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Saving The Gnostic Body
A Practical Guide to Gnostic Masturbation
Jesus said, “Whoever has come to know the world has discovered the body, and whoever has discovered the body, of that one the world is not worthy.”
The importance of the body in Gnostic cosmology is cloudy to say the best. Philosophically, it seems like they often describe an existence in which the world is illusion and must be transcended in order for salvation to occur. Understood as “just myth,” the Gnostic texts describe, in symbolic fashion, interesting but perhaps pointlessly complex cosmologies.
In the gnostic Apocryphon of John (long version), there exists an intricately detailed passage describing the creation of Adam, the first Man. Without getting into the complex metaphysics of how they all fit together, a bunch of entities interact - angels, demons, archons, powers, the Demiurge, etc - in order to create the physical body. Each one gives according to its attributes to make a composite body featuring the characteristics of the lot, the culmination of which is the Primordial Man. This is a pretty common occurrence in esoteric myth: a bunch of gods get together and give their powers to create another being. Hinduism has a handful of examples of this, from what I recall, my favorite of them being the demon-slaying goddess, Durga. In each of her arms, she holds a weapon given to her by a god.
Gnostic ringmaster Jeremy Puma made a pretty cool diagram a while back which I’m going to gank for a minute. He attempted to map the names of the angel/archons from this Gnostic text onto a simple human shape. It helps a great deal to be able to visualize it like this, I think.
What’s In A Name?
Now, saying you’re a Gnostic from hundreds of years ago. Why do you might potentially go through the trouble of including this level of detail in one of your sacred texts? Obviously, it is important. But in what way is it important? Is the association of a different entity with each part of the body strictly a symbolic affair, showing us fractally just what we’re made of? Based on some recent experiments I have been doing, I believe it is certainly that, but also much more.
Usually we only give formal names to things that are very important. Usually they are living things (people, pets), or else places. But a place is a living thing in its own way, isn’t it? So we could reasonably surmise that Gnostics thought that (1) these bodyparts were important enough to give formal names to, and that potentially (2) they saw each one as its own almost living thing. Hinduism does this with chakras, energy centers which have a certain typical set of characteristics, animating them with almost a life of their own. The other thing about formal names is that we don’t know everyone on earth’s names: only the people who are the most important to us. Only people who we know really well. We call other people’s cats “kitty”, but we call ours by her proper name: Francine (I pulled that out of nowhere, but check this out). So we could also maybe get away (in our entirely loose pseudo-scholarly method here) with saying that (3) the gnostics knew their bodies really well.
I have always half-jokingly stood by the interpretation of the Greek “gnosis” not as just spiritual knowledge or knowledge of the divine, but as “knowing” in the Biblical sense - as in you guys have done the “horizontal hokey-pokey.” But lately I am beginning to see that as more and more potentially accurate as an interpretation, not to mention useful in a practical sense. No, I am not talking about going out and having sex with yourself, but I am talking about gaining full and intimate knowledge of every aspect of your entire body. [I also like this line here, from the website True Blue Healer, who describes a “lay gnosis” which the author claims can be triggered through simple exercises. The line is: “To be pursued romantically by a God is a priceless experience awaiting you all.”]
Yoga seems to be about this: about gaining full control over every aspect and process of your entire body. Translated backwards into corresponding Gnostic symbol sets, we might compare this to subduing the archons, angels, demons or other entities which make up or control one’s body. So is this how one “transcends” the body in classic Gnostic mythology, by gaining full and utter control over each part? It seems very likely: in most occult systems of “magick” when you know the name of an entity (especially of the infernal regions), you thereby have power over it. So I can envision a corresponding meditative practice which probably accompanied the Secret Book of John, wherein one goes through and names each of the powers of the body, gaining control over them.
Developing Proprioceptive Awareness & Control
Directing one’s awareness to move slowly and consciously through different parts of the body is an excellent method in developing something called proprioception. Most sources describe proprioceptive awareness as the sense of understanding “relative position of neighbouring parts of the body”:
Unlike the six exteroceptive senses (sight, taste, smell, touch, hearing, and balance) by which we perceive the outside world, and interoceptive senses, by which we perceive the pain and the stretching of internal organs, proprioception is a third distinct sensory modality that provides feedback solely on the status of the body internally. It is the sense that indicates whether the body is moving with required effort, as well as where the various parts of the body are located in relation to each other.
In robotics (and other electronics), this is pretty similar to what “force feedback” means. It’s the rumble pack attached to your video game controller. It gives you immediate sensory feedback on the effects of your actions. If you were a robot, it is what would tell you how much pressure was appropriate to apply for picking up a glass of wine without instantly shattering it. Wikipedia adds, on the topic of proprioception:
Without the appropriate integration of proprioceptive input, an artist would not be able to brush paint onto a canvas without looking at the hand as it moved the brush over the canvas; it would be impossible to drive an automobile because a motorist would not be able to steer or use the foot pedals while looking at the road ahead; a person could not touch type or perform ballet; and people would not even be able to walk without watching where they put their feet.
There is a much more modern system of creative movement called the Alexander Technique, which has allowed me to bridge these subjects together. One of the things the Alexander Technique addresses is learning and un-learning of physical habitual movements. They talk a little in that Wikipedia article about how students new to the technique have to rely on outside feedback of classmates and mirrors. “Teachers say this is because a student’s senses may not yet be awake enough to register the crucial subtle adjustments, which cannot be experienced piecemeal. Improved sensitivity can be reawakened by sustained practice over time.”
In other words, you can’t feel that you’re learning it until after you’ve developed the awareness to be able to feel it. And the only way you can do that is by actually learning it. (I know that creates a bit of a mental logjam, but it all works out: it’s the whole catch-22 of needing experience to get a job and needing a job to get experience.)
Unlearning Bad Habits
I’m bringing this back to Gnosticism, don’t worry. But the Alexander Technique’s approach to habit formation and re-learning has potentially everything to do with what the body archons might be referring to. Pulling more from Wikipedia here:
Alexander Technique teachers believe that humans have a naturally conditioned blind spot concerning their ability to adapt and learn. As people adapt to repeated situations, they create habits and routines to cope with circumstances and to learn skills. The advantage of adapting by creating habits is that behavior and learning are simplified; it becomes possible to meet a given stimulus or interpretation of circumstances with a ready-made reaction that may be chained onto a set of previously learned skills… People tend to merely accommodate all previous habits they once trained themselves to do. Alexander Technique advocates stopping, redirecting or preventing habits that are in the way of newly revised intentions… Using any habit decreases the importance of paying attention to seemingly unrelated proprioceptive feedback, because these anomalies do not match expectations and getting to the goal is usually the focus.
In a nutshell then, there seems to me to be a connection between habits and what I would consider archons to refer to mythpoeically. Archons in general are associated with badness, with limitation, with insanity, with being the wardens of the illusory prison world in which we are trapped. So it doesn’t seem to me to be much of a stretch to say that archons mean something like a shortcut where you rely on a bad habit instead of facing the Truth and doing what you know you should. Something like that.
Center of the Universe
So if you applied this understanding to Gnosticism, it begins right at the source. That is, you. Your body. You may or may not be the source of the universe, but the thing to understand is that your body is the source of all of your perceptions of the universe. I like to think of perceptions as the reflection not the illusion of the universe reflected into your nervous system. Which is exactly where proprioception lies: at the root where perception has its conception: the point of deception. The point where your brain stops saying to itself, “I am collecting sensory data reflected onto my nervous system from the exterior world” and starts saying the shortcut, “I perceive existance directly.” It’s almost like the difference in role playing games between saying, “My character does such and such,” and “I do such and such.”
It has to do with the being at the level of identifying with your shortcut habitual perceptions and reactions to the world. And this is what the ego is constructed out of: once useful logical habits upon which hinge emotional and physical reactions like colors on a painting. And this is the domain of the Demiurge. In more straightforward Christian myth, it is the Devil as the ruler of this world. In the Tarot we see the Lovers chained at the feet of the Devil, like Princess Leia on Jabba’s Pleasure Barge.
And that’s exactly what your body is: a Pleasure Barge. A Pleasure Barrage. The purpose of your body is to register ecstatic signal reception through the activation of sensory data points. Part of what your mind does is acts as a cultural programming interface (interference) for the body to tell it how to categorize sensory data and therefore what to completely tune out. This is what Huxley talked about with the brain being a “cosmic reducing valve” where it cancels out things that aren’t directly important to biological survival. Cultural programming then determines and brands a system of taboos on the open-imprint young nervous system based around the biological timeline activation of various capacities within the body, due to chemical occurences and hormonal changes. In other words, as you begin to become aware of your various body parts as you’re growing up, you have cultural information which tends to sort out various types of sensory input into pleasure/pain guilt/shame sensitivity/dullness, etc. types of pairs. It becomes okay to enjoy this sensation, but this other one becomes nasty or painful. Have you ever noticed how when little kids of a certain age fall down and cut themselves, the first thing they do is look at you to see how you react? What they are doing is modeling emotional reactions from you. If you express concern, they ham it up and act more hurt so that you’ll give them more affection. If you act like you almost didn’t even notice what happened, they will sometimes shake it off altogether.
Shake It Off, Child
Imagine you could do that when bad things happened to you now in your adult life. Instead of reacting, getting upset, pissed off, going crazy, crying or being depressed or sad, you could just kind of get up and shake it off. I believe this is the sort of the day-to-day essence of the gnostic experience of “enlightenment”. Buddhists call it non-attachment. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna talks about it as sacrificing the fruits of one’s actions.
Jesus talks about how you need to become like a child to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. What does that mean? A child is totally open. A child isn’t imprinted with the years of habitual responses which typify both the adult mind, body and emotiomal behavior. A child, therefore, hasn’t shut down parts of their sensory data flow for the purposes of minimizing computer processing power. A child is then receiving a more pure, less filtered stream of information about the world.
“I and the Father are one,” was central to his message, and what ultimately got him condemned for blasphemy, for saying that he was God. He meant he was connected to the raw data feed of pure experience. And when he proclaimed, “My Kingdom is not of this world,” what he meant was that it was actually in the body: in gaining full proprioceptive awareness of every aspect of his physical person and therefore the mental and emotional processes built on top of that.
