One Clumsy Seeker: Living in the Flux with mental illness and trying to make some sense of truth using reason and science

By Providence Greenseed

This book summarizes the journey of someone with mental illness trying to break through the facade of false beliefs through mental meanderings in esoterica and science.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Dec 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9798765236086

Providence Greenseed

It became a need for Providence Greenseed to express their thoughts and experiences of both turmoil and ectsasy. They were raised LDS (Mormon) and that did some damage as well as other trauma. There is no need for a bio here as they have written so much within the book.

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Copyright © 2022 Providence Greenseed.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 979-8-7652-3607-9 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-7652-3608-6 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date:   12/08/2022

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

Purpose

Content

Process

Organization

Chapter 1 Creation of Illusion

The birth of illusion

The birth of my illusion

Chapter 2 Buying in to the Illusion

A Self

A Girl

Chapter 3 Maintaining the Illusion

Status Quo

Bias

Brains

Community

Habits

Limiting thoughts and behaviors

Anxiety

Closed Mind

Depression

Denial

Fear

Language

Lies

Prejudice

Relationships

Religion

Self-Deception

Self-Perception

Shame

Mental Illness

My family

Myself

Chapter 4 What the illusion provides

The Self

Body

Brain

Mind

Soul

Experiencing

Expressing

Chapter 5 Glimpses of Our Source

Nothingness

Space

Death

Awareness

Narrow Views

Altered States

Wider Views

Somethingness

Let There be Light

Let There be Life

My own spiritual growth

Childhood

Adolescence

Adulthood

Retirement

Chapter 6 Rebuilding our selves

Remembrance

Black Butterfly

Intimacy

Loss and Grief

Love

Nickel and Dimed

Review

Alcohol and Drugs

Art

Athletics

Career

Cats

Cooking

Crafts

Dancing

Education

Gardening

Music

Play

Poetry

Service

Sex

Speaking

Travels

Writing

Reframing

Self

Parents

Siblings

Friends

Community

Associations

Reconstructing

Clearing Ground

Re-Building the Structure/s

Ongoing Construction

Chapter 7 Moving On

Karma and Pain

Listening and Learning

Boundaries and Needs

Communication and Compassion

Compassion and Forgiveness

Perspective and Shifting

Hardship and Gratitude

Challenges and Courage

Acceptance and Healing

Transcendence and Enlightenment

Expansion and Inclusion

Humor and Play

Chapter 8 Power

Personal

Group

God

Chapter 9 Us

Our condition

Conversations

I’ll meet you there

Cultivation

Harvest

Postlude

PREFACE

What PURPOSE does our past serve anyway? Why write memoirs or history? True, we learn from the process, but we can also lock ourselves and others in to old ways of being that don’t serve us well any more, by identifying too much with our personal histories. By this I mean that we are not our personal histories and we don’t have to be defined by them. You know, having your narrative own you rather than you OWNING your narrative. This helps when you have points in your life where you might feel like you’ve just gone along blindly and it took a while to realize some things. Writing things out helps to figure things out. Sharing them helps each other.

Owning your NARRATIVE is easier acknowledged than done. If it were easy, there wouldn’t be so many books and workshops around the whole process. Habits - and cognitive habits of rehashing the past can be challenging, especially when individuals, relationships, and reputations keep moving into your space of energy to draw you back. Besides, some things just have to be EXPRESSED. Built up energy needs to be released. I found this to be the case for me. I had to write this book.

Life is amazing! Our physical reality is comprised of molecules and atoms and so on. The molecules and atoms move or vibrate as the botanist Robert Brown discovered. This movement is called Brownian motion. These particles move with rapidly changing electric and magnetic forces. Light is the result of electric and magnetic forces rapidly changing within the source from where that light comes. Light exists independently of whether or not we can see it. Like the proverbial tree in the forest, sound exists independently of our hearing it. Waves of compression create vibration. Reality then, is a very broad bunch of vibrations. Our senses only pick up short bandwidths of this huge PHYSICAL reality.

So why do we make a distinction between what is physical and what is metaphysical? I would say that it has to do with what is within the confines of our personal FILTERED experience. Our filtered experience is not only a small bandwidth of reality, but it is clouded with our biases and expectations and yet still based on what we can measure with our senses or additional technology. The reality that is beyond our comprehension has more truth than what lies within our limited perceptions.

