Freedom = Science + Rebellion

"The map is not the territory, the word is not the thing defined"

Some things that are obvious might need careful re-stating or else there will be misunderstandings between us that could prove fatal. After all, in a time of economic and political troubles, people do kill each other over misunderstandings.

All sense perception is an approximation of that which it senses. Since each person has a marginally different biological structure to their senses and of the brain that orders the senses, then each person is:

- i) approximating objective reality (on terms by which no person can ever know that reality except as an approximation expressed through mathematics or language which pre-suppose that a community of persons have agreed on rules that 'level out' personal perceptions into a pragmatic 'normality' that need not be identical with objective reality at all),

and,

- ii) constructing reality in a marginally different way from every other person so that the reality that is pragmatically effective socially is not necessarily either objective reality or the reality of the person whose situation is (possibly radically) different from other persons.

Practically (or pragmatically), a 'social reality' (a working tool for the ends of the majority of persons in a community for the majority of the time or for the ends of a minority which has managed to command the conditions of the majority) is possible.

However, such a reality is never 'true' except pragmatically i.e. its contingency is in-built by the very biological basis of sense impression and the braibn's ordering of data. Social reality is the most contingent of the three forms of reality (objective or mathematical, individual and community) because it is vulnerable to:

- a) the varying numbers of individual realities that enter into it at any one time;

- b) the degree to which such minds are willing to suspend belief in those aspects of their own reality that do not fit with the community's reality;

- c) the power structures by which some individual persons can impose their realities in a value hierarchy against other minds' realities;

- d) changes in internal objective realities (the waxing and waning of biological strengths) and their effect on minds;

- e) changes in external objective realities (facts of nature) and in the realities of members of the community as they individually face not only changes in internal and external objective reality but ...

- f) shifts in the ability of other minds to manipulate their reality, communicate those shifts (not necessarily verbally), and become aware of their own learned experience of socialised reality and of its degree of dissonance from their own individual reality.

In other words, we must start our analysis of reality not by distrusting the relationship between our reality and objective reality (which is an individual construction derived from the interaction of our own objective biological reality with physical reality) but by distrusting the relationship between socialised reality and our own reality.

Whereas our biology and our physical world set certain absolute limits on our perception and on our ability to create a framework for our perception, socialised reality sets limits that are contingent and constantly changing in a way that is far more volatile than 'natural' reality.

This instability of the social can be summarised thus:-

- a) limits set by our own lack of awareness of our situation: the limitation of blind acceptance or irrational understanding of the degree of choice and risk involved in asserting our own reality (often based on anxiety, fear and the deliberate withholding of knowledge by others);

- b) limits set by the 'imperial' aspirations of other minds whose own realities involve the attempt to dictate their victim's reality through the use of custom or habit (see c)) or a command of physical reality (the bending of physical reality to ensure the ability to deploy 'force' or 'manipulation' [i.e. in regard to sense impressions]);

- c) as a corollary of a), the acceptance of custom or habit, what might be called the 'drag of tradition', especially strong where tradition has become part of the armoury of 'imperial' minds with a stake in promoting conservatism;

- d) the limits set by language which is a social tool and not an individual tool (except for the purposes of wilful managing or manipulating social reality) and which, therefore, defines the person, especially in the form of 'shared texts', by reinventing reality for the sake of what is 'average' or 'dominant.

Ergo, individual freedom (i.e. a right state of individual reality) requires a right relationship with physical or objective reality (including the biological underpinnings of sense perception and idea-formation) and a right relationship with the social, which is one of permanent questioning criticism of the social's functioning value to the individual.

The right relationship with objective reality is a questioning respect which encompasses a right relationship with natural laws where they are scientifically and mathematically valid and with observable social phenomena where they take on mass characteristics (such as the flocking of humans in terms of the market or the community).

This right relationship also requires a right relationship with the individual's own abilities to perceive the world correctly and to analyse it. To know what one cannot or may not know because of the conformation of one's own biology is part of this right relationship. Some distrust of the senses, within reason, is wise.

