Our Inner Inuksuk?

Inuksuks do not point the way as much as state: "I am here!" Their arms, stonily outspread as they are, do not necessarily indicate East and West, or point the way back South; the lone statuette is merely a marker upon a way ~ and that way is yours. You took the path that brought you upon it. And in the traceless deep of snow, or the hardly discernible shift of the shale, the solitary figure stands out across the way as a reminder that somehow someone was here before you ~ or how else do you think it got built?

Is there any thought we can have that does not find its origin in that which went before? Even The Tower of Babel did not rob mankind of a similarity of contentions, albeit guised differently; man is meaning-making, and man is empirical and abstract and self-referenced. Ontological, factually-experiential, and solipsistic. Every language has big words. And in every culture, much like that of Ozymandias, there is an instinctual sense that it too someday will have little but the crumbling edifices of its heritage to indicate it once was there. We shall have been silenced. And like the many crude Inuksuks of old, the statues we come upon or leave behind may be reduced to acid-eaten malformations, eventually, but someone else will surely come along and know that we too have tread upon this planet, and have left our mark.

The prognosis is not good. There are very many articles that have surpassed ‘The Silent Spring’and that point out that we are overpopulating, overindulging, and over-producing such that our natural resources cannot, and won't, sustain us. And the immolation rate, given the clearly observable death of trees and the acidification of the ocean, is in chronological terms drastically alarming; but in the day to day of our regular existence we are adjusting as readily as does the frog adjust to the rise in temperature in the pot on the stove, not realizing it will trap him when it boils.

As a panacea, 'The Singularity' is advanced in order that Biology may marry with Technology such that we become a global organism that, as a computerized consciousness, can make a lake and a forest out of a desert. One for all and all for one. Yet movies like 'Her' and the fascinating opportunities in 'Transcendence' serve to threaten mankind, rather than excite, entice, or invigorate him toward impelling us all to lose our individual ego and gather together in a complete sensibility about the balance of man in nature. That 'I' may no longer desire an 'other', another 'thing', or even want my own brain is too much for the individual to bear ~ and we will fight off any overt or recognizable intermarriage between our species and the machines, let alone its offspring! Or will we?

The future is upon us as surely as the energy increased around that frog is intensified. We are, item by item, whether technological or not, being subjected to the choices of others so much so that 'they' affect us all, and the individual, even if wanting escape to the hermit-like hopes of the family in The Mosquito Coast, or rendered as alone as Noah and his offspring on a dry mountaintop, is already subject to the effect of the flood of mankind’s makings upon the whole.

Please see: http://witsendnj.blogspot.ca/2014/07/a-fine-frenzy-universal-dance-of.html?spref=fb=

 The question is not so much what one does about it, but can one attain peace with all that which evidently already is? Such peace, we are led to believe, is the predominant practice of integration at its finest.

Or are we Inuksuks, with no purpose other than to be a landmark to those who may feel lost?

And thank to my scientific friend, Justin Neway, Ph.D., here's a most empirical essay about the topic:

http://www.pnas.org/content/99/14/9266.full

Eschatological Elevenses?

Mind benders stretch credibility. The eleventh hour is like that; will things really end? So too for penultimate moments; the marathon tape is but a mile away; 1999 is about to be 2000; there is only one more year before graduation! Even Armageddon was imminent. Yet... life goes on.

As such, when reading a summative sentence like "and we are living in a wonderful time that will never be repeated again", well, cognitive dissonance sets in. After all, there 'always' has been an eschatological history of "the end of the world". There is/was The Bible; and lately, Computer Doom; not to mention the apocryphal writings of The Club of Rome. Yet, here we are!

Thing is, Dolores Cannon's work, with some 17 books about the somnambulistic hypnosis into which her 'thousands' of subjects go, truly is mind-bending. As a therapist with over 40 years of practice she purports that we humans are indeed on a path to self-destruction, and that aliens (so called by those of us regular beings being reincarnated over and over on earth) are here to save us. What's more, these aliens have been here since the early 50's, and the Third Wave of them, the most integrative wave, is among our children, already spreading light and energy and love. At the very least (to cut to the chase) her pronouncements are positive. At the very least, we humans are being looked after, guided, redirected, and stirred toward seeking integration and care for all, thanks to the influence of these wonderfully caring aliens among us. Whew!

