Posts Tagged mental-health
“Children being seen as things … as inanimate … not as live or animate beings with intention … but as objects in space, matter to be used … is called thingification”: The Planetmates on thingification, the economic lodestar, children as commodities, large families, child labor, Nature’s parents
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 April 3, 2014
“So, in this mode, children get to live, but only at the behest of their caregivers. For as long as there have been humans, children have been poisoned through interaction with the unconscious of their parents, and they subsequently manifest the repressed undersides of fully growns, which is comprised of early unmet needs and corrupted desires. However, with this “advance,” this step in human “evolution,” children are actively molded—intrusively—to ends not their own, as well.
“Notice that with Abraham, at this point in history, humans are agrarian: They keep flora and fauna planetmates; they raise crops and they herd sheep. And this is a clue to how, from here on, children will be seen.
“Children will be allowed to live, but only to the extent that they further the agenda and ends of the adult. Children become chattel. They can be utilized, like any resource or investment, and much as humans use animal planetmates, for economic reasons and as little slaves. They can be sold and traded—and this you did and still do. So children are seen not much different from the way humans see the rest of Nature (including planetmates, flora, fauna, and even your women), that is, as investments. They are seen as tools, also. More about that later, in the 29th Prasad.
“Fundamentally, children are thought of as investments. They are commodities. You evaluate everything in the world along cold economic lines. Why? Because of your unnatural fears of deprivation and death, you have built your entire world and your entire consciousness oriented toward that—your economic lodestar. And with a sedentary/agrarian lifeway, there is more work, tedious and hard work, than when you were nomads and gatherers. Your living is harder, but it is more certain, as we have been saying.
“So, on this altar of certainty and increasing control, you sacrifice your children. You see them not just in terms of their level of burdensomeness, not just along the lines of getting a smattering of your unconscious needs fulfilled, though those are influences that always exist. Rather you focus all your intentions on what kind of person you can make of your children for your use later. Barely are you training them in ways to benefit themselves when they get older, but of course, you will do that, for language and primitive interpersonal skills are necessary for any human to function … and to be of use. Rather you are seeking totrain them to be better investments, more useful tools or pawns, in your survival struggles.
“This is why you might call this an intrusive mode of parenting. In this, you wander boldly and blindly into the soul of your child and you rearrange its elements in a way that you can use it. At this point, you have gone from infanticide and abandonment, to soul murder, to children being seen as things … as inanimate … not as live or animate beings with intention … but as objects in space, matter to be used. This is called thingification, and it represents a more separate state from Nature than even soul murder.
“So, it behooves you to intrude upon and dominate that innocent child consciousness, to train that “investment,” in order to maximize its usefulness when it is older. This is very much as you might put money into stocks and bonds as an investment in hopes of a future return. Your mind is calculating how much of physical resources you might need to “invest” in your child and how much “return” you might get … and when. And if there is not a profitable payoff, you are unlikely to do much more than trade, sell, or abandon your child.
“For the first time, then, sedentary/agrarian ways do provide advantages to people with children. Not one child, but children are wanted, for they can be workers. A larger brood of children becomes, with this lifeway, economically advantageous; whereas in your gathering and hunting, nomadic days, an extra child would be seen as another one to be carried along with the group and another mouth to feed, while providing little in exchange, until much later.
“But with large families, you have your little bands of workers and slaves. They are the best “employees” for they can be coerced to work and payment need only be in the amount of food and basic necessities that child might need to survive. You cannot get cheaper labor than that. Furthermore, they can begin to help at very early ages, thus expanding their years of economic value for you. Thus child labor becomes prevalent along with the tendencies toward larger families.
“To clarify, your crazed non-sedentary forebears still were ambivalent about children and perceived families as a burden in relation to their overblown perception of the struggle to survive. However since this burden was lessened through tribe membership and sensible birth control methods and family management, children who were born were—relative to later and to today—wanted, appreciated, and more seen and attended to.
“Alongside this, in the world of Nature, there was neither a disinclination for offspring nor an overinvestment in them. Bonding and affection with Nature’s young rose from the correct, biologically constituted, appreciation of the offspring, and this more individually so. Nature’s parents do not view their children through a dark, crazed veil of dry and thirsty deprivation nor a floral, milky gleem of vain and pathetic estimation.
“In contrast to both of these, agrarian anchors and accumulating, conniving modes fostered appreciation of increases of population, specifically, families, as beneficial in the struggle for survival. It follows that attention and energy would be put into these extra beings, seen increasingly as resources in the struggle against the monstrously over-apprehended fear of death.
“The upshot is that in your ever-increasing sedentary numbers, children were considered advantageous against that imagined encroaching darkness you carried. So the life of your otherwise doomed, helpless newborns was valued more often than not. Your desperate, suffering half-borns would increase your numbers as a defense against your personal demise….”
[Pt 7 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….
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*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).
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*Culture War, Class War: Occupy Generations and the Rise and Fall of “Obvious Truths”* (2013).
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Invite you to join me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/sillymickel
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Invite you to join me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/sillymickel
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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
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
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, Culture, Generations, globalrevolution, History, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, philosophy, psychology, science, spirituality, uniqueness on December 21, 2013
Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Five — “Bliss to Exist”: A Strong Plant Blossoming, Digging Deep and Casting High, ‘Tis Bliss to Exist.
(continued from Past Lives, Other Lives, and The Vast Hole of the “Not the Tribal”: A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Four — Sidling Up to the Implicate Order [Footnote 1])
The Sound of Creation, or “‘Tis Bliss to Exist” (April 28, 1992)
It’s the holotropic session of Tuesday of the first module. It started out with a long period of movement and that mid-space between consciousness and unconsciousness, and it was O.K.