The right relationship with socialised reality is one of permanent and questioning distrust. To understand social phenomena, including the social use of language and of texts, and the use by those skilled in language, texts and the manipulation of sense perception and brain operations of their tools, is not to be construed as acceptance.

The operations of humans en masse (likened to the flocking of birds or the herd behaviour of wildebeest or the pack actions of wolves) must be understood but not taken as necessary conduct for the free individual - the aim is merely not to be sent awry or be eaten, indeed, to be cleverer than the flock, the herd or the pack.

Similarly, the superior 'fire-power' (control over objective reality) or skills of the few who command the many are worthy of no intrinsic respect but are simply taken to be a 'fact in the world' which must be worked around, undermined or defeated as suits the individual reality of the person observing a social reality that is out of kilter with itself.

It may be that an individual reality is in perfect accord with the flock or with the interests of those with 'fire power' but this can only be meaningful if a person chooses with knowledge to be a conservative or the servant of a master.

Otherwise, the individual reality (the person) has become little more than an adjunct of a socialised reality. They have ceased to exist as a person. They have become socialised reality - a passive component of it like the Borg. They have reduced themselves to the level of the animal.

Conservatism and serfdom are not irrational options. They may be objectively sensible relations if the command over objective reality by the social (either as herd-like community or as a community of betas ruled by alphas) is a fact but the 'victim' in such cases should know their vulnerability and should show their teeth as soon as objective conditions allow.

To internalise socialised reality without needing to do so is asking to be the conscripted soldier, the cheap labour, the bored congregation member ... and so the struggle to preserve a right relationship to objective reality (a respect for science and power) and to socialised reality (a resistance to its claims) is the basis of all human freedom.

On Kundalini, the Serpent ...

Our Tantric series has been designed, in part, to transliterate an Eastern way of thinking into Western philosophical language. We do not think it useful to mask phenomena with obscure terms derived from exotic languages and faraway cultures - what I call the namastisation of language.

Not 'Namaste', please, but 'Yours Sincerely' at the end of a communication ... and yet the concept of Kundalini remains useful because there is no Western equivalent. The Qabala perhaps expresses the same concept to a degree but with an excess of intellect involved.

Kundalini, a serpentine Eastern goddess, conceptually represents the flow of psychic power coursing through the body from root to perceived transcendence far better than anything that has emerged out of late nineteenth century Vienna or mid twentieth century California.

We do require some term to describe how it feels to have an energy flow from Will in the mind down through the body and back up to the brain as a sensation. This serpent goddess and the identification of nodal body points called Chakras is the best that we have at this time.

Exactly what is a Chakra and what is not is disputed by the 'authorities' but the matter is probably best considered expansively as what nodal points seem to work for each person regardless of doctrine.

What flows of energy are felt between nodal points are equally a personal matter. The point is only that there are nodal points and that there are flows.

The consequent process of psychic management is essentially one of 'visualisation' - a mental concentration on nodal points and on flows in order to work inner change. We will return to visualisation later because not everyone can visualise easily and 'pure' visualisation overlaps with narrative dreaming.

The traditions might best be regarded as teaching methods but a certain autodidacticism is reasonable once the principles are established. Sometimes one has to accept a weak theory from a 'guru' in order to get access to the technique but one should always be cynical about theory. Ideologies rarely reflect all reality.

Let us demystify the chakras by translating the six widely established nodal points into language we can all understand:-

