An ass kicking by the Sandman
In Sandman, Neil Gaiman created a writer who abused a muse, loaned to him by the publisher. The first thing he does is fuck her and then he confines her, forcing her to keep feeding him ideas from the basement while he is being celebrated in society as a great novelist. He is punished by the Sandman opening the gates and releasing ideas like water through a broken dam. There are so many ideas coming so fast it drives him crazy. There is an obvious harmony in this of course, the punishment fitting the crime, and there is another level to it.
I worked as a writer until I was thirty because when you want to learn how to do something and you don’t have money, you have to get paid while you learn. Next I wanted to explore consciousness, or more specifically, what I saw as the Consciousness Movement. It was like the blind man and the elephant, to use a snowclone, it was different depending on where you touched it. So I started by studying bodywork.
I went to school to learn all kinds of different methods, from Easlen to shiatsu to trigger pointing to polarity to non verbal hypnosis. I alternately studied hypnosis as I studied bodywork, as they have a synergy when combined. And then there is another synergy when they are combined with writing, where the keyboard is a medium, like a wizard’s cat.
What I attempt is is to translate touch into written language. This writing isn’t for scanning. Slowing down is the first step in understanding how to shift states of consciousness. This is because there is a different rate of movement in the body mind, materialized into muscle and blood and skin and bone.
The body is a mind which exists in eternal time, which means it sees the completed structure at once, without sequencing it. There is no sequential time, there is right now and not right now, like ones and zeros. Eternal time is where there are no remaining options, or probabilities, which might happen instead. It already happened. There are no opposites, there is a field of energy wherein polarities can form. Without the polarity of opposites everything is just what it is. No words apply. It is direct knowledge. The direction into the body is moving from the general to the specific, called deduction. I will give you an example:
Let’s imagine that you are in your room and want to explore your range of consciousness moving from right to left. As with cooking, lay out your ingredients first. The right side is patterned, and that’s why it’s called right. That was why it was so funny when Colbert called out G.W. Bush at the correspondent’s dinner for thinking the same thing on Wednesday as he did on Monday, no matter what happened on Tuesday. He is contained in an ideology or pattern which repeats reliably. That is the far right with its obvious drawbacks when not balanced with the left.
The left side is the pattern maker, like the coach, who works for the team owner, to produce great athletes. The left is connected into the earth, into what is fully materialized, and thus in eternal time. Sequential time is conceptual. It is a defined rhythm which allows us to synchronize as one organism. Once we looked at the night sky and saw the repeating pattern, so that there was the one and the zero, the pattern was on or off in the same way. And once we knew the pattern would come back again, we began to see figures of heroes and animals with bodies made of points of light.
Looking out into the stars and seeing gods and animal spirits is the opposite direction from the deductive process. It is inductive, moving from the specific out to the general. Now we get back to Gaiman’s writer when ideas became his poison. Ideas without connection to eternal time are noise.
Gaiman’s writer is like the client who is in a state of anxiety because there are so many patterns running which have no earth, no ground. The more patterns being processed at the same time, the more claustrophobic the experience in the body.
Hypnosis is not really an induction, it is a deductive process. Everything non material is eliminated, as in, “Elementary my dear Watson.” There is just you in eternal time. This state of trance is portrayed in such great detectives as Nero Wolf, whose thumbs would begin to circle each other as he sank into a deep trance to see who was the murderer. His corpulence, like that of a Chinese buddha, was symbol of a connection to the earth, where the answer and the question are in the same location, like everything else.
Milton Erickson, the maestro of hypnosis, who taught us we can implant suggestions in ordinary conversation as easily as swing a gold watch and twirl a mustache, if we have the nerve to charge for it without the theatrics, said that his greatest experience was being aware of himself as an object in space. This is the ultimate experience of being one with the deep mind. There are no directions, no location in time, no connection to any mediating externalities.
The process I devised to increase awareness of the different levels of consciousness was to analogize it to music, so that we would begin with the steady beat in the heart chakra, which keeps the time. Everything is built around the tempo. From there you can see down into the eternal time of materialized body, and up into the metaphorical realm of the head, where you can escape the body entirely by just moving thought to thought and running patterns. It’s like lead guitar, great in context with percussion and rhythm, but it can’t stand alone for very long. It’s the same with not being connected into the body. It doesn’t take long to develop neurosis.
The analogy to chakras is of musical instruments which play together in harmonious cooperation. The breathing is the bass line, or baseline, the internal dialogue, or thinking, is the lead guitar, exploring beyond the rhythms of the body but staying connected to it, the vocal, a synthesizer, and all of it in built around the beat. The heart centering is the most advanced work, because it is from the heart that we can be aware of both directions, both sides, at the same time, and weave them together in patterns which combine intellect and esthetics, the writer and the muse in service to each other.
