Rasputin’s Enigma

I just finished reading Edvard Radzinsky’s investigation and reconstruction of Grigory Rasputin’s life and death. I cannot escape the fact that Rasputin deserves some serious writing, a comprehensive perspective. He, initially an illiterate peasant and a heavy drinker, became one of the few most influential persons in the last years of the Imperial Russia. I feel that before I am ready to author a serious work on Rasputin (if that ever happens) I need to write this short note now.

Grigory Rasputin gives his blessing

The renowned historian Radzinsky, who is famous for his exalted emotionality as exhibited in the TV shows that he hosts, concludes his Russian biography of Grigory Rasputin with a statement that Rasputin was a faithful Christian who ended up in lust and sin and “serving Antichrist.” I want to subject that Radzinsky’s statement from the concluding paragraph of the otherwise beautifully and neutrally written biography to doubt (it is understandable what presuppositions the statement seems to be based on) and note here that Rasputin is ungraspable with black-and-white judgments. As most phenomena in pragmatic happenings of the world he does not conform to simplistic labels “good” or “evil”; and as a complex personality that stirred and influenced some of the major events in pre-Soviet Russia and Europe Rasputin needs to be apprehended with a perspective of profound complexity.

There is no doubt that Grigory Rasputin was a Christian mystic and healer, that kind of personality which uses altered states of consciousness, shaman-like ecstasies, and what in some spiritual traditions is known as “subtle energies” in order to catalyze a therapeutic effect. At the same time he was a man coming from the lowest and most underprivileged class (caste) of Russian society—peasants—which is essential to remember in order to be realistic about the probable structure of his personality. 

Why Radzinsky calls Rasputin a person who believed that he served Christ while in fact serving Antichrist? “Father Grigory,” who in pre-Revolutionary 1910s has had the reputation much alike to that of a controversial rock star, with (mostly exaggerated) rumors about sex orgies and alcohol parties always surrounding him, belonged, as Czarina Alexandra firmly believed, to Holy Fools, Russian Orthodox Christian variation of what is known in the East as “Crazy Wisdom.” Indeed, in the last years of his life (he was violently murdered in December 1916 by high-profile conspirers who deserve more than a passing mentioning) Rasputin appeared to have transformed into a drunkard in the brutal state of Russian binge drinking (zapoy)—and it is interesting to note that, according to reports made by the secret police, he was able to become sober when it was needed (that is, whenever Czarina summoned him for a healing session with her only son Alexey who suffered from hemophilia) within a very short time. 

But it is unfair to make an absolutistic, reifying statement that his apparently open views on human sexuality—and his use of sexual energy (known in India and China as prana or chi) for mystical purposes—were “sinful” (at least if we don’t really use the word “sin” as an excuse to label and negate the multiplicity of people and attitudes). In fact, the remarkable book Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Human Sexuality by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá shows that our assumptions regarding what is normal, what is and isn’t sinful in terms of sexual relationships are largely misinformed and require further investigation and reflection. Our common assumption that the Eurocentric conservative model of sexuality (with its emphasis on monogamy) is universal appears to be false and distorted; and, as Ray Harris points out in a number of his works, the totality of human sexuality is more like a spectrum with different styles appropriate in different contexts (see, e.g., his article on Integral Sexology).

Grigory Rasputin became both a hero and a victim of his time. Rasputin managed to achieve that which seemed impossible: coming from a poor peasant family he entered the elite circle of the most powerful people in Russia, appointing and firing ministers together with his clique that operated under the auspices of the Czar and Czarina. But in the largely mythic mentality of Russian society at that time his unorthodox (for mainstream “moral majority”) views, enormous vitality, folk sexuality, simple origins, provocative behavior and multi-faceted personality made him a victim of the constant social pressure that always came with shadow-driven attacks. 

The combination of sex, spirituality, and power triggered the entire spectrum of mass projections on what the nature of Rasputin’s relations with the Emperor’s family was—including insisting rumors that he was sleeping with the Czarina (caused by repressed sexuality of the masses) or that he was cooperating with German spies during the World War I (caused by war paranoia and seeking for a scapegoat in the times of a crisis). It is important to note that Rasputin and Czarina Alexandra used all their political power in an attempt to prevent the World War I; and it was their opponents who were outraged by “the peasant’s influence” on international affairs. The World War I brought the Russian Empire to its end; and many Rasputin’s enemies died with its demise, as history of the 20th century has demonstrated. Indeed, history tends to have that appearance of an ironic bitch sometimes.

The Horns of Integral Pragmatics

What I propose and emphasize by constantly returning to integral pragmatics is the possibility for co-enacting a “new” mode of intimacy with the utterances we make.

