"Plato imagines a group of people who have lived chained in a cave all of their lives, fac
ing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of the cave entrance, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. According to Plato, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to seeing reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not constitutive of reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners." Quote from Wikipedia.A persons behavior, thoughts and emotions would be the shadows on the cave wall and the philosopher would be a person with enough wisdom to be able to interpret his own shadow silhouette correctly. If we see our lives as an expression of an entity we can examine that expression to understand the entity that is expressing itself.
This widens the concept from a person to an entity and that is one of the changes in my personal thought structure that is a result of using the tools I mentioned to examine the outer and inner worlds of my self. It also points out that anything we feel is important really IS important since it makes us act out our drives directly and therefore provide clear, sharp shadows on the wall that are easy to interpret. This goes for the most humble and insightful person just as well as the most atrocious tormentor out there. If we restrain ourselves in our urge to do things we feel are important we inhibit our expression and refuse ourselves the shadows on the wall that are easy to interpret.
I am sure that most people will identify with the fact that the drives find other outlets if we try to repress them. Repressing something is also performing an action that, hidden from others in thought or acted out in life, distracts our attention from the drives that are burning in our hearts which cause us to act in a neurotic fashion. I feel that this is the birthplace of all unpleasant drama, neurosis, psychosis and basically everything that feels bad in life.
Seen through the eyes of physics it would be degrees of removing oneself from the path of least resistance. I visualize it as a momentum that cannot be stopped, its path can only be diverted and complicated until the false structure that supports our unwillingness to pay attention to the things that drive us finally collapses violently. This is evident in the collective psyche of the entire earth where humans carry out the neurotic and self-destructive behavior of the unhealthy parts of the consciousness of the planet. Many paint a picture where we are a cancer to the earth and even though I think it is correct, I think it is a necessary evil. These and many other related issues are very comprehensibly illustrated in the brilliant new video Kymatica by Daniel Stewart. There is a link on your right.
How do we use this knowledge without swapping our old paradigm for a new one, IE; how do we navigate and observe this sea of information, triangulating our way closer to truth without constructing a new dogma that inhibits growth? How do we approach ideas of oneness without entering a limiting hippie or new age subculture? How do we change other fundamental habits in our lives without reaching for any subculture, political -ism, religion and without believing anything that limits us at all?
I feel that the key lies in choosing the environmental stimuli we expose ourselves to since they dictate how we react, and therefore influence what stimuli we will choose at a junction further into in the future. This coupled with very careful discernment in the things we attach to and identify with will keep us flexible enough to truly enter our experience and learn from it, attaching to the new things that forces us to evolve while detach
ing from the things that are too rigid to support our new more flexible way of perceiving ourselves.
If we escape the discomfort of detaching by watching TV to entertain ourselves we will be dumbed down, manipulated and inhibited in our personal evolution by absorbing false references. We subconsciously use any and all input as a template to discern what is real, so watching TV in stead of having an experience of our own causes us to use the input the TV gives us in stead of using an experience of our own. Another analogy is thinking of everything we pay attention to as the only source of information we have when we try to decide what is real and what is not. Watching TV or trusting the words of your friend is equally bad if you take for granted what is said.
If we eat any industrially produced food we poison ourselves and force our physical manifestation to take care of the poisons in stead of adapting to and expressing the evolution of our non-physical self, thus hindering that evolution. Another perspective of mine on DNA is that if it is the blueprint that governs our entire exestence it has to be in constant flux since it rarely feels the same to be me from day to day. Stating that DNA something static that dictates what I am becomes ridiculous when pitted against the comparison of me as a child since I was very different in all respects.
People that come from a western scientific background normally think of DNA as something that dictates the structure of all life in physical existence and then assume that the physical structure is what causes consciousness. I say that anyone assuming this is making that expression (that way of thinking) a very good example of repression as I mentioned earlier. Any assumption taken without scrutinising how it connects to all other concepts that are held for true is an act of repression. What is repressed in this example is of course that western science cannot explain the process of how consciousness is created, it only establishes that it does exist. The widespread belief that DNA is a pre-set, unchangeable cause of what we are is a total fallacy since what we are is constantly changing.
I say that considering these profound things are at the core of what is important since it is impossible not to do anything. Our doing is a constant in our lives, we cannot cease to express what we are but we can choose to pay attention to it or to ignore it. In Zen we hear the message "Don't do, be.", J. Krishnamurti says "Observe", and it really applies. In my life I have found that there are ups and downs of awareness that can be very frustrating. There are situations where I have to focus on other things than what seems important because I am mauled by the situations I find myself in. I think of the mechanics behind it as if there is a point in linear time where I make a conscious and subconscious decision of what to experience, also called an intent. That intent mingles with earlier intents that are currently manifesting and gives me a bunch of experiences that I respond to. This mix of intents can be harmonious or disharmonious depending on if I am intending things that mix well.
