Saturday, March 6, 2010

Coming Up From the Undersane

As I start this piece (I'll by no means imply I'll attempt to finish in the same state) I find myself on a sort of finely balanced personal edge, in a liminal state of consciousness, poised between undersanity and supersanity. I've barely slept in days, having spent much of it in transit and having begun the saga with some scientific discovery: staying up all night asking the stars above to tell me some of their secrets (while every night for the past two weeks, on which it had been cloudy, I stayed up late asking for other secrets from the same sources, by means of astrology), and then staying up all the subsequent night having my awareness peeled open with a uniquely Liberatory Scientific Detection instrument so that I could speak to the stars within, and discover the stars around me. Following which came the seemingly endless grey airport-and-plane limbo-state of travel, a shifting time of movement from one context to another in which, regardless of how comfortable it is made, little of any consequence can be accomplished ... save to move with that flow, and arrive where you're going.


You might say that's a metaphor for the flavor of the times: we're in transit, though we've forgotten from where and nobody seems to have a very good idea of where to, either. Everything's shifting beneath our feet, like a tectonic dream getting ready to move the world into a new configuration. There's no telling where or when these outbreaks of novelty will take place. Forces so deep as these cannot be predicted as to precisely where, when or how but only evaluated as to a momentary 'if' ... and that if gets more pressing it seems by the day. I'm not talking earthquakes here of course, or not just earthquakes. Things are rising from the depths of the collective human soul and from the deep, forgotten history from which it emerged, things that that few alive today can comprehend, and that incomprehension is all those Lovecraftian elder gods need to keep their movements invisible, save to those few who are able to regard this spectacle with an unblinded third eye.



The footprints however, are getting harder to ignore by the day. Forget being pissed on and told its rain, what's coming down now is leaving craters and people are starting to wonder how it is that raindrops are stamping out subdivisions. A ravening beast with an octopus for a mouth can't stay hidden forever, even if it's so large you always just thought it was a part of the landscape.

There are some wild stories told by the men who've gone mining in that mountain, the wilderness-eyed and wild-haired explorers at the reaches of reality who have found the secret tunnels and the caverns and stared into the chasms, into an abyss that one by one they learned had been staring back the whole time. Most still write their descriptions off as the crazy ramblings of deranged lunatics but ... well, the Italians thought Marco Polo's tales were made up too, you know. Back then a truth that strikes us a mundane and very prominent facet of reality - the existence of China - seemed an elaborate fantasy intended for no more than selling books ... and where have we heard that before?


You can draw an analogy too to the old story of the natives who couldn't see the European vessel anchored just offshore, until after a few days their shaman had a dream about it. Of course, the natives listened to their shamen and so it only took them a few days to process an Out of Context Event such as the European colonization wave proved to be. We on the other hand call most of ours schizophrenics, put them on drugs to make them crazy and lock up the ones who object, some of whom get electroshock and maybe even a lobotomy to supplement the intravenous cocktail.


They say it's because schizophrenics behave erratically but then you see cases like Dr. Romesh Senewiratne, an Australian GP who got diagnosed with 'hypomania' (which means, he was too happy) and injected with drugs because he wouldn't shut up about the benefits of meditation, creative activity, learning and access to the third eye (which is as he insisted on pointing out, the pineal gland), and how much more effective such a path was as a treatment option for maladaptive behaviours such as depression or other neuroses, as supposed to the psychiatric regimen of intoxication, torture and mutilation. His videos are all up on Youtube by the way, and they're a bit rough-and-ready but given what the man has persevered through he deserves to become a global cause ... both for how he's been treated, and why.


That's not at all an uncommon story, though, these days. Is it?

But that's just what you get I suppose in a situation in which every sector of society has been progressively infiltrated and then dominated by the insane. Whether the ones who were born psychopathic are the main problem, or it's the sociopathic institutions and practices and belief systems and ideologies and religions that are their legacy to the world, that have made the majority of the population neurotic, apathetic, depressed and dysfunctional, the problem of mass insanity remains. It is something each of us must live every day and no, none of us are immune. If you think you're going crazy, you're only wrong in the sense that you already were ... and so long as society remains insane, so must we all be, in one way or another and usually several.



Maybe it isn't a problem, though, so much as a joke, a cosmic giggle. You might almost characterize this as the universe's primary vibration, that initial fluctuation within the fabric of creation in which God perceives himself through the universe and, like a happy eight-year-old arriving at the end of a ride in an amusement park built just for her, coos, "Cool! Again!" And so the cart trundles back up the track as the cosmos, in all its thrilling, throbbing, terrifying wonder is born again amidst shock, confusion, violence and pain.



