Entries from November 2005 ↓

I am fond of saying that I think the heart of spiritual practice can be seen as a sophisticated form of hedonism. And there is probably a part of me that enjoys the provocativeness of the statement. But I also really do believe it on some level. It keeps me humble. When I see someone downing a beer or sitting zazen, it’s all on the same continuum of pleasure-seeking built into our bodies. Every sentient being just wants to be happy and everyone has their “practice” they hope is going to make that happen. My personal belief is that meditation is a vital part of a process of skillful means that leads to the deepest pleasures possible. It’s been through meditation that I have experienced bliss deeper than any drug or sex. I can’t ignore that this is probably why I keep coming back to the cushion. Buddha says that it’s through the Jhanas (absorption ecstasies) that we are purified and drawn into enlightenment. But nowadays the Jhanas are almost frequently dismissed as “dangerous” or as temporary crutches for the beginner or as spiritual materialism. Even the Tibetan and Indian Tantras are kept hush hush in “serious” circles; swept under the rug. I think this is a shame. In particular I think it creates a barrier to a more popular embrace of the contemplative life. There is a party going on inside the body and soul, no need for shoulds! Once shown proper meditation, the pleasure of spirit just naturally draws a person in deeper and deeper. Then better values begin to flow out naturally. It all feels really good. Spiritual pretension is side-stepped. I consider myself no different than a raging alcoholic, it’s just I’ve found the best drug ever to be addicted to.

The modern paradigm of Qigong, at least how it’s been popularly imported into the West, is mostly based around an energetic model of the universe. It’s appealing to more pragmatic, scientifically minded people who are turned off by worldviews involving numerous deities and “other worldy realms” that sound too fantastical to have any basis in reality. The idea that a subtle, immaterial energy is pulsing through channels in your energetic body and that you can work with this energy in various ways is not quite as strange or daunting as some fantastical dark ritual like interacting with spirits. But what if this Qi is not quite as cold and mechanical a substance as the energetic model often treats it? What if Qi itself is alive and sentient? And what if the different patterns and shapes that Chi can take on represent distinct, living personalities in the energetic fabric of our bodies and the universe? And what if we, just for the hell of it, were to name each of the different shapes of energy we experience in our lives?

This thought experiment shows how the energetic model can blend with a more theistic model that seems so far out many people. The kind of ritual work involving deities. Spiritual magick. It’s not far out at all actually. At least no more so than communicating back and forth with a voice in your head everyday that you falsely assume is your Self.

Here’s a scenario. Let’s say you have a friend, Kyla, and she is doing some intense breath work. She notices this powerful energy starting to pulse in her perineum. As she experiences this energy on deeper levels, she notices it has what she considers a feminine quality. Suddenly she finds herself almost compelled to name this energy. She calls the energy “Shakti”. One night, deep in meditation she has a very clear image in her mind of a beautiful woman dancing for her. She knows it is Shakti and Shakti says “I love you Kyla”. She has been touched. Afterward she goes on to approach this pulsing energy in her perineum with respect. She treats this “energetic shape” as if it were a real being with consciousness and emotion, instead of just an inanimate, soulless form of bioelectricity that she can flip on and off and push and pull through her body at her whim. Uh oh. Kyla has started down the ominously dark, ludicrous, evil path of insane Harry Potter spiritual magick.

In this scenario Kyla simply took an energetic pattern she was having an experience with, and named it in order to deepen her experience into a relationship with a living form of energy. It’s in no way different to the shang qing Taoist belief of living, intelligent spirits inhabiting the organs. And there is a lot of merit to this approach. Humans are social creatures before conceptual ones. Language probably evolved first as a means of communicating with the tribe before it became internalized as a way of telling stories in our heads and creating selves and egos. We are probably hardwired more for sophisticated communication with sentient beings than we are for abstract thought because we have doing the former much longer. Moving chi through the body definitely has power. But it can quickly get co-opted and become an intellectual process. That’s why the Chinese systems put so much emphasis on movement. To get us out of a potentially over-intellectualized alchemy.

There is much power in the belief that you can communicate with almost anything in your life as if it were a living god. Much more of the brain, body and emotions are drawn into the interaction. And of course more power means a greater risk of giant success or giant failure. This is a deep deep way to draw yourself into the divine though. And many many spiritual paths utilize it, giving people something human/animalesque they can communicate with.

All legitimate spiritual paths involving deities start out with these personal experiences of configurations of energy that are then named and treated as real. In our example, Kyla has named a god. If she were to go on to teach other people, and were to tell them about Shakti and hopefully show them how to get in touch with the same energy that she has named such, then a religion of shared experience and worship begins to form. And a Shakti archetype is also being carved deeper into the stream of reality, into the Mind of God, perhaps resonating more powerfully then when just Kyla stumbled across her. More and more life is being breathed into Shakti as an independent form.