An example of a harmonious mix could be me wanting to experience an intense period of change as one part of the intent, another part being me wanting to share the fruits of that change in connecting closely with someone. When they mix they could manifest as me turning my attention to opportunities for traveling, finding amazing people and a loving connection with someone on my travels. The opportunities would have been there anyway but if I had been caught up in a complicated diversion designed to divert my attention from drives that I am not comfortable with, attaching to the idea of me doing something else, I would not have acted upon them and these synchronicities would have been lost to me. An example of disharmonious intents would be if I while traveling would remain attached to things that I previously used to define my identity and manifested them and the traveling intention at the same time. This would cause me to end up not in separate situations of blissy change and love one evening and in situations that were similar to the life I led before the next night, it would cause a blend of the two. I would for example go find a culture in a country that puts me in situations that I am not used to to provide change but the the situation would also contain things that reminded me of habits I had back home, inhibiting me from opening up to attach to the new things that will allow me to change and evolve.
This happened to me when I spent two weeks in Thailand, waiting
for a visa to India to meet up with some wonderful friends. Prior to going to Thailand I had studied for four months in the City of Kunming in China and had developed a lifestyle there with some routines. Me and my friends went out drinking and partying pretty often (mostly reasonable levels) which made an atmosphere where consuming moderate amounts of alcohol became something that signified this period and something that I identified with. Since the bars were coffee shops as well as restaurants where we ate, studied and mingled during the day they got a living-room-like feel to them and became natural natural hang out spots during the evenings as well. My life there was very static compared to what I expected from traveling in Thailand and India as a backpacker and since hanging out with my friends drinking a few beers had become a routine way to put myself in a situation where I could enjoy myself that was reflected in what I found in Thailand. The intent of maintaining that activity to gain a sense of security in the face of something truly different and unknown landed me on an island called Koh Chang where I waited for the visa procedure to take its course. On the island I found lots of people that were habitually drinking in the evenings but I also found amazing beaches, inspiring people and an awkward flirt with a Thai girl. I learned a lot and got a soft start of what was to come in category of bad hygiene and shoddy living quarters. I also met a very special type of decadence that reflected parts of my inner self at the time. There were a lot of people that were 35-60 that came there to feel free but were so miserable that they drank and took advantage of the greedy tourist-deifying parts of the Thai culture. They did this to the point where they were so morally decadent that they had gotten lost in their own attempts of justifying their behavior that they no longer could find the freedom they came to experience. I was not that corrupt but it still mirrored my process at the time.When I am in a situation that allows me to intuitively focus on important issues and stay aware (because of previous well matched intents that put me in a harmonious situation) I am capable of forming more of those precious intents that are close to the path of least resistance in life. The thing is that this is not something one does in the morning and then has it play out during the day, it is constant. Since these intents are set by our desires, thoughts and emotional processes they are part of the ceaseless doing, they are created all the time. I have found that the New Age-inspired discourse in North America focuses heavily on intents and manifestations, phrasing it as if the intent is something you set and then the act of intending is over, leaving you to reap the harvest of what you've sown. My experience is that it is a continuous process. It simply does not work to put up notes with beautiful words representing intents in your home, burning some energetically cleansing herbs and then go to work, being a bastard to your co-workers. This hypocrisy is not something to be scorned, it is a treasure chest of introspection since it illuminates the processes causing it.
Choosing to engage in areas of knowledge and research that is not commonly accepted in our community is a good way of unlearning the things that have forgotten we gave up for someone else to decide for us. Many fundamental concepts are being presented to us at a young age when we are busy with distractions like understanding how to handle cutlery properly or our first experimentations with social interaction outside our family. Since they are outside the scope of our experience we do what we have to; we trust what we need to in order to function. That means that many important questions gets no answer at all or false answers at best. What is a person? What
are laws and who do they apply to? What is citizenship? If (when) the definition of these questions and answers are provided by the societies of today to children they become the foundation of the identity of that child. If a person identifies with the laws of a nation they are superimposed over his or her intuitive ethics. That means that the person will have constant contradictions in his life. If he follows the law he will go against what he intuitively knows is right. If he goes with his intuition he has to unravel all of the projected morals he has accepted and taken as his own before he is free from guilt. A person that forgets that he has the authority to define himself as he likes can not become anything that reaches outside the confines of his beliefs. If we accept that there are things in our psyche that we do not have conscious knowledge of we also have to accept the possibility that anything we take for granted can be a ruse. This also empowers us in the most extreme way possible by allowing us to define ourselves as anything, to be anything. The way we perceive ourselves and the way it feels to be "me" can be totally altered depending on what concepts we identify with. This is the base of my definition of evolution, the possibility for change of absolutely anything that is a part of what is "me".
Consciously choosing our present is indeed time travel in the most basic meaning of the words. By making an informed, intuitive choice on the course of our lives we are able to set the heading of our life in a direction where we know we will meet circumstances that are beneficial for our growth. That way we consciously influence who we change into in the future. This indicates that it is not necessary to fulfill the classic dream of venturing into the past to change the present since we can change the future by being conscious right now. Would you rather play pinball with or without access to the flippers?
