Zigzag Idiot

@tsuki Just now I was scanning the posts and realized I projected somewhat. You wrote “essential quality” and I replied misquoting your question with the term essential aspects. Excuse me, I read it as that this morning and pondered it much of the day without rereading the question and catching my mistake.

@Keyhole It would make a cool basket but I bet it would take a long time to get the stink out of it. Did you know that Armadillos are the only other animals besides humans to host the leprosy bacillus. In 2011, the New England Journal of Medicine published an article formally linking the creature to human leprosy cases—people and armadillos tested in the study both shared the same exact strain of the disease.

@tsuki To make sure we’re on the same page. Let me relate my understanding of what essential aspects are or what my usage of the term is. In short, ‘flavors’ of being or maybe flavors of presence. Hence, aspects of being or presence or aspects of essence A couple of excerpts from the Ridhwan glossary to fill in some gaps.= Although Essence is One, the Same Substance, It has Many Varieties, Many Qualities But we must use concepts if we are going to communicate verbally. One important concept that we have been using without clarification is that of essential aspects—that essence has many aspects, not just one quality. As we have seen, essential substance has precise and definite physical characteristics. In fact, it can be described in terms of color, taste, texture, transparency, density, luminosity, viscosity, and so on. Variations in these give rise to different aspects of essence, which have different psychological significance. So although essence is one, the same substance, it has many varieties, many qualities. These are aspects of essence. This is true for both the baby and the adult. The aspect of truth is not the same as the aspect of love, and this is not the same as the aspect of will, and so on. They are all essence, and clearly so for the one who knows, but they are experienced differently and affect us differently. Essence with the Elixir of Enlightenment, pg. 78 As the Dynamism Takes the Soul Into new Realms, Our Being Reveals many Pure Qualities which I have Called Essential Aspects As the dynamism takes the soul into new realms, our Being reveals many pure qualities, which I have called essential aspects. It displays the quality of Love, the quality of Clarity, the quality of Strength, the quality of Peace, the quality of Truth, the quality of Contentment, the quality of Spaciousness, the quality of Existence, the quality of Passion, and so on. These qualities are elements from the beyond, from the unseen world, and our conventional wisdom cannot fathom them, can’t really see or discern their meaning, function, or usefulness. So how can we discern what these essential qualities are? We need to recognize what they mean; we need to understand how they are related to our conventional experience and how they can optimize our lives. For this, we need a vehicle of understanding—a source of discrimination and knowledge—that originates from the same or a deeper dimension than the one these qualities come from. The specific guidance that makes this possible is what I call the Diamond Guidance. The Diamond Guidance is itself a pure manifestation of our Being, which is necessary for it to be able to guide us in the essential dimension. Our Being not only displays its richness, it also provides us with the capacity to comprehend, appreciate, and integrate that richness. Without this discrimination, we are only able to approach this richness as candy. We don’t understand the significance of the richness, that it is really part of our inner nature, so we just want more and more of the candy—these things that taste sweet and wonderful but are separate from who we are. Spacecruiser Inquiry, pg. 211 With this usage of the term essential aspects, I don’t see a common ground specific to Rednecks. Other commonalities come to mind though. Blue collar or no collar workers. Before the majority of tractors had cabs, this condition was present among most tractor operators. Also generally, no formal higher education. There are self taught or egg headed nerd rednecks like me, though. When I think of rednecks, in my mind, the southern United States and moreover the rural areas are where rednecks would be most numerous. A cousin of mine returned from a college class one day a few years ago and informed me that redneck was a political term. He was studying to become a lawyer. I think I replied something like yeah, whatever,,,

@Keyhole I’ve heard Coca Cola with all of its acidity makes a fairly decent toilet bowl cleaner! On the subject of ants, Our local pastures have become infested with army ants in the last10 -15 years. I used to see the giant ant mounds in northern Louisiana but like the armadillos they migrated north over time. I’ve heard some refer to the armadillo as a sport model opossum. ?

No problem. I understand. I corrected my post,,,, spray bottle of bleach water.. ?‍♂️?

