Siddhis are “powers” such as psychic hits, healing abilities, prophetic dreams. They exist, are real, and while they are more likely to be found in people who engage in spiritual practices, are often to be found among the mass of average joes as well. They are just facts of existence, but you’d have to be paying attention.

Many spiritual traditions warn against siddhis. Practitioners are told to ignore them, to keep eyes firmly on liberation, enlightenment, dissolution of self, nondual awakening etc. Distractions at best, ego traps at worst.

Not all spiritual traditions though. I spent the better part of a decade going to the Amazon yearly, training in Shamanism. Siddhis: healing, divination, spirit communication – are the path in shamanistic traditions.

Why be Wary

There are good reasons for traditional admonitions against siddhis. It’s easy to be hypnotized by them. The ego, the persistent sense of separation says: “Look what I can do.” And the wheel of samsara keeps spinning.

Even healing, which can feel noble, can be corrupting. The ability to affect others, to possess knowledge unavailable to regular people, can subtly or not so subtly reinforce the sense of self that gets deconstructed in nondual awakening.

The whole path of nonduality is the complete unraveling of conditioning around self, emotion, time, and space.

Yet

And yet, something not talked about much in traditional sources, is the ways in which these powers might help that unraveling.

Consider what happens during a genuine psychic hit, or what happens when you realize that the dream you had the night before spookily reflected what happened on that day. In these moments, the veil of consensus reality shifts, solid boundaries reveal themselves as permeable, provisional, constructed.

Each time the veil moves, conditioning gets released. The more you experience these slips in ordinary reality, the harder it becomes to maintain the conditioned illusions about how time, space, and perception work.

Nonduality and Psychic Phenomena

Those on the nondual path aim to see reality as it is, stripped of conception overlays. This means deconstructing conditioning on every level: the subject-object split, the separate self, the solidity and selfing of emotions, and assumptions about time and space.

Learning to spot psychic phenomena and the like can accelerate this deconstruction. They can serve as controlled explosions that crack the edifice of consensus reality, over and over again. Each of these experiences makes it harder to maintain the story that consciousness is confined to your skull, that the past is dead and the future is unmade, and that you’re fundamentally separate from the universe.

In that spirit, I have a new offering, an Intuition Foundations course, that will help you pay attention to life more, spot these cracks both in waking and dreaming life, and possibly help encourage a revolution in what you take to be reality. Learn more here: https://offer.sunship.space/90-day-intuition

There's a flippant critique of AI that interacting with it is nothing more than interacting with a stochastic parrot. But according to my observations, most of the time, what we call thinking can very much be described as stochastic parrotry. The thoughts that we have in our heads tend to be echoes of media that was taken in, past conversations with other people, proclamations by authority figures…in this big sonic soup.

“Words are not just wind. Words have something to say. But if what they have to say is not fixed, then do they really say something? Or do they say nothing? People suppose that words are different from the peeps of baby birds, but is there any difference, or isn't there?”
– Zhuangzi

On a related note, there's a reason why thinking is looked at with suspicion in, say, non-duality, Buddhism etc. It can be very misleading. You have thoughts, you have thoughts about thoughts, and you don't really know where they came from. While thoughts cannot exactly derail awakening if that process is already in motion, they can interfere with... the clear seeing of awakening, the seeing that all is enlightenment.

For example, I've listened to quite a lot of material from Angelo Dilullo and other nonduality speakers. An orientation emerged on and off in where I’d continually try to relate my experience to what they describe their experience to be — potentially a very major hindrance.

For example, a lot of these speakers talk about how they experience phenomena as appearances, appearances that arise and pass away, that rush forward and then pass away.

That's not how I would describe it. I experience it more like an ever-changing collage, a collage of phenomena emerging, being replaced and replaced and replaced. It's extremely gentle. The gentleness is the loudest thing in the room, not the appearances as such. The word nirvana comes to mind. It's not perfect by any means, but sometimes it feels perfect.

All that looking for a certain kind of perception that the body-mind was doing really was just more pushing and pulling. But I also am not sure that it could have unfolded any other way.

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Difficulties

I've tried lucid dreaming on and off for many years. I found it very hard to stick to—to keep doing reality tests during the day, to interrupt the sleep cycle to do Wake Back to Bed at night (the two pillars of becoming a lucid dreamer).

