Welcome to N/om Shakes where quasi-random thoughts, directives, contemplations, and absurdities help shake everything up. The entries come from Professor Keeney's lectures and they all serve the shaking, undoing, and unknowing of whatever comes to mind.
Imagine that tonight you will have the most thrilling dream of your life. As you dream it, you have full awareness and think to yourself, "this is an honest to goodness sacred vision." In this experience you are taken to the wisest Being in the universe and told that you can ask three questions. What would you ask? Write these questions down on a piece of paper and then choose the one word in each sentence that is most important to you. Cut out each of these words with some scissors. Sprinkle these three words under your pillow before sleeping. Do this every night for a month. Before sleeping, think to yourself that you are planting seeds in your imagination with these "three little words" and that anything could happen in the world of your Creative Imagination. Expect the word seeds to sprout something that might surprise you. The surprise could come at any time - during a dream, a walk, a conversation, driving to the grocery store, or while singing in the shower. It may happen deep in your unconscious before your conscious mind even knows that it has taken place. It may have already happened as you are now reading this, but pretend that it hasn't yet happened so you can thoroughly enjoy the process of gardening the interior of your Unknown.
When I recognize what I am not, I am able to further undress and reveal myself. The more radical or extreme the encounter with the not-ness of what I am not, the more deeply I may know myself. Therefore, I need the greatest of enemies to liberate the truth of my own identity. Similarly, through skilled negation of my self, I may re-cognize the other. The more I extinguish what I am and what I know, the more deeply I may know the other. When our experience is organized by this dynamic of ever-changing negation, we release the importance given to both self and other. Stepping further up and/or further down this ladder, we can imagine negating the process that negates: a double negation. Now the process of construction and destruction are similarly self-revealing through their alternating negations. Here we see that not only is it "not you and not I," it's "not the difference and not the absence of difference." In this cyclic reincarnation of emptiness we may find other universes, as long as we are willing to re-enter/rebirth the awareness of a distinguishing mind. I shall always disagree with you as I expect you to do the same with me, so we may know what we are not and therefore become what we are.
Open the most important book that resides in your home. Keep opening it until your eyes fall upon a deeply meaningful statement. Write it down. Pretend that you will devote the rest of your life to this statement, whatever it means to you. Do this for six days. Then rest.
You are to drill a hole in one of your books. I recommend doing this to Shaking Medicine. If you don't have a power drill, find someone who has one. If you can't find a drill, find a way to drill through some of the pages, preferably all of the pages. You are to conduct this task with absolute seriousness, revering the possibility that so-called 'irrationality' may awaken what you have been seeking and open a door to a surprise that has been waiting to be discovered.
Your cerebral cortex is tired and full of all those promising words that may have tried to inspire you - from shamanism to healing to feminism to Buddhism to quarks - but arguably none of these words or their many meanings will actually make the needed difference in the world. Let us attempt to take a journey into the center of the Earth, our inner landscape of the non-Jungian Pre-Primal Unconscious, the analogic (non-digital) Unknowable, the Original Formless Full Bodied Emptiness. Fasten your cognitive seat belts, close your book, and go look for a drill.
I drilled a hole through my book, wondering what I would find. I was lost, wondering where I would I find my purpose. I wrote out a simple request with a crayon, "Please help me find my purpose." I pushed my question through the book hole before I went to sleep. I agreed with the invitation that I would wake up the next morning believing that my unconscious would deliver my answer. My only uncertainty concerned the form in which my answer would be delivered. Would it come inside a remembered or unremembered dream? Would it be in the form of a surprising feeling that takes place the next day, or in a book that is found while browsing at a library? I am grateful for the way mystery may be unknowingly received when we grant it permission to reveal/conceal itself inside and outside understandings.
I see this as a "needing to get more deeply lost before you can get significantly found" sort of thing.
Visualized drilling doesn't count. This needs to be enacted. Come to think of it, since you've already read it, you actually need to drill two holes before the second reading. Should be twice as potent.
Yes, I mean it, go drill a hole in the book. Thinking about it, visualizing it, or wondering about it, IS NOT a substitute for doing it.
5. MUSING ON THE HOLE IN YOUR BOOK
What's so different about this drilling? Haven't you been BORING for knowledge all these years? How many times have you seen the act of reading or studying to be a mission to extract knowledge from the text? [Top Secret: There is no transport of knowledge. Knowledge is constructed rather than received. No data, only "capta." If you don't act, there will be no knowing.]
6. INTERACT WITH YOUR BOOK IN OTHER UNUSUAL WAYS:
*Drill other holes
*Underline spaces rather than words
*Talk to the book
*Place it under a pillow or bed or television or stereo speaker
*Place it on a serving plate at the dining table
*Play catch with it
*Add wheels to its back
*Create a more aesthetic cover
*Cover the author's name with your name (in a constructivist universe, the reader is an
active participant in the interaction called "reading")
*Add your name to the author's book, making it a collaborative writing/reading
*Glue a mirror to the front of the book
*Feed your book a snack before reading so it will have the energy for you to read it
*Heal the book with your hands
*Run a string through the hole and floss it before reading
*Place book on top of your head and ask it to come down to the level of your heart before
reading
*Move where you are sitting after reading each page so that your reading moves you
around a circle
*Perform a naming ceremony - the book needs a name (not a title) - give it a name that
gives you the possibility for a more personal relationship with the book
*Create a family history for the book
*Write alternative chapter titles in colored ink under each black and white chapter
*Change male pronouns to a nonsense word like "zerp"
*Write a fictitious author biography on the inside of the front cover
*Write a fictitious reader biography on the inside of the back cover
*Make a little cardboard or paper sack room for your book to sleep in at night - call it the
book's private quarters.
*Call someone and say that your book has something to say to them
*Place your book in the funniest spot in your home
*After your book has resided on a funny spot, carry it to a serious place and have it stare at the seriousness that needs loosening
*Attach a light to your book and place it under your bed for one night with the light on
*Purchase or make a mask for the book to wear
*Write a letter to the tree that gave its life for the book
*Write a paragraph about whatever comes to mind and then randomly place it in the
book, making it an unusual special edition
*Take your book to a library so it may visit other friends and introduce the book to other
books it may not know
*Plan to mail the book to yourself - consider this a vacation for the book.
*Encourage the book to have an out of body experience.
*Sing any sentence in the book
*Tell a joke to the friend, but when you get to the punch line, pull out a sentence from the
book that you previously wrote down and read it
*Send out a press release describing the hole in your book and what is happening to it -
try to make some news
*Tell Oprah about any of this activity and explain why it provides the last hope left for
changing the world
*When you finish reading the book, have a "The End" party
7. GREETINGS Pilgrims on the Road to the City of Enlighten-and-darken-ment
It is irrelevant whether you or I am a shaman or an anti-shaman or both or neither. I once woke up in the middle of the night with the vision to prescribe drilling a hole through your book. I didn't know why. Then several weeks later, I unpacked a box and lo and behold, I discovered my Grandfather's Bible that had been willed to me many moons ago. It had a hole in it. So, I am now assuming that this is a mystery, a sanctified thing, a get out of the way and let the Spirit and ancestors breathe life through us sort of thing. Wake up call for the unknown, the glorious and holy benevolent Irrational, the don't-think-about-it-just-do-it-in-the-present-moment-thing.
Consider that your drilling or shall we say "opening" gave the book an "eye," one step toward FACING it (rather than defacing it). Or consider the hole a blowhole and squirt some water out of it. Makes a whale of a story.
9. DENSE, UNCLEAR, AMBIGUOUS TEXTS
I think there can be great value in the dense, unclear, ambiguous texts that people have trouble deciphering and understanding (the opposite of all pop best-selling books). Sometimes they are the most important contributions. If something is radically distinct from our understanding, then it holds greater promise for transforming us than what is easily recognized and understood. This is the difference between art and entertainment. The former requires a bit of an ordeal to get into it, but if you hang in there and persevere, you walk away changed. The latter requires no effort and you walk away the same or less.
Run a string or rope through your book hole and hang it to a tree. Sit under the book that is hanging from the tree while holding an apple. Decide whether you will place the apple on top of your head, rest your head on it as if it were a pillow, or have one or more bites.
The royal road of cognitive punctuation takes us to many realities. Since we are making choices for how we distinguish and construct, we are ultimately responsible for what/how we see. This is a level of ethics that hasn't been fully appreciated by partially or fully committed naive realists.
Let's consider quirky punctuations like "close encounters with aliens," "past-life memories," "spirit guides," "apparitions," "energy readings," "channeling," "talking with the dead," and the whole of new age speak. First of all, I don't like any of these distinctions, indications, or punctuations because they imply we know something about experiences that we don't know much, if anything, about. This comic-book-like-discourse gives false concreteness to extraordinary mysteries. Furthermore, I believe these light- weight framings trivialize and even disrespect the complex wonder of unknowable experience.
For example, I'd rather say nothing more than, "Last night I experienced a mysterious luminosity." However, if someone subsequently asks whether it flew across a green horizon and I nod affirmatively, they may predictably go on to say, "then you saw an alien golf cart in the sky." That bugs me. Nobody knows what I experienced and to concretize it with simple punctuations and framings removes the uncertainty and mystery of an out of the ordinary moment. I hope you see that I am actually giving more validity and importance to the experience by refusing these all too easy/lazy to use punctuations.
*Draw a distinction: let there be unity and difference
*Re-enter the distinction: bring forth the re-entrant form - the circle of life is born?
*Enter the drawer of distinction: into the deeper/higher hole we go
*Surrender to the Whole: swallow your tale.
You are getting very, very confused with all this circular talk where this means that, and that means this, and no it doesn't if we affirm the other unspoken contrary; yes we have long been sleepy, waiting 4 another silence to turn another word so that we may return. As I speak to your unconscious circulation, allow your mind to not care whether it minds the rules of knowing. Open the door to always realized fantasies of the most unusual and moist T R A N S F O R M A T I V E kind. That's right. See how easy this IS; know that IS knows that Not knowing is good and WHOLE some for the body and that you can count this baptism as I slowly go backwards toward 3, 2, 1.
13. CONTINUE TO ENJOY THE IMAGINED OTHER THAT CAN NEVER BE REVEALED
THOUGH SHALL EVER BE KNOWN AS, THAT'SSSSSS RIGHT, IT'S ALL THERE FOR YOU, THIS U, THIS U FOR UPSIDE DOWN STATE THAT BECOMES AN EVER REST, A CURVE OF A MOUNTAIN PEAK, WHEN FLIPPED UPSIDE DOWN BRINGS YOU TO THE HEIGHT THAT IS CARRIED WITHIN. IMAGINE WITH ME AS I IMAGINE WITH YOU THAT YOU IN SOME OTHER REFLECTIVE SPACE ARE INVITING ME TO GO FURTHER WITH YOU INTO THE UNKNOWING OF OWNING THE UN BEFORE THE KNOWING CAN ING WHAT IT KNOWS
14. GO DEEPER AND DEEPER INTO THE HOLE,
THE HOLE YOUR UNCONSCIOUS KNOWS IN SO MANY INTERESTING WAYS - AS IT CONSIDERS THIS OVER AND OVER AND UNDER AND UNDER DURING THE SLEEP OF THE UNAWAKENED THOUGH ENLIGHTENED NOW AS YOU BREATH IN A WAY YOU HAVE NEVER KNOWN BEFORE BECAUSE YES THAT BREATH WAS A UNIQUE ONE NEVER BEFORE PRESENT IN ANYONE'S LIFE, BUT AS IT GOES AWAY KNOW THAT THE NEXT ONE CARRIES ALL THINGS THAT MAKE YOU ALIVE FROM MOMENT TO MOMENT AND AS YOU ALREADY HAVE ANTICIPATED WITH THE VERY NEXT BREATH, CARRYING YOU FURTHER INTO THE DEEP
15. SO DEEP, SO DEEP, SO DEEP, SOUL DEEP WE ARE:
WE CAN SEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE FAR N2 THE FEWTURE, YES I DEW SI THE WAY ONE CULTURE CAN BE INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE OTHER IN THIS REV REV REVOLUTION OF CONVOLUTION.
