Thursday, January 26, 2006
Consciousness Fiction and the Maximum Esoteric Overdrive
(** = future link)
I'm overdue for a blog entry, and I already wrote several that were concerned with the mundane (perhaps to a scary degree, what with my project acronyms, political rants, and housecleaning philosophy). So let's try a further space-shot, shall we?
I'm writing a lot more these days, stories of what I call **Consciousness Fiction. Most of these what-if tales operate from a personal evolving cosmology, ie. how I think the universe is organized into individual (contactable!) beings. I used to think that I and my ideas were being called to write educational metaphysical non-fiction, but my friend **Kurt Leland is covering that area so well that I feel liberated to make up stuff more readily for the sheer joy of imagination, much as I did as a kid. Plus Kurt's excellent books have helped me sift for the best insights and truths. Thanks Kurt!
Kurt's specialty is in going back to original sources - including sacred texts, mystery school teachings, and psychological studies - and reconciling these with his own dreamtime and out-of-body adventures, producing sensible primers for the modern psychic explorer. Kurt is currently working on a book that will, among other topics, demystify levels of reality as taught by **Buddhists and **Theosophists. Check out his blog of research for ** Kurt's book in progress here. The reincarnation of the evolving human spirit through the physical kingdoms, from crystal to plant to animal to human, is just the beginning of such esoterica. The Theosophists diagrammed some wild stuff like the downward movement of incarnating souls through multiple planes simultaneous to and harmonious with the upward movement of evolving spirits, human and other. The former movement is called involution, the latter evolution, and following is an email to Kurt that I sent speculating how/where nature spirits, fairies, elementals, and more might fit in with such a scheme.
Nature spirits and consciousnesses of physical configurations will appear in a future story of mine, so I keep playing in this area of thought. I have curious recurring visitors and locations in my dreams, including spirit friends on other planets, the anima and animus, etc. I don't know which of my experiences I would call fairies and such exactly, but I feel a kind of cultural and historical respect for these mytho-poetic fauna. There are stories of strange beings recorded across societies, often reflected in encounters on a darker, or at best shaded or tinted, side of psychological experience. Perhaps life was harder then. ** More recently, Terence McKenna met techno-elves on **DMT, the so-called spirit molecule derived from Amazon shamans’ ** ayahuasca that is said to give otherworldly roundtrip tours in just under 10 minutes. World War time populations began seeing flying UFOs that they could not identify (what do you call it when an acronym sublimates into a word that again calls for adjectival clothing? linguistic evolution?) which sparked a wave of ET abductions as, shall we say, new perceptual discoveries. ** Carl Sagan wanted to connect abductions to the fairy realms in the British Isles with the ** UFO abduction experience and also, highlighting the, shall we say, second chakra issues of the phenomenon, with the **incubus and **succubus demonic seductions of medeival society, and possibly **Hindi visitations by Gods experiences, and so on.
Now I have seen, in ** out-of-body ** lucid dream states, visitors in space suits in my bedroom. One in particular was a nice lady with a green face in an orange helmet and vivid blue diving suit. I asked her why she wore that suit, and she said "I. R. Q. N. Y.". Right, well then I woke up and puzzled over possible meanings for this for weeks. Not too long after the visitation, I met Kurt Leland and asked him what he thought of it. He said that, in his experience, higher beings often wear protective garb that may look to us like space suits or armor or capes. The protection is ironically to protect us, not them; their light, or intensity of uneclipsed presence, could overwhelm our consciousness. So I have decided that her answer meant "irony" with a "q" for my question in the middle of it. Not that that is a particularly linear or human approach to answering a question, but it's not unintelligible. I also saw wise gentle alien spirits resurrecting Jesus, but that's another dream story.
Now my friend Alex, he's had some interesting adventures of waking up out of his body and walking around, or flying places, or simply thinking of places and appearing there. Sometimes he met strange beings right in his bedroom. One was a boucy blue cloud that was having a lot of fun. Another time, there were two little ET guys, much like ET's are depicted with the big eyes and head. Alex went over enthusiastically and said Hi! They were flustered that he could see them, and they zapped him with high-speed thoughts, like being blasted with a modem, and then disappeared. If you want to know more you should ask Alex, but right now he's playing proper businessman and doesn't want to talk with most people about such things. But I think that is a lot like someone encountering a peeved elf or pixie in mythology. A classic story like **Rip Van Winkle, that tale is powerful because it is actually depicting a whole folklore of true experience.
