Stefan Stjernberg.com

Three things must be experienced for what they are during some period in life in order for us to be involved in the initiation that we encounter and that runs within us throughout our lives. We must be exposed to and feel real vulnerability, experience real seclusion, and understand and find our access to the inner nature that is one with the one that embraces us, something we must also face alone in our experience of how darkness affects us. I believe that everyone goes through them individually and in different forms, and that some of us stay for far too long in deviations from them, and in what then arises when we do not understand what it is we experience when we go through it. What it is within us that is a part of it. We tend to suffer from it in silence or in seclusion without knowing why we do it. We feel exposed and vulnerable without knowing the cause of why it appears. We can experience fear of our own natural instincts through others, and of the darkness that naturally arises around us, which can then trigger our own sense of insecurity that we carry within us in the encounter with our own nature, and we begin to see it through people and things around us. That’s why exposure to seclusion and darkness is so important. To experience our nature in its embodied sense of that wholeness that encompasses us. Because if we ignore our part in this, it will silently haunt us and cause anxiety. We diminish ourselves and become irritable and defensive. If we accept it, we will be guided in the experience of our psychic architecture. We become part of nature instead of repeating ourselves in our fears, or in our feeling of loneliness and vulnerability which is where we are made unique. That is, we constantly try to rationalize this away while our reality speaks a completely different language that says something else about the truth behind our attitude. We are not involved. What I mean is, our fears, feelings of vulnerability and loneliness are intimately connected to the experience of the psychic initiation everyone has within them. Whether we are aware of it or not, it will be expressed through us as a physical experience. The question is if we are able or willing to follow its lead. Which initially is painful and tremendously disturbing for the mindset we are growing out of and leaving.

To me it seems that finding our double is crucial for all types of human relationships. It is about our recognition of the arguments of others. If we deny ourselves ”the other” within us, we do not recognize the other person’s validity, so we deny them this other, or his / her’s double’s right to exist. When we do that, we become two-dimensional and have no standpoint in ourselves. The other have no say, because we only let our ”civilized” ideals decide what is to be accepted by us. Completely leaving out the rest of our shared psychic Nature. We become a dummy for what is generally accepted regardless of its consequences for the individual, and for ourselves. We become our own enemy without knowing it. Grand ideas and flamboyant ideals become guiding principles for our human actions. Something that is constantly going to remind us, and shame us as inattentive people. An experience that we are constantly influenced by in others. We let it ravage freely and wonder how political phenomena seem to arise out of nothing, and how isolated outbreaks of atrocities are carried out by people who have lost or never had any contact with who we also are within us. We dont even recognise how it appears in our own personal life. Scale it up to leadership over large companies, organizations or countries and we see more clearly what is behind our news. What is happening in the world. We just let the world suffer it for us. It is about finding our true voice, or our real name. Or we only know of others what we think is civilized, or generalized in ourselves through our compressed dummy. Not through our conversation with ourselves that is something that also exists in others. It is this that makes us impenetrable, to a mere facade, isolated and inaccessible to the world around us.

In Finnish folklore, an ‘etiäinen’ is what a person is a reflection of, a sensed impression of a double that precedes him or her, and does, or do, the same things that a person does, and have to encounter later on. To meet with such a ’being’ can be called an etiäinen. An etiäinen can be heard and sometimes also seen. In sami it is called ”Ovdasas” (forerunner or forewalker) or ”Mannasas” (walking afterwards) or ”Forrosas” (traveller), This Farrosas (traveller, covering both terms) refers to that everybody is born with a double, which is also the person’s guide. Ovdasas in Finnish is oudastaa, which means to detect, or see through things. An awareness, and a promonition, hence the term ”forerunner”, when it refers to the double or the template of our being. It is often confused with the image we have of ourselves, our autopilot or the ”civilized” version we use in our social interaction with others. But they have nothing to do with each other because they are two separate experiences. One of them, our Nature, is in us what is constantly evolving, the other is that which is already known, and generally accepted.

I’ve always had a companion who is what makes me se ahead, like in a premonition of people and events. Recently I also learned that it is a norm, something to be expected with my background. In a way one can say it walks ahead of me at the same time as it follow me from behind. Like someone giving me directions and points me to how I react to the experiences I have to dwell in, that occupies me. This activity freaked me out in my youth, and made me prefer to spend much of my time alone with myself trying to figure out what this was, to contain its energy, since no one around me seemed to take notice about such things. In the past, the Finnish language had terms that referred to it, oudastaa, and etiäinen. Which is the double that we are a reflection of, or have a sensed impression of. By using its raised energy, it was used to perform some needed tasks, and get help or guidance. We still sense it in that way. An impulsive force of nature that is inspiring us with its close physical connection to earth. Which make us feel part of it. But its first appearance in my youth really made me question my sanity. Among other things with auditory visions that was threatening my sense of reality. Later it forced me into a complete breakdown of how I previously perceived my world. To shift my stand about it. I am deeply in debt to those that was close to me for taking it for what it was. To let me ride it out. It opened me up to what I had in my bones, deep in my marrow. It was a release of the experience of that other nature I had within me. This in turn also made me realise that people talking of having had previous lives, or identifying with it in our present one, and respect that layer of experience, are worthy of more than scorn from people around them. The undercurrents of our current time do still hold old layers of experiences close to us in the architecture of our mind. When we begin to realise that we have a double within us, a kind of universal human template, we may also be able to experience where its reality was cut off from our life together with others. To connect to it again is to embody it anew, and translate its experiences to our present time. We reconnect our true being with our lives. The content that previously made us see through things now turns into a living reality behind the person we have learned to be. What we have seen between the lines becomes our reality, and the energy level of the double now becomes the center of our world. The person now faced by our doube becomes a ghost of what we once where, of what we had to let go. He was just a make believe, a smokescreen, not what we truly are. We can relate to the psychic layer and its functioning in us that we were born with, which will connect us with our ancestors, and help us to understand how its influence affect us in our lives.
That person we where, the reflection of how our world wanted us to be, not what our double really are, and the name that has been attached to his, or her reflection, is a mere mannequin, a dummy and a compromise. An idealized version of what is considered to be civilized. It becomes a threat to us when we realize that it is not at all civilized. That he cannot make our decisions for us, because he is an empty representative, not of how the content of our psyche, as part of our common human nature is transferred to him by us. Or as our threshold to the world around us. He is not something we should identify with. If We do, we just become empty shells. So when we complain or criticize others, what we feel is psychic starvation through him. I think that’s why many relationships in ”civilized” societies are so turbulent, and become violent.

I also believe that it is our own external substitute, that ”civilized” perception of a personality, which only resembles and serves an image of the real one, that is what our psychopathic culture forces on our indigenous peoples. Who then just like us when we have lost the relationship to our own psychic architecture, try to relieve the pain in it, with psychotropic drugs, alcohol and other self-medication. We suppress the relation to our own inner origin by oppressing indigenous peoples in the outer. Often, this sickness comes disquised behind words like developement and globalisation. But a clear language is extremely important to people, because in its natural context it refers to our original experiences, which are then through language transmitted to us by our grandparents’ parents’ parents, and then by us to our children and grandchildren. Without it, we will be deprived of the geography of our psychic extistence. Our experiences becomes disconnected from its relationship to our immediate reality.

”People sometimes talk about ”schamanic disease”, a special condition, a nervous disposition combined with artistic talent and extraordinary irritability.” (Wiklund, 1978: 166)
Traditionally, some individuals had the ability to raise the energy level of our double, in order for it to perform certain intended tasks, drumming was the ceremonial way to do that. Today we experience it in many of our relationships with each other and in nature but also without having a psychic architecture that can put what we experience into a psychic whole. So we look for explanations instead of a relationship to that which affects us, and which is beyond our control.

I think this ”disease” is our kind of initiation into our interior form of being as a container for experiences of psychic nature. Like how women understands how they can manipulate men by becoming a container for it, and for men, the relational nature of life that men see of themselves through women. In the same way that men casually embody the ability to formulate that container, and what it contains for women who are reluctant or prevented from doing so. Herein lies much of the conflict we experience later in life with still youthful minds in an unprocessed interior. Obviously this is based on culture and not on gender since both the experiencing and the formulation of it will occur regardless of how culture define it. It is annoying as hell for any reality outside of our instinctual sexuality because so much confusion is put into it, to how we victimize each other and force the other to emotionally give in to what we ourselves have unprocessed within ourselves. With what our lack of self-independence imagine identity is all about. That blame is all over the place when we do not work through the insights of what it means to see through everyday events on a human level. And I am not referring to hearsay, mindless thoughts, gossip or guilt that floods us on a daily basis. That will not create any genuine reflection of this process we have within us. It is like a primordial initiation into a world of psyche and to independently discover our own constant dialogue with that other in a world of experiences. Of course, depending on how this has first been translated to us in our surroundings, by our heritage. But it will work through us in one way or the another anyway. Even if we do not recognize it as something that exists as a part of ourselves.

Casually, many today believe that we must make ourselves victims of its influence on us. While we are, in fact, called by our nature to walk the inherent path that it currently leads each of us to follow in ourselves. We are all alone in listening to what it has to say, and following where it leads us, but we share that calling with everything around us.

