blog 5

Blog 5
A book with pictures!!! Quite a change from The Field. I had a hard time focusing on the reading. My eyes kept going to the pictures. Not to mention that there was so much information in these chapters, that I could relate to…I had a hard time focusing on one thing. My head was all over the place.
It was interesting to read what the book says about creativity after we had discussed it in class & defined it for ourselves. It seems so hard to put it into words, but I really like what the books says about converging the inner world with the external world. I still remember what my high school art teacher said about being an artist. He said that “a true artist is ahead of their time.” This made lot of sense to me & still does. I really like what Dryden said about mental illness and creativity. That “great wits are sure to madness near allied.” This seems to make a lot of sense to me too. Maybe explains what happened to my art school career ;-)
I thought a lot about what was said with daydreaming. That it uses symbolism to disguise its real content. I thought about the things I daydream about & can concur that most of the time up in my head is spent taking possible situations in my world & fantasizing about them until I’m clicked back into reality. I’d much rather spend my time up in my head for the most part. I think that maybe most of us would that is why we are in a constant search for another level of consciousness.
So although it sounds nuts, the Shamans have special skills of magical flight...?! Does this mean that thoughts are real & consciousness is relative to what we agree it is within ourselves? If that is the case then I can say that I have been a flyer myself on several different occasions. All under an altered state of consciousness, but maybe the goal is to practice this skill in order in any way possible so the ability is there anytime one calls upon it….?
I found the coyote story interesting. I used to live in Joshua Tree Ntl Park (desert in S. CA). Coyotes were all over & they were considered by the tourists to be a nuisance. They were scavengers & they invaded camps often. They also defecated on picnic tables almost every night. I thought it was funny. People would get so mad. I think they were trying to send us a message. If you don’t speak the language, you will miss the message. It goes across the board with all living things.
I’ve never heard anyone relate a Rave to the Dionysus cult of Ancient Greece. After reading this chapter, it makes perfect sense. I wish had known this back in the day. I spent many overnights in underground warehouses in Baltimore and DC doing just this. An overwhelming energy of becoming one with a group thru sound and dancing is definitely one way of describing it.
“The world is a mass of individual illusions subsumed under a species –wide collective illusion.” I wish that we as a society could respond to this. I wish that we could better understand that our world is just something within us, left to our own interpretation. Maybe we could be more at peace if we lived under this understanding.
“If seeing is believing, then not seeing is often a form of not believing.” This certainly goes along with what we discussed in the Field.
What was said about psychotics & their REM, dream state was really fascinating to me. I work with this population and have been around quite a bite of severe mental illness. Comparing mental illness to a form of dreaming sounds much more pleasing than a label of schizophrenia.
The dream chapter in this book was full of information. I had a hard time getting all of it. I’m still not exactly sure how or what makes us dream. I can relate to the lucid dreaming and dream journals.. I have had experiences with re-occurring dreams and wanted to try to control them. Iam very curious about dreams. Why some people are able to remember them so vividly & others cannot. Why some have very detailed dream stories and others are fragmented & dont seem to make sense. I wonder why we replace people we know in our dreams with a substitute figure. The book mentions something about archetypal figures & I wonder if we subconsciously place different roles on the personalities in our lives.
Looking forward to reading more of this book…