I recently reviewed a fine documentary about fairy lore, see **"The Fairy Faith". Over **Christmas vacation I met artist **Andrew Gonzalez who illustrates **Tibetan angelic beings called **Dakinis. I also like **shamanism with its angelic overworlds, earthly middleworld, and animal spirit underworld, and how this might correlate with classical western **Heaven/**Olympus, a **purgatory, and **Hell/**Hades. **Swedenborg's cosmologies were very detailed, and he describes visiting hells, other planets, and three major spiritual realms, the natural, spiritual, and celestial. Then there's modern psychological and human potential terminology which imply realms of being, and I like how the channeled entity **Lazaris describes the evolution of power downward from the higher conscious, through the unconscious (which connects lifetimes), through the subconscious (which connects everything in a lifetime), into the conscious mind (you and me!), which then must choose to travel back up again through the same levels to co-create with the higher conscious.
In the past I may have gone off the deep end with such cosmologies, numerologies, and other psychic theories. Now I just tinker for the purpose of writing a (metaphysically) plausible story, and I feel pretty grounded. I'm gradually learning about the history of Consciousness Fiction too, as it stands in my opinion, and I'm enjoying exploring my affinities for the metaphysical works, especially shorter stories, of such authors as: **E. M. Forster, **Nathaniel Hawthorne, **Washington Irving, **Edgar Allen Poe (bit dark that fellow), **Dion Fortune, **Theodore Sturgeon, ** Ray Bradbury, **Ursula K. Le Guin, **H. G. Wells (love the movie version **"The Man who could work miracles"), **Edward Bulwer-Lytton, **David Lindsay, **E.T.A. Hoffman, **Jorge Luis Borges, and more. I claim no expertise but I will be compiling a personal ** ConFi authors list on my astralresearch.org website as I read and write (it won't be nearly as extensive as my ** Mystical Movie Guide project).
So take it with a grain of salt, and enjoy below an excerpt of my own maximum esoteric overdrive in the thinking behind my fiction. I welcome **feedback or questions, and by the way, if you're an aspiring writer in need of guidance, a great book of writer's validations and tips I found is "**The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters". My favorite guidance so far is: whatever your blockage is, write through the blockage! That is to say, just write, write your way past the problems, just express, flow, and be a writer. That's why there so many more places to write these days, the internet has created mental plane real estate. That's what a *blog is, you see!
Best wishes,
Carl
Hi Kurt,
I guess what I like about the invo/evo cycle is that it is cyclical, rather than the linearity of lower chakra/plane to upper/chakra plane which always begs the question well what's lower than that and what's higher than that. Similarly with the origins of the universe, people ask well what happened before the big bang, the answer being there is no before, and maybe the beginning is also the end (and the end is a new beginning!).
So evolving consciousnesses are becoming god-like in their return to god, and involving consciousnesses are becoming constrained in rules in their return to individuation. I say constrained in rules to avoid a word like imprisoned, but one could also use the word ensconced. Etheric and physical incarnation. Involving consciousnesses become the matter to evolving consciousnesses.
I also like to think of everything as being "here now", there are no other places, just other ways of perceiving and connecting with everything that's already present. Whatever cycles exist are continually existing at all stages simulataneously. So a primitive human interacting with a god can be just showing the split within the consciousness, the amount of integration that soul still has to do, or is always doing, or is willing to do. Lazaris likes to call it the long division, implying to me a mathematical process (and Lazaris is big on process - not mechanical, but spiritual, like maturation stages). The primitive human can be the soul involving, the god is the same soul evolving, and the being is meeting itself. Today's New Age culture is showing more of the balanced integration between the individuated potential and all-aware potential, as people think of god as being within and that individuals create their own reality. Maybe a meta-evolution would involve the span across planes, diameter of consciousness cycle. But meta-evolution must be multimensional, because it can too simply imply a paradoxical hierarchy too. Can it be that Earth is an impressive and advanced school as some spirits say, even as it seems to us in the middle of it so messy and unadvanced (one could say ignorant and dangerous)?
