Table of Contents

• Cheer Keeping Peace
• What Faces Look Like
• Assigned Faces
• Our Brains Illusions
• Live the Truth
• Focus on Now

Cheer Keeping Peace

What is cheer?

A buoyancy of mood.
Mirth, joy, good feelings, lightheartedness . . . celebration?

So something not often experienced, by comparison to other feelings?

Not for me. I need more cheer.
Yes, I’d agree.
Somehow, I feel that it’s always available if I just made that connection.

The original meaning of the word cheer, was face, referring to a general attitude of whatever nature. So if you have read much Shakespeare say, you may have read some uses of the word that wouldn’t make sense to the modern thinker, but made complete sense then, and really still does.

How do we keep the peace in a community?

With song. Indeed, music has much power to do that.

Festivities. Indeed, celebrations can serve as a cornerstone of community cohesion, even in the original sense of the term celebrant, which referred to a participant in ritual. Peace is kept when the community works together to create something. They laugh together, share meals.

They have discovered some fascinating things about the human brain recently, and more specifically about human interaction. What would you say sets your mood? Makes the difference between peace or distress?

Food, everything is better with a full stomach. Indeed, a happy and quiet stomach does much to calm the mind as well.

Confidence? How do you experience confidence? I experience confidence when I know I am grounded, in home, welcome where I am, and belong where I am.

What is confidence but the face you wear in any situation? What tells you when you are home?

I guess routine is peace to me, but that can get boring for me also so then distress sets in.
I feel at rest, comfortable.
Well, I can feel at home pretty much anywhere. How do you manage that? What tells me I’m home is a feeling of security, safety, connection, even rootedness- groundedness.
When I can feel that I am balanced is when I have the most confidence.

Boredom leads to a lot of disregard for the peace in a community, thus we observe festivities. They have found that your mood regulation is not uniquely yours, it’s common ground held between you, your close friends and your loved ones to the point that those close to you can influence you even when you can’t control yourself very well.

At certain festivities and such I enjoy the energy. It’s not that way with all of them. What is being celebrated certainly matters.

Influence like peer pressure when you’re a kid?

You don’t have to learn about energies to experience and be influenced by them, especially in powerful events like celebrations.

Not that. As an empath, I have to kind of…shut off…the waves. I am constantly distracted by the dancing colours and lights.

We all know a whole range of such energies, even if we haven’t consciously reflected on them.

Sometimes, I feel like a chameleon changing energy colors according to the environment. You are likewise changed. The chameleon and the octopi don’t even have to consciously choose to change. It’s an unconscious reflex triggered by their visual processing among other things.

An adaptive survival mechanism — for the octopus and the chameleon, I mean. But for us? Changing color with every different scene? Actually, it promotes troupe cooperation, prevents dangerous delays to alarm cries, or so one theory goes.

What Faces Look Like

What does the world look like to you? If that has no obvious answer, then perhaps another question. What do the faces of the people on the street look like to you, most often I mean?

“I prepare a face to meet the faces that I meet” — Jay Alfred Prufrock. You do indeed.
Peoples faces look tense to me.

So why is peace or enjoyment so rare when we can prepare our own face to meet the world? You will notice the faces that best match your expectations, and your expectations will be shaped by your default emotional balance, be that positive, negative or bland.

To me the world looks like a giant playpen full of amazing toys and kids who are sometimes peaceful angels and sometimes distressed devils.

For myself, largely I have avoided taking a hard line view of the world in any particular way, siding with any particular belief system, and as much as many deny it, everything is shaped by a belief system. There is a notion in some groups that you can function and think without beliefs or belief systems.

All depends on if people do what they say they are going to do and are who they say they are.

When in doubt you doubt everyone. I have yet to meet a single soul who had no belief system, and I am no exception. It’s natural.

Believing that there is no belief system is itself a belief, of course. And they will form whether you consciously shape one for yourself or one emerges from your unconscious so called experience when you do not consciously choose to believe, what and where you believe, and yes where you believe matters as much as what you believe.

I wonder what would happen if I stopped believing in existence itself. Would I disappear? Then what you get is a system dictated by outside influences, reactionary. It might lead one to believe popular but absurd things, like there is no such thing as free will. When you believe that thought and imagination and feelings matter only very little, and have little to do with reality, it leaves you half blind. This naturally damages the brain.

Belief, it seems to me, is one way of making connections — between perception, and reality, and the stuff that we can’t explain.

I have been engaged lately in an intense program of self directed neuro plasticity, drawing from systemic analysis of everything I can get my hands on in the fields of neuroscience coupled of course with the insights I have gleaned from philosophy, spirituality, mysticism and the rest of it. What has been guiding and shaping this effort, and what lead me to undertake it in the first place (despite the difficult physical symptoms and disorienting dis-associative phenomena), my brain has always been a problem for me. I have a few clinical diagnosis, but I have always instead followed a field of information that has no basis in my brain function.

So you are searching for yourself? Ah no, I have found myself, or never lost myself really, but integration has been a huge challenge. They have actually corrected a long standing misconception about one of my diagnosis.

Do you “believe” in those clinical diagnoses, then? I do not. I would say from experience only that I am disconnected from something humanity as a community relies on so I fail to access it myself, and has caused considerable complications, socially and practically. You wouldn’t think being strange would be a problem. People often insist it’s not, but in my experience that is hopeful but untrue thinking.

They don’t seem to be able to consciously control their reactions, so I myself put on a face. It’s the one that made the most sense for me when I was very young. Of everything humanity presented to me I understood stories, which didn’t reflect human behaviour as much as they reflect human imagination, the human heart.

Chameleon face? Actually not so much chameleon. People react to me as if I were a figure of their imagination. I become someone who once said something, that strange guy who really knew a lot about animals, or who knew much more about their feelings than he was supposed to. A common imaginary role I have played is psychic.

Psychics as people think of them, exist only in their imaginations. The reality of what they are seeking is quite different, but the role is simple and convenient, sometimes necessary when too much detail would just be too stressful.

Assigned Faces

So, we can be assigned a face, or we can create a face, which is the more common? Are you ever assigned a face that pleases you? That’s good for you? I have never been assigned such a face.

Both.
Creating faces.
The most common is to be assigned one; but my preference would be — and has been — to create my own.
For me I think it’s been assigned from expectations of others and myself.
It’s usually annoying when someone projects their assumptions onto you.

You assign the face of cashier to whomever you meet in the store that day, do you know their real face? If not, is not to worry, they likely don’t know it either.

But that doesn’t mean I’m a chameleon!
Many careers are all about an assigned face.

You actually want people to project onto you. You will get very insecure if they don’t. It keeps interactions simple, allows you to keep your distance, shields you from feeling personally invaded.

I usually tell them to keep it real with me. I don’t like the fake facade.
It would get complicated in every interaction.

The chameleon is enlightened. It is never disturbed by projection, allows everything to see exactly what it expects to see, and goes about it’s business in peace.

From what I’ve seen being on the cashier side, customers are not expected to care about the face of someone doing a job for them. They don’t want to know if you had a bad day. They just want their stuff rung through.

I both envy, and distrust, and pity persons whose entire lives seem to be about making a ‘ face’ that others will recognize. And, isn’t that what becoming a ” celebrity” is all about? Indeed, is why celebrities are so admired. They are the apex predators. We envy their power, yet they are in fact powerless. More than even the common person, their faces are made for them.

With my job at times I have to shield myself. For example, I was threatened last week to be stabbed by a student. I stood my ground and at work I do not show it bothered me. But when I get home, I let myself go for it did and does. When you were threatened by that student, the student was threatening a face that the student themselves created.

I had my protective face up for days, then BOOM!!! I feel apart and still pick up the pieces now.

I get and have had co-workers get mad at me because of how I interact in a positive manner with those I take care of. Recent one harassed me via text and over the phone. Debating on turning her in to the agency.

We can use this illusion, as all magick is art, all reality is illusion, and illusion reality.

“I would have stabbed you 5 times now for looking like my grandmother” at first I was like OMG!! I look that old! More likely their mom and grandmother had kids early in life.

Everyone familiar with the concept of the uncanny valley? No. I’ve heard the phrase but don’t know what it means. I accidentally trigger it. Because of my genetic mutation, my facial muscles are not very responsive to my nervous system, and my face under-expresses any reaction, so people don’t trust my smile very often as genuine as it actually is because my biology doesn’t mirror the natural pattern well. This is part of what gives people the creeps, makes people think I’m hiding something, or angry, though this is usually very far from the truth.

You’ve said before that your wife knows the genuine and that’s what matters to you the most right? My relationship is quite sound, yes. I do cherish that saving grace.

Well, the uncanny valley is a reference to a particular part of the human brain. It is present in chimpanzees as well and that is responsible for facial recognition. If something is obviously fake, it doesn’t disturb your instincts. If it’s obviously real, it causes no discomfort, but if it’s just on the threshold of being real, almost natural but not quite, it will freak people out, produce an instinctive response to ignore or reject. In the case of the chimpanzees, they even attacked the image.

When the Final Fantasy movie came out, many people hated it, because they tried to animate the facial expressions by hand, and people didn’t understand the uncanny valley back then.

Our Brains Illusions

Our brains wrap us in illusions. The largest and most powerful part of our brain is actually incapable of distinguishing between sensory perception and imagination. Though our brains create illusions, we function only with our illusions. For the brain there is no reality, only virtual reality.

Our brains illusion crafting process isn’t actually very good. There is a steady stream of lag lingering just beneath our regular perception, as well as continuity glitches, perceptual and cognitive skipping. This is what is behind what they are calling change blindness, and much else. Your brain is actually aware of the reality behind the virtual reality, although it has never learned to process it and can’t begin to express it even in body language really. This reality behind reality is what makes your thinking always seem at least a little bit unconvincing, or is that just me?

You are not convinced by your own thinking?

Do you really believe comfortably in your understanding? I am certainly not. The process that I have learned, my interface for this thinking world, does not convince me. It is like a operating a computer with a bare bones version of windows, but the system errors make sense. They follow a pattern. Have you ever asked yourself why exactly you hate being labelled? What answer did you get?

Oh yes, that can be frustrating to be limited.
I have yes.
Yes and no. I’ve not been bothered by it too much.

“Why do you allow them to label you?” Is what I get. I can answer that easily. You both need and want human interaction, and they can only interact with you through labels, tags if you prefer.

I wonder if they’re right or not.
Right now I am getting the answer that I don’t like someone else putting a face on me.
I’d rather be labelled as a person instead of being labelled by my personality.
No one else is allowed to put a face on me! Or what’s a hermitage for!

It’s much easier and more convenient to accept labels, but they are broken, and they do remind you of the gaps in your own virtual reality. You feel something beyond that, and you both desire it very much, and fear it, so most people stay stuck on that threshold.

When another role player told me I had a habit of taking over or being over dramatic, I started worrying that I was doing just that. It made me darn right paranoid. So is that their face or my own?

Everyone familiar with the phrase history repeats itself? Ever notice how strange the behaviour of the gods seems in legends? How unrealistic they seem?

Yes! The gods behave strangely — mirrors of ourselves! Or perhaps of some buried part of ourselves.

In ancient Greece everyone knew the gods were involved with a story, because they always had a really dramatic mask, even before they spoke their lines.

Thank God for these myths!

Those gods are real. They are real pressures on the human psyche, real patterns in living interaction, biological exchange, and the reason they can find such purchase in our consciousness.

I’ve always felt the gods were inside of us all along. We just think they are high and mighty.

Why even the most self styled die hard atheist will crave fantasy as if their life depended on it, is because there is more reality behind the rational than contained in it, a vast vista of potential and freedom for the soul. Every legendary figure, popular character, myth or meme is a gatekeeper, a messenger from not only the deeper psyche of humanity, but from our shared species memory, and even shared inter-species memory. The entire history of life on this planet. Thus the irresistible attraction to the role of the beast man, the green man, the lady of the lake, the figure who runs like the wind, or whose wrath strikes like lightning, because our brains illusion making ability is shoddy.

Myths contain geometrically more than historical ” facts.”

We love Magneto for seeming to be unbeatable. Indeed, Magneto is an excellent example.

We can exploit those pressures as they act on those around us, and it can seem as if we work magick. We can embody and channel the gatekeeper in that situation, and free the affected persons imagination, make their virtual reality just a bit more open, their thinking just a bit more flexible, and the range of outcomes in their behaviour just a bit broader, and this can build over time.

This is why I am willing to be the devil, why I so commonly appear as this being, because these days everyone believes in the devil. Atheists in some ways more than anyone else.

I’ve only met a few atheists, they seem to be almost frantic in their desire to disprove things. It doesn’t feel like they are very peaceful. They are devout devils advocates.

Atheism is also a belief system, and every belief system has its fanatics and its fundamentalists.
Atheists seem to be very unhappy.

Better the devil you know, they say. What this means is people prefer to be lied to, but you can use those lies, those fantasies, to sneak truth in. Genuine truth does not hurt. The most it does is disturb what is believed to be a comfortable numbness. If someone approaches you as the honest person, they are lying to you, because they are hiding their personal lies from you. If anything, the honest person is the biggest most pernicious liar. They believe passionately in that truthing. They deny the innate nature of their own minds, as well as develop an intolerance for the views of anyone around them as well.

Live the Truth

Genuine truth does not hurt. That is a wonderful, wonderful concept to carry through life. Indeed, if it’s useful. You can’t help but lie, because you do not know the truth. You cannot think the truth, you can only live it. Is this helpful at all?

Truth is being. Being is truth. That is all you know; that is all you need to know.

The customer expects the lie so they can learn about the product. Yes. The salesman may tell you everything they honestly know about the product, which is very often very little, and they do know that they have to tell you what they were told. They have to do their job. It’s only honest.

Now, enjoy your being! Enjoy your truth! Be of good cheer! Indeed, make a good face, and don’t be afraid to really make that face, make it with passion, with imagination. It’s through the door of imagination that insight or intuition into genuine reality finds it’s way in. We can’t think it or know it intellectually, but we can spontaneously express it.

Here is an example, I was looking for a used car a year ago, went to three dealers, got the normal run around. By the time I got to dealer four, I told the guy, no BS, no sales pitch. and they were honest with me.

To think you’re being honest can be very damaging and you’re less likely to correct yourself when you need to. So just cheer the f#$% up? Yes, frown like you mean it, or be as serious and gray as you possibly can. Just don’t believe that your passive mood is more real than it actually is, don’t convince yourself that how you feel is a product of your circumstances.

Let’s try this now, be as gray faced and serious as you possibly can right now. Be as straight faced as you possibly can, don’t dare move your face, keep your eyes focused, your mind on task, control everything. Take a moment and do that. When you are ready tell me what happened, no smiling, no imagination, no drama.

I fantasize that I was ‘the Man in the iron mask’ and that was not pleasant. You didn’t go far enough. You allowed it to settle into your comfort zone. You let it be believable. It’s an illusion, but you have trained yourself to make those behaviours seem realistic.

I feel tight inside, my body closing in. I feel gloom around me. I feel angry.

I am wandering around in space and time. I am looking for identity.

At first I could not avoid smiling a little. That smiling was the realistic response. We can unlearn that false realism. No one benefits or is made any healthier because you suspend your disbelief in the consensus.

“The son of man has nowhere to lay his head.” The son of man never lifted his hand, head either. We need the sons and daughters of man to lift their heads and rise, to walk the dream as we did of old. Sing the old song lines and reawaken reality. It’s long been sleeping a poisoned fever dream, and the poisoning is so simple to cure. It’s carbon dioxide poisoning. We have been holding our breath, waiting for futures when we will be allowed to be creative and imaginative, to be our full selves. We are too busy thinking to feel, so since we have gone numb we have lost track of the fact that we aren’t breathing, our emotions aren’t circulating, and the souls hand can’t even be moved let alone layed to the creative acts it’s always been intended to.

You always have the choice not to follow the rabbit, my childhood nickname was rabbits, my older brother couldn’t say my real name. So yes, you don’t have to go down the rabbit hole, but we are very late, and it’s getting later still. The old way is done, is decaying, a rotting corpse meant only to feed the ancient roots of the ancestor tree, beneath which the rabbit hole leads. We need to go there, behind the world, behind your eyes.

Perhaps there are multiple rabbit holes? Take your pick. There are as many rabbit holes as there are wormholes in time space, or passages in the human body all networked for the same reason, to live this life, to preserve the breath that is the spirit, to keep the rhythms of the eternal dance. What mood does dancing suggest?

CHEER! Yes, so dance knowing that you dance, move knowing that you feel, and move with feeling. Be of genuine face.

Zorba: “One needs a little madness, else he never dares break the ropes and be free.”

Keep that one true faith that would indeed prevent you from being false to your bothers and sisters. To your feeling heart be true, and you will poison no ones ear. You will vandalize no ones protective walls with the tags that are your expectations of them. This is a heroic act, and much to expect of anyone, but it is possible, and isn’t it time yet?

OH MY GOD, YES!

I sometimes frown at people who smile at me, just briefly, before I smile back genuinely. What do you think that does to them?

Freaks them out! But they leave thinking!

The rabbit hole is behind every corner anyone has painted themselves into, in ever path of the crooked mans house as long as you haven’t become confused and started believing in the rooms in that house, believing in the destinations they promise you they are working toward. Have we arrived there yet? Is there any reason to believe we ever will?

It seems to me that confusion is all there is right now.
We are there/here. It is us.

To paraphrase the Cheshire cat, if the you beyond all your paths don’t know where you want to go, then any road will get you there, and none of them matter. You will be stuck seeking jam tomorrow and jam yesterday but never having any today.

Any every day will be a very far from merry unbirthday. Instead perhaps undeath days, very gray and gloomy. I prefer to avoid those.

Focus on Now

As Ram Dass put it: ” Be here now.” TODAY is the first day of your existence. This moment. Be here. Be now.

So how do you focus on the jam you have right now? That can be illustrated in an old eastern story, which again unfortunately I must paraphrase. A man was feeling a tiger when he fell over the side of a cliff. He saved himself only barely by grasping a root in the side of the cliff which began to come lose as the tiger paced back and forth on the ledge overhead. He notices a strawberry also growing on the side of the cliff. He plucks it and eats it, and it’s the sweetest strawberry he has ever tasted. He says “Today is the best day of my life.” Does this answer your question?

Another related fact which may make it make more sense. There are some cultures today who’s language has no future tense. They can’t reference the future, can’t talk about it with others, can’t read about it in their native tongue. Some would say they can’t even think about it, and when asked about it by outsiders they don’t actually express much worry or concern about the concept. They don’t express a desire to learn about or understand the concept. No reference to the future, it would seem like their judgment and decision making would suffer, yes?

“Be Here Now” Apparently, they don’t feel a need for a future tense. They are here. They are now.

How would they make wise choices without reference to the future, right?

Many people live their lives that way, never planning for the future and get grief for it too.
It’s all a matter of perspective. You could save up all your money and never spend it, and then get hit by a bus, or you could spend all your money and live to 100 in poverty.
Observe any animal’s behaviour . . . observe no future tense.

When tested they actually show superior decision making skills. They examine things very closely with attention to detail, and choose based on this. So they do better than future tense sensitive speakers, interesting no?

It would be less convoluted decision making, clearer.

Is it clear how this all relates to cheer?

Absolutely so! It is about cheer, about happiness, about life!

Give good face, in your own style, to the masses. Make faces to power, make faces in front of your fears.

Namaste and be well.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~