Psychonauts

In his introduction, Thurman also notes Evans-Wentz's misnomer but calls his translation The Tibetan Book of the Dead. And like the Evans-Wentz version, about half of Thurman's work is taken up with his own commentary and glossary. Part of the commentary is taken up by Thurman's interpretation of the Bar do thos grol, a Nyingma text, in light of the antic theory of the great Geluk master, Tsong kha pa (1357-1419). But much of Thurman's introduction is reminiscent of Evans-Wentz. For Thurman, Tibet was a unique civilization. while the West has devoted itself to the investigation and conquest of the material world and outer space, Tibet was an inwardly directed society the produced generations of mystical adepts who studied spiritual technologies and became "Inner world adventurers of the highest daring" he calls them psychonauts" who "personally voyage to the furthest frontiers of the universe which their society deemed vital to explore: the inner frontiers of consciousness itself, in all its transformations of life and beyond death." As a product of this society, The Tibetan Book of the Dead is not a Buddhist approach to death and dying but a scientific description of the death process, derived from the research of Psychonauts. The Tibetan views of death are no more or less religious than modern Western views on the structure of the solar system. In the preface of the third edition, Evans-Wentz had written that the book "reveals to the people of the Occident a science of death and rebirth such as only the peoples of the Orient have heretofore known"

In the 1990 film Jacob's Ladder, a Vietnam Veteran experiences disturbing hallucinations, and the viewer, like the protagonist, is unable to distinguish reality from illusion. In the end, it is revealed that the entire film has been the visions of an American soldier in Vietnam as he dies on the operating table. He is finally led to a light be a child. The director Adrian Lyne explained in interviews that the film had been inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

(p251-252) The Tibetan Book of The Dead ~ Afterword: Psychonauts
 — with Donald S. Lopez Jr

Depression, the secret we share

The Colossus (painting)

"The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep away from me in that moment." In a talk equal parts eloquent and devastating, writer Andrew Solomon takes you to the darkest corners of his mind during the years he battled depression. That led him to an eye-opening journey across the world to interview others with depression — only to discover that, to his surprise, the more he talked, the more people wanted to tell their own stories. (Filmed at TEDxMet.)

Andrew Solomon: Depression, the secret we share

Every Seven Years You Change

ARE you the same person now that you were fifteen years ago? In fact, are you the same person you were just seven years ago? Most of us have heard the old saying that every cell in the body is changed over a period of seven years; but recent investigation has uncovered facts of far more significance to us as human beings. This concerns the emotional, physical and mental changes that seem to occur in approximate seven-year intervals. Of course there are no fixed boundaries and so one may achieve these levels of maturity at any period of our life. so what follows are simply the general changes you may find.

Rudolph Steiner, the great teacher of Anthroposophy said that the seven-year cycles continue throughout life, and are of the utmost importance to doctors, teachers, psychiatrists and the social sciences. Without some smattering of these changes it is difficult for anyone to understand the relationship of any given individual with his or her environment. So I have tried to summarise what Steiner and others have said about the cycles.

Before the definition is started, I feel it is important to say that as humans, in fact as any life form, we are creatures of great polarities. Or as the philosopher Erwin Goodenough said, “A book on love, loyalty or justice would gain little but pedantry by starting out with a concise definition of the term. Only as we describe the various conflicting elements associated with such words can we finally arrive at a meaning that includes these complexities; for important matters we understand, not as we simplify, but as we tolerate the paradoxical.”

One of the great paradoxes of our lives are that we constantly go through such enormous such massive changes every day. Daily we pass through an extraordinary change that we often take so much for granted we miss the wonder of it. The change occurs between sleeping and waking. For most of us being awake is when we most fully feel ourselves. Compared with this sleeping is a period during which we lose any focused awareness of being an individual, and we sink into what is generally called unconsciousness — the lack of personal awareness.

This swing between waking and sleeping can be seen as the extremes within the possibilities of our experience. Sleeping and waking are the polarities, the North and South Poles of what we can confront. In quite a real sense we can say there is nothing beyond what is included in those polarities. But there is an enormous difference between waking experience and the experience of dreamless sleep. Yes, one can have an experience of what is considered deep unconsciousness. In waking we have a sensation of time, of being in a locality, of separateness and even isolation. But at the other end of that polarity we have a sense of timelessness and non-locality. What was a sense of self merges into an ocean of awareness. See Levels of Awareness in Sleeping and Waking.

http://dreamhawk.com/body-and-mind/every-seven-years-you-change/

"If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we aren't really living."
~ Gail Sheehy

Every numeral of the series of numbers is associated with some interesting facts. The repeating nature of a certain number in different spheres of life can be a coincidence or simply a wonder! What do you think? Read on to know some interesting facts about the number seven.