.. when a Sámi becomes closed up in a room, then he does not understand much of anything, because he cannot put his nose to the wind. His thoughts don’t flow because there are walls and his mind is closed in .. But when a Sámi is on the high mountains, then he has quite a clear mind.
Johan Turi – An account of the Sami.

I could not agree more. There is a Sami word, meahcci, which is a perceived moral dimension with practical consequences, where psyche and nature are experienced as one in our interactions with it. There are practices of enchantment there that is not possible to squeeze in to closed spaces.

Perhaps it was the experience of this that organized religion later came to recognize as the concept of soul, which in its external form in a Sami context was called radien neita, and which inwardly was called saivo neita. But no matter how we choose to name these types of experiences, they do not differ, because this occurrence is in them both. This is not the gender issue it is often formulated as. Radien giedde is as important to the understanding of the content of inspiration as the soul is as a container for it.

To see through things is to pay attention to what occurs in the space between humans, animals and nature, to allow oneself to be mutually observed in it, to what is transferred as a transparent content between us. It is a kind of separation, where what we experience is removed from us and embodied in that space. Nature becomes something that embodies itself in us at the same time that we are embodied in it. It is also what I experience when my I-ness merge with someone or something else, and to take it back becomes a necessity for my personal inner balance. This often becomes obvious to us when we get annoyed at the dissonance that arises between what we want other forms of being to be, and what they are in them selves. If we do not have an initiated experience of the experienced, we try to coerce that other to bring it back to us because it is something we have transferred to them, to nature, to things or other beings. But they are already part of that space. The opposite is also equally true. When what we see through is something we embody for someone else. Like Nature or earth, forms or qualities that does not belong to us. Either way, it involves a lot of pain, and a genuine sense of independence on the transpersonal level. Here it is a shared experience of our origin and of the raw powers of Nature itself, that is, of the forces that independently of us work through us.

We will never attain the whole that embraces everything that surrounds us at the same time that it also exists within us only with our intellect. It is something we experience from how we interactively participate in the basic structures of our psyche. Which means that we must first go through the defences that prevents us from reaching it again, transmitted to us by our personal and cultural surrounding. People around us are not conscious about their relation to it. So by learning to omitt our own relationship to its experience, or having a conscious relationship to how it affects us will create the conditions to our attitude to defend ourselves to its influence. It overwhelmed us with confusion and threatened to obliterate our relation to our beingness with embarrassment when we where young. So we defended ourselves with obstinancy and scorn, or we learned to do it with a total submission to those who where willing to carry it for us and compensate for our wound. That wound then turn our original wholeness into a suspicion of authority, and the sense of wholeness became a threat to us. So we cannot approach it again through those external defences we have built up under the pretence that it is that which create our individuality. Or with our intellect alone. Because this will only create a state of coercion, where our relationship with the underlying forces that affect us from within constantly repeats our need to resist them. We will find ourselves in a kind of psychic recursion and we simply lose touch with what really connects us to other people. Of course, we can constantly try to criticize ideas and opinions and feelings that do not agree with ours, but that will not make us feel more involved in the underlying structure that powers them from within our greater whole, neither with others nor in the world we are in.

Have we not already identified how this loss affects us both personally and collectively. With leaders holding suggestive narcissistic mass meetings solely to glorify their own ideas, their own significance and grandeur, both in plan and execution, not for what they actually do for the individual to make their lives better, and then incessantly blaming others for the imperfections and failures that results from the exaggerated and unattainable. Eagerly cheered on by submissive followers and inflated lackeys who are appointed to important positions to maintain the impression of the perfect leader’s glorified appearance. We behave like children in constant need of attention. But in a child, these exaggerated fluctuations are natural in the weighing of the balance that arises to the whole that exists both within us and everywhere around us, and in the development of our independence in relation to it in ourselves and in others.

On the other hand, we also have the wounded whole we see in everyone else, where we then try to force others to engage in the pain of the whole we ourselves have lost. I believe that it is this search that makes many people look for it in psychology, but also to use these means to try to control and force others to a constant submission of what has been lost in themselves, or ignore by medication.

No matter how sadistic it sounds, it is also through this wound that we will relate to others, to the world that surrounds us and what makes us empathetic people. Anyway, it is still always going to be a balance we must find in ourselves between the two.

When we feel the full power of our nature, when we are no longer children and it goes all in, then I think we develop the sensitivity that make us able to be observed by it, both in others and out in nature itself, because with years of living close to it, it becomes nothing but this Nature who experiences itself through us. It is transpersonal at the same time as we experience it in our own unique way. We share the source of that experience. Violent at first, powerful, then wonderful at the same time that it is damn challenging morally. A constant balancing act.
There is a wonderful image of it in Egyptian mythology, the goddess Maat. She bound all things together into an indestructible unity; the universe, nature, the social order of society and the individual, were all seen as part of the larger order she has generated. It was against a feather from her wings that all hearts were weighed against before they could pass to the psychic nature which is the common whole that exists for all of us, and from which we emerged as children. But it is unique in our personal experience of it. We feel a deeper belonging to life from within this larger whole, and we just now the difference between what is right and wrong in the sense of balance and integrity, and we sense our independence by heart through that experience. Maat has a strong resemblence to the door woman Uksakka in the old Sami tradition. She who watches over the transition or passage between this world and the transpersonal one.

The difference between the transpersonal perception today and the traditional one only seems to be that today that is transmitted to real women and to men in our temporal world instead of to psychic forms shaped by our psychic experiences. We are no longer physical vessels of this. And a balance between them is probably what we call feeling whole.

Instead, we live on opinions and ideas that do not originate from the forms that appear from within. So our reluctance and natural fear of facing them, creates a market of drugs from the large drug companies that prevent access to ourselves through cynical marketing, and diagnostic simplifications of our experiences supported by that, creating a distorted view of what it means to have the experience we need to be able to get access ourselves as whole human beings. It is our reluctance to face the transpersonal as something universal within us, and ignore it with psychotropic drugs, that creates the conspiracy theories that emerge from this context.
This is the mental sickness that is raging in the western or modern view of the world today. Our world no longer experiences itself through us. We have lost our ability to hear it within us, because we no longer understand that this is the way we are a part of it.

Since the age of 28, and the mental tsunami I went through, I have experienced myself as part of a whole that surrounds me, which is also physically experienced as a center in me. I feel seen by it and by the surrounding Nature I am in. Strongest during my solitary walks in the mountains. But also here in the forests that are close to me. The sky above my head is experienced as a cosmic embrace from which everything is constantly created, and behind everything, are all forms of life existing in a psychic totality, of which my inner being, my psychic double, the one we refer to when we are reflected back to ourselves, is a part, and express itself through me. He who alternately follows me during the day and who I follow at night. In all this a moral balance arises. A kind of mental foundation on which everything is based. Our inner truth, and an underlying order in everything that is balanced by its own inner law bound to a justice that cannot be experienced with our outer senses. It is the one law we cannot challenge without severe consequences both to ourselves and to the surrounding nature. It is experienced in the consciousness as the spontaneous insight that follows us from within. A light that is accompanied by the insight that allows us to see through things and what happens, and that it is a natural balance between who I am and the morality that is included in it.

I know, this may seem strange, but it is my description of the sense of context and relationship I have with the nature that I grew up with. Both internally and externally. My inner conversation has been going on there since early childhood, though not visible to those around me other than during spontaneous outbursts of insight that were not immediately seen or recognised as a result of my age. I lived with it and trusted it.

When I am now able to formulate it as a psychic reality, and also try to understand the influence it has had on me in all the contexts I have been in, where it has been expressed, I can see how bound I am to nature. To a much larger immense whole, and to those who have existed before me, and those who are close to me now. It is in the mutual interaction with all this that made it possible for me to approach my inner other.

It’s like finding a myth I lived with, and have tried to grasp and understand. I have related to it in various parts linked to my origin that kept it alive. But then my spontaneous interest spread to the Egyptian creation story through the discovery of Maat. The balance in everything I have struggled with since the age of 28. And Atum, the underlying psychic substance everything is made of, and my being is connected to, the ongoing creator, father and king, or why not our spontaneous insights of the undercurrents we see of ourselves in events and people from the larger whole of our interior, and in parts of a totality that is transferred to an external authority. Also, Nut and Geb. The experience of the depths of the sky above us, and our physical connection to the earth, to the sun, to Ra, our consciousness that is accompanied across the sky by reflection and balance, with Maat, and Toth’s insight, to re-emerge from Nut in a daily recurrence. When Nut and Gebs embrace release their grip and become a new day. I can go on, it’s an inspiring story that constantly gives me mental nourishment every day. Not the story in itself but the experience it contains for me. And it makes sense to get out of bed early and listen to how it interacts with me in relation to my surroundings. Listening to my timeless nights, and go hiking. It makes what I perceive within me an absolutely living reality. And I can formulate something that is otherwise only experienced, and realise that it is something that I actually live in. Generally I do not like to personify it, but in different contexts it feels wonderful to me when the two are connected as a single whole, because it makes me return again to where my first experience of it came from.

I can see no other purpose in my life than to continually strengthen the bonds I have with experiences that I make of this kind. Without them, everything just becomes empty words.

