[Riggio’s Rants] “Mea Culpa” … new on Blognostra tinyurl.com/n2wj9rg
Archives for June 2013
Ending The Matrix …
Reclaiming Life …
It’s a scary thought …
Here we are all trapped in an illusion, a matrix, designed to keep up caught up in its intricacies while we spin out the days of our lives. Yet the design is so clever, so well thought out that we perceive ourselves engaged with something “real” something “meaningful” nonetheless.
I’ve written about “The Matrix” before … calling it out as “language” … nothing more, nothing less …
Language traps us … and it frees us … when we use it, instead of letting it use us.
It couldn’t be simpler actually.
Our escape from the Matrix is what keeps us locked into it … language, or rather how we use and relate to it.
Maybe I’d be better off explaining it slightly differently …
It seems our lot as humans to “own” language, yet I am proposing that language “owns’ us instead.
Specifically, through the process of “labeling” things we interact with our labels, i.e.: the language we use for things … including people, activities, places, ideas … instead of the things themselves.
Language, as we typically use it, removes us from our experience. Yet, if/when we learn to use it, language can allow us to become one with our experience it.
In the MythoSelf Process work we move towards the experience of life as a singularity, a simultaneous compression and expansion of life as it is … NOT as we wish for it to be.
The MythoSelf Process is a uniquely non-magical, or even anti-magical model. There is no presumption of being able to manipulate the rules or laws of the Universe, nor is there any desire to do so. Residing outside or, or beyond, the mundane and ordinary is counter to what the model offers and proposes.
I have placed the MythoSelf Process model within the sphere of “Fourth Way” models … an homage to the wisdom seeker, Gurdjieff, and his model or “The Work.”
As I understand it the “Fourth Way” refers to a way of becoming “real” or present to the “truth” of the world or cosmos as it is … nothing more, nothing less … and doing so while you remain fully immersed in the swirl of life as it arises.
In my opinion a “Fourth Way” model, like the MythoSelf Process is the “Way of the Warrior,” confronting life and all it has to offer, as well as all it demands, whilst remaining in the midst of it … at the center of the cyclone that is life.
I say the “Fourth Way” is the “Way of the Warrior” because it demands courage … there is no desire or room to remove yourself from the daily interaction with life as it shows up in all of its fury and finesse … its horror and its beauty … the terror it provokes as well as the awe and wonder. Only a warrior could withstand the paradox, contradiction and chaos of the Universe as it is … without desiring or striving to make it other than it is … and the path of the warrior is NOT for everyone.
It seems some souls are better suited to another way … the way of the Monk, the Yogi or the Hermit as Gurdjieff proposed long before I.
However, in “The Matrix” film trilogy we see the Way of the Warrior, a Fourth Way exposed in full relief IMO.
Neo represents the warrior way …
He begins in an ordinary life, doing ordinary things, bored out of his mind. So he rebels, he resists.
He thinks there might be somewhere to go within the Matrix, something to be doing. Yet he is miserable and lost, a shell of what a human is capable of being
But at the start of the film he knows none of what he is truly capable of … so he resorts to small time crime in the pursuit of money, entertainment and escape
In time Morpheus gives him the option of learning the truth … nothing more, nothing less …. and it is not at all like what Neo expects.
Like all other seekers when he comes to know “the truth” beyond the illusion, he is shocked and wants to return to the comfort of the illusion.
As the film progresses, Neo becomes more aware, more present to what is possible. He begins to manipulate his perception … how he perceives the Matrix … and himself
As Neo lets go of the limitation of what he has believed to be “truth” … the way the world is … his worldview … he begins to shift … to become someone, something else.
In the end Neo learns to “see” the system for what it is … interactive patterns of swirling energy contained in the material of the world he inhabits … yet to all external evidence he is blind.
What Neo finds is his way … his destiny … and the cost is his life … he sacrifices himself so that life may go on … despite the predictions of the Architect he finds a way.
Neo escapes the Matrix, but not with his life.
The MythoSelf Process is a model for finding your way … a true Fourth Way … a way for warriors.
The MythoSelf Process depends on ‘tricks’ to unravel the puzzle and mystery that life is as we typically experience … while we are trapped in the Matrix.