The Walls of Jericho

I put the word new in the quotation marks because I believe that this mode is old enough to have seen the first geniuses of both a spoken word and a written word in the history of humankind. I, nevertheless, say “new” because it seems we either lost our connection with this mode or haven’t found it yet. For some reason we tend to distance ourselves from the embodiment of our Logos or Word; and yet we shall always remind ourselves: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

In the alchemical lab of our Imagination the seed of the Word manifests as God’s will and energy. Through becoming one with the Word we re-unite with the miracle of Oneness with the Spirit as it manifests inseparably from reality. The Word uttered always brings aliveness to our being; and instead of looking straight at things we stare into the abyss in front of us and our consciousness embarks on a journey through the realms of the living and the dead, following the footsteps of infinity, swimming in the clouds of timelessness, and reaching out to express as non-locality.

The sacred way of speaking the Word is totally different from the profane way of speaking words. Peter Kingsley explains the difference between “talking about” and “talking from” in the magnificent article “Raven’s Appearance”:

There is the profane way of talking, which is to talk about things. And if you care to notice, you will see that in the modern Western world we always talk about something. There is the word; then there is the point of reference for the word, which is always separate from the word itself. And this, of course, is the basis for nearly all modern linguistics.

But according to people such as Parmenides there is another way of talking. This other way is that instead of talking about, you talk from. If you sense oneness you talk from oneness; and that oneness is communicated through the magic of the word in a way that our minds may find incomprehensible but that, even so, fascinates and endlessly obsesses them. For these people were magicians. The founders of logic and science in the West were sorcerers. They knew what they were doing even if, now, no one knows what they did.

If we intuit the infinite, if we intuit the eternal, if we intuit the timeless, the transcendent, the Divine, we are bound to wake up in the echoing thunder of silence. This silence is the original face of our selfhood; and it quietly floats in our Hearts. The silence explodes with ecstasy, and when it does, the Word manifests. You see, the Word is inseparable from the silence, the Word is connected to the silence, the Word is silence revealed itself.

We can spend years and decades talking about words but unless we talk from the Word we never reach the realm of profound pragmatics. We can infinitely chase our own tail of signifiers and signifieds but no matter what we do unless we open our minds and hearts wide enough to courageously embody the Word, our talking will always remain talking about philosophy instead of being philosophy, talking about poetry instead of being poetry, talking about science instead of being science, talking about art instead of being art. Philosophy is the Love of Wisdom; in its pragmatics it’s the Word uttered itself to itself and echoed in the Hall of sentient Mirrors.

I have always intuitively sensed the appearance of the intimacy with the Word in the writings of Ken Wilber. The striking difference between him and his philosophy and those who talk about Wilber and his philosophy is in the embodiment of the Word—Logos. The seed of this vision of integral pragmatics that I want to convey to you has been sown by a little and seemingly evanescent utterance of profound importance, the utterance delineating Integral Semiotics in Wilber’s Integral Spirituality (pp. 286-287):

James was a genius and a pioneer in so many ways, and the fact that he took states of consciousness as seriously as he did was extraordinary; but monological is monological, and in that instance he merely extended the imperialism of the philosophy of the subject. Fortunately, James’s sheer genius pushes him beyond his own self-imposed limitations. His empiricism is always open to hermeneutics, the representational paradigm is supplemented with Peircean pragmatics, and—above all—his is a soul in which Truth and Goodness and Beauty are still a holy and unbreakable trinity.

But radical empiricism is still empiricism. That is, radical empiricism is radical monologicalism. Stages in zone #2 and the constitutive nature of zone #4 are alien to him. Had he availed himself of more of the work of his contemporary James Mark Baldwin, how different it all might have been. This imperialistic empiricism is the worm in the core of this otherwise extraordinary work.

It’s interesting to note that, in fact, Charles Peirce himself criticized James for exactly this central problem. James and Peirce were lifelong friends, despite their little tiff over James’s appropriation of the term “pragmatism” from Peirce, who coined it. (Peirce subsequently changed the name of his philosophy to “pragmaticism,” which was “a term,” he said, “so ugly as to discourage theft.”) Despite their friendship, Peirce felt James’s approach of “pure empiricism” was deeply flawed. Peirce—who, as noted, is generally regarded as America’s greatest philosophical genius—nailed James with a simple sentence: Perception is semiotic.