Limitations of Cleverness

"Cleverness, after all, has its limitations. Its mechanical judgments and clever remarks tend to prove inaccurate with passing time, because it doesn't look very deeply into things to begin with. It has to change its opinions later on because of what it didn't see when it was forming them. The thing that makes someone truly different -- unique, in fact -- is something that Cleverness cannot really understand."
~ The Tao of Pooh

Book Smarts vs. Street Smarts

"Knowledge and Experience do not necessarily speak the same language. Knowledge that comes from experience is more valuable than the knowledge that doesn't. There is more to knowing than just being correct."
~ the Tao of Pooh

It's the Little Things That Count

“A Brain can do all kinds of things, but the things that it can do are not the most important things. Abstract cleverness of mind only separates the thinker from the world of reality, and that world, the Forest of Real Life, is in a desperate condition now because of too many who think too much and care too little.”
~ The Tao of Pooh

Full Circle

Engaging the flow

The Eighth Insight is about using energy in a new way when relating to people in general. It talks about how humans will eventually learn to relate to each other, such as how to project energy to others and how to avoid addictions to people. It warns against your spiritual growth being stopped when you become addicted to another person. 

When one first learns to be clear and to engage one’s evolution, any of us can be stopped, suddenly, by an addiction to another person. the idea of an addiction explains why power struggles arise in romantic relationships. We've always wondered what causes the bliss and euphoria of love to end, to suddenly turn into conflict, and now we know. It is a result of the flow of energy between the individuals involved. When love first happens, the two individuals are giving each other energy unconsciously and both people feel buoyant and elated. That’s the incredible high we all call being “in love.” Unfortunately, once they expect this feeling to come from the other person, they cut themselves off from the energy in the universe and begin to rely even more on the energy from each other—only now there doesn't seem to be enough, so they stop giving each other energy and fall back into their dramas in an attempt to control each other and force the other’s energy their way. At this point, the relationship degenerates into the usual power struggle.

Our susceptibility to this kind of addiction can be described psychologically. The reason we can become addicted to someone of the opposite sex is that we've yet to access this opposite sex energy ourselves. The mystical energy that we can tap as an inner source is both male and female. We can eventually open up to it, but when we first begin to evolve, we have to be careful. The integration process takes some time. If we connect prematurely with a human source for our female or male energy, we block the universal supply. When we first begin to evolve, we automatically begin to receive our opposite-sex energy. It comes in naturally from the energy in the universe. But we must be careful because if another person comes along who offers this energy directly we can cut ourselves off from the true source… and regress. Until we learn how to avoid this situation, we are walking around like a circle half complete. You know, we look like the letter C. We are very susceptible to a person of the opposite sex, some other circle half complete, coming up and joining with us—completing the circle that way—and giving us a burst of euphoria and energy that feels like the wholeness that a full connection with the universe produces. In reality, we have only joined up with another person who is looking for their other half on the outside too. This is a classic co-dependent relationship and that it has built-in problems that begin to arise immediately. The problem with this completed person, this O, that both people think they have reached, is that it has taken two people to make this one whole person, one supplying the female energy and one supplying the male. This one whole person consequently has two heads or egos. Both people want to run this whole person they have created and so, just as in childhood, both people want to command the other, as if the other were themselves. This kind of illusion of completeness always breaks down into a power struggle. In the end, each person must take the other for granted and even invalidate them so that they can lead this whole self in the direction they want to go. But of course, that doesn't work, at least not anymore. Perhaps in the past, one of the partners was willing to submit themselves to the other—usually the woman, sometimes the man. But we are waking up now. No one wants to be subservient to anyone else any longer. We can still have romance, but first we have to complete the circle on our own. We have to stabilize our channel with the universe. That takes time, but afterward, we are never susceptible to this problem again and we can have what is called a higher relationship. When we connect romantically with another whole person after that, we create a super-person… But it never pulls us from the path of our individual evolution.

So how do we avoid these encounters? By resisting the ‘love at first sight’ feeling for a while, by learning to have platonic relationships with members of the opposite sex. But remember the process. You must have these relationships only with people who will reveal themselves, telling you how and why they are doing what they are doing. By understanding who these opposite-sexed friends really are on the inside, one breaks past one’s own fantasy projection about that gender, and that releases us to connect again with the universe. Remember that this is not easy, especially if one has to break away from a current co-dependent relationship. It is a real pulling apart of energy. It hurts. But it must be done. Co-dependence is not some new malady some of us have. We’re all co-dependent, and we’re all growing out of it now. The idea is to begin to experience that sense of well-being and euphoria experienced in the first moment of a co-dependent relationship when you are alone. You get to have him or her on the inside. After that, you evolve forward and can find that special romantic relationship that really fits you.
~ The Celestine Prophecy