We have learned that light is comprised of various colors – the spectrum. The colors are seen as they are by their WAVELENGTHS. These comprise the electromagnetic spectrum. The electromagnetic spectrum is a range of wavelengths and frequencies that increase 10^9 as suggested by Robert Rivlin and Karen Gravelle. The earth vibrates at 7.8 Hz or cycles per second. This low vibration extends through the bandwidth of electromagnetic radiation to a high-energy wavelength of gamma rays that vibrate at the highest frequencies with the shortest wavelengths.¹ Beta rays are the normal vibrational state of the active human brain. Gamma waves are found in states of insight and are seen most often in monks and those who meditate regularly.

Everything has motion. Everything vibrates. From the large pulsar emitting beams of electromagnetic radiation measured as long as 8.5 seconds, to its comprised photons in wave-like manner, producing interference PATTERNS. Our hearts beat producing waves of nourishing blood, our lungs breathe for us to move necessary gases, and our molecules shiver as they exchange nutrients, neurotransmitters zapping across sodium-potassium pumps to give us thought. We are pulses within pulses within even larger pulses. We are layers and layers of vibration within and without.²

David Bohm proposes a model of the universe which he describes in terms of implicate and explicate orders. The implicate order is where time and space don’t exist as we know it, because it is an enfolded wholeness. It is this order that is deeper consciousness and awareness, and that physical reality is the explicate order which is derived and ABSTRACTED FROM the implicate order.

E = mc^2. Are we at our very core, light? Actually, considering that light is an electromagnetic vibration, what or who we are as a consciousness that animates must be even more prime than that. To say that we ARE the vibration is to say the ocean is the waves. Our bodies and what is physical is merely light slowed down. If we are layers and layers of MANIFESTING light, then could the karmic dimension be where action/reaction occurs? The realm of pure light consciousness is where all possibilities co-exist simultaneously. Here’s my reasoning. Matter is made up of vibrating atoms and the slower the vibration the denser the matter, right? If we go the other way, the faster the vibration the sparser the thing, like gases and such. What if, in the implicate realm of which David Bohm speaks, we consist of such a fine matter that we vibrate at the speed of light? The implicate realm would be eternal because time doesn’t pass when you go the speed of light. In order to experience life, we need time to pass, and we would have to manifest ourselves from the nonphysical domain of matter to the physical or more classical domain or matter. To become manifested physically, our implicate consciousness vibrates within our bodies giving life to cells and tissues. To reconnect to our source, requires the brain to be quiet. Meditation and altered states help to get there. Implicate begets explicate, but the explicate scatters widely and sparsely (entropies) to that of the implicate. Giggle… me = mc^2.

That is how I come to see the deeper levels of reality. As the multidimensional energy forces in a COMPLEX WEB of networks. The energy that creates the reality A fractal³, of course.

Every day is filled WITH LIMITLESS events, limitless perceptions, and limitless possibility. This book is an attempt to encourage us to open ourselves into the universe with love, encounter others and experiences in loving creative RESPONSES rather than reacting. To open our transcendent selves into the universe with love, and move us as an interconnected body of vibrations, forward in peace.

INTRODUCTION

Living in the flux, was going to be the original title of this book. It is an expression that I like to describe as chaos and unknown situations. True, there can be sheer hellish experiences, but there can also be power in the potential of possibilities that arise as a result of what is learned along the journey. I write about my clumsy journey as being different people in one body throughout the adventures in my life. Coming from an early life of abuse and indoctrination, I chronicle my experiences and views in various forms of several writing styles.

Also, flux short for fluctuation is the effect from virtual particles being randomly created in particle/anti-particle pairs that seem to annihilate each other immediately. Like a bit of a sinusoidal wave, I suppose that could be the fluctuations of wave forms and their cancellations. Fluctuation of wave forms. The collapsing of the wave describes particles falling out of superposition (same in space/time,) and into a definite and measurable state. As virtual particles are created, yet do not have an anti-particle to kill it, as in really get rid of it, then we have EXISTENCE.

