And the Flesh Was Made Word

drawing on both sides of the brain

This video and post are the continuation of a long comment conversation I had with Guy Duperreault in response to his essay, Just This Is It. What is This? Guy and I have great respect and affection for each other, and one of the many things I love about Guy is that his essays include a playlist, so there’s a soundtrack while reading, from which I’ve gotten some of my new favorite songs. Highly recommended!

I also love that Guy will ‘stay with the trouble’ and keep sorting through the branches for the fork where our viewpoints diverge. He’s published our full conversation here: Just This Is It. What is This? Tereza Coraggio Comment Thread:

Just This Is It. What is This? - Tereza Coraggio Comment Thread

What I will suggest is that, although our branches intertwine, they stem from two wholly (holy) different roots, two metanoias or ways of seeing the world, paradigms for how you think before you think you’re thinking. I’ve been writing about a lot of very dark topics lately and feel that it’s important to alternate taking a hard look at the reality in the world while questioning the reality of the world, the two feet of socio-spirituality. One foot alone will go around in circles.

Does it matter? In a synchronicity—something Guy and I pay attention to—his original article starts with a 1929 quote from Krishnamurti in which he castigated the Theosophical Society, dissolved his own Order of the East, and denounced all religious/ spiritual organizations because “truth is a pathless land.”

I’ve been reading Rudolf Steiner’s lectures to the Theosophical Society and Pasheen Stonebrook sent me his 1917 clip saying “People will invent a vaccine to influence the organism as early as possible, preferably as soon as it is born, so that this human body never even gets the idea that there is a soul and a spirit.” He ends with:

We need serious, profound ideas to look ahead to the future. Theosophy is not a game, not just a theory. It is a task that must be faced for the sake of human evolution.

Rudolf Steiner, The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness, 1917

While I don’t agree with all of Steiner’s conclusions, I love his model of a forum for talking about the big questions and applying them to current issues. It isn’t an amusement but the most important thing we can be doing, if we’re tired of the way things are.

We must be ruthless in challenging ideas and scrupulous in not attacking people.

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In that spirit, Guy starts his essay with a quote from the Gospel of John. I also happened to read Sasha Latypova who started her article with the same quote:

On Mind Control, Part 2: Word-to-Vector

Sasha goes on to talk about the Greek trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric, that was the prerequisite for learning to think clearly:

Critical thinking is a skill which is driven by the cycle of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The purpose of grammar is to bring a consistent order to a body of knowledge. The purpose of logic is to extract understanding from the body of knowledge. Rhetoric is the cogent explanation of that body of knowledge. In ancient times, students were taught the Trivium at home, by their parents, as a pre-requisite for admission into universities.

Grammar-Logic-Rhetoric, Grammar-Logic-Rhetoric, etc. = a comprehensive decision making process. When this human learning process is malformed, stunted or deficient in some way, we cannot arrive at the truth by critical thinking process, and instead accept whatever feels emotionally pleasant as truth. We emote instead of thinking. Intellectually, emoting is a lower level space which leads to the mind enslavement, passing the operational control from self to others.

I once did a radio episode on the trivium called Rhetorical Devisives or Two Half-Truths Don’t Make a Whole. In addition, Sasha looks at the human mind as a trinity:

This gets into the theory of dual mind, which goes back to antiquity as well. The idea that a human is 2 minds + 1 material body (a trinity). The two minds are called different things, sometimes it is soul and spirit, sometimes intuitive and rational.

This echoes Steiner that the soul and spirit are different. She continues on the importance of applying the trivium to questions of truth and reality:

It is not enough to only think the truth in silence—the truth must be spoken out loud, published in prose and poetry, put to music, represented in all art forms, and it must circulate in the space of human exchange of ideas. This is not just a bunch of nice sounding words. The act of speaking the truth shapes the physical reality of our world by shaping our collective word-vector spaces. They are not imaginary, they are material, as we humans are minds represented in matter, i.e., material beings carrying the living language of the universe through this moment in time and passing it on to the next generations. When this living language rings true it resonates directly with God, the Creator, the Source in the most awesome and nourishing way. When it is distorted by lies, we all suffer.

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Guy begins his essay:

In The Bible John describes the beginning of this puzzling thing called ‘life’ in a very odd way: he by-passes actual Life and rests ‘all’ creation in the lógos (usually translated into English as ‘Word’ with capital ‘W’). 

1. In the beginning was the lógos, and the lógos was with God, and the lógos was God. 

2. The same was in the beginning with God.

3. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made (John 1.1-3).

I responded:

So—play with me here—what if our collective identity in reality is the logos, the giver of shape, form, modulation. God is the breath, the spirit. Nothing can be formed from the throat alone, the tongue, the lips. It all starts with the breath. God gives essence but we give shape to the essense. Nothing can be made but what is made with God.

In this world of dream/ delusion, we're just mouthing the words. But there is no Word because there's no breath/spirit to animate it. No wind blows through our reed. Somewhere in our memory is the song of breath to which we gave voice. But we are dis-membered until we re-member ourSelf.

Guy enthusiastically took me up on my invitation to play, even creating a diagram of the collective identity as the undifferentiated self as a crowd or mob, completely unaware. At the other end of the continuum is the differentiated self as totally aware. I wrote back:

What I mean by the collective Self is at a right-angle turn from both the ego-self as individuated and the group of social selves as the crowd or mass. It's again the third paradigm. Someone else has been talking about communities as fractals, in which each smaller unit (family) contains the whole of the bigger communities moving outward. Maybe what I'm talking about is the fractal Self.

What A Course [in Miracles] would say is that the dream was never created, it doesn't exist, in the same way your dreams have no reality. There is no sound of One mind dreaming. So no, I don't mean the lack of breath or spirit as metaphor. Do the figures inside your dream breathe? Can I go into your dream and change it?

If we, as the One mind, are having a nightmare, God is helpless to go into our dream and straighten things out. Nor can He shake us awake. The purpose of the dream needs to be fulfilled. The voice of God or wholly spirit can speak to us and help to shape it, but we need to be ready to listen.

And we don't need to agree on that, but I wanted to clarify the experiment I'm running. Now to listen to the song of the night!

Ghostpoet - X Marks The Spot feat. Nadine Shah

Guy answered with a new diagram:

Group / Individual - First Draft

and Guy disagreed that dreams aren’t real:

Nope. That hasn’t been my experience with dreams at all. Nor does it align with my multi-year research of dreams, including Jung and others. … Your description (from ACIM?) is simplistic, very much aligned with how some eastern yogis often dismiss them. Dreams are so difficult that for many it is best to leave them untouched and, sadly, to denigrate them.

I answered:

I think you're the first person to ever call The Course simplistic ;-) It does start with a simple statement: “Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Therein lies the peace of God.”

Even though the whole Course is in that statement, it takes 1300 more pages to say it in different ways to get across a way of seeing that's completely contrary to everything we think we know. So you don't need to agree with it, but you do still need to tell me which of the alternatives you choose: God is Evil or Evil is God.

One of the statements in The Course is that darkness is the absence of light. Darkness doesn't exist. It's not real. It's like a hole that's the absence of dirt.

Your continuum of undifferentiated self that's perfectly unaware to individuated self that's perfectly conscious is a value-based line, from bad to good. It's a continuum of superiority, of domination in a moral sense. Both ends of the continuum are based in the belief, even dogma, that you exist separate from me so I can be perfectly conscious while you are unaware.

IF the flesh-encapsulated mind is an illusion, they're both equally deluded. And there is no further point from completely deluded. There's no "worse" or "bad" way to be deluded. Either we're separate minds in separate bodies or we're not.

Positing an arm of the third paradigm going down keeps it in two dimensional space. You can still, as you did, portray it on a flat surface. What I'm imagining goes off in a completely different plane, springs off the page, if you will, and opens up a new space. …

If all of what we call reality is our twisted dream, why would you think that dream analysis is unimportant? It's the most important thing in the world! We have to figure out our own psychology and why we've chosen to hide in our dream of separation, otherwise we keep going round and round in it.

And here’s a musical interlude from Pasheen on the best rendition of Amazing Grace I’ve ever heard, transcending all sectarian religions:

And it was with grace that Guy received my objections that he was not playing fair: that he had redefined my terms and the question, couched my intellectual disagreement as "projecting my sense of valuation" and "casting aside the challenge of nuance," and dismissed the 1300+ pp that I've studied for 20 yrs as simplistic ‘New Age truthiness.'

To get an outside view of whether Guy was just playing hard or not playing fair, he sent our discussion to an independent third party (female) at my request. She wrote back:

Wow! What a fascinating conversation! I think JBP could make much of it - lol!  I loved how you provided a soundtrack to—that provided a lot of depth of meaning that otherwise would have been absent I think. So I made some notes and have a few things to offer...

But as for you being macho in your argumentation—as opposed to being "toxicly" masculine—well, yes, perhaps, but not that that's bad but maybe misplaced. I think men do tend towards differentiating and insisting on precise definitions whereas women tend towards emphasising agreement and likeness. JBP has spoken (written?) about this quite a lot. Women are high in trait Agreeableness, is how he puts it.  

He's also said that a feature of female tyranny would be lack of differentiation, or something to that effect. I could look for the links for you if you want to look into that further?

In sum, a man would recognise this as being deeply respectful, but a woman is unlikely to.

So, that is what I see on a surface level—just the differences between what men and women focus on, consider important and how they communicate.

Guy adds that she was a little surprised that:

[Tereza] didn't really attempt to push back against your rigorous argumentation. After so many years of study, you'd have thought she'd have plenty of strong material to counter your positions with.

I leave it to readers to decide if I’m a woman high in trait agreeableness and not interested in differentiating, precise definitions or rigorous debate. But I so appreciate Guy for ‘staying with the trouble’ because as the Boddhisattvas say,

The only way any of us win is if all of us win.

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In the meantime, here are two older videos I did on Jordan Peterson:

Waking the Dragon Mom:

Responding to Russell Brand's interview, I agree with Jordan that men and women are fundamentally different and I describe a feminine ideology, morality and shape of government. Jordan suggests a fourth branch of government as symbolic with a king. The symbol I'd choose for a feminine structure is the interlocking honeycomb with the child in the center and the queen bee serving the hive. Jordan proposes that lust isn't a sin when directed to the marriage, but I look at sin as seeing inferiority, including objectified wives. I end by applying problem-solving criteria to the pandemic and wonder what it will take to wake the dragon mom.

and The Divine Feminine:

Instead of women paid equally to serve investor profits, should men be liberated to serve family and community? I examine whether women even existed in government, economics or religion for the past 5000 years. I address Job and the Leviathan as a metaphor for Jordan's recent ordeals and query the missing feminine in the Trinity. I look at how divorce courts turn the family home into a dead asset, acknowledging an astute listener question on Russell's community newsletter. I end with two nods to the feminine divine: The HU's Song of Women and Wendall Berry's Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.