Beyond Delusions of Grandeur

 Beyond Delusions of Grandeur

 

Hi Everybody!  Welcome To An Informal Evening with Leo Volont.

Yeah, “Going Beyond Delusions of Grandeur” is really a funny Title, isn’t it?  So let me explain.

 

1  So, yeah, I’m in my last week or so doing the  Rewrite Editing and Reading Rehearsals for my next Formal Blog Video, “Adventures In India, and I really like how it’s coming along, but then, well, last night, after hours, as I began to unwind into my new routine of Dance Practicing, where my Body’s really busy, but my mind was free to wonder, well, I got to thinking that many of the Exalted Feelings I was describing in my “Adventures In India” Blog, well, I saw that one day  I might have to face the criticism that I was entertaining Delusions of Grandeur.   Okay.  But that got me wondering about just how much Semantic Distance exists between Socially Acceptable “Fantasy” and what seems like Pathological “Delusion”.   You see, Nobody on God’s Green Earth objects to Sexual Fantasy.  Really, no Loving Couple could survive their 4^th Date unless they recruited Fantasy to come in and jack up Reality a little bit, right?

 

2  So, yeah, where Sexuality is propelled by Desire, well, while Spirituality certainly isn’t same thing as Sex, there is a Desire that also propels Spirituality forward, isn’t there?  Yeah,  I’ve been focusing a lot on Persona Development with my Channel.  My intention there derives from my understanding that Spiritual Realization is not Partial or limited, that is, it fills out a Complete Persona.   (Yeah, I just thought of something – what about Multiple Personas?  But that’s a topic for another day).  But, yeah, it’s been recognized that Yoga is Integral, filling out one’s entire Being.   Yeah, perhaps the foremost Spiritual Philosopher of the 20^th Century was Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) ,and he often spoke in terms of a Synthesis of Yoga and Integral Yoga, implying that when Yoga is successfully engaged in, well, it expands its Domain and reaches into all facets of your life.   And then there’s my old Spiritual Hero, Swami Vivekananda, intellectually more accessible than the more abstruse Aurobindo, and he said much the same thing, using mostly smaller words.

 

3  So a Spiritual Realization will not just give you some new Outlook on Life, no, but you’ll be onto developing a New Persona, that is, a New You.  Yeah, it made me understand what the Bhagavad Gita meant when it talks of the Wise as being the Twice Born, and the Christians were once familiar with the Concept because they use the Terminology “Born Again”, and, yeah,  if they do have their Religious Experience at a time of personal crisis and Nervous Breakdown, then it’d probably be actually true that they’d be coming out of it ready to become something “New”, though not guaranteed to be much better than what they were before, considering their limited stock of Spiritual Influences and their dirth of compelling Role Models.  You see, its all about one’s Ideals.  That’s where all my Dream and Astral Work come into play.  In Real Life you rarely meet an IDEAL, but Ideals are the Stuff that Dreams are made of, but only if you make it the object of your Dreams to look for and find them.

 

4  Yeah, in my series “The Material Mechanics of Spirituality” I discuss the Enlightenment Experience as being initiated by a kind of severe nervous breakdown, where the Body is reacting to an overpowering internal dread that the Personality is going to get the Body Killed, you know, you know, with the Personality so dysfunctional that the Body can’t understand how it could possibly continue going in such a direction without it leading to doom.  The Purpose of the Breakdown is just to STOP all forward momentum into Disaster.  The Second Phase of the process is a Personality Rebuilt.  Well, back in that video I spoke of the Rebuilds coming in two kinds:  the Unstructured Rebuilds, which is what happens to people who have spontaneous Breakdowns, and the Structured Rebuilds which is what Monasteries, Cults and Military and Criminal Organizations use after they’re able to use deliberate stresses and traumas to precipitate intentional Breakdowns. 

 

5  But what I’m trying to do with my Channel now goes beyond that Material Mechanics Breakdown and Build up Model.   I’m putting across the idea that we can take responsibility for our own Post Breakdown Persona Restructuring by Identifying our own Idealizations, you know, your Idealization would be what you would consider the Perfect You?   But there’s the problem of not having the Breakdown Phase for giving us an effective Blank Slate for our Idealization Implementation.   You see, Strong, Capable, Intelligent and Responsible People like ourselves simply don’t have so many Breakdowns.  It is because we can’t help but to figure out ways to Cope, and our  Bodies never lose confidence in our ability to Stay Alive.  Yeah, being Damned Near Perfect is kind of a Blessing and Curse, isn’t it?   But Idealizations can Implement without the extreme of a Complete Nervous Breakdown, but understandably the Process is slower, happening in Episodic Steps, where Events cause Epiphanies or Mini-Realizations.  Yes, the Fully Integrated Persona would not yet be completely manifest, BUT the Personality would no longer be in Balance, but our Psychic Gravatas would more and more weigh towards merging into the Idealization, with the Old Personality sort of being replaced Block By Block, as it were.   Yeah, if you do go to some real valid Spiritual Sourcing and find some actual Idealization Archetype that really does have real Psychological Foundations that go all the way deep down into the very core bedrock of your Soul, and you’re not just trying to create some silly disconnected Private but Powerless Universe, well, such authentic Idealizations would be ATTRACTIVE and COMPELLING for the Personality, and therefore it would be natural for these Idealizations m to take root and grow out and Blossom into the Realization of an Idealized Persona.   

 

6  Any of my Old Subscribers have probably noticed by now is that Leo Volont is a Persona Idealization busy with just trying to fill out his own Details.   Yeah, but there’s something you all need to know, that there is the Ancient Adage that Story Tellers have passed down through the Ages, going back probably all the way to the Conception of Language, and that is that “The Hero of every Story is always the Fool”.   Yeah, just consult with any half way decent Tarot Card Reader and ask about The FOOL Card… it’s not really such a bad card, is it?   And so we can understand that about Leo, that he’s not trying to be a Fool but striving to be a Hero, and so there’d bound to be a lot of “If at first you don’t succeed, try try agains”, right?  It’d be inevitable,  wouldn’t it? 

