Telepresent

@seeking_brilliance Glad you find some of that helpful! Incorrect definitely talks about the process more, and provides some examples of a student's writing, but be careful with it: I found myself for a long while feeling like I needed to imitate the way it was presented in that book, rather than read under the surface to understand it. I find more and more as I explore further myself that, when I return to McKenna, I recognise much more that he is talking on a more subtle and symbolic level a lot of the time, rather than a literal one. The funny thing about how the process is examined in Incorrect, though, is how much more of a deeply personal and emotional process it is. He explores it through two characters, and focuses almost entirely on their emotional/personal journey, rather than the intellectual one described in the autolysis chapter in Damndest. I think the reality lies in-between: that you need to return to autolysis as an intellectual process as a grounding, but that it will lead to some very personal and painful places.

*NOTE: this may start in a way that sounds very dramatic, but it's just where I've gotten to right now. Also, I actually broke through another bit of wall here, so that's cool. I need to sit with it, absorb it, return to it later. Right now I'm in a place of excitement, which is nice, but makes critical thinking and examination of the idea hard. I am evil. That's a deep one: it goes down to my bones, my core. Core belief, they call it. No shit. This thing is harsh. I know my past, I know what happened as a small boy. I know the psychological reasons that a pre-verbal child would blame themselves for things that couldn't possibly be their fault. I know how that impacted me as I developed through school, how certain moments of treatment or discipline by parents, teachers, other kids, reinforced this core concept. Knowing doesn't make a shit bit of difference. I am evil. I am evil. Ok, here goes: what the fuck is evil? Yes, yes, easy to answer. Opposite of good. Great. Job done. Bah. Not at all. That's an idea. Evil - my evil - is a knowing. A being. It's suffused in my very state, my very essence. It's not my actions, not my words, not the opposite of a moral framework. It's me, deeply me. Of course I have no words for what this state actually is. Why? Because it's not actually an object. It's not a tangible thing I can point to. I could say that it's an idea, but that word isn't right because it's far more pre-cognitive than that. It's... the best word is ether, I think. No, it's the substance. The substance that is the making of me. Whether in body, mind, spirit, action, memory, impact or influence... Don't get too bogged down. Stay on target. Go back to evil vs. good. Of course, both of these are subjective issues. There is no absolute evil, or absolute good. There is only objectivity and subjectivity. Good and evil exist in the subjective, but what is evil for the worm is good for the bird. So evil is based upon survival. Of course it is. Always goes back to survival, doesn't it? Refresher: everything is about survival. Survival itself is neither good or bad, but over billions of years of evolution - evolution which is dictated by survival - the drive to survive, the need to survive, is very very hardwired. Everything good or bad is based, in some way, on survival. So evil... is evil that which contradicts an individual's survival? Ok, maybe, but how does that relate back to me being evil. Abandonment. Of fucking course. Daddy left, didn't he? Daddy left and that was your fault. So says pre-verbal Telepresent. Daddy left you, which from an evo-bio perspective greatly increases your risk of death. Then he comes back. Then he goes away again. Then he comes back. WHY??? Am I being good, am I being bad? I don't know. But pre-verbal kids blame themselves for everything, so it must be my fault. I am the cause of my potential death, at such a formative time. I am not worthy of the guarantee of the one most important good: survival. I am not worthy of that. I am not worthy of that. Yeah, there it is. That's true for me. That hurts. And it only gets reinforced. Yelled at. Unpopular. Not good enough for the grammar school. Sent somewhere where I get yelled at. Picked on. Girls not liking me (another fundamental 'good' I'm unworthy of, there). Reinforcing, reinforcing, reinforcing. Unworthy of love, safety, security, survival. Evil. Unworthy of good. Evil. Yeah, that's the belief. What's it targeted at? Nothing. It's not targeted at anything. Not body, or mind, or achievement. It's prior to those. It permeates them all, because it's further inside. I'm not evil because of xyz, xyz is because I am evil. And here we reach the wall again. Smack your head, smack your head, because you know this isn't Absolutely True. You KNOW it's not! Evil is a subjective feeling, not an actual Hang on. Subjective feeling. Not object. Hang on. Of course it is. Of fucking course it is. You've played around enough with the idea of emotion and feeling that you should GET this. It's an energy. It's an energy. "Emotions are states of consciousness", right? Well, maybe, but yes emotions are the energy of conscious experience, right? Well, sort of, the energy of felt experience... ah, this is too loose, but let's worry about that another time. Evil, evil, evil - it's not a thing. You can't point to it in the same way you can't point to anger, or anxiety, or anything else. Holy shit is this sense of being evil an unnamed emotion? Is it a fear? IS IT FUCKING FEAR??? Fear masquerading as fact? And of course that makes sense as fear has to be the primary emotion of a survival-dominated perspective. But what does that do to you, if you take an emotion and transform it into a fact of the world, a fact of life, a fact of yourself? If you infuse it into your being. Not your feeling, but your substance? What does that DO to how you know the world? Shit. Fear of what? Fear I will die - that's what all the fears come to, isn't it? Fear I will fucking die and be no more. Pre-verbal, unable to look after yourself... the only thing you can do to try to survive is be loved. And Daddy leaves. It's your fault. I can't protect myself. I can't protect myself. I am unsafe. I am unworthy of love = I am going to die. BANG, branded deep deep in that developing mind. Looking out through that forever, looking at the world through that fear, seeing the potential to be hated, abandoned, to die, in every moment, every relationship, every person. The only way to protect yourself to try to keep them all happy, all the time. So we're touching on something new here: fear as a perspective. Not fear as an intense feeling, not dramatic fear, but fear as a way of seeing, interpreting, thinking. Fear as a world-filter. Seeing myself, and everyone else, through it. And given that fear is subjective, that means the filter can only be subjective, can never be absolute. Enough for now: I need to sit with this one for a bit, let it settle in. Thanks for indulging me.