The thing I have noticed lately in doing a lot of left-right body/mind integration exercises is that the more you utilize in a fine degree a certain part of your body, the greater sensitivity it gains. After a few weeks of intermittent left-handed writing, I can now write fairly legible sentences which do not look like they are written by a three year old (who would have possibly less developed proprioceptive awareness). After using Baoding balls extensively for weeks now, I can now rotate them backwards and forwards in both hands (at once), upside-down, four in each hand, and four in both hands combined at various speeds and with alternating circular rotations of the arms themselves. That’s a whole lot of dexterity gained in a hell of a short time. At first when I started I couldn’t do it at all in one direction with my right hand. It was like my brain would just stop there and not allow me to move forward.
Conscious Pain
What happens the more you practice these kinds of things (see also: juggling) the more you become able to deal with that edge of frustration though as you develop body awareness in new areas and learn new skills (which are nothing but formalized sets of body movements, usually). I think of it as “conscious pain.” The only way to beat it is to do it habitually. You can think of a habit as being like a callous. If you play guitar a lot, your fingers get tired of registering the sensation of slightly sheared off skins from constantly sliding across the metal fretboard and strings. The way your brain tunes that sensation out is not by damaging the nerves themselves, but by gradually adapting. The skin in your fingertips gets calloused. It gets thicker. More padding between proprioception and perception. Or something like that. I may be using those terms wrong. This is all fairly new to me.
So habits are like callouses are like archons, are shortcuts taken by your brain to protect you from sensory input and the emotional responses which it is programmed to have follow thanks to culture and personal experiences up until this point. Habits are your body/mind’s attempt to help you though. They are good for you because they help you survive. But you more than likely imprinted a lot of bad habits and needlessly negative emotional responses as a result of growing up as well. This is when your habits and your ego rule you, where the Devilish Demiurge keeps you trapped in a prison world of illusion. The only way to beat habit then becomes to replace it with other habits. You change your old habits through pushing through the firewall of “conscious pain” set up around habits to protect them from scrutiny and change. When you have a habit it is easier just to indulge in it than to go through the struggle of changing it, right? Much less resistance. Why bother changing? It is too hard. There is no reward compared to the struggle I would have to go through. This is what you think when you are in this place. This is you shutting down rather than facing an area where you could change and improve. This is what makes people disappear inside themselves and to dwell in the misery of their own habitual responses instead of acting creatively, authentically and sincerely in the real world.
What you’re not realizing is that it actually is more difficult and more energy consuming - in the long run - to maintain habits than to exert the relatively minimal amount of conscious pain required to actively change them. More from the Alexander Technique entry:
This drawback encourages people to feel convinced that whatever effort they now use for movement and coping with circumstances is necessary, even when it is far from normal. Forgetting about habits now automated and recognizing a problem developing, it’s easy to imagine the need to train an equally strong, opposing habit rather than subtracting the hidden habit. Loss of perceptual sensitivity encourages mistaken conclusions for a call to action, and can be driven by the imperative necessity for any response. In a panic, all opposing habits can fire off at once, pulling in all directions, sometimes without the person noticing they are doing it except by the immobility or pain it can cause.
How our kinesthetic sense becomes untrustworthy from adapting to needless over-compensating is built into many innocent situations. People create habits for themselves that are driven by goals that seem useful at the time. For instance, if a person often carries a bag on their forearm, he will later find himself holding up his arm when the bag is not on it. Misunderstanding a teacher’s directions, a student may repeat what the teacher knows is unnecessary, but the teacher forgivingly allows the mistake to go by; this causes the student to unknowingly adopt useless or later problematic routines. If someone experiences fear while learning, adapting can mean that person will most likely continue doing the skill fearfully. If someone has healed from a temporary injury, a habit of wincing in anticipation of pain can be automatically continued indefinitely, despite pain being healed. Due to rapid growth, teenagers often move their own bodies based on inaccurate assumptions of their size and structure, i.e. a rapidly growing 13-year-old may think ‘I’m getting too tall’ and stoops as the solution.
In other words, the way to re-open childlike (as opposed to childish, which most adults are) parts of your awareness is through enhancing proprioception, and thereby actively dismantling negative physical, mental and emotional patterns one has gained through their life. These modalities all always tie in together. We are all always experiencing things on all these levels, but it is our programming which has molded our awareness of our awareness (another name for proprioception?) to have them pushed into needlessly reductive boxes and categories.
Hit ‘Em In Their Habit Habitat (their, uh, inhibitabititfortat)
So this is how you defeat the archons: you hit them where it hurts. You consciously face your habits & shortcuts (sins and shortcomings?) and you do it all the time. You make it a habit. You do this multiple times a day, every day. No particular schedule need be followed, other than just to practice “conscious pain” (the Way of the Samurai, Rilke’s embracing of solitude) whenever you have a chance. Constantly be trying to master a new physical skill. This is the simplest way to do it. It is absolutely fool-proof. It keeps your mind occupied with new calculations, considerations and connections. It gives you a physical outlet for pent up thoughts who have been lacking in a connection to concrete reality (which all thoughts crave: being touched). And it forces you to replace old habits with consciously chosen new habits.
