- and not fall into the trap of "being a person who has managed to stop being a person" (like some "celebrity nonperson")

The nonperson is natural, he is Nature

Nature is desire without ego

and destruction without evil

But these faculties are associated with "blindness". Nature is innocent because of being "blind", purely ruled by instinctual (in the case of animals) or causal conditions (for socalled "inanimate matter").

To stop being a person is not to become a "beast". Then the dictators and evildoers of human history could serve as our models.

Let's outline the exact opposite path. To stop being a person and at the same time live with increased awareness.

An awareness that is unforced, natural, choiceless, spontaneous, free in every direction

The first thing to do is to learn to love oneself. Love and accept oneself. Love ones eternal and essential nature, the higher self, but also ones weird and complex temporal "person-self". Eventually, with time, the distinction and separation between these two poles of ones being could, optimally, merge into one.

To love oneself is to forget oneself. Then life begins. Until we forget ourselves, we are too much engaged with our fears and hangups. The good and the bad... the rollercoaster will be forever moving. To be attached to ones own name and fame, and the perceived enemies and friends... Sometimes it degenerates to the point that it takes nearly all of ones time and energy.

So the reason to love oneself is to be able to forget oneself. To flow with life and See other people, their beauty and their genuine needs.

Being a person here is meant as "the persona", from latin, "mask". It's our egoself, fully engaged in our external parts. Looks, reputation etc.

Being a person means you cannot really see anything or anyone. To be fully engaged in ones personhood means projecting ones own stuff wherever one is looking.

To stop being a person is to let go of the world. Not the natural world, but the world of stories. The manmade world, the toxic society spun out of generations of wounded egos striving to arrive at the top (of the other egos). These are childrens games, and often hurtful, harming and killing along the way.

To flow with the "good" and the "bad", "success" and "failure", whatever comes, but without neither turning away from it nor being hypnotized by it.

It sounds like the Dao, sometimes called taoism. Many wisdomtraditions touch upon this.

What is called "inferior emotions" makes it hard. Among these the worst may be aversion, which is why love is so important, beginning with unconditional selflove. This is the recipe for peace of mind, freedom from the inner tyrant.

The modern self has become so much like a hungry ghost, it is almost insatiable. This makes mental disease and suffering into huge problems. Whether you live naked alone on the top of a mountain or elegantly dressed in the middle of city life is of minor importance. As long as there is a continuous inner story rolling inside the mind, the ascetic on the top of the mountain is miserable. But without this "narrator" the city man is free, if at the same time living with a heart that is open, soft and an awareness that is lucid, present and without choice.

THE ULTIMATE DREAMSELF

The celebrated person, the one we dream of, being admired, successful, gaining fame and merit and so on, is EXACTLY the same as the one who suffers. One cannot have one without the other. Looking for admiration means hating rejection, and so on...

That is the kind of path where freedom will be out of reach. The less of a person is there, the more the inner gifts can unfold without being disturbed or corrupted.

HOW TO DO IT

One cannot just stop being a person from one day to the other. It takes time, practice. But it is an unpracticed practice and an effortless effort. It is silent maturation. The path is to learn to love, but also see, know and be with the whole of ones personality. Not just the celebrated parts. All of it.

To accept it, but not buy too much into it, all the "cute" or not so cute, maybe painful, stories. Be with them without judgement. Seeing, detached like a wise parent, holding ones own psyche like a mother holding the child.

NOT A GREAT SALESPITCH

To stop being a person will sound Very Unattractive to most people.

But it is just one way of putting it.

In reality, one might very well never stop being a person completely - that is, become fully free...

In any case it is no use making it a goal in and of it self. That could leed to selfdeluded behaviour. Roaming around, careless, but still in a pretense, just fully unconscious about it...

Like a fake holy man, fake guru. This is not good. You need not search too long before you'll find several such examples.

That's why the Path is through virtue

To unbecoming a person, to flower into a non-being being, is possible through lightness.

Lightness comes from harmlessness. Harmlessness is not weakness, it is having removed the source of hatred within. This means having uprooted the inner separation, living in the unified self, the One Self.

