Archive for January, 2014
Biology as Metaphor and Mythology, Part One: “The Map Is Not the Territory” and Biological Phases As Levels of Consciousness
Posted by sillymickel in authenticity, globalrevolution, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, philosophy, psychology, science, spirituality, uniqueness on January 31, 2014
Biology Reflects Consciousness: Biological Changes Reflect Changes in Experience and Create the Spectrum of Consciousness
“The Stuff of the World Is Mind-Stuff”
We are living in stimulating and revolutionary times. For, even as we watch, the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm is collapsing in the ocean of the new physics, “matter” is being swept away by “wavicles,” and scientists are beginning to acknowledge what the poet-seers have always known: that physical reality is metaphor, that the external world and all of its components are subtle yet elaborate webs thrown upon the formless, meaningful forms created from no-thing-ness . . . that matter is metaphor for Consciousness — which is the only real stuff knowable about existence, in fact is the only stuff of the Universe.
Physicist and astronomer, Arthur Stanley Eddington (1928) phrased it: “The stuff of the world is mind-stuff.” More recently, University of Minnesota physicist Roger S. Jones (1982) unveiled a position which he calls an “idealistic reevaluation of the physical world” (p. ix). He writes
I reject the myth of reality as external to the human mind, and I acknowledge consciousness as the source of the cosmos. It is mind that we see reflected in matter. Physical science is a metaphor with which the scientist, like the poet, creates and extends meaning and values in the quest for understanding and purpose. (1982, p. ix)
Even more recently, anthropologist Armand Labbe (1991) summed it up at a Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness conference saying, “Ultimately our physics . . . is going to demonstrate that essentially there is no such thing as matter. All there is, is mind and motion.”
Granted, this is an extreme position, a strict Idealist stance. But it is the only truly supportable one, in light of what we know from the new physics. That would be enough in itself to cause us to reflect on it. But this perspective is also supported, even demonstrated, by the discoveries of the “new psychology” as well. More about that later.
It is ironic that it would be the most “materialistic” and “hardest” of the sciences that would be leading the charge against the primacy-of-the-physical-world postulate (and, unfortunately, leaving the rest of the sciences — both social as well as natural sciences — behind). The discoveries from quantum physics, though some of them almost a hundred years old now, are, only with difficulty, being assimilated into the other sciences. For the most part, they are largely ignored; science going along ‘as if’ . . . that is, as if the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm were still viable, as if the physical world was really “objective” reality, as if the mind could validly be considered an epiphenomenon of brain activity. So the old paradigm holds sway despite its inadequacy.
This is understandable, however. For truly acknowledging these newer perspectives requires a reformulation of theoretical positions, a rethinking of the 
Universe in much the same way that astronomical theories needed to be reformulated after the Copernican revolution. What we do not need are theories that disfigure themselves in trying to incorporate some (not all) of the new information and new perspectives in the way of the convoluted theories of the pre-Copernican astronomers who refused to accept the 
newer paradigm postulations.
This book, to the contrary, consistently presents a new-paradigm perspective.
In doing so it includes a rethinking of some theoretical constructions associated with Ken Wilber who, from this analysis, appears as inconsistent as pre-Copernican astronomers in devolving his theories.
The Import and Consequences of the Primacy-of-Consciousness Postulate
It may also be argued that the new-paradigm primacy of consciousness is irrelevant to much of what is done in normal science. Whatever the truth of that, it must be acknowledged that theoretical positions that ignore the very foundations upon which they are based—that is, the subjectivity of the observer—are going to be weaker for that. Yet, acknowledging even that, one could argue that there is no clear idea of how to go about applying these new perspectives. How could they be used? How could they be relevant? What implications might they have?
It is in answer to these questions that I offer the following analysis of how these perspectives could be used in the understanding of child development. I propose a devolutional model—one that is rooted in Wilber’s (1977) “spectrum of consciousness” theory. It is based also in the findings of new-paradigm experiential psychotherapies—that is, those that place primacy upon experience over concept, “territory” over “map,” and percept over object.
The implications of this approach, I hope to show, are for no less than the validity of the current direction of child-caring, the effectiveness of mainstream psychiatric approaches, and the direction of psychological and spiritual growth. It is my belief that such implications will not be considered to be irrelevant or unimportant; and I will deal with them at length in Part Three.
