The power of consciousness to accept and the ineffectiveness of consciousness to control

"When we're unaware that we share the ability to co-create reality with the universe itself, that power slips away from us, causing our dream to become a nightmare."

I love self-help books that remind us we need their help cos we can't do it ourself.

I am a powerful person sometimes and sometimes I throw my weight around too much.  I know I am right most of the time but sometimes people assume this therefore means they are wrong and they are wrong in this assumption.  All our consciousness can do is maintain some sort of balance between the habitual and novel influences of the world.  If my presence has a novel effect on people I have to be careful how I place myself in relation to their sensitivity and the beauty inherent in it because I have no intention of threatening their vulnerability.

The most powerful thing consciousness can do is to merely accept.  I usually accept the life I have created for myself and the person I have become and I therefore would like to place myself in an environment that not only strengthens me but an environment that I strengthen as a result of my presence, because my presence is all I have to offer.  I do my best to be respectful by washing dishes and mowing lawns but if small things like this have become relevant then the power of my presence has become irrelevant and I am weak and pathetic and must move on.  I need only challenge myself with the profound and that which resounds deeply because my life is too empty and impermanent to worry about the small things that impact a more precarious equilibrium lifestyle.

The astonishing feat of maintaining our metabolism is, of course, entirely unconscious.  God is not doing it, it is not happening by chance, we are definitely doing it.  No amount of consciousness could possibly maintain this process, let alone improve upon it.  Our consciousness can merely choose where to place us - amongst microwaves and televisions or amongst trees and flowing water.

Why do we choose one and not another?  Is there a reason or is there no reason at all?  Do we eat randomly or do we choose precisely what we want to eat?  Do we eat the food that makes us feel the way we want to feel or do we choose to eat food that makes us feel something we choose not to feel?

I have to tell you that regardless of how developed your consciousness is, it cannot change the words I have chosen in composition and communication.  I have written these words whether you like it or not and your consciousness merely allows you to choose whether or not you continue reading them (not whether you have already read them).

Our consciousness is also sometimes called our ego.  For some reason one is separated as good, the other is separated as bad.  In this momentary linguistic model the two are inseparable.  Our consciousness is inherently insane (not bad) and chatters with itself incessantly and repetitively.  It defines us as the most unusual animal on this planet.  Calling it insane reflects little.  What our consciousness is largely doing, whether we ask it to or not, is creating meaning, telling stories, defining and refining myths for the purpose of externalising our interior world and containing it in symbols and metaphors.  This is our process, this is our purpose on this planet.  This is the intention on this planet whether we are conscious of it or not.  (The opening lines of John suggest this.)

Six months ago I took a ferry from Turku in Finland to Stockholm in Sweden.  I have friends in Stockholm who I intended to stay with.  However, I did not tell them I was coming.  I arrived in Stockholm without anyone knowing I was coming and made some phone calls for a place to stay only upon arrival.  These phone calls were ineffective for various banal reasons and therefore I had nowhere to stay.  When I had spent a lot of money making expensive cash calls on the public telephone I wandered around looking for somewhere to lay my head.  I slept in the park.  The following day I tried again on the public telephone and achieved an equally ineffective result, did not contact my friends and was therefore still alone and homeless.  By the end of the second day, after hours of rain, I did not want to be alone anymore, I did not want to sleep in the park in the rain, and I wandered off into the city looking for something I knew I wasn't going to find.  I finally had an emotional break-through and began to cry.  I acknowledged all the love and all the homes I have been blessed with in my life and felt intensely their lack in my present situation.  I shook and sobbed and stood feeling silly and bawled and wept.  It was a painful and powerful emotional catharsis and I of course survived it.  A few days later I was telling my friend Disa about this difficult beautiful experience.  She reminded me of something I had said a few days before I had left her to make this trip across the gulf.  "I never cry.  Even when I want to I can't do it.  I think crying is healthy.  I wish I could have a good cry."  Did my deliberate actions manifest this desired experience despite the fact that I never once considered it consciously?  You can consider this in the abstract if you like, but the effect the realisation had on me was physical.  It illuminated for me a constant process of unconscious manifestation in every moment of my life.  I might look at something and judge it bad, "this is not what I want in my life", but the reality is more real and the reality is that I created it, not through some mystical psychic manifestation process but through my actions.  I clearly intended it despite the fact that I didn't consciously anticipate and plan the consequences.

