the psychic theater

"Here am I, my body made of elements that once were stardust, drawn from the far corners of the universe to flesh out, however briefly, the pattern that is uniquely me, my soul, a thing that can breathe in the enormity of such awe-inspiring origins.

The quantum self, the 'I' that we take ourselves to be, is real enough, but from moment to moment it is a shifty thing with fuzzy and fluctuating boundaries.

If you reflect on the contents of your conscious mind at any moment, you can become aware of a dim array of multiple thoughts, of possible thoughts. These borderline areas of consciousness, the twilight of the mind, are most accessible just before falling asleep, in states of deep meditation or under the influence of certain drugs, but they are always there, on the edges of any act of concentration. Their reality is fuzzy and their future indeterminate, awaiting some act of realization. In quantum terms, this fuzzy, indeterminate margin of thought is the necessary precondition of all thought. Each act of concentration is an act of thought realization. By focusing on any one thought, you make that one into a classical reality while the others disappear like so many shadows in the night.

Through the act of observing your own consciousness, you actualize or lose some of your possible thoughts. The brain is, therefore, a successful example of a quantum computer. The act of concentration is the process by which energy is pumped into the brain. The mental choices you make are simply the collapse of the quantum wave function of possible thought into one definite thought. All definite answers - all logic and reason - are classical structures. They arise at the point when the wave function of thought collapses - after the moment of choice.

Our choices give rise to our logic. In making a choice, we also make a reason for that choice which explains the choice. But some other choice would have been associated with some other reason which we would have also had an explanation for. Whatever the meaning of the choice, the choice itself preceded all becauses. It was made in a leap of faith.

In quantum processes, a probability that something will happen is associated with the amount of energy required to make it happen. The probability is very high that an electron will move with the least expenditure of energy, as opposed to a very great expenditure of energy. It is free to make any transition because nothing is determined, but it is most likely to take the easy option.

So it is with us, although the factors that influence the energy requirements of our various choices are more complex. Your nature, your essence, your body, your genetic dispositions, your experiences, all of these qualities have an impact on your choices, on the indeterminate meeting point between what you are and what you're becoming.

While reasons themselves don't determine the choices we make, they do play a crucial role in making some choices more likely than others.

Through the whole process of living and thinking we are reinforcing or changing the probabilities that our choices will have a particular outcome. Each choice that you make has an influence on the next choice you will make.

On the whole, the quantum nature of our consciousness makes it tempting for us to make choices that require the least expenditure of energy, the least amount of concentration. And that is why we are by nature creatures of habit and imitation. Habit requires very little mental work. Being a low-energy activity, habit pumps very little energy into your brain.

All quantum systems [especially systems like ourselves] share a mechanic for creative self-discovery through a dialogue with their environment. There is recent evidence to suggest that biological evolution itself may be, in fact, responsive evolution. Evolution may be a quantum dialogue between the creature and its environment, a dialogue that has the capacity to elicit and realize one of many possible directions of evolution. All living systems evolve, and to that extent have creativity built into their development.

It is the capacity of the quantum self to pluck reality from multiple possibilities - the capacity to make experimental worlds, some of which will be improvements on the last, and our ability to articulate what made them so - that essentially links our freedom and our creativity.

It is our essential freedom, the fact that each choice we have made is only one of several possible choices we might have made, which gives each individual a crucial role to play in the gradual evolution of consciousness. My thoughts may now take this form and now that, make an association here and a different one there, and it is this free, shifting quality that makes us so creative."
- Danah Zohar
The Quantum Self



"Yet with this question concerning essence do we not soar too high into the void of generality which deprives all thinking of breath? Does not the extravagance of such questioning bring to light the groundlessness of all philosophy? A radical thinking that turns to what is actual must surely from the first insist bluntly on establishing the actual truth which today gives us a measure and a stand against the confusion of opinions and reckonings. In the face of this actual need what use is the question concerning the essence of truth, this "abstract" question that disregards everything actual? Is not the question of essence the most inessential and superfluous that could be asked?"
- Martin Heidegger


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"This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women."
 - D. H. Lawrence