This automatically fulfills every virtue: compassion, kindness, selflessness, justice etc

At the same time it works the opposite way. The path of virtue is the force flowering the selfless, unified Self.

It is the kind of virtue that becomes effortless, automatic. It is not for show, planned. It is wu wei - "doing no-doing". Doing without a doer. This sounds very theoretical. But it means being so fully present that there is no separation. This implies no spectator, no little commentator sitting on the shoulder.

It is full awareness without selfawareness

We all know this state, but unconsciously. It is the flow state. It is natural to our animal self, our body.

So, the practice is to fuse this natural, but unconscious state with awareness. The very first stages are of course typically meeting ones inner critic, fear, distraction etc.

But eventually we can have short moments of full lucidity without the common small self, the narrator being present.

🌹

It is a taboo, and even a "dangerous" suggestion to anyone on the early stages of the path towards this. Which includes myself. But let's say it anyway:

It is to become a god.

If one really can travel the path outlined above, timeless and universal, and travel it all the way, there is no lesser word for it.

Becoming one with the divine.

But for the rest of us, all beginners and simple human beings, lets start with practicing union with each Moment, the Here and Now.

These matters have been in my mind and heart for years. I have meditated on them, but not in a structured or methodical way, it simply repeatedly arose within as echoes of living with the sacred land, generating a continuous need for deeper understanding.

I have of course along the way read or heard about many different teachings regarding medicine wheel or mandala. Hardly any of these have made much sense to me, beyond giving the impression of being related to this or that specific culture or visionary, and therefor probably carrying certain connotations that is not easy to grasp from outside.

These are symbolic matters, not scientific facts. Diversity in interpretation is enriching. Still, it seems obvious that certain general aspects must be similar from one model to another. And, from what I have seen, sometimes they are and sometimes not.

Note that the names of the four cardinal directions in this text exclusively refer to the points of the sun symbol.

The Sun

The saami sun symbol is in the center of many of the old drums. Symbols are rich in meaning, much is lost when we limit them to one or two interpretations. Interpretation is in it self a step away from the original Seeing, but at the same time often necessary.

The four directions marked from the central sun are basically cyclical pointers. East: spring/morning/childhood; South: summer/day/adulthood; West: autumn/evening/elderhood; North: winter/night/death or better: the space between death and new life.

The horisontal and the vertical lines are two axis of polarity. These polarities reflect basic forces, also inside human life

The beauty of symbols is that they are not factual. Even these basic, seemingly logic pointers to the directions are completely reversed in the southern hemisphere. South of the ekvatorial line one will have to view this in it`s opposite; the North being Day and South Night, the sun rising in the West (morning) and so on. This can of course make everything totally confusing, and so we're gonna leave things there and return to our original premises. It just had to be mentioned to underscore the fact that though symbols are the way to envision and realize great truths, they can never be facts in a rational or scientifically accepted way. Making the symbolic into facts are actually the foundation for dogmatism and fanatic belief systems.

The two axis of the Sun

The background for this text is this: I already had a wellrounded and functional understanding of the North/South axis in the solar symbol (more about that a little later). Then, after a couple of years of trying to figure out the horisontal line, I suddenly saw that this East/West axis can be understood as the two minds: Rationality/Thought and Mythology/Image. The Conscious and the Unconscious.

Many people into New Age-spirituality want to "see images" and receive channeled knowledge. This means they are predominantly in the West. About the more extreme of these, one of my teachers would say "They have fallen in love with the unconscious". They might even have aversion to rational, skeptical thought. Then there are those who ONLY relate to intellect and thought and are not in touch with the older pictorial mind. This is another kind of limitation.

As already mentioned; symbols/images/mythology are not "facts". They are not actual truth like "2 + 2 = 4". Misunderstanding of this can create dogma and religious fanaticism. If you believe the world was created in 7 days or that the mother of Christ actually was a virgin, you obviously have a gap in understanding between the symbolic mind and the rational intellect (and to the disadvantage of the intellect...)

But we cannot understand or truly grasp the Whole, the connection of all things, through the analytical mind. It happens through images, symbols and mythology. It is a intuitive "felt thought" or "thinking-feeling". Therefore, rationality/intellect is linked to the direction East. It is young. Necessary, but limited.