Pretty cool stuff. Of course this is all just my wild speculation that I am making an interesting story out of. On the surface it can seem like many of the more obvious wackos are drawn to what is openly called magick nowadays. And I’m sure we could wax on and on about stereotypes relating what temperaments are drawn to which type of path, what their character flaws might likely be, what they might do that is “just too far out”. It’s fun, but I think it’s hard to really accurately judge a whole paradigm based on just a handful of self-described magickians who’ve had some imbalances. Even poor Jesus got a little crazy sometimes. Like that one time he broke out that whip and just started thrashing on dudes selling crap in the temple.

Update … I just discovered this awesome program last night called EverNote. Really cool piece of software. It’s taggable note feature is something I’ve been looking for everywhere for several months now. Don’t know how I missed this one. I’ve already purchased it and not only impulsively dumped all my TreePad, Backpack and Wikka notes into it, I’ve also made it my central Getting Things Done implementation, replacing my previous GTDMail workflow which I came to find lacking in some important ways.

My favorite bits and pieces of an article I recently enjoyed.

Via Z Magazine Online

“What do I mean “the Left doesn’t know what it’s talking about”? I certainly don’t mean that Left values are bad, or that the abolition of the market and its replacement by democratic planning is naïve. But I do think that the Left is often incoherent, stupidly dogmatic, and almost unintelligible to ordinary people. I don’t think, in practice, that we convey effectively our vision of a desirable future, nor do we convey a strategy for achieving it that seems … well, achievable. I don’t think most self-described socialists (Marxist or otherwise) could tell you, in straight, ordinary language (and that’s the key) what a market economy IS, what the essential institutions and features and dynamics of capitalism are, and how a worker-run economy might differ, be more fair, and still deliver the goods. I don’t think most self-described anarchists could tell you that either, or for that matter, tell you about the essential institutions and function of the State, and more importantly, how a non-hierarchical polity might differ from a capitalist or State-socialist one.
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There is a good deal that the Left has to own up to –– that is, if it actually wants to inspire, and motivate, and grow…and win for Christsake! (I’m not convinced that a lot of Leftists really want to win, that they don’t prefer marginality, because marginality is somehow by definition more “pure” than the mainstream. In my opinion, this is nonsense; “purity as pathology.” The Left should be ecstatic about its values and goals becoming mainstream; it means a revolution is brewing!)
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Instead of saying “Anything short of complete ‘Revolution’ is reformist” (and then going home to watch TV), we need to recognize that no revolution begins with the overthrow of the State. The dismantling or seizure of the State is usually a reflection of a deep revolution already occurring at the grassroots, community and workplace level.
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There’s nothing complex or mysterious about this –– even though the High Priests of Capitalism (and some Marxists) work very hard to make economics seem that way. What do we value? What do we want an economy to achieve? Any attempt to conceptualize alternatives to capitalism must begin with these questions, if we want to interest ordinary people in the debate, if we want to be rooted in the real world. One doesn’t build a broad-based, anti-capitalist movement by pretending to understand the “labour theory of value,” or by saying capitalism sucks (and not having a well-thought-out alternative model to put in its place). We need to ask straight-forward questions about what we want. We need to debate different proposals and options for how to best achieve our desires. I don’t care what you call this –– communism, anarchism, participatory democracy, socialism as it was always meant to be –– it really doesn’t matter. But if we’re going to develop an anti-capitalist alternative model, we need to be very clear about what values and principles we want to uphold. And if we can’t communicate these values in everyday language, if we can’t persuade anyone of anything, then we either don’t know what we’re talking about, or our ideas suck.”

My consistent disappointment with the environmental movement and progressive politics in general is a lack of coherent vision and an apparent reliance on merely deconstructing the right. Here are my favorite bits and pieces of a fascinating article that touches on these points.

Via Grist Magazine

“As individuals, environmental leaders are anything but stupid. Many hold multiple advanced degrees in science, engineering, and law from the best schools in the country. But as a community, environmentalists suffer from a bad case of group think, starting with shared assumptions about what we mean by “the environment” — a category that reinforces the notions that a) the environment is a separate “thing” and b) human beings are separate from and superior to the “natural world.”

The concepts of “nature” and “environment” have been thoroughly deconstructed. Yet they retain their mythic and debilitating power within the environmental movement and the public at large. If one understands the notion of the “environment” to include humans, then the way the environmental community designates certain problems as environmental and others as not is completely arbitrary.

Why, for instance, is a human-made phenomenon like global warming — which may kill hundreds of millions of human beings over the next century — considered “environmental”? Why are poverty and war not considered environmental problems while global warming is? What are the implications of framing global warming as an environmental problem — and handing off the responsibility for dealing with it to “environmentalists”?
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The effect of this orientation is a certain literal-sclerosis2 — the belief that social change happens only when people speak a literal “truth to power.” Literal-sclerosis can be seen in the assumption that to win action on global warming one must talk about global warming instead of, say, the economy, industrial policy, or health care. “If you want people to act on global warming” stressed Becker, “you need to convince them that action is needed on global warming and not on some ulterior goal.”
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It is our contention that the strength of any given political proposal turns more on its vision for the future and the values it carries within it than on its technical policy specifications.”