Posts Tagged experience
A rare peak into holotropic breathwork: “It’s not like anything you know or have heard about” … here’s a taste, on video, of some authentic spiritual experiences….
Posted by sillymickel in Apocalypse NO, books, Experience Is Divinity, Falls from Grace, Funny God, holotropic breathwork, Michael Adzema author, spirituality, Stanislav Grof, transpersonal psychology, videos, Wounded Deer and Centaurs on November 5, 2015
For those of my friends and followers who have been wondering what holotropic breathwork “looks like” here is a very rare clip…. Rare, because Stanislav Grof, its originator, has refused to allow the actual goings on of such workshops to be video recorded for media use. These experiences are too easily misunderstood and mislabeled, especially taken out of context. To my knowledge, he was unwilling to let the workshops be filmed unless the reporters themselves went through the experience. Perhaps this is one such. It occurred in the Eighties, and you will see a very young-looking Stanislav Grof facilitating here.
This is in German, so I can’t know what the commentary is saying. But this is most definitely what it looks like…. this is what i have been doing with my clients for years… this is what i have had years of experiencing with …this modality….
Simply describing what we do, no one really gets a good idea of what it’s like, for it is not like anything they know or have heard about….
So here it is folks. a sample…
Of course, this says nothing about what the actual experience is like, actually feels like …. nor can it convey the profound transformations that go on inside one, or the depth and meaningfulness of the experience to one’s life….
But here’s a taste….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlGg99yt1ZA
Holotropic breathwork experiences played heavily into my writings. One of my books, in particular, contains detailed explanations of some of my holotropic breathwork experiences.
That is
Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness
http://www.amazon.com/Falls-Grace-Devolution-Revolution-Consciousness/dp/1499297998/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
Other books of mine related to holotropic breathwork include, importantly,
Experience Is Divinity: Matter as Metaphor
http://www.amazon.com/Experience-Divinity-Matter-Metaphor-Return/dp/1492932213/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
Apocalypse NO: Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious
http://www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-NO-Emerging-Perinatal-Unconscious/dp/1492347213/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation
http://www.amazon.com/Funny-God-Minds-Liberation-Return/dp/1499504845/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
***
and the soon-to-be-released
Wounded Deer and Centaurs: The Necessary Hero and the Prenatal Matrix of Human Events
prepublication excerpts and samplings to whet your appetite include:
http://sillymickel.blogspot.mx/2015/11/the-next-frontier-in-evolution-time.html
****
For any of Michael Adzema’s books, go to Michael Adzema at Amazon at
http://www.amazon.com/Michael-Adzema/e/B00J7F0URC/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1445400944&sr=1-1
#holotropic #breathwork #experience #actual #Grof #rare #transformation #spirituality #authentic
“We call it “growing up” to be impassionate, to be morosely, meekly obedient: Educators exhort us to deny emotion; Doctors prescribe pills; therapists counsel us to be less alive
Posted by sillymickel in adulthood, books, child-rearing, consciousness, Experience Is Divinity, Funny God, Michael Adzema author, parenting, Reality, spirituality on September 22, 2015
“We call it “growing up” to be more insensitive, less spontaneous … to be impassionate, and morosely and meekly obedient. Our educators exhort us to deny emotions; our doctors provide pills to suppress them; and our therapists counsel their clients, helping them to be less alive. Like suburbanites paving over everything with asphalt and with manicured lawns in which any weed has been assassinated out of existence, we are terrified of anything unpredictable in the Divine, anything emotional. We want to control Divinity.
“Yet, this kind of going to the opposite extreme of emotion … worshiping nothingness, emotionlessness … does not give us a picture of Reality. It only gives us a picture of a defense against what happened to us. The problem is that God is *more*, not *less* of what is Real. Divinity is not Reality devoid of the Real, of real experience. But that is what, out of fear, we have come to wish for….”
– from “Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation”
#spirituality #consciousness #experience #growingup #divinity #follow #tsu #Reality #spirit #emotion
We’d rather cuddle with a statue: “Emotions having become soured in us … we strive to empty ourselves of them. Our cultures, similarly, glorify the unaffected personality….”
