P S Y C H O A C T I V E
______________________
TO DISSOLVE THE HIDDEN GRIP OF AFFLICTION
— You’re the horse. | You’re the trainer. —
Finding Ourselves Out
thing: I should know about what I’m talking about. I’m an expert on
identity formation, as I’ve been running and reforming this identity for
years. One of these days, somebody’s going to find me out and we’ll
all end up in show-biz.
show-biz, to the degree that an actor/ess is free within
his/her identity set and free to change, to that degree he or she can
play different roles well.
means that our identity changes (more or less), from moment to moment,
and in the circumstances of the moment, as we resonate with our circumstances.
one thing that persists in some way is
the vague idea of “self” — the one to whom this identity purportedly
belongs. People rarely talk about that one! (It’s our ‘sacred cow’
self — the one “outside it all” and viewing it all, the one who
ostensibly never becomes hamburger, supra-Kosmic or otherwise.)
and now, a very important disclaimer:
political flip-flopper
who uses the word, “fight”, instead of “create”
whose primary interest is
to get rich and avoid getting into trouble
to avoid any kind of crisis, lest he flub his response
he, in a position of visibility,
who fears to look like an incompetent
— or worse — have to face consequences.
Maybe it’s what makes him a schlimazl
for whom nothing good ever seems to happen
since he can’t marshal all the forces needed
to make it happen.
or makes him a shlemiele
(closely related to a no-account fool)
not good at much of anything,
fallen back into being a good-for-nothing freeloader,
an imbiber by days
and something of a hapless dimwit at twilight
walking into lampposts
a person who’s a total loss
uneducated
unperceptive
incomprehending
wrong and insistent.
or its sillier version, shmegeggie
a nudnick (Pest!)
NO! This is a smart person!a wonderful person!He cleans up after himself.He picks up his clothes.He can read.
He’s nice.He’s also a clever person, having learned a thing or two.He knows the difference between“flip” and “flop”knows when it’s OK to be flip
and knows when his flippancy has flopped.Oh, most unflappable one,
I see you keep your equilibrium pretty well —— most of the time.
You are intelligently mindful of how we are unavoidably
affected by each other
and inextricably interconnected,
with everything unified in the present moment,
not as an idea or ideal, but as a perception
of how things actually are,feeling and observing how we are affected by this moment
in a resonant and moving equilibrium
continuous in moment to moment experience
participating and yet mystified,
faithful in nothing in this life made of change,
in which the currents of our own existence
carry murky, turbulent memories that shape and color our times.You sound like a wise man (or woman).
How did that happen?
~~~~~~~~~~
So, when I speak of
identity, I’m not speaking of socialization or role. I’m speaking of
something much more fundamental, something that explains human behavior,
how we get stuck in behavior, and how we may deliberately grow or evolve through an “unhooking” or “unlocking” process.
Four steps are involved in identity formation:
- experience: the emergence of the “present” from the unknown: self,
others and things, the momentary and total condition of “now” | Without
the gathering and coalescing of attention and aggregations of memory,
experience is void, without meaning, without significance, without
object, just movements of the unknown - memory : persistence of experience, the experience of “now”
(immediate memory), meaning, recognizable events, holding on to
experience and experiences, having experience “be in your face” - identification: choosing to stick with a certain experience at any
moment : assigning importance, assuming memory (persistence) is reality :
taking remembered experiences of self as self and our perception of other things as “the way they really are.” (The Myth of Actuality = “The Myth of the Given”) - perpetuation: intending, inviting, seeking to make more, or
refusing, seeking to make less, all motivation, all “go”, all “stop”,
all spin, all involvement with, all imagining
(“the One” multiplied by becoming “the Many”)
consists of our experience of our situation and our sense of
ourselves. Most of this sense of experience is submerged in subconsciousness. But we
experience it every time we meet a new person and visit a new place.
It’s our first impression — which fades with familiarity, into the
background.
(yes, I wrote that rightly). Our first impression is of “unknown”.
Gradually, with enough time and enough exposure, “unknown” fades-in into
“something known” — a memory is formed. Until a sufficiently vivid
memory is formed, no experience is being had.
actual experience, so we can more easily focus on experiences that have
that pattern, and look for what’s changing, moving, happening. It’s beginning from a presumed base of knowledge.
the experience of the moment is seen always in terms of existing
memories, which grow in a moving, changing pattern. The growing edge of
memory
is experiencing what is emerging out of the unknown, clothing it in
imagination so it may seem known, then forming memories and bridging
them with other memories. Impressions form over
time about the “realities” of life, colored by memories brought to life
by imagination, imagination informed by memory and going beyond.
form our memories from our experiences of the moving moment of life,
the changing harmonics of life. All sensory impressions that go into
memory refer
to movements and harmonics of life, memories of persons, places and
things. Our memories of “the movements and harmonics of life” flavor or
dress up all
of our sense-impressions of the moment.