16. PERHAPS THE MOST IMPORTANT ASSIGNMENT OF YOUR LIFE:
TONIGHT SHALL BE A SPECIAL HOLLOWDAY. THE HOLLOW HOLE IN YOUR BOOK HAS BEEN GETTING READY FOR THIS EVENING. THIS, ON ANOTHER SPIRITUAL DIMENSION, MAY BE THE PURPOSE OF THIS WEBSITE OR EVEN THE REASON YOU WERE BORN.
TONIGHT, YOU ARE INVITED TO TAKE OUT YOUR BOOK SO IT CAN CELEBRATE HOLLOWEEN. MAKE SURE THAT YOU DRESS UP THE BOOK. COVER IT WITH A PIECE OF PAPER THAT HAS AN ORNATELY DRAWN TITLE. THE TITLE MUST BE ANOTHER NAME. CALL IT THE HOLLOWEEN COSTUME FOR THE HOLE IN THE BOOK. MAKE SURE THE TITLE WILL "DRAW" ATTENTION FROM OTHERS. THE BOOK IS WAITING FOR YOU. THE HOLE IS WAITING FOR YOU. THE TITLE IS WAITING FOR YOU. YOU ARE WAITING FOR YOU.
"[The wild] means self-organizing. It means elegantly self-disciplined, self-regulating, self-maintained. That's what wilderness is. Nobody has to do the management plan for it. So I say to people, 'let's trust in the self-disciplined elegance of wild mind.'"
What metaphor most precisely describes the opposite of clarity? Is it confusion? Muddle? Nonsense? Whatever you choose, make an appointment with it - spend at least 30 minutes or longer mulling over the opposite meaning of clarity, cognitively stretching the difference in meaning as far as you can with your imagination, talking about it, seeing images of it, and pulling it to the extreme.
Then obtain a rubber band and wrap it around two books: one book's text should seem clear to you and the other should be muddled to you. Place this stretched rubber band (that holds the difference between clarity and non-clarity) underneath your bed or place it under your pillow.
Before sleeping, see, in your mind's eye, the rubber band stretching further and further, knowing that there will come a point that the tension will release and send you to another place of knowing.
Call this the YIN/YANG SLINGSHOT.
But don't forget where you are right now: stop and examine the immediate muddle. What can you learn while you are there/here? What does confusion have to teach? Whatever you learn will heighten and intensify and broaden and deepen the clarity that will be released. Get ready to be shot by the yin/yang slingshot.
You already are where you have asked to be. It's just on the other side of your head. If you had eyeballs on the back of your head, you'd see it.
Tonight imagine yourself stretched between your two favorite flowers. In this fantasy scene, your head rests inside one flower, while your feet stretch across a garden onto another flower. The two flowers may or may not be known to you. I think I will assume that one of them, the one your head rests upon, is your favorite flower. I will surprise you by considering it to be a muddled one, the confused one. This is because the plant at your feet is even more beautiful and infinitely overwhelming in the whole scheme of things. Perhaps it is too beautiful for any human being to ever see. Its brilliance is too much for our immediate beholding and we can only rest our head upon the more familiar before meeting what is above or below or beyond or within.
May your dreams cultivate wonderful surprises and sights too beautiful to behold.
May you know that this will happen tonight and every night as well as throughout the everyday.
Transformation I: learning to frame things in a new way.
Transformation II: learning a new set of frames
Transformation III: learning the system that gives birth (and death) to the sets of frames
The problem with specifying Transformation III is that we tend to overlook that most of our punctuations arise from the same premise (or implicit rules, programs, logics) for punctuating. Comparing different punctuations that arise from the same premise merely generates Transformation II - we become more skilled at inventing new punctuations within the same system.
FOR EXAMPLE:
All the different historical schools of psychotherapy that think they are paradigmatically distinct actually belong to the same set of frames: behaviorism, Gestalt, Jungian analysis, humanistic psychology, or family therapy. Most, if not all, are within the same set of frames even though they loudly declare that they are not related.
BUT WHAT IN THE HELL IS HIGHER ORDER TRANSFORMATION?
Gregory Bateson:
"It is a corrective change in the SYSTEM of sets of alternatives from which choice is made."
In other words, here change does not refer to change of a specific response (I) or contextual punctuation (II), but refers to change of the premises (the rules) underlying an entire system of punctuation habits. This order of change is rare and difficult. It sometimes occurs in religious experience and wherever else there is profound reorganization of character.
HOW DO I GET OUT OF TRANSFORMATION II?
Alan Watts:
"The 'guru' or teacher of liberation must therefore use all of her skill to persuade the student to act upon her own delusions, for the latter will always resist any undermining of the props of her security. She teaches, not by explanation, but by pointing out new ways of acting upon the student's false assumptions until the student convinces herself that they are false."
HUH?
Carl Whitaker:
"It's though an individual patient comes with a leaning tower of Pisa and the therapist, instead of trying to straighten the tower, builds it higher and higher until, when it falls, the entire building falls rather than just the construct that the therapist has helped with."
FOR EXAMPLE?
Gregory Bateson (personal conversation with BK):
"I helped prevent the war in Southeast Asia from having traditional propaganda on the radio. The latter is when you come on the air and pretend to be a bunch of dissident soldiers who hate their leader. They did a great deal of it in Europe during WWII and they wanted to do it in Southeast Asia. I was in a position to say no. You shall do the reverse. You shall come on the air professing to be an official Japanese station, you will exaggerate the propaganda everyday, and you will exaggerate it 30% and give it back. That's the entire policy. In other words, you amplify the hell out of it until they can't bear it and yet don't know how to deny it. It's a double bind.
HOW CAN WE MOVE TOWARD HIGHER ORDERS OF TRANSFORMATION?
W. Ross Ashby:
"No system can produce anything "new" unless the system contains some source of the random."
DO YOU MEAN THAT WE NEED TO ASK, "MAY I HAVE A LITTLE NOISE PLEASE?"
Yes, but not too much, not too little. Bateson guessed 30%
WHAT SERVES AS NOISE?
Whatever you believe holds meaning, but is sufficiently ambiguous and complex so as to inhibit being readily understood. Examples of noise: family history, cultural myth, psychobabble, religious metaphor, Asian philosophy, mathematics, I Ching, astrology, cybernetic epistemology, chaos theory. But not any noise will do, you must be believe that it is meaningful. Therefore we shall call it "meaningful noise."
20. A LITTLE BEDTIME STORY (told to BK by Gregory Bateson):
When Samuel Johnson was an elderly man, he lived alone in a little house in London in about 1780. His daily schedule was to go for a walk in the afternoon, eat a light supper, sleep for 4-5 hours, wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning, read for a couple of hours, and then sleep again. On this particular day he followed his routine and woke up at about 2 am as usual and went through his usual routine. Suddenly everything was hellishly wrong. He had a stroke. He had never had a stroke before so he didn't know what was happening to him. He knelt down beside his bed and prayed. He prayed that God might do whatever he wanted to his body, but would he please leave his mind alone. He then climbed back in bed again. When he got back into bed he started to think about the Latin verses in which he had prayed - because Samuel Johnson would never pray in anything but Latin verses. When he noticed that he was thinking about his thinking, he got out of bed again and thanked the Almighty for preserving his critical faculties.
Design yourself an odd question, but it must be limited to 4 words.
No one can be quite free from schizophrenia - the habit of false concreteness - where we identify the metaphor with the referent.
Gregory Bateson objected to the "vulgarity of the fundamentalist" - one who believes the metaphors of the right brain (that is, whole brain) can be translated into the language of the left brain (creatura). This happens with the scriptural literalists and the scientific literalists. It is rampant in New Age talk. The most important matters of life, from art to ecstasy cannot be explained. He advised us, "It can't be done. Don't try it." He regarded all efforts to articulate the processes of whole brain process, from art to religion, as insane. "When attempted, translation from right to the left is teratogenic, creating of monsters," So let us enter the WILDERNESS and know that there is nothing that can be said so as to fulfill the criteria of left brain rigor. Let us act and speak, as part of our experience, with disciplined voicing of the Unknown Whole. Into the holes we go.
"There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds and it is the characteristic of the system that basic error propagates itself. It branches out like a rotted parasite through the tissues of life...high up on the list of bad ideas is the self-validating myth of power. If you do not get what you want, you will blame somebody and establish either a jail or a mental hospital, according to taste, and you will pop them in it if you can identify them." Gregory Bateson
24. Into the WILD we go where lives THE PATTERN WHICH CONNECTS.
"Why do schools teach almost nothing of the pattern which connects? Is it that teachers know that they carry the kiss of death to whatever they touch and therefore they are wisely unwilling to touch or teach anything of real-life importance? Or is it that they carry the kiss of death BECAUSE they dare not teach anything of real-life importance? What's wrong with them?"
"What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all four of them to me? And me to you? And all the six of us to the amoeba in one direction and to the back-ward schizophrenic in another?"
Gregory Bateson
25. "I am making the question bigger."
The SACRED (whatever that means) is surely related (somehow) to the BEAUTIFUL (whatever that means)...To be conscious of the nature of beauty is the folly of reductionism."
Gregory Bateson
C.S. Lewis' devil advises his nephew in the matter of how to corrupt human beings: keep them thinking about the past and future. Never let them live in the present.
The unconscious does not distinguish past, present, and future. It exists in the timeless present.
Francisco Varela taught that the autopoiesis of the Whole Whole is ETERNITY.
Don't do a thing until you are pulsing with the Eternal Present.
Is there more than one nothing? And more than one everything? Is your nothing different than my nothing?
"I have nothing to say, and I am saying it, and that is poetry"
John Cage
"Theatre takes place all the time, wherever one is, and art simply facilitates persuading one that
this is the case."
John Cage
Perhaps I am not a therapist, not a transformer, not a shaman, not a teacher, at least in terms of how those names have been domesticated, that is, tamed into being predictable enforcers of a status quo guild. I aim to be a wild shaman, a wild therapist, a wild tranceformer, a cagey trickster, a loopy performer, a coyote teacher, a not nothing of the most trippy kind, but I am quite playfully serious and seriously playful about all of this.
