Still I am in recovery and haven't really gotten out about yet. I did
however look at some calendars for local T groups and am looking at
one the weekend of 10 may and another the weekend of 6 june. Anima
woman has a group starting 22 april. That's a little soon and I don't
want to rush so what I am thinking of doing is going over right before
the first group starts and I'll join up if the poontang quotient is
high enough otherwise just drive back home. Not that this will earn me
any karma points but you don't believe in karma points anyways, do
you?
It's a lot less work being agnostic than it is having a messiah
complex type narcissistic personality disorder. If you solve the
salvation problem you suddenly have an entire planet load of
responsibility and it would be totally psycho to want that.
Faust had the world's greatest library and still he was bored to
death. Inconceivable.
There were a couple things in the Hollenback mysticism book I probably
should have mentioned. One is that he is a historian, not a
consciousness scientist, but it appears his own take on what is
happening with the mystical experience is very similar to my own.
Which is that a lot of our mechanisms of perception and reason are
habitual. They are learned and enculturated. If you can neutralize
them with drugs or hypnosis or meditation or by hook or crook, what
happens next might well be astoni****ng. Also not predictable or
repeatable, in principle. The significance of repeatability is one of
those habits we are trained to appreciate and you cannot arrange to
ditch everything else but that one.
His main examples of modern mystical experience are Sylvan Muldoon and
Robert Monroe, and I don't think those are very good choices. Mostly
what he relates of theirs I would characterize more as lucid dreaming,
not paranormal phenomena. His longest sections are on Black Elk and
Saint Teresa Avila and these are much better choices.
He re****ts that Black Elk eventually abandoned the medicine man
practice and became a Catholic church convert and employee. There is a
quotation that he personally supervised the conversion of 400 souls
and was considered a highly regarded asset in his district. There is a
really goofy sketch where he was at Wounded Knee and was cloaked from
the bullets by holding out his arms like a flying goose and singing
the goose spirit song. The Catholics must have given him a lot of
money because I don't believe there is anything in their ritual
repertoire that can compete with that.
Then again there is the case of Saint Teresa. This is one of the most
interesting cases in the anals. First was her reluctant elevation. She
was doing it in the middle of one of the most extreme episodes of the
Spanish Inquisition and was paranoid it was the evil spirits filling
her soul and not the good spirits. One of the first church people she
went to for guidance advised her to cut it out with the silent prayers
all the time because he also thought it was probably the devil. Then
she appealed to a higher authority who told her it was not the devil,
go ahead and do the silent prayer thing, but to take care that she not
aspire to any more of the holy orgasms she re****ted. She came back
later and said that as hard as she aspired to no more holy orgasms,
they came back hotter than ever.
(Neither she nor Hollenback use the word orgasm, that is the
interpretation of myself and Bellini.)
This week I read the entire collection of my journals from 2001. There
is a lot of pain in there. I have four 150 pg spiral bound notebooks
which normally sit on the floor in my closet, not locked up, and I
really hope Sarah Not has not read them, since about 10% of it is
repeated ad nausem sarah not loves me loves me not. Reading all that
in one week puts the nausea in ad nauseum. There was one little tidbit
in there which was fascinating. On 13 Sept 2001 I had a session with a
psychiatrist. It was around 8 or 9 out of 12. In fifty minutes neither
one of us brought up the subject of the terrorist attacks. How many
fifty minute conversations were there on the planet on 13 Sept 2001
with no discussion of the terrorist attacks? Anyway we did talk about
it the next Thursday. He got a really pained expression on his face
when I told him I thought the chickens had come home to roost. And
then quickly we changed the subject. But not before he told me that a
hundred 1000 replays of the videotaped footage on the network
broadcasts would cause an epidemic of post traumatic stress disorder.
Narcissism or trauma it's gonna be one or the other every time.
This morning I managed a peacock pose and a crow pose for more than a
minute each. When I can do the headstand lotus for 15 minutes I am
going to post on craigslist for a TANTRIC *** partner. Not happening
any time soon.
Bukvich
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