For a very long time, there has been an imbalance between our physical life and that which gives it its value. It emerges in relationship to our internal representative, or double in our psychic reality. The timeless human potential in our being that senses the transpersonal through our environment, without which there is no reference to our existence. It is the world, the forests, the mountains, the rivers, the living forms of reality underlying the world that perceive itself through us. The world as Nature within. We interact with these forms when they influence us. This imbalance of Nature we live in is beginning to make us acknowledge the sensorial world’s independence of us. To make us return to the wholeness of life. Instead of destroying the world while it is watching us doing it from within of ourselves.

In my 5 year old grandson I can see how he struggles to develop a sense of independence to the often violent forces that affect him as he tries to create his relation to them. How he alternates between independence and struggle through what is transmitted by him to his parents, and the need for tenderness and care that he is strengthened by having, in that struggle with them. Often to the embarrassment of not feeling that there is an independence between those forces and his parents. I think that’s the cause of a lot of confusion and abashment when we’re at that age. Through cultural constraints, we inhibit access to our psychic origins and to our transpersonal environment. Which only increases the vulnerability we feel. Because this experience will also determine how we are coming to deal with our Nature as we proceed further into our lives. This is what I see of myself in my grandson, and where the groundwork for our relationship to the transpersonal is laid. I have never before imagined that there could be a mutual task to develop that independence together with our children. Now I can see that without it, there can be no access to our own nature, and they cannot find theirs.

Religion has not been practiced in our churches for a very long time. I can barely understand how that can be possible in a building. Instead, it is lived out in a hidden way in politics, in sports and in music, in arenas, and on social media. There, the psychology of our religious life is expressed spontaneously, often with the violent influence its full power has over us as Nature. People seem to live in a severe lack of receptivity that rests on the absence of being an active part of that nature that allows one to exist as a reflective human being in a living world, and without a reference for one‘s own existence. We thereby block our perceptual reciprocity with that beingness, and go crazy. This is the animism of modern man that has been transferred to indigenous peoples still in contact with their traditional transpersonal life by suppressing it in them, and replace it with our own helplessness. No academic jargon can help us, or explain away the raw power of our direct experiences of the nature of which we are a part.

All true life experiences are based on the act of seeing through events to detect what it is that gives them their value. What at first seems to be personal, changes when we suddenly experience its underlying reality, where everything is saturated with psychic meaning and has hidden connections with transpersonal powers. It manifests in and through the participation of our beingness with the energies of life. Their intentions overlap all people and events to include the whole of nature with its personal and collective revelations. It is exactly this that make us sense what it is that is half about our life, and of each other.

What is perceptionally referred to as an archetype and its similar diversity of experiences in a psychological sense, has its equivalent in the exterior where we call them concepts and facts. It is not too far-fetched to also refer to it as things of the spirit world because its content originally seems to arise from there with our desire to understand how it relate to us. To get answers from the infinity that exists everywhere around and inside of us at the same time, we ask for it and it comes to our aid. We can just as easily call where psychology affect our bodies to pray. Because the substance and intensity of the powers that then appears to us there is common to us all. It does not matter how different temporal minds have referred to them. We still have to ask them by praying because we have reached as far as consciousness will let us. We can settle for the answer we get and move on as if nothing has happened. As a young mind do. But in the long run we are better off by also recognising those who assist us from there.

To be out in the mountains, in nature, is to be close to the force that is both the whole that surrounds us and that which is the Nature that is within us. What we feel we are embraced by, and talk to within ourselves, and relate to in others. Which constantly reappears in and around everything. There we are close to what it is and the place it is in. And we hear ourselves most clearly there. The closer we can get them to each other, the healthier and more genuine we feel. Nothing may come in that changes and destroys it. Or try to replace us with what is already there. In that silence, we are close to it both in a bodiless, and in a physical sense. In integrity, independence and spontaneity. We materialize it in us. We sense it in certain places and with certain people. Often as something intensely alive and in parallel with our collective order. But not everyone realize it as within them. They experience it only on someone or in something. In something that has been. In some historical sense, in mobile phones, media or in buildings that will try to determine to us what it is. But our Nature only becomes violent then. And destructive. She has never liked being trapped. At all.
It’s like the ultimate challenge. Testing our courage. If we can face it, or continue to be children in relation to our being. One aspect of that is perseverance. This is why every traditional initiation ceremony has copied the element of mental pain and transferred it into a ceremony. This is what we reject and diagnose away. We make it a medical condition. Far from the experience we have of our nature. Which then drives us mad. This is where we learn that there are forces that are much greater than us that we must live with. Where words just become empty. To feel genuine is to experience love, integrity, creativity and sexuality also as independence. It’s energy. To be our nature without shame or guilt. We feel guilt and shame when we cannot share it. When we mutilate ourselves for those who do not want to see it in themselves.

Since someone close to me goes through what I myself have gone through, and I had to formulate that intensity again, and for someone else this time. This in turn became what follows below. It really makes one feel genuine, to be able to share the force of experiences like this. But it is not just a one time event. I admit it is quite violent the first time, but this connection and its movement back and forth, between and into psychic events and back to the world of I-ness is something that is happening on a daily basis, and all the time. It really makes one feel genuine, to be able to share the force of experiences like this.
In our conversation with ourselves, friction always arises if we do not ”materialize” the energy that arises there, and convert it into something physical. It then wells up and almost floods us. It’s nature. Our Nature. The raw natural power that exists ”within” our personal space. And it feels like the more friction we can bear, the more of that nature we can receive. Like we become more us. That we are both independent of others, and lonely containers of this together with them. We ”burn”, and it almost drive us mad. But at the same time we begin to see the difference between our life energy, what it is, and that Nature that we want to experience more of. We feel involved in ourselves and in it as an independent force that exists everywhere and in everything. A living entity or world soul. But above all, we see that when we are not really connected to it, there is only an undeveloped and unspoken demand for compliancy. Since those who have not endured the friction created within them must constantly ”have” that power from others. Own it through them. Like children we believe that we can constantly get it just by wanting it. Not because it is a shared energy. As a child, it is an absolute necessity to experience it like that at first. But beyond our childhood, it is a have to, to discover that it is not dependent on anyone else. But that it exists within and through us. That we may own and express it as the natural force it is and that it exists between the I-ness and the self that materializes it. It is life-energy, self-preservation, creativity, sexuality and the integrity we express in the psychic space that exists between us, which acts on us from the Nature that is our common source. It is raw power. Unfiltered, unwavering and not diluted by ”rules” about how it should be rather than what it actually is. It is as if we descend into our being, and finds the space where we become objects of the forces that exist in a Nature that are greater than us. As children we need rules and regulations to handle it. As initiated adults we have an approach. With statistics, we treat people like cattle, with experience as individuals. It is the way of life.

When I am out hiking or in the woods, or in the mountains, I have always felt seen by the nature that surrounds me. It has confirmed me through my experience of it. It is as if the nature that I myself consist of has been confirmed by the one who surrounded me. But since adolescence there has also been a worriness that did not belong there. It was bigger when I was not out in nature, and almost completely disappeared when I was in it. Later in life it has come back from time to time. And been strongest in periods when I was far from nature. Since it did not originate from there, I began to wonder where it came from, and I realized that it was transmitted. I have always enjoyed spending time with myself. I have never been worried about it, instead it has been the other way around. I liked that more than spending it with people. So I left my thoughts on it a bit half conscious and waited to get an answer. And some time ago, I got it.
Loneliness is often not perceived as the integrity we need in our conversation with ourselves. Or as our need to develop an individual independence to the psychological powers that influence us. I began to see that I had taken over other people’s anxiety about this, their loss of an active inner conversation because as a young person I semi-consciously sensed that it was trying to exist in people between them and themselves. It is like living in a world of intentions but without form or material reality. I wanted them to formulate what this was. Their abscense became my concern. And a period before my teens, this substance became so difficult that I became afraid of the dark. It had gone so far that I was constantly aware of the influence it had on the mood of my environment. How that affected them. Made them distracted and disappear. I felt abandoned in their darkness. As if their association with themselves was somehow connected to my presence. That was what I later took with me out into nature. Sometimes I did not feel part of it at all, but I was tense and anxious all the time. It was new to me and the longer I was out the more relieved I became until it almost disappeared. But the feeling has come and gone all the time until the answer came. Even the fear of the dark reappeared when I lost touch with my nature. But then I realized that it was not mine. It was someone else’s, and a worry that was placed in me to try to control me with christian guilt. For a while, it even took my nature away from me. Imagine my surprise when this came back much later in my life to force me to go through it again. And this time I could see where it came from. Because it was an unconscious need to adress what I perceived in my parents, it created the constant attention for this that I carried with me into adolescence. And since it was an unconscious need that was not mine and yet obvious to me, it also came to be portrayed as fear of the dark. As an unknown influence. A darkness from outside for what was not yet comprehensible that affected me. To a child this is what was once called black magic. But now I could really see that when we loose the relation to the nature that exists all around us, and which is also something that interacts with that which exists within us, then we may come to replace it with an unhealthy need for attention and care that extends too far beyond our own integrity, which accompanies the anxiety that arises from causes that made us loose it. But most importantly, when it comes to children, it is important that they get to know that it is not theirs to worry about, or carrying. It will only obscure the view of the relationship we must establish with our raw nature within, which make us one with it outside of us. Any genuine relation depend on it.