The ‘tricks’ of the MythoSelf Process are the ‘tricks’ that warriors use to awaken themselves, to become aware of the world as it is … to uncover the”truth” … to become themselves.
Here’s the first ‘trick’ …
We are led to believe we are going somewhere from the moment of our birth … like life unfolds as a linear process … Point A leading to Point B … leading to Point C … the cause and effect paradigm.
Language supports the cause and effect paradigm because it is itself digital, linear and sequential, one distinct word following another, ad infinitum, giving the illusion that what is labeled, described and held in language is digital, distinct, linear and sequential.
Language also identifies things relationally, that this is like that, similar but different, part of a common framework. Language, and labeling things, forces a taxonomy to emerge … relating unrelated things as though by virtue of their similarities they belong together … ala a hydrax is like an elephant .
I call this the “X/Y Paradigm” comprised of two distinct parts:
Part one is where “X” leads to “Y” (cause and effect), establishing a causal, liner progression from one thing to another, moving sequentially forward in time.
Part two is where “X” can represent any given perception that we associate with “Y” … the “this is like that” consideration
Taken together there is no escape from the “X/Y Paradigm” – your destiny if fixed
Yet in the Matrix we are offered another alternative … choice.
Life may in fact be more like a spiral wrapped around a center point. than a line progressing away from the center
This is the paradigm of choice … recognizing the spiral emerging from and leading to the center, and closing the circle so that you reside at the center at all times.
Instead of getting caught up in getting somewhere … you begin seeking to experience where you are instead.
Let’s call this an non-magical, or anti-magical, framework designed simply to re-enchant life as it is … nothing more and nothing less.
Joseph Riggio, Ph.D
Princeton, NJ
You’ve Got To Change Your Evil Ways …
My Mea Culpa …
I was a young’un when Carlos Santana released his version of the Clarence “Sonny” Henry song … “Evil Ways” in 1969 on his debut album “Santana” with the band of the same name. Yet I got it, I understood what Clarence had written about and Carlos was singing about … if you want things to be different you’ve got to change your ways … do something different!
Now I know something about how to organize myself so that what I got back then makes sense, instead of just “understanding“ it.
Folks come from around the world to the programs I run. Other folks watch from the comfort of their homes or offices … in real time via my simulcasts or on the videos we release … what I do with those that show up wherever I am in the world doing what I do. And now it seems I owe them all … a deep apology!
Mea culpa … I am sorry!!!
What am I sorry for? Well, most of all for unintentionally misleading them about what it is that I’m doing with them.
Indulge me for a moment more …
I don’t come from any “spiritual lineage in the sense of the modern day gurus out there, or the “spiritual teachers“ offering their wisdom about enlightenment or whatever.
I do have a lineage of sorts, having studied intensely with my own teacher, Roye Fraser, for seven years … dang near every week, two or three days a week for all those years. And then remaining close to him for the next thirteen until he passed away … learning from him and absorbing what I could of his hard earned wisdom.
BUT …
My training with Roye was unlike anything that resembled “Spiritual Teaching“ or New Age Thinking as most folks have come to think about them … or experience them either as far as I can tell.
What differentiated what I learned with and from Roye as simple …
Roye taught me to stand on my own … to have my own views, to figure out for myself how the world was and worked, and what to do to build a life that was uniquely my own!
There were no rules, or formulas, or rituals to practice … no early morning meditation, or energy transmissions, or anything of that sort … just hard, disciplined, prolonged work to GET “IT!” as he used to say.
There was no commitment to a group or community per se (although there was an informal group of us having our individual experieinces with Roye of course) … everyone was on their own, but it was not every man, woman or child out for themselves (just one of the paradoxs of a true Fourth Way system).
There was really only yourself … and the way.
Roye was a guide, pointing endlessly to a possibily … i.e.: finding one’s self.
Most of what I did in the process of learning with Roye was giving up what I had come to believe is true … about myself, about others, about the world that contained us … about the nature of the cosmos itself …
In my language today I refer to the process of giving up and surrendering to truth, or things as they are, as getting over it … and my students are often at the other end of me barking, Get Over “IT!”
My first confession …
My first confession is that I have nothing and no particular common “WAY” to offer anyone … except for a process that points to a “WAY” you yourself must find or invent … a unique WAY to find yourself.
This is the Fourth Way … finding one’s self by trial and error … but not alone.