Regardless…. What does this quantum flux have to do with me or you? Like this memoir that has flux in the subtitle? Flux happens, and life then happens. Flux creates life. Spiritual discipline awakens us to experience deeper reality, and corresponding waves of energy. Life happens. WOW. LIFE HAPPENS! That is just far out cool. It’s all a multidimensional intermingling of waves – some colliding, some resonating. Together they resonate to carry strength and power for the other wave forms to synchronize. Hmmmmm… like create change? REALLY??!

This book will take you on an adventure of my life and my thoughts. I wonder how many similar thoughts and experiences you have. Thank you for opening yourself up to read about my journey.

What sensation have I? Is it I? Where did unity go?

Let me re-unite. Don’t forget the drop of water that helps to constitute the ocean.

Don’t forget the reflection of all that could be conceived.

Should it be now? Soon? Never? Sometime? The answer is when.

Entering unknown barriers, need I be afraid? A golden thread will guide.

The past is full of wandering, searching for the way.

Vain rituals that engulfed- Where stand I today?

PURPOSE

For me, for you. My goal is to express myself fully and openly in the hopes that others identify and get some kind of solace, relief, insight, help, and growth. I am motivated to write this by an occasional comment from a friend who thanks me for saying something that helped them. I will share with people whom I don’t know since I’ve benefited so much from people who don’t know me. Those who have poured their hearts out in complete vulnerability about their lives and lessons learned. They inspire me always and I have such deep gratitude for them. They/you are the people who have posted on YouTube or written autobiographies revealing deeply personal stuff. If I can provide any bit of insight to help someone else along, I have not lived in vain.⁴

CONTENT

Life is change, and often the way we perceive it has direct outcomes in large degrees. In this book I describe living in the flux as recognition and lack of recognition, that we live in a DYNAMIC SYSTEM of which we are an active part whether we’re aware of it or not.

Going through my life and making sense of it through all the memories and in perspective has made me realize just how full and rich my life has been. I am overwhelmed with the paradoxical incompleteness and fullness as memories keep arising. I feel so blessed. I’ve done some LIVING! Along with all of the crap there have been some amazing times and I feel compelled to share those.

What is that feeling

when you realize what you’ve lost

and what you’ve gained

and this knowledge

makes you full of remorse

as well as forgiving and rejoicing

and contentment

all at once?

So full

of the time

and the space

where everything just comes together

and balances

into peacefulness

freedom from needing

that completeness.

Because, it is.

COMPLETE.

CONTENT.

Considering our brain plasticity and ability to SHIFT our awareness to accommodate sensory input, aren’t we all, in a sense, shape-shifters? We’re changing our internal wiring and firing networks to perceive. The level that we understand this about ourselves varies in many degrees. My belief is that there are several subtle aspects to reality, that together, both determine current events and allow possibility in that same instance, if one is aware. Everyone has different abilities and levels of awareness. Some of us, through adaptation, evolution, or personal growth, have different awareness’s’ of these subtleties in the interplay between subjective reality and objective existence to varying degrees. We have personal veils that filter us from spiritual ground⁵, and thickens and thins from time to time. Being aware of these subtle shifts has its advantages and disadvantages: They are sometimes painful because of things that come up from our collective unconscious, but more often quite glorious from realizing our spiritual progression. However, I believe it is important to have soft, compassionate eyes in openness, so that we can affect change. By realizing and understanding that everything and everyone has an individual time-scale, as well as individual perspective/FOCUS, we can be co-agents of change in ourselves, and in our universe.

I have clumsily schlepped through life, at times feeling like I had it all together when in fact I was a mess, insulted people, hurt people, been hurt, felt pain, given pain, done some really stupid things, and amazingly still alive and quite healthy. There by the grace of God go I. MAN! But – I have experienced and have more to experience and CELEBRATE in JOY. Don’t get me wrong. I’m still a mental mess on occasion, but I’m a mental mess less often. Progress is success.

This book intermingles my own esoterica and wild speculation with my LIFE EXPERIENCES.

PROCESS

I started this book many years ago trying to write about various insights that I had discovered but kept feeling compelled to add personal anecdotes and experiences that seemed relevant. I would write a bit, and then felt like I really had to describe where I was coming from to have that kind of idea. LIFE would give me more experiences, so much of my previous writing was insufficient. I have grown using this book to interact with by questioning, reviewing, healing as the book has been amended and revised and re-created.

