mysticism

It’s All Grasping

by

Lately I’ve been contemplating several psychological phenomena I see in my meditations and self-analysis. The funny thing is the more I look at the different problems we face – and that we address with meditation, psychology, and spiritual pursuits, it all seems a whole lot alike. In a way that seems very familiar. It’s all grasping.

I have talked before of what I call The Escape Capsule, that place in our heads and minds where “we” hide. Where we run away from things. Where we think we’ll be safe, but we are not safe, and our “we” is ephemeral.

I’ve talked of the Place of Death from the Tao Te Ching, where we hide, where we cut ourselves off from life, and where we usually seal our fate by being so disconnected. We can’t move through the world and flow with it, we can’t respond, and we fail. I noted it was a lot like The Escape Capsule, if not the same.

In contemplating Desire, I’ve seen how I have habits of mentally grabbing or seeking certain things. I’ll latch onto something, some urge or thought, and my mind is engaged in everything from rumination to playing with mental puzzles. In fact, my mind seems to want to have something to grab onto – I imagine you’ve been there as well.

All three of these things I’ve analyzed over time- and named, are reflections of one simple thing – Grasping or Craving. You know, what Buddha warned us about explicitly in his Four Noble Truths, and what everyone else warned us about. Buddha though really brought it to the surface with his gift for specific organization, so game recognizes game.

Needing a separate self, needing to wall it off (in a way that ruins it), and just craving really are the same thing. We’ve got all these grabby complexes in our heads, burrowed into our habits and even our physical postures and tensions, that are active. They also end up backfiring and making us miserable if they solidify too much.

Desire and fear, hiding away and reaching out, it’s all the same, grasping. You can feel that in the tension in your neck, in the worry running around your brain, in the obsession that makes you stare at the cigarette or angry email in horror. You’re stuck in the machine, and the machine is what you thought you were – and thought you enjoyed it sometimes.

As we get reminded, craving, what makes us suffer, is the problem. But this is a reminder it has many faces. The desire that torments us, the cutting off we create, the attempts to escape – they’re all the same.

This is where I get thankful for the legion of sages, therapists, mystics, artists, writers, and so on that keep reminding us that being alive isn’t the same as grasping, or having, or running away from danger. It’s being alive, flowing like water, present, there. That’s what meditation and therapy and so on are about in the end – seeing, understanding, but most importantly being there and being real in the midst of it all.

It’s all been said before, but I’m glad people keep saying it.

– Xenofact

Don’t Know It Until I Say It

by

Those of us who engage in mystical, magical, and meditative activity face a paradox of recording information. It’s useful, it lets us review things, but there’s also, well, some problems.

Sure, it helps to write things down as you might read them. Also, after awhile you end up with a pile of notes and no time to read them. There’s also a little self-pressure to review such things. It takes the fun out of “holy shit, I had an insight.”

Yeah, you may write down great wisdom. But sometimes mystical insights are of the moment, and the future readings might not help. “The mind is a bird on fire” might be a good album name, but what were you talking about? Were you high? Can you remember?

Writing down deep experiences can become its own purpose – and squeeze out your other activity. When you’re trying to record your deep experiences, you might focus on the record and not the doing. When you’re ready to write it down, you might not do the meditation or spellcasting or whatever you need to do to have something to write down.

These are what I’ve experienced. I assume, perhaps arrogantly, you’ve experienced some of them. I also assume you found who other issues of writing down mystic experiences I’ve not had – or aren’t aware of. Let’s commiserate if you want to email me.

Anyway, such negatives are almost enough to make you not want to record your insights for posterity – or whatever.. But I actually have found a very good reason to do so that has nothing to do with future review or recording the wisdom of your ages. To write down or otherwise portray your mystic experiences helps you understand and process them.

You know how it goes, you have something in your head and you can’t quite understand it. But when you write it down, sketch it out, do something to put it in an understandable form you learn. The act of communicating helps you understand what you experienced.

Sometimes you write things down or whatever to talk to yourself. You might not look back on it or reread it or whatever, but at least you get it when you record it. That’s fine, but maybe the act of writing down an experience lets you process it.

I found this doing a mix of art and trying to figure how to write down my various experiences. I noticed when I wrote down things that happened in meditation as small bits of text, like the little chapterlets of The Tao Te Ching, I got them. The target audience was me at that moment, but worked better than just taking direct notes.

So when you record your various experiences in magic or meditation, remember one reason is to figure out whats’ going on right then. Don’t ignore the moment.

Even if you find the moment is the only time you pay attention to what you wrote down.

– Xenofact

Rethinking Our Bodies

by

It takes little effort to look into most forms of mysticism and find something involving the body and the supernatural forces supposedly within. Energy channels and chakras, planetary correspondences and and vortices, many a form of mysticism treats the body as some supernatural system. Even if it’s not part of a given practice, someone has, is, or will add some spiritual-physical elements by shoehorning it in.

Now as any reader remotely familiar with me knows, as much as I find “blueprints” of such things useful, I’m also cautious about them. It’s too easy to turn a mystical practice into a checkbox of experiences one can merely hallucinate instead of experience. But when it comes to this “psychoanatomy” as I call it, I get the value and appeal even when it’s obvious bullshit.

Our bodies are part of our experience, part of reality, and they should be part of our spiritual practice. I mean you can kind of ignore them, but hunger, horniness, or a stubbed toe are going to bring you back to your body, like it or not.

A moment to look at your body quickly reveals how it reflects – and affects – your mental (dare I say even spiritual?) state. Tensions in your mind manifest in your body, emotional reactions are burned into your physical ones, and sense memories can flood you with recollections. It’s complicated,it’s complex, and not dealing with our bodies in spiritual practice just leaves out part of us.

Someone dealing with any form of psychoanatomy is at least being aware of our bodies and deconstructing and rethinking them. To think of the body as energy flows, or correspondences, or chakras can help see and even “take apart” old habits of thought, tension, and reaction. Sure, some of the techniques we use may be utter bullshit (and there’s plenty on the market) but rethinking your body is valuable.

It’s also something I think a lot of us really need to do. I get why people may buy some hack Quigong book or try to align their energy centers or use emotional support oil, or whatever. In my own meditative work I’ve become painfully aware of my tensions and how my body reflects deeper psychological processes. Sometimes you hurt, or feel uncomfortable, or suddenly have overwhelming musical reactions and you really want to deal with that.

It’s easy to fall into bullshit mysticism over the body. I’m sympathetic.

As spiritual practitioners, mystics, and the like, it’s also a reminder that people may have some real insights from their otherwise ill-informed practices. We shouldn’t just be sympathetic, but should help them out with healthier practices of bodily mysticism – or just recommendations for a good therapist. Even the crap may bring insights, and we can make sure those are channeled in a useful way.

– Xenofact