Reichian armour

After 14 years of having an idea of what Spalding Gray meant when he posed the question, "Why are you so, armoured, as in Reichian armour?" (from the film/book Monster in a Box), I now know. The twist in this discovery is where I found it...researching Chaos and Thelema. Go figure. There are really no coincidences. So, I'd like to share this nugget of info from Wilheim Reich...

Character armour then, in Reich's terms, is the sum total of our defences against external threats and internal excitation or distress. It stays with us in later life, and limits our freedom of expression, the depth of our emotional responses and our feelings of aliveness. Reich would say it arises as a response to fear and threatening situations, as well as from frustration of our primary needs - the latter being for healthy, warm physical and emotional contact. It is both psychic and somatic. He said "functional identity means nothing more than muscular attitudes and character attitudes have the same function in the psychic mechanism: they replace one another and can be influenced by one another. Basically they cannot be separated … tensions are not the "results", "causes", "accompanying manifestations" of "psychic processes"; they are simply these phenomena themselves in the somatic realm". The unity of psyche and soma is expressed in the diagram on the cover of all his books — two arrows curling in to meet each other, both expressions of an underlying energetic process.

And, if you can overlook the typos this is a fantastic essay by Alistar Livingston, check this out.

and this...

The Art of the Butterfly

Dreams and Reality. How do we morph (i.e. a special effect that changes one image into another through a seamless transition) between these stages. How do we identify between illusion and matter? As the Buddhist say, "Beyond form, beyond the present." Perhaps I've read, heard or dreamed this somewhere or sometime, I cannot recall. Perhaps I am too enmeshed in maya. Or, could it be that I'm too focused on the symbol to move beyond the physical? Nevertheless, this is how it appears:

As applied to the 4 stages in becoming a butterfly
1. The egg = recalling dreams
2. The caterpillar = interpreting the dream
3. The cocoon = becoming the dream
4. The butterfly = enjoying the dream

Now, introducing that concept of the cycle of life and the stages in a linear sense, bend the edges. Now you can form a circle (in your mind). A round. Even better defined, a Mandala. A synonym for sacred space. Often referred to as a geometric design symbolizing the universe (usually set within a 'O'). The root manda = essence, add la and you now have your container. Perhaps we enter stage 5 here.

The universe is the container, a circle very much like a zero enso.

This universe is inseparable. Firstly, in India the adoption of zero '0', was associated with a doctrine which negated the reality of the material world. In sanskrit the word for zero is sunya, which means empty. Empty is not equal to nothing. In math there is a concept known as Frobenius endomorphism (field theory). In which all fields of characteristic '0', and all finite fields are perfect. Extend this still curving line of reasoning to include the word maya. In sanskrit its original meaning was the power to divide. In time it came to mean illusion or the material aspect of the universe as illusion. Now, follow me here, this is where we bring the ring to a close. We are contained within a universe that is capable of perfection, capable of sacred geometry, capable of change; and at the same time zero does not exist. All is illusory. Each memory deposited into the banks of our mind is empty.

Empty the container. The adoption of '0' negates the reality of the material world. What stage in this process am I in? Well, I find myself unable to define that at the present time. Perhaps none of the above and more approximately, the event horizon...the point of no return.