tsuki

Today I had my first divination session using I-Ching. In this journal I will share the contemplation on my life guided by the Oracle. I'm using the version rewritten by Carol K. Anthony and Hanna Moog titled: I CHING The Oracle of the Cosmic Way. The question: How can I fulfill my role better? The hexagram: 35. Progressing The judgement: Progressing. The true self is honored by the Sage's presence so that there is help in everything he does. I received two changing lines: Line 2: Progressing, but in sorrow, due to looking to one's ancestress. Being firmly correct brings success. Then one obtains great happiness. Line 4: Progressing like a hamster. Perseverance brings danger. Contemplation: I couldn't have thought of a better answer to my question. The role plays itself organically. The role grows, like a flower and to do anything to make it better is to damage it. The judgement has been rewritten by the authors to remove the feudal and human-centered nature of the original one: Progressing. The powerful prince is honored with horses in large numbers. In a single day he is granted audience three times. Upon reading the first changing line, I had an emotional release. It powerfully connected with my childhood memories to the point of tears. When I read the interpretation from the book, there was not much I could connect with. Apparently, it points at the belief of lost paradise, original sin and guilt. The second changing line made me smile, as it points at my unhealthy tendency towards money and the dynamic between me and my wife that we're trying to work through. It's getting better (progressing, huh?). During the Retrospective-Three-Coin method (RTCM), it was communicated to me that the first changing line was directed towards my wife and I was asked to draw a hexagram for her. Later it became clear that my question was ambiguous - was the drawing supposed to be a gift for her, or should I simply read it to her on behalf of the Sage? I drew: Hexagram: 22. Grace The judgement: Grace shows success. It is not favorable to create form for its own sake. I received two changing lines: Line 2: He lends grace to the beard on his chin. Line 3: Graceful and moist. Being firmly correct brings good fortune. What I read in this hexagram is superficiality of our sexuality. I need to contemplate that more, as I'm not sure what is this all about yet. RTCM questions weren't of much help, unfortunately. I'm not sure whether I should share the sexual aspect of my marriage here on the forum, so that's it for now. I read this hexagram to my wife and her facial expression was tense. I think she was being superstitious.

I don't consider that an 'except'. Your body needs other people to survive. It needs touch, it needs chemistry, it needs bonding, it needs to be useful and use others. The fear of social rejection is a genuine threat to the body and the body communicates it. You do not become fearless by telling yourself that you don't need anybody, but by being in touch with what the body needs. You can decide that the body is mistaken and act against it, but in truth it rarely is. If you shut yourself off from people, you will develop all kinds of coping mechanisms that start with binge eating for example. Yes, definitely. The trick is that you survived mostly automatically for 30 years, or at least 15. The body had learned all kinds of useless response patterns that lock into your family dynamic and "friends". If you fear something, the default response is to avoid it. If you're angry, the default response is to attack. If, as a woman, you are socially pressured to be submissive, then your response to anger gets overriden by shame, for example. It really is not at all obvious which emotion should be employed at which situation, especially because you lose your cool precisely when you need to observe yourself carefully. One thing is adrenaline response. Another thing is fear. Yet another thing is a 'response'. Fear is a concept you produce in response to adrenaline. This concept, if is identified with, creates a response that hopefully is beneficial for your survival. Identification here is 'letting the fear take you', not noticing the choice to be made. You can always stand still in response to fear. You can always dissolve fear in response to adrenaline. That is emotional mastery and it is not enlightenment. Enlightenment is when you understand what you are. You are a concept, a division of reality. [I don't like that definition, but I'm gonna leave it as is]. If you feel like you are in control of things, like I don't wanna run away from tiger, that is an ego. That thought that deliberates. Enlightenment certainly helps in mastering emotions, and mastering emotions helps becoming enlightened. ___________________ By the way, I highly recommend reading Ursula's The Earthsea Cycle. I did not choose that particular translation because of its quality in itself, but because I highly value Ursula as a spiritual teacher. That cycle is a fantasy novel informed by Taoist nonduality. Absolutely amazing, it was very influential on me.

I'm just gonna leave these three here in case they are relevant: Please don't be too hard on yourself.

Mmmm.... perceiving instinctual responses to danger is not synonymous with identification with the body. It's like saying that the fact that you see, means that you are identified with the eyes. The body is having a freak out because it's built to survive and you are perceiving it. That's good, that means that you are sane. Please explain your understanding of the term "identification". I'm afraid that the one that I shared with you isn't free . Do you still have the PDF file? Maybe the mods won't mind if you attach it to the post?

@Neorez Keep walking the walk and see for yourself. Maybe it is exactly what you need.