And then just like yesterday, it was right about in the middle that a certain musical piece started to be really delicious; and I couldn’t help wanting to breathe with it and become part of it more and just express my feeling of deliciousness. And I started to breathe more and started to enjoy breathing more with the music and moving a little with the music, and then at a certain point the sperm movement started to happen in my body.
And then it was shortly after that when I recognized certain egg feelings in me. Again I was feeling this deliciousness, a feeling of attraction and desiring, just loving everything, loving the music, and my hands were going out to the sides. I was going into all kinds of opening and closing movements, almost like a sea creature or 
sea vegetable. 
My hands were going all kinds of ways, like a floating movement; but then I became centered on these egg movements, like bringing in, and my body came together this one time very much like what Farrant talks about when he describes bringing your arms together and bringing the egg in; and so there was that kind of a thing going on.
And after a while I was lying there and I felt rather round; I was feeling amazingly round. And I remember the last thing—when I was feeling like I was the egg—my hands went out to the sides and I was waving them up and down. And it was this amazing feeling of softness in my hands. It was like I was in an altered state, hard to describe.
But I began to feel like I was switching into a different mode of consciousness, like I was on a strange drug, or I was becoming a different kind of a creature.
But then after that there was this sensation of feeling very big, very round rather. And then it was just these small movements in my hands, and my hands reaching out and putting something back, reaching out and putting something back; and it was going on in my hands and my legs.
And that went on for a little while, and then it started to get more and more. A lot of it was the music, like wanting to take in the music. Or I was doing it in tune with the music, like I was this pulsating one-celled animal.
And then the most amazing part of it was that as this one-celled animal I was expanding, getting bigger. It was a wonderful feeling, and there was also a sense of power. It was a beautiful feeling; and then this piece of music came on with a sense of power to it.
I was reaching my hands and legs in four directions, like reaching out, reaching out my hands and my feet. And I realized that this was my bliss in life, this sense of reaching out and expanding, getting to know more and more, getting to be more and more, getting to be more and more creative in more directions. This is the bliss that I follow, and it’s making me happier and happier in my life right now.
It was like, here I was, right from the beginning, feeling this bliss as an early template, as a fertilized egg becoming more and more, expanding and multiplying; it’s that wonderful feeling of expanding and multiplying and reaching out more and more, just an infinite amount of more is out there to reach out to.
And it was just so much; I had this feeling like “God,” or maybe I was God; this was a God-like feeling, but this was the bliss of God; this is what it is all about, this expanding and reaching out, eternal experience, eternal bliss.
It was just so wonderful that I had to start expressing it, I had to vocalize it, little by little, with sounds coming out of me, almost synchronistically, with the music. Like I didn’t plan it that way but these sounds like “ooooooh” and “oooo” started coming out of me with the music. They were the only expression for that wonderful feeling I was having that I could think of. It was the only proper expression of that wonderful feeling, and I began to realize there was a real lack of ways to express the bliss, that there were many ways to express pain, but so few ways to express joy and bliss. We are really limited in this way.
And physically it was like my hands were expressing this bliss; each time I reached out it was this wonderful feeling of joy and just being alive.
And I also began to realize a connection with the haiku I had written. The haiku was a perfect premonition of what I was now feeling—the haiku being,
A strong plant blossoming,
Digging deep and casting high,
‘Tis bliss to exist.
That was a perfect premonition, because that’s exactly what it felt like to me when I was stretching in each direction: digging deep and casting high, taking in and then throwing it out again as far as I could … and this wonderful feeling of power and bliss in being able to do this and knowing that it was endless, eternal. It was bliss, and so I expressed that for a long time.
Continue with 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
Return to Past Lives, Other Lives, and The Vast Hole of the “Not the Tribal”: A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Four — Sidling Up to the Implicate Order
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 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
Return to Past Lives, Other Lives, and The Vast Hole of the “Not the Tribal”: A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Four — Sidling Up to the Implicate Order
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
Life Is a Sickness … for the Purpose of Getting Us Well: A Foray Into Cellular/ Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Three — There Is Always Grace
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, globalrevolution, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, philosophy, psychology, spirituality, uniqueness on December 9, 2013
Love Is “Just a Membrane” Away: No Matter How Bad It Gets, There Is Always Something to Keep You Here … to Comfort You When You Really Need It
(continued from We Are Always and Only “Just a Membrane Away” … from Understanding Everything: A Foray Into Cellular/ Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Two — “Juicy Caring” and the Answer to Pain [Footnote 1])
The Real Reasons for Being Alive
Another thing I was thinking about in the course of my session was what good work this holotropic breathwork is and how—regardless of what I had been thinking about it when I was doing it with Stan Grof a couple of weeks ago—that I feel like this is certainly taking me to all kinds of goddamn places. It’s certainly getting me past where I was in primal, getting me beyond that; so certainly it’s damn good stuff.
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I mean I just kept thinking that this is something that reminds people of the real reasons for being alive; and if that’s not important, nothing is. But, if nothing else, I sure as hell felt: it works! The music was great; it did all kinds of wonderful things to me, taking my mind into all kinds of incredible places; it was almost like being stoned or like being on acid.
Cosmic Frown
I remember thinking at one point about Mary Lynn and the cat and the dog that I had when I was a kid. I was thinking about how much pain there is in 
existence, and how my life has been in pain. For example, there was one time when my face just 
went into this incredible frown, and I was crying and crying after the frown happened. I began to realize how that was my essence: this Frown, a big part of me—there’s just so much sadness in my life. I was thinking about what just happened recently with my father and all kinds of stuff. There was just so much sadness.