"We have curious ideas of ourselves. We think of ourselves as a body with a spirit in it, or a body with a soul in it, or a body with a mind in it. Mens sana in corpore sano. The years drink up the wine, and at last throw the bottle away: the body, of course, being the bottle.
It is a funny sort of superstition. Why should I look at my hand, as it so cleverly writes these words, and decide that it is a mere nothing compared to the mind that directs it? Is there really any huge difference between my hand and my brain? — or my mind? My hand is alive, it flickers with a life of its own. It meets all the strange universe, in touch, and learns a vast number of things, and knows a vast number of things. My hand, as it writes these words, slips gaily along, jumps like a grasshopper to dot an i, feels the table rather cold, gets a little bored if I write too long, has its own rudiments of thought, and is just as much me as is my brain, my mind, or my soul. Why should I imagine that there is a me which is more me than my hand is? Since my hand is absolutely alive, me alive."
- D.H. Lawrence


"Forget about your life situation for a while
and pay attention to your life."
- Eckhart Tolle



I see my beauty in you. I become
a mirror that cannot close its eyes

to your longing. My eyes wet with
yours in the early light. My mind

every moment giving birth, always
conceiving, always in the ninth

month, always the come-point. How
do I stand this? We become these

words we say, a wailing sound moving
out into the air. These thousands of

worlds that rise from nowhere, how
does your face contain them? I'm

a fly in your honey, then closer, a
moth caught in flame's allure, then

empty sky stretched out in homage.
- Jelaluddin Rumi
The Glance Songs of Soul-Meeting



an asphyxiation of spirit
I "I saw how much human life hurts people. It was not a normal intellectual understanding like, say, commiserating with the misfortunes of others. It was a very deep inner knowing that elicited a lot of natural compassion. I saw how life is so scary for people, and I perceived the sheer amount of pain they have to cover up day by day just to make it through. It's the resistance that hurts them the most. Fear forces them to stiffen, and in the stiffening, they take a lot of scary blows.

The other thing I saw was the loneliness these individuals suffered by being separated from each other and separate from life. The distance they had to establish between themselves and others in order to sustain the ego's image, and so deal with the pain of life, caused them even more pain. The illusion really hurt them, and through the illusion, they cut themselves off - not only from each other, but from the life force. You could see that each was an island unto him - or herself. Each suffered from a lack of life force, as if they were being denied oxygen. Now (these were) some very conscious, aware people who would have worked upon themselves a great deal. Yet the separation was still so marked and so sad that it really shocked me."

II "Whatever judgments I've had in the past about people's lack of honesty, or about their weakness and lack of follow-through, I saw in a different light. It's not totally their fault. The external world of our lives is forcefully driven by the real person within, which is often so cut off and terrified that it can't help itself. It acts according to impulse, as if programmed by the condition. (We all) seem like prisoners shuffling along, chained to a terrible circumstance.

Being trapped in the world of atoms and molecules and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which requires everything to entropy and die, is so utterly terrifying and eerie. To make matters worse, the inner-self can't defend itself against the personality and the intellect's reaction to all that. The inner you just accepts the program given. It's helpless.

I saw how the personality's fear was real and justified. Why try to boost the personality to transcend the fear and be brave, when the inner self has been trussed up for years by terror and confusion? Bravery is fleeting; the inner impulse soon returns. If you have ever judged an alcoholic or a drug abuser or one that exhibits obsessive dysfunctional behavior, start to beg for forgiveness. In the light of the real self and the God force, your judgments will look pathetic. You'll see how your judgment was forged out of your own illusion and separation, and how the rancor of it was sustained deep within you, fueled by the terror of your own collapse."

III "When you first have this realization, a great weight descends upon you. You may see that your whole life has been a terrible lie, a deception - one coated in righteousness and buried in denial - a position sustained for your own pleasure and sense of power. Because we are powerless to change our condition in the world of molecules and entropy, we victimize others with our power trips to gain a modicum of self-worth. It helps lessen the fear. The power trip only tends to accentuate the separation. If you don't realize it in time, that path kills you. You die a slow death by an asphyxiation of spirit, which in turn cuts off the flow of vitality to your human cells. Then, they begin to entropy sooner than they should.

