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Saturday, November 28, 2009
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Keeping Your Inner DignityKeeping your Inner Dignity John Hurt as Quentin Crisp in the superb 1975 film (based on Crisp's 1968 book) The Naked Civil Servant
The film is a brilliant portrait of a mutant maintaining his unique identity and inner dignity under very difficult circumstances. Quentin Crisp, a self-described "effeminate homosexual," dressed flamboyantly in England beginning in the 1930s. He suffered continual abuse including beatings and hassles with the police. John Hurt wonderfully conveys the inner dignity with which Quentin faced such travails. This card was directly inspired by watching the film. In 2009 John Hurt reprised his role as Quentin in a sequel about Quentin's elderly years in NYC: An Englishman in New York | One of the most crucial defenses from the many hardships of the Babylon Matrix is the maintaining of inner dignity.
Many of us, with the giddy and naive optimism of the disincarnate, chose to incarnate into the human form, never fully realizing the almost infinite array of indignities and inconveniences involved in such a corporeal existence. Being in a physical body subject to illness, disease, gravity, and scarcity of resources is bad enough, but when you add in that you will be stuck in a mono-body reality, in which you will be limited to one gender-specific body aging in a linear time frame, with no ability to change your form at will, so that for decades you may have to live with approximately the same face, race, and other physical parameters programmed into you at birth . . . then the grim imposition of human incarnation becomes nearly intolerable. And if this weren't enough indignity, in the Babylon Matrix you find yourself in a realm literally swarming with other entities, similarly confined to mono-bodies, who are stumbling and thrashing around in the same murky darkness that envelopes you.
Now, and throughout the history of the Babylon Matrix, unhappy hominids compensate for the indignities of corporeal incarnation by inventing and executing myriad ways, subtle and grossly unsubtle, to insult, degrade and even obliterate the dignity of other embodied entities. Across many periods and cultures this is the most classic of Babylon Matrix games — the oppressed becoming the oppressor. However, if this ever-popular recreation, reinforced by millennia of patriarchal history, does not work for you, if you prefer the deviant path of respecting the dignity of other entities while maintaining your own inner dignity, then this card has relevance to your situation.
The first consideration in maintaining inner dignity is to restrain yourself from all the many ways, subtle and unsubtle, in which you could be insulting or oppressing the dignity of other entities. Many incarnates who have an exaggerated notion of their own dignity have no respect for the dignity of others. They may be acutely aware of perceived slights to their own dignity, while at the same time they are oblivious to the indignities they heap on others. So this is the first rule of inner dignity:
I. First, do no harm to the dignity of others.
Following this rule alone is enough to keep most of us busy with self-examination and restraint for a lifetime. The second, interrelated rule is:
II. Do as little as possible that compromises your inner dignity.
These principles are obviously interrelated, because your ability to recognize and respect the inner dignity of others is contingent upon your ability to maintain your own inner dignity. Conversely, those who abuse the dignity of others are those who confuse false pride with inner dignity.
There are infinite ways in which we can compromise our inner indignity. One of the most obvious is when we chose to go along with the unreasonable demands or actions of others. There are other cases where we don't have a choice about submitting to unreasonable demands and actions. In such cases our outer dignity is oppressed, but our inner dignity does not have to be if we have sufficient inner strength. In some of the worst cases, however, outer indignities may be so severe — the case of torture, for example — that inner strength cannot be expected to prevail. In such cases it is not we who chose to compromise our inner dignity, our inner dignity is compromised by forces outside of our control. Our job, therefore, is to defend our dignity, and that of others, to the extent that we do have a choice.
One of the most classic ways that we compromise our inner dignity is when we choose to reach for nourishment that does not nourish. For example, when we choose to abuse our bodies with poor quality food and other toxic substances. We also compromise inner dignity when we choose to imbibe poor quality cultural products such as bad music, literature or video. Another form of poor nourishment is when our addiction to the social matrix is such that we choose unworthy companions and degrading situations to fill our time. Ask yourself of various choices if you will remember them well on your deathbed. This question will usually sharply divide what preserves inner dignity and what compromises it.