I want to pause here for a moment, take a deep breath and state that for the last two years I have been a semiotician to the marrow of my bones. Semiotics is a way to recognize the almost religious reverence for the Word that manifests as a movement of the unmoving, as a birth of the unborn. The entire universe after the Big Bang represents the Word extended through time and space. Now, having said so, I shall continue this magnificent quotation:

In other words, perception is always already an interpretation. At least in part. Failing to see this is the common mistake of naïve phenomenology and naïve empiricism in all their forms. Understanding this also let Peirce point out two further problems, which people simply will not understand if they don’t get the first problem with monological empiricism itself. Namely, it let Peirce say of James, “Of course, he is materialistic to the core.” And further: “He inclines toward Cartesian dualism.” Whenever I mention this to fans of James, they usually express shock, which tells me that they haven’t gotten the postmodern revolution, because otherwise it makes perfect sense. But for those who fail to understand this, James is even seen as somebody who overcame materialism and dualism, whereas he merely embodied their subtler monological forms. Peirce went on to humorously say of James’s implicit materialism that this is so “in a methodological sense, but not religiously, since he does not deny a separable soul nor a future life; for materialism is that form of philosophy which leaves the universe as incomprehensible as it finds it.” What Peirce means is, what monological delivers is incomprehensible; perception itself is actually semiotic.

Now we come closer to the part which is most important to our reasoning. Let’s take a look:

We can also see, further, why James—as well as virtually all meditation and phenomenology—is, as often noted, modernist in essence, and why Peirce was a great postmodernist about a century ahead of his time (who else could see natural laws as natural habits, without falling into magenta magic?). Peirce maintained that all perception is already an interpretation, and interpretation is triadic in structure: it demands a sign, an object (referent), and an interpretant. You can see the similarity with Ferdinand de Saussure, who maintained that the sign is composed of a signifier and signified in a system of interpreted differences. Peirce coined the term “semiotics”; Saussure called what he was doing “semiology.” AQAL has drawn on both of them: there is a sign (signifier plus signified), referent, semantic, syntax, and pragmatics.

Here we have to look at the bottom of the page to find a short footnote with the utterance that forever changed my relation to the Word as it is written or spoken or read or done:

To give a quadratic view: the sign is composed of UR-signifier and UL-signified (and yes, à la postmodernism, there are often huge gaps between them, resulting in deferral of meaning). Integral Theory defines a sign as “any aspect of reality that signifies another, to another.” Signs exist in systems of semantics (LL) and syntax (LR), held together by pragmatics (whose telos is to integrate the 4 quadrants of any semiotic occasion: and all occasions are semiotic, although only higher animals have linguistic forms of semiotics: the 4 quadrants go all the way down, taking semiotics with them). . . .

Ever since I have read this footnote my life has never been the same. As I was reading the words “signs exist in systems of semantics (LL) and syntax (LR), held together by pragmatics (whose telos is to integrate the 4 quadrants of any semiotic occasion . . .)” the subtle tingling in my body and the space of clarity in my mind signified that the treasure is found.

I have expressed elsewhere my point of view that the third tier of development and evolution of consciousness described in the Integral developmental theory is the first truly Pragmatic Tier. In a gesture of connecting the dots I have linked Wilber’s testimony that the AQAL framework itself is a product of the Indigo stage of consciousness (a third-tier stage) with the statement that pragmatics’ telos is to integrate the four quadrants of any semiotic occasion. This means that the true nature of the four quadrants, the true nature of these primordial perspectives reveals itself only as an embodiment of the Word coming through a third-tier structure of consciousness.

Indigo is the first stage of consciousness which in its utterances, the utterances that manifest not just as a verbal-linguistic activity but as a kosmocentric activity, is able to hold the four quadrants in a single gesture of integration. Before that stage, every utterance we make is bound to be a fragmented aspect of a text within text within text within the boundaries of one dimension of consciousness. To understand and grok and grasp the difficult transverbal reality beneath these words I want to extend my philosophical hand so as to reach Vasily Nalimov, a truly unsung hero of our time. Vasily Nalimov understood consciousness as essentially a text reading phenomenon. He intuited very well the power of Logos—the power of the Word—and spoke from the silence and timelessness. The grand narrative of our life is a holarchy of semiotic occasions that forms the scripture with the Holy text breathing within and without.

I emphasize integral pragmatics but my words sometimes are misinterpreted as utterances of an isolated theorizing mind—but I am not a Pharisee and not interested in a book knowledge and in talking about. When I reach the space of clarity through which I can reconnect with integral pragmatics I see that human beings are lost in massive textbooks of their own minds. The dissociation of the words and actions is being established. The intuition of the immediacy of the Spirit-in-action’s tetra-manifestation becomes forsaken. A seed of integral intentionality which has the potentiality to reach a luminous mindbody becomes lost in the swamps of smaller vortexes of karma. The Integral Word instead of being spoken is being stuck at the throat chakra level of incessant mumbling; and the energy never reaches the forehead and the crown chakras (and often lower chakras as well). The micro-orbit is never fully completed. The Beauty fades away. The hopes get broken. Alienation insists. The Word is forgotten. The Man isolates himself in the web of texts he created.

