Wondering if this is familiar

[sarek]

Before I began the Work I was not altogether unhappy with myself. I had nothing much to show for in a material way but that was only one aspect. In everything else i was the archetypical good householder. People asked me for advice and support all the time and i didnt really mind that job. It let me play my "sarek" role and cultivate that image, especially online, to the hilt.

Yet there was this nagging feeling that I was supposed to be going somewhere and not doing it. Its like the feeling of an engine, not connected to the wheels.
I had vague plans of a career move from taxes to psychology(believed it or not, that was intended as an STS to STO move) but that wasnt really happening either.

Until I found the Work.

I have to say it flipped my world upside down. Its had major positive effects but is also giving me a lot to think about.

The plus side is that its given me a huge impulse. This is exactly what I needed. For some reason, it seems to fit me like a glove both intellectually and emotionally. On top of that it allows me to engage that ADD hyperfocus which had been slumbering for far too long, never meeting a challenge interesting or big enough.

The down side is that I got to know myself. That is not a pretty picture even if i am aware that the Work is showing me only the things I can bear right now.
I cant believe I have gotten away with so much and that I have let myself get away with so much. I always had a vague idea of my many flaws but to see them highlighted in full technicolor is quite a shock. It can be discouraging at times, when I think at how much there is that I have yet to overcome. But I got to start somewhere.

But I have to admit its not every day that I go from being an adult all the way back to feeling like a five year old.

 

[Buddy]

But I have to admit its not every day that I go from being an adult all the way back to feeling like a five year old.

Yep, it's familiar.

In Blink!, Malcolm Gladwell said that the machinery of our unconscious thinking is forever hidden behind a locked door. I don't agree necessarily. Unlike conventional, accumulative (self) education which is about adding to our knowledge base, in many ways I think esoteric education is asymptotic; meaning it's all about removing false ideas and weakening the contributions of those false beliefs that tend to convert what should be a massive hierarchical, holographic, internally experienced model of reality to a mere flat-space.

So, those two parallel but inverse dynamics working together and that shifting back and forth, in the terms in which you put it, would seem to be two ways of expressing the same thing, OSIT.

 

[SMM]

But I have to admit its not every day that I go from being an adult all the way back to feeling like a five year old.

Yep, it's familiar.

In Blink!, Malcolm Gladwell said that the machinery of our unconscious thinking is forever hidden behind a locked door. I don't agree necessarily. Unlike conventional, accumulative (self) education which is about adding to our knowledge base, in many ways I think esoteric education is asymptotic; meaning it's all about removing false ideas and weakening the contributions of those false beliefs that tend to convert what should be a massive hierarchical, holographic, internally experienced model of reality to a mere flat-space.

So, those two parallel but inverse dynamics working together and that shifting back and forth, in the terms in which you put it, would seem to be two ways of expressing the same thing, OSIT.

Buddy, can I ask what you mean by "convert what should be a massive hierarchical, holographic, internally experienced model of reality to a mere flat-space"? From what I can understand it means being stripped bare & left feeling 'empty' of inculcated long-held assumptions, 'stripped to the bone' so to speak? Sort of like 'tabula rasa'? Trying to grasp the concept better, haven't read Blink! though.

But the five year old feeling - yup familiar with that too. Shocking fits the description.

 

[Buddy]

Buddy, can I ask what you mean by "convert what should be a massive hierarchical, holographic, internally experienced model of reality to a mere flat-space"?

Hi SMM. It's like the difference between having an understanding based memory and a memory based on rote-recital, or perhaps like the difference between perceiving the world holistically vs projecting onto a mental stage, organizing all the elements and characters as a perpetual scripted play or somesuch. What I'm suggesting is that fragmentation is imposed on us - our being and our memory - memory that would otherwise have been naturally and more realistically modeled like the 'holographic universe' itself.

From what I can understand it means being stripped bare & left feeling 'empty' of inculcated long-held assumptions, 'stripped to the bone' so to speak? Sort of like 'tabula rasa'?

I don't know about 'tabula rasa' and I don't know if it's possible to go back to a blank slate even if, as some have suggested, we start out as that. As for the rest of what you said, I would tend to agree. As a process, there are certainly levels and degrees to that stripping. Some even refer to this process as 'peeling back the layers of an onion' or something like it.

At any rate, if illusions and false beliefs create limitations on us, then it follows logically and it follows in experience that removing them while, at the same time, gaining knowledge and seeing relationships as well as creating new categories of such (seeing relationships even between classes of relationships which takes work) allows a mental modelling of reality that feels more like actual experience - because it includes actual experience.

Does that help? :)

 

[sarek]

I think there is more than one analogy with entering the next dimension. As described in the Flatland analogy that allows one to see the inside of oneself instead of merely riding the wave of time.