“a movement and a felt harmonic” gets called up every time we recall something and every
time we put ourselves in a situation to experience anything familiar. Memory creates expectation.
the degree that something feels, “in your face”, that’s the degree that
you take it for truth, for reality, or as self. That’s how solidly set
your / my attention is in memory, how solidly fixated, how ingrained, how entranced. That’s how much experience has “got us” by the ….. (ooch!) .
and resistance (or intending and refusing) are two forms of the same thing: one is “wanting to
make it more” and the other is “wanting to make it less”; the difference,
only one of direction; both are “wanting”.
something, they want (to some degree — strongly or mildly) either to
reinforce/assert their knowledge or to minimize/deny it. They want to
rely upon it or they want to forbid it. Either way, they want to do
that for themselves, for their own sake.
a person has an attitude, they want to impose it upon the world. (Even
the idea of “not wanting to impose it on the world” is an attitude.)
the activity of identity, of self-propagation, the genetic imperative
that distinguishes itself from others on the basis of memories.
experience
Jimmy has never been to a baseball game.His father comes home with tickets to see the Cardinals.
They go on a Saturday.
At the ballpark, Jimmy takes it all in, eyes open wide.
Dizzy Dean is pitching.
He winds up. There’s the pitch.
Foul ball. Into the stands.
Jimmy catches the ball.
memories
Now, Jimmy has a story to tell the guys in the neighborhood.What does that do for his social status?
Jimmy likes the attention. He brings the ball to school, he tells the story at Sunday School, around …
The more Jimmy tells the story,
the more he reinforces the memory of it
and his place in it.assuming memories are truth, reality, or self
Jimmy takes credit for catching the foul ball,
lays claim to special status, reason for pride.
casts himself into a self-image that he takes for himself
and shows around.perpetuating what we remember as extended forms of “self”
Soon, Jimmy is a fan.He’s read up on Dizzy Dean, knows his statistics,
roots for the Cardinals,
feels the glory when they win
feels the humiliation when they lose.He’s even gotten into a couple of fights over it.
He can’t help himself.
But then, he’s only ten.That was a long, long time ago.
Now, Jimmy’s a Republican.
Goes to war. It’s his patriotic duty.
He’s sent to the front. Wounded.
Now he has a limp. And a medal.He’s honorably discharged and sent home. He gets special recognition, special privileges. (This was an earlier time.)
He’s sent to an innovative form of therapy that promises he can walk, again. In fact, he’ll lose the limp.
But
now, George doesn’t know “who he’d be” without his war wound. He’d
seem ordinary. He also can’t imagine walking normally, again. He’s
forgotton his “pre-army” state. His wound and his status as a wounded
war vet, based in memory and the seeming permanence of his wound, have
made him into something else.The therapy doesn’t work.
He gets into politics. Eventually, he runs for political office.
Now,
he gets some mileage out of being a wounded war vet. His wound is his
badge of courage. He cherishes the identity of “War Vet”, keeps it
low-key on the campaign trail. He imagines that it is some of the basis
of the respect with which people treat him, that it’s a “trump card”:
On certain topics, no one dares challenge his position.And, of course, years later, he’s a Republican.
identity is a standpoint with general ways of operating based on
memories of experience, a standpoint that wants to reinforce (or
perpetuate) its way of operating in the world.
we know, we want to continue to be “right knowledge”. That’s why
people dislike “being wrong” and why “being made wrong” is such a
politically incorrect social impropriety. It’s about what “wanting to be
right” means — not having to change (to change is work!).
first we experience something. And then, as we experience it, we
remember it. Then, we assume that memory represents and actually says
something reliable about either oneself or something or someone other.
We carry all the accumulated memory patterns that form out of the
interaction of the world with our memoried self. We act as if life
exists in terms of those memory patterns — and so act accordingly —
either to perpetuate and reinforce or to refuse or counteract.
explains how we form behavior patterns, how we get stuck in behavior
patterns (egotism, arrogance, “anything goes” or cold-fish authoritarianism), and also how we
learn to grow and evolve. It’s a spooky business.
as we form innumerable memories from moment to moment, we form
innumerable identities for each moment — and hopefully they’re all well
interconnected, so we don’t get trapped in one (dissociated identity state).
answer is, to reverse the process. What would happen for Jimmy if he
imagined himself going back up the chain of identity formation?
