My 142857 Work

Caregiver's Guilt

2007-10-10T16:54:00.000-04:00

It's been just a little over a year since Jane committed suicide. There was no escaping the anniversary of that event. I thought about a great many things that I have struggled with throughout this past year, and had come to terms with. But, something was still bothering me, so much so that I had pushed it aside, out of mind and into the realm of repression and denial I suppose. Those kinds of defense mechanisms do serve a purpose, and there are only so many emotions a person can deal with at a time, but eventually they have to be faced.

If not, then your “inner being” has a way of sending you messages.

I finally started listening.

There is a lot of guilt to deal with when someone very close to you commits suicide. My family, Jane’s family, my friends and colleagues all know how devoted I was to Jane. Because of her medical condition I always had a lot on my plate: full time job, cooking, household chores/repairs, errands etc. (I sure developed respect for the women in our society who do the same thing.)

I never felt as though it was a burden. I loved doing things for Jane. It made me feel good. But, it didn’t make her feel good. She always felt as though she was a burden on me, no matter how much I tried to convince her otherwise. She would struggle before asking me to do something as simple as going to pick up a prescription for her. That irritated me, well frustrated me at times, which only made things more difficult for her.

When she died, there was a huge “burden” and responsibility lifted off my shoulders. There was a sense of relief and freedom. And it made me feel absolutely miserable. That’s what “caregiver’s guilt” is all about.

But that guilt ran even deeper.

Despite my full plate as a “caregiver” (I don’t really like that term, I prefer “loving husband”) I still found time for my own interests. I love music, art, reading, studying, and over the past 10 years, “inner exploration” and the mysteries of human “awakening”. Jane didn’t really share those interests, although we had many discussions in these areas, especially lucid dreaming. I don’t think she read this blog much. And, I always felt a little guilty about the time I spent with my internet friends and community. I should have spent more time working on my honey “do” list, and I often felt as though Jane thought the same thing.

So for the past year I have had the freedom to play my guitar, draw, read, or blog to my heart’s content, but I have not done any of those things. I have developed other interests, but when it comes to the things that I used to love, I haven’t been able to do a damn thing. In fact, I would sometimes feel physically sick when I tried, and had no idea why.

Of course I really knew why, and have known all along.

So, I’m trying to get my toes wet.

To be continued….. eventually…..

The 2005 index

2006-12-30T18:33:00.000-05:00

When I started this blog I made a mind map of the various influences that had happened over the previous 10 years as a list of topics I wanted to blog about. Many of the influences occurred and reoccurred, but in different ways. I hope to re-organize my blog in 2007 to reflect this.

I created this index at the end of 2005:
(Technical Note: I can’t figure out how to get rid of the blank lines under the mind map. For every clickable link in the mind map, a blank line shows up below it)

Solar Cycles

2006-12-21T13:24:00.000-05:00

I’ve had this idea simmering of how I want to organize my My 124857 Work blog in a manner that integrates my past, present, and future in more of a non-linear time sequence flow. One that more closely symbolizes my thinking processes, practices, differentiations, and unfoldings. I like the idea of using one solar year as my reference point, and decided to use Dec 21 as the starting reference point.

I’ve always thought of point 9, or point 0, on the Enneagram as simultaneously symbolizing both the beginning and the end. But with the end integrating the previous beginning at a new level.

Good Grief

2006-12-01T23:27:00.000-05:00

Good Grief!? I have no idea where a phrase like that might have come from. I have a difficult time imagining that a person could actually have good grief. But then I think how some people might lose someone close to them and have no friends, family, or support to turn to. I guess that might make my grief “good” relative to their grief, since I do have a lot of support. But when someone very close to you dies, I have a hard time seeing anything good about it. All the support in the world doesn’t change that one fact…. i.e. for me, I no longer have my best friend and lover to share things with.

She is dead.

I have come to think of my grief like vomiting when you have a stomach malady. I’ll lay in bed feeling like I might start crying, but I’ve cried so much that I don’t want to cry any more. Just like the feeling I have when I need to throw up but I really don’t want to. So I’ll keep fighting it until suddenly I have to make a mad rush to the bathroom and puke my guts out. I hate that feeling of hanging over a toilet and heaving. But it feels so good afterwards. So I try to not cry, but finally just give in, and then I feel a little better…. For a while anyway. And the in between intervals keep gradually lengthening.

These days I have to deal with our culture’s “death avoidance” mentality. I’ve turned into a “death” leper. People avoid talking to me at work now. No one wants to talk about death. People seem to want to pity me, and offer condolences, but please don’t talk about death. It makes them uncomfortable. I really don’t blame them, because not too long ago I behaved the same way. I had no reference.

I have discovered that I now belong to a clique, a club. A club that no one wants to join. Membership just happens. But, a club that one person of nearly every couple in the world will gain unwanted membership in at some point during their lives.

I’ve found myself exploring the following aspects of human experience:

Grief in general. The loss of someone close
Caregiver guilt. Serving someone for many years
Suicide. What if? If only….. Clues?
Widower. Not anything like I’ve seen it portrayed on TV shows

When Jane died, I died. She physically died, and I died in other ways. No one seems to get it, except those who know the path I have just walked.

Jane ultimately gave me two gifts. I loved her like I have loved no one. Experiencing the joy of love together with her gave me the greatest gift of my life. Then Jane gave me the second gift, her death. A horrible gift that I did not want to have, but a gift none-the-less.

How can I call the death of someone I loved so much a gift? It sure doesn’t seem like it when I look at all the tears I have cried, and the horrible feelings of grief that just slam me up against a wall, and the utter alone feelings, and the silence, the never ending silence. I feel as though everything that mattered to me vanished, and all the “things” that used to matter to me, mean absolutely nothing to me anymore.

So what does matter? I think death does. I’ve considered that saying “Many paths, One truth” from a slightly different perspective. People arrive at death from many directions, but we all end up arriving at the same destination.

As a death leper, I realize that I have, to a certain extent, died before I died. What a shitty beautiful gift Jane gave me. I hope that I can use it wisely.

My Wife's Death

2006-09-27T23:27:00.000-04:00

On Sept 27, 2006 my wife Jane committed suicide. My world changed forever. I have tried to practice mindfulness using breath awareness for a number of years now. Jane killed herself by denying herself life sustaining breath.

I did not truly understand the pain that Jane suffered. I could not take her perspective on life without my own filter, a filter in which suicide does not exist as an option. But it sure did for her, although she kept that option a secret.

I have experienced a myriad of feelings since this tragic event; guilt, sadness, anger, regrets, longing, despair.

But mostly, I just really miss her.

My Favorite Sufi

2006-09-16T09:33:00.000-04:00

I really like the writings of Hazrat Inayat Khan. I consider him my favorite sufi. A lot of the little sayings I used in my transpersonal ads came from his writings.

(Mushtaq found this photo of him and posted it some time back)

I like his "The Art of Being and Becoming" the best.

STIME

2006-09-09T09:39:00.000-04:00

I stumbled across the STIME site a while back and it made me think a little bit more about time and how we represent it. Seeing as I have a penchant for Enneagram layouts, the 24 hour day cycle presented me with some ideas about that. I figured three 8 hour segments in one day seemed good.

Where to start? midnight? daybreak? I finally decided that point 9 on the enneagram would represent the end of the day at the very moment I transition from the wake state to the sleep state.