• The root of the system is where we start. It is basically the near-arse where all the tension lies that needs exploding upwards. It is as if one shits one's liberation upwards. Waste out, enlightenment. up.The root, where we expel waste, is our link to the matter of the world through our adding to it. The metaphorical link with money and stress, or rather to our need to eat to add to a messy matter which takes us away from ourselves, is apposite.
• The sex organs are the driver for enlightenment. It is our actual unconscious and libidinous centre. It is from where we may decide to move no further. It is the bit of us that we are socially and unconsciously (and incorrectly) inclined to see as monstrous and inchoate. Ordering this towards individuation and self is the necessary precursor to the next stage
• The third chakra is the navel - rather it is our centre and our gut. It can be lower down in the abdomen in some and higher in the stomach in others but it is our bodily material core when we bother to think about it 
• The heart is not the beating life-giver but where we feel high stress and emotion. It needs to be calmed for the next stage psychotherapeutically when our relationship to matter, the unconscious and to our 'root' have been dealt with.
• The throat is the place from which the sounds arising from our heart are made real. It is the place of communication with existence, a connection with being. It is perhaps the hardest to understand. 
• The 'third eye' is the expression of that mind as pure power, a surge of ultimately libidinous energy that not so much commands the world as makes the world irrelevant except in the light of the mind's command. Its action is non-magical because the world of matter itself is not changed but the view of the world is transformed - and so the world is transformed insofar as the world is imagined and magic returns by the back door. 

Above all this is a narrative of perceived transcendence which is a sensation of rising above and out of oneself that comes, as in a sequential flow, from the root, driven as an escape from the world, through awareness of material reality, emotional existence, the presence of existence and a sense of inward power towards something that, even if momentary, can be life-changing.

The concept of Kundalini as an unwinding serpent captures this process conceptually as libidinous energy operating beyond thought and reason as one's very core in action. All the attempts to conceptualise this process analogically and allegorically come down to variations on this theme.

We have the earthiness of our arse and the liquidity of our libido working through the furnace of our gut  to float free in our heart and into the sound-space of our throat - whatever! The symbolism is all very well for teaching but it obscures the path for the natural 'adept' who simply feels what is true in the core process.

The Nath sect's simplification into sexual organs, heart and head is equally intuitively right even if simplistic - libidinous drive, emotional somatic response and thought all driven towards the transcendent point that makes life more than just the drudgery of duty and social obligation.

The root or point between arse and genitals, the earthing point, is the threshold between being human and being unconscious matter, effectively between life and death. The Kundalini is cthonic, not accidentally a serpent, coming out of the Ground of Being to become transcendent from the death to which we will return.

What is being said here is that transcendence is the precise opposite of death, the counter-point where, albeit briefly perhaps and sometimes accidentally, the human being experiences the life-changing illusion of immortality, the eternal and the absolute - in a rewiring of the brain that permits new ways of seeing reality.

This brings us on to technique. Each of the traditional techniques is fundamentally physiological rather than spiritual (unlike, say Christian prayer). This gives us a clue to what is going on here. This is not an attempt to seek help from outside as in the Christian tradition but an active attempt to manipulate one's own matter.

This is not to say that 'prayer' does not work to achieve some desirable ends - including the suspension of disbelief to effect healing - but only that transformation of mind, rather than of body, requires a transformation of body through an aggressive engagement with it.

Physical re-positioning (yoga) and breathing exercises (pranayama) are rigorous, potentially dangerous, techniques that manipulate physiology in order to trigger biochemical change.

The rousing of the Kundalini through pranayama (and the equivalent Taoist exercises) are proven techniques for driving the sense of 'flow' upwards through the body. The surrounding analyses of what is going on may be absurd but that something is going on is a fact from the ground.

If symbolism and ritual enter into the process, this is based on the suggestibility of the body to the mind (as of the mind to the body). Pure visualisation can achieve transcendent ends as can pure physical technique while combinations of both may be regarded as 'pure'. What floats your boat is all that is required.

Different body/minds (aka persons) will have different abilities to 'think' somatically and conceptually. Most minds tend to fall on either side of dead centre of the continuum between the two.

The truth is that the body/mind is variably pre-geared to the possibility of transcendence and that it is the will to technique that is more vital than the precise method. Some literally 'yearn' for transcendent experience and other have no interest at all - neither type is superior to the other, simply different.

One might be aroused by sounds or words (which have physical aspects as sound waves), by mental images, by sexual excitation, by asceticism but the central point is that, by whatever means, a flow of energy is ready to roll and it just needs the trigger that suits that person.

The central question is always - who am I? Am I centred on the physical or the mental, on mind-emptying or mind-filling or on some combination of both? Katon Shual (Mogg Morgan) has a useful mental model, derived from Eastern practice, reproducing one's own body/mind as a visualised external temple.