But There Is Always Grace
I was grieving hugely for that, and then I was also thinking about how there were also things in my life that were good—like Mary Lynn and the cat. And I was thinking about our trailer, and about the kind of a life I have now, the cozy times we have. And then I was thinking about how there was that dog when I was younger, various cats, and so on. And I was thinking about that time in Puttaparthi when that cat came to me, and I realized how there had always been something—that no matter how much pain there was, there was never too much pain. That’s when I got into the feelings about the membrane, or maybe that wasn’t when I got into those feelings.
Life Is a Sickness … to Get Us Well
It was as if your needs are taken care of in some way or other. Life really was a sickness. But the sickness was for the purpose of you getting eventually healthy, that you weren’t given more sickness than you could handle; there was always something to alleviate the pain, to enable you to continue on; that you would always be able to stay one step above the “pit” so to speak. You would be kept above it.
The Fact That You Only Get as Much as You Can Handle Is Evidence of the Divine in Life
Your purpose here was not to be “tortured” or irrevocably damaged by pain—it was to be able to learn from pain, but mercifully so, so there was always something to keep you here and to comfort you when you really needed it. And I was feeling like that was God’s evidence in our lives, that He’s always just a membrane away making sure it doesn’t get too extreme here.
Joyful Compassion
One last thing I should mention is that after this final crying during my breathing session—about all these people in my life and my connection with them and that juicy feeling I had when I was a kid caring for everybody, really wishing I could do something to help all my family, and not feeling that I was helpless, but really caring, really wanting to help—well there was this feeling of huge compassion, and it was a good feeling. I mean it was actually joyful—it’s hard to describe.
A Place on Which to Stand
But anyway after that I was left with this huge, very deep feeling of relaxation like I have rarely experienced, if ever. And I didn’t want to come out of it. I lay there for a while after that feeling like I was an energy field, especially in my hands. I felt like a locked-in energy field just buzzing, and I didn’t want to come back. I was so calm, not in pain, so comfortable that I felt like I wanted to keep this feeling with me always; it would be a wonderful place to come from in the world, to have inside me, to stand on, from which to view the world …
Continue with Past Lives, Other Lives, and The Vast Hole of the “Not the Tribal”: A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Four — Sidling Up to the Implicate Order
Return to We Are Always and Only “Just a Membrane Away” … from Understanding Everything: A Foray Into Cellular/ Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Two — “Juicy Caring” and the Answer to Pain
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 Past Lives, Other Lives, and The Vast Hole of the “Not the Tribal”: A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Four — Sidling Up to the Implicate Order
Return to We Are Always and Only “Just a Membrane Away” … from Understanding Everything: A Foray Into Cellular/ Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Two — “Juicy Caring” and the Answer to Pain
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
We Are Always and Only “Just a Membrane Away” … from Understanding Everything: A Foray Into Cellular/ Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Two — “Juicy Caring” and the Answer to Pain
Posted by sillymickel in authenticity, being yourself, globalrevolution, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, philosophy, psychology, science, spirituality, uniqueness on December 4, 2013
“I Couldn’t Believe How Much Caring I Had Inside of Me”: Underneath It All the Only Juicy Thing That Makes Life Worth Living Is this Feeling of Connection with Everybody
(continued from The Spirituality of Cells and Seeds of Light in Every Darkness: All the Things We Do in Life Are Distant Reflections of Our Earliest Life as Cells [Footnote 1])
Cellular Beginnings of Desire: Sperm and Egg … Reflections of Universal Love/Attraction
I did have a lot of opening and closing of my legs also. I even had some egg-welcoming-the-sperm feelings at the same time as I was feeling like I wanted something, I wanted to reach out and hug the music it was so beautiful.
And the movements of my hands made me realize I was like the egg pulling in the sperm. I had an insight into how the egg wanted to unite with the sperm and what it’s like to want to unite with something—to have something wonderful on this physical plane with all this pain … that there are some things that you want, and that’s why the egg pulls the sperm in.
Being One Cell … You One-Celled Animal You!
Again there was a lot of lying there and feeling like a one-celled animal, and that being both good and bad and if nothing else, being different. At one point I remember focusing on all these feelings and they weren’t good and they weren’t bad, just different. They were interesting.
The Immensity of Experience
I kept on thinking about the immensity of experience. The music kept having me look into all these areas of experience from all these times and places and everything else—physical and non-physical, never been physical, and so on. All this universe of experience … and I just kept tapping into it, all these spaces. And a lot of it wasn’t great or bad; it was just different. I can’t say I really liked it; but if you’re going to be here, it’s interesting to see what all there is. And I went through a period where I wasn’t quite feeling conscious; and all kinds of things were happening that were almost on a dream level, that had to do with shapes and forms.
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Juicy Caring
Finally, towards the end, music came up that made me really cry. And it had to do with feeling or thinking about all the people in my life and all their pain … and my pain, but mostly theirs, and all the people that are sad. I had a strong sense of connection and caring for them. I couldn’t believe how much caring I had inside of me. It was a real juicy feeling. I felt like I was feeling something fundamental, like when I was a kid.
Connection With All and Everyone
I kept thinking about how when we are in our hylotropic mode [i.e., the everyday consciousness mode], we go away from these kinds of things, from those kinds of feelings. We get caught up in things and plans and duties, but underneath it all the only juicy thing that makes life worth living is this feeling of connection with everybody. I kept thinking as an example how Mary Lynn and I, when we watch TV and see all the pain of people around the world, and how we really feel a connection with these people and we cry for them and their pain.
Why We Turn from Caring
And that’s how it felt, that’s how it felt when I was a kid before I had to shut down because the pain was overwhelming. It’s just too overwhelming to see people like my father and my mother, my brother Chuckie, all these people in my life who have so much pain.
“I Really Want to Help” — The Answer to Pain
I felt like I was actually primaling for them, for the world; letting out the feelings of pain for the whole world, and I felt like I really wanted to do that; I really wanted to help. I realized how that is my major motivation: I really want to help.
