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Enlightenment goes to the movies.
I have discussed the connection between spiritual awakening, the techniques involved, and their very obvious connection with the enervation of the nervous system, as is enhanced by Wim Hof’s technique, Gregorian chanting, Qi Gong, and Tai Chi, and the real clincher, pure blind faith, which somehow has the defensive ability to overcome anything, even if it is not necessarily the best forward motivator of positive action when energy sources are minimal.
I will continue to the discussion of the connection between spirituality and the empowerment of the nervous system, and the positive effect that has on mental and physical health, but today I wish to address popular culture. What we consider to be dry and dusty religion was once one of the dominant forms of popular culture. It has fallen by the wayside in favour of glitz and glamour in the modern world, but the limited view of the average non enlightened person is that religion is safe from sin, and the material world is largely free from God. Sadly the former is not true, and happily the latter is even less true.
Just as the stories from the Bible can have allegorical power to influence the energies in a situation, so can the stories from popular culture. Wisely we do not consider this to be a source of God’s wisdom, otherwise, we would inevitably get very confused, especially during Jeremy Kyle’s television show. When there is a strong narrative to a published story, that has been inspired by a solid power of positivity, then it is able to carry as much gravitas as a powerful story from the Bible.
There are movies out there which will change a person. Certain Will Smith movies are incredibly inspiring, and when you are sensitive to the influence of what we see around us, they will inevitably lead you to become a better person.
I do not wish to discuss our ability to communicate with our inner self through manipulation of our perceptions, and the model we build from their data, that is a lot too esoteric before the reader has grown strong, because it is a sure route to insanity if the reader is weak.
However, aside from the fact that all we see is a mirror of our inner thought processes, so that we are always in direct, though clouded communication with our inner self, the television can communicate direct and useful messages, that are not going to twist your melon. In other words, the simple techniques you can use for enlivening the power within your nervous system are re-iterated again and again on television, and in movies. Every artistic creator of a movie or show, wants the audience to feel better when they go away, unless they are motivated by dark intentions anyway. This is usually delivered pretty directly by creating an emotional flow to the show, that builds to a peak, and finishes on a spectacular finale, or some such similar method.
There are others, who are far more literal, and will both intentionally and unintentionally include scenes that will show you how to enable your inner nervous system to flair up to its full potential. Often these scenes are not advisable to be tried at home, and very probably are never even contemplated by most people. Nevertheless they will be done because people are stupid. People should know there are gradual manners in which the same effect can be created, and often the gradual manners, as well as being safer, are also going to be longer lasting, and will have built up a discipline, which will take you to full enervation far more easily, and far more regularly and often, with far less discomfort.
An obvious scene that springs to mind is the scene from Fight Club, where Tyler Durden is attempting to awaken the mind of the narrator. He does this by pouring lye onto the narrator’s hand. Lye is a very strong alkali, which for the purposes of putting on hands, means it is as pleasant as a very strong acid. For the purposes of the narrative, the solution to lye burning into the skin is to neutralise the alkali, by balancing the PH by adding acid, specifically vinegar, acetic acid. This is a Yin Yang attempt at realisation. Water is the middle way with a neutral PH, so will not neutralise the alkali. The solution to the burning is to have faith that you will be safe if you pour acid over your hand. Ordinarily this is counter intuitive, so it has to break past that fear in the mind, to make it so, and that is the only way to escape the scene without the alkali burning away the skin.
Of course, the yin yang concept, and the nature of balance and harmony are great topics for meditation, but the moment of break through for a mind is not something that is attained intellectually. It is something that happens by surprise, during the meditation. It happens by surprise, at that point when the nervous system’s inner power, is at a peak, just when the understanding is broken. We have discussed that inner power is a result of enervation of the nervous system, which can be brought on by ice baths, chilli, bad tastes, sudden surprises, and having one’s nerve endings burned away by alkali. So as Tyler presented the contradiction of the yin yang alkali acid dichotomy, balance and harmony, he also created the intense peak in sensation that would cause the higher functioning cap of the narrator to just be turned off, by the sheer intense sensation of massive amounts of agonising data incoming from the burning hands. This prevents the moment of understanding from being shattered by the noisy monkey mind.
