The funny chronic of E.J Gold

*note* funny chronic....worthy of examination.
-added by danny-

"If we want to discover our chronic, all we have to do is go into horizontal sleep and have somebody shake us awake in the wee hours of the night or sometime in the pre-dawn and observe our first reaction. That will be our chronic.   

The machine doesn't want to enter the waking state; it resists it right up to the last moment. But once it's in the waking state, it can't imagine what it was ever doing in the sleeping state, why it preferred the sleeping state, why it developed a defense mechanism against this wonderful waking state, and may even wish never to return to the sleeping state again. 

But when it has returned once again to the sleeping state, it can't imagine what it ever saw in the waking state, and it wants to stay where it is now just as powerfully as it wanted to remain in the waking state a few moments or hours ago."
"...there's a barrier between the sleeping state and the waking state. This barrier is maintained by the chronic. You actually are quite frequently near the waking state.
"In fact, as a child you were probably in the waking state almost all of the time, and the chronic developed to bring the machine into the sleeping state so that it could function...
"...Social, economic and cultural functionings are governed by the sleeping state..."
"...when you look at the machine - or view the machine from the standpoint that the machine is actually functioning correctly in the sleeping state - as far as its survival in the ordinary sense is concerned, you'll have compassion for the machine in the sense that you'll recognize the wisdom of the machine in developing the chronic defence mechanism in the first place so that it can maintain the sleeping state, and therefore, function properly from the cultural view..."
"...People react differently... Someone whose chronic is anger will be angry upon being awakened suddenly from a sound sleep, especially a sleep which contains a dream. It could also be resentment, hysteria, shock or fear; it depends upon the chronic."
"...You were in the waking state most of the time as a child. What happened is that the defence mechanism in the sleeping state imposed itself very little, in which case, you didn't become an adult, you just got to be a bigger kid. Where the defence mechanism kicked in,
you became an adult.

"The defence mechanism kicked in because somebody you trusted - implicitly trusted - told you to develop the defence mechanism against the waking state and to grow up - in a particular way - to adopt certain habits and make behaviour modifications and so forth..."
"...Shamanism is a way of reintegrating the sleeping state from the waking state deliberately, freely leaving the sleeping state, entering the waking state, and then leaving the waking state and entering the sleeping state at will... To enter the sleeping state from the waking state, you must enter it without fear - without the fear that you're going to be trapped there..."
"...The key to awakening is actually hidden away in the sleeping state..."
"...The machine avoids the waking state because it 'dreads' having to put the meaning of its ordinary existence back together again. The sleeping state has to be reconstructed each time from the waking state. It's all shattered and fragmented into its 'skandas', its primary components.
"That 'is' what the Bardo Todol is all about: the reintegration of the primary components of the sleeping state which periodically shatter and are put together and shatter again and are put together, and which the machine avoids. That is to say, it avoids the fragmentation of the waking state. It avoids the loss of face..."
"...If you ask anyone on the street, 'What is the purpose of your existence?' they will give you an answer which translates roughly to, 'My purpose in existing is to maintain the sleeping state of the machine.' It translates that way.
"They may say it in a different way and they may have totally different ways of going about it, but it will come to this, that everything they do reinforces the maintenance of the machine's sleep..."
"...another name for the chronic defence mechanism is chief weakness, and in the Gurdjieff terms, chief feature. It all boils down to 'how your machine defends itself against the waking state..."
"...What I plan to show you is how to re-enter the sleeping state without the chronic, and how to maintain the sleeping state without the chronic, or by using the chronic in a conscious way. At the same time, you must learn how to use the chronic to thread your way through the labyrinth out of the sleeping state into the waking state. The chronic will tell you whether you are hot or cold. So eventually, you are going to have to have the courage to stimulate the chronic right up into the waking state..."
"...The majority of popular movements or self-development programs are designed to maintain the sleeping state and to go as far from the waking state as possible. In this way, the chronic defence mechanism remains perpetually unstimulated. If you see that, you
understand what calmatives are all about..."
"...you don't want a calm environment in a school. The calm state is what we would call a 'false waking state'. False waking state mimics the waking state but in a much lower scale..."
"...Catharsis - blowing it off - leads to the false waking state. You'll also find it available to you in skydiving, hanggliding, impact sports, roller coasters, downhill skiing, many things in the sports area which push your machine to the limit. You'll find that when it goes past that limit, a false waking state is produced..."
"...Remember that the chronic serves as thread through the labyrinth of sleep toward the waking state. One way is that you can work toward the waking state, which will activate the chronic. At this point, you can note that the chronic is getting more and more intense which indicates that you're getting closer to the waking state with the machine. So you can use the chronic as an indicator.
"Another way is to actually allow the chronic to deepen, to intensify itself, to wildly allow it to become deeper and deeper up to the point where it would be expressed, 'but not expressing it'. I don't mean suppressing it, I mean not expressing; there's a difference. At that point, at the very, very verge of the waking state, you must hold everything in rein, hold yourself in check and wait. Sure enough, the waking state will be produced..."
"It sounds like hell!!!"
"It is hell! If you were in heaven, you wouldn't work for the waking state, would you? The Buddhists knew this. Only in hell could you work toward awakening. It's the only place that will motivate you well enough..."