Credibility is stretched indeed when we encounter new paradigmatic thinking. On re-reading Genesis the "facts" are astounding. God's vengeance knows little discernment. Noah is 950 years old when he dies (Gen 9:29). Cain and Abel, the sons of Adam and Eve, find themselves wives. The babble leading toward the Tower of Babel is like a fairy tale, which, dissected for truisms in a modern world of probabilities, is easily dismissed. And yet, we continue to "believe" in Hogwarts, in its Harry, and even in Superman. "Somebody save me" is the signature song in Smallville. We have a strong inclination to be led, saved, guided and directed by forces beyond our very own; all history has inbred us toward the essential dependence on a father and mother figure; it's in our very genes! (Or as young men and women might have it, "in my jeans", ha!) 

Thing is, when Dolores Cannon states that thousands of deeply hypnotized fellows have said the same thing, that there are tiers of enlightened entities, ranged in Councils, taking care of the universe and concerned that man's activities (in danger of blowing up the world) will be as a cancerous harm to the Whole, and therefore waves of volunteers have come into the world (albeit through natural birth) to take on human form and to contribute to the health of the whole (albeit the vast majority of them unknowingly) then we have at the very least a progressive sense of being taken care of, of being redirected toward cooperation and concordance and love.

These First Wave of alien beings lost their sense of origin on entering the earth. They could hardly withstand the pain and suffering of the world; many committed suicide. The Second Wave came with stronger essence, and became the grand observers, doing little more than contributing with loving energy and light. The Third Wave, now prevalent among our children, are the ones who have a clearer sense of purpose, and instinctively know the mission is to make us more cohesive and concentrated on the preservation of all. Earthlings are repetitive with their reincarnations, hardly advancing much in their evolutionary enlightenment. Aliens do not identify with reincarnation, their essence being enlightenment evolving toward higher levels among the Councils. And being volunteers on a mission toward advancing the health of the planet, they are here to give unto us succour and spiritual manna and enlightened guidance that we may care. See: http://www.collective-evolution.com/2014/02/19/we-are-living-in-the-most-important-time-in-the-history-of-the-universe-dolores-cannon-discusses-our-current-paradigm/

Interesting premise! Interesting 'proof'. Interesting speculations. Interesting story! ...As for you?

Which Tenth Now?

"Ten" is easily said; less easily felt. Pain is most often referred to by a number out of 10 (as if everybody's 3 is the same for a headache, or a backache, or a sprain.) I know my own declarations are with relevance to my own endurance, or experience. A constant unrelenting chronic pain is worth what, a 5? If so, then my constancy varies on either side of the fulcrum of that 5. Standing still after 45 seconds will raise the chronic pain to a 7. After a minute it'll go to a 9, and then my endurance gives in and I simply must lean against something to ease the 10. But if I really have to practice I could make that endurance last longer and longer, until I could withstand say two or perhaps even three minutes of standing unsupported. Will I have upped the bar, raised the measure, created a new 10? So too for the other end of the scale. As we become desensitized our new 1's and 2's may be our old 3's and 4's. Individual strokes for different folks! We each feel and see things so uniquely. One person's 10 for a movie can be another's...

Beauty is like that, a 10 out of 10. Yet a beautifully Rubenesque wife is quite different from a rich man's 'sugar-candy', depending. And Bo Derrick is no Twiggy. That "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" is commonly accepted, yet we perpetuate the mythology of a perfect 10, don't we? To me the liveliness in another's eyes is more beautiful than anything seen of wrinkles or hair or vanity. Yet I confess, I will comment on the shape of vehicles (particularly while I'm in the vein of perhaps having to purchase a replacement for my ailing one). Do we not do the same with a lot of things over which we've grown tired? Furniture, houses, bedspreads, dishes, and even our own pets get disowned. Things that one has, having no longer enough of a number value in the order of liveability, like-ability, love-ability, or affordability, are demoted. We eventually can judge, purge, and reduce such once-'loved' things down to a zero. Next? Where’s a perfect 10?

But tens of thousands have suffered in the name of our looking for perfection. Consider these: 

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wycliffe;

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tyndale

John Wycliffe died in 1384, but 31 years later The Church exhumed his body and burnt his bones! William Tyndale, for his beliefs, was strangled and burnt in 1536 (without That Church giving much evidence of learning from history). Their sins? Both men had translated the bible into English! Wycliffe translated the bible out of Greek and Latin for the common English reading people for the first time; Tyndale improved upon it. (I do not bother here to fill in the particulars; as Einstein said, "I just want to know God's thoughts, the rest are details.") Yet these are but two among the many thousands martyred in the name of living for an ideal, betrayed by an ideal, yet even eventually sanctified by Others for having that same ideal. So too in the great long history of mankind, from Adam through Noah, Abraham, Moses, Solomon, David, and Judas has man found himself the bearer of striving for what he thinks and feels is best. So too for Socrates, and for Galileo. In almost every story of man attempting to persuade, control, and convict others is the measure of opinion and tradition and values held over another's. And yes, not all martyrs were 'men'! Now then, “Count to ten before....”