About Breath

2006-09-02T06:33:00.000-04:00

My attempts to “stay awake” by pausing to count out 10 breaths throughout the day have had limited success. The red entries still seem to outnumber the green entries. But I tend to keep an optimistic perspective on these things, and try to use the information to help develop strategies that might increase the frequency of those green 10x entry counts.

Mushtaq offered an interesting sufi-studies post on breath work a few years ago that he subsequently posted on his blog regarding the pathological types of breathing, drawing from the work of Scott Sonnon.

My mind map of the Scott Sonnon pathological breathing types:

(Click image to enlarge)

This gave me just what I needed to provide a shift in perspective on this activity. Instead of focusing on trying to just observe my breath, I started to focus on “how” I breathed. I started to realize that when I slipped into the “waking dream”, I could recall a breath pattern. Unfortunately, it seemed to happen before I could “think” about it. (Another clue dangling just beyond my reach).

Life Balancing

2006-08-28T03:33:00.000-04:00

David Allen's Getting Things Done helped me develop a methodology for capturing all the "things" I wanted to do. It eliminated a certain kind of stress that had bulit up from having piles of papers, and e-mails, and projects, and feeling so overwhelmed at times that I just got stuck and ended up spinning my wheels more than getting myself organized.

So at this point I had finally captured everything in one very large to-do list, but I still had to deal with "prioritizing" the order in which I did things. I tried several different List Managers and ended up using one called Life Balance for several years. I only recently stopped using it.

I liked Life Balance because it had a balancing feature so that you could group your tasks into focus areas. My 142857 Work has 6 areas that I based on Ken Wilber's Big 3: It, We, and I.

The Life Balance software would give me a certain amount of credit for each task I completed. However, if I neglected tasks in certain groups, the priority for those tasks would rise.

That seemed good in theory, neglected areas of pursuit would push higher on the list, but in practice it just never seemed to work quite right.

Ken Wilber Enneagram

2006-06-28T06:33:00.000-04:00

I think that Ken Wilber's writings have helped glue together more memes for me than the memes of any other author i have read, so far.

The 'non-personality type' enneagram has provided me with an interesting way to view many of Mr. Wilber's ideas, the quadrants, the Big 3 "I", "We" and "It", holarchies, pre-trans fallacies, differentiate, transcend and integrate, to name a few.

This diagram basically depicts the name of my blog and the description of my blog:

non personality type enneagram of Ken Wilber’s I-we-it quadrants

Balancing Presence

2006-05-09T06:36:00.000-04:00

I sometimes look at the non-personality Enneagram as two hemispheres. The left hemisphere represents the inner perspective and the right hemisphere represents the external perspective.

The left triad segment can also represent the inner, and the right triad segment can represent the outer.

The inner and the outer perspectives influence each other

And most interesting, the inner and the outer both exert influence on the bottom segment.

I symbolize the midpoint of that 4-5 segment as representing inner/outer balance, and point 9 as symbolizing present moment timelessness

Buddhism

2006-04-20T21:36:00.000-04:00

I got interested in Buddhist thought as I started trying to get more skillful at having lucid dreams. A lot of Buddhist practice involves “awakening”, and I liked the story of people asking the first Buddah if he was a god, or angel, or magical being, and he said "no". When they finally asked him “Well then what are you?”; he told them, “I am awake”.

More Ads

2006-02-10T15:33:00.000-05:00

A few more of my old transpersonal advertisements

Right Exertions

2006-01-24T06:36:00.000-05:00

I posted this little excerpt from Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche's The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep in a comment at Zatoads Blog a few days/weeks ago.

Although some Western psychologies believe that the dreamer should not control the dream, according to Tibetan teachings this is a wrong view. It is better for the lucid and aware dreamer to control the dream than for the dreamer to be dreamed. The same is true with thoughts: it is better for the thinker to control the thoughts than for the thoughts to control the thinker.

It got me to thinking about an aspect of Buddhist doctrine that I have as a reminder task on my PDA that pops up every 2-3 weeks titled sammapathana. I use it to remind me to practice the “Four Right Exertions”.

I think the Four Right Exertions provide some direction to help the thinker to control the thoughts rather than the thoughts controlling the thinker. In the notes for this to-do list reminder item I have:

1. Guarding - unskillful qualities that have not yet arisen
2. Abandoning - unskillful qualities that have arisen
3. Developing - skillful qualities that have not yet arisen
4. Maintaining - maintenance, non-confusion, increase, plenitude, development, & culmination of skillful qualities that have arisen.

So, I try to identify patterns of unskillful thinking as well as skillful thinking. At the very least, it sometimes helps to keep potato chips from reaching my lips, or mean words from coming out of my lips.

I have spent more time recently exploring the thought origination component since the thinker doesn’t enter the picture until quite late in the thought origination process. I wonder if one can view the body-mind/mind-body relationship like this:
?

Another's Shoes

2006-01-21T03:33:00.000-05:00

I find the cognitive line of development very interesting, especially in the early childhood years. One of the key cognitive abilities that must emerge before a person can develop true compassion and empathy for other life forms requires the cognitive skill of taking on someone else’s perspective. Young children can’t do that, as some of Jean Piaget’s experiments showed:

Until Johnny reaches a certain age he doesn't have the cognitive capability to answer that question.

Another example:

Once again, until Johnny reaches a certain age, he can't answer the question.

But after a person does have that basic capability, a teacher can help push it into the beginnings of true humanness. I just love Robert Kegan’s description of a school teacher manipulating young minds into developing this skill in his book In Over Our Heads:

On this particular morning, as the students are engaged in a heated controversy, the learning goal on his mind has to do with the very way students listen to each other – or more precisely, the way they do not.
……
He lets the conversation/debate proceed, but he institutes one new requirement: before any speaker may make her point, she must restate the preceding speaker’s point with sufficient accuracy that the preceding speaker agrees it has been adequately restated. At first the students try to fulfill the agreement by restating the point in the straw man fashion they are prepared to attack. But they do not get the chance to attack, because, amid the laughter and hooting, the preceding speaker objects, requiring them to restate the opposing view in a nondistorting, noneditorialized fashion, however maddening it may be to do so.

….
The trick is that this unwelcome route, first seen as a mere means to an end, has the promise of becoming an end in itself, since the continuous consideration of another’s view in an uncooptive fashion, which requires a continuous stepping outside of one’s view, is a definite move towards making one’s own view object rather than subject and toward considering its relation to other views.

Wow! At 50 years of age, I still have trouble trying to step out of my own worldview enough to see another's worldview, without my own worldview's interference. I can only imagine a world where children get taught this skill early on.

Note: I felt inspired to write this after browsing a few blog entries in Donna's Mundane Little World. I have come to realize that children get really cheated when it comes to education in how to move from animal to human.

Dream Report Cards

2006-01-18T09:39:00.000-05:00

I have a dream reporting scheme I started using a few years back as I continued to pursue dream practice. It has morphed and changed a bit over the years. One of the projects on my to-do list involves going back through my dream journals from 1997-2000 and identify all the lucid dreams. I think that over that particular period of time I had my biggest successes.

I’ve ended up preferring color schemes over the other various grading schemes I have used:

RED – I didn’t think about dreaming at all
ORANGE – I vowed to myself that I would try and recall my dreams, but ended up doing little more than that
YELLOW – I had a lot of dream activity, but darn it, I can’t remember a single detail of any of them
YELLOW GREEN – I remembered dream(s) but did not jot down any notes
GREEN – I jotted down a few dream notes
PURPLE – LUCID DREAM!!!

My logs from 2000-2005:

NOTE: I keep these logs in addition to the logs for tracking my Dream Yoga activity.

Blue

2006-01-15T21:39:00.000-05:00

I wanted to take a look at the Blue Spiral Dynamics v-meme a little bit. I like to try and identify Blue memes that I have embraced from time-to-time. I like to try and make myself find these behaviors in myself rather than summarily dismiss the notions that I don't, or have not, engaged in blue v-memetic behaviors.

- find meaning and purpose in living
- sacrifice self to the Way for deferred reward
- bring order and stability to all things
- control impulsivity and respond to guilt
- enforce principles of righteous living
- divine plan assigns people to their places

Blue - Truth ForceWhen people first develop a conscience or a moral sense they are ready to sacrifice themselves now for benefits later. This is the stage at which religion converts people to its truth in order to save them from hell and get to heaven. It is the process that young army recruits go through on the parade ground as they submit to the dominance of the sergeant representing the authority structure. School is a natural place for children to learn self control.

Blue is reinforced through appeals to traditions, by respecting the past, by honouring length of service and loyalty. Various forms of patriotic appeals and charitable sacrifice should accompany observances of national, religious, or secular holidays and commemorative events.

Although this blue behavior often seems associated with religious dogma. I think that scientists can behave in a blue v-meme world-view manner. I would use the pre-trans fallacy as an example of scientific dogma i.e. a doctor rejecting all alternative medical methods, and other behaviors.

Economic Vision Logic

2006-01-12T21:39:00.000-05:00

I can remember certain minor events in my life that have resulted in my glass getting a little bigger.

Around age 25-26 while in college, I had one of those breakthroughs in mental processing capabilities, where developing a small shift in perspective had enormous consequences.

I took a required Economics class that I had a very difficult time with. It required a lot of reading, and the professor only used essay questions for exams. I would pour over 10 pages of economic theory, listen to the professor drone on and on, and not recall much of anything.

I flunked the first two question essay exam.

One weekend at a book fair I picked up a book called “Economics Mathematically Speaking” for 25 cents.

Now although I had taken numerous math courses throughout my education, I barely got by in that subject. I learned the mechanics of algebra and calculus, but never really the applications. In fact, I hated “story problems.”

But this book approached math from a different perspective. It defined a concept such as “taxes” and then said, “Now let us call that ‘T’”, and so forth with other economic terms. Then, the author would introduce a formula.

After 10 years of math classes, I finally "got it".

Suddenly I realized that a single math formula captured 10 pages of economic theory discourse. And, most importantly for me at the time, I could generate 10 pages of essay by just knowing the formula, and the definition of the variables.

It was like the formula and definition came in as input to the left side of my brain, and then the right side of my brain would “see” stuff, and then my left brain would attempt to verbalize that (verbalizing has become the bigger problem for me these days).

My Economics grades shot up, I started acing Physics tests, and I developed a love for story problems.

And I think it helped lay the groundwork for my eventual interest in the process Enneagram 20 years later.

Pre-Trans Fallacy

2006-01-09T09:39:00.000-05:00

Ken Wilber describes a condition where things of a “higher” nature get erroneously labeled as something of a “lower” nature because they seem the same.

The “fallacy” occurs because from the initial conventional perspective, post-conventional behavior can look like pre-conventional behavior. A person operating at one level can’t see above their current level.

So for someone like myself operating in and around the orange, conventional, rational v-meme, a sage and an idiot can appear the same. Although I still suspect that some self proclaimed sages actually operate at different levels than what they think.

But I have no ability to see into a person’s heart, so I try to focus on my own emotional reactions towards people whenever possible.

My blog entries sometimes remind me of the handle of the pitcher in this story:

An idiot may be the name given to the ordinary man, who consistently misinterprets what happens to him, what he does, or what is brought about by others. He does this so completely plausibly that for himself and his peers large areas of life and thought seem logical and true.

An idiot of this kind was sent one day with a pitcher to a wise man, to collect some wine.

On the way the idiot, through his own heedlessness, smashed the jar against a rock.

When he arrived at the house of the wise man, he presented him with the handle of the pitcher, and said;

'So-and-so sent you this pitcher, but a horrid stone stole it from me.'

Amused and wishing to test his coherence, the wise man asked: 'Since the pitcher is stolen, why do you offer me the handle?'

'I am not such a fool as people say,' the idiot told him, 'and therefore I have brought the handle to prove my story.'
(From Idries Shah's Tales of the Dervishes)

Eye Yoga

2006-01-06T21:39:00.000-05:00

I’ve worn glasses since about age 8-9. During my 20’s and 30’s i wore contact lenses. In my 40’s i started to require reading glasses. It seemed silly to wear contact lenses and still have to put on glasses. So i went back to just wearing glasses.

During 2001 this question started my exploration of eye yoga:

"Why do the eyes appear to be the only part of the physical body that is not self-healing?"

A couple of books i read put the blame on the use of corrective lenses, and those who prescribe them.

So, i spent 3-4 months practicing the exercises and spending time with my vision. After two months i went in for a new pair of glasses and i did require a less powerful prescription. But i gradually wandered away from eye exercising, and back into bad vision habits.

I experienced a couple of other tangential benefits beyond the vision improvement itself:

Corrective Lenses Create Tension
Initially i felt a sense of tension and stress when i tried to not wear my glasses. I just had constant panic urges to put them back on. I had to keep convincing myself that unless i absolutely needed clear vision for that particular moment, then i didn’t need to have my glasses on.

I gradually became more comfortable operating in that mode, and the tension situation actually reversed. I found myself putting on my glasses to see what needed seeing (much like when i need to put on my reading glasses) but then i immediately took them off. If i left them on, then i could feel the strain and tension start.

I eventually found not wearing corrective lenses very centering and useful in cultivating some forms of presence.

Dreaming Vision
The most interesting eye yoga things occurred in conjunction with lucid dreaming. I became fascinated with vision during a number of lucid dreams. It always amazes me that the visual experience in dreams happens without any sensorial input from the eyes. But i never gave much thought to the blurriness or clarity of my dream vision, until i started practicing some of the eye exercises…… while lucid in a dream.

Word Translations

2006-01-03T09:33:00.000-05:00

I thought I would try and do a linked blog comment to Mushtaq’s The Problem With Translations post.

He discusses, with some interesting examples, the difficulty of translating words from other languages, from centuries ago, without knowing something of the culture of the time.
I realize, my poor language learning abilities aside, that even translating from one modern language to another modern language can introduce the “Lost in Translation” doodad.

I recently started listening to The Teaching Company’s “The History of Language” for a second time. The lecturer, John McWhorter, talks about various kinds of language “drifts” (i.e. grammar, meanings, sound modulations.) Those lectures help me understand how languages evolve over time into other languages.
The first 7 lecture titles:

I remember in one example he presented a Romeo and Juliet excerpt asking us why Juliet asks “Romeo, Romeo wherefore art thou Romeo?” Can’t she see him standing right in front of her? It turns out "wherefore" doesn’t have anything to do with “where”, but some people have started to interpret it that way.

I wondered if you could map out Ferdinand de Saussure's sign stuff on an enneagram:

And how about a run on sentence from Gurdjieff?
(From Chapter 1 of Beezlebub's Tales to his Grandson)

That is why each word, for the same thing or idea, almost always acquires for people of different geographical locality and race a very definite and entirely different so to say "inner content."