Wake Back to Bed is particularly hard to stick to because the interruption of the sleep cycle means more tiredness during the day, which means less motivation both to do it again the next night and to reality test during the day, to care about becoming lucid. By the end of the day, I would just want to sleep.

Really, the attempts have been like Teflon—always slipping off. Working with sleep and dreams is inherently slippery. It doesn't heed to waking obsession/integration in sleep, which is how I tend to approach things I want to grok.

Lucid dreaming happens between remembering and forgetting. That is very tricky ground for those of us who are not natural lucid dreamers. If getting traction in something in waking life is a matter of walking until you can run, dream life does not offer the kind of ground that has good grip. One moment there is consciousness; in another, everything has been forgotten about entirely.

Last night I dreamed I was watching a TV. In the dream I had been in the middle of something and had some very vague intention of getting lucid. But I had totally forgotten where I was and what I was doing, and was completely absorbed in the program. Like that.

Wins - Insight Into the Mind's Tendency to Reify Form

One basic exercise in Dream Yoga is to get some degree of lucidity within a dream and then change aspects of the dream. Turn a mouse into an elephant, turn night into day, turn a chair into a table.

Even if there is awareness that this is a dream, it is not particularly easy to do this. I have found that the image tends to shift with some effort and then goes right back to where it was.

For example, I had a dream where I was on a rooftop. I realized I was dreaming and tried to fly. But I was brought back to the rooftop each time. Moreover, in these dreams, it was not particularly surprising to me that things returned to where and how they were.

Andrew Holecek (I highly recommend his work) calls this the habit of reification. This is a very big deal. Understanding this through to the end feels like a tantalizing door to unimaginable freedom.

I had another dream: I was looking at a faucet. The water was running clean and clear. I turned the scene green, then blue, etc., with ease. Water often symbolizes emotions. In the dream, I felt my own emotional body flowing—it did not feel frozen or remote like it often does in dreams. There is a clue here. Ease in lucid dreaming might be helped by connection and ease with the emotions.

To be continued.

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Liberation is about clear seeing. When seeing is clear, reality is seen as very, very fluid, changing constantly, perhaps with the karmic wind and weather, for what appears to be no reason at all.

The ego-mind tends to fixate—that is what it does. It's probably an evolutionary function of wanting to protect. And yet to a hammer everything looks like a nail. There is no need to fixate like that; there is nothing to figure out, the vast majority of the time.

There is just this, and there is the ego's tendency to want to make something of this. Proliferation. One definition of nibbana is no-proliferation.

In sleep, the ego layer of reality is much weaker. There is far less inclination to want to make something of this, to fixate. It's very fruitful to pay attention to the hypnagogia that arises before falling asleep. In that hypnagogic state, phenomena arise: an image here, a snippet there. Sometimes these images feel very close, like a ripple in them immediately causes a ripple in the body-mind. Sometimes the images feel more remote, like they are over there, with some sort of energetic seal between self and object.

When consciousness is lost into a non-lucid dream, it feels like there is total and complete immersion in a certain time and place—that this makes perfect sense, that there is no inclination to doubt that this is how it is and always was. In retrospect upon waking, all of it is seen as purely a construction of the mind.

In ego-diminished states like sleep or near-sleep, it is easier to see arising. Everything in experience arises and passes away. When there is little hindrance, when the ego is not very active, it is seen that what arises replaces what had just arisen and passed away—cleanly and without remainder.

Phenomena arise and pass away. Suffering is greatly reduced or eliminated in direct proportion to how little grasping there is to that phenomena. The "seer" gets caught up. When seeing is completely clear, the seer is dropped; there is only the seen. As with the Bahiya Sutta: "When for you there will be only the seen in reference to the seen, only the heard in reference to the heard, only the sensed in reference to the sensed, only the cognized in reference to the cognized... this, just this, is the end of suffering."

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“Questioner: What do you do when asleep?

Maharaj: I am aware of being asleep.

Q: Is not sleep a state of unconsciousness?

M: Yes, I am aware of being unconscious.

Q: And when awake, or dreaming?

M: I am aware of being awake or dreaming.

