Tag: mindfulness

Questions

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on John Stewart’s Evolutionary Manifesto and his concept of ‘intentional evolution’ to propel humanity beyond current environmental/existential crises.

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If all that came to be in humanity goes extinct, was it really for nothing if it created beauty? /// Can an individual be a ‘self-evolved intentional evolutionary’ and also refuse to procreate? What will happen if intentional evolutionaries refrain from having children and the masses continue to procreate ‘blindly via trial and error?’ /// What’s so bad about leaving no trace? Isn’t the goal of continuation selfish in some ways? Isn’t the desire to reach further into time and space another form of manifest destiny? Is it arrogant to assume human capability to advance so far beyond? /// Can anyone actually unfetter themselves from their biological past? Is that ability/inability to disconnect an illusion or encoded within us? Can it really be rewired? /// If more and more people begin to experience a mindful gap in their consciousness, some space between their embodied awareness and thoughts/reactions to others/the outside world, then won’t they become more robotic/mechanical? How will this impact human relations? Can’t this gap actually take people out of the moment and into a headspace of calculation and separation? Can’t people progress and evolve intentionally and still be completely immersed within direct sensation/reaction, even if that reaction can at times be ‘wrong’ or less than productive? Will the mindful delay in reaction further connect or disconnect humans? (If intervention in connection/disconnection is possible.)

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on further thought… and why we should consider evolutionary history and trajectory…

Maybe the more we delude a tilt into the sheerly cultural, and ‘extract’ ourselves from our evolution/biology/environment, the more sick and disconnected we become internally and externally. And reliant on pharmaceuticals. Anyone who says ‘biological determinism’ as if it’s a bad concept is deeply disconnected from their origins, body, Earth. We were born! We are here! We have senses! We are not floating purely in culture, but deeply grounded in matter, in physical embeddedness. And what a relief. We are together in this. But right now: I’m okay with the oblivion. With some Earthly fever clearing humanity out.

The effects of microdosing LSD

Erica Avey7 Comments

Originally featured on Medium

It’s 7am on the uBahn. Eyes still puffy from the night before. A woman slowly nibbles her morning brötchen while staring into the static on the broken TV above. Everyone is silent. And in this crowd of straight faces, there I am: grinning like an idiot. Why? I have a little secret. There’s acid under my tongue.

This slightly mischievous feeling is familiar to me. I’ve taken 1P-LSD (a legal LSD analog in Germany) over 50 times in the last six months. Most doses have been small. So small that they’ve merely lifted my mood, generally speaking. But somehow each and every time still feels brand new.

These ritual doses have drastically improved my life and reshaped my perception, but what’s really been going on inside my head? It seems my brain has been especially malleable these last few months. I’ve been able to untangle the knots of thought that eclipsed my reality and made everything a little darker.

Continue reading “The effects of microdosing LSD” →

Mix

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“

Ambiguity is the warp of life, not something to be eliminated. Learning to savor the vertigo of doing without answers or making shifts and making do with fragmentary ones opens up the pleasures of recognizing and playing with pattern, finding coherence within complexity, sharing within multiplicity.”

– Catherine Bateson
Peripheral Visions: Learning Along the Way

You & I

Erica AveyLeave a comment

“

The self is the way we organize reality. It is mutable. Ephemeral. It’s an organizing structure that arises and is always completely embedded in relational reality. It’s never apart from that relational reality. That’s it. It’s pretty simple.

Oftentimes when people hear the teachings of no-self, they think that no self exists, or that no self should exist. But that’s not what it means. The teachings of no-self mean that we are not fixed, we are not permanent, separate, isolated. We are this dynamic reality. We are as Dōgen says: a flower of emptiness. A mutable articulation of reality.

So the teachings of no-self are not aimed at erasing ordinary personality or diminishing our worth, our needs, our vitality.

The self is not a problem to be solved or an obstacle to be obliterated. Quite the opposite. The teachings are about liberation from constricted states of suffering. Liberation from the delusions that we have about the self. They aim for our full participation, with kindness and clear thinking. 

It’s also true that when we let these teachings sink in, when we allow them to touch us, they are deeply, deeply challenging. Because they ask us to risk a new way of being…

Releasing the hold on the self is a necessary and radical event that is liberating. It is also a process that leaves the practitioner to the edge of the known and beyond. The practice requires a willingness to allow everything on which one has relied and what is most intimately known — the self and one’s notions about the nature of reality — to shift and change.

If we look closely at this process, we find the ability to allow it is intimately linked with our experience of trust. And it requires an encounter with trust. Ultimately, it requires trust in life itself.“

-Rev. Dr. Daijaku Judith Kinst
SF Zen Center