MAKE THIS A LIFESTYLE. Do not just practice this for a week or two, but for five years, for the rest of your life. That is all. It is so simple. Gnosis is total self-mastery, gradually, daily. It is the experience of Jesus dying upon the cross (Golgotha, the place of the skull), dying to his former experience of his self, body and identity, and being reborn to not another spiritual ghostly body, but a physical body which allowed him to bodily “ascend to Heaven.” Gospel of Thomas:
Rather, the (Father’s) kingdom is within you and it is outside you…
Jesus said, “Why do you wash the outside of the cup? Don’t you understand that the one who made the inside is also the one who made the outside?”…
He said to them, “You examine the face of heaven and earth, but you have not come to know the one who is in your presence, and you do not know how to examine the present moment.”…
Jesus said, “The Father’s kingdom is like a person who wanted to kill someone powerful. While still at home he drew his sword and thrust it into the wall to find out whether his hand would go in. Then he killed the powerful one.”
The “powerful one” who can be found while “still at home” is the demiurge/ego operating within the body/mind as a habitual control system, replacing illusion for genuine perception, the false for the real. The sword which this person sinks into the “wall” of conscious pain is the sword of intention: of reason, of systematically dismantling the bad things about your experience of reality by the continual practice of self-mastery.
The Root of the Root of One’s Self (The BIOS)
After all, what goes into your mouth will not defile you; rather, it’s what comes out of your mouth that will defile you…
Jesus said, “I will give you what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, what no hand has touched, what has not arisen in the human heart.”
Rumi poetically refers to this as returning to the root of the root of one’s self.
Don’t go away, come near.
Don’t be faithless, be faithful.
Find the antidote in the venom.
Come to the root of the root of yourself.
Molded of clay, yet kneaded
from the substance of certainty,
a guard at the Treasury of Holy Light –
come, return to the root of the root of your Self.
Once you get hold of selflessness,
You’ll be dragged from your ego
and freed from many traps.
Come, return to the root of the root of your Self.
You are born from the children of God’s creation,
but you have fixed your sight too low.
How can you be happy?
Come, return to the root of the root of your Self.
You were born from a ray of God’s majesty
and have the blessings of a good star.
Why suffer at the hands of things that don’t exist?
Come, return to the root of the root of your Self.
You are a ruby embedded in granite.
How long will you pretend it’s not true?
We can see it in your eyes.
Come to the root of the root of your Self.
You came here from the presence of that fine Friend,
a little drunk, but gentle, stealing our hearts
with that look so full of fire; so,
come, return to the root of the root of your Self.
Our master and host, Shamsi Tabrizi,
has put the eternal cup before you.
Glory be to God, what a rare wine!
So come, return to the root of the root of your Self.
Hopping back to Thomas for a second (PS. “Doubting” Thomas is the one who made a point of needing to be shown for real that Jesus was back in a physical body):
Mary said to Jesus, “What are your disciples like?”
He said, “They are like little children living in a field that is not theirs. When the owners of the field come, they will say, ‘Give us back our field.’ They take off their clothes in front of them in order to give it back to them, and they return their field to them.
The “little children” are the open state of perceptual awareness which through the course of one’s life takes on habits formed by the proprioceptive system to filter out certain data sets from reality (the “field that is not theirs”). The owners of the field are the experience of God living in your heart and body. The clothes you take off are your old habitually-forged self-images. This is why Don Juan talks at length about erasing personal history and disrupting routines and habits as being necessary to becoming a man of knowledge, of gnosis, of full awareness of himself. There is a reason “Know Thyself” was plastered above the oracle at Delphi: mystical/occult systems are designed to develop self-awareness and thereby self-mastery.
It is not that any of this is by any means secret though. The only thing which is at all “hidden” about the occult is that you cannot know until you have tried it what the experience feels like of re-opening proprioceptive physical awareness and re-patterning your entire life, mental and emotional process. There’s just no way to describe it. It’s just awesome.
“Trust me.”
This is the only part that requires the leap of faith in any spiritual discipline: and it is because the ego operates according to a strict cost benefit ratio analysis system. If it doesn’t perceive immediate value in long-term action, it will dump the process altogether to free up memory for other calculations. The money changers need to be thrown out of the heart temple, those aspects of yourself which keep track of debts owed and wrongs done to and by you. These things are overcome by conscious pain as well: actively confronting things which you avoid and try to pretend like they are not there. All I can say is that it requires more energy to maintain and fortify a wall (ie, a habit) over a long period of time than it does to simply break down the damned thing. What will flow through in its place once the damn has broken is a cool wave of clarity and tranquility through which you can swim effortlessly in all dimensions, like Neo operating in the “bullet time” of the Matrix. Full existing within the motion and having full responsibility for and control over all actions, reactions, thoughts, emotions and physical responses.
Not that I’m Neo or something. As I said before, I have not solved all of my problems, but all of my problems have become solvable. But as the Tao Te Ching says: the man of the Tao does not seek to be full.
I think the only reason we need other people so damned badly is that they can touch us in ways we ourselves cannot: physically, emotionally, psychically, spiritually. And that touchy world of give and take is how we develop awareness of ourselves and of the patterns which we have accidentally locked ourselves in. One of the greatest gifts we can give to one another then is this increased sensitivity and the outside feedback required as you develop the subtle awareness to feel it on your own, and begin to “feel God pursue you romantically.” Tee hee hee…
Or you could just learn to touch yourself:
(But even that can become a habitual response cutting you off from the other deeper possiblities of the world! - I’m just sayin’ is all!)
