Zigzag Idiot

@tsuki I enjoyed the video! Years ago I heard someone loosely describe Fourth Way Inquiry work as Contemplative psychoanalysis. In some of A H Almaas's earlier lectures he mentions Karen Horney's work which he has read extensively in his own search. The following video was in the prompt after I watched your video post. This seems to fit the category you've made and I enjoyed it. When I watch some more from Academy of Ideas and I enjoy them, I'll post them. If you want to keep it 100% Acadamy of Ideas please let me know and I'll take this one down.

From the list I found a brief one concerning Metanoia and also a 2 1/2 hour Graham Hancock video that I just started. I recently got around to watching a documentary on Hunter Thompson that I ended up enjoying more than the movies made about him - Where the Buffalo Roam and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Besides a little too much of Gary Busey at the Beginning, it kept getting better and better. I've watched it 4 or 5 times. Letting it run while I'm doing other tasks. I looked for it on the list under biographies and didn't see it. At 15:50 John Cusack is telling about playing shotgun golf while visiting Hunter at his home in Colorado. This could have gone in under a number of different categories. He was such an influential person on American culture,,,, It wouldn't embed. Hopefully the link will stick here alive. https://youtu.be/VlAZV_EsSSE @Enizeo @Jonac @Leo Gura @Aeris I agree. @Pernani Too bad You Tube has taken some of these down. I can tell that there will be much time here spent enjoying many of these. Thanks!

I appreciate your openness in sharing and hope you have some luck with this. The following is one of my favorite resources concerning Kundalini. I've shared it before on here but it's been a while. http://biologyofkundalini.com/ Last year I discovered Hans Wilhelm YouTubes. Speaking of synchronicities, I ran into this one again where he quotes Matt Kahn @ 8 :05 which I used as a signature line - "We have to bless the living crap out of everyone". I had never heard of Matt Kahn and didn't recognize the name for a couple of months while I binge watched Wilhelm's videos. I'm only on page 11 of The Secret of the Golden Flower. I let my reading become sporadic sometimes. It doesn't help that I often get several books started at once,,,,, By the way, I'm reminded of Bennett's Idiots In Paris, (great book) John tells how Gurdjieff instructed him to stand while sleep deprived and hold his arms out at at ninety degrees for several minutes as a concentration practice. I think sometimes up to half an hour or more. Can't remember exactly but it's mentioned in more than one place,,,, This book was created out of John and Elizabeth Bennetts personal diaries.

Today's reading - 8 -23 -2019 Just one unchanging Hexagram - 43 Resoluteness/Breakthrough a small piece of the text,,,,, "The force of will lies neither in physical nor mental power, but in its irresistible strength, which develops when it aligns with inner truth. Breakthrough refers to the successful effort of the will in breaking down the power of the ego. The breakdown of the ego is initiated through saying the inner No to any part of the ego that is active in the situation. The inner No brings about transformation in the realm of the atom, which is the realm of consciousness." page 365

Ok, I got you now. I've done that before,,,

That does sound synchronous! What is this thing called cross posting? I've never understood what that means. Must be in my blindspot,,,,

It was a turning point in my life for sure. It takes Saturn that long to go 1 time around the sun. ? Its an interesting frame of reference.

Straight posture is key in meditation. I tore some kind of something in my left shoulder six years ago. It stays dislocated most of the time. I customized my Centering Prayer to where I go from sitting with back straight to standing with back straight. I'll stand up and sit down how ever many times I need to in 20 minutes. It also gives me a time to remember my Centering Prayer word and let go. This might make all the difference if you have a chronic ailment in your posture like me. My Automaton has some wear on it. ?

Some interesting text below for those who are interested or trying to learn about Astrology,,,, https://timburness.wordpress.com/2014/01/21/russell-brands-astrological-birth-chart/ He sobered up around his 'Saturn return'. We all have Saturn return when we are around 29 and 1/2 years old

Love with a capital "L" gives one the Impartiality and persistence of 'honey badger' minus the violence.