In other words, if in the entirety of any man who has arisen and been formed in any locality, from the results of the specific local influences and impressions a certain "form" has been composed, and this form evokes in him by association the sensation of a definite "inner content," and consequently of a definite picturing or notion for the expression of which he employs one or another word which has eventually become habitual, and as I have said, subjective to him, then the hearer of that word, in whose being, owing to different conditions of his arising and growth, there has been formed concerning the given word a form of a different "inner content," will always perceive and of course infallibly understand that same word in quite another sense.

Sufi Influences

2005-12-28T03:36:00.000-05:00

I haven’t blogged much about the sufi influence on my Work. Over the course of several years Mushtaq posted a lot of interesting things about Sufism on the sufi-studies Yahoo user group. These always prompted a wide variety of discussions and live demonstrations of various types, and levels, of human behavior, and I learned a lot.

Mushtaq's The Hidden Conversation remains my favorite sufi-studies discussion, and he pulled most of that material together and posted it all as a single blog entry, sort of a 7 course meal served all at once. I just want to nibble a little appetizer out of that corpus for right now.

My personal objective for the remaining years of my life center around integrating three things: the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.

One component of the Hidden Conversation that helps with the “How?” of doing it employs Attention, Intention, and Presence.

I see the tasks ahead of me somewhat like this:

Finding the True through Attention

Developing the Good through Intention

Experiencing the Beautiful through Presence

All right! (pardon the drool) I see Mushtaq has started gearing up for some good stuff on his Traceless Warrior blog.

Cognitive Development

2005-12-25T03:33:00.000-05:00

Of the many lines of development that Ken Wilber examines, I initially spent a good deal of time looking at his cognitive line elaborations before moving on to some of the others.

Wilber sometimes receives credit for marrying Freud and the Buddah. He basically makes a case that where modern science stops (vision-logic,) the wisdom traditions (i.e. Buddhism, Sufism) continue.

And as the methodology of science demand, the wisdom traditions have repeatable injunctions that one can follow to either prove or disprove the claims. What more can one who has an orangish center of gravity ask for?

Getting Things Done

2005-12-22T15:33:00.000-05:00

Well, I ended up with a kewl electronic to-do list of hundreds of items on my PDA. But I just never seemed to get much done.

So, I started reading various “Time Management” books. I ended up trying to implement David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” approach.

I do get more done, although as with many things, I frequently wander off the path.

I would credit Getting Things Done with helping reduce my stress level by 15%-20%.

Belief Systems (aka B.S.)

2005-12-19T15:39:00.000-05:00

This story helped me see that we orange scientists, and blue religious fundamentalists, in many important areas, have the same problem.

Orange

2005-12-16T06:39:00.000-05:00

After looking at the various Spiral Dynamics v-meme descriptions, I concluded that my own center of gravity, for most of my adult life, has existed in and around the orange v-meme.

- Strive for autonomy and independence
- Seek out 'the good life' and material abundance
- Progress through searching out the best solutions
- Enhance living for many through science and technology
- Play to win and enjoy competition
- Learn through tried-and-true experience
- Change, not permanence, is how nature works
- Authority lies with experience, experiments, and one’s own right-thinking mind
- People are meant to succeed and become winners
- Run it up the flagpole and see who salutes

However, having intellectually concluded that humans can, and do, evolve through stages, I of course wanted to try and make it happen.

So, I figured next stop…. the green v-meme.

Constant Consciousness

2005-12-13T06:33:00.000-05:00

Note: I use some of my blog entries to lay the groundwork for other things so that I can escape the constraints of linear blogging from time to time, as well as to provide myself a creative outlet and review mechanism.

Zataod had a recent blog entry on Tibetan Dream Yoga. That practice has yet to materialize for me, although it does rank quite high on the list of things I feel I must integrate into my Work.

My first lucid dream marked a transformational point in my life. For a number of months after that first one I managed to achieve a good 3-5 lucid dreams per week. But they have really dwindled over the past 5-6 years to only a couple a month, and sometimes not even that.

In the beginning, as I read more about lucid dreaming and other things, I realized that some Buddhists used it as a stepping stone to continuous awareness.

“Huh?”, I thought, “Is that really possible?”

Since I had nothing else urgent going on, besides the normal hectic, sometimes frantic, morning to night activities (and 2012 seemed years away), I figured I’d just give it a shot and see for myself if I could do it.

And so my journey started.

The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep seemed to provide a nice fit because it involves practice through the three states of: waking, sleeping, and dreaming. So you have the whole 24 hour day covered.

I figured, “Good. Let’s get started! Could it be any easier?”

Flowing Body

2005-12-10T03:33:00.000-05:00

So now take the filling a glass with water process Enneagram and substitute some other things for the water faucet, the glass, the mechanical part, the intentional part, starting the water to flow, adjusting the rate, turning it off and you can see how simple body movements from position A to position B seem to fit nicely around an Enneagram.

That little part in the middle offers a lot of opportunities for exploration.

NOTE: Check out Mushtaq’s recent Scott Sonnon blog entry. I tend to focus on Scott’s joint mobility, breath work, and body flow instruction from a general “physical fitness that also helps the waking up process” perspective. But wow… watch that man walk his talk.

Flowing Water

2005-12-07T06:39:00.000-05:00

Since I had some pictures of glasses filled with water, I thought I’d go ahead and create a picture/diagram/word sequence to show the simplified process Enneagram A.G.E. Blake describes in The Intelligent Enneagram for filling a glass with water. I find that I can apply this to many other processes.

A description of filling a glass with water:

Turn on the tap.
Water flows into the glass.
Monitor the level of the water until you judge there is enough . . .
and then turn off the tap.

A.G.E. Blake observes:

The enneagram teaches us that there is a mechanical side and an
intentional side to every complete action: a side to do with the movement of things in space and time and a side to do with purpose and perception.

Unlearning

2005-12-04T03:33:00.000-05:00

One of the stories I have seen regarding learning as it relates to personal transformation in the various wisdom traditions depicts the teacher showing the student a glass filled to the brim:

The teacher implies that the student must empty the glass (unlearn) a little before progress can occur.

As an aging mammal I find myself having a lot of trouble in that area. I have some very deeply engrained behavior patterns.

So as a potential alternative, or at least a way to get a little more room to grow, what about trying to make the glass a little bigger?

It seems like even with a full glass I can accomplish horizontal learning (i.e. new technologies, facts and figures) but vertical learning (transformative shifts in perspective) requires much more attention, intention, and presence. i.e. a bigger glass?

Global Village

2005-12-01T09:36:00.000-05:00

I’ve always liked a little report I see from time to time that takes the world’s population and proportions it to 100 people, calls it the “Global Village of 100 people”, and then presents statements like this:

The village would have 60 Asians, 14 Africans, 12 Europeans, 8 Latin Americans, 5 from the USA and Canada, and 1 from the South Pacific

51 would be male, 49 would be female

82 would be non-white; 18 white

67 would be non-Christian; 33 would be Christian

80 would live in substandard housing

67 would be unable to read

50 would be malnourished and 1 dying of starvation

33 would be without access to a safe water supply

39 would lack access to improved sanitation

24 would not have any electricity (And of the 76 that do have electricity, most would only use it for light at night.)