Q: I do not catch you. What exactly do you mean? Let me make my terms clear: by being asleep I mean unconscious, by being awake I mean conscious, by dreaming I mean conscious of one's mind, but not of the surroundings.

M: Well, it is about the same with me, Yet, there seems to be a difference. In each state you forget the other two, while to me, there is but one state of being, including and transcending the three mental states of waking, dreaming and sleeping.”

– "I Am That" by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj.

“Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly …. soon I awaked, and there I was, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.”

– Zhuang Zi

Dharma tends to first start knocking on the door in the form of suffering. Or maybe you — what you take to be you — starts knocking up against the door of the cage of delusion, while simply trying to stand up to your full height. Same difference.

If realization had a defining flavor it’d be a sense of boundlessness. As described in the famous Bahiya sutta: “When you are not 'in that,' then, you will be neither here nor beyond nor in between the two. Just this is the end of suffering."

With realization, there is no boundary between inside and outside, between “here” and “there”. But something that is not talked about as much — and is absolutely profound and a very promising thread to tug on – is that it is also seen that there is no boundary between dreaming and waking.

I’ve written down my dreams for a long time, starting many years before any awakening. Over that time, I noticed that the more connected to my dreams I feel when awake – the more easily I remember them, the more I can relate them to what is happening in my psyche or day to day events – the more I have an overall sense of wholeness, satisfaction, and flow in life.

So it would follow that lucid dreaming takes this kind of connection a big step further, has the potential to create a more high-resolution, higher-bandwith bridge between waking and dreaming life. I experimented with lucid dreaming much in the past without much luck, but in this spirit I’ve been trying again.

A fundamental tool for lucid dreaming is reality testing: training the body-mind to do reality tests during the day so that it starts doing them while asleep. You can reality test for example, by looking at a digital clock, then looking again to see if the numbers look changed and distorted. If it did, you are dreaming. If you realized you are dreaming, you have just become lucid, have woken up in the dream.

Many have pointed out that the body-mind gets caught up in dreams while sleeping much like it gets caught up in what it takes to be reality during waking life. The difference is more a matter of degree of the stability of the dream, rather than a difference in kind.

Really waking up means waking up from the delusion, the dream, that arises from constantly getting caught up in phenomena. The end of the path is to be simply always awake (non-duality fans might recognize this as the name of Angelo Dilullo’s youtube channel). No separation between sleep and wake, no separation anywhere.

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photo: Studio Tomás Saraceno

When alone, it tends to be easier to let go of the self, into the now, the infinite. Even the mere presence of others can reify a self to a body-mind, and thus all the snags and suffering that come from that. People tend to relate to each other completely convinced of the reality of self and other. And thus we are all in complicity with each other to keep the illusions of our separate selves going.

Worse, people often relate to each other through position, rank, gain, loss. Lesser and greater. The human in relationship suggests a self to be protected and/or added to. It suggests a self that can get embarrassed with a loss of status, that might want to be more than the next person, who might be paranoid that he is less.

In the 10 fetter model, this bind is the conceit of self, the 8th fetter. The 8th fetter includes 3 types of conceit: “I am superior”, “I am inferior”, and even “I am equal” (which is also a thought, an edifice that arises).

Status is protective. Sometimes, extreme losses in popularity can lead to loss of family, employment, incarceration or worse. There are reasons why losses of status feel so existential, why the body reacts so violently, why the body might be so attuned to changes in the social weather, and how the self might shake out in it.

All of this serves to keep the fetter of the conceit of self right where it is, corrupting perception, keeping the body-mind stuck in the matrix.

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Habit

Reactivity is largely a function of habit. Remember Pavlov's dog: A bell rings, dinner brought out, the dog salivates. Again and again. Eventually, a bell rings, and the dog salivates, no food to be found. Reactivity is often no different from this.

Say a boundary was constantly violated in the past by an abusive person. The body reacts. Perhaps 20 years ago, beaten down, feeling utterly helpless, only terrible words and thoughts brought up a semblance of power. Perhaps you started to hate, bringing up this feeling of faux- power whenever this person violated your boundary. Say a decade later a completely different person is loud, talking too much, not letting you speak. The boundaries feel violated in a very similar way. All manner of ill will and hatreds come up.

This is similar to cargo-culting.