What was so embarrassing was that every emotion belonged to me. I couldn't distance or repress any of them. And even though there would be a contradictory positive feeling in me somewhere, the negative one was so forceful and real. And worst of all, I saw that it was true. That's not to say that our shadow-self is all our fault, for much of it is formed in the innocence of childhood.

To close the gap and make yourself spiritually whole, you have to own your shadow and embrace it, realizing that the negative force is inside you as a part of the positive force. Once you own the negative as part of the real you, you have understood something that most miss. To own it, you have to look at it, and you have to be willing to fix it. There is a positive side to the shadow that often expresses itself as creativity. That's why so many creative geniuses have had such troubled lives. Both parts of their shadow are sharing the driving. First the creative impulse, then the destructive one, back and forth."
- Stuart Wilde
Sixth Sense



"Think of yourself as an incandescent power,
illuminated and perhaps forever talked to by God and his messengers."
- Brenda Ueland


"Human character evermore publishes itself. The most fugitive deed and word, the mere air of doing a thing, the intimated purpose, expresses character. If you act, you show character; if you sit still, if you sleep, you show it. You think, because you have spoken nothing when others spoke, and have given no opinion on the times, on the church, on slavery, on marriage, on socialism, on secret societies, on the college, on parties and persons, that your verdict is still expected with curiosity as a reserved wisdom. Far otherwise; your silence answers very loud. You have no oracle to utter, and your fellow-men have learned that you cannot help them; for, oracles speak. Doth not wisdom cry, and understanding put forth her voice?"
- Ralph Waldo Emerson



"However smart we be, however rich and clever or loving or charitable or spiritual or impeccable, it doesn't help us at all. The real power comes in to us from the beyond. Life enters us from behind, where we are sightless, and from below, where we do not understand.
And unless we yield to the beyond, and take our power and might and honor and glory from the unseen, from the unknown, we shall continue empty. We may have length of days. But an empty tin can lasts longer than Alexander lived."
- D.H. Lawrence



"Imagination is like a light that shines through perception - without it the world still appears, but it appears dormant. Imagination wakes the world up so that it can be played with, experienced as alive. Fantasy, on the other hand, is desire's (and therefore fear's) bastard child; it can make the world virulent."

"First, we need it as persons, to give us a path into the content of our lives. Of course I don't need art to know what I think and feel. But without art what I think and feel will become quickly circular, self centered, and limited. Making art gives me a way to start with what I think and feel, and to plunge deeply enough into it until it becomes not only what I think and feel but what anyone thinks and feels, and even, beyond this, what isn't thought or felt at all. In other words, writing poems I reach beyond my own sensibilities to what Celan calls the "Over-against," which I cannot directly know but very much need to know. When I write poems I am met, through my own thought and feeling, by what's outside my thought and feeling. In this sense art practice promotes a profound empathy, a widening of my sphere of awareness and appreciation of my own life.

Second, we need art specifically as spiritual practitioners to help us overcome our weakness for religious doctrine, dogma, and identity, which we all have, no matter how resistant to it we think we are, for we are all looking for the security of a fixed truth. Not knowing the truth, but having to discover it for ourselves anew through the imagination, is a much more difficult proposition, one that we are all reluctant, at bottom, to undertake."
- Zoketsu Norman Fischer
Saved from Freezing
Dharma Practice, Art Practice



"Imagination is what makes our sensory experience meaningful, enabling us to interpret and make sense of it, whether from a conventional perspective or from a fresh, original, individual one. It is what makes perception more than the mere physical stimulation of sense organs. It also produces mental imagery, visual and otherwise, which is what makes it possible for us to think outside the confines of our present perceptual reality, to consider memories of the past and possibilities for the future, and to weigh alternatives against one another. Thus, imagination makes possible all our thinking about what is, what has been, and, perhaps most important, what might be."
- Nigel J.T. Thomas



"But submitting a question to reality is to make an oracle of it. This means relying on reality - hence on the unknown - as regards the answer. This means to accept the autonomy of the world and to have decided already to surrender to it."
- Pierre Petiot
Surrealism and the Machine



