StrangeCaptain
Jedi Council Member
whitecoast said:Thanks again for recommending the 5 psychology books - I read Unholy Hungers over the weekend, and am hunting down copies of the others :p I do try and apply as much knowledge that I newly acquire as possible to my recapitulations and observations, but I must say I don't understand your comment on how reframing or applying that which we've learned to our lives and self-knowledge necessarily side-steps the issue of bankruptcy. Wouldn't this wall only occur if we refuse to alter our self-image based on our new understandings and observations? Are you referring to how some may confuse "gaining self-knowledge" with the useless reshuffling of the psychic material?
Well... I think Anart rephrased what I was trying to say, but as an example, I will quote you:
whitecoast said:I've been studying myself independently for about four years relating to these questions, and I want to ask others who are doing/studying similar activities in themselves for feedback and maybe some assistance with some things I'm beginning to encounter. The goal of this is to bring these observations of mine into the context of the work so that I may more fully understand my experiences with your assistance. There’s a lot here, because I’ve been carrying on these observations of my centers for a few years. I wanted to get this all out here because I recognize how critical it is to get feedback from the network/school on my development and such, and I think I’m a bit backlogged as far as that goes, hehe. So I want to see if I’m on the right track or if there are either things I am missing, or things that I am going about incorrectly.
I first started observing how my mind/body works as manifested through certain centers about four summers ago. I was just out of school, and my mind had essentially imploded from all the intensive studying I was doing. I had frequent headaches and stomach aches, for example. These didn't go away immediately after school was out either. It wasn't until I started doing qi gong, and some “grounding” exercises by some people I met that my stomach aches subsided, and I actually felt like I was in my body again! Being a primarily cerebral person, my curiosity about how this all worked was piqued.
I tried focusing on certain feelings or sensations in my body, as Mouravieff advised when he taught the Sage's Pose in Gnosis I: Exoterica (I didn't begin to study Mouravieff until this summer, but I found the connection/corroboration interesting). Eventually I learned to direct awareness and sort of up-regulate the functioning of certain centers and such. This was the first inroad I made to learning how to directly control the functioning of centers, instead of commonly used methods of indirect control (such as, say, doing yoga to try and direct more awareness to your physical center, or doing calculus to direct more awareness to your mental center). My first real empirical test for this was jumping into a freezing cold shower while raising the activity of my physical center. The result was that I actually felt more capable and able to endure the sensory shock of having cold water pouring all over me. There was much less internal resistance to it... like I was more able to embrace the new experience and assimilate it.
I should add I didn't learn how to down-regulate or slow down the functioning of centers until I started reading more into the fourth way path. I think this had to do with my eventual waking up to the fact that the wasting of energy through the misuse of centers is a serious obstacle in the way.
Who was making all of these observations? Who was focusing on these feelings and sensations? Quite simply, who is the observer? Were these observations and sensations just the thousand little I's having conversations with each other? I don't think we can begin to answer these questions before having the type of first initiation that Salzmann describes, and if we have not had that initiation, placing validity on observations of doubtful quality and building structures on top of these observations is a barrier from this type of initiation because we get further and further from being able to see where we started chasing our own tail in the first place.
I am in no position to judge rather or not this is what you are doing. I am in a position to say that this is a real and present danger. I am not going to claim that I have undergone this 1st initiation. I can however say that I have mistaken past experiences as being a first initiation through exactly this type of trying to redescribe my life in terms of esoteric vocabulary, and in doing so, was not able to see just how dysfunctional my everyday life was (and still is in many ways). For me, it was a sort of desperate way of saying "Yes! Yes! I know something! See? See?"
So... As the French would say... Bon courage!!! And best wishes...