This sort of thing is the typical kind of ordeal that is seen again and again in primitive cultures, and as the culmination of a long period of training, can be a method of proving oneself, and overcoming one’s weaknesses. A similar scene is shown at the beginning of the television show Kung Fu. David Carradine’s character, Caine, must go through a process to leave the monastery. First he must grow so fast, and smoothly interconnected with the tao energy, that he can take a pebble from the hand of his master. As the years go on, and he grows and develops his inner energy, he becomes able to dodge thrown spears, and eventually develops the swiftness of inner energy that he can step ahead of his master, and snatch the pebble.
Once he is ready, he may leave the monastery, but the final barrier is one that is designed to push the enervation of his nervous system to a limit, that if it is bypassed will be the proof, and the making of his power. It will also open the door.
I mean the door to get out of the monastery, though if you wish to consider it the door through which light pours in through the top or your head, that works too.
He must lift a burning hot cauldron full of burning coals, and move it to open the door. The catch is that it must be lifted by holding it with only his naked wrists, pressed against the symbol of a dragon and a tiger that are on either side of the cauldron. As he lifts, the pressure of these two symbols on his wrists, must be intense because the cauldron if it was real, would have to weigh in excess of 50 kilos, which is burning hot.
As such, the pressure and heat from the dragon and tiger, will be sending feelings of such intensity to the brain, that most people would just pass out from the intensity. After Caine’s many years of training, he is able to lift the cauldron, and the mark of the dragon and tiger are burned into his wrists, as a lifelong testament to his achievement in overcoming his mind. From this intense heat, he steps out of the monastery into the snow of the mountains, as he walks barefoot into his new world.
These are two very different instances. Caine has received many years of training, so will already have assimilated a lot of power and understanding. The final ordeal is more of a formality for him. He is well prepared for it, and it might not even be that decisive in determining his final power level, as he is already quite powerful. For the narrator in Fight Club, the situation may have some of the same elements, but it is a sudden peak activity, any realisations that are obtained due to the massive burst of nervous energy that would flood the brain and nervous system will be hard to retain, as the return to reality will be a lot sharper than it would be for someone like Caine who was well prepared, and used to this sort of ordeal. Tyler points out that this moment is now ground floor, rock bottom, so it is portrayed in an opposing manner to Caine’s becoming of something more. It is not the attainment of everything, it is the realisation of nothing.
In more practical consideration of a normal secular life, examples of enlightening activity are often shown by those who have incredibly powerful nervous systems for physical reasons. The obvious example being Terry Crews. Terry has a huge range of techniques for achieving optimal physical and mental performance, and I am certain some of the hilarious scenarios he is shown in on television have to be inspired by that. When he is shown exercising, it is always to a hilarious extreme that normal people wouldn’t think of as a work out, so much as a demonstration of superhuman ability. The scene that comes to mind as a method for nervous system enervation, is one from Brooklyn 99, when Terry is trying to help Amy quit smoking, and he suggests resetting the brain with icy water. This is very clearly connected to the theory that is presented in the Wim Hof method. The intensity of the cold suddenly enveloping the skull has various physiological effects on the brain. My favourite part of the working day used to be 9AM, when having done the fastest, most intense, and physical part of my job, I had reached a point where I had to plunge my head into the cold water from the cold tap, until I felt chilled and calm again, so that I could begin for the next two hour stretch. Looking back on that time from two decades in the future, I would credit that daily practice with the fact that I am still alive. I was pushing myself so hard that it was after I stopped doing that particular job, and following that practice, that my health originally took a downward dive.
The principle, as described in my post on overcoming, though in a rather more esoteric framework, is shown again and again in movies involving superhero origin stories. They may use unusual physical concepts that might not apply in daily life, but the becoming of the superhero has to be modeled on the same recognisable struggle, or jihad that we all have to go through in our transformation from weedy people, into carriers of a bright and powerful, fully charged nervous system. We each go through these struggles in ways of our own choosing.