Me too. Very much so.

@mandyjw @abrakamowse @Ero @SoothedByRain @Stefano Provenzi ??

@dmitry12312 Thank you, looks like a good practical resource. On the flip side, I hear Rumi say - "Don't scold the lover The wrong way he talks is better than a 100 right ways of others" Thank you @khalifa @Nahm @dmitry12312 @shamaanitar

As Rumi puts it - ,,,,,I ride after a deer and find myself Chased by a hog.,,,,, Got The Secret of the Golden Flower in yesterday but have spent all my time digging in Almaas Glossary. Earlier this morning and still now there is a humbled feeling over the rich responses in High Consciousness Resources, I feel strangely unable to even say thank you. How paradoxical,,,, Freedom Becomes, in Some Very Deep Way, Freedom From any Sense of Self As our range of freedom expands—from being free from suffering to being free to experience presence and realization—we can come to a place where we don’t know who it is or what it is that is enjoying the freedom. Because it is free from perspective and position, freedom becomes, in some deep way, freedom from any sense of self. Yet, at the same time, we are the particular individual for whom freedom is relevant; we live a personal life that is significant and that needs to be addressed, lived, and enjoyed. My experience is that the more freedom there is, the more there is heart, the more there is love, the more there is enjoyment and appreciation, and the more there is clarity and understanding in living as an individual. Clarity and understanding become freely given, love and enjoyment become freely given—given and not possessed by anybody. As individuals, we share in them, we express them, and we enjoy them. They don’t come from anywhere and they are not going anywhere. These are some of the qualities that we experience as we live a free life. Living realization, living freedom, means that life becomes practice and practice becomes life. Practice is not a way to get to freedom; it is freedom expressing itself as practice. As you recognize that you are both the particular, unique individual and also Total Being in its indeterminacy, your life does become free from unnecessary suffering but, more importantly, it becomes inherently free—the joy of living the authentic life of Total Being. Total Being—the reality of all times and all space, of all beings and all phenomena —lives as the irrepressible freedom of our individual lives. And the freedom of your life simply expresses the freedom of the dynamic creativity of Total Being. You are the living universe as the universe lives as you. Runaway Realization, pg. 244 The Mysterious Unity of Being and the Individual In other words, the delusion of the ego perspective is that Being identifies itself with the organ of its experience. That is to say that Being, in its mystery and vastness and magic and indefinable and immeasurable qualities, constrains itself by taking itself to be the organ through which it experiences and perceives. Being mistakes the individual consciousness to be all of what it is, to be its only identity. So the problem is not that there is an organ of perception, that there is individual consciousness. What causes all the trouble—the suffering and discontent and incompleteness and meaninglessness and dissociation and headaches and heartaches—is that we take the individual consciousness to be all of what we are, now and forever. But in reality, we are Being in its vastness at the same time as we are the individual with its uniqueness. This mysterious unity of Being and the individual manifests in infinite kinds of experience and realization, which signal the freedom that is possible for human beings.

