Finally my wife and I are going where my heart has been calling out to be — Algonquin park, arguably our favourite place in the world. We leave tomorrow, if we don’t race off early!
Life has taken strange and beautiful turns lately. I am stronger than ever, though often full of tears. I am transforming.
I’m looking forward to doing some shamanic journeys this week too, surrounded by beauty and nature. What more could I want?
A few days ago I thought it was going to be the end of the world. I thought we were all going to dissolve into light, as the Q’ero shamans say.
We drove all night. We watched the sunrise, holding our breath. I thought I could hear angelic singing. And nothing happened.
It wasn’t the end of the world — it was the beginning of ME.
I’m remembering things. On the one hand it is terrifying and horrible. On the other hand I’m finally ME and I’m set free.
You can’t put a price on life. ❤
Last night I was happier than I have ever been in my life. And last night, I thought I was going to die.
But it didn’t have to happen that literally. We were out driving (of course), throwing apples to any deer or raccoon we saw along the way. I know feeding wild animals is frowned upon, but I think deer munch on fallen apples anyway, and we didn’t approach them.
So I was spilling my guts to my partner, who, bless her heart, doesn’t think I’m crazy. But she was telling me I had to give up a few things I’d been obsessing about, and it hurt like hell. I felt distant from her, bawling my eyes out, and that was enough death for me. She means everything to me.
But everything we said and did and saw and heard had additional layers of meaning. Everything was clicking into place, making perfect sense. Even every song on my mix CD had new meaning.
We came upon a dead rabbit, and that symbolized my death too. Then everything went dark and quiet for a while, and like I said, it was hell.
Then the deer came back again. See, deer is my primary spirit animal. In a way, I AM deer. I called out to it, “Have you come back to me now?”
And all was beautiful. We saw another herd of deer nestled up sleeping (!) by the road. Dreaming their deer-dreams.
I felt and said that all would be new again when I woke up in the morning. And it is. My favourite cat seems more orange and wild than ever. I’m changed too.
Blessed be, blessed be.
My life has suddenly become the X-Files and the world is a different place for me now.
However, I have been called upon to document the strange events of this evening. See, about a week ago my partner and I came across the strangest roadkill we’ve ever found: a beaver. It wasn’t even near a pond, just a tiny stream. But of course I honoured it and helped it re-connect with the All-Spirit, shamanically. And then…this evening, we found another one.
This one was bigger and in perfect condition, with nary a scratch on it. It was by a big river but way up a hill from it, so still pretty weird. Again I communed with the beaver spirit. This time, it had a message for me. Watch for the deer, it said.
So we drove on and on, stunned by the twin beaver finds. When we came to the end of our route however, our focus shifted. This was now about the deer. We drove out another way, and I felt the deer announce that they were coming. My partner said, “How do you feel about this?” And I said, “It’s just a bit further.” We drove a bit further and then we came upon them: two deer in a field.
I got out of the car and sang to them, then walked a bit and waited. I received a message then, and I knew it was done.
So strange, and so beautiful.
We take the existence of unconscious thought for granted. By unconscious thought I mean thought that one is unaware of thinking. The term consciousness is a troublesome word as it’s employed to illustrate both brain activity generally and self-awareness, which are not identical. Infants are conscious and have active brains, but they aren’t self-aware. They think, in a rudimentary way, but they don’t know that they’re thinking. Their thoughts aren’t noticed by a self. And since I believe that nothing comes into physical being without an observer to be aware of it, the infant’s unnoticed thoughts never manifest as memory. This is why we cannot remember being babies. The infant brain can obviously store information and build physical brain connections as it learns to babble and crawl – because the infant experiences babbling and experiences crawling. However, these types of stored information are more like muscle memory. The infant doesn’t experience a self and thus cannot create narrative memories of its experiences. However, once the self begins to emerge, a toddler begins to build “life memories” that detail experiences as they affect the self, and we as adults can remember our lives only as far back as that process began.
Now, I believe that the brain experiences wave-particle duality insofar as we can express its functions in terms of both brain waves and individual particle flow between synapses. Brain waves are used to measure levels of consciousness, whereas brain scans produce images of localized electrical activity.
Meanwhile, the Uncertainty Principle tells us that one cannot accurately know both the position and the momentum of a particle simultaneously. I suspect that this has an effect on what one can know about consciousness (insofar as consciousness is both particle and wave) simultaneously.
Here is one attempt at an Uncertainty Principle of consciousness: You are aware of thinking, therefore you know that you think (this is argued at length by Descartes). If you know you are conscious, then you have defined a Self, and you cannot know that anything which is not yourself is also conscious. The thoughts of the Other are held apart by definition. Even if you could read someone else’s mind, you couldn’t hear a thought in your own head and know beyond doubt that it originated from something non-self. By hearing a thought it becomes your own. Even if you noticed that the thoughts somehow “sounded different” than things you characteristically think, or that the thoughts contained information you weren’t aware of knowing, you could still only propose the mere possibility that the thoughts originated from another mind. The thoughts would be in your mind, thus yours.
I suspect that Cartesian Mind-Body duality is essentially the same as particle-wave duality and Cartesian doubt (not knowing anything more than “I think, therefore I am”) is essentially the same as the uncertainty principle.
