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Reality Safari: Gurdjieff

Started by Cramulus, April 11, 2017, 02:25:05 PM

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The Wizard Joseph

I was just reading the hymn of the Pearl from a few posts back. (my software autocapitalized Pearl... Twice. Well anyway..)

I was struck by this bit and what follows after

QuoteAt once, as soon as I saw it,
The Glory looked like my own self. 

When I was much younger, how old exactly I couldn't say, I undertook a form of hermetic path work meditation. The intent of the meditation was to show you your true self. I was struck by a vision of myself but more trim, with kohl under his eyes, wearing a shirt that was brilliantly colored and shiny. He was snickering at me as though there was a joke between us that I had not understood. He still shows up from time to time in my dreams both waking and sleeping.

One time he showed me a vision of a circle divided from the center by 3 equal lines. I watched as the lines separated in the middle and the three pieces of the circle bled into each other until eventually the lines were gone entirely and the circle was whole. I was struck by an understanding that this was the act of enlightenment. The destruction of the barriers between these three parts of a human. The understanding I received was that these three parts were mind, Spirit, and body. I understood that the entire point of working in the path was to steadily dissolve these without trauma. I saw that these barriers could be shattered suddenly and traumatically producing sicknesses of mind body and spirit. I consider the spirit aspect to be the soul. The mind and body pass away, dust returning to dust, are returning to air, but that the third part remained. When the vision was over I saw the bastard again. He was grinning at me like he just explained something way over my head And was amused.

There's more but I feel like I've already said enough. The vision of my higher self never seems to speak, but is very expressive in other ways. When I see him I am often struck by understanding that I don't fully comprehend yet or I will feel an impulse, no an imperative, to write. Some of my writings and poetry here are directly from this experience. I see him again even as I write this. He appears smug and almost condescending as though he is watching a toddler doodle with crayons. I'm going to end this now but I thought I would share some of my experiences as relates to what I call 'soul'. My soul is apparently kind of a cocky prick.
You can't get out backward.  You have to go forward to go back.. better press on! - Willie Wonka, PBUH

Life can be seen as a game with no reset button, no extra lives, and if the power goes out there is no restarting.  If that's all you see life as you are not long for this world, and never will get it.

"Ayn Rand never swung a hammer in her life and had serious dominance issues" - The Fountainhead

"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality :lulz:

"You program the controller to do the thing, only it doesn't do the thing.  It does something else entirely, or nothing at all.  It's like voting."
- Billy, Aug 21st, 2019

"It's not even chaos anymore. It's BANAL."
- Doktor Hamish Howl

The Wizard Joseph

Just a note I hopped onto Facebook after I wrote that and was greeted with an image of Gritty wearing a Pearl Earring... My autocapitalize just capitalized Pearl Earring... Twice
You can't get out backward.  You have to go forward to go back.. better press on! - Willie Wonka, PBUH

Life can be seen as a game with no reset button, no extra lives, and if the power goes out there is no restarting.  If that's all you see life as you are not long for this world, and never will get it.

"Ayn Rand never swung a hammer in her life and had serious dominance issues" - The Fountainhead

"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality :lulz:

"You program the controller to do the thing, only it doesn't do the thing.  It does something else entirely, or nothing at all.  It's like voting."
- Billy, Aug 21st, 2019

"It's not even chaos anymore. It's BANAL."
- Doktor Hamish Howl

The Johnny

Ehm, i was browsing wikipedia for some reasons and it seems that:

"La Montaña Sagrada es el único largometraje de ficción cuyo argumento está basado en el eneagrama de la personalidad, ideado a partir del sufismo por Georges Gurdjieff"

Which means taht Jodorowskys "The Holy Mountain" was inspired by Gurdjieff
<<My image in some places, is of a monster of some kind who wants to pull a string and manipulate people. Nothing could be further from the truth. People are manipulated; I just want them to be manipulated more effectively.>>

-B.F. Skinner

Cramulus

Yes that's true. Gurdjieff's Enneagrams are all over the movie:



The Alchemist (who wears the Enneagram) is sitting at the end of the rainbow tunnel. The Rainbow has a special meaning within alchemy--similar to the tree of life--a journey from beginning to end. In fact, do you know why Isaac Newton described the rainbow as having seven colors? Because Newton was a spiritual alchemist first and a physicist second--he was referencing the ancient "law of octaves", which Gurdjieff calls the Law of Seven. The Enneagram is also a symbol of this. But I'm getting distracted...



