I did an interesting meditative activity tonight, somewhat accidentally.
In thinking through my sadness about whether or not I alone can help stave off the destruction of humanity, as important as I feel it is to ensure we do not subject future generations to endless strife, I couldn't help seeing the aged sadness in my eyes, facing the near futility of the task, and the personal sacrifices that entails, if nothing else than subjecting one's conscience every day to the true misery of the world we've made, by our own choice.
It dawned on me that I needed to change that perspective, lest it influence the effort to the degree that I am unable even to experience some existentialist joy. And I couldn't do it my simply trying to consciously change my thought - I had to meld inside of myself, into my transendent self, and I simply gazed past my own eyes into the infinite light and void - it was more a swirling mass of color and non color, light and nonlight, so that the experience was as looking into a totality of being, even in the breathing in of the entity.
It also dawned on me that the lives which have gone before us have imbedded within our deeper genetics, the ones tied into culture, the limbic brain, the hypothalus, ages and ages of survival, sometimes requiring a barbarity that seems demonic, but could have been part of our early ability to survive. Those are literally the demons we face, and looking deeper within, enough to encounter a return to the divine, requires assuaging all of our own being with compassion. And that involves experiencing an almost infinite amount of pain, to unlock our ultimate bliss.
It's frightening walking down those paths of brutality. As brutal as things have been in our written history, when we were becoming more appreciative of the benefits of mutual benefit, cooperative enterprise, over war and fear, I can't imagine how much more brutal they may have been in ages and ages past. I think of cultural mythology around vampires and werewolfs, which were tied up in the physical effects of certain ancient illnesses, more prominent likely in some crowded situations. I imagine what it took for people to begin to understand and look more compassionately on those different than us. Early instinct to lash out at and kill those different from more normative genetic stock may have been part of our history, but it no more subjects us to living in a larval stage for the rest of our existence.
This must be part of the cosmic struggle going on in the genes of a butterfly, as some realize that they are to be transformed, lost forever in the movement towards a different, not final stage.
Recognizing that there is no final stage, other than accepting the cyle of life, a return to the divine, is the path to being the butterfly who reaches the sun.
Thinking that was nice, but if were to face the light, I must also be able to face the darkness. So I pushed the door to block the outside light. It's scary staring at yourself in the dark. You see things more clearly, deprived of some of the senses we depend on too much. I finally saw some of the ideas of hell implanted in my own psyche. I am not ready to wander among them wholly, but I understand the facing of demons, the illumination of caves dark and deep.
It's interesting that during one my first holotropic breathing sessions, my mandala, the ride I ended up settling into after settling into my spirit avatar not needing atmosphere and swimming the depths of the sea, was going into the roots of the abyss. Deeper and deeper, all the while with a little smily face, yellow, with a big green and two dots for eyes, the iconic smily man jutting out and among the path further down, letting me know it's okay. I think some people get lost in those places in their mind while journeying, and make that void their ever present reality, instead of part of the totality, no more, no less - our intention realized soley in the way we shape those moments in our heads.
So I figured I should try the experience in total darkness. Which is where I encounted the beginning of the abstractions around the journey we must take towards enlightenment, a journey that can be shared, and shared with enough people, can liberate the very conciousness of humanity from itself.
These are the struggles that manifest themselves within the institutions that literally hold our values, carrying them to the future. And we must work to influence one another to help lift more people into a place where they can be more fully realized individually, making them more a part of the whole community than ever before.
I just had a vision of some of the early meditating primates. Their blood runs more through our veins than anyone would like to admit, especially those who want us to shape our destiny around a brutish model. They are the ones who can help communicate more clearly with the brutal ancients, providing an even more self relational path to self-reconciliation. I think of the monks who walked unmolested in the wilderness, respected for the wisdom they sought, the separation from fear of death that allowed them to leave everything they knew behind. I think these existed early, and might attract more breeding partners simply by being outside any breeding hieirarchy. I think of the prophets sitting at the feet of kings. This is why it is imporant to study and know what has influenced or explained the thoughts of those who came before. The better we can reach their paths, the better we can reach deeper. This does not all come from books, and can come from exploring our own embedded experience. It will lack the historical context, and hence lack as much depth, but it will be understood.
It's crazy to think of some amoeba distracted for a moment by exploring some other potential food item relaxing rather than reacting immediately to a flash of light, thereby not dying with most of the rest of a breeding population in that moment, passing on some subtle trait, existing only in the annals of genetic statistics much older than our present or future models will ever decipher. A monkey getting, somehow, that some night he or she will die, at least for a moment, and not despairing, simply breathing in the environment that he or she is in, knowing how fleeting life is, and, as a result of being relaxed, is more attuned to real threats, during both the day and the night.
This is the ongoing riddle of relaxation - the results are always counterintuitive. And there are strains that survived by being stressed out all the time, but they need to be coaxed into the world of abundance we live in. The they within each of us as well. No one is going to die, no one needs to live in want, no one needs to live in fear. We can all live together.
The crazy thing is that the ancients have been saying this for years, and many of them for years escaped the brutality enough to have their words repeated, or recorded. It amazes me what they went through to get their ideas passed on through the ages.
They had to face many more demons, many of them still very present among them, humans, barbaric, fearful in their actual phenotype behaviour, and love them over to their way, at least until they got crucified, or stoned, or otherwise brutally killed. None of us could have lasted a day in some of those conditions, without the help of compassionate humans, of which there were many.
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