If this is a genuine personal mechanism that I have momentarily noticed, is this happening on a larger scale?  Are there some profound and disturbing implications in this model?

I spent 2005 obsessed with someone, "in love" I called it at the time, smoking a lot of marijuana, beginning to fail my degree and therefore my passion and focus in life and being depressed and taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (antidepressants).  I had no ideas about how to get myself out of this lifestyle and wasn't even considering that I need to get myself out of it.  But I am not in this lifestyle anymore, I got out of it.  My mother committed suicide and the shock and grief was so intense that it disrupted every aspect of my life, destroyed the linguistic constructs I was living by, and forced me to reinvent myself.  This was such a powerful process that I managed to create a completely different lifestyle that made me a completely different person and alerted me to the possibility and necessity of transforming myself periodically.

The possibility that this particular cathartic situation was intentional may be considered more difficult to accept than the previous example, but it seems to fit, if only on a mythical level.  It raised some significant and illogical implications about my mother and I making some sort of unconscious or higher-dimensional agreement that presumably also included others who were affected by this situation, such as my father and my siblings.  When thought through the situation raises many interesting possibilities about the interconnectedness of the universe.  Quickly the connections and implications become to complex and far-reaching to consciously think about, let alone contain within words.  Maybe I could communicate this experience to the face of a human being who is listening with a profound openness that taps into the depths of my unconscious understanding, rather than in this moment of sitting in front of a computer alone.

I have heard the concept that life is some sort of ladder-structure, a climb from unconsciousness at the bottom of the ladder to enlightenment at the top through the process of becoming aware of more and more things.  This doesn't equate so well with my experience.  You may decide I that I am implying that this concept is wrong, whereas I merely offer an alternative model.

My model is that life is a series of vicissitudes, fluctuations between novelty and habit (as Terence McKenna suggests), ups and downs.  Everybody is somewhere on this scale.  They are not above you or below you on some cosmic scale, but simply moving consistently along their own.  We are all either heading through habit into catharsis or through novelty into climax.  Those heading towards catharsis cannot be touched and cannot be helped, those heading towards climax will love and appreciate your input and your insight, absorbing as much as they can from a variety of sources.

I possess and arrogant and self-righteous tendency to interfere with people's lives.  I want to help them because I love them but all I'm doing is trying to change them when I should be accepting them.  I realised this when my friend was depressed.  The most beautiful man on Earth as far as I knew at the time and so I couldn't accept the fact that the joy in which I met him had become depression.  I tried to "cheer him up" until I realised that the most loving thing I could do is let him be depressed.  I honoured his depression and remained present with him in his depression, rather than trying to change it.  This actually made it easier to love him.  Thus we return to the power of consciousness to accept and the ineffectiveness of consciousness to control.

I noticed this vicissitude model when I got myself into a state of marijuana-fueled depression again in 2008 and this time actually felt the exact moment when I hit the bottom and started coming back up again.  It got to the point where I found myself stoned and curled up in a ball in the corner of the living room, whacking myself in the head in an effort to externalise some of the pain I felt within.  And then I felt a distinct shift in the vibrations of the room, felt a sudden surge of energy, stood up and began immediately to undertake the tasks that went on to transform my life powerfully and permanently.

So you think you can tell
Heaven from Hell,
blue skies from pain.
Can you tell a green field
from a cold steel rail?
A smile from veil?
Do you think you can tell?

