Whatever gets you through

[Steven Nickeson]

Whatever Gets You Through
A Soap in One Prologue and 11 Lines

Prologue

To live sanely is to limit the awareness. It is to draw back from the incoherent cusp of each on-setting moment to organize snippets of conditioning into sheltering illusions and idealized blinkers. Enough of these patches can be cobbled together into a process that one can call their own perspective; a discreet, serialized narrative that is manipulated to function within others and around others—currents knotted on currents—and function smoothly as long as one can pretend it is non-fiction. To live sanely is to suspend disbelief in the Inner Disney, the master of make believe and author of The Cautionary Tales. Sanity depends on how closely one attends the Inner Disney’s Cautionary Tales.

Act I

One — “I’m afraid…”

Another — “Tell me.”

One — “…of the chaos out there…”

Another — “The chaos within?”

One — “We can only hope for Integral™”

Another — “Oh, but Darling, how can you sacrifice your authenticity, your heat, for such a…a…clunky…I don’t know…oh god…it’s a cloister!”

One — “I need to gain control again…” (sobs)

Another — “But there are others…other sheltering illusions.”

One — “What? Existential Phenomenology? It’s too sad. It’s too scary…too real…so close to the edge. We have to fall back! I’m frightened.”

Another — “I’m afraid…”

One — “Tell me.”

The Scene

Outside: Reality remains the same as it has always been—but that’s an incidental matter.
Inside the Tale: Their content is nothing, their style is all.

They are trembling through the night.

Fade

[MetroPunk]

nice poetics.
some thoughts:

let me tell you my fears:
i fear you are propping up that old myth
- hindu maybe, buddhist certainly -
that thought, belief, intellectual scaffolding
is The Problem™ with getting at the Peak -
the insight, in to Is.

the myth that intellectualizations as such
are for the spiritually weak, and the frightened?

this is a tired worn out myth.

what is not Spirit?
what is Spirit not?

Spirit is satori
Spirit is mathematics,
Spirit is poetics,
Spirit is existenz,
Spirit is urban sprawl,
Spirit is qualia-and the Witness
what is Spirit not? Truly?

Integral™ is a container, for experiments
in idea-awareness, in pointing to body-awareness
and sharing Other-awareness,
in symbols, sex and praxis.

is is no-thing other than a signaling tool
for the rough and tumble of what Is.

it all hangs on the who of its use,
the potency of the soul, the psyche, the self, the nothing
that engages such a tool.

if you prefer another tool, go to the shed,
but don't blame the tool...

just thoughts,

d-

[Steven Nickeson]

d

do you really need a container

or a tool?

just questions

S

[MetroPunk]

"need" is a tricky concept in this context.
but i do believe we already HAVE a repertoire
of tools (or ad hoc cognitive frameworks) which we use
to understand the world - whether we like it or not.
so my point is that we might as well be as conscious and flexible
with our choice in tools as we can.

AQAL can help to orient people to some deeper aspects of their own
awareness - which, i feel, "needs" to be included in a more flexible world-viewing.

"Integral" more broadly is a good 'tool' for that particular
epistemic wayfinding project...

yet i do have some issues with AQAL now,
having learned it (included)
and gone past (transcended) it;
but... it was a interesting tool for those purposes.

today, at least for me, its simply a goofy heuristic,
with funky colors and interesting diagrams.
so now i use other tools to explore thinking,
and relating and becoming.

imo, knowing that AQAL is a "lie"
(but a better "lie" than most of the 'lies' of its kind)
helps to move past a post-formal cognition (and critique)
of its rationalizations as such
towards a more fleshed out pragmatism.

but that's how i roll...

you?

d

[Steven Nickeson]

d,

my prgama tism

has no flesh atall


down

to the


b
o
n

es ....

tools be self-abasement... brass

no tools

but
brass

s n

[zachary samuel krueck]

bare bones are good but so is the nervous system and flesh and muscles, the meat and potatoes. cant have one without the other. i doubt ive transcended the spiral and the aqal framework, i look at it as something to come back to once in a while as i read something different each time from the same writings. steven you mention the inner disney, im picture the cartoonlike illusory vision of reality as opposed to the black and white brass tacks perspective? they aer both illusory correct, and either perspective can be exaggerrated or neglected. if one side exaggerates or is neglected, they both suffer. bones get brittle or the flesh gets mushy. take the stroy of siddhartha, he was an ascetic for a while, then he realized, not total renunciation, nor hedonistic glutony but the balance in between. zsk