My task is to do my best to bring the message which reveals the possibility for a passionate embodiment of the Word—the Word that has the sound of the Horns of Jericho. It shakes your destiny and frees your throat and liberates your fate. The influx of authentic pragmatics results.

Sepulchral frost

Sepulchral Frost

The gravestone’s coldness dissects streams of wind.

In solitude’s transparency a sepulchral rainfall bursts.

And on the headstone of my last resort

An inscription shines, hidden by withered leafs.

Six feet under the ground: it lies, consumed by worms,

Covered with loose, airy earth, with eyelids eaten away:

My corpse, forsaken organic matter,

That ceased to act as a living embodiment of mind-body unity;

That is simply a rotten mass feasted by Nature,

Out of which my corpse emerged some years ago,

While still being alive, hurrying to live, spurting towards joys

And sorrows of yet another illusion called the life path

Of an isolated personality that grows and develops under the blue sky,

The moon and the stars that shine with an elusive mystery,

The mystery which is so easy to miss in the face of the enchanted

Vibrating web of meanings that we weave as we dwell in our collective dreaming.

In my heart, ever since the moment of my birth, there was this sepulchral frost,

And behind the left shoulder, near my ear, I felt someone’s breathing,

And someone’s whisper pontificated to me that, while being alive,

Somewhere there, very near, right in my Heart

I’ve never been born. And my hour has struck but nothing changed:

All these years were dreamt by me when my body was already enthralled

By this cadaveric freeze. Another day on the planet Earth,

In the Milky Way galaxy, on the outskirts of this universe

Was lived by me. In vain or not in vain, that is the question of no significance

On the back of the monumental triumph of kosmic void

And her unstoppable life, in contrast to which I am only

A weak shimmering of a body shell swept away by a blink of Eternity.

Let the memory of me as of an unnoted sparkle remain

In the great sentient archives of the undying Kosmos.

And one day when the right time comes the good I’ve done here and now

Will grow into a gigantic wave, humongous sea of Goodness

Which will destroy all ignorance and bring eternal peace and joy—

At least for a moment. And I will cry for all the cursed and all the blessed.

April 27, 2010 

(translated from Russian)

The tale of Midas

Many Russians grew up on stories and tales from the Ancient Greek mythology. There were many Soviet cartoons made about Heracles (known in the West under his Roman name Hercules) and his Twelve Labors, about Prometeus who brought fire of knowledge, about smart Odysseus, Argonauts, and so many others. Perhaps, one of the most mysterious stories of all is the tale of King Midas.

The story is usually told in a very sad and ironic manner. Midas was a king of Phrygia. Once, his soldiers caught Silenus, who was a right-hand satyr to the god Dionysus (whose Roman equivalent is Bacchus). Midas recognized him as such and set him free. Dionysus was very pleased by this doing, so he offered to grant whatever Midas should wish for. Midas asked that everything he touch be turned to gold. As the story goes, soon Midas encounters that his blessing is also seems to be his curse. Everything he touched, a tree, a chariot, a fruit, food, and even his daughter was turning into gold. So Midas begged Dionysus to take this gift away. The god told Midas to wash himself in the river Pactolus. Ever since Midas washed away his magic touch in this river, it has been abundant in gold, and Midas returned to his normal life.

The way I am interpreting this myth is quite optimistic. In fact, gold and the color of gold has always been a symbol of Spirit. When Midas receives a gift from Dionysus to turn everything into gold, what he receives is the power of transmutation and transfiguration: of discovering Spirit beneath each and every occasion. Everything he touches turns into gold, that is every phenomenon in the universe that he  spontaneously selects with his awareness shows its true Divine essence. In the end he realizes that everything around him is Spirit's, and there is nothing he, Midas, could personally own or have. This leads to the agony and transformational death of his egoistic self. Then he asks Dionysus to retract the gift. But what has actually happened is that he makes one step further: by washing himself in the river he has undone the last barrier before the realization of Spirit as Spirit. In some spiritual traditions this move is called realization of the Nondual. Then the world becomes as simple as it has ever been. The source of gold, of spiritual energy is not ego but God. There is nothing to turn into gold because everything is always already gold—everything is always already Divine.

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.

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.

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.