Jonathan Zap's Pavillion

Most of all don’t forget to overthrow the Babylon Matrix which does not necessarily require armed insurrection or battling artificially intelligent machines in a charred, post apocalyptic radioactive wasteland (unless you’re into that sort of thing and are really good at it). All it requires is that you follow your own highly individual path.

[...]And the I Ching doesn’t want you to have faith in it (uncritical belief) or doubt, but recommends an open, neutral stance. Take what resonates with your inner truth sense, what works for you, and leave the rest.

[...]Speaking of our thoughts, we need to watch them constantly. (I’ve decided to surrender to the nonlinear and let intuition zigzag me between interpersonal and intrapsychic principles.) We need to recognize that different voices, often generated by distinct subpersonalities, speak in our heads, and we need a central, witness personality that observes those voices/subpersonalities without becoming them. Hexagram 27 reminds us not to nourish ourselves on negative, unnourishing thoughts and fantasies. Yes, that’s easier said than done, but here are a couple of psychic filters to keep online that are guaranteed to catch all the psychic allergens (all the negative thought forms) that all too easily pervade our inner world.

We’ll call the first of these the “tone filter.“? As you listen to the voices of your inner world (or the voices in your outer, interpersonal world) refuse to believe any voices that aren’t calm, compassionate and centered! Listen to them, understand where they are coming from, but don’t become them, don’t identify with them or believe them. If a voice is nagging, carping, bitter, mechanically repetitious, whining, angry, self-pitying, hypercritical, etc. then it is not to be believed! By tone, you can easily distinguish the voices of false subpersonalities and the still, deep voice of the self.

A second filter involves a list of categories of thought that are indicative of the ego nervously trying to control the Tao. The position of Taoism (based on the I Ching) is that the universe is unfolding as it should. But the ego, like a nervous back seat driver clutching an imaginary steering wheel in its sweaty, white-knuckled grip, never trusts that nonlinear path of the creative so completely out of its control. Categories (presented as a list of gerunds) that indicate the ego resisting the Tao and/or trying to assert imaginary control over it include: WANTING, WISHING, WORRYING, HOPING, FEARING, DREADING, DESIRING, ENVYING, COMPARING, SUPERVISING, LIFE-GAURDING, JUDGING, COMPLAINING, SELF-PITYING, STRIVING, ANTICIPATING, EXPECTING, PRESTRUCTURING, CONTRIVING, FORCING PROGRESS, HEDGING, RATIONALIZING, CLINGING AND DOUBTING.

[..]So shock can be like a divine gift, a catalyst for evolutionary change. After all, if it wasn’t for shock in the form of a giant asteroid hitting the earth sixty-five million years ago and flattening everything larger than a chicken,* there might be a velicoraptor strolling through tropical foliage instead of you sitting there reading this over the internet. Our incarnation began with birth shock and often ends with a shock too. Shock is our constant, if unpredictable, and often unwelcome, companion.

Try this thought experiment. You are the author (the equivalent of God) of a novel about a young person who in the course of your story is going to develop greatly as a person---psychologically and spiritually. Would you as God/author provide them with the perfect, peaceful relationship, the perfect career and a tranquil, happy “successful“? life? Not unless you wanted to create a boring story and a boring character. What you will probably find is that as God/author you are going to have to create “evil,“? you are probably going to have to hurl at that young person some gigantic shock, right at the limits of what they can handle, to get them out of the door and on their quest. If you are writing a screenplay you better do this in the first ten pages (the equivalent of the first ten minutes of screen time). This is called the inciting incident, and if you don’t have it, unless you are an absolute master with a cult following, you will probably lose much of your audience. There are classic, archetypal elements to story structure because story structure parallels life structure.