Get with you later with a possible answer. I’m still pondering that one,,,

Not so. I was expressing myself in hyperbole. I come by it honest on my Mother’s side of the family. If anything, I was alluding to Gladrial in lord of the rings. She was givin the highest honor because she refused the power of the ring. I intuit that universal justice is like that. Maybe not. I’m just full of beans anyway. It was nothing toward you. I was going to say though that I got rid of black mold in my house with just a spray bottle of bleach water. PEACE

Ive always wanted to get a propeller beanie. Maybe just to get a reaction from my redneck friends. I can talk about rednecks because I’m one still. I can’t speak for all rednecks, though. They’re not all belligerent, racist, homophobic, numbskulls. There’s certainly a variety. Some are quite progressive, even downright liberal in their views. I was remembering yesterday how God sometimes allows me to read people’s minds. If I forfeit the use of power, I’m even bestowed the power of putting thoughts into another's mind. It’s that old Jedi mind trick that Barack Obama referred to in jest while at the podium one time.

I read this in the past from Arnold Keyserlings writings,,,, I think Happiness = the perpetual willingness to fall

Whenever one fights or opposes something, it only makes what one is fighting more powerful. In the Fourth Way it’s stated as - To oppose second force increases second force.iME, this is what Red Hawk was getting at, in the quote I put up above. As humans, we have the tendency to either dismiss, explain away, or make excuses for our discontinuity of consciousness. It might be called a change of moods or perhaps the activation of a sub personality, the result of temporary stress, etc.,, Terence McKenna pretty much dismissed the contemporary diagnoses of schizophrenia. In a roundabout way, his view aligns with a core element of the Gurdjieff Teaching. Earlier in this journal I metaphorically labeled myself as a ship of fools. This metaphor I borrowed from Robert Deropp, a biochemist of the early 20th century and student of Ouspensky. He authored a book about the path to higher consciousness and enlightenment called The Master Game which became a classic in the early 1970’s. The Fourth Way teaches that we’re more fractured psychologically than the majority of contemporary psychologists and academia will allow. Transpersonal psychologist Charles Tart coined the phrase “cultural consensus trance” . A beautiful description of the result of the fracturedness prevalent in modern humans which creates the collective ego This element of fracturedness is susinctly delineated in an article written by Ralph Losey called The Problem of the Subtle Sybil effect. http://www.lawsofwisdom.com/course-overview/opening-statement/the-problem-of-the-subtle-sybil-effect/ It’s very difficult to change our habits but it is possible to transform our habits of mechanical behavior over time. It’s why in the Work, it is advised to not try and change ourselves but to just objectively observe. This observation will allow Conscience to awaken through remorse. Remorse of Conscience will make transformation of our mechanical behaviors much more possible than the route of self criticism, blame and guilt. It makes our transformation of lower self and lower chakra energies a conscious endeavor by way of awakened conscience. Awakened conscience is the same in everyone unlike acquired conscience which changes over time and from culture to culture. Awakened conscience is called by some, the intelligence of the universe. Jesus Christ and the Buddha taught non-violence and forgiveness through letting go and not judging or keeping accounts. The path of awakened conscience. By awakening, we leap out of our graves, as Ocke deBoer humorously puts it. Awakened people are not over burdened with false seriousness, they’re light hearted.

Letting my tragic romantic “I”s

Self-Respect is for the Dogs by Dr. Jim Rosen ©2021 Dr. Jim Rosen He was really asking about himself when he raised this question during his therapy session. “What is self-respect?” he said. Seeming to dodge the issue, I asked him if he liked dogs. “Yes,” he did. Then I asked him to suppose that he had too many dogs, and that he needed to get rid of a few, how would he do it? Would he shoot them? “No!” came his strong emotional reply. I asked why not. He answered that he had "some tender feelings." What if he didn’t know these dogs? What if they were somebody else’s dogs? More strong feelings surfaced. He couldn’t shoot them, “because they’re living, breathing creatures!” “That is self-respect turned outward,” I said, “now turn that toward yourself. You already have the feelings. It’s a matter of learning to develop them.” “How can I develop them?” he asked. Getting there is not so hard. It just takes a lot of practice. You follow the principle that changes in your thoughts and behaviors always lead to changes in your feelings. So you make the choice to practice thoughts that promote your self-respect. They are called “affirmations” and this is the real purpose of them. You say kind and appreciative things about yourself to yourself. You won’t believe them for a while, but you say them because they are true. And you follow this up with self-respecting, self-loving behaviors. You do lots of small nice kind things for you. Each of these little things (that you really want to do) get you a bit closer to your goal. If you really desire to love and respect yourself, you will practice these thoughts and behaviors. You will walk the way that leads you there. These are choices that you make.