In the early through the mid 20th century, some indigenous people in Melanesia in the south pacific would witness foreign militaries bringing valuable cargo by air and sea. At some point they developed ritualistic practices mimicking what they had observed—building mock airstrips, control towers, and radios from local materials—believing these actions would summon the cargo. They saw part of the story, but were not aware of the broader truth, the vast technological and economic systems behind that cargo.

The body does something similar. The body reacts to ghosts, cargo culting a perhaps appropriate reaction to something that happened long ago, of causes and conditions that have arisen and passed away long ago, unaware of the causes and conditions of this very moment. The matrix re-forms again.

This is an excerpt from my upcoming mini-book Emotional Reactivity: What It Is and How to Release It, available soon on Amazon or via PDF.

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Reactivity is something that happens in the body-mind.

In the buddhist-adjacent non-duality world, there can be negativity around words like "self", "I", "you". It seems silly, but there are some legitimate reasons for this. Using such words assumes something with an inherent existence. Using the term "body-mind" instead emphasizes that what is typically referred to as an "self" is better understood to be a process – of thinking, feeling, perceiving, etc. This shift of context is useful for the work of unbinding, to encourage the shifts of perception that lead to freedom.

Buddhism describes six sense doors: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, and cognizing. The senses can be activated in response to external or internal changes. The problematic sense doors here are feeling and cognizing.

Feeling is the felt sense of the body. Also the feeling of contraction that is part of reactivity. Cognizing refers to thinking, in this context the thoughts that accompany reactivity. When reactivity arises, feeling and thinking tend to get tangled with each other, proliferate with each other, ignite each other.

You think of an argument you had yesterday. Feeling arises. Fists clench. Words you wish you said arise. The body mind is pulled here, pulled there.

The body comes with a fight, flight, freeze, fawn response built into it. The proliferation of thought that arises with the body's reaction can be just as painful. The words drive more contraction. It dialogues with itself, eggs itself on, and thinks what it has to say is very very important.

And then it gets even more complicated: guilt and shame arise, for having these thoughts:
“Others must not know what I'm thinking.”
“Why am I like this?”

At the level of texture, not content: some activation comes up in the body-mind. Another activation comes up immediately and suppresses it. It feels like how the word sounds — it presses down on you, there is a vague or not so vague feeling of suffocation that then arises.

Down that way is madness. This is a complex, a tangled knot. The whole world is tangled. What a mess.

One translation of nibanna is no-forest. Freedom comes from non-proliferation. Feeling arises and falls. Thinking arises and falls. Cleanly, without remainder, without proliferation, without getting tangled up.

This is an excerpt from my upcoming mini-book Reactivity: What It Is and How to Change It, available soon on Amazon or via PDF.

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There are ways in which the body is incredibly intelligent. There are ways in which it just operates on autopilot, with a kind of dumbness.

The body can be full of false emergencies, reacting to ghosts, to nothing. Even more so for those of us with complexly traumatic upbringings. A memory is touched off and ripples of fear, contractions of shame, overtake from out of nowhere. Reactions can be so bizarre and inappropriate to the situation, leaving the body-mind with a sense of lack of trust in itself.

There are also the ideas that the body-mind is attached to. The idea of “have to” do this, “have to” do that, in the future. Where is this future? Is it in the room with you right now? The matrix formed again, and again it was not noticed.

These are some of the ways the body-mind creates its own suffering. It’s really astounding, how much it gets twisted up in the past, trying to defend a me, mine, how much it wants to add to this imaginary me, mine by imagining a future.

In early Buddhism, if you understand the three characteristics of reality, you understand much of the dhamma. One of those characteristics is suffering. The understanding of suffering gets deeper and deeper as this pathless path unfolds. It’s much more subtle and tricky and automatic than ever imagined before.

Lately my mind has really been craving rest. It sees these false emergencies and says "whatever". Glimpses of the complete cessation of reactivity, coming from a bodily realization that there is no point in reacting. Not in this moment, or this moment, or this moment. Maybe a reaction is appropriate in this moment, considering the erratic behavior of that guy over there. The legs simply move in the other direction. And once again there is no need to react, in this moment, or in this moment…

(image from olga.klimova.art)

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Above is a demonstration of cymatics: a frequency is played underneath a plate of water and cornstarch mixture, and it comes alive. Like it has various minds of their own, coalescing moment after moment into different beings that have their own goals, directionality, volition, eventually passing away back into the soup, to recombine and arise anew.