The third rule for preserving inner dignity is:
III. Recognize that some people will dislike you and want to attack your dignity through no fault of your own.
The Babylon Matrix is a projection world, where people continually project disowned parts of themselves onto others. The people who want to insult your dignity are not really seeing you; they are seeing a phantom that they associate with you. For example, let's say a highly attractive young woman is walking down a city street and encountering strangers. None of these strangers knows who she is, but they are all able to register her appearance. To one guy she is an attractively sculpted piece of meat lighting up in his reptilian consciousness like a glowing target. He sees body parts and shoots an unpleasant glance at her, expressive of what he would like to do with those various body parts. A young woman passes her and sends her another unpleasant glance that is expressive of her projection: "That bitch thinks she can get any guy she wants." Each of these glances is an attack on her dignity happening on the energetic plane, and although she can resist them, and preserve her inner dignity, it is also rather exhausting and stressful. And then there is the very real danger that some projection-based attacks may come on the physical plane.
Of course, you don't have to be good looking to be subject to noxious projections. If you are a mutant, for example, and hard for people to categorize in their minds, you may get some very polarized reactions. Also, the projections and attacks on our dignity do not come exclusively from strangers or people who completely misunderstand us; they can also come from people who are very close to us and know us well. As two people get to know each other they become more real to each other, but oddly enough when they get really close with each other, they can start to get less real again. When two people are all too familiar with each other they become part of each other's mental furniture. Since most people are a bit mixed up and ambivalent about self-image, identity and other life aspects, when two people are really close they get mixed up with each other's inner ambivalence. If one person has compromised inner dignity, he will inevitably strike out at the inner dignity of someone he is really close to.
IV. Maintaining inner dignity means that we carefully examine our projections onto others and their projections onto us.
Our projections are much less likely to compromise the dignity of others when we bring our vigilant awareness to them. The projections of others are much less likely to harm our inner dignity if we are aware that they are projections. This is what Katherine Hepburn meant when she said, "I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true."
The principles of maintaining inner dignity could be multiplied past the scope of this card, because they apply to so many spheres and aspects of life.
Consider this a propitious time to reflect on the many ways that you can benefit yourself and others by maintaining inner dignity. |
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Friday, November 20, 2009
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No Fate but What we MakeNo Fate but What we Make
"No fate but what we make." Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Sometimes we may presume that there is an answer "out there" to a fateful dilemma or difficult situation we are living through. Indeed, this notion often holds true because many situations are close variations on classic situations for which there are classic solutions. For example, we might be in a difficult situation that is the result of our stubbornly trying to force progress in some area of life. In such a situation we may make the classic mistake of hubris, arrogantly presuming upon a power that we don't really possess, and often we suffer for this. Alternatively, we could consult an oracle, a wise counselor or ancient literature, and find a ready-made classic answer to our situation, such as: relinquish prideful ambition, submit humbly to fate and work with it rather than against it. But in other cases, more rare cases, the classic solutions are insufficient, and we must either create or cocreate a novel solution.
This card is the result of a series of dreams. The dreams seem to show that my essential life situation has deep ancestral roots. In one of the dreams, a holy and wise ancestor seemed to give me acknowledgment. The man was blind, a quality I understood as indicating that his vision was bound before the unformed future, a future I would need to help shape. In the last of this long series of dreams, I received a unique tent that seemed to be designed with ingenious precision. I only had to turn a crank on a cylinder and the tent would erect itself.
Jonathan, wearing free dream interpretation sign in front of his tent, at the National Rainbow gathering in New Mexico, 2009. Although this tent was fully invented, many other temporary resting places in life are not.
