Path of Conocimiento Notes

LAW (LEX)

  • Shift towards "the path of conocimiento".

Gloria E. Anzaldúa

  • Her work is presented as an offering, blending inner work, and public acts.
  • Encountering a snake crossing one's path is described as a trigger for heightened senses and intuition, symbolized by a "reptilian eye" in the forehead.
  • This intuition reveals signs, images, feelings, and words that can disrupt habitual thought patterns.
  • The snake represents awakening consciousness and the potential for inner knowing, beyond logical thought.
  • Nature can provoke an "aja" or "conocimiento," guiding one to transform perceptions of reality and life conditions.
  • One carries this knowledge with them, experiencing nature as ensouled and sacred.
  • This knowledge urges the casting of an "ofrenda" of images and words, like kernels of corn, across the page.
  • Transform painful experiences into something valuable to share, empowering others.
  • Asking spirits—animals, plants, and ancestors—for help in stringing together a bridge of words to give back to nature and others.

The Journey: Path of Conocimiento

  • Daily struggle to understand the world and life's problems, driven by a need to understand and be oneself.
  • A spiritual hunger to live up to one's potential, questioning doctrines that no longer fit.
  • The central task is to determine life's meaning, glimpse the cosmic order, and translate these into artistic forms.
  • The path requires encountering one's shadow side and confronting what one has been programmed to avoid.

Profound Transformations

  • Humanity undergoes profound transformations and shifts in perception at the turn of the millennium.
  • Caught between cultures and realities, experiencing a personal and global identity crisis.
  • A disintegrating social order oppresses people through hierarchies of commerce and power, controlled by government, industry, business, and the military, linked by technology and science.
  • This system impacts lives and justifies a sliding scale of human worth, dividing humankind.
  • It condones exploitation, mind theft, spirit murder, and genocide of others, conditioning people not to acknowledge that comforts are acquired through the blood of others.
  • Dependent on consumerism and the culture of the dollar.

Threshold of Consciousness

  • Caught in the "remolinos" (vortices) of systemic change.
  • Collapsing binaries of colored/white, female/male, mind/body.
  • Living in "nepantla," the overlapping space between perceptions and belief systems, aware of the changeability of categories.
  • Conventional labels are obsolete, yet those in power use them to negate those who are "different."
  • The new paradigm must come from outside and within the system.

Cultural Shift in Understanding Knowledge

  • A shift from knowledge valued now to what will be desired in the twenty-first century.
  • Moving away from knowledge contributing to military and corporate technologies and colonization of lives by TV and the Internet, towards inner exploration.
  • Attributed to the feminization of knowledge, beyond the subject-object divide, a way of knowing and acting called conocimiento.
  • Conocimiento questions conventional knowledge's categories and classifications.

Spiritual Inquiry: Conocimiento

  • Conocimiento is raised to the level of science and rationality as a valid form of knowledge.
  • Reached via creative acts: writing, art-making, dancing, healing, teaching, meditation, and spiritual activism (both mental and somatic).
  • Experiences are embedded in a larger frame of reference, connecting personal struggles with those of other beings and the Earth.
  • These struggles are viewed as spiritual undertakings.
  • Identity is a filtering screen limiting awareness to a fraction of reality.
  • Beliefs are provisional and depend on perspective.
  • Physical senses do not provide the whole picture; they are determined by core beliefs and societal assumptions.
  • Knowledge inferred from experience is subjective.
  • Intuitive knowing, unmediated by mental constructs, is the closest to direct knowledge (gnosis).
  • Conocimiento comes from opening all senses, inhabiting the body, and decoding symptoms.
  • Attention is multileveled, including surroundings, bodily sensations, intuitive takes, emotional reactions, and imagination.
  • Breaking out of mental and emotional prisons and deepening perception enables linking inner reflection and vision with social, political action, and lived experiences to generate subversive knowledges.
  • These conocimientos challenge official ways of looking at the world set up by those benefiting from such constructions.

Information and Knowing

  • Information registered by sense organs and organized by the rational mind, coupled with imaginal knowings derived from the third eye along with the perceptions of the shapeshifting naguala, results in conocimiento.
  • The desire to know (reflective consciousness) has been viewed as evil, aspiring to conocimiento.
  • The reflective mind makes one aware of freedom to choose, not needing to obey the reigning idols (secular culture, commerce, science) or accept fate decreed by church and culture.
  • Symbology systems like Tarot, I Ching, dowsing, astrology, and numerology can further self-guidance.

Demonization of Knowledge Seekers

  • Those seeking alternative forms of knowledge have been demonized throughout millennia.
  • Female origin figures who "disobeyed" in pursuit of knowledge, including carnal knowledge symbolized by the serpent, took agency.
  • Xochiquetzal seeks knowledge from "el árbol sagrado”.
  • Eve snatches the fruit of forbidden knowledge from the serpent, "inventing" consciousness.
  • Serpent Woman (Cihuacoatl) represents instinctual knowledge and alternative ways of knowing that fuel transformation, not the root of all evil.

Expulsion from Paradise

  • Females are expelled from "paradise" for eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge and taking individual agency.
  • Their "original sin" precipitates the myth of the fall of humankind, for which women have been blamed and punished.
  • The desire to expand consciousness drove Xochiquetzal, Eve, and Cihuacoatl.
  • Driven by the desire to understand and know how humans and other beings know, and the hunger to understand and love oneself.