The Enneagram also appears on the table at the end of the movie, when the characters have completed their transformation.

There is a holy mountain in Beezlebub's Tales, it is a place where people go to conceive children.

But the inspiration for the film The Holy Mountain actually comes more directly from one of Gurdjieff's disciples, Rene Daumal. Speak of the devil, I'm reading Daumal's work Mount Analogue right now.




Mount Analogue is an interesting book. Daumal was a mountain climber who also studied under Gurdjieff. In his mid 30s, he caught a terminal case of tuburculosis. No longer able to climb mountains, he decided to write a book which would help others understand the spiritual experience of the ascent. The Holy Mountain is a symbol in basically every religion -

QuoteI had written in substance that in the mythic tradition the Mountain is the bond between Earth and Sky. Its solitary summit reaches the sphere of eternity, and its base spreads out in manifold foothills into the world of mortals. It is the way by which man can raise himself to the divine, and by which the divine reveals itself to man. The patriarchs and prophets of the Old Testament behold the Lord face to face in high places. For Moses it was Mount Sinai and Mount Nebo; in the New Testament it is the Mount of Olives and Golgotha.

I went so far as to discover this ancient symbol of the mountain in the pyramidal constructions of Egypt and Chaldea. Turning to the Aryans, I recalled those obscure legends of the Vedas in which the Soma - the 'nectar' which is the 'seed of immortality' - is said to reside in its luminous and subtle form 'within the mountain'. In India, the Himalayas are the dwelling place of Shiva, of his spouse 'the Daughter of the Mountain', and the 'Mothers' of all worlds, just as in Greece the king of the gods held court on Mount Olympus.

In fact it was in Greek mythology that I found the symbol completed by the story of the revolt of the children of Earth, who with their terrestrial natures and terrestrial means, attempted to scale Mount Olympus and enter Heaven on feet of clay. Was this not the same endeavour as that of the builders of the Tower of Babel, who, without renouncing their many personal ambitions, aspired to attain the kingdom of the one eternal Being? In China people have always referred to the 'Mountains of the Blessed', and the ancient sages instructed their disciples on the edge of a precipice."

Daumal died before he could finish the book; it ends mid sentence. But he put his entire being into this work, and every sentence reads as if written with firm intention.

Jodorowski's film is inspired by the book, though it is not a direct adaptation.

The Johnny


Yeah like, the origin of my comment comes from a friend of mine reading 100 years of solitude (100 años de soledad)... her saying that it was just so lame and boring and me agreeing not from direct experience, but that i read some other book by the same author and considered it verbose trash.

But then she mentioned that The Holy Mountain, was twice as better, of what 100 years of solitude people told her it would be... to which i replied that the only good movie i think of him is Santa Sangre, but thats probably because its psychoanalitically inspired.

Anyhow, i hate Jung's stupid Nazi mystical face, but synchronizity is an interesting concept to play around with, thus my rambling.
<<My image in some places, is of a monster of some kind who wants to pull a string and manipulate people. Nothing could be further from the truth. People are manipulated; I just want them to be manipulated more effectively.>>

-B.F. Skinner

Telarus

Whoa, I didn't know about Rene Daumal, thanks Cram!

On the "soma lives in the mountain" reference:

"Enyalius" is the "name of a deity" that translates to "Son of Enyo". It is actually a title bestowed on those who Enyo/Rhea gives HER secrets.

While most commonly found referring to Ares, in Myceanean times he was a separate deity - or an aspect of Dionysus, who is the other god that holds this title. Dionysus is also one of the only Greek gods shown driving a chariot pulled by cats, and this is a DEEP erisian motif that we find in depictions of Eris/Enyo/Rhea/Freya, etc.

