Apocalypse and Right Mind Emergency

Yesterday, for the first time in almost a year, I purchased a few books. One of these was by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor entitled My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey. I devoured it in one sitting. I regret that I came to it so late, since I knew of the book and the author when it first appeared in 2006. I would not only recommend this book as a companion volume to A.H. Almaas’s Luminous Night’s Journey, but also to anyone who finds the work of Carlos Castaneda riddling or impossible. Dr. Jill’s book does provide fresh insight into the neuorological bases for Castaneda’s own experiences and his “sorcerer’s cognition”.

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Conscience, Consciousness, and Planetary Civilisation

“A guy as personally hampered and sociopathic as Julian may in fact thrive in an inhuman situation like this. Unlike a lot of keyboard-hammering geeks, he’s a serious reader and a pretty good writer, with a jailhouse-lawyer facility for pointing out weaknesses in the logic of his opponents, and boy are they ever. Weak, that is. They are pathetically weak.”– Bruce Sterling, “The Blast Shack”

“Irruption”: The Theme of the New Mutation

“The new consciousness structure has nothing to do with might, rule, and overpowering. Thus it cannot be striven for, only elicited or awakened. Anyone who strives for it, intending to attain it mentally, is condemned to failure at the outset. This is also true of those who think that mere desire and the power of imagination, that is, mythically-tinged volition, are sufficient to fully effect the new mutation. And it is equally true of those who believe that they can master the mutation by some machination, for they simply revert to magic compulsion and constraint.

What is needed is care; a great deal of patience; and the laying aside of many preconceived opinions, wishful dreams, and the blind sway of demands. There is a need for a certain detachment toward oneself and the world, a gradually maturing equilibrium of all the inherent components and consciousness structures predisposed in ourselves, in order that we may prepare the basis for the leap into the new mutation”. — Jean Gebser, “The New Mutation” in The Ever-Present Origin.