nousrose

[nousrose]

As long as we confuse the myriad forms of the divine /i/a with reality, without perceiving the unity of Brahman underlying all these forms, we are under the spell of maya. Maya, therefore, does not mean that the world is an illusion, as is often wrongly stated. The illusion merely lies in our point of view, if we think that the shapes and structures, things and events, around us are realities of nature, instead of realizing that they are concepts of our measuring and categorizing minds. Maya is the illusion of taking these concepts for reality, of confusing the map with the territory. In the Hindu view of nature, then, all forms are relative, fluid and ever-changing maya, conjured up by the great magician of the divine play. The world of maya changes continuously, because the divine /i/a is a rhythmic, dynamic play.

The Tao of Physics

Fritjof Capra

[nousrose]

When we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense. For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society. Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within.

Uses of the Erotic

Audre Lorde

[nousrose]

People who require strict bounds of individuality (guardedness) are usually the least capable of surrendering. Individuals firm within their autonomy are more capable of surrendering. This is identical to the notion that one must actually have a viable ego before one is qualified to lose it. Those who have had their primal sense of autonomy severely impaired by an environment which stressed chronic self-defense to maintain their autonomy are all but incapable of surrender. Their sense of autonomy is so fragile, held together by pain and suspicion, that the idea of surrender brings forth intense feelings of shame, anxiety and guilt. Thus, they are incapable of giving love or receiving it. Their habitual defensive posture, learned when they were too vulnerable for differentiated defense, makes it next to impossible for them to drop their guard long enough for love to come in or for love to come out. Ironically, individuals such as these are often those who talk the most about love yet treat their relationships as an endless chain reaction of negotiations centering around the issue of control. The entire idea of "control," in this context, contradicts the result people believe "control" might yield— self-mastery. Here control means "control" of anxiety, smallness and the feeling of falling apart which an impaired sense of autonomy has created. These fears and maneuvers are unfounded and unnecessary, once the person realizes that in reality they can only truly surrender to their Secret Lover. This act of surrender can do nothing but add to one's autonomy and power, but it is important to keep in mind that the benefits brought about by love are always a consequence, a result of surrender, and never the reason for surrendering. The need to surrender is "caused" by life fulfilling itself.

Sex Magic, Tantra & Tarot

Christopher S. Hyatt

[nousrose]

If we are gripped by a strong attraction to a person or a thing, we must reflect on it. As Jung says: Unless we prefer to be made fools of by our illusions, we shall, by carefully analysing every fascination, extract from it a portion of our own personality, like a quintessence, and slowly come to recognize that we meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life. The same applies to our passionate antipathies. They also must be subjected to thorough analytic scrutiny. Whom do I hate? What groups or factions do I fight against? Whoever and whatever they are, they are a part of me; I'm bound to that which I hate as surely as I am to that which I love. The important thing, psychologically, is where one's libido is lodged, not whether one is for or against a particular thing. If we follow such reflections diligently, very gradually we will collect our scattered psyche from the outer world, as Isis gathered the dismembered body of Osiris.

The Mystery of the Coniunctio

Edward F. Edinger

[nousrose]

The mind sees reality through the lens of māyā. That is, it sees things as fundamentally separate and differentiated because its primary function is to produce discursive thought-forms, or vikalpas. Vikalpas are mental constructs or interpretive filters that divide up the world into discrete chunks for analysis (e.g., “Dangerous to me or not?” “Source of food or not?” “Potential mate or not?”). This function of the mind was very useful and important in our evolution, but has led to a problematic situation in which our interpretive lenses are constantly interposed between awareness and the rest of reality, such that it’s very easy to mistake the lens for reality. To be more precise, we take the modified image that appears in the lens or filter as being accurate, when in fact it’s distorted to an unknown degree, until you learn how to remove the lens, at least temporarily. This is one definition of the ‘unawake’ state or dreamstate. We often translate vikalpa as differential thought-construct, which indicates two things: first, the fabricated nature of vikalpas, which after all are not reflections but interpretations of reality, and second, the fact that all vikalpas are based in perception of difference and articulated in terms of difference with the most basic difference being self versus other. By its very nature, the mind is a perceiver of differentiation, not unity. Pleasant versus unpleasant, good versus bad, the way things should be versus the way things are. That's no fault of the mind. Its function is to see difference, without which we couldn't survive. But to what extent has that function come to dominate? The price we have paid is the increasing loss of the ability to see the greater unity which subsumes all difference. The mind is, in its natural state, a useful tool, not a locus of selfhood. A servant, not a master. And certainly not the aspect of our being that has the last word on what is ultimately real, and ultimately significant.

