Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Oh yeah. You saw The Big LebowskI?
Reminds me of a song;)
It's still the tonal, but the Nagual is closer to you than before.....pushing on you sorta. You've removed a barrier.
There's different techniques for stopping thought. To see the "stability", you might go for a walk and fill your mind with the stuff your senses bring you.
I put "stability" in quotes........you've seen Mandelbrot zooms......wtf..?, lol.
there is stability that is not of the mind= the nagual?
We are fluid, luminous beings made out of fibers. The agreement that we are solid objects is the tonal 's doings. When the tonal shrinks, extraordinary things are possible. But they are only extraordinary for the tonal .
The nagual , once it learns to surface, may cause great damage to the tonal by coming out without any control. Your tonal has to be convinced about all of this with reasons, your nagual with actions, until one props the other. As I have told you, the tonal rules, and yet it is very vulnerable. The nagual , on the other hand, never, or almost never, acts out; but when it does, it terrifies the tonal .
The tonal must be protected at any cost. The crown has to be taken away from it, but it must remain as the protected overseer. Any threat to the tonal always results in its death. And if the tonal dies, so does the whole man. Because of its inherent weakness the tonal is easily destroyed, and thus one of the balancing arts of the warrior is to make the nagual emerge in order to prop up the tonal . I say it is an art, because sorcerers know that only by boosting the tonal can the nagual emerge. That boosting is called personal power.
Don Juan Matuis....Tales of Power
Freedom from Occupation
Can the mind be free from the past, free from thought- not from the good or bad thought? How do I find out? I can only find out by seeing what the mind is occupied with. If my mind is occupied with the good or occupied with the bad, then it is only concerned with the past, it is occupied with the past. It is not free of the past. So, what is important is to find out how the mind is occupied. If it is occupied at all, it is always occupied with the past because all our consciousness is the past. The past is not only on the surface but on the highest level, and the stress on the unconscious is also the past.Can the mind be free from occupation? This means, can the mind be completely without being occupied and let memory, the thoughts good and bad, go by without choosing? The moment the mind is occupied with one thought, good or bad, then it is concerned with the past. If you really listen - not just merely verbally, but really profoundly - then you will see that there is stability that is not of the mind, which is the freedom from the past.Yet, the past can never be put aside. There is a watching of the past as it goes by, but not occupation with the past. So the mind is free to observe and not to choose. Where there is choice in this movement of the river of memory, there is occupation; and the moment the mind is occupied, it is caught in the past; and when the mind is occupied with the past, it is incapable of seeing something real, true, new, original, uncontaminated.
J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life
Human beings in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free but are as causally bound as the stars in their motions.
~ Albert Einstein
Does free will exist? Or is it just an illusion? Are we limited to finite choices and think we are free because we can choose as we please from that set? Mix and match? Rearrange? Never having original thought, intention or will outside our library of choices?
“It is only when we realize that life is taking us nowhere that it begins to have meaning.”
? P.D. Ouspensky
It's not that you have to live with all this. You are all this. A warrior doesn't ever leave the island of the tonal . He uses it. This is your world. You can't renounce it. It is useless to get angry and feel disappointed with oneself. All that that proves is that one's tonal is involved in an internal battle; a battle within one's tonal is one of the most inane contests I can think of. The tight life of a warrior is designed to end that struggle. From the beginning I have taught you to avoid wear and tear.
The warrior's way is harmony--the harmony between actions and decisions, at first, and then the harmony between tonal and nagual.
It is the tonal that has to relinquish control. The tonal is made to give up unnecessary things like self-importance and indulging, which only plunge it into boredom. The whole trouble is that the tonal clings to those things when it should be glad to rid itself of that crap. The task then is to convince the tonal to become free and fluid. That's what a sorcerer needs before anything else, a strong, free tonal . The stronger it gets the less it clings to its doings, and the easier it is to shrink it.
The tonal shrinks at given times, especially when it is embarrassed. Once the tonal has shrunk, the nagual , if it is already in motion, no matter how small that motion is, will take over and achieve extraordinary deeds.