 

7   But what my New Video, “Adventures In India” deals with are some moments where Leo’s Persona Idealization flared up with several Epiphanies, you know, nothing Really Big, but just Moments where my Persona Ideal seemed to kick in and take solid hold and I could sort of feel that Electrical Connection to the underlying Spiritual Stock and Power that would bolster and energize such an authentic process.  But that’s where my After Hours thoughts and doubts got active.   So, okay, would such experiences be termed to be “Delusions of Grandeur” or could we say they are “Grandeur” pure and simple?    Yeah, we might have to ask ourselves whether there can ever be some Real Healthy and Permissible Grandeur, or do we live in a Jaded Age were Materialism dictates that there can be no rational basis for such an “Unstable” Emotional State, and so Grandeur must always be considered as being carried along on some False Body of Delusion, you know, just about in the same way that True Love has been getting a hard reception among the Materialists too, but who among the Happy and the Healthy hasn’t felt the undeniable State of being in True Love, right?  Heck, on a good day I can be in True Love twice before breakfast!

 

8  So, yeah, I think that we in the Spiritual Community need to look more at the concept of Grandeur.  We talk about Love Love Love Love Love all the time when trying to describe the ‘Ineffable’ State of God Consciousness, but, honestly, using that kind of ambiguous terminology, well, it just looks like we can’t keep our minds off Sex for a minute.   So what are we really talking about when we’re trying to describe the Mystical State?   Are we really just talking about Love or do we really mean Grandeur?   Remember that Love requires Subject and Object, but in the Oneness, there aren’t these two separate things, are there? – Lover and Beloved are still down there groveling in Duality, aren’t they?   But that One Perfect Thing that we Experience in Cosmic Consciousness, well, aren’t we really just throbbing and pulsating with Grandeur.  Yeah, the Core Spiritual Emotion is Grandeur, isn’t it?  

 

9  But, yeah, enough of this talk talk talk.  I gotta get back to work on “Adventures In India”.  Oh, It’s looking like that thing go 90 Minutes.  Yeah, that’s like a full Length Movie, isn’t it?  But, honestly, I’ve been busting my butt to bring the narrative style up to Literary Quality and I think the Story Line is interesting and the Philosophy pithy enough to carry you all through that much time.   And there’s going to be Flower Girls.  Yeah, Man, Flower Girls!  Who doesn’t like Flower Girls, right?   So, yeah, I think you’re all going to like it.   But, yeah, I need to get to work…. Jesus!  Look at the Time!  I’ve already wasted half the day!  So, yeah, I gotta split!   Thanks everybody.   Leo the Slave needs to get back to Work before the World stops spinning, right?       

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Horse Dreams

 Hi Everybody!  This is Leo Volont with a new Formal Blog (you can see that the Japanese Screen is up).  This one is entitled “Horse Dreams”.  SO, let’s get started.  

 

1  Recently I did a video entitled “Friendship Love and True Discernment” where I spoke of a Goddess-Like Hollywood Girl who loved riding Horses. The Story she told involved a Spooked Stallion who took off in a frenzied gallop, but whom she was able to calm down using a Gestalt of soothing vocalizations and body language, and then she summed up her story by saying, “They Understand, you know”.   Well, I mentioned to her at that time, long ago, that her story recalled to mind some of the Horse Dreams that I had had just a few years before.   Well, since it had been such a long time ago, well, I was curious enough to want to try to refresh my memory and so I dug around through my old dream files and found one of those dreams.  This Dream came to me early on in my Spiritual Path, and so even I was wondering how I’d explain it all now, if I gave myself some time to think about it.  Well, let’s find out what I come up with.

 

2  My dream started as I came walking off the Main Local Route and onto the residential street where I had grown up, but there was a large overlay of unfamiliar details, as though the Reality Facade of my Old Street hid about as much as it wanted to show, but the Dream brought it all into view.   Behind the row of Houses should have only been a field before a forest, but where my Higher Dream Mind had set up a Fair Ground.   Featured was a Band playing music, but belonging to the Band was a large White Stallion.  He was a Talking Horse, and he’d challenge various of the Fair Goers to ride him.  No, the Horse was not overly vicious, never resorting to Rodeo Style bucking to violently toss off his Riders, but nevertheless he’d ride off with such speed and intensity that they wouldn’t be able to hold on.    

 

3 The dream was also giving me a strange hallucination, that the Appearance of the Horse was somehow superimposed over the Being of a Pig.  Yes, such a Vision probably should have made me wary and suspicious of this Horse, or whatever it was, but only looking at his behaviors, well, he Ran, Reared, Stood, Whinnied and Shook its Head like a Horse, so I was more Puzzled than Judgmental, and was willing to believe that the Outward Appearances here couldn’t be all wrong.  So I preferred to think of the Horse as being a Horse.  

 

4 Then the Horse galloped up to me and ordered me to “Get On!”.  Well, what happened next was surprising.  In real life I had very little riding experience and had never taken any horse all the way up to a gallop.  But I suddenly got this intuitive flash that gave me a kind of a Riding Plan, a set of Dos and Don’t, and from that I knew that I should Not ‘sit’ down in the saddle but rather stand up in the stirrups, and that during his initial dash from the start I should lean forward against the Force of his Acceleration, and then keep my body at a constant height above the ground.  That would allow the Horse to bob up and down beneath me, as though I were flying straight and level above him, you know, using the flexures of my knees and ankles to smooth out the ride.  Yeah, it seemed that the other riders were being ‘bumped off’ by the Horse’s savagely oscillating saddle.  Really, at the time I was still young enough to remember all my bicycle riding, where, before hitting a bump, it became natural to stand up on the peddles, simply in order to save myself the beating the seat would have given me.   

 

5 The Dream was, after all, yes, just a dream, but the kinetic feeling I had was like I was actually riding this horse well and it seemed somehow miraculous that I knew what to do.  My Hollywood Horse Girl Goddess had often described the various riding styles, even getting up off her lounge, next to the pool, to pantomime her riding on what must have been  a very short invisible horse.  Yes, her Demonstrations gave me a real sense of Déjà Vu.  Yeah, although it would’ve been metaphysically impossible, somehow I felt that the Riding Instructions she gave me several years later had somehow retro-ed back in Time to help me Ride Out that Horse Dream.  But, yes, if she really was a Goddess, well, then anything’s possible, right?