In the below passages, the things to note are repeated references to "Rhea's milk" and the "mixing of wine":

"The grapegrowing land of Bakkhos, where the vinegod first mixed wine for Mother Rheia in a brimming cup, and named the city Kerassai, the Mixings [in Lydia]."


DO YOU MIX MODERN WINE? No. But if you are initiated into Enyo's Secrets, you know what to mix into it. Same thing you mix into milk to get "bhang", and into water with crushed ephedra twigs to get "soma". ;)

-----------
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enyalius

A scholiast on Homer declares that the poet Alcman sometimes identified Ares with Enyalius and sometimes differentiated him, and that Enyalius was sometimes made the son of Ares by Enyo and sometimes the son of Cronus and Rhea.

-----------
https://www.theoi.com/Olympios/DionysosMyths3.html#Kybele

DIONYSUS MENTORED BY RHEA-CYBELE
Euripides implies that Dionysos' was mentored by the great Phrygian mother-goddess Kybele in the rites of the orgia.

Euripides, Bacchae 45 ff (trans. Buckley) (Greek tragedy C5th B.C.) :
"[Dionysos :] 'You women who have left Tmolos, the bulwark of Lydia, my sacred band [of Bakkhai], whom I have brought from among the barbarians as assistants and companions to me, take your drums, native instruments of the city of the Phrygians, the invention of mother Rhea and myself."

Euripides, Bacchae 70 ff :
"Chorus of Bakkhai : From the land of Asia, having left sacred Tmolos, I am swift to perform for Bromios . . . celebrating the god Bakkhos . . . Blessed is he who, being fortunate and knowing the rites of the gods . . . and who, revering the mysteries of great mother Kybele, brandishing the thyrsos, garlanded with ivy, serves Dionysos."

Euripides, Bacchae 120 ff :
"The Korybantes [of Kybele] with triple helmet invented for me in their caves this circle [the castanet], covered with stretched hide; and in their excited revelry they mingled it with the sweet-voiced breath of Phrygian pipes and handed it over to mother Rhea, resounding with the sweet songs of the Bakkhai; nearby, raving Satyroi were fulfilling the rites of the mother goddess, and they joined it to the dances of the biennial festivals (trieteris), in which Dionysos rejoices."

Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 2. 29 (trans. Aldrich) (Greek mythographer C2nd A.D.) :
"He [Dionysos in his youth] went to Kybela [Rhea] in Phrygia. There he was purified by Rhea [of the madness inflicted upon him by Hera] and taught the mystic rites of initiation, after which he received from her his gear and set out eagerly through Thrake." [N.B. Apollodorus is probably summarising the account of Euripides.]

The geographer Strabo also says that Dionysos received the rites of the Orgia from Kybele quoting both Pindar and Euripides, Bacchae.

Strabo, Geography 10. 3. 13 (trans. Jones) (Greek geographer C1st B.C. to C1st A.D.) :
"When Pindaros, in the dithyramb which begins with these words, 'In earlier times there marched the lay of the dithyrambs long drawn out,' mentions the hymns sung in honor of Dionysos, both the ancient and the later ones, and then, passing on from these, says, 'To perform the prelude in thy honor, Megale Meter (Great Mother), the whirling of cymbals is at hand, and among them, also, the clanging of castanets, and the torch that blazeth beneath the tawny pine-trees,' he bears witness to the common relationship between the rites exhibited in the worship of Dionysos among the Greeks and those in the worship of the Meter Theon (Mother of the Gods) [Kybele] among the Phrygians, for he makes these rites closely akin to one another.
And Euripides does likewise, in his Bakkhai, citing the Lydian usages at the same time with those of Phrygia, because of their similarity : 'But ye who left Mt. Tmolos, fortress of Lydia, revel-band of mine [Dionysos], women whom I brought from the land of barbarians as my assistants and travelling companions, uplift the tambourines native to Phrygian cities, inventions of mine and mother Rhea.'
And again, 'happy he who, blest man, initiated in the mystic rites, is pure in his life, [text missing] who, preserving the righteous Orgia (Orgies) of the great mother Kybele, and brandishing the thyrsos on high, and wreathed with ivy, doth worship Dionysos. Come, ye Bakkhai, come, ye Bakkhai, bringing down Bromios, god the child of god, out of the Phrygian mountains into the broad highways of Greece.'
And again, . . . 'the triple-crested Korybantes in their caverns invented this hide-stretched circlet [the tambourine], and blent its Bakkhic revelry with the high-pitched, sweet-sounding breath of Phrygian flutes, and in Rhea's hands placed its resounding noise, to accompany the shouts of the Bakkhai, and from Meter (Mother) Rhea frenzied Satyroi obtained it and joined it to the choral dances of the Trieterides, in whom Dionysos takes delight.'"

