![[tmbchr]™](/journal/popocculture-blog-logo.jpg){kind=logo}
The Struggle Towards the Mystical
In response to my piece on occultists longing for direct experience of the divine, a reader calling themselves “Hello” left a great comment which I think really speaks to the heart of what many people working in alternative religions seem to be struggling with. An excerpt from that comment:
I find a flat materialistic, positivist, rationalist view of life to be unfullfilling. But I feel tormented because the left part of my conditioned brain knows it should accept no supernatural explanations for anything.
It is depressing to think we live in an absurd universe which has no instrinsic meaning because there is no spirit, nothing transcendental. I don’t want existential dread!
I keep seeing this same struggle come up in conversations I have with other people studying these fields. Daniel Pinchbeck’s book, Breaking Open the Head (which I just finished) even had the subtitle in an earlier edition: “A Visionary Journey from Cynicism to Shamanism.”
Something tells me this is one of the key issues that all of us are trying to work through: overcoming not only the limitations of rationalism and materialism but also of much more pervasive cynicism and, depending on your age group, ironic distance. We’ve just become so type-cast in these cultural roles that many of us have a really hard time breaking out of them and opening ourselves up to true authentic experience of something else, something greater. I know, speaking from personal experience, that this is pretty much *THE* struggle that I’ve been working on these past few years, getting myself to a point where I’m able to accept these weird far out areas of life and thinking as not only legitimate, but real, valid, and most of all worthwhile.
What about you? Is this part of what you’re working on personally and/or spiritually? If it’s not, how would you characterize the essence of your struggle? What forces do find pitted against one another inside and outside of you? Where is it you really think you’re going? How much does all of our experience and drives overlap? What do we all share that makes us come together in the ways that we do?
September 5th, 2005 at 2:40 am
The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent, but if we can come to terms with this indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. … However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.
I stick by Stanley Kubrick on that one (his quote above).
Your greatest creation is the life you lead. I feel that, in the end, all these quests for truth are really an exploration of yourself. I hate to throw down two quotes in one post, but this note J. Krishnamurti once said:
Truth is a pathless land. Man cannot come to it through any organisation, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, not through any philosophic knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind.
September 5th, 2005 at 3:06 am
Yes, this tension is part of my spiritual path. I practice an eclectic form of Wicca, and I argue that my faith doesn’t rely on belief in the supernatural. Nevertheless, I believe things that can’t be explained by science, not because they are “unnatural,” but because I think science, while a superlative epistemological method, isn’t the only route to knowledge. I don’t believe in a deity who is transcendent, omnipotent, omniscient - who is literally supernatural because he is outside of nature. Neither do I think that the energies we work with in Witchcraft are supernatural. They are part of the natural world and they follow natural laws. Witches are powerful insofar as we act in accord with nature.
September 5th, 2005 at 9:52 am
Life is because it is. There is no way we can know more than that untill we get out into the universe and handle the matter. Our current state of religiosity is realy quite pathetic. We sit here alone in a dark a dark room and think that there might be something out there that explains it all…the only way to explain it is to get out into the universe for creation is equal to or greater than its creator…if we do not understand the creation how can we understand the creator and its spirituality.
September 5th, 2005 at 10:05 am
Existential terror used to periodically paralyze me for a few days at a time… Ever since I ate mushrooms, and then began studying neoplatonism and mysticism, the Fear doesn’t grip me like it used to.
We can only know the material world through the spirit, as Boehme has succintly said. That is important. There is a faculty within us that perceives. It can perceive sensations, feelings, thoughts, and perception itself. Follow this perception back, find the innermost eye of the soul. This isn’t flaky hippy stuff, anyone can do it. We’ve just been discouraged since birth to even consider the possiblity of spirit.
This is not dualism. The forms proceed from their source into their particular
September 5th, 2005 at 10:29 am
Hello’s comments really nailed it. When I was a teenager, I used to stay home from school for days trembling over those concerns. It took a long time to get over the terror. A mix of intuition and logic finally got me to the conclusion that mind is fundamental in the universe, which is a fairly happy thought, for me.
September 5th, 2005 at 12:06 pm
No, Dan, you nailed it! For me the key mental move was to simply invert the whole mind-matter framework. Western culture tells us that matter is the root of mind. Even most western religions tell you that — they just make an exception for God who sits outside tweaking the matter. It’s taken a long time to retrain myself to think of mind as the root of matter, and I still sometimes catch myself thinking the other way. But if mind is fundamental, all the meaninglessness, all the difficulty in explaining the “paranormal,” is wiped away.
