Here come some basics… the assumptions that I take to be true. It is growing as the work I’m publishing here grows.
Humanity is addicted to violence, greed and ignorance, and refuses all treatment… so far. (Addiction, in case you don’t remember, means you keep doing things, putting work, focus and money into maintaining your addiction, when it’s obvious to you and everyone concerned that it’s eating your health, happiness and future away and may even destroy you at some point.)
My life has been a study in artful living; I am a senior practitioner of the art of life – my transformations often result in a deep sense of beauty. Sometimes it takes a while as I go through the emotional turmoil that is also often part of it as transformations may be caused by desparation, ennui, a continual nagging feeling etc., or simple understandings, like “I cannot keep on doing this!”
The ego/I is a verb and a token of ownership. When great and beautiful thoughts pass through the wetware that language insists on calling my brain, the process of ego-ing, the prime addiction of humanity since the Age of Enlightenment (at the very least), is trying to turn these thoughts into “my insights”. This addiction, like all addictions, will never satisfy the deep human hunger for true and immediate participation in reality. Rather, complying with the dominant cultures’ constant ego-ing leads to passive and active aggression over what’s mine and what’s yours, keeping scarcity and its concomitant fears intact as foundation of “civilization.”
What we call culture and civilization is really just automated behavior, thinking and feeling; automated because it’s obvious, and “only a fool would question it” because it’s common sense. Great artists find ways to show this to us, by comedy, tragedy, music, 2D and 3D artifacts, film and so on. To get out of behavior that you’ve automated simply find behavior you would prefer, and automate that (I’d rather use the bandwidth of my “reality interface and working memory” — what people call consciousness — for presencing instead of focussing; but hey, you can do whatever you like 🙂
What arrives in consciousness and the way it does is patterned and constellated by the “deep self.” If you’re lucky, like me this morning, you can participate knowingly in configuring of what’s going to be “reality” on waking. I marvel at how brilliant, beautiful and wise unconsciousness or deep self really is; this gives me all the more reason to forever deepen the trust I put in “her.” The deep self is female to me, a man, maybe because she’s mother to my reality, or maybe because of C.G. Jung’s concept of man having an anima and woman an animus.