August 16th, 2007 at 10:17 pm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongue_twisters
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2007...speaks-to-me-in-dreams/#comment-84249
August 16th, 2007 at 11:24 pm
Marcus Aurelius Meditations: 2:16
Philosopher = lover of Wisdom/Sophia
August 16th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
wow. I swear I hadn’t read this most recent post before I made my last comment(s).
this is good stuff.
August 16th, 2007 at 11:33 pm
another thing I have started doing in the last 6 months is Tai Chi, except I do not use any the common family of moves, I just totally make it up as I go along, it is different every time I do it.
August 16th, 2007 at 11:49 pm
I know exactly what you are referring to. It is a slow circular free-form rotation of all joints. I’ve started doing it too!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvVdjMxSZxg
August 17th, 2007 at 12:27 am
Hah, ya. I’ve started to incorporate other things too besides the joint rotations, like recently I have incorporated sumo type posturing, the extreme face contortions and posturing like the Kiwi rugby team uses to intimidate their opponents at the beginning of their games (from traditional Maori war moves) and more recently trying to imitate some of the subtle and beautiful eye, hand and finger, leg and toe movements of Balinese dance (like legong)
I find myself craving this type of movement more and more and sometimes launch into it in places like the shower and elevator.
August 17th, 2007 at 12:34 am
That’s so awesome. I know EXACTLY what you’re referring to. Check out Ghost Dog and watch the flourishes he does when he’s putting away his guns. Same thing.
August 17th, 2007 at 1:50 am
This post: exactly what I needed.
You’re on an amazing roll, Tim.
Congrats on the new living situation, too.
Peace.
August 17th, 2007 at 7:13 am
Great article - I agree with your take on the Alexander Technique. A good place to learn more about it is their main website at http://alexandertechnique.com There’s a page of resources that contains links to other articles about the AT and spirituality.
August 17th, 2007 at 8:08 am
I really like this. I linked to the True blue Healer site on my blog too, because I know exactly what he is talking about and had the same experience.
I think I have some insights into what you have compiled here, but not in a systematized way, because I have a “learning disability” that’s probably genetic. My Mother and My Mother’s Sister seem to have it too.
For me it was diagnosed as ADHD, with my Aunt its diagnosed as ADD and aspergers. But what it is is that we have a hard time forming unconscious habits. It took me a long time to learn the multiplication tables, and to do math and learn how to drive. I am kind of a “spaz” in a lot of ways. I never brush my teeth the same way twice. I do lots of things slow. I had developmental delays in co-ordination. I was put in a special Gym class. I think I caught up later. I wrestled in High school and college. I think I learned moves slower and because of that wasn’t as good, though. I relied on strength and determination, cardio. but it wasn’t enough to give me a winning record. My coach assumed I never wrestled in highschool, but actually I had.
So a lot of things I do, I do like I am experiencing them for the first time, over and over again. I do have a lot of habits though. But it doesn’t come as easily to me. I do notice that in my interactions with people, even going through a drive through, I am very conscious of the other person and its hard for me to slip into an unconscious role. I notice things about all the people I pass on the street and get overstimulated. So I get nervous in crowds.
I think I have a window into what you are saying. But I think self mastery takes things to a new level and that is where self discipline comes in. So I think its worth it. I am pretty excited about it and applaud you on compling all this stuff and being a guinea pig and leading the way.
August 17th, 2007 at 10:28 am
*fantastic* post, tim– possibly my favorite thing you’ve ever written. exactly along the lines of what i’ve been contemplating for the archon/body map. i’ll likely have a response on my site a bit later today.
August 17th, 2007 at 10:37 am
Haven’t checked in here at all for the past few weeks, but this post and your juggling post are awesome! Made my day.
And hey! guess what… just 2 weeks ago I too started to learn how to juggle… and it has been a wonderful experience. Paying attention to my increasing ability to notice the intricacies of coordination and movement has been a treat. I have wondered how it might be helping other aspects of my life, and now these posts give me tons to think further about.
August 17th, 2007 at 11:12 am
BTW I just wanted to mention how much I also love Ghost Dog– everybody needs to see this film. Repeatedly.
August 17th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
Ted, very interesting you bring up the Asperger’s link: There is an author with Asperger’s I heard on NPR years ago who I enjoyed his writing and what he had to say so much I made him a website:
http://www.jonathans-stories.com/
What you are saying about habit formation and unconscious awareness rings a lot of bells, though I am not at the moment entirely sure how to sort it all out. But there is something there.
PS, I was *never* good at sports as a child, even though I was pretty active. I feel like this had a big impact on my social development, not being able to play along well enough in all the “reindeer games”…
JP: I think this sort of interpretation also partially solves the “myth vs literal” problem people were having about the gnostic symbolism at your workshop: if these things describe proprioceptive awareness, then they are both mythically/psychologically valid AND describe literal processes within the body as well. That seems to be the premise of Sansonese’s Body of Myth, though I might be putting words into his mouth. I have a tendency to do that!