"One must have chaos in oneself in order to give birth to a dancing star."
- Friedrich Nietzsche



"Whatever is profound loves masks; what is most profound even hates image and parable. Might not nothing less than the opposite , be the proper disguise for the shame of a god? A questionable question: it would be odd if some mystic had not risked something to that effect in his mind. There are occurrences of such a delicate nature that one does well to cover them up with some rudeness to conceal them; there are actions of love and extravagant generosity after which nothing is more advisable than to take a stick and give any eyewitness a sound thrashing: that would muddle his memory. Some know how to muddle and abuse their own memory in order to have their revenge at least against this only witness: shame is inventive.

It is not the worst things that cause the worst shame: there is not only guile behind a mask - there is so much graciousness in cunning. I could imagine that a human being who had to guard something precious and vulnerable might roll through life, rude and round as an old green wine cask with heavy hoops: the refinement of his shame would want it that way.

A man whose sense of shame has some profundity encounters his destinies and delicate decisions, too, on paths which few ever reach and of whose mere existence his closest intimates must not know: his mortal danger is concealed from their eyes, and so is his regained sureness of life. Such a concealed man who instinctively needs speech for silence and for burial in silence and who is inexhaustible in his evasion of communication, wants and sees to it that a mask of him roams in his place through the hearts and heads of his friends. And supposing he did not want it, he would still realize some day that in spite of that a mask of him is there - and that this is well. Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every profound spirit a mask is growing continually, owing to the constantly false, namely shallow , interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives."
- Friedrich Nietzsche


<°))))><

now does our world descend
the path to nothingness
(cruel now cancels kind;
friends turn to enemies)
therefore lament, my dream
and don a doer's doom

create is now contrive;
imagined, merely know
(freedom: what makes a slave)
therefore, my life, lie down
and more by most endure
all that you never were

hide, poor dishonoured mind
who thought yourself so wise;
and much could understand
concerning no and yes:
if they've become the same
it's time you unbecame

where climbing was and bright
is darkness and to fall
(now wrong's the only right
since brave are cowards all)
therefore despair, my heart
and die into the dirt

but from this endless end
of briefer each our bliss -
where seeing eyes go blind
(where lips forget to kiss)
where everything's nothing
- arise, my soul; and sing
- e.e. cummings



the I is a multifaceted character "We all have our neurotic conflicts, our little areas of private folly (at least let us hope so); we are all susceptible to psychosomatic breakdown under stress; and we are all capable of creating perverse fantasies as well as dreaming impossible dreams. Each of us harbors in our inner universe a number of "characters," parts of ourselves that frequently operate in complete contradiction to one another, causing conflict and mental pain to our conscious selves. For we are relatively unacquainted with these hidden players and their roles. Whether we will it or not, our inner characters are constantly seeking a stage on which to play out their tragedies and comedies. Although we rarely assume responsibility for our secret theater productions, the producer is seated in our own minds. Moreover, it is this inner world with its repeating repertory that determines most of what happens to us in the external world.

Who writes the scripts? What are the plots about? And where are they performed?

Language informs us that the scriptwriter is called I. Psychoanalysis has taught us that the scenarios were written years ago by a naive and childlike I struggling to survive in an adult world whose drama conventions are quite different from the child's. These psychic plays may be performed in the theater of our own minds or that of our bodies or may take place in the external world, sometimes using other people's minds and bodies, or even social institutions, as their stage. We are also capable of shifting our own psychic dramas from one stage to another in times of overwhelming stress. For the I is a multifaceted character."
- Joyce McDougall
The Psychic Theater and the Psychoanalytic Stage



some say we are here to become "Ancient myth states that humanity became manifest or stuck in a physical form because the "Archetype" (our ancestor(s) saw its reflection in the waters of the Earth and fell in love with its own image, then the matter rose to wrap itself around the spirit form thereby trapping the spirit in the manifest world."
- Ron O. Cook
Focusing on the Human Virtural Universe



"Man creates a god in his own image, and the god grows old along with the men that made him. But storms sway in heaven, and the god-stuff sweeps high and angry over our heads. Gods die with men who have conceived them. But the god-stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with too vast a sound to be heard. Like the sea in storm, that beats against the rocks of living, stiffened men, slowly to destroy them. Or like the sea of the glimmering, ethereal plasm of the world, that bathes the feet and the knees of men as earth-sap bathes the roots of trees. — Ye must be born again. Even the gods must be born again. We must be born again."
- D.H. Lawrence



Sentient beings are in essence buddhas
It is like water and ice.