Don Juan Matus.....Tales of Power
Human Evolution
Must we know drunkenness to know sobriety? Must you go through hate in order to know what it is to be compassionate? Must you go through wars, destroying yourself and others, to know what peace is? Surely, this is an utterly false way of thinking, is it not? First you assume that there is evolution, growth, a moving from bad to good, and then you fit your thinking into that pattern. Obviously, there is physical growth, the little plant becoming the big tree; there is technological progress, the wheel evolving through centuries into the jet plane. But is there psychological progress, evolution? That is what we are discussing, whether there is a growth, an evolution of the "me," beginning with evil and ending up in good. Through a process of evolution, through time, can the "me," which is the center of evil, ever become noble, good? Obviously not. That which is evil, the psychological "me," will always remain evil. But we do not want to face that. We think that through the process of time, through growth and change, the "I" will ultimately become reality. This is our hope, that is our longing - that the "I" will be made perfect through time. What is this "I," this "me"? It is a name, a form, a bundle of memories, hopes, frustrations, longings, pains, sorrows, passing joys. We want this "me" to continue and become perfect, and so we say that beyond the "me" there is a "super-me," a higher self, a spiritual entity which is timeless but since we have thought of it, that "spiritual" entity is still within the field of time, is it not? If we can think about it, it is obviously within the field of our reasoning.
J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life
For a proper tonal everything on the island of the tonal is a challenge. Another way of saying it is that for a warrior everything in this world is a challenge. The greatest challenge of all, of course, is his bid for power. But power comes from the nagual , and when a warrior finds himself at the edge of the day it means that the hour of the nagual is approaching, the warrior's hour of power.
One bids for power and that bidding is irreversible. I wouldn't say that at the time power comes, that one is about to fulfill his destiny, because there is no destiny. The only thing that can be said then is that, at that point, one is about to fulfill his power.
Don Juan Matus.....Tales of Power
Goodness Has No Motive
Obviously, goodness has no motive because all motive is based on the self; it is the egocentric movement of the mind. So what do we mean by goodness? Surely, there is goodness only when there is total attention. Attention has no motive. When there is a motive for attention, is there attention? If I pay attention in order to acquire something, the acquisition, whether it be good or bad, is not attention, it is a distraction. A division. There can be goodness only when there is a totality of attention in which there is no effort to be or not to be.
J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life
I didn't know that........couldn't find it on youtube. I got this, but those damn copyright turds......
http://sulochanosho.wordpress.com/2011/01/31/bohm-and-ug/
Bohm has had conversations with both K's.
Yep.....he didn't like anyone or anything, lol. Interesting at times, though.
Gurdjieff is another one. I've thought about posting him soon.
Awareness, the Origin of Thought, and the Role of Conscious Self-Deception in Resistance and Repression.
From below cried Id,
If thou be Christ,
save theyself and us!"
But Superego rebuked Id, saying:
"Dost not thou fear God?"
http://brainmind.com/Awareness.html
Have you ever heard of U. G. Krishnamurti?
Especially when there are others involved. The best K interview, imo, is the one with Alan Anderson....but it's 18 hrs long....still. I posted them here, but the guy who uploaded them closed his account, so the links are no longer valid...:<(.......but.....
Yes, I think so. I was reading a conversation he was having with Bohm in which they were both thinking out loud and it was a bit disjointed at times. But I guess that is to be expected when you are dealing with these types of concepts.
Want to hear more double talk?...lol. Sometimes K in trying to put things "in other words" gets himself into trouble......jmo.
He is speaking of good and evil as "things" not "no things". How does that square with his belief that duality doesn't exist?
A proper tonal is a tonal that is just right, balanced and harmonious. There are, roughly speaking, two sides to every tonal. One is the outer part, the fringe, the surface of the island. That's the part related to action and acting, the rugged side. The other part is the decision and judgment, the inner tonal , softer, more delicate and more complex. The proper tonal is a tonal where the two levels are in perfect harmony and balance.
Don juan Matus....Tales of Power
Justifying Evil
Obviously the present crisis throughout the world is exceptional, without precedent. There have been crises of varying types at different periods throughout history - social, national, political. Crises come and go; economic recessions, depressions, come, get modified, and continue in a different form. We know that; we are familiar with that process. Surely the present crisis is different, is it not? It is different first because we are dealing not with money nor with tangible things but with ideas. The crisis is exceptional because it is in the field of ideation. We are quarreling with ideas, we are justifying murder; everywhere in the world we are justifying murder as a means to a righteous end, which in itself is unprecedented. Before, evil was recognized to be evil, murder was recognized to be murder, but now murder is a means to achieve a noble result. Murder, whether of one person or of a group of people, is justified, because the murderer, or the group that the murderer represent, justifies it as a means of achieving a result that will be beneficial to man. That is, we sacrifice the present for the future, and it does not matter what means we employ as long as our declared purpose is to produce a result that we say will be beneficial to man. Therefore, the implication is that a wrong means will produce a right end and you justify the wrong means through ideation. We have a magnificent structure of ideas to justify evil and surely that is unprecedented. Evil is evil; it cannot bring about good. War is not a means to peace.