@Matys You're welcome man, godspeed. ? If you have any more questions, go ahead and post them.

Yes, it is born out of contraction of what is. For example, body identification is mostly habitual muscle tension. Contraction in this example is the 'habitual' tension.

Hmm... that seems like what I call 'deprivation chamber vision of death'. Look deeply into your senses: Sight Sound Touch If you close your eyes, do you stop seeing? Try to locate the exact moment when your 'vision' stops being real and turns into imagination. If you cover your ears, do you stop hearing? Try to talk and finish the sentence in your mind. How do you turn the outer sound into the inner? If you move your hand and it touches something (stops), does the movement stop, or does it turn into something else? Try locating the exact moment when movement turns into sensation upon contact. Try to touch the touch. Is it possible to not experience?

@Matys It is important to distinguish between the ego death itself, and what your mind is imagining to be like. If you shared your specific fears and what imaginations they trigger, I may help you dispel them if I were going through something similar. The bottom line is that if you are going to realize absolute truth, then that truth is not something new, added, and you are "it" right now.

Farewell. Talking to you was a pleasure.

Being a submissive housewife is a better place to be in than a psychopath. There is a legitimate experiential difference between the two. We need more submissive housewives. Notice that she only suffers because she's vulnerable to other people's exploitation. Her own exploitation does not return back to her like the psychopath's does because she exploits out of a legitimate concern for other people's well-being. That is not a lack of human spirit, but an overblown one. It is born out of having the psychopath in the shadow, out of reaction against it. The trauma locks it in place but that reinforces the heart, not the head. She's softer. Of course you can, if you are able to handle and observe those instincts. Upaya.

@Truth Addict You are awesome, man! Keep rockin! Have you found Love?

That's a pre/post fallacy. Psychopaths are not attached to non-attachment. They are attached to such an extent that they dispose of their emotional, empathetic side to exploit people. First, you need to be healthily attached to become attached to non-attachment. That happens when all of your needs are fulfilled securely.

When tripping on LSD, my subconscious was communicating that I am an eye-creature, that every inch of my body is an eye that has eyes in it. Something of an insect things, but made of human eyes. This was not a part of visuals (eye-consciousness), mind you. Just a "feeling" of what I am. This shot from "lean on" sparks this feeling:

"Trap" is a cheap, ideological, marketing trick. A trick that must be played if one wants to pierce through the saturated market of today's viewer attention. It is very unfortunate that this word has caught on because it plays on the most basic instincts and that is counter-productive if one wants to be in touch with the higher self. Spirituality is dialectical and things only seem as obstacles when you're starting to suffocate in their presence. Today's traps are yesterday's accomplishments. It would be awesome if more people were 'trapped' by attachment to detachment, because it is freeing and more inclusive. I don't know why I quoted that sentence in my previous post, but I meant that your insight is in accordance with my experience.

This is in accordance with my experience.

@JPaulo Notice that 'you' letting 'yourself' follow intuition is a 'you', doer, questioner, doubter. You are an ego wondering whether something other than yourself (intuition) is an ego. Following the path of greatest resistance like @Neorez suggests will 'break' you into something malleable, surrendering. That does not make the ego disappear - it makes the ego transparent, adaptable, fluid, flowing. That is good, but be weary of taking up the mantle of a hard-ass. That is a part of why the ego seems transparent when it is broken open. Is your intuition something that thoughts speak of, or did you actually find it in your direct experience? That is a genuine question and I hope for sincere answer.

@Faceless, @now is forever, and @Zweistein although she is posting here from time to time.

You're misusing mathematical operator here. Hate is founded in love, but love is not founded in hate. It's more of a love -> hate relationship. Love is all there is, but you may be disconnected from it. If that is the case, then you're looking for your own sense of direction and invent one. Hate is when your personal sense of direction is threatened and you are not open to perceive other's actions through their own perspective. You may even hate people that genuinely have your best interest in their mind because their ego is so expansive and inclusive that they perceive you as themselves (non-duality).

Because we so good at being egos that we killed off all competition.

@LucyKid Spirituality (transcendence) is the top of your survival pyramid and needs to be firmly founded. If you're dependent on your parents to sustain you, chances are that you're missing other areas of development that have more immediate impact on your well-being. If you look at this situation more broadly, it seems like you're trying to develop your father spiritually while he's trying to ground you in physicality. You need each other, but you need to establish common ground for communication. If you started to follow his advice and develop yourself in the areas he is suggesting, maybe he would start to listen to your advice as well (if he saw that they actually do provide value)? Since you consider yourself more conscious, it seems like the responsibility for providing space and "yielding" is yours. With the everyday "mindfulness stretch" your father is unwittingly giving you, I would not be too concerned with having a dedicated meditation practice on top of that. What I would suggest instead is shadow work and emotional healing in general which would be beneficial for both of you.

