Waterline 1: I Marks the Spot

By Jed McKenna

(This article may be freely shared, translated, reposted and reprinted. Please leave footer
info intact.)

A person swimming in the ocean far from the shore deals exclusively
with the world of waves and does not get into trouble no matter how
big they are. If the same individual climbs up high on the shore and
is facing only the world of solid forms, there is again no problem. It
is the waterline, where the two worlds mix and neither of them can
be experienced in its own right that presents the difficulties.
-Dr. Stanislav Grof, The Adventure of Self-Discovery*

Dr. Grof distinguishes between two modes of human consciousness; hylotropic and
holotropic. I, having formerly inhabited the former and currently inhabiting the latter,
will try to explain these two worldviews in light of my own experience and
understanding.

The hylotropic, or matter-oriented, mode of consciousness is

the term I am using for the normal, everyday experience of
consensus reality. The holotropic mode of consciousness, or
consciousness aiming toward wholeness and totality of existence,
characterizes certain nonordinary psychological states, such as
meditative, mystical, or psychedelic experiences. -ibid.

Hylotropic refers to the mundane consciousness of nearly everyone nearly all of the
time. In this mode, I experience myself as separate and distinct from my environment.
The world seems mechanical and materialistic, matter seems solid, time seems linear,
space seems fixed, duality seems universal, causality seems to govern events and reality
seems real. This is a stagnant state with only room for lateral growth. In short,
hylotropic consciousness is the mundane reality of the Segregated State of Human
Childhood.

In the hylotropic mode of consciousness, an individual

experiences himself or herself as a solid physical entity with
definite boundaries and with a limited sensory range. -ibid.

In the holotropic mode of consciousness, the mental-emotional barrier that separates me

from my environment in the hylotropic mode is no longer in place. Thoughts and
feelings seem to influence events and outcomes, time seems flexible and causality seems
optional. My environment acts like a natural extension of myself and my reality takes
on an interactive dreamlike quality. This is a dynamic state with unlimited room for
further development. In short, holotropic consciousness is the dreamstate reality of the
Integrated State of Human Adulthood.

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In contrast to the narrow and restricted hylotropic mode,
the holotropic variety involves the experience of oneself
as a potentially unlimited field of consciousness that has
access to all aspects of reality without the mediation of
senses. -ibid.

A Fragment of Reality

The wall that divides these two modes of personal reality is the protective egoic shell of
the human child who has yet to undergo the second-stage birth transition to human
adulthood. Within the artificial and finite environment of the juvenile shell, the world
seems to exist independent of self and we are merely guests or trespassers in it: Self and
other are two. Once liberated from that eyes-closed, fear-based, herdlevel perspective,
our worldview shifts from materialistic and mechanical to idealistic and dreamlike. We
merge with our environment and form a cocreative partnership with it: Dreamstate and
dreamer are one.

In the hylotropic mode of consciousness, we experience

only a limited and specific segment of the phenomenal
world or consensus reality from one moment to another.
The nature and scope of this experiential fragment of reality
is quite unambiguously defined by our spatial and temporal
coordinates in the phenomenal world, the anatomical and
physiological limitations of our sensory organs, and the
physical characteristics of the environment. -ibid.

From the hylotropic perspective, the holotropic perspective might seem magical and
mystical — or like total bullshit — but from the holotropic perspective, holo seems
normal and hylo seems like a hobbled and blindered state more befitting domesticated
livestock than self-aware beings. From my perspective, the holotropic perspective is the
natural state of consciousness of the Human Adult, and the hylotropic perspective is the
stage-one birth consciousness of normal children and juvenile adults.

A person whose entire existence is limited to the

hylotropic mode, even if free from manifest clinical
symptoms and thus mentally healthy from the point
of view of traditional psychiatry, is cut off from these
inner resources and incapable of drawing on them. This
leads to chronic frustration of higher transcendental
needs and a sense of lack of fulfillment. -ibid.

