Today I want to write about a subject that has been taking up a lot of my thinking lately, largely because I've been struggling with it a lot in the past few months. Maintaining and cultivating energy, or chi, or whatever name you use to work with it.
I've always been interested in this subject, and I've also found that I have to keep up a very careful daily pratice because mine gets disrupted very easily. And that is the part that bothers me- the fact that I find it so difficult to maintain a balance, despite being very aware of its flows though my body. It seems like some people are in balance without hardly being aware of it, whereas I feel like mine is constantly boiling around, getting entangled with other people's bad emotions or draining away somewhere. This leads to me being very spaced out very easily, and it is like I am always fighting control not to go off into a trance. I have to keep constantly reminding myself "get back in your body!"
On the surface I know this sounds like I am just very ungrounded, or have a weak root chakra, but even if this is the case, it is not from lack of working at it! Every morning I do a grounding meditation, and focus on the paths of energy flowing through my body, making sure each one is in alignment, yet every day it is a stuggle to maintain focus. I really miss the sensation of feeling sharp and connected, like my brain and body are right there with me. Instead, I feel spread out and hazy, like I am intermingling with my surroundings, and yet not really having a connection to anything around me. It sort of feels like being in a dream.
Perhaps it has something to do with boundaries- like I can't feed the energy I am cultivating back into myself because I don't know what my own boundaries are (or don't have any?), and so I become some sort of neon all-you-can-eat-buffet sign for everything around me.
I really need to learn how to do this properly, because it's severely interrupting my life.
How do you maintain stable energy? Where are your boundaries and how do you create them?
Saturday 9 July 2011
Thursday 16 June 2011
An Introduction
Welcome to A<>A!
I've been wanting to write this blog for a long time, but until now have felt it lacked a core concept to hold it all together. What am I going to explore here? To put it simply, conciousness and perception- how it affects us, and how we can effect it. This gives me room to go everywhere from neurology to comic books to mental health and magic. I'm going to explore a wide range of topics- a lot of them probably seeming unrelated- but the intention is to have a core topic that revolves around what I essentially see as programing reality.
What is up with the name? Apophenia to Apotheosis encapsulates my interests.
Apophenia is seeing connections between unrelated things. On a visual level, it's called paralellia- finding recognizable images in random patterns. It can be seeing the virgin Mary in your macaroni, but it is also a technique that DaVinci used- he would stare at the woodgrain on his floor until images and inspiration emerged. On an action level Apophenia is like a synchronistic event, but a little more loosely defined. French philosopger Guy Debord talked about a technique called derivee or drifting (in English) which was used to explore cityscapes. Derivee can be used to explore ideascapes as well. In some senses a lot of people see apophenia as a potentially dangerous thing- I think the main use for the term is in a mental illness setting when it is related to paranoia and seeing signs and symbols everywhere. However, I think apophenia can be used as a tool, one to understand the world around us, and also one to use as a mirror for ourselves. Sometimes we have experiences like the main character in Aranofsky's Pi- seeing 216 everywhere and existing in everything. Left unexamined this could be a maddening place to be trapped in, but with a little deconstruction it could also lead to incredible insight- figuring out a personal langusge of signs and portents.
This is what leads to Apotheosis. This is the process of a person realizing their own god self and the god inside of everything. At least that's how I interpert it. What processes lead to that divine feeling of being plugged into the universe? How do you get there? How do you stay there? What relevence does it have in a person's life?
So in essence this blog is about moving between these two states, living in a land of paradox where meaning becomes meaninless and vise versa. We will spend most of our time in the Temporal Autonomous Zone- a place where anything and everything can happen. The fool will be crowned king, and our cells are holographic images of the universe.
What this blog is not. I want to say here and now that I am not a positive psychology person, I think exploring our dark sides- or as Jung would put it our "shadow selves", is more important to exploring reality and finding whatever truth is out there than "thinking only good thoughts". I don't believe in trying to be such a good person that we repress our innser primal nature. Darkness, depression, anger and all those other so called negative aspects of ourselves are still part of us! They can be tools that are just as useful as positive visualization techniques- you just have to know how to use them. Repressing them, pretending it doesn't exist, denying them a voice leads to a warped perspective, and from my own experience, a lot of mental anguish.
So that's it for now! I have a bunch of articles broiling around in my brain that I can't wait to get started on. It's going be be an interesting journey!
Starhive
I've been wanting to write this blog for a long time, but until now have felt it lacked a core concept to hold it all together. What am I going to explore here? To put it simply, conciousness and perception- how it affects us, and how we can effect it. This gives me room to go everywhere from neurology to comic books to mental health and magic. I'm going to explore a wide range of topics- a lot of them probably seeming unrelated- but the intention is to have a core topic that revolves around what I essentially see as programing reality.
What is up with the name? Apophenia to Apotheosis encapsulates my interests.
Apophenia is seeing connections between unrelated things. On a visual level, it's called paralellia- finding recognizable images in random patterns. It can be seeing the virgin Mary in your macaroni, but it is also a technique that DaVinci used- he would stare at the woodgrain on his floor until images and inspiration emerged. On an action level Apophenia is like a synchronistic event, but a little more loosely defined. French philosopger Guy Debord talked about a technique called derivee or drifting (in English) which was used to explore cityscapes. Derivee can be used to explore ideascapes as well. In some senses a lot of people see apophenia as a potentially dangerous thing- I think the main use for the term is in a mental illness setting when it is related to paranoia and seeing signs and symbols everywhere. However, I think apophenia can be used as a tool, one to understand the world around us, and also one to use as a mirror for ourselves. Sometimes we have experiences like the main character in Aranofsky's Pi- seeing 216 everywhere and existing in everything. Left unexamined this could be a maddening place to be trapped in, but with a little deconstruction it could also lead to incredible insight- figuring out a personal langusge of signs and portents.
This is what leads to Apotheosis. This is the process of a person realizing their own god self and the god inside of everything. At least that's how I interpert it. What processes lead to that divine feeling of being plugged into the universe? How do you get there? How do you stay there? What relevence does it have in a person's life?
So in essence this blog is about moving between these two states, living in a land of paradox where meaning becomes meaninless and vise versa. We will spend most of our time in the Temporal Autonomous Zone- a place where anything and everything can happen. The fool will be crowned king, and our cells are holographic images of the universe.
What this blog is not. I want to say here and now that I am not a positive psychology person, I think exploring our dark sides- or as Jung would put it our "shadow selves", is more important to exploring reality and finding whatever truth is out there than "thinking only good thoughts". I don't believe in trying to be such a good person that we repress our innser primal nature. Darkness, depression, anger and all those other so called negative aspects of ourselves are still part of us! They can be tools that are just as useful as positive visualization techniques- you just have to know how to use them. Repressing them, pretending it doesn't exist, denying them a voice leads to a warped perspective, and from my own experience, a lot of mental anguish.
So that's it for now! I have a bunch of articles broiling around in my brain that I can't wait to get started on. It's going be be an interesting journey!
Starhive
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