Part of the success in this and other visualisations lies in the fixedness of perception inwardness away from external sensory distraction. All models - physical and mental - rely on a reduction of sensory inputs and their replacement by repetitiveness of function (stillness or concentration) or a fixedness of internal imagery.

It is the removal of the mind from the process of editing out extraneous data (including memory data) that permits that same mind to turn inward towards the body and so allow the flow of internal energy to start to work the 'non-magic' that will eventually result in the transcendent experience or such near-analogues that make the hard labour worthwhile.

This is also close to 'pathworking' in the neo-pagan community and is a technique that extends far beyond the usual tantric suspects. Or it is 'guided imagery' for those who see it as a technique for life without any attempt to add a spiritual gloss. Intensity of the experience can build up into a trance-like status of perceived non-magical 'magical' power.

A real adept at visualisation can construct whole worlds that are coherent, meaningful and perfectly reflective of specific personal issues, constructing a flow that mimics the 'goddess' Kundalini. She can create 'gods' or 'goddesses' integrated with herself to reflect and express aspects that are hard otherwise to articulate.

Personally, I have a set of separate coherent worlds all accessible through a defined portal and each framed by a narrative. There is a physicality about these worlds that can take them to the edge of and even over the line of alternate reality, usually with some symbolic starting point or core image.

As I get older and resolve conflicts, I need the narratives less and the process centres on a 'state'. But the given task of the narrative is to reproduce those aspects of the unconscious that are not merely stress-relieving but permit psychological machinery to emerge which can face fears or uncover truths.

Ultimately, while the narrative visualisation process is never likely to trigger transcendence in itself, it can create the conditions by which other things can trigger transformation.

Whether managed through a therapeutic or self-managed engagement with the body or through an imaginative re-ordering of the mind, something can be done to sense and manage the flow of energy within the body that can result ultimately in individuation or transcendence - which is really self-possession.

Although Wilhelm Reich may have identified the disease of blocked flow in the West, the best therapeutic cures still remain Eastern - as adaptations, without the cultural baggage, of Taoist and Tantric technique. And we still have no better alternative to Eastern terms, Kundalini or Ch'i, in describing the experience and the process.

Transgression

This is a posting in a series mostly related to sexuality but it should not be interpreted as relating solely to sexuality - transgression may be economic, social, familial, political, artistic, spiritual or cultural. The question is - why even bother to transgress 'norms' if conformity seems to be the easiest path to take?

An effective transgressional act is not an uncompassionate or cruel act. It simply asks whether a rule or a convention or a habit imposed by society or by others serves your own inner purpose. Of course, knowing one's own purpose helps but sometimes we only know that we don't know what we want.

In that situation of not knowing what we want or who we are and it is clear there are no answers to those questions in conforming to social expectations and rules, then the logjam may have to be broken - an instinctual transgression may be the only means to do this.

To break an irrational taboo (irrational in terms of one's own rational needs) is a liberatory act although this begs the question of the rational and the irrational since the social definition of rational or reasonable may be in direct contradiction to what is rational or reasonable for self expression ... for self-becoming.

Much of social life is, in any case, not strictly rational. It can be an imposition from the past, habit, from power, convenience to others and so forth. The central point to remember is this difference between what is reasonable for society and what is reasonable for oneself.

Ideally, rationalities converge in a free society but social conditions are rarely and only contingently free. Either the 'self' must reconsider its position or it must liberate itself from social rationality. This may not be just a liberatory stance but a revolutionary one.

All permanent change in oneself must be (ultimately) sub-consciously willed - to become the creature of an external substance, however, (addiction) is to lose will. The dionysiac qualities of external substances must serve the person and the person should not become slave to or creature of the substance.

A formal exercise in exploring transgression (or an opportunity to transgress norms) might be to list as many things as possible that might be regarded as transgressive within the culture of the day, and then note alongside each:

• whether the transgression or opportunity would be a 'desire' for you, all things being equal - is it what you actually want in itself or as a means to something else unknown?
• what the costs and gains to the self would be in acting out the transgression (even a marginal gain would still be gain);
• what the costs to the self in society might be and then lay out the material and social risks to be set against the personal gains.