Some of us act out our development of self in a high powered business environment, where all the symbolism of our being is mighty, and powerful. It is a good narrative to live by. It gives you an inner bearing that enables you to stand up straight, and feel powerful. A sharp suit adds to the illusion. On Sunday you are just a regular guy doing regular guy stuff, but on Monday, the suit comes out, and it is an exoskeleton that projects to the world that you mean business, and often it is business that is the business you mean.
Some of us act out our development by playing the role of the parent, nurturing and creating new life, making someone who will enhance the world, and create a tree of offspring who will go on to make the world a better place, that would be unrecognisable to people from less happy times.
These are both radically different roles, and they are both potentially also roles that could belong to characters in a show or a film. They both have in common the fact that they are the role of the hero of the story.
Contrast this with the show about the guy who really is not cut out for business. His suit is not sharp, it is shabby and crumpled. He doesn’t have the power to do his job, why did he ever choose this path? Or the parent, who never intended to be bringing up a child by themselves, and they feel so tired, and just want another drink. Those are the same people, but they are also the complete opposite of the same people. Their story has changed, the energy that those characters have running through their spinal column, and invigorating their nervous system, brain, and body, is in short supply. Those are tales in decline.
The nature of many movies, whether they contain ideas that are clearly based in morality or not, is to show the viewer a low, then create a connection to that low, via emotional resonance, and then carry the viewer from that point of low, to a peak of experience, that will have allowed the inner nervous system of the viewer to recognise a sympathy with the progression of the story, and thereby to create within the nervous system, the self same progression of change that is being shown by the story. The more closely you are able to identify with the story, and with the hero, the more you will feel the intensity of that progression. If you are a theatrical actor, I am told that it can be quite transformative.
In general this effect is not too strong. The human race has adapted to the increasing presence of visual story telling very easily. We have been used to having an imagination for many thousands of years. There are some who are more susceptible though, and may even have trouble working out where mental reality and spiritual reality are divided from material reality for various perceptual purposes. Though to be fair, that does to a degree apply to almost everyone, but most people have coping mechanisms that include not noticing, and not caring.
Of course an increased identification with the plot can be induced by increasing the nervous energy flooding up the spinal column, and through the brain. When this is done, the heightened neural plasticity caused by the fireworks of myriad lateral connections will allow the suggestibility that will enable the psychological lessons from the symbolic representation of reality on the screen, to be more readily programmed into the brain. In other words, you will find that increasing the level of energy that is running through the system will create an effect whereby the realism of the show will become far more intense, and will become as gripping and exciting for you, as it would if you were a two year old engrossed in cartoons. That is the effect of the idea of 4D cinema. Increase the realism by increasing the stimulation for the nervous system.
I’m fairly certain I did say I wasn’t going to be going down this avenue a couple of thousand words ago.
Essentially, the difference between a story in the Bible, and the same story not in the Bible, with different character names, and a funny title, made into a buddy movie, is based upon the intrinsic presence of the sensation of importance and gravity. The Bible is by definition, the word. It is the word of God, made tangible. This is so, because this is the psychology of how the Bible works. It is in its very essence as close as most people will come to touching the intensity of absolute power, while they are alive. For the Bible to not be that, would be like giving someone a toy for Christmas that runs on AA batteries, but in a world where they do not sell AA batteries.
In other words, if the Bible is not the word of God, then the world in which that is the case, is the world of the material, and it is not the world of the spirit. That is an option that the subconscious does allow. The only problem is, that this removes a major positive factor that is a huge invigorator of the nervous system. That needs to be replaced with something else of equivalent psychological power. The Koran is good, as is the Torah. However if you are relying on any mythology that does not include the beneficial influence of the concept of a universal God, that has unlimited omnipotency, then I am not sure how well that will hold up in the more trying of situations, where the mind is in danger of losing itself.