Biology As Metaphor
At any rate, the knowable premise of the new science is that our physical world is a construction (of consciousness); that it can be metaphor, only, of the unknowable That Which Is; that, therefore, matter is metaphor. It follows that the sciences, which study this reflection of the unknowable Real, provide metaphors about metaphors.
Moving in the Air Without Support
Schopenhauer saw it much the same way. His understanding of “ideas” is very close to what I am saying about science being composed of metaphors about metaphors. Gardiner (1966) explains this viewpoint of Schopenhauer:
Schopenhauer distinguished a further class of ideas, namely, what he termed “ideas of Reflection,” or sometimes “ideas of ideas” (Vorstellungen von Vorstellungen). It is in terms of these that we think about and communicate the contents of our phenomenal experience. In other words, they are the general concepts by virtue of which we can classify phenomena according to common features that are of interest or importance to us, forming thereby a conceptual structure or system which may be said to mirror or copy the empirical world. The function of this system is essentially a practical one; it provides a means of memorizing, and generalizing from, our observations of how things behave under varying conditions, and hence of putting to use what we learn from experience. Schopenhauer insisted, moreover, that this system cannot legitimately be separated from the foundation of empirical reality upon which it is based, and he claimed that concepts and abstract notions that cannot be traced back to experience are comparable to bank notes “issued by a firm which has nothing but other paper obligations to back it with.” Consequently, metaphysical theories that pretend to offer an account of the world purely a priori, and that in doing so employ terms or propositions not susceptible to empirical interpretation, are empty of cognitive content; they “move in the air without support.” (p. 327)
In modern terms, “the map is not the territory” — the scientific construct is not the same as the experiential/ empirical reality of existence; and the farther they are removed from each other, the more unsubstantial becomes the construct — ultimately collapsing of its own weight.
Analyzing Scientific Dream-Weaving
Nonetheless, these metaphors — despite the threat of their moving “in the air without support” and cognizant of their practical value; these metaphors — because of the fact of their being for the empirical world a reflection or “mirror,” which we then call “physical facts,” “objective reality,” or “scientific truths”; these metaphors can be analyzed in the same way that dream symbols are analyzed, that is, to uncover their deeper meanings.
Furthermore, this uncovering means essentially that we can discern their meanings for ourselves; “deeper meaning” being that understanding that relates the symbol to ourselves and that gives us understanding of our inner and outer actions and guidance for such behavior. In this way we can relate these “ideas about ideas,” these scientific truths, back to our empirical, experiential, subjective reality . . . back to the base that they were originally the reflections and mirrors of. Thus we can come full circle, looking at ourselves from both inside as well as outside of ourselves and approaching, to the degree that a person can, a fuller understanding of ourselves and the world with which we are inseparable.
Specifically, then, for our purposes here, in looking at the biological sciences’ metaphors of the human body — especially as concerns its structure, function, and ontogenetic and phylogenetic developments — we can discern and analyze an “underlying” meaning — a reflection of the Real, or of what Wilber (1977) calls Mind.
It is especially heuristic to analyze body for, as it has been said, body is concretized mind. This is not to mean concretized Mind—in Wilber’s sense—but concretized ego (in the sense of the separate self, in the sense of mind as used by Satya Sai Baba and other teachers who say that, ultimately, mind must be destroyed). Therefore, in contemplating the metaphors of the biological understanding of body, we can discern patterns and derive meanings concerning the separate self—its evolution, relationship to the whole, patterns of activity, stages of development, essence, and its experience of itself.
Biological Phases As Levels of Consciousness
My attempt here is to skeletonize a portion of such an overall endeavor to show how it can be done and what kinds of meanings can arise. I will relate stages in the ontogenetic development of the human body to the dualities (splittings) of consciousness that, according to Wilber (1977), create the spectrum of consciousness.
Specifically, I will correlate the patterns of change in both form and experience (feeling) that a human undergoes with levels of consciousness. I will do this beginning with the sperm and egg; through the fetal, newborn, child, and adolescent forms; to the adult. What I am saying is that the forms that characterize the biological history of each individual (as delineated by the science of biology) and the processes that characterize the psychological history of each individual (as reported to us in the psychological sciences of the new experiential growth modalities) reflect, and correlate with, the changes in consciousness that Wilber describes as creating the spectrum of consciousness.
Continue with Cellular Memory’s Challenge to Materialism and Support for Panpsychism: The Body Arises from Consciousness, Not Vice-Versa, but There Is a Legitimacy to Heuristic Inquiry Into Form
Return to Tribes and Wonder Versus Civilization and Suffering: More Nestling Up With the Implicate Order, Or Before and After the Western Fall (Split)
To Access the Entire Book, of which this is an excerpt, Go To Falls from Grace. It is now available in print and e-book formats at Amazon.
Invite you to join me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/sillymickel
friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel
Continue with Cellular Memory’s Challenge to Materialism and Support for Panpsychism: The Body Arises from Consciousness, Not Vice-Versa, but There Is a Legitimacy to Heuristic Inquiry Into Form
Return to Tribes and Wonder Versus Civilization and Suffering: More Nestling Up With the Implicate Order, Or Before and After the Western Fall (Split)
To Access the Entire Book, of which this is an excerpt, Go To Falls from Grace
ABOUT THE AUTHOR, Michael Adzema. Video below … interviewed by Michael Harrell
.
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2mm9OBbYjRE
.
.
— Related: See also other published versions of these ideas….
.
*Dance of the Seven Veils I* (2017).
At Amazon at
*The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy* (2016).
*Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness* (2014).
*Apocalypse NO: Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious* (2013).
,
*Culture War, Class War: Occupy Generations and the Rise and Fall of “Obvious Truths”* (2013).
.
“You Lose Your Form, You Lose Your Fear”: Experience Is Divinity, Part Fourteen — The Dream Is Over, Liquid Memories, and THE TRUTH
Posted by sillymickel in authenticity, being yourself, globalrevolution, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, philosophy, psychology, spirituality on January 21, 2014
Realizing hOMelessness, The Hidden Face of Death, and Being God in Spite of You: Uncertainty Wakes Up Zombies … “Won’t Be Nothing but Big ol’ Hearts Dancing in Our Eyes”
The Dream Is Over.
But, you know, at some point we want to go back.
Pretty much when we’re talking like this, we’re tired of it … we’re tired of the whole thing, all the drama, the Cosmic Dream. We’ve had enough of it, and we want to go back. We’re ready. We’re ready to understand, to remember again….
Liquid Memories
No Pain, No Gain –> No Form, No Fear
Perhaps by this time we have had certain experiences—and they do come to us in a variety of ways—where we have discovered that when you lose your form, you lose your fear. When one has a near death experience, what one says about it afterward is that all fear and worry disappeared upon release of the physical form.
In Heaven There Is No…
In a near death experience or in deep meditation or using psychedelics one might get a taste of that “heaven”—that state of bliss and no-form—and one realizes that in that state there is no such thing as an unhappy experience.
There is also no such thing as an experience in our no-form state that is less than magnificent. There is nothing boring about Truth-Awareness-Bliss. God is the opposite of an icon. It is only in the human form that we diminish Experience, that we reduce it down to a “measly trickle of awareness,” filtering out the vastness of a Universe of All Experience.
Indeed, it is this that creates the drug addiction in humans. All of the drugs that become addictive have one thing in common: they reduce the awareness of one’s form, they reduce bodily awareness. In doing this, in some of them the awareness of Mind is amplified.
Realizing hOMelessness
It is a situation that is similar in structure to dying, and drug addiction is almost always an indirect wish for or longing for death … to return to the no-form state, to go hOMe.
So at the point when one wants to go back, drug addiction is more likely, for it mimics the spiritual goal. Indeed it gives a taste of the goal.
But, like the Siren calling, it ultimately leads one away from spiritual awareness. All drugs are some form of expanding awareness beyond the stagnation of the physical form, but like all signposts to the Divine, they block out awareness of the Divine when they are focused on, relied on. They are then the Buddhas on the path who must be killed; they are the Sirens to be resisted.
Uncertainty Wakes Up Zombies
For it is the unexpected that creates real experience.
God moving in mysterious ways.
If you know it, if you expect it, it is just a trance state. And all addictions are about trying to re-live, ever and again, a particular experience or set of experiences, which happened at the beginning of that addiction. We all try to re-create pleasurable experiences; we call it addiction when it is most obvious that it is counterproductive.