A perfectly rational procedure - except that the best transgressions usually 'come out of the blue'. But let us continue with the conceit of rational transgression. The central question should be - if the transgression against norms is gainful, without material risk and is desired, then why is it not done?

If the answer lies in fear or anxiety or shame and not in financial cost or lack of fundamental interest, then you cannot be liberated as a person unless the actually desired transgression (say, being gay in a faith-based community) has been faced head on. But a transgression is still not a stupidity.

A transgression that damages one's own mental or physical health or safety or one's own property or risks the full weight of the law may, indeed, be a transgression but it is also a stupidity. If the law is stupid, change the law, learn secrecy or take the consequences but never be stupid in order to posture as 'free'.

The gay example is perfect in this respect. A gay person in most of the modern West has no need to transgress because homosexuality is an accepted new norm within the norm of tolerance and diversity but it was not always thus. Campaigning, secrecy and punishment were the 'norms' for the abnormal.

For tens of thousands of males (more!), a brutal choice was given - to conform because of the sheer weight of social pressure or to take phenomenal risks in order to express your sexual nature. Nor were homosexual people (of both sexes) the only oppressed people in society - the list is endless.

Today, polyamorous personalities may not be punished and may wonder precisely what they are campaigning for - and campaigning itself is an aberration from 'being' - but they still live under conditions where secrecy (aka 'discretion') is required and the social structure is biased against them.

But transgression is not merely a revisiting and revision of social reality. It is also a revisiting and revision of personal reality - the habits and conventions of the self and the construction of oneself by others for the sake of others (without needing to unravel the beneficent construction of oneself through the love of others).

The irony of this in the gay example is that a homosexual may find themselves obligated to become 'gay' with a new set of oppressive behavioural norms when all they really want to be is a 'normal' person who just likes sexual attachments to their own sex. Identity politics can oppressively construct people because it is 'social'.

A transgression can even be against harmful habits, routine or those personal rituals that act as barriers to desire or to becoming what one wishes to be. Perhaps there is an act of apparent private 'sin' that you want to undertake but do not know that you want because it is buried deep within you out of fear.

The problem here is, of course, with the idiot inherited notion of 'sin' but let that pass. But if this 'sin' is there, bring it out into the open, study it closely, imagine it, decide whether it is a desire that requires action. The desire may evaporate in the light of honest consideration but the 'sin' may also evaporate into an action.

If the 'sin' does no material harm to you or others (so let us be explicit in condemning non-consensual sex, paedophilia and bestiality where harms may be reasonably presumed as default), then why not make this transgression happen, savour it, make it part of yourself - or just return it to its box without guilt or shame as having been studied, felt and rejected after all - for oneself and not for the social or some imagined being watching your every step.

Or it may be transgression in favour of a secret desire that only you could ever know was desired and which only you think of as 'wrong'. Why on earth, under such conditions, would you not transgress against oneself for the sake of oneself?

Transgression can also be something with a ritual quality between two or more - though be careful that the breaking apart of an old convention does not create a new and equally enslaving one. We are back to the identity politics of turning homosexual feeling into gay culture.

To become lost in a cult or culture is no liberation, especially if it is the replacement of one ideological rigidity with another. To be merely rebellious for the sake of rebellion (I am 'against' not 'for' in such cases) is also not to be truly liberatory nor revolutionary.

Transgression is not a matter of thought in itself but of the necessity of unblocking life energy. Transgression for the sake of transgression becomes just an absurd waste of energy, a bad habit. Every revolutionary act must be focused precisely on the unblocking of energy and only on that purpose.

Finally, transgression for one person is different from transgression for another. A woman is different from a man in this respect. The risks are different. All must respect the material risks taken by the other.

Each must try and enter into the mind of the other in order to understand that transgressions must be proportionate and intelligent. This is not the imagined empathy of new age loons for trees and rocks but a really existing empathy between persons. And transgress against trangression if you must ...