Sophie McLeish @sophieactual@witches.town
A plurality.
we/they
@victim_of_changes Duct tape?
After years of not being able to shut up appropriately, we've concluded it's probably the only thing that would work.
Probably just as antisocial though.
@Eve That feeling has become a hallmark for us that we've integrated a piece of expanded awareness and it's become a core part of who we are.
It's like learning a new language and suddenly noticing that you were thinking in that language, instead of translating, the new thought processes have become a native part of who you are.
@Eve You hit the nail on the head there. We've come to the conclusion that the place arrived at after beginning to quieten down the internal chatter is a very active state, not like the passivity that seems to be the goal of so many meditation styles.
The difference is subtle to begin with. It's hard to differentiate the daily noise from expanding awareness and it seems to plateau regularly, then after a while there's a post-fact realisation that "Yes! Something changed and we didn't even notice it, but the world is somehow different today from what it was up until yesterday."
@ohtorifightclub We were reading an Idries Shah book years ago and one of his Sufi stories concluded with "This also, will change."
@Maenad If we were all perfect we'd all be boring, don't beat yourself up. We cringe, regularly, about typing then pressing Enter before thinking it through.
@ohtorifightclub reality is a weird place that people who can't handle their drugs live in
@Eve Lineages, there's no better word we've been able to find in English, the word group just doesn't cut the mustard, are a bundle of threads of the fabric of the universe with a common feel.
A lineage exists outside of its participants, who become attached when they manage to align with enough common elements.
You don't get to choose to join most of them, you're born with the connections, or you're not. They're homogeneous.
Of the heterogeneous ones, the Plumed Serpent is the only nexus we've encountered that feels right to us. There's some commonality with a rebellious one with which we've been interacting for all of our life in this meatbag.
@Eve Our inference is that Casteneda was a necessary rogue element and whatever he managed with the demons, irrevocably altered the course of his group.
As that group, a Plumed Sepent lineage, is heterogeneous, it acquires participants purely based on their capabilities, not where they born, unlike the homogeneous lineages.
The capability is, pure and simple, being able to hold focus in a lucid dream after encountering them.
After that, it's exactly what the rebellious ones try to show us, lucid dreaming with someone else.
@Eve One of our highlights in lucid dreaming was finding that in early September 2013, (we think, would have to check on the exact date), Juan Matus pulled off a bizarre technique from the realm of the ancient sorcers and merged with a living person, the intial attempt failed but about four months later he succeeded, with someone else.
Since then, anyone who can manage lucid dreaming, can find him and he will, ocassionally, talk about his lineage's new direction since Castaneda changed everything.
@Eve One of our favourites is the similarity between Crowley's "Love is the law, love under will. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the the law." and Castaneda's notion of sobriety.
The only difference is that The Great Beast lost track of his concept of will and flew off track to some drug-fuelled demonic never-never land, while Castaneda ran with sobriety, reached unbending intent (his words), and pulled off a deal with the demons that very few people have ever managed.
We'll expand on that in the next post.
@Eve Definitely agree with "different phrasing". We've noticed a pattern of different people almost simultaneously, but completely independently, publishing very similar ideas, particularly in computing, physics, and medical research, which often leads to enormous patent or copyright squabbles.
No reason why the science of awareness should be any different, except we don't tend to squabble about who was first.
@Eve the previous post was a bit problematic, there are shades of meaning in how we use "you", "feeling", and "undestanding" that English seems awfully ill-equipped to deal with, so we'll just hope that what we intended to say came across adequately.
@Eve We like to think we're not arrogant enough to offer advice, but just describe what's happening to us, so keeping that in mind, maybe try watching your own chatter while it happens, without intervening. The part doing the watching is the real you, and you may well notice something akin to a sigh of relief, a feeling that the real you has finally been able to grab the reins, if only for a short time.
That feeling is the beginning of silencing the extraneous chatter, the beginning of direct understanding, unmediated by language. That feeling can later be turned into words, but that's definitely post-fact, the understanding comes first.
@Eve "openness, stubbornness and willingness" that's brilliant.
As for defining "chatter" it's a term we throw around glibly, but as far as a strict, expressible definition, we're still working on that.
There's a very fine line between the noise that the demons give to us to keep us asleep and thoughts that originate from who we actually are.
It's a distinct feeling, but as for expressing it, well, we're still trying.
@Eve Our current favourite paradigm for the question and answer thing is Supernatural's angel radio.
If you've never watched the series, sorry, that probably makes no sense at all.
@Eve And yes, we did spend years worrying about multiple personality disorder and other juicy psychiatric terms, however we know a few shrinks and, well let's just say, they consider us fairly well adjusted, weird maybe but not on their spectrum of requiring treatment. They have their own tidy little boxes that invoke terms like reasonable coping mechanisms.
In return, we think all the shrinks we've met are pretty far off the planet weird too.
@Eve ROFL, we spent ages trying to figure that out ourselves.
In a lucid dream, the thing we were interacting with, which was using the woman in the red dress paradigm at the time, just said "Stop your chatter and ask us, we'll answer."
To which, we replied, "What, even if we're awake?"
And the only response was a feeling akin to, "Well, maybe not if you're going to be that stupid about it."
It's that simple, and that difficult.
@Eve For the third group, we started thinking out this response and things immediately began to go wrong, as they always do, so this part of the reply is abridged. You'll have to interpret it.
There is a way of looking at the Chronicles of Awareness which is simultaneously very gross and very accurate. It can be seen as an enumeration of the universe's food chain.
Survival is a core driver of anything sentient. To survive it needs to be nourished. What this amounts to is that everything tends to try to eat everything else lower on its perceived scale of sentience.
Humanity is definitely not at the top of the food chain.