In the West is the old mind; pictorial, mythological. But in reality both sides of the polarity need each other to have optimal function. This is the return to the center, to the heart of the Sun.

West can be said to denote Faith, and East Skepticism, and the integration of these is Knowledge. The shaman must know the Center. The center is where the real understanding of the periphery is found.

The East also represents, at worst, dry intellectuals and the paradigm of modern society that does not see or accept the hidden "inner" side of existence.

There are some who are so heavily invested in "belief" that it seems they have an aversion to rational thought (Too much West).This brings to mind the old norwegian philosopher Arne Næss who asked "Does it hurt to think?"

The vertical duality

North is Night, Winter, Sky, Death/Infinity and thus a mental or spiritual energy. South is Day, Summer, Earth, Life/Sex and bodily.

Too much North is lifelessness, theory but no action, and even escape from life into monkhood. Too much South can be material, superficial, to do/act without insight.

All the extremes represent possibilities, values ​​and phases, but the shaman is the one who can consciously and deliberately put himself in the center and act, understand and see from there.

He/she will have some strengths and weaknesses on one or sometimes both axes. Mental/spiritual (North), physical/material (South), rational/analytical (East) or symbolic/figurative (West). This reflects the personality. It is a map for selfreflection and growth.

The sacred natural self

According to scholars, the norwegian christian missionary Thomas von Westen (1682 – 1727) famous for his dedication to destroy the traditional saami shamanism, once had a conversation with a noaidi (saami shaman) about the devil. The shamans reply was: "We know him, but we've never heard anything unfavourable about him".

There are some uncertainties to this story. Presumeably they spoke in saami, which Von Westen knew. And so "the devil" could have been described picturally or maybe understood to be one of the traditional saami gods. Exactly who is hard to know for sure. Not much use for speculation, maybe another time.

Gurdjieff, respected for his contributions to esoteric knowledge and also known for his love of "wine and women", wrote a book called "Beelzebubs tales to his grandson". In my native northern Norway, we speak of "Old Eric", a less fearful way of refering to the devil. Like some old uncle.

What I'm pointing to is an inner level of integration. Earth and Sky. Body and Spirit.

Our general appreciation of the sacred today is through heavenly archetypes and its human representatives. The great saints, ascetics. But an honest perspective is that such folks are a minority. Most of us are content to be natural, both earth and sky. The "ruler", the archetype of "the god below", is much like gods of the ancient worlds. Life is sacred, and there is no life without fertility, the body, sex. Humans can make good or bad use of all things, and so it is our understanding and inner level of maturity and compassion that matters, more than the specific question concerned.

Integration

The "dark god", the forest god & the sky god, the higher self diety should integrate, work together, unify. This is a symbolic or mythic representation of selfrealization. And it is the optimal balance of the North and the South. Mountains and clouds mutually attracting each other. To make the subtle more solid and the solid more subtle, wedding the coarse and the delicate, the finite and the infinite.

Without this we swim around in a strange soup of "sin" and "salvation", where those most rigidly fearing the natural self, the body, and "sin" often are the ones who do actual harm.

In a more provocative way one could say it like this: Christ is good, but don`t forget the devil! Focusing solely on one of these, makes it's polar opposite stronger, but in a shadowy way. It is an unhealthy path. Bring the two of them together like the archetypical twins of mythology.

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The North and South need to work together.

In the same way should the analytic intellect and the archaic mind which works through images and symbols be in a mutually beneficial relationship. This is the integration of the East and West.

When these four different points - the four winds, cardinal directions - corners of the ancient Sun symbol, are all active and in relation, as symbolic forces and energies, a fundamental experience opens up to us. To enter the center, merge with the Sun of our Being, which is the Sun of all beings. Shining, yet endless bottomless dark, yet blindingly brilliant.

The experience is for each of us to make and make again. And the map too. Build, remake, construct based on aquired knowledge merged with felt discoveries, visions and illuminations. Over and over.

To be alive, the process of living, is refining and transmuting ones view, ones mind and realization along a path like this. The path of the World Tree, the Anima Mundi, symbolized through the Sun and the four directions.