 

6  But while in the Dream, my apparent command as a Rider did remain untested in one regards, because I never tried to steer.  So  I allowed the Horse his Head and gave him full rein to go where ever he pleased.   My wish was only not to be thrown, which I set myself up to accomplish by being as accommodating as possible while not making any demands the Horse might resent me for.  And my Wisdom here was vindicated because the Horse did indeed have his own preferred destination.  It was a Sandwich Stand across the Field on the far right corner near the Woods, so far away from the rest of the Action that nobody was there but the Shop Keeper, an Old Woman of Serious Disposition. 

 

7  The Horse told me “Get me a Ham Sandwich”.   Okay, so I dismounted and strode up to the Counter to place the order, but the Old Woman told me that first she needed to visit the Rest Room.  Well, that made me a bit anxious about whether a Mood of Angry Impatience might be a characteristic of a very Strong-Willed, Fast and Proud Horse.  But, as the Horse waited calmly, I found I could begin to relax too.

 

8  After a short while the Old Woman returned and made the Ham Sandwich, which she knew was for the Horse, but she included, at no charge, a small side order of Sandwich Fixings for myself, apparently she was concerned that I should have something to eat too.  Now this time I was struck by the impression that I had been both wrong about her and about the horse, that both were kinder than I had judged them to be before.  Then, as I brought the Horse his Ham Sandwich, I realized he seemed entirely a Horse now, that the illusion of Piggishness had vanished, and then it was that this main part of the dream came to a close.   

 

9  The Dream then seguewayed to myself becoming just a Point of Consciousness where I was attending to my Father’s commenting on this Dream.   Yes, It was a Dream Critique within a Dream.  My Father’s Dream Character was presented elaborately as a stand in for Alistair Cooke, the dignified scholarly Old Man that used to be the Host of Masterpiece Theater, an old BBC Series.  He was dressed in Alistair’s suit, sat in the same padded chair, and the Dream Scene used ostensibly the same background of Library Book shelves as from the Masterpiece Theater’s original Sound Stage.  My Father was presenting the Thesis that my Horse was internally a Pig but only because some Third Element was missing from his mixture, which if once provided would make for a Fully Integrated  Horse.  And there it was that the Dream ended and I woke up.

 

10  Now what does all that mean?  Well, although I was still young in this Dream, just in my early twenties, well, this Dream still constituted something of a Home Coming for me from College.  Where the Stage for the Band had been set up would have been right off from my Family’s back yard.  The Field had been my playground all through my growing up.  Where the Sandwich Shop appeared to be had been a Cylindrical Water Tower, no,  not a large Bulbous Container being held up off the ground by tall steel legs, you know, to give it the height it’d need to generate Water Pressure, but a Tank going all the way down to the ground, being as wide at its Top as at its Bottom.  Yes, although the tower did not appear to be atop of some obvious Hill, well, it must have been the High Ground for the Community it would supply, and, yes, now that I think about it, there were mild downhill stretches of road going in every direction from my neighborhood.  And while I may have made that Water Tower larger in my Childhood’s Imagination than in Actuality, still, it persists with me even today that I grew up in the Shadow of the largest storage tank I’d ever seen before or ever since. 

 

11  I became curious about that old Water Tower and so I brought up the Satellite Image of my old neighborhood on Google Maps, and I hardly recognized the area.  Everything’s changed, with the old homes torn down to make room for more modern, more costly houses, and it looked as though the original Water Tower had been replaced a comparative Dwarf.  But in the Dream, where the tower would have been, there was just the Old Lady and her Sandwich Shop.

 

12  You know, if you’ve been following my Channel long enough, the Dream Goddess Theme is a recurring one, and this Dream might have been Her first appearance, manifesting as the Old Krone.  The first observation I can make about Her, well, it’s that She and her Sandwich Shop were substituted in for that colossally large Water Tower, and Water is an often cited Symbol for Life and Purification.  Also, and this is something I just thought about now, that we are now entering the Age of Aquarius and Aquarius is “The Water Carrier”. 

 

13  Then, this Goddess Symbol of the “Old Krone”, needing to use a Rest Room, perhaps tells us that even the Gods have Necessities and Contingencies they need to deal with, and therefore we can expect them to commiserate with us, for as we must face our own Impossibilities, we know that they themselves have their own Walls of Spiritual Laws they too must confront.   Really, any Dimension, even the Higher Ones, are defined by their Limitations, and even at the Very Top Peak of it All, we can see that the Highest Transcendental God is limited by his utter Uselessness, and Divine Bliss is but an empty Froth that floats above the Dark Deep Waters of Substantial Existence.

 

 14  And Lastly, I suppose that by the Old Krone slipping me a side order I didn’t ask for, well, that would suggest that the Gods are discerning enough to know what we need even if we forget to pray for it, and the Graces are bestowed without charging a fee.    

 

15  There is also the Music that we would need to account for, but it really didn’t seem to serve much more of a purpose than to capture my attention.  But I suppose the Music here would suggest Angelic or Spiritual Influences.  So that would mean that because the Horse belonged to the Band, well, that  would make it something of a Spiritual or Magical Horse, wouldn’t it?  But as a Symbol in itself what would the Horse be representing?  Well, we all have a sense of what the Horse Archetype would signify for us, but the Big Question I should need to answer is why I would see the Horse as a Pig.  So, okay, let’s look into my Mind and see what a Horse is and then what a Pig is.  Well, okay, I think that the Horse is the most noble and useful of all Animals, and there has grown an Evolutionary bond between Horse and Man, really, Rider and Horse, and that relationship goes back now over 5000 years.   Just as with Dogs and then later with Cats, Human Beings are now not complete anymore without their Horses.  Just look at how we try to fill that Emptiness by assigning ‘personalities’ and ‘character’ to our cars, motorcycles and airplanes, all of which Modern Times have made to be our new ‘Horses’, and we can’t help but to see these inanimate replacements as being ‘alive’.   

 

16 I think it would be interesting to recount Civilizations first encounters with Horse and Rider.   Yes, Ancient accounts tell us that often People didn’t know what they were looking at when horse mounted Riders first came galloping down from the Eurasian Steppes to terrorize the River Valley Settlements, and we hear of reports describing their attackers as being Centaurs, that is, Mythological Creatures that were Man above the waist and Horse below. 