Nonnus in his epic Dionysiaca describing the adventures of Dionysos, provides a colourful account of the god's youth spent with Rhea. A few selected passages are quoted here:-

Nonnus, Dionysiaca 1. 20 ff (trans. Rouse) (Greek epic C5th A.D.) :
"Bakkhos [Dionysos, as a babe] on the arm of buxom Rheia, stealthily draining the breast of the lion-breeding goddess."

Nonnus, Dionysiaca 9. 136 ff :
"She [the jealous Hera] would have destroyed the son of Zeus [Dionysos still a baby in the care of the Theban princess Ino]; but Hermes caught him up, and carried him to the wooded ridge where Kybele dwelt. Moving fast, Hera ran swift-shoe on quick feet from high heaven; but he was before her, and assumed the eternal shape of first-born Phanes [one of the first born gods]. Hera in respect for the most ancient of the gods, gave him place and bowed before the radiance of the deceiving face, not knowing the borrowed shape for a fraud. So Hermes passed over the mountain tract with quicker step than hers, carrying the horned child folded in his arms, and gave it to Rheia, nurse of lions, mother of Father Zeus, and said these few words to the goddess mother of the greatest : 'Receive, goddess, a new son of your Zeus! He is to fight with the Indians, and when he has done with earth he will come into the starry sky, to the great joy of resentful Hera! Indeed it is not proper that Ino should be nurse to one whom Zeus brought forth. Let the mother of Zeus be nanny to Dionysos--mother of Zeus and nurse of her grandson!'
This said he put off the higher shape of selfborn Phanes and put on his own form again, leaving Bakkhos to grow a second time in the Meter's (Mother's) nurture.
The goddess took care of him; and while he was yet a boy, she set him to drive a car drawn by ravening lions. Within that godwelcoming courtyard, the tripping Korybantes would surround Dionysos with their childcherishing dance, and clash their swords, and strike their shields with rebounding steel in alternate movements, to conceal the growing boyhood of Dionysos; and as the boy listened to the fostering noise of the shields he grew up under the care of the Korybantes like his father.
At nine years old the youngster went a-hunting his game to the kill . . . he would hold lightly aloft stretched on his shoulders a bold fellstriped tiger unshackled, and brought in hand to show Rheia the cubs he had torn newborn from the dam's milky teats. He dragged horrible lions all alive, and clutching a couple of feet in each hand presented them to the Mother that she might yoke them to her car. Rheia looked on laughing with joy, and admired the manliness and doughty feats of young Dionysos; his father Kronion [Zeus] laughed when he saw with delighted eyes Iobakkhos driving the grim lions . . .
Often he stood in the chariot of immortal Rheia, and held the flowing reins in his tenderskin hand, and checked the nimble team of galloping lions . . . Thus he grew up beside cliffloving Rheia, yet a boy in healthy youth, mountainbred."

Nonnus, Dionysiaca 9. 206 ff :
"[The apotheosed Semele addresses Hera :] 'See [the baby] Dionysos in the arms of your own mother [Rhea], he lies on that cherishing arm! The Dispenser of the eternal universe, the first sown Beginning of the gods, the Allmother, became a nurse for Bromios [Dionysos]; she offered to infant Bakkhos the breast which Zeus High and Mighty has sucked! What Kronides was ever in labour, what Rheia was ever nurse for your boy? But this Kybele [Rhea] who is called your mother brought forth Zeus and suckled Bakkhos in the same lap! She dandled them both, the son and the father.'"