It’s a good metaphor for what happens moment after moment in the perceptions, the thoughts, the feelings — especially in the thoughts and feelings, as they are particularly sticky and can appear substantive. They can appear like they have varied, autonomous minds of their own, for a time.

When I watch this chaos, it feels like suffering. Naturally the being would want to be free from this, if this is what it is like inside. But try to control it, and it just becomes worse, more disturbing, more chaotic.

Frank Yang said something like “objectify everything in your experience”. But that never quite worked for me. “Objectification” feels too cold, remote, and dissociating. Rather, I find it useful to treat everything that arises in inner experience as aliveness, that can have its own directionality and egoic pull, subtle or intense. Aliveness that arises and passes away.

I find when inner phenomena are treated in this way, they stop being so sticky, stop being so chaotic in their rising and falling. Occasionally they even appear to be suddenly embarrassed by their own sound and fury, signifying nothing, and calm down on their own, in an interesting unexpected dropping of volition.

When these risings and fallings are treated as not-me, not mine, in this way, there can be access to deeper, more subtle carrier waves of experience. Hear the hum of the universe. Feel its fabric. Here, experience can feel more esoteric, it can feel like the regular assumptions of space and time do not apply. Phrases like “everything being nothing” and “nothing being everything” start to make sense. Let that settle too, into nothingness. Let the self and the world disappear, until it appears again.

***

More cymatic patterns:

more on cymatics here.

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The bahiya sutta is a direct pointer to enlightenment: in the heard only the heard, in the seen only the seen, the cognized only the cognized. The problems emerge when the cognized proliferates. Worlds are brought forth. Pasts and futures are constructed. This world of shadows is acted on and reacted to. All of this blinds and binds. Some of these patterns of proliferation have textures that are recognizable with practice. For example, opinions.

Part I: Opinions

Opinions tend to be easy to identify. They often feel hard and angular to me. They rile the system up. They often emerge along with pride, ego, self – opinions can act as accouterments of the self like petals on a flower, an overlay on reality that can create a subtle overemphasis on a perceived self. Opinions pull here, pull there, and the system is happy for the excitement. Until it gets exhausted with it. Then perhaps it is left with an unease, a subtle feeling that this isn’t quite right. There is suffering there, in the vein of one of the meanings of the Pali word for suffering, dukkha – a wheel off its axle, the discomfort inherent in life. Something is just off, again.

I remember there was a time when I didn’t have so many opinions. And then I remember a proliferation of opinions, along with a hardening self sense, somewhere around late adolescence. They were my opinions, concepts to identify with. I barely even remember what those opinions were about – probably around politics, the value of certain fields of study, what looks good, what doesn’t, who is better than others, how best to live. Some of these were transmitted from the people around me, some of them we formed in reaction to what the people around me thought. The opinions themselves don’t matter here, just that the tendency to form them accelerated at a certain point.

This is not to say that it’s bad to have opinions. But opinions lightly held are very different from those held with a vice grip. The more tightly they are held, the more they scrunch up and distort the fabric of observed reality, and that leads to pressure, unease, complexity and suffering.

(picture: an excerpt from the Jata Sutta: The Tangle)

Part II: Assumptions, and Part III: Beliefs coming soon.

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It shouldn’t be that hard: clearly we are all part of this vast web. Even the materialists have to admit this. If one node in this vast web is perturbed, angry, agitated, it affects the rest of the web. If it is peaceful, it similarly transmits. If that node exudes endless peace, the peace that surpasses all understanding, then perhaps a subtle hush comes over parts of the web. There might even be the potential for a collective shift, conscious or unconscious.

These connections aren’t limited to physical proximity or direct communication. We are connected in ways that are beyond the understanding of most, probably having something to do with light and quantum phenomena. Psychic phenomena and precognitive dreams etc are a regular part of life (I don’t bother arguing with people about it; if they know they know).

But even here, the conditioning of the material world, the world of subject and object, is very, very deep.

Now, many nondual teachers say something along the lines of: “The best thing you can do for the world is wake up, and continue waking up.” This is triggering. Do you see what is happening in the world? Don’t claim that you are doing something for humanity if you’re just sitting there meditating. People are out there getting their hands dirty, putting themselves at risk.

