“What people can do to awaken is to just turn their attention to what they’ve always been.  It’s almost as simple as turning awareness back on itself to realize what it is that’s looking through this mask right now.  It’s the part of you that’s been watching you your whole life….  What’s conscious is consciousness.”

 - Adyashanti

 

Ironically, for most of us, the “self conscious” part of our mind is the part that’s least conscious of the true self.

 

A vast awareness, deep as oceans, watches life through your eyes and mine.  It witnesses.  It is the true self.  It is pure, wordless, infinite consciousness.

 

Our chattering, story-making, self-conscious mind is at best peripherally aware of the one self, like an angel glimpsed from the corner of your eye.  But if you can become still and quiet, you can catch much more than a glimpse.

 

Bend your personal field of consciousness back toward its source.  Behold the face in the wishing well.  Witness the witness.

 

Adventure

Into every life should come a little adventure.  Modern man has forgotten how to have adventures.  We’ve evolved, as comedian Robin Williams says, “from hunter-gatherers to consumer-borrowers”.  We pursue the creature comforts of modern civilized life, and confine our hunting to the shopping mall.  Our only outlet for adventure is the vicarious fictions we consume in the darkness of a movie theater.  We fear any real adventure that might take us away from our comfortable routines, or even threaten our comfortable worldviews.

 

Till about 150 years ago in America, anyone seeking adventure could join a wagon train and head out west.  A hundred years ago, a boy or girl craving adventure could run away and join the circus.  Even as recently as 40 years ago, a young person could go drop acid in the Haight, protest in Washington, or follow the Grateful Dead on tour across America.

 

Eric Shackleton in 1914 launched his famously ill-fated journey to the South Pole.  To recruit a crew for the voyage, he ran the following newspaper ad: Men wanted for hazardous journey.  Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful.  Honour and recognition in case of success.

 

Over 500 men applied for 28 positions on Shackleton’s ship.

 

What socially acceptable adventures are left for us in 2008?  Joining the army to fight in Fallujah maybe, but that’s too high a price to pay for adventure in my opinion.  I’d rather spent a winter frozen in the Antarctic ice, like Shackleton’s men did.  As Bill Plotkin says, “We need a better game than war.”

 

Hunting, hockey, NASCAR racing, day trading, and automobile repossession are socially accepted games but they seem like poor substitutes for wild adventure.  They only simulate adventure.

 

Real adventure always entails real risk.  The risks can be physical, but there’s also the risk your adventure could undermine your small ego sense of self.  In which case the risk is its own reward.

 

Listen to your wild side.  Go join the circus.

 

Projection

 

Projection is something all of us have experienced.  When you feel love at first sight, there’s a good chance you’re projecting your subconscious image of the perfect mate (anima or animus) onto someone who resembles the perfect mate in some superficial way.  For example, I have a visceral reaction to brunettes with dark eyes, especially wearing glasses and/or boots.  When you experience an irrational dislike or hatred of someone you barely know, that’s a projection of your subconscious shadow.  Relationships that start as projections often end badly, regardless of whether the feelings are positive or negative.

 

Sometimes we even project subconscious archetypes onto whole groups or nationalities of people.  This is one of the causes of racism and war.

Sometimes, instead of projecting a deep archetype, we project the memory of someone from our past (often a parent).  Psychologists call this type of projection transference, especially when it involves a patient projecting onto a therapist.  Therapists, being only human, may subconsciously encourage such projections, which is called counter transference.

 

Projections can damage the psyche of both the person projecting (the “projector”) and the person being projected upon (the “screen”).  As the poet Robert Bly wrote, “When one projects, one is really giving away an energy or power that rightfully belongs in one’s own treasury.  [For example] a man may give his feeling side to his wife.  Then he is rid of it, and when a feeling problem with the children comes up, he naturally lets her handle the problem.”

 

Indeed, a Jungian psychologist will often hurl the words “You are projecting!” as a damning accusation.  Yet Carl Jung’s own protégé Marie Louise von Franz once asked, “Why do we always assume projection is bad?  Sometimes projection is helpful and the right thing.”

 

Projection is certainly natural.  All of us do it, all of the time.  We're usually not conscious of it though. 

 

I think the sacred Other Within (HGA if you prefer) transmits powerful images and feelings 24x7 on many frequencies like a TV transmitter.  Most of the time those TV waves fly off into space, and disappear unseen and unheard.  But sometimes a "screen" comes into your life -- usually a person -- who clicks with one of the frequencies you’re transmitting.  The message on that frequency then becomes visible to you - embodied in that person.  Your reaction is powerful and immediate feeling of recognition, often accompanied by feelings of excitement, ecstasy, anger, love, or hatred.