J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life
In the words of the English physicist and philosopher David Bohm:
"In nature nothing remains constant. Everything is in a perpetual state of transformation, motion, and change. However, we discover that nothing simply surges up out of nothing without having antecedents that existed before. Likewise, nothing ever disappears without a trace, in the sense that it gives rise to absolutely nothing existing at later times. This general characteristic of the world can be expressed in terms of a principle which summarises an enormous domain of different kinds of experience and which has never yet been contradicted in any observation or experiment, scientific or otherwise; namely, everything comes from other things and gives rise to other things."
http://www.marxist.com/science-old/dialecticalmaterialism.html
I just love that feeling of being part of everything. No more, no less. Everything equal.
"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!" - Mario Savio - Sproul Hall, University of California, Berkeley on December 2, 1964.
I saw that, lol. Thnx for digging up that old quote. K does begin with
Yeppers on that one. Same as the Hopi's beliefs.
A small coyote is tatooed on my sternum, over the heart.
A warrior treats his tonal in a very special manner. Life can be merciless with you if you are careless with your tonal .
To see a man as a tonal entails that one cease judging him in a moral sense, or excusing him on the grounds that he is like a leaf at the mercy of the wind. In other words, it entails seeing a man without thinking that he is hopeless or helpless. You know exactly what I am talking about. One can assess people without condemning or forgiving them.
Youth is in no way a barrier against the deterioration of the tonal . You say you think there might be a great many reasons for one's condition. I find that there is only one, our tonal . It is not that our tonal is weak because, for example, we drink; it is the other way around, one drinks because one's tonal is weak. That weakness forces one to be what he is. This happens to all of us, in one form or another.
But aren't I also justifying our behavior by saying that it's our tonal ? No, I'm giving you an explanation that you have never encountered before. It is not a justification or a condemnation, though. Our tonals are weak and timid. All of us are more or less in the same boat.
There is no need to treat the body in an awful manner, but the fact is that all of us have learned to perfection how to make our tonal weak. I have called that indulging. Only a warrior has a "proper tonal." The average man, at best, can have a "right tonal."
The nagual is not experience or intuition or consciousness. Those terms and everything else you may care to say are only items on the island of the tonal . The tonal begins at birth and ends at death, but the nagual never ends. The nagual has no limit. I've said that the nagual is where power hovers; that was only a way of alluding to it. By reasons of its effect, perhaps the nagual can be best understood in terms of power.
Don Juan Matus.....Tales of Power
Beyond Duality
Are you not aware of it? Are not its actions obvious, its sorrow crushing? Who has created it but each one of us? Who is responsible for it but each one of us? As we have created good, however little, so we have created evil, however vast. Good and evil are part of us and are also independent of us. When we think-feel narrowly, enviously, with greed and hate, we are adding to the evil which turns and rends us. This problem of good and evil, this conflicting problem, is always with us as we are creating it. It has become part of us, this wanting and not wanting, loving and hating, craving and renouncing. We are continually creating this duality in which thought-feeling is caught up. Thought-feeling can go beyond and above good and its opposite only when it understands its cause, craving. In understanding merit and demerit there is freedom from both. Opposites cannot be fused and they are to be transcended through the dissolution of craving. Each opposite must be thought out, felt out, as extensively and deeply as possible, through all the layers of consciousness. Through this thinking out, feeling out, a new comprehension is awakened, which is not the product of craving or of time.There is evil in the world to which we are contributing as we contribute to the good. Man seems to unite more in hate than in good. A wise man realizes the cause of evil and good, and through understanding frees thought-feeling from it.
J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life
Naguales - guardian spirits
The sense of the wholeness and interpenetration of all living things was so strong in the ancient American peoples that they believed a man's fate to be determined by his birthday, and also by his name, which even today is linked with his animal totem. Naguales were guardian spirits that took the form of an animal or a bird and presided over a man's fate.
http://kaie-elanor.blogspot.com/2010/08/naguales-guardian-spirits.html
Don Juan Matus, who the story is really about, is the one that tells the story thru CC. His claim is that he comes from a long line of sorcerers. It's more than just word of mouth........ it could be likened to passing on the tradition of Kung Fu masters.
