Joseph Woodhouse
Forum Replies Created
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Hi Anthony, I think your metaphors are brilliant and useful as we explore the awareness phenomenological state space… this requires “unfreezing” our attention from contracted, tense left brain dominated states.
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Hello Christina, I was there for most of the talks and will review all the videos once they are posted. I also participated in the discussion break out Zoom sessions and would be interested in contacting any of the individuals I met there. I found the conference to be a powerful life changing gathering of some of the most wise, creative, epistemically open people on this planet; a true example of the type of community needed to amplify the countercurrent to the ongoing collapse of global civilization. I am open to further discussion with you and others that were able to attend. I would have attended in person but it was sold out before I received notification so I am very interested in hearing more about your in person experience.
Thought I might share one of my artworks that came to mind as I read your post called: Ark of Awareness
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Very admirable work sjahari. I have found that Ian’s insights have been essential in my journey to uncover our natural human endowment of wholesome present centered, lively, relaxed, highly energetic awareness/attention capable of shifting easily from states of left hemispheric contraction, to right hemispheric expansion to a third attention that accommodates and moves adaptively to any place in the awareness/attention phenomenological state space. All this requires energy so I have been thinking that we should, as healers, pay attention to mitochondrial health. We could hypothesize that the felt sense of the body in this moment is directly linked to the web of mitochondria throughout the body and the flow of H+ throughout the body in connective tissue microtubules.
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Hi Jena, Its no secret that for me Ian is one of the greatest wise men and teachers on the planet. I notice his conversations, for instance, the one between Ian, Daniel Schmachtenberger and John Vervaeke. Daniel in his conversation with Nate Hagens on AI has pointed to Ian as a leading generator of the countercurrent of wisdom and love to the self terminating activity of the global super organism. I live in Iowa and my concern is the mental imbalance that is underlying global civilization collapse and evident here last night as 50 some percent of Republicans voted for the monstrous, insane Donald Trump as a candidate for President with Evangelicals thinking he is Jesus. I contribute with these artworks that point to qualities of everyday awareness that amplify the countercurrent. All the best Jenna… your work is extremely important to the ultimate survival of human beings who are currently on the accelerating path to self obliteration. Love…. Joseph Woodhouse
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I think this article is highly relevant. Thank you for bringing it to our attention. A direct moment by moment coherent over time experience of the “synthesis” mentioned in this quote from the article is possible.
“The tone of the lyre and the strength of the bow are not improved by compromise, the string going slack. They are both emergent properties of a synthesis between opposing entities, which displays entirely new qualities. Not the midpoint, but the synthesis, not avoid- ance of the ‘negative’ pole, but embrace of the apparent duality. The dual and non-dual need to work together, as Adyashanti puts it.”
The actual experience of this “third attention/awareness” can be invoked or uncovered by art such as this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HjVxtW4OgQ
Further, I think that the connection of those who are able to sustain this third attention is the countercurrent to the ongoing collapse of civilization. See what you think of this and let’s enjoy a conversation that flows from our wholeness.
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I hear you Peter… I agree that the countercurrent is growing and real… just not visible like the antics of Donald Trump. It lives and breathes as civilization collapses…
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Though it would appear that the two hemispheres are in opposition, as in the metaphor of the boxing match; another way of seeing it is as a lack of balance in human attention.
In this view, the awareness phenomenological state space is a vast Universe with our attention imprisoned in one small, contracted, angry, hateful, fearful, disconnected space. The puzzlement is who would want to live this way if they were aware of the joyful alternatives?
So then the question becomes, how can we free our attention/awareness from the current of evil that is destroying the habitability of our planet?
Our puzzlement at the strength of this dark current and our release into the countercurrent of light and love is possible only if attention/awareness comes to a non-judgemental, pure witnessing realization of its predicament and then renews it capacity to instantly shift to experience the flowing, joyful, vibrational, fluid and connected feel of attentional freedom.
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I found Dr. Vernon’s talk to be an illuminating synthesis of key insights into what we are calling, “attentional freedom”. Thank you for the revelations of Blake’s and Dante’s contributions. I loved the images that were shown during the talk.
To cut right to what I see as the essential thrust of Dr. McGilchrist’s gift of wisdom to our planet in this time of ultimate crisis and I believe that Dr. Vernon is amplifying this wisdom, I pose this question: How do we free attention from its imprisonment in the left hemispheric mode of inhabiting the world when most of our efforts to do so, only make the walls of the prison more secure? I offer the following Sufi tale as a potent tool in this Great Work. I am interested in connecting to anyone who has escaped the prison… even if it was just a glimpse.
The Indian Bird
A merchant kept a bird in a cage. He was going to India, the land from which the bird came, and asked it whether he could bring anything back for it. The bird asked for its freedom, but was refused. So he asked the merchant to visit a jungle in India and announce his captivity to the free birds who were there.
The merchant did so, and no sooner had he spoken when a wild bird, just like his own, fell senseless out of a tree on to the ground.
The merchant thought that this must be a relative of his own bird, and felt sad that he should have caused this death.