I have never really found myself in any way related to Buddhism in general. Nor to Tibetan Buddhism with its llamas. A very long time ago, I read Alexandra David-Néel, her stories and experiences during her travels in Tibet. I loved her adventures. But it never got me into Buddhism. It was too abstract, I had no experience I could dress with its teachings. I did not understand it. Because there was something else that was still dormant in me. I have long since forgotten her stories and looked with some skepticism at people who for various reasons became Buddhists because my experiences were never so abstract. But so today, out of nowhere, it dawned on me. I do not know for what reason. But suddenly I realized that my I-ness, ego, or bodily center in a world of matter, is what returns to our objective person, who is the one who constantly returns to this world. It is the objective personality that is reborn. Our ego is created as its relation to the temporal and we develop our egos as parts of that in time. To establish this connection. It is truly a far-reaching idea that there are people who throughout their lives practice an approaching to our objective timeless personality in order to constantly develop it in its relationship to each return. Perhaps with the intention that it matures to such an extent, and becomes so aware of itself in us, that it experiences its own conscious presence in every human being regardless of time itself. Like it is moving in and out of time without loosing its knowledge about who it is in between every specific location it enters in time. This must really be the crown of the work of human achievement. And humanity at its best. To develop the recurring aspect of human consciousness that exists independently in every human being. Now I think I know something about the inner workings of Buddhism that make it a lot more accessible to me. Something that is also present in all indigenous peoples experiences of all living things. It is only expressed in other ways. This vision was about the essence of man. Of what we do or do not do with it. And how we relate to it. It handed me a different way of looking at the world. I think that the traditional Sami notion of Radien-attje and Radien-giedde is the equivalent of this kind of buddhist experience.

Yarning is a wonderful australian aboriginal way of learning used to expand on the traditional way of seeing through events and experiences, to connect to and share that which gives them its value in an agreed context with one another. To become one with creation together, and explore its emerging patterns. We can get glimpses of them in our daily lives. We meet people or find ourselves in places where creation suddenly connect us and we open up to have an experience. But yarning is a deliberate gathering, provoked by the urge to see what the patterns of creation want to spin for us. For me this is what learning is all about. What genuine relationships are made of. But I have always been muted by the fact that I have never been in a learning environment where there has been a clear relationship to creation as it appeared in me, or in other people and places. I have learned a lot of things, but nothing that had anything to do with the experiences I had, or the life they connected me to. There have been personal moments when it has happened, but most of the time people I have met have felt uncomfortable both in a physical and mental sense, of being outside the generally accepted, of what is already thought and known. I have always felt genuine in the presence of the ongoing of creation, it is very powerful.

Throughout my life, I have followed a maturation process that has little to do with the material aspect of the world. It has always existed alongside the social order of which I have also been a part. I have followed intentions that were not my own but psychic motives related to an inner totality in that process. It is as if I have approached and become more and more embraced by it. And I have also always felt a physical communion with the nature that surrounds me which makes me feel as I am one with it as an aspect of that totality. This has made me aware that there is an intention and a reciprocity that follows from objects of a psychic order, and if we don’t follow its intentions, what they convey to us, we will struggle with ourselves and make our world suffer. We make it suffer from our own anger over the loss we feel from having abandoned our sense of this whole. Without being able to put it into words before, it is probably this process which I so much wanted guidance with throughout my upbringing. I wanted to put my experiences in context. But this knowledge is coming up short in the general consciousness, and not many people today have it. Thats why we become mad. Without knowing better, normality is not always good for us in a time of need. It only increases our anger and frustration. Which is why we all need to have some training in how important the integrity of our inner dialogue is.

It may never have been more obvious than now how the overwhelming psychological pressure from an outside body creates its own replacement. And how our short-sightedness between us, usually negotiated through our media, is infected by the same wound, the same violation, in the experience of how an external power creates this endless compulsive feeling of submission anger and sufferings. Of psychological pressure and compliance on collective conditions that are not based on the individual’s unique composition.
Within us, we have all experienced how social pressure, transmitted through our parents on individuals, also creates the righteous indignation we will carry within us as our own war with ourselves for the whole we once abandoned to be able to feel connected on an emotional and social level. But by seeing our own integrity being abused through others, and repeated in the world again, and without acknowledging that what we experience there, has nothing to do with us, and that it is a vulnerability that was once created on our own sense of wholeness, and that what we see are others who have also undergone the same thing, who with righteous anger also continue to expose others to the same abuse that we ourselves have been subjected to, and that the socially ”righteous” and generally accepted moral anger is nothing more than our own internal war, our own abandoned struggle för integrity seen through others. So maybe this is what humanity as a whole must do. We have to become so abominable to one another, so disgusted of what we do, that it finally is so obvious what we carrie within us, that we realize what it is to us and change, before we can actually choose another more human and individually experienced path of the whole we all have our relation to.

To be consumed by urban life is like being separated from the body, from the experiences it makes. It is to grow up in psychic loneliness, with fathers outside a tradition and be limited by forms of compulsively transferred qualities and their carriers, to get lost in the eternal between unaided, and exposed to the forces that affect us there. Our experiences become abstract absentees who does not appear from their own origin. We do not personally recognise them as the powers they are, integrated in our reality. We are kept in a material relationship with mental ”things” that have been broken away from the sensual world of our subtle body. Which is overwhelmed by the onslaught of a tone-deaf materialistic environment. We become prey for thoughts, feelings beliefs and values ​​that do not come from us, or from our own body perception, from the experiences we make, and from the mental substance it conveys. We do not see things through the senses we are made of. Or in their relation to the essence of our universal being. Anthropos in greek. Purusha in old indian belief. Radien-attje in sami. As an interaction between a form of psychic substance, a greater, objective personality, and bodily matter. It is mixed up with our personal fathers, partners and friends, becomes gendered and transmitted to different types of referenced authorities as its substitutes. But it is where it intervenes in our life, and make us aware of its presence, or make us disappear as we get absent minded. Because when we need to reflect on something, we ask our questions. We dwell in them and we get answers. We have a dialogue with our beingness. With our objective personality which we as might as well call to pray. A relationship that involve us in our surroundings, to go beyond the temporary. And this counterpart appears seemingly out of nowhere. It gives us instructions and advice that we could not have concluded with our ego’s alone. And even if others are not receptive to this, we are still involved in it, whether we like it or not. Because it is a universal principle that is eternal, without form and the one that creates a sense of oneness with all life forms. No words can make this experience justice.

There is a sense of calmness, of a telescoping of time by the mind. Which distinguishes it from the temporal world. Like having a vision of the past, present and future at the same time. And see how the same universal experiences change, gets transformed and interpreted in different historical contexts.
”the insurmountable force of reality is no longer sustaining the data of this earth, but psychical data”.
– C G Jung

I do not analyse my environment conceptually since it is embodied and emplaced in my Nature. It’s more like I spontaneously reflect on it when it is projected on me. My perception is more participatory in that, which involves an active interplay, or coupling, between my perceiving bodiness and that which it perceives as a subject to subject experience. By dwelling in a place in an embodied sensory manner, the participatory aspect of the dwelling is my way of actively participate in it, and in other persons or animals existence. But also with other autonomous agents presence of non-material substance. It’s a matter of course for me there, but most people around me usually do not have this kind of relationship to either themselves or their surroundings. Especially people consumed by their urban environments. If that is the only type of relationship we recognize, it seems almost impossible, for it usually precludes that we reflect on the interpersonal aspects that spontaneously materialize independently of our considerations both within and outside of us in our daily lives since nature is perceiving itself through us.

I think that what makes the concept of luonto so difficult to grasp for many is that it is at the same time the personal relationship to what we mean by soul while it is also the relationship to the notion of a world soul. The two are one and yet different when we experience them. One way to approach it is to discover that our experience is in the common imaginary field in which we interact with everything around us. It is where the embodiment takes place that unites us with the nature we share with everything. We experience ourselves in it with our senses, and that it is an ongoing activity that independently of us transforms itself into a another conscious experiencing through our bodies. Without them, we have no way of referring to our surroundings. Our senses remain locked in and exist without being able to convey the experience of being involved in the imaginary as a container for our being together with others. We cannot see ourselves as phenomenologically integrated with our senses in a larger whole. A presence that is strongest in relation to nature.

It does not matter if I call it thinking, feeling or perceiving, it is still forms of information I materialize in terms of my presence in a disembodied mental substance. Often we distinguish them only by what we have learned to accept and by its practical usefulness. But knowing that we are all natural elements in an undifferentiated field of forms and interacting there with a whole of which our inner center is also a part makes all the difference. That is what experience is, it determines how we should perceive the world. (see: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4217602/) We feel broken and split up if we ignore that. We turn into psychopaths disconnected from the world, and our nature becomes a threat to ourselves. We experience it with imbalances in our bodies and in our environment. No psychotropic drug can heal a river. Analgesics do not purify polluted air, or restore earth from the destruction of the soil on which everything depends. They do not fix the connection to this larger whole that is broken. It will still produce processes in symptomatic form in the biochemistry of our bodies and on earth to be adressed and integrated into our everyday life. It is the phenomenology of structural information that is transferred through time embedded in our genes.