Posted by sillymickel in books, consciousness, Culture, Experience Is Divinity, Funny God, God, Michael Adzema author, Patriarchal culture, personality, spirituality on September 21, 2015
“Why We Think Less Is More: There is a good reason why we make the mistake of confusing unfeelingness and a vapid personality and life experience with a greater and more Divine one. We are so traumatized by things that have been done to us in early life … maybe we had an angry daddy, a cruel mommy … that we get comfort only in imagining a Divine with no emotional qualities. We would rather cuddle with a statue, cozy up to a piece of granite, or be enamored of an empty concept or an ambiguous image or symbol than expose ourselves to what we feel to be the only alternative. That is, that Divinity might come crashing down on us like a thunderbolt … something perhaps our parents did. Because life was threatening to us, once, we seek to create a Divinity, thus, a Reality, that will not be, cannot be.
“Emotions having become soured in us, in our religious and spiritual pursuits we strive to empty ourselves of them. Our cultures, similarly, glorify the unaffected personality; and we wish to put ourselves above our feelings and to train our children out of their emotions….”
– from “Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation”
http://www.amazon.com/Funny-God-Minds-Liberation-Return/dp/1499504845/ref=sr_1_1_twi_pap_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1442668372&sr=1-1&keywords=michael+adzema
https://www.facebook.com/notes/michael-adzema/wed-rather-cuddle-with-a-statue-we-remove-the-essence-of-divinity-from-our-ideas/10152677583538138?pnref=lhc
#spirituality #consciousness #experience #God #divinity #follow #tsu #personality #spirit #emotion
Schizoid experience and God: “Being closer to God is having more participation in, more inclusion of the Experience of Reality”
Posted by sillymickel in books, consciousness, Experience Is Divinity, Funny God, Michael Adzema author, psychology, spirituality, transpersonal psychology on September 20, 2015
“Being closer to God is having more participation in, more inclusion of the Experience of Reality.
“This does not mean that God is not of the mind at all, is not “mental.” Feelings and experiences include the mental. For deep and profound understandings and overstandings of Reality are experiences also.
“There is the focusing on the map of Reality that distracts one from actual experience of Reality, true. There is also the retreat into abstraction in avoidance of and in fear of feelings and emotions, with their peripheries of darkness and pain … also true.
“Experience that is divided and categorized this way, and with one category elevated, others repressed, is unreal, is schizoid…”
– from “Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation” http://www.amazon.com/Funny-God-Minds-Liberation-Return/dp/1499504845/ref=sr_1_1_twi_pap_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1442433185&sr=1-1&keywords=michael+adzema
https://www.facebook.com/notes/10152683728223138
#spirituality #consciousness #experience #God #divinity #follow #tsu #retreat #abstraction #shizoid
“we’ve built theologies out of our fears…created religions to soothe…deny our experiences…. It is the opposite of Reality”
Posted by sillymickel in books, Experience Is Divinity, Funny God, Michael Adzema author, religion, spirituality on September 16, 2015
“…we’ve built theologies out of our fears. We’ve created religions to soothe and deny our experiences … our Experience. Well, this has nothing to do with Reality. Indeed, in denial of our experience … and Experience … it is the opposite of it. The theologies and religions … and many spiritualities … have nothing to do with God, either. They take the most alive, profound, glorious, and exciting things imaginable (and unimaginable) and reduce them to nothing … and thus to something that is safe: A statue Jesus. A distant and unknowable God. An amorphous, boring, and bland Universal Consciousness. An impersonal detail of the physical world like light, vibration, or energy. All of which — in denial of what we truly feel about them and their coldness, abstractness, or emptiness — we call glorious, ultimate, grand … and loving. Like those heartless parental figures we wished had been there for us … but weren’t….”