The difference between hylo and holo is not spiritual but developmental. The
undiscovered truth is that holographic consciousness is the goal of all spiritual seeking,
but it’s not the sole province of Buddhists or Taoists or New Agers; it’s the process that
all humans must undergo to become what they really are. Nor is it the exclusive
vacation destination for trippers and adventurers; it is the full-time consciousness-of-
residence for those who complete their birth process. The juvenile ego, however, is
committed to its own survival and erects complex defenses against the threat of change.

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An average, “healthy” individual has a sufficiently
developed system of psychological defenses to
protect him or her from holotropic intrusions. -ibid.

In theory, everyone everywhere everywhen should prioritize the second-stage birth

transition to adulthood to the exclusion of any other concern including survival, but in
practice, you and I are the only ones who know about it. Even Grof seems to view it as a
special state, but it’s only special because it’s rare, not rarefied.

Holotropic consciousness is not a lofty spiritual ideal, it’s simply the result of the second
stage of birth you were meant to undergo at the age of sexual maturity but didn’t.
Maybe it’s too late for you now, but maybe it’s not. Of those I know who have achieved
holotropic consciousness as a living reality, none did it on nature’s schedule.

Unseen Agency

With regard to the hylotropic and holotropic modes, nobody is all one or the other.
Those in the juvenile state are generally around 98% hylo and 2% holo. It’s in that 2%
mode that we are open to good weirdness. That’s when we peek behind the narrative
veil to see the structural pattern beneath.

If you think about it, you’ll find that the validity of the 2% disproves the 98%, just as
proving the truth of one disproves the possibility of zero. Once you confirm subjectively,
to your own satisfaction, any non-ordinary phenomenon in your life — any instance of
extra-sensory awareness, any confluence of events revealing unseen agency, any
combination of fortune and timing that defies random chance, any act that can only be
explained as manifestation or wishcraft — then you have effectively falsified the
mechanistic, materialistic, hylotropic model and verified the idealistic holotropic model
for yourself.

Incidentally, you will also have reclaimed the self-sovereignty you have abdicated to the
Church of Scientism which is wholly based on a materialistic, mechanistic worldview.

The One and Only Way

There is no other spiritual path to follow, teaching to embrace, or level of consciousness

to achieve except the progression toward and transition to adulthood. (You are
somewhere in the progression stage right now. That’s how you got this far, but where
will you go from here?) Nothing else matters, there is no other option to choose, no
secondary objective, only a multitude of consolation prizes; work, money, power, love,
family, duty, belief, sports, hobbies, shopping, games, entertainment, society, etc.
Thanks for playing, better luck next time. In fact, the reason we embrace the idea of a
next time is so we don’t have to get serious this time.

Anyone who fails to achieve second-stage birth at the age of sexual maturity (everyone)
is effectively halfborn and living at a caterpillar level of the butterfly life they were born
to live. Any objective other than second-stage birth transition into our full and rightful
lives is an egoic diversion meant to keep us trapped at the tawdry level of melodramatic
tragicomic spectacle.

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What we seek in spirituality is simply the reconnection to our natural development.
There is nothing else for a child to grow into but adulthood, nothing else for the
segregated being to aspire to but integration, and nothing for an eyes-closed being to do
but open their eyes. All else follows from that.

The nonsense they peddle in the spiritual marketplace is nothing more than shiny
baubles, pretty distractions and flowery trappings to lure you away from the serious
work of becoming what you really are. Forget enlightenment, bliss, contentment and
compassion, and focus on resuming your natural growth and development. Any other
goal is just fool’s gold luring us deeper into the dungeon we’re trying to escape.

Transition to adulthood is what you, as a spiritual seeker, are really trying to achieve.
You do this by opening your eyes and learning to see, which you do by thinking free of
emotional influence, which you do by externalizing the thought process, which you do
by writing. Adulthood is the destination, lucidity is the path, and thought is the process
of steps by which you travel. That’s it, the search is over. You’ve found the map to the
treasure. “I” marks the spot. All that’s left now is the hard work of digging it up and
claiming it for your own.