Where does the "transformation" come from? Answer depends on the hat I put on:
Bushman hat: n/om
Seiki Jutsu hat: universe
Milton Erickson hat: inner resources for growth
Zulu hat: ancestors
Recursive hat: you
Zen hat: Buddha nature of sleeping dog
Jazz hat: improv
Wild shaman hat: spiritus
Knowing hat: I don't know
N/om hat: first creation where everything changes
Universe hat: dance of Shiva
You hat: us
Epistemology hat: the hand (an ensemble of universal fingers) that puts on the hat
"To understand the whole of us and the world, we have to participate with the whole of us. Specially, the bringing together of verbal and nonverbal forms of knowledge, rational and intuitive, is necessary."
Francisco Varela
Now if you haven't drilled a hole in your book, you missed one of the most important teachings offered here. If that was too much for you, at least prick a small hole in one page. It might cause the necessary leak.
In all seriousness, and I say this because I expect practically no one to believe me: I have spent a lifetime studying many of the great systems of psychotherapy, shamanism, and transformative practices. I was fortunate to meet many leading practitioners. Bottom line: almost all of it is bullshit. There are plenty of seductive explanatory systems - they attract because they are seen as familiar. People go straight for that which they already believe. Nothing feels like a better relief than having your own beliefs (or desires) confirmed. This is why that which is popular (the bestsellers and populists) typically represents that which is most full of shit. But recognizing the familiar is the first sign that it has no transformative value. If it holds the possibility for higher order change, learning, transformation, then it should be recognized as not familiar, strange, odd, weird, but at the same time be held with some degree of respect because of the context that holds it.
I personally have little use for grand theories or theorists that do not have real life exemplifications of how their ideas have transformational efficacy in the everyday world. Most good intentioned methods are not going to work and will be assimilated in such a way as to make things worse. There is a way out and it requires walking out of the door. How do we get up and start walking? Enter the action koan.
33. GRIDLOCK: ODE TO WILBER & MR. ED
The grid became full:
All was said.
Everything known
and explained
and understood -
the end of that.
But everything was the same:
All unfulfilled.
Everything separated
and covered
and dead -
the end game.
Along came a horse:
Wilber wanted it to talk
and explain everything.
Someone sang: "I am Mr. Ed"
Plop, plop dropped the manure.
And then came a seed
Carried inside a bird dropping
Rolled by a dung beetle -
It sat and said nothing.
A flower opened without words
without knowing
without understanding -
unboxed, unspoken, unwritten life.
You must be ready for an "accident" to happen - which, according to Stravinsky, is the "only thing that can inspire us."
35. LESS GRID THROUGH MORE GRID
My twin brother, not totally unrelated to G Spencer Brown's twin, has suggested that we all make a grid with as many quadrants and subquadrants and hyperbolic twists and turns as we desire and fill it with as many dots as we possibly can. Then place this well filled grid on the floor and stand on a chair about five feet away and observe it. He said this is what it means to have a Theory that Explains Everything. He is writing a book entitled, "Knowing it All is Nothing at All."
36. STEPHEN TYLER ON NOT UNDERSTANDING
Some words of wisdom from my colleague, Professor Stephen A. Tyler, endowed chair of anthropology, Rice University (founder of cognitive anthropology and a cutting edge postmodern thinker):
First Law of Culture;
The more we control things, the more uncontrollable we both become.
Theorem:
The more we comprehend the other, the less we comprehend the other.
Proof:
We cannot comprehend or understand or explain the other in its otherness, for inasmuch as we will have succeeded in understanding the other, we will have failed to understand the other, for what we will have understood as the other will no longer have been that other, but will have become the other-as-understood-by-and-for-us.
Tinkering a bit with Professor Tyler's work:
First Law of Knowing:
The more we know things, the more unknowable we both become.
Theorem:
The more we try to map the other, the less we are able to map the other.
When the map or canvas has been torn, even pricked with the tiniest drilled hole, the light shall shine. It will burn away all illusion and reveal the deepest felt unknown. Let it shine, shine, shine!!
The Original Ones emerged - through the hole - in the Kalahari sand - the infinite hourglass. Let us shake our minds empty, with nothing restraining us from entering the INFINITE BLISS. Honor the hole in your book. Only it can take you past the words. Let these holes be the callings for the anti-cut that reveals the entry, our beginning as the new tribe.
39. PLEASE CONSIDER THIS LIST:
seashell
plant's roots
song
quark
kiss
distinction
epistemology
creativity
God
god
chopstick
moon
drum
gender
galaxy
flea
research
ocean
dust particle
locomotive
Now consider how you engage these names, notions, ideas, and descriptions. Using the name does not imply that your use has anything to do with that which is named. I may talk about a song, but there may be no music. Similarly, we may be uncreative in our use of the creative metaphor and violate the presence of the relational in our feminine discourse, or eradicate dialogue in our monologues about it.
On the other hand, we can examine a seashell, a kiss, and a moonbeam and find that our ways of interacting and knowing are similar across all the different phenomenal domains. This similarity makes the differences among phenomena less interesting, less relevant, less present than the commonalities in how we interact and know them. We are looking at looking, knowing about knowing, being Being, bring forth the bringing forths.
Let me play with this again: here there is no primary importance given to the distinctions between ocean and dust particle or between research and a flea. What is primary is the pattern that holds in our ways of beholding, knowing, interacting with, becoming, being as we share company with the names, ideas, metaphors at hand. When we move away from the relevance of distinguishing distinctions on the basis of assumed compositional criteria (men versus women, rock versus water, sky versus earth), and find ourselves facing how we are created by our habitual relations with pre-assumed others, then we start a pilgrimage toward finding our flux-presence in the world as well as an inquiry into holding/finding/juggling/inventing/dancing/singing the galaxy inside a seashell, revealing the tremor we were born to embody.
In the beginning of human culture, people knew how to shake their booties and in doing so, the secrets of the universe were revealed. Then along came language, social hierarchy, over-inflated beliefs, and the mirages of understanding. Whereas human beings embodied the most important truths in the beginning, it all went to hell when we stilled our bodies and fed too many words to our minds.
Look at the oldest library in the world - the rock art of southern Africa. What we see are images of people dancing themselves into ecstasy. Many generations later, the elders of the oldest living culture on Earth today, the Kalahari Bushmen, still know that the electrified body inspired by heightened feelings - rather than anything remotely related to a calm and still presence - is the master key to being fully alive.
What is most important has little or nothing to do with words and linguistic understanding. As the Bushmen say, words can trick us into believing anything. With word trickery, we may end up worshipping a pile of elephant dung or a heap of metal. Somewhere between the early cradle of civilization and the internet, our species made the colossal mistake of proclaiming that words, theories, and understandings are the roads to salvation and happiness. If this is true, or even partially true, then it means that we have been misled for over a thousand years. The word games have led us to posit one form of gender, race, culture, nation, or religion as superior to others - thereby justifying any and all acts of arrogant greed, war, and destruction of life and planet.
Religions and philosophies can never deliver the truth we most deeply desire. Our born destiny is the same as the first humans - to release our bodies, our whole beings, into feeling and expressing the deepest joy and ecstasy. In other words, dancing our selves into heaven, enlightenment, peace, and love. If there is anything history teaches, it is that words and understandings aren't taking us anywhere but more of the same bullshit. We need to start up the wild drumming and shake off the words and stuck thoughts.
If we don't free ourselves to be ecstatically tuned and happy, we may continue going to hell while taking the planet down with us. It's time to turn to our species' deep collective past, held by the embodied wisdom expression of the ancestral culture. They teach us that the revolution we need cannot be voiced through lyrics or words, but through spirited rhythms and music. The Gods only speak through music. Anyone who says they have talked to God is a liar. Words only have value when they help liberate us from any over-seriousness, either/or thinking, and any form of fundamentalism from the Christian right wing to the Buddhist left wing and the New Age no wing. All are word games. Unless the Dalai Lama and the Pope are willing to trade costumes for a week and thereby truly contribute to the big breakup and meltdown of the differences that hurt others, they are unable to liberate us. We need to shake ourselves free from the shackles of over-serious words and totalizing meanings.
Since most words and lyrics are dead, one of the most important social movements today is hip hop. It usurps words and says "fuck you" to all feigned political correctness, piety, and double bound social manners. In a Karl Rove mind fuck driven political climate and a Hollywood Spielberg glossing of violence with Disney-esque bullshit, hip hop is a fresh breeze of integrity that makes things real again. It sounds violent when it speaks of violence as opposed to sounding nice or talking about peace and God while inflicting huge scale slaughter. Hip hop is the first step toward freeing us from the bullshit of words, exposing all the violence, lawlessness, narcissism, and greed that defines our present situation. It mirrors the truth in those who most vehemently oppose it. Oprah's reckless greed and profit-making promotion of ignorant pop stars like Dr. Phil are mirrored and exposed by the gold toothed, diamond laced, Bentley-driving hip hop stars. Hip hop shines the light on the ugly deceptors that are in positions of cultural leadership. It is today's prophetic presence.
It should be no surprise that hip hop is held and voiced by the youth and has its origins in the African Diaspora. My son, DJ SKEE, is one the leading figures in hip hop and hosts top rated shows worldwide including on Sirius Satellite Radio. Most recently, DJ SKEE was behind the emergence of Akon, the Game, and recently produced the "American Godfather" remix of Jay-Z. DJ Skee says, "My Dad has been in Africa trying to let their truth free to the rest of the world, while I am in America helping deliver the truth from the streets."
I am proud of my son and encourage him to not be discouraged by the idiotic protests of dumbed-down television talking heads (and dead beat bodies). They are no different than those who historically suppressed folks from dancing wildly in the streets. It's time to silence the bull shit, first by releasing the heightened emotional expression of words and then to awaken the drums, not the gentle pitter patter of a smooth click, but the wild thunderstorm of unexpected cacophonies of life arousing beats and celebratory noise.
What does it mean to sound the revolution? Here's a few teasers that provide some hints - remember, it can't be said in words:
*You gotta go beyond dance: no choreography, let the body be free to move without purpose.
*Recognize that whatever the great mystery or god is, it hates all reasonable and tamed definitions of god. God is not what the word authorities say it is! God is a rhythm not a bullshit concept!
*Spirituality has nothing to do with spirit. It is another word game perpetuating hierarchy and self-righteousness.
*New Age is as judgmental and ignorant as any religion, maybe more so.
*Although some of the historical figures of the world's great religions were radical love maestros and wisdom cool, God help us from the folks who created inflexible institutions around them.
*Being relaxed and stilling the mind puts you asleep when you need to WAKE THE FUCK UP!
*Meditation without wild ecstasy is a dead end.
*You're more likely to become enlightened at a concert than at a church service.
*You only get the deepest truths, the greatest visions, if you paradoxically are wildly absurd and irreverent.
*Kundalini and chi are unnecessary words that refer to amplified excitement. No need to mystify this natural experience.
*There are no kundalini accidents in the Kalahari. They occur in any culture stupid enough to sit still while being excited. Get up and move!
*The so-called wisdom of the East is as ignorant as the wisdom of the West. Look where both have gotten us. Let's consider the wisdom of Mother Africa, the ancestral culture that honored rhythms more than words.
*Encourage hip hop to get wilder than it presently is. It doesn't go far enough. When you have shaken the lyrics, then bring on the wild rhythms. They'll set you free.
