Gratitude and Laughter

Thank you, Integral, for making this available. I hope there will be a whole lot more of this kind of thing coming.

I need to simply hear him speak about what he's looking at so I can acclimate myself to it. I've seen some of this too - in the territory, without help from maps - and I need to have labels for it all and confirmation that I'm really seeing that. Like the Shaman in the "What the Bleep" movie who had to touch the 3rd Eye of the other person so that they could see the ship which was already there, I can't process the information properly and build an Object in my vision of any kind unless I have help from someone else who is also seeing it. In other words, if something appears and my eyes register it, "I" still won't "see" it and I will develop a strange sense that I am crazy or that another world exists that is not seen from this world and it is inhabited by foreign beings with unimaginable and frightening agendas.

I guess that's how we seem to some others who can't see what we see yet. How terrifying. This is the main reason I prefer to live alone and withdraw from people. The reaction to my mere presence and awareness is often violent. It wears me out.

Perhaps Ken has a similar experience.

What enables him to see like that? All those subtle distinctions. I'm pretty sure my disorder created a "Superpower" as a work-around. But he hasn't let us know of anything like that beyond the usual minor psychoses and neuroses that everyone has. No big whoop. What would drive development to that kind of extreme?

I know that under normal circumstances this is a "rude" question. Impolite. In time, this social rule will dissolve. Unique mental patterns of ability and difficulty will eventually become just a neutral Object like which kind of broom or shampoo you use. Standing out in a crowd is not the danger that it was for our Ancestors - the Antelope. Soon it will become another thing to put on your resume to indicate which skill-sets you do and don't have so they know where to best use you. Hire the OCD Clients to keep the bathrooms clean! Hire the Aspies to research and manipulate exteriors! Because I was involved in the Mental Health Recovery Movement, I have a more hopeful vision of the future than most.

But right now, my probings and comments are impolite because they locate the point of embeddedness. The place where a large portion of the "I" is stuck and limited and unable to navigate the larger territories that we are obligated to inhabit. Saying that "I have a disorder" gives me permission to bring awareness to my own limitations and inabilities and embeddedness and stuckness and say it is a real thing. It seems like Ken is saying, another way of saying it is that "I am an Antelope right now", or "I am an Alligator right now", instead of "I have PTSD". But the irony is that it is even less polite to say that. Saying that it is PTSD is more socially acceptable.

The discussion of Archetypes seems to me to be overly charged. I'm just not feeling Jung's pre/trans fallacy as being that threatening. Maybe it's because I wasn't depending on getting such things exactly right for earning a living. I don't know. I can't even speak about that because I don't have a "Make Money" self. I don't understand how they work. I don't even know how to speak about it.

I kinda always thot that Jung already understood that we didn't descend from Angels but that the Archetypes in our "collective unconscious" were entities which were conceived by very primitive minds which couldn't process and see what we can now process and see. But maybe he didn't understand that. Or maybe it was Freud's wrathful polemic about primitive energies that drove him to compensate. Lord knows Freud's attitude wasn't really any better. Or at least it is no longer helpful. Rejecting emotionally charged Symbols and characters is not necessary now.

Right?

I guess we had to see that the ol' Gnostic Heresy wasn't really true - that humans didn't descend from Superior Beings from another plane of existence and they are now corrupted and icky - but it just seems to me that we went too far.

Manly P. Hall described the process that was commonly present in the Ancient Mystery Schools like this:

1. You understand "The Fall" which is another way of translating our potential in relation to our primitive drives and how they each were the product of an exclusion or a repression.
2. You learn to value them again in a higher context
3. You reintegrate them back into the personality in such a way as to cause them to loose their primitive exclusivity.
4. You transcend them.

He describes this using the meta-physical contexts (Astrology/Zodiac) that were available at the time. There doesn't seem to be a problem here. "Learning to value" and "reintegrating" are ambiguous terms, I know, and I'm sure the methods varied according to Tradition, but the goal was clear and correct. They lose their power to regress you and limit your choices. They are neutralized Objects now in a much more expansive awareness that can express them or not according to what is appropriate.

The question at the end of the audio and Ken's response tell me that this is not a problem. It really isn't. Not at the higher levels. And there seems to have been some awareness even long ago that transcendence works better when you include than when you don't. Years ago I toyed with a concept of describing Shadow processes with a number-line that included negative numbers and contrasted those with "Absolute Value". I noted the irony of that term then. It still seems valid.