This is a sheet of paper I had on my refrigerator. It’s dirty and stained because it was on there for roughly 15 years. The quote from Lao Tsu speaks for itself. The sentence at the top - ‘Beware of psychic entropy’ -was especially important for me to remember for quite a few years. The two phrases right below it was my reminder of method. This was some knowledge I received out of reading Fourth way material. I found it to be so true that when my attention was dispersed it would get spread thin. But worse than that,, things and people out in the world would grab my attention. The result usually meant that whatever grabbed my attention would mess with me according to whatever it’s nature was. On the other hand, if I remained in control of my attention. I then possessed more will. That’s just one way of saying it. It’s not easy to remain in control of one’s attention with the ability to direct it where chosen. The payoff for me I realized eventually was staying free of psychic entropy. All of this is still relevant for me in the current day but it was my path out of personal hells I would sonetimes find myself in years ago. The term psychic entropy if I remember right was picked out of an essay written by Jonathon Zap. https://zaporacle.com/card/dealing-with-psychic-entropy/#gsc.tab=0 Yeah, there it is. I found it again. ’Content to process shift’ written in the middle of th page was a concept that hit home for me reading one of David Hawkins books. If I were to elaborate on this I would juxtapose content to context. If I can direct my attention away from content and towards context while falling into psychic entropy, It can often keep me out of psychic entropy because it is usually a larger frame of reference. Another trick I found was to put a larger percentage of my attention into my peripheral vision. This has the effect of moving my attention away from content and more into context. I wanted to explain or expand on why I posted those Red Hawk’s quotes the other day Just above. Maybe in a little bit if I don’t fall asleep.

WithIn the Wisdom compendium Chance and Choice in the chapter concerning Chinese wisdom a humorous quote comes to mind. The highest achievement is no longer self-centered. You are in civilization and in spirit, a part of the New Earth in the sign of the DOG Ò Aquarius. You are, like the DOG, completely faithful to your path and to sacred history. You transcend your ego by announcing your truth in society like the ROOSTER without regard to the practical consequences. Not that I’ve transcended my ego but announcing my truth like a rooster without regard to practical consequences. That kind of describes me at times. As I’ve aged it’s become more toned down though.

A poem by Red Hawk

David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D 1927 - 2012 https://veritaspub.com/dr-hawkins/#Biography Summary Hawkins developed a scale of Consciousness through use of Kinesiology (muscle strength testing) Fellow Actualizers, please feel free to leave your favorite Hawkins lecture, article or your own comments about David Hawkins work if you feel it’s appropriate for this particular thread.

Only in recent times has having passion been seen as a good thing. It might be more appropriate for me to suggest that there now seems to be Two usages perhaps. Anyone have thoughts on this? The enneagram, for example is often labeled as having passions listed on it which are opposite of the Virtues. Passion of fear Virtue of Courage Passion of lust. Virtue of innocence passion of anger Virtue of serenity passion of pride Virtue of humility etc.,,,

@seeking_brilliance I thought I had read most of your journals but It seems I’ve missed some entries. Sounds interesting for sure. Regarding your astral guide. I happen to have a stethoscope. May have to play around with it some,,, I had to google Tulpa. I had never seen the word before. So,, I guess I’m not and to be honest, I’m going to have to reread it again to try and get it in my understanding. Much appreciated are the kind words and also the light heartedness.

Zz

@seeking_brilliance I think you would like Joseph Chilton Pierce’s Biology of Transcendence. It’s been a while since I read it and I forget a lot of the particulars. Something like when the systolic pressure is in optimum rhythm with the diastolic pressure an activation of the prefrontal lobes kicks in and a measurable entrainment occurs. He writes quite a bit of the how and why there’s an abundance of brains cells (neurons) in the heart, that makes this entrainment or feedback loop between the heart and frontal lobes possible. You have good intuition! I believe that actually may be a heart function and a forerunner of clairvoyance,,,?