Those early experiences in the addiction may have originally been a step out of the boring life of everyperson—they almost invariably were—but in trying to have them again, one has created simply a different type of stagnation of life. It is like getting stuck in a rut, now, on the other side of the road from which one has pulled away.
Our Prodigal Return
But somehow or other, one way or another, sooner or later, we succeed. We make our way down the road. We end up hOMe. Like prodigal children we return to the embrace of the Universal Soul.
“Hey, Thanks for That Death I Wasn’t Expecting!”
Those most clinging to form and with the least experience of no-form are the most insistent on the reality of death … that is, of death being an end of consciousness.
But eventually, as you near hOMe, sure enough you realize there is no death. Other-than-Western cultures have it easier in coming to this awareness, for the vast majority of them have institutionalized ways of going regularly into nonordinary states of consciousness where the death-rebirth experience naturally occurs. Over and over again, before they actually die, they face what is felt to be death and discover it has another side—a hidden face which is an expansion of consciousness, a rebirth. More and more the prospect of death loses its anxiety; over time one becomes less fearful and more free. This is why Plato advised, “Practice dying.”
The Hidden Face of Death
However, Westerners, as in everything else, filter out real or deep experience from their lives; they further diminish consciousness from what it already is in just being human. They fortify, regimentize, medicalize, regulate, pharmacalize, and “insure” their lives against any possible deep experience, let alone death, and so they fear it most exceedingly, having nary a glimpse of its beatific other face … and knowing little of its nature as another peek-a-boo, another thing that will be fun to discover was not as was feared and in fact was something wonderful.
But as I have stressed throughout this work, the Universe—ourselves in essence—continually brings to us the experiences we need in order to grow and re-member again. In might take a dire illness, a neurotic or psychotic break, psychedelics, near-death experience, addiction in any of its forms, accidents, tragedies, or the death of a loved one. In various ways, and gradually over time, we recall our formlessness, we regain our liquid memories.
Death then loses its power in derailing our perception of What Is. We learn that killing is not possible for God, for there is no death.
Also, since there is no death, there is no time limit on realizing our Divinity.
Being God in Spite of You
And we learn everything about getting back by teaching ourselves the way back through the ways we interact with each other and the things we do to each other… even the bad things.
We are always ourselves trying to get ourselves back hOMe. We do that by acting upon ourselves through the actions of ourselves in the forms of others and though all those “external” events, which are also ourselves being on our side, teaching us, guiding us, and re-membering us.
The events that we encounter coming into the world as humans—most notably at the prenatal, perinatal, primal scene (around age four or five), and identity stages … more about this later—have the effect of reducing our awareness of Divinity and separating us from hOMe. The events that occur at and between those times through our interaction with ourselves as others serve to increase that diminution of consciousness … when we are newbies not wanting to go hOMe yet.
And later in life, beginning sometime in adulthood and when we have had enough and feel we are ready to go back, the grand U-turn begins and our interactions with ourselves as others serves to reverse that narrowed awareness.
So, it’s all Love that we give each other because whether we are assisting ourselves in reducing awareness to set up the experiment in Experience we call the individual self or helping ourselves back from it, we are glorifying the Divine adventure and moving it along. In spite of ourselves, we can’t help but be God.
And in spite of ourselves we can’t help but act as the Divine to ourselves and to others, perfectly, in bringing about many Divine adventures in consciousness. For even the seeming imperfection of it all—our actions and others—is part of that perfection, even if the realization of that does not come till after we have left our human form.
“Won’t Be Nothin’ But Big ol’ Hearts Dancin’ in Our Eyes”
There is a verse to a song that expresses this: “In spite of ourselves, we’re gonna end up a sittin on a rainbow… Against all odds, yeah, we’re the big door prize…”
There’s the knowledge.
“We’re gonna spite our noses right off of our faces…”
That’s true. That’s God speaking, you see?
“Won’t be nothing but big ol’ hearts dancing in our eyes.”
Nothing but Love. And that’s THE TRUTH.
Continue with Those Times You Absolutely Hate, The Divinity Within You Might Be Finding Interesting: Experience Is Divinity, Part Fifteen — Easily Ungrateful Humans
Return to Keep on Cosmic Giggling and HumanLand — Fun, New Amusement Park: Experience is Divinity, Part Thirteen — Fun Times Waking from Nightmares
To purchase Experience Is Divinity, or any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.