“Vizier” is Arabic for “wise guy“.)
“Somatic Awakening” is not an “awakening to” something. It’s an awakening as something and then an awakening from it.
It’s “awakening as” what one most ordinarily IS,
scanning and observing it with attentiveness,
feeling it, inhabiting it,
enfolding it,
assessing its “charge”: how one feels implicated (entangled)
in the force of memory,
detecting the imagination of memory,
then awakening from imagining,
releasing the sense of “something there”, feeling it dissolve into the formless field of attention, as no-self, original self, more familiar than breathing
There. That. Which is Here.
It’s going backward through
the stages of priority (“that which came before”)
“upstream” of the creative process,
to
awaken, undefined, as self-source — the Natural State, the awakening of which feels like A Big, Divine Kosmic Kiss, which we may symbolize
by the word,
“mmmmWAH!!!”
which is also what it feels like, as we dissolve into the undefined Condition.
- He feels his position, attitude, standpoint, or whatever he is stuck
with or is perpetuating — his knowledge, his chosen identity, his
refuge in the immunity of “rightness”.Whatever it is, it’s a sensation,
felt bodily, with a location, size, shape, and intensity in the overall
body-sense (kinesthetic body, subtle body, etheric body, dream body — whatever the name).
Feel each term. Pretty similar, huh?It may occur to him that he
may have “bought in to something” — assigning the status of “reality”
to his memory-shaped-colored perspective in the world: “the truth” or
“The Truth”, “oneself” or “the Self”.It may occur to him that, that
he does not “have” it, but that it “has” him — that he lives “inside” it
and is subject to its limitations, which he takes as Reality and not a product of his way of remembering and seeing things — his perspective. To him, it’s solid, real, and consequential. The mood
is, “This is real.” or “This matters” (to a greater or lesser
degree– but note: If something makes a difference to you, you’ve bought
into it and it has you.) - He feels how much of this sense of “solid truth” or “things
mattering with consequences” feels like memory and how much of memory
feels like imagination. It’s a “feel” thing, not an “answer” that he
comes up with. He traces the feeling from the sense of solid truth to
memory to imagination.He imagines, moment to moment, that a scenario — of which he is a part — is developing and he has expectations — informed, in part, by
memory, and his perceptions are shaped and biased by memory. - Remembering is re-imagining something into our experience. The
seeming persistence, the solidity or reality of anything you can put
your attention upon is memory. Memory fades unless refreshed by
imagining. The denser the memory, the more persistent it is.The way we do it:
We put attention on the feeling of having some experience.We sense the feeling of experience without words,
as a sensation someplace within us
We feel its size, shape, intensity.We pump up our ability to sense our somatic state
with “attention maneuvers”.We sense how much (not “what”) intention we have toward it
We notice how steadying attention solidifies intention.We feel the whole package as a single, contained force:
the thing we are experiencing
and our intention toward it made solid by attention.
How intention*attention = memory.Now, we feel how much it matters
in order to bring ourselves into the picture
and acknowledge how much we are involved.
How much it matters has to do with our relation to the world.
Observe it, when you get around to doing a Gold Key Release.We may then own the intensity of the memory
even if we don’t know or understand when the memory is
and we may sift that intensity
to find the feeling of imagining.We
feel how much it feels like “solid reality”, how much feels like
memory, and how much of the memory feels a bit like imagining (or as we
like to say, “daydreaming” or “being entranced”).We feel
“remembering” and “imagining” and alternate between them until we can
zero in on each equally steadily and equally easily, and so can balance
them. What makes it easier to alternate more to one side than the other
is that we are more entranced by it. These words make sense with
experience, but perhaps not before. Save yourself the brain-fog;
instead of “trying to figure it out”, just do it (at least once).If you
have trouble with this step, deliberately remember something. Feel
what remembering feels like. Then imagine something. Feel what
imagining feels like.Now apply those distinctions to your sense of “solid truth”.
- Feel the dissolution of his “fix” (or fixation) — the thing he has
been perpetuating — as his discovery or sense of “how much of it is
imagination” is “the little valve” through which the “air” that has
inflated his sense of “solid truth” (and ego) escapes. Simpler if he
just does Step 3. (Imagination is easier to let go than “solid truth”.) - He takes a breath, lets go of the imagining, and falls toward (or into) his identity-less,
natural state, at least for the moment. (Don’t do this while driving or
try to understand this by reading it. Do the procedure. Do it well at
least once.) - He checks the remaining intensity of the feeling. If anything is left, he starts at Step 1.
From here, we go to the first “magical” process for decrystallizing crystallized identity patterns:
