Entries from May 2006 ↓

I just got back from acupuncture. My acupuncturist did some amazing work to transition me into spring (I am sensitive to and often have difficulty with transitions). Between the spring coming, the warmer weather and taking tribulus the past few days, I’ve noticed a lot of warm energy in my upper body and head, but not so much in my lower tan tien, legs and feet. This has led to a sense of ungroundedness and some pent up frustration. She used a needle pattern to balance my Kidney and Lungs, which just profoundly opened up my whole conception vessel, down to my perineum, into my legs and feet. I feel like a new man! It’s like she accelerated what would have taken me another month to come into. Damn, acupuncture is so amazing and so complementary to cultivation I really highly recommend it.

“My parents fucked here”.

This is a Bill Hicks quote I also use sometimes to describe the degree of sentimentality I have about living in America. I don’t really talk or even think politics much lately. History is one of my poorest subjects, and so I end up only being able to take philosophical positions on discussion topics. I skim the news here and there, read a political philosopher on occassion, the idea of second tier libertarianism appeals to me, but my opinions about America are mostly aesthetic, as strange as that may sound. The visual and even emotional texture of this country just disturbs me and always has since I was a kid. Much of American architecture, the way towns and suburbs are laid out, the cookie cutter mindset behind almost everything that completely devalues art and feeling and the environment, even down to our color pallette … gaudy saturated primary colors, even our flag is ugly. It makes me shudder when I see Americans walking around in their flip flops, gut hanging out of a “World’s Best Dad” shirt and an American flag hat.

This probably sounds shallow. Maybe it is. I mean, I’m not trying to present it as a great attitude I have here. I’m just trying to explain that, while I am often embarrassed of American politics, I do think it’s a democratically evolved country with economic opportunities for people. I just don’t often feel at home here. I do respect people that like it in America and think it’s great if you want to stay and do your work here. There is work to be done everywhere.

The passions of delusion are inexhaustible.
I vow to extinguish them all at once.

I read somewhere about Papaji, a modern Indian sage, saying that Americans who take up a spiritual search are often more spiritually ready than people in countries like India, because people in these countries haven’t witnessed the “man behind the curtain” of celebrity, glamour, fortune and flatland capitalism they are exposed to. Seekers in America are close enough to the realities behind these images to see that they are illusions and that there is no happiness in them. But from afar it looks like a paradise on Earth has been born. This is how I see much of the “coming to America”. They don’t see it’s a lot of false advertisement.

In NLP there is a term ‘polarity responder’, for people who spontaneously and naturally do close to the opposite of what they are told. I remember reading Bandler say once that he was this type, and so he needed to structure his directives inversely.

Along similar lines, a few years ago I skimmed “The Positive Power of Negative Thinking” and strangely identified with it. I think the (simplistic) example they give in the book is there are two people that are about to give a speech and are they are both a bit nervous and trying to maintain a good mindset. One of them is pumping himself up with “I am going to do freakin’ awesome. This is going to be my best speech ever. The crowd is going to love me. I’m going to remember all of my lines”. The other dude is going “God. This is so fucking annoying. I freakin’ hate speeches like this. This is going to suck and I’ll probably forget my whole speech. They are going to shoot me in the face with a shotgun. This is the worst day of my life”. The point was that most people would think the first guy’s style was “right” and that it should be applied to the second guy to “help” him “stay positive”. The value of the latter is not considered. But the reality is that the second dude is actually having a good time and preparing himself in his own way. He is making a funny, overdramatic cartoon about how unpleasant the situation is … and this style actually helps ground him and prevent deflation from the reality of things going worse than he might hope. Further, one of the points in the book was that trying to apply the positive thinking style to the latter dude is actually going to freak him out and make him more nervous and more wired to fail. Likewise, applying the negative approach to the positive guy will not make him very happy.

Like I said, I can really identify with the negative thinker. Not all the time. But especially when I am nervous or already have negative or just overwhelming feelings about a situation, I’ve found it helps me much more to make a negative joke about things either in my head or even out loud … you know, kind of like self-effacing Gary Shandling kind of attitude … “oh this is great. cool! we are all going to die.” .. and it makes me smirk on some deeper level and helps me through it.

Another way of looking at this, through the eyes of magickal theory, is that the two types are at different phases of attempting to accomplish their will. For example, in sigil magick there is the initial phase where you want to specifically imbue your desire with positive energy and you actively build up this focused, energetic trance. “I am going to do great. I am going to succeed”. Then you focus all of this energy and “fire it” into your intention. For the positive-style speaker this might spontaneously occur when walking out onto stage. All of their positive “I am going to do great” just collapses into the live moment. The next, generally agreed upon step is to completely forget your desire, and even actively distract yourself from it. So again, in the positive-style speaker, this distraction may just happen naturally during the speech itself.

The negative-style speaker just has different timing and has to dig out some extra tools. He already has a deep, natural intention to deliver a successful speech. And now, pre-speech, he is just trying to get out of his own way, to prevent cramping up on wanting to do a good job so badly he fucks up. The conscious mind often has little power to penetrate into the subconscious in ordinary states of consciousness, so the negative self-talk might just be a way of keeping the conscious mind distracted from trying to take over, so the deeper intention can shine through naturally.

Or maybe he is just a cynical asshole, I dunno.

Fiddling with a map of subtle body structures. Feedback is most welcome.

1. Channels - Energetic grooves

subtle - Meridians, sushumna, ida, pingala. Core channel. Pathways through which energy flows. In very subtle layers of anatomy I imagine energy flows freely without much structure, so channels are more relevant descriptions of the subtle anatomy a bit closer to the gross body; ie: as typical pathways energy travels.
gross - Expressed as nervous, spinal, circulatory, lymphatic, fascial, muscular, tendon and bone marrow pathways and connections

2. Points - Holographic wormholes

subtle - Accupoints. (5 pairs of Taoist organs?) Any number of these accupoints can be distinguished. This is where the the points along the microcosmic orbit go. I say they are holographic because they each contain the wisdom of every point. I call them wormholes because they are often intimately linked with other specific points, cauldrons, vortices, and portals. (ie: Qu Quan and Liver connection)
gross - Expressed as “trigger points” along channels that have stronger influence than more neutral aspects of the channels.

3. Cauldrons - Etheric neural-networks.

subtle - Tan tiens. For processing, and storing subtle body energy (chi). Interrelated with chakras. Cultivating exclusively with tan tiens also resonates with and opens the chakras. (?)
gross - Densest plexus of ganglia, 3 major ones are found along central nervous system at brain, heart and gut.

4. Vortices - Archetypal galaxies

subtle - Chakras. Subtle body transmitters and receivers extending deep into the nonphysical, archetypal realms.
gross - Expressed primarily as the hormonally based endocrine system but also the plexus of nerves connecting these glands to the nervous system, hence the intertwining chakra and tan tien relationship.

5. Portals - Organs of communion

subtle / gross - Areas of the gross body intimately linked with the subtle body in such a way that they are most capable of acting as portals for receiving and transmitting subtle body energy at the grosser levels, between two human beings for instance. Expressed as feet, palms of hands, nasal passages and lungs, lips, mouth, tongue, genitals (densest areas of tactile sensitivity. See homunculus)