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.

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.

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.