I also suspect that our mental chatter never stops (whether noticed or not), and attempting to stop it is really more difficult than holding one’s breath. Contemplating mental silence is the same as thinking, so we cannot know if our brain is silent or not without thinking about it, which instantly breaks the silence (if there even was silence). It is as if one wanted to hold her breath, but couldn’t tell if she was actually holding it without breathing to check. I suspect that our unnoticed thoughts are in that sense automatic, but we can learn to be more mindful of them. When we are more actively focused on our thoughts but apparently in control of what we’re thinking, I believe we still have a line of unnoticed and uncontrolled thought running in the background.
For instance, one might think that in periods of deep philosophical contemplation, one is very aware of one’s own thoughts. But that is not the same as saying that one is aware of their stream of uncontrolled “unconscious” thought, which may continue even while actively thinking about something else. What happens if we are so aware of our uncontrolled thought that there is no unnoticed thought? When if there was no attempt to control or understand or analyze the uncontrolled thought – just to notice it? Is this when self and spirit are combined?
Incidentally, I find that when I try to notice my uncontrolled stream of thought, which appears truly random and unrelated to anything, I am on the verge of putting myself to sleep and entering a dream.
Ultimately, I suspect that insofar as thought is unnoticed, it is in waveform only and represents the Spirit world. Insofar as one is aware of one’s own thought, it becomes the work of electrons, the world of Matter. Somehow we know we have unnoticed thought even though we cannot remember it. We sense it although we really have little to no evidence of it in the physical world. Thus we sense the spirit world directly; or rather, it is our connection to the continuous self-propagation of spirit.
In the beginning, Nothing happened, and the void of the infinite Nothing dreamed. The dreaming was all the Nothing had and was: a great womb of non-being. She dreamed until she ached with the entirety of possibility inside her, grown so full up with every variant of Everything she was not and had not. The Nothing watched her dream quicken unbound by time or space or rule, like a seed that became an apple tree full of apples full of seeds that came to fill up a field, a world, and more without end. So heavy was she that when she dreamed of the mere possibility that Everything could be born out of Nothing, out of non-being and into being, she moaned. She yearned to see her child, but she knew the moment Everything came into being, the Nothing would cease to be. She would become her child’s one dream and one wish. Then, if the child ever bore her dream alive, the Nothing would live again and the Everything would die, and on and on forever.
The Nothing wept, but would not quit her dreaming. She dreamed of the possibility of the possibility that Everything could be born out of Nothing. Then the possibility of the possibility of the possibility that Everything could be born out of Nothing. It pained her but she pushed on, dreaming of the possibility of the possibility of the possibility of the possibility that Everything could be born out of Nothing. This pained her more but she pushed on.
Finally, Everything happened. Nothing breathed in her dreams.
In time and non-time, in joy and sorrow, in beauty in ugliness, and in all other things, Everything smiled, holding her vast dream. “Thank you,” she said to her unborn child, “but I was alive the moment you dreamed of me, and I won’t let you die. For when you gave me Everything you withheld Nothing and so bore great contradiction. It is possible Everything and Nothing are both real and a dream within a dream within a dream.”
With Nothing stirring within her, Everything closed her eyes. “It is possible that Everything and Nothing can exist together.”
Then, Something happened. The newborn child bolted awake as startled as lightning — crashing from a dream into reality, and from reality into a dream. In his great mind, he was Everything and Nothing and he dreamed of them both.
I have been toying a bit recklessly with my states of consciousness. See, I’ve been sick and taking cold medication which I am apparently sensitive to, as it strongly affects my mental state. Also, my wife and I have been not sleeping properly, going out for long drives at night instead, looking for animal sightings. The other day I was awake for about 30 hours straight, and even after a 12-hour rest I feel like my mind isn’t working right.
And, I’m hungering for word salad.
I wrote word salad once, thinking I was writing something coherent, and even writing excited comments in the margins (which were also word salad) about the content. I had not slept for 72 hours straight. Then, thankfully, I went to bed. When I read the piece later, I was utterly fascinated by it, because I really thought I understood it at the time. Currently my view of reality is wary of the supremacy of logic. I believe in the existence of other, variant, systems of logic (in other universes, or under certain circumstances in our universe such as within a black hole, or in spirit).
Right now I want to read word salad. Not merely bad poetry, but true word salad found in spam emails. The kind that generally follow some grammatical rules, but in which the content makes no sense. For some reason it excites me. I read one example: “Isn’t lettuce brave?” on wikipedia and I absolutely love it, even though it makes no sense. I’m not trying to figure out what it could mean — I’m not working out a metaphor in which lettuce could be called brave. It means nothing and yet, for some reason, I find it excitingly beautiful.
So I am a little worried about my state of mind, even though I am at work and competently working, having complicated conversations with my boss about tricky indexing problems in our online database. But perhaps I am indeed fine, and instead I am accessing some aspect of spirit. Is spirit somehow connected to pure abstraction, absent from logic?
Also, I have been thinking intensely and writing a great deal about consciousness. In particular, the unconscious flow of thought, or the random thoughts that seem to self-propogate continuously in the mind, whether we notice them or not. I suspect this is a spirit thing, but am still working out the details and will post about it soon.
Where Spirit Stops 