 

When your projection comes into contact with a screen, life gets interesting and juicy.  Juicy is good.  Without juicy, life would be dull and dry.  Some people fear these projection events because they often end badly, but they don’t have to.  In fact, every projection is a wondrous gift from the Sacred Other -- if you know how to unwrap it.  Without screens to show us our projections, we would remain unconscious of our own hidden treasures and the growth opportunities they represent.

 

To see why projections often end badly, and how to avoid those pitfalls, consider the five stages of projection as defined by Jungian psychologist James Hollis:

 

1. I am caught up in a projection but I don’t know it yet.  Every attribute my psyche projects on the screen, I believe is objectively true.

2. I begin to notice discrepancies between characteristics I projected versus the screen's true personality.  This may come as a shock or cause for anger.

3. I begin to accept the screen as s/he really is.  I start questioning the basis of the relationship.  The projection begins to weaken.

4. I realize the whole episode has been a projection. I withdraw the projection.  The relationship w/the screen usually ends at this stage.

5. I recognize the projected characteristic represents a hidden part of myself I desire or fear (or someone I had an intense unresolved relationship with in my past).  I begin to understand what I was projecting and why.  I work consciously to integrate the unconscious shadow parts of myself so the projection truly ends.

 

Most people never reach stage 5, or even stage 4.  This is why projection based relationships often end so spectacularly, and then the same pattern repeats itself again.  (“She keeps falling for men who are wrong for her.”)  Only by performing the work of stage 5 does one receive the gift proffered by the Other Within -- so that it never again need be projected on an Other Without.

 

I was discussing this with a friend, and he suggested there might even be a sixth stage unknown to mainstream psychology:

 

6. I gain conscious control over my projections, sending out only what I wish to manifest in the physical world, and holding back that which I don’t.

 

Stage 6 is essentially how magick operates.

 

Projection is neither good nor bad.  It is natural.  It’s the way soul & psyche interact with the exosphere.  Whether it’s healthy or unhealthy depends entirely on how well we understand it and learn from it.

 

 Fall came unannounced, as it often does, without calling ahead first.  Labor Day was the last hot day here.  Last day of the State Fair too.

 Then Tuesday morning, right on cue, cool weather and school buses came.  Maple trees shivered.  Kids returned to school with varying degrees of enthusiasm.  The State Fair packed up its booths and midway rides.  The tattooed carnies and blue-ribbon livestock have all left town.

 The Republicans have left town too, politicians migrating like swallows to nearby battleground states, traveling lonely rust belt roads mapped by pollsters.  The biased liberal media have flown home to the coast to sip lattes and sneer at small town values.  The Excel Center is a hockey arena again.

 The riot police have left our streets too, or maybe we just don’t recognize them in their regular street blues.  But the haunting aroma of tear gas lingers.

 Summer’s last remnants; we treasure them here.  Like the crickets who still hopefully sing of freedom and love outside my window, and try not to think of November.

 

Our children and grandchildren will look back with gratitude on the year 2008 when gasoline hit $4 / gallon in the US.  Four Dollar Day will be a national holiday, a new Independence Day when Americans celebrate the beginning of the end of our petroleum bondage.

They'll remember 2008 fondly as the year when:

 - Americans started driving less.
 - CO2 emissions began to decline.
 - US economic dependency on the Middle East diminished.
 - Globalization slowed down due to higher shipping costs.
 - Americans started walking and biking.
 - Obesity began to decline.
 - Urban sprawl stopped as commute patterns changed.
 - Crime began to decline as city neighborhoods grew stronger.
 - Sales of dangerous, gas guzzling SUVs plummeted.
 - Traffic accidents and fatalities declined sharply.
 - Influence of oil lobbyists in Washington began to wane.
 - Global warming slowed down.
 - America started building wind and solar energy farms.
 - Cost of maintaining roads, highways, & bridges began to ease.
 - Detroit developed truly fuel efficient cars.
 - Cities invested in mass transit.
 - America resolved never again to shed our soldiers' blood for oil.

Our experience of Time is closely tied to our illusion of personal separateness. To a corporeal consciousness experiencing the daily drama of life in Assiah (the physical world) experience is divided into a million separate but consecutive slices. Each slice is experienced momentarily as "now" or the Present, then immediately joins that collection of memories we call the Past. The "now" slices are very thin, and pass through the sensorium quickly like film through a movie projector. This creates an illusion of activity and change, just as frames of film seems to come to life when run through a projector.