But are there other consciousness which make the Earth their home? Maybe the so-called "different" evolutionary paths of nature spirits, devas, etc. are simply different stretches across the "planes", different cycles or tours (tours of duty?) through the worlds. Lazaris for example says he is of a group of consciousnesses that simply chose early in their growth to never grow physically. That suggests to me that a soul can know early on in it's growth, or at least challenge itself to the constraint, that its invo/evo cycle, or spin, stays within certain distances of self-recognition. (I read that the spin of electrons influences their availability for reactions). Beings who are never physical just don't go as far as the physical plane to be ready to turn around, but physical beings can communicate with them from their less integrated and less material invo/evo dualisms, ie. their intuitive inner senses, like intuitive thought and feeling. If that's what a deva is, a spin, then humans could have two ways of sensing them, from the involving self or downward spin (felt as a primal nature connection) and the evolving self or upward spin (felt as a psychic explorer connection). A gnome or troll could be a soul that goes lower/closer to the physical in its spin, thus their appearance to a human is symbolized as the animalish hairy underground beings of folklore who can be peevish, ie. more dualistic. A higher nonphysical being, one who orbits its soul to less unintegrated distances, remains more consistently angelic, perceived by humans as a spirit of the air and of higher morals, thus sylphs, fairies, etc. Humans, being willing to orbit even further from the soul, have more dualistically self-unintegrated aphelions than even the nature spirits, and when operating from aphelion in the other planes (remember, it is all here now, and we're in all the places that we're ever going to) would probably be the source of some of the most dangerous astral forms.
I like this idea of perihelion and aphelion in describing the integration degree of a being in a soul orbit. It always seemed odd to me that planetary orbits are elliptical, so there must be powerful metaphors and constructor idioms available here. Certainly the orbital shape of Earth leads to the seasonal cycles which so influence our mythologies and cultures, harvests and nature. The question is, as we change our environments, do the nature spirits change with us. Do they look like the ETs and ride about on UFOs? Or can we meet friendly brightly hued aliens in space suits who answer questions with multidimensional acronyms and good cheer?
I guess this is the kind of stuff Theosophists worked out, and Buddhist and Hindu monks before them.
That's enough for now, you can reply or just wait til our next conversation.
regards,
Carl
I'm overdue for a blog entry, and I already wrote several that were concerned with the mundane (perhaps to a scary degree, what with my project acronyms, political rants, and housecleaning philosophy). So let's try a further space-shot, shall we?
I'm writing a lot more these days, stories of what I call **Consciousness Fiction. Most of these what-if tales operate from a personal evolving cosmology, ie. how I think the universe is organized into individual (contactable!) beings. I used to think that I and my ideas were being called to write educational metaphysical non-fiction, but my friend **Kurt Leland is covering that area so well that I feel liberated to make up stuff more readily for the sheer joy of imagination, much as I did as a kid. Plus Kurt's excellent books have helped me sift for the best insights and truths. Thanks Kurt!
Kurt's specialty is in going back to original sources - including sacred texts, mystery school teachings, and psychological studies - and reconciling these with his own dreamtime and out-of-body adventures, producing sensible primers for the modern psychic explorer. Kurt is currently working on a book that will, among other topics, demystify levels of reality as taught by **Buddhists and **Theosophists. Check out his blog of research for ** Kurt's book in progress here. The reincarnation of the evolving human spirit through the physical kingdoms, from crystal to plant to animal to human, is just the beginning of such esoterica. The Theosophists diagrammed some wild stuff like the downward movement of incarnating souls through multiple planes simultaneous to and harmonious with the upward movement of evolving spirits, human and other. The former movement is called involution, the latter evolution, and following is an email to Kurt that I sent speculating how/where nature spirits, fairies, elementals, and more might fit in with such a scheme.