Slimeworld WareHouse -- Esoteric Lectures:
http://www.slimeworld.org/warehouse/totm/totm019.html"""I understand completely what You have been trying to explain to me through the analogy of that story, Lord," I said. "But it still leaves me in the dark about what happened to Harold."

"You ignorant twit!" His voice was silky. "You do not need to know anything about this. It would simply serve to satisfy your already overwrought imagination and curiosity."

"But Lord..."

 

"But Me no buts! In the course of human events, it eventually became necessary for me to encapsulate their world into a completely mechanical process. These beings, on their typically circuitous paths, were already quite destructive...

"This mechanical format of existence for humans is all that prevents them from destroying the objective pattern of their world, and that of all forms. The problem for them is that although the Essence is immortal, it is usually stupid, while the body and psyche are very intelligent but limited in duration to the life of the planetary body, which even though it recurs endlessly, is not always occupied by the same being, for as soon as the body has run down through entropic failure the essence separates from it, leaving it to blend once again with the organic body from which it arose. 

"Unless the being who has up to that time inhabited that planetary body has transformed the Essence into an active and permanent entity in which habits have been formed consciously along certain definite lines...thus helping to create the subtle body required for the placement of a soul, and in that way justifying and completing my hopes for humans on the moon earth...Do you understand what I am trying to tell you, Gabriel?"

"Yes,Lord, but what happened to Harold?" 

The Lord compassionately drove His right knee smartly into my groin, which is an already agreed-upon signal between us that I had in some way failed to comprehend exactly what he had been saying. 

"This can only mean one thing, Gabriel," He said. "A basic inability to grasp the subject at hand--and far worse, since a simple intellectual understanding of these ideas is of no value, an example of vivifying force will have to be used."

The Lord sat back and waited for that bit of information to sink in, and I, sure that I had already received sufficient data at that moment for the attainment of a new gradation of reason one degree above Ankhlad, periodically felt at the top of my head for any sign of the appropriate horns, which I expected imminently, according to some very intricate calculations using the old Gregorian calendar and some litmus paper. But all I got for my trouble was scalp flakes on the fingertips--and suddenly I realized that after all this time I still had no idea what had happened to Harold.

Habits are so completely automatic that our nonphenomenal attention is blind to them. We are not able to study the habits of the machine directly, because when we exert our attention upon the machine, the machine wakes up a little and the habits disappear momentarily. The most difficult manifestations to observe are those tiny little unconscious habitual expressions of the motor centrum. The smaller they are, the harder they fall. 

  To be able to gather data about the very smallest negative manifestations, those most automatic, we must receive help from outside because the machine cannot be trusted to give us correct information about itself. A work-circle is useful for this, because in the beginning we really cannot see the manifestations of our own machines with enough impartiality to categorize them. The habits of the motor centrum are so trivial that we may not be able to see them without special help, and for this we must use a group of people engaged in similar work, who can see our machine with much more objectivity than we can ourselves. Naturally they may miss one or two particularly revolting manifestations, but leave that for later. Sometimes an outside observer can catch us in an uncustomary posture and delineate it clearly to us, even considering our clouded vision.

Let's say you have been practicing. Then what are you doing with a paperback version of this book? Well, first of all, it's absolutely necessary to rid oneself of that pride peculiar to human primates, that conviction that we need none of this stuff because we're already there. This is just the sort of arrogant nonsense that's going to guarantee that we get knocked off in the first stages of the between-lives section of the labyrinth. Imagine someone saying to the Clear Light, 'Well, as it happens, I was just a Sufi before I woke up dead!' That puts a nice neat barrier between you and a gentle blending with the Absolute, doesn't it? 

When you first came into the cosmos, your idea principally was--or at any rate your hope is now--to maintain the thread of consciousness throughout your experience in the universe, Usually it works out that what with all the fascination and sudden experiences and emotional-sensory shocks, and sympathy with the focus of attention of the biological machine, and constant demands on your attention, before you realize that you're being quietly dragged into a tar-baby little by little (you rarely get caught all at once), there you are, nodding ironically, muttering something in the general direction of 'Sonofabitch! Got me again!'