Month: October 2012

In my breathwork session, when I was vocalizing, at some point I said the word AM over and over.  I felt it had psychological significance, and it likely did, but in playing with my mouth I realized also that AAAAA  starts in the back of the mouth and moves forward to MMM, which is the frontmost sound.  I AM, if you do it carefully a couple times–say it, I mean–you will notice that the I stands like a tree in the middle of the mouth, then AM folds around it, from back to front.

Am, of course, is similar to the Sanskritic root syllable, as it is often called, Om, which is really more like OWUUUM.

A space is created, then terminated at the lips.  Add an EEEE to it, so AMEEEEEEEE.  It flows out into the world.  Is the word AM symbolic of property and place?  A sense of being related to termination?  Are there linguistic roots that caused “life, liberty and property” to arise within the English sphere?

Interesting questions.  I pondered how one might approach this scientifically, and the best I could do was to hook someone up to a brainwave monitor of some sort and have them make sounds, and see if the brain reacted differently to different sounds.   Since sounds in our language have affective elements, it might be interesting to have them say basic words in languages they couldn’t know, like Navajo, and see if the words for, say, home and mother caused reactions.

It may of course be a complete waste of time, and my speculation idiotic. It happens.  Try a lot, and failure is inevitable.  I suppose you could even measure a man’s life by the quantity and quality of his failures.

Few more: holy and wholly.  Stan Grof’s signature creation could be spelled Wholotropic.  It could be altered to Holytropic, moving towards the Holy.  Note that H is basically breath going out, that is morphed into something, and that that word ends in EEEE, a going out.  It is a going out of the breath, pneuma, prana.

Man starts in the front, moves all the way to the back, then ends up in the front again, but not completely, since N is behind M.  Man is an incomplete movement, an incomplete circle.  The complete circle is Ma’am.  Woman contains more information, more movement.  W is all the way in the front, O opens up the mouth, then it does the man circle.

One could argue that man is contained in woman because woman is larger and richer.  That seems both plausible and true.  Man should not be excised by feminists, but woman celebrated.  I will note the ratio of women to men was roughly 2 to 1 in my class.

Womb is contained in Woman.  Womb and Room are quite close, to the point that the substitution of W for R is a common speech defect.

That’s enough for now.  I am fortunate in having a job where I can sleep in and dream.  I get less outward work done when I do so, but I would submit that this qualitatative work is useful too, and less common.

Courage is what fills the gap between confidence and necessity.

Corollary: Courage is a habit; so is cowardice.

I think many people view crying as a failure.  I have long viewed it as something that makes you stronger.  I saw in my group this past weekend that this is a helpful mindset, and wanted to share.

Crying makes you stronger, if you accept it, and accept the pain, which to say that you accept that your feelings matter, and that if you are feeling sad, empowerment is feeling sad, and accepting it.

I was in a hurry and being a bit thoughtless the other day, and left my planner on the top of my truck.  When it fell off, it was picked up by somebody who then called me to come and pick it up, since I had my number in there.

What was funny, is that it was immediately obvious to me that the person who called me was in a good mood because he had been given an opportunity to do a good deed. My stupidity was a proximate cause of his happiness. It would not be an exaggeration to say I did him a favor.  By sheer chance, I knew this man, and had worked with him, and my experience had been that he was normally prone to being irritable.

He just called me about a project, and now we are old friends.  He asked me if I’ve lost anything lately.

Watch this world, and you will see many interesting things.

I am an individualist.  This means not that I value selfishness, but that I resolutely, absolutely refuse to allow my own experience to be run through any one else’s filter.  I see things my way.  I will listen to you, and I will learn from you, but how I choose to think, and what I choose to do, and my reasons for doing so, are and should be utterly unmediated by laziness with respect to perception. I own my life.


This is said as prologue because what follows is a bit weird.  I own that weirdness, with pride.  This post  is pieced together from three pieces.  This was the first.

I did a Holotropic Breathwork session last weekend, and it was very interesting.  Imagine a room full of people, in which half of them are in trances causing them to scream uncontrollably, cry, dance, make rhythmic movements on the ground, pound pillows, and “speak in tongues”.  Imagine a room, in other words, filled with the random, the chaotic, the repressed, the eternal.  Damnation and salvation on a stick, moving through the room like an avenging and healing angel, darting around, moving around, saving, controlling, healing, wounding, using, releasing.

OK, had to get that poetic part out.  There will likely be more.  My mouth seized up, such that my jaw would not stop moving.  The facilitator, Tav Sparks, who is a very good person, held my jaw and asked me to vocalize.  I make strange noises that my partner (the person not in trance who sits next to you to make sure you don’t hurt yourself) said sounded like speaking in tongues.  I was quite aware of them, but they came out on their own.  Later I broke down and cried freely.

It was a unique experience for me.  To call it moving is to be literal: there was so much movement of all sorts that it was infectious.

What I kept thinking, while watching as a sitter in the second session is WE NEED THIS.  Our society needs this.  We need an opposite to the mechanical nature of our lives, the programmed, the ordinary, the predictable, the banal.

If there is anyone who reads this regularly, they will have seen me often ponder our cultural state.  I wonder about the darkness, the vampires, the serial killers, the zombies, the satanic music.  I have tried often to explain sadomasochism.

What I think I am prepared to say is that much of that stems from a latent awareness that it is NOT NORMAL to always be normal.  We need ecstatic states.  We need to be released periodically from our selves, our duties, our obligations, our PLACES.  We need to do this completely and without any hesitation.  Social orders like ours that fail to do this breed meanness, parochial concerns with place and time, and defacilitate and degrade creative capacities that would otherwise manifest.

Nietzche famously opposed the Apollonian and Dionysian.  I don’t remember his exact argument, but I will say this: both are ways of perceiving, of interacting with the world, of BEING, and both are NECESSARY.

I sent out a lengthy email to the group I was with, that probably was read by few, and fully understood by no one, but I will cut and paste it here.  I am an enthusiast by nature, and am filled with optimism as to the possibilities of this system.  The relevant part is here:

I
worry regularly about the future of our civilization.  Ecological
sustainability is easy: it is a technical problem, and science is good
at solving those.  The root problem we face is what I term moral
sustainability, which is in broad stroke the preservation of a sense of
meaning.  Science wants to make all internal emotional states the
product solely of chemical processes and therefore all  humans objects. 
In a formal sense, there is no room for an “observer” anywhere in the
universe, within the current Scientistic paradigm.  This is an
enormously damaging belief system and one which is inaccurate.