Posts Tagged doors of perception
The Making of a Calmer Crazy Person … Why Meditation by Itself Is Often Not Enough: A Primal Perspective on Spirituality, Part Eight — Non-Conceptual Experience
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, globalrevolution, individualism, nonconform, philosophy, psychology, spirituality on July 15, 2013
Cerebral Distortion and the Importance of Connection: It May Be That, Without Therapy, the Real Benefits of Spiritual Practice Are Not Attainable by Most Westerners
Non-Conceptual Experience
It would seem that some spiritual disciplines and religions are able to give some people a taste of more “alive” experiences than would ordinarily be possible by temporarily reducing the amount of pain-energized cortical activity or “noise.” In Huxley’s classic work, The Doors of Perception (1954), he makes a point that there are many “temporary by-passes” to “brain-as-reducing-valve,” some of which he directly relates to a slowdown of cortical activity through physiological means (pp. 23-24).
Meditation Tries to “Cut Through” the Pain
Meditation, specifically, appears to be a method of attempting to still the pain-driven cortical ramblings to gain access to nonverbal experience. In primal terms it may be said to be an attempt to bypass second-line pain and go directly to nonconceptual first-line material. This is not to say that some second-line is not dealt with. In addition to the evidence presented by Kornfield (1979) and Kapleau (1980), we might also remember that Muktananda’s journey inward was characterized by smiles and tears. Apparently, some second-line connections were made. Yet the meditative technique seems structured, basically, to get “below” these “personal” levels as soon as possible.
In meditation one attempts to maintain a “calm, detached attitude while observing his mental processes,” and the goal is to attend to thoughts that will deepen meditation and allow other distracting or disturbing thoughts to arise and burst without becoming involved in them (Rama et al., 1976, pp. 149-150). In this way the body learns to associate the relaxed state with what had formerly been disturbing thoughts, ever productive of cerebral “noise.”
Primal and Meditation Both Access Nonconceptual Experience
This meditation technique is vastly different from a primal one wherein all disturbing thoughts are allowed full sway in consciousness. Nevertheless, both do seem to provide access to underlying nonverbal levels. In fact, I have been told by one person who has experienced first-line pain in both meditation and primal that the phenomena encountered are identical: They are primarily body phenomena that the conceptual parts of the brain can interpret in a number of ways.
Meditation and Primal Both Access Body Memories of Birth and the Perinatal
In this respect, we might recall the descriptions of death-rebirth that are so commonly found in the spiritual literature and in the ethnographies of nonliterate peoples. Though primalers will invariably relate their particular experiences of this sort to their own biological births, in the psychedelic literature we find many examples of people reliving their births and using spiritual concepts, such as death-rebirth, to explain their experiences … although it should be noted that often in subsequent relivings the biological elements become too obvious to ignore.
The Importance of Connection
Apparently, it is only in the ways that these experiences are interpreted that shows up as a difference between them. Whereas Muktananda felt the “hopping” his body did was like that of a frog, someone in primal might realize that the jerks and kicks were actually the eruption of unresolved tensions from her or his birth.
Janov would say, however, that this difference in interpretation is an important one. For if one is interpreting these nonverbal body feelings in spiritual or other terms, one is not linking them up with one’s personal reality or one’s own experiences. One is not “connecting”; one is not seeing how that particular pattern of pain has influenced one’s second-line pain, nor how it has influenced one’s life history and present patterns of behavior. Thus, Janov would say that no change in those patterns of behavior can occur.
Cerebral Distortion
It would seem that first-line access without connection to second-and third-line—that is to say, without connection to how those birth and prenatal events influenced one’s childhood experiences and current life feelings and circumstances—would keep the cortical programs intact. Neural energies would continue proceeding along familiar distorted pathways, and these pain-necessitated elements of the antiquated defense system would remain to influence and distort the perceptions of one’s deeper experiences.