@seeking_brilliance Hello. I hope you don't mind me replying to you here - it seemed easier. I've had a bit of a read over this and it seems to me like you're getting a bit overwhelmed by the mass of concepts that you're trying to deconstruct all at once: every word, every term, is subject to a simultaneous attempt at deconstruction. The problem with doing that is that you wind up jumping from idea to idea, without really digging into everything. Remember that you don't have to do everything at once. In fact you can't do everything at once. So allow yourself to focus in on one thing. Without focus, you will only skim along the surface of things. The problem with autolysis is the fact that it involves using an intellectual approach to try to attack ideas that are very deeply felt and believed. That means a quick theoretical skim of a deconstruction isn't going to be much use: you come up with an idea, which you will quickly forget as you go back into autopilot. Beliefs about what you are, what the world is, how everything works, are very very convoluted things and a brief four-line deconstruction as you've done here won't dent their surface. I often find that I'm chipping away at one idea, one concept, for days or weeks at a time - writing, thinking, talking to myself - knowing that it is not true but not yet knowing that it is not true, if that distinction makes sense? How much time do you give over to this? Autolysis (or any kind of self-inquiry) requires time to work on. Time to reflect, re-examine, check yourself, remind yourself again and again what you're trying to understand. In truth, I spend most of my non-practical time (i.e. when I'm not at work etc.) in some form of autolysis or self-inquiry, and while I don't know if that's necessary for someone else, I do know that to dig into beliefs like this you need to dedicate time in the form of hours, not sub-hours. And this ties in with the question of focus: it's a very different thing to spend half-an-hour writing a bunch of questions, to spending six hours trying to dig into one. Reading back over this, I think you're currently wrestling with the issue of terminology, and semiotics in language (i.e. that language is only a sign-system, not the thing itself). That's fine, good, and important to do. I wonder if you'll get more traction by focusing on the concept of language as a whole, rather than trying to pull apart each individual term? There will certainly be terms that need deconstructing and re-definition as you go on, but right now I think it might be the problem of language as a pointer, not true thing, that is causing you to loop around on yourself. This process of re-definition is important. If you only question (as you mostly do in your first post), you're going to get frustrated and stuck. So take your concept, the thing you are exploring, and define it in your own terms. Then deconstruct that definition: what assumptions are going on in there? What foundations does it rest upon? Define those, and you'll have a re-defined simplification of your first statement. Then start again. (Admittedly, sometimes it doesn't feel like a simplification! I think that's just an indication that more work needs to be done, though). I don't want to start answering any of your questions as a 'demonstration' as I don't want to imply that my thought-process or conclusions are correct, but I wonder if what I've written above makes sense without doing some kind of demo of what I mean? What I think I'm going to do now is work a little bit more on the door I'm chipping away at at the moment - it's useful to me as it's part of my process, and if it's of interest to you, great. I'll do it in a follow-up post. Apologies if it feels like I'm thread-jacking or something like that. Finally, don't worry too much about what your subject matter is: I think the three things you've used here are all good starting points. What will happen as you progress is that a sense of A-B-C-D starts to emerge. One thing leads inevitably into another. The important thing is to begin. Have you read Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment? One of the things that McKenna says in that book is that "discovering your process is part of the process". Keep going, experiment with it, refine it, and it'll start coming together.