Among the experiences of life was a breakup from a dysfunctional relationship when I was my own share of crazy. I watched videos on YouTube to help me recover and found much advice from too many to mention. Ajahn Brahm, a Buddhist Monk from Western Australia has thousands of videos and talks about the importance of meditation. This was something that had been gone from my life for many years, and I remembered when I meditated before how calm I was. I decided to begin to MEDITATE again with the goal of 20 minutes twice a day. I started at 3 minutes twice a day and every weekend increased it by a minute. Everything in my life changed for the positive and is continuing to do so.

It was in the process of meditation that I realized that memoir writing would be a good way to get perspective. I kept telling myself that my life was so much more than the ugly secrets that caused me such PAIN. It is a way to remember and document life experiences. In the fullness of such a rich and wonderful life that I have led, the ugly secrets get tinier and tinier in contrast. As a matter of fact, all the mess ups and clumsiness get tinier and tinier the more I meditate and find peace, perspective, and wisdom in the grander scheme of life.

Also, a very exciting outcome of this process is that opening up to remembering brings forth so many forgotten and delightful experiences. So much so, that I feel overwhelmed with the richness of living. Although experience and subsequent experiences in my early formative youth, shaped a lot of how I viewed people, life, and relationships; I am so grateful I can acknowledge the lies that skewed thinking provided and can have a refresh on my views of people, life, and relationships. I have been rewiring my brain and visiting my MEMORIES to experience them from a different me. Surely there is a lot of love and goodness and joy and that is where I direct my focus. This process of reviewing, reframing, and reconstructing is one I highly recommend.

So, my MENTAL MEANDERINGS became married with my life and experiences in this book. Mmmmmmm…AUmmmmmmm…. To which, I think… why the hell would they not? Also, as I am learning to use humor to reframe and heal, why should I not find the funny in the experiences and attempt to write the humor of them? I also want to write a lot of really great stuff. Fantastic experiences to represent my life that although I’ve had this mental illness issue, I have had a really good life with lots of cherished experiences. To not write about those experiences, would misrepresent my life. I want to write this book to express fully how intertwined my experiences and my seeking for spiritual truth have been. It’s been a recognition that the possibilities are as endless as the potential is endless. Even if we forget. I know I have numerous times.

I have been growing with the writing of this book. By asking the questions and slotting my life experiences into the various aspects of spirituality. How my motives for doing what I did aligned with whatever lessons I needed to learn, or just because I learned why I did what I did and when I did it, has helped me come into ACCEPTANCE of my life. It’s quite a life. On-going, work-in progress, precious, adventurous, painful at times, joyful at times. Sometimes I feel like I have made a lot of progress and other times I feel like I’m dealing with the same old shit again. I have to look at it from a wider perspective and realize that for the most part I’ve grown a lot. It’s just that some days aren’t as good as other days. Maybe a lot like yours.

ORGANIZATION

There are several questions that have guided me in my personal spiritual quest and comprise the outline of this book. I intersperse personal stories with these views because they are relevant in how I came to believe my answers. I found in my PERSONAL PROCESS that it became important to me to share many memoirs. As a person who has survived and grown from complex PTSD, depression, and generalized anxiety disorder, it became very important to me to take creative stewardship of my own brain. Rather than get absorbed in those ugly secrets that shaped much of who I used to be, but rather to express all the beautiful and rich experiences that comprised and also shaped my life outside of that.

There are 9 chapters – a great number! In chapter 1, I write about the creation of illusion as well as my own illusion. In chapter 2, I write about how we buy into the illusion with the construction of self. In Chapter 3, I write about what the illusion provides. In chapter 4 I write about how we maintain the illusion by various means, and in chapter 5 I address glimpses of our truer nature. I then go on to write about how knowing this can help us rebuild ourselves through remembering, review, reframing, and reconstructing in Chapter 6. In Chapter 7 I write about moving on past our baggage and what we’ve learned, and in chapter 8 I write about power of self, group, and God. In chapter 8 I write about power with the understanding that we are more than we think we are and together as individuals we are beyond amazing. We need to understand how to use that power to solve pretty complex issues and continue our evolution. In chapter 9 I write about where we are and where a lot of us want to be.

We get born, we build an ego, we work to transcend that self, and then we learn that we still need that self to get NECESSARY spiritual work done.

