Long post, sorry. This post isn't an explanation of anything, it's more of a diary of an experience I had two days ago.
I had another series of coincidences knocking into each other like dominoes, it left me reeling and questioning everything. None of them are world-shaking in of themselves, but it's rare you have a day where the hits keep coming like this, so it left me in a strange psychological space. I don't want to attach too much weight to these experiences, but I want to record them anyway.
In brief...
In the morning, I saw
a FB post from the guy who runs the "Discordianism" page... it is about the Black Iron Prison, and includes a graphic from the forums.. a little snippet that says
From the Semi Secret Order of Kaballistic Navigators
Every 1% of enlightenment generated comes with about 20% idiocy as a waste product.
this, by the way, is a nice little summary of my year.
But it made me think about Mangrove (a guy who used to post here), and my early explorations of Kaballah, which we talked about via PM becuase the forum was too judgy about woo stuff. Brought me back to a place where I was questing, exploring, open. More on Mangrove later.
Later in the afternoon, I read this -
He Was Supposed to Be the Next Stephen King. Then the Aliens Came.This is an interview with Whitley Streiber, the author of
Communion. When I was a teen, I was
really interested in UFO abduction stories... Communion plays a large role in the pop-culture image of aliens as grey big-head big-eye creatures who take you to an elevated perspective which shows you how things really are and changes your life (basically the same jungian archetype as medieval accounts of angel experiences -- see
Cosmic Trigger). But I never realized that the author (whose book is based on his pereceived-real experience) did not consider them aliens, he just called them "Visitors". Anyway, reading his abduction account put me into an old mental space...
In this interview, Whitley mentions how he received this profound piece of information from the Visitors - the number 137. He unpacks how that number has its own "23 phenomenon" surrounding it. This startled me, because I, too, had an ... interest in the number 137. In fact, one of the first PMs I sent on this forum was to Mangrove, asking him if Kaballah could help me understand why I was seeing the number 137 everywhere, and how I should orient myself to this. And I know, I know --- the Law of Fives, merely seeing a number isn't meaningful in of itself.. But still, the memory echoed within me, brought me back to an earlier time.
In the next paragraph, Whitley describes the type of meditation he does:
What kind of meditation do you do?
I do something called the Sensing Exercise that I learned in the Gurdjieff Foundation. It’s a very simple exercise to start. I’ve been doing it now for over 50 years and over time, you get to the point where you have sensation of more than just your physical body.
It starts with an idea, that the human attention is sacred for a very simple reason. It is the only attention on this planet that can be intentionally directed. When you place your attention on your body, it causes your nervous system to change suddenly so that you, in another level of reality, can be seen more clearly. I asked the visitors, when they first came to me, why they came. They said, “We saw a glow.” After Annie died, she made it clear to me that she could see me when I was sitting in the chair doing the exercise. That was when she could see me and I realized that the glow they were talking about was the glow that comes from placing the attention on sensation.
Reading the 137 thing and the Gurdjieff Meditation thing right next to each other did something funny in my head. Suddenly, I was completely present.
At about the same time, I got a text message saying my Gurdjieff meeting was cancelled, but I was encouraged to come to a panel at the Foundation on Self Observation. This text message reminded me to observe that presence, remove myself from the awe and confusion I was experiencing, remove myself from the "that's just the law of fives / pattern detection" heuristic I automatically apply to these experiences, and just observe both from a neutral point of view.
The panel was good, gave me a lot of material to think about.
And on the way home, I flipped open this book written by
John C. Lilly --
Programming and Metaprogramming the Human Biocomputer.
I gotta say -- despite some of his weirder thoughts, Lilly was on some next level shit. The book is about his work in developing therapeutic procedures involving LSD in the interest of expanding consciousness. Lilly has
clearly practiced the Fourth Way. The way he understands consciousness as rooted in physical experience, the way he understands the self as collective, (and component of collective) and especially the way that he uses self observation -- it's very Gurdjieffian.
Those of you who have been reading my lunatic ramblings know that I had a mystical gnostic experience that rocked my world and turned everything upside down. For the last 9 years, I've been trying to make sense of that profound moment. Part of the gnostic revelations I received had to do with the correspondence between Microcosm and Macrocosm. This is the root of my
Fractal Cult writings and the original reason I got into the Gurdjieff work. (because I can tell he spent most of his life exploring that experience too)
The mystical experience I had is somewhat universal - it can be found in many different cultures and paths, and is well described in William James'
Varieties of Mystical Experience. One of the side effects of this experience is that when someone else has had it, I can usually recognize it in their art and writings. Just by looking at a piece of art, I can usually tell if that person has been "initiated" in this way or not.
John C Lilly was initiated. In this one part of the book, he describes this series of experiments where he asked participants to consider a belief while they were tripping and suspended in a float tank. (float tanks themselves are a john c lilly concept, btw) At first, he gets them to accept the idea that travel to other universes is possible - but not through astral projection or leaving the body - the universes are inside the self.
Over the course of seven years, he asks participants to explore universes generated from these belief statements. A few parts of his belief statements have 100% correspondence to the experience I had. When I read this, I was
awestruck.
Basic Belief No. 2
The subject sought beings other than himself, not human, in whom he existed and who control him and other human
beings. Thus the subject found whole new universes containing great varieties of beings, some greater than himself,
some equal to himself, and some lesser than himself.
Those greater than himself were a set which was so huge in spacetime as to make the subject feel as a mere mote
in their sunbeam, a single microflash of energy in their time scale, my fortyfive years are but an instant in their lifetime,
a single thought in their vast computer, a mere particle in their assemblages of living cognitive units. He felt he was in
the absolute unconscious of these beings. He experienced many more sets all so much greater than himself that
they were almost inconceivable in their complexity, size and time scales
Basic Belief No. 3
The subject assumed the existence of beings in whom humans exist and who directly control humans. This is a
tighter control program than the previous one and assumes continuous day and night, second to second, control, as
if each human being were a cell in a larger organism. Such beings insist upon activities in each human being totally
under the control of the organism of which each human being is a part. In this state there is no free will and no freedom for an individual.
This supraselfmetaprogram was entered twice by the subject; each time he had to leave it; for
him it was too anxietyprovoking. In the first case he became a part of a vast computer in which he was one element.
In the second case he was a thought in a much larger mind: being modified rapidly, flexibly and plastically.
All of the above experiments were done looking upward from the selfprogrammer to the supraselfmetaprograms. A converse set of experiments was done in which the selfmetan programmer looked downward towards
the metaprograms, the programs and the lower levels
Essentially, that each individual human is part of a superorganism, and that superorganism is an organ of a larger organism, and so forth. And furthemore, the self can be understood as a collective. In this section, Lilly also describes Gurdjieff's "self remembering" technique, and the "Ray of Creation", but in different words.
I felt like there's a message here, something is being shown to me.
It was
uncanny how much the outside world reflected my inner world. Uncanny both in the sense of unusual, and the "uncanny valley".
I'm still processing all of it. But I tell you - when I finally got home, I just had to sit on the couch in silence and be with it.
In other news, I went to a Sacred Movement class last night. While at the Gurdjieff foundation building, I met Bill Murray. Really nice guy.
