Xenofact

The Tenth Picture

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A lot of spiritual experiences give you a high. This isn’t a bad thing at all, but too often the sign gets mistaken for the destination

I’m not only talking the high from drugs some people take for spiritual or faux-spiritual reasons. It’s obvious that appropriately used substances, employed by informed people under proper tutelage, can lead to deep spiritual insights. It’s also obvious you can have such deep experiences from breathing, visualization, energy work, etc. These are deep, strange, powerful and also can get you high as hell for that moment.

And that high is not necessarily a bad thing. That is a sign that you’ve gotten something going on. You feel that high of your body relaxing in Quigong, the self-yet-not moment of cyclical breathing, or the psychedelic top-of-your-head-blows off of a drug or visualization trip. Something happened, and you have a powerful experience and often see and feel life differently.

However, I think a lot of people see the high as the goal. They want the sign of enlightenment, of achievement, of spiritual fulfillment – and to them that’s the rush of the therapeutic relaxation or some stunning vision. They want to own it by owning an experience.

I think this is why we see so many people falling under the spells of gurus, grifters, endless substance experiments, and shifting trends. They’re chasing the high or looking for a new one so they can once again “hold” that sense of spiritual enlightenment. But it’s just a senstion.

Spiritual highs are just roadsigns you’re onto something (and, in some cases, just on something even if it’s your own neurotransmitters). Something in your head and personality just shifted, got blown apart, or made connections. But the question is what you do next.

Plenty of seekers’ next step should be to ask if they just deluded themselves. But for many they had some authentic insight and that’s a chance to grow, not just find a new way to get high again.

What did you learn? How can you apply it? Does it help you understand yourself, others, and your teachers better. Where does the spiritual experience send you next? I mean even if you go to conventional therapy, good job, you learned something.

Spiritual experience should help you grow, not become a junkie.

I’m reminded of the famous Ten Ox-Herding pictures of Zen. They’re a lovely metaphor for meditation and spiritual practice based around seeking and taming a recalcitrant bovine. Eventually the trainer – the seeker – returns to society after many insights, helping others. He doesn’t leave the world or stay in his seeking, but returns a better person.

If your spiritual highs don’t help you become better, if they don’t someday lead you back to the bustling marketplace and busy town, then pause and take stock of yourself.

-Xenofact

Checkbox Minds and Deep Souls

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I was discussing life with a friend of a similar age, and they brought up the desire to cultivate virtue – deep, innate character. This led to a discussion about how some people’s morality is just checkboxes, while others is a deep sense of right and wrong inseparable from their personality. Between that conversation and speculation later, I wanted to share some thoughts.

(And yes, this is carrying on a conversation by other means.)

The idea of virtue is something I’ve thought of because of its depth, the idea of having some inherent deep goodness and quality. In my Taoist interests it stands out, a quality (“Te”) one obtains through contemplation and meditation, a kind of mystical-moral gravity. My recent readings on Neoplatonic and Stoic philosophy and mysticism led me to similar ideas as well, of one cultivating some kind of depth of character. There’s something that happens when we cultivate or find an inherent force of character, being “good” so we act “good.”

The “checkbox” idea of morality is the opposite. You are good because you can check off these things, like a car maintenance list or an order form. Things are done because they’re on the list not because of ones character or any depth of contemplation.

After this discussion I realized that “checkbox morality” is no kind of morality at all. It’s doing some signifiers, not even a minimal effort. It invites cheating the checkboxes with games of language, like some kind of tax code of morality. It has nothing to do with the actor, why they do things, and what led them to their actions.

And of course, checkbox morality invites people to say “I did all these checkboxes” then still go on being a colossal asshole. I’m sure a quick look at the world will allow you to name several public figures that fit this . . . then several more . . . then several more . . .

Checkbox morality is shallow, not really moral – and is empty. Also honestly sort of boring and pretentious.

This helped me understand my desire better, and that of other thinkers whose writings inspire me. I wasn’t interested in checklists, I was interested in evolving, like some kind of moral Pokemon (steal this idea, Nintendo). The drive to virtue is a drive to grow, sometimes driven be a delightful unsettling sense that one can be better.

The quest for virtue is something real, it has depth, it’s even a bit dangerous. It’s not a list, it’s both being and an adventure.

This also helps me understand some of legends of past sages and holy men and artists I saw in the Taoist cannon and elsewhere. Groups of informal mystics and philosophers and outright weirdos gathering to discuss virtue and morality and life, and of course sometimes get completely shitfaced while hanging out. There’s a delight in exploring one’s depths with friends – like this friend and I did.

I hope this column inspires you – and I’d like to hear your own thoughts on virtue.

– Xenofact