I know a lot of people can feel a great sense of empowerment if they get a brand new set of really cool golf clubs. I am not sure how helpful that can be in the throes of death, as your bloodstream PH is heading into nasty territory of severe oxygen depletion, and panic is beginning to set in. Those with a powerful faith in God will ride through these moments of mortal terror without issue, but if your most powerful totem is a Ferrari, or a penthouse, I am not sure how comforting that is going to be as the life drains gradually from your brain. I suppose if you have had the forethought to ensure that you bought magic golf clubs, then you could probably enjoy yourself beating off hordes of the imagined demons of your unconscious. A magic Ferrari could perhaps help you escape and go to somewhere in the brain that isn’t currently dying as quickly as the area full of imaginary demons. A magic penthouse could be used as a fortress to ride out death in style until the final moments.
Who can afford magic golf clubs though? Those things must be even more expensive than regular golf clubs.
The irony is that the kind of magic that does support someone in their last moments of life is dependent upon what kind of person you are. If you have led a life where transactions have been incredibly important, then the psychological support you receive from any symbolic system, or magic, will be valued according to that transactional mind set. As such, your psychology will have become so deeply ingrained with the concept that value is transactional, that if you have not paid adequately, you will have the subconscious belief that your side of the transaction has not been supplied, and therefore you may not benefit from the symbolic support, because you are not worthy.
So basically, if you want magic golf clubs that work, then you are going to pay through the nose.
A top tip is that if you have a young child who loves you, then if they paint you a set of magic golf clubs that you then put in a place of power like the fridge door for many years, then that particular set of golf clubs will hold far greater power for destroying the undead hordes, and you paid for it with love. It didn’t even carry the financial transaction of buying a new driver.
While you are fully alive, final judgement is not a worrying prospect because you know that worthiness is just a load of old superstitious twaddle, and that the reality is we have a right to whatever happiness and joy that comes to us, because it is our job to grow happiness and joy for future generations. This is of course utterly true, if you do not have a transactional mind set. The problem is that as the brain dies away, and you get left with less and less conscious matter, you are gradually reduced to the kind of primordial understandings of existence we originally had in the days before we evolved higher functioning thinking. We become stupider basically. It is inevitable when your brain is literally dying at high speed.
On the way to the absolute loss of all conscious knowledge, there is inevitably going to be a point where your conscious ideas about freedom from karma, and the joy of all things, and the beauty of heaven will cease to exist. As this happens, and you head into the space of mind that is created when only the innermost core of feeling exists, you are entering the part of the mind that is just pure experience. This is where heaven and hell become detached from conceptions such as the imagery we create to describe them. At a certain point, you are going to be faced with a choice at which you will be allowed to let go of the idea of pain and misery. This is inevitable, the final awareness of life, is the letting go of it, when all we see is pure bliss because we are not attached to materiality any more. What happens from that point steps outside the realms of psychology, and into the realms of philosophy, at least until such time as the two disciplines merge into one. I shan’t address that for now.
The point of acceptance of bliss, can come sooner or later. In the mind of someone who is positively oriented by having right intention as a central aspect of personality, or someone who is protected by unshakeable faith, most of the death experience will be along the lines of blissful experience. The hiccups will seem like the same nature of tribulations they had to overcome, to originally give them their faith, or right intention. The mind of the transactional individual, (by which I suppose I must mean someone who is governed by karma), they get to this point where they know nothing, and they see bliss and pain. Obviously they want bliss, but the mind is a tricky cove, and how the brain is trained, will govern the choices the subconscious makes in the absence of the conscious mind.
As such, the transactional mind, which has been training itself throughout its entire life to make transactions, considers this to be a transactional moment. Of course this is ludicrous. This is not a transactional moment. You are already dead. Just enjoy it. If you are transactional you can’t enjoy it though, because that is an emotional tangle. The enlightened master is basking in the last few seconds before the brain turns off. Part of every person is that enlightened master, waiting at the very end of the mind for when you have given up everything. For most people though, they are busy identifying with the identity they spent a whole life time crafting. They may have lost all its memories, but they still retain the transactional training that is ingrained at the deepest levels of personality.
Pint of milk 50p.
Loaf of bread £2.
Car £20000.
House £500000.
The subconscious no longer knows what any of these things are, but it is aware that at the present moment, the most valuable thing in the world is bliss. That enlightened master part of the mind is currently sitting in bliss watching you panic. The master sips a margerita, interested in when you will eventually realise everything is okay, and there is a cool beer in the fridge when you are finished.