– from “Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation”
https://www.facebook.com/notes/10152683728223138/
See Michael Adzema on Amazon for any other of Michael Adzema’s books
http://www.amazon.com/Michael-Adzema/e/B00J7F0URC/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1
#spirituality #religion #divinity #God #denial #follow #tsu #heartlessparents #fear #experience
“We’d rather think of God as being nothing…or devitalized…rather than heartless; like we feel Him to be, because of our experiences with authorities in childhood”
Posted by sillymickel in FunnyGod, Michael Adzema author, psychology, religion, spirituality, transpersonal psychology on September 15, 2015
“We’ve experienced meanness and cruelty in our early lives, so we imagine a Divine with no qualities at all. We say It is loving, but in an incomprehensible way and “from a distance.” So how loving … really … is someone who is distant? We don’t see ourselves as free and loved and forgiven … let alone, sinless and unjudged. We are terrified of an emotionless monster, which we call God, which we say is loving, but who we depict as emotionless so as to be better able to apprehend than if we depicted Him as we felt Him to be … cruel. We’d rather think of God as being nothing … or devitalized … rather than heartless; like we feel Him to be, because of our experiences with authorities in childhood.
“The point is that we’ve built theologies out of our fears. We’ve created religions to soothe and deny our experiences … our Experience. Well, this has nothing to do with Reality. Indeed, in denial of our experience … and Experience … it is the opposite of it…..”
– from “Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation”
https://www.facebook.com/notes/10152683728223138/
#spirituality #religion #divinity #God #love #follow #tsu #authorities #fear #experience
“To the extent one lowers the barriers of early pain and the mental defenses from it, you also can feel such Divine instruction, as “instinct,” say Planetmates
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, Culture, Generations, globalrevolution, History, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, philosophy, psychology, spirituality on April 25, 2014
“…there would be much more “instinctual” knowledge available to you — and is available to you — were you, for reasons of your birth and infancy and the way they have caused you to run away from the feelings in your bodies, not split off from them. Indeed, to the extent that you have not run away from such pain, or to the degree that one has turned and faced and integrated that pain and reconnected with one’s body, you do feel and receive such specific “instinctual” instruction.
“In fact, think of it, when we say we do not know where those messages come from, which we experience in the body, do you see that, to be more specific, we know them to come from the “divine”? For they are “instructions,” as it were, that guide us in the care of ourselves in life and the carrying out of our life’s actions along lines most beneficial and pleasurable. And other than a force that is comforting, beneficial, and wiser than our limited selves, what else is the Divine? For certainly that is enough for us. Keeping that in mind, do you not see that it is the same for you? And that to the extent that one is able to lower the barriers of early pain and the mental defenses that arose from it, you also can feel such Divine instruction … of an increasingly more specific quality … and become more “instinctual.” Or, in your words, divinely inspired or guided by God.
“Backing up, so you denigrate our experience as “instinctual,’ when it is no different from your own experience of life … and if there is any difference it has to do with the greater access we have, the stronger and clearer connection we have, with a wisdom and beneficence beyond our limited selves, which you have separated from, but which is still accessible deep inside you, below the levels of your early pain. Just because we have more access to Mind at Large, which contains all information and knowledge, does not mean we are mindless, feelingless machines. Does it not mean the opposite? Indeed, we are your angels in nature, as we said earlier.
“So, keep in mind, our “instinct” is what guides us in having the experiences of the joy, pleasure, and happiness of life … something you have lost so much of. And it hardly matters where it “came from.” Certainly, the fact that we are more divinely inspired is no reason to trivialize our experience, or our knowledge … any more than you should demean the brilliance of your Shakespeare or Einstein or Jesus just because they happened to have found a way to stay or become sensitive to the wisdom of the Universe and the Divine, which is everywhere around, but which you, most of you and for the most part, block yourself from feeling.
“And for us this pleasure and joy, this “instinctual” guidance, includes having offspring. It is another capacity that wants to be actualized, which, in doing so, planetmates feel pleasure. It also is not a chore, or work, which for you it has often become.
“But you also know what life is that is lived under the direction of the Divine instead of the direction of higher ups, extracting from you the suffering equivalent to the control of you, which is termed work.
