I’d Rather Be Sitting Here Reading This Book
This is the name that I gave my 1999 journal. The only journal that I published. It was a test run on a much more grand idea. I was at the time limited by time, funds and technology to accomplish the kind of story telling that I had invented and to that point had been using to entertain myself since 1992 when I became dedicated to a daily journal process.
I’d rather be sitting here reading this book, the name, speaks to the amount of effort that I placed in editing and reading my own words as I wrote them and as I committed them to publication. My style was I thought to be autopoetic, now at that time, I did not know what autopoetic meant. I just thought that it sounded like what I was doing. Turns out I may have been the first person to even say autopoetic in this context but most likely taken from the term autopoiesis or autopoietic, “Systems that reproduce themselves from within themselves.” (Luhmann’s Theory of autopoietic social systems” by David Seidl).
This fits well with the reason that I called what I was doing autopoetic though for some time, until now actually I have not felt justified in sticking with its usage, thinking perhaps that I was out of context. It is issues like this that tend to hold me back, because I just know that I do not know enough to make this call, however like the word and the meaning I intend so well for its lyrical merit and for the spontaneous way it emerged in my consciousness to use it that I cannot use another word or simply explain my meaning with so many other words without using autopoetic. But what I was doing was documenting the event of my own developmental becoming and spiritual emergence. I was keenly aware that it was arrogant to suppose ones own spiritual emergence and if I were more intelligent then I might have been able to simply call it a developmental becoming, but I was not that informed.
This was the key. I was not informed at all. I was on the outside of my education looking only at the intelligence held by a 19 year old high school honor graduate who did not take college prep courses. I had very little influence as far as actual reading as of 1992. I was trying to figure everything out on my own, through my own intellect and imagination.
This is not totally a fair statement. You have to take into consideration the entire social and cultural backdrop that would support a child born in 1973 and raised in South Western Michigan. I was born in Kalamazoo, adopted a few months after my birth through Catholic Charities and raised in Dowagiac, Michigan. You have to take into account the media, the music, the movies and the general education presented in that period to get an appreciation for the general level of experience that I had at the age of 19. I wish I could give you a better account than this, I have looked for years for the ability to provide prose details of the cultural backdrop of my world and it just is not to my capacity at this time. I can tell you, go to, “you know you grew up in Dowagaic if” on facebook, it is the best way now to convey this type of information.
I believe that due to being adopted and having a biological mother and grandmother prone to schizophrenia that I had my central state of conscious tendency was in the perception of the witness. I am aware that it is not common or perhaps acceptable by any fields of current psychology that an individual could emerge from infancy from an operational state of witnessing awareness so lets just say, I was introverted. When I was young I could close my eyes and hear voices, and those voices would know I was listening, They would consider if it at all mattered due to what sense would it make if I would try and explain it to anyone, that eventually I would stop listening and just recognize that this was all just an active imagination flowing from the fountain of universal mind and was accessible to all at any point in the stream of it. That I had work to do here seemed to be the message, that I had agreed to this, and that monitors and administrators of universal quantum entanglement were at this time necessary to part out the knowledge to the potential vessel.
7.13.2016
Well, talk like that just destroys the whole anybody can be anything they set their mind too rhetoric that often plagues new age formulas for the acquisition of enlightenment. I came in fixed and highly focused in the witness state. I got the conditioning and my was narrowed into a localized mentality, however that mentality was only at ease when in a pure witness state and I was resilient to conditioning unless it sounded and felt like Rock N Roll. I do not remember at this time a recent past life. I do not remember being in my mothers womb although she tells me that she played and sang to me the Beatles Abbey Road through her entire pregnancy and some Johnny Cash. I do remember that Johnny Cash was one of the first voices that I recognized and he seemed to be telling me the good news of welcome, setting down the lay of the land, and preparing a way. I am certain this memory of my feeling for the voice of Johnny Cash is from before I was one year old if not the first few weeks. He like to be saying, listen young boy, me and my friends will never lead you astray, well maybe astray but we will not lead you wrong, well maybe wrong, but we will never let you go, well we will let you down, but we will catch you, we may not catch you, but you get the picture. I smiled what I thought that perhaps I might someday get a chance to write down. Sometime after I gained an ability to speak and write. SERIOUSLY!
So for me to say, the autopoetic journal of John Michael Davis was to say that my writing would somehow illustrate my illumination and show a path for examining the natural development of the mind and spirit in the course of a raw awakening, this I came to call nervosa. After the Dragonfly one of the oldest species on the planet and the feminine quality of the nervous system being the energy of awareness moving through it, oh, and the flower.
