Musings on the meaning/nature of existence by a curious participant...
Information is excitation?
I’ve noticed that the works of literature/film/music/philosphy/* which impress the most substancial and lasting impact upon me are the ones that communicate new ideas, or new “information”. I suppose this should come as no great surprise, not even to myself. Yet on a day-to-day basis I am seldom aware of my perpetual novelty-seeking and this realisation makes me wonder how much of a slave I am to the new.
Also, it may offer a sound neurological explanation as to why film sequels rarely seem to match up to the standard set by the original, as well as the “sophmore slump” phenomenon, whereby an artist’s second offering rings hollow in comparison to the first.
Christmas, fancy dress and other anomalies
The christmas period has provided me with ample time for associative rumination on the seemingly anomalous behaviour of people during the “festive season”. For instance, why do so many of them seem to make uncharacteristic shows of affection towards family members that they otherwise ignore? Why are ‘obscure’ relatives invited to make appearances at the homes of people who otherwise ignore them? Why do people temporarily subscribe to a tradition that compels them to eat vegetables they detest, ‘remember’ messiah’s they forget, or elaborately adorn their house in incandescent decorations that rot in the garage for the other 50 weeks of the year?
When you consider that human beings are essentially domesticated primates and that all of their actions and behaviours seem to fulfill some kind of ‘positive’, subjective purpose, it would seem logical to assume that any kind of widely-held tradition or oft-performed ceremony serves to fulfill a significant purpose for human beings in general.
Thus, the real question proposed is: what function does Christmas serve?
I think that it’s basically an elaborate ‘pack-bonding’ ritual that serves to reinforce domestic ties amongst families as well as social ties in the wider community. That is, despite still being half-heartedly dressed up in a veneer of religious significance.
As for fancy dress parties, they too seem to serve a similar function. Yet I would hazard to speculate that they are not so much about domestic-reinforcement as ‘socio-sexual facilitation’.
At one of these events, a set of ‘game rules’ are established under the guise of a ‘theme’ - often pertinent to a shared interest - that creates an exclusive ‘virtual environment’ populated by ‘virtual characters’. This exclusivity inherently creates a bond between the participants, and the impersonal ‘character assumption’ allows them to add further veneer to their already contrived ‘personalities’, working in much the same way as alcohol - a social lubricant with anti-anxiety properties.
Perhaps I might be accused of being too aloof in these observations, yet I can’t help but notice the insincerity of it all. Is it possible for people to have genuine (honest) social interaction? Or was Antero Alli closer to the money when he stated:
”The Post-Larval Must Be Very Cautious in Communicating with Larval Humans
The larval has no interest in you, you do not exist, unless you can hook into Hir limited reality-island, transmit on Hir narrow mind-band, unless your behavior offers meaning in terms of possible benefit or threat to Hir:
1. cellular well being
2. emotional-hierarchical status
3. artifact manipulation game
4. socio-sexual security; domestic reassurance”
The wiseacrings of a three-brained being named Timothy Leary?
Timothy Leary’s 8-circuit model of the human nervous system has significant parallels with most its counterparts, including Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychosexual development, the Hindu chakra system and, of course, Gurdjieff’s “centres”. He proposed that most homo-sapiens operate exclusively on the lower 4 circuits and that the higher ones are only active in a minority, but can be activated by anyone - at least temporarily - with the consumption of psychedelic drugs, such as LSD.
As Robert Anton Wilson - the ultimate agnostic who refused to believe in ANYTHING after learning and experiencing so many conflicting ‘truths’ – noted; higher-circuit experiences, whilst being similar in nature, tend to retain a distinctly personal flavour.
Could it be that the entirely subjective - and in many cases unpleasant – nature of these experiences is a result of ego manipulation of what is actually truly objective data?
And I quote from The Gurdjieff Journal:
“Taking drugs to increase vibration, users entered what Gurdjieff calls the higher emotional or higher mental center. The problem was—never having worked on themselves and thus purified their vibration by their own conscious labors and intentional sufferings—their egos subtly skewered and distorted the experience. They unconsciously projected their own ego-laden values and assorted psychic maladies onto the higher reality. In a word: they personalized the impersonal. As Gurdjieff would say, imagination was created in higher centers.(9)”
Scared of the moon?
A great significance has been attributed to the moon’s influence upon the earth in many cosmologies, from today’s mainstream science to arcane ‘mystical’ philosophies.
Its tidal influence is a well established empirical fact and there are countless studies that have demonstrated a direct correlation between the cycles of the moon and various earthly phenomena, including human and animal behaviour.
Mental hospitals have reported a significant increase in admissions during full moons (the words ‘lunatic’ and ‘lunacy’ derive from ‘luna’ - the Greek word for moon). Some prisons have been known to enforce a ‘lockdown’ policy during one too, owing to experiental evidence linking its presence with higher than normal incidences of rage and violence.
Science seems to reluctantly recognize many of these phenomena, but offers little more than speculation in terms of explanation.
In the ‘ray of creation’ cosmology, popularised in the west by Gurdjieff, the relationship between earth and moon takes on an even greater significance. According to ‘G’, the moon is a living being in its embryonic stages - a future earth - and organic life on the present earth (including humanity) serves as a kind of ‘energetic film’ used to transfer energy from the earth to the moon. Basically, we are ‘food’ for the moon. Our own nourishment comes courtesy of the sun, which is in turn nourished by the centre of the milky way galaxy, in a grand cosmic food chain.
