magical realism

Magical realism may be called a syntactical marriage of fact and fiction, the weave of 1st and 2nd attentions. Consider the paradox: when his early nonfiction was considered fiction, Melville attempted to produce fiction that would pass for fact. Well, someone else tried a hand at that game, right? Carlos Castaneda. You will know from metahistory.org that I place CC in the literary genre
of magical realism along with Melville, Marquez, Asturias, Italo Calvino, and a dozen others, not to mention the fabulous Russians such as Bulgakov. Most of this well-known crew in this genre are South American, as was Carlos, born in Argentina. Melville is without question top totem in the North American school of MR. Castaneda belongs in the top five of the South American team. From his first book in 1969, The Teachings of Don Juan, he attempted to pass off fiction as fact.
Melville matters now more than ever, on several counts. First of all, we are currently engaged in an experiment with MR. Not merely a literary exercise, not fictional invention for the sake of entertainment, spinning a good yarn while we hang in our hammocks below deck. Not just that, of course. But an actual experiment that can be verified, following a course that can be charted in imagination and lived in real time. To appreciate the power of MR as demonstrating itself now in the Gaian navigation experiment, consider this proposition from the nagual:
Fiction passed for fact lends enormous directive power to human imagination (Castaneda’s writings), but admitted fiction designed to be interactive with divine imagination does it even better (GNE).

John Lamb Lash

tree and well

Odin

http://www.metahistory.org/guidelines/TreeAndWell.php

"Nordic mythology presents the same eternal image in the story of the poet-shaman Odin (or Woden), who must hang on the cosmic tree for nine days and nine nights to receive a sublime revelation. He ascends the Tree to surrender to the streaming of cosmic currents through its leaves and branches. Through this ordeal he acquires the runes, a secret alphabet composed of divinatory symbols. The runes represent the generative formulas of all possible languages, the bases of all verbal and written expressions in which human knowledge can be captured and transmitted. By his ordeal the "tree-hung" shaman acquires the magical power of language, but still needs access to the transcendent wisdom that will use language for its instrument. 

For this second endowment, Odin must descend into the underworld, to the root of the Tree, and drink from the miraculous Well of Mimir. The name Mimir is related to the Latin memor, hence Mimir’s Well has been called the “well of remembrance”. Ralph Metzner explains:
• It was said that to drink from this well would give one knowledge of the beginnings and origins of things — of humans, of life, of the worlds... In German translations, the term used to describe Mimir’s well is marchenreich, “filled with stories” — a clue that to drink from the well was an experience that involved both visioning and storytelling. Stories tell us about our past, and visions tell us about our future. To drink from Mimir’s well, then, is to enter into a state of consciousness of recollection, where we can remember our evolutionary origins, our relatedness to the realms of animals and plants, and our primordial nature as children of Earth...

. . Nordic myth says that when Odin came to the Well of Mimir, he was confronted with a test by its guardian. The giant demanded an act of surrender before allowing Odin to drink at the Well. To gain illumination by mystic memory, Odin must surrender one of his eyes. Hence this shaman became known as the One-Eyed Seer. 


The myth teaches that we must surrender our one-sided way of seeing and understanding, the preclusive rational mentation of the left brain, in order to realize the poetic-visionary faculties of the other eye, the right brain awareness. Curiously, the left-brained mentality, when surrendered, does not go away. According to the Icelandic Eddas, “when the giant Mimir, or other gods of knowledge-seeking shamans, drank from the well, they would see Odin’s eye looking back at them.”  Sunk to the bottom of the well, the sacrificed eye (the rational faculty, Odin's left eye) keeps seeing. 
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At this point it would appear that the higher teaching of the myth proposes an arresting thought: if we peer deeply enough into the well of ancestral wisdom, the rational, left-brain thinking with which we are so identified and in which we invest the sole validity for knowing how the world works, will be there peering back at us. Here the myth conveys a key survival lesson:rationality is not precluded from the deep-level transrational knowing of ancient seership, even though the rational limits of cognition must be surpassed for that deeper knowing to become experiential. This paradox was uniquely understood in the tradition of the Gnostics, pagan spiritual teachers who asserted the basic complementarity of rational and visionary knowledge.

John Lamb Lash

compassion and desire

I love this piece from www.metahistory.org. What I see is that when we are genuinely reconnected with our feeling senses we feel what others feel, we experiece empathy, and then we naturally wish for them to feel good, rather than needing a conceptual moral framework to adhere to. That does not mean of course it's always possible for us to enable others to feel good but we will naturally tend to behave in a way that is helpful rather than unhelpful - from our own desire.

"Miranda Shaw says that Vajrayogini liberates the mind from self-referentiality. I prefer the more emotively toned term self-involvement. This is the primary fixation of narcissism, the terminal psychic disease that goes pandemic at the end of Kali Yuga. Self-involvement is exclusive and excessive preoccupation with what affects a person, with little or no regard for what affects others. Meaning, no regard for how the self-involved person affects others, or even how the other person is affected by anything at all. Many behaviors blatantly demonstrate this type of callous self-involvement. Normally, we call such behavior selfish, self-centered.

For instance, a supposed friend shows no concern for the death of your cat. Trivial example, which could be multiplied into the thousands. Then there are non-trivial examples: someone you know and love shows no concern for your highest aspiration, what you seek to achieve in life, or what you have achieved. The self-involved person is never impressed. Such people are only interested in how you affect them. Self-involvement is the basis of using and abusing, controlling and manipulating others so that they only affect us as we would wish them to. It is a crass and sickening behavior, desolating to witness.

I like the term self-involvement because it indicates that a selfish person is involved or enmeshed in something that prevents them from other kinds of involvement, reaching toward the world and other beings, or toward nature, Gaia. In a healthy state of affairs, human beings get involved with each other. They may handle it badly and make mistakes, or get over-involved, but the basic willingness to reach out and be involved is sane and rewarding to both sides. Love is involvement with the life of another. Over-involvement is called codependency, and this is also rampant in our time. But over-involved codependency always stems from an initial self-involvement that is not seen or admitted. People are codependent, appearing to base their reality on others, because they selfishly think that this tactic will pay off, it will serve their self-involvement and egocentric neediness in one way or another. The codependent gives away self in order to extort something for self—a rotten bargain for all concerned. So the two behaviors are intricately related, and routinely enforce each other.

Some individuals can resist codependency: their self-involvement is so deep and intricate that they can't engage enough with another person to develop or express codependent attitudes. Extreme self-involvement produces behavior that isolates the self-involved person and desolates others who care to reach that person. Isolation is the greatest social and emotional plague of our time. It is a blatant symptom of the global virus of narcissism, which I define as excessive self-concern based on the lack of a genuine sense of self. Without a genuine sense of self, you cannot relate honestly and openly to others and you sink into a black hole of self-concern. Such is the gruesome paradox of narcissism.

So how does Vajrayogini come into all this? I would guess that she is the devata who intervenes most deeply in the territory of self-involvement. Mirroring BY the other and TO the other and the realization of voidness are "co-emergent" in the enlightened state. Blissful Freedom involves recognition of the Other. Direct realization of shunyata,Void, comes in the awareness that no single thing or being stands alone. You and I exist only in relation, involved with and reflected to each other. I relate, therefore I am. When I care and relate, I realize my own existence and simultaneously surpass it.

When I reach out to another, I do not merely connect with another part of me, myself, and I, theoretically over there— although what I encounter IN the other is a real transposed mirroring of me. Because something exists that really is other, union can happen. Even fusion. In the liberating voidness of enlightened awareness, you only exist in the immanent flux of relationship. Voidness is not emptiness, but absolute contingency, total interdependence. It is impossible to mirror anything if you are overly self-involved. Self-involvement is mental and emotional obtusity, desolated and desolating.
To be mirrored in the gaze of another, you must realize they are other. One and other come into union, but they are not a unit, not the single same thing. That is the wonder of union: it is the uniting, mirroring, or fusion of two distinct things or beings. Vajrayogini teaches mirroring, the attribute of Buddhic awareness calledAkshobyha, and shows the way out of self-involvement. This pointing is central to the sacred instruction of this devata."

John Lamb Lash

http://www.metahistory.org/tantra/lunarshaktis/DesireCompassion.php

"The Measure of Compassion

How she does it is really fascinating, I find. She uses pleasure and passion to break the self out of its self-involvement. Passion, even grand passion, is the most effective tool in her kit. A grand passion will break someone free of self-involvement, when nothing else will. The nature of passion is to surge and expand, to reach out endlessly. This is also the tonality or dynamic signature of the CRAB. This small, amorphous constellation has the look and feel of a spiral nebula that expands before your eyes.

The unity of desire and compassion is Vajrayogini's leading instruction. The desire to please another person, for instance, is a force sure to undo self-involvement.

"Desire is the measure of all compassion," is one of the five principles of Kala Tantra. This is dakini syntax, an exact and rigorous teaching.

This teaching means that the way you express and live out your desire shows how your compassion really works. Compassion is the ability to feel how another is affected, either by what you do, or by anything at all. Feeling what the other feels is not feeling for them (there's codependency) but with them: com- means "with"; or even better, through them. You can hurt someone and still feel compassion for them as long as you recognize what they feel in being hurt. Compassion is not a state where you are beyond hurting or harming anyone, either intentionally or otherwise. It is the attitude of total responsibility toward how you affect others. But it is not responsibility for what others do with that affect. How they receive or manage it. That is their responsibility.

Compassion in Kalika terms is not an altruistic or transpersonal approach to life: it is desideristic, desire-based. The obvious objection to the pleasure-based or hedonistic ethos of Kala Tantra is this: if you just do what you desire, and what pleases you alone, you will selfishly ignore others and how you affect them. But the Kalika teaching is, you can do no good for others, no matter what you think you're doing for them, unless your compassion comes straight out of your desire."

John Lamb Lash

http://www.metahistory.org/tantra/lunarshaktis/Vajrayogini.php

boost of the earth

In this amazing and inspirational recent audio John Lamb Lash gives us ta sense of what it is to align ourselves with the dreaming power of the Earth, and make our magic real.

http://gaiaspora.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Nav-Briefing-96-The-Boost-of-the-Earth-28-November-2013.mp3

"We are magical animals".  Although the ultimate source  is the Originator, the immediate imminent source of our reality is the Earth.  The closer to the Originator we get the more catatonic we become, nothing happens there, the action is here...
Her (the Earth;'s) dreaming is material.  Her dreaming is manifested in the filaments of the organic light.  (non-material animating light that permeates and emanates from all matter on Earth) We can perceive it in the granular detail.

We were not given a certain quantity of life, we are given life at every instant.  She sustains our life in her dreaming.

Animism is the direct perception that the Earth is alive.  To indigenous peoples, and us today in certain states of awareness, it becomes self-evident that the Earth is a living being, as single entity that we can interact and communicate with.  Hunger for magic is in the human endopsyche.  It requires rigorous magical method to engage the boost of the Earth.  If we consciously align our lives with her life then we have a future.