Once the tent was set up, I realize that I needed to restore it to my backpack and continue traveling. However, there were no instructions on how to break the tent down. Somehow I knew that the tent had been produced by a married couple, the husband of which was an entrepreneurial inventor. I noticed the wife of the couple and asked her how to undo the tent. She responded evasively, telling me to ask her husband. I realized that as ingenious as the tent seemed, the inventors never invented a way to undo the tent once it was set up. I became very annoyed and a bit angry. After a time I realized I might be able to figure out a way to unmake the tent myself, but the dream ended and I awoke.
Not long after I awoke, I realized that the dreams were acknowledgement of the fact that a lot of precision, intention and ancestral momentum had gone into creating my life situation, but that there were no preformed ready-made solutions to it. Part of my fate is that I have to create my own solutions, or cocreate them, because although fate has unformed aspects that give some room for my free will to operate, it still has formed aspects as well, and therefore my ability to find solutions also depends on the good will of other free-willed persons involved. A solution has to be cocreated in a situation of creative interdependence.
The essential insight of Gnosticism is that nothing is more crucial than gnosis, the direct, inner spiritual knowing. Many people, however — fundamentalists would be the extreme example — feel they have to consult an outside authority, a savior, a religious or governmental functionary, a parent, a divine text or rule book, to find solutions. But it is gnosis that is the essential guide through largely unformed, novel situations.
Some people fall for what I call the museum curator fallacy. Perceiving that there is something sacred about the universe, they feel that they don't dare touch anything or change anything or interfere with anything. They become like a member of a Star Trek away team with an over-fussy sense of the prime directive. What people caught by the museum curator fallacy forget is that they are not outside of the glass case, they are in it, and that they were designed by nature to be interventionist alchemists.
On the other hand, gnosis does not always provide you with certainty on how to intervene. Nor does it provide a grand, encompassing solution to a difficult situation. Deng Ming Dao, a modern Taoist sage, points out that one should never underestimate the value of a partial solution. Often we are navigating through a murky, misty sea and cannot see the distant shore of the land we are heading toward. When this is the case, we engage point-to-point navigation; we aim at the nearest point we feel sure of.
In other cases, gnosis calls us to intervene drastically. Rather than flowing with things, we are called to pierce through to the source code of the matrix and shift things fundamentally. For example, in Star Trek mythology, prospective Federation captains are tested in sophisticated simulators with a no-win scenario called the "Kobayashi Maru," a tactically impossible situation where every possible strategy and series of actions will fail. Captain Kirk's response when he was tested by the Kobayashi Maru simulation for the third time was to reject the no-win scenario. He did this by reprogramming the simulation computer.
Consider this a propitious time to reprogram, to cocreate novel, life-affirming solutions to an unformed fate. |
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Saturday, November 14, 2009
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Appreciating Inner RichesAppreciating Inner Riches | Jack, a talented poet, composer and musician, who has few outer resources, but a rich inner life, photographed in front of my refrigerator. | What good fortune can possibly surpass the value of a rich inner life? Yes, for thousands of years, the earth's resources have largely been ruled by extroverted men of action, but as Mark put it, "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" Mark 8:36 Outer resources can be great too — after all, it is only through the grace of outer resources that you are able to read this right now, but the experience only has value if you have inner resources. Which would be preferable, to be a financially struggling genius or a vacuous billionaire? Most people reading this would probably choose to be the genius, because a genius, even if her outer circumstances are challenged, has great inner riches, but a vacuous person is impoverished no matter how opulent the outer circumstances. Of course, it would be great to have some of both, inner and outer resources, and most of us do, but if I could only choose one it would be inner resources, because those are intrinsic, and if I don't have the inner resources there's no one there to experience the outer resources.
