The Drying Soul, 
by Scott Mandelker

Slowly emerging through membranes of lonely wisdom,
Grows tired of the cycle of seeking and loss,
Sick of the bitter fruit of death, again and again,
Wearied of lowland tag in damp meadows of weed.
Comes slowly to know a greater good, a bridge to forever,
Brilliance of the vast mind-sky, happiness without pause,
Seen both inside and out the shimmering mental play.

The dried soul sees the white canvass below,
Upon which run all oily paints of this world.

Slowly, the soul begins to hear its own Voice,
Turns toward the source of all wishes and hope.
Waking within the fascist reign of desire, paint peeling off,
Realizing that its own grasping is but the fast path to death in this Life,
Chimerical presents in the sand, merely dreamed by drunken mind.
Those sad transient ghosts, pale-faced heavy lids of life-long demise,
Hold never the promise of ending my longing.

But at last we can see: the Mind holds it all,
Their world is my dream, projected by me,
No peace in the hunt, nor ever was.
Though indeed I did like it, Or so did I think.

Endless chasing my own tail,
I thought it was mine, the heart of my search, the search of my heart.
I thought it was home to my glory, my rich seedpods bursting;
I thought it led home, I thought it would slake thirsting.

Frai Jonah here:

It occurred to me the other day that the intellectual pride wherein I lived had little if anything to do with  soul, and that this mind was in no way to be credited for whatever grace had manifested at different times, which after all was an undeniable reality.  So, thought I, if this were the case, I was maintaining a definition of  self which was denying what was lasting and effective and going for the chimerical presences on shifting sands,  the mind's intellectualizations.  Well, then, continued I, because most nothing is really unprecedented, this  must be a common state of matters which in turn leads to a rather Dantë-esque vision of so called awake people  walking, as did the lost soul in Inferno, holding their severed  head by the hair at the end of their  outstretched armm, as one would hold a lantern to light the way.

And it is thus that empires rise and fall, philosophies get written and expounded, and so forth, all in the  soundest sleep.

And while the detached head is busy spinning its transient tales and bragging about its accomplishments, the  spirit complex, as Ra puts it, only comes through "as a bias or preference, which cannot properly be called an understanding."

And when  getting some idea of our state, we attempt to fill the void with more mind, which does not ameliorate  the fact that we remain split from essence, we realize that this is what Ouspensky must mean with the metaphor of dreaming about awakening.  And what Gurdjeff must mean by the "I" which stands no cheating, which splits the self at the sight of falsehood.  So the linear mind goes on its merry way thinking how cool it is, and it does not even occur to it that it's forgotten to invite the soul to the party.

 "So, get real," said I to myself.  It's this separateness, within and without, mind/soul, individual/individual,  that feeds and makes possible the "struck senseless" state of man, the broken mirror of the group soul shattered  into tiny fragments of disjointed consciousness.

So I interpret that the C's recommendation to meditate and to network refers to overcoming the internal and  external walls of separation.  So in the highest sense, it is not one or the other, it is about regaining what is lost, uniting what is split.

 Well, there's been a lot written about reincarnation in theory and practice, and esotericists like Steiner have  presented arguments about how the head and profile reflect past lives and so forth.  Hedsel too talks about this. So it seems that there's some rules to this, but maybe these are not really of the essence at this time, for this  time may well present a particular character wherefore we may do well to set our sights a little closer.

As to empires rising and falling sound asleep, there is nothing in this that would contradict the notion of  inspiration from other levels, the sleeping mind indeed even tending to be more receptive than the waking one.   Even the Old Testament will bear witness, and as Laura herself speculated, maybe indeed it is as they say, that  it is the imprint of the hand of God, only question being, which God?

***

And then we're led to the question of which we almost dare not speak, i.e. what do we do about it?  Do we  recognize the application, as the C's put it?  And this is a tall order, because pretty much  every path of development or study has presented breaking free of Samsara as something that is so impossible that maybe Buddha  did it, and maybe St Francis, but we - mere food for the moon - don't stand a snowball's chance in hell to cut it. So runs the program.

It is as if our crazy soul bought us a ticket to the mother of all rides, combined spook train, rollercoaster and  funhouse. 

Ah, my crazy freak of a soul, how shall I-little-mind live up to thee?

Yet the observational fact is that we're in incarnation in this world at this weird time.  Can't deny, we're  already on the train and it won't slow down, so it's the experimental and experiential adventure of each and everyone.

So, are we having fun yet?

Dropping all beliefs and assumptions and images by the wayside, is there something we can orient ourselves by?   Are there beliefs or emotions which limit and are there ones which expand?  Can we be totally in the groove, totally our pure Frequency Resonance Vibration?  How do we get streamlined?

If there's one thing we know for sure, it's duality and separation.  There is merit in some New Agers' use of  'plane of separation' in the meaning of 3D Earth.

We're split inside, in ways too numerous to mention, hemisphere from hemisphere, soul from mind, emotion from  intellect, even mind from body. And we're split outside, from each other, from divinity, from Earth, from our  history, caught in linear time, and so forth.  On the mental plane we're impaled on the horns of myriad dilemmas, hanging between poles of various dualities,  good/bad, desire/aversion, past/future, self/other and so forth.

So if there's something we should know about from experience it's all of these things.

Granted, there's some differences of  degree and emphasis from person to person, but so far, the situation is pretty universal. 

So how come then do we have the brass to talk about going streamlined and clear while stretched on the rack of the million and one  strings all binding us to different poles of different attachments, immobilized in the spider's web, waiting?   For what?

It seems to me that we picked our spider and its specific web, not in order that we'd perpetually fight it round after uneven  round, but so that we'd know it and leave it behind, having assembled the fragments of being from the sticky clutches of attachment to karma and old sorrows.

Which then leads us to the necessity for the redefinitionm of essentially everything, which draws us into a mystical community of  cosmic renegades, freaks camping on the spiritual beach at the edge of the world, waiting to ride....

Yet the beach is cooler than any beach of the physical world, for there is no single way, no one airport of  access, no one tour organizer.  It is the lizzies who like productized and packaged experience, squeezed into  loosh commodity units for consumption.  The universe which seeks to know itself goes for the personal, unique,  specific trek of reintagration of each one. Thus there is no ritual, no programme, no format, there is only  discovery and limitlessness in faith and expansion.  It is as if we all created ourselves, or at least  resurrected ourselves, where each time this happens the sum total of universal experience grows.  So we also break the bounds of the individual vs. collective duality.  STS 'embraces' i.e. squeezes to death in  uniformity, STO 'unifies' in co-creation, where knowledge is no longer the commodity of commercial exchange, but  rather the networked and shared basis of creative expression.

There's a catch, however, and here we see why utopia has not manifested in spite of attempts by idealists  throughout the ages.  As Branton, of all people, put it, and as history will tell, the collective ends up serving its most selfish individual.  Thus we need to transcend the fundamental separateness of 3D, within which the  collective is just the police state or cult or street gang.  It is by reversing the notion of scarcity and exclusivity and dependence that we could in principle get ahead, and this in turn requires development of each  being.

Now again we come back to the self and to its relationship to other self, i.e. where we started, which is  meditation and networking, overcoming the split within and without.  And the expectation is not necessarily that  we immediately get past all our hang-ups or know each past life or karmic influence or that we immediately stop  needing any physical means of communication, but that we anchor an idea, create a blueprint which may gather  substance.

Like creating a template for manifestation of a 4th density concept, not in the hard "you create your own reality" sense of forcing it,  but rather in the idea of making a sort of archetypal antenna for receiving manifestation.

Sounds cool, but how is it done?  Has somebody else done it before?  Would we know if somebody had?  Does it  matter? 

We don't find a lot in the way of manuals and case studies for the 10 year frequency raising sprint ahead of us, yet do we have something better to do?  Knowledge not lived is sin, said Cayce.

Outside the prison of linear time, we can say that we've done it in the future.  Thus we are not disconnected  from a positive outcome, but we are a marker in its history, which is also its present, and nature manifests causal  chains between end points, or states witnessed by consciousness. Thus we have dual emergence or conduit, where  end points are both significant.  

So the future guides us and we build the future.  Thus somewhere in our realm  of consciousness, this future must have an embryonic representation,  into which energy can be invested, this  being the linear half of the contract, the soul's choice in timelessness to go for it being the other half of the  contract.  It is however this latter half which provides the path and inspiration for the other to follow.  Hence: the soul,  she counteth.

And when being preposterous  enough to talk of this in the first person, we run against another program of the  mind of limitation, which is that it doesn't like to talk about points where it can't plan an intellectual defense or present itself as the expert who has done it all.  So we get to appreciate the archetypal Tarot card  withe the Fool merrily stepping off the cliff.   So we return to soul and mind, where the intellectual pride of the ego mind is just another bar of the soul's prison.

Another brick in the wall.

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