After having met the bear several times in a psychological sense I suggest that the ceremonial bear hunt may have another side to it than what is common belief.
The killing and eating of the bear in traditional sami life may also be seen as a ritual for the renewal of spiritual beingness transferred to the bear, and a respectful ceremonial of death and rebirth in a controlled ritual hunt as an outlet for uncontrolled acts of discontent, aggression and blame that has accumulated in the community. Of powers threatening its stability. Or when the the acts of an eviscerated and repetitive social life in a city make us feel bad about ourselves. More of that further down. In the killing of the bear, it was extremely important to let the bear know that the blame was his, not theirs, and the hunters where very careful not to take any of that blame with them back from the hunt. In fact, everything involved in this ritual was about being cautious not to let the bear blame them for his murder. So the blame was transmitted on to the bear. By waking it up from its hibernation, they also awoke themselves from the slumber of social life, from casualness in relation to nature, the bear turned on them att full force. So the hunters must have been very alert and keep their heads to be able to handle the tensity and its rage. Which is the very purpose of spiritual training. Intuitively, my senses tell me that the whole hunt is more of a clensing ceremony. A ritual transfer of guilt, of handling aggression, dissatisfaction and complaints, and to put the blame on the bear for him to carry it back to the spiritworld. Ultimately, it seems that the hunt was aimed at a spiritual revivification of a group or community. We still have it today. The hunt is there but the ceremonials are gone. Our sports heroes may in part meet these ritual conditions today. Even so, it continues to live on in a hidden and distorted form outside of any ritual handling where it doesn’t belong, and we turn it loose inside the community itself and tear both the community and each other apart.
In the absence of ceremonials, or the integrity of spontaneity and visual life, this is what is happening today. We hunt indiscriminately both people and animals with our rage, and we blame them for our actions. It is how we relieve ourselves of the phenomenology of our actions, no matter how obvious it is for any bystander to actually observe that the aggression or blame are coming from us as we move it out of ourselves and place it on something else.

So the bear itself becomes the subject of our untamed forces in the hunt. For the unrestrained and antisocial behavior we have within us. But when the bear within us expresses itself, our own company is enough. He is playful but make us irritable and anyone in this state is best left alone to himself. It is a kind of social hibernation. And not a behavior for common purposes. We can meet the bear in our dreams, as the power of our raw unrestrained nature. In solitude and in the mountains. Wherever he appears, he has something important to say about the relationship we have with ourselves and others. When we have met him, he becomes a significant companion to our inner life.

The Sami have for some time seen that it is the daughters who whole heartedly continue with their way of life and the reindeer husbandry, that it is no longer a given that the sons should be and do as it always has been. That something else have been intervening in their path for some time, and it makes them look in the direction from which an interaction can take place with what is being formulated there, which is also shared by all people. There is no confusion in this. They do not pressure anyone to do anything. They listen to the sense that there is another order behind everything. And that is what it is. It’s not about gender issues, not about masculinity or what is feminine. Just about what is. I like that way of looking at things very much.

I have also found another way to put it. In a sense it is even more about what is, because the world as such is so stripped off off it. Which makes it very difficult to absorb. And if I had not had any experience of what is described here in extremely abstract terms, I would not even grasp what is being said. Experiences are really difficult to translate into words without them becoming stereotypical or scientificated. I understand what he’s referring to but not what he’s saying. Here it it is.

”The archetypes of the collective unconscious, as projected into consciousness, are thought to bring objects of affects which influence the formulation of ’self’ postulates. This interaction between unconscious archetype and traditional environmental components causes a reinforcement between the two aspects. Aided or abetted by the temporal it creates conflicts with the ’read-out’ of archetypal material through the stages of life development from birth to death.” -Joel Taylor Ryce.

We are all the same if this unconscious material is not reflected back from our consciousness in the physical world. We mysteriously emerge from this pre-conscious whole, and in its undifferentiated field of forms were are all natural elements where each may transform into the existence of the other and change presence from its bodiless psychic substance. I think every child knows what I am talking about.

For some time now I have experienced that I live i two worlds, one that is about our interior processes, which are part of a totality that surrounds us, defined as psychology, and one that is about biochemical processes that is facts about our physical or bodily world and I am going to use an answer made by Jordan Peterson to a Q and A he had about where he thinks Jung was wrong to illustrate my point (link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjBkKDvjbFc&ab_channel=PhilosophyInsights). For me it is not about wether Mr Peterson is right or wrong. Or if Jung is wrong, or some psychological school is preferable to another in some way. I am just building my reasoning inspired by what Mr Peterson said. Because we are all inspired to do things. We are captivated by forces that originates from a shared totality beyond our control(see, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4217602/). They create purposes, or our participation in their order of them. One of those psychological powers, or spontaneous independent forms of information is often materialised as a form of a hero. Most commonly in sports but also academically. It may also be depicted such as Geb in egyptian mythology, Radien-giedde in Sami, or Sicun in Lakota. Apart from any concrete form it is psychic energy. Or the energy that makes us ignore our physical Nature and endure or do what we otherwise would not be capable to. It has nothing to do with if we are extroverted, practically oriented, or introverted, creative and socially oriented. We all materialise this energy into specific forms and goes beyond our ordinary self. Introverts may have a disposition that makes it more natural for them to be aware of it as opposed to extroverts. Anyway, in sports today we may take someone we admire and let him or her channel that energy and then we formulate its intensity to be able to focus its expression into certain uses. It’s the same in the academical world. When that is done there are biochemical processes that will fire in our bodies which in turn will make us go beyond our present physical condition and for example build mass, increase our responsiveness and spatial attention. This kind of energy produces matter and make us access information that cannot be solely explained by our bodily appearance only. Our hero’s in any kind of sport can attest to that. In the film matrix, this is shown in a wonderful way in that Neo still has to learn by practicing digital or imaginary simulations, in order to later be introduced to and consciously connected to the matrix. Where he finally experience the true origin of his powers. It is our relation to the experience of the psychological forces behind our imagination that inspires the physical processes to make this possible. We can measure them and detect them as they fires. But that is not being exposed to them. To endure them. To learn something. They are our shared human experiences and they connect us to that or make us sick, pointing out psychological imbalances through our bodies biochemistry, and tell us if we are heading in the right or wrong direction. This is how we learn about morality. In the actual world they are what influences biochemical processes, which shows us a different order in life through how they affect us. If we experience an inner urge that we must change, it is a message that is about our relationship to our inner self, to listen, not that we must change how we look to others. If we go beyond todays materialistic obsession and reverse engineer our approach to life, we will discover our presence in that reality. Whatever we call it, these ”forms” are our teachers and inspirers. They will affect us physically. Just like the Great Mother Earth once taught us agriculture by showing us the constant return of everything. The biochemical processes they materialize in our bodies is where psyche and body meets and are what make us receptive to their influence and to change, to learn about our consciousness in its widest sense.

Think about what we have to be subject to and go through both physically and mentally if we want to gain general recognition without a personal sense of our shared totality. Not for what we are in ourselves there. But for what we may represent of it to others. Not many can even imagine what we are exposed to when we try to achieve a recognition that does not come from us, from demands that are not our own, but from an outside shared source that is independent of us, and from other peoples inability to expose themselves to what it takes to learn to accept what it is to us. Some even put their lives at risk to attain it. That is often called heroism, and it is a wonderful thing to draw psychic inspiration from as it drives us from a common psychic totality from which it originates. It captivates us and makes us a little crazy but it’s not the only energy out there. It just seems to be the only one who gets to express himself because it is generally accepted. Or the only one we have learnt to accept in shared use. But there are many others.

Being condescending, diminish, ridiculing or teasing someone is a way we use to reject with a disguised form of aggression qualities, feelings and experiences we all have but which we can not acknowledge or carry within ourselves because they show us our vulnerability, and question how we want to look at ourselves. Our lack of or lost sense of wholeness does not allow it. So we give in to the feeling of guilt we have because we do not allow ourselves the influence it has over us, and we transfer the content that we have difficulty dealing with to others by being insensitive. We see and experience it around us every day at a personal level, collectively with our elected representatives, how our companies present themselves, and in how people want to control how we should perceive what they convey to us. For most of us, this becomes a kind of second nature. We lose our inner whole to this at an age when we have not yet learned to defend ourselves. It is deprived of us by those who matter most because they have also lost it in their adaptation to the collective ego and to its artificial collective personality. If we do not have a traditional setting to compensate for our loss we truly become lost. We have no way of navigating through the content of our shared totality.

It is truly part of our primordial setup to be part of a psychic totality. Of psychic space. To feel contained in it. Both as a kind of protection from the intrusion of others, from all kinds of cultural psychic colonisation. But also as an emotional container where we feel safe and grounded in an earthy way, with a strong connection to Nature, so that we can protect ourselves from other people’s need to see themselves through us, to oppress us with their views. But also to be able to confirm it in person as an activity that relies within the realm of our mutual psychic experience. It is animism as congenital native psychology in all of us. Collectively speaking, this is what has been distorted, and which we then transfer to domestic and foreign policy. On a personal level though, it is about the integrity of a shared experience of this totality so that its psychic states are made possible. To exclude our presence there is, of course, what creates the psychopathy that is the current dominant view of life. Most of us take for granted that our collective behavior is ”normal” when in fact it creates psychopaths. At an industrial level, we train people to become laborers, we do not support one another to develop into humans.