Seven Stages of Conocimiento

  • An earthquake scenario illustrates these stages:

    • Initial Shock: The sidewalk buckles, bricks fly, and a building collapses.

    • Immediate Reaction: Fear, helping injured.

    • Subsequent Aftershocks: fear, displacement, and the need to evacuate.

    • Emotional Impact Loss familiar. Fear, work through fear.

    • Nepantla : The transitional state between shifts where reality is fluid, creating opportunity for openness and awareness Access deep feelings and insight outer events mindful holistic aware.

    • Coatlicue Depths: hopelessness refuse move paralyzes you. A breakdown into despair, self-loathing, and hopelessness.

    • Call to Action conversion Action pulse conversion reconnect with spirit. Breaking free from habitual coping strategies and reconnecting with spirit.

    • Tracking Ongoing Meaning and circumstances pattern of experience to create new narrative.Tracking the circumstances, sifting through experiences, and creating a new narrative.

    • Testing your Story: You want edifice collapse .Testing the Story conflicts others. Taking the story out to the world and facing conflict when ideals are not met.

    • Turning Point: Realities Develop ethical strategy with which negotiate difference. Shifting realities, developing ethical strategies to negotiate conflict, and finding common ground through holistic alliances.

Symbolism of the Stages

  • The stages represent directions (south, west, north, east), above and below, and the center.
  • Symbolize the seven "ojos de luz" (chakras) of the energetic body, seven planes of reality, stages of alchemical process, and four elements (air, fire, water, earth).
  • Struggling with the shadow self in all seven spaces.
  • The seven stages open senses and enlarge the breadth and depth of consciousness.
  • All seven are present within each stage, occurring concurrently or not.
  • Zigzagging from ignorance (desconocimiento) to awareness (conocimiento).
  • Nepantla occurs often as its own space and as the transition between others.
  • These stations constitute a meditation on rites of passage and transitions of life, with bits of the self dying and being reborn in each step.

1. El Arrebato: Rupture, Fragmentation

  • An ending, a beginning.
  • An assailant's attack is described, including physical and emotional trauma.
  • The event changes one's relationship to the world, creating awareness of vulnerability and distrust.
  • This event is symbolized by the dismembered moon goddess Coyolxauhqui, representing emotional dismemberment and the work of re-membering.
  • Every arrebato—violent attack, rift, illness, death, betrayal, racism—rips one from their familiar home, showing something is lacking.
  • Cada arrebata turns the world upside down, cracking the walls of reality.
  • Letting go of former positions and frames of reference leaves one feeling like an orphan.
  • Disoriented, wounded, and conflicted, one is forced to live "en la orilla."
  • The upheaval jars one out of the cultural trance and collective mind-set (consensus reality).
  • Double or multiple "seeing" results, forcing dialectical encounters and critique of one's perspective.
  • Seeing through culture separates one from the herd, exiling and wounding.
  • Cada arrebatamiento causes questioning and awakens the ability to see through the surface.
  • Suffering a "susto," a shock that knocks the soul out of the body, causing estrangement.
  • One struggles to regain balance, reintegrate, and repair the damage, calling the spirit home.
  • Every paroxysm has the potential of initiating something new, reconstructing oneself, and reworking one's description of reality.
  • Every morning, ritualistically asking Spirit for increased awareness, honoring what has ended, and picturing embracing a new life before plunging into ambiguity.

2. Nepantla: Torn Between Ways

  • A spiritual isolation, like Sor Juana and Mexicans not recovered from the conquest.
  • Feeling out of place in a Ph.D. program, with professors disliking subjective texts and unorthodox perspectives.
  • Leaving home casts one adrift in the liminal space between home and school, feeling on a rack between diverse notions and nations.
  • Remolinos (whirlwinds) sweep one off their feet, with family and ethnic culture pulling back to the tribe while the Anglo world sucks toward assimilation.
  • Separate realities and belief systems vie to convert one, facing divisions within cultures of class, gender, sexuality, nationality, and ethnicity.
  • Torn between "white" and Mexican ways, traditional values and feminist ideas, not knowing whether to assimilate, separate, or isolate.
  • The vortices and cacophonies bombard with new ideas, feeling spiritual anxiety and isolation, swinging between elation and despair.
  • In the transition space of nepantla, self-identity becomes the central concern, and an inner impasse blocks progress.
  • Nepantla itself becomes the place one lives in most of the time—home.
  • Nepantla is the site of transformation, questioning inherited ideas and identities.
  • Nepantla is the zone between changes, struggling to find equilibrium between outer expression and inner relationship to it.
  • Living between cultures results in "seeing" double, rendering cultures transparent and glimpsing the sea in which one has been immersed.
  • Seeing through the fiction of the monoculture and the myth of white superiority, eventually seeing through the ethnic culture's myth of female inferiority.
  • A demythologization of race occurs, seeing race as an experience of reality, not a fixed feature.
  • Perceiving something from two angles creates a split in awareness, engendering the ability to control perception.
  • Willing oneself to ground this doble saber (double knowing) in the body and soul, staying alerta y vigilante.
  • The twin-faced patlache is the symbol of la otra tú, the double or dreambody (energetic body).
  • La naguala connects one to unconscious and invisible forces.
  • In nepantla, sensing the overlap between material and spiritual worlds, glimpsing el espíritu, and seeing the body as inspirited.
  • Nepantla is the point of contact where the "mundane" and the "numinous" converge, being in full awareness of the present moment.