@seeking_brilliance Sure - can you drop a link here and I'll have a look in a few hours? Bear in mind I'm an explorer myself, so I expect I won't be able to say "you need to go in this direction", but I can certainly let you know my thoughts & maybe throw some questions your way

Not quite. The (paraphrased) instruction is "write something you know to be true, or believe to be true, and keep reducing it until you reach what is true". So knowing that you don't know for sure that something you know in everyday terms is 'true' (I.e. Earth being round) is very much a part of that reduction process. Now take it further: reduce the various reasons, ways, evidences etc. that we've brought up in this thread and reduce them down to what they truly seem to be. Then take that and reduce it down. By reducing, we recognise and understand what is not absolutely truthful in our understanding; thought-images, conceptual models, emotional beliefs of ourselves and the world - we take all these things and attempt to identify what is untrue about them. When something is identified as untrue, it can be put down. Eventually, maybe we put everything untrue down. So it's not about figuring out what you are, it's putting down what you're not. And I think one of the biggest risks is believing what anybody else says you 'truly' are. Because your head-canon of what they mean becomes a new thing you carry around, a new untruth. Many people seem to be trying to figure out how they can prove to themselves they are infinite consciousness or whatever. Don't. Won't work, can't win. Just find what is untrue in every word, thought, deed, and belief, and put them down

@seeking_brilliance Actually the idea that people thought the Earth was flat until a few hundred years ago is modern day myth: http://www.bbc.co.uk/earth/story/20160126-how-we-know-earth-is-round And if you want to prove it yourself, you don't need to go to space. You can repeat Eratothanes' experiment: https://www.juliantrubin.com/bigten/eratosthenes.html That experiment led him to calculate the circumference of the Earth almost perfectly, two millenia ago

@starsofclay In case you haven't encountered it:

@Pernani It's changed a lot. To begin with, it was curiosity (sparked by this one deep sense of "yes, of course no-self is true") mixed with a hint of all these great promises of no more fear etc. Then it was an egoic desire for all the things that people spout about (manifestation, special powers, etc.) - wanting to be special. Then it became about my own pain: life became very, very painful - mostly due to actions I had taken - and I didn't want to experience that any more. Then it became about truth vs false beliefs (which is very much linked to pain/suffering) - a deep drive to eliminate false belief from my mind/self/existence. Now, it's about being able to see how much of my life/self is based on illusion, and the need to eliminate all illusion and falseness from my life/self/existence. As regards pushing through, I have quit this work many times. Yet I've always come back. Why? I think that first spark, that "yes, of course this is true," leaves me little choice. It feels like I have to do this. Even if I try to stop, I can't: I keep thinking on it, keep returning to it. Like a drug, an addiction. I don't think I have a choice.