The point is: it is worth considering that this too might just be conditioning of the material world, of subject and object. That in fact waking up, and continuing to wake up is the best thing you can do for others.

And really, I want to believe this. I still don’t entirely, but I want to. For me seeing is believing. Start small. Start with the self. See how cultivating peace in part of the body-mind encourages peace in the rest of the body-mind. See how other parts of the body-mind respond. Then go out, or online, and communicate with others from that place. See what changes. I’m not convinced yet. I hope to be.

***

“Make me a channel of Your peace
Where there is hatred let me bring Your love
Where there is injury, Your pardon, Lord
And where there's doubt, true faith in You

Oh, Master, grant that I may never seek
So much to be consoled as to console
To be understood as to understand
To be loved as to love with all my soul”

— Peace Prayer

(image by Romare Bearden)

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The wheel of dhamma is the mysterious, multi-dimensional force that leads people to awakening, to liberation. The wheel of dhamma turns with no one to turn it. The wheel of dhamma turns through the thoughts, actions, words, of myriad beings. It turns through chatter, through wordless transmissions in all manner of contexts. It turns through events, through coming together and falling apart.

In monasteries around the world there are physical prayer wheels that represent the wheel of dhamma. Some of them are so big that it takes several people to turn them. Sometimes monks have little versions that they hold in their hands. In this land of forgetting, these are tools for remembering.

In temples and sanghas all over the world, there is also the repetition of the bodhisattva vow, a vow “not be free until all other beings are free”. I’ve always side-eyed that vow. It felt disingenuous. It felt like cope. I want to be free, I’m unequivocal and certain about that. What are we even doing here.

I still think that dynamic is in play in many if not most sanghas, but do see the vow a bit differently lately. It’s a return to the understanding that this is shared. A simple wish for everyone to be free. Because the dhamma belongs to no one. How could it. A deep understanding of this allows much deeper letting go. Reality catches you moment after moment. You never had to hold up what you thought you had to hold up. Everything is held up and released by the vast web of dependent origination, and the wheel of dhamma keeps turning.

(image by Autumn Skye)

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The imagination machine. We are all part of it, made of it. When looked at directly, with a firm gaze, rigidity arises. When looked at softly, lightly, fluidity arises. When not looked at, it disappears entirely. It and you are one. It never existed.

It’s been said that people generally come to the dhamma through suffering. For me and I suspect many others that’s only partly true. For me there was also a deep desire to see reality as it is. The stick of suffering, the carrot of ultimate reality. The wheel of dhamma keeps turning.

The realization eventually dawns that there is no way reality actually is. This comes to the foreground in the place some call potentiality. Where reality is seen as something incredibly fluid – constructed and deconstructed moment after moment.

There is incredible freedom here. The wild ever morphing creativity of it. Feels like shiva dancing.

Even better — it is seen that reality can be released into entirely. That this body, this mind, their patterns – will rise and fall until they lose cohesion, re-form into other patterns, other bodies, other minds. The imagination machine keeps whirring.

screenshot: Rastal’s regions

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Nothing is our own. Not the ideas in our heads either. They arise and fall away like anything else. And the fact that they arise is the result of causes and conditions like anything else. Why are the ideas in my head mostly in English, if they are articulated into language – because most of the language around me most of my life has been in English. I’d like to think of myself as a free thinker, but the truth is my mind, like every other, is only free within bounds, within the bounds of the causes and conditions it has been exposed to.

The mind has all sorts of ideas about things, people that it has no direct experience with. They are symbols.

Symbols arise, symbols pass away like anything else

There is, for example, the symbol of Elon Musk. Never met the guy. The symbol that arises in me in regards to him ten years ago is very different from what it is now.

What did I think of him before? Probably some sort of innovator. I associated him with some of the on the spectrum boys at my specialized math/science high school. Mostly just earnestly interested in math and science. I didn’t have anything against him really, didn’t doubt the intelligence he supposedly had.

My eyebrow did raise a bit once though, when he talked unequivocally positively about Winston Churchill. Perhaps Churchill was a positive force in Britain but he definitely was not in India. And he was generally a good old boy who thought his particular class from his particular region of the world were entitled to rule the world – my symbol of Churchill.