The Recognition Sutras

Christopher D. Wallis

[nousrose]

There is a very simple secret to being happy. Just let go of your demand on this moment. Any time you have a demand on the moment to give you something or remove something, there is suffering. Your demands keep you chained to the dream state of conditioned mind. The problem is that when there is a demand, you completely miss what is now. Letting go applies to the highest sacred demand, and even to the demand for love. If you demand in some subtle way to be loved, even if you get love, it is never enough. In the next moment, the demand reasserts itself, and you need to be loved again. But as soon as you let go, there is knowing in that instant that there is love here already. The mind is afraid to let go of its demand because the mind thinks that if it lets go, it is not going to get what it wants - as if demanding works. This is not the way things work. Stop chasing peace and stop chasing love, and your heart becomes full. Stop trying to be a better person, and you are a better person. Stop trying to forgive, and forgiveness happens. Stop and be still.

Emptiness Dancing

Adyashanti

[nousrose]

The dissolving, uniting forces combine what to us have been incompatible: attraction with repulsion, darkness with light, the erotic with the destructive. If we can allow these opposites to meet they move our inner resonance to a higher vibratory plane, expanding consciousness into new realms…The sacred marriage or coniunctio, the impulse to unite seeming opposites, does indeed seem to lie at the heart of the subtle body’s imaginal world. One important characteristic of the coniunctio is its paradoxical dual action. The creative process of each sacred marriage, or conjoining of opposites, involves not only the unitive moment of joining together in a new creation or third, but also, as I have mentioned, a separating or darkening moment. The idea that “darkness comes before dawn” captures this essential aspect of creativity…In alchemical language, when darkness falls, it is said to be the beginning of the inner work or the opus of transformation. The old king (ego) must die before the new reign dawns. The early alchemists called the dark, destructive side of these psychic unions the blackness or the nigredo. Chaos, uncertainty, disillusionment, depression, despair, or madness prevails during these liminal times of making death. The experiences surrounding these inner experiences of darkness and dying (the most difficult aspects were called mortificatio) may constitute our culture’s ruling taboo. This taboo interferes with our moving naturally to stage two in the individuating process, a process that requires that we pass through a descent into the underworld of the Dark Feminine realities of birthing an erotic intensity that leads to dying. Entranced by our happily-ever-after prejudiced culture, we often do not see that in any relationship, project or creative endeavor or idea some form of death follows naturally after periods of intense involvement. When dark experiences befall, we tend to turn away, to move as quickly as possible to something positive or at least distracting, away from the negative affects of grieving, rage, terror, rotting and loss we associate with darkness and dying.

Embrace of the Daimon

Sandra Dennis

[nousrose]

Continually trying to look on the bright side interferes with our finding the wisdom that lies in the fruitful darkness. Continually striving upward toward the light means we never grow downward into our own feet, never become firmly rooted on the earth, never explore the darkness within and around us, a darkness without whose existence the light would have no meaning.

The Fasting Path

Stephen Harrod Buhner

[nousrose]

To “purify” the senses is to release them, so far as human beings may, from the tyranny of egocentric judgments; to make of them the organs of direct perception. This means that we must crush our deep-seated passion for classification and correspondences; ignore the instinctive, selfish question, “What does it mean to me?” learn to dip ourselves in the universe at our gates, and know it, not from without by comprehension, but from within by self-mergence.

Practical Mysticism

Evelyn Underhill

[nousrose]

Liberation from self-sabotage requires an understanding of how we co-create the life we experience. We are not innocent victims suffering at the cruel hands of fate. Rather, we participate in the circumstances of our lives by giving consent, consciously or unconsciously, to most of the pleasure or the pain we experience. Self-responsibility enables us to see that our reactions to the inevitable stresses and challenges of life are a result of choices that we are making. It requires the courage to acknowledge that we may have an emotional investment in maintaining our negative emotions and beliefs.

Freedom From Self-Sabotage

Peter Michaelson

[nousrose]

Magic is a doorway through which we step into mystery, wildness, and immanence. We live in a world subject to extensive and seemingly, all embracing systems of social and personal control that continually feed us the lie that we are each alone, helpless, and powerless to effect change. Magic is about change. Changing your circumstances so that you strive to live according to a developing sense of personal responsibility; that you can effect change around you if you choose; that we are not helpless cogs in some clockwork universe. All acts of personal/collective liberation are magical acts. Magic leads us into exhilaration and ecstasy; into insight and understanding; into changing ourselves and the world in which we participate. Through magic we may come to explore the possibilities of freedom.

Condensed Chaos

Phil Hine

[nousrose]

When a person says to a friend, “I’ll see you later” or a parent says to a child at bedtime, “I’ll see you in the morning,” these are statements, like delusions, whose validity is not open for discussion. Such absolutisms are the basis for a kind of naive realism and optimism that allow one to function in the world, experienced as stable and predictable. It is in the essence of emotional trauma that it shatters these absolutisms, a catastrophic loss of innocence that permanently alters one’s sense of being in the world. Massive deconstruction of the absolutisms of everyday life exposes the inescapable contingency of existence on a universe that is random and unpredictable and in which no safety or continuity of being can be assured. Trauma thereby exposes “the unbearable embeddedness of being”. As a result, the traumatized person cannot help but perceive aspects of existence that lie well outside the absolutized horizons of normal everydayness. It is in this sense that the worlds of traumatized persons are fundamentally incommensurable with those of others, the deep chasm in which an anguished sense of estrangement and solitude takes form.