 

17  Yes, it was a huge innovation for Humanity, to subsume another Animal, making its Body an extension of our own.  Yes, alone and left to his own two legs, Man would live and die in the same Valley he was  born in, but turned Rider he’d crisscross a Continent, and we have the double scholarly prongs of Archeological and Linguistic evidence to support this assertion, in that the Indo-European Family of Languages, spawned by Barbarian Conquest, spread concurrently with the Domestication of the Horse.

 

18  But what does a Pig mean to me?  Well, to put it bluntly, pigs are Excrement Eaters.  Nasty, huh?  Yeah, if you do a few cursory searches you will not see ‘excrement’ as being a part of their preferred diet, but search specifically for “Do Pigs Eat Excrement” and, yeap, they sure do.  Now, today, we see pigs in the context of Corporate Factory Farming with Feed Lots, and it’s cost effective enough just to truck in the Corn, and we can assume that these Pork Producers would wish to hide the unsavory fact that if left to themselves their Pigs could make well more than one hearty meal from just a single serving of corn.

 

19  But now we should look at how most Traditional Family Farms had operated throughout History, where the Pigs were not the primary income source but just considered an efficient extra attached to the Grain Farms and Gardens.  You see, the huge benefit of raising pigs would be that they could thrive on both Garbage and Excrement, products that are generated across the entire Farming Complex, from the Farmhouse to the barn and barnyard.  Then if situated close to a village, arrangements could be made to have all their ‘biomass’ waste carted back to the Farm for free.  Yeah, when I was World Traveling, a common sight to see in the Third World was Cargo Bicyclists transporting huge buckets of Excrement, which you wouldn’t need to see in order to know what it was, and whenever I’d inquire about it, I’d be told it was “for the pigs”.  

 

20  Next, we must consider that we may be viewing these Pigs from the Perspectives of two different Humanities, that is, one Humanity that comes out of the Evolutionary Context of being Pastoral Nomads whose primary honest incomes were derived from trade in sheep, goats and cattle, or whatever animals they could  herd around from Seasonal Pastorage to Seasonal Pastorage.  But pigs defy herding and besides that they root up the ground which would destroy any good pastorage (and as we know from Jane Austen that it’s always a crisis if the pig should ever get into the Garden), and so it is that pigs must be penned up and so Pork is a meat source that can only be produced from within Settled Communities and so Pork would become an important part of the Civilized Urban diet.   

 

21  So we can see why both the Arabs and the Hebraic Jews, both sourcing from Pastoral Nomadic Lineage, would want to consider Pigs to be “unclean”.  A big driver for their motivations must have been Economic, that Pork would undercut the Price of Mutton in the Urban Centers.  So going in with the Barbarian Sword and telling a Conquered City that they can no longer eat what they’ve always eaten before, but now must buy all their meat products from Pastoral Nomads, well, we can see how the “Pigs are Unclean” narrative could be very convenient excuse for those in the Sheep and Goat Industries, right? 

 

22  Then, yes, at first glance we might think that Humanity’s Collective Consciousness might have centered Itself from inside the Civilized Settled Urban Populations, a biased predisposition in favor of the best of all possibilities.   But an argument can be made for assuming that Humanity’s Character has been far more greatly influenced by the Barbarians.  You see, the Heroic Ideal of the Barbarian Ethos largely evolved out from the Pastoral Nomadic Peoples who were the first Horse Riders, and because they were always traveling, they didn’t have fixed neighbors whose respect they would need to earn and maintain, and so, any time before moving on to ‘Greener Pastures’, well, first they’d look to steal anything worth carrying away, and then carry it away fast enough on their horses so that no Civilized Peoples could catch them.   

 

23  From this the Riders became Raiders, evolving into full time Predatory Bandits, and from there they evolved into Conquerors.   Then the Conquerors became the Aristocratic Ruling Classes.  Yes, a Social Moral Religion can do much to civilize these Aristocrats, but the Barbarian Ethos is in the Blood Lines of every King and Ruling Class, and it would be them who would decide upon the Form and Quality of Humanity’s Social Ideals, and it's an easy guess that their natural inclinations would to be Proud, not Pious.

 

24 Okay, so if we can assume that there is already a kind of a Collective Consciousness subliminally influencing Humanity, and if Humanity is Ethically split between the Social Moral and the Barbarian Ideals, well, we would probably be conflicted, which is what my Dream is probably demonstrating.   But, yes, while Asia seems to have an evolving sense of an increasingly coherent Social Moral Ideal, well, the West is predominantly still under the sway of the Barbarian Ethos.

 

25  Okay, so what does all that mean in the context of my Dream, which presented the Horse as substantially just a Pig in disguise. Well, what I think we are looking at is a symbolic accusation that this particular Horse had abandoned its original Rider, the Hero of the Barbarian Ethos.  This apparently treacherous Horse of my Dream was now seemingly setup to serve the Settled and Civilized Social Moralists, that is, the despised Pig People.  Yeah, the Pig Symbol might just have been a Projection of Heroic Barbarian Contempt upon Social Moral Religious Ideals.  Also, while I didn’t take a close look, my guess is that the Band, the owners of the Horse in the Dream, were probably a bunch of Hippies, which would have been fine by me, but my father would probably have been predisposed differently.  And the Hippies did have a kind of a Social Moral Ideal, but unfortunately Hippies never organized or created any lasting Institutions, (Because they were Anarchists), and so when the fashions changed, the Hippies, and All the Good they might have stood for, just faded out.  The Ideals of Peace, Free Love and Dope, along with whatever else the Hippies collectively stood for, went the way of Bell Bottoms and even John Lennon cut his hair while the rest of us cleaned ourselves up and went out looking for jobs.  

 

26  Yes, I can blame my father for Projecting Barbarism, but as they say, “The Apple doesn’t fall far from the Tree”, and now when I think back to my childhood, I did seem to be fully on board with the Barbarian’s Heroic Ideal.   For instance, when playing ‘Cowboys and Indians’ or ‘Soldier’, I was always either one Barbarian Ideal or the Other.  And going to Church, from as early on as I can remember, I’d feel an unspoken but tangible embarrassment.  Yes, I would say my nightly prayers for my Mother’s sake, but no friend would ever catch me praying, and as for the Clergy, well, I wondered that Men didn’t leave such a soft and fussy profession for the Girls, seeing the Religious Vocation as waste of a good sack of balls.   Really, I endlessly wondered why all the Dads in the Church didn’t relentlessly tease the Pastor for being such a big sissy boy.  It all seemed quite beneath my dignity.  It was a case where the Proudest Man in the Room was the Youngest Boy. 