7 people would have access to the Internet

1 would have a college education

1 would have HIV2 would be near birth; 1 near death

5 would control 32% of the entire world’s wealth; all 5 would be US citizens

33 would be receiving --and attempting to live on-- only 3% of the income of “the village”

After doing a little Google research, I started to wonder how much “urban legend” had crept into the 100 people Global Village? After looking at this excel spreadsheet of information sources, I started to see how easily someone can create a 100 people global village statistic. But, I still like the memetic perspective it provides.

Spiral Dynamics Dreaming

2005-11-28T18:33:00.000-05:00

I like to consider how spiral dynamic v-meme groups might interpret experiences through the three basic states of waking, dreaming, and deep sleep.

Particularly the dream state, and even more so the lucid dream state.

It seems like each v-meme group speaks a different language.

Everything

2005-11-25T15:39:00.000-05:00

I keep trying to work my personal transformation strategies using enneagrammatical insight. The enneagram provides a symbolic model that allows me to see multiple perspectives, from multiple levels, simultaneously.

For me the outer circle of the enneagram symbolizes "everything". "Everything" in the most absolute sense possible. Real, imagined, time, space, physiosphere, biosphere, noosphere, emptiness, heaven, emotions, creation.... everything, bar none.

It seems as though we should have a word to symbolize this as well. But the word I often think might apply, I don't dare use for fear of getting myself killed, or even worse, ridiculed and laughed at.

Language Learning Loser

2005-11-22T09:33:00.000-05:00

I have had a strong lifetime interest in languages and trying to learn them, but have failed miserably. If I had another chance in life, I would choose linguistics as my profession. My earliest interest occurred around age 10-11, around the time that the innate gift of natural language learning by children has already passed.

I had a Berlitz French phrase book and tried to learn some French, without ever having actually heard the language spoken.

Par lay voo frawn say?

When our family moved from Arizona back up to the extreme Northern California coast, about halfway through my 8th grade year, I got my first chance to take an actual French class in school! My eagerness and excitement burst into humiliation and embarrassment as I spoke my Berlitz phrase book French in front of my new classmates who had already had 3 months of classes.

In high school I wanted to take language courses, but because of a math and science class emphasis, I only got to take one year of French.

However, my interest in electronics and ham radio allowed me an opportunity to hear all sorts of languages on my short wave radio. And I soon discovered alternative opportunities for learning languages. Radio Nederland had a “Dutch by Radio” course. Radio Sweden had a Swedish course. Radio Japan had “Let’s Learn Japanese”.

And they didn’t cost anything!

And ultimately I didn’t learn anything!

During my military service I had a number of chances to learn languages. While stationed in a small town in Spain I met a girl that shared the same age and birth date as me. I can attest to the language learning acceleration factor that occurs when romance enters the picture.

In Iceland I tried once again to learn the local language, but eventually abandoned it and really that marked the end of my language learning enthusiasm for about 5 years.

In college I found myself in the same situation as high school. I had to take all science classes for my degree in Computer Science. My General Study classes, as chosen by the Computer Science department and not me, did not include language courses.

However, I rekindled my interest in French and started listening to Radio France, and the Radio Canada french broadcasts, and started checking out books from the library and translating them.

I actually decided to extend my college days by an extra semester just so that I could take a course in German. A huge decision since I basically lived in poverty during my college years

German ended up as the only language that I managed to develop a modicum of fluency in. Jane and I lived there for a couple of years, and I have made numerous business trips there. I think german beer helped me finally get over the remnants of my 8th grade French class embarrassment.

But 10 years have passed since living in Germany and I have not gone back since then. I have about 100 video tapes of german TV that I recorded while there that I have started converting from the European PAL TV format into computer .mpg format. But as I do that, I realize I have forgotten most of what I had learned.

A few years ago Mushtaq managed to rekindle my interests in languages, initially with Arabic. Sufi mystics employ Arabic as their technical language in ways that english can’t support.

More recently Mushtaq steered me towards areas of language study that go way beyond mere translation from one language to another. Semantics, Semiotics, Sumer… and some other really interesting stuff…..

Service Management Kitchen

2005-11-19T03:33:00.000-05:00

In my current Livelihood position I manage an IT program using an ITIL Service Management model. High level depictions of Service Management often show this diagram integrating technology, processes, and people.

However, I prefer to use an Enneagram to depict this.

It reminds me a lot of the popular “kitchen” Enneagram that depicts the process for transforming raw food into something customers consume. Only in the case of Service Management, technology gets “transformed” into a service that customers consume.

As much fun as I have with that, I have even more fun applying it to the study of personal transformation. For instance, the process of "transforming" raw sensations into the reality I experience:

More Organizing

2005-11-16T15:33:00.000-05:00

I guess by 2001-2002 or so I no longer had an organizing planner, or method of approaching all the things I wanted to do. I had finally stopped creating my transpersonal ads (I had over 2000 of them) and had tried to pick out 365 of my favorites to use as a perpetual calendar (note: add perpetual calendar to my blog to-do list.)

My interest in organizing got rekindled when I received a Palm Pilot at work. I started creating to-do lists, and using the calendar to try and schedule stuff. I eventually bought my own PDA, a Tungsten T3, that gave me a lot more power, and a lot of kewl applications.

Ultimately I ended up with a huge 300+ to-do list of things I would most likely never get done, and I rarely followed my calendar, except for actual meetings and things I really HAD to do.

Sensation to Thought

2005-11-13T06:39:00.000-05:00

I have a number of observations on meditation that I hope to make, but I want to insert a more recent development before doing that.

Most of the meditation techniques I use involve keeping the body very, very still in order to observe and quiet my monkey mind.

For a number of years Mushtaq has suggested I try another approach that emphasizes body movement watching more than mind watching, but I don't think I really quite got it.

But, late last year I finally started some new exercises and things started to figure a little bit more.

Scott Sonnon's Body Flow helped clarify some things for me:

A lot happens between a sensation and a thought. Now I especially see how my body creates the thoughts I have, before I even know it has happened.

Skin Resistance

2005-11-10T15:33:00.000-05:00

Radio Shack has sold this thing since the early 1970's. I bought it as a kit back in 1973 while in the USCG when they marketed it as a "lie detector". In 1997 they called it a "biofeedback monitor", and it came preassembled. I don't know if they still sell it, but I knew I still had it somewhere, and started to wonder how it might work while using the binaural beat technologies to force my brain into certain brainwave states.

SD Orange to Green

2005-11-07T06:33:00.000-05:00

The Spiral Dynamics movement from the Orange v-meme to Green v-meme seemed a lot more suited to studying with an Enneagram than my previous attempts at doing it. Things seem to click a lot more when I observe "the process" from point 3 to 4 to 5 to 6.

SD Orange to Yellow

2005-11-04T09:33:00.000-05:00

I've tried to place Spiral Dynamics "levels" around an enneagram in various ways, but without a lot of success. So, then I looked at just three levels, as a triad:

This seemed better, but still not quite right.

Spiral Dynamics

2005-11-01T18:36:00.000-05:00

I've really enjoyed trying to develop the ability to see things from different perspectives. The personality enneagram helped me see how people experience life differently, but mostly from a horizontal approach. Spiral Dynamics offers an interesting persepctive of looking at how memes attach themselves to groups depending on that groups particular level of development.

