2015.02.07 — - Shattered Consciousness and the Burden of The Common Man — Small fushigis*

Today was a day with three tiny but remarkable fushigi. The last one today began two days ago. And like all great ones, it began small, with my deciding to look at The Nature of Personal Reality: A Seth Book by Jane Roberts. I decided this, in my mind anyway, because I

have been thinking about my path from childhood and its soul destroying trauma, to paraphrase a sister, to peace and the beginnings of joy for the first time in my life. And Personal Reality was very very important in that path.

So I flipped open to a random page in an unread old copy of the book. (I loaned away my thumbed copy many years ago, and it is not likely to return.) And I flipped open to Seth talking about the effects of massive doses of LSD as a therapeutic tool. When I read it I smiled at his discussion about the birth, death and rebirth of consciousness, because I recently posted a similar argument in Kubrickon as it relates to the problem of consensus versus consciousness. I posed the following question:

With [M.L.] von Franz’s comment [in her interview ‘The Way of the Dream’, that consciousness can be easily absorbed back into unconsciousness], it struck that there may be a relationship between consensus building and the unconscious. Here's my thought: what if

consensus is the means by which consciousness struggles against annihilation by the unconscious? The collective consensus is the counterbalance to the collective unconscious. The challenge or conundrum or irony of it is that for our consciousness to be saved from the darkness of unconsciousness requires that we dim the light of consciousness enough to join with the masses and become, hopefully, not a fully unconscious member of the tribal consensus! LOL!

From Jane/Seth:

[Sidebar! I’m listening to Laurie Brown on CBC R2 ‘The Signal’ talking about being alone with the opportunity to rest, repair, heal as I am preparing to transcribe the following. She was introducing the song ‘In My Solitude’ by Del Bel. The contrast with my subject felt healing and appropriate. And bloggable.]

In therapy using massive doses of LSD, a condition of chemically enforced insanity takes place. By insanity, I mean a situation in which the conscious mind is forced into a state of powerlessness. There is a literal assault made not only upon the psyche, but upon the organizational framework that makes it possible for you to exist rationally in the world that you know. The ego, of course, cannot be annihilated in physical life. Kill one and another will, and must, emerge from the inner self which is its source.

Under such enforced conditions, you are literally facing egotistical consciousness with its own death in an encounter that need not occur — and while the physical body is fighting for its own life and vitality. You are bringing about a dilemma of great proportions (176-7). Toronto: Bantam Books 1980. ISBN 0553248456

Tonight, just before coming up stairs to write (in Kubrickon supposedly), I opened the book that arrived in the mail on Monday from the UK. The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit by Donald Kalsched I bought it a that recommendation

of my sister while we were talking about surviving childhood and some of the ways we can be set back by inner archetypal energies created in that childhood. From the introduction:

… I will be using the word “trauma” to mean any experience that causes the child unbearable psychic pain or anxiety. For an experience to be “unbearable” means that it overwhelms the usual defensive measures...The distinguishing feature of such trauma is what Heinz Kohut called, “disintegration anxiety,” an unnameable dread associated with the threatened dissolution of a coherent self.

To experience such anxiety threatens the total annihilation of the human personality, the destruction of the personal spirit. This must be avoided at all costs and so, because such trauma often occurs in early infancy before a coherent ego (and its defenses) is formed, a second line of defenses comes into play to prevent the “unthinkable” from being experienced (1).

[I am still listening to Laurie Brown, this time she mentioned “Lost in the All” which is the closing song of the movie The Samaritan with Samuel Jackson about a man struggling to grow out of his criminal past. That was kind of interesting, with the subject of growing out of our childhoods. But then it got really weird because, when I went to find the YouTube link, the one below it on the search results screen is Bastille - Things We Lost in the Fire.

Why I note this is that about a week ago I was struggling to remember the name of that movie. I am not even sure why, except maybe it is about a family and people struggling with harsh life events and destructive choices. I loved Things We Lost in the Fire,

and consider it to be one of Halle Barrie’s best performances. It also stars Benicio Del Toro in a great performance.]

End of the first fushigi of the day. Now for number 2.

It began, oddly enough, with another random book flip. For some reason I wanted to break the routine of work with my co-worker this morning and flipped open my office copy of The I Ching. And, as is usually the case, the hexagram was perfect, because of the feeling of work in the office. I flipped to p156, Six in the third place of #40 Deliverance. And I allowed my eyes to take me to where they wanted to go, which was Confucius’s comment:

Carrying a burden on the back is the business of a common man; a carriage is the appurtenance of a man of rank….

And then I proceeded with my day, which included a surprise requirement to visit a job site. And — OMG, this is funny, I didn’t realize it until just now! It was a job site, and I needed to open a service vault, and — Laurie brown is talking about a book called, I think, The Importance Of Waiting as I write this! Too funny! … And I needed to open a service box, but had to wait while men came by with a load of supplies they were pushing on a large dolly of some type. Except the last man, the biggest, who was carrying on his shoulder a very large and obviously heavy thick blue coloured plastic pipe of a type I’ve never seen before.

Anyway, where was I? Right. I got the pictures I needed and when I got back to the office I was very surprised to see that the man I had helped yesterday get a 34x44 inch colour print for his workshop had thanked me by leaving a copy of a CD he’d made on my desk. He was a stranger to me, here from Toronto to put on a type of software architecture course. And so a bit later I plugged in Mike Beauchamp’s CD ‘Welcome Mat’. This is a moving CD! The heart and feeling comes through very powerfully and the CD is well produced and sounds excellent. Mike’s vocals are, perhaps, a bit rough, but the heart and feeling he conveys more than makes up for that. A delightful listen and a heartfelt gift that really touched me. I listened to the CD without looking at the track names — the liner doesn’t have them, while Windows Media Player played it in the background. And the hairs on my neck pricked a little when I heard Mike singing:

Bear Their Burden

He will not bid the stones
turn in to bread today
easing his pressing hunger:
for the hungry and the poor
of the world cannot,
and he is in the world
to bear their burden.
He will not circumvent
frail humanness today,
denying his mortality:
for even the mighty
of the world cannot,
and he is in the world
to bear their burden.
He will not seek the throne
of a kingdom today,
no selfish wealth, no vain glory:
for the outcasts and the hurting
of the world cannot,
and he is in the world
to bear their burden.

Now for bed. It has been a long day and a long week.