When he got home, the bird asked him whether he had brought good new from India.
‘No,’ said the merchant, ‘I fear that my news is bad. One of your relations collapsed and fell at my feet when I mentioned your captivity.’
As soon as these words were spoken the merchant’s bird collapsed and fell to the bottom of the cage.
‘The news of his kinsman’s death has killed him, too,’ thought the merchant. Sorrowfully he picked up the bird and put it on the window-sill. At once the bird revived and flew to a near-by tree.
‘Now you know’, the bird said, ‘that what you thought was disaster was in fact good news for me. And how the message, the suggestion of how to behave in order to free myself, was transmitted to me through you, my captor.’ And he flew away, free at last.
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Thank you for the kind words on the artwork. Not sure how Channel McGilchrist will engage with this upcoming seminar, but I am very excited to see that Ian is coming to the U.S.A., I believe in person. https://ctr4process.org/mcgilchrist-schedule/ I would have gone in person but it was sold out. I will attend via Zoom. The countercurrent is beginning to grow in the number of awakened beings that are engaging and this is a very good sign. If Ian happens to pass through Muscatine, Iowa, scenic little town on the Mississippi River, he is welcome to stay with us! All the best, Joe
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I checked your website and watched the video. You come across as a very compassionate and experienced psychotherapist. It would seem to me that your courses could be very helpful to people who have had a glimpse of wholeness or intuit that some metamorphosis is possible but are stuck with the emissary usurping the role of master, to use Ian’s metaphor.
By the way, to bring in Dr. Vernon, which is the original inspiration for this particular thread; his commentary on Dante’s “Divine Comedy” has provided me with some very powerful metaphors. I would suggest that you are trying to attract clientele to your programs who are stuck in purgatory. Dante described, 700 years ago, people whose attention is frozen in the first three levels that you describe in your video.
Perhaps the challenge is to help people notice exactly where they are before they are able to free attention and enjoy the effortless states that you are teaching. By definition, those folks have been unable to see themselves as they are with non-judgemental, non-interfering, witnessing awareness and may have much of their lives invested in the contractions of denial, distraction, fear, hatred, anger or sheer struggle to survive. Hard to break through those prison walls. Here is another Sufi tale that addresses these issues:
Prisoner by Idries Shah
A man was once sent to prison for something which he had not done.
When he had behaved in an exemplary way for some months, his jailers began to regard him as a model prisoner.
He was allowed to make his cell a little more comfortable; and his wife sent him a prayer-carpet which she had herself woven.
When several more months had passed, this man said to his guards:
‘I am a metalworker, and you are badly paid. If you can get me a few tools and some pieces of tin, I will make small decorative objects, which you can take to the market and sell. We could split the proceeds, to the advantage of both parties.’
The guards agreed, and presently the smith was producing finely-wrought objects whose sale added to everyone’s well-being.
Then, one day, when the jailers went to the cell, the man had gone. They concluded that he must have been a magician.
After many years when the error of the sentence had been discovered and the man was pardoned and out of hiding, the king of that country called him and asked him how he had escaped.
The tinsmith said:
‘Real escape is possible only with the correct concurrence of factors. My wife found the blacksmith who had made the lock on the door of my cell, and other locks throughout the prison. She embroidered the interior designs of the locks in the rug which she sent me, on the spot where the head is prostrated in prayer. She relied upon me to register this design and to realize that it was the wards of the locks. It was necessary for me to get materials with which to make the keys, and to be able to hammer and work metal in my cell. I had to enlist the greed and need of the guards, so that there would be no suspicion. That is the story of my escape.’
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Greetings Don, I think you and I are making a very interesting connection here in which we can discover and amplify the process of “thawing” or “unfreezing” attention. I hear you on your thoughts about practice and technique. I would add classical Sufi stories as another “technique”. These techniques all can easily “freeze” attention and just as easily “thaw” attention.
As a sidelight, many years ago, I attended in person Krishnamurti’s Ojai talks. No doubt about it, he led the audience to an encounter with wholeness though, at the time, I was unable to understand the pattern well enough to move freely within it. Still, I realize as I am writing this that the encounter was essential to the metamorphosis that people are seeking.
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Thank you for posting these insights. I am resonant with your flow on the Way. What is interesting to me is the quality of moment to moment awareness. Studying the work of Mark Vernon, first his new book on spiritual intelligence and now his Divine Comedy exploration has resulted in noticed shifts in the quality of awareness which could possibly be described as a thawing of attention from frozen contracted states into the flowing wholeness. I just got the same effect from watching the Owen Barfield “cartoon”. There is immediately within us something inconceivably enormous, energetic, mysterious and totally alive…whenever we notice it, words become trivial…
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Hi Don, For me, uncovering our wholeness, is an experience that you clearly point to in your posting. Not through any intellectual effort or arrangement of words, but by simply noticing that we naturally and always have this ability to experientially connect to all of life, we can come to be grounded moment by moment in our wholeness. Attention is freed from the need to explain and the flow and vibration in our bodies resonates with all that is.