For, you ask a child digging in the sand with a shovel if that is work. Ask the athlete if clearing the bar when pole vaulting is work. Ask if it is work to sidestep all tacklers and throw oneself over the goal line. Ask the sculptor if fashioning stone and watching her or his vision of it emerge from it is work.
“Lion cubs fight and wrestle with each other. You say they are just preparing themselves for an adult life of struggle and fighting off predators. Really? Do you really think they are taking it on like a class, or exercise regimen, and not just having fun?
“At any rate, creative people know what we are talking about. They know about the work that is not work, that is actually play and conducive to joy. And they know about that magical, “instinctual” knowledge that comes to one precisely and specifically. For they know that their “works” (their “plays”?) have to be just so. When it fits with their “instinct” — their unconscious knowing which only comes out in actions of following it or expressing it — they know it is done and it cannot be any different. As Amadeus, in an ironic tone, said in the movie when someone criticized his composition for having “too many notes,” “Just exactly which notes would you have me take out?”
“So for the artist in any medium, the creative product arises as if it was done somewhere else, by someone else, and one is just the channel for it. Upon its completion, it feels as if it had come forth perfect and precise in all its details … springing, as it were, “fully formed from the forehead of Zeus.” So this is instinctual knowledge, of a sort, which ultimately comes from a place beyond themselves and ourselves.
“But with sedentary ways you forgot all that and you created work, which is the non-divine actions emanating as urges, not from the inside and the body (ultimately the Divine), but from the outside, driven and pushed by coercion. Rather than the positive reinforcement one receives in following one’s “instinctual” guidance, which makes of one’s life a happy one, acting in response to the promptings of the outside is largely a product of negative reinforcement. One is not, as in Nature, just rewarded when one follows its promptings, one is punished when one does not. Overall, such a life is not a happy one….”
Pt 3 of 25rd prasad — Family Fortress. .
ABOUT THE AUTHOR, Michael Adzema. Video below … interviewed by Michael Harrell
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https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2mm9OBbYjRE
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— Related: See also other published versions of these ideas….
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*Dance of the Seven Veils I* (2017).
At Amazon at
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*Prodigal Human: The Descents of Man* (2016).
At Amazon at
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*The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy* (2016).
At Amazon —https://t.co/WMyo609jCi
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.
At Amazon at
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At Amazon at
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*Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness* (2014).
At Amazon — http://amzn.to/2anYVzi
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At Amazon — http://amzn.to/2aeeZUA
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*Apocalypse NO: Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious* (2013).
At Amazon at
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At Amazon at
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,
*Culture War, Class War: Occupy Generations and the Rise and Fall of “Obvious Truths”* (2013).
At Amazon at
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See Michael Adzema at Amazon for any other of the twelve books currently in print.
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https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2mm9OBbYjRE
*The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy* (2016).
*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).
“What you have so forgotten, astonishingly, is how life’s pleasure is involved, not just in sensory satisfactions, but in using the skills latent in you … your ‘instinct’”: The Planetmates reveal instinct and “free will”
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, Culture, Generations, globalrevolution, History, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, philosophy, psychology, science, spirituality on April 16, 2014
“All planetmates come into the world with unique skills. Humans, as well. What you have so forgotten, astonishingly, is how life’s pleasure is involved, not just in sensory satisfactions, as in passing substances over the surface of your taste buds, but in using those skills latent in you. Athletes and artists know what we are talking about. But, look into Nature and you will see planetmates, from birth, reveling in the use of the skills and unique abilities—like the cat’s skills in going after prey—they are born with, which you say is attributable to “instinct”—as if it matters where it came from.
“For what is instinct, after all? You say it is a knowing that is programmed into us, passed down through our genes, pushing us to do things at certain times and guiding our actions in how to do it. Any way you look at it, you see us as little different from machines or computer programs going through their processes, or like the inanimate forces of Nature interacting according to laws of physics. This is part of the way you have removed spirit and consciousness from the rest of Nature, so you could raise your own up higher. For, amazingly, you say that you do not have such “instinct,” you say you have “free will”!