 

27  But, remember that Third Element that my Father had spoken of?  Well, what could be added to the Mix that would redeem my Horse into being fully genuine?  Well, at the time I never did figure out any kind of an answer that would ring true for me.  Remember, I was involved in the Traditional Transcendental Style of Spirituality for so long, where the Methodology is rather to strip factors away until one is left with Absolutely Nothing and then THAT would become the answer, really, just negating the Problem.  But here something would need to be Added and so I was left at a loss as to what that could be.   

 

28  But now that I’m a Spiritual Dualist, a believer in Light vs Darkness, of Good vs Evil, well, that fills my Intellectual Quiver with a lot more Arrows.  But I am also a Philosopher who realizes that Social Morality is an Aesthetic, and not a Logic that can be reduced to Axiomatic Principles, but nonetheless Aesthetically based Moral Systems can be Creatively Designed to achieve beneficial objectives, worthy in themselves even if we can’t prove why.  The Conceptual Structure that could manifest such a Social Morality would be what we call an Idealization.  The Third Element would be an Idealization. 

 

29  So, my thinking is that the Horse could be made whole if it could embody an Idealization to either replace the symbolic accusation, or to deflect the projection, that it is a Pig.  And such an Idealization could only be concretely manifested through discipline, training, and what Horses are really the most good at, taking Journeys and learning what the distant lands have to Teach us.  This would be a kind of Idealization of Adventure, the Quest for Challenging Endeavors.  An Ideal such as that would be at least as Manly as Heroic Barbarism ever was, but without all the unpleasantness of Rape and Rapine.   

 

30  Yes, in the coming years I would have various dreams of riding that Horse, once even at some formal riding school where the horse and I had been rather adept at circling barrels.  But the last important Dream I had regarding my Horse started with this this Wise Old Man confronting me with his objections that my Horse would pause too often to graze, and would stop too long in midstreams to drink water, and such delays would impede my Journey!

 

31   Well, I was really a bit puzzled by that.  Does not the Horse need to eat?  Does he not need to drink?  Time must be made for accommodating the Necessities of Life, right?  Yes, usually I listen to the Wise Old Men in my dreams, but this one seemed like a Pushy Old Crank.  But he did make me think about my Horse and so I ran back to the Camp to find him, and there he was.   I found him self-abandoned in Deep Sleep in a patch of flowering clover.

 

32  Really the scene was quite Archetypically Idyllic, with green puffy trees and Spring flowers everywhere, and billowy white clouds in a crisp blue azure sky.  And my Horse was like the beautiful Jewel in the Setting of that Dream Scene.  I loved that Horse, but, yeah, maybe we were both a bit on the lazy side and much of what we thought to be the Necessities of Life were perhaps a bit more necessary than they strictly needed to be, and my Horse was beginning to look a little bit too plump. Also, at the time I had that Dream, I had decided to quit a Cult that had bogged me down for the last  20 years, and I started thinking for myself again. Yeah, remind me to do a video about that sometime.    

 

33 But that Dream of Blue Skies and Clover wasn’t finished yet.  There was a trail ahead of us; a perfectly straight trail going up a slope and continuing on into the far off distance, waning away to the slenderness of a thread at the outer edge of my perspective.   But it was more a gradual ridge than a Mountain, and nothing that a Good Horse couldn’t climb.  So, yeah, we’d have a long journey ahead of us, but we’d get to where we were going as long as we’d just keep on moving.

 

 So I guess that Horse Dream from a half Century ago was perhaps about presaging this Long Journey, my Adventure in Advancing the Cause for a Civilization based upon the Aesthetics of a Moral Social Ideal of one kind or another.  Yes, and I suppose that determining the Details of such an Aesthetic would be part of the Journey.  

 

The Faculty of True Discernment

 

True Discernment

 

1  Hi Everybody.  This is Leo Volont and this is a rewrite of a Blog I did back in 2018 which was a rewrite of a Blog I did in 2008 under the name “The Faculty of True Discernment”… yeah, apparently my Discernment gets better every couple of years.   So let’s get started.

 

 

When I first started with Kundalini Yoga, decades ago, my old Guru had told us that the Kundalini, particularly at the Ajna Chakra, would make us ‘smarter’.  Well, that made me wonder for two reasons.  The first was that such a pragmatic consideration was something of an outlier in the more etherealized and anti-elitist atmosphere of the broader Spiritual Community, and, secondly, well, nobody among the Guru’s entourage seemed particularly “smart”.

 

2  And apparently the Smartness wasn’t the kind that would automatically kick in.   Yeah, one time during a break in one of his informal talks, I took the opportunity to go outside and grab a smoke, and the Swami quietly barked at me that “Smoking wasn’t the most positive thing I could be doing and so quitting it would be making my Yoga work for me”.  Yeah, I understood what he was saying and immediately began quitting, and after 3 years I never smoked another cigarette again.   But there was the problem of him having to tell me, but if the Yoga had really been able to make me so much Smarter, well, the added Intelligence probably would have been able to speak for itself, right?   

 

3  But then something else happened.  I remembered it just the other day in one of my “An Informal Evening with Leo Volont” videos concerning “My Initiations”, that in the year after my Crown Chakra High Initiation I had that Dream where I was told that “the Principalities of the Sky vie for my Soul”, implying that I would have moral choices to make.  Well, that was a Huge Dream and now that I think about it, what would have made me so important to the “Principalities of the Sky” unless it was my walking around resplendent with Spiritual Energy all Lit Up and with me wearing a Crown Chakra on my Head: yeah, all that would be invisible to mere mortals but to Spirits, Angels and Demons, well, I’d really stand out from the Crowd.