Thanks @Nahm I’ll watch,,, I should have given a link to the full article. It’s down below. C. Bourgeault is in fact speaking of the physical heart. To paraphrase. It’s where the bridge is that we can use between physical and metaphysical. Joesph Chilton Pierce has written about this quite a bit in which he refers to the Menninger Institute studies. He makes a good case for the dramatic results stemming from a heart that beats in coherence. The Heart Math institute seems to be carrying the ball now and taking it even further. There’s an actual emf wave field put out by the heart that is measurable,,, https://parabola.org/2017/01/31/the-way-of-the-heart-cynthia-bourgeault/

A relevant article comes to mind that I posted in Top Christian Resources. It draws on Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Sufism. Here is an excerpt from that article- Crushed summary of the following article- The heart is an organ of spiritual perception . Emoting is not the same of true feeling. When one is engaged in emoting, they are in a form of spiritual sleep. The Way of the Heart, by Cynthia Bourgeault From the Christian esoteric tradition, a path beyond the mind Post authorBy Cynthia Bourgeault Post dateJanuary 31, 2017 Photograph by Brandon Zierer From the Christian esoteric tradition, a path beyond the mind Put the mind in the heart…. Put the mind in the heart…. Stand before the Lord with the mind in the heart.” From page after page in the Philokalia, that hallowed collection of spiritual writings from the Christian East, this same refrain emerges. It is striking in both its insistence and its specificity. Whatever that exalted level of spiritual attainment is conceived to be—whether you call it “salvation,” “enlightenment,” “contemplation,” or “divine union”—this is the inner configuration in which it is found. This and no other. It leaves one wondering what these old spiritual masters actually knew and—if it’s even remotely as precise and anatomically grounded as it sounds—why this knowledge has not factored more prominently in contemporary typologies of consciousness. Part of the problem as this ancient teaching falls on contemporary ears is that we will inevitably be hearing it through a modern filter that does not serve it well. In our own times the word “heart” has come to be associated primarily with the emotions (as opposed to the mental operations of the mind), and so the instruction will be inevitably heard as “get out of your mind and into your emotions”—which is, alas, pretty close to 180 degrees from what the instruction is actually saying. Yes, it is certainly true that the heart’s native language is affectivity—perception through deep feelingness. But it may come as a shock to contemporary seekers to learn that the things we nowadays identify with the feeling life—passion, drama, intensity, compelling emotion—are qualities that in the ancient anatomical treatises were associated not with the heart but with the liver! They are signs of agitation and turbidity (an excess of bile!) rather than authentic feelingness. In fact, they are traditionally seen as the roadblocks to the authentic feeling life, the saboteurs that steal its energy and distort its true nature. And so before we can even begin to unlock the wisdom of these ancient texts, we need to gently set aside our contemporary fascination with emotivity as the royal road to spiritual authenticity and return to the classic understanding from which these teachings emerge, which features the heart in a far more spacious and luminous role. According to the great wisdom traditions of the West (Christian, Jewish, Islamic), the heart is first and foremost an organ of spiritual perception. Its primary function is to look beyond the obvious, the boundaried surface of things, and see into a deeper reality, emerging from some unknown profundity, which plays lightly upon the surface of this life without being caught there: a world where meaning, insight, and clarity come together in a whole different way. Saint Paul talked about this other kind of perceptivity with the term “faith” (“Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”), but the word “faith” is itself often misunderstood by the linear mind. What it really designates is not a leaping into the dark (as so often misconstrued) but a subtle seeing in the dark, a kind of spiritual night vision that allows one to see with inner certainty that the elusive golden thread glimpsed from within actually does lead somewhere. Perhaps the most comprehensive definition of this wider spiritual perceptivity is from Kabir Helminski, a modern Sufi master. I realize that I quote it in nearly every book I have written, but I do so because it is so fundamental to the wisdom tradition that I have come to know as the authentic heart of Christianity. Here it is yet again: We have subtle subconscious faculties we are not using. Beyond the limited analytic intellect is a vast realm of mind that includes psychic and extrasensory abilities; intuition; wisdom; a sense of unity; aesthetic, qualitative and creative faculties; and image-forming and symbolic capacities. Though these faculties are many, we give them a single name with some justification for they are working best when they are in concert. They comprise a mind, moreover, in spontaneous connection to the cosmic mind. This total mind we call “heart.”1 The purification of Muhammad’s heart by three Divine messengers. Bal’ami. Early fourteenth century “The heart,” Helminski continues, is the antenna that receives the emanations of subtler levels of existence. The human heart has its proper field of function beyond the limits of the superficial, reactive ego-self. Awakening the heart, or the spiritualized mind, is an unlimited process of making the mind more sensitive, focused, energized, subtle, and refined, of joining it to its cosmic milieu, the infinity of love.2 Now it may concern some of you that you’re hearing Islamic teaching here, not Christian. And it may well be true that this understanding of the heart as “spiritualized mind”— “the organ prepared by God for contemplation”3—has been brought to its subtlest and most comprehensive articulation in the great Islamic Sufi masters. As early as the tenth century, Al-Hakîm al Tirmidhî’s masterful Treatise on the Heart laid the foundations for an elaborate Sufi understanding of the heart as a tripartite physical, emotional, and spiritual organ.4 On this foundation would gradually rise an expansive repertory of spiritual practices supporting this increasingly “sensitive, focused, energized, subtle, and refined” heart attunement. But it’s right there in Christianity as well. Aside from the incomparable Orthodox teachings on Prayer of the Heart collected in the Philokalia, it’s completely scriptural. Simply open your Bible to the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:8) and read the words straight from Jesus himself: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