Often, people with great inner resources, underestimate the treasure they have. Even those people, like myself, who value inner resources, still underestimate the blessings and abundance of their inner wealth. We live in a world that through advertisements, and other relentless engines of conditioning, focuses our attention on surfaces, appearances and outer resources. The message that underlies every one of the millions of advertisements you have seen is that outer resources are the key to a good life. If only you had the new pill, the shiny new gadget, or indispensable service, only then would you have the good life. For example, Subaru says, "The All-New 2010 Legacy. Feel the Love. Bigger and better, the 2010 Legacy is one dynamic drive. Feel the difference starting at $19,995.*" If only I had the All-New Legacy, then I would feel the love, then I would be bigger and better, but I don't have the $19,995* to obtain such a love. Since I don't, I'm going to have to settle for the inner feeling of love. Unable to obtain the love of a new SUV, I will have to settle for loving and being loved by people, and on my death bed, I will have to settle for that legacy, knowing that the love of the 2010 Subaru Legacy eluded me. Research in Motion (Blackberry) says of their new gadget, so elemental it is called "Storm," "Touch it. Love it. Share it." Here is another lover, beckoning me, inviting me into its stormy depths. If only I can commit to a contract with Verizon, this lover, so ready for me to touch it, to share with it, could be mine. And I do love gadgets, and sometimes they really do make life better, in fact, I already own a Blackberry, and it is a great gadget, it allows me to talk to people I love with better sound quality than other gadgets I have owned, but the value of that is due to my inner resources, my capacity for love, and the inner resources, the capacity for love in those other people. But what if I could replace my Blackberry, which is not All-New, with the more loving, more touchy-feely, Storm II, but at the cost of my inner resources, would I be better off? Suppose I had both the Storm II and the All-New 2010 Legacy so I could text while driving, but this was at the cost of my inner resources, so I could only send instant messages like, "Whad up? r u hot?" would I really be better off?
No advertiser will sing the praises of inner riches. And yet with inner riches, the world has higher definition, has better colors, better audio quality, and the potential for a type of love so profound that it even surpasses the love of cars and phones. With inner riches I have something that is worth sharing, and can build my own legacy of relationships and creative works.
People who visited J.R.R. Tolkien found his house to be depressingly ordinary and middle class, but what inner riches he had! Tolkien created new languages, cultures, races and worlds. Tolkien called fantasy writing "subcreation." Nietzsche said, "If there were gods, how could I bear not to be a god?" The consumer culture gets you to say, "If there is a new gadget, how can I bear it not to own such a gadget?" I say, "If there are subcreators, how could I bear it not to be a subcreator?" If it is possible to have the inner riches to give birth to whole worlds, the inner riches to find portals and multitudes within, to generate artistic creations, empathic intuitions and new revelations, how could I bear it not to have such inner riches, such magical fertility? What car, what phone, even a touch screen phone, could possibly compensate me for the lose of such inner riches?
Outer resources can be great, but they can never replace the value of your inner kingdom. Consider this a propitious time to appreciate your inner riches. |
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Saturday, November 07, 2009
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Late Bloomer — Valuing Prolonged AdolescenceLate Bloomer — Valuing Prolonged Adolescence Valuing prolonged adolescence sounds counterintuitive, I know. Indeed, our culture abounds with examples of the worst sort of prolonged adolescence, such as narcissistic baby boomers desperately and pathetically trying to hold onto the things of youth. I have often quoted the Mary Renault character who said, "Man must make his peace with his seasons or the gods will laugh at him." It can be dangerous to cling to the Puer Aeternus, the archetype of the eternal youth. And yet there is also the creative, inspiring and metamorphic side of the prolongation of adolescence, a more hidden side of the paradox of prolonged youth that also needs to be honored.