The subconscious is busy tallying up whether it can afford bliss. If bliss is that good, then it must be expensive, but you have no money. Of course you have no money, you are dead. You are right up that creek without a load of money. The transactional mind, then thinks, perhaps I paid ahead of time. Perhaps I paid for bliss in my life. It cannot remember your life though, because your brain is dying. All it can remember is, “how much of a total git was I?” At least I presume this is what the transactional mind set will have them think, because quite frankly once someone does get too transactional, they do turn into a total git. That is not new news.
The art of building mind is something that is governed with transferable points though. In order to avoid the situation of being about to die, and using that quality time to make yourself feel miserable, you can raise the chances that your subconscious mind will think, “Hey, I was never a total git. I was always awesome.” If you get that, then those last few seconds of internal mind madness will go favourably instead of negatively. In order to assure this, you need to build up your transferable points.
Obviously saving the world is a great idea. If you’ve done that, then you can probably afford to have a nice sit down now. In the event that you are unable to fully concentrate on saving the world, perhaps you could save a few local people. There is a list of favourable methods for maintaining a positive outlook after death. That Moses geezer had them last time anyone noticed. I thoroughly recommend them as being a positive starting point in the crafting of a system of ethics.
Never start with nothing. Always start from a foundation, and make that foundation something more inspiring than the concept of ignorance. That is advice for scientists, rather than for law makers though.
There are other ways to be awesome though that will become so deeply a part of your personality, that when you are in that state of not knowing whether you deserve freedom from pain or not, you will have an overwhelming awareness that you are awesome, so you will just choose bliss, or perhaps not even realise that there was any other option.
Clearly there are solid psychological reasons for trying to shake off the transactional mindset. The more you do things, just because you like to do things, the less importance your brain will place on transactional relationships, and as such, when death comes, there will be no concept of transaction to make you imagine that there is any trade, or payment to be made. If you stop using the transactional paradigm, then it will eventually fade from your awareness. That can be surprisingly quick to happen. I have to do my shopping in small local shops now, because I have lost all joy in the idea of placing a huge load of transactions into one bundle as a weekly supermarket trip. I am currently unable to even work out how or why I used to buy so much stuff anyway. A preference for charity shops, has meant that most of the items, or clothing I buy, are not being bought, so much as found, and then some token sum of which I am unaware, is taken by the shop staff. My awareness that this has had an impact on my transactional mind is made clear by my inability to think of things in transactional terms without considerable discomfort now. This would be considered to be a major disability by all my past maths teachers, but it does not seem to have caused any problems so far, and it is such a relief. I simply have to have faith that I can afford what I want, and so far I can. Naturally this has probably been helped by the fact that my inability to understand transactional issues with the usual clarity means that I am not spending money, so if money is coming from somewhere, it is only accumulating. One presumes. Maybe it is not. Who cares?
My mother cares. She seems to get quite annoyed at my lack of worries.
Nevertheless, the benefits in productivity and creativity that came, once I freed up that space in my mind, mean that I do not care to take it back again. I would rather be productive, strong, happy, creative, and poor, than I would be rich, miserable, and lazy.
A strong part of losing the transactional mind set can only be done by religious practice, or in fiction. Real people in the real world are unremittingly transactional, and then they try to clean that off them on Sunday at church; If they are the holy ones. Otherwise they are busy nursing a hangover on Sunday morning. There is little time that is not being filled with transactions at the bar, or at the bank, or in a shop, and in the absence of the spiritual influence, these people are having to maintain their own inner mental and moral integrity.
Ideally I would recommend some spiritual practice, but bringing us back to the topic of this post. Movies do create mini mythologies that can tell the same inspirational stories, and enable the same progressive steps towards psychological individuation, and empowerment of one’s inner confidence, and inner power, with a far higher possibility of pushing through the biphasic shift beyond the higher functioning mental cap. The difference is that in the absence of two or three millennia of mythology to back it up, the movie may lack the gravitas to just grab a person’s nervous system and fill it with the realisation that it can just turn on like a flame. Kevin Smith’s ‘Dogma’ was an excellent and even rather holiness oriented movie, but I’m afraid that Jay and Silent Bob lack a lot of the sort of gravitas that Jesus is reported to have brought to his story. I’m not saying Jay and Silent Bob couldn’t enlighten someone or faith heal someone. I just think that if they are going to, it is something that is probably a fair way in the future.
