Bladder 3: The World At Night

This is a very small excerpt from my CEU offering, Intro to BL 3-4-5 (on sale now). See previous blogs Bladder Intelligence, Bladder 1: Enter the Dark and Bladder 2: Dark Visions. This is the perfect time of the year to heal the Bladder meridian, starting right at the beginning…

We have discussed BL 1 and 2, and now we move upward to the upper edge of the brow, to BL 3, just into the hairline. As usual, the location says it all.

I grew up in Manhattan. We used to go out to Riverside Drive sometimes as night to look out over the Hudson River at the Palisades, in New Jersey. We’d sit looking all the way down at lights from the highway below; we’d look at the light from the boats; we’d look at the lights across the way. It was a feeling of being able to look out over it all, at night. BL 3 is very similar to the nearby statesman-like GB 15, in the sense of being a lofty vantage point from which to get a clear view of an earthly expanse. I call GB 15 the Thomas Jefferson point (see my article on Gall Bladder points on the head).

BL 3 is not the same as the grand statesman-like vision of GB 15, but it’s close, literally and metaphorically. It’s the Bladder meridian so it’s a nighttime lofty vantage point for considering the worldly panorama, so it’s more like a philosopher—especially a political philosopher, one who reads the news and then ponders the deeper trends and deeper meanings of it all. Unlike the intelligence of GB 15’s statesmanship, BL 3 intelligence penetrates international politics into the realm of the deeper questions. It’s reflective, but it’s reflective on the world, rather than on one’s inner process, or one’s own deep nature, or why we are all here.

In most people, when I put my fingers on this point, I can’t tell you how often I feel like I’m reading endless newspapers. A lot of political activists and journalists get a lot of darkness collecting here, as though the news is like an endless soot falling from a dirty sky. It creates a layer of dirty darkness (very different than the healthy winter darkness of the clear night sky) that settles on BL 3 like a layer of pollution on our worldview. It can get heavy, a kind of heaviness of the brow, and a heaviness that enters a person’s countenance and outlook. I’ve seen some people begin to hate life because of how much soot and darkness accrues in BL 3 from too much listening to the news and getting a world view that’s dark, worse than Charles Dickens; a sense that it’s an awful life.

BL 3 is a good point for resetting the worldly philosopher’s view of the balance of light and dark in the world. It’s not that you don’t see the dark, but you also see the single candles being lit, see the stars, see the twinkling, and you know that they all represent human hearts living their lives. It reminds me of coming into a big city on an airplane at night, and seeing the beautiful city lights. It helps us to be able to look at the world and see yeah, yeah, Koyaanisqatsi, okay, life out of balance. But isn’t it pretty, all that traffic?

BL 3 helps us remember that somewhere across the river on the Palisades, there are people just like us whom we do not know, having potlucks with their neighbors, too. We see their headlights; we see the lights from their windows. They are just as real as the news, and keep the worldly philosopher balanced in the play of both darkness and light in the world we live in together, even if we never meet.

Would you like to learn more about BL 3? Check out my CEU, Intro to Bladder 3-4-5.