once again there is a lot here for me to respond too, even before i got to your extended citation on 'shadow work'. and shadow work has been to a very large extent what much of my writing in and pre-substack is about, particularly in the last year or so.
in that regards, to shadow work i mean, you may like the last essay whic…
once again there is a lot here for me to respond too, even before i got to your extended citation on 'shadow work'. and shadow work has been to a very large extent what much of my writing in and pre-substack is about, particularly in the last year or so.
in that regards, to shadow work i mean, you may like the last essay which is for me a really deep dive into a collective (imo), as well as my personal, shadow around the 'morals' and 'morality'. it turns out that morality and morals of the enablers and/or even 'drug' pushers in our societal addiction to reason. it is with great morality that we kill people, cultures, animals and the planet.
and i will side with your gnostic in that words are a huge impediment to knowledge. for many, as described by patañjali in the yoga sutras, the path to alignment with the wordlessness of 'god' — however the wordless energisation of life is worded by you — ishvara-pranidhana — is in fact through words and the serious practice of svadyaya, the study of the self (shadow-work of the highest order) that is to be done with the other yamas and niyamas. patañjali also points out that the person who is able to align with god (energisation of life) without words will automatically, wordlessly, be engaged fully with the yamas and the niyamas and no need to study their words to understand the. understanding will have preceded words and words are the very pale, (beyond the pale?) simulacrum of the gnosis. from what i remember from pagels's look at this in her book, 'the gnostic gospels', this was a key part of the reason that the gnostics were considered heretical: that they didn't need words to know the experience of god whereas the official church demanded that the true followers trusted only the words of the apostles and their official designates. i have argued in my substack that that is the narcissistic gaslighting roots of the church - the use of words to separate people from the reality of the energisation of life and to rely solely on the words of the church.
jung made a similar allusion when he described the difficulty of using words to convey the experience of god with another: nope. can't be done. to the one who has had the beyond-word experience of god, there is no possible conversation with someone who has only read about the experience. the experience of gnosis is beyond words.
and for the ‘final’ word on words — rotfl as that is possible! — i'll return again to my second favourite taoist writer, after edward de vere (aka shakespeare): it would be easy for me to cite my favourite aphorism which is that words are for catching ideas, and once the idea is caught we no longer need words. however, for a change of pace, this is fun too:
if words were satisfactory, we could speak the whole day and it would all be about the way; but if words are unsatisfactory, we can speak the whole day and it will all be about things. the way is the delimitation of things. neither words nor silence are satisfactory for conveying it. without words and without silence, our deliberations reach their utmost limits. — chuang-tse. wandering on the way: early taoist tales and parables of chuang tzu. toronto: bantam books, 1994. tr. by victor mair, p. 266.
and yes, to the dogma of the separation of people. the criticism of this idea, hence it as an idea, is very old, of course. it was a key part of the success of hinduism to build and to maintain the caste system, for example. and it was the key argument that gautama made with his pre-heisenberg affirmation of the interdependence of **every thing, including people** with the idea of dependence co-arising. (i think that this was largely removed or 'managed' by de-emphasis in much of 'official' doctrines of so-called buddhism.) every thing, **every** **thing** is so interconnected that the removal of even the smallest gluon-quark would dismantle the entire universe. (and yes, gautama even used the word ‘’gluon-quark! not! lol!) he added if that single idea was understood without the need for words and the intermediary, then we wouldn't need words anymore to use morality to justify caste systems and our killing the undeserving (amoral) others over there.
and william blake also also hinted at this problem of separation from the other with the false split between soul and body, that might be the foundation of the perceived even dogmatically proper morality of the separation of people:
the voice of the devil
all bibles or sacred codes have been the cause of the following errors: —
1. that man has two real existing principles, viz., a body and a soul.
2. that energy, called evil, is alone from the body; and that reason, called good, is alone from the soul.
3. that god will torment man in eternity for following his energies.
i would suggest a slightly more nuanced deepest (moral) dogma that may precede or be concomitant with the idea of the separation of people, which is the separation between the deserving and undeserving because that form of separation is energised by morality and reason even more strongly than the separation of people. i suspect that the separation of soul from body might be the genesis of the idea of people as being separate and undeserving or not.
thank you for the interesting exploration. as usual, you have asked me to look deeply at things in my shadow. all the best with what is changing — everything is changing.
hola, tereza.
once again there is a lot here for me to respond too, even before i got to your extended citation on 'shadow work'. and shadow work has been to a very large extent what much of my writing in and pre-substack is about, particularly in the last year or so.
in that regards, to shadow work i mean, you may like the last essay which is for me a really deep dive into a collective (imo), as well as my personal, shadow around the 'morals' and 'morality'. it turns out that morality and morals of the enablers and/or even 'drug' pushers in our societal addiction to reason. it is with great morality that we kill people, cultures, animals and the planet.
and i will side with your gnostic in that words are a huge impediment to knowledge. for many, as described by patañjali in the yoga sutras, the path to alignment with the wordlessness of 'god' — however the wordless energisation of life is worded by you — ishvara-pranidhana — is in fact through words and the serious practice of svadyaya, the study of the self (shadow-work of the highest order) that is to be done with the other yamas and niyamas. patañjali also points out that the person who is able to align with god (energisation of life) without words will automatically, wordlessly, be engaged fully with the yamas and the niyamas and no need to study their words to understand the. understanding will have preceded words and words are the very pale, (beyond the pale?) simulacrum of the gnosis. from what i remember from pagels's look at this in her book, 'the gnostic gospels', this was a key part of the reason that the gnostics were considered heretical: that they didn't need words to know the experience of god whereas the official church demanded that the true followers trusted only the words of the apostles and their official designates. i have argued in my substack that that is the narcissistic gaslighting roots of the church - the use of words to separate people from the reality of the energisation of life and to rely solely on the words of the church.
jung made a similar allusion when he described the difficulty of using words to convey the experience of god with another: nope. can't be done. to the one who has had the beyond-word experience of god, there is no possible conversation with someone who has only read about the experience. the experience of gnosis is beyond words.
and for the ‘final’ word on words — rotfl as that is possible! — i'll return again to my second favourite taoist writer, after edward de vere (aka shakespeare): it would be easy for me to cite my favourite aphorism which is that words are for catching ideas, and once the idea is caught we no longer need words. however, for a change of pace, this is fun too:
if words were satisfactory, we could speak the whole day and it would all be about the way; but if words are unsatisfactory, we can speak the whole day and it will all be about things. the way is the delimitation of things. neither words nor silence are satisfactory for conveying it. without words and without silence, our deliberations reach their utmost limits. — chuang-tse. wandering on the way: early taoist tales and parables of chuang tzu. toronto: bantam books, 1994. tr. by victor mair, p. 266.
and yes, to the dogma of the separation of people. the criticism of this idea, hence it as an idea, is very old, of course. it was a key part of the success of hinduism to build and to maintain the caste system, for example. and it was the key argument that gautama made with his pre-heisenberg affirmation of the interdependence of **every thing, including people** with the idea of dependence co-arising. (i think that this was largely removed or 'managed' by de-emphasis in much of 'official' doctrines of so-called buddhism.) every thing, **every** **thing** is so interconnected that the removal of even the smallest gluon-quark would dismantle the entire universe. (and yes, gautama even used the word ‘’gluon-quark! not! lol!) he added if that single idea was understood without the need for words and the intermediary, then we wouldn't need words anymore to use morality to justify caste systems and our killing the undeserving (amoral) others over there.
and william blake also also hinted at this problem of separation from the other with the false split between soul and body, that might be the foundation of the perceived even dogmatically proper morality of the separation of people:
the voice of the devil
all bibles or sacred codes have been the cause of the following errors: —
1. that man has two real existing principles, viz., a body and a soul.
2. that energy, called evil, is alone from the body; and that reason, called good, is alone from the soul.
3. that god will torment man in eternity for following his energies.
i would suggest a slightly more nuanced deepest (moral) dogma that may precede or be concomitant with the idea of the separation of people, which is the separation between the deserving and undeserving because that form of separation is energised by morality and reason even more strongly than the separation of people. i suspect that the separation of soul from body might be the genesis of the idea of people as being separate and undeserving or not.
thank you for the interesting exploration. as usual, you have asked me to look deeply at things in my shadow. all the best with what is changing — everything is changing.