I wanted to be as authentic and pure as possible and through 1991 and 1993 I was mostly able to do this in my writing. But the forces of the world around me were crushing in and the necessity to become the one who I was writing about or as I coined, to be the one who sees the one, a meshing with the outer historical and current world would be necessary. Yes I had accomplished a 12 stage model that opened up to a 24 stage model for consciousness. It had relevant switch backs and was consistently operational at every nexus or stage. It was like an integral model however, not having been informed by philosophy or psychology, my system was not very complex, well it was, however it was simplified. My first stage was just reality as it is without any superimposition or awareness of differentiation. It sounds good now, but I did not say it like that, I only say that now after having read a lot about it. I know longer know where my version was in contrast to the current integral model because it was destroyed. It is as though mine and Ken Wilber’s mind was in tangent and his won the potential for vessel of communication in the academic round. It is fair to say that I was considering the integration of all the worlds knowledge in 1994, because it was in my journal. I did not even hear of Ken Wilber until 1995. So this window before 1994 I consider to be pure of influence, not that I was not reading, because I was, and non-stop for like 4 years straight, but it was not until I found Ken’s work that I stopped reading, philosophy and moved onto nutritional books, fasting and YOGA. In that period I realized their was an encyclopedia of philosophy from A to Z containing like 100 large volumes. I was reading at the time, Swami Vivekananda and the Bhagavad Gita AS IT IS, and I wrote the song, Silver Cup. “i’m giving it up — i’m giving it up-that silver cup-I’m giving it up” I heard it blowing across the desert overlooking Bullhead City Arizona actually about 2 weeks after Sam Kinison had died on that very road below me, with a whisper of “Okay….”
I am a product of my environment and I am a member of what was classified as generation x. I identify within that cluster though I am not certain where I clearly draw the line of differentiation and recognize it as relative to your attitude and cultural identity and contribution. It gets complicated and well, perhaps Douglas Rushkoff could take another run at it or you could read his work. Look, and this is the point of the shift in our place in the world, typically it is not acceptable to be so lazy and say, hey go read so and so, I’m trying to hold my own line together, I just want to say, that person did it alright. But that is exactly what I had to learn. One boy can not access the entire spectrum of the universe alone and make his point. I’m talking about raw adolescent ability. I had these thoughts, but I instead of writing them down, looked for others that had already or were in the process of writing them down. I figured many things out and told many people, but I never wrote it out, and what I did, it was destroyed by fate. Nearly everything from 1991–1994 was destroyed. This was the material before I hit a stage of development, the one that realizes like minds do exist and can work together and honestly, I didn’t want to be known for my writing alone. I thought I understood why young rock stars died… I didn’t want to go down that road this time or felt the importance of not… and if you knew me when I was in my twenties… I’d be dead now. It is fair to say I think, that only a few people knew me in my twenties because I was in retreat.
I saw that wall of books and knew that I would never read it. I immediately assumed that someone else already had, that they would summarize it for me. That was Ken Wilber. I do not apologize for rarely questioning his authority, because I recognize his intention as my own. When I found his work, my immediate thought was, thank God, I do not have to do this!
But then, the culture began to just zing with self-realized beings. I felt like everything just took off without me or that it had been that way all along and that I might be making this more difficult than it need be. At first I thought it was great when I would find artist in my peer reaching for enlightenment. But then soon I realized that I was the only one struggling to awaken. I was just on the bench watching others tap their potential. Even my ability to write went away.
After 2005 I hardly wrote anything. I felt that the work that I had completed to that point actually was a firm foundation to a life work accomplishment.
I returned to college and completed that last year in 2010-2015. It took me 24 years to finish what I began in 1991 when I first enrolled at WMU in the city of my birth. What I would like to do is tell and share my story as it happened. But also as I wrote it and remember it. Picking up with my journal in 1994.
I believe this is a story of what Christina Grof calls a spiritual emergency, sure it would be for others to verify if it stands as such a thing, but that is the story that I sought out to capture for you in the first place. I mean a real live blow the windows out quickening in the process of happening, but slowed down so that all the details can be tracked and paced for the basis of scientific developmental spiritual and artistic quantification.
In my own phase of awakening. At this point of a 12 stage path of progression into super-consciousness I think I am at or moving into stage 7. It is a point when the internal realizations of the individual have been refined to a point that they can then be transmitted consciously to a greater round of society safely and in the interest of the greater good of humanity. I’m not exactly ready for a TED Talk unless it were about the importance of an all-inclusive alphabetical rendering, that I call the Axon Meta Matrix.
DEDICATION
tHAT ALL ARE FREE.. THAT ALL HAVE FOUND ABSOLUTE BLISS.. IN ISOLATION.. IN SOLITUDE.. IN HUNGER.. IN POVERTY.. IGNORANCE.. FEAR.. HATE.. HURT.. ANGER.. GREED.. INDULGENCE.. FRUSTRATION.. GUILT.. CONFUSION.. LUST.. DEATH.. LIFE AND JUST PLAIN IN FUN..
John Michael Davis
pROCLAIMING a self dETERMINAte DoctoratE of Philosophical Engineering.. Masters of D-Synthetic Hypnosis.. stylized from heart.. totally bent on personal discovery.. aN Eternal bEING born Human ONCE Again.. tHIS is how one does iT.. aND do nOt doubt that this is not the hand of Almighty Mork
In the book 1999, this author statement is below a picture of me age 8 with rainbow suspenders and a Robin Williams button. I am aware this is a double negative. Meaning that you should be clear, this is not the hand of an extraterrestrial galactic universal intelligence. Nanu Nanu! I may be joking.