That symbol of Churchill likely was formed from various other influences that taught me to look with suspicion on “heroes” – maybe at a certain point in early adolescence when it became very clear that so many of those who were put on a pedestals as heroes – parents, priests – behaved in purely self-serving ways, abusing the positions they were entrusted with.

It was just a bit of an eyebrow-raise, a first weakening of that initial opinion, a picture softening and re-forming, a bit.

And now what do I think of Musk? “Twat” comes to mind. Can’t get much more crystallized than that. When he got into right wing politics, for a while I still thought he was still probably basically intelligent, despite the voices from the democratic informational landscape saying otherwise. But that change instantaneously when I saw this tweet from him:

I’m a software developer. This is complete unadulterated, self-serving, agenda-driven bullshit.

A cascade of thoughts:
What a bullshitter.
He must of just been bullshitting through his entire life.
Look at him, jumping up and down on stage, in his ill-fitting black clothing.
Twat.

There was an immediate and probably permanent crystallization of that opinion, that symbol. I see everything he does through that lens now.

Symbols arise, symbols degrade. Sometimes, they get violently replaced.

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Neptune moved into Aries today, the same place it was during the Civil War. I saw the place we are today from a decade away. I wasn't the only one. There is the phrase "those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it." And how about: those who know history are doomed to watch it repeat. There is no covering it up anymore: I feel helpless.

Parts in the mind-body system will do anything to not feel helpless. I was going to write that the whole body rejects it, but that is not really true. Sight keeps seeing. Hearing keeps hearing. It's really only certain factions of the body and the mind that reject it. But they are so full of emergency and singleness of purpose – to not feel this – that they become the loudest things in the room. Frankly, we might all die. We might experience horrors that we only read about, have seen in movies, that can't be shown in movies. That feels like it's on the map, much more than it ever was before.

For me, vulnerability is typically immediately reacted to with hardness, anger. Fight. But I'm exhausted. The anger that arises feels impotent; it doesn't believe in itself. And yet something in me has always wanted to be here, to touch into this deeply uncomfortable vulnerability. Anger has for a long time acted as a buffer to the world. Reinforcing the separation that keeps this being, whatever this is, bound.

Actually, without being able to feel vulnerable, there is likely no possibility of freedom. This hardness creates an inside and an outside. The harder and more insistent it is, the more separate these imaginary places of inside and outside feel. I feel it in my chest.

There appears to be nothing to do but to feel helpless right now. I was always so slow to tears. I'm trying to let the tears come.

It is beautiful. It is scary.

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In the world of thoughts, cognition, ideas, something similar happens. Someone says something, mostly it's re-cogitation from other ideas, snippets, sayings from elsewhere. Perhaps the idea is compelling enough to people at that time and place that it gets picked up and keeps getting picked up, and perhaps it is reinforced all over the world for a time. It has nothing to do with the value of the idea, and everything to do with how compelling it is to various human animals, and what these imaginary selves think they are missing, what they are hungry for. Andrew Tate has 10 million Twitter followers, I hear. This one Bible app has 100 million downloads. Sometimes an idea is held for a while, maybe millennia, until it goes by the wayside—dying, decomposing, recomposing perhaps into something else, something unrecognizable. The suttas say that even gods are subject to arising and passing away.

What a situation. The mind freezes in the face of it. Despite its pretensions, it was mostly built to determine if one rock is bigger than the other, or if this wild and dangerous animal is 1,000 feet in front or 10 feet behind. In moments of rest, it dreams that all this locating in space and time suggests a self at the center, and that this self is better or worse than others.

What a situation. Once assessed, the mind naturally seeks liberation.

The famous Bahiya Sutta is a direct pointer to liberation: "In the seen, only the seen; in the heard, only the heard; in the cognized, only the cognized..." With no self doing the seeing, hearing, cognizing. In womb and in tomb. The noise of the body being built, the body decomposing. Who is there to hear it? These were thoughts that arose in me, in a float tank in Brooklyn, hearing the sounds of the body, digestion, the cells of the body being replaced.

check out my book, The Jungle Cuts Through Itself: A Post-Awakening Journal.

Available on:

Kindle

or

PDF download