I have this impulsive, ruthless and enchanting psychic subpersonality that is closely associated with the cultural ego in me. It is intensely fascinated by ideas, and all its insignificant facts that are constantly added to them in a mixed flow of timelessness. He sees and produces things that most of us do not want to know about. It makes me disrespectfully give in to him, and go beyond my true presence of what I am in my relationships. He is the side of my being that is close to Nature. Instinctive and erratic. He embodies the mountains, the forest, the earth. He unites them in me and hates the very purpose of form-bound thought. Facts are something that usually only confirms this. Therefore, words are just energy. He sees them instead as parts of a living process, of experiences in relation to a larger perceived whole where the thought does not reach in itself. So the cultural ego becomes his destructive opponent. Something that is far from what he represents in a world where the obvious is not always visible to the naked eye, but something we reach through our inner center that is also what exists in everything, everywhere around us.

Being infantile means not acknowledging the psychic content we can only acquire through experience. This means that we have a relationship to an invisible, experiential content, which we use to describe intentions produced by a spontaneous background content that affects how we relate to ourselves, and our surroundings. If we do not actively participate in the knowledge that our experiences convey, we cannot see it within ourselves, or in others. Instead we replace our nature, or luonto with rational concepts and terms that lack that background knowledge. This will then control the abstract imagined reality that we use to replace any kind of genuine human relationships we have with each other. Other people’s well-being and integrity are not something that will be taken into account. Rules and regulations, ideas and formalised behaviors, all that is generally accepted and recognized as a sense of duty, may instead replace human considerations. They also become fiercely defended. We relate to them instead of to each other and our own and others’ immediate reality. We then lose our personal considerations. Our sensitivity to each other and sincere consideration that everything in the whole that surrounds us is personally experienced. Our reality becomes completely abstract and everything that opposes it in the form of other people’s experiences or the physical presence of the world becomes its opponent. We are no longer a part of it. Our undeveloped psychic beingness excludes us from it. We remain unaware of our psychic life in a contradictory world that we create for ourselves outside the whole of which it is a part. We constantly create tensions that can only be resolved through sacrifice. So we blame our own lack of human consideration on others, on those who do not live up to our needs for control in our ideal abstract world where no real life can exist.
Obviously, one really has some serious work to do.

Since most people do not know the other person they have within them, as they are constantly trying to get proselytes for what they have put together for others to like that they like in themselves. If others then do not agree with how this substitute for the inner person wants to be seen, they turn them into opponents or enemies of the image they have created to be able to still live up to its expectations. They do not sense the timelessness that the other person within us is showing to us. Which is also where we meet him or her in silence. It is the absolute loneliness we share with everyone, where words can not really reach to describe the dialogue we have in common in this greater whole. Or the endless repetitions we submit ourselves to when we try to ignore this raw experience of Nature . It surrounds us at the same time as it is the inner center of our being. We see it in people all around us when they become reflective. They disappear into it. Into our need to be there, to merge with this greater sense of ourselves and its Nature. Most often though, people just try to recruit followers to what we want to live up to through others. We create a kind of constant creed that we proclaim in one way or another and the whole that surrounds us becomes our adversary through others. They must follow us, or defend themselves from our needs to control what we want them to like about us. In many respects this is the equivalent of the ”Modern” workings of magical ”spells” to trigger psychological effects on a person or an object. We are lost in the magical contradictions of our senses and an artificial morality that is not based on how things are, but how we want them to be. And that is constantly confirmed by the objectors we find in everyone around us that have an opinion of their own. But in our personal experience of a surrounding whole there is no one else to confront but us, the person within and the timelessness that comes with him. It is our own personal discussion with the wordlessness of experience. Here we are all alone, and most people are so scared of it that they do almost anything to avoid it. To destroy the integrity of others is of no concern to them. I think this solitude is the main quality we have that we can share with everyone else. This is just som basic facts about experience. Without them, life will make no sense, and the first indicator that we need to listen up is when we start to complain about things. We have neglected this relation, and we need to reconnect. When I look at our society today I wonder if people ever going to find it. We seem so far removed from this that complaining is all that they can do. It is a horrible personal situation in any collective, and it is getting worse.

There always becomes a difficulty in relations between people when we are not actively involved in the knowledge that we are producing. Something that we early on confuse with our personal fathers, and authority. Even more so when consciousness is not understood as an existential presence of meaning and purpose within the spatial sense of a totality. When we do not move unconditionally in its own time and space. In the human sphere of it. Our center get too mixed up with the circumference of everywhere. We find all kinds of character traits there that belongs to humanity as a whole. And all people have access to them in this wholeness. But to be human is to be authentic to the specifics of our own individuality. We have to become real persons of what is given to us personally there. There is a Sami way to put it, albma-olmmos. A real, genuine person. We may recognise or even identify ourselves with many human qualities, but only a few of them are instrumental to us as we recognise them in the space of our own beingness between nature and culture. Also, we are not the only acting subjects of influence in that environment. Presence goes far beyond the human domain. There are sacred places where that reveals itself to us independently of the constitution of our own nature. In sami they have been called livvasadji. And a special dialog appears there. By listening to it a place become more alive than it was though to be before. We have been drawn into a subject-to-subject experience were we actively participate in it and become objects to its existence. We sense it in a place as togetherness, and in an embodied sensory manner. But most people I know of cannot stay here too long because they get confused. The forces that affect us there threatens to overwhelm them. So they must be transformed and cultivated by them. It is important to know that the sami words I put into context here are traditional references to actual living experiences, not academic terms or concepts. And that beyond them, there is another kind of consciousness were we are present in a non-conceptual way. We perceive it as it unfolds to us. Where there is no separation between body and psyche. Where we become parts of a process with many intentional origins, and a direct subject to subject sharing of presence. And as I mentioned before, there are many voices, but only a few of them put our own thoughts and experiences together. Indeed, only a few actors has an integral part of our aspect of nature, and through them we communicate with the environment as a whole where we mutually co-create a sense of this totality by the sharing of a beyond in our own subjectivity. Places then become actors of influence to us in their own right.

In most traditional contexts, people have discovered that if we do not recognise the larger whole of which our interior is a part, meahcci in sami, which is all around us at the same time that it is what we relate to as our absolute center, our essence, it will turn against us. If we do not meet it when it seeks us with the equivalent of what we are, then we will become completely immersed in the game of opposites within us. We get lost in ourselves, and we believe that is the way it should be. We become absorbed by egoism and self-pity which are important feelings for any five year old learning about this influences on him or her. And to adults in their re-initiation to this experience. We tend to believe that the psychic pain this wholeness creates in us is emerging from those around us, not from our attitude towards its appearence. This will be our way of relating to our surroundings. It is determined by how we perceive our relationship to it. Not that everything there is, is also part of a greater experience of a shared totality which also contains all our human qualities. This is why people in traditional cultures confront this, in order to be able to see themselves and what they experience as something both within and outside of them in a much larger context. Its a calling from nature itself. To search for it in our psychic heritage and see how our ancestors encountered these forces. What they are in themselves, as the nature we share with everything around us. It is both a wonderful and an extremely painful experience. It is also where we find true heroism, not heroism by comparison. That is probably why most people stay in a world of opposites all their life, and unknowingly create it for all there is around them. Locked in an affection to psychic life lived through others, or ideals as a substitute for morals. From a numinous point of view, we become cattle. I think this is what is referred to when we we speak of hell. We are all in opposition to our greater sense of life at one time or another, whether we will confront it or not is the question each of us must find an answer to within ourselves.

The source that I relate to as my center, my psychological experience of my body, is also the flow of a whole which circumference is everywhere. It is the Nature of my body in an etheric sense. A container for my human form. Being with that around most people I know of, is like being battered into a constant standby mode. We always seem to be missing out, switching instead between a thousand identities, or attitudes, infecting everyone and everything around us in our search for the true physical experience of the body, and its connection to Nature. Mixing everything up. This is what we experience when it independently of us disrupts our natural flow of consciousness to make us listen to it, when it want’s us to recognise what it is. We feel an urge to seek it out. We need to go out, to spend time for ourselves outdoors were we can get a first hand experience of our body’s connection to nature, and a proper look at what we see in ourselves, what that place is. The qualities and perceptions, temporary identities and attitudes that we think we are, but that are a semblance of parts belonging to everyone. We come to see that everything is a shared human experience that we transform into knowledge. Without this psychological relation to our body, we have no ground, no container, we are lost. When Nature intervenes, we get distracted from our usual attitude towards life. She tries to bring us back. We can call it what we want, but if we do not listen we become sick. We become hollow materialistic psychopaths and we don’t even know it. Our relationships to life become something we use to fulfill selfish purposes, not something we relate to through what we are. We all have a relationship with that madness, and the psychopath we have within us that appears when we have lost our relationship to nature, that is, the container that is the bearer of our inner being. We believe that our rational attitude relieves us from the ”madness” of spontaneity, but without our container we are helpless, and all the common human qualities we do not want to recognize as part of our nature, which are now out of control, we blame on other people. It is the ”other” human qualities we do not want to recognize as our own. We tend to stop living in a bodily world and get lost in the contradictions that arise in our abstractions of what it should be, instead of what it is. We become mad.