“Because it does not fit with your constant need to pump up your Ego, you have not considered how we feel or what our experience is in going about these “instinctual” “tasks.” And yet you could. Despite your vanities, you are part of Nature, too. You are not much different from us, so you have overlap with the Reality we experience and ingress to the way we experience it.
“Assume that you are not so different from us, for a second, and see if you can understand what “instinct” really is. Okay, you eat, for example. But why? Well, you know you have certain urges within your experience, which become more noticeable and then even painful the longer you fail to respond to them. They are called hunger, or you might say you have a craving. You do not “choose” these events or experiences. Are they not something like instinct?
“Not quite getting it, I see. Okay, consider also what you do, then. You bring that urge or hunger to an end by satisfying it. You do this by eating something. And do you need to tell yourself how to eat? You have mouths, teeth, throats, and stomachs. Does your free will come up with the idea of how to use them, or are you “instinctual,” too? Was swallowing some invention one of you had at one point, which was then taught to generation after generation?
“Still is not completely clear? Alright, then think what is your experience when you eat. When you satisfy that urge, called hunger, you experience what you call pleasure. Put it all together and what do you have? You have an experience which directs you to do something, at particular times, and guides you in the exact ways of doing it, which you do until you achieve pleasure, or at least satisfaction. Sounds like “instinct,” does it not?
“But you say we have more specific directions on things to do and when to do them. You say one of our bird planetmates knows “instinctually” how to build a nest, whereas you have to learn how to fashion your house. But consider that your desire to build a shelter does not have to be learned. You would say that it comes naturally out of the experience of existing in the open, encountering inclement weather, and wanting to be comfortable (to not be in pain because of it), and possibly as being proactive against the threat of predators. Have you not considered that our actions might also come from exactly the same kind of experiential pushes? Just because you, standing outside of us, do not see this does not mean it is not going on for us.
“But more. You may be someone who is naturally strong. Where does the desire to use that strength come from? You may be someone with a sweet voice. Where does the urge to sing come from? You may be someone with a knack for understanding the workings of things. Where does the “instinct” to delve deeply into matters and “research” them come from? Where does that “curiosity” come from? Do you see that many of the things you do in life—from being able to eat and breathe to individual skills like singing—arise out the fact that you are born with the capacity or ability to do them? Do you see that the potential for something gives rise to its actualization? And that experientially this comes across, just like hunger and eating, as an urge (seemingly coming out of nowhere), containing within it exact conceptualizations or imaginings on the possible fruition or manifestation coming from that urge, leading to what you call a pleasure when you are following through on that forethinking or imagining and especially upon its completion? But, if we viewed things the way you do, why would not we, looking at you doing this, think you are acting “instinctually”?
“So you and we are the same experientially. We do our lives carrying out actions that arise out of messages from our bodies (and from where they come, neither you nor we exactly know), which provide the satisfaction and pleasure of life in their manifestation.
“How specific those messages are is not a huge dividing line between us, as the fact that we often are much more precise in the actions we carry out is easily explained by the fact that you are more split off from such sources of information. You also have many things you do out of unconscious knowledge, coming to you as feelings in your bodies, which you do not see and do not want to notice … preferring the self-congratulation of crowning yourselves with “free will,” instead. And there would be much more “instinctual” knowledge available to you—and is available to you—were you, for reasons of your birth and infancy and the way they have caused you to run away from the feelings in your bodies, not split off from them. Indeed, to the extent that you have not run away from such pain, or to the degree that one has turned and faced and integrated that pain and reconnected with one’s body, you do feel and receive such specific “instinctual” instruction….”
Pt 2 of 25rd prasad — Family Fortress.
— excerpted from *Planetmates: The Great Reveal* … now available in print and e-book at Amazon.
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).
.
To purchase any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.
Those who want signed copies of any of my books, email me directly … sillymickel@gmail.com … Discount for blog subscribers.