Thats not entirely what I mean by the five year old feeling though. That relates more to the realisation that so much what I deemed set and unchangeable, is now open to the light of day.

I remember as a young kid when I disassembled a very old broken bradio, asserting my parents that I "would put it back together" But of course the task is of such a magnitude as of being beyond the scope of fathoming the difficulties and their nature.
Well, right now, my mind feels like that broken radio and I am the kid.

 

[SMM]

Buddy, can I ask what you mean by "convert what should be a massive hierarchical, holographic, internally experienced model of reality to a mere flat-space"?

Hi SMM. It's like the difference between having an understanding based memory and a memory based on rote-recital, or perhaps like the difference between perceiving the world holistically vs projecting onto a mental stage, organizing all the elements and characters as a perpetual scripted play or somesuch. What I'm suggesting is that fragmentation is imposed on us - our being and our memory - memory that would otherwise have been naturally and more realistically modeled like the 'holographic universe' itself.

The difference between memorizing lines/a mantra & projecting that onto what is currently understood & understanding from within then having everything else understood? I might be mixing concepts incorrectly but is it something like the difference between bottom-up & top-down processing?

From what I can understand it means being stripped bare & left feeling 'empty' of inculcated long-held assumptions, 'stripped to the bone' so to speak? Sort of like 'tabula rasa'?

I don't know about 'tabula rasa' and I don't know if it's possible to go back to a blank slate even if, as some have suggested, we start out as that. As for the rest of what you said, I would tend to agree. As a process, there are certainly levels and degrees to that stripping. Some even refer to this process as 'peeling back the layers of an onion' or something like it.

At any rate, if illusions and false beliefs create limitations on us, then it follows logically and it follows in experience that removing them while, at the same time, gaining knowledge and seeing relationships as well as creating new categories of such (seeing relationships even between classes of relationships which takes work) allows a mental modelling of reality that feels more like actual experience - because it includes actual experience.

Does that help? :)

I'm not sure we start out as blank slates, at least on 3D level.
Yep, that helps Buddy. I agree with the last part you wrote, in terms of understanding holistically, because that understanding cannot be separated from what you experience & it takes a lot more in terms of energy to act against that understanding than in alignment with it.
Thanks! :)

 

[Buddy]

Buddy, can I ask what you mean by "convert what should be a massive hierarchical, holographic, internally experienced model of reality to a mere flat-space"?

Hi SMM. It's like the difference between having an understanding based memory and a memory based on rote-recital, or perhaps like the difference between perceiving the world holistically vs projecting onto a mental stage, organizing all the elements and characters as a perpetual scripted play or somesuch. What I'm suggesting is that fragmentation is imposed on us - our being and our memory - memory that would otherwise have been naturally and more realistically modeled like the 'holographic universe' itself.

The difference between memorizing lines/a mantra & projecting that onto what is currently understood & understanding from within then having everything else understood? I might be mixing concepts incorrectly but is it something like the difference between bottom-up & top-down processing?

I was thinking about the best way to answer your question when I recalled a story Richard Feynman once told. I'll quote it here as an excerpt from page 13 of the book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! You'll probably enjoy it more reading his style. I know I do. :)

I often liked to play tricks on people when I was at MIT. One time, in mechanical drawing class, some joker picked up a French curve (a piece of plastic for drawing smooth curves--a curly, funny-looking thing) and said, "I wonder if the curves on this thing have some special formula?"

I thought for a moment and said, "Sure they do. The curves are very special curves. Lemme show ya," and I picked up my French curve and began to turn it slowly. "The French curve is made so that at the lowest point on each curve, no matter how you turn it, the tangent is horizontal."

All the guys in the class were holding their French curve up at different angles, holding their pencil up to it at the lowest point and laying it along, and discovering that, sure enough, the tangent is horizontal. They were all excited by t his "discovery"--even though they had already gone through a certain amount of calculus and had already "learned" that the derivative (tangent) of the minimum (lowest point) of any curve is zero (horizontal).

They didn't put two and two together. They didn't even know what they "knew."

I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way--by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!

I did the same kind of trick four years later at Princeton when I was talking with an experienced character, an assistant of Einstein, who was surely working with gravity all the time. I gave him a problem: You blast off in a rocket which has a clock on board, and there's a clock on the ground. The idea is that you have to be back when the clock on the ground says one hour has passed. Now you want it so that when you come back, your clock is as far ahead as possible. According to Einstein, if you go very high, your clock will go faster, because the higher something is in a gravitational field, the faster its clock goes. But if you try to go too high, since you've only got an hour, you have to go so fast to get there that the speed slows your clock down. So you can't go too high. The question is, exactly what program of speed and height should you make so that you get the maximum time on your clock?

