welcome

welcome to the blog of my contextual enquiry project.

here you will find a collection of writings and reflections on my journey to Mexico to learn about the Dreamtime of the Mayans and my adventures in Hollywood's weird and wonderful dreamscape.

please feel free to read in which ever way you will but the more linear of you may wish to read chronologically and start with my first post and introduction to the project way back in October. you can navigate through the posts by date using the menu on the right.

i would also like to draw your attention to the list of links just above this where you can find a link to the blog i set up as a collaborative project between myself and the other participants on the conscious dreamers course as well as a link to the 12 conscious dreamers website where an outline of the course i took part in can be found.

anna

always somewhere between a sunrise and a sunset; a constant becoming, no fixed locus my focus shifts as i reassemble my assemblage point in every instant.

you have taught me to be hollow, filled me up with the cynical notion that all i am is all i have seen, all i write a regurgitation of all i have been fed. and as down to the depths as this has taken me, the space i now find inside is luminous. i am dispersed on threads that fill the sky and i am here in the tips of my fingers as i type.

mememachine

http://www.realitysandwich.com/multiple_choice_reality




"regardless of how secular this ultramodern condition appears. the velocity and mutability of the times invokes a certain supernatural quality that must be seen, at least in part, through the lenses of religious thought and the fantastic storehouse of the imagination"

Erik Davis "techgnosis".

"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding..."

William Gibson, "Neuromancer".


"recite to yourself some of the traditional attributes of the word spiritual; mythic, magical, ethereal, incorporeal, intangible, nonmaterial, disembodied.. is that not a definition of the electronic-digital?"

Timothy Leary "chaos and cyberculture".

"I leave my home seduced by the horizon of the distant, but my body accelerates into obsolescence. I have no place - or - that place is everywhere. This absence of place has created binary encoded spaces of death. Not frozen, but seamlessly enfolded. An erosion of trajectories, like an ancient wound. Yet I feel no pain. I draw a thousand lines across the void."

John Beckman "merge invisible layers" http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=112


"When the simulation wins a new kind of autonomy, the territory disappears behind the map: "The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory,precession of simulacra,it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. it is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself."

Jean Baudrillard "Simulacra and Simulations".

reflection and refraction

when i started out on this journey i had two areas of inquiry that i wanted to explore; the liminal state as context for writing and the digital as a context for shamanic experience. over the last few months i have gone full circle in my understanding of these two contexts and how they relate to each other.

my first assumption about the liminal state was that you could clearly distinguish some kind of line between shamanic reality and material reality. what i came to realize was that these realities were always intertwined and overlayed. The idea of dividing consciousness into "ordinary" and "non-ordinary" states relies on the assumption that "ordinary" states of consciousness are indeed ordinary, i.e that objective reality is objective and not just the current dominant paradigm.

"The straight world didn't end. The straight world and the other world had bled into one another and produced the world that we live in today."

William Gibson, "no maps for these territories".


the further my explorations have taken me into shamanism the further i have understood how so called "altered" states of consciousness have no more or less validity as any other state of consciousness. No one reality is really any more "real" than any other, its all about what we can agree on, what we feel most comfortable with, what we can imagine, what the media tells us..

"all hallucinations are real, some hallucinations are more real than others."

Genesis P Orridge, from "go" ultraculture journal one.


it seems that increasingly culture is reflecting this model of reality. digital media is becoming increasingly more immediate and non linear and this has huge impacts on the ways we process information and therefore the ways in which we contribute to that process as artists.

this project has really brought up far more questions around these ideas for me than it has answers, it has fundamentally changed relationship with my creative practice. i really feel like i am starting everything a new.

dream machine

in every fruit is the seed of it's own destruction.




before i left i felt the city infringing on my thoughts, i wanted to shut it out. now it just seeps through me and i don't mind because its no more real than i am. we smile at each other across the ether, "i know your game" we whisper as we pass in the street.









i return from the stillness of the desert to Hollywood's bright lights, Christmas has sprinkled the city with fake snow and the smell of cinnamon. the sun still shines its Californian glow but after the relentless desert heat i am shivering in the slightest shade. sounds are loud and conversations caricatures from my skeleton eye sockets. i am invisible and slip along the sidewalk freely. all wires exposed i see the innerworkings of this program. the dream machine churning and perpetuating.

escape luminosity

letting go the wheel

follows is a collection of my writings and drawings from my peyote ceremony, on eof the last ceremonies of the course. i had a lot of anxiety about what this experience would be like. although i had experienced hallucinogenic plants before, i had never experienced them within the context of ceremony or so far from home. i suddenly was very aware of just how much resistance i had to this structure. i could'nt relax with the idea of being bound to a structure in an otherwise structureless realm.

it seems this feeling was echoed throughout the group because a series of events unfolded the day before the ceremony that meant we could not continue as planned. Daniel and Arbolita's son was very sick which meant if we did it that night only one of them would be able to lead the group. also only about half the group returned from the days exercise -to pick our peyote- with any cacti and i returned hours after dark after getting hopelessly lost in some much spikier cacti.

(There is something very central to this project about getting lost and i am interested in how this came up for me in response to ritual. the juxtaposition between walking without direction and trying desperately to find one's bearings is a strange relationship that repeated itself in many guises during the course, physically, in journeying and in my writing and as i saw more and more parallels between them, these things became more and more indistinguishable.)

so, because of these factors, we postponed the ceremony until the following day. instead of taking the peyote around the fire in the evening and staying in ceremony all night, we meditated together in the morning, eat the peyote together under a tree near the camp and walk off into the desert alone. we then had the option if we wanted to return to the camp for sunset to hold ceremony around the fire, which actually the whole group did. this felt like a good marriage of chaos and order and definitely had huge impacted on all of our experience.




i spent a long period of time playing with dualities that day and in fact this was mirrored throughout the whole trip. the mayan's symbol for the centre of the universe; the hunab ku, came to me again and again in different forms, working as a sigil holding paradox within me.







this is something i drew whilst peyote was with me. i was trying to show the energies of different numbers as i experienced them and the colliding worlds of day/night inner/outer. the view i drew of the sunset was as i had seen it vertical hanging from the branches of a tree, the night engulfing my left side and sinking sun my right.

bury me with the stars

at the end of the second week we each conducted our own earth burial ceremony, this was definitely a gateway point, the energy intensified ten fold for me that day. this ceremony was probably the one thing i had the most fear around before going to mexico, and suitably ended up being my favorite day in the desert. earth burial is a traditional form of initiation in many shamanic traditions, it is a ceremony of death and transformation, renewal and rebirth.




our task was to dig our own grave using a pick axe and once inside tell our life story to the earth. i don't think i have ever felt so content as the hours i spent in that hole in the ground as i chatted my way through a thousand flooding memories laughing uncontrollably almost all day! the earth was cool even in the heat of the desert sun and the weight of it on top of me gave the most incredible sensation of being held; completely, there was nothing within me that couldn't just trickle away into the soil and be soaked up by the earth mother. you could tell her anything; she's heard it all before!



emerging from the grave i was completely white, caked in the baked earth. i wanted to stay like that forever. i couldn't see myself but i imagined the saddhus from india covered in ash from the fires of the dead, i imagined that was me. my body felt light, like i was made of it and my heart felt like it might burn right out of me. i remember thinking, then, and every morning since. "ok im dead, what do i want to do today?"

crystal skull meditation

i am following our instruction. focusing the breath. breathing from the heart, breathing from the third eye, breathing from the top of my head. i am reaching out towards the stars, to the star where i was born. i am feeling her light shine down on me. it is filling me up. i am building a pyramid in my head and i am sitting inside. it points to the sky. below my feet another, it points to the centre of the earth. here i sit, breathing in, breathing out.

crystal skull comes. his laughter is echoing right through me. "whats so funny?" more laughing. in front of me he is bobbing up and down. huge bobbing white skull wearing big black sunglasses. like something you might find on the front of a motorbike belonging to a hell's angel. "you look ridiculous" i say. "its your dream" comes the reply through laughter.

i ask you to come into my head. there is much clunking like old machinary, you move our head from side to side. "its a bit like trying to move a dinosaur" you say, pulling my strings; opening my eyes.



my mind is chattering. "listen to you go on and on!" you chuckle. "don't you ever stop? "some things don't need to be understood, its not the only way in you know! you don't need to know the way forward to take a step! even if your mind doesn't understand the importance of the step, it is still taken. and that* holds weight".

empty like an atom

on our first day in the desert we set up a medicine wheel where we stayed alone and meditated, drew, danced sang and slept. the medicine wheel is a tool found in many shamanic cultures although its form varies. the medicine wheel is a way of holding sacred space. it is used for protection and orientation of the dreaming and physical bodies. a basic medicine wheel has 7 directions. north, south, east, west, above, below and within. for the purpose of this exercise we were orientating ourselves with the first four. in the mayan tradition north is the direction of initiation, of air and of consciousness. the east is the direction of fire and the will. the south is the direction of earth and the body and of manifestation. the west is the direction of water, of emotion and of death and transformation. calling a medicine wheel involves honoring each direction and asking for guidance and giving thanks. it is my practice to call a wheel before doing any kind of journeying or magical work. the following piece of writing is taken from my journal of experiences of sitting in circle that day. although alot of my writings that day were of a more personal nature and have not been included, i've kept this one because i feel it demonstrates something i learned in a very practical way that day. if we can centre ourselves in the four directions, learn to watch as our thoughts, desires, emotions swirl around us, we can learn to hold circle in everyday situations; we can see influences come like waves.




i fall asleep to the laughter of coyotes, imagining them as they dance around the tent in the moonlight. i awaken in a dream. the night is quiet and moon fully risen shining silver on my skin. curious i unzip my flimsy cocoon and crawl out into the night. not far away, under the tree that lends us shade from the sun, stalk 6 cat-like creatures. similar to how i'd imagine an ocelot to look, alhough i've never seen one, but their eyes huge and hypnotic; the colour of pale jade. as i fall into them, i fall in love, into the whole universe within. it is like nothing i have ever felt before and somekind of channel is opened. the cat speaks, not words but directly into my head.