*The revolution is through sounding it and allowing yourself to be fully shaken.
Is this revolutionary enough to inspire a turn?
This sound revolution aims to bring forth an earthquake inside the established traditions that teach and preach how we are supposed to seek the purpose of our life. All the best selling spiritual writers I have experienced are simply charlatans, but that is not the problem. Everyone is a charlatan, a fraud, and an idiot when they limit themselves to word games. So what! The problem with the gurus is that they don't have a rhythm, they don't shake and they don't wiggle their ass. It is entirely about the rhythms and movements we make.
This is the revolution: Shake everything up - your body, mind, heart, ideas, understandings, and everyday routines. My CDs aim to shake everyone up. Surrounded by a dozen African drums, synthesizers, and a Steinway concert piano, I go into an ecstatic frenzy and create the sounds that announce the revolution that has awaited thousands of years to re-set us free. We should assume that the first people of the Kalahari, the world's original shakers, shamans, and masters of spirit, have been waiting for this since the beginning of human culture.
Imagine going past the dance! Shake yourself into the mysteries of life and tell anyone who tells you that you need to be still, or read, or believe, or understand, that there is a true alternative: shaking yourself into ecstatic truth.
[Keeney does not consider himself a spiritual teacher, healer, or shaman. His calls for Sounding the Revolution take place in CD recordings and performance settings where he prefers being called a radical improvateur. He was recently backstage and onstage with hip hop artists David Banner and DJ SKEE.]
There was a guy who shook from time to time. Then a bunch of right wing kkkristian fanatics in the deep south got upset and wanted him chased out of town. What to do with this? Be scared? Get religious? Call a hit woman? This guy decided to be skillfully crazy and create an absurd performance. With a computer wizard, an experimental sound engineer, some crazy musicians and a room full of instruments, he created wild music and sounds. Act One was called "Sacred Reversal." It was totally improvised. They did things they promised to never tell another soul. In the midst of it all, the shaking man read parts of the Bible backwards, doing so while shouting like a country evangelist. Then he tried gargling water while preaching. It made him giggle so much that he started laughing and the water went down the wrong pipe. He felt he was drowning. He and his friends went into a panic state. He couldn't breathe. He was on the edge of life and death, turning colors, going deep into the void. And then a mysterious voice said, "Chill." He replied with whatever was left of his mind, "Why not?" He then relaxed and a tiny breath came back. Then another breath emerged and another, until he could laugh again. The musicians and science nerds were freaked out, but eventually all laughed together. They went to the swimming pool for baptism and cocktails and guess what had happened? They found a baby opossum had drowned in the pool during the choking episode. Gosh golly, gee willickers, they actually must have performed an exorcism on the entire fucking kkkristian right wing deep south, suckin' that possum right out of all their ectoplasmic bullshit. They then moved on to act 2 and performed the most amazing musical creation they had ever recorded. They called it Requiem for Opossum.
Lessons learned:
*Never take anything too seriously
*When facing death in the final moment: chill
*When necessary, exorcise the rest of the world by performing any creative act
*During the latter, consider reading out loud any holy book backwards
*Do not gargle during an exorcism
*Always say thank you to the opossums
*Let your best friends know these things when they are in need of shifting gears
Shamanism is a topic that is largely misunderstood by contemporary writers and scholars, including those who are publicly renowned for their assumed expertise about it. Having said that, I should add that the improvisational and idiosyncratic aspects of shamanism imply that it is risky to make any general claims about it. Shamans in the same culture can be as different from one another in their practice as psychotherapists vary in beliefs and conduct.
I have spent a lifetime experiencing and studying the nature of shamanism. I say "ecstatic shamanism" or "wild shamanism" to differentiate it from what I call "tamed shamanism." In its natural form, shamanism is wild expression. The earliest observers of shamans described them as wild, neurologically disturbed, neurotic, or psychotic. This is the only way they could account for extreme body excitation, shaking, trembling, unpredictable sound making, and extreme carrying on. The difficulty in holding the wild has led most cultures to tame the wild spirit and convert it into ritualistic procedures that calm and hypnotize rather than excite and awaken. At this time in history, let us look at ecstatic/wild forms.
43. MIRCEA ELIADE SHAMANISM QUOTES (from Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy):
"shamanism" = "technique of ecstasy " (p. 4)
"shamanism is always a gift from the gods or spirits" (p. 15)
"One destined to shamanship begins by becoming frenzied…" (p. 16)
"During his/her ecstasy the candidate sings shamanic hymns. This is the sign that contact with the beyond has been established." (p. 19)
"If necessary, (the shaman) can drum, dance, and jump all night." (p. 28)
"the traditional schema of an initiation ceremony: suffering, death, resurrection." (p. 33)
(Among the Iglulik Eskimo) "the master obtains the angakoq for him, also called quamaneq, that is, the disciple's 'lightning' or 'enlightenment,' for the angakoq consists 'of a mysterious light which the shaman suddenly feels inside his body, inside his head, within the brain, an inexplicable searchlight, a luminous fire, which enables him to see in the dark, both literally and metaphorically speaking." (p. 60)
"This is the well-known sign of a genuine ecstatic experience: 'he feels as though he were drunk, and does not know whether it is day or night nor what he is doing.'" (p. 100)
"shamans do not differ from other members of the collectivity by their quest for the scared - which is normal and universal human behavior - but by their capacity for ecstatic experience..." (p. 107)
"What differentiates a shaman ... his ecstatic experience." (p. 107)
"The Yukagir have two terms to designate the shaman: a'lma (from the verb 'to do') and i'rkeye, literally 'the trembling one.'" (p. 245)
"Songs are improvised by the shaman and he/she forgets them after the seance; their purpose is to summon the helping spirits. But in inspiration they are purely ecstatic..."
(p. 303)
"...numerous texts warn the aspirant against the danger of letting himself be seduced by the magical sense of boundless capability that they produce and that can make the yogin forget his true aim - final liberation." (p. 417)
"We know that the shamanic 'spirit language' not only attempts to imitate animal cries but contains a certain proportion of spontaneous creations presumably explained by pre-ecstatic euphoria and ecstasy itself." (p. 440)
"... we find that many emperors, sages, alchemists, and sorcerers 'went up to heaven.'" (p. 449)
"Hence we must conceive of Asiatic shamanism as an archaic technique of ecstasy whose original underlying ideology - belief in a celestial Supreme Being with whom it was possible to have direct relations by ascending into the sky - was constantly being transformed by a long series of exotic contributions culminating in the invasion of Buddhism. ... The phenomenology of the trance...underwent many changes and corruptions, due in large confusion as to the precise nature of ecstasy." (p. 507)
"Sickness, jail, poverty, getting drunk - I had to experience all that myself. Sinning makes the world go round. You can't be so stuck up, so inhuman that you want to be pure, your soul wrapped up in a plastic bag, all the time. You have to be God and the devil, both of them. Being a good medicine man means being right in the midst of the turmoil, not shielding your self from it. It means experiencing life in all its phases. It means not being afraid of cutting up and playing the fool now and then."
Lame Deer, Lakota Medicine Man, p. 79
"Explicit in Iktomi's personality and deeds is his dualistic nature. He is capable of transforming himself into any object, but his natural appearance is that of a spider. He is at once the personification of good and evil, pride and humility, knowledge and ignorance, maleness and femaleness, child and adult."
William Powers, Yuwipi, p. 12
46. PERFORMANCES/PERFORMERS/PROPS NEEDED:
Drumming of a most peculiar kind
Unrecognizable love song
Spoon skating on a watermelon
Five pennies on a string being whirled in the air
Book with three holes in it
14 images of shamans that come to life
Firecracker that squirts water
Rattle with pieces of chocolate inside it
Sunglasses with attached medieval images of transformation
Potted human being
Goldfish beverage
One tire covered with glitter
Three wise words
Twelve toy robots
Ostrich egg attached to water hose
Wallpaper with the word "feminine" repeated 5000 times
Giant 20 foot long straw
Flashlights that sing
Turtles that fly
Bear that pontificates
Lion that drives an ambulance
Forgotten dust particles
15-year old piece of used chalk
Dictionary without any words
Horn that makes explosive sound
Dolphin that plays accordion
Purple lights that look yellow and red
Sami lawyer
Bushman ballerina
Minnesota Triplets
Apples and oranges that dance the tango
Jazz pencil
The door must be opened so that the passage can call us in.
We will lubricate the hinges so the door may easily open.
Prepare for the opening to the openings.
Await the beginning of remembering the first passage, the oldest door.
Ancestral pulling, wanting us to hear their voice and rejoice the releasing of roads and passageways to spirit lands.
WELCOME SISTERS AND BROTHERS.
Tonight you should knock on the door, asking for the listening that voices remembrance.
For the next three nights, you are to find the image of a drum. Draw it or make a copy of a photograph. Place this drum image underneath your pillow. Before sleeping, take out the drum and place it over your heart. Tap your fingers on it. Hear the old ones playing the drum with ecstatic feeling. Remember how they were played, heard, and felt. Now place the drum underneath your pillow. Acknowledge that you will be sleeping on your drum. Go into the world of dream with the ceremonial hearing of the old drumming, the old remembering. Ask to be taught. Ask to be taught. Ask to be taught. Oh ma shaw ka ti ti ma. Oh ma ka taw wa oh ma saw.
Look at your hands and anoint a particular finger. Do this now. Without over-consideration, choose a finger that will help you in a special way. Name this finger with a spontaneous sound and bless it in the ways your voice will find. Now touch your body where the life force wants to enter. Shout out and vibrate your body with no care as to what needs to be released. Do so with the fullest expectation that you are being softened and that arrows of life force are entering, to be awakened when it is time. Oh mo show now tee do komay. In cimon des remenus os needum.
50. WHY NOT GO FOR IT NOW?
SHAMANIC BLOW IT WIDE OPEN TASK:
Stay up 2 hours later than usual and wake up 30 minutes earlier than usual. Consider this a shamanic interruptus. As you stay awake 2 hours before usual departing time, say the word "teach me" over and over. Make sure you sing it while moving your body. Go outside and tell it to a star even if it is not visible. Go to sleep believing that a change will be initiated by this action, whether or not it is revealed by vision. Expect it. Be grateful for it. Do it to become it.
You might go inside the jaws of a mythopoetic crocodile
or rest peacefully in your grandmother's lap
or find yourself with wings
or talk with a honeybee
or dance with a rose
or dissolve into the soil
or become a steam of passion
or make love with a grasshopper
or enjoyably suck fire released by a dragon
or dance on lily pads
or give birth to your mother
or marry a unicorn
or ride a giraffe
or enter the intestine of a lion
or drink the blood of a turnip
or talk to a dandelion
or sprinkle yourself with letters
or get baptized in laughter
or dive into a hole
or listen to yourself say what cannot be said or feel your heart crack open
or be loved by the light
or embrace the unseen
or surrender to the void
or pledge allegiance to the wild
or zuck a duck
or sing a joke
or wrap yourself around a pencil
or talk with your hand
or heal 5000 dolphins
or release 500,000,000,000 molecules
or plunge into the sun
or flirt with the moon
or drown in chocolate
or add two extra fingers
or kiss with your ear
or write a letter to your next incarnation
or receive a nut
or shout a silence
Now you have been taking the first steps toward making relationship with the sacred drum - living with an image you have laid your head upon while sleeping. We will now walk further with the drum that awaits you on the other side. Through the rhythms, you are carried through the VEIL, fording the divide between day and night. With each crossing is a widening of an opening.