I can tell something though. From the manner in which my understanding works, I am drawn to those who can manifest that ability simply by my awareness of what kind of circumstances, and combinations of imagery and symbolism, lifestyle, etc will lead to spiritually fertile ground, and I have a very strong sensation that those two can actually do it. They don’t know it yet, but the pattern of Kevin’s life means that he has been given a strong awareness of mortality, which combined with the wealth of imagery that has surrounded him, has placed him in a position where his life has been taken, and given back to him by his inner self. His inner self could have let him die, but it didn’t because it is a fighter. That is itself a manifestation in Kevin’s own personal faith in his own self. He likes himself, he makes good movies, therefore he must live because good movies need to be made. This sounds like Kevin’s internal logic addressing himself, but the altered states of mind that are revealed by dialing up the internal energy of the nervous system, show that when the mind is that overwhelmed by power, the model of reality that becomes superimposed over the usual under powered, and weakened cognitive model held by the enfeebled nervous system, will show that at any time, even in our weakened and ignorant state, all such inner conversations, were the real deal with the big guy, the inner core of human existence. It may be a crappy connection, and God may have clearly become incredibly wobbly after that last blunt, but nevertheless, this is fucking God dude. I’m not fucking joking, that is how faith works you fucking dumb ass.
I apologise for the language. Gabriel makes it quite clear at times, why it is that people can’t hear. They often speak different languages.
Regardless, Agent Smith, mired in symbolism from his career and youth, is taken to the edge, and he is saved, and he is returned to humanity. Humanity is incredibly grateful, and Kevin, being someone who is somewhat held by transactional thinking now feels that he is here for a reason. Too bloody right he is.
Following his heart attack, he has now undergone a massive amount of weight loss. That has made him lighter, and swifter. He regularly walks in order to maintain the weight loss. I’ve already gone into detail explaining how walking effects change in the nervous system, and access to power. In the ten years following Nietzsche’s conversion to hiking, he produced his most influential work. Thomas De Quincey’s confessions of an opium eater starts off more as confessions of a frustrated rambler. The triggering of the nervous system that Kevin is going to be experiencing with all the walking, is going to combine with the loss of physical mass, and the renewed life vigour from having survived his heart attack to create a new man, in whom there is a vast well of power. Kevin will use this in the coming decade to create some of the greatest movies of modern pop culture. They will define a new era for humanity. Alternatively he may forget the vast influx of power that lent his vision of the future that power it needed, to make the truly remarkable manifest, he may let his power fester, and it will take him back for another shot at an early grave. I think he is strong enough to avoid that though. He is currently doing everything right.
Jay shows similar potential. While Kevin clearly has the ability to create great things, Jason’s story is more complicated. He has been playing high stakes. I’m not sure that he can stop playing high stakes. Once again, high stakes go two ways, big wins, and big losses. As Jay goes low, he always goes high again, in a positive life affirming way I mean. Not that he gets wasted when he feels bummed out. He plays near the gates of hell, but he always comes back again. One day he will come back, and he will not want to return to the darker times. This is the classic overcoming story that can create prophets. This is why so many people fail to survive that long. When you do survive you bring back knowledge that can save a lot of people in the future. End a lot of pain.
Jay does have that potential. He is not as safe as Kevin though. Part of Kevin’s story is to protect Jason. It is important because of who Kevin is, and more so because of who Jason is, and because of how Jason is shaped by Kevin’s friendship, and how Kevin is shaped by Jay’s friendship. There are future machinations there that can only be put in motion by the faith of those two guys. Mark my words, they are important to humanity, that is just the motion of the Western zeitgeist, and by reflection, that makes them important to God.
Harry Monmouth's Two Penneth 