I realized that is the answer to pain, that’s why I’m doing all the reading, looking so hard in all those books I’m reading. There’s no end to the amount of books I want to read, because right around the corner I may find the answer to pain. And I’ll be doing it for myself but mostly for the whole world. I want to help the pain stop.
Just a Membrane Away … from Satori
And then at another part of it, it was almost like there was a membrane around me. And I could sense there was something wonderful which was like the spiritual reality, that we were just a membrane away from it; we’re always just a membrane away from it.
And especially me, my whole life I’ve felt like I’ve been on the edge of this spiritual reality and caught on the physical plane, caught in my own consciousness and just a fuckin’ short jitterbug away was this wonderful bright yellow existence, this whole wonderful perspective about everything.
Feeling “Juicy”
Actually it’s this juicy feeling about everything, and what makes life meaningful is the occasional upsurge of this juicy feeling that just gives you a feeling of something that makes it all worthwhile—some reason to be here. And I feel like that is probably the reality on the spiritual plane all the time, and that we just get glimpses of it here; and I feel like it’s just a membrane away. And my whole life I’ve been just a membrane away from it, and just striving to find the answer to getting there, to find the answer to what this is all about.
Continue with Life Is a Sickness … for the Purpose of Getting Us Well: A Foray Into Cellular/ Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Three — There Is Always Grace
Return to The Spirituality of Cells and Seeds of Light in Every Darkness: All the Things We Do in Life Are Distant Reflections of Our Earliest Life as Cells
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 Life Is a Sickness … for the Purpose of Getting Us Well: A Foray Into Cellular/ Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Three — There Is Always Grace
Return to The Spirituality of Cells and Seeds of Light in Every Darkness: All the Things We Do in Life Are Distant Reflections of Our Earliest Life as Cells
To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … of which this is an excerpt, Go to Falls from Grace
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Enslavement of Earth Citizens, Husbandry, and Sedentary Ways: All This Controlling Required the Changeover from Nomadic to Sedentary … Your Increasingly Sedentary Ways Is the Root of the Apocalypse We Face Today
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, Culture, economics, globalrevolution, History, Politics, psychology, science, spirituality on September 17, 2013
“Driven by Your Crazed Brains, You Plucked Planetmates from Nature’s Perfect Blueprint and Set Us to Your Ends”: The Twelfth Prasad from The Planetmates — Enslavement of Earth Citizens … Interference in Fauna Empire
The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Twelfth Prasad: Husbandry and Sedentary Ways – Enslavement of Earth Citizens
Planetmates Release The Twelfth Prasad
Planetmates plucked from Nature’s perfect blueprint, set to your ends, driven by your brains crazed from early trauma.
Cow is First Consciousness at The Twelfth Prasad.
"[Y]our control of both Flora and Fauna in this way required the most drastic change in your way of life—one that would be the sole root of the apocalypse that we see looming before us all."
The Twelfth Prasad – Husbandry and Sedentary Ways
Incidentally, it was not long after this “conquering” of the Flora Empire that you began to extend your control over some Planetmates in exactly the same way. You captured, enslaved, and set their life cycles to fit yours. The who, what, when, where, and how of their lives were plucked from Nature’s perfect blueprint and set to your ends—the ends driven by your fear, obsession to control, and crazed, backwards, and overstimulated brains, borne of early trauma. 
No longer content merely to hunt Planetmates who were living their divinely ordained lives in the perfection of Nature, you corralled and kept them for any number of ends that you would choose, including, usually, their being killed and eaten, without having to hunt them first. However, your control of both Flora and Fauna in this way required the most drastic change in your way of life—one that would be the sole root of the apocalypse that we see looming before us all. For horticulture, and to some extent “herding” of planetmates, required the end of your nomadic lifestyles and the establishment of sedentary ones.
Video Commentary by SillyMickel Adzema
What follows is a video of a reading of The Twelfth Prasad, with commentary, elaboration, and context, by SillyMickel Adzema.
“The Twelfth Prasad” From The Great Reveal by The Planetmates – the audiocast
The link above takes you to the audio-only version of my commentary on The Twelfth Prasad, exactly as is in the video. Click on the link to go to the the audio site, or you can listen to it here using the audio player below.
http://ecdn0.hark.com/swfs/player_fb.swf?pid=cxdzbsbplv
Image of The 12th Prasad. “The Great Reveal” By The Planetmates: “Enslavement Of Earth Citizens”
Paraphrase/ Summary/ Abstract of “The Twelfth Prasad” — by SillyMickel Adzema
After you “conquered” the Flora Empire, you began “conquering” your fellow Planetmates of the Fauna Kingdom. Pumped up on the desperate desire to control, you captured, enslaved, and set the lifecycles of these independent Earth Citizens to ends that would suit only yourselves. The ones you enslaved were ripped from the perfect design of Nature; they were beaten into alien, schizophrenic molds, which were the products of human minds—themselves the product of early trauma—that were fearful, obsessesive about controlling, crazed, backwards thinking, and overstimulated. It was no longer enough to hunt Planetmates for food, you had the bright idea of owning and growing them, much as you’d done with the Earth-bound Planetmates, the Flora. 
So, you captured these Planetmates out of their perfect, divinely-ordained lives in Nature; and you kept, grew, raised, trained, ate their offspring, and often killed and ate them eventually, along with other ends of yours that you would dream up for them emanating out of your brains, which were overstimulated and at this point seeing much of the Fully Conscious Universe, 
Alive Universe around you as dead, including all matter, all the Flora Kingdom, all the Fauna Kingdom, and even your own kind who were not like you enough (those from other tribes/cultures; even those that were different in your own tribe/culture),
even if it was just their age—infants and children were predominantly seen as things, not fully living or feeling, and as resources to be exploited or discarded at will. All of this controlling required the final changeover of your lifestyle from nomadic to sedentary. You needed to be in place to grow food, as least for the growing/harvesting season; but you needed to be sedentary the full year round in order to raise Fauna Planetmates. This final phase in your change from nomadic to sedentary lifestyles would be the one major root cause, in time, of the apocalypse that we see looming before us all today.