Waking, sleeping, and dreaming spiral dynamics

States

2005-10-29T03:36:00.000-04:00

Ken Wilber describes the three states that every person has access to, at every stage of development, as the waking, dreaming, and deep dreamless sleep states.

He also describes how those states manifest themsleves in the gross, subtle, and causal realms.

The gross body and the subtle body interest me the most in this area:

I think lucid dreaming gives a person the first access to a "subtle body". I always struggle trying to remember that fact during lucid dreams. It takes quite an effort to remember I don't need to try and walk up the stairs. I can float up, or even just "materialize" at the top of the stairs. But, I still have a very strong connection to my "gross realm" physical body, and my lucid dreams occur so infrequently that I don't get much subtle body practice.

Meditating Brainwaves

2005-10-26T06:36:00.000-04:00

I’ve started dabbling with binaural beat technology, again. I had some old Hemi-sync cassettes, some Brainwave Suite tapes, and a few other tapes that I used a few years ago. I eventually captured them to .WAV and audio CD, and finally to MP3s (and recently onto my iPod). But I only used them once in a while, mostly as a relaxation aid in the afternoon after work.

A few months ago I purchased Holosync CDs and really saw an improvement in my meditation practice.

But, I like to customize things.

I don’t really like the music, Tibetan bells, rainforest sounds etc. mixed with the binaural beats, something all the commercial products seem to do.

So I used BrainWave Generator to create a few 10 minute segments at various brainwave frequencies without any other “added ingredients”.

I use a 40 hz tone that I can barely hear. Above 40 hz, it sounds too much like AC hum, and at higher frequencies the audible tone can get a bit annoying.

I use Goldwave to edit files and convert them to MP3 format. A 1/4 second sample of a regular song looks something like this:

A 1 second sample of the brainwave generator output looks like this:

For kicks I mixed a Sally Oldfield song, Flaming Star (I just discovered Sally's music a couple of weeks ago) with the one of the brainwave files:

Seven Things

2005-10-23T03:33:00.000-04:00

Mushtaq tagged me with this.........

Seven things I will do before I die:

fight cancer (skin, colon, lung, or prostate)
evolve in three directions
chop wood, carry water
memorize the 99 most beautiful names
watch E.T. and Star Wars
Read Beezlebub's Tales to His Grandson at least once, preferrably twice, all the way through
die gracefully (or if possible, die before I die)

Seven things I can do:

play guitar
manage a DOD program that actually saves U.S. taxpayers millions of dollars each year
learn new things until the day I die
forgive people (exception: see #3 in next section)
start over
wait patiently
keep a secret

Seven things I can't do:

Speak another language fluently
defend myself
tolerate intolerance
cut off my pony tail
remember the one thing I must never forget
communicate as effectively as I would like to
always finish things that I start

Seven things I say most often:

d'oh!
I love you too
It's taco Thursday!
Crazy cat
Give me 5 more minutes
No wonder people hate us
Thank you

Seven people I would like to pass this on to:

i we it Connectivity

2005-10-20T03:36:00.000-04:00

The inner lines of the enneagram intrigue me the most because they seem to indicate directions of "movement" between levels of an holarchy

I have still not figured out how to make practical use of that information

it we i Holarchy

2005-10-17T15:33:00.000-04:00

I think of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful as a holarchy. At least in it's manisfestation in the human realm.

The Good can't exist without the True.

The Beautiful can't exist without the Good.

Dream Yoga Log

2005-10-14T06:33:00.000-04:00

I mentioned that I haven't had much success praticing the Four Foundational Dream Yoga practices, much less the practices of the night. About a year ago I added a new section to my 10x log just for the night practice. Four check boxes, one for each practice. Basically each practice corresponds to 2 hours of the night (8 hours altogether.) I thought I would start simple. Orange meant that I had remembered in what part of the night I had awakened. Yellow, green, blue would represent varying degrees of success with the practice itself.

This month's log looks very much like every month for the past year:

Evidently I prefer sleeping to Working.

Exercise Shift

2005-10-11T03:36:00.000-04:00

I started modifying my exercise routine a little bit late in 2004. Mushtaq had recommended Steve Barne's Five Minute Miracle for some beginning breathing exercises. I ended up working with that and also a DVD from Mushtaq's Sufi Order.

So instead of observing my breath, or how I breathed, I started "breathing my body" and doing the 5 Tibetans, and also what I later discovered drew from "Warrior Wellness"

A lot of the source material came from Scott Sonnon, and early in 2005 I finally got some of those excellent DVD's:

99 Name Flash Cards

2005-10-08T18:33:00.000-04:00

I started creating flashcards last year that I mostly let run on my Palm when I have it in the cradle on my desk. A program called Splash Clock, does a random slideshow kind of thing.

Figuring

2005-10-05T15:36:00.000-04:00

I started trying to figure out what "figure out" meant because I had never really thought about it before. The word "figure" has 12 different meanings according to dictionary.com including:

- a list of figures, as in a book
- don't forget to "figure in" xyz
- having a nice figure (a body, or amount of money)

I think of "figuring it out" as a sort of "a-ha!" experience. It seems to involve a process:

I get bits of information as input.

That information simmers in me with things like repetition, practice, contemplation

Then it seems to, or has the potential to, suddenly "figure" (Ah Ha!)

But in a non-verbal, non-symbolic innner way that I can only make meager attempts at externally verbalizing or symbolizing to someone else.

Like with this blog entry.

Dream Yoga

2005-10-02T18:36:00.000-04:00

I keep wanting to practice these four foundational practices, but the desire to sleep seems to kill my intent most of the time.

Lucky Numbers

2005-09-26T21:36:00.000-04:00

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

Verbal Holarchy

2005-09-23T21:39:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-20T21:39:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-17T15:39:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-14T06:33:00.000-04:00

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:

My Family

2005-09-11T03:33:00.000-04:00

I had a trouble-free childhood, thanks to my family. So many people suffer through trauma as children because of troubled parents. I didn't. I grew up in an atmosphere free of meanness and anger. My mom and dad always allowed me tremendous freedom, though anchored in strict adab. They insisted on proper behavior around others. Through their examples, I learned tolerance and respect for humans and animals, although I still have a terrible teasing habit. My sisters will attest to that. Through my sisters I developed an interest in "the feminine", whatever that means. I guess I feel that the survival of the world depends on "real" women (not women acting as men) readjusting world culture. And finally Jane my wife, and soul mate. If I believed in reincarnation, I would say that we've known each other for many lifetimes. And we continue to groove together in this one.

Music

2005-09-08T06:36:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-05T09:36:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-02T15:33:00.000-04:00

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:

My War Days

2005-08-27T03:33:00.000-04:00

I turned 17 in 1972. A few months after that I joined the US Coast Guard. I had earned enough credits to get out of high school after the first semester of my senior year.

The fondest memory of my military service occurred in April of 1973 as I traveled from boot camp in Alameda, Calif to Governor’s Island, New York.

I had to ride the subway from JFK airport to South Ferry in lower Manhattan in order to get to Governor’s Island, while wearing my dress uniform.

During that ride on the subway, some guy came up and spit on me. People clapped. I served in a different era.

But memes change, and unfortunately the US government and Hollywood have introduced more palatable military/war memes since then.

Dream Signs

2005-08-24T09:33:00.000-04:00

I think of Dream Signs as a Homer Simpson D’oh!