It would just be interesting to see what one could find out about its origins though I doubt there is much in the way of research into the subject.
What does Castaneda base his interpretations on then?
Agreed.......but the Popal Vuh doesn't go into the detail that Don Juan does.
Anyway...it's just my take based on CC.....fwiw.
I was thinking more along these lines.....
Actually......Don Juan maintains that his lineage is quite old....predating the Spanish conquest. So it would be the other way around. With that understanding, you can kinda see how the current description is a watered down version of the other. jmho.
I was just curious as to the etymology which may, if explored, provide some insight into how the concept may have evolved into what Castaneda writes about.
I know. It's sad and criminal. The FDA is just the front man for big pharma and their poisons.
I looked up the terms once and came up with what you did. Don Juan via Castaneda uses them in a slightly different way. If ya wanna read the thing in one piece, lol, I'm getting the quotes from here:
http://www.prismagems.com/castaneda/donjuan4.html
When I see stuff like this I wanna go berserk.....
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2010/05/19/126975784/kids-become-prime-market-for-prescription-drugs
The word nagual derives from the Nahuatl word nahual, an indigenous religious practitioner, identified by the Spanish as a 'magician'. The nagual is acquired along with the other characteristics of a person's birth day at birth. Each day is associated with an animal which has strong and weak aspects. A person born on "The Dog Day" would have both strong and weak 'Dog' aspects. In Nahuatl the word tonalli was used to refer both to a day and to the animal associated with that day. The nagual is different, where the tonal is the day spirit proper, the nagual is the spirit familiar of the day. It is probable that the tonal represents the daytime aspect and the nagual the nighttime aspect of the tonalli, 'the things of the day'. Because practitioners of powerful magic were normally born on certain days related to animals with a strong or harmful aspect they would often have specific tonals such as the jaguar or puma. In Aztec mythology the God Tezcatlipoca was the protector of nagualism, because his tonal was the jaguar and he governed the distribution of wealth.
In modern rural Mexico, nagual is sometimes synonymous with brujo ("witch"): one who is able to shapeshift into an animal at night, (normally into an owl, bat, or turkey) drink blood from human victims, steal property, cause disease, and the like.
In some indigenous communities the position of Nagual is integrated into the religious hierarchy. The community knows who is a Nagual, tolerating, fearing and respecting them. Nagualli are hired to remove curses cast by other nagualli.
In other communities the accusation of nagualism may result in violent attacks by the community towards the accused—much like the witch processes of renaissance Europe.
The Western study of Nagualism was initiated by noted archaeologist, linguist and ethnologist Daniel Garrison Brinton who published "Nagualism: A Study in Native-American Folklore and History" which chronicled historical interpretations of the word and those who practiced nagualism in Mexico in 1894. He identified various beliefs associated with nagualism in some modern Mexican communities such as the Mixe, the Nahua, the Zapotec and the Mixtec.
Subsequently many studies have described Nagualism in different Mesoamerican cultures such as the Zoques and the Jakaltek, K'iche', Q'eqchi', and Tzeltal Maya. Among the Jacaltec, Naguals reinforce indigenism by punishing those who collaborate with non Mayas.[5]
Discussion continues on which degree nagualism represents a pre-Columbian belief system or is modelled on European popular religion. Gustavo Correa,[6] suggests nagualism is not pre-Columbian, arguing that it was wholly imported from Europe, where he compares it to the medieval belief in werewolves.
However, Indigenous sources of pre-Columbian origin such as the Popol Vuh describe concepts clearly related to modern Nagualism.[dubious – discuss]. Nonetheless, the only version of this document which has survived was transcribed well after the Spanish Conquest and may contain concepts introduced by European missionaries.[citation needed]
Kaplan[7] concludes that, in Oaxaca, the belief in Naguals as evil shape shifting witches is common in both indigenous and mestizo populations. According to Kaplan, the belief in animal spirit companions is exclusively indigenous.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagual
Great posit. Critical thinking, unfortunately, is not allowed. Just need more bricks;)
Are the nagual and the tonal within ourselves? you ask. You yourself would say that they are within ourselves. I myself would say that they are not, but neither of us would be right. The tonal of your time calls for you to maintain that everything dealing with your feelings and thoughts takes place within yourself. The sorcerers' tonal says the opposite, everything is outside. Who's right? No one. Inside, outside, it doesn't really matter.
