On Philosophy and Wonder

"Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher; and philosophy begins in wonder." - Plato

"Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best,
the wonder remains." - Alfred North Whitehead

"Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts it
raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from
the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are,
it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant
dogmatism of those who have never traveled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps
alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect." - Bertrand Russell

"Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to enduring

fact of mystery." - Henry Miller

"Science is what you know. Philosophy is what you don't know." - Bertrand Russell

I want to wake up

"I don't want to dream anymore. I want to wake up."

What is a dream?
"A series of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations occurring involuntarily
in the mind during certain stages of sleep."

"A daydream; a reverie."

"A state of abstraction; a trance."

And how is that different from being awake?
Our common state is thinking, a state of abstraction (not "what is", presence),
a series of images occurring involuntarily in the mind.
One may argue that their thoughts are voluntary while awake. But if we are
honest, for every voluntary thought there are a dozen or more involuntary ones
that react to it. We are more asleep than we are awake.
The whole world is this way and no one seems to care.
We care about a thousand things, but no one is "occupying" any street or city
and demanding that we wake up from our dreams - the greatest conspiracy of
them all:




"Thinking is an impediment to experiencing; and there is no wisdom without
experiencing. Knowledge, idea, belief, stand in the way of wisdom. An occupied mind
is not free, spontaneous, and only in spontaneity can there be discovery. An occupied
mind is self-enclosing; it is unapproachable, not vulnerable, and therein lies its security.
Thought, by its very structure, is self-isolating; it cannot be made vulnerable. Thought
cannot be spontaneous, it can never be free. Thought is the continuation of the past, and
that which continues cannot be free." - J. Krishnamurti

Don't you see, when we use our thought/knowledge/past/images we are dreaming - the
ego, the imaginary construct of thought, the thinker, is dreaming for you. The Matrix
has you.

"You are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that
you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind."

"This is what happens with human beings. Our mind is a biological machine like a computer.
There is different information in every human being according to their experience. Each one
has learned differently from parents, society, school and religion. The information that we
put in our computer is what will teach us to dream. It tells us how to interpret what we perceive.
According to that information, we perceive the world and call it reality. This information is the
source of our limitations. We create images about ourselves and about everything else. We then
want to believe in those images. The process of putting the information in the computer is the
Domestication. We were domesticated in the same way that we domesticate dogs, by punishment
and reward... The dream of the planet, held by all of us, is the same. When we rise out of the
dream of the planet, and out of our own dream, we find that what we have thought of as truth is
nothing but information in our computer, and it can be easily changed." - Miguel Ruiz


Not only can you change information in your computer, but you can perceive in an entirely
different way, beyond the mechanical computer system of thought.
You can exchange one dream for another, decorating your prison cell differently - it is still a
prison. "Thought cannot be free."
Or you can leave the prison, get up and walk out of Plato's cave of reflected images and into
the sunlight.

"I don't want to dream anymore. I want to wake up."

apparent time

This post is an extension of the previous one on the apparent self. Please familiarise
yourself with it first.

The idea of the self is inextricably combined with the idea of time. Time is, only when
separate self is (apparently, never actually). The idea of the separate self is a center, the
thinker, and correspondingly a circumference, that which one thinks about, one's knowledge,
the projection of the past. This subject-object relationship is separateness, distance and time.
Time is the distance between thoughts. Thoughts are time associated entities. Do you see?

The projection of the past onto the present as thinking is time; and the projection of the past
knowledge/thinking into an imagined future is also psychological time... again, the self/ego,
knowledge, which is the past, projecting and objectifying itself as the present and future is
apparent time and apparent ego identity - both psychological, linear, associative, apparent
constructs with no actual reality.

The true and actual present/Presence is timeless, quintessential, unassociated, unconditioned
(by knowledge) consciousness/awareness. Thus the wise Moses said, "Make no image of YHVH."


Time is limit. Knowledge is always limited, finite.
Trinity said, "The Matrix cannot tell you who you are."
When I ask, "Who are you?", why do you start thinking?
Thinking cannot tell you who you are.

Jesus said, "Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become
troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over the All."
- The Gospel of Thomas

the apparent separate ego

One of the necessities of "experiencing" Oneness is to "dissolve" twoness.
What is twoness? Self and not-self, subject and object, thinker and thought, etc.
The idea of the individual separate ego is one of the trickiest to unveil, mainly
because we have identified ourselves with this separate ego and try to use it to
unveil itself, which it won't and can't do. Another way we are roped into this
deception is to identify with our thoughts. Let me try to show you, or at least
describe, how this is so. Try to follow this with me - look into yourself. It means
nothing to "understand" this with your reason. You must see it directly.

Answer this question: who are you?

Okay. Don't go too far with that. What I really want you to see is that when you
endeavor to answer this question, or any question, you begin thinking. What is
thinking? It is presently filing or searching through your memories, your knowledge.
Memories and knowledge... do you see this is the past? Your knowledge is what you
already know. It is accumulated and stored as memory. You can't think about some-
thing you don't know - you have no word, no image, no impression of it. So when you
are thinking you are accessing the past. This is important to see because it will bring
you to the present and "automatically" or effortlessly undo twoness. We can't undo
twoness because we want to or because it is wrong or bad or by trying to avoid it or
go towards something else... all these ARE twoness. The "wanter" cannot be there!
You cannot have a separate individual will from the Universal Being of what is!
So any effort on your part will result in twoness. Understand? But seeing what is
directly, that all thought is the past for example, is simply noticing the truth, or what
actually is. It is not an effort to change anything. Let's continue.