August 17th, 2007 at 12:52 pm
I don’t have aspergers but my Aunt does, I mean I don’t think I do and its not certian exactly what the syndrome is describing exactly. Its the same thing with ADD /ADHD.
But she is really interesting. She has synesthesia also, which in interesting thing in an of itself. To her All notes on the paino have a color and all numbers have a personality.
August 17th, 2007 at 12:53 pm
This may also be loosely connected to John Lash’s interpretation of gnostic myth, but I haven’t gone back and read it in this light:
http://www.metahistory.org/JLLBoucher.php
Also, I found another good “awareness” developing exercise last night. I am going to start compiling these all together pretty soon. They are all very simple. This one consists of putting on the television or a movie and imitating it. Whenever a facial expression appears on any of the actors, mimic that expression. Do the same thing with body movements and postures. It helps develop emotional expressiveness and the ability to more closely feel the connection between physical states and emotional states.
August 17th, 2007 at 12:55 pm
I tend to think that synaesthesia is the natural functional order of the human mind, and that Asperger’s points towards elements of of it as well!
August 17th, 2007 at 12:56 pm
I read the Alexander website and it looks like the Author systemetized some techniques I kind of discovered in more of a haphazard kind of hit or miss way.
I used them to work on my co-ordination, he used them initially to overcome a stuttering problem.
I think its really fascinating. I’d like to sort out a lot of this stuff too. maybe I will try to work on it and write about it also.
August 17th, 2007 at 1:00 pm
I guess Lash thinks the Archons are reptilian Space aliens and that Sophia=Gaia.
A lot of people at PTG seem to hate him. I guess Lash just wrote a book of which Derrick Jensen wrote a forward, so that kind counts against him in my book, but I am still curious about him.
August 17th, 2007 at 1:06 pm
Yeah, that is exactly how I feel about it: which leads me to invest greater “authority” in it, because these are things which can be universally uncovered for and by oneself!
Definitely do so! Want to get as many people cracking this one as possible, as there really seems to be something there: something which naturally belongs to all of us.
One of my next big written projects here will be to connect all of this to circus symbolism, and sort of the forgotten Western traditions of developing proprioceptive awareness. Circus seems to directly connect to yoga, alchemy, bardic traditions, development of the theatre and sacred drama, prophetic traditions, street performers, modern music and pop culture, etc. Will probably be a multi-part series, which I will then connect back to my whole thing about life being a musical…
August 17th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
Yeah, that’s really cool how you are conecting all those things. I am looking foward to it and will contribute what I can.
I guess these similar experiences we’ve had with the preprioception stuff, just goes to show how people should trust their instincts and innate wisdom about things.
August 17th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
Yes, because your body knows everything it needs to know. There’s a passage in the Tao Te Ching about this, but I leant my copy to someone. He says something about how to know the universe you just need to look at your own workings. It is not mere metaphysical speculation but an active command to master your mind and body.
August 17th, 2007 at 1:33 pm
I think Emerson and Krishnamurti said similar things.
August 17th, 2007 at 1:40 pm
i keep meaning to get into emerson. he is going on my short list
August 17th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
another piece of the puzzle?
http://dearcomputer.nl/gir/?q=whirling...dervishes&s=4&b=Rip+Google%21
Google Image Ripper v.0.2.4
August 17th, 2007 at 1:49 pm
Didn’t Steiner create a system of movement as part of anthroposophy?
August 17th, 2007 at 2:52 pm
Tim: I still don’t think Lash quite ‘gets’ it– he’s still very literalist as far as Gnostic myth. His Sophia=Gaia approach is kind of… well… wrong, and it seems to me (based on comments from your interview, for one) that he’d consider anyone unable to achieve this kind of awareness “too stupid.” Not a big fan.
August 17th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
Gurdjieff did a lot with movement, too– it kind of looks like a Sufi/Tai-Chi combo. There’s a big industry surrounding it right now, but I think ol’ Gurdjieff had a lot of good stuff to say.
Here’s a link:
http://www.gurdjieff-movements.net/
August 17th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
One additional comment re Lash: those of us on the PTG who have a problem with his approach don’t have a problem with his theorizing and such. The problem we have is that he tries to pass off his theories as something the historical Gnostics believed, which is quite simply not the case. Essentially, if he took more credit for his own ideas, we’d be far kinder to his approach. As it stands, we just find him kind of intellectually dishonest.
Oh, that and the whole “everybody who doesn’t get this is stupid” thing.
August 17th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
Ya, I think he would laugh at the standardization (and Industrialization) of his “movements”. He knew that this type of thing would only flourish with the fluidity and liberalization of communication in his future so that people could see and understand the diversity outside of their own little isolated communities. Tim and others are now taking this idea, the habituation of non-habituation with resulting drilling down to and then strengthening of individual essence, to levels not previously possible on a larger scale. Perpetual resistance to godmitisation and growth through this freedom. Elimination of rolling resistance by changing the analog spirit shape from pyramid to sphere (that always helps to jog my vision).
The folks that take the old revolutionary ideas then ossify them are just following the same old path with just a modified language surrounding it.
August 17th, 2007 at 3:19 pm
And I owe it all to Chinese balls… Thank You!
August 17th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
Haah. Mixed jeans.