Oh, and by the way, you might want to read just the words in all caps in various paragraphs. Sometimes I found it a fun way to express a thought by cohering some paragraphs with an all-caps key word and also to create phrases in and of themselves.

Another fun thing I did is trying to call that transcendent force, that prime mover, the creative energy some call God, just different names and acronyms. Just for fun. God is many names after all. The great I am. How many names do you have for that transcendent force?

CHAPTER 1

CREATION OF ILLUSION

Illusion is seeing something as different than what it is. It’s not having all of the information so it can pertain to believing that a part or subset of something is the thing in its entirety. It’s perceptual. Often it happens by believing that a part of something is the whole of something like the proverbial blind men and the elephant. Delusion is a belief disturbance and a deeply held false belief that stays although there is much information to contradict it. This is how I see it:

IllusionDelusion.jpg

Figure 0-1 Illusion to Delusion

48315.png

In order to have illusion, you have to talk about what is real. The problem is that real goes way out beyond our perceptual scope. We seem to say that something is physical if we can measure it with our own senses, or instrumentation that are only extensions of our senses and subject to the same expectations of what our senses will derive from the results of that instrumentation.

Everything has VIBRATION. Brownian motion shows that even solidly appearing objects have atoms and molecules that are bouncing around. Even solids have molecules that bounce in place. Our consciousness ends up being filtered from something that has wide reception (vibrationally speaking) into a small life form with just a neural tube yet to be formed into the human brain. Our experience of the vast vibrational existence (a spiritual ground) gets filtered through our new sensory organs that interpret only a small band of energy.

How energy is received by our physical bodies IS TRANSDUCED⁶ into various perceptual experiences. Transduction in this context is the act of converting stimulus into experiences for our minds to have. Some might call it qualia. Our bodily perceptions do not have the full capacity of experiencing the entire spiritual ground, which I call collective unconsciousness with a spiritual bias. Humans hear frequencies as low as 20 and as high as 20,000 Hz⁷, but other animals have different ranges. Mice can hear frequencies between 1,000 and 100,000 Hz, cats can hear as high as 60,000, and elephants hear a range between 1 and 20,000 Hz. The elephant can hear sounds that are ultrasonic to us. Visual systems and olfactory systems also are senses that do not experience the full range of the electromagnetic spectrum. The default system is that you cannot fully see and experience who you are at your deepest levels.

Our brains take what is given to us by the electro-chemical energy of the little hairs in our ears vibrating from sound and make meaning from it. While I was coming out of surgery one time, I had a cool experience. I was sliding sideways through a sparkly granite type cave with geometric blocks that would slide out of the walls and back in to the walls with some type of unintelligible sound. One block would shift forward with sound and then slide back as the sound subsided. I was continuing to float towards the exit of the cave while a differently shaped block would slide out towards me from the other side with sound and then slide back. Before too long I became aware that each block corresponded to the voice of a different medical professional standing around me. My brain had taken the OUTSIDE STIMULUS and created that mental experience. Transduction, this conversion of the outside experience of waves, be they auditory or visual, is what happens for our brains to go further and think, make meaning of, make assessments of, etc. Your brain tries to interpret the best they can. However, they are filters fraught with biases and expectations that don’t accurately interpret.

Since illusion is what is likely to be misinterpreted by the senses, and reality is NOT FULLY PERCEIVED, then the senses are going to misperceive reality and reality will be misinterpreted by the senses. Hence, what we think of as reality, IS AN ILLUSION.

THE BIRTH OF ILLUSION

Christians talk about original sin. Toltecs talk about the domestication of humans. Although Christians might mean that we were born into SIN or imperfection and the Toltecs might mean that we are trained to be what is defined as human; I believe that we are all talking about a similar experience that is a large and shared illusion. In our limited perception how can we truly know and understand the unlimited possibilities that have to co-exist with us in order to create this thing called evolution and adaptation?

When we were born, we left a pre-existing state of infinitely potential energy and forgot who we were. Being born NARROWS our pre-existent range of vibrational experience and I believe we grieve on some level. We feel a loss and we feel tiny because we have a spiritual memory of where we came from and who we really are. Now we are in a body with a filtering system of brain that doesn’t move so easily, and find ourselves no longer in vastly in higher space-time dimensions. We grieve our true nature.