Continue with The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Thirteenth Prasad: Breaking with Divinity, Resisting Divine Assistance
Return to The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Eleventh Prasad: “Agrarian Revolution” – Interference in Flora Empire
To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … Go to The Great Reveal from The Planetmates
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The Spirituality of Cells and Seeds of Light in Every Darkness: All the Things We Do in Life Are Distant Reflections of Our Earliest Life as Cells
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, globalrevolution, History, life, philosophy, psychology, science, spirituality on September 9, 2013
The Experience of Simultaneous Fractals That Is Life … The Toilsome Life of Cells: Cellular/ Transpersonal Consciousness, Part One—It Ain’t Easy Being Sperm
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.
Just a Membrane Away (February 8, 1992)
Physicality Just Feels Sickening
An important thing that happened during the holotropic session was that after experiencing sperm feelings, and going into the egg, and the egg swirling around … in the beginning there was a lot of heavy duty nausea, a lot of it. I was very sick. I felt like I remember being sick like that at certain times of my life, and I just wanted to die. And I felt like I was back there at the beginning of life and feeling how shitty it is to be physical, right from the beginning … and feeling like: yes, this is what characterizes the physical plane; physicality just feels sickening.
And then there was a bhajan tape on. And I couldn’t help thinking lots of times about my Sai Baba connection and even picturing Puttaparthi and everything. There were several different bhajans. And suddenly I got this whiff of incense out of nowhere [there was no incense anywhere in the room]. And then I made the connection that I was feeling exactly the way I was feeling in Puttaparthi when I had dysentery. And it came to me that I had not fully processed the pain I’d gone through over there. And so here it was coming up again prompted by the smell of incense.
Nausea Goes All the Way Back to the Beginning … Everything That Happens, Even Sickness, Is Part of Spiritual Process
And I was making the connection, thinking about how I haven’t wanted to burn incense since that time because it’s associated with that feeling of nausea. And since that nausea goes all the way back to the beginnings, when we first came into life, it makes sense that I wouldn’t want to be triggered into that. I also realized that Baba had been setting me up to feel these feelings, about sperm and egg and everything, through the getting of the dysentery and how He was taking me to some pretty profound feelings over there—just in getting sick and dealing with life being a life and death matter and wanting to leave it and deciding to stay and everything.
Primordial Evil and Its Relation to Pain
Other things that happened: I got a glimpse into some primordial evil. At one point I started to feel real powerful, and there were a series of images of war in my consciousness. And I could understand how people could murder and rape, because it was so powerful to be caught up in stuff like that rather than to feel the pain of the body. And it dawned on me that I could easily have been murdering and raping in other lifetimes and that other people do also.
Even Warring Feels Better Than Feeling One’s Emotional Pain
And it’s got to do with how we come into this life and there’s all this pain in the physical body, and we act it out in all kinds of ways, including getting caught up in wars and things which are just this hyped-up organized energy which seems better than feeling the pain. And that was a pretty grisly area to look at about physicality and the horror that exists in it.
It Ain’t Easy Being Sperm
I also realized that I was feeling tremendously exhausted going through the sperm … egg … and I was having some blastocyst feelings for the first time. I was feeling like I was multiplying. At one point I felt as though I were trying to connect with the uterine wall and all kinds of things like that. There were, occasionally, good feelings, but mostly it was pretty uncomfortable and not nice.
Understanding The Core of Pain … “Life Is a Prison.”
One thing that occurred to me: Of course I want to transcend the physical plane! I said when I introduced myself in the go-around before the workshop that I’d done this hundreds of times in the last twenty years; and I’ve been born literally into hundreds of lives, and I’m tired of coming here, and feeling this pain. And it occurred to me that that is what Baba is doing to me—having me get right to the core of understanding pain, so I can decide finally to give up this addiction to the physical plane and stop coming back here. At one point, for example, at the end, it occurred to me, as Baba had said: “It’s a prison.”
The Experience of Simultaneous Fractals That Is Life … The Toilsome Life of Cells
After the sperm and egg feelings, and the egg getting nauseated going down the fallopian tube, and the conception feelings, I was having these feelings that were like cells multiplying. I was also feeling like a zygote and my hands were going out, taking things in and throwing things out. I was thinking how everything in my life is a reenactment of these early things, like right down to the tiniest things like taking tissues in and throwing phlegm out while I’m lying here in this workshop.
Seeds of Light in Every Darkness
I remember one spot in the experience where I was feeling the imperfection on the physical plane, and then at one point in that Mary Lynn had water ready for me. And so I realized there are some good things here too, that there is love, and so on—some flashes of light in it all.
Continued with We Are Always and Only “Just a Membrane Away” … from Understanding Everything: A Foray Into Cellular/ Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Two — “Juicy Caring” and the Answer to Pain
Return to The Agonies and Ecstasies of Exquisiteness: A Primal Perspective on Spirituality, Part Thirteen — The Psyche Heals Itself … If Only Allowed to Do So
To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … of which this is an excerpt, Go to Falls from Grace
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Early Humans, Foragers, Harmony with Nature … the Fall: The Tranquil Time Ended … the Gap Between Natural Functioning and Twisted, Human Functioning Widened.
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 September 8, 2013
The End of Innocence – As Early Humans with an Increasing Obsession to Control Everything, We Kicked Ourselves Out of “Eden,” According to the Planetmates
The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Ninth Prasad: Eden and the Fall … Harmony with Nature, Early Humans, Foragers
Planetmates Release The Ninth Prasad
Harmony with Nature, Early Humans, Foragers
Toad was First Consciousness at The Ninth Prasad.