@Gligorije I won't argue here about a physical reality or no. What I will say is: an account of Absolute Reality/Truth has to account for everything that exists. All I know is that my consciousness exists. However, my consciousness is not physical - not in the way a brain is thought to be. Ok, fine. But in that case, where is the conscious experience taking place? In another dimension from the physical brain? Does that mean the brain is creating another dimension? That every conscious being's brain creates a new dimension? How? Where? Or maybe the experiential dimension already exists, and the brain connects to it. Again, how? Did the universe know to have this dimension on standby for when life came around? Do all our brains tap into the one dimension, or is there one for each of us? I'm not going to answer any of these questions, just leave them for you to work on if you want

@Torkys do you see an agent of other in what you've read?

@Torkys eat this eat this eat this

Prove it

@zunnyman I don't want to come off all mystical hippie doo-dah, but I fear I will: look not to answers, but to the questions. Pick a question and ask yourself: what assumptions, beliefs, fears, desires, wants, needs, pains, etc are coming together to form this question? Then look at those assumptions etc and ask if they are really, really true

Male and female are biological tools of reproduction. Nothing more. Many life forms don't even bother, or are hermaphrodites. Also notice that the traits of male and female are not common between species. Look at bees, seahorses, gorilla, lions - none have the same male/female 'truths' as one another. It feels like you're trying to take your current perspective and explain it in divine/universal terms. What happens if you do the opposite - give up your perspective and attempt to see things from a universal perspective?

@KMB4222 I'm going to suggest that this question is a diversion from the quest. If you reach the truth, then presumably you will understand. Probably at this stage you wouldn't understand anyway. Asking "why" right now (as far as I can see) can only be a distraction. It is, reason or no reason. Work with that.

Have you heard of Jed McKenna or spiritual autolysis? Basically his whole method is a form of journalled self-inquiry. He talks about it in his first two books, but if you YouTube 'spiritual autolysis' you'll find the audiobook version of the chapter where he describes it explicitly. It's one of my chosen methods and it's blown many doors off their hinges. In terms of whether you're on track: if you're doing it, you're on track. If you're not, you're not!

@Shakazulu in review, what I mean is that you've given us a lovely impression/idea/objective to seek, and I agree that objectively that may be true. But is that really a belief you live by? For example, how do you define world view?

@Shakazulu give us a specific example. Describe it in detail. Don't worry about defining belief, but tell us about a belief you hold

Good work! Keep going! And don't be put off if each session doesn't reach similar results ☺

This contains so much of what you believe the world is, other people are, and how you fit in. If you really dare to focus on this and handle the emotions it brings, you will profoundly change Willing to expand if you want to discuss but won't lecture here

@Shakazulu Man, there is no step by step for this. You have to identify your beliefs one by one, and check the foundation that they sit on. If you believe in that foundation, you need to check that foundation, and so on, and so on. There is no plan, just brutal honesty. I just tried to write a genetic example and failed, but maybe if you give us a belief we can examine it together

@Shakazulu Got Google maps? Zoom it in to the outside of your house (or street view your house) while you stand outside and look yourself. How inaccurate is the map to what you are seeing yourself? Then think that all of what you are told about truth/consciousness/enlightenment is at least as inaccurate as that map, and often many degrees of magnitude more so. Then think that the true is probably the same about what you were taught about the world growning up. Then think about what you believe, and why. Then think about how it aligns to your experience, standing on that doorstep

@Bernard Also, use your enquiry to eliminate the false, rather than find the true. Kill false and truth must remain

@Bernard I find that enquiry without writing is very limited. And that without listening / reading / attending is also limited. In other words, I find it to be a sort of (but not at all...) input-output process. The output part - for me - is very important; for me that is writing. It helps to get ideas out of my head, and for more abstract points which I'm stuck on proves to me that I'm stuck: if I can't explain / describe it in straightforward language to MYSELF (who has the advantage of first hand experience), then I clearly an stuck on something. Writing helps me to narrow it down and identify it, then work out why I am stuck. It's still not easy, but a bit easier than purely in the head

Does anyone else see spiral dynamics as a significant ego risk? I seem to see people rushing to define and categorise both themselves and others; this seems counter-productive to me (that is, if your goal is to disidentify from ego). Thoughts welcome