I took part in a year long online group reading of Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson in 2017. Being that it was a small group, it became an atmosphere where we sometimes shared our inner world along with our self observations. It was all saved to Google Drive. The following is what I shared at the end of chapter 43. Thoughts on empathy and compassion in relation to Spiral Dynamics. I’m not claiming what I wrote was spot on. I’m sharing it as just food for thought. Anyone feel free to give an opinion or question me. DS - More on not expressing negative emotions. I mentioned in one post about the ‘payment’ I felt when achieving this aim in a time of stress. It feels like resolving a disparity in a small puzzle piece of my shadow. On the other side is specific kinds situations in which I continually fail. When I become more than just dismayed and disgusted at my inability to stay awake, a big shift can take place if it causes me to see and feel my own nothingness. The nothingness of my personality/ego self. Regarding The Tales being overweight in Patriarchy, misogyny, and other biases against the feminine. I've been pondering on the second tier of Spiral Dynamics as being Gurdjieffs intended territory of destination for his persistent readers. The first level encountered in the second tier is yellow. It has a multiperspectival approach to learning and gathering information and living in general. The yellow individual is more interested in understanding accurately someone's view than they are in labeling it. This multi-perspectival kind of awareness is key. It turns every offensive or seemingly ignorant perspective into a curiosity or a mystery to figure out or understand why it is that people perceive the way they do. But this requires the kind of impartiality that Gurdjieff is talking about. Enduring an injustice,,,, or being emotionally abused and tormented by someone for months or maybe years. Being ridiculed,,,,ostracized ,,,, and mocked. These situations grow us in terms of 'being', faster than anything. That is, if one isn't traumatized beyond recoverability. But at the same time, the amount of intensity needs to be enough for one to be pushed into a kind of state that one has never experienced before. This experience reveals more of what being 'identified' is about. This is a part of second tier awareness. That's where green and yellow differ in terms of emotional suffering in connection with wanting to be a protector and an advocate of compassion for all apparently disadvantaged beings. From outward appearances green looks more 'spiritual' than yellow. That's because yellow has more impartiality that can be interpreted by some as cold and detached. People in yellow are not as apt to experience the feeling of pity toward others because they realize it perpetuates unnecessary suffering and is an attitude declaring the Divine to be inept. In the second tier it seems pity is completely replaced by empathy.

I think this link might be a good resource for this thread. http://www.consciousdynamicsllc.com/home/levels_of_consciousness.html See how the description of your enneatype lines up with the descriptions given.,,,,