Crossing Thresholds, Getting Threshed

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Going Through, Going Beyond

I've differentiated. I represent a cultural mutation. 

For long ago, early into my adulthood, I began following a code unrecognized and unvalorized by most everyone around me. 

In order to discern this code and abide it, I had to go myself into territory unknown. 

Since my young adulthood I’ve been developing what is today a worldview, a body of theory and practical magic entitled fractal praxis. 

Fractal Praxis is about an intimacy with what is. With life—the process and pattern language.
This is a hidden way. It is not apparent and it is not a given. 
To inhabit a fullness of knowledge that explains the world, what is needed to achieve such effectiveness and openness, it looks like stripping a whole lot MORE away. Incomplete perceptions. Inaccurate stories. Insufficient belief systems. Inadequate self-identities.

Since age 20 I adopted one tool to strip away superfluous ideas. And since my first transcendental spiritual experiences (a grand insight) around age 23, I gained direct access to insight.

These two aspects—stripping away what is less true, and seeking what is more true—play off of one another. Continuously refining me. Leading to a unified experience of robust and refined Intuition that is the truest relationship in my whole life.

So, no wonder I’ve become somebody divergent.
For to even locate the path I’m articulating, one would first have to transcend oneself. At least once. Probably numerous times. Absorbing all the pain and precarity that comes along with those threshold crossings.

We have to be willing to shed our shallow conditioning if we want to be sculpted by the truth... and let it shape our very evolution.

I believe we adapted, over millions of years of evolution, to discern what’s true and adapt to it. This is literally and simply a way of saying that beings survive and thrive. To discern what’s true, and then adapt to it, by building predictive models of behavior or culture in response to that truth. I hope I’m not saying anything radical here.

However, sometimes—or even often—what is culturally encoded or internalized diverges from what is, strictly, true.

The Limits of Culture and Self-Ideas

From birth, we are shaped largely by our cultural conditioning. This conditioning derives from the culture’s process of surviving and prospering previously. 
The culture engages in a logic that is imposed onto the shape of our lives.
The culture forms a lens through which we view all other information—and, dictates what we filter out.
A culture is like developing an external appendage, an external kind of sight. For without concepts, what could we properly perceive in the first place?
This cultural “appendage” emerges because it gives us an advantage: to help us navigate our environments and survive and thrive.
This conditioning, if unexamined, comprises our self, which is to say, our story of self or our ego. The lens through which we view the world, and are ourselves, as far as we know.

Unless and until something disrupts the lens itself,
we form a self and remain a self—
even if we gradually become numb to the ways we’ve “locked in” to an idea, becoming conscripted to a limited life by our mentally stagnant identities. We live within the self. We live our life from it—by definition we struggle to process anything that doesn’t reinforce who we already determined we are.

Yet in times of epic dysregulation at the scale of society and even planetary ecological systems… We must recognize that we can afford to shed some false stories, skins, and versions of ourselves.
And in fact, we maybe even must, to survive in a radically changed landscape.
In these circumstances, our identities might become like sodden baggage we need to shed if we’re going to not drown in the turmoil.
The more energy going into preserving and maintaining the self identities rather than the actual BEING (the living breathing process of your existence)... the more prone to getting snuffed out you become. 
In general, in theory (...my theory).

So these crisis moments, where the aperture of life narrows,
where the use of energy efficiently is more imperative,
we must be ready to transcend into that open state of being.
And transform into someone more true. 
Someone connected to, and adjacent to, the who you live out of today.

They say, you can’t take anything with you when you die.
So, from my perspective, why lug around a weight-bearing, wet blanket of an ego now?
If you could be freer from it. Lighter from it.

In the view I’ve developed… Being is greater than self. Self is a stagnant concept, a noun. It noun-ifies everything we are. Which inherently distorts the situation. 
Being is a living, open process. Being is full of wisdom and love. Being with being, operating from being, is a kind of adaptive edge.
One I hope we all awaken to sooner than later.

Of course, the Buddhists would debate: As we liberate ourselves, are we becoming free of a self? Or are we becoming more and more sophisticated and advanced in our self-actualization—that is, enacting a self identity that is more and more expansive, inclusive, and intelligent?

All I know is... You’ve got to be willing to strip away the bunk information. Which, today, is clogging everything—like we are all swimming in like a shit ocean.