Trauma and Human Existence

Robert D. Stolorow

[nousrose]

We fashion the world that surrounds us by the intensity of our imagination and feeling, and we illuminate or darken our lives by the concepts we hold of ourselves. Nothing is more important to us than our conception of ourselves, and especially is true of our concept of the deep, dimensionally greater One within us. Those that help or hinder us, whether they know it or not, are the servants of that law which shapes outward circumstances in harmony with our inner nature. It is our conception of ourselves which frees or constrains us, though it may use material agencies to achieve its purpose. Because life molds the outer world to reflect the inner arrangement of our minds, there is no way of bringing about the outer perfection we seek other than by the transformation of ourselves. No help cometh from without: the hills to which we lift our eyes are those of an inner range. It is thus to our own consciousness that we must turn as to the only reality, the only foundation on which all phenomena can be explained. We can rely absolutely on the justice of this law to give us only that which is of the nature of ourselves. To attempt to change the world before we change our concept of ourselves is to struggle against the nature of things. There can be no outer change until there is first an inner change.

No-One To Change But Self

Neville Goddard

[nousrose]

We invest the breaking of our barriers with some tangible form if necessary. We try to think of it as a thing. Left to ourselves, we jib at death and have to be forced to go the whole way. We are incessantly trying to hoodwink ourselves, trying to get at continuity, which implies that the boundaries have been crossed, without actually crossing the boundaries of this discontinuous life. We want to get across without taking the final step, while remaining cautiously on the hither side. We can conceive of nothing except in terms of our own life, and beyond that, it seems to us everything is wiped out. Beyond death, in fact, begins the inconceivable which we are usually not brave enough to face. Yet the inconceivable is the expression of our own impotence. We know that death destroys nothing, leaves the totality of existence intact, but we still cannot imagine the continuity of being as a whole beyond our own death, or whatever it is that dies in us. We cannot accept the fact that this has limits. At all costs we need to transcend them, but we should like to transcend them and maintain them simultaneously. As we are about to take the final step, we are beside ourselves with desire, impotent, in the clutch of a force that demands our disintegration. But the object of our urgent desire is there in front of us and it binds us to the very life that our desire will not be contained by. How sweet it is to remain in the grip of the desire to burst out without going the whole way, without taking the final step. How sweet it is to gaze long upon the object of our desire, to live on in our desire, instead of dying by going the whole way, by yielding to the excessive violence of desire.

Erotism: Death and Sensuality

Georges Bataille

[nousrose]

The acquisition of consciousness is a crime, an act of hybris against the powers-that-be; but it is a necessary crime, leading to a necessary alienation from the natural unconscious state of wholeness. If we are going to hold any loyalty to the development of consciousness, we must consider it a necessary crime. It is better to be conscious than to remain in the animal state. But in order to emerge at all, the ego is obliged to set itself up against the unconscious out of which it came and assert its relative autonomy by an inflated act. There are several different levels on which we can apply this understanding. On the deepest level it is a crime against the universal powers, the powers of nature, or God. But actually in everyday life it is generally not experienced in such religious categories, but in quite personal ways. On the personal level the act of daring to acquire a new consciousness is experienced as a crime or rebellion against the authorities that exist in one's personal environment, against one's parents, and later against other outer authorities. Any step in individuation is experienced as a crime against the collective, because it challenges the individual's identification with some representative of the collective, whether it be family, party, church, or nation. At the same time each step, since it is truly an inflated act, is not only accompanied by guilt but also runs the very real risk that one will get caught in an inflation that carries the consequences of a fall.

Ego and Archetype

Edward Edinger

[nousrose]

This is the great lesson the depressive learns: Nothing in the world is inherently compelling. Whatever may be really “out there”cannot project itself as an affective experience. It is all a vacuous affair with only a chemical prestige. Nothing is either good or bad, desirable or undesirable, or anything else except that it is made so by laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we live. And to live on our emotions is to live arbitrarily, inaccurately—imparting meaning to what has none of its own. Yet what other way is there to live? Without the ever-clanking machinery of emotion, everything would come to a standstill. There would be nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be, and no one to know. The alternatives are clear: to live falsely as pawns of affect, or to live factually as depressives, or as individuals who know what is known to the depressive. How advantageous that we are not coerced into choosing one or the other, neither choice being excellent. One look at human existence is proof enough that our species will not be released from the stranglehold of emotionalism that anchors it to hallucinations. That may be no way to live, but to opt for depression would be to opt out of existence as we consciously know it.

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

Thomas Ligotti

[nousrose]

The tragedy is simply this: that new meanings can only come from the creative depths of the life force within each individual; but the individual is the last one who believes in his right to develop unique meanings. He takes everything he needs uncritically from the society at large. As a result, man's meanings, instead of being free and open, are in fact "instinctivized" — hardened into the mold of a standard social pattern. Thus, the one animal in nature who is the potentially open vehicle for the life force actually closes up that vehicle by his fear of standing on his own original meanings.

Beyond Alienation

Ernest Becker