Category: Uncategorized

 

No words.

 

 

The unconscious is a “trickster,” the ultimate illusionist, navigating the demands of our inner and outer worlds, negotiating our strengths and limitations to impact our perception, our understanding, our choices.  Most of what we consciously know is sourced and bent from the shadows, casting figures in the “out there” of our world … representing unwanted vulnerability, contradictions, secrets, and fears…. the unknown.  Kept in the darkness or “out there,” we become the Sisyphean boulder, death itself, lost in futility and affliction without a will of our own, an aim outside of the command “repeat.” If we are lucky, we fall with adequate accessible consciousness in our surroundings and….wake up.

If you will, take a moment to really listen to the lyrics within the rhythm of Cohen’s music, his pitch, his tone …

Seemed the better way
When first I heard him speak
Now it’s much too late
To turn the other cheek

Sounded like the truth
Seemed the better way
Sounded like the truth
But it’s not the truth today

I wonder what it was
I wonder what it meant
First he touched on love
Then he touched on death

Sounded like the truth
Seemed the better way
Sounded like the truth
But it’s not the truth today

I better hold my tongue
I better take my place
Lift this glass of blood
Try to say the grace

Seemed the better way
When first I heard him speak
But now…

Cohen is inviting us….into the darkness, the unconscious.

A mass projection (illusion) is a presumption that we are already conscious, able to hold love, death, their opposites and all that is in between, all that is life.  We largely presume we are awake with free will, know what we are doing and where we are going.  When we actively check this presumption against the data it fails, over and over, across method and time.  The projection, nevertheless, thrives in personal and mass moral relativism and certainty, primal processes which find objectivity offensive, false, incomprehensible, wrong.  At times we may catch shimmering reflections of the boulder against our cheek, the summit, or perhaps experience the thunderous sound of the descent of our boulder to where we began a million times before.  Mirrors (people, memories, systems, facts), however, reflecting back too much unwanted truth are too often dismissed, thrown away or shattered …  out of necessity, until the tools are acquired.

The work of objectivity involves the stuff of patience, the capacity to suspend certainty while holding the tension of opposing energies.  We are not born with such a capacity, nor can we learn it by intellect alone through a book or academic study.  Our attention is easily redirected or confused, our pride wounded, our views narrowed by ignorance, our senses full or maxed out, our paradigm fused to the consciousness of our family of origin.  The basic and essential need for safety and control are well maintained by routine and habit that support what we know and keep at bay what we do not want to know.  The practice of building equanimity in the face of uncertainty, adversity, and change is the alternative path.

The song “It Seemed the Better Way” is from Cohen’s album You Want It Darker.  It goes against our grain to “want it darker,” like the solution to Chinese handcuffs.  It goes against our instincts that we gain life from loss, failure, sacrifice, and confrontations with our mortality.  Together and alone, each teaches us about surrender and grows our patience, understanding, humility, truthfulness, courage, and compassion.

Into the darkness…we find the questions…we break open to true light, love, and life.

Conscious femininity is our unique feminine essence observed.  In men and women, she both lies in waiting and seeks our full attention.  Across language, culture, and time, she speaks to us through symbols, myth, music, parables, and the poetics of word, body, and nature.  She is the source of engaged presence, relatedness,  spaciousness, love, and truth.

There are points in our lives where we might feel her call us to go deeper, to know her more intimately.  For most, she is easy to ignore amidst the wall of clamour or numbing in our lives.  For some, she is closer to consciousness and carries an urgency to be known, to be heard, to be held in reverence.  An experience of affliction, often described as “feeling stuck” or “broken,” is her signature invitation to open ourselves to a deeper dimension, to learn a method for accessing and knowing our symbolic lives and spiritual needs with intention, to coming toward realizing free will.  The invitation may take the form of boredom, loss of energy, loss of a sustainable creative vision, aimlessness, indecisiveness, hopelessness, helplessness, anxiety, powerlessness, or disillusionment.  The invitation calls us into knowing ourselves, our illusions, our gifts, our capacity for self-restraint and real self-direction with accountability.   Every hero/heroine declines the invitation numerous times with the proclamation that he/she is not fit for the task.  The call, nevertheless, persists and grows stronger.  From this experience, a spiritual or contemplative practice for restoration and renewal is revealed and sustainable.

Conscious femininity pre-exists our imagination and certainly all that we believe to be free will.  She lies within, in all of us, seeking to be…engaged, to enliven our being.  Until we consciously seek her out through an organized practice, relate to her, and learn her language of the heart, our relationship with her and all that she reveals remains weak, unstable, and undecipherable.  She maintains a subordinate position and is experienced as mysteriously and frustratingly elusive, if not unreal or foregone.  Efforts to imitate or identify with her are empty and futile.  She is not an identity, an achievement, or something we can possess or control.

Knowing ourselves requires knowing her — with heart, mind, and body.  She is the part of us that knows what we really want, the part of us that asks deep unifying questions that unbind us from our illusions.  She shows what lies beyond the mask of our ego, the habits of our conditioning. She gifts us with impressions that excite new understandings, new questions, and new trajectories.  She is life itself.