August 17th, 2007 at 3:46 pm
ooooh, that key image you have in your last post just “sunk in”. I love how this stuffl works.
August 17th, 2007 at 6:53 pm
When somebody yells in anger at anyone in my vicinity, there is a little part of me, a demon/archon/subroutine, that feels guilty, that takes on a bit of embarrassed guilt feeling, and feels sorry for me/the one being yelled at. It is a drain of my energy.
It took quite some time of observation to finally witness this, as in me it is very subtle.
August 17th, 2007 at 11:12 pm
Where is the occult in the pop? Your mind never sleeps. Synthesis,individuation,spirit,evolve. Shine forth brave souls!
August 18th, 2007 at 2:29 am
Tim, nice juicy article, with many fine integrations of the microcosm and macrocosm.
Perhaps including the element of “voice” can take you into deeper understanding of this, since you start off mentioning names. Perhaps planetary and celestial names fit into this as well, which may mirror our physiology somehow.
Of course there is much in the canonical scriptures which mention these archons of vain imaginings as well:
2 Corinthians 10:4, “For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds; Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.”
but even the tongue can be our worst enemy which “setteth on fire the course of nature” in its vainity. better to be used for blessing.
those blind spots are killers to, which is another reason, as you say, why we need other people, and community to belong to. If they care, loved ones help us see - or its the blind leading the blind.
diet and breathing of course are influencial, but I think the simple stretching and toning of our bodies are central to health and wholeness. I’ve done Taiji for awhile (Tim I’ll tell you about the Seattle Kung Fu Tai chi club sometime), and it’s interesting how staying on your feet can be just as beneficial to get down on the floor Yoga, and allows for simple self-regulation of the organs, rather than specific manipulation. Not sure what’s best, or if there’s a difference, for the body of the western european, but some is better than none if you have time for that sort of thing (plus push hands is cool - if I ever work up to that, then sword styles too).
Anyone ever take a free yoga class or anything?
How about before sleep trying out progressive relaxation, where you lie prone, feet & hands apart. Starting at one end of the body (heard it done from both ends) sense/feel the bones, sinews and skin of each small area gradually relax while moving up (or down) the body. I go feet, legs, body, hands, arms, neck, head.
Then just breath/pray and sleep.
Each area feels both heavy and light at the same time, and gives a good sense of your material structure and body awareness.
Jesus mentioned the certain breed of unclean spirits which *only* come out with “prayer and fasting.”
Fasting is proper as a type of emptying, and goes for habits as well as just food.
Supplication is likewise a “pouring out.”
Emptying is important for healing. This goes along with your “childs resistance to callousness.” While the child remains clean and innocent due to the constant emptying, releasing, reliance upon the most high, the calloused in contrast, gets tough, and dirty and scarred, by holding on, hunkering down, and not forgiving. The salt gets bitter and the sweet becomes rancid.
And it all comes down to sacrifice, and what are we sacrificing for?
That seems to be the next question. Ya gotta serve somebody …
August 18th, 2007 at 4:54 am
tell me about the club now
August 18th, 2007 at 10:12 am
ok, heh. They have 3 schools in Seattle and teach a very traditional rigorous from of Tiger Crane style kung fu, and a unique Ng style tai chi. The Taiji is time intensive, as you first complete a series of stationary stretches and joint rotations which activate every muscle, then you perform step walking, then you learn the actual form of movement. The trick is that once you are taught the next excercise (or each step of the form) you then go back and start the excercises again from the begining, working back up to where you get taught the next part.
So if you go 2x a week, you must attend for 7 weeks before you even begin to learn the form! Not for the impatient or faint of heart.
But you do get to learn proper form, controlled breathing, and wear the cool black uniform
Fresh delicious green tea is served afterwards. The ID school is like going back in time - you go up creaky wooden stairs to a large old training room surrounded by weaponry and banners. They have the honor of performing the Lion dance every new year.
August 18th, 2007 at 12:05 pm
“There is a reason “Know Thyself” was plastered above the oracle at Delphi: mystical/occult systems are designed to develop self-awareness and thereby self-mastery.”
Actually that is not what was there. The full phrase was, : Know thyself as a human being and not as a God. —- Along with another phrase, : Nothing too much.
The period of the occult in transferring knowledge is gone now. At one time you could be skinned alive or burnt for questioning authority. Now you can post real ideas on the internet without resorting to putting on layers and layers of extraneous information.
The occult served its purpose. Science and straight forward sharing information is a far better method to change society, than relying on outdated, confusing, and scam like concepts, to try and teach any ‘truths’
The occult always promises everything, and often delivers nothing.
Religion is occult personified. Religion is always based on bigotry.
A simple and direct method is generally the best.
August 18th, 2007 at 1:13 pm
Agreed. And?
August 18th, 2007 at 3:00 pm
Skip,
You seem to have a model of reality based on technocracy, and you kind of crudely shoehorn everything into that context, often in a really crude way without really understanding what you are doing. You dont seem to get much beyond categorizing things in really rough boxes.
Its like you don’t really get what Tim is saying other than that its related to the occult somehow, so then you go back and think how the technocracy authors you admire treated the ocult and then you present some canned response of how you think they would have replied.