This is the path of the individual … the “Western Way” as Joseph Campbell pointed out.
Unlike the traditions of the Orient, or the Eastern Way in the West the seminal and sacred way is the way of the individual, not the collective.
In the West no one submits to anyone or anything other than themselves … so much more difficult than pledging allegiance to a teacher, guru or master of one sort or another.
The Fourth Way … or The Way of the Individual is a lonely path compared to sitting in meditation in an ashram or dojo. Yet it has it’s benefits as well.
When you “arrive” via a Fourth Way path you know without question where you are going, and where you have arrived when you get there … i.e.: to yourself, not to an immersion in a system or a collective.
Now this may or may not be of interest to you … no way for me to know really (except for those of you I have met … and who have demonstrated that this way is the WAY for them).
My second confession …
My knowledge is NOT passed on from a lineage, or from one teacher to a disciple, or a master to a student … DESPITE MY YEARS SITTING AT THE KNEE OF A MASTER LEARNING … HE DID NOT TEACH ME WHAT I KNOW!!!
What Roye offered was only an opening to find out for myself what was possible … and held the space for me to explore whilst I did.
This WAY … what Roye called the “Generative Imprint Model” and what I call the “MythoSelf Process” is a Fourth Way … a way of holding a sacred space intact for others until they can hold that space intact for themselves.
That’s all … Nothing More and Nothing Less.
While this is enough … offer others the gift of nothing so they can find for themselves what is truly possible for them and they alone … it has been so often corrupted and co-opted …
I find myself in the challenging position of having to apologize here for the confusion that has occurred via my own communication over the years as I came to the fullness of appreciating the “NOTHING” that I was seeking, and presenting what I now recognize others heard as seeking “SOMETHING” instead.
My third confession …
There is NOTHING to learn, NOTHING to get, NOTHING you need … and that is all I have to offer … NOTHING MORE and NOTHING LESS.
This statement is reasonably confusing unto itself, but there is really no other more direct or powerful to say it. What I can do to help clear up the confusion is say it differently maybe …
You have to change you way if you want to have the experience of YOUR life.
Literally, you must become someone anew … let go of your current view of the world and begin to consider the world as you have never done so before.
This includes first and foremost the way you know yourself to be … and then everyone you know as well … and finally everything that you ever thought of as you have must shift for you to come to have YOUR life.
You must surrender yourself … to yourself … and to truth, i.e.: the world as “IT” is … NOT as you hope, wish, desire or pray for “IT” to be.
YOU HOLD THE WORLD AS “IT” IS … YET “IT” IS WHAT “IT” IS … DESPITE YOUR DESPERATION FOR “IT” TO BE ANOTHER WAY!”
When you come to … “the entirety of your experience is a projection you create and manifest as “IT” becomes what you intend for “IT” to be you become free to have the experience of YOUR life” (NOT the experience imposed and impressed upon you).
Somehow along the way folks who have trained with me came to think they were adding something onto or into the life they already had … as opposed to having to give up the life they have to get the one that’s waiting for them.
I saw this painfully this past weekend when I ran the most recent MythoSelf Professional Training module with a group in New Jersey.
Even folks that have been around training with me for years and should know better are stuck in what I did and was doing in 1999!!!
MEA CULPA … it is my cup … and I apologize to you profusely for the confusion!!!
Now you must let go … give it up … GET OVER “IT!” … and move past what you thought you learned with me and into what I have now learned myself if you want to GET “IT” …
Truly, it was painful to watch … and we must set a new direction …
My only pledge is that I’ll start with me, ’cause there’s no where else to begin.
Letting go of the way you know the world and coming to know the world as “IT” is … that’s all I have to offer … ‘far as I can tell there is NOTHING MORE and NOTHING LESS … but as I said, this is enough.
SCHOOL’S OUT … time to find your own WAY …
“No more pencils, no more books, no more teacher’s dirty looks …”
If you’ve got the fever, and you’re interested in coming along for the ride … stay tuned … it’s only gonna get hotter now that summer’s here!
Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.
Princeton, NJ
P.S. – My apologies to those who been around a long time … especially those who’ve been around the longest … Something Wicked This Way Comes* and the old must go out to make room for the new or we may all get lost in the promise of living out our fantasies, instead of coming to and finding the truth ourselves.