What is sanity? Is that even a meaningful question? Certainly it's not taken up in the DSMV, nor in any of its previous editions. The main difference between one through four and the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is that in the new one, they've managed to define just about every human behaviour there is (as supposed to just the dangerous ones) as a symptom of insanity. I don't think I'd really dispute this diagnosis, nor their statistics, although their notion of a panacea for the problem - the mass drugging of us all - strikes me as somewhat missing the point.



Unless of course, the point is that secret definition of sanity - and why else would they not discuss this openly, unless it's an open secret? - means restricting consciousness to those states society deems fit for it. But then they would no longer be doctors but mind police and that, I think, is not far from the truth. Ever notice how when you're at a party everyone gets a little quiet when it comes up that someone there is a psychiatrist? Maybe a little cagier afterwards ... which behaviour is duly noted by the competent and observant head-shrink, no doubt, though whether he chalks it up to paranoia on their part or thinks they actually respect his position comes down to his own hubris because in the end this kind of thing is all entirely subjective (and it's exactly that subjectivity that the discipline, presenting itself as a pretender to objective science, seeks to deny).


The Mind Police have always been there: the priests of the Inquisition, the Soviet politburo, the beard-cutting Taliban inspectors, the Great Firewall of China, every censorship board or secret court in history, all have served this function in some respect, and that function is to control behaviour through the exploitation of fear on the one hand and the limitation of information on the other. One society might interpret this as the imposition of ideological conformity, others a harshly enforced purity of the soul. In ours, it is expressed as a certain nebulous ideal of perky but dull and servile 'mental health': with just enough energy to execute necessary functions and consume material 'goods and services', but not enough to, you know ... live. Not enough to be complete human beings, able to create their worlds independently and explore those worlds with curiosity. Funny how many dangerous things there are that begin with a 'c': creativity, conscience, compassion, consciousness ... but curiosity. Too much curiosity killed the cat.


Of course curiosity will do no one any good if what the curious find is ... unpleasantly surprising. Who knows what they might do if they found out?

And so the Mind Police maintain their unspoken order by means of guarding against liminal states: those rare and delicate moments of altered awareness in which anything and everything within self and world is in flux, uncertain in its definitions, open to ... whatever it now realizes may really be out there. So long as nothing out of the ordinary happens the psychic equilibrium of society will be maintained, as the majority of its constituents remain happily inside whatever psychic box they've found themselves in.


Anything that disturbs this equilibrium - doubts about the consensus version of reality, whatever it may be, as well as any pursuit of spiritual disciplines (especially outside of established religious pathways), predilection for creativity or any other eccentricity of belief or behaviour - anything that threatens to wake the individual from his trance belief in her reality box is defined as 'crazy' and targeted for psychopharmaceutical termination at the very least. It's as easy as 1, 2, 3, Prozac times a day!


Fortunately there are consciousness warriors out there still, scattered across the world, hidden here and there where no one expects them, keeping the flame of ancient wisdom alive, men and women who refuse to let the Mind Police and the society they help govern dictate to them how they should behave, what they should believe, what drugs they should take or in any way how they should live their lives. And no, they do not live in Zion.


Of course the Mind Police's masters feel the same way, for the most part, as regards who can tell them what they can and cannot do; the difference being that in this War of Consciousness, one side seeks to awaken, the other to stupefy; one to enlighten, the other to misdirect; one to show the way to freedom to any who will see it, the other to guard it jealously to themselves and indeed profess outwardly that there is no such road. It is the difference in temperament between a prison guard and a teacher.

I had the fantastic good fortune of enjoying the hospitality and company of two of these warriors recently, 13 Muluc and GodIAm, and so was able to get another look at a side of reality - and of myself, but then, same thing - that I've been meaning to check in with for some time now. I can't remember the last time I met such people, with this incredible chi rolling off them and a deepness and intensity to their eyes that I almost never encounter. It was strong enough that I was skittish of eye contact at first, so unused am I to interactions with such beings, whose awareness I feel penetrated to the core of my being. But in casting this light I was able to penetrate perhaps more deeply than I've ever been before, and with them to laugh and Lucidly see the Synchronicity while denying the Dichotomy, to get a glimpse past the data Matrix of maya and open hyperdimensional hatchways to hyperfractal higher selves, Self, Source and inner messiah.