There is no ice without water,
There are no buddhas outside sentient beings.

What a shame, sentient beings seek afar,
Not knowing what is at hand.

It is like wailing from thirst
In the midst of water.
- Hakuin Ekaku



"What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, 'This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust!' Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, 'Never have I heard anything more divine'?"
- Friedrich Nietzsche



"The Universe will expand, then it will collapse back on itself, then it will expand again. It will repeat this process forever. What you don't know is that when the Universe expands again, everything will be as it is now. Whatever mistakes you make this time around, you will live through on your next pass. Every mistake you make you will live through again and again forever. So my advice to you is to get it right this time around because this time is all you have."
- Prot
K-PAX



"If you were to become aware of only one mental dynamic, the most important one to know about would be the relationship between your thinking and the way you feel. It's important to realize that you are constantly thinking. Don't be fooled into believing that you are already aware of this fact. Think, for a moment, about your breathing. Until this moment, when you are reading this sentence, you had currently lost sight of the fact that you were doing it. The truth is, unless you are out of breath, you simply forget that it's occurring.
Thinking works in the same way. Because you're always doing it, it's easy to forget that it's happening, and it becomes invisible to you. Unlike breathing, however, forgetting that you are thinking can cause some serious problems in your life - unhappiness, anger, inner conflicts, stress. The reason this is true is that your thinking will always come back to you as a feeling; there is a point-to-point relationship. Try getting angry without first having angry thoughts. Try feeling stressed out without first having stressful thoughts. Sad without sad thoughts. Jealous without thoughts of jealousy. You can't do it. It's impossible. In order to experience a feeling, you must first have a thought that produces that feeling. In the absence of that thinking, the unhappiness, or stress, or jealousy, can't exist. There is nothing to hold your negative feelings in place other than your own thinking."
- Richard Carlson
Don't Sweat The Small Stuff



Gaining enlightenment is like
The moon reflected on the water.
The moon doesn't get wet;
The water isn't broken.

Although its light is broad and great,
The moon is reflected even
In a puddle an inch wide.

The whole moon and the whole sky
Are reflected in one dewdrop on the grass.
- Dogen Zenji



"Reality-insight says get a sense of immediate politics and history, get control of your own time; master the twenty-four hours. Do it well, without self-pity. It is as hard to get the children herded into the car pool and down the road to the bus as it is to chant sutras in the Buddha-hall on a cold morning. One move is not better than the other, each can be quite boring, and they both have the virtuous quality of repetition. Repetition and ritual and their good results come in many forms. Changing the filter, wiping noses, going to meetings, picking up around the house, washing dishes, checking the dipstick - don't let yourself think these are distracting you from your more serious pursuits. Such a round of chores is not a set of difficulties we hope to escape from so that we may do our 'practice' which will put us on a 'path' - it is our path."
- Gary Snyder
The Practice of the Wild



"Recognize what is in your sight, and that which is hidden from you will become plain to you . For there is nothing hidden which will not become manifest."

"It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying 'here it is' or 'there it is.' Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it."
- Jesus
The Gospel of Thomas [Nag Hammadi]
Early Christian Gospels



my mind is
a big hunk of irrevocable nothing which touch and taste and smell
and hearing and sight keep hitting and chipping with sharp fatal
tools
in an agony of sensual chisels i perform squirms of chrome and ex
-ecute strides of cobalt
nevertheless i
feel that i cleverly am being altered that i slightly am becoming
something a little different, in fact
myself
Hereupon helpless i utter lilac shrieks and scarlet bellowings.
- e.e. cummings