Nonnus, Dionysiaca 10. 139 ff :
"Dionysos, in the latitude of Lydia's fields, grew into youthful bloom as tall as he wished, shaking the Euian gear of Rheia Kybele."

Nonnus, Dionysiaca 12. 380 ff :
"To Dionysos alone had Rheia given the amethyst, which preserves the winedrinker from the tyranny of madness."

Nonnus, Dionysiaca 13. 470 ff :
"The grapegrowing land of Bakkhos, where the vinegod first mixed wine for Mother Rheia in a brimming cup, and named the city Kerassai, the Mixings [in Lydia]."

Nonnus, Dionysiaca 34. 214 ff :
"Vineclad Phrygia, where Rheia dwells who cared for Bromios in boyhood."

Nonnus, Dionysiaca 45. 96 ff :
"[Dionysos] whom Rheia mother of the gods nursed with her cherishing milk."
-----------
Telarus, KSC,
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(0o)  Tender to the Edible Zen Garden, Ratcheting Metallic Sex Doll of The End Times,
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altered

#186
Jeeeeeez telarus. I've been around the fringes of this stuff recently (lots of research into pre classical Mediterranean cultures, gotta love the etruscans and Minoans tbh) and this post you made is probably the biggest single source I've seen online on /any/ pre classical Hellenic myth. Impressive, and now I need to read all of it voraciously. Thanks for the post man.

ETA: I know you cite a site that has much more than your post does, but I saw it for the first time as part of your post, so I'm still telling the truth.
"I am that worst of all type of criminal...I cannot bring myself to do what you tell me, because you told me."

There's over 100 of us in this meat-suit. You'd think it runs like a ship, but it's more like a hundred and ten angry ghosts having an old-school QuakeWorld tournament, three people desperately trying to make sure the gamers don't go hungry or soil themselves, and the Facilities manager weeping in the corner as the garbage piles high.

The Wizard Joseph

 :lulz: :lulz:

I wondered when Telarus would jump on this thread. Very neat stuff!
You can't get out backward.  You have to go forward to go back.. better press on! - Willie Wonka, PBUH

Life can be seen as a game with no reset button, no extra lives, and if the power goes out there is no restarting.  If that's all you see life as you are not long for this world, and never will get it.

"Ayn Rand never swung a hammer in her life and had serious dominance issues" - The Fountainhead

"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality :lulz:

"You program the controller to do the thing, only it doesn't do the thing.  It does something else entirely, or nothing at all.  It's like voting."
- Billy, Aug 21st, 2019

"It's not even chaos anymore. It's BANAL."
- Doktor Hamish Howl

Telarus

#188
Very welcome.  :fnord:

Bacchus' cult of Eris invented the tambourine.

[ Shades of Joy - The Desert is a Circle | 1970, Music of El Topo ,O.S.T. ]
https://youtu.be/cOBtwYGpciI


:pax:

:lulz: :lulz: :lulz: :lulz: :lulz:
Telarus, KSC,
.__.  Keeper of the Contradictory Cephalopod, Zenarchist Swordsman,
(0o)  Tender to the Edible Zen Garden, Ratcheting Metallic Sex Doll of The End Times,
/||\   Episkopos of the Amorphous Dreams Cabal

Join the Doll Underground! Experience the Phantasmagorical Safari!

Cramulus

Been a while since I posted an update.

I wanted to talk a little about the Sacred Movements. In my last post about them, I was feeling frustrated, like it took so much energy to get to / from the class that I wasn't able to really enjoy the class itself.

Things have changed. For one, I changed the commute - instead of taking 1.5 hours and $12 to arrive by train/subway (and then the same thing just to get home), I'm just driving into Manhattan, which takes about 45 minutes. I had a major mental block around driving in Manhattan, but it turns out that the route I take isn't too bad, and I can park on the street right near the Gurdjieff foundation. So instead of running from the subway to get to the class in the nick of time, I am able to arrive 10-15 minutes early and meditate before the class. That changed everything.

The class is still challenging, but I'm making progress. I'm more comfortable in my body now, more practiced in coordinating its fine-movements. And each class is additive - we will work on a series of movements, and in the next class, will try it again, with another step or movement.