To explain all this is not that simple. No matter how clever the checkpoints of the tonal are the fact of the matter is that the nagual surfaces. Its coming to the surface is always inadvertent, though. The tonal 's great art is to suppress any manifestation of the nagual in such a manner that even if its presence should be the most obvious thing in the world, it is unnoticeable.
Let's say that the tonal , since it is keenly aware of how taxing it is to speak of itself, has created the terms "I," "myself," and so forth as a balance and thanks to them it can talk with other tonals , or with itself, about itself.
Now when I say that the tonal forces us to do something, I don't mean that there is a third party there. Obviously it forces itself to follow its own judgments.
On certain occasions, however, or under certain special circumstances, something in the tonal itself becomes aware that there is more to us. It is like a voice that comes from the depths, the voice of the nagual . You see, the totality of ourselves is a natural condition which the tonal cannot obliterate altogether, and there are moments, especially in the life of a warrior, when the totality becomes apparent. At those moments one can surmise and assess what we really are.
When we die, we die with the totality of ourselves. A sorcerer asks the question. "If we're going to die with the totality of ourselves, why not, then, live with that totality?"
Don Juan Matus.......Tales of Power
Would We Have Drugged Up Einstein? How Anti-Authoritarianism Is Deemed a Mental Health Problem
By Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet
Posted on February 20, 2012, Printed on February 23, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/story/154225/would_we_have_drugged_up_einstein_how_anti-authoritarianism_is_deemed_a_mental_health_problem
In my career as a psychologist, I have talked with hundreds of people previously diagnosed by other professionals with oppositional defiant disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder, anxiety disorder and other psychiatric illnesses, and I am struck by 1) how many of those diagnosed are essentially anti-authoritarians; and 2) how those professionals who have diagnosed them are not.
Anti-authoritarians question whether an authority is a legitimate one before taking that authority seriously. Evaluating the legitimacy of authorities includes assessing whether or not authorities actually know what they are talking about, are honest, and care about those people who are respecting their authority. And when anti-authoritarians assess an authority to be illegitimate, they challenge and resist that authority—sometimes aggressively and sometimes passive-aggressively, sometimes wisely and sometimes not.
Some activists lament how few anti-authoritarians there appear to be in the United States. One reason could be that many natural anti-authoritarians are now psychopathologized and medicated before they achieve political consciousness of society’s most oppressive authorities.
Why Mental Health Professionals Diagnose Anti-Authoritarians with Mental Illness
Gaining acceptance into graduate school or medical school and achieving a PhD or MD and becoming a psychologist or psychiatrist means jumping through many hoops, all of which require much behavioral and attentional compliance with authorities, even those authorities one lacks respect for. The selection and socialization of mental health professionals tends to breed out many anti-authoritarians. Degrees and credentials are primarily badges of compliance. Those with extended schooling have lived for many years in a world where one routinely conforms to the demands of authorities. Thus for many MDs and PhDs, people different from them who reject this attentional and behavioral compliance appear to be from another world—a diagnosable one.
I have found that most psychologists, psychiatrists and other mental health professionals are not only extraordinarily compliant with authorities but also unaware of the magnitude of their obedience. And it also has become clear to me that the anti-authoritarianism of their patients creates enormous anxiety for these professionals, and their anxiety fuels diagnoses and treatments.
In graduate school, I discovered that all it took to be labeled as having “issues with authority” was not kissing up to a director of clinical training whose personality was a combination of Donald Trump, Newt Gingrich and Howard Cosell. When I was told by some faculty that I had “issues with authority,” I had mixed feelings about being so labeled. On the one hand, I found it amusing, because among the working-class kids I had grown up with, I was considered relatively compliant with authorities. After all, I had done my homework, studied and received good grades. However, while my new “issues with authority” label made me grin because I was now being seen as a “bad boy,” I was also concerned about just what kind of profession I had entered. Specifically, if somebody such as myself was labeled as having “issues with authority,” what were they calling the kids I grew up with who paid attention to many things that they cared about but didn’t care enough about school to comply there? Well, the answer soon became clear.