I use Ockham’s Razor to do this, to strip away unnecessary useless information. I’ll explain how I’ve used it to help liberate me from burdensome belief systems (including conspiracy theories altogether) in a later episode.

And, secondly, you’ve got to be willing to know. To experience. To feel. To sense. To inhabit your body, your mind, your soul, your dreams, and tune it like a refined antenna… You’ve got to be willing to reunify with the flow of life, even at the cost and pains of shedding a false self. 

This is not an easy walk of life. But it is THE walk of life that liberates everything fractally—past and present, ancestors and descendents, and YOU as well as your kin, and frankly all your relations, in kind.

There are threshholds on this path to liberation. You can expect to get threshed, if not thrashed, every time you cross over one. Threshing the wheat from the chaff. You will be purified into being more whole; into being of greater service to the whole. Your self sublimated and submissive to the capital S Self which encompasses us all, and all our meaning, and all our destinies.

So which self do you serve? What are you enacting, pursuing?

Who will you be in the mirror of we? 🪞🌏

And what, if anything, do you find there is to see in the mirror of me? A cultural mutation that, by definition, will stir up the unexamined, and may even set in motion a climax like cascade of disillusionment or revelation.

My walk spins these out in its wake because all I’m ever doing is immersing in the process. Reveling in the revelations, and befriending my disillusionments. I can’t help but splatter, splash and stir up a bit of these waters through my existence.

I love the revelatory process, and I embrace it, because it has both saved and redeemed my life. I love how life gets better as a result of profound LEARNING processes, which is really what life is all about, I believe.

Diverging from a Toxic Culture of Origin

I grew up in a patently toxic culture that did a poor job of explaining reality or helping me navigate it. So it’s no surprise that I embarked on a journey beyond myself. Literally feeling the survival pressure to get out of that circumstance and shape my own destiny.

I remember being an adolescent or teen when I identified that none of the adults around me seemed to really know what was going on. In terms of their own life, or what this whole society was supposed to be about. What life was about.
Nobody knew, and I felt very “on my own” in realizing this.
No one could help me. And no one seemed to want to.
So if I wanted to know, I necessarily would have to go beyond.
Beyond the edges of their horizons. 
Beyond and into the fringes of society, into the wisdom retained and circulated there.
Crossing thresholds of not-knowing and daring, and knowing and encountering, alike.
Being shaped, like a rock is shaped by caressing water, by every single experience I lived through—AND the meaning I took from it.
I diverged into a new self, many times over.
Cresting and falling into an edgeful yet today rising culture.

I took a wandering journey to differentiate from my culture of origin, because I suffered greatly and chronically from the toxic normal it imprinted me with. Self-loathing was its foundation. Hierarchy; oppression. A general unwelcome. Needing to earn one’s worth in others' eyes, and right to exist. Consumerism and social conformity as the only available identity, and TV media and junk food’s empty calories to assuage the soul’s unrest. Being anxious and depressed was the norm. Dysregulation was the norm and the constant.

On my own, I started co-regulating with the process of learning. Of wonder, of inquiry. 
Eventually this would lead to a really rich direct relationship with life itself.
Transcribing, then ascribing, to a logic intrinsic. 
Pursuing the most elegant rules for the most universal good. 
A way of being, a set of disciplines, practices, techniques, sensitivities, thought processes, and attunements, developed carefully over the course of many years.
This is my cultural mutation, and these I intend to unfurl and share with you, dear listener/reader.

Overall: this pathway of co-regulating with curiosity, with wonder, and with encounter with the unknown, with what is beyond your horizons, is available to all people right now. This ecstatic climax and resolution experience available through wanting to LEARN something beyond what you ever knew. This is available to ALL sentient beings. And the more we engage with it, the more we MAKE OURSELVES into people capable of transcending any sticky problems or complex dilemmas through the power of insight and skillful means.

I want you to become this person because you’ll benefit your society. And I want it for you because you will thrive. You will experience less cognitive dissonance and more belonging, more self-actualization, more effectiveness, and more bliss.

In the next talk I’ll get more into the orienting beliefs I adopted early on in my journey, from ages 20-22, that set me up for such divergence, such cultural mutation, as this.

With love from Fractal Praxis.