The class bypasses the intellect. As someone who is more intellectually-minded, I struggled with this. At first, I was really craving explanations. I wanted somebody to say "This is our goal, and here's how these actions support that." I wanted someone to tell me why we are holding our arms exactly like this, while concentrating on the sensation of verticality. Those explanations never came.

Likewise, nobody ever explains the motion before we do it. Nobody says "Okay, so the eight steps go like this, step 1 is X, Step 2 is Y, Step 3 is Z...." We just do them and repeat them.

Earlier in this thread, I brought up the metaphor that the self is like a horse and carriage.. there's a driver, a horse, a carriage, a passenger... eventually one day there might be a master who can coordinate everything and isn't just riding along. But these parts don't speak the same language. "How do you tell a horse what to do?"

I feel like the movements speak the language of the body. They are talking to the physical center without routing through the intellect or the emotions. It's like we're moving through a rocky forest.. The horse knows how to move past the obstacles all by itself. The driver (intellect) can't instruct the horse how to do it--just like how if you try to think about all the things you need to do in order to walk across the room, you'd never take a step.

The movements are a physical expression of the Gurdjieff work. To do the movements, you have to align all three centers: the body, the intellect, the emotions. And when they are aligned, you are open to something. Someone once described the movements to me as something like a prayer. I understand that now.

Maybe a half dozen times now, I've arrived at an internal place of complete awareness and sensitivity. It's a very special feeling. It's not like being in a trance, it's like being snapped out of one. It's a similar experience to being in "the zone", where you are acting almost automatically. But reflecting on these experiences, I can't say that it's fully automatic or intentional. It's like, both...? Very hard to describe.

Months ago, LMNO talked about how in practicing the drums, you learn to play different rhythms with different parts of your body. Somehow, the body keeps track of all this, you don't have to think about it. It's like that.

Sometimes I'm watching TV, zoned out, and I see somebody doing something and really engaged in it - playing a sport, an instrument, dancing, et cetera. And I can't help but think - that person is really alive right now. It's like it shines a light on how asleep I am at that moment. I envy people performing with bands because they are having a real moment, right there. They're not in the waiting room, they're really doing what they're meant to be doing.

And in a way, I'm glad that it was hard for me, at first, to approach the movements. By overcoming these internal obstacles, I created something inside of myself. I literally did give up. And for some reason I kept going anyway -- and arrived at a place I couldn't have discovered if these things were "easy". Somebody told me that people with a dance background are almost worse off, in that regard -- the movement / coordination part comes easy to them, so they get tricked into thinking that's all there is. That they've got it. But there's something else there which you don't discover if it's easy. It takes conscious labor and intentional suffering.





I want to capture a moment that happened a little over a month ago. First I want to mention that the experience of doing the movements really focuses you on your own mind and body. But there's also (I don't know how to express this verbally) a "group feel". A sense of being a component of a larger, moving organism. Both one that's present in the room, and the larger human organism. Sometimes when you do these movements right near someone else, you bump into them -- and that bump causes this little shock of awareness - you get a flash of awareness of their position as well as your own.

We are sitting in rows and columns. Each column  performs an action at the same time (and those action correspond to the digits in the number 142857, but I won't get into that here). There's a movement where you look to the left and hold it for about 15 seconds. Then there's a movement where you look to the right and hold it for about 15 seconds. Because each column is doing these actions but staggered by one beat (ie, I'm looking to the left, while the column on my left is looking to the right), you end up making eye contact with the person on either side of you for a 15 second period.

This was an intense experience. During this exercise, I was in a heightened state of sensitivity. Very focused on all the tiny little emotions in the body and how they manifest in the muscles. On que, I turned my head to the left. I made eye contact with this guy next to me.

Eye contact is like an electrical conduit.

In 15 seconds, I saw him go through so much.. he's aware of me, then he's aware of my perception of him. I experience the same. The tiny movements of the muscles around his eyes... I could feel his deep seated anxiety, and his reaction to me seeing it, his attempt to overcome it, his failure to insulate himself. Likewise, I could feel my own fear of the Other, and how it manifested on my face.. and also how I was reacting to his seeing me. We were plugged into one another, directly. Nothing supernatural here, but I felt like we had a moment of true psychic contact. Electrical contact, soul to soul. I learned more about him in 15 seconds than I know about some of my close friends.

