In this chapter we need some undesirable or bad habit to pick on because if not for the apparent need for an unworlder to alter his habits in order to alter his state of being and his state of mind, the topic couldn't be taken seriously. In fact, I have satisfied myself that spontaneous unworldings rely solely on what mindset you happen to find yourself in when the Dream Usher points at you and says, "Let's go." And that mindset seems much more dependent on the kind of confidence that gets its strength from fluididty and humor vs. the kind of confidence that gets its strength from having rigid mental muscles. Enthusiasm, intuition and humor seem capable of doing more for an unworlder's hopes and dreams than all the self-discipline in the world.
And while bad habits are bound to affect one's mood to a great degree, I have proved to myself that always keeping one's promises to oneself and never changing one's mind about what habits to indulge in are not necessary in order for me to accidentally get unworlded once or twice a month. For others it could be more frequent; it just so happens that left to my own devices, without a push in some disciplined direction, my makeup doesn't allow me to get into a really fantastic mood very often, and of those moods which I consider to be really fantastic, only a small proportion of them actually comprise the magical mindset Intopia that guarantees an unworlding experience. It's not for my conscious mind to decide these things.
So it's a practical matter: we want to know if breaking bad habits will build some kind of inner strength in us that can help us get unworlded more often, on purpose. Does this sort of discipline help when it comes to establishing the magical mindset on purpose, or is it a waste of energy to even think about deleting parts of our routine? Would it be better to just keep pushing forward, practicing more of the Frawmbickly Acts more often, doing more Daytime Practice of Awakenings, practicing Blaffinveigle longer and more often, doing more reality checks, instead of getting glum and down-in-the-mouth about one's addiction to chocolate covered marshmallow bunny rabbits? Or do the bunny rabbits in fact have the innate power to prevent the magical mindset from gelling with greater consistency?
Of course I would never suggest that it's good for an unworlder's practice to get depressed and shame-faced about eating too many donuts or smoking or repeating any compulsive, pleasure-oriented activity so much that it makes you feel displeasure before, during, and after performing the habitual act. A case like this must be tackled from more than one direction.
First you have to have patience with yourself and you have to determine with great resolve that feeling guilty about eating chocolate bunny rabbits is a huge waste of perfectly good chocolate bunny rabbits, as well as a waste of your limited energy. Emotional control when one is on a bender of some kind is the first step to controlling the behavior itself. We also know that, no matter how trivial or how critical the habit is, the key to understanding the existence of addictions of all kinds is the knowledge that the habituated person is innocently seeking pleasure and this is a normal impulse.
While this understanding and resolving to not feel guilty about being a mere human does not in itself solve the problem of deciding what should be done about it, if anything, self-acceptance without question is the first step. This prerequisite step can't be bypassed, as far as I know. Two or more habits can't or shouldn't be tackled at once, as far as I know. Knowing when you're ready and when you're not ready has to be balanced against the many lying internal voices that just want a cheap thrill at any cost. Because everything in life is about balancing one thing against another, nothing is ever just simply one-dimensional.
I just woke up from a dream that I was called into. I was falling asleep at the computer so I lay down and pretended to do some unworlding induction techniques but I was being called strongly by the Suction of Sleep and I knew my real goal was to become unconscious for a period of time. I was in bed for a full sleep cycle in the mid-afternoon and woke up from this dream with some answers in the form of a ROTE conveyed by the dream. The ROTE has provided some insight which started unrolling itself like a scroll when I lay back down to try again, so I couldn't sleep, and got up to type the ROTE as it unrolls, so here goes. As usual, Synfonemia will provide the framework for the answers since it's the framework of everything. I don't yet know what will be in the ROTE.
We've been told that if you simply believe this habit (such as eating donuts five times a day) won't hurt your practice, then it won't. But first we have to define some terms.
In the dream, I was a spectator in a 3rd person narrative, rather than a participant. It was a highly lucid dream, though not Officially Lucid. I was observing the center of operations of an extraordinarily efficient and well-organized illegal smuggling operation. This was in a mansion with all kinds of illegal stuff all over the place, so it was obvious that the occupant of the mansion was afraid of nothing, not living a double life. Which indicates connections in high places. There was only one dream character, and I couldn't see him; I only heard his voice from another room. He would pick up the phone every few seconds, put out a fire with a great deal of sober decisiveness, and move on to the next fire. He was unemotional and objective in every way about sacrifices made along the way due to the decisions he had to make. He was under tremendous pressure, with his fieldworkers phoning in continuously, and his job was to make their decisions for them in novel situations. His performance was impeccable, succinct, and above all, amoral . He did not concern himself with right or wrong. His only concern was getting the job done, solving and preventing problems, and getting the job done some more.
