Randomly send your loved ones heartfelt audio messages saying "I love you." If tragedy strikes and you're suddenly removed from this life they will cherish those messages immensely. Listening to it in the future could offer them some small comfort as they reconnect to the love in and sound of your voice.
replace our thoughts of suffering with acts of devotion.
May we celebrate + maximize the journey of our 24 hours, 1,440 minutes, and 86,400 seconds to:
The 4 Immutable Laws of the Spirit
Gentle reminders as we begin a new week of self-exploration:
models
Follow-up on Instability of Mystical Personal Transformations
by bonnitta-roy from https://substack.com/@bonnittaroy/note/c-78756202?r=1b3ie
Someone asked me to describe how I think transformation happens. Here is what I wrote:
We can look at the question from two fundmental processes that shape us.
First, a person must continuously maintain their identity through ongoing processes of individuation. It's like the cell having to maintain its identity by keeping its membrane intact, even while it has to exchange chemicals in and out of itself. For a person this means we are both modifying our identity to fit a larger social environment (ie taking some aspects and keeping out others, ex: -- roles, information, values, fashions, opinions). This is precarious, because as the situations change, if you don't change you die (get expelled from the group) but if you do change, then you die (the previous identity changes).
Secondly, a person is a living center that grows radially. Radially means that many directions are available all at once-- a person searches, explores, discovers in many directions. (These processes are driven by arousal states that seek actions that satisfy). Remember this active - open exploration is happening against the background of precarity that I first described. Here the person is not so much an identity but an agent.
You can see how this tension between identity and growth create a generative cycle that may breach a threshold such that the change is not slow and incremental, but large and life-changing (from homeostatic and regulative change to ecstatic and transformational change). Transformational change has an energetic signature (the ecstatic part) because it releases all the complex, nuanced coupling in the identity project and opens up for new relations to be negotiated (ie. a new identity begins to individuate). And on and on it goes. One can see, then, that as one decenters from identity, there is more open possibility for radial expansion, one shifts from being/maintaining an identity to becoming/growing as an agent — hence the Alchemist is born! As a result one feels less that life is precarious and more available to exploration, discovery, surprise, etc...
I've found the following spiritual guideline really helpful: psychedelics can show you where you're going, but not really how to get there. meditation can show you how to get there, but not really where you're going. I suspect a collaboration is possible.
Reminds me a bit too of moving from the catharsis model (just release emotions!!) to memory reconsolidation (the gold is in the reintegration) where you need both the technical skills to reintegrate (🧘) and just the raw mana to bring stuff out (🧪)