A Calmer State with a Disturbed Understanding May Result from Meditation on Its Own
On the other hand, one could make a case that very real, repressed energy is released during these first-line encounters no matter how they are interpreted. This energy, then, is no longer driving the excess cortical activity common to neurotics and characteristic of the beta state. The effect is that of less “noise,” calmer brain wave activity, and an increased capability to gain access to subtler energies.
Therefore, the fact that connections are not made and the original cerebral pathways are not altered seems to mark the difference between the primal and spiritual first-line encounters. I will discuss the effects of this further on.
Differences in Pain
It should be pointed out that for some this difference may not represent a real problem. Some people may simply not have much second-line pain, or even first-line pain blocking the perception of clear Reality.
People Differ in the Amount of Life Trauma Separating Them from Bliss
Apparently, there are vast differences in the amount of pain that people carry around, as Grof has demonstrated in reference to his LSD subjects. He found that there were some people who, after dealing with and reliving psychodynamic and perinatal material for a few sessions, would proceed to transpersonal experiences for the remainder of their sessions. This was especially true of professionals who were undergoing the treatment as part of their training.
This was in contrast to others with manifest neurotic and psychotic symptoms, many of whom had been hospitalized and often required scores of sessions dealing with their personal material before proceeding to transpersonal material (Grof, 1970, p. 2).
“Humanity … Is Neurotic”.”
Also there might be cultural differences. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho) wrote that “humanity, itself, is neurotic” because society requires that each person be “conditioned” and “molded into a particular pattern” and not be “allowed to be just whatever he is” (1976, p. 26). Further, he said that this may have had something to do with the fact that the great spiritual masters, who themselves realized, could not help the greater portion of humanity to reach enlightenment (p. 27).
Westerners Might Be “Crazier” and Thus Find It More Difficult
Keep this in mind along with the evidence that Americans have traditionally ranked among the lowest in the world in the general indulgence we afford our infants (Whiting & Child, 1953). Additionally, we are, in cross-cultural perspective, “quite severe in the general socialization of [our] children,” especially in regards to such important events as weaning and toilet training where we have been judged to be “exceptionally early and exceptionally severe” and “in a hurry to start the training process” (p. 320). These things be truing, we may say that we are, in some ways, more “neurotic” than many other cultures.
It May Be That the Real Benefits of Spiritual Practice Cannot Be Gained by Most Westerners
Considering all this we might question why we think we can just adopt, wholesale, the techniques that have been developed down through the centuries and, especially, for use in other cultures. For if, as Rajneesh says, the spiritual techniques don’t work because they do not address humanity as it is—that is to say, neurotic—then meditation and similar practices may be said to be even less applicable to a modern “severely conditioned” … and more traumatized … Westerner.
Continued with Bad Karma Enters Us Through Our Birth and Womb Experiences … Meditation as a Defense: A Primal Perspective on Spirituality, Part Nine — Karmic Genetics
Return to The Joy Beneath the Pain and Positive Possibilities of Experiential Process: A Primal Perspective on Spirituality, Part Seven — The Roots of Bliss
Invite you to join me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/sillymickel
friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel
The Doors of Perception: Each of Us Is Potentially Mind At Large… When Perception Is Cleansed, All Kinds of Nonordinary Things Happen
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, Generations, globalrevolution, individualism, meaning, philosophy, psychology, spirituality, uniqueness on December 8, 2012
Why Everything Appears Infinite when the Doors of Perception Are Cleansed: Biologically Constituted Realities, Part 4 — “Mind at Large” and The Awakening
Summary: Our combined efforts in psychology, physics, biology, and anthropology have led us to an impasse. We have been led to conclude that our view of reality is symbolic. We have learned, above all, not what to know, but that we know not . . . i.e., that we are incapable of truly knowing.
So, if we can’t know, why then bother to know anything? We seek to know because it is useful to our biological survival to know. That which we “know,” in our most refined science and in our daily lives, is that which is, or has been, in some way useful to the biological existence of our species.
