Here, you can:
write
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541.210.8470 in the USA. Outside, add 001.
In your message, give your number, a sentence or two about why you are calling, and, if possible, your email address.
participate
- be a sounding board
- prepare a darkroom to test the conjecture
- refine the methods and broaden their applicability
- apply the results in service to volunteers, supporters, and the public
- document the process and compile an open-source manual
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For pages with closed comments, comment below, noting which page you are responding to. Someday I will figure out how to fix this.
Thanks for your comments, everyone.
(RE: the conjecture) I’ve just asked the Yi Jing (I Ching) about your conjecture, and it provides an interesting line, the second line of hex 2 – The Receptive, moving to hex 7 – The Army. My sense is that the line is pointing to fulfilling one’s duty in life as the true source of healing.
I think you point to a kind of deconditioned/unconditioned experience. But one must always enter the world. Until that and what surfaces (from the sub/unconscious) is faced and understood in its subtlety, the unconditioned space can only be a temporary fix. Sure, there may be value in exposing oneself to the darkness, and something of a practice might be made of it. But aren’t we really looking at something, in your darkness idea, that is a form of meditation: an attempt to relax and heal those pieces that are crimped by the world, to see beyond the crimping to something free from the deluded ideas about the world the cause suffering? There is a place for both. But ultimately a meditation “practice” is one that must reach into life–even into its most confounding moments, as surely death is.
(General comment) I suppose I’m not even sure where to begin. I found this site through… On my homepage it said you had updated your profile and it was in regards to a darkness retreat.
Upon reading, I was then lead here and am in awe. You’ve added another piece to this puzzle I’ve been putting together. I’ve been running away from personal anguish my entire life, both physically and mentally. It hasn’t been until recently I’ve been changing my perception and evaluation what works for me and what doesn’t. Always having the sense that we are perpetually bombarded with things that effect us more than we can consciously determine. And I’ve been looking into ways to, not so much alleviate or combat, but integrate that stress or evolve from it. I’m extremely interested in this. It just makes sense.
(RE: the conjecture) Well that explains why I love and need the dark.
(RE: psychosis) Consciousness is pure and can never be truly impaired or distorted. The distortions and negativities are conditioned into our bodies, speech, and minds (Budddhist description) by trauma, traumata, and our own bad choices/ unwholesome proclivities. Conditioned formations can be purified via the eight-fold path. According to one teacher, “karma is volition.” The will itself can be purified and aligned with “dreamtime” or alaya then further to pure consciousness. There are individuals who have been almost instantly purified, but most strive lifetime after lifetime for clarity of consciousness and oneness with reality. The “dreamtime” is pure, but we are not. There are strong chances our conditioning will not allow us even to recognize our own negativities and proclivities. There are infinite amounts of all needed energies for any being longing for freedom and happiness, questioning, and striving in a truly ethical way. It is our job to individually clean up the (internal and perceived as personal) blocks to positive, universal energies. Consciousness is already free and can never be harmed or do harm.
(RE: the conjecture) Consciousness is based in the organism and conditioned by all that it interacts with. Imagine all that the organism goes through, not just cultural conditioning, but its own basic survival needs. What could be more conducive to healing than simple rest or retreat? Calm with focused awareness, non-clinging awareness. When the human being begins to focus (one-pointedly) during calm, such focus provides a huge and unprecedented change for the biological organism/animal. Consciousness does not perish. Reconditioning and conditioning consciousness goes on endlessly until a being turns towards consciousness itself. This can be done through meditation (If there is thinking, one is not meditating. Absence of “discursive thought”.) Brain chemistry is altered from mildly to radically during meditation, but any past conditioning remains stored in the organism. Over time or right away, when the organism returns to the conditions that caused negativity, the negativity will be reactivated until that conditioning is “cleared.” This takes time and sustained effort. I am attempting this healing only with guidance from a trusted teacher.
(RE: the conjecture) Leaving aside a longer conversation about civilization, the chronic condition that it universally induces is simply over-stimulation. I think that the “cure” exposes this beautifully.
I’ll just posit, with prejudice, that this frenzy began as a virtue of some sort. It’s undoing is overdue.
The response to noise is quite telling. I’ll wager that there are many other “environmental” subtleties to contend with also, which brings me to my point.
I believe the whole mess we call civilization is entirely structurally unsustainable as you point out, and that it is the work of deconstructing this one piecemeal and building a sustainable model that is the “burden” of many generations to come. (Oh but what joy this burden!)
Like most ideas I’ve discovered there are many people who have been on the case before me. I will start with the link to The Timeless Way of Building, and highly recommend A Pattern Language to boot, not in all of it’s conclusions but definitely it’s methodology. An online community has begun employing these methods in reality.
Your conjecture seems spot on and discovering the individualized methods to produce sustainable results seems a logical beginning. The issue next is the environment one walks back into. The ceaseless din.
(RE: the conjecture) Hi, S. I’m so glad you’ve read and appreciated this idea.
I agree, there is some unavoidable validity in civilization to discern and embrace if we are ever to move on.
I loved the bits of A Pattern Language and A Timeless Way of Building that I read. Christopher Alexander is the best teacher of the designer’s perspective I have ever encountered. I believe just reading his books can transplant it into an untrained mind.
I was lucky to receive design from my father from an early age. His hero, Frank Lloyd Wright, whose books I grew up with and love very much, and whom I consider a better designer than Alexander by orders of magnitude, was, in my view, terrible at explaining design in his books.
The ceaseless din, like one’s habits, have helped to keep our psychosis in place, but they do not cause it. At most they remind us of the causes. They are not decisive. If I am correct, once one emerges from darkness, the problem is permanently solved in its essence.
Then spiritual discipline comes in. Then knowledge of healthy lifestyle becomes useful. Then simplicity can help us flower. Until then, these things are sticks in the mud that have a one chance in a million of doing anything REAL in one’s life.
Thank you for your comment, Justin. Please see essay called strifeless, especially third to last paragraph.