So afterwards when I'd woken up and tried to go back to sleep, I couldn't sleep because this ROTE was unrolling in my mind. It goes like this.
Belief involves 2ness and 3ness and decisions are based on belief.
If you believe that eating donuts will make you a diabetic blind amputee, you either decide to quit eating donuts because you don't want to be a diabetic blind amputee or you decide to keep eating donuts because you temporarily want to experience that habituated pleasure so much that you're willing to take a chance. Chances are you'll feel shame and guilt.
I know because I researched it. There are internet sites and discussion forums on the topic of not eating donuts because the shame that some adults experience when they can't control what they consider to be a childish, disgusting habit is like a bomb going off in their life. People get seriously bent out of shape about their own lack of self-control. Partly because they've watched themselves going through a process of deciding that it's OK to go blind, lose their legs and inject themselves with insulin every day for the rest of their life, and thus they're aware that their priorities are completely skewed and that makes them a moron and a misfit and a wanker. And the only one there is, of course. No one else has the same problem, right? If they did, it wouldn't help. In fact they know that everyone else has problems but it just doesn't matter. They're still the only one.
Of course the issue is not really going blind and getting your diabetes-ruined legs whacked off, but the ability to get unworlded at will. We want to be able to get unworlded multiple times a day, not just multiple times a year. And it seems logical that the depression caused by not being able to control one's own appetites might have something to do with the relative absence of the magical mindset that provides impetus when seeking to engage Intent and get desired results.
As taught on the not-eating-donuts websites, there's a physical explanation for why eating donuts is as addictive as morphine: it generates dopamine--a neurotransmitter invoked when we seek pleasure--as much as the white powder drugs do. In fact, sugar and white flour are white powder drugs, any way you look at it. Such that just deciding to drive to the donut place can get you higher than a kite; the actual donuts themselves can be a bit of a letdown, to say the least.
The end result is that one will tend to ignore one's more interesting goals and decisions in favor of one more bag of jelly beans for exactly the same reason that a junkie will choose a life that's hell on earth for one more high, or a peeping tom will indulge in one more attempt to catch Sally putting on her pajamas, knowing that if he's caught his name is mud forever. It's not exactly the same high from one idiotic delight to the next--with the exception that no self-respecting chimpanzee would take an interest in any of these obsessions--but the decisionmaking process, in favor of the habit over an inspiring self-image, is exactly the same. And without that physically unnecessary but seriously craved experience, obsessive Narxing is the result. It seems easier to just get it over with, fill the appetite, and get back to the important things in life.
Unfortunately, if the truly important things in life require any enthusiasm to accomplish them--and unworlding requires plenty of enthusiasm--then the fact of the matter is that little enthusiasm will be forthcoming due to the fact that all our available enthusiasm is used up in large doses analogous to the physical brain chemical situation involving dopamine production. So we have two emotional considerations to take into account: pleasure and enthusiasm. Both are a reflection of 6ness, which is a more basic function than anything that can happen in the physical brain. The brain is just a filter, just a mirror of your underlying configuration, your Troovammickle.
So we need to look at the nature of beliefs, decisionmaking, and other related mental building blocks to see what the answer really is going to be. This ROTE is still unrolling and I still don't know what it's gonna say.
A belief can either be a stand-alone belief or a cause-effect connection, a reflection of 3ness. Here are some examples: the belief that the moon is made of green cheese stands alone. There doesn't seem to be anything to support this belief; it doesn't seem to be based on anything. The belief that 'if you don't look at the warts on your hand they will go away' is a reflection of 3ness, an if/then connection linking 'don't look' with 'go away'. The latter type of belief literally Chains two separate thoughts together.
What then is a stand-alone belief? A few more examples might help clear this up. A belief that 'America is a white Christian country as ordained by God' is a stand-alone belief. A belief that 'science knows best' is a stand-alone belief. A belief that 'children should be spanked' is a stand-alone belief. Because in my opinion, there's no evidence to support these beliefs. Right?
Wrong. Your evidence could be a laughing stock to someone else. All beliefs are based on something; there are no stand-alone beliefs. Here's what's really going on:
Someone believes children should be spanked because it will teach them respect for the rules. Someone believes poor people should be given free food or else they will resort to street crime. Someone believes that science knows best based on another belief such as the experimental method is more factual and sensible than pseudoscience, metaphysics, or intuition or science knows best based on another belief that uneducated assumptions can't be trusted. Or even science knows best because I have a student loan to pay off the rest of my life and that's the sacrifice that made me able to call myself a scientist, so I damn well better be right.
Personally, I believe that if you don't look at the warts on your hands they will go away because I tried it and it worked with precision. As a child, bored at a school assembly program, I decided to stop looking at the warts on my left hand. Two or three years later, I looked for warts on my left hand for the first time in years, and there wasn't a single one, while the warts on my right hand, which I'd been keeping close track of, were still there. I'd looked at them every day, so there was no place for them to go.
I've tried to help people get rid of acne in the same way, but talking a zit-popper out of his mirror is like robbing a junkie of his needle. Don't bother. They won't stand for it. People need their zits to pop. If someone's not ready... well, obviously, if it's not your problem, just stay out of it.
I'm going to say that all beliefs are reflections of threeness, literally the Chaining together of two or more unrelated ideas, but don't forget that threeness depends for its existence on twoness and oneness. Twoness: if there were no separate thoughts, there'd be nothing to join together as the connection between two inherently unrelated thoughts that we hold as a belief. Oneness: if there were no awareness as a pure field of undifferentiated potential creative thought energy, there would be nothing to separate into things or identities or ideas, nothing to draw limits and definitions upon.
Taking this notion to the next step, if there were no threeness or association of separate things with each other, there would be no Chain of joined things to arrange into a certain order. The Chain of things is threeness, the things are twoness, but the order is fourness.
Another reflection of 4ness is value. In relation to beliefs, some of us come to a crossroads in life when we try to evaluate our beliefs. We sense that some of our beliefs could be changed either as to their basic definitions or as to the priority they are given in our framework of values.
Once again we've landed back at square one: the 2-3-4 Mind/Body/World--the conscious mind--is a suck on our total energy. The seemingly inescapable whirlpool experienced in youth, comprised of separating our thoughts from each other in order to recognize and identify them, the simple matter of learning to distinguish X from Y, is a matter of 2ness. For example, I still remember the exact moment, at about age 13, when I first realized that one could struggle against one's problems instead of just accepting them as life in prison. Coming up with a representation of your own belief system or 3ness is difficult, much less coming up with a satisfactory way to describe someone else's belief system. And then 4ness, evaluating all that, leads to the urge to decide what to do about it, which is...
Fiveness. The power to change is Intent.
The decisive man in my dream was the Dream Usher, the 5ness body.
Believing stuff and having opinions is one thing. Any bigoted overgrown baby can do that. Knowing that your beliefs and opinions are fallible is another thing: the seed of aptitude, a glance into fluidity. Actually changing beliefs in order to get better results is another thing entirely. That's where fiveness takes on flesh and bone.
Fiveness: if there were no structured framework of values or 4ness, then change would be impossible; their would be nothing to change.
This is what we sense when we sit down to have a little talk with ourselves, but it's easy to get bogged down in uncertainty and leave the conclusion for another time, deciding nothing, or else deciding something based on emotion and pseudo-knowledge (beliefs) while knowing that you will not hold fast to your decision. With your right hand you're dialing the donut crisis hotline while with your left hand you're dang well gonna finish that box of donuts while they keep you on hold.
If the man in the dream was the Dream Usher, my fiveness dream body, my heart chakra, the moderator between the lower dream bodies (conscious mind) and upper dream bodies (Remote Mind), then what was the dream supposed to show me?
Lack of fear. Amorality, bald-faced honesty, emotionlessness, efficiency, clear thinking, and this all adds up to decisiveness. What could be described as clear intention. Presumably a forerunner of Intent itself.
Here's an example, the genuine article as it was both unplanned and successful. It did not come about as the result of the machinations of anyone's conscious mind.
Almost fifteen years ago I had been trying to quit smoking tobacco for the better part of 26 years. I had an older roommate who clearly and decisively informed me, when he caught me hiding in the back yard with my shameful cigarettes, that he would never nag me to quit because he knew it wouldn't help. And he never said another word about smoking, not so much as a dirty look.
Somehow, I internalized his words and used his voice, instead of mine, since mine had failed me through hundreds (yes hundreds) of miserably unsuccessful attempts to quit smoking. A few weeks after he made his pronouncement, I got a bad cold, a real whopper, and two weeks later when I was almost over it, I got sick again. This had never happened to me before. I knew I was done for. I won't list the reasons why I knew it, but after 26 years of smoking I kinda knew the score. I was having nightmares about the little bubbles I was coughing up. I sensed a moment of opportunity, maybe the last. Somehow I used the voice of my roommate and told myself that I would never smoke another cigarette. I told myself a successful attempt would be easy because only unsuccessful attempts are hard. I told myself the conversation was now over, forever.