Nature spirits and consciousnesses of physical configurations will appear in a future story of mine, so I keep playing in this area of thought. I have curious recurring visitors and locations in my dreams, including spirit friends on other planets, the anima and animus, etc. I don't know which of my experiences I would call fairies and such exactly, but I feel a kind of cultural and historical respect for these mytho-poetic fauna. There are stories of strange beings recorded across societies, often reflected in encounters on a darker, or at best shaded or tinted, side of psychological experience. Perhaps life was harder then. ** More recently, Terence McKenna met techno-elves on **DMT, the so-called spirit molecule derived from Amazon shamans’ ** ayahuasca that is said to give otherworldly roundtrip tours in just under 10 minutes. World War time populations began seeing flying UFOs that they could not identify (what do you call it when an acronym sublimates into a word that again calls for adjectival clothing? linguistic evolution?) which sparked a wave of ET abductions as, shall we say, new perceptual discoveries. ** Carl Sagan wanted to connect abductions to the fairy realms in the British Isles with the ** UFO abduction experience and also, highlighting the, shall we say, second chakra issues of the phenomenon, with the **incubus and **succubus demonic seductions of medeival society, and possibly **Hindi visitations by Gods experiences, and so on.
Now I have seen, in ** out-of-body ** lucid dream states, visitors in space suits in my bedroom. One in particular was a nice lady with a green face in an orange helmet and vivid blue diving suit. I asked her why she wore that suit, and she said "I. R. Q. N. Y.". Right, well then I woke up and puzzled over possible meanings for this for weeks. Not too long after the visitation, I met Kurt Leland and asked him what he thought of it. He said that, in his experience, higher beings often wear protective garb that may look to us like space suits or armor or capes. The protection is ironically to protect us, not them; their light, or intensity of uneclipsed presence, could overwhelm our consciousness. So I have decided that her answer meant "irony" with a "q" for my question in the middle of it. Not that that is a particularly linear or human approach to answering a question, but it's not unintelligible. I also saw wise gentle alien spirits resurrecting Jesus, but that's another dream story.
Now my friend Alex, he's had some interesting adventures of waking up out of his body and walking around, or flying places, or simply thinking of places and appearing there. Sometimes he met strange beings right in his bedroom. One was a boucy blue cloud that was having a lot of fun. Another time, there were two little ET guys, much like ET's are depicted with the big eyes and head. Alex went over enthusiastically and said Hi! They were flustered that he could see them, and they zapped him with high-speed thoughts, like being blasted with a modem, and then disappeared. If you want to know more you should ask Alex, but right now he's playing proper businessman and doesn't want to talk with most people about such things. But I think that is a lot like someone encountering a peeved elf or pixie in mythology. A classic story like **Rip Van Winkle, that tale is powerful because it is actually depicting a whole folklore of true experience.
I recently reviewed a fine documentary about fairy lore, see **"The Fairy Faith". Over **Christmas vacation I met artist **Andrew Gonzalez who illustrates **Tibetan angelic beings called **Dakinis. I also like **shamanism with its angelic overworlds, earthly middleworld, and animal spirit underworld, and how this might correlate with classical western **Heaven/**Olympus, a **purgatory, and **Hell/**Hades. **Swedenborg's cosmologies were very detailed, and he describes visiting hells, other planets, and three major spiritual realms, the natural, spiritual, and celestial. Then there's modern psychological and human potential terminology which imply realms of being, and I like how the channeled entity **Lazaris describes the evolution of power downward from the higher conscious, through the unconscious (which connects lifetimes), through the subconscious (which connects everything in a lifetime), into the conscious mind (you and me!), which then must choose to travel back up again through the same levels to co-create with the higher conscious.
In the past I may have gone off the deep end with such cosmologies, numerologies, and other psychic theories. Now I just tinker for the purpose of writing a (metaphysically) plausible story, and I feel pretty grounded. I'm gradually learning about the history of Consciousness Fiction too, as it stands in my opinion, and I'm enjoying exploring my affinities for the metaphysical works, especially shorter stories, of such authors as: **E. M. Forster, **Nathaniel Hawthorne, **Washington Irving, **Edgar Allen Poe (bit dark that fellow), **Dion Fortune, **Theodore Sturgeon, ** Ray Bradbury, **Ursula K. Le Guin, **H. G. Wells (love the movie version **"The Man who could work miracles"), **Edward Bulwer-Lytton, **David Lindsay, **E.T.A. Hoffman, **Jorge Luis Borges, and more. I claim no expertise but I will be compiling a personal ** ConFi authors list on my astralresearch.org website as I read and write (it won't be nearly as extensive as my ** Mystical Movie Guide project).
