psychology

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 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

Liberatory Spirituality

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I’ve been thinking about my spiritual practices lately, what I want to do, share, write about, and learn about. I think the best term is “Liberatory Spirituality.” There are several levels to it, and I’m going to try to consolidate them here, both to share and also to organize how I think about it.

There’s the personal level of Liberatory Spirituality. The practice of spiritual activities that help liberate me to think and act in ways where I am more connected with the world but also less restrained. It’s meditation that brings a unifying intent. It’s contemplation that overcomes neuroses. It’s things that both evolve me but also let me be myself without the constraints of time and neuroses – more me, less my limited ideas of me.

Our first set of constraints is ourselves. We need to be liberated from what we think we are, not necessarily a jailbreak, but just realizing where the walls are. This is important because we can be our own prison and our own jailer – and because we can delude ourselves into thinking we’re liberated when that’s just a new prison.

There’s the social level. What is my role in the world, what does my spirituality tell me? How do I interact with others and help them in their own liberation? What roles and professions and so on help us grow and grow together? How can we be liberated together?

Taoist and Buddhist writers I’ve read often talk about the wish to help all attain the Tao, for all to be liberated. That’s so important because when we care about others, we take down our own walls. When we connect with each other, liberty is reinforced and amplified.

Finally there’s the “cosmic” level, a lovely term I heard in Understanding Reality – being part of the Celestial Design. There’s that role in the greater universe, in the underlying principles and powers of the world. Gods and virtues, history and cosmology.

This is the hardest area to talk about, perhaps. But it’s also one that has us think about our place in the greater world – or how we’re disconnected from it. It helps us think of gods and great patterns. And yes I’m being all artsy and poetic because it’s the only way I know to express this.

These liberations all work together as well. Some great teaching from history leads us to take up liberatory practices that in turn help us liberate others. Compassion for another can crack our emotional armor, leading to realization that inspires us to write down our thoughts to share for history. We may see a god in another person, leading us to appreciate the cosmic patterns beneath the world while our own sense of self weakens – yet broadens.

It’s liberation all the way up and down our spiritual practices.

So in my own limited way, that’s what’s important to me. I’d like to see human liberation on all levels – in short, as a spiritual practice. It’s nice to know so many feel this way, from the Liberation Theology of Christianity to the Buddhists desiring to liberate all to people who just care about their fellow humans.

Let’s all get there together by being here with each other.

–Xenofact