Now how to foster metanoia… There are elaborate rituals, vast moral guidelines, richly elaborate creeds complex to the point of being almost completely obtuse. It’s arguable that all theurgic ritual, all religious ritual, serves this purpose. Ecstasy. To leave you standing outside of yourself. Your self as you are normally conscious of it. Even if these rituals have lost any such power to achieve this in our modern world, the pressure is still there, the need is still there. It’s driving our world insane; holy wars, idealistic agendas of “progress.”

Now the pressure is focused on a single point, the bindi, the collective point of view. It hasn’t broken through though. The third eye is the eye of the other, the eye of the observer, the eye of the one watching you, the one you pose and fret for. The third eye is the internet community, and it is yet still without an intuitive sense of direction or a sense of genuine meaning.

Perhaps a synthesis of “self’ and “other”… this “community”? Actually, the breaking has to happen, but it can be broken carefully, surgically, through communication and honest consideration, or it can be broken forcefully, in a psycho-spiritual tooth and claw survival of the fittest sense which is what is now favoured because of rationalism, rabid secularism, mechanistic Darwinism. Not seeing the information for the mechanism that only reflects it.

Natural selection doesn’t have to be read as tooth and claw… It can also be cooperation. If I am “nicer” person and cooperative, I will find more folks to support my efforts for survival. Yes. We can choose the cooperative path but not without honest confrontation with the spirit, the essence of human nature.

We have to accept that we do know and never have understood what it means to be alive before, and begin to explore that meaning now. Meditation can help. It has taken off as if it had a mind of its own. Meditation has become a meme now because at our root as a species we recognize its necessity. Other disciplines are also growing and what they may mean or contribute to our understanding of a living life with it.

I recently heard a story of a woman with cerebral palsy who attributes her ability to stand at all to her practice of yoga.

These insights that are showing so much promise. They were discovered intuitively in the age of mythology. They can be explored and advanced now, but not without allowing the return of intuitive thoughts, conscious mythology. You can see semi-conscious mythology crop up here in Second Life. The various sub-cultures, furries, goreans, anachronists, historical fiction fans, everyone is exploring something that could be true at least metaphorically. We shouldn’t dismiss the attractiveness of these fantasies. There is a reason why we want to live them. Some people so much that the bigger part of their day is spent in environments like World of Warcraft, or Guild Wars, or Second Life.

Unfortunately a young man even died because he needed to be in his fantasy world so badly. He was not truly insane, our “rational” world is insane. It’s the real world that needs to change. The desire to experience the visceral desire of another is quite primal.

I was shocked at how popular Gor was until I realized how many women have fantasies about being dominated. It was an eye opener for me. I expected it to be dead in Second Life by now. Yes, virtual worlds could be said to come cheap these days. I look forward eagerly to them being the primary interface, the basic substrate of the internet. Things like Oculus Rift and whatever comes after it will make interacting with virtual worlds faster, easier, and more natural.

That would be a hard task… many people don’t interact with 3D very well. My brother gets dizzy.

BCI technology (brain computer interface) would also be empowering. Huge parts of our cognitive ability, our total ability to understand express and create anything, is lost in an unnatural format like text only expression.

I liked the Biology of Belief. Very good explanation of evolution from single cell to multi-cell and an interesting take on the soul.

To use the Biology of Belief to explain the principle… If the environmental signal didn’t get jammed, metanoia wouldn’t be necessary as the flow of signal would be even across both channels, but because we have such a sophisticated brain and such a deranged living environment, culture instead of ecology, the signal has to work its way through all that noise and instead encrypts itself in various embedded behaviours and social constructs.

Could you give a short definition of metanoia to recap? Metanoia is psychological or spiritual reconstruction like signal scrubbing to recover the original information. It usually takes place under pressure, a “dark night of the soul”, but doesn’t have to. It just helps, I guess, to trigger the left hemispheres avoidance response regarding its own processes so something else can emerge.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~