The Lurking Banality

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Many a classic piece of weird and horror fiction involves people “seeing beyond the veil,” often in ways that invite madness. Drugs, strange technology, an experiment in space travel, alien encounters, and more invoked as ways for people to grasp the wider universe, and usually go bonkers in the process. If you want to experience the chilling idea that you’re just one slight experience away from seeing things you can’t handle, there are books and films to give you your preferred fright.

Now with this theme being so classic, I think it’s actually part of a different horror. “The horror beyond the veil” often says more about us than the universe. Honestly, the universe seems more chill than, well, us.

The world may be filled with wonders, but I also invite you to consider the horrors we see and keep seeing. How many genocides have people committed joyfully in the last 100 years? How many people suffer in poverty while the rich gain more? How’s that climate looking as things get weirder and weirder thanks to human-driven climate change?

“Man is the real monster,” is a theme of many pieces of horror fiction. But we don’t need to sympathize with Adam, Frankenstein’s creation or lonely and tormented King Kong in a world he never made. We can read the news and see just how horrible we can be, if we choose.

But that’s really the deeper horror The awful things in our world are things people ignore over and over again. The terrible things are actions taken by people who claim they want a better world. There are gut-wrenching terrors in the world, and people participate in them, we participate in them, and we ignore them.

We are surrounded by darkness that we create and choose not to see. We don’t need exotic drugs or mad science to see horrors beyond comprehension, we just have to take a moment to pause and be honest with ourselves. We can look in the mirror and see a monster snarling back.

Perhaps, just like weird fiction warns us, when we do this we might go a bit mad, but not in any cool way that leads to a famous novella and a cult movie. The real evil isn’t “beyond the veil” – it’s right here.

The real terror of many of these “horror beyond the veil” stories is our ability to tune things out. It’s not that we are ignorant, but deliberately ignorant, that we’ve ignored or cut off part of ourselves. Scary monsters are one thing, but the banal evil lurking in all of us is worse.

I can say my “beyond the veil” experiences in real life were less terrifying than things I’ve seen my fellow man do, enjoy, or ignore. “Beyond the veil” fiction, in a way, becomes “man is the monster” in more ways than one.

We want the universe to have monsters so we don’t admit we live next to ones, or that one lives inside our own skin.

–Xenofact

The Mathematics And Mutual Methods of Meditation

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This is an odd post as I want to record and share some thoughts on my meditative work. This helps me organize my thoughts, helps me share with others, and helps me see if I can communicate delicate information. No guarantees, so your feedback is welcome.

I do breath meditation as I often note, inspired by Taoist works (especially The Secret of the Golden Flower and The Inner Teachings of Taoism translations by Thomas Cleary). One sits and tunes breath to make it slower and evener constantly, mind constantly resting on breath. If you have a rough breath even it, if you are distracted, return to breath.

Taoist teachings in this vein provide a lovely description of this – this is a method that helps unify the forces in one’s being so the Mind of Tao arises. It’s usually phrased as sense and essence, or breath and spirit, and so on – essentially mental and physical functions unify. Breath is not the only method, but a key one.

This is a simple if useful model. There are many such models and as you know if you meditate there’s the model and then there’s actually doing it. Worse, a model can lead you you seeking results, which disrupts the meditation that you’re doing inspired by the model. Meditation is one of the most complicated simple things.

But, as I’ve meditated I’ve had a few insights that provide me a little more for my model – and hopefully ways to think about it that lead to less disruption.

When we meditate, what we are doing is wholehearted. We wholeheartedly set our intent to continuously refine our breath to be slower and evener, attending it devotedly. We wholeheartedly refine our breath to be slower and evener. The initial setting of intent is gentle intent, devotedly set on breath. This setting of intent inspires action, the refined breath, the firm intent.

When we do this we are wholeheartedly doing two things at once. Yet at the same time they’re unified. The mathematics of Meditation is 100%+100%=100%.

But also these two intents that are one spawn each other and map easily to Yin and Yang – which of course is all throughout Taoist literature. You sit quietly with your breath, passive, Yin. That intent to be with breath spawns the powerful and firm refining of the breath, which is yang. That breath, ever slowed and evened by firm intent, is a resting place for your attention – which is yin. Two two parts of breath meditation continuously reinforce each other, and they’re one.

Well that let me organize some of my thoughts and at least I understand what I’m saying. Hopefully you do to.

And I hope this entry helps you with your own meditation – and perhaps to share your own experiences. We’re all on this journey together, each of our journeys unique, yet also the same journey people have made for thousands of years. Sharing helps us all on the path.

–Xenofact

The Intent You Know, The Intent You Don’t

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In the last year or so I’ve become fascinated by the role of intent in meditative and spiritual practice and how intent has different qualities. We set our intent to meditate or do something else and our behavior shifts. We meditate on our breath, yet the intent (as per the Taoist works I’ve read) has both firm (breathing) and gentle (attending the breath) components that are also one. The study of intent is teaching me a lot of lessons.

In my case, one realization I’ve come to in studying intent is that, by setting one’s intent, you very quickly learn that your intent isn’t what you think.

You can sit down with the intent to have a regular breath and pay attention to it. Then you start pushing away at certain “wrong” sensations. You think about your cooking and what you have to do. Suddenly you’re analyzing Dungeon Crawler Carl. OK, some of this is just me, but you get the idea.

You sit down with a very clear intent and it goes off the rails. So are you weak-willed? Are you a failure? No, you’re not – you’re learning a lot about your actual intents – plural.

Sure you’re sitting down with the intent to meditate – but is that your actual intent? Maybe you’re seeking certain signs and experiences (something oft warned of in Taoist documents I’ve read). Maybe you’re wanting to get away from the day. Maybe you really just hope to relax. You sit down with one intent but it evaporates quickly as other intents were there, intents you hadn’t thought of.

Or perhaps when you set your intent on something and there are competing intents. Yes, you have an intent, but it’s currently in a wrestling match with six others. You weren’t going to eat that gigantic chocolate chip cookie, but your intent to deal with your crappy day at work wins out. Your intent was clear, but it lost the debate.

You get the idea. We set our intent and then it doesn’t hold. It’s not that we’ve failed, it’s that often what we want to do and what our priorities aren’t what we think they are or want them to be. You didn’t fail so much as not know yourself as well as you thought – and be ready to persist through that realization.

Which is fine because then you learn. You learn about what you want and what you really want. You learn about about your priorities. You set an intent and fail, yes, but that failure can be informative.

For myself, I learned that in my meditative practice I did often seek signs or milestones of progress, or try and reject “wrong” states of mind. In many cases I knew enough that my intent was not what it should have been. I had to relearn just intending to sit there and breathe and that’s it.

My meditative work also helped me understand other aspects of my life and intent.. I noticed how I’d set intent to get something done and fail because I’d ignored exhaustion or stress.. I’d notice how certain things would seize my imagination in a distracting way, telling me more about my creative interests and goals – and obsessions. Honestly, failing with intent has been incredibly therapeutic.

I keep meditating though, and not only have the benefits of meditation, but of my failures. I have taken to setting intent for clarity of mind in mundane tasks, making them into meditations in a way – and learn from both distractions and focus. Intent is a wonderfully simple tool, and like a tool practice helps and may result in a few humiliating banged fingers.

So don’t beat yourself up when your intent doesn’t hold. The issue is the self you want to beat up isn’t who you thought it was. Maybe you can intend to keep going – and learn.

Intent never ends, it’s always there to work with.

–Xenofact