Again hand-draw the image of the drum you have made a relationship with. Inside the boundaries of the drum, draw a sacred symbol. It may be like an ancient rock art image. Or it may be any symbol at all. You can make one spontaneously and unconsciously as your hand automatically draws a marking. Or you can give contemplative consideration for what you will draw upon the drum.
Each night for the next 10 days, you are to draw the drum and draw a sacred symbol on it. You may draw the same symbol or a different one each night, either making a slight alteration, a major change, or introducing an entirely different image. Do this every night until the drum and the symbol carry you into a shamanic dream. When that happens, you are to place that drum image in a special place in your room. Write a brief description and/or draw any image or color you experienced in the dream upon the other side of the drum. Place an offering on it and consider that it has become more than a drum and a symbol. It has become one of your canoes and is capable of taking you across the divide.
When you have a dream canoe, then you must decide whether you will use it again. If you decide to use it again, then make a special pouch or find something to place it in so that you may carry it with you throughout the day. As you carry it through the day, be mindful that it is preparing you for the evening crossing.
When a dream canoe is used, the next day you must faithfully know/trust/believe/act as if it has carried you across. You must wake up the next day saying "thank you" for the crossing. It will deliver you something that may or may not be another dream. It may be a new thought, intuition, experience, sight, sound, that pops up during the next day. Be on the hunt for what the evening crossing brought. When you notice it, find a way of adding this gift to the drum or the offerings that surround its special place. In this way, the drum will become a stronger vessel as will your relationship with its ability to carry you into the Unknown Mysteries.
Into the dark we must each go to find the light, a light that cannot be seen through words, spoken or heard. Move, dance, laugh, or weep to erase the minding and binding of words so that the light may shine through. Continue sleeping with your drum image or try another drum or try another symbol that marks the drum. Bring forth the canoes. Empower the ritual of going into the dark with your drum. Sing with it, dance with it, move with it before getting into bed. Perhaps set the alarm for 3 am to repeat the ritual. Show the deepest part of the WILD that you are ready and available to receive.
Place a dot of red paint on the right side of your drum image, a yellow dot on the left side, and then draw a bolt of lighting that connects them. Ah ma sa tee moh!
Consider blowing staccato breaths onto your drum image and then with a big gust of blown wind, allow it to fly out of your hand. If it falls more to the right side of your body, hold it with your left hand. And vice versa. As you prepare to place it under your pillow imagine that you will wake up the next morning and place it inside your shoe and walk with it throughout the next day. Decide the ritual you will undertake to determine which shoe to wear it in. Walk with it the next morning.
Collect no more than 5 drops from a natural spring or river. Bring it home and baptize your drum image.
Shine a flashlight on your drum, doing so for a second. Repeat no more than 5 times.
Place one hand in your freezer while holding a glass of hot water with the other hand. Do so until you feel that an opposite condition has been satisfactorily achieved. Then proceed to hold the drum with both hands, one hand on each side. Do this before sleeping with it.
Make a relationship with some fruit. In your imagination, create some pear bears, banana giraffes, apple owls, and grapefruit kittens. Until plants and animals have interactive relations in our minds, we cannot have nontrivial relationship with either. Go find your new fruit allies from the mytho-absurdo-poetic world.
This week you are invited to step into the mind of the fantasy child - cultivating wonder, joy, play, and full presence.
Position your drum image(s) under the foot of the bed. They are there for your dream/imaginary feet to dance on should the calling present itself. When going to bed, imagine that you can infuse yourself with a child's pure joy and delight. Sing the most meaningful song you remember from your childhood. Perhaps your mother or grandmother sang it to you. If you can't think of a song, then select any song and pretend that it is the song you always wanted to experience as a child and now have found it. Go to sleep in a state of innocence and open mouth awe of the possibility that anything can happen to you when you are immersed in beginner's mind.
55. I WENT INTO THE DREAMTIME LAST NIGHT:
I saw the top of my head as an egg that was cracked all the way across the top. When I touched it, the shell fell away to reveal a soft covering that still looked like an eggshell. It then broke open and 4-5 baby birds fell out, taking first steps as they tried to stretch their wings. I had no brains - the inside of my head was a bird nest.
56. UNIVERSITY OF HEARTS DIVINE
Let's give birth to a new university: the University of Hearts Divine.
Let us collectively build a nest. Each person is to gather materials for a nest. Place it near or under your bed. We shall imagine that all of our gatherings will be seen by spirit as holding a very large nest. In this nest we shall place our special images, markings, words, metaphors, symbols, indications of relationship with other living presences, and our whole being. There shall be a great hatching. Each of us is necessary to create the NEST. Ask anyone with an open heart and imagination to join our cause. Prepare for the birth of a university.
Gathering the straw, grass, stones, threads, ropes, flower petals, words, symbols, metaphors, words, rock art, songs, fabric, buttons, seashells, branches, jars of fresh water, mud, clay: building our NEST.
Your mother was once your nest. Let us honor her by placing her name in the nest. Feel free to post the names of your grandmothers, real or imaginary.
It's not about doing shamanic ritual.
It's about BEING shamanic/alchemical/transformative in all things.
As cybernetician Heinz von Foerster said, "To know yourself, CHANGE!" Now go change!!
I WOULD LIKE FOR YOU TO IMAGINE THAT A MAJOR SHAMANIC EXPERIENCE WILL HAPPEN TO YOU THIS FRIDAY NIGHT. EXPECT IT TO HAPPEN IN SOME DIMENSION. PREPARE YOURSELF FOR IT. START WALKING TOWARD IT.
*While conversing with someone, say "Rosa Mystica" in the middle of a spoken sentence. If asked, say this is an extremely rare mystical practice.
*Wear a rose over your heart or on the top of your shoe or the top of your head.
*Serve rose tea to a tree.
*Adopt a thorn.
*Attach a stem to your pen and write a letter to yourself, explaining how you need to learn from flowers.
*Go to a restaurant and order three desserts. Only look at them and then ask for them to be boxed up separately. Draw a rose on each box. Take them to friends.
*Purchase a rose at one flower shop. Then purchase a second rose at another flower shop. Introduce them to one another and escort them on a date.
*Sleep on the floor next to your bed, while allowing a rose with its stem to sleep in your bed.
*Do all of the above again and again.
In the world of Mystery, the place where shamans unlearn, we may cry for a vision, lament and beg for a song, and wait patiently for the gods to gift us in any way. Some of the greatest shamans have apprenticed for years, fasted for weeks, and sat though many ceremonies, waiting to receive one word, one sentence, one image, or one song from Spirit. If you received one word, one sentence, one image, or one song, you were very lucky. If you received more, you were more than generously blessed. If you are waiting, then you are like all the shamans who have ever lived. You are on the road to receiving something if you sincerely persist with your journey. Maybe without any conscious knowing, it is happening. Maybe you are only waiting for a moment to realize that it has been received.
61. WORDS GLUE IT TOGETHER: NOW UNSTICK IT!
The words wrapped around the everyday make things stick together, bound for no reason other than to stabilize the every of the everyday. Minding and wording are doing the gluing.
We assume that no one can possibly change/transform without new minding or new wording, but that is just another minding and wording, more of the same gluing.
The way out: the transformative hinge, door, exit: undo the glue, the words, the mind.
We are here to release the straight jackets that hold together our everyday habits, sequences, redundacies, cliches, over-used-under-standings, and homeo-staticized realities.
We gotta do some undoing of the doing to get to some transformed BEING.
Undo the doing that glues the everyday - seek release from the karmic recycling of psychological re-re-re-re-re-incarnations.
Gonna have to trick yourself, arrange an accident to fall outside the box, Box, BOX.
Doing so with altered states of action and interaction to bring on the altered states of BEING HERE IN THE HOW-NOW-BROWN-COW-BIG-TIME NOWWWWWWWWWWOWWWWW
Our EXPERIMENTS aim for nothing less than changing the entire world. Begin by stepping into the world in a way that is out of step with the binds that restrain the world from being free.
62. FOR THE NEXT THREE DAYS, YOU ARE TO WRITE A LETTER TO YOURSELF EACH MORNING.
EACH LETTER SHOULD BE SENT TO MERLIN c/o YOUR NAME AND ADDRESS. IN THIS LETTER WRITE OUT ONE WORD, THE WORD THAT IS THE BEST METAPHOR FOR THE TRANSFORMATION YOU HOPE TO EXPERIENCE IN YOUR EVERYDAY. EACH DAY SHOULD BRING A DIFFERENT METAPHOR. MAKE SURE THAT EACH LETTER IS MAILED.
AS YOU WAIT FOR THE LETTERS TO ARRIVE, PREPARE A HOME FOR THE METAPHORS. PERHAPS IT WILL BE AN ALTAR SPACE, A SHOE BOX RE-DECORATED AS A TINY HOME FOR YOUR THREE METAPHORS, OR A WISHING WELL MADE FOR PLACEMENT UNDERNEATH YOUR BED. GET YOUR HOME READY FOR YOUR MAGICAL THREE METAPHORS OF TRANSFORMATION.
WHILE WAITING, SING THE WILDEST SONG YOU KNOW (AND LIKE). SING IT WHEN YOU WAKE UP, WHEN YOU SHOWER, AS YOU WRITE EACH LETTER. AT LEAST ONCE AN HOUR THROUGHOUT THE DAY, BEFORE EACH MEAL, AND BEFORE FALLING ASLEEP, SING IT IN MANY DIFFERENT WAYS - softly, loudly, slowly, fast, blues, rock, country, jazz scat, chant. GET READY FOR THE SEEDS OF CHANGE. THESE METAPHOR SEEDS ARE NOW TO BE CREATED, MAILED, PREPARED FOR, RECEIVED, AND GIVEN A NEW HOME.
BY THE POWER VESTED IN THE NOT KNOWINGS OF ALL THAT MATTERS BUT NEVER MINDS, WE SEND FORTH THE CURRENTS OF TRANSFORMATION INSIDE THE WINDS OF EVERY BREATH OF EVERY ONE OF US AS WE BREATH TOGETHER, BEAT OUR HEARTS TOGETHER, MAKING THE SEEDS, MOVING THE SEEDS, ANTICIPATING THE SEEDS AND ALL THAT THEY BRING INTO OUR TINIEST HEART OF HEARTS, WITHIN WHICH IS HELD THE ABSURDUM LOCOMOTION, THE MOVEMENT THAT WILL RELEASE.
I SAY THIS WITH THE AUTHORITY OF SHE THAT I EMBRACE AS I SAY THIS:
AS YOU READ THIS NOW, BLOW A PUFF OF WIND. I SAY IT AGAIN:
BLOW
A
PUFF
OF
WIND
LET US ALL BRING FORTH THE TRANSFORMATIVE WIND TOGETHER, KNOWING THAT IF THREE OF US PUFF AT THE SAME TIME, SOMEONE TONIGHT WILL BE VISITED IN THEIR DREAMS. BLOW, BLOW, BLOW.