Slaying the Dragon

As a practical matter, we move toward adulthood through the progressive slicing away
of attachments. All attachments are elements of the false self, pieces of you, so all
detachment is self-mutilation; death by a thousand cuts. The more you cut away, the
less attached you are. The less attached you are, the more you ascend and elevate your
perspective. The more you ascend, the more painfully aware you become of the
attachments dragging you down and the easier it becomes to hack away at yourself.
That’s how actual progress is made; wash, rinse, repeat.

Holotropic consciousness is the mode of being that awaits you, the estate to which you
are rightborn heir, the winning lottery ticket in an unchecked pocket, but you have to
escape herdlevel consciousness to claim it. This is easier said than done because you’ll
want to hold something back, and you can’t. To hold anything back is to hold everything
back. All attachments must be cut and you can never really know what everything
means until you’re standing in the cave, mortally exhausted, bloody sword in hand, and
you can’t believe the goddamn dragon is still alive. If you didn’t get the head, you didn’t
get anything. But that’s just a metaphor. Dragon-slaying is like navel-gazing compared
to ego-slaying.

This is the true adventure of self-discovery, and look! Here you are.

*Grof, Stanislav. The Adventure of Self-Discovery. State Univ. of New York P., 1988.

Jed McKenna is the author of the Enlightenment, Dreamstate, and Jed Talks trilogies. Find
free ebook, articles, spiritual quotations gallery and more at https://www.WisefoolPress.com

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Waterline 2: The Hot Zone
By Jed McKenna

(Waterline 1: I Marks the Spot here. These articles may be freely shared, translated, reposted
and reprinted.)

Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth;

that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the
soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest
winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous,
slavish shore? –Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“Am I an asshole?”

Lisa doesn’t answer right away, which might be answer enough. We’re sitting in Adirondack
chairs at the formal firepit, feet up, drinking a good white wine in her case and a peasant red
in mine. Her stemware could cut diamonds, mine could pound nails. I started the fire an hour
earlier so it would be settled by the time we sat down.

“A bit of a curmudgeon, maybe.”

“Ouch. That’s how mommy calls grandpa an asshole in front of the kids.”

“Why do you ask? It’s all this truck business, isn’t it? You’re not used to all that facetime, are
you?”

“Thirty seconds is about my limit, and this was almost thirty days.”

It was probably only fifteen, but it felt like a lot more.

About a month ago, a storm knocked a tree onto my truck and I spent a very unpleasant
period in something like 25% outward, worldly, hylotropic, character-animating mode; living
and interacting at the waterline between worlds, dealing with insurance and banks and the
body shop and the car rental place, buying and using a disposable phone, finding and buying
another truck, being lied to and manipulated from behind smiling faces and friendly voices,
dealing with notaries and documents and overnight couriers, and all sorts of tiresome little
activities that normal people consider normal. It’s not the activities that tire me, it’s being in
the waterline environment.

A person swimming in the ocean far from the shore deals exclusively
with the world of waves and does not get into trouble no matter how
big they are. If the same individual climbs up high on the shore and

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is facing only the world of solid forms, there is again no problem. It is
the waterline, where the two worlds mix and neither of them can be
experienced in its own right that presents the difficulties.
-Dr. Stanislav Grof, The Adventure of Self-Discovery

It was a very fortuitous accident, as accidents tend to be when one lives in alignment with
energetic pattern. It put me into an ideal truck at an auspicious time so I was grateful for it,
but the time I had to spend in character among characters took a toll. The universe seems so
accommodating in so many respects that I’m surprised it didn’t spare me this experience, but
I’m sure it has its reasons. You don’t just wave a wand every time you need a nose job,
there’s still an actual surgery to undergo.

“You’re not an asshole,” says Lisa, “you’re a sigma male.”

“Is that the Jeremiah Johnson thing or the Great Pumpkin thing?”

I was trying to make wine come out her nose but all I get is a smirk.

“Self-sufficient, independent. not caring how you’re perceived; a lone wolf, not running with
the pack. You said in one of your books that if you needed anyone else’s respect, you
wouldn’t have your own. That’s pure sigma.”