A few days ago I said - Im trying to organize my thoughts for a topic in High Consciousness Resources concerning just 3 words. Personality - Ego- Mind As usual, I go digging in Ridhwan School Glossary,,,, Confusion About the Term "Ego" Here we digress to point out a source of confusion about the term “ego.” Readers who know both the spiritual and psychological literatures will find the term freely used in both, but with no general agreement on what the term refers to. This ambiguity often leads to confusion. The literature on spiritual development, on essential or inner development, on all matters of religious concern, generally uses the term “ego” to mean something which is seen as the barrier to spiritual realization. The literature on depth psychology, however, uses the term with a very different meaning. The ego referred to by Freud, and which ego psychology studies, is not the ego which is the barrier to spiritual development. They are two different concepts. The psychoanalytic term “ego” refers, rather, to the functional self, which is the site, organizer, and coordinator of the functions of perception, memory, mobility, and so on. There is, however, a concept in depth psychology and ego psychology that coincides with the ego of spiritual literature: it is called the “ego-identity,” and is sometimes referred to as the sense of self, or the sense of identity. This sense of self or separate identity is the main concern of ego developmental theory. This identity is, in fact, the acme, the most important outcome of ego development. It is ultimately the organizing center of the psychic apparatus. This psychic apparatus includes as one of its units the Freudian ego. In other words, the Freudian ego is part of the mind, is a structure or a structured process in it, while the self is a sense of identity and a center of action. The exact sense in which the ego identity is a barrier to spiritual development will become clear in later chapters. The Void, pg. 9 The following also goes with it The Main Difference Between Being and Ego To identify with the reaction that is the ego is to be cut off from Being, one’s true nature and identity. This is what the man of spirit means when he says the ego “is not,” it has no true existence. Now, we can understand in a deeper way the autonomy of Being. From the perspective of Being, what we are is not determined by either the past or the present situation. We are not a reaction; we simply are, an essential existence, totally free from the past. Our nature, our identity, cannot be influenced by situations. The main difference between Being and ego—which is that Being is just being-as-such and ego a reaction from the past—makes Being the true autonomy, and ego autonomy a delusion. It is ironic that object relations theory first describes so competently the way in which ego is structured from past object relations between inner images and, therefore, is compulsively reacting to situations in conditioned patterns, and then goes on to describe this same entity as autonomous! How can this set of reactions from the past be said to be autonomous, when true autonomy can be recognized to be the fullness of the presence of Being in the present? Again this understanding will be difficult for those who have no direct experience of what Being is; but actually almost everyone has had some experience of some deeper aspects of experience which are not completely dominated by ego activity. Here it is a matter of seeing these experiences for what they are, for their great significance.

This song inpspires me because Ozzy is pointing fingers and calling out the shit within the cultural consensus trance hooked into the control in part because of the mainstream media, fear, the military industrial complex, and much of the shadow in our culture, group think/collective ego. At 2:20 - 2:45 especially effectively allegory of the authority figure ripping the schoolwork away from the child and replacing it with the Bible then covering the Bible with the American flag and the scene shifts to war Bombers dropping ordnance. Very rich in other symbolism also. It was the second video I put in my journal when starting it back in December. Poetry - He's screaming - WAKE UP!

? ??? Just noticed his tattoos,,, ?

@Eden If it ever were convenient, I'd love to hear you sing it! I almost posted these next 3 recently. 3 generations showing their appreciation for one song. I grew up getting goosebumps from Roberta Flack's version. Thought I better add Perry Como.

@Ero Articulate assessment and interesting quote. It does indeed sound interesting,,,,, ?

She's in a league of her own, as the saying goes. I've been digesting on parts of this for about two years. ?

For several years I had a Bob and Doug McKenzie alter ego that rotated in and out among my ship of fools. It furthered my dissociation from a world that sucked. Okay, aye.

I've always loved 'The Doors'. This song always reminds me of a good friend who was having a nervous breakdown on a Sunday afternoon after a whiskey binge. Still teenagers, this song was playing in the background as we were talking and he made a comment about it. I didn't like this song as a child but in my mid teens, I became a true fan of The Doors. No one gets out of here alive is an interesting biography about Jim Morrison. Like Nirvana, I didn't discover the Stone Temple Pilots until 10 years after they were popular. I don't know why I'm sharing these. Just feel like sharing music,,, with some reflections,,,. Reify is an interesting word I learned about reading Almaas. Getting lost in music as a form of dissociation. Listening to the same song over and over which was a big part of my coping mechanism growing up. I was reifying.

@mandyjw ? Just ordered this version from Amazon. I look forward to discussing this one! In the meantime, feel free to paraphrase your understanding of it here on my Journal if the spirit moves you to. ? Im trying to organize my thoughts for a topic in High Consciousness Resources concerning just 3 words. Personality - Ego- Mind Tonight and the next few days, I'll organize here on my journal before I create it. These three words have multiple uses that cause a lot of confusion. @Keyhole Your last post just blew my mind! So good,,,,