I'M BLOWING AT MY SCREEN, AIMING RIGHT AT YOU. BLOW BACK AT ME AND AT EVERYONE ELSE WHO COMES OUR WAY
I SAY BRING ON THE GODDESS OF WIND AND LET THE MOVEMENT BE UNLOOSENED, UNBOUND, UNKNOWN.
YOU SHOULD NOW GATHER SOME REAL SEEDS, ANY KIND OF SEEDS. PLACE THEM IN THE HOME YOU HAVE MADE OR ARE SOON TO MAKE FOR YOUR METAPHOR SEEDS. PLEASE PROCEED.
MAYBE YOU SHOULD TAKE A PHOTOGRAPH OF YOURSELF AND THEN CUT IT OUT TO BE THE SHAPE OF A SEED. PLACE THAT SEED INTO YOUR SEED HOME.
MAYBE YOU SHOULD TAKE OTHER PHOTOGRAPHS OR NAMES OF PEOPLE YOU ARE CLOSE TO AND CUT THEM OUT AS SEEDS AND BRING THEM TO THEIR SEED HOME.
The ACTION KOAN is what interests me, not setting about to change the world with more talk, textual production, and understanding.
Everyone talks & writes about changing the world through words, words, words. Let's stop the wording game. Turn words inside out. Give them less power to hypnotically induct habituated understandings. ACT RADICALLY DIFFERENT IN ORDER TO SEED AN UNEXPECTED EXPERIENCE: HATCH A SURPRISING OUTCOME.
Consider writing the following words on a tiny card and placing it on the backside of your driver's license:
I am neither a neither nor a both.
I am none of the names
Make up some names of places - maybe 25 names. Don't read further until you have done this.
Do an internet search and see if any word is the name (or close to being the name) of a place in the world. Regard this as your second birthplace.
69. CHANGE YOUR LIFE WITHIN THE NEXT 48 HOURS.
YOU ARE DEAD!
NOW RESURRECT!!
GET ON WITH IT!!
Announcing the end of the habituated you.
v
Now reinvent your next life.
Dress rehearsal tomorrow!
THE TRUTH:
Your mind is an imbecile.
Wake up the whole of you, doing so through heightened feelings!!
Swallow any available seed and say, "It's now time to grow."
One more time: not one book matters any more.
Time to act, tinker, experiment, and play.
COME ON IN THE WATER. IT'S WHERE YOU ORIGINALLY BEGAN!!
REPEAT AFTER ME:
"I, THE SPEAKING PART, AM AN IDIOT. LET THE WHOLE OF THAT WHICH EMBODIES ME SPRING FORTH."
Gather your seeds: some should be biological seeds while others should be metaphor seeds. Call each biological seed a "bio seed" and believe that it needs to be introduced to a metaphor seed. Find two that belong together. In the bringing together of a bio seed and a metaphor seed, imagine that a new chapter of your BIOgraphy will begin. Plant the seeds to grow your forthcoming stories. Place the coupled seeds on your body, attaching with tape. Walk through a day and sleep through a night while carrying the coupled seeds. Touch them, rub them, scratch them, wet them, talk to them, dance with them, and honor them. Make them come alive in your everyday and every night Being. Bring new life to your life!
Transformation of the everyday does not require words though it sometimes utilizes words. Honor your noises and silences, along with images, felt presences and absences. Invite freedom of expression and freedom of non-expression. Bring forth the seeds of transformation. Allow more seeds to enter your deep not knowing. Some seeds have been planted. Others are waiting to be planted. Consider browsing through the entries again to see if something has grown inside you. You will know that germination has taken place if you experience any entry in a different way. Know that we have started something.
Let us strive to be illegitimate sons and daughters of God, proclaiming the irreverent truths. We shall know that we have spoken the shaking truth when people get truly shaken and upset about their overly rigid truths being played with. They will lose control of their calm self and shout at us, writing nasty things about our legitimacy. When someone else is an inappropriate critical bastard, let us shout with glee: "We have shaken someone up. Let them continue shaking until they shake themselves into being a more authentic bastard prophet." If everything we say is believed by everyone, then we have failed. The truth will piss off some of the people some of the time.
Lord, make us instruments of your divine madness. Make us empty so we can know the fullness of your original mysteries. Help us experience who we are not so we can become who we are. Help us be serious about the absurd, and absurd about the serious. Fill our bodies and minds with creative energy and inspired expression. Bring us contrary visions. We rejoice in being spiritual idiots, fools, and imbeciles completely devoted to your unattainable wisdom. For these things we pray. Amen
74. LESSONS FROM THE LOST SHAMANIC EPISTLE
Know that most of today's so-called shamans, spiritual teachers, and elders have lost their way. Somewhere along the path they lost their childlike nature. You will recognize them by their over-seriousness, their judgmental pronouncements, and their literalism. Their words will reflect fundamentalism in all sizes and shapes. Do not follow them. Instead, try to play with them, hoping that the disturbance created by your presence might awaken what they have forgotten.
Some will say that you, a wild shaman, must be seriously concerned about spiritual protection. Be careful not to become too preoccupied with protection. The rituals of protection too easily call forth the dichotomy of good and evil, giving evil more weight than it deserves. We feed evil when we are too serious about it. Stand in the light, feel the love, and then get downright silly. That's a triple whammy: Evil hates light, love, and laughter. It can slip in only if one of those three guardians is not present. Of these three, perhaps the most powerful protection is the laughter of a child. Open your spiritual valves with shaking childish merriment. Then you will be ready to do God's work.
There are times to get serious: The experiences of ecstatic energy and visionary rapture will take your breath away. Be serious about them, but only during the moments in which they occur. Afterward, return to levity. Forget forging the truth onto iron. Instead, be available time and time again for the spirit to catch you, ride you, and fly you anew.
There are four sacred corners of the wild shaman's mystical cross:
*The ecstatic life force (or Holy Ghost power, kudalini, chi, n/om)
*Spiritual vision
*Creative expression
*Absurd experience
Never stay stuck in any one corner. Keep moving from one corner to another. This is the road you must stay on, and you must keep moving on it. The road is circular. It deepens, broadens, and heightens with each cycle you traverse. It is this virtuous cycle that makes the wild shaman.
Here are four truths to go along with the four corners of the cross:
*No shake, no shaman. You must learn to shake with joy and spirited fervor.
*No music, no shaman. God communicates primarily through music and rhythm.
*No vision, no shaman. I'm not talking about psychological dreams, but spirit-infused
perception which comes either through sacred dream or waking vision.
*No absurdity, no shaman. There is no such thing as a serious shaman; there are only
laughing shamans and serious shams.
The wild shaman loves all the religions of the world and feels free to play with them in a trickster way. This includes the unwritten religions and the unspoken traditions.
Be your own missionary. Convert one other person to wild shamanism so you have a playmate. Two's a sandlot; three's a party.
There is one other time to be serious. Be very, very serious about your prayer life. Pray religiously and wholeheartedly. You have to show God and the deepest parts of your being that you are sincere about this.
Do more than pray: Act out your desire to make a connection with spirit. Without the enactment of ritual, it will be more difficult to get inside the mystical gates. Few will enter because few have the divine madness required to stretch the dichotomies as far as they need to be stretched. The cross must be stretched to open the gate to the mysteries.
One word sums it all up: love. This is all about love, and only about love. It is never about having power, being special, or getting magic. Love is the God we serve - wild, complete love in all possible forms and manifestations. The Big Love is the name of the wild shaman's worship. Surrender to it, and it will set you free.
Say "Thank you" over and over throughout each day and night. This is your mantra and secret saying. Be thankful for every breath and every experience. When you pray for guidance and don't remember getting a big vision, say, "Thank you," believing you received exactly what was perfect for you in that moment.
Always remember that there is really no such thing as an individual. No one lives outside of relationship - relationships with significant others, community, and the natural world. What you may regard as "work on self" is always "work with others." The opposite is also true: Your work with others and the outside world simultaneously becomes work on your internal nature. The outer and inner are mirrored and aligned. The work is to separate the lines of separation.
75. EMBRACE THE NEGATIVES AND THE POSITIVES
There is an idiotic notion floating about that says we should only have positive thoughts, feelings, and expressions. This is a misguided and dangerous attempt to maximize only one half of creation. Mother Nature will roar back with an earth-shattering reminder that it takes two to tango. Embrace both the light and the dark, indulging in neither. See both the positive and negative as resources that embody the whole. Honor your ignorance as well as your know-how. Say both "bless you" and "fuck you" with a complexity of heart that enables Shiva to play his gig. Now get on with it and let it get all over you. Bring on the clarity and the muddle. Let the light shine and let the dark make possible the sunbeams that otherwise would be silenced by half-baked do-gooders. Let's get dirty for the Lord and enter the honky-tonks and juke joints, shouting out holy sounds of glory.
76. IT DOES MATTER: LIFE DEPENDS ON HOW WE THINK
Cybernetician: There are ideas that are as toxic as DDT. The talk perpetuated by the healing and so-called "spiritual" professions isn't always on the side of healing, beauty, and wisdom.
Educator: But everyone talks about health, beauty, love, spirituality, and wisdom.
Cybernetician: That doesn't mean that their ideas and talk aren't ugly and toxic. We need wise talk about wisdom.
Educator: People too easily jump onto one buzzword and fail to see how it is being used or contextualized. Say the word "love" or "spirit" or "ecological" or "healing" and people nod yes or no in robotic fashion.
Cybernetician: It's the "pattern that connects" what we are talking about rather than any particular word that jumps out at you.
Educator: Bateson thought that most of our cultural ideas were like a weed patch choking out the rare flowers. Who would be guilty of this toxicity?
Cybernetician: Almost everyone. For sure, medical science is one of the worst with its ignorance of systemic complexity and recursive process on all levels of biological organization. However, both spiritual discourses and the social movements that address inequalities and suffering in all its forms and disguises can be equally as toxic. It is one thing to see injustice and another thing to want to do something about it. But doing so without wisdom is very dangerous. You can make things worse if you try to battle for good, but do so with toxic ideas, metaphors, and thinking. Bateson was all over the blind cruelty of psychotherapy as much as he was all over those who fought about issues concerning social power.
Educator: If he is right, then are most social programs, spiritual workshops, and good-intentioned public efforts, including education, toxic?
Cybernetician: I'm afraid so. This is the toxicity Bateson asked us to clean up.
Educator: Be careful now: Because if we cut the larger circles of connectivity and ready ourselves to get rid of the toxins, we may act without systemic wisdom.
Cybernetician: Exactly. Even when we see the systemic lies and errors and pathologies of another, our course of action must embody systemic wisdom rather than lineal errors of maximizing and minimizing particular chunks of our experience.
Educator: So it is possible that the very attempt to evangelize a cybernetic or systemic view could be toxic?
Cybernetician: Yes, that is possible. It is wiser to not be a missionary for any cause - including the fight against poverty or the fight for health or advocacy for indigenous wisdom. This is tricky stuff isn't it?
Educator: If I ask you to read an essay that embodies wisdom, then is there value in your reporting to me that you have received wisdom by mentioning this fact or by quoting some part of the essay?