“Well, that’s better than asshole, I guess.”

“Let’s not rule anything out,” she says, making me laugh in mid-sip with unsightly results.

So a tree fell on my nice old truck and totaled it. That made me sad, but endings are
beginnings so I stiffened my resolve, girded my loins, hardened my… Okay, yeah, I see how
that sounds. Anyway, I braced myself for a period of time spent downhill dealing with people
in their various workplaces full of bad air, bad light and bad energy; my senses and personal
energetics under constant assault and no one to complain to because it’s all just so damn
normal.

My solution to dealing with people in their workplace is to minimize contact when I can and
retreat behind a dull, glassy-eyed facade when I can’t. It’s not an act. The only reason I
usually deal with people at all anymore is in the context of their job, so I’ve learned to keep
my mouth shut and let them do it.

The term uncanny valley refers to the point on a graph at which our upward-trending reaction
to humanoid robots spikes suddenly downward. Before this point, we find them appealing,
beyond this point, appalling. The more real they seem, the more we’re skeezed out by them.
How much skeezier when the humanoid robots are actually human? That’s how most people
appear to me. I believe that they must be thinking, feeling, fully aware beings no different
from myself, but up close they seem more like life-sized animatronic dolls or computer-

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generated non-player characters, and I get caught in that uncanny valley where I am disturbed
by their artificial resemblance to authentic humans.

The deeper revelation of Grof’s waterline metaphor is that there is no land, there is only
water. On the shoreless sea of the infinite dreamstate, land is invariably a mirage or an
artificial construct. In this case, the illusion of a continental landmass is created by the
tightly-packed herdmass held together and afloat by fear. In my natural environment I’m a
dolphin, but on land I’m fish out of water. I am out of my natural element; weak and
awkward. It’s like the gravity of an alien world. It would be nice if it differed in my favor so I
could run like a gazelle and drive a golfball half a mile, but it goes the other way. It oppresses
me, makes me tired and wobbly and doltish, which is not a good look for me.

Lisa has provided a warm brie with cranberry chutney with chopped walnuts, sliced apples
and pears, and crackers. She forgot the little napkins and doesn’t want to go back to her house
for them. She asks if, just this once, we can lick our fingers between helpings, but I can tell
she doesn’t like the idea. She’s wearing a nice dress and a sweater but I’m wearing grungy
work clothes, so every time she takes a bite I extend my leg so she can wipe her fingers on
the cuff of my pants, and every time she says thank you.

In the entire world, the only thing that can be considered not-right is ego; the false self. This
is the single source of all not-rightness in the universe and the sole obstruction to spiritual
progress. The society of ego-bound human juveniles is so unnatural that it defies
comprehension, even for one who has spent decades in that state and decades more studying
it. I can handle it from afar as a sort of abstraction, and I can watch it on screens like a movie
or TV show, but up close and personal it discombobulates me. I am rendered semi-catatonic
by prolonged exposure to eyes-closed, fear-based, ego-clad juveniles. Fatigue sets in and my
brain fogs over as if exposed to radioactive materials. I don’t know if I’d start losing my hair
in clumps or bleeding from my eyes because I’ve never stayed long enough to find out, but it
feels like it’s going in that direction.

I try to explain all this to Lisa but, despite my super-awesome communication skills, I still
sound like a pathetic whiner.

“Maybe instead of a waterline between land and sea,” I suggest, “we’d do better to think in
terms of a skirmish-line between humans and zombies. Sometimes, a former zombie like
myself has to smear himself in zombie goo and make his way back into the horde; to replace
a totaled truck, for instance.”

“What the hell is zombie goo?” asks Lisa.

“It’s their scent. You smear handfuls of their blood and guts on yourself so you can walk
among them without being detected and eaten. Didn’t they teach you anything in law
school?”

“I guess I was out that day.”

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 *

So why are we talking about me? We’re not. This is all about you and what might lie ahead
for you. I spent thirty years as a land-based creature just like you, but now my former
environment is chaotic and disruptive to my subtle energy system. This fragility and
discomfort is not unique to me, this is how your current world will affect you after you’ve
transitioned out of it. Right now you’re a normal person in a normal world, but if you manage
to resuscitate your aborted development and transition into adulthood, you’ll find that normal
is not so damn normal after all.