Certainly this state was not one the Mind Police would deem sane, but to experience it neither does it seem to be insane. This is where we get into notions of supersanity and undersanity: the latter what happens when an otherwise logical mind fails to question any aspects of its reality, and thus leaves itself open to intentional misdirection as maladaptive beliefs (in lies, obviously) are locked into belief structures. Undersanity is almost guaranteed to result in safe, predictable behaviour in the short run and neurosis in the long-run, arising as a natural consequence of maladaptive belief structures coming into conflict with reality without being revised. Trapped in their boxes, the undersane come increasingly to resemble neurotic lab rats.



Supersanity, on the other hand, is the state of being open to reality and everything it might contain: a state of oneness with reality, devoid of fear or judgment, accepting that what will be will be and not attempting to limit it in any way. In the short run, supersane individuals can get up to some strange behaviours as the belief structures that influence them grow ever further beyond consensus reality; in the long run, as supersanity becomes increasingly congruent with the world as it is, behaviour becomes more tranquil and compassionate.


There are few of us indeed who can see the inner fire, though it burns in all. Or nearly all. However, to see the fire is to see that the cosmos looks through your eyes, to look out upon all of creation and know that you created it because you are it. It's a lot to wrap your head around and sometimes it can help to have the blinds chemically kicked down but ... not always. Certainly it had no such affect on me earlier in my life but then, at that point black magick was really more my thing: the Left Hand Path of occultism, twisted by materialism and ego-infatuation, founded on the belief there ultimately is no God, or if there is She probably hates you anyways. That's too simplistic perhaps but the point remains that back when I saw the world through a black magicians eyes, tripping never did much but freak me out or bore me. There was no revelation of oneness ... perhaps because I was expecting such a thing from the drug, while denying its existence within. You can lead a horse to water....

And that's rather the issue that confronts us now: the masses of undersane horses that aren't so much being led to water as in danger of being carried off by the flood.

And still the beasts won't drink!

And we must live with the knowledge that those that don't, won't, until they drown.

Something's coming....

5 comments:

Amanda said...

I'm reminded of agent Smith in The Matrix, telling Neo that one of his lives has a future and the other does not. Only Smith had it wrong about which was which, because he could only think in terms of the matrix.
It's only when you realise that the matrix itself (in it's present form) has no future that you can begin to free. It's not an easy thing to do. It means that you can no longer feel a part of the herd. It means that socially approved goals become meaningless. Who would choose such self-imposed exile if they didn't have to? Who would choose to set themselves adrift on such a sea of doubt?
I think everyone tries to fit in, at first. I did, try that is. When I was 17 and the doctors said that I was sick (clinically depressed) and needed drugs to make me well, I believed them. I tried for years to "fix" myself. I tried everything I could think of, even (like yourself) attempting to convince myself that compassion was nothing but a fear-based illusion. In the end, I had to admit that I was congenitally, incurably unfit by the standards of society. I was never, ever, going to be sane by it's definition, and I finally gave up trying to be. That was a great turning point.
Up to then, I had cursed my cruel and unfair fate. Afterward, I realised that it had been grace in disguise. A week ago, I saw the movie "V For Vendetta" for the first time. What V did for Evey, locking her up and torturing her, was a perfect example of that kind of grace.
Knowing all this, one can't blame the sheeple too much for staying asleep. They'll no doubt continue to believe that the matrix is viable right up to the point where they can't anymore. That point is not far off now. Some day, if we make it, we'll all look back on the events of the last several millenia and see that they were just what we needed to set us free.
In the mean time, we the emerging supersane, are so blessed to have each other.
Gabba gabba hey!

Lukiftian said...

Brilliant post


Lukiftian... or 9 Cib

Anonymous said...

Ah, what intelligence, what grace with words. Very nice indeed.

Anonymous said...

Ah, what intelligence, what grace with words, indeed.;)
I don't even think I need to identify myself at this point as you already know who I am. There's really no way of disguising myself as my language makes my identity painfully obvious. Interesting how that works isn't it?