Invite you to join me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/sillymickel
friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel
About the Books
Posted by sillymickel in History on January 14, 2014
I was asked, which of my books to start with. Here’s my suggestions:
if you are more inclined to the spiritual, then Experience Is Divinity…
the political, then Culture War, Class War
the psychological (and environmental), then Apocalypse NO
the environmental (and spiritual), then Apocalypse Emergency
I’d definitely go with what is your main leaning in life … I think everyone has a particular leaning/liking in one direction or the other.
the easiest reading is Culture War Class War
the most philosophical (and most profound) is Experience Is Divinity
Apocalypse NO is fun … but also deep (and illuminating)
Apocalypse Emergency is disturbing … but ultimately uplifiting….
… so it really depends on you….
You Say You Want a Revolution?
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, Class, Culture, globalrevolution, Politics, psychology, spirituality on January 8, 2014
The problem with conspiracy theories is that it satisfies an age-old desire for revenge by finding individual actors culpable for what is wrong. This makes folks feel in control because they think they can fix things by going after individual actors — be they reptilian, alien, or whatever — and by eliminating them, solve the problem.
The situation is far worse than that. The true monster is the corporation. It is an entity with no morals and — like the monster in the movie, “Alien” — only one single desire motivating it: survival — which translates to profit and greed. It does not care whether the world and all life die within decades in an environmental apocalypse, as long as one extracts the maximum profit of the situation in the meantime. It does not care if women and children die in endless wars, as long as it is making money on the weapons used.
But who is to blame, then? The people making the decisions in the corporation are the kinds of folks you know next door (or you!). They are operating in tiny little worlds, disconnected from the whole, making efficient decisions with the aim of profit (in small areas) which, cumulatively, create the “monster” — the corporation.
So, the real situation is one where what is wrong is the system itself. And that is something that conspiracy buffs cannot handle, for it leaves one feeling helpless and hopeless: The real monster cannot be attacked by placing blame on individual actors and is not deterred by having one’s rage directed upon any particular target.
No. The real problem can only be addressed through a global revolution. And a true global revolution cannot be successful unless it is different from everything that has come before: all the revolutions that have failed. It can only succeed if it is using new tactics, built upon a complete revamping of the individual — that is, each and every one of us. (See “The New Hero’s Cycle Involves Surrender Not Struggle, Sacrifice Not Slaying, Compassion Not “Toughness,” and Silliness Not Stoicism,” for example). The global revolution can only succeed built upon the first ever, complete and comprehensive, consciousness revolution. And your guns, by the way, thus make you part of the problem, not the solution, you see.
This global revolution does not give you allowance for revenge, and you do not get to scapegoat any illuminati (or such) for things that are inside you. This global revolution starts with you and requires you work more on changing yourself than on changing others. And then the system itself needs to be addressed: It must be confronted on a societal and political level, as well as one must stop feeding it (corporations) in one’s personal life.
There are bad people, of course. There is treason, yes. (Bush and Cheney, for example.) And crimes against humanity should be investigated and punished to prevent their reoccurrence. But one should never forget, the real culprit is everywhere and yet in no particular persons. And it is partly in you. So the real battlefields are in your personal lives — the lifestyles you adopt, the consciousness transformation you seek for yourself, the consciousness raising you work to share, and the mass movements for complete and total change you give your bodies and minds to.
So, though you must relinquish your rage and scapegoating desires, in the end, you have more power to do something about this problem. But the responsibility lies upon you.
I was asked, “How do we dismantle the corporation?”
Here is my answer, taking off from my post on “The Monster Is the Corporation, Global Revolution Starts With You.” What do *you* think?
the short answer: “the lifestyles you adopt, the consciousness transformation you seek for yourself, the consciousness raising you work to share, and the mass movements for complete and total change you give your bodies and minds to”
OR
1. choose your life to live outside the corporate matrix as much as possible, starting with your job … just don’t do it! ( corporation)
2. choose ways of eating, purchasing, behaving, and recreating that are outside of the corporate matrix …. (without us, the monster dies)
3. work on yourself to look inside and resolve your issues from the past so you are not part of the problem, too.