 

4  But what about that Dream? – with Elijah in the Dark Cave of Prayer that turned into a Blue Sky with Flying Dragon wheeling all around in arial combat; well, I had been thinking all these years that it had been an Archetypical Dream, and if I had it, well then Everyone would have it too, and even if that IS true, well, each person’s moral choice would NOT be pre-determined.  You know, being in league with Evil might actually come with a huge Benefits Plan, where Riding the White Horse like me might give you a Saddle, but not much in the way of Saddle Bags. And Religion has been so very much discredited in this Age that many people today might find Evil to be the more appealing bargain, since they also seem so convinced that Religion is Evil too.  Yeah, to them it might not be much more of a moral choice than deciding to be a Lawyer instead of a Doctor.

 

5  But, most of the High Initiates I’ve known neither became Giants of the Darkness nor the Light. Apparently the Principalities of the Sky weren’t fighting over everybody.  So I think that the Guru simply miss-spoke about being Smart.  I think that Yoga is really only about Opening a Door to Spiritual Possibilities, but you’d have the same Will to Action as you had before, and only your own Will would ever be able to push you forward so that your Yoga could then make it easier for you to get anywhere.  At first Experience would give you Knowledge, and with Knowledge one could begin to Act Effectively and then finally Successfully, and that would bring Confidence, and Confidence looks a good deal like being Smart, doesn’t it?  So maybe the Guru said “Smart” as a kind of a shorthand to save himself a more complicated explanation for people who are mostly just looking for Simple Answers anyway.   

 

6  So, I guess most of his High Initiates just spent their entire Lifetimes lingering at the Open Door of Spiritual Opportunity that stood before them.  The Guru never did much to exhort them forward.  And the Swami had received a Modern Education and so I think he was really concerned with Justifying Spirituality before the Worldly Gods of Nihilistic Materialism, you know, he had probably been a Marxist back in College, and so I suppose those  Materialistic Assumptions had broken his sense of Moral Confidence, shattering any comprehensive Moral Vision he might have communicated to us.  But, well, to do the Old Man justice, he did tell us to ‘experiment’ and be creative, you know, basically telling us HE WANTED US to think for ourselves.   But most people who’re attracted to Gurus want to be told what to do, right?  A Guru should know that better than anybody else.  So he should have known to at least issue a Warning that all of his System could come to naught if all we did was stand still at the Open Door and wait for the results to come to us.

 

7  But I had made choices and moved forward, through Experience, and then Knowledge and then Action and finally to a sense of Confidence, but, no, not just Swagger but a kind of Epistemological Confidence, you know, that my Knowledge transcended Opinion and became Truth.   Yeah, I found I could recognize the Truth and have a sense of certainty about It whenever I would hear It or see It.  Maybe I was also incrementally better at ‘thinking up’ the truth of things, but becoming a more Creative or a particularly inspired thinker was only a small part of it.   It was not so much a case of thinking faster or better but of thinking with more Certainty and Conviction.  I became More Sure of the Truth of things.  But I would need to encounter these Truths first.  I’d have to Find them before I could Know them.  The Path is a Path and one needs to keep Moving along it, and you can’t get anywhere by standing still.

 

8  I was lucky to be able to identify a certain point in time , a moment when the transition came about, when that brand of ‘smartness’, that sense of Confidence and Certainty in Truth kicked in.  It had been about 30 years after my High Initiations.  That’s half a lifetime, isn’t it?   Yes, Spirituality is not for the timid and the slow and ‘he who hesitates too long is lost’.  But, Yes,  this special moment had been punctuated by a Dream, my Dream of True Discernment.     

 

 9  The Dream Scene had been a sun lit grassy field with large rocks and fallen trees that offered a natural gathering place for hikers and nature lovers to sit down, rest and take in the ambient beauty. Well, in this particular Dream Scene, there was this woman who was playing a guitar and one would have to describe her as being ugly.  But her guitar playing, really, her finger picking style, was the most beautiful I’ve ever heard.  She made the guitar sound like a harp.  But, then came along these guys, who might have been nice enough if taken singly, but together they dropped on the Evolutionary Scale to being Primitive, that is, they acted like a pack of jerks.      As they approached they started in with ridiculing her for her looks… yes, they were speaking among themselves, but they knew she could hear them.  I was concerned that this would annoy her enough so that she would stop playing, and besides, it was difficult to hear her through all their noise, and so I yelled out to them, "Hey, guys! Everything else being equal, can't you hear that playing. We are in the presence of some real talent here, right?  So why don’t we all just shut up?" Then the lady, who had seemed oblivious to all of us up to this point, suddenly looked up, and looking me square in the eye said, "The faculty most worthy of cultivation is the faculty of True Discernment".           Then, well, BOOM, In an instant I was transported into a second dream; to the midst of a grove of trees lit up by the silver light of the Full Moon.  It was young growth forest with as many bushes on the forest floor as the trees around them,   The air was cool, and this felt like a nice place to be.  

 

10  In this dream I had been a disembodied presence floating up above the scene by about a dozen feet, simply watching.  What I witnessed down below was a beautiful Greek Goddess… I would guess, Diana, Goddess of the Hunt.  She was clad in a pearl-white translucent toga, made of not much more than a few yards of material, and belted at the waist.  She was barefoot and she also had a bow in her hand and a quiver of arrows slung over her shoulder.  It was breathtaking, and I knew this must have been some kind of special vision. 

 

11  But the tranquility of it all was shattered when along came this strong virile heroic looking man – too old to be young, but not old enough to be wise.   Well, He was delighted to happen upon such a pretty young Goddess and of course I supposed he was all perked up to make her acquaintance. He said in a boastful tone which may have had a degree or two of double entendre, "I’m on the hunt tonight and I feel sorry for the poor creatures that’ll happen my way, because I’m such a good shot they’ll surely not stand a CHANCE".

 

12  Diana remained silent and seemed in no hurry to reply, but rather pulled a strangely unique arrow from her quiver. She held it out a moment so that the hunter, and maybe even myself, could see that it was probably the most crocked arrow that could still be straight enough to be shot from a bow. She loaded it onto the string and pulled back in preparation of shooting... then turned her head off to the side so it could be seen that she obviously had no intention of aiming, and she released the shot.   SHHHWOOOOPP!  The arrow whistled off and lodged inside a bush.   She walked over and took hold of the arrow’s shaft and withdrew it from the shrub, and, amazingly, there impaled on the arrow’s tip was a limp dead game bird. Then she spoke, not to the Hunter, but directly to me, "Chance? Nothing happens by Chance".'  Then I awoke.