"[T]his long tranquil time was destined to end...the gap between natural functioning and twisted, backwards human functioning widened."
The Ninth Prasad – Eden and The Fall
For a very long period these early humans lived in harmony with Nature as foragers and nomads and as non-savage Earth Citizens. Your earliest ancestors did not even eat Earth Citizen flesh; while even some Planetmates do that.
But this long tranquil time was destined to end. As gestations became shorter and more time was needed in the dependent state before the newborn could function much for itself, the gap between natural functioning and twisted, backwards human functioning widened. For the rest of your lives, the pain and trauma of birth and from the time in the dependent state after birth pushed tension, anxiety, overstimulated brains and states of consciousness, and behavior more and more disparate from Nature’s easy, simple flow. And the biggest part of that crazed behavior pushed by fear and anxiety emanating from the roots of your being was your ever stronger drive to control.
Video Commentary by SillyMickel Adzema
What follows is a video of a reading of The Ninth Prasad, with commentary, elaboration, and context, by SillyMickel Adzema.
“The Ninth Prasad” From The Great Reveal by The Planetmates – the audiocast
The link above takes you to the audio-only version of my commentary on The Ninth Prasad, exactly as is in the video. Click on the link to go to the the audio site, or you can listen to it here using the audio player below.
http://ecdn0.hark.com/swfs/player_fb.swf?pid=lvlhqsnhzv
Image of The Ninth Prasad. “The Great Reveal” By The Planetmates
Summary/ Abstract of “The Ninth Prasad” — by SillyMickel Adzema
Early humans were nomadic foragers who did not hunt or eat meat and were relatively peaceable, living harmoniously in Nature. 
This long period of tranquility changed as gradually the effects of premature birth built up anxiety and stress in successive generations to greater degrees. Humans behaved more and more in ways at odds with Natural ways, becoming more twisted and backwards. Birth pain and trauma and pain from having needs insufficiently met by caregivers in the first years of live, while primarily dependent, caused tension, anxiety, overstimulated brains and states of consciousness to be common among humans. But the core of that craziness was this increasing obsession about control, and the need to control with the fear of uncertainty, rooted in an absolute however unjustified terror of the unforeseen and unknown.
Continue with The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Tenth Prasad: Descent Into Savagery Begins…Becoming Controlling, Becoming Killers
Return to The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Eighth Prasad: Straying from Nature – Prosperity Won Out Over Happiness for Early Humans
To Read the Entire Book … on-line, no cost at this time … Go to The Great Reveal from The Planetmates
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The Agonies and Ecstasies of Exquisiteness: A Primal Perspective on Spirituality, Part Thirteen — The Psyche Heals Itself … If Only Allowed to Do So
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, Culture, Generations, globalrevolution, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, occupywallstreet, philosophy, Politics, psychology, science, spirituality on September 7, 2013
“The Only Way Out Is All the Way In”: The Eye of the Hurricane, The Cosmic Adventure, and Being Here … Why Would Reality Not Be Real?
Such it is that we can be in the midst of life, fully experiencing it, and yet be aware of its illusionary quality, hence be unattached to it and more able to flow with it. Let us say “Zorba the Buddha.”
The Eye of the Hurricane
From this view we see that it is our attitude toward intense experiences, not whether or not we have them, that is important. The I Ching addresses this in the hexagram, “The Arousing (Shock/Thunder)”: “[T]he shock causes no loss, because one takes care to stay in the center of the movement and in this way to be spared the fate of being tossed hither and thither” (p.200).
“The Only Way Out Is All the Way In”
One is reminded of Heider’s statement that new members of a group may be badly frightened in viewing another member who, in the midst of catharsis, feels no feelings of fear about it (1974, p.37). Or, as one primaler put it, “It is not feeling one’s feelings that is really painful” (cf. Janov, 1970, pp. 98-99). Thus, by plunging in and surrendering to it, one can be aware of a calm center within the chaos that is imperceptible on the periphery. Or, in another primaler’s words, “The only way out is all the way in.”
Again, Be the Observer
Thus, it is a matter of whether or not we get caught up in intense experiences and make them part of a personal drama … “acting out” is the primal way of saying it … or we simply allow them to flow through us. In the first case, we give these feelings a status in our lives they do not deserve and increase the time required to work through them; in the second, we maintain an attitude as of a channel for experience, not an originator of it.
Cosmic Adventure
In this regard, we note Grof’s statement that at advanced levels of transpersonal experience, beyond ego death and rebirth, “it becomes . . . a cosmic adventure in consciousness aimed at solving the riddles of personal identity, human existence, and the universal scheme” (1980, p. 215). Or in other words, we still carry water, but we are not attached to it.
Process Is Process
Therefore, I am saying that much has been made of a difference between primal and meditation for what is primarily a difference in technique. Both can be seen as ways of attuning us to a spiritual/growth process that is common to us all, affecting our daily happenings and the life choices and directions we take in either direct or distorted fashion.
Meditation Is Technique. It Is not the Process Itself
For meditation the confusion seems to have arisen from viewing it as the sole means to growth, rather than simply a means to get in touch with a process that is growthful both inside and outside of meditation. And when we open up, what arises always is different from what we expect and includes all sorts of phenomena and experiences, all linked to our growth and resolving our blocks.
Primal Aids Learning Surrender
Likewise, an important benefit of primal is that it can teach us an attitude of surrender to process. That we can throw ourselves, time and again, into the maelstrom of catharsis and still, somehow, be upheld and even embraced, despite ourselves, gives us confidence in a beneficent universe and allows us to foster surrender in our attitudes to the pushes and pulls of process as it makes itself known to us in our daily life.