Cybernetician: No. That would be a reductionist trap. "Here, see, I am holding the piece of the essay that is the 'wisdom piece.'" That is a bit crazy. You cannot necessarily show me the wisdom with a particular sentence, quote, or reference. You must embody the wisdom. This could be shown in an infinitude of ways from being silent, to uttering one word, a sentence, a conversation, or even a metalogue. The paradox is that the literal replaying of a fragment of another person's wisdom is typically not wisdom. To say it differently, an abstraction about a system does not convey the wholeness of that system.
Educator: What are we to do?
Cybernetician: Bateson spoke of orders of learning from simple reflexes on up the ladder through instrumental learning to deutero-learning (learning to learn) and then to the things that concern the early day Zen provocateurs. Francisco Varela spoke of different orders of ethics with the highest form being about what I like to call "bringing forths" rather than "bringing backs."
Educator: The latter - "bringing backs" - is similar to what Alfonso Montuori calls "reproductive learning." "Open your mouth little bird and I will drop in a worm. Wait a while and then poop it out to show me that you actually swallowed and digested it." That's old school academia.
Cybernetician: "Bringing forth" is when the whole context moves one to speak on its behalf. It's what the Zen koan tries to activate. Perhaps all the textbook answers are trivial. There is no correct answer that can be written down and accessed for subsequent encounters with the same question. This becomes a repetitive recycling of various fractionated parts. This is not the spontaneous voicing of the whole. Wisdom is sung through the latter. The same can be said for ethics, aesthetics, love, spirituality, shamanism, and creativity. This is the most important learning about learning to learn.
Educator: Bateson chose, for the most part, not to mention sources in his writing. He avoided academic modes of referencing. Why?
Cybernetician: Maybe he was lazy.
Educator: He was. He told me so, but he also was more interested in engaging the movement of ideas rather than the posturing of authority.
Cybernetician: What is this "movement of ideas"?
Educator: It is the sound of the weave, the rhythms of the patterns that connect, the music of the spheres.
Cybernetician: Imagine music with only one note, or notes that are given names, names of names, and names of names of names. Someone might take the middle note "C" and say that it is the primary message for our time. She might argue that "C" needs to be seen as the important middle way. A musician would reply, "You are mad. Worse, you will destroy music if anyone is stupid enough to listen to you." Think about this my friend.
Educator: How is that different than holding onto one metaphor, one idea, and proceeding to vertically stack higher order abstractions? Then going on to pretend that important discourse occurs within this erected silo. It's no different than calling the musical note C, the middle note, the root, the clear tone, the love tone, the vibratory beginning, and on and on. This enables us to speak within a silo: "Let us explore the root of the vibratory beginning so as to achieve clear love with one another." It translates to saying "Let us explore the C of C so as to achieve C with one another."
Cybernetician: Please give me an example from the everyday world.
Educator: Take the word "conflict." It spawns all kinds of abstractions like inequality, injustice, fighting, war, and so forth. We then say things like "War breaks out when our fighting over inequality reveals intolerable injustices." Which is the same as saying "Conflict breaks out when our conflicting over conflict reveals intolerable conflict." Explains a lot doesn't it? Forgive my oversimplification to make a brief illustration, but it shows Bateson's point about the folly of unnecessary reifications, creating too many dormitive principles, and getting lost in the bullshit of over-extended explanatory principles.
Cybernetician: This happens to the best and brightest among us. Just look at what happens when a physicist starts talking about everyday life. Quark this, quantum that, dissipate this, fractal that… Total insanity.
Educator: Unless the patterns that hold the talk embody systemic clarity.
Cybernetician: Yes.
Educator: But no one, or rather few, jump outside the silo that holds variations on one note. It takes rhythm, the passion of the heartbeat, to move one note to another note. It's the beat that gets things moving, that makes the music. "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing."
Cybernetician: Yep. The trouble with most academic talk and all kinds of talk and writing is that it ain't got any swing. It doesn't move and hold greater patterns that connect with the muses who desire the playing of divine music.
Educator: Was Bateson just trying to get us to swing?
Cybernetician: His mission was far simpler, though nearly impossible. Bateson simply asked us to be CLEAR. His mission was to bring forth clarity. But like the blind spot, we do not readily see that we don't see. It takes all kinds of tricks to show us that we walk around with a blind spot. Our epistemological blind spot concerns how we are not clarifying, but muddling the world with toxic habits of thought.
Educator: Clarity matters?
Cybernetician: The notes need to be clearly sounded.
Educator: And moved.
Cybernetician: And sung.
Educator: And swung.
Cybernetician: So as to release what is being called forth in every unique situation.
Educator: There's only the calling forth of music.
Cybernetician: Which is to say that there is only rhythm and swing. We ain't got a thing unless we got that swing.
Educator: Doo wah doo wah doo wah doo wah doo wah!
Cybernetician: We must learn that we don't know whenever we think we know. And that certain authors, books, and ideas are weeds. For example, most self-help and new age books are part of the weed patch. All cookbooks, whether written for chefs or spiritual seekers are weeds. They posture a deluded knowing.
Cook: They don't know that they don't know.
Cybernetician: What does it mean to know that we don't know?
Cook: That's a more sophisticated way of knowing. It is not a trivial realization, though its utterance may be trivial and trivializing.
Cybernetician: What else do we need to know?
Cook: The most important ideas, intuitions, feelings, hungers, and tastes cannot be expressed with words.
Cybernetician: What, for example?
Cook: Consider love, wisdom, spirituality, complexity, ecology, freedom, learning, and knowing. Anything said about these concerns may paradoxically evoke the opposite. Talk about love may not be loving, talk about spiritual may not be spirited, talk about freedom may not be freeing, talk about liberation may not be liberating, and talk about justice may not be just.
Cybernetician: Is this what Gregory Bateson meant when he suggested that if you speak about issues of who has power and who doesn't have it, then you are perpetuating the myth of power? The latter is what is most toxic, not who is perceived as owning it.
Cook: Yes, that is an example that few people care to understand. If I am exploited because my forehead has a question mark on it, then I may be tempted to say that I should be on the battle ground fighting for the rights of question-marked-foreheads to have more say, more money, more rights, all of which I generalize as more power. Power to the questions!
Cybernetician: All that does is maintain a way of knowing and a way of being that maintains the power games. If power, as a myth, as a metaphor, and as a constructed reality is perpetuated, then it will necessarily bring forth a power-based universe. Is such a place toxic to clarity, beauty, wisdom, and love?
Cook: This sounds mad to the rest of the world.
Cybernetician: That's because everyone thinks it's about power. They say there is a pie and everyone wants a slice and some want to be compensated for not getting a slice in the past. And the new agers say that if you have the right kind of intention, you get some pie.
Cook: Gandhi said there is another way. It has little to do with asking for a slice. It has little to do with meeting power with power. Yes, I know, there will always be those who see everything and everyone through the lens of power tactics, but you do not have to see it that way.
Cybernetician: Is love an alternative to power?
Cook: It can be. But it can also be made toxic through the eyeglasses that see relations through the understanding of power and all the arguing about the slices of pie.
Cybernetician: OK, for the sake of dialogue, let's assume we step into a way of seeing, knowing, and being in the world that has nothing to do with the myth of power. How would that be different?
Cook: We would love our enemies. We would not draw distinctions that divide perpetuators and victims, privileged and colonized, healthy and sick, enlightened and unenlightened, positive thinkers and negative thinkers, good and bad vibes, and all the rest of the great dividing distinctions.
Cybernetician: This is hard to do because there are inequalities.
Cook: Yes, but the inequality does not require that we say that we frame it with a polarizing distinction. We can move to another way of seeing and knowing and being.
Cybernetician: No one will listen to this.
Cook: Perhaps. In which case, we will all continue going straight to hell. All opposition can do is strengthen both sides and create an escalating runaway. The liberal power tactics of the 60's created more sophisticated propagandists who learned to be better tacticians. It is difficult to see that the way we know has as much to do with maintaining inequality as those who unjustly have more say as to gets the pie.
Cybernetician: How can we get a peek at the non-power world? How do I get past my anger and outrage when I see inequality? How can I see anything but power battles? How can I not be against privilege?
Cook: It requires higher order learning, knowing, and being. Perhaps this is what the mystics learn. It cannot be logically derived from either-or thinking that chops the world into easy binary oppositions.
Cybernetician: Another step out of the anger trap may be to learn a bit more about the complementarities, the non-Hegelian dichotomies, the cybernetic loops, the recursive processes, the constructivist activities of sensory-motor coordination.
Cook: But I can't imagine that that is enough because it makes you angry at everyone else who is stuck in perpetuating the convenient and lazy either/ors.
Cybernetician: I know. That's why I think some traditions dance all night in ecstatic surrender to the heavens.
Cook: Most of the authentic shamans I know say that the most difficult temptation is the one of not getting angry with others who we see as wrong. They know the only experience that transforms is one that lifts you away from simplistic either/ors and baptizes you into the ambiguities and contradictions of complexity. Shamanism or religion that does not do this is simply corrupted magic - the trivial pursuit of maximizing or minimizing preferred values of the ecosystem at the cost of cutting the relational lines of connection, the very fabric of the greater webs.
Cybernetician: We could always find a guru who talks about love and God consciousness.
Cook: Be careful about that. I'm not sure that words, anyone's words, can pull you out of this quicksand.
Cybernetician: Then there are those who say things like, "I don't feel connected to what you are saying. It feels alien. I don't understand." Or they say, "I completely understand; What's the big deal?"
Cook: This is the voice of trickster-sloth who protects them from going through the ordeal of transformation. If they sincerely ask to be transformed, the ideas will both disturb and attract. They will be called to go on an unexpected journey.
Cybernetician: I think the journey is to move to our hearts, making the heart the center of our universe. Allow it to hold the mind. The heart has higher order reason than the ratios of logical calculating mind.
Cook: You don't mean talking about heart from the perspective of an academic.
Cybernetician: I don't mean talking about the heart from the view of mind, whether it is everyday mind or ivory tower mind.
Cook: I know what you are about to say. You are going to tell me to STOP LOOKING FOR THE ANSWER IN A BOOK!
Cybernetician: That's right. Today you think you have come closer to the answer, the liberating antidote to saving yourself from despair and freeing the world from its injustice and insanity because you found a new book you hadn't heard of. Let me tell you now: no book will help.
Cook: It's not about the ideas or the theories or the paradigms or the formulas or the mantras or the wisdom stories or the narratives or the sayings.
Cybernetician: You must be transformed.
Cook: Perhaps "cooked by god" as the Kalahari Bushmen put it.
Cybernetician: I think it is something like that.
Cook: How can we cook one another?
Cybernetician: Those who know must be impolite when it is ethically called forth.
Cook: Are you speaking of a prophetic in-your-face manner?
Cybernetician: Yes.
Cook: As in saying things like, "Oprah, Chopra, and Dr. Phil (and quite a few other therapy workshop performers) are simply false prophets?"
Cybernetician: I can imagine a prophet saying that and saying it because those folks vulgarize wisdom and make it toxic. Their words are not comparable to the voices of the great wisdom traditions.
Cook: "Popular" means "vulgar." You can almost always assume that popular voices in the culture are the vulgarizers, the false prophets, and the bearers of pretentious nonsense.