A part of me has always been an outer wholeness, a form of the earth in constant development, as its mind in a greater sense. Because it is what I belong to. Where I am. That is from where everything originally emerged, and I am part of it as it also is in the absolute center of my being. And in that sense, I have never been able to find my place as part of the environment that characterizes how we should look at ourselves today, in which it is thought that we should think of ourselves only as features of different kinds of attitudes. Not as a process that is both within us and outside of us. Instead, I have always felt outside the mechanical view of what I should be, and to what my relationship to myself actually is. Because I am part of this psychic architecture that i was borne with, which I cannot convert to our mechanical view of life. But I have learned to identify with it in a number of attitudes that allow me to relate to its character. How it want’s to be seen, which I then applied to it. Faces to put on and take off, because I have not had a physical guide in my environment to give me directions on how one’s true being should be expressed there. So what was my true being was turned down by me for safety when I was younger, but it has constantly tried to merge with that larger whole that it is part of. So in the end, it was no longer possible to wear any of these attitudes, they begun to sound hollow to me, and feel like old worn-out clothes. The human in me rebelled. It really felt like I had to turn back to my being again. To get closer to who I really was. The problem was that it also became impossible to return to any of that which I once were, and to how it also repeated itself all around me. It is easy to establish oneself in the hollowness of people and get anaesthetized, and just reuse old attitudes as identities of what once was. Clingin to hopes that are no longer realistic, unless they are lived through others. Or to ideas that are no longer ours. There is an overwhelming resistance to translate our inner essence into our true personal reality. To find the connection to our beingness again, but anew. Instead, this is where alcohol and immutable or rigid ideals often comes into the picture.

In Sami, meahcci is the interaction between what we are and time as a series of events unfolding from a state that is both a wholeness that surrounds us, at the same time as it is what we experience as the essence of our being. This gives us a way to interact with what something is through the relationship we have to what it is as experienced from within life. In this sense one can speak of an inter-subjectivity, meaning a direct subject-to-subject sharing of presence. Meahcci is neither nature nor culture, local or non-local, but both, and no one. It is the practice of our mind as it is expanded into the encounter with consciousness as something spatial. Of observation and relational participation in both its visible and invisible aspects. Meaning and information are not something that is transported by a concept of time, it is an integral part of consciousness as space, of wholeness, expressing itself in forms of experience right now. History, like our personal memory, is how a collective have learnt to imagine it. It is not always our personal interaction with existence. That is why it is absolutely fundamental for our psychic health to find out what it means in a world were what unfolds is intended, were our extended sense of being is what generates practices of knowledge and enchantment. A knowledge emerging from generations of participation in all kinds of inter-subjective processes of periodic recurrence. Perhaps this is the greatest gift the Sami can share with us.

If I experience earth as a whole, that every mineral, every biological substance, and every biochemical process of earth is part of what I am, then it is not difficult to see that the physical aspect of me is something made of an Earth alive in itself, of earth as my psychological experience of my body. Because my perceptions and experiences of this is not something that is in me. It is the consciousness of my psychic Nature that is in them. It’s a wonderful mystery how it got there. And then to have a more subtle version of myself which is my psychic beingness at the same time as it is this surrounding whole, an inner hub, and a center. The very essence of myself. If I do not experience my consciousness as if it participates in that way, I become mentally frozen. An ideologist with a completely artificial personality, and a child left out to the forces that affect it. I will lose the balance between me and myself. I will become materialistic and either exclude the relationship I have to everything, and its contact to our surrounding origin of a psychological whole, or I exaggerate how I transform it into something tangible. I will loose the relationship that makes me feel a sense of harmony, of participation. I do not hear my own voice, and I definitely do not listen to the voice of the earth. I do not participate in life then, or experience its sense of wholeness. Which is painful on several levels. But mostly when I see how this relationship mutually affects the physical experience we have in the encounter with ourselves, and how our physical life then suffers from it.

I do not reject other people. I just find it increasingly difficult to associate with people who try to replace me with themselves because they feel outside the conversation we must have with the wholeness that is constantly within us, in our immediate vicinity and that surrounds us. In this space we also connect to the forces that protect and strengthen that relationship we have to ourselves, to Nature and to the earth as a body in a cosmic setting. Through our conversation with that wholeness, we keep it intact and sense a balance in this context because it is then a part of us at the same time as we are a part of it. It is in this that I feel that I have direct access to the connections that exist all around us.
How disturbed are we not if we constantly must try to go between others and themselves, to find ourselves between anyone or anything and that? Because this is the relationship we all have in common, and what creates this something that we see and connect to in everything around us. The absence of this is also what creates the feeling that there is something wrong with the world. But it is us. What we neglect in relation to this psychic essence within this space that is our experience of being in an outer wholeness. Which is also what exists as a volatile presence in everyone around us. Do we want what is real or do we want to live in what it was before? Do we want what makes us real or do we just want to fill others with our own inner opposites?
By evicting others from themselves, we replace their contact with their inner center with the opposites that are our own, with our own conflicts between this something that is at the center of us that is also made of what is the whole of what we are in. No one wants to end up in an oppositional relationship between our inner center and its corresponding sense of an outer whole. No one wants to live without that context. But we must find out what it is, how, and where it wants to appear to us. For the sake of this world, we should all have been allowed to be carried by the genuine sense of beingness that the original whole gives us, which we have a constant living contact with in our lives. It should not form the basis of the conflict we have with ourselves, and with ourselves through others. Or with how it relates us to Nature. I really respect the helplessness I sense in others here. What I also sensed in my parents at an early age. Their need to deny that it challenges a culturally oppressed relationship they carried within them. The absence of an affirmation, ritual or otherwise, of the need we have to be in the immediate presence of what it is, and to really be part of its larger context. But this is the ”job” we must do for ourselves. If I do it to me, I do it to others too. They do not have to defend themselves or suffer the opposites I have within me then.

One of the most basic experiences we are forced to learn in early adolescence, it is emphasized and supported by an unconscious environment in the absence of a cultural vessel that can carry it, is to abandon our inner center’s presence in the experience of a larger whole, which diminish us to pieces of our collective psychic material as ideas, reducing what we are to physical spare parts of public life, thereby separating us from our personally experienced singularity’s embodiment of that wholeness whereby our inner center’s portion of a larger psychic whole and its experience-based common origin gets lost. We are forced to relate to our being as something that is divided into infinite pairs of opposites outside our own inner center. And to handle it, we seek our identity in various parts of these contradictions, and force the larger whole to carry that in our identity we cannot come to terms with. Which then becomes what we must learn to reject and replace in order to be accepted in this greater belonging in our new superficial modern life. We blame that wholeness because it now consists of what is unbearable in that polarity. So the greater whole of which everything are a part of, will be what have to bear what is irreconcilable with the public image we have of what it should be, and then we place that in our environment. This will turn us into the plague of madness we ourselves are objects to, and spread it to others. Without the presence of a personal container for this we will turn on each other. That is what we do. We just become trained psychopaths. Because all kinds of extreme opposites occur within individuals who put ones singularity against its part of a wholeness where we exclude the opposites that reign there in us all. It is truly a painful stretch to go through, and a lot easier to go ego picking with an artificial morality.

Everything we see and experience is a realized expression of our own, someone, or something else’s whole, and as such it is much more significant than all transient phases of temporary physical states, because they are parts of a whole’s original source, its psychic essence, its being. This is what we see in others and also convey by ourselves, which will also always appear as something volatile and intangible and which is represented in all the different biological and psychological processes in which we and everything else are part of. These are the motives we timelessly repeat in every moment of our lives, through this whole and in our personal history as a cultural expression of a conceptually indeterminate organized theme. Through that, we see our inner center as an extension of this greater presence of Nature because that is a part of us at the same time as everything in our center is part of that. We constantly oscillate between the two, in a kind of polarity of opposites as we conceptually constantly transform our impressions of all the different components and phases that this whole expresses, into different definable physical realities. In this way, everything becomes an individual singularity of the content of this totality. But we express it in its parts. As a collective mind we seem to have lost our ability to see the immediacy in which it is expressed, which is our basic human way of relating to our personal existence. Instead we begin to discern only the parts we want to see in ourselves in it. And see our ego as an identity in parts that creates their opposites outside the whole they are part of. Not that these are the qualities we all have and share in this greater experience of our being.

The sun is not only a celestial body, it also has an appointed psychic reality. As such, it is as much the experience of light as consciousness as it is the light of the day. The bringer of vision, of making us the recipients to mediate the potentiality of everything that is in a cosmic darkness. To observe the transformation of psyche to matter, and the experience of the circles of life. In this way, as the night sky and the earth are separated by him, he is borne by their embrace. And as such they are part of us. We are part of this within us at the same time as it is also the infinite totality that is all around us. We are as one as everything is one to us. And everything we do in this greater oneness we also do to ourselves. Thats like the law of reciprocity. If we do not listen to it, we get lost in contradictions and go mad. If we only acknowledge one side, identify us with it, we run the risk of becoming its all in oneness, we believe we are the only truth. That there is only one tangible and exterior version of life, and in that one sidedness, we try to disown its effect on us. But in the common totality in which we also are, all the qualities we see in ourselves and in others, all these opposites are also our own. They are qualities in the psychic essence that exist both in us, and in that larger whole that we experience in everything, both as something we are part of, and as something within ourselves. It is only in this extended sense of beingness we do not infect others with ourselves. Where we not only choose to acknowledge those qualities who allow us to accept our compromise with others.