From an evolutionary and developmental point of view, it is often an advantage to be a late bloomer. A general trend we see in nature is that the more complex the organism, and the more potential it has for individuality, the longer it needs to develop. Baby spiders and scorpions seem to come into the world already fully locked and loaded with everything they need to know to be spiders and scorpions. They seem to have pre-installed operating systems of instincts allowing them to function as miniature adults at soon as they hatch. Spiders and scorpions are not late bloomers, they don't spend years wondering what they will be when they grow up. Spiders and scorpions seem to hit the ground running, without the slightest doubt or insecurity about who they are supposed to be, and what they are supposed to do. They are also hard-wired and mechanical compared to more individualized creatures like us. They are prodigies of self-sufficiency, competence without training, action without hesitation. Adolescence for spiders and scorpions doesn't stretch for decades into middle age. To a person of painful self-consciousness, like J. Alfred Prufrock , to be an action-oriented exoskeleton seems an enviable thing,
"I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas."
But the lifestyle of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas may not be as enviable as J. Alfred imagines. For the late bloomer, the path of the fully formed man of action may seem enviable — the glamour of an instinct-driven life ensconced in an attractive exoskeleton, the imagined lives of square-jawed muscular types stepping out of glossy magazine pages and action films — and yet there is much to be said for being a mutating introvert, not yet identified with a glossy exterior on a path of unhesitating action.
The more evolved animals seem to take longer before they are ready to hit the ground running. Human development can slow and stagnate, stretch out too long, but it can also end too soon, and we have the prematurely adult types, those whose identity has been locked and loaded since middle school or high school. They are not experiencing prolonged adolescence; they are formed adolescent types prolonging themselves into stagnant adulthood.
But some highly individualized mutants retain the metamorphic aspect of adolescence, and have not fully formed. Some inner will for transformation will not allow them to rigidify into a finished adult form even though it might be decades since biological adolescence should have ended. This type of late blooming has its painful drawbacks, but also its developmental advantages. The longer and more labyrinthine the path of developmental, the more individualized and novel may be the results.
The world is overpopulated with finished exoskeletal types. The exoskeletal folks have already been locked and loaded with fundamentalisms and absolutisms that tell them everything they think they need to know. Exoskeletal folk are busy scuttling forth, acting out. But the world also needs more interiorized folk, the personifications of evolution's attempts to experiment with the human form, those who live in prolonged states of metamorphosis.
Consider this a propitious time to allow the painful metamorphosis of prolonged adolescence, and honor the path of the late bloomer. |
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Saturday, October 31, 2009
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Crossing the Event Horizon of Death---Emergence or Emergency
Detail of van at Arkansas Rainbow Gathering
Happy Halloween! Before we get to our main content, which also relates to the Halloween theme, today is the fourth anniversary of the Zap Oracle as an online entity. It's inception on Halloween happened in an uncanny way. In the Zap Oracle's Instructions, Credits and History I wrote about it as follows:
Halloween of 2005, was a day of synchronicities with a lot of thematic coherence. It was an emotionally charged day because my mom was entering Mt. Sinai hospital for procedures preliminary to open heart surgery on November 1st. A long I Ching consultation that morning pointed in multiple ways to work on the website as my main focus. Synchronicities immediately seemed to support that with emails (the first of this sort in weeks) coming in from people who found the website and wanted DVDs and readings. Later in the day I found myself doing other livelihood work which I experienced as extremely counter enthusiastic that evening. Almost the moment that work ended I got a call from David and he set up a three way call with Drew. Most of this conversation was rapid fire dialogue between D&D in computerese I could only follow in broad outline, but I was delighted being mostly a bystander in this conversation. I felt like a kid looking in at the elves workshop as these two computer wizards talked about future designs and at the same time, working online together, modified a prototype David had built for the Zap Oracle. To my amazement and delight, while we were on the phone, they uploaded it onto the website and made a number of modifications and enhancements. I was out on my bicycle when the phone call started, by the time I got home and turned on my laptop the Zap Oracle had been born, coming on line at the time of the year most associated with magic and the crossing over of living and dead, conscious and unconscious----All Hallow’s Eve---also known as Halloween.