Cybernetician: OK, let's get past that. Will it make a difference if we read the classics of wisdom?
Cook: Not necessarily.
Cybernetician: What?
Cook: If you read it with a mind that has not been brought into your heart, it will be grist for trickster's mill.
Cybernetician: But if you read it through a heart that enlists mind as its servant, it will be different?
Cook: Yes. Then you will not read it. You will drink it.
Cybernetician: When your whole being is tuned, you will know and act in inseparable ways. You will be operating from the highest order of ethics, as Varela put it.
Cook: Then let us shut up and lower our mind into the heart. Here dance and rhythm may help with the lowering.
Cybernetician: Yes, we need to get down, down, down in order to bring the mind into the heart. We don't need to reach for any more lofty abstractions whether from new age physics, cybernetics, feminism, or postmodernism. We need to get down as our soul sisters and soul brothers put it.
Cook: Time to learn from our African ancestors.
Cybernetician: The next revolution will not involve a new book that changes everyone's understanding. It will not involve an elevation of minds or people.
Cook: It will require a great lowering.
Cybernetician: We need to get down, down, down, a true knowing that each of us is a lowly worm. I don't mean feigned humility. I mean being humbled by the complexity of it all.
Cook: Then what happens?
Cybernetician: Our mind drops like a falling star. With luck, our heart will catch our mind, making it a servant of another form of reason.
Cook: Let us drop out, drop in, and drop down.
Cybernetician: Down, down, down, we go - on our knees, leveled to the ground so we may be resurrected in this death and resurrection show called life.
Cook: Maybe silly cartoons, dumb video clips, goofy music, and odd poems can do more to help us get leveled than any serious scholarship.
Cybernetician: Only if it makes us go down, down, down.
Cook: What do you think of cybernetics?
Cybernetician: It helps bring it all down and that's a good thing if you allow it to conquer you so you can fall along with all your fallen ideas, assumptions, beliefs, oppositions, and sacred cows.
Cook: Let us fall.
Cybernetician: Into the fall we go, the autumn of ontological transition.
Cook: Into the freeze we go, epistemologically stuck, unable to move, hibernating, germinating until…
Cybernetician: The time for springing forth into a re-entry, this Ouroboros of recycled presence.
Cook: Hot and sultry summertime. Time to get cooked. Fully cooked, boiled, fried, sizzled by the heavenly muses of divine play.
Cybernetician: Bring it on, bring it down, and let it go round and round.
Cook: In this circularity of surrender and falling, we find the unspeakable love and wisdom that can liberate us from all that never was, never is, and never will be.
Cybernetician: Call it higher order learning, higher order teaching, higher order performing, higher order ethics-aesthetics, higher order mind, higher order heart, higher order presence, higher order spirituality, higher-order shamanism.
Shaman: Or call it nothing.
Cybernetician: Call it forth.
Shaman: Books are calling it something.
Cybernetician: You cannot be given the name or the map and expect to find it.
Shaman: This is why education typically fails whether named in a classroom, workshop, or training program. Education is usually based upon what Heinz von Foerster calls "trivial learning." Show me that you know by naming it. That is predictable conversation and it is trivial.
Cybernetician: Show me how you don't know. That is nontrivial.
Shaman: Do not call it a name. Call it forth.
Cybernetician: How do I call forth the calling forth?
Shaman: That is the question of questions.
Cybernetician: You must transform.
Shaman: Tell me how.
Cybernetician: That cannot be done in a trivial way. There is no response that can help you if it is heard as clear, logical, and easily adapted by your present way of knowing.
Shaman: Then I assume I must be dipped in a muddle with a dash of illogical notions and get completely confused.
Cybernetician: Most likely - getting from here to there where the there is not here means not recognizing, understanding, or knowing there. Of course, the there is really here so you don't recognize, understand, or know here either.
Shaman: OK. I don't know that I don't know that I don't know. Is this a good start?
Cybernetician: I don't know.
Shaman: Are you feeling confused?
Cybernetician: Yes.
Shaman: Then you have begun. Now you face a choice. Do you allow your discomfort to bring back the names and then go back to being comfortable with blind-spot knowing? Or do you sweat it out and get transformed into a bringing forth?
Cybernetician: Is there another choice?
Shaman: Yes, but telling you about it won't help now.
Cybernetician: What is the other choice? I don't care if it doesn't help. I want to know what it is.
Shaman: It is this: no know, know no.
Cybernetician: What does that mean?
Shaman: Pour yourself a lemon and provide aid to any unnecessary sweetness.
Cybernetician: That's enough. Why do you say such things?
Shaman: They just come forth.
Cybernetician: Is there a book that can teach me to say such things?
Shaman: There's a book for everything. Pay no attention to them. You can read them, but give them no unnecessary importance.
Cybernetician: How do you become a "bringer forther?"
Shaman: The deepest part of you must tell yourself that you really want to be transformed.
Cybernetician: How does that work?
Shaman: In the old days of Greece, people had to dream that they should seek a transformative or healing dream. They couldn't just go to the temple and say I am here for your weekend workshop. Set me up for a vision. The deepest part of a person had to ask for it - in this case a dream about dreaming.
Cybernetician: Is that the way it usually happens?
Shaman: Often. The same is true in other mystical cultures including the Caribbean island of St. Vincent where you must dream of a "pointer," a person who will point you into the world of dream.
Cybernetician: What happens when you dream about dreaming or see a pointer?
Shaman: Some of the old ways took this question as an invitation to go through an ordeal that helps break down who you presently are in order to know more deeply who you presently are. In St. Vincent, you go into a 1-3 week fast.
Cybernetician: Yikes, that might kill me.
Shaman: It's meant to kill you, but you must die to move from here to there which is Here.
Cybernetician: You mean an existential death?
Shaman: And a death of death.
Cybernetician: A rebirth?
Shaman: A re-entry.
Cybernetician: A transformation?
Shaman: A calling forth.
Cybernetician: Are the "true teachers" the calling forthers?
Shaman: When they are calling forth.
Cybernetician: How might you know them?
Shaman: By the absence of clichéd trivial questions and answers.
Cybernetician: Are the Zen teachers nontrivial?
Shaman: Some used to be. Some are. Some are not. It has nothing to do with them. It has to do with the bringing forth.
Cybernetician: Do you mean that they learn how to position themselves in an interaction with life so that it comes forth?
Shaman: They are not interacting with life. They are life. As is bringing forth.
Cybernetician: Should I head to a Zen center?
Shaman: A bar will work as well.
Cybernetician: Makes no difference where it isn't or is. What matters is whether there is a bringing forth.
Shaman: Are we bringing each other forth?
Cybernetician: If we are not posing and answering questions in a trivial way, if a teacher is not teaching, if a student is not learning, if everything is knotted in a complex and alive way, then maybe someone will be moved to bring it forth.
Shaman: So if shamans feel uncertain about what to say, or confused, or lost, or nervous, or anxious about expressing what they know they don't know, then they are a good vessel for a bringing forth?
Cybernetician: Let's say they are being cooked. That is the preparation for bringing forth a good meal.
79. DOES CYBERNETICS HAVE A HEART?
Poet: Does cybernetics have a heart?
Musician: Does grammar have a heart? Do words have a heart? Do poets have a heart? Isn't heart found in the patterns that hold the words, not the grammar, but the human being who holds words to express the presence of a felt connection with a flower, a cloud, or a sunset? The holding is what I call music. Without it the words have no heart.
Poet: Are there words without music? Can you give me a sentence that has no heart?
Musician: Any sentence may be embraced by heart. We may sing any words.
Poet: There are no sentences in vitro. They are part of a context and in the context we find whether there is heart and music.
Musician: I think this is quite true. Cybernetics, in its isolated statements, definitions, and lexicon, holds no music. The music is found in the contexts that express it with a song, a dance of sacred interaction and connection.
Poet: If this is true for all statements, then why should we worry whether a cybernetic epistemology is used or not? Why wouldn't any way of knowing work as long as it is sung and heartfelt?
Musician: I think that any way of knowing can hold heart. Whether it sings the voice of heart depends on how it is woven into a context, how it is inseparable, recursively embodied in the whole.
Poet: Sounds to me like you are implying that heart holding and singing require a voice embedded within cybernetic patterns of connection.
Musician: If it were only that simple. But the cybernetic holding must hold cybernetics - the holding of the holding must be recursive and embodied in the whole and this includes all who sing and all who hear.
Poet: Does cybernetics of cybernetics have heart whereas simple cybernetics has none?
Musician: That's like asking whether the melody holds music, whereas a simple note has none. If you believed that, you would try to eliminate each note and then there would be no melody and no music at all.
Poet: I understand because it is the same with words. One word may be the music, while all the other words set up, hold, and bring forth the musicality for that one word. And it's usually not just one word, but many, if not all words, in a poem that are self-reflexively held together in this self-organized way.
Musician: Are these cybernetic metaphors poetic or musical?
Poet: Certainly not by themselves, but perhaps the movement of them can bring forth the presence of the musical muse. Is a dialogue that moves circularly and recursively a way of evoking song and heart?
Musician: Doesn't that depend as much on the reader as the writer? Don't both interlocutors have to move together in order to realize the connection, the circularity of their implied presence with (and) in each other, in order for heart to be awakened?
Poet: I think I am feeling a poem coming on.
Musician: As I feel a song ready to be played for you my friend.
Poet: Then we have created a moment of heart-filled connection, whether or not cybernetics has heart or not.
Musician: We have felt heart whether or not either of us has a spirited heart.
Poet: The presence of heart in the poem and song that inspires us requires each other. Perhaps that is a cybernetic matter.
Musician: A recursive mind is the center of the poet's heart.
Poet: Let us forget cybernetics, poetry, music, and heart so we may become more present with(in) one another.
Musician: Those are lyrics that honor our music.
80. CUPID & R.D. Hermes: A DIALOGUE
Cupid: Why do you never say that you love me?
Hermes: That is nothing that can be said, especially now that you have brought it up with your question. I can never say that I love you because you have made it a response to your question.
Cupid: But if you love me, why not say it?
Hermes: I can say it but it has been lassoed by your question, rather than by our hearts. You never should have asked me that question.
Cupid: You should have told me that you loved me so I wouldn't have brought it up.
Hermes: Perhaps my silence was an unconscious test of our love - to see whether it was strong enough to silence the intrusion of that horrible question.
Cupid: I shall shoot you with another arrow.
Hermes: But now the arrow has to pierce that thick armored question.
Cupid: Then I will melt the question into an arrow so that the question enters you in a new way.
Hermes: And I shall change how I know things so I can't be caught or pierced.
Cupid: Excellent. In which case being a new presence means that someone else can be pierced.
Hermes: Don't say anything because it won't matter in the next moment. You see I have changed and no longer remember what was previously said.
Cupid: I love you.
Hermes: Did you say something?
Cupid: Did you hear something?
Hermes: Something pierced me. Why am I feeling dizzy about what I can't remember you saying.
Cupid: Arrows are like that.
Hermes: What arrows?
Cupid: The ones that keep changing you.
Hermes: Don't say that. Now I can't change.
Cupid: Nor can I say certain things