And I've never touched another cigarette since, nor have I ever felt tempted to. There's no argument as to whether or not the lack of a tobacco habit has changed my life and given me tons of energy. It also made it more likely that I might someday conquer those chocolate marshmallow bunny rabbits.
The point is that the 2-3-4 Mind is an expert at maintaining a habit, but it doesn't know how to change a habit. That's the realm of the heart chakra, the Dream Usher, the center of our being, the moderator between the conscious and the unconscious minds. Our basic configuration or Troovammickle can't be changed; it's what makes us who we are rather than someone else. But the way in which we habitually tend to express that configuration can be changed, and this means of redirecting what cannot be changed starts with the Dream Usher's talent at fomenting change, proceeds to the 6ness body's inherent enthusiasm, moves on to take advantage of the 7ness body's ability to know what's really going on in an intuitive way, and ends up in the hands of the 8ness body and its unique talent at just relaxing and expanding with humor into any situation, somehow just knowing what needs to be done without worrying about it. Eightness knows how to merge with the Moment because it knows what 2ness, 3ness, 4ness, 5ness, 6ness, and 7ness know.
The fiveness body is Intent, the power to create change. The lower chakras, representing separating, joining, and ordering, know nothing about change. Change is the next step beyond 2ness, 3ness, and 4ness, so it's just past the exclusive realm of the conscious mind. In order to get the help you need, you don't need a shrink, a seminar, a self-help book, or a shoulder to cry on. You need access to your own Intent. Intent never fails to get what it wants, but it can't be controlled by the conscious mind. It's above the conscious mind, in its own jurisdiction.
The genius Milton Erickson who founded the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis suggested that people learn how to perform self-hypnosis in order to change a habit. His preferred methods usually didn't involve the conscious mind working out some system by the commonly preferred methods of analyzing and releasing childhood trauma. As the inspiration for what's now sometimes called 'brief psychotherapy,' Erickson might have recommended that you bypass all that psychobabble noise and get practical.
Sit down in front of a mirror and tell your conscious mind to go into a trance and not come out of it until your subconscious mind has developed a full understanding of the problem and invented the perfect solution. People who tried this would sometimes have amnesia for a few days, if it took that long for the subconscious to do its job with the conscious mind (and memory) out of the way.
Milton Erickson was literally a savant when it came to observing people and influencing them indirectly. If he came to understand you and develop rapport with you, and he told you to sit in front of a mirror later and go into a trance, later on when you did this, it might be his voice, in a way deferred, that might push you into the trance and make sure you went down the right path for you, to meet your needs, not his.
We all have a heart chakra, a Dream Usher, and the conscious mind has no power over him. But if the Dream Usher is not invoked, if his participation is not wanted, then he will bide his time until something happens to change that. Your Remote Mind lives in the Unworld. The Uppers already know how to be free; they're not the ones trapped in the physical so why would they force themselves on you? Even though they're as amoral as the day they were born, they want what you want and as soon as you want it bad enough to take tangible steps, they try to help you get it.
Since the 2-3-4 is an utter terrorist when it comes to monopolizing your energy, and since it's constantly goaded by the Voice of Idiossification to keep repeating the same safe, boring mistakes over and over, it's highly likely that donut addicts and chocolate marshmallow bunny rabbit junkies reading this will come to the end of the chapter and then proceed to try and design a solution to their problem habit using the conscious mind. The solution might fail if it's not anything new, and like I just got done saying, the conscious mind's domain does not include the ability to change itself.
But does it matter?
Well this chapter is X pages long and you just read the whole thing, so I'll ask you: does it matter?
As taught by Gurdjieff, an identity is not a single voice but a composite of many voices, some of which are incompatible with each other and some of which are unaware of each others' existence. But as taught by Erickson, the all-seeing Remote Mind has talents and abilities that the conscious mind would never dream of. And due to the 2-3-4's being stuck on itself--and stuck in general--if the conscious mind did have the ability to change its own habits, it would probably refuse to do so.
Fortunately the 2ness, 3ness and 4ness bodies which comprise the conscious mind, physical body, and so-called real world are not the be-all and end-all of our existence. The Uppers and the Dream Usher are patiently waiting for us to grow curious enough about the freedom inherent in living in the Unworld to make us care about what they can do. When we start caring more about the freedom residing in the unknown than about repeating mindless pleasure rituals that make us feel stupid, ugly, gross, incompetent, and useless, then the higher chakras or Uppers can handle all the energy you have to offer them. And when I say 'you' I mean the conscious mind, the greedy idiot that's willing to keep besmirching its own extended stay in prison as long as it's so happy to be a prisoner.
Turn it over to your higher self. Your Upper chakras are you and they know what to do.