A New Heaven and a New Earth in Sydney

I seem to be more attractive in a state of complete detachment.  As I brisk walk down the street plugged in to my mp3 player I am completely immersed in the Swedish lessons I am listening to.  I am listening very carefully and repeating the language they are introducing me to.  I barely take a few quick moments to direct my attention out into the world to make sure I know where I am going, or to keep half an eye out for the street down which I should turn.  I pass hundreds of people and barely notice their reactions.  Perhaps they find it amusing or confusing that someone is speaking clear simple sentences in some foreign language with a tone as if they are speaking to an idiot.  But the day is hot and I am wearing only a pair of shorts, no shoes or shirt.  My body is exposed to the weather and the world.  A young woman whose beauty deserves more than the attention I give her is trying to elicit donations for the Red Cross.  When she approaches me I assume she will ask me for money, but she asks me if I am going to the beach and then admits that she would love to come with me.  I invite her silently with my hand as I brisk walk away and we both smile and we both know that she's not going to come with me.  Again I am completely immersed in the world of abstract Swedish language until I am stopped again by a couple of guys who tell me they are making a video for a Christmas party and they need me to perform for it.  I give them two minutes of attention and enthusiasm, receive their brief thanks, and continue walking at the same pace as before.  I finish the "tape" and begin the same lesson again.  I am profoundly excited at how fast it is possible to learn a new language.

I am a part of this capitalist world but not so identified with its seriousness.  I am a hypocrite for criticising it with such moral superiority and then desiring its objects.  I desire its food and literary objects.  I am not one who is pathetic enough to be defined by my low economic status.  The fact that I have very little money and currently have no income whatsoever does not mean that I have to buy house brand noodles and white bread for nutritional support.  I desire these superfoods like chia seeds, goji berries, unhulled tahini and New Zealand manuka honey.  I don't see why I would muck around with anything else simply because it is cheap.  There are ways of shopping, of course, that many people are not aware of.  There are now cloth bags which are reused and increasingly common.  One can simply shop with one of these green cloth bags, putting all their items into the bag with the most expensive items on the bottom.  When one reaches the checkout one simply digs as deeply into the bag as finances allow.  Sometimes only the cheapest two items are scanned through the checkout and the rest simply remain in the bag.  Life is more simple than people are telling us.  Of course I would never do this because it is against the law and I face the prospect of an awkward confrontation; and it is morally evil to enjoy the pleasures of the Earth's nutritious plants without financially supporting multinational corporations.

Whatever the city, I can behave in as unusual a manner as I like, and it is only my shame or self-consciousness that will attract negative attention.  If I perform my strangenesses with complete self-confidence I will radiate an attraction that will draw all sorts of beauty into my life.

The city is a place where we live so violently close to one another that at any moment we can create the experience we want and need by finding precisely the right person to share this experience with.  Perhaps this is the real deep-seated reason for the modern tendency towards urbanity.  The world is speeding up, time and space are expanding and we all need to contribute to the exponential increase in novelty in human society.  This tendency we are all manifesting will lead to a collective catharsis because as a universe we need an eschaton in order to be reborn.  Together we will create the global experience we need to experience.  In exactly the same way that individuals carefully subconsciously select each other because we know the experience we need, so the collective mind of all life is bringing about the experience we all need to share in order to destroy the veil of separation and bring us back to our god.

This brings me to my favourite Australian city, which only exists for two weeks per year; one week over Easter and one week over New Year.  I don't see Confest as a festival so much as a city.  A festival is a temporary distraction from life, an amusement or an entertainment.  Confest, however, can be seen as bringing you intensely into the reality of your life in a deeper and more immediate manner than is usually experienced.  As an "alternative" event, Confest is not an alternative to society at all.  Confest is a city, Confest is what a city can and should be, Confest is practice for what the cities will become, once we have achieved the catharsis that will bring about the manifestation of our joy.  The intensity and delight of this world is available now for those who want it and for those who somehow know that in the years to come they will be ready for the inevitable.

A New Heaven and a New Earth have been promised to us and the city is making it happen.  Thank you, Sydney.