Then Ten Commandments are a case in point. Or how about when Pounds, Shillings, and

Pence became decimalized? Dozens of us are still converting values (never mind the bakers of old, ha!) Esoteric and subliminal and clandestine and symbolic cultures continue inculcating the purvey of subtext references and semiotics and even overt gestures that perpetuate ideals beyond our everyday ken. Beauty, and Standards, and even Expectations can have that "what happened to the other 10%?" effect on the report cards of life. Yet perfection is a product so temporary as to be a blink in time; it is the journey that has perfect moments; one's realizations that have sublime insights; and one's feelings that can be appreciated for what they are, however temporarily, as a 10. May our tithes then (that tenth that we tend to give of all (?) the potential in ourselves) be given toward people over product, the journey over the destination, and individual understanding over blanket regulation; or do we but comport ourselves in tenths? 

A Notion of the Ninth?

The Ninth Rung appears so un-attainable. We are daunted by the highest of echelons, the top of hierarchies, the top of tiers. When soothsayers declare Four Agreements, or Five Stages we know instinctively that one of them is more-better than the others and thereby almost impossible to attain. After all, one-self is so very human. And then along comes yet someone else declaring not Five Passages, but Nine! Still we aspire to aspire, and we nurture our spirituality and grace.

Philosophy derives from the Greek for love of wisdom. For me philosophy is essentially about whether or not one identifies with contentions. After all, it's easy to see that Plato contends this while Aristotle contends that. So too do Jung and Freud and Heidegger contend something, each quite different from the other. Yet without factual scientific research conjecture is at the root of philosophy, not empiricism, and indeed, great wisdoms about the state of mankind have been derived, promulgated, and argued over. Interesting, eh? So much so that in my eclectic fashion I enjoy synthesizing the many Others' differentiated ideas, finding similarities, and if anything, admit to my subjective identification with a contention, based on 'my experience'. So too for most of us, I submit. And it is with this contention in mind that I speak of MY inklings of the Ninth Stage (apparently the highest mortal-accomplishment) in a given hierarchy as but the first stage of yet more and more to come, infinitely. (But then again, let me beg you to read my last essay, An Eighth of Infinity, for you to understand my contentions about MY infinity, ha!)

Thing is, that's where my inkling of what The Ninth Rung (as in Clare Grave's contentions) is perhaps about. I see that 9^th state as the First Rung of the Next Tier (if there is indeed such a thing.) Our supposition that one's ego involvement seeks perpetuation (infinitely, as in my last essay) is quite evidently endemic to our species, across cultures, across history. Should the self have attained such a ninth rung, predominantly (for we indeed are an amalgam of all things, by variant degrees,) surely there is still a survival instinct that asks "what's next?" Jesus most evidently wrangled with it, yet I've seen deer or rabbits or even grouse seem to go into a catatonic shock where there's no longer any argument with fate. We continue, however nobly, however accepting, to retain a sense of consciousness of self to the end (unless we are among the poor souls who've lost all cognizance with a reality). But I speak here of the awareness of spirit in us, and an inkling into the moments when we have overcome the needs and wants and preferences and have allowed everything simply just to be. That is what Kohlberg's highest, or the apparently unattainable Ninth Rung of Gravesian Spiral Dynamics contention would have us glimpse; so too for the Fifth Level of Dabrowski. It is that predominant level where the Self has subsumed into the service of The Whole such that the very most of one's acts are channeled at contributing toward Everything, rather the egoic servings of The Self. Yet this is where my inkling lies; the self is still not prepared to give up life, and must needs protect itself, or survive, in order to contribute. And Survival, as seen when synthesizing yet more of the very many models extant (from people such as Maslow or Bloom, or Kohlberg, or Erikson, or Rogers or Gregoric, or even in Anneagram Theory, let alone Graves) is The First, or is the Primitive Level, in which one at core is invested in the Self. Me, My, I am. Ain't you? My soul. My spirit. My God!

