Lucky Numbers

The Law of Seven and the 6 points (1,2,4,5,7,8)

Verbal Holarchy

In the following passage from a Carlos Castaneda book, I think of the "moment" he describes as the shock point between pre-verbal and verbal. (And overall, trying to point to trans-verbal)

For the sake of validating this premise don Juan concentrated the best of his efforts into leading me to a genuine conviction that what I held in mind as the world at hand was merely a description of the world; a description that had been pounded into me from the moment I was born.

He pointed out that everyone who comes into contact with a child is a teacher who incessantly describes the world to him, until the moment when the child is capable of perceiving the world as it is described.

According to don Juan, we have no memory of that portentous moment, simply because none of us could possibly have had any point of reference to compare it to anything else.

From that moment on, however, the child is a member.

Intelligent Enneagram

A number of years ago Mushtaq started pointing me away from the personality enneagram. Wow! It has remained a dominant influence in contemplating almost everything. My favorite book, so far:

I've tried to explain to myself what the enneagram does, but never very well. It allows communication using a different language. I spotted this Gurdjieff quote at the very beginning of The Intelligent Enneagram and realized that it says it all very nicely:

In expressing the laws of the unity of endless diversity a symbol itself possesses an endless number of aspects from which it can be examined and it demands from the man approaching it the ability to see simultaneously from different points of view. Symbols which are transposed into the words of ordinary language become rigid-then, they grow dim and very easily become "their own opposites" confining the meaning within narrow dogmatic frames, without giving it even the very relative freedom of a logical examination of a subject.

-Gurdjieff speaking in In Search of the Miraculous by P. D. Ouspensky

Differentiate, Transcend, Include

Ken Wilber describes the movement from one level to another as a process of differentiating, transcending, and then integrating. Once I started understanding the process enneagram, I could see how easily that concept fit.


You can look at any two points along the developmental lines in any of the Wilber Quadrants and use the process enneagram to consider various aspects of that process.

Drawing

This Betty Edwards book helped me see differently. I didn't realize how much I don't really see physical reality, but instead see a symbolic representation of physical reality. That symbolic reality fuses with physical reality to the point that I really can't tell the difference.

That becomes apparent whenever I have a lucid dream and look around at everything in the dream. It reminds me that I continually mistake my mental models for physical reality.

Drawing symbols:





Drawing what I see:

Music

I can remember recording songs from the AM radio on a little reel-to-reel tape recorder (the kind whose speed changed with the age of the batteries) by holding the microphone up to the transistor radio speaker. About a month ago I bought an iPod. It seems to work much better than that reel-to-reel tape recorder.

Involution

I understand evolution okay. Involution seems a bit more slippery. In enneagram speak I think of it sort of like this:



and sometimes I think of this Islamic passage as a possible definition of involution:

I was a Hidden Treasure and I desired to be known. Therefore, I created creation in order that I might be known

Jon Kabat-Zinn

That first lucid dream started a lot of things happening for me. Mindfulness meditation came along not too long after that, and it has remained a cornerstone of my life.

I accidentally found Jon Kabat-Zinn’s work when I first started to experiment with meditation (Curiously, at a bookstore in the Pentagon.) I consider myself lucky because he presents the topic in a very simple and straight-forward way. No mysticism. No morals. No B.S. He presented mindfulness meditation in just the way I needed to have it presented to me.

I sometimes give copies of this book to people who ask me about stress management:

Hmmmm, while grabbing these book covers I saw that he has another book out: