Prying Open My Third Eye

I spent much of 2017 looking at 'New Age' stuff. Yes, nebulous stuff. The reason was that I was in a relationship with a student of Anthroposophy, a practitioner of Yoga and Vipassana meditation. I myself had prior to all this done a fair bit of meditation myself and including once in a sensory deprivation tank and had some profound and weird experiences. I've had some profound experiences with my experiments in near total sobriety too, though not for a long time.

And the fact is human history is littered with the fact of testimony of out of world, supernatural and paranormal experiences. Experiences that are somewhat regularly recreated, but with the very particular caveat of being regularly recreated in the subjective experiences of individuals. Thus all we really have, is testimony.

It's hard to annex such a nebulous body of knowledge into any one category, because really it is moving away from reason and deap into intuitions. Thus I'm going to refer to it perhaps insultingly erroneously as peering through the Third Eye. But I like this metaphor because it lends itself to a description of a different way of seeing, furthermore looking through an impossible perspective - the minds eye.

I am much more in favor of this perspective than many might assume, and I want to discuss all the many ways it is safe to entertain and even profitable to do so rather than be railroaded by reason. This comes with a major caveat though, which is that it is my experience that the people most devoted to seeing through this third eye do so in order to close the other two. This can leave a person down two eyes in their vision. The third eye alone is not enough.

Our two regular eyes, may be enough. There is not in my experience any strong evidence to suggest that viewing the universe as completely material is insufficient to thriving, to being happy, to being productive and useful and ethical. But I suspectthat those who go too hardline material are at some disadvantage to those more flexible to an out-there notion like having a third eye.

I am a fan of the Chariot Allegory though I wouldn't use Plato's terms. The charioteer has the task of steering the two horses in a unified direction towards enlightenment. But you can see a trinity emerge in the model too - A charioteer, and 2 horses. One horse representing eros, the passions, emotions, intuition, the unconscious mind. The other horse representing reason, logic, intelligence whatever - most people have some fuzzy notion of left-brain right-brain dichotomy.

I have no real qualifications to comment on neural anatomy, but there's kind of a chariot in the material brain. We have the old brain that is fast, unconscious (the 'fast' in Daniel Kahneman's 'Thinking fast and slow') and the new brain (the neocortex) that is slow and costly, the conscious brain (the 'slow' thinking brain duh.) Communicating between the two is the hippocampus, which the ancients for some reason named after a sea horse because they think it looks like one, but it's basically the charioteer that integrates the two systems.

But in the practice of thinking, and please join me on some metacognition - with the reason vs emotion horserace, it is in my experience more a task of multi-tasking reason. Using reason to moderate not just my emotions, but also to moderate my reason, though when I think about it, both emotions and reason are pattern recognition systems and maybe emotions moderate reason as well.

Point being, I trust neither.

So to be frustratingly abstract like my idol, I'll just have to say that learning when not to trust your reason and/or emotions is a skill to be developed with practice and I cannot testify that healthy distrust of one's own mind can be mastered. So avoid unnecessary high stakes decisions...

Now a few years ago I was persuaded to stop reading the news. Newspapers all that shit. It's a problematic undertaking because my newsfeed on social media, even feed agregators that collect art-blogs I subscribe to are a source of news now. On the one hand it reinforces one of the arguments to dispense with newspapers - important news will find you. You don't need to exert energy looking for it. On the other though, the depressing reality that a large group of people use social media to publish content not about their own lives, but the news kind of just make it a news-story.

At any rate, if you must pick up a newspaper though, the best thing to read is probably the horoscope.

Why?  

Because horoscopes are usefully vacuous. They basically in all their variations are vague enough to always be relevant and encourage a person to second guess a purchase they might be considering, or a person they are doing business with, whether to stick with a dead end relationship or to be optimistic about a future development in the domains of work, finances or romance.

To me that is more or less a benign daily exercise. But astrology needs some moderation. I have come across people who genuinely evaluate the viability of relationships on star signs alone. A fire sign clashing with a water sign is literally a deal breaker because a belief in what can be inferred about the content of someone's character from a star sign is set to strong inference rather than weak.

That is a good example of closing your basic conventional eyes to noticing the vast amount of variation in personality traits within star signs. There are only 12 signs in the Western Zodiac, the Chinese Zodiac clusters people by whole years, making variation more obvious though I'm sure there's still generalities to notice. The Myers-Briggs 16 personality types can function similar to astrology if you subscribe with the same conviction and close your eyes to how relative and contextual personality is...

the point being, that you need to keep one eye open and fixed on uncertainty. You need to have an eye that can rationally perceive when you are being irrational.

If my zodiac contains vagueries that are of no interest to me - for example it tells me to reconsider moving accomodation something not on my horizon and I'm anxious about what might be developing in my love life, I simply pick another star sign to read that is relevant to me. Because why not?

Keep it benign. But how about when one can engage irrational ways of seeing the world in good faith? Can we move from benign to useful?

Here is where I argue seeing the world through the third eye is much like shit I came across in maths in high-school.

I distinctly remember being excited to do a unit on imaginary numbers, and the premise being 'Imagine there's a number i for which i^2 is -1' so too can one employ mystic concepts just to do things. The God of Gaps is useful, provided you acknowledge that it is irrational to worship such a God, and don't say... try to derive moral authority from your belief.

Here I find talking to New-Age type people stimulating conversation in so far as they provide a space for me to talk in archetypes, metaphors, think in analogies, anthropormorphise natural phenomena and not get treated like I'm fucking crazy.

It's in these conversations heard perhaps with a mystical third ear, that out there ideas can be entertained. There's I feel, sufficient grounding for this being useful in Einstein's theory of Brownian Motion where a degree of randomness, mess, sloppiness can improve the efficiency of a system. Very similar to De Bono's work in lateral thinking.

Thus I like Tarot as an irrational analytical tool. Shuffling a bunch of archetypes and then retrofitting it to my reality to create narratives. Based on the fact that my straightforward, rational narrative is likely going to prove not a whole and complete description of reality and truth, I may as well produce a variety of narratives by shuffling a tarot deck and seeing what the fuck I draw.

This isn't of course an appeal to ignorance. I do not write gospel with Tarot cards, I just write alternative narratives that I then consider. As Lao Tzu advised in the I'Ching: "Therefore the truly great man dwells on what is real and not what is on the surface, On the fruit and not the flower, Therefore accept the one and reject the other."

One practical example I can demonstrate was using the archetypes of Tarot to analyse the patterns of my own love life. How I present myself, how I reveal myself, what I look for, what I overlook... tempting though it is to get into the detail, I discovered a telling personal inconsistency.

I myself embody a lot of behaviour consistent with Temperance, a word not used much but you might call it self-deprivation, or perhaps even delayed gratification. But this isn't a quality I go looking for in prospective partners. Thus with the Temperance card metaphorically in hand, I managed to recalibrate and I managed to change my own narrative of relationships. To know myself better and feel better, completely irrational but something that I'd found incredibly hard to just think my way out of despite years dedicated to a more rational, material, analytic approach to my own psychology.

And speaking of psychology, here is a discipline where one can appreciate the vast contribution made by the lost religion, lost mysticism of Greco-Roman paganism. Apollo, a sometime Sun God, God of Reason, Medicine, etc is the archetypical Charioteer. His (or Helios') son Phaeton is also an excellent cautionary tale of what can go wrong if you lose control of the Chariot by giving one aspect of your nature more credence than the other.

And I guess I do mean giving one more credence than the other. I have met people who aspire to conscious control of even their body language to reflect their inner truth better. I've met many more people who want to abandon the quick and dirty heuristics of their unconscious mind - their unconscious ability to distinguish men from women based on appearance and other cues, their predisposition to distrust strangers and trust family. There is an absolute sense where the expenditure of energy to undertake every interpersonal transaction objectively has some payoff, I just don't believe we can function in a complex world to any meaningful or significant extent without heuristics.

I like esoteric mysticism because it lends itself to inaccuracy. There is profit to be made from uncertainty and very little in certainty. So in part I feel if mysticism is taught it should be taught as advanced rationality, rather than an alternative to rationality. One of those situations where teacher says 'I know up until now I've told you all to never... but now I'm going to teach you the technique where we actually do...' Just as my maths teachers taught me that you can't square a number and produce a -ve value then to have them say 'in these situations under these circumstances we imagine there is a number i such that...' though to be honest it is still unclear to me as to what fucking use imaginary number sets have in practice.

Before wrapping up, I do have to address the Phaetons, the Woo-woo speakers, the psycho-babblers. Firstly in so far as these new age thinkers do not have nothing to teach a more grounded mind. They do not only instruct as cautionary tales, but their folly can point to our own. Because everyone is prone to believing what they want to believe, hearing what they want to hear and not looking into an ugly mirror of reality. To sit with our shame and our pain are incredibly rare traits, and the new-age people are not especially deserving of derision for avoiding shame and pain in a more obvious way than most do by buying into say... empirically proven bogus economic theories.

What concerns me more for the new age is that knowledge to them is more like feeding a fire with an endless stream of kindling than building a stone fireplace that can reliably and with minimal effort keep one comfortable and warm. These are people that can pile framework after contradictory framework on top of one another and simply choose always what they want to do. This is opening your third eye and closing the other two.

Having had a relationship with a student of theosophy, and Chinese medicine and yoga and so fourth, what alarmed me was not so much the illogic or irrationality of her belief systems, but how easy it was for me to give any argument I made weight by appending some mystical precedent to it.

One can easily say I need to personify the Fool Archetype or I need more Wood element to counteract my excess of Water element in a way where there's no question of compatibility or incompatibility. Whereby seeing the world the regular material way you can't invoke say both a psychological argument about positive illusions and an economic argument about rational expectations. There's an onus of reconciliation on the sciences that just do not exist for the mystic arts.

In some absolute terms New-Agers are no less reasonable than a secular Australian borrowing from her future self to pay off a mortgaged property in early 2018, except that the New-Age people tend to live at the fringes of society commanding little wealth except for the rare instances where one with conviction or cynicism can build a business model whereby they can transfer what little wealth a group of New-Age believers have to one individual - via a Youtube Channel or running Seminars or selling Crystals online or something. The irrational material secularist can have no greater command of truth and yet live more comfortably.

Perhaps the esoteric author of greatest influence to me put it most succinctly:

"Respect the Gods and Buddha but do not count on them."

It's tricky stuff, but it is there to be had.