Today, I am very much in touch with this mute interpretative faculty - maybe because I've been watching movies for the past two days. I'm aware of how I'm in contact with it and I usually leave it be, by itself, passively, and use it as a kind of radar for various everyday situations. For example, I was going to the grocery store and I noticed that my attention was shifting towards the buildings and my own body and I understood that that 'thing' was feeling small, fragile. The cities make people feel insignificant because of how big the buildings are, and how they represent the sheer scale of the collective effort to survive. I noticed that I instinctively retracted back to my own body and balanced this feeling of insignificance with acute awareness of the complexity of my body, as if I was reassuring myself that I am not, in fact, small. I am a very complex creature, very similar to a tall building, and started to notice small details of life scattered across the pavement. Like I said, this faculty is very active during my interactions with art, recently with movies. First, I watched the third John Wick movie, which apart from being a great spectacle, was also an exercise in body awareness and relaxation. If I fully immerse myself in the movie, my various body parts tense up instinctively and make me feel uncomfortable. It is not the emotional charge that disturbs me directly, but my bodily responses. Then, we watched Lord of War, which was a commentary on violence, and a critique of the green's attempt to scapegoat dysfunctional orange, when really - systemic solutions are needed. Today's movie, was really good. We watched Vanilla Sky which was about enlightenment with a meta-narrative story that talked about the subconscious mind! So, in a sense - as an awakened person with the intent of understanding my subconscious - I was watching a movie about a person that is awakening and battling with his unconscious mind! What the fuck?! It was mainly an exercise in not losing my shit and doubting my sanity, while watching another person doubting his sanity during his awakening. The ending *spoiler alert* brought me to tears, when the awakened protagonist understood that it was just a dream, and decided to resurrect his dead girlfriend for a last kiss. What brought me to tears was the realization that he knew that she wasn't real and he knew that she was a projection of his subconscious mind, but it did not stop the love. So, in effect, he was loving his incompleteness that was projected outwards, as a perfect person to fill his brokenness. Very, very bold. My subconscious had a feast in reading symbols, mirrors and looking through the smoke in this film. There is actually one instance when I know that I'm not using this faculty passively - it is when I'm trying to understand something that eludes me. I'm meddling with this field to recontextualize symbols used by another person, and forming a language, code, that 'makes sense'. The key component here is the willingness to abandon my understanding of his words that are usually experienced as "negative emotions". It is very dependent on Ego's willingness to stay malleable and flexible. For a very long time it had me bound in a perpetual 'understand everything' mode where I did not know when is the right time to listen, and where it is the right time to exercise my knowledge and stand by it firmly.

There is a part of me that is mute, but it has (it is?) an interpretative faculty. There are times when I am acutely aware of it, but most of the time it's working somewhere in the background, subconsciously. The moments when I am in touch with it the most, are when I am engaged with art and are open to perceiving its, hmmm... beauty or depth of meaning. Maybe, it is something in lines of aesthetic sense and it is one of the deepest parts of me that I enjoy cultivating a relationship with. I was always thinking that it's a kind of a separate thing from which the regular discursive thought can be 'drawn' to from stories about what is perceived, but my recent LSD trip brought new understanding to the table. My awareness expanded to the point where this mute interpretative faculty was blown waaaay out of proportion and my thoughts were being "drowned" in it. The movement of that faculty was so pronounced that thoughts were 'swept' along with it and it informed everything in my perception, including visuals. What was very apparent in this mode of being, is that my inner emotional landscape is the reflection of my surroundings, and that my surroundings are the reflection of my responses to those emotional images. What I suspect is the case, is that actually, that mute interpretative faculty is the basis for discursive thought in my 'sober' mode of operation. With ego death, "my" intelligence was freed from its usual self-other-world loop and directed itself towards its origin. This origin is the 'field' from which thoughts arise and it is 'stirred' by the "hardware" of the body. I'm using these terms borrowed from technology, but it's definitely not the case that this field is 'dumb' in contrast with the discursive thought. If anything, the brilliance of discursive thought permeates downwards and explodes, or implodes in its origin, this, hmm... primordial soup that is the interface between the ego-bound "subjective" and the "objective" world that starts at the 'unconscious' parts of 'my' body. This gave me a new appreciation, and maybe - reassurance, in spending my life simply caring about my most basic needs despite having intellectual capability for being someone that is perceived as greater in the social sphere.

Show-off.