So I am endeavoring to point out to you that the ego, or idea of the separate individual
self as a consistent and continuous being (which is how we think of ourselves - stringing
our past memories together into an apparent continuous being who has learned, grown
and changed, but is essentially still "me"... a linear personal history from birth to present,
point A to point B, two very distinct and unrelated points separated by time and space,
yet "magically" associated by memory-knowledge-the past; a past that only exists in our
minds, in our memories, kept "alive" by our re-member-ing. "Re" meaning "done again",
i.e. not new. Is it any wonder that we age when we are rarely ever new, due to continuous
thinking and association/identification with dead past thoughts? Ok, let me try to continue
again.) ...so this idea (and I intend for you to see directly that it is indeed an idea and not
an actual entity) of the separate self/ego is composed of thought, of memory, of knowledge,
of association. Here is what I really want to reveal to you - a great secret and mystery and
tragedy and usurping of spirit: you/we think that you are the thinker having thoughts, as if
you are in control, as if you are the subject, the entity. But watch and see for yourself -
thought has objectified itself as the thinker! You really don't exist.

Forgive me for what I have said. This place is terrible!
But it is said that "fear/awe is the beginning of knowledge, and fools despise wisdom and
instruction." - Proverbs 1:7

Have we not been fools/fooled by our worship of knowledge?
You who claim to love wisdom/chokmah/sophia/sapientia... Isis has never been unveiled
by a mortal! Don't you know you - the illusory idea of the thinker/ego/self - must die to see
Her? Don't you know that Her veil is you? Your apparent existence - "I think, therefore I am" -
is Her death. Your death is Her life. She ate of the tree of knowledge (now do you understand
knowledge?) and was exiled from "the Garden". If you wish to return, you must exile knowledge
to regain (the tree of) Life ("Eve" means "living"; not dead like knowledge).
But you cannot force this exile! You simply see it as the truth; you simply cease seeing/believing
the illusion.

May the All-One shine Its Grace upon you.

corroborating post

I posted this back in July:
http://serpentrioarquila.blogspot.com/2011/07/alchemical-meanderings.html#comment-form

I tried to relay the three principles as axis of a cube or three dimensions using the
glyphs of nitre, salt and gold.

Anyway, today I came across this. It does a better job conveying what i wanted to say. :)

http://www.alchemylab.com/quantum2.htm

the art of being human

I've been thinking a lot about what a human being is.
We don't meet many humans anymore - it is always the personality,
the ego, the mask - some adjusted, corrected, PC version of oneself.
Does this hiding and protecting really benefit us?
Surely there is another human in everyone we meet that is just like us.
None of us is that different that our darkness or shadow is not the same
darkness in others. Why hide this sameness and flaunt our other sameness,
the sameness of lies/masks?
There'd be a lot less judgement in the world if we agreed not to censor ourselves.
Once you've seen the pure and simple human being, it becomes very tedious and
effortful to lie, to constantly embellish some edited version of yourself.
It really uses a lot of energy which could be being applied elsewhere.

If you've forgotten what an unmasked human being looks like, you may want to
check out the first part of this documentary on a "wild child" named Genie.
Notice how everyone is drawn to her. IMO, it's because she's a real person with no
pretense and we crave connecting with real people.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEnkY2iaKis

A stretching exercise :)

I believe I've written about the upside-down tree and the hanging man before.
In a way, this is related - how upside-down and inside-out and backwards
we have things.

It is a common view, I believe, that one is a spirit and/or soul trapped inside a body.
Is it not more accurate that the body is inside of spirit?

Or, if you prefer, not a consciousness inside a body, but the body is inside consciousness.

How does that feel for you? Big difference, huh.  :)

Another exercise:



Let's call the center spirit/mercury, the radius an individual soul/sulphur and where
the radius touches the circumference we'll call body/salt.

When we withdraw awareness from the manifest circumference and go within to the
center, we can then realise the all:



Your center is the All-center. Mercury is One. Your source is the One source of All.

To be clear, the exercise is to return to the One center and then creep back towards
manifestation as the All, following All radii instead of just your one personal individual radius.

power, strength, virtue...

I think about words alot. I've often thought of making a blog
just for words that i find interesting.

Potent means powerful; consider potential:
po·ten·tial/pəˈtenCHəl/
Adjective: Having or showing the capacity to develop into
something in the future.

Noun: Latent qualities or abilities that may be developed and
lead to future success or usefulness.

Dynamis (greek) means power, strength; consider dynamic:
dy·nam·ic/dīˈnamik/
Adjective: (of a process or system) Characterized by constant
change, activity, or progress.

Noun: A force that stimulates change or progress within a system
or process.

That's interesting, no?

And then we have a third form of energy/power in the Emerald Tablet:
"Virtus eius integra est si versa fuerit in terram."
"Its power is whole if it is turned into earth."


If you figure out how these three relate, let me know. :)