After the class, I went to shake his hand and say hi, but he jetted, quickly, preventing the opportunity. Probably on purpose. I'm reminded that there are reasons we build walls around ourselves. And there's a reason you don't want to be "conscious" all the time - it's not comfortable. If we were receptive all the time, we'd be crushed by it.

It was a powerful moment - shook me to the core.


Telarus

Both of those really hit home atm. I have been doing Silat, an Indonesian martial art, for the past 8 years. So much of it is "non-explained movement". I was very lucky in that my guru badgered his teacher with "silly questions" and so he has a completely different mental map of this thing that we do than most other instructors I've seen.

And that map is _absolutely_ body-centric. Unfortunately, our culture lets the kids who "show competence" receive all the physical training, while the rest of us have to struggle through retraining ourselves later (if we ever take that opportunity). Reconnecting with the body means undoing a huge amount of chronic tension (your pose-hold-relax-repeat description has deep parallels to Christopher Hyatt's "Undoing Exercises"... who I think has Gurdjieff connections). Then looking past the flood of sensory information coming in from the "environment" and focusing on the sensory information coming from "inside".

Our beginner breathing meditations involve flowing the arms and hands all across the body, almost like you are lathering yourself with soap in the shower. This is SUPER WEIRD FEELING at first, almost indescribably weird. You are not socialized to touch yourself like this (you are basically anti-socialized away from it), you fuck up and lock up, or your breathing catches and gets blocked, or your hand leaves contact with the body. Your "monkey brain" is going to jump all over these feelings and try to convince you that this weird stuff you are doing is boring, not worth your time, etc. The best I can recommend is to just return focus to the breath, the intellect will run out of steam eventually.

The point to our exercise is to retrain the body to be confident that it can move in certain ways (through certain vectors) with power. We are literally "filling in the blank spots on our personal-space map". But guru Brandt and I just made that metaphor up to distract the intellect. ;)


Will go back and re-read this thread. Thanks for posting.
Telarus, KSC,
.__.  Keeper of the Contradictory Cephalopod, Zenarchist Swordsman,
(0o)  Tender to the Edible Zen Garden, Ratcheting Metallic Sex Doll of The End Times,
/||\   Episkopos of the Amorphous Dreams Cabal

Join the Doll Underground! Experience the Phantasmagorical Safari!

Fujikoma

This is GREAT stuff. It took me a while to read the whole thing. I think I might have to walk down to the book store and pick up Baelzebub's Tales now. Really had me reflecting on a lot of my own experiences and considering them. Anyway, with how scattered my mental processes typically are, it's likely better I don't go far into detail, and just say, thanks.

hooplala

Might want to start with some Ouspensky first.
"Soon all of us will have special names" — Professor Brian O'Blivion

"Now's not the time to get silly, so wear your big boots and jump on the garbage clowns." — Bob Dylan?

"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"
— Walt Whitman

Fujikoma

#193
Quote from: Hoopla! on April 25, 2019, 10:02:59 PM
Might want to start with some Ouspensky first.

Yeah, probably a good idea. Not sure they'll have them, or if they do, if they'll be able to find them, it's an odd sort of, disorganized bookstore with cats roaming free in it, with little chairs for the cats to sit in. Oh, and the basement is even more chaotic and has a stand with anarchist newsletters, free, among other weirdness. In short, it's a cool, but sort of spooky place... also no one is ever shopping when I go in, which is, strange.

EDIT: Seriously, the basement is unreal, with twists and turns, and seems bigger than the store it's under, almost like the laws of space are, bent a little. I've gotten lost down there before.

Cramulus

I guess the last thing I want to say about the Movements is that I can't verbalize what I'm getting out of it. But I can tell I get more of whatever that is every time I go


Somebody said that we are processing the Movements at a non-verbal level. Your words can't really touch what's happening, but you can feel it. I'm learning, but learning what? couldn't tell you