This belief - although bizarre and ludicrous to many a modern man - seems to be very prevalant amongst many ancient mystic traditions, and Gurdjieff - a sufi initiate - declared himself a ‘true christian’ in the gnostic sense. His cosmology has been traced back as far as pre-dynastic Egypt.
The psychiatrist Carl Jung made the interesting observation that it is common for suffers of schizophrenia to report psychological material that has a distinctly archetypal/mystical flavour that parallels the symbology of these esoteric traditions. In his book, ‘The Archetypes And The Collective Unconscious’, he mentions one patient that reported seeing a giant penis dangling from the sun, ‘inseminating’ the rest of the solar system with its energy.
Of course, such a sight could be an eccentric mental projection (hallucination) that is entirely subjective and contains no ‘objective’ significance. Or, it could be, that many schizophrenic or generally ‘disturbed’ patients are in fact more attuned to a higher understanding of reality, without being aware of this attunement so to speak. Gurdjieff himself said that mental institutions all over the world are full of people who had woken up ‘too soon’.
This brings me to the latest theory of the world’s most prominent conspiracy theorist, David Icke. Apparently, Icke was sitting down to begin work on his latest book when a thought ‘popped into his head’ to inform him that the moon ‘wasn’t real’. Thus began his judicious investigation, which eventually culminated in him concluding that the moon was an artificial body that had been deliberately placed in its position in order to restrict certain frequencies from reaching the earth from the sun - frequencies that reached the sun from the galactic centre of the milky way? Ray of creation anyone?!
Could it be that David Icke, owing to his various ‘spiritual experiences’ that ‘enlightened him’ and precipitated his pursuit against what he now dubs ‘the moon matrix’, may well have encountered these universal symbolic principles, as Carl Jung observed was often the case with schizophrenics. It may be that he has taken a negative impression of - and built a subjective cosmology - from this data available to him as a result of his mental state.
He also makes the point that the moon is ‘feeding’ off us. Apparently our negative emotions are its primary source of sustenance. It is interesting that Gurdjieff also urged people to struggle against the expression of negative emotions.
What’s more, I have personal experience to draw upon which seems to be in congruence with this theory of lunar nourishment. When I was suffering from severe anxiety to the point of clinical panic disorder a few years ago, I developed an irrational, perplexing fear of the moon. Not a full blown phobia, but a palpable reticence to be exposed to or even look at it. I also remember having a particularly disturbing nightmare involving being ‘trapped’ under a giant moon.
Considering my precarious mental state at the time, could it be that I had in fact begun to ‘wake up too soon’? Was I somehow becoming attuned to horrifying cosmic truths that I did not understand? Perhaps I was on some level aware that the moon was draining me as a result of my persistent anxiety? Perhaps it is no coincidence that I then began to read about Gurdjieff and his ray of creation?
Whilst considering all this the other day, I decided to see if there was any discernable correlation between lunar activity and the various ‘major incidences of rage’ I have suffered in the past couple of years. I was shocked to find that each of the 3 events I could reliably date occured within 24 hours of a full moon.
Then again, it could all be mental illness.
I no longer fear the moon now that my anxiety has abated. Perhaps my dream was only personally symbolic, expressing the fear of being overwhelmed by emotion. Carl Jung seemed to think that the ‘common spiritual data’ experienced by many of the mentally ill as well as religious adepts, was all metaphor of the mind - our psyche’s own symbolic way of expressing itself.
So, who knows? Anyone got any dirt on the moon?
Stories facilitate communication to our ‘higher’ selves?
Gurdjieff alleged that “myths” and “symbols” are capable of communicating “objective knowledge” to our “higher centres”.
Carl Jung famously theorized that the all human beings shared a “collective unconscious” - a subconscious layer of fragmented archetypes that represented various aspects of ourselves - which communicated to us through the symbols of our dreams and the fruits of our creative states. He noticed the presence of these archetypes in the recurring myths and fairy tales of all human cultures - particularly with regard to religion - and recognized them as allegory that was created and understood by our collective unconscious on a much more profound level than we realised consciously.
Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary also hypothesized that Jung’s collective unconscious was akin to the “neurogenetic” brain circuit - which is, in turn, a parallel for Gurdjieff’s “true intellectual centre”.
So - it would seem to me, that they - and no doubt many others - are expressing the same concept through differing languages (models of reality).
And so the question that this arouses within me - or within the associative/thinking part of me should i say - is this: are there “conscious agents” out there who actively inseminate popular culture with these myths in order to communicate with our higher selves (whether with benevolent or malevolent intent)? And are these people the “conscious circle of humanity” that Gurdjieff referred to - the “sangha” as buddhist tradition calls them, or “neurogenetic adepts” in Tim Leary speak?
Or are they simply evidence of our unconscious impulses expressing themselves time and time again in our supposedly “conscious” myth-making creativity?
Either way, I’d have to agree with Carl Jung that these archetypes are really prevalent in the popular stories of any culture I’ve known. Take Disney films for example. The kind wizard/evil wizard, kind fairy/evil witch protoypes appear in pretty much every release! But that’s a topic for my next post…
Already dead?
I’ve read quite a bit about Gurfjieff and The Fourth Way recently and find it utterly fascinating.
There is one element I find rather troubling, however (perhaps deliberately intended so) that I would appreciate some insight on:
Gurdjieff stated that many people were actually “already dead” - “in essence”. Was this intended as a metaphor in any way or was he speaking literally of a discernable substance of sorts?
If so, how would one know whether one was indeed already dead?
NIGHTNIGHT by DEDDY