This assistant of Einstein worked on it for quite a bit before he realized that the answer is the real motion of matter. If you shoot something up in a normal way, so that the time it takes the shell to go up and come down is an hour, that's the correct motion. It's the fundamental principle of Einstein's gravity--that is, what's called the "proper time" is at a maximum for the actual curve. But when I put it to him, about a rocket with a clock, he didn't recognize it. It was just like the guys in mechanical drawing class, but this time it wasn't dumb freshmen. So this kind of fragility is, in fact, fairly common, even with more learned people.

 

[obyvatel]

Unlike conventional, accumulative (self) education which is about adding to our knowledge base, in many ways I think esoteric education is asymptotic; meaning it's all about removing false ideas and weakening the contributions of those false beliefs that tend to convert what should be a massive hierarchical, holographic, internally experienced model of reality to a mere flat-space.
....................
It's like the difference between having an understanding based memory and a memory based on rote-recital, or perhaps like the difference between perceiving the world holistically vs projecting onto a mental stage, organizing all the elements and characters as a perpetual scripted play or somesuch. What I'm suggesting is that fragmentation is imposed on us - our being and our memory - memory that would otherwise have been naturally and more realistically modeled like the 'holographic universe' itself.
.........................
At any rate, if illusions and false beliefs create limitations on us, then it follows logically and it follows in experience that removing them while, at the same time, gaining knowledge and seeing relationships as well as creating new categories of such (seeing relationships even between classes of relationships which takes work) allows a mental modelling of reality that feels more like actual experience - because it includes actual experience.

So in 4th Way Work terminology, the above can possibly be expressed as balanced working of the 3 centers (instinctive/moving, emotional and intellectual centers) with each contributing its own understanding leading to a growth of being which is described as "togetherness of experience".

osit

 

[kenlee]

At any rate, if illusions and false beliefs create limitations on us, then it follows logically and it follows in experience that removing them while, at the same time, gaining knowledge and seeing relationships as well as creating new categories of such (seeing relationships even between classes of relationships which takes work) allows a mental modelling of reality that feels more like actual experience - because it includes actual experience.

The "new categories" of thought and thinking in terms of new categories of thought is interesting since it might relate to these concepts posted below in philosophy and metaphysics:

_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_of_being

In metaphysics (in particular, ontology), the different kinds or ways of being are called categories of being or simply categories. To investigate the categories of being is to determine the most fundamental and the broadest classes of entities. A distinction between such categories, in making the categories or applying them, is called an ontological distinction.

_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology

Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, becoming, existence, or reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations. Traditionally listed as a part of the major branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, ontology deals with questions concerning what entities exist or can be said to exist, and how such entities can be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences.

But then as you mention there's "seeing relationships even between classes of relationships which takes work) allows a mental modelling of reality that feels more like actual experience - because it includes actual experience"

This might relate to the progressive gradations of.objective reason that Gurdjieff talks about in Beelzebub, where the universe is 'stratified' according to levels of intelligence and levels of Being. In that respect I think Gurdjieff's ideas on 'levels and categories' brings the above mentioned metaphysical and philosophical concepts (that it may have been based on) into clearer focus since, although it's still a theory, the food diagram and the 'Diagram Of Everything Living' (some descriptions on it are posted below) might bring those philosophical concepts closer into the realm of actual experience..

_http://www.ardue.org.uk/university/system/lect40.html#level

Cosmic Level of Being

First of all it is necessary to know the level of being of the creature in question. The level of being is determined primarily by the number of storeys in the given machine. So far we have spoken only about man, and we have taken man as a three-storey structure. We cannot speak about animals and man at one and the same time because animals are radically different from man. The highest animals we know consist of two storeys and the lowest of only one storey.

_http://www.ardue.org.uk/university/system/lect40.html#chain

There is still another system of classification which you also ought to understand. This is a classification in an altogether different ratio of octaves. The first classification by 'food', 'air', and 'medium' definitely refers to 'living beings' as we know them, that is to say as individuals, including plants. The other classification of which I will now speak leads us far beyond the limits of what we call 'living beings', both upwards, higher than living beings, and downwards, lower than living beings. It deals not with individuals but with classes in a very wide sense. Above all, this classification shows that in Nature, there are no jumps whatever. In Nature, everything is connected and everything is alive. The diagram of this classification is called the 'Diagram of Everything Living'.

According to this diagram, every kind of creature, every degree of being, is defined by what serves as food for this kind of creature or being of a given level and for what they themselves serve as food, because in the cosmic order each class of creature feeds on a definite class of lower creature and is food for a definite class of higher creatures.