the Kingdom of Heaven is led by force and the violent are seizing it
(Mat 11:12)
I think that in 3-74, at the height of despair and fear and grieving I stumbled into the Kingdom, stumbled around for a while and then stumbled back out, none the wiser as to how I got there .. Now I don’t see or understand anything.
(Exegesis)
Both Dick and a couple of other authors point towards a general personality failure and psychosis being at times instrumental in unlocking shamanic experience.
In our case, there was never a problem, and we didn’t approach the Kingdom with our hand stretched out, as a beggar, but rather from the position of force, and out of a scientific curiosity about the borders and experiences we’d reach through a combination of hypnosis and magickal beliefs (as opposed to the scientific reductionism we’ve been familiar with).
Our hacker-like persistence in this can be in turn compared with monastic tradition, of achieving spiritual experiences through “goal-directed striving” rather than passively or by accident. But we are likely going much further with this in terms of N-of-1 on-demand reproducibility.
The more Dick would mellow out, assuming himself an amazed *target* of benevolent divinity, the farther he would go from *unknown*, the *safer* he would feel in the familiar cradle of Christian Providence, the less he’d had access to his Kingdom.
And this is interesting because it tells us something about the *will*.
Seems like spiritual revelation is sometimes a form of endogenous changework. A lot of traditional resources are pulled from the collective unconscious as a kind of a failsafe. Once the person is through with the transformations and on their route towards being reintegrated into society, ((purple: they return to normal life as if nothing ever happened.))
It is a bit like Westworlds s02e10, where Bernard Lowe conjures the spirit of Robert Ford, only to figure out later that this particular Ford was a timely product of Bernard’s own imagination.
That is, among the various forms of will there is the medical kind, which comes about when the person is challenged, and goes back to sleep otherwise.
We could say that this will is [prevention focused](https://youtu.be/TwasxNk1824?t=2815), and is inversely motivated when the sense of emotional safety or well-being is achieved.
For Dick the access to the paranormal experiences was a boon, and he wonders where did it all go. Turning from revelation to speculation. This is evident from his manner of speech, which goes from that of authority to one of awe. (We are only surprised by that which is no longer a part of our identity/narrative.)
He has “*no idea as to how I stumbled out, and seeking always to find my way back ever since*”, but attributing his experiences to some external will could have been for him a Cold Control block against reproducing them by the will of his own, or else approaching them as a skill to be learned and exercised.
Long experience on a job always increases people’s confidence in their judgments, but in the absence of rapid feedback, confidence is no guarantee of either accuracy or consensus.
(Kahneman)
In that same [Westworlds s02e10](https://youtu.be/mkuIsrJLikk) episode AI hints that application of will in a human system can be, in general, broken. As the imagined Ford would say [later](https://youtu.be/YLmXCtJfTCU), referring in part to Left-brain interpreter, a human conscious is often a “passenger”. The will is applied by the unconscious drivers, which are not accessible to the surface consciousness precisely because the rational and socially acceptable narrative does not match the underlying machinery. It is like the baby seat in The Simpsons, where the steering wheel and the gas pedal are not attached.
Indeed, successfull application of verbal will might be so strange to a “normal” peron that we would have a special term for it: “self-hypnosis”. Here the application of will can be immediately measured (through the variety of hypnotic effects), which per Kahneman is a good predictor of expertize.
Abundance mindset might be a double-edged sword. On one hand, it creates a Predictive Processing pull between the narrative and reality. On the other hand, if we would convince ourselves that everything is well, then there is no reason left for a change. This spectrum between the “effort error” and “positive illusion” is among the common hypnotic toolset. Conversely, self-hypnosis effects allow us to test for and find a proper cocktail of emotions for the abundance mindset.
Love it