 

 

Intentional observing gives way to a special kind of remembering.  This remembering is an opening penetrated with reverence or exhausted surrender.  It rushes in like an unexpected wave…  transforming, protecting, and guiding the surfer through the pipeline of her life to the shore where she begins again, invigorated with all the possibilities that lie in waiting.  No, she is not reminiscing.  No, she is not revisiting a timeline of events.  She is remembering something that is essentially and uniquely her yet she has never known: the third.

Kairos is a space within Chronos time. It lies between the tics of the clock. It is circular, not linear. It is an experience, not an outcome. It cannot be measured. It cannot be controlled. It can only be entered. Kairos is the space of the Transpersonal, intangible…. the space where the soul gives birth… to awareness, to Truth, to Life. This space is Holy. It is not ours. This space is Holy, without desire. Beyond desire. This Holy Space without desire is the breath of God. Inside the breath of God we can be still from all reaching, stretching, longing, trying, pushing, predicting, analyzing, wishing, craving, pulling, wanting, clinging, thinking, reacting. Outside. Outside. Outside……..Fear. Inside Imagination. Inside Potential. Inside Love. Inside Life. Kairos-centered coaching is an invitation to women from all backgrounds and faiths into a safe contemplative space that provides them with an opportunity to observe and listen for sacred moments, Kairos moments, in their lives. The ability to listen for Kairos moments is the way for finding our authentic centers and building purpose-driven lives.

 

 

and when you get your cue…you say your line.”

 

Beneath the scripts left by others long ago, read over and over in our daily lives and deeply intertwined, there is an ache, a restlessness, moving us toward unchartered, fresh territory. We wonder, wander, stumble and fall in the grand labyrinth of life in search of the feeling of awe that reveals we are unique, we are here, and we are ready for the cue ……to say our line.

“Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.”

Yesterday I watched Savannah interview Christopher Wylie on the Today Show (see https://www.today.com/video/cambridge-analytica-whistleblower-says-the-company-worked-with-trump-campaign-strategist-and-steve-bannon-1189326915651).  As he  described the company Cambridge Analytica and explained the “ideal of informational dominance” it brought home the global battle with darkness that we are facing today.  He explained:

“Cambridge Analytica was founded on misappropriated data….I think what is really    important for people to understand is that Cambridge Analytica was birthed out of a  company called SCL Group which is a military contractor based in London.  This          data was used to create profiling algorithms that would allow us to explore mental      vulnerabilities of people and map out ways to inject information into different streams or channels of content online so that people started to see things all over the place that may or may not have been true.  This is a company that took fake news to the next level by powering it with algorithms.”

“You have to understand that this is based on an ideal called informational dominance which is the idea that if you can capture every channel around a person and inject content around them, you can change their perception of what is actually happening.  The fundamental difference between what Cambridge Analytica has done and standard political messaging is that when I show you an ad for a candidate it says, “Hi, I’m so and so and I approve this message.”  It is apparent that they are seeing political messaging.  It is apparent that they are trying to be convinced.  What Cambridge Analytica does is works on creating a web of disinformation online so people go down a rabbit hole of clicking on blogs, websites, etc. that make them think that certain things are happening that may not be.”

When asked if he had a political agenda he replied, “I think we need to step back for a second and de-politicize this because this is about the safety of Americans and the integrity of the American democratic process.  This data was misapproriated and mishandled by this company and I think they need to be investigated for that.” 

The “ideal” of informational dominance is subconsciously hijacking will, psychologically controlling behavior on a global scale.  We might assume that Wylie is initiating a global outrage, a global awareness to set off our current stand up, organize and march paradigm that is creating change.  Activism has awakened and now is a ripe time for people to speak up and speak out against what typically we denied, ignored, or adapted to because there was too much natural information dominance normalizing undercurrents of immorality, hate, and dehumanization.  The question is, “What are we willing to sacrifice?”  Change always requires real sacrifice.  Would we sacrifice social media?

We need to awaken or stay awake!  We are now in an age where we can collectively be held hostage to a War of the Worlds algorithm operating as an undercurrent in our subconscious awareness.  If I heard myself say this two years ago I would think I had gone mad.  In this consumerist society, however, we are now over consuming information, consciously and unconsciously.  The algorithm KNOWS how to engage addictive consumption of information and bring us down rabbit holes of misinformation and complex manipulation.  It knows how to create mass think, mass delusion, mass confusion, mass terror.

In 2014 Elon Musk  (https://www.techemergence.com/elon-musk-on-the-dangers-of-ai-a-catalogue-of-his-statements/)  declared “artificial intelligence (AI) as the most serious threat to the survival of the human race” and guessed that “our biggest existential threat” is AI.  Four years later we learn that Cambridge Analytica allegedly used information dominance to control what people believed and how people voted to undercut the integrity of our democratic process.  Does this constitute enough of a crisis amidst the current political atmosphere?   “I’m increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish,” said Musk.  He goes on to say,  “With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like – yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon. Doesn’t work out,” said Musk.

October 24, 2014 – MIT’s AeroAstro 1914-2014 Centennial Symposium