Some astrologers do charts not just on people, but on projects, political movements etc. and they base their charts on the time and place of inception. Without anyone having the conscious intention, the conference call and birth of the Zap Oracle happened to occur on Halloween Evening which was also the eve of a huge medical transition for my immediate family and the eve of a day in which there had been so many indications to focus on the website. The place of inception would have to be cyberspace, otherwise we would have to triangulate some intermediary point in the USA as all three of us on the design team were at least a thousand miles from the next nearest person. Come to think of it, both time and space were somewhat indeterminate as we are all in a different time zone. That also seems propitious, as an oracle (like the unconscious, like the dreamtime) needs to exist somewhat outside of space/time. Also propitious was that every phase of my mom's recovery from heart valve replacement surgery (which happened the following morning) happened ahead of schedule.
Feedback always welcome---send to jonathanzap@hotmail.com
Crossing the Event Horizon of Death
text and photos © 2009, Jonathan Zap
Pioneer Cemetery in Boulder, Colorado
Emergency or Emergence?
Looking west toward the Flatirions from 12th and College in Boulder
The fear of death (in you or others) is a sometimes hidden, potent force affecting personality and behavior in strange and varied ways. To compensate for this fear, some will seek to control others, objects, money, the appearance of youth, etc., in vain, hollow attempts to stave off the fragility of corporeal incarnation. The fear of death can warp the perception of time, body, money, property, ambition, relationship, power and probably any other human attributes that can be named.  I took a picture of this absurd ad in Manhattan in 2006. Western culture is in denial of death and encourages us to think we can cheat it through dieting, plastic surgery, cosmetics, exercise, romantic adventures, exciting purchases, and so forth. The ego may view death as an emergency, but for the self it may be an emergence. Death is a guaranteed portal, an event horizon, an opportunity to step across the threshold. We cheat ourselves by viewing it negatively or denying its inexorable approach. Tolkien called the desire to avoid aging, "premature immortality," and in his mythology humans were considered more blessed than the elves because their corporeal incarnation had a definite time limit. The fear of death seems to be located in the ego, whereas the self, aware that it did not begin at birth, perceives death as change, not annihilation. For the ego, death is the great emergency. For the self on the path of development, death is the great emergence. When I was very young, my fear of death was quite intense, but numerous out-of-body experiences caused the fear to vanish. I experienced that not only could my awareness exist outside of my body, it could also be incredibly enhanced by the separation. The view of death as possible annihilation was replaced by a deep intuition of death as an orgasmic portal.  Many people brought up in a culture of fundamentalist materialism (also called "scientism") have a bleak view of death. One friend described it as, "It's just lights out and that's it." That friend seemed to pursue physical fitness as a hedge against the inevitable and inexorable approach of death.  Nakita in front of a collage — decoupage on plywood, and a multi media assemblage sculpture I made. A careful study of near-death experience findings should be enough to convince an open-minded skeptic that death is an event horizon, not a pit of oblivion. The position of neurological materialism, the belief that consciousness is an epiphenomenon or secondary effect of biochemical process in the brain, is resoundingly and definitively contradicted by NDE findings. Consciousness does not reside in the brain, and electrical activity in the brain is not a prerequisite for consciousness.* (see example of NDE evidence below)  The fear of death is often a function of a life not fully lived, of aliveness rejected or neglected in the present. The fear of death may be a fear of the comprehensive life review that so many near-death experiencers report, a fear of being accountable for a life not fully lived, of a life misused and of harm done to others. Some visionaries say that the soul may travel on from death, but this survival is not guaranteed. Those who have led dissolute, fragmented lives may not have enough of a center to hold together and may disintegrate at death. To paraphrase FDR, "There is nothing to fear but the fear of death itself." Depending on the position of the card, the death element may mean that you are in a phase where an aspect of your old identity may need to die and be reborn transformed. Death means transformation. You may be experiencing some form of necessary ego death. What the ego views as emergency, for the soul may be an emergence.
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