As we forget where we came from, and adapt to where we come to through birth, we respond by feeling small and powerless. We become conditioned through genetic predisposition and by our parents, peers, and society to buy in to the illusion that we have limited POTENTIAL because of the constraints that our social networks have us believe. We believe lies about ourselves. The forming brain is programmed to fit in, so we adapt.

These SOCIAL NETWORKS have an entire history and life form of their own because of the contributing buy-in from the participants. Since the participants of this illusion were around before we were born, we, in our perceived puniness, give further credence to the illusion and buy in to it also. The illusion is fraught with lies of not just the nature of reality, but who/what god is, what god wants, and much damage comes from this skewed thinking. This is what I think the idea of original sin has come from. Our esteem suffers from these lies about ourselves.

There is a difference between illusion and delusion. Illusion is a trick in perception and delusion is belief in that which is NOT REAL. As delusions are false beliefs with the consideration of subjective reality, one person’s illusion might be named as delusional from someone else. To be making up stories and messing with each other’s heads is delusion. For someone to wrap their ego up with something transcendent can cause all kinds of psychological problems. Some of us struggle with sanity. The trick is to get through the delusions, see the illusion, break through to see the truth, and free the ego from the pain that it believes it needs to exist as separate. However, we need the ego to work through life, grow, and then realize the transient nature of it all. We will eventually die, and the illusion will necessarily fade away as our deeper energies continue and merge with the deeper reality.

I believe we deal with variations of both illusion and delusion and some of us get further away from our true nature by various means. If we fail to learn autonomy and power of self that will come with a good self-esteem, we can become even deeper locked in the illusion from the outer layer of delusion. Believing we are less than we are by identifying with the physical form of body and brain self-deprecates us and as others take advantage of us, the result is that we not only fail to see the power of the illusion, but we cannot use the knowledge that this is an illusion and evolve spiritually. So, we try to sort out what is TRUTH.

THE BIRTH OF MY ILLUSION

I have freakishly early childhood MEMORIES and memories in which I was pre-verbal. Of course, I didn’t have words to describe the objects or my surroundings so the words had to come later as I flashed back in time to re-experience the event in that part of my brain. There’s one in which the sunshine was coming in through the window warming my skin and the feeling of that sunshine was intense bliss that made me feel all giggly. I wrote a poem about experiencing that sunshine. Words fail to DESCRIBE the ecstatic bliss of sunshine and joy to be alive. This feeling was like an intense giggle throughout my entire body.

In another one of my memories, I was in the crib at the hospital and could hear people talking. Here’s a poem I wrote back in high school where I put words to the sensation of that grayness, the sound, and the sensation of the hospital:

The circle of dimensions

secreted itself

from nonentity to unintelligibility

I stumbled weakly to indiscriminate thoughts.

A palpitating prickle was thrust through my structure.

Beyond the blurred gray,

a nonsensical murmur of words… incessant moments…

The circle of dimensions

was forgotten

From realization to reality

I was compelled to conceive

no deviation from normalcy.

All was tangible, clearly defined;

physical beautiful.

At edges of eternity

the circle of dimensions is conveyed from commencement to conclusion

intertwined in becoming, in beckoning…

Deviations are eccentrical

all is tangible in threads of connection

pulsing in

the circle of dimensions

Being a Baby

The dragonfly hovered over the dandelion

that was white with seed.

Furiously fanning, as a

thunder clap shook the air.

Lifting away from the seed bundle

I arose, the wind feathering at my reach.

No direction, unrestrained,

electrified in the misty disturbance

I veer suddenly off – blind motion -

Stunned, I awaken…

My flesh tingling with the yellow and loving glow

of the sun through the window

And a dragonfly buzzing along…

CHAPTER 2

BUYING IN TO THE ILLUSION

As we forget where we came from and adapt to where we come to through birth, we respond by feeling small and powerless. As WE FORGET where we came from, it becomes more important to pay attention to our new surroundings. I once was having a little conversation with one of my nephews when he was only 4 years old and he was talking and just put in the sentence, when I was a grandpa… and I was stunned. Since I was in a family with religious beliefs that strictly did not believe in reincarnation, I didn’t initially pursue it. I didn’t want to cause any trouble. I let my curiosity go and didn’t ask him further questions. I now wish I had. I doubt he remembers that exchange any more. We forget any prior existence and become conditioned through genetic predisposition. Our parents, peers, and society convince us to buy the illusion that we have limited potential, because of the constraints that our social networks have led us to believe, instead of our infinite re-incarnating selves. Our undeveloped brains also don’t make as many possible connections and relationships between entities and concepts, so we require over-simplification - shortcuts that contain highly abbreviated and complex meaning. The symbol becomes the truth rather than the DEEPER UNDERSTANDING that goes with it, like the proverbial map is not the actual territory.