You seem really stuck in a type algorithm.
Tim actually is taking things that were once considered occult and applying them scientifically. At least that is where he seems to be going.
Try opening your horizons a bit. I mean this in a kind way.
August 18th, 2007 at 3:05 pm
That algorithmic thinking is more or less what everyone does, myself included. Our bodies even get caught up in these algorithms. Breaking that algorithm in order to open our minds up to taking in new data is what this whole thing is all about.
August 18th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
Tim,
I just blogged an entry, constructing a rough outline of how I put this all in context you may want to check it out.
August 18th, 2007 at 4:40 pm
Very succintly put, Ted!
August 18th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
There are a lot of ways to get down town, and down town is different things to different people. Technocracy allows people to go downtown, whichever way they want, except violently.
Contrary to what you think, it is not a belief system. It is not political, or religious.
Technocracy which I did not mention in the last post, is another way. I choose it because it fits with what I know about history, philosophy and religion.
I am familiar with lots of other kinds of ideas.
This may seem crude to you, but it not only seems sophisticated to me, it also, in my mind, is probably the only real alternative that will work.
Thanks for the suggestions though Ted, but I like and value my current horizons.
I have paddled around in the back waters of ideas for many decades.
Science is simple and direct. Philosophy, Religion, Poetry, Art, are all very interesting and fun. A good secular humane system of culture insures personal freedom, and would promote responsibility. Technocracy will do that.
We have to adopt a new system soon. The Adam Smith 18th century economic model, that has its roots in the 22nd B.C. Sumer tradition, with the Hammurabi codes thrown in will no longer work.
Disaster looms. Money no longer functions as a good moderator. It insures that all choices are made wrong, and those wrong choices pile up.
August 18th, 2007 at 10:52 pm
Skip, I’m afraid that I’m about to cut you off from advertising for Technocracy any further. As Sting said, there is no political solution.
August 18th, 2007 at 10:59 pm
Pathocrats always win out, and corrupt any system we form. We don’t need a new system, we need a critical mass of people that can see without the biases that the pathocrats have largely helped foist on us. It has always been this way, I suspect.
Humans are basically good if not yoked too and hypnotized by the psychopaths at the top.
Your technocracy appears to me as another socialist system with more bells and whistles. Again, it might work just fine for us, if people actually were able to make conscious choices, but because we cannot, a Technocracy is subject to the same old subjectivity of mechanicalness.
August 19th, 2007 at 2:49 am
No, we are not getting drawn into another sidelined conversation about this. This is Skip’s whole purpose here. It has no place in a conversation about mastering oneself and consciously re-forming your habits in order to live more consciously. And I want no more of it here. Do not be baited and do not bait.
August 19th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
haven’t been here very long, haven’t read but a few of Skip’s posts, thanks for the pointer.
August 19th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
Sorry to upset the balance of carefully preconceived ideas here, and I attempted to add to the subject in question.
I responded to another poster in regard to the other subject.
August 19th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
I will try and respect your vision for this board going forward Tim, and I hope that includes this bit:
I try not to leave out pondering any part of the world around us, including the state of our cultural institutions, from the sphere of work of the self. Consideration of others/exterior consideration/in as out, out as in and so on does not stop at the individuals with whom we come into contact, but also to those who know those individuals, whom we do not have direct contact with, and outward/word and upword. As you have already mentioned Tim, we still have to function in this world, and that includes trying to understand the social structures to which ourselves and others are tethered and how they might affect us and our loved ones.
I don’t know if we can affect any true change within the overall functioning of this world, or if we are even supposed to try in any physically tangible way. Nevertheless, I think it is useful to at least consider it as an individual and in conversation with others.
I understand that a detailed analysis of this subject is for the most part a distraction here, at least for the present.
September 12th, 2007 at 2:49 pm
[…] I’m going to be using the blog as a sounding board for some explorations into a system of “internal alchemy” inspired by the Gnostic Secret Book of John (Herein referred to as SJn). This is related to recent posts on the Ego, and also owes a great deal to discussions between myself and Tim Boucher. It should be emphasized that I do not think that this is something the Gnostics who wrote and used the SJn historically did. Rather, it’s a modern method of Gnostic theory and praxis based on experiment and syncretism. So remember: inspired by, not created by, the Classical Gnostics. I’ll be quoting from Gnostic texts rather heavily, so I thought I should clarify this. […]
September 18th, 2007 at 6:07 pm
[…] I’d like to continue building upon the excellent work Tim has done with the Archons of the Body from the Secret Book of John. I’m not going to attempt to redo or re-state any of the work he’s done, but if you haven’t read his post yet, this follow-up will make far more sense once you have. Here’s the pertinent section from the Secret Book of John (SJn), which details the creation of Adam by various Archons: “And the powers began: the first one, goodness, created a bone-soul; and the second, foreknowledge, created a sinew-soul; the third, divinity, created a flesh-soul; and the fourth, the lordship, created a marrow-soul; the fifth, kingdom created a blood-soul; the sixth, envy, created a skin-soul; the seventh, understanding, created a hair-soul. And the multitude of the angels attended him and they received from the powers the seven substances of the natural (form) in order to create the proportions of the limbs and the proportion of the rump and the proper working together of each of the parts. […]