 

13  Anyway, what do these two juxtaposed dreams mean?  Well, not many dreams come with captions, but these dreams did, and, of course, that should provide us with a great deal of insight.   But we really need to contextualize the statements to be certain we’re drawing the right conclusions, shouldn’t we? 

 

So, yes, returning to the First Dream, well, what happened was that I made two appraisals:  the first was that the Musical Lady was off on the far end of the Ugly Scale, and the second was that her Music was as far off in the opposite direction, going off into Extreme Beauty.  Then the group of Young Men arrived, interrupting my enjoyment with their loud discussion about the girl’s ugliness, and so I yelled over to them using words that effectively almost conceded the point that I thought the Lady was ‘ugly’ too, but rather than dwelling on that, I urged them to change their focus towards what was Beautiful, her Playing, but I could have been more polite in my approach with them.    And that was the point where she turned to me and said "The faculty most worthy of cultivation is the faculty of True Discernment".   Well, was she congratulating me on my True Discernment, or was she taking me to task for some Stupidity?  Yeah, it took me years to contemplate the possibility that I might I have gotten something wrong?

 

 14  But in the cases of both her Appearance and her Music, well, we’re in the Domain of Aesthetics, and so, really, both ends of the Scale were in the same Indeterminable Field where any number of Reasons could endlessly be argued back and forth, proving nothing.   Yes, it could be said that I was shallow for even noticing her Ugliness, but only Transcendentalists throw out all Distinctions, and even if we can’t all be Beautiful, well, we should all at least acknowledge Beauty as one of the worthiest of Evolutionary Ideals, right?   Just look at Flowers, Butterflies, Tropical Fish, Tropical Birds and most Cats, and that will show us that Evolution finds Practicality wrapped up in Aesthetic Beauty.   Also, to focus on humanity for a moment, we see that in Societies where Arranged Marriages become the norm, where priorities are dictated by property and convenience, while Personal Appearances become secondary considerations: well, the Peoples turn ugly and their general health declines.   So when we see a Beautiful People that means we’re looking at Healthy People and it’s Evolution’s Way of  telling us that it’s getting things Right.

 

 15  Then, in regards to the Music, that while I recognized the beauty there, well, again it was a matter of taste, and I couldn’t expect a “pack of jerks” to feel it all that special, like expecting Cats to appreciate Mozart.  Also, taste in Music is acquired, and unless people are exposed to fine music from their childhood, they’ll never really ever get it.  Also, with the Popular Music Industry ever innovating to provide a cheaper, simpler Product to Mass Market to the broadest and dumbest Demographic, well, the result is a global degeneracy in Music Appreciation.  Literature is also on a steady decline.  And God only knows how people don’t appreciate the best YouTube Channels… not that I’m complaining…  

 

16  So, well, back to our subject, where we need to ask ourselves what can be True when speaking of Aesthetics which are really just a matter of taste.  Well, it finally occurred to me: that there was the Intention behind the Music, while her Appearance was Unintentional.  The Art was a Communication, an Expression, and apparently her Intention had found resonance in me.  I understood her.  I connected to her through her Music.   And maybe there was even some kind of a Dream World Teleological Intention behind her Ugliness.  You know, I thought even at the time that her Ugliness must have been placed in front of me like some kind of a hurdle, some kind of a Test, requiring me to Look Past her Outer Appearance before I could enjoy her Essence.  So, yeah, maybe I got that right too.  And so, well,  where was it that I may have gone wrong.

 

17  So, yes, I probably fell short with the Young Men.  Afterall, this was a dream, and from other dreams I’ve had, with Monsters far more intimidating than “those guys” were, well, the trick I found is simply to approach and give them the lightest touch, which then transforms them to Friendly Congenial Spirits.  Yeah, I found out about that ‘Trick’ by accident once, where I only put up my hand to ward off an attack, but that simple action proved to be far more effective than I ever imagined.  And it doesn’t take Faith or Confidence either, because in these approaches with my Hand held up, well, it’s typically shaking from Fright.   But, yes, apparently these Young Men weren’t terrifying enough for me to take them that seriously and so I let my temper get away from me.  I treated those silly fools more roughly than I would have treated Demons from Hell.  So, yeah, it may be that I had failed to Discern the Truth of the Situational Social Dynamics, you know, not playing the situation to my greatest advantage, and so that is probably where I should focus in my Cultivations.  

 

18  Then there is the Second Dream with the Goddess Diana and the Hunter.  Really, fresh insights into that dream have left me ashamed of myself.  You see, I’m rarely ever just a Point of Consciousness in a Dream, so why in this Dream?  Well, now it seems obvious that it was me who had been intended to play the part of the Hunter, but the Higher Dream Mind anticipated that I wouldn’t have the Confident Swagger to Play the Part, you know,  to strut forward and hit on the Goddess with that Pick Up Line: "I’m on the hunt tonight and I feel sorry for the poor creatures that’ll happen my way, because I’m such a good shot that they’ll surely not stand a CHANCE". Yeah, smooth right?  But the Higher Dream Mind didn’t trust me with it.  And we know that it should have been me because we only have to look at the denouement of the Dream where she looks straight at me and gives Me the answer that rightfully should have been addressed to the Hunter, and that clearly means that I was, or should have been, the Hunter.    But, then, yes, at least, as it played out, I got a chance to see how the Higher Dream Mind interprets my Persona, like the Dream Mind casted Brad Pit to play my part:  Strong, Confident, even Attractive, but not so completely Wise, and, well, 3 out of 4’s doing pretty good, right?  

 

19  But, now, what did the Dream Action and the Goddess’s Statement mean?  Okay, she killed that bird without aiming, BUT she had the Will to kill it.  She is the Goddess Diana, and, as a Goddess, her Will is the dictation of Fate.  What she Intends is Destined to Be.   But the Hunter, well, he also appeared to be willful and he was confident in the certainty of outcomes, but it was largely swagger, wasn’t it?  It was confidence in his own skills, both with hunting and with, well, ‘socializing in the Evening’, let’s call it.  But only the Divine can ever count upon Absolute Certainty.   “Nothing Happens By Chance” is an assertion that can only come from a God, or be attributed to one.  But as Humans we require Will to Action even to just put “the ball into play” where Fate can find us as being a factor for consideration.  Without the exercise of Will the Gods will simply ignore us.