You wake up from a dream, and as you try to recall the details of the dream, you realize it contained all sorts of “cues” that could have clued you in to that dreaming realization

I used the section on Dream Signs in Stephen LaBerge’s “Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming”

To create this Dream Sign study aid:

E-Books to Mind Maps

2005-08-21T09:33:00.000-04:00

For some of the books I converted to e-Books, I also created MS Word Headings that allowed me to create a linkable Table of Contents.

It also allowed me view the book in an outline format.

But really, as you might have guessed, I love mind-map like formats. This allows me to see a lot more information all at once. Even outlines have a “linear” limitation. I think mind-map organization takes outlining to a higher level.

More 10x Counting

2005-08-18T03:36:00.000-04:00

For a couple of years I would try to pause every 15 minutes and count out 10 breaths. Sometimes I would go for more than 10 breaths, sometimes I wouldn’t even make it to 3 before my mind had wandered. I would jot down the number of breaths with blue ink.

Sometimes I would forget completely. I would use red ink to mark that.

Eventually I went to a 20 minute interval, and the color coding scheme, because I noticed that when I looked back at my logs, I generally focused on the red and blue, not the actual data written in blue.

Al-Muhsî gone awry?

(the counter, the appraiser, the reckoner)

Transpersonal Ads

2005-08-15T18:33:00.000-04:00

So the whole idea of printing off my schedule and to-do list each day kept changing.

In then end I just liked to print off a page of pictures.

However, I had also gotten into the habit of collecting aphorisms, quotes, and other tid-bits of information.

So, I decided I would try and create advertisements for myself.

Instead of selling myself a product, I would sell myself ideas.

I called them transpersonal ads.

I created at least one a day for several years and ended up with over a thousand before I finally stopped.

Life Cycle

2005-08-12T03:33:00.000-04:00

Some thoughts on what happens between birth and death:

This gave me a chance to use artwork from my favorite album cover of all time (The Moody Blues "Every Good Boy Deserves Favour") :

Developing Memory Fitness

2005-08-09T09:36:00.000-04:00

aka Raymond Lull's Art

For me this tool falls into that area where if you can’t momentarily set aside your emotions, intellect and judgements, and just execute the instructions, you will get nothing.

I initially found this whole Ars Infusa thing a bit odd, and the religious orientation somewhat uncomfortable, so much so that the secret nearly remained invisible. But luckily I managed to get past that.

I made this chart to help with my studies:

The traceless warrior pointed me towards this art in 2001 (30 minutes has turned into 4 years…. so far):

Date: Wed Jun 27, 2001 1:22 pm
Subject: Ars Infusa

In response to my:
> Hello everyone,
> I've become obsessed with the Rules and the Enneagram.

Mushtaq said:

Hi Jeff,

Go here http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Parthenon/4572/

read everything, apply it to what you are learning and tell me what you think.

(you have thirty min,,,,, starting now :-) ) (sorry, I couldn't resist)

*********************************************
LOL Mushtaq. It's taken me a while to fully appreciate that humour. I've been busy learning the alphabet, the definitions, the principles, rules, and practicing evacuating cameras. Goodness, greatness, duration, difference, concordance, How, Why, When, Majority, BC, BtB, BtC, CB.......... I'm afraid I've gone way past the 30 minutes.

Exercise

2005-08-06T03:33:00.000-04:00

As like many people, I’ve gone through lots of ups and downs with exercising. I generally try to exercise every day, and would say I have managed to achieve an overall 55%-70% success rate. Up until late last year (2004) I pretty much followed a 5 day repeating sequence which I’ve summarized like this:

E-Books

2005-08-03T15:33:00.000-04:00

As I started reading a lot of books, I found it somewhat cumbersome to carry around 4-5 books everywhere I went. Sometimes I would forget to bring the book I really wanted to read with me.

Other times I would find myself wanting to read (ie during a boring meeting) but job etiquette wouldn’t allow for that. Or sometimes as I did stuff on my computer, I would have 5 minutes as I waited for a job to finish, but again job etiquette doesn’t allow for reading books.

So I started scanning books and running them through an OCR so that I could just read them on my laptop as a text file.

About a year later I ran across a device called a Rocket E-Reader. It seemed a bit pricey, but I ended up purchasing one anyway.

That company went out of business after a couple of years. So, I ended up just loading books onto my Palm Tungsten T3.

I still prefer a reading device like the Rocket E-Book reader because of its paperback book size, unlike the tiny Palm or somewhat bulky laptop.

Enneagram Holarchies?

2005-07-31T18:33:00.000-04:00

I’ve held this suspicion that you can use non-personality type Enneagrams to study holarchies.

For example:

When Gurdjieff writes of those curious "three brained creatures" does he allude to this kind of holarchy?:

Can you really even use the Enneagram in this manner? What about taking it a step further and plopping the True, the Good, and the Beautiful (It, We, I) on top of it?

E-Prime

2005-07-28T18:39:00.000-04:00

My introduction to E-Prime came from reading Robert Anton Wilsons “Cosmic Trigger III”.

The subject later came up on the sufi-studies list, and I started to make an effort to implement it in my writing. I still try and use E-Prime as much as possible, although I have not had much success using it orally…. yet.

1. It changed the way I perceived certain things
2. It helped stop me from treating people as things
3. It helps with “Right Speech”
4. It helps control inadvertent transmission of undesirable memes
5. It helps see how language forms cultural stuff

6. It makes me think before I speak/write

Daily Pictorial Note Pad

2005-07-25T06:33:00.000-04:00

During 1998-1999 I drifted further and further from printing off a “to-do” list, or a daily calendar for each day.

But I still had a drive to print a “page-a-day” (front and back, well, actually more left and right.)

I really just loved scanning and printing pictures that appealed to me.

So I did that every day for a couple of years.

I would leave some areas open on each page to jot down notes and stuff.

10x Counts Introduction

2005-07-22T03:33:00.000-04:00

I started this particular habit in Oct 1998 and have kept with it ever since. And I have questioned the value of doing it ever since. But I haven’t stopped.

The inability to keep my attention focused on the “one task that one must never forget” drove (drives) me nuts.

I could meditate in the morning and afterwards feel very focused. But, that session did not sustain it throughout the day.

I always fall back asleep during the day (and night, but I’ll leave that discussion for another time)

So I started working on a methodology to make me pause throughout the day, stop my mind, and return.

As always, I tend to use my breath as the anchor. So I decided I would try to take 10 breaths in complete present moment awareness.

I wanted to track two things:

1. The frequency of the exercise
2. The quality of each attempt

I’ve measured the quality in a number of different ways since 1998, but pretty much use the color-coded scale I've shown in the picture above.

Cultivating Awareness

2005-07-16T21:33:00.000-04:00

For me, the path towards having more lucid dreams meant learning how to overcome “the waking dream”. I spend more time asleep at the wheel during the day than I care to admit. Remaining “awake”. Learning how to remain awake.

If I do nothing else in this life, let me at least not sleep through the rest of it.

Kabir Helminski wrote something (A Rumi passage) in the introduction of his book Living Presence, that sums up this idea for me:

The Master said:
There is one thing in this world which must never be forgotten. If you were to forget everything else, but did not forget that, then there would be no cause to worry; whereas if you performed and remembered and did not forget every single thing, but forgot that one thing, then you would have done nothing whatsoever.