Each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet
When this is reversed by various methods, and the brain is itself inhibited from its task of reducing awareness so that “Mind at Large seeps past the no longer watertight valve, all kinds of biologically useless things start to happen.”
“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is … infinite.” – William Blake
Why We Seek to Know
Ordinary Reality is Useful
In view of all this, one might ask, if one cannot have any truly accurate conception or even “sense” of what is really real, why then bother to know anything? Well, we bother to know because it is a helpful part of our species-specific worldview to do so. We have evolved, as nearly as we can determine, through a process of natural selection based on survival. We are, consequently, the endproduct of a biological drive to exist, to live—in all that may biologically, or otherwise, connote. Hence, that which we “know,” in our most refined science and in our daily lives, is that which is, or has been, in some way useful to the biological existence of our species.
Ordinary Science is Useful
This so-called “real-world” information is important because, then, it relates to our very biological aliveness. It has worth and it has value in that. That which comprises our species-world (as opposed to the “World-In-Itself”), indeed, is extremely relevant to everything that we think of as living and existing . . . for our species. The point I make, however, is that our senses and our sciences (which are extensions of our senses) are not ultimately in any one-to-one relationship to That Which Is . . . that our refined as well as cruder perceptions of reality are bioculturally relative—even more biologically relative than they are culturally relative in Marshall Sahlins‘s allegedly extreme theory.
Though We Know Not
Neither Ordinary Reality or Science Is Necessarily Real
Let me put it this way. Our combined efforts in psychology, physics, biology, and anthropology (examples of which I have indicated in this article) have led us to an impasse. We have been led to conclude that our view of reality is symbolic. We have learned, above all, not what to know, but that we know not . . . i.e., that we are incapable of truly knowing.
In anthropology we see this in Sahlins’s (1976) thinking on culture. But D’Andrade makes the important point, as mentioned earlier, that in Sahlins’s theory the total cultural heritage is a symbolic structure. Thus, his theory is “epistemologically sealed.” My point is that since our total biological heritage is also a “symbolic structure”—in the sense at least that it is a species-relative created reality providing analogous representations, survival-oriented metaphors only of That Which Is—we are “epistemologically sealed” as regards That Which Is and specifically in terms of understanding other known or unknown species. Our reality is symbolic and “sealed” prior to the cultural symbolism that creates further obfuscation between people in different cultures.
Paradigm Relativity
We see that there are therefore levels of applicability of “knowledge.” We might think of these as paradigms. But as surely as there are cultural paradigms, there are biological paradigms. I am saying that every biological configuration of spirit represents a separate paradigm for interpreting reality. [Footnote 3]
The Awakening … A New Paradigm Perspective
It might be helpful to mention Huxley’s (1956) way of viewing this matter. In his classic work, The Doors of Perception, he quotes Dr. C. D. Broad on the importance of considering a view of memory and sense perception, originally proposed by Bergson, in which “the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative” (p. 22).
What Is Outside All Paradigms … Really Real
By way of explanation, Huxley (1956), still quoting Broad, writes
Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful. (pp. 22-23)
Mind at Large Is “Really Real”
According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large.
But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. (p. 23)
When the Doors of Perception Are Cleansed, The Nonordinary Happens
Furthermore, Huxley (1956) points out, when this is reversed by various methods, and the brain is itself inhibited from its task of reducing awareness so that “Mind at Large seeps past the no longer watertight valve, all kinds of biologically useless things start to happen” (p. 26).
Continue with How We Might Come to Know: In Tossing Away Our Species Blinders, We Relearn That Consciousness Is Infinite, Yes … but Fantastic as Well.