In me there is this center, the source and the essence of my being. In its outer sense, it is like a vast extension of my childhood village. Its surrounding nature together with everything that was in it. Its circumference is everywhere. At the same time as I am contained in that, it is also in me. But it has its center in all that is in that too. It is both an ambient greatness and a personal essence that acts independently of both, but surrounds us all. Denying that, is a denial of what we are. We are just going to feel misplaced and get sick. The loss also makes it turn against us. Its like a common constantly present endemic disease making people go mad. It creates an ever-growing anxiety, and a readiness to argue and to fight, to all kinds of heroism, including its dark sides, which deprives us of ourselves. Like patriotism, nationalism and terrorism to name a few current ones. Heroism is what we do when the integrity of that center is challenged. The rest is just ego. It is our derailed resistance of being dehumanized and turned into mere functions. When our container is lost, every one of us with this disease will also deny it in others. Making others feel bad about themselves, or even having the right to their own personal connection to life, or a genuine relation to Nature as a greater beingness and its essence in us and other people. It seems that our external one-sidedness has created a polarity between them within us, we say that we are either outward-looking or inward-looking. While it is in fact a division of this inner essence and its outer circumference. In traditional finnish belief this is luonto, and luontohaltija. An interaction between our being and its equivalent in parts of the earth, a place or a landscape. In that, we are also part of the way our ancestors influence us. Because their, and everything’s essence is part of an expanded sense of this personal experience on a larger scale. We often call it a little half-hearted remnants of memory, and psychologize it just to conceptually try to control the influence that the content has over us and others. But in that way we only separate ourselves from our relationships to our participation in a larger whole. They are the ones giving us directions, and a clear voice at the center of what we are. And that center is our common destiny. Either we do not listen to it, or it may be that not everyone has access to the quality that our ancestors have in this way. Rituals are a way of confirming their existence, to interact with what they are, not to unconditionally submitting to them.

In the study of beliefs and traditional thinking it is not often recognised that it is a philosophical study of empirical facts with both a psychological and physical impact on people crossing over several generations that has to be considered. Remove the barrier of the skin and we come closer to what kind of experience I refer to. Just like what we call science, but with personal experience used as its main body of communication with phenomena. This is the approach of people to the forces experienced in their environment which is the sources of traditional life. It is the awareness of the backgroundforms of these forces that are studied, which are then approached by the visionary traditions that formulate both ours and their beliefs. Language is metaphorically used in a pictorial narrative to describe the occurences of this mutual interaction, and its coherency with experienced similarities over long periods of time. It has also to be recognised that this is not common to all individuals. There is always only a small number of people with these abilities that carry on this kind of work. Which is evident in our world today too. This kind of psychological insights is not commonplace, not even today. It has never been. I think it is so because of what must be personally endured to get there. What I think is of great importance in this, is the early experience of a psychic totality of nature in a greater sense, of which everything in an individual’s life is part as something both within, and without. Where our skin is not a barrier to experience the world. It is more of a continual relationship that is strengthened and developed in clear personal phases during an individual life in traditional contexts. That experience is both its physical center and its psychological totality. In the sense of a reciprocal relationship to a world in constant creation and related to cosmos. This totality is a psychically experienced and jointly shared container found in everything, and also something tangible that constantly affects all life in and around us. By having this present and shared by generations within a community, a psychological continuity is maintained because it is defined as part of both humans and the surrounding nature. Outside of this there is confusion, exclusion in the sense of a personal loss of an inner center in an external shared psychological context, which in turn leads to madness. It is in this way that I imagine that many indigenous peoples with traditional knowledge look at the rest of the world today. I share this view with them.

It’s been a while since I wrote this. I felt I needed to post this again for two reasons. Partly for my inner balance, and partly for the significance it has for the experience of a relationship to a larger ecological context. The two belong together and affect me alternately all the time. Hence its significance for my balance because it is a constant shift of the center that exists in everything, It is an inner source of being while also encompassing the whole of our existence. It is not only what grant us our true existence, what is the least respected between us, but also what is most rejected within us and is our constant loss in life. It is that rejection that makes us stand outside it, and feel that we are not entitled to it.

In the northern parts of Finland, Sweden and Norway there has been a wonderful metaphorical language to describe inner experiences in relation to life, and in relation to the environment. People related to these local forces and occupants called haltijas. They were both male and female and could be found everywhere in nature. Everything was related to everything else by individual haltijas. It was peoples relation to the soul of the world in something like an objective relation to Nature. They were conceptually perceptible in the elements where they were experienced in the form of väkis. Also, they were locally connected to the land as impersonal powers or sub-souls to be aware of since they attracted peoples attentions from all around them. Misplaced or otherwise not treated well, they could become a disturbance and even cause illnesses. In this sense, they were experienced as personalities, or agents of a numinous experience of nature. There are still people who pay attention to them today. A persons haltija was called luontohaltija, and was the personal entrance to the inside of Nature. Here they were equal in substance to that of the experience of the väki’s. People had a relation to them through their own Nature, or luonto. Later metaphors for luontohaltijas is the more technical term psyche and the concept of a soul. And as part of a person, luonto was the shared ”nature”, the personal experience of the world soul. With their itse, and its connection to the underlying universal field of energy, people had a personal communication with the original autonomous patterns of nature. Luonto was both part of a person, and part of something else. It was separate of him as a power outside of his control, as was the väki’s and haltijas in his immediate environment. But he could also have a relation to the numinous sensation of the elements, and have a personal communication with the ancestors, to get instructions from them. Which in itself offered an access to another view of the world. They were asked to help, to contribute knowledge, and by accepting them, take the ancestral spirits into the world of the living as luonto. Relationships of this kind were never far away. In close vicinity to my childhood village there was a tarn. I was told when I was young that it was bottomless. That it opened up to something else. It made me respect it, because a depth of that magnitude scared me. It had a frightening quality about it that was coming from my own lack of understanding an experience of that metaphorical indescribability. And I had trouble dealing with that. I knew then that it was somehow inhabited. And whatever it was that appeared from it, it came from an invisible mirror world behind mine. Later I also learned that from beyond of my physical life, a life force emerged that transformed mind into culture. This generating power, libido or henki also permeated all life. It contained the background forms of everything. Mediating between my worlds. But its full realisation was the vision of the loss of our body. Who’s skin is our barrier to the full extent of the experience of our inner world. Of the timeless aspects of consciousness in the vision that it is the body that is an apparition. When we have obtained the sense that only our bones remains of what we once were, some knowledgeable people saw this as they had attained their true form. A more complete body. Something that we can also achieve in life. These people were called tietäjä’s or noadi’s. They had another kind of knowledge. And it was based on the personal experience of having a human form to answer to. A voice of our own. Influenced by an ancestor with a specific knowledge for us to bring into the world.

It feels as if I am one with, and facing, a masculine presence of earth at the same time as it is an embodied psychic quality embraced by a feminine cosmic totality. This experience is not based on my external senses, for my body perception is also, and maybe even more so, composed of my psychic experiences of it. This in turn explains not only our blunt view of all physicality. But also the pathological relationship we have learnt to have to our bodies in our current society. We seem to have forgotten the psychic integrity that comes from the conditions that our physical impressions of beingness mediates. Our body perception derives from our psychological relationship to it, not from the mechanical worldview we place it in. It is from the image we have of it, that we then decide how we should relate to the world. How we look at all our relations. That is what determines our relationship to nature. Through our bodies we experience a dimension that is never understood by rational means alone. Our bodies becomes more like some kind of imaginary vessels we try to contain that dimension in, and in that psychic space we are subject to our emotional and imaginary states, which we experience through a physical embodiment of our relation to nature. But in there, they act on us, independently. We even have a tendency to burden our surroundings with it. With all that this dimension contains.

Here I immediately hear a voice saying; ”How can you treat sky woman in that way?”, It is the voice of the earth. ”She belongs to the sky. If you do, the sun will not be able to rise, or find its way there. Our sun is how she becomes aware of us, it is consciousness, we will live in constant darkness without it.”, ”Our space will lack dimension.”, ”Your body will become empty”. ”Nothing in this world will have any content. That content will cease to exist.”, ”Is that what you want?” Of course not, I said, that’s why I greet her and you every morning at sunrise, to acknowledge how important you are for me. ”Good! He said, and went into silence”. But he is still there. Listening to us. He is always there. That is how it works.

No matter how much I tried when I was young, I had a hard time feeling a real physical presence in what I was doing. My body was there, and it had its own inherent needs, but it was beyond the psychic experience of the totality of which I was a part. They were a bit in opposition to each other. I did not experience my body as a part of, or as a content of, it. My ego instead tried to do the opposite by letting this sense of a wholeness become subordinate and adapting it to the expectations of others. So the psychic experience of an embodied world was never part of the whole I was in. Although the experience of this whole was more intense and more present to me. The physical presence was therefore not a conscious part of the kind of interaction that transforms psychic experiences into physical reality. Which is what makes us feel real. It was not considered as something we needed to have access to from the time we ended up in school age. I never did abandon it, even though I for a long period of time suffered terribly because that was what I really was. Maybe this is the personal madness we all share and have to go through. Maybe there is no other way to find out what we are, what it really means to be there, to be the one who we are. We just have to suffer it out, all the way until we just know. That’s why I now think that excessive normality is a kind of standardized madness. And as a consequence of this, my embodied physical presence in this psychic totality has never been more intense than it is right now.