Context socializes us, as well as co-constructs and co-defines us. We create the architecture of our worldview of youth. Here is some context of mine.

A SELF

It is well understood that we respond to the world and others from where we are. We experience through filters of perception based on previous experiences. As we grow and develop, we learn how our relationships, our choices, and generally how we move through life have been impacted layer upon layer from the earliest of self-defining moments. We all journey uniquely and some of us have come to realizations of how the CONDITIONED SELF is formed. In addition, traumatic experiences and subsequent religious brain-washing can create a person struggling with mental illness. However, with neural plasticity and the right ingredients of positive experiences, and medication, a healthier person who has regained vitality and authentic joy can emerge. This is my story.

The brain is so MALLEABLE. Particularly in the developing brain, experiences can be laid down through the hippocampus to be hardwired into conscious memories in areas such as the medial temporal lobes, the medial thalamus, the basal forebrain, and the frontal cortex. The entire nervous system contains memories for motor, perception, and emotion. Our bodies contain memories from not only our lives, but from the lives we evolved from. Genetic memory is an exciting field. In the womb our bodies replay human evolution. The deepest parts of ourselves remember.

As each naive brain forms it becomes BIASED because of numerous self-defining moments as it develops and re-creates itself. We are told that essentially, we are in a hypnagogic state up to about 5 years old as we take everything in as complete truth. When we get older, we can break through the illusion and discover truth. We lose who we are but eventually gain abilities to remember who we are truly and deeply. I believe some of us never leave that state and keep a system of beliefs just because that is what we were delivered.

Negative emotional states can inhibit the DISCOVERY of true self. As our brains develop in the areas required for complex thought, it brings with it the possibilities and levels of abstraction from our core selves. If it becomes indoctrinated with the realities of other people, it loses connection to true self. Serotonin is the happiness chemical, and our brains produce it by complex mechanisms. Sometimes we don’t experience enough happiness and our brains don’t learn how to produce enough. Deficiencies can cause Downs Syndrome and Autism. Insufficient serotonin is also shown to cause memory loss in Alzheimer’s. A highly malleable and forming brain thrives in happiness.

A good practical book well worth reading for examining the Self is Dr. Phil’s Self Matters. In it, he describes events in our lives when we have come to believe ourselves to be. These he calls self-defining moments, and encourages us to list them out, and what we believed as a consequence. These are not always pain-free moments. Many of them are emotionally scarring and we behave according to the belief, avoiding the scar, or over-compensating as much as we can. The PROCESS is worth it. It’s hard for me to explain how messed up my thinking had been in so many ways and how it has impacted my life.

A GIRL

I have a picture of me very young wearing nothing but a diaper, outside by a sandbox, with a truck in my hand and a full-on broad smile. Santa didn’t bring little girl’s trucks, though. All that boy-stuff was socialized out of me. For example, when I got older and was told not to build muscles. My toys were chosen for me and I was urged not to be too physical. It’s not like any of us in the family were that athletic anyway, but we were all RESTRAINED. Like controlled, over-protected, and bullied.

I was around 5 I think, standing in the hall on the hardwood floor when I ran in to my sisters coming from my mom and dad’s bedroom. We know what you’re getting for Christmas! they said You’re getting a baby DOLL! I was horrified. I hated dolls because they scared me. I felt that they were paralyzed and in pain in their little bodies. I remember staring at my shelf at night with the stuffed animals feeling so sorry for them because they couldn’t move. It was awful. They continued, Oh, the reason we know this is because sometimes mom and dad help Santa out. I didn’t care about Santa. I didn’t really like him anyway. I didn’t want the scary doll. I don’t ever remember receiving it actually. I probably freaked out or something or got sick or something. It was just that disturbing to me. I did like barbie dolls but in the former house my brother cut the boob off of mine and giggled about it.