Zac put together an excellent response to the topic of occult evangelization. It’s worth reading in it’s entirety, but I wanted to select one of the juiciest morsels and post it here. Zac writes:

The important thing to remember is that spiritual practice is not based on changing your concepts. It is based on changing your expeirence of life, beyond the reach of conceptualisation. Evangelism doesn’t touch this area, and tends to deal entirely in the change of opinions and viewpoints.

Fucking - brilliant! This is something I’ve been really struggling to articulate lately and have not been very successful. I find myself growing more and more weary of the occult as a sort of “concept parade”. The endless train of ideas is stimulating, but not fulfilling. Sex without love, you might say (although I’m sure some would argue otherwise). Anyway, the thing I don’t like about evangelism is that it seems to deal with impregnating somebody with a new story-system, a new set of concepts. Does that help people or does that get them further enmeshed? Arguments could be made in both directions.

Personally, the place I’m at right now is becoming much more about the experience, and much less about the concepts. But then, to get to this place, it’s more than likely that I had to go through the concepts. Seems like a rare person that can just hack straight through the jungle and find the hidden temple. There’s some story about the Buddha that Joseph Campbell used to always relate. I forget the exact wording. But it’s something like the Buddha has an audience gathered to hear his teachings. He begins his sermon by holding up a flower. One particular monk in the audience is suddenly struck with understanding or enlightenment. Buddha sees this and smiles, and then begins speaking so the rest of the audience can understand.

Arizona of the blog Alchemizade recently left an exceptionally good comment in relation to this (specifically about Ken Wilber):

There is a nice series of alchemical images somewhere which depict a pair of alchemists starting on their quest with ladders to the heavens. In the final image the ladders have gone. It seems that we do need a framework in order to make some initial sense of the everything but success can be measured by our capacity and willingness to let go of these formulations

This is the link to where she found the images, along with a textual description for anybody who’s interested. In any event, I can very much relate to this imagery. I don’t fancy that I’ve reached Heaven or anything like that. But I do feel this exceptionally strong urge to kick the ladder out from under me and move forward the rest of the way without the aid of devices. Surprisingly, the ladder sticks to you when you try to kick it away. So it seems to be a necessarily gradual process, if my own experience is a reliable indication. The first and most important aspect of this stage of the game seems to be give up the need to be right. And not just that, but to allow yourself (and others) to be wrong (or what seems like wrong). It’s very much about suspending judgement and allowing and supporting possibilities. But it’s not something you can do all at once. You gotta chip away at it.