So take it with a grain of salt, and enjoy below an excerpt of my own maximum esoteric overdrive in the thinking behind my fiction. I welcome **feedback or questions, and by the way, if you're an aspiring writer in need of guidance, a great book of writer's validations and tips I found is "**The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters". My favorite guidance so far is: whatever your blockage is, write through the blockage! That is to say, just write, write your way past the problems, just express, flow, and be a writer. That's why there so many more places to write these days, the internet has created mental plane real estate. That's what a *blog is, you see!
Best wishes,
Carl
Hi Kurt,
I guess what I like about the invo/evo cycle is that it is cyclical, rather than the linearity of lower chakra/plane to upper/chakra plane which always begs the question well what's lower than that and what's higher than that. Similarly with the origins of the universe, people ask well what happened before the big bang, the answer being there is no before, and maybe the beginning is also the end (and the end is a new beginning!).
So evolving consciousnesses are becoming god-like in their return to god, and involving consciousnesses are becoming constrained in rules in their return to individuation. I say constrained in rules to avoid a word like imprisoned, but one could also use the word ensconced. Etheric and physical incarnation. Involving consciousnesses become the matter to evolving consciousnesses.
I also like to think of everything as being "here now", there are no other places, just other ways of perceiving and connecting with everything that's already present. Whatever cycles exist are continually existing at all stages simulataneously. So a primitive human interacting with a god can be just showing the split within the consciousness, the amount of integration that soul still has to do, or is always doing, or is willing to do. Lazaris likes to call it the long division, implying to me a mathematical process (and Lazaris is big on process - not mechanical, but spiritual, like maturation stages). The primitive human can be the soul involving, the god is the same soul evolving, and the being is meeting itself. Today's New Age culture is showing more of the balanced integration between the individuated potential and all-aware potential, as people think of god as being within and that individuals create their own reality. Maybe a meta-evolution would involve the span across planes, diameter of consciousness cycle. But meta-evolution must be multimensional, because it can too simply imply a paradoxical hierarchy too. Can it be that Earth is an impressive and advanced school as some spirits say, even as it seems to us in the middle of it so messy and unadvanced (one could say ignorant and dangerous)?
But are there other consciousness which make the Earth their home? Maybe the so-called "different" evolutionary paths of nature spirits, devas, etc. are simply different stretches across the "planes", different cycles or tours (tours of duty?) through the worlds. Lazaris for example says he is of a group of consciousnesses that simply chose early in their growth to never grow physically. That suggests to me that a soul can know early on in it's growth, or at least challenge itself to the constraint, that its invo/evo cycle, or spin, stays within certain distances of self-recognition. (I read that the spin of electrons influences their availability for reactions). Beings who are never physical just don't go as far as the physical plane to be ready to turn around, but physical beings can communicate with them from their less integrated and less material invo/evo dualisms, ie. their intuitive inner senses, like intuitive thought and feeling. If that's what a deva is, a spin, then humans could have two ways of sensing them, from the involving self or downward spin (felt as a primal nature connection) and the evolving self or upward spin (felt as a psychic explorer connection). A gnome or troll could be a soul that goes lower/closer to the physical in its spin, thus their appearance to a human is symbolized as the animalish hairy underground beings of folklore who can be peevish, ie. more dualistic. A higher nonphysical being, one who orbits its soul to less unintegrated distances, remains more consistently angelic, perceived by humans as a spirit of the air and of higher morals, thus sylphs, fairies, etc. Humans, being willing to orbit even further from the soul, have more dualistically self-unintegrated aphelions than even the nature spirits, and when operating from aphelion in the other planes (remember, it is all here now, and we're in all the places that we're ever going to) would probably be the source of some of the most dangerous astral forms.
I like this idea of perihelion and aphelion in describing the integration degree of a being in a soul orbit. It always seemed odd to me that planetary orbits are elliptical, so there must be powerful metaphors and constructor idioms available here. Certainly the orbital shape of Earth leads to the seasonal cycles which so influence our mythologies and cultures, harvests and nature. The question is, as we change our environments, do the nature spirits change with us. Do they look like the ETs and ride about on UFOs? Or can we meet friendly brightly hued aliens in space suits who answer questions with multidimensional acronyms and good cheer?
I guess this is the kind of stuff Theosophists worked out, and Buddhist and Hindu monks before them.
That's enough for now, you can reply or just wait til our next conversation.
regards,
Carl