Invite you to join me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/sillymickel
friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel
“With agrarian economics … there was more focus on the immediate family. You had increasing alienation from each other … and increasing greed”: The Planetmates on sex, happiness, the tribe, the nuclear family, and the “intensity of experience” of life
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, Culture, economics, Generations, globalrevolution, History, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, occupywallstreet, philosophy, Politics, psychology, spirituality on March 25, 2014
“…there was much more happiness attendant upon the state of being a child — being free and open, not just to the awesomeness of the physical world and world of Nature, but to the love, pleasure, fun, and interactions of the social world, as well, with its fascinating array of human behavior and emotion, and the brilliance and marvel of its “magical” members.
“Correspondingly, as nomadic humans, while there was marriage, you were less monogamous. You had various forms and varieties of sexual interactions and marital arrangements. Monogamy was most common, but even then it was less constrained. Sexuality was not the hoarded and jealously guarded commodity it became later for you. Marriage ties were more about the children — their care and the primary responsibilities for them. Additionally, it had to do with societal and cultural concerns, such as expanding kinship opportunities for the relatives of the married couple, and maximizing the circles of sharing and reciprocation. It had virtually nothing to do with establishing lines of heredity or kinship. For owning little (and needing little), you had no concerns about passing possessions or property along. And the mother being the child-bearer led most often to lines of descent being calculated primarily through her, and there was no need, or desire, to upset that natural configuration.
“At any rate, you had much freer ideas about sexuality. Not only did this contribute to the spice of life and the intensity of human experience in general — for women as well as men — but it contributed to the caring of children. Let us explain:
“By “intensity of experience,” we mean that with the excessive stipulations and pressures upon your personhood that came with hierarchical societies, including today’s, your experience — along with your needs, emotions, and aliveness — became muted, dampened. Repressed and numb, your experience lacks the color, the extra flavors and magnificence, and intensity of our lives in Nature. You have no idea what you are missing in your lives. You have not an inkling how you cuddle with your chains and contribute to your increasing numbification over the course of your lives.
“Yet for most of your existence, which preceded your controlling-conforming-sedentary times, your experience was much more intense, alive, and interesting than it is for you now. And what added to that intensity and color, that exquisiteness and pleasure of your experience, was a freer and less constrained sexuality … among many, many, many other things, by the way.
“And how it contributed to the care of children is that it allowed — in that there would be no deprived party — for those times of sexual abstinence after the child was born and during the pregnancy itself. This kind of sexual abstinence would be a product of the sexual disinterest the mother often had while engaged in devoted attention to a young child. The mother derives much sensual satisfaction and emotional fulfillment from nursing, which for one thing pushes other kinds of sensual desire to the side. Other aspects of motherhood and the caring and nurturing of children are also both pleasurable and desirable as well as completely engrossing. So sexual disinterest is much more likely to happen for the mother in the period after childbirth. And as we have said, this contributes to a longer interval between births, and therefore an exceedingly needed and beneficial attention to the most recent newborn.
“Freer sexuality and looser or nonexistent constraint on sexual partners contributed to human satisfaction and social/marital stability for another reason. For sexual disinterest leading to sexual abstinence also occurs for humans for many other reasons: It often occurs during the times of and in the course of spiritual pursuits — not as a result of intention, for as we have said, self-denial is counterproductive to spiritual progress, but because of the degree of engagement and immersion in other-than-bodily pursuits at those times. A person might feel a pull toward taking on something with the total engagement of self that occurs, for example, in a vision quest or walkabout. A looseness of constraints on sexual partners can only facilitate the ability of tribe members to take such things up, being as how it leaves no sexually deprived other, so there is no pressure from another to refrain from following one’s spiritual or creative inclinations.
“Similarly, sexual disinterest occurs, sometimes, during periods of personal transformation, which occur naturally and spontaneously to Authentic humans in the course of their lives. For these might require their full engagement and attention. Other times disinterest might occur is because of ritual or cultural involvement, during periods of grieving upon the death of loved ones, advancing age, sickness, and simply the changing feelings of the partners toward each other over the course of time.
“For all of these reasons and in all these instances, the loose constraints on the sexuality of your earliest forebears and the relative non-exclusivity of sexual partnership meant that the individuals involved were not pulled away from total immersion and focus on these experiences because of a sexually deprived and demanding spouse. In addition to the examples given, consider how, freed from sexual obligations, one could allow oneself to fully and thoroughly grieve, when needed, or allow complete immersion in any comparable emotional experience. This, in its own way, and being at the core of mental health and personal growth, contributed to greater overall happiness, life fulfillment, and expansive abilities to experience life.
“All things considered, more free flowing attitudes toward sex allowed for amplification of life experience, greater spiritual and personal transformation, overall greater happiness, less personal conflict and neurosis, and, importantly, benefit to children. Not only were children helped by the care and attention they wrought of mothers who were not having additional newborns requiring their attention until they, the older ones, were much less emotionally needy, but they were better off due to the fact that they lived in family and tribal groups which were composed of more loving, giving, happy, and affable human adults, because of their overall better fulfillment and experience of life.
“But then you became sedentary and lived in hierarchical societies and all of this changed. With agrarian economics, suddenly, there was more focus on the immediate family. Living permanently on land that one claimed ownership to and which one farmed separated your tribal human group of before into nuclear family units. You did not own the land in common and farm it in a communal style. No. For part of this war against uncertainty and increasing fear of deprivation, which manifested in your having become agrarian and sedentary, was mistrust and fear, not just of Nature, but of each other. You had increasing alienation from each other, greater possessiveness of all things, and increasing greed. What came of such inner forces was that the nuclear family established borders around the land it cultivated and built walls of emotional avoidance between itself and the rest of the community.
“It was families against the world….”
Pt 5 of 24rd prasad — Family “Investment”
— excerpted from *Planetmates: The Great Reveal* by Michael Adzema … now available in print and e-book formats at Amazon
ABOUT THE AUTHOR, Michael Adzema. Video below … interviewed by Michael Harrell
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https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2mm9OBbYjRE
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— 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).
.
Invite you to join me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/sillymickel
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The war on drugs, one example, is basically the battle between folks finding out for themselves what is real versus outside authority doing that: Experience Is Divinity, Matter As Metaphor
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, Culture, globalrevolution, History, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, occupywallstreet, philosophy, Politics, psychology, spirituality on March 18, 2014
Experience Is Divinity, Matter As Metaphor … Book and Introduction
we create time so everything doesn’t happen at once….
we create space so everything doesn’t happen together.
but the tiniest atom is no different from the biggest galaxy….
we are only perceiving one thing. that “thing” is perception… I.e., experience is the only reality … everything else is reflections and illusions of Absolute Subjectivity … in the immediate moment….
Experience Is Divinity: Matter As Metaphor … the book
So, is perception everything, you might ask. Well, tell me, what is outside of your perception/experience?
Or, put it this way: We can’t know if perception is everything. But we can know that the reflections of perception, which we call words, icons, and the physical world are illusions.
So, our experience is all that is knowable to us.
Example: People say, “Everything is energy” … y’know. thinking that is more profound than matter being reality. But is there energy existing *outside* of our perceptions of energy? We don’t know. So, we have maybe words in a book describing energy … so that’s way removed from the reality of it … or we have putting our finger in a socket and say that’s energy, but even that is a perception of it. so what is energy directly experienced, like in the body? well, it is our very subjectivity. the perception itself, not the object of the perception (which is always only a deduction, once removed from reality)
In other words, say I am a doctor and I have you on some kind of scan and I say, hmmm, there is energy moving through your body … I can see it on this machine… Well, that is the doctor’s experience of it. But your experience of it might be an emotion, a thought, a word inside one’s head, feelings of warmth or cold … and all combinations of these things and things like them. It is called Experience or Subjectivity.
So the doctor calls it energy, but what do you call it? You call it your experience. Now, who is going to be more correct? the doctor who is *outside* of you experiencing this energy in you Indirectly or you who are experiencing the energy directly?
I’d say you are more real to you than the doctor. Yet, what we do is we take everyone else’s opinion for what is reality and disregard the very essence of it all …. what is right in front of our nose…. our experience… our soul… our divinity….. well, god … as far as we know it.
That is to say, all the things we call “real” are all at least one step removed from the thing they describe … actual reality, our experience of it…. And we, in our forgettingfulness of our divinity give these things one step or more removed from reality a higher status of reality than the reality itself, the experience. So, in this way we deny God.
And, you know… remember God said not to do that. That is what is meant by having “no Gods before Him” … in other words, start giving your experience of reality (and god) more reality than what you are taught, or someone else says is reality (or god), but you only know indirectly….. through them … through words… so only in your head….. in your imagination at best…. but all illusions compared to the real thing, all derivatives of it….
So now someone might say why is this important? of what use is this? How can it be used?
Ok, coming full circle, what is going to be more true, then: the Bible, the words in the Bible, the words coming out of the mouth of the pastor, priest, or religious friend … or is going to be what one experiences as true? Say, you are told by the pastor or Bible that you can achieve everything through the force of will. So you really believe that and you attempt something with all the will there is in your body. But then what happens is your body can’t take the strain and it collapses and you end up failing. So what is more true? The statement that you can do anything you think through the power of will or that your ultimate success or failure is not in your hands at all. So you see how it is experience that is the teacher. This is what is meant by learning from your experience and experience being god. Especially when you find out that in reflecting on your experience and following what it has taught you, you find yourself growing and becoming a better person.
And this takes us back to the old spiritual/ religion division. For when you are being told that someone else knows better than you have experienced yourself what is real and tells you to believe something that you absolutely do not experience to be true that way and that you are somehow wrong, then you have a situation like in the middle ages with the dominance of the church. They were actually able to say that the evidence witnesses brought forth on the people on the accused heretics … witnesses who saw or heard something different from the accusation … that this evidence was less reliable than what the accusers said happened or what was determined by torture. For, they said, perceptions could be manipulated by the devil. But the word that came out of the mouth of someone in incredible pain or the word of the inquisitor based on his own subjective and arbitrary inclinations was more true, more real.
Imagine that. This is the idea that evidence, that which can be perceived, that which is empirical, is faulty because the world of perceptions is the world of Satan. Whereas the Word—of the Bible or as determined by the priest through intuition or out of the mouth of the accused under the influence of torture—was actually true. “The Word” is more real than the thing itself. And of course that Word, that Reality, is determined by someone other than you, you see? That is a religious world view.
Meanwhile in the world of shamanism and spirituality, we would say that what we are taught by and through our direct experience is what is really real, over against what anyone else says.
And obviously there are factors of economics and power that come into play in terms of what societies will want their people to believe is truer — a religious approach or a spiritual one. Always those in power or at the top will prefer a religious inclination for their populace, which makes outside determination, like theirs, more powerful over a person’s life than the person him or herself. Whereas those not in power, the “lowlies”, will prefer the idea that their experience is the real authority, not some outside authority.
And when these both exist in society and the ones in power have an exceeding amount of power, they will eliminate those who think the other way, because, indeed, their belief in the power of external authority demands that … demands the extermination of people who are believing what “undermines” the elites’ authority … and ultimately threatens their state of wealth, power, and, yes, often, god-like status in society. So vanity and hubris are strong drivers of this persecutory behavior, too.
I don’t think I need to point out that was the situation down through history when heretics were eliminated, witches were tortured and burned, and indigenous people were forced to convert or be killed. And if you look around you, you will see this battle between religion/authority and spirituality/personal truth going on even today. There is the war on drugs, to give just one small example, which is basically the battle between folks finding out for themselves what is real versus outside authority having the power to do that for you. But, indeed, all major political divisions, if you think of it, are reflections of this basic divide in belief of what is to determine matters going forward—you or someone/something else.
So, yes, this distinction about what is real and what is not real is, in my opinion, sort of important….
— excerpted from Experience Is Divinity: Matter As Metaphor, by Michael Adzema
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.
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).
.
SillyMickel Adzema
Culture War, Class War 