Mental Illness Diagnoses for Anti-Authoritarians
A 2009 Psychiatric Times article titled “ADHD & ODD: Confronting the Challenges of Disruptive Behavior” reports that “disruptive disorders,” which include attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and opposition defiant disorder (ODD), are the most common mental health problem of children and teenagers. ADHD is defined by poor attention and distractibility, poor self-control and impulsivity, and hyperactivity. ODD is defined as a “a pattern of negativistic, hostile, and defiant behavior without the more serious violations of the basic rights of others that are seen in conduct disorder”; and ODD symptoms include “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules” and “often argues with adults.”
Psychologist Russell Barkley, one of mainstream mental health’s leading authorities on ADHD, says that those afflicted with ADHD have deficits in what he calls “rule-governed behavior,” as they are less responsive to rules of established authorities and less sensitive to positive or negative consequences. ODD young people, according to mainstream mental health authorities, also have these so-called deficits in rule-governed behavior, and so it is extremely common for young people to have a “dual diagnosis” of AHDH and ODD.
Do we really want to diagnose and medicate everyone with “deficits in rule-governed behavior”?
Albert Einstein, as a youth, would have likely received an ADHD diagnosis, and maybe an ODD one as well. Albert didn't pay attention to his teachers, failed his college entrance examinations twice, and had difficulty holding jobs. However, Einstein biographer Ronald Clark (Einstein: The Life and Times) asserts that Albert's problems did not stem from attention deficits but rather from his hatred of authoritarian, Prussian discipline in his schools. Einstein said, “The teachers in the elementary school appeared to me like sergeants and in the Gymnasium the teachers were like lieutenants.” At age 13, Einstein read Kant's difficult Critique of Pure Reason—because he was interested in it. Clark also tells us Einstein refused to prepare himself for his college admissions as a rebellion against his father’s “unbearable” path of a “practical profession.” After he did enter college, one professor told Einstein, “You have one fault; one can’t tell you anything.” The very characteristics of Einstein that upset authorities so much were exactly the ones that allowed him to excel.
By today’s standards, Saul Alinsky, the legendary organizer and author of Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals, would have certainly been diagnosed with one or more disruptive disorders. Recalling his childhood, Alinsky said, “I never thought of walking on the grass until I saw a sign saying ‘Keep off the grass.’ Then I would stomp all over it.” Alinsky also recalls a time when he was 10 or 11 and his rabbi was tutoring him in Hebrew:
One particular day I read three pages in a row without any errors in pronunciation, and suddenly a penny fell onto the Bible....Then the next day the rabbi turned up and he told me to start reading. And I wouldn’t; I just sat there in silence, refusing to read. He asked me why I was so quiet, and I said, “This time it’s a nickel or nothing.” He threw back his arm and slammed me across the room.
Many people with severe anxiety and/or depression are also anti-authoritarians. Often a major pain of their lives that fuels their anxiety and/or depression is fear that their contempt for illegitimate authorities will cause them to be financially and socially marginalized, but they fear that compliance with such illegitimate authorities will cause them existential death.
I have also spent a great deal of time with people who had at one time in their lives had thoughts and behavior that were so bizarre they were extremely frightening for their families and even themselves; they were diagnosed with schizophrenia and other psychoses, but have fully recovered and have been, for many years, leading productive lives. Among this population, I have not met one person whom I would not consider a major anti-authoritarian. Once recovered, they have learned to channel their anti-authoritarianism into more constructive political ends, including reforming mental health treatment.
Many anti-authoritarians who earlier in their lives were diagnosed with mental illness tell me that once they were labeled with a psychiatric diagnosis, they got caught in a dilemma. Authoritarians, by definition, demand unquestioning obedience, and so any resistance to their diagnosis and treatment created enormous anxiety for authoritarian mental health professionals; and professionals, feeling out of control, labeled them “noncompliant with treatment,” increased the severity of their diagnosis, and jacked up their medications. This was enraging for these anti-authoritarians, sometimes so much so that they reacted in ways that made them appear even more frightening to their families.
There are anti-authoritarians who use psychiatric drugs to help them function, but they often reject psychiatric authorities’ explanations for why they have difficulty functioning. So, for example, they may take Adderall (an amphetamine prescribed for ADHD), but they know that their attentional problem is not a result of a biochemical brain imbalance but rather caused by a boring job. And similarly, many anti-authoritarians in highly stressful environments will occasionally take prescribed benzodiazepines such as Xanax even though they believe it would be safer to occasionally use marijuana but can’t because of drug testing on their job.
It has been my experience that many anti-authoritarians labeled with psychiatric diagnoses usually don’t reject all authorities, simply those they’ve assessed to be illegitimate ones, which just happens to be a great deal of society’s authorities.