Being Here
Both meditation and primal can be seen as techniques to help us “be” where we are “at.” And to be most fully where we are means to be most fully in process. So it is just that at times they employ different means to get us in touch with the underlying flow that is the epigenetic protagonist of healing and creation, growth and transcendence.
And once attuned to process, one can “be here” while working, walking, primaling, or engaging in “zazen”; it then becomes ludicrous to talk of different techniques or different levels of growth. Ultimately, when we are “on track” the process takes over, leading us onward to more encompassing realms, regardless of how we get on track.
Evidence for this is given by meditation research as cited by Earle (1981). Although physiological correlates differ with different techniques at beginning levels, later stages show a convergence of the correlates.
The Psyche Heals Itself
… If Allowed to Do So
There are striking similarities in the descriptions of the deep-level growthful experiences found in the spiritual literature, the psychedelic literature, the ethnographic literature, and in some of our primal reports. But what we find, in primal anyway, is that the psyche “heals” itself, if only allowed to do so, and in a way that is reminiscent of the way the body does. And so it is not so surprising that the manner in which it does so would be so similar in different places, at different times, and using different techniques for allowing it.
Why Would Reality Not Be Real?
It is equally not surprising that we should find examples of spiritual phenomena occurring during primaling or “primal” phenomena occurring during meditation, or either occurring under LSD. For why would we expect to have anything but a common heritage and for reality to be other than itself? Is it not only our dichotomizing mind that construes such dualities to obscure and make more difficult the path that we commonly tread, that tragically serves to neutralize the compassion and interrelatedness that we would otherwise feel?
The Agonies and Ecstasies of Exquisiteness
The point being made is that the primal process of which we speak is the same as the spiritual process. Both catharsis and calmness are natural parts of the same flow, mingling and alternating with each other, and emanating from each other, sometimes in a linear way. This flow is a natural process of creation that encompasses both types of phenomena, the agonies and ecstasies of existence, and harmonizes all of reality, both internal and external, in a pattern that is unique for every individual and oriented toward one’s patient unfolding in the path of exquisiteness.
Summary of “A Primal Perspective on Spirituality”
Contrary to Janov’s assertion that spiritual experience is derivative of primal pain, there is evidence that primalers are encountering transpersonal phenomena at a deeper level of the primal process. I relied on my experiences and those of other long-term primalers, along with the evidence of meditation and LSD research and the current spiritual literature, in proposing an alternative explanation of the relationship between catharsis and spiritual process in which they are seen as complementary, not opposed, processes.
At a certain level of the spiritual process “primal-type” experiences often occur, no matter how interpreted. A primal-type therapy, therefore, can be an invaluable, perhaps indispensable, aid in higher consciousness. Primal therapy reduces the symbolic clutter and cerebral “noise” that characteristically obscure the perception of spiritual realities. It thereby enables spiritual access that would be unavailable to some people conceived into less than ideal life situations. Beyond the primal-type levels of the spiritual process, deeper levels are encountered that do not give indications of containing elements of repressed pain or need, and that can be accurately termed transpersonal.
Therefore, primal therapy and meditation represent an identity of ends and an antithesis of means. Both catharsis and meditation are techniques to help us to “be” where we are “at” and thereby to be more fully in a “process” that transcends techniques. For “when we are ‘on track,’ the process takes over, leading us onward to more encompassing realms, regardless of how we get ‘on track.'”
Continue with The Spirituality of Cells and Seeds of Light in Every Darkness: All the Things We Do in Life Are Distant Reflections of Our Earliest Life as Cells
Return to Enlightenment as an Attitude of Adventuring … Eventually It Is Simply About Staying Open to Experience/Process: A Primal Perspective, Part Twelve — Zorba the Buddha
To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … of which this is an excerpt, Go to Falls from Grace
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Enlightenment as an Attitude of Adventuring … Eventually It Is Simply About Staying Open to Experience/Process: A Primal Perspective, Part Twelve — Zorba the Buddha
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, Culture, globalrevolution, History, individualism, nonconform, philosophy, psychology, science, spirituality, uniqueness on September 6, 2013
Ecstasy Is Intensity … Catharsis and Calmness in Spirituality: Spock Should Hardly Have Been the Poster Child for Mysticism … What’s so “Alive” About Acting Like a Machine?
Spock is hardly a role model for spirituality … quite the opposite. Do you not think it awfully convenient that the role models for mysticism promulgated in the media—Unfeeling Machine Men—would be exactly what totalitarian societies want to create?
The Big Primal ~ Instant Satori
Another perspective on this subject is suggested by Heider (1974). He says that an emphasis on catharsis is rooted in “a model of growth and transcendence based on the concept of the sudden satori” (p.41), which is considered unrealistic. It is true that this situation existed among many primalers. Many of us initially, and in line with Janov’s assertions, did assume this dependence on and/or expectation of the “big primal”: 
the primal that would make it all different and change our lives forever. In fact, letting go of this expectation began to be seen as a mark distinguishing advanced from beginning primalers. More experienced primalers began to see primal as a tool, not an end in itself. We began to see ourselves as growing and living both inside and outside of our primaling, and to see feelings as going on all the time, not just when we were lying down and “catharting.”
.
.
…if we do not “be” with our illusions, we cannot know them…
The initial confusion, however, is understandable, considering the inaccurate impression engendered by the early primal that all feeling that is not primaling is somehow unreal. 
This myth serves to negate all that passes through one and all that one feels between primal experiences. Janov was trying to make a point, and an important one at that: Much of what goes on inside one’s self is, in fact, elements of primal complexes and therefore is not accurate perceptions of self, others, and world. But an important facet to this is that it remains important to “be” with all that material, whether objectively valid or not, in order that one may link it all together and have the connections and insights that can occur during those catalyzing events called primals. For if we do not “be” with our illusions, we cannot know them. Hence, how can we discard them?