It is just as if a king had sent you to a country to carry out a specified task. You go and perform a hundred other tasks; but if you have not performed that particular task on account of which you had gone to the country, it is as though you have performed nothing at all.
So man has come into this world for a particular task, and that is his purpose; if he does not perform it, then he will have done nothing.
DISCOURSES OF RUMI (TRANSLATED BY A. J. ARBERRY)

So I continue to try and use as many tools as I can to help me try and fulfill that task:

1997 Daily Pages

2005-07-13T06:36:00.000-04:00

Once I got a scanner and a color printer I started wandering off on a little tangent with my habit of printing a daily page. I found myself scanning all sorts of stuff and printing it as part of my daily organizer/schedule/to-do list page. In fact the organizer/schedule/to-do list aspect kept shrinking and shrinking during 1997.

Quadrants in Triad Form

2005-07-10T21:33:00.000-04:00

I have taken Ken Wilber’s quadrants and adapted it to an Enneagram. I assign values to aspects of the Enneagram that symbolize concepts described by Wilber.

Ken Wilber assigns a certain perspective to his UL quadrant and a certain perspective to his UR quadrant.

I assign that UL perspective to the I->It segment, and the UR perspective to the It->I segment of the I-We-It triad.

And similarly the LL and LR quadrants:

So the Enneagram triad provides for 6 different perspectives:

I-It The subjective inner experience (the meditation experience)
It-I The objective measurements (measuring a meditator)
It-We Observing/studying social/cultural behavior
We-It Experiencing social/cultural customs
We-I It takes a village to raise a child
I-We What the greatest human beings of all time passed on to us

That provides me with 6 perspectives for building some sort of integral practice.

7/2/2005 - 18154 days old

2005-07-07T15:33:00.000-04:00

In 1997, as I continued to try and develop lucid dreaming skills, I ended up looking for books about the brain. Easy to read books about the brain.
Peter Russell's The Brain Book found it's way into my library. Ultimately this book provided my introduction to Mind Maps more than anything else. But I did pull it off the bookshelf today to look at the contents:

An experiment. I want to see the resolution of a more detailed mind map:

Hmmm. I dunno. I guess that doesn't work very well. Oh well.....

I also did a Google search , found Peter Russells web site, and browsed around a bit. I found the little "your age in days" calculator there. I also plucked his Passing Thoughts section to my PDA to read a little later on.

Enneagram Pieces

2005-07-04T06:36:00.000-04:00

I use the non personality type Enneagram as a sort of symbolic modeling tool.

cat – we assign those letters to represent a cat. The map isn’t the territory.

a+b=c – We assign ‘a’ to something, like 7 green lizards. We assign ‘b’ to some other quantity. And then we say that ‘c’ represents what happens when we do something (+) to ‘a’ and ‘b’. Manipulating equations allows us to see all sorts of interesting things.

The parts of the Enneagram allow me to do a similar type of thing. I assign stuff to the different components and then describe relationships between the components.

Organizing

2005-07-01T21:36:00.000-04:00

I've gone through various approaches for organizing my interests in ways so that I get stuff done. It seems like I have always had a bottomless to-do list that every few months or so starts to overwhelm me. Over the past 10 years my methodologies have taken lots of twists and turns as I try to engage various technologies. This became even more complicated as I started "inner" work. But I started 1996 with a certain new found enthusiasm. Each day I printed off a page of stuff and used that page for my notes.

In the summer of 1996 I got my first color printer, and a scanner. My daily pages evolved to incorporate that technology.

Reading Frenzy

2005-06-25T03:33:00.000-04:00

After that first lucid dream I found myself turning into a voracious reader. I've always enjoyed reading, but it seems that as an adult I read less and less. If you looked at my library prior to 1996 you would see titles such as:

Turbo Pascal
C++ Programming
Organizational Management Strategies
Essential Managers Handbook
Object Oriented Programming
German Grammar Made Easy

But then I entered a frenzied information gathering phase. I just consumed book after book. Sometimes I had 3-4 books going at the same time. I read during every free moment I could find.

I still read a lot more than I used to, but the pace has slowed and I find myself re-reading some of my favorite books, and savoring them a little more.

A sample of stuff I inhaled:
Pierce Howard: Owners Manual for the Brain
Alan Watts: The Book
Ken Wilber: A Brief History of Everything, Integral Psychology, Sex Ecology and Spirituality, The Marriage of Sense and Soul, Grace and Grit, Eye of Spirit, No Boundary
Sri Aurobindo: Integral Yoga, Growing Within, The Future Evolution of Man, Looking From Within
Deepak Chopra: Ageless Body Timeless Mind
Robert Anton Wilson: Prometheus Rising, Cosmic Trigger 1, 2, and 3. Schroedinger’s Cat, Reality is What You Can Get Away With
Thich Nhat Hanh: Old Path White Clouds, The Miracle of Mindfulness
Anthony DeMello: Awareness, The Heart of the Enlightened, Sadhana A Way to God
Gurdjieff: Meetings With Remarkable Men, Life is Only Real When ‘I am’, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson
Walsh/Vaughan: Paths Beyond Ego
Beck/Cowan: Spiral Dynamics
Kegan: The Evolving Self, In Over Our Heads
Idries Shah: A Perfumed Scorpion, 101 Tales of Wisdom, Caravan of Dreams, Tales of the Dervishes
Jane Roberts: Seth Speaks, The Magical Approach, The Nature of Personal Reality
Talbot: The Holographic Universe
Newberg/D’Aquili: Why God Won’t Go Away
Steve Pinker: The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works
Epstein: Thoughts Without a Thinker
Tony Schwartz: What Really Matters
Charles Tart: Living the Mindful Life
George Murphy: The Future of the Body
Jon Kabat-Zinn: Full Catastrophe Living, Wherever You Go There You Are
Colin Wilson: From Atlantis to the Sphinx
Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan: Awakening
Dalai Lama: Sleeping Dreaming and Dying, The Good Heart
Helen Palmer: The Enneagram
Suzuki: Zen Mind Beginners Mind
Hancock: Fingerprints of the Gods
Buddhadasa Bhikku: Mindfulness With Breathing
Riso/Hudson: Wisdom of the Enneagram
Geshe Gedun Lodro: Walking Through Walls
Kabir Helminski: The Knowing Heart, Living Presence
Karen Armstrong: Islam
JG Bennett: Enneagram Studies, Creative Thinking, The Sevenfold Work, A Spiritual Psychology, The Way to be Free, Elementary Systematics
Hakim Sanai: The Walled Garden of Truth
Joyce Nielsen: Sex and Gender in Society
A.G.E. Blake: The Intelligent Enneagram
Ellen Langer: The Power of Mindful Learning
Carol Gilligan: In a Different Voice
Tulku: Time Space and Knowledge
Wolinsky: Quantum Consciousness
Peter Russell: The Brain Book
Ouspensky: In Search of the Miraculous, The Fourth Way
Hazrat Inayat Khan: The Art of Being and Becoming, The Inner Life
Thomas Moore: Care of the Soul
James Moore: Gurdjieff
David Allen: Getting Things Done
Es-Seyyid Es-Shaykh Taner Ansari: The Sun Will Rise in the West
Alexander/Langer: Higher Stages of Human Development
Sogyal Rinpoche: The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

Lucid Dream Kick-Off

2005-06-19T21:36:00.000-04:00

A short time after I turned 40 years old something odd happened to me while sleeping and having a dream. During the dream I remember realizing "Hey I'm dreaming, I'm suppose to look at my hands now". I did. My life changed forever.

Lucid Dreaming 1