Maintaining the Societal Status Quo
Americans have been increasingly socialized to equate inattention, anger, anxiety, and immobilizing despair with a medical condition, and to seek medical treatment rather than political remedies. What better way to maintain the status quo than to view inattention, anger, anxiety, and depression as biochemical problems of those who are mentally ill rather than normal reactions to an increasingly authoritarian society?
The reality is that depression is highly associated with societal and financial pains. One is much more likely to be depressed if one is unemployed, underemployed, on public assistance, or in debt (for documentation, see “400% Rise in Anti-Depressant Pill Use”). And ADHD-labeled kids do pay attention when they are getting paid, or when an activity is novel, interests them, or is chosen by them (documented in my book Commonsense Rebellion).
In an earlier dark age, authoritarian monarchies partnered with authoritarian religious institutions. When the world exited from this dark age and entered the Enlightenment, there was a burst of energy. Much of this revitalization had to do with risking skepticism about authoritarian and corrupt institutions and regaining confidence in one’s own mind. We are now in another dark age, only the institutions have changed. Americans desperately need anti-authoritarians to question, challenge, and resist new illegitimate authorities and regain confidence in their own common sense.
In every generation there will be authoritarians and anti-authoritarians. While it is unusual in American history for anti-authoritarians to take the kind of effective action that inspires others to successfully revolt, every once in a while a Tom Paine, Crazy Horse or Malcolm X come along. So authoritarians financially marginalize those who buck the system, they criminalize anti-authoritarianism, they psychopathologize anti-authoritarians, and they market drugs for their “cure.”
Conflict of the Opposites
I wonder if there is such a thing as evil? Please give your attention, go with me, let us inquire together. We say there is good and evil. There is envy and love, and we say that envy is evil and love is good. Why do we divide life, calling this good and that bad, thereby creating the conflict of the opposites? Not that there is not envy, hate, brutality in the human mind and heart, an absence of compassion, love, but why do we divide life into the thing called good and the thing called evil? Is there not actually only one thing, which is a mind that is inattentive? Surely, when there is complete attention, that is, when the mind is totally aware, alert, watchful, there is no such thing as evil or good; there is only an awakened state. Goodness then is not a quality, not a virtue, it is a state of love. When there is love, there is neither good nor bad, there is only love. When you really love somebody, you are not thinking of good or bad, your whole being is filled with that love. It is only when there is the cessation of complete attention, of love, that there comes the conflict between what I am and what I should be. Then that which I am is evil, and that which I should be is the so-called good.You watch your own mind and you will see that the moment the mind ceases to think in terms of becoming something, there is a cessation of action which is not stagnation; it is a state of total attention, which is goodness.
J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life
"...love...is a state of being when the activities of the self have ceased."
The First and Last Freedom, p.180
"Does life having meaning, a purpose? Is not living in itself its own purpose? Why do we want more?...Our difficulty is that, since our life is empty, we want to find a purpose to life and strive for it. Such a purpose of life can only be mere intellection, without any reality; when the purpose of life is pursued by a stupid, dull mind, by an empty heart, that purpose will also be empty. This question about the purpose of life is put by those who do not love."
The First and Last Freedom, 1954
Love is: dying every day. Love is not memory, love is not thought. Love is not a thing that continues as duration in time. And, through observation, one must die to the continuity of everything. Then there is love; and with love, there comes creation.
-Talks by Krishnamurti in India 1965 p.48
We sense that there is another side to us. But when we try to pin down that other side the tonal gets hold of the baton, and as a director it is quite petty and jealous. It dazzles us with its cunningness and forces us to obliterate the slightest inkling of the other part of the true pair, the nagual.
The nagual has consciousness. It is aware of everything. In order to talk about it we must borrow from the island of the tonal , therefore it is more convenient not to explain it but to simply recount its effects.
Don Juan Matus......Tales of Power
"Truth is a Pathless Land".
"Take a ride to the land inside of your mind
Beyond the seas of thought Beyond the realm of what.
Across the streams of hopes and dreams where things are really not".
Is the thinker different from the thought?
"Is it possible to love without thinking? What do you mean by thinking? Thinking is a response to |
Before we can answer those questions, we need to understand the nature of the mind that is asking them.
Come Along If You Dare! |
Join Us In The Exploration Of The Mind.
Volume | |
Day Range: | |
Bid Price | |
Ask Price | |
Last Trade Time: |