Return to We Are What We’ve Experienced and The Perinatal Paradigm: Our Conception, Gestation, and Birth Create Our Windows to the World
Footnote
3. This perspective has much in common with Wilber’s (1977) “spectrum of consciousness” view of reality. Though, for reasons which will become clear as we proceed, I must stress that this position does not synchronize with Wilber’s later formulations (e.g., 1980, 1981), where he has conformed his view to the more traditional and presumptuous Western biases; biases that are distinctly at odds with an essential point I have emphasized in this article of making diligent our attempts at wiping away any ethnocentric as well as anthropocentric residue from our lenses if we are to have any chance at all for even minimal success in our venturing into Reality. (Cf. Winkelman 1990; Adzema 1991)
Continue with How We Might Come to Know: In Tossing Away Our Species Blinders, We Relearn That Consciousness Is Infinite, Yes … but Fantastic as Well.
Return to We Are What We’ve Experienced and The Perinatal Paradigm: Our Conception, Gestation, and Birth Create Our Windows to the World
Invite you to join me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/sillymickel
friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel
Kaleidoscope of Postmodern Life, Part Two: Fleshy Mosh Wombs, Rock Rebirthing, Trolls, and the Doors of Perception…Stormed
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, Culture, Generations, globalrevolution, History, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, philosophy, Politics, psychology, spirituality, uniqueness on April 14, 2012
Rock Concert Rebirthing, Mosh Wombs, and the Doors of Perception…Stormed: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 2
The Perinatal Veil: Rock Concerts (For some, ditto)
Lawson has also described perinatal elements in rock concerts. [Footnote 1]
Mosh Wombs
Keep in mind that rock music popularity and concert rituals are world-wide phenomena. Youth from nearly all
countries are involved in rock culture.
Among other things, Lawson, in his article, refers to placental guitars, umbilical mikes, and youths jumping into mosh pits. Mosh pits suggest birth feelings in that they simulate the crushing in the womb.
At birth our consciousness is filled with the feeling of flesh all around. The world is crushing, heaving, rollicking, bouncing flesh everywhere. During a non-cesarean birth one struggles and moves through this flesh to reach space, air, light…freedom. We re-create this pattern of struggle in order to reach the light, or freedom and space, throughout life. It is obvious that mosh pits are attractive, appealing places to re-create the danger of birth alongside the hope of being “held up,” uplifted, and reborn.
The Doors of Perception…Stormed
We could also mention the loud music, fireworks, and flashing and bright explosions of light at these concerts as perinatal in that they re-create the assault of sensation that occurs to the newly emerged fetus—an assault which in one’s mind is like unto a bomb exploding.
The rock groups and their lyrics themselves are often blatantly perinatal. The most obvious example of this was the group, Nirvana, who came out with a CD titled “In Utero.” The fact that the leader of the group, Kurt Cobain, committed suicide is a strong indication of his closeness and access to his perinatal trauma…as I will soon explain.
Pacifiers, Trolls, and Collective Rebirth
Turning from rock, we see perinatal BPM III elements in the scenery of our everyday lives evident in the rising incidence of violence by children at ever younger ages.
In Europe, as pointed out by Mayr and Boederl, it appears a collective regression to the perinatal is going on, especially among the youth. [Footnote 2]
Collective Navel-Gazing
The forms this “regression” has taken include the surprising popularity of a pop song, sung by a very young child, expressing the difficulties of being a baby; the wearing of baby pacifiers as ornaments as a powerful fashion fad; and being enamored of troll-like dolls, which, according to the authors indicate a “regression to the womb.”
I would say a progression to the womb, by the way….I will soon explain why.
Footnotes
1. Alvin H. Lawson, “Placental Guitars, Umbilical Mikes, and the Maternal Rock-Beat: Birth Fantasies and Rock Music Videos.” The Journal of Psychohistory 21 (1994): 335-353. [return to text]
2. Daniela F. Mayr & Artur R. Boelderl, “The Pacifier Craze: Collective Regression in Europe.” The Journal of Psychohistory 21 (1993): 143-156. [return to text]
Continue with Crushing Populations and Its Relief—Perinatal Pulls of Public Life, Sky Diving, Dancing, Swimming, and “Birth”Day Parties: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 3
Return to Dangling Above the Abyss and Perinatal Aliens, Pretty Much: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 1
Invite you to join me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/sillymickel
friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel