My higher self or future self is my Miruvor, that is, the me who has already fought the battle against the mirror and won. The mirror is simply the so-called 'real' world although by now I'm getting used to that species-wide misuse of the word 'real' stopping me and making me back up. Reality is infinity, and it's indescribable and inviolable. It exists, and that's all. It underlies everything, it is raw energy, pure awareness, existence itself.
So 'reality' and 'the world' are distinct things; the 'so-called real world' should be abbreviated to 'the world' with the understanding that each person lives in his own world and that world morphs into a different world once per Moment. The reason some of us want to become highly capable unworlders--i.e. Miruvors--is so that we can cause our worlds from Moment to Moment to change radically compared to the status quo march of time, which I prefer to call the Petty Pace or depending on whether or not I've been able to ignore the headlines, the Suicide Dance. But in practical terms, the way you can watch the Moment continuously changing is 5ness, which is your Dream Usher, which is your gateway out of physical imprisonment. But getting out of the 2-3-4, the obstinate physical world, comes with tests to see if you're ready, to see if you're gonna carry through. Why would your Uppers bother leading you there if you don't Notice you're there once you get there? Every dry spell in the world can be explained in this way: the wanna-be unworlder is not ready for the next phase of his unworlding re-education. He's failing tests so the Remote Mind is devising challenges for him which he is ready for, instead of the unworldings he wishes he could accumulate without taking the right kind of effort to make it happen.
Since your mind, body and world are simultaneously generated by a single infinite awareness shining through an individual Troovammickle, the result is that these three sides of the same coin--mind, body and world--are perfect mirrors of each other. I didn't have to think this up, it's just obvious. Never mind that it's not obvious to everybody; I don't mind being ahead of the times. It keeps the world from beating a path to my door. I wouldn't want them stomping on my front garden.
The Typical cares nothing about dreams and just wants a new car and other symbols of stability. Stability in this sense is a positive emotion, and like all emotions, it's based on fear. This feeling of stability that we seek at great cost to our energy and resources is the fear of not measuring up, not keeping up with the Joneses, not keeping up with your family's needs, being publicly humiliated, shunned, left out of the group, and gossiped about. And yet the Typical, in contrast to the Contrary Being, seems to dance relatively effortlessly with his environment, which is largely a social environment. If by chance he gets interested in unworlding, he can learn it with relative ease. This book is not for these people. This book is for people like me who find unworlding hard to learn and thus need to change some attitudes, some of them radically, until unworlding becomes as easy and natural as it could be. Most Contrary Beings don't dance smoothly with their world, because we find enjoyment here to be fleeting. We struggle against our own mind, body and world because most of us have been taught that there's something wrong with us.
Of course the Typical struggles too, is rewarded, and keeps struggling long past the point where he has attained stability. The unending struggle for more money, status, and all the usual things that send someone to the grave with a bigger, shinier gravestone is an addiction. Most of them fail because bigger, shinier gravestones wouldn't be bigger and shinier if everybody had one. The commonalities of the Typicals include an undying affection for the world, the self, the body, and an uncritical, accepting attitude toward people who are a lot like themselves. Most people are like this, from successful dog walkers to successful bankers to successful criminals.
The Contrary Being, on the other hand, is born without ignorance and has to have ignorance pushed into him by other people. In undergoing this, he develops a fear of the unknown because the unknown--that is, all the wonderfulness of the Unworld and exploring and curiosity in general--becomes a symbol of personal suffering. That feeling of people always ready to throw rocks at you while daring you to shout your minority opinion just one more time. We Contrary Beings fear a violent death and a short life for good reason; since time immemorial, it's been popular to hunt us down, torture us, imprison us, and kill us for sport. This trend slowed down a bit during the petroleum glut of the 20th century when a large variety of people were allowed to claw their way into the middle class, but now that LSD has been illegal for 50 (fifty!) years, the aristocracy has taken over again, and persecution of oddballs is picking up again in popularity. With population always on the rise, the amount of human intelligence available per person is always on the decline. Since this is a definite trend, individuality + intelligence = target.
The Miruvor has already struggled against all these odds and won. He can leave this world any time he wants and stay gone as long as he wants. He only comes here for entertainment purposes. He can even change this world if he wants, but who would want to? Earthville serves its purpose, and its purpose is not to change into something that it is not. Overcoming the desire to save the world is just one of the things a Contrary Being has to go through, to get to the other side of. You might call it the MESSIAH TEST.
Along the way, the Contrary Being who wishes to become a Miruvor must pass many such tests. The rest of this chapter will be a description of a few of these tests.
THE SINCERITY TEST
You actually want to live in the Unworld at least part of the time, so when a non-physical event takes place in your life, you can't wait to record it, to make it part of your collection of memories. You know the experience will be lost if you don't write it down. For Contrary Beings, keeping a dream journal is not optional. If you don't keep one, your Uppers will be happy to continue living in the Unworld without you. They aren't judgmental; they don't care. They want what you want. If you don't like their world, you're free to stay where you are.
THE EMPTINESS TEST
Do you meditate? Or clear your mind from time to time? Or go for a walk for no particular reason? If you can't tolerate emptiness, you won't make it through the Nowhere with your ability to pay Attention intact. Attention is the entrance fee. Meditation teaches you to pay Attention, through concentration on something or stopping the internal dialog or any number of other ways to exercise the Blaffinveigle muscle.
THE FEAR TEST
And its corrolates the ANIMOSITY TEST, the PRIDE test, the ANNOYANCE test, etc. etc. All emotions are just fear wearing a mask.
You want to live in the Unworld badly enough to push through fear and all the other emotions that plague us and keep us grasping at and averting from the circumstances that have got us all tangled up with the world. Contrary Beings are more sensitive to emotional strife--their own and others'--than Typicals who seem to breeze through life with relative ease, bathing in seemingly impossible rivers of money along the way while navigating stress, obligation, and responsibility as if life on earth was some kind of team sport. Which it is, for the majority. Contraries are more sensitive to everything and our punishment for this is to be pushed to the side, to become fringe people. This is to be accepted and not struggled against. What we have to struggle against is the ever-present fears and over-sensitivities that made us easy targets to begin with. As for being a target to begin with, the idea is to go someplace where most people have more interesting hobbies than shooting other people down. A species that considers life a team sport might not be a good place for someone to settle down if he doesn't appreciate participating in team sports.
RELAXATION TEST
Can you relax no matter what? If not, you'd better learn how, if you ever want to live in the Unworld. The inability to do this will just get you sent back here to Earthville after ten seconds of lucidity in the Unworld.
REALITY TEST
The reality test must be accomplished backwards, since the voice of the Collective Average--the Hoveltongue--has most people believing that the Dayly Dreame in Earthville is the essential backbone of reality. This probably includes you since you're reading this book looking for answers. Contrary Beings have had the unignorance beaten out of them by living on earth and trying to adjust to the aberrations of the human form. We know, with our intellect, that the Dayly Dreame is just one among any number of dreams, but since it is so nightmarishly repetitive, it seems distinctly real to us. It's more physical than the Unworld at large, more unforgiving, more unyielding. Earthville isn't actually more real than the transcendant, ecstatic experiences we crave to experience in the Unworld, but deep inside, we don't believe this . The childlike belief in infinity has been punished out of us by parents, schools, peers, religion, the workplace, politics, the economy, etc.
Because we think dreams are illusional when we're focused in Earthville, we then have to go out into the Unworld in any mundane or so-called 'non-lucid' dream, and find a way to communicate to ourselves that the real experience we are having in the Unworld is actually a dream. Which of course is wrong, it's really a backward reality test. A preposterous, conniving lie designed to establish rapport with the comatose 2-3-4 by starting from the swamp of deceit where the conscious mind lives and weaning it off The Greatest Fraud There Is... gradually. We have to deal with the things we've been forced to believe in order to not be tied to a chair in a padded room by the Lords of Fear or our own family, so there's no way around it for most people. Beliefs will change; the Miruvor or future self doesn't have to do backwards reality tests anymore. But we do for a time, because our beliefs about reality are backwards. It helps when you can come to an understanding that the Dayly Dreame, which we've been taught to believe is the one and only factual world, is actually a recurring nightmare that happens to take place on a spectacularly beautiful planet. A nightmare that any normal person would want to be able to escape from at will.
So the reason that Contrary Beings resist doing reality checks is that inside ourselves, we know that the physical world is a dream and the dreams we have when we're asleep to the physical are real. And vice versa. And Contrary Beings hate to tell lies, which certainly sets them apart from the Typicals.
APPETITE TEST
What's more important? Some childish and/or self-destructive appetite, or having dozens of unworldings this month instead of one? What do you desire most? Chocolate-covered marshmallow bunny rabbits? or meetings with your higher self in cathedralesque buildings made of light, wind and waves, a hundred stories high and a thousand cities wide, held up by celestial winds and ringing with the indescribable voices of beauty, majesty, and infinite wisdom?
Please don't take me too literally. One person's jaw-dropping awe is another person's cliche. I happen to like dreams about grandiose architecture. If that's just not you, I think you still know what I'm getting at.
We have a wantingness called 'Narxing' that never goes away. Unfortunately Narxing's whole ploy is to make us think we can get rid of it. Narxing perpetrates this fraud by showing us a cute little hole and fooling us into thinking that all we have to do is fill the hole up. You know the routine. Fill it up, and an hour later or a day later or a week later, the hole has to be filled up again, and the hole keeps getting bigger.
Whether or not you truly desire the Unworld in favor of other desires is something that your Remote Mind demands proof of. Why does it even matter? Not for moralistic, goody-two-shoes, do-the-right-thing reasons. There's nothing to prove, that's not what it's about. You have to know about the hole because what you put into that hole in your incessant attempts to fill it up is your energy. Since energy and awareness are the same thing, and Attention is directed awareness, your life as a Frumbessler revolves around that hole and trying to fill it up. That's what you end up paying Attention to, and the word 'paying' is not used by accident. As an individual, you have limited energy to use. So if you want to conserve the energy you need to get unworlded, don't toss it all into the Bottomless Pit of the Appetites and then wonder why it is that whenever you get to the borderline of sleep, you keep robotically plunging into deep unconsciousness. As if you had no energy. Get it?
You know the routine; stop pretending to be confused about it. And don't make me tell you again.
OK, I give up. You really didn't get that did you? You still have visions of chocolate-covered marshmallow bunny rabbits dancing around your head, don't you?
Here it goes again.
Narxing is the result of being an entity instead of experiencing existence from the perspective of pure infinite awareness. Pure infinite awareness doesn't have a perspective; it isn't differentiated into separate things, portals, or points of view. Can you say that infinity has no needs? Well infinity includes everything, so it has all the needs in the world. It just doesn't matter, because in the face of eternity, nothing matters and everything matters. Which doesn't matter.
But when awareness becomes aware of its own existence, it splits off from oneness through a process called twoness, the second harmonic of existence. This is instantaneous, time has nothing to do with it. An entity or individual comes into existence and its constant companion Narxing comes into existence simultaneously due to the nature of identity coming into existence. While everything including separateness is infinite--you can't get rid of these paradoxes, so don't try--to be an entity instead of infinity means there are boundaries drawn around things, definitions. You are you and the rest of the universe is not you, it's the world (so the assumption goes). This stimulates and restimulates and feeds and regenerates and morphs and feeds again, the insidious sensation of Narxing, the unshakable feeling that something is missing, something must be fixed. Some damn thing is just plain wrong, now if only I could figure out what the heck it is and do something about it, then maybe things would be OK.
For how long, muchacho?
Forget filling up that hole. Just know where it is on the map and walk around it and keep going, hundreds of times a day. Why do you think they invented sleep? So you could spend a few luxurious hours forgetting who you are! Being you is what instantaneously generates Narxing, the ultimately fatiguing experience. The amnesia of sleep still generates symbols of Narxing in Unworlding Lessons (dreams), but anything's better than being stuck in this ridiculous Earthville Mental Institution where we think recurrence and physicality make something more right and real than symbols we can dissolve with our mind in the Unworld. So-called 'non-physical' things.
The problem with that is, here I come with my big ambitions to be a full-time unworlder, and I think I can take my co-dependent marriage to Narxing with me to the Unworld. Overcoming this self-perpetuating feedback loop is a real trick. Like Castaneda said, most people who learn to stop the internal dialog are no longer motivated to go to the next step, so they just quit at the first sign of success. This is a natural result of beginning the practice for the wrong reasons. When the wrong reasons evaporate, a new motivation must be found.
In the vacuum left by having had your first few peeks at the Unworld, appetites easily ignored during the frantic early days of leeching off of Noob Enthusiasm, which fuels sporadic beginner's luck, will rear their ugly heads once more. Narxing will leer at you, back in power, and present you with a cute little hole to fill. One you thought you'd gotten rid of. You have to leave the hole empty and walk away from the damn thing. This involves struggle. People who won't struggle with their hopelessly wasteful energy habits should just forget about learning unworlding and read pulp fiction or watch movies or get a second job and buy a new car to drive to work in so everyone will see you driving a new car. Change your hair color, whatever makes life on earth so wonderful that billions of people would do anything to keep from dying so they can keep on struggling with that thing called 'life'. Which nearly impossible game do you really want to play? Splitting yourself between two nearly impossible games is the mark of a born loser. Don't lie to yourself about what you want. The world or the Unworld, choose and keep choosing.
Now about that hole.
I hope you've noticed that this concept is important to me. I'm trying to teach you something here; the Bottomless Pit of the Appetites should be important to you too. If you have unlimited energy compared to other people, never mind. If self-discipline and you were made for each other, forget it. You don't need this book. This book is for people who find the going too slow and want a new, better way to learn unworlding. Such a thing is not likely to come through a commercial source because capitalism ruins everything it touches. I'm happy to announce that I may be an idiot like everyone else, but money has not had a chance to ruin me. I don't know if it's me or money, but one of us is slippery. Money just slides off of me. If this book sucks, it's not because someone paid me to think something wrong, crazy or stupid. Unlike capitalist who publish a book and must leave the bad parts in it because it's a finished product --like soap--so it's too late to change it, I learn as I go and fix the book by adding better parts and removing the bad parts.
This chapter right here is one of the better parts. It's hugely important.
If you want to be the sort of person who gets unworlded at will, but by all indications you are not that person, then you need to become that person. Don't get me wrong for a second: self-acceptance is always the first step to permanent change. Unless you're a murderer or a rapist or a heroin dealer or a banker, in which case you should just jump into a volcano and enjoy the trip. But in general, self-acceptance is not optional if you want a new life, a new you, a different way of expressing your Troovammickle, who you are. Multitudinous instances of steeling yourself for the long trip around the Bottomless Pit of the Appetites are going to test you every which way because without fighting and winning this battle, you are going to lack the energy to Gralthify the Miruvorning Vroombelleration. But if you stir ugly self-loathing and other worse-than-useless emotions into the pot, you won't get anywhere but full of recycled stew. So don't forget self-acceptance.
Becoming the sort of person who is not defeated by obsession with the appetites of life is all about the nature of a Bottomless Pit. Narxing has to be ignored. It can never be defeated. That's the inexorable curse of being an individual and it's never going away. So it's you that has to go away, leave your friend Narxing weeping and wailing in wretched solitude, and never look back.
So I'll tell you the secret about that appetite you can't conquer. This is going to be short and sweet. Because it's the only thing that works, once you've enlisted self-acceptance and rejected all the guilt and confusion and trying to figure out whether this idiotic self-indulgence really hurts you or not. Ready?
When the Voice of Idiossification tempts you, you must immediately--like a pre-programmed robot--turn away and refuse to discuss the matter. There must be no conversation with any part of yourself about this thing. It's the conversation that keeps you entangled with a habit. The conscious mind doesn't know how to change, and will muck it up for you every time, trying to trick you into retaining control of the habit when all you have to do is reject the entire conversation about the habit.
Failure at this is a trick. How we love being tricked. What a great excuse: "Yeah but, the voice inside my head lied and said blah... blah... blah..."
Bullshit.
End the conversation.
What you put in that hole is your energy. The same limited energy that you have to conserve in order to get unworlded.
Any questions?
