Be Afraid

A common complaint levied against Western Buddhism is its leniency regarding the self and its agnosticism regarding evil spirits. I found a gem digging in the uncle's crates today--a dharma tape telling a supposedly 500 year old story. It reflects what I've been reading in the Cassiopaean material with Laura Knight Jadczyk. (I'm currently on chapter 28 of The Wave.) LKJ is vehemently opposed to blindly loving New Ageism, sharply criticizing their wishful thinking and ignorance of beings trying to take advantage of them. This tape, entitled Destiny Can Be Changed, briefly mentions the technically advanced but immature beings who eavesdrop on us and whom LKJ discusses at length as the Service-to-Self (STS) beings.

I'm not finished listening to the tape yet, but so far, the story mirrors the section I'm reading from LKJ so much. The Venerable Wu Ling tells of a man who has his fortune told, and as the years pass, he finds the predictions so dead on that he relinquishes his grip on life and peacefully lets destiny take its course. He then meets a master who tells him he could change his destiny if he did some practices, such as being kind, being mindful, doing good deeds, reciting a mantra, and clearing his mind of discursive thought.

LKJ discovers in Gurdjieff and Ouspensky a very similar picture of the human predicament. We are robots with very predictable lives. Only if we practice diligently seeing how we are influenced externally can we ever find our kernel of free will. Another similarity between LKJ and Wu Ling is that Wu Ling also encourages practictioners to feel shame for making mistakes and to fear more sentient beings, suggestions you don't hear very often in the self-centered New Age circles LKJ criticizes.

Audio excerpt from Destiny Can Be Changed: Eavesdropping_Beings.mp3

Conform/Rebel

Damn it. I thought I was over this. I just got up from a bad dream:

I was playing baseball at school. I was playing a base. I miss catching the ball every time. So embarrassed. When I throw the ball, it doesn't go where I want it to. Too weak. More embarrassment. I'm feeling really shitty. My heart pounds hard as the spotlight is on me to perform. I awake with the pounding heart.

There's nothing more painful than social impotence. Conformity is safe. To follow the herd means to be protected from being stampeded. But when I can't catch up, it is embarrassing. I do get run over. The pressure builds to conform and perform better. I fail again due to the pressure, and the pressure only builds.

Another part of me rebels to preserve the kernel of individuality. But the rebellion itself is taking up so much energy that I don't have any to expend on real self-expression.

To one not suffering from this double-bind, the solution seems so obvious and easy. Just let go of the conform/rebel complex and be myself. Yet the more I push it away, the harder it rebounds, or the more insidiously it pervades another part of my life. It's one of those soul fragments that scream for attention and only the proper kind, but what is the proper response? The mere knowledge of their existence does little to mitigate them.

So I try dialogue.

I asked that part of me why it was there. It means to protect me from the stampede. It means to find for me the apparent peace and good fortune of the "normal." They do look relatively confident. It wants me to be like that. It wants their nonchalance. It wants their free expressiveness. It wants their friends and their toys.

The other part hates the normal. It sees the normal as a bully, trying to squish all real self-expression, allowing only for that which fits within their parameters. It projects its own repression on others, seeing them as cowardly automatons following a script. It responds with anger and vindictiveness toward authoritative attempts to confine it. It uses the little remaining brainpower I have to rationalize political and religious views that maintain its position as victim of the mainstream. It wants to change the world because it doesn't fit into this one.

You're both crazy. Thank you for your time, but I don't need your "help" any more. If you would please leave, I could get on with my life and great achievements, after which I'll buy you guys a drink for your attempted assistance. Okay, bye now. "No!" they respond.

Breathe in slowly. Breathe out. Letting go of thoughts run amok, giving despair a blank look when she visits. The thoughts come back; let go again. Rinse, tumble, repeat. What else is there to do?

Caffeine Conscious

I don't like caffeine because it disrupts my chill mood. I drink soda about two or three times a year. Stupidly, I decided to try it out again even though I've never had a good experience with it. Yep, there come the jitters. Anxiety. Wait! What if I adjust my personality to use this extra energy? So I blast some music, Radiohead's Amnesia. No, too chill. Atmosphere's Happy Clown Bad Dub 8. Hmm, surprisingly still too chill! Lyrics Born - Same Shit Different Day. Yes! This is perfect. Set the volume to 11 (it's one higher).

And it's conscious rap: Lyrics Born - The Last Trumpet (remix)

pwned

You know a song is good when it's banned by the Nixon Administration: Eugene McDaniels - Headless Heroes. We're pawns in the master game or prawns in the master's wok, food for the powerful.

Self-Stupefaction

Click here for audio version.

We stupefy ourselves so that we may experience learning. The angels say, "Learning is fun." However, while in class, we rebel or don't pay attention. Even this is part of the experience we signed up for! We wanted to see what separation from the truth (of our infinite power) looks like so we forget our source. We wanted to feel what being prey for spirit predators feels like so we expose our souls to greed and fear.

From this stage, we can go on learning and reunite our fragmented selves or we can reject the true laws of nature and continue to live blind and broken. No easy "proof" will be given to us of the truth because that would stifle our own personal discovery of the truth. It would go against the contract we agreed on upon entering this realm. We came here to experience innocence and learning in a free will environment, not to be fed into a factory and programmed with knowledge.

We are on an adventure of self-discovery. Every new problem is a challenge that stretches our imagination and thus our power. Even stagnation is not a sin. It is the choice to revel in or suffer in our self-created playground or self-imposed prison, respectively.

Reference: The Wave by The Cassiopaeans through Laura Knight-Jadczyk