If you don’t like the Zombie Horde metaphor, the Borg Collective metaphor works just as
well. Maybe, whether zombie or Borg, you have some vestigial awareness of your core
humanity. Maybe you’re reading this because you want to know if your condition can be
reversed, if you can undo the damage and reclaim your full humanity. You can. It’s your
dreamstate, you can do whatever you want, but what do you really want?

Asking if you want to open your eyes and see isn’t incidental, it’s the single defining question
of your existence. How much do you want to know and understand? What price are you
willing to pay for that level of awareness? How much emotional ballast are you willing to cut
away to achieve that level of perspective? Do you want to know who and what and where
you really are, or are you content to stay who and what and where you currently are? Despite
the confusion we all experience at the waterline, land and sea are different paradigms and you
can’t inhabit both.

There is no mystery. Nothing is hidden or withheld. Everything is just sitting right out in the
open, but you can’t see it through closed eyes. If you want to know you have to look, and if
you want to look you have to open your eyes. If you do open your eyes you will see, but by
seeing what is you destroy the illusion of what’s not. Do you really want to set yourself apart
by awakening from the shared dream of the collective? Do you really want to be mocked and
scorned and banished by your tribe? Not until your answer is an emphatic and unequivocal
yes, that you’d rather die than continue life as a zomborg, is your head really in the game.

What we’re looking at now is this confusing waterline area where the personal and
transpersonal paradigms meet and overlap. Right now, you’re wondering if and how you can
make the leap from one to the other, but your head is full of all sorts of whackadoodle
spiritual bullshit that’s calling you back to the comforting illusion of land.

But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless,

indefinite as God – so better is it to perish in that howling infinite,
than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!
For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land!
-Herman Melville, Moby Dick

By being here and reading this, you are asking one question, and the death-rebirth transition
from the sleeping dreamworld to waking dreamstate is the one answer. Maybe you don’t like
that answer, why would you? We don’t really want to awaken from the dream, we just want
to dream we’re awake. That’s the service the spiritual marketplace provides, but you
wandered out of the carnival and onto the rocky shoreline, so here we are.

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I’m not an asshole, I’m a nice guy. I don’t dislike eyes-closed, fear-based, halfborn,
herdbound, ego-clad humans, I just like them at a certain distance. I see developmentally
disrupted juvenile adults as the single most wonderful and wondrous thing in creation.
Delusion is the most interesting, amusing and redeeming aspect of the dreamstate. Human
Children are the fun ones, the interesting and amusing ones, the ones who take it all so
seriously and make it all seem so real. Without them, there’s no drama, and without drama,
there’s really no point to any of this. The dopey Bodhisattvas want to end suffering for all
sentient beings, but suffering is just delusion and delusion is the spice of life; without that
there are no love stories or shoot-em-ups or sitcoms, just twenty-four hour nature
programming.

Billions of brave, sincere, intelligent seekers never opened their eyes because they didn’t
know they were closed. That’s how Maya deceives us, by making us see what’s not and not
what is. Now, however, there’s a chance you can discover and express your own unique and
authentic spiritual DNA. You’ve never been closer than you are right now, here at the
waterline. Thought is the key. Thought is the undiscovered sense, the unsuspected
superpower, the one we all possess but none of us use. If you want to open your eyes and
learn to see, you must discover this sense in yourself and bring it into focus. The light of the
focused mind is the destroyer of all illusion.

Lisa holds a cracker with some stringy cheese with chopped walnuts and cranberry chutney
on it. I know what she’s thinking; zombie goo. She shrugs and eats it anyway. Good spirit. I
hold out my leg. She wipes and says thank you.

Jed McKenna is the author of the Enlightenment, Dreamstate, and Jed Talks trilogies. Find
free ebook, articles, spiritual quotations gallery and more at https://www.WisefoolPress.com