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Ron West

"The history of the great events of this world are scarcely more than a history of crime" -Voltaire

Time to time I delve into the impossible subject of the psychology of ‘god’ in the western incarnation; here is my Sisyphus endeavor again, whence an (authentic) friend drew my attention to this Facebook post:

APPROACHING SAMADHI WITHOUT PLANT MEDICINE

The post’s author begins:

“I really resonate with this article and the timing of its showing up in my life is interesting given what happened yesterday.

“On Thursday, June 8, 2017 (a date I will record in my diary) I had a profound encounter with the numinous and entered an altered state analogous to what I experience with psilocybin mushrooms or edible cannabis, without the assistance of such plants. This is something I’d hoped for, eventually, but was surprised that happened the first time I sat down for a serious long meditation session in a long while.

“The teacher plants appear to have opened up some kind of portal or neural pathway for me to the universal awareness that exists silently behind all things, which functions like the operating system of a computer — entraining all experience embedded in the software of this dimension. Like training wheels, the plants taught me how it “feels” to ride the bike. Yesterday I rode on my own for the first time…”

Referencing this article which includes:

“The integral SELF [emphasis on SELF is original to the article] is therefore a yoking of the ego (our time bound self) with the soul (our eternal self). The point is that there is no good reason to assume that just because forms are temporary that they are not holy. The higher-self within us often hates to be confined or defined into forms, and the material self within us often hates to be taken outside of its familiar home or trappings into the boundless freedom of the higher self.

“Freedom, true freedom, is perhaps ultimately found in acceptance and balance”

This preceding is actually narcissism underlined and emphasized; where all is focused on the ‘self’ returning to ‘god’ (my deliberate lower case g) whereas in the ancient native community (the article’s author seems to think this had influenced his upbringing) the ‘self’ is at the bottom of the ‘totem pole’ (forgive, if not overlook my irreverence.) EVERYONE was expected to integrate to surrounding reality in sense of community sans ‘self’ interest and that’s where all dwelled, except that community elevated one via path of community observation (all eyes are on you) for purpose of sharing exceptional sight. Exceptional sight in this sense had precisely zero to do with any individual path.

It was considered ‘cheating’ to do psychedelics in the tradition where I spent decades. There is no substitute for hard work on shaping the interior to opening to awareness requiring (for westerners) narcissism die or the total death of the ego-self.

Actually ‘ego’, as experienced by the westerners’ sense of self, had been in indigenous cultures, diagnosed and treated as a mental disorder.

The object sought in our tradition is a background state of awareness in which there is no entry or exit, no coming and going, an ever present state where both; you deal with mundane task or life complexity equally and persistently in a state of ‘the spirit puts into the mind of a man to know what to do.’ No high or low, all experience is to be found in a steady state of ‘level.’

As MJ Zimmerman notes in her Being in Nature’s Mind:

“Carl Jung once warned that Western people who take up Eastern spiritual practices run the danger, first, of doing those practices inauthentically, since they are not beginning with an Eastern psychic structure, and secondly, of using those practices to avoid the real psychological work they, as people with Western psyches, need to do to ever become ready for higher spiritual practice

“I believe that the same warning applies to modern urban people who take up Native American practices. I am glad that there is growing interest in Native American thought because I believe it is a deep and subtle source of wisdom which the planet needs; however, it will serve no one to have Westerners appropriate Native ceremonies or practices and act them out while staying completely within Western ontological assumptions and Western psychological experiences. A more radical deconstruction of the Western mind is required in order for Europeans to finally begin to see into another way of being and other ways of knowing” (Zimmerman’s free pdf on the web)

I had, on previous occasion, attempted to explain the ancient native perception in these precise terms:

“Our existence is Macro-Gaia (in the big picture) or all is [inter] related, from sub-atomic particle to planetary structures, with an element of Vitalism (the ‘great mystery’), taken together presenting as quasi or mimic intelligent design. The intelligent design would be ‘quasi’ because the native take on this aspect would be better described as intelligent expression, ‘design’ implies an egoic projection or attribution, whereas ‘expression’ should not. This thought goes to the native persona of humility: There are some things one simply cannot know”

This why (in our native view) we cannot know ‘god’ except as a projection where man has created god in man’s image. The mystery of our existence cannot be individuated except in a sense of arrogant projection of self, or the ultimate false perception.

Our creation is called the “mystery” for the very fact of its’ indecipherable nature; and when we accept this, as a community in its entirety, the mystery opens to us at several levels but always with a caveat: none of us can know it in absolutes; because ‘reality’ is an elastic thing with frequently shifting parameters and any related ‘truths’ are often of fleeting relevance.

This is why, example given, Indo-European ‘civilization’ has a habit of rising and falling; wherein this western civilized perception ‘truths’ can become absolute, leading to a brittle construction when the elasticity of reality shifts away from any particular society’s foundation in the Indo-European family of nations. Brittle constructions imply impending collapse as the given society’s parameter of ‘perceived reality’ which is actually a state of inter-generational perception in stasis, becomes farther and farther removed from shifting reality in actuality.

I somehow doubt the major Indo-European enlightened figures, whether in the historical order of Krishna, Buddha, Jesus or Mohammed, made any pretense to embody the entirety of the Great Mystery of our existence but it didn’t matter, lesser men were certain to falsely confer this upon them; insuring lesser ideas became fixtures of those respective cultures. These are example of the Indo-European stasis or inter-generational inflexibility of thought pointing to collapse, of which there is likely no greater coming probability than that of Europe and Plato.