Self-centricity is the inherent wiggle of the sperm that wins. It is the Selfish Gene. It is ego in consciousness and super-ego in unconsciousness, and Survival in instinct. Naturally it is in thoughts of the self, and is manifested however subtly in a sense of pride: nice to be so humble! The time and attention given to the increasing attainments of my spirituality, my faith, my grace, my life, my future, my mansion in heaven, my next reincarnation, my sensibility, my very own apprehension, knowledge, and my understanding is naturally about The Self. Wouldn't it be nice to be so evolved that I am predominantly at the top of whatever level, tier, aspect, development, or hierarchy? And then, I'll be like K. Wilber, or Ekhart Tolle, or Wayne Dwyer, and be... at peace? Peace: A stitch in time saves nine. Such are the notions within each 'now'. 

An Eighth of Infinity?

My father loved 8's. Numbers like 35, or 134, he'd relish. Licence plates, addresses, train or ship cabin numbers, dates, anything when added together culminating in an 8. Like his birth date: 26 August,1927. Dad's (2+6th=8)+(August=8)=16, which is 1+6=7, added to (1+9)+(2+7)=19, and 1+9=10, which added to 7 equals 17, which adds to 8! Dad had an emotional dependency on numerology; I remain interested. Yet on and on I keep up my father's habit, ad infinitum. But...

Infinitely? We bandy the word. We use the figure eight as infinity's representation (iconographic as it is,) a lopsided: OO; or a straight: 8. We advance ourselves as infinite too, "...or what's a heaven for?" Of hell itself we hope for a back door, an exit, or at least some definite end in the fires (ugh! shiver!) But of Heaven there be the pervasive concept that it be never-ending (or at least that those we love, who 'went on before', are indeed still there, waiting.) Hard to let go.

Infinity is forever. Theories abound. The notion that we continue in paralleled-beings to all of the choices we did not make, that our 'other selves' perpetuate as if we actually made that 'other choice', or that there are parallel universes, like trillions of mirrors in which our every action is but a holographic realization within the immediate purview of our own consciousness at times, and mostly a momentum of the unconscious, makes for fascinating reading (for some). Most of us don't care or have time enough to make the effort to read Theory. We prefer Fact. Yet there are multiple religions and multiple contentions and multiple adherents and multiple view-points, ad infinitum (?), throughout history that have seriously, ineluctably, and even drastically affected the (mis)fortunes of mankind. Esoteric and intellectual references are, after all, not really infinite, ha! (No matter how many we add.) Yet interwoven in our general ethos the collective symbols of the eights of infinity are continuous loops that would have us reincarnated, being forever an identity, being always available to someone or other in some form or other as 'oneself.' Even the concept of giving of oneself, even in death as myriads of dispersed atoms, surely, never ends?

We can hardly let go. The concept of death as an END does not meet easily with us. (It certainly did not agree with Tutankhamen.) It abides in the very concept of anno domini (the year of our [living] lord). And certainly the soul's ongoing identity is given voice in multiple belief systems and religions. It is not easy to let go. And so? When does one let go? If infinity is a forever continuous looping (in which one may see one's conscious existence as perhaps the brief crossover point in the twists) we may make the heuristic symbol solipsistic, multi-dimensional, ad infinitum, such that every loop in each eight, like a kazillion indefinite balls of intersecting loops, touch at the tips and impel us on and on, indefinitely. Perhaps being tired of one identity we assume another, as in reincarnation, where if not a worm or a pig or a butterfly or a gazelle we might at least be a different sex, have a different station in life, and even take residence in some other mansion in heaven (as Matthew 17 would have it). But we cannot let go! Tell me, how can there be only an eighth of infinity, or any fraction thereof? Is infinity not always?

Our universe we perceive as infinite (though even today I read an article that suggests our universe and our existence after the Big Bang should no longer 'be'): http://www.forbes.com/sites/bridaineparnell/2014/06/24/higgs-boson-seems-to-prove-that-the-universe-doesnt-exist/?

So too might one delight in the concept of black holes being but interstices in the great cell that is the universe, providing for osmosis between the membranes of molecule upon molecule that is the corpus habeas of an Infinite God. Ontological, are we not? Solipsistic, eh? Yet as meaning making and self referenced as we can be, there is, for me, the caution of assuming (even a bit) that the universe owes care toward me, specifically. I've seen too much death to presume, in my arrogance, that I, RM-P, have import of identity beyond what I presume to be doing for it. You?

...........................................

Addendum (seen a week after writing the above, and worth a read, indeed):

http://www.collective-evolution.com/2014/02/19/we-are-living-in-the-most-important-time-in-the-history-of-the-universe-dolores-cannon-discusses-our-current-paradigm/