4. help to raise the consciousness of others on all this (and not use social media to spread right-wing disinformation that threatens life)
5. at least don’t do wrong (like actually voting for a Republican/tea-bagger), but put your energy to mass causes (like occupy) which seek to address these problems as part of a massive change, … not incidental issues.
These things alone are plenty to do. And if you did the minimum you will be part of the solution, not the problem, at least. And with enough people doing just that (and some others, doing more), we can change the world.
***
When all is said and done — when the environment has collapsed apocalyptically, half the species no longer exists, radiation is killing everyone and their children, the oceans have risen and are covering the land, and extreme temperatures and fierce winds are beating upon everyone and taking out the frail — the corporate men and women whose day-to-day decisions made it happen, the Koch Brothers and other major misinformers, who led everyone astray, and the Tea Party and other climate/environmental troglodytes, who ridiculed and harassed all of us who tried to help, will all be up in arms, angered and enraged, looking all about and challenging,
“Why didn’t somebody DO something?!!!!!”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR, Michael Adzema. Video below … interviewed by Michael Harrell
.
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2mm9OBbYjRE
.
.
— Related: See also other published versions of these ideas….
.
*Dance of the Seven Veils I* (2017).
At Amazon at
*The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy* (2016).
*Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness* (2014).
*Apocalypse NO: Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious* (2013).
,
*Culture War, Class War: Occupy Generations and the Rise and Fall of “Obvious Truths”* (2013).
.
Tribes and Wonder Versus Civilization and Suffering: More Nestling Up With the Implicate Order, Or Before and After the Western Fall (Split)
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, Class, Culture, economics, Generations, globalrevolution, History, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, occupywallstreet, philosophy, Politics, psychology, science, spirituality on January 7, 2014
The Priests in the Church Were Keeping Out All the Screaming People, Forcibly Repressing, Refusing to Acknowledge It: A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Seven
(continued from The Bliss of Connection with Others … But There Is a Pain in Unexpressed Love: A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Six — Womb with a Review [Footnote 1])
More Nestling Up With the Implicate, Or
Before and After the Western Fall (Split) (June 19, 1992)
This is a holotropic session of this day:
It started out when the music was very rhythmic, and the hands were doing a lot of fertilized-egg kinds of movements and embryonic kind of stuff. And sometimes I was having images of Prague and of inside the city—especially Old Town Square and the towers. [Prague is where the holotropic workshop was being held.]
And I kept having pictures of people who had lived here, and all the suffering that had gone on here, and the striving. I kept picturing the people who had lived and written books and everything, plays and philosophies, inside their little rooms—all the different kinds of lives that people had here [Prague].
I kept picturing Swami [Sathya Sai Baba] and kept saying: “Oh Swami,” as if I were feeling and acknowledging what had gone on here: the feelings and desires, the struggles and the yearnings, and all those human things and feelings that had passed through this place. And I felt sad for all these people, the hardship they had gone through and all the feelings. And then I got up and went to the bathroom.
And when I came back it was just very peaceful. The drumming and everything was just something that was there. And I enjoyed parts of it: There were African parts, and they would have drumming and I would understand what it would be like to be an African person in a tribe.
At one point, however, the African tribe music sounded different or not good. And I had the feeling that this was singing from another tribe, not my own, an enemy tribe or something; I didn’t like it.
And then as it went off into different phases of music I would often feel very good—very interesting and beautiful in a certain way. And then it went into Native American chanting; and I thought that was incredible, that I must have been an indigenous American at one time … just wonderfully beautiful.
And it was either just before or just after that there was this Gregorian-type Church music. And one of the things that I kept having—scenes from Prague going through my head the entire time—and one of the scenes was the inside of a church.
And when the Gregorian music came on, I pictured the inside of that church again. And one of the interesting things was I realized at a certain point that people in the room around me were screaming [they actually were, in reality]—and there was a lot of that going on—and I had this feeling as if—when the Gregorian music was on—that the people in the church, the priests that is, that they had this reality going on in which they were keeping out all the screaming people, they were keeping them all outside the church, trying to repress that, trying to deny the reality of that. And so I felt like I was tuning into the reality of this place: That they [the priests and ecclesiasts] would forcibly try to repress this other element and keep it out of their consciousness, would refuse to acknowledge, let alone deal with it.