But what is the Present moment? It's as slippery as quicksilver. As soon as you focus attention upon it, it's already gone into the Past. You cannot grab hold of it no matter how hard you try, at least not using ordinary states of consciousness. Through meditation it is said to be possible to experience "the moment". But when one tries to do this, what you actually experience is a sensation of unbounded timelessness. No separate present moment; all moments are Present.

Time is necessary because it enables consciousness to experience change & growth, and change & growth are the purpose of physical life in Assiah. The arrow of time constrains how we experience change, causality, and entropy. It gives us our past and future. It enables all the changes we experience, from a teacup dropping to the floor, to a baby growing into a man.

In meditation we can briefly experience a timeless frame of reference beyond normal Assiah consciousness. Is it real? To make sense of this, imagine an omniscient consciousness that observes the entire 4-dimensional universe simultaneously and in its entirety. Physicists call this the "block universe"; a 4D block containing the entire history of our universe with time as just another static dimension. Nothing changes in the block universe. It has no Past, Present, or Future.

Of course the words "real" and "illusion" are slippery. It is more accurate to say all frames of reference are relative. In the timeless frame, time seems to be an illusion. But to us in Assiah, static eternity seems like an illusion. Both points of view are correct.

For an omniscient consciousness to experience change within the universe, it would have to make its awareness finite like ours. Only consciousness bound to the arrow of time can watch the universe play like a movie, with movement, change, & growth. A movie whose end is unknown.

But we are much more than spectators watching a movie in the darkened theater of the sensorium (or Plato's cave). We are the ones making the movie as well as watching it! For it takes consciousness to collapse the infinite potentialities of Future into a Present moment, just as quantum physics requires consciousness to collapse a waveform into a particle/wave with definite properties. The act of observation affects the outcome (Heisenberg Principle). The act of watching the movie changes the movie. So you are both the director and audience of your movie.

In the Assiah frame of reference we have free will, which certainly makes the movie more interesting. In the omniscient block universe reference frame, every decision that will ever be made has already been made, so there are no surprises. But that doesn't necessarily mean free will is merely an illusion. To the extent that time is real, so is free will. Just because I know I had waffles for breakfast this morning, doesn't mean I didn't choose waffles freely.

This is our culture's creation myth: Before the Big Bang, all of the universe's space & energy was packed inside a tiny seed the size of a single subatomic particle. It was in a state of indeterminate quantum superimposition, as are all quantum objects until consciousness collapses them. Some unknown consciousness touched the quantum seed, causing its waveform to collapse into physical manifestation. Immediately it was in a physical state of such extreme energy density that it had to expand violently. That Big Bang created 3-dimensional space which is continuing to expand all around us to this very day. It was also at that moment 13.7 billion years ago that Time began for all practical purposes.

Every time your consciousness interacts with the physical world, something like a little Big Bang (Small Bang?) happens again. You make observations and choices. Your observations and choices collapse the myriad possibilities of Future into a Present that immediately solidifies into Past. You collapse the waveform. You are co-creating the universe. Which is not too surprising, because the original consciousness that triggered the Big Bang was ours. This may seem like a chicken & egg paradox. But if you can meditate, and release your awareness from the illusions of time and personal separateness, you will see how this is so.

So which came first, the omniscient chicken or the cosmic egg? :-)

Stop the movie
Put the masks in the cupboard
Silence the monkey
 
What's left is you
Not you

Modern man's understanding and consciousness has split into seemingly mutually exclusive modalities of the religious/spiritual and scientific/rational.  This split has caused massive suffering and misunderstanding on both individual and societal scales in the modern (post Newton) era.  Yet it is understandable, even forgiveable, given the physiology of the human brain, with its bicameral design effectively giving each of us two quasi-autonomous brains or hemispheres which process information in radically different ways.

The way to vanquish the false dualism that plagues humanity is synthesis of the opposing thought paradigms.  By the ancient Law of the Triangle, a union of two opposites is not only possible, it is generally inevitable.

The way forward is the third way, i.e. development of a "third mind".  A sum of today's limited left and right minds that's greater than the sum of its parts.  People can be mentally ambidextrious.  Albert Einstein exemplified this, as have other leaders and geniuses, so we know it can be done.  The challenge now is to make the third mind available to everybody.

Barriers built and institutionalized over centuries must be overcome, old grudges and stereotypes set aside by partisans on both sides of the divide, but it can and must be done.