 

20 But, now, well, what do these two dreams mean together?  Okay, accepting the Word of the Goddess as axiomatic, that “Nothing Happens By Chance”, well, that should help us in “Cultivating the Faculty of True Discernment” because it should eliminate from our considerations that anything that Happens could possibly be random, coincidental, arbitrary or meaningless.  “Nothing Happens by Chance” means that everything has meaning, and if we don’t recognize the Meaning of Something then we aren’t paying sufficient attention.   The advise coming from the first dream, to cultivate Discernment, means simply to stay focused on paying attention.  Yes, Cultivation is just another way of saying Practice Practice Practice.    

 

21  So, yes, even equipped with all the accoutrements of Kundalini Yoga, apparently there has to be some intent and practice in order to ramp up one’s abilities in regards to True Discernment.  Well, what I’ve found to be a very good practice is to just talk to people, and not just talk to friends but to everybody: store clerks, cashiers, people in elevators, pedestrians on the street where you’re waiting for the same crossing light.  Just talk and often they’ll say something that will just LIGHT UP as TRUE, that is, that you not only understand their intent, but in a way feel a connection to them, clicking with another person in a kind of Shared Reality. 

 

22  But in talking perhaps the most important thing you have to do is listen.  Most people who are ‘in conversations’ are using up most of their brain power in thinking of what to say next.  Well, don’t think about what to say.  You’ll surely think of something, right?  Also, if you are fully engaged in listening, then what you’ll probably think to say, when it comes your turn to speak. will be something related to what the other person was just talking about, that is, you’ll be appropriately responsive.  People like that. And so they keep talking, and eventually you get the Truth out of them.  And when you hear it, and Know it, well, it is like finding a Treasure.

 

23  Oh, now I should mention that another dream came along which would affect my view of the World and help me in my Pathway towards attaining to the Faculty of True Discernment.  In this Dream I was walking on a narrow board that lay across a Chasm so deep that looking down I could see only Darkness. Suddenly the board was pulled away and I found myself falling.  Well, before hitting bottom a Dream Guru appeared, pulling me out of the Dream to tell me “Remember this, that Perfection consists in Randominity, so Be Not One Thing, and Be Not the Other”.  

 

24  Okay, so what’s that mean?  Well, the two sides of the Chasm are the “One thing” and then “the Other”.   Then the Unknown Darkness below is the Infinity of Random Possibilities that lie outside our well defined but confining conceptual structures.  And maybe the Randominity is only Dark because it only becomes visible after we manifest something out of it, making Randominity a kind of Blank Slate that we can draw freely upon. 

 

 25  But, yes, in translating this Dream into Life Advice, I took it to mean that I shouldn’t be predisposed to any particular belief system, which would induce a kind of a Tunnel Vision.   So, yeah, apparently one has to be able to see Patterns in the Complexity, or we’d just lose the World in the Fog of an Undifferentiated Oneness, but at the same time we’d need to refrain from over-generalizing about what are essentially just instances of imaginative guess work.  And most of our Civilized Institutions were structured as material responses to particular problematic situations and so we could expect that they’d no longer be a perfect fit for our Present Day Conditions.

 

26  Next we need to discuss the inevitable discoveries of unpleasant Truths.  Yes, the Truth is always good to know, but its not always good news.  People often live paralyzed by Denial of the Unpleasant.  But if you are sleeping at night and even think you might smell smoke, well, you have to IMMEDIATELY think Fire and jump out of bed.    And here’s another example: On my first stint of World Travels, just starting out, I met a World Traveler in the Far East and he gave me some particular advice which we can use to come to a generalized opinion.  Now, the thing you need to understand about World Travelers is that they often don’t know the Languages and they don’t know the Cultures, and so all their Information needs to come largely from raw instinct, feelings and intuitions.   So his advice was, “well, if you ever sense the energy in a Bar Room or Club turning sour, Man, well, walk out fast and just leave your drink behind, Man, walk away from it.   Yeah, man, People get killed because they want to finish their beers first.”   Yeah, what that advice means, when we generalize it, is that we need to limit the time we waste in Denial, and that once we feel the threat of an immanent danger, we can’t distract ourselves with the wishful thinking fantasy that it might turn out alright.   Yeah, that reminds me that I once read a study that Pessimists react better to emergencies because they always expect the worst and so they walk around prepared for it.  So, yeah, when things get rough the last person you want with you is a happy person who believes in Positive Thinking. They go into shock too easy.   

 

27  But, again, we need to avoid extremes, and in contextualizing our realizations of Unpleasant Truths, we’d need to acknowledge that Nothing is Perfect, especially in regards to any kind of a Social Group, Organization, Corporation, Cult or Religion.  Even becoming a Couple in a Relationship is to form an Imperfect Organization.  In regards to these Connections we can rationally suppose that we should stay balanced in the idea that we should be prepared to leave as soon as it’s clear that leaving would result in less trouble than staying.  And “trouble” can come in may guises.  Even being demoralized for reasons we can’t fully explain to ourselves is “trouble”.  But we need to remember that there might be trouble on the other side of that Exit Door too, and the ancient proverb tells us to prefer “the Devil we know to the Devil we don’t”.

 

 28  You see,  Human Beings are Social Animals and our instincts compel us to Belong.  There is Safety in Numbers, and we can rarely walk out of any Social Relationship without effectively “burning all our bridges behind us”, and more options are always better than fewer.  And Societies would be impossible to maintain if we as Human Beings hadn’t evolved to have some degree of tolerance and forbearance built into us, and, therefore, we can assume that we can summon up from our deep store of internal resources the elasticity that can allow us to put up with Situations that are far less than Perfect.

 

29  But there are limits to forbearance and we can be worn down by patience.  So let this be the final note in this Blog:  the suggestion that perhaps the most important use we could ever make of our highly Cultivated Faculty of True Discernment is knowing when it’s time to quit.          

 

 

Well, that’s it!  Thank you everybody.