An Afterthought
As many as 30 million women were murdered horribly over a period of 300 years during the middle ages for having any trace of free-mindedness. This was done under the direction of the Catholic Church. They were often burned at the stake.
It is no coincidence that what followed for next four hundred years of Western “civilization” was a pall of Stepford wifery unparalleled among the cultures of humans, which we are only with great difficulty over the last hundred years awakening from.
Yet these forces of repression and murder continue with us today wishing to take us back to such middle age benighted views. They exist in the anti-abortion movement, even among mainstream Republicans, again with women as the direct target. And they exist in the tea party and conspiracy circles, even among some progressives, where feminism and progressive-liberal ideas are called “illuminati” — showing again that free-thinking women and enlightened views will not be tolerated … and will be scapegoated for all the horrors of the 1% and the powers that be, just as they were in the times of Catholic tyranny.
By the way, I’ve been misunderstood if anyone thinks this is just an attack on the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church was the primary evil then. I mentioned Western civilization. There are many more evil perpetrators today. It is not about blaming any institution. This is a product of our “civilization” and its anti-body, anti-sexual, anti-Nature insanity and the inherent evil of hierarchical societies in general.
Continue with Biology as Metaphor and Mythology, Part One: “The Map Is Not the Territory” and Biological Phases As Levels of Consciousness
Return to The Bliss of Connection with Others … But There Is a Pain in Unexpressed Love: A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Six — Womb with a Review
Footnote
1. Cellular/ Transpersonal Experiences
Having established the legitimacy of transpersonal aspects of prenatal, and especially cellular, re-experience, it remains to be seen what light this new perspective throws upon traditional formulations. I suggest to you that this perspective is a catalyst to a radical reformulation of traditional concepts of consciousness and development. My understanding is that it supports a view compatible with Eastern, Platonic, and “primitive” philosophical renderings—which can be characterized as Emanationist —and completely undermines the dominant Western evolutionary paradigm. I delineate such a perspective, which I call the Falls from Grace Theory, beginning in the next chapter.
However, let us first take a look at a sampling of the kinds of experiences and perspectives that are possible at this cellular and prenatal level of re-experience before attempting to see deeper into the structure of consciousness and development, presented immediately afterwards, which contains and makes sense of them. The current chapter—A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness—contains transcripts of cellular/transpersonal experiences I had through the modality of holotropic breathwork. In order to retain the flavor and potency of the raw experience itself, these transcripts are only slightly edited and are from the descriptions of my experiences I recorded immediately after having them.
Continue with Biology as Metaphor and Mythology, Part One: “The Map Is Not the Territory” and Biological Phases As Levels of Consciousness
Return to The Bliss of Connection with Others … But There Is a Pain in Unexpressed Love: A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Six — Womb with a Review
To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … of which this is an excerpt, Go to Falls from Grace
To purchase any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.
Invite you to join me on Twitter:
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The Bliss of Connection with Others … But There Is a Pain in Unexpressed Love: A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Six — Womb with a Review
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, Culture, globalrevolution, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, philosophy, Politics, psychology, science, spirituality on January 2, 2014
A Review of Womb Life: I Was Experiencing Creation … and the Sensuous Wonderful Feeling of Being Alive and Growing….
(continued from The Sound of Creation and Cellular Template of Eternal Bliss: I Was This Pulsating One-Celled Animal … Each Reaching Out Was Joy of Being Alive [Footnote 1])
And then I seemed to tire of that, or the music changed. And after a while I went into a period where I felt like I didn’t want to be on my back, and I went to one corner of the mat. And I told myself it was because it was wet where I’d been, but I went to one corner and I lay on my side.
And all of a sudden that made sense. My hands were moving like little fetal hands; and I was still feeling blissful. In fact I was thinking: “I don’t want to become a big baby and have BPM II.” I just wanted to stay a blastocyst. But I noticed that even as a fetus I was still grocking and digging and having a great time; and the music was still wonderful and I was still floating around. I still had movement in my hands and in my body to go with the music, to just groove with the rhythms of existence. And I felt like I was getting bigger. It seemed like I was going through a stage where I was really fetal, on my side. But then I felt the need to get up on my knees. And there was this really strong compulsion to get, like, on my head, to have my head down, and to have all the weight in my neck.
And when I did that finally—and it took me a while to get into that position, because it felt like the confines of gravity were working against me—I just wanted to tumble! But I couldn’t do that because I wasn’t in a gravityless situation. But eventually when I did get into that position it felt very right. And that was pretty good, too, but it was kind of cramped. And so I eventually stopped—it was too painful to maintain very long.
So I turned over on my side and just listened to the music. And then I spent a lot of time just listening to the music and realizing how great it was to exist and how beautiful it all is and how beautiful people are. And I began to think that that’s why we come here, to have this wonderful experience of reaching out to people.
And I began to realize that the blastocyst knows somehow that it’s reaching out to everyone else in the universe, even when it’s just a blastocyst. It’s reaching out because it knows the bliss of connecting with others. And the mandala that I envisioned would just be these cells multiplying outward with these snakelike arms reaching out in several directions to spin oneself around, or to reach out for more, or to just reflect the sensuous wonderful feeling of being alive and growing.
This is great. I’m real glad I’m doing this, and I hope I can continue to capture these feelings and to come from this space.
I want to say one other thing, and that’s that I realized at one point that I used to do things where—when I’d have a holotropic or a primal session—that I would go and do a review of all my past issues of pain. It was almost like doing a summary first, and then at the end I might get into something new. But I would often do the summary: Like I would sometimes be repeating the trauma of not having my mother after birth— and my lips would be sucking and there’d be nobody there; and going through the pain of getting out of the womb—being stuck in the womb; and just do that whole repeat. And then sometimes after doing all of that I’d go into sperm feelings.
But this time it was as if my body was doing a review, a summary of all that I’d learned: life from sperm to egg, fertilized egg, blastocyst, all the way to fetus, and then all the way to the second stage, all the way to BPM II—like the whole sequence of BPM I was being reviewed. And I thought this is a much better time to be doing a review of than of what happens later on, after the pain starts [from BPM II onwards, as mentioned in the previous paragraph].
So this is what I was experiencing, this wonderful being a creative process. I was experiencing creation. They say Om is the sound of creation, the creative sound; everything comes from that—the primordial sound, primordial symbol. So I kept wondering if my “ohing” sounds would turn into Om [it never exactly did].
One other thing: I was feeling one time how what I was expressing was the feeling of love, that I was feeling love and expressing that. And that there is a pain in unexpressed love; the pain [of life] is that we express all our pain [and suffer through all that], and we don’t get to feel the great love, which is kept in check.
And the pain is that the love is not able to be fully felt or released unless we do this kind of work, of course.
Continue with Tribes and Wonder Versus Civilization and Suffering: More Nestling Up With the Implicate Order, Or Before and After the Western Fall (Split)
Return to The Sound of Creation and Cellular Template of Eternal Bliss: I Was This Pulsating One-Celled Animal … Each Reaching Out Was Joy of Being Alive
Footnote
1. Cellular/ Transpersonal Experiences
Having established the legitimacy of transpersonal aspects of prenatal, and especially cellular, re-experience, it remains to be seen what light this new perspective throws upon traditional formulations. I suggest to you that this perspective is a catalyst to a radical reformulation of traditional concepts of consciousness and development. My understanding is that it supports a view compatible with Eastern, Platonic, and “primitive” philosophical renderings—which can be characterized as Emanationist —and completely undermines the dominant Western evolutionary paradigm. I delineate such a perspective, which I call the Falls from Grace Theory, beginning in the next chapter.
However, let us first take a look at a sampling of the kinds of experiences and perspectives that are possible at this cellular and prenatal level of re-experience before attempting to see deeper into the structure of consciousness and development, presented immediately afterwards, which contains and makes sense of them. The current chapter—A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness—contains transcripts of cellular/transpersonal experiences I had through the modality of holotropic breathwork. In order to retain the flavor and potency of the raw experience itself, these transcripts are only slightly edited and are from the descriptions of my experiences I recorded immediately after having them.
Continue with Tribes and Wonder Versus Civilization and Suffering: More Nestling Up With the Implicate Order, Or Before and After the Western Fall (Split)
Return to The Sound of Creation and Cellular Template of Eternal Bliss: I Was This Pulsating One-Celled Animal … Each Reaching Out Was Joy of Being Alive
To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … of which this is an excerpt, Go to Falls from Grace
To purchase any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.
Invite you to join me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/sillymickel
friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel
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