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The main point of the current reading group is to try to understand Robert Anton Wilson's points by doing the exercises in Prometheus Rising. I tried to get caught up with some of them over the weekend, with somewhat mixed results; I also had a busy weekend at work.
My most successful exercise so far has been the "I am sitting in the room doing this exercize because" exercise that I wrote about for Week 29. All of the complex reasons why I was sitting in my living room working on the exercise seemed pretty amazing to me.
For many of RAW's exercises, I often have the feeling that I'm not doing it right.
Sunday, I tried exercise 5 for chapter 3, the "breath of fire" exercise. I tried to follow Wilson's instructions and felt a mild sense of relaxation, but I didn't really feel I got the results I was supposed to.
Tried again today. Still no huge results.
I didn't have time to run out to an aquarium, but some aquariums have live webcams, so I looked at this one for the Aquarium of the Pacific. (I do love looking at fish in aquariums.) Wilson says you should visit an aquarium and "observe very closely" to see the bio-survival circuit of the fish in operation. I also tried this one from the New England Aquarium. Watching them, I did have some sense of the circuit in operation and I'll try to look in on the fish today as time allows.
Another exercise involves eating one gooey, sugar-filled dessert every week. This is pretty much what I do, anyway; I allow myself ice cream one time every week, on Saturday evening.
Eric Wagner has worked pretty hard on these exercises and he's a teacher by trade. You can get a lot done on the internet, but in-person instruction has its value. Maybe if we all lived near Eric, we could get together with him and he could help us with some of this.
3 comments:
By panting he is trying to get you to hyperventilate... panting is typically shallow, you might have better luck by quickly and deeply inhaling and exhaling. Or attend a kundalini yoga class and ask the instructor about breath of fire.
Thank you for this week's update.
Thanks as well to 'Apuleius Charlton' for last week's post, to which I did not respond. The whole thing made me wanna start reading Ishtar Rising.
I also somehow did not manage to make time for much PR-related mental space these days, which makes me appreciate the value of taking our time and spending a month on each chapter.
There seem to be a lot of aquariums live cam on youtube, so I thought about just tuning in sometime and doing some watching.
Exercize 3 says to go to a health spa for a swim, a massage and a sauna.
Where I live, the public swimming pools all have hot tubs, some with bubbles massage option, and saunas or steambath as well. Even a cold tub (8 - 12°c) for a quick body shock, supposedly good for blood circulation.
I usually go once a week, and has done so for years. I do not often get high beforehand, though. It feels great to do so, but honestly even sober stay in the sauna for over 15 minutes and you're out of your mind already.
@Tom Jackson: "For many of RAW's exercises, I often have the feeling that I'm not doing it right"
I do not think that there must be a right or wrong way to do them. Different people might get different results.
Well, perhaps in this specific case of the "breath of fire" there is actually a proper way to do it, because it is a physical exercize rather than psychological.
Nice report. Thank-you for the aquarium links. I had similar feelings of not doing the exercizes correctly when I began working with Crowley's experiments, sometimes I felt I was doing them completely wrong; they still worked surprisingly well. Somewhere Crowley says something to the effect that making the effort holds more importance than doing the practice exactly right.
Going to a yoga teacher seems a good idea for learning the breath of fire. It can be kundalini yoga or hatha yoga; a practice in the latter, kaplabhati pranayama, seems very similar if not identical to the breath of fire. I've never seen a yoga teacher advise doing it while lying on your back as Wilson does. I practiced various kinds of pranayama quite a bit often combined with hatha yoga in my 20s and early 30s. I wouldn't say I've ever experienced incredibly dramatic results. Sometimes the combination of the two, pranayama and asana (yoga postures) can feel like smoking a joint of mild weed and you feel like you have more energy. Pranayama can calm rough emotional states if you can get yourself to do it in such a state which can be challenging. Mild relaxation seems in the range of expected results from doing the breathing exercize Wilson suggests a couple of times. Crowley and others say not to lust after results. Leary says that this kind of work prepares the brain and nervous system to receive higher energy. It also intends to quiet the body and mind for meditation.
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