You'll think I'm probably just here to shit-disturb, and maybe I am. I know the kind of question I'm about to ask you will infuriate you(when doesn't it?).
You still haven't defined what you genuinely believe "sanity" to be. You've clearly rejected the docile,barely functioning vision delineated in the DSM-V which depicts a for-itself barely capable of functioning and who(I hesitate to even say "who" rather than "which") deliberately avoids any reflective process which may give it the characteristic personality traits which could qualify it as belonging to any one of the "disorders"...and yet the impossibility of a human entity ever being able to truly live up to this depraved ideal inevitably leads to the genuinely insane undersane...the sadism...i almost enjoy it.
Anyway, clearly that's the direction a normative definition of sanity(I really want to scare-quotes that...but feel the need to resist on the basis of technical training)has taken in your argument, and I fully agree with it.
Then we have the cyclical supersane which seems to simultaneously thrive off of circuitous modes of thinking(don't you love how even the word *circuitous* itself has developed a negative signification?But you know me better than to assume I'm using it in a negative context). Anyway, this supersane thrives off of these circuitous, highly archetypal systems and yet simultaneously undercuts them(ie. using duality to get to the universal) and yet seems to have bounced a category above the "sane".
Maybe the insinuation in your writing is that "sanity" as a construction could only ever connote a hopeless ideal which the undersane attempt to live up to, and as such is a meaningless and distracting term which should simply be disregarded.
However, I can't help but feel that there is some Other lurking beneath the revelatory language of this piece. Some reconstruction or more appropriate construction of sanity which either is beyond human language and therefore you cannot access, or which maybe you fear accessing on the basis that you may profoundly misunderstand it.
This may be some sort of convoluted metaphor for every way in which we grate against each other. Maybe at some level I'm attempting to locate and exist within this unutterable and potentially incomprehensible other, positioning myself in a strangely lateral way to the entire thing, while you seek to transcend into the realm of the supersane. Ultimately you may be right and I'm wrong as it's been evidenced that I'm painfully neurotic...and as I get sucked under by the tide of current and recent circumstances, facing the spectre of at least surface depression yet again(don't worry that's not a "cry for help", just an admission....albeit a terrifying one). But as you know, I am not the sum total of these states, and so really they shouldn't undercut my insight or well, I almost want to balk at calling it such in a blog such as this, "theoretical understanding" in any way.
So maybe the central feud is this: I don't like the fact that your system is still posited as supersanity(and therefore implicitly "above" or "transcendent" beyond mine...I'm avoiding the Freudian images here of the id, ego, and superego deliberately as I KNOW that your terminology was not based off of these things), and you don't like the fact that mine is trying to access this other that is, as of now, unutterable and incomprehensible to you(and maybe to everyone), because perhaps it represents the one set of tools you perceive yourself as not yet possessing...
All this is to say,great post.

psychegram said...

Well Anonymous, you're right in that I know exactly who you are. Don't worry, though: I won't blow your cover.

I suppose if I had to define the supersane - an inherently dodgy undertaking - it would be as that state of consciousness which beyond the ability of linguistic thought to define. It cannot be reached through reading, alone ... although reading may help. Reason on its own won't get you there; it will take you to the door, then lead you in circles around it. Intuition by itself will not get you there either ... it will point the way, but it can't undertake any of the practicalities involved in the journey.

I guess really what I'm talking about is enlightenment, in the Eastern sense ... merely rebranding it with an updated name, to cast it in the language of psychological theory rather than Eastern mysticism. Which is a very necessary thing to do, at least if the Western tradition is to ever make the lateral movement necessary to incorporate the body of thought and massive depth of research of the East (in which I am myself at best pseudo-educated.)

Is it possible to transcend, without incorporating what is already around you? Can one sit in a cave all one's life and know the world? Know oneself? How ... when the self is fundamentally a part of the world? From one point of view, 'transcension' would mean to ascend to some higher, nonphysical plane, to purely occupy that existence and leave the mess of materiality behind but ... is that ascension, or abrogation?

The story of mankind up 'til now has been one of 'onwards and upwards', and it has brought us to a low state indeed. Perhaps now is the time to move sideways, to know the world for what it is, in every respect - good and bad, beautiful and ugly - and so to fully incorporate it into our consciousness. To cease privileging the abstract over the real ... the great irony of this ending era is that we sought to separate mind above matter and raise the former above the latter, and have found ourselves in a place where mind is nothing but matter, yet still separate from it, thus not really existing, not of any fundamental importance, save as just another objectified profit center, producing intellectual property that competes for the scarce attention of content consumers. While meanwhile the world of matter rots, festers and burns.

Supersanity - enlightenment, if you will - is the only way we get out of this trap. Matter and mind must be reunited: if the mind is nothing but matter ... then matter, we are finding, is a kind of mind. A contentious point I grant you....