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Certainly the awesomeness of some forms of catharsis, the energy release involved, helps one to downplay the significance of the in-between times. But subsequently such plateau or calm spots, preparation or postcathartic periods, even the activities of our daily life, took on an importance previously unacknowledged. We began to understand that it is not a matter of catharsis for catharsis’s sake, or just of emptying one’s “Primal Pool,” in Janov’s terms.
In that sense I am in agreement with Heider’s (1974, p. 41) direction in leaving an emphasis on catharsis and beginning “to rely heavily upon spiritual disciplines, both as preparation for the release of tension and as a maintenance program designed to enhance and prolong the desirable effects of the encounter experience.” For, using meditation in the sense that Rajneesh (1976) does, that of being with where one is in the here and now, it makes perfect sense to me that a spiritual regimen can and should be used during the in-between times to help us to stop and be aware of the continuing process within us, if that is what it takes.
Being Where One Is
An important sidelight, however, is that for many primalers this sort of structuring may be unnecessary. As mentioned, the results of primaling, in the postcathartic period, may be the same as the results of meditation. Consequently, for many advanced primalers access is only too apparent during the between times. Therefore, to “be” where one is often only requires that we leave off avoiding, through distracting ourselves in work, sex, alcohol, drugs, food, and various other ways, the primal/spiritual process that continues within us between sessions. At this point it becomes a matter of staying open to Experience/Process, allowing it to flow through and teach us.
Meditation Can Be Anti-Spiritual
In fact, there is the known danger in using a spiritual technique that it can be used to defend against “process.” As Epstein and Leiff (1981, p. 145) put it, “Meditation experiences may be used in both adaptive and defensive ways.” And a meditation that is used solely to force us into relaxation or into a concentration with a specific focus as a way to defend against “process” and the occasional peaks and valleys that are part of it would, in my opinion, be antiprimal, indeed would be antispiritual, antimystical, antigrowth.
Zorba the Buddha
Therefore, in general I agree with Heider’s shift in emphasis away from catharsis and to the postcathartic period, but not nearly to the extent to which he apparently has. For I do not see a need to “transcend” catharsis or go “beyond” it as he does. Certainly Grof, Muktananda, 
and others would concur that even the outer reaches of transpersonal experience do not entail a cessation of conflict, resolution, growing, and learning. Similarly, Epstein and Leiff (1981, p. 144) have pointed out that “meditation can be viewed as a developmental process which can produce side effects anywhere along the continuum,” and so one would wonder why we would leave off catharsis as a tool for dealing with such blocks.
Ecstasy Is Intensity … What is so Alive About Being Machine-Like?
I should point out that the experience of nearly all primalers is that the need to cathart becomes less as time goes on. But additionally, I do not see a need to posit a point beyond catharsis, for I do not see anything wrong with catharsis, with enjoying the capacity to experience intensity of ecstasy, desolation, or insight. It seems to me that this capacity can add color and vitality to our lives. Indeed, it may be that which, at times, makes us feel we are alive!
It Wouldn’t Be “Up” if You Never Came “Down” from It
But Heider certainly does find something wrong with catharsis, and our differences bring up an important point. He points out that he left off inducing catharsis because of post cathartic depression that would ensue. it is my opinion that occasional catharsis can have just that sort of effect
if we acknowledge the depths of primal and perinatal phenomena extending all the way back through birth and womb material. Therefore, anything short of a thorough working through of these deeper levels always will leave one susceptible to relapses, postcathartic depressions, and return of symptoms in that these catharses represent further access as well as resolution.
Enlightenment as an Attitude of Adventuring
To that extent, I believe that Heider has not gone far enough with catharsis to those areas where the most substantial gains can be made … although even then we can expect”relapses”
if we employ the model that Grof, among others, presents of “enlightenment” being an attitude toward the process of becoming, of adventuring deeper into the cosmos, rather than a static serene state of inaction. Grof has shown us how deep one often must go before one can expect real resolution; or, in other words, just how deep within us, and how far into our past, the roots of our present concerns extend.
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Spock is Hardly a Role Model for Spirituality
A passage from the I Ching may help to clarify this point. It is possible that because of our Appolonian Western heritage we have a tendency to view an unaffected, somehow undisturbable state … as in our common conceptions of the results of meditation … as a goal. But not all cultures and spiritual disciplines posit it as such. In the Wilhelm/Baynes classic translation of the ancient work it is written,
While Buddhism strives for rest through an ebbing away of all movement in nirvana, the Book of Changes holds that rest is merely a state of polarity that always posits movement as its complement” (p.201).
Apparently, an unmovable state is seen as neither desirable nor possible; it is indicative of death rather than greater life.
It continues further on:
True quiet means keeping still when the time has come to keep still, and going forward when the time has come to go forward.
In this way rest and movement are in agreement with the demands of the time, and thus there is light in life.
When a man has thus become calm, he may turn to the outside world. He no longer sees in it the struggle and tumult of individual beings, and therefore he has that true peace of mind which is needed for understanding the great laws of the universe and for acting in harmony with them.
Whoever acts from these deep levels makes no mistakes.
Such it is that we can be in the midst of life, fully experiencing it, and yet be aware of its illusionary quality, hence be unattached to it and more able to flow with it. Let us say “Zorba the Buddha.”
Continue with The Agonies and Ecstasies of Exquisiteness: A Primal Perspective on Spirituality, Part Thirteen — The Psyche Heals Itself … If Only Allowed to Do So
Return to Science Has Uncovered Something Subtler Than the Physical, Undergirding One’s Life, and Interconnected with All and Everyone: Deeper, and Higher, Spiritual Realities
To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … of which this is an excerpt, Go to Falls from Grace
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