Rod's Summary

Piet & Everyone

Week 5 Summary

This week started out with a re-immersion in archetypal trance imagery such as I explored back in the 1980s. I began to use the 5 minute morning meditation as a time to allow such trance imagery to re-emerge. A typical notation from the first of the week reads:

the visceral & the ethereal. The moist slime and gristle of the visceral transforms into the lucid blues & golds of the ethereal.

Still, though, I sometimes struggled with trying too hard to "make something happen" (an issue we dealt with at great length during the first phase of the WoK experiment.) I had to remind myself of "letting go" in order allow the trance imagery to emerge and to allow immersion in "what is, right here, right now."

A very important part of how rapidly I've come to this re-visualization of consciousness is the book I'm now reading, Morris Berman's Re-enchantment Of The World (1981), which treats the history of Western culture as a loss of participatory consciousness during which period Science & Technology & Commerce became dominant. Berman's thesis is exactly what I've been working on in the WoK experiment during this first month, i.e., the re-integration of Linear-Causal (scientific explanation) & Tranquil-Holistic (the living world). I realize that I have always explored both realms of consciousness, but only as separate ways of knowing. Now, however, I'm beginning to comprehend their integral nature via the Working Hypothesis of Completeness!

Piet will perhaps recognize the antecedents of this burgeoning awareness from a long essay I sent him entitled "Viewpoint Dualism Revisited" which I had written late last Summer. I ended that essay with the following statement:

"I've characterized consciousness as an unfolding edge brought about by the complementary processes of perception & hallucination. The edge of consciousness is exceedingly fine, so fine that we sense no division between what is now, what was then, and what is coming. The here & now of consciousness always is....[and] extends simultaneously all around me. Everywhere at once. Said another way, consciousness is neither spatial nor temporal, even though it encompasses both space and time. The best I can do is to say that consciousness consists in being-here-now, knowing full-well that neither Here nor Now nor Being exist in any sense other than as concepts within the metaphor of mechanical materialism."

... from Rod