1/14/23, 6:58 PM becoming galactic - philosophy of bob dylan 1

becoming
galactic
a blog by
 
patt  july 25, 2011
o'neill  philosophy of bob dylan 1:
 he not busy being born
 is busy dying
 from It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)
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search becoming
galactic
A phoenix is a mythical bird . It has a 500 to 1000 year life-cycle, near the end of which it builds
itself a nest of twigs that then ignites; both nest and bird burn fiercely and are reduced to ashes,
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from which a new, young phoenix arises, reborn anew to live again. The Phoenix's ability to be
reborn from its own ashes implies that it is immortal.  

In real life, the next phoenix, a new culture, is now arising from the flames that are consuming its
blog predecessor. Thus, the phoenix is both emerging into existence and dying at the same time.

Disclaimer:
This series of essays do not necessarily reflect
archive the actual thoughts of the illustrious bard of the ’60’s.
They are my own musings evoked by his brilliant lyrics.
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about the Do not bring me news of situations that I can do

author & nothing about. I pay little heed to what I cannot
purpose change because giving it my attention, my life force,
 disempowers me. Just as it disempowers you, dear
reader. Observe how you feel the next time you scan
the headlines. Notice your frustration and anger, the
impotence you feel.

Or perhaps you become outraged, wanting to get on

your white horse and charge the bad guys. I used to
do this, wasting my precious life force on things I
could not change. This is the ego, that part of you
that would be a hero. It is childish posturing that can even be dangerous.  Witness
the actions and motivation of the man from Norway who killed 93 people, most of
them children, on July 23. This was an ego in outrage, rearing up on its hind legs,
braying its righteousness. Oh, yes. Andres Behring Breivik was trying to save
Europe. He wanted to be a hero. How noble.

HOW TO CHOOSE YOUR BATTLES: DOING VS. NOT-DOING

I grew up (finally) and learned to choose my battles and how to differentiate

between a doing and a not-doing. This is Carlos Castañeda’s most powerful
teaching, in my opinion.1 Doingness is our normal state of mind and is composed
of our activities and beliefs concerned with everyday life, with consensual reality,2
acculturation, with space/time. Doingness is all bound up in our identity and is
mainly ego, including much of our altruistic behavior (like having your name on a
building you donated the money for, or shooting up a children’s summer camp,
etc).

Not-doing, on the other hand, is absent preconception, attachment and ego. It is

devoid of beliefs, because beliefs dictate future experience. Not-doing is the spirit,
fearlessly open to new experience.

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Doing = ego. Not-doing = spirit. For more clarity, I recommend the works of
Castañeda, this definition of wu wei and the works of Chogyam Trungpa, the
founder of the Shambala school of Tibetan Buddhism (who would refer to doing as
part of one’s cocoon.3

I discern the difference, not by thinking, but by checking with my whole body. You
can, too:

1. Sit quietly, release the world outside of yourself, close your eyes and think of
something you want to go charging off in outrage to set right. Imagine yourself
doing it. Notice where in your body you feel it. (Use outrage in this calibration
session because the emotions are so strong. Later, you can use it for anything
you are not sure if you should do or not.)

2. Open your eyes and say your phone number backwards. (In NLP terminology,
this is a break state; it breaks the physiological state you were just in with the
visualization above). It is important to do this in order to keep this state
from polluting the state you will go into in the next step.

3. Now, sitting quietly, close your eyes and imagine doing something out of love,
taking a chance, not knowing how you want it to turn out, or even caring. You
are doing it freely, with no attachments, no desired outcome, nothing in it for
you. You are peaceful and joyous. Notice where you feel this in your body.

If I want to take on a task of creation and commitment, I follow the above

procedure. It ensures that I am not charging off, brandishing my ego, trying to be a
hero. It ensure that what I am planning is instead an act of spirit.

WHAT TO DO WITH ALL THAT RIGHTEOUS RAGE

Whenever I feel outrage at the world’s perceived inequities I try to follow Gandhi’s
teaching to “be the change you wish to see in the world.” Hate the greedy
bankers? Become less greedy yourself. Sick of war? Become more peaceful. We
project our reality, which gives us a mirror to our inner selves and shows us quite
clearly the psychospiritual work we need to do. This is the essence of satyagraha4
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and of lo jong. This is turning poison into medicine, refining your spiritual state in
space/time with ancient teachings.

WHAT'LL YA HAVE? THE FIRE ROASTED PHOENIX OR THE CHICKEN?

There is a journalism-for-profit adage: If it bleeds, it leads. Humans are amazingly

susceptible to mental manipulation because most know themselves but very little.
The less you know of yourself and your spiritual essence, the easier you are to
control by advertisers and political spin doctors, by strutting incompetent authority
figures or alpha males who know only how to control by force.

A new civilization is arising from the ashes of the old. Instead of news of genocide,
war, hunger, crime, violence, ad nauseum, bring to me word of evolved people
who are creating the new civilization that is being born right now.

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
        -- T. S. Eliot

Some bewail the dying of our American civilization. Everything dies, even empires.
However, the rotting corpse of this violent and corrupt culture we have made will
provide fertile ground from which will emerge a bright new consciousness, knowing
itself for the first time. The dying whore that is America is giving way to people who
are awakening to their birthright of quantum consciousness and kinship with their
fellow Man.

Let go of your attachments to the old, dying world. They will not serve you in the
new one. In order to be born into the new world, the following points are what you
need to know about yourself:

•   Will you sit in the fire?

Arnold Mindell, Ph.D., a brilliant psychospiritual healer who is the author of

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many books, teaches at the Process Work Center of Portland. In his book about
conflict resolution, Sitting in the Fire, he states: “

[E]nforcing order does not stop riots, hinder war or reduce world problems. It
may even kindle the fire of group chaos. If we don’t permit hostilities a legitimate
outlet, they are bound to take illegitimate routes. ¶ The fire that burns in the
social, psychological and spiritual dimensions of humanity can ruin the world. Or
this fire can transform trouble into community. It’s up to us. We can avoid
contention, or we can fearlessly sit in the fire, intervene and prevent world
history’s most painful errors from being repeated.

•   Will you be steadfast and courageous as we bring this new world into
being?

“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs . . .” Rudyard
Kipling wrote in his famous poem If. Your peace and courage will be a powerful
calming force for those around you. Just as fear is contagious, so is calm.

Your spiritual power stems from being able to keep your seat, as the Buddhists
say. Think of Zen monks in a tea house calmly sitting with their tea during an
earthquake while everyone else is panicking and diving under the tables.

•   Will you cease to judge and blame? Will you take responsibility for all that
you experience?

•   Will you be strong and compassionate in the face of adversity, forgoing

force or violence?

I took an oath to not use violence or force in the attainment of social and
political goals. Do you have the courage to swear the same?

•   Will you hold truth as your highest value, serving truth before you serve
mankind or its institutions?

Can you know yourself and your own conscience that well? Can you ruthlessly
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assess your motivations? Have you discovered the point at which you will sell
out your spirit for your physical survival? Courage is based in confronting truth.
Cowards run from it.

•   Are you able to step outside of your ego and think systemically? Is this
your preferred state of consciousness?

Scientology teaches a very useful scale of cognition titled the Determinism

Scale that has only three items on it. At the bottom is other-determinism, where
individuals allow others to create their future for them and make decisions for
them. Follow the rules, dress in approved styles, think like your group thinks,
follow an honor code given to you that you did not create yourself.

In the middle of the scale, the individual breaks away from the pack, rebels
against convention, and becomes self-determined, and usually a royal pain in
the neck because he or she is ego-driven.

At the top of the scale, the person evolves into systemic thinking across many
areas of determinism and makes decisions according to what is best for the
system (ecosystem, economy, the world, etc.), seeing one’s own tiny self as just
a cog in the machine. At this level of determinism, we are pan-determined (pan-
is a prefix meaning all).

Native Americans taught that decisions should be made with the next seven
generations in mind. Given that they lived in harmony with nature and
understood sustainability, they were much saner than we now are.

•  Can you step outside of your own small vernacular and speak the
universal words of please and thank you, love, peace, life, and vibrancy
for everyone?

Renaissance At Work

The great European renaissance (which means rebirth) that gave us Michelangelo,
DaVinci and Botticelli lasted 272 years. It thrived even amid the horrific
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circumstances of a Europe dying of plague, war, political collapse and financial

upheaval. Add environmental degradation and you have our world today.

The remarkable thing about this huge emergence of new consciousness and art
was that it was carried forward by a very tiny percentage of the population. I can
guarantee you that these strong people did not  live in fear. They did not docilely
stand in line like sheep to be treated as possible threats by the overlords of the
Church, who used a kind of protection racket to make money by selling
indulgences. These brilliant people threw off the mental shackles given them by
the authority figures of the day, the Catholic Church, and they discovered ancient
Greek philosophers. They opened secular universities. They were concentrating
on art and philosophy, on exploration and creation -- not on the crumbling
Medieval world around them.

According to Will Durant in The Renaissance, which is volume V of The Story of

Civilization series of history books, the Renaissance man is “the combination of
intellectual enfranchisement and moral release.” In other words, he threw off the
bondage of socialization and gave himself permission to study beyond the limits
imposed by the culture around him.

I Am Schrödinger’s Cat. Hear Me Roar (Or Not)

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A [hypothetical] cat, along with a flask containing a poison and a radioactive source, is placed in
a sealed box. If an internal Geiger counter detects radiation, the flask is shattered, releasing the
poison that kills the cat. … [Q]uantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is
simultaneously dead and alive. Yet, when we look in the box, we see the cat either alive or dead,
not both alive and dead. (Source for graphic and caption: Wikipedia.)

Like Schrödinger’s cat, the phoenix and 14th Century Europe, we are alive and
dead at the same time. By being conscious of the choices we make that create our
future, we can become increasingly renascent. You and I can choose life and
flower into the consciousness being born in our world, or we can remain asleep
and circle the drain along with the masses.

I never cared to be ordinary or normal, decaying in consensual reality and popular

culture. How about you?

We so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not
see the ones which open for us. -- Alexander Graham Bell

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Credits: Phoenix image and italicized caption text from Wikipedia.

              Schrödinger’s cat image and caption from Wikipedia.

1
Carlos Castañeda, Journey to Ixtlan
2
"The world, or a simulation of a world, as viewed and comprehended by a
society." (From here.)
3
"An enclosed familiar world in which we can hide or go to sleep..." ¶ "The way of
cowardice is to embed ourselves in a cocoon...perpetuate habitual patterns. When
we are constantly recreating our basic patterns of behavior and thought, we never
have to leap into fresh air or onto fresh ground." (From, here.)
4
Mohandas Gandhi described satyagraha as follows:
I have also called it love-force or soul-force. In the application of satyagraha, I
discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of truth did not admit of violence
being inflicted on one’s opponent but that he must be weaned from error by
patience and compassion. For what appears to be truth to the one may appear to
be error to the other. And patience means self-suffering. So the doctrine came to
mean vindication of truth, not by infliction of suffering on the opponent, but on
oneself.  [Gandhi, M.K. Statement to Disorders Inquiry Committee January 5, 1920
satyagrahi valvuloplasty (The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi vol. 19, p.
206)] (From here.)

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The writings contained in this blog are the intellectual property of Patt O'Neill and copyrighted © 2008.
   
ALL RIGHTS ARE RESERVED. This blog is a non-profit, educational publication.

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