Sunday, January 22, 2006

 

empty as you make it

non volitional reality pushes in on the chest like an iron lung.
words fail again and again to evoke
anything-
numbers do better but still fall short
of sensetastesong
it maybe
newagey but hey
aint it better this way?

Monday, January 16, 2006

 

Anthromorphology: for real this time.

Well it seems I have forgotten the point of this site in the first place: pseudo-academic justification for the consumption of psychedellic drugs in the rain forest. or, on the other hand, a new feild of anthropology which could revolutionize our very concept of being-in-the-world. ladies and gentlemen, i mean all three of you that actually check this site from time to time, i give you anthromorphology: the study of locatedness, action and actor through the various levels of intertwining and separation that characterize the fluid process of knowing is the physio-psychological experience we call being alive. this experience, as anyone who has ever fallen asleep will know, is made up of varrying levels of consciousness. the ordinary waking state for the average 'sane' individual (which dr. michael harmer has so blithely and blandly dubbed 'ordinary reality' or O.R.) is one of relatively limited (and limiting) sense data. from early infancy onward, we become accustomed, for the sake of our own survival, to pairing down the massive amounts of sense data we recieve (be it from inside or outside the body) to managable bits and chunks which we quickly learn to assemble into our 'ordinary reality,' that is, the world we see and move through every day(think huxley, doors of percetion blah blah blah.) In our dreams, however, the rules which govern this world break down and we can get a taste of what it would be like to move through the universe free from the illusion that we are isolated lumps of flesh and nothing more. in fact, there are very few cultures that actually believe this to be the case. we simply have the misfortune of belonging to one of them.
due to the general boringness of living in a modern civilzation, and the mundane way in which all of us must function on a day to day basis, we soon lose the ability to imagine that our dreams are anything more than just dreams. what we experience is our reality, and when we experience nothing but concrete and glass, with the occaisional tree, baby or animal thrown in to spice things up, we quickly come to believe that that is all there is to the world. beauty is nice because it allows us to get out of our heads for a second and appreciate something higher, but as a rule we are confined to experience the world as constructed by modern western Science. a world in which thought is a 'mere' impulse in a meaty brain, and everything can be reduced to the 'physical' realm of ordinary reality. this can be seen in all facets of 'modern life:' our buildings are efficient, our entertainment basic, our art intellectual (at best) and even our desires controlled by a darwinian combination of market economics and biology. we have learned to sell ourselves to our selves every day and reduce any serious problems we face to inevitable consequences of past actions. impotence is the current opiate of the masses. in the end, the main message of the western sociolpoliciojudeochristianscientificobjective machine is that you are what you are and THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT but try to 'better yourself' through the appropriate channels. diet, exercise, religion, medicine, all view the thing located at your precise position in the socioeconomic matrix as a number on a grid, a number that can maybe move itself up or down a few inches, but a number none the less. as long as one is confined to ordinary reality, one is playing their game and, lets face it: they made it up, and they're better at it than you.
but there's another game, an older game, and a lot more to your ordinary reality than meets the eye. for it is based on a deeper more involved level of experience, something that could be called aesthetic, unconscious, collective, communal, spiritual, divine, but has to be experienced, (or rather, accepted) in order to be believed. this is what our friend the good doctor harner calls nonordinary reality (or, nor,) and while he needs to work on both his acronyms and his relaiance on binaries (an outdated and oh so western intellectual technique) he does set it all up rather nicely and simply: this 'other' reality is no more or less real (or as he says 'consensual') then 'ordinary' reality. it is not something concocted or evoked. it is a world which always exists behind, beneath and between the ordinary world we build out of it through the unconscious selection and mitigation of our senses and our mind. this nonordinary reality requires a re-training, a return to a 'shamanic state of consciousness' in order to be experienced. as a culture, however, we have cut ourselves off from the possibility of believing that the unique experience of a single individual could have any meaning what so ever (think of the 'groupthink' that defines the scientific method) and that something that is not immediately availiable or perceptible to everyone cannot be real. but think of the way science actually operates, of the amount we take on faith, of the large amount of 'invisibile forces' that define where we are, who we are and what we are capable of: dna, gamma rays, atoms, gravity (thats a good one.) our lives are defined by things we do not know. shamanic consciousness simply gives us another way to know them, another way to move through the network (a better word than the heavily loaded but much cooler matrix) of plants, animals, molecules, ideas, facts, relations, heritages, planets etc. etc. etc. of which our world is made. it is through traditional ecological knowledge (there you go, dana) that we can come to know and truly interact with these 'things themselves' in all their openness and relative impermanece. it is also one of the only ways to encounter things that are truly beyond our ordinary perception. this can include beings, intelligences, or entities (that is actual agents) that have a profound and sometimes defining effect on our ordinary reality. commonly, these agents, or actors are known as spirits or divinities or demons. we can refer to them scientifically as toxins, memories, archetypes, or even 'inherited knowledge.' but the only way to know them as agents with volition is to meet them. and the only way to meet them (that i've found) is through the traditional ecological knowledge (there i said it twice) known as shamanism.

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