life. And all of it in the totality of who you are you present as a total message of your existence to others. And others respond, both consciously and unconsciously, to this message as a whole with their being. Of course, you are responding to their message as well.

If I am so attached to these things that I don't even let them into my awareness so as to let go of them, how not to get lost in this vortex of apparitions and how to finally arise above the process of recreating the suffering, the suffering that is constantly shared with others? If there is nothing in my self that I can ground myself in, for it all is essentially a fleeting and constructed experience, what is the way to freedom? How can I free myself to being fully embodied and yet unattached? The ultimate way is to ground yourself in something that has no content and yet is always already present, in a presence that constitutes the basic undeniable dimension of the being-in-the-world that is closer to you than your self.

That which is always already present and yet has no content is the silent awareness, the very framework of attention, the very space of consciousness in which everything you are reading right now as you are sitting in a certain posture, feeling certain sensations and thinking ideas and making various micro- and macro-movements is arising moment to moment. This awareness is your best fucking friend forever. Ground yourself in awareness and allow yourself making new moves, approaching people in new ways, playing new roles, having a fresh taste of feelings in the body, no matter how silly you think those are, for these very thoughts of silliness are just temporary clouds in the sky of your awareness that come and go, come and go like flowing waves in the ocean cradled by the wind which is the Spirit whispering.

Ground yourself and help your beloved to ground themselves in awareness and then look into their eyes and make funny faces, scream and cry and move and liberate and dance together and give the full space to feelings in the body and suffering in the life for this is the path to healing and redemption and underneath suffering you can find profound happiness if you actually follow this advice, this practical injunction. Constantly remind yourself and others of this translucent awareness and the power of the present moment and the glory of all-pervading silence by being a living example.

The quietude is the Spirit smiling to you.

¹ Tetra-construction is the term that points to biological, psychological, cultural, and social factors of development and evolution. See, e.g., Wilber, Integral Spirituality, 2006.

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?

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.