September 5th, 2005 at 4:16 pm
the mind is the matter. there is a fair consensus in that here. my challenge has been to prove it to the material-minded. yesterday i visited friends and family out away from the city at rural property owned by my girlfriend`s brother. we ate dinner and had a drink or two and then my girlfriend brought out my tarot cards. i don`t read them much these days. they were a great learning mechanism for me in intuitive developement, but i rely on the intuition more now and have moved away from doing the spreads. the others were doing readings with some of my books as guides for thier readings and that was o.k. i don`t make judgement about other`s methods of inquiry.
i had forgotten how powerful a tool they can be.
one girl pulled a card out and put it down and asked what that meant. the 10 of swords. spiritual destruction. misuse of gifts. etc. yes, that was the answer to the question alright. it turns out that the girl who pulled the card out had been having prophetic visions and dreams with negative outcomes all her life and was afraid of this process in herself.
she was upset and i had to pull her aside from the group and explain that our minds create reality, for good or bad, depending on what the mind focusses on and that she has a great start on many in that her inner eye was working already. she just needed to decide to focus on peace and love in her meditation and conscious thinking and her natural ability would do the rest.
we returned to the table and then my girlfriend`s brother wanted proof of how the cards and my reading of them worked. his experiment was that they would do a spread for an issue that one of them was experiencing while i was out of the room, so i would have no idea what or who the reading was for when i came to do the reading.
i think he thought that i was using the person`s responses as a guide. a cold reading technique that james randi used to crow on about as proof of trickery.
i read the reading and it was about a business relationship and fraud, bankrupcy and misrepresentation. it was about the 10 of swords girl`s boyfriend. i was 100% on the issue and the person.
i have lived with this understanding all of my life. it is amusing to see the surprise in people when they experience this stuff, but the tragedy is that most will wake up tomorrow and go right back to material duality and to them it will be a card trick.
September 5th, 2005 at 4:21 pm
Hm, interesting. I guess the mind/matter question is really never one I’ve been that worried about. I think for me the greater issue was getting myself just to accept that it’s okay to pursue the stuff. You know, giving permission to do so. I always knew since I was a little kid there was something to it, but I was just scared.
September 5th, 2005 at 4:38 pm
let`s face it. there is a process of marginalisation in our society toward the occult. the fear is a boundary that keeps people off the grass.(quite a few sub-texts there.). once you cross over into understanding there is no going back to the old way. when you know that you are the god who makes the grass green then you treat the process with reverence and divinination stops being a parlour trick and becomes a way of life. jesus`s words were all about that. it got lost somewhat in the king james version. the bible is still a powerful tool for living life, unless it`s taken literally as translated.
September 5th, 2005 at 4:38 pm
oh, and tim, where did that fear come from?
September 5th, 2005 at 11:38 pm
We speak of science as a source of knowledge, as a reality. We have created that reality, as a collective agreement (though not all agree). We have created our own reality in the laws and theories we create to describe and understand the segment of the infinite realities which we have found accessible to our senses and reason.
It is not so much about creating our own reality as it is about attending to that part of reality from which we create our lives.
Like that old saying (or something like it): Some look at a problem and say, “why?” Others look at an opportunity and say, “why not?” And still others look at a mess and say, “I’m not cleaning that up!”
But maybe it’s not a mess to be cleaned, but a game to be caught up in, luxuriating in the soapy water, intrigued by working out a system to turn the chaos into valuable resources. Are we having fun yet? Because if we’re not, we’re probably missing the point.
I miss that point alot. It’s not as if I have the answers. What I have are open-ended questions into which theories and possibilities can be dropped. If reality is about perception and perspective, and the reality you are looking at blows, walk around, look at it from other perspectives, find the interesting shapes and contours.
As far as I can tell, life is not about getting an easy ride, or hoarding toys, or holding on to a place or situation, or even building a nest egg upon which to set. Life is a constantly evolving self-creation, one to be proud of, to rejoyce in, sometimes to find collaborators with whom to expand one’s perspective, sometimes to dance free in a self-designed sacred meadow while all the possibilities whirl about in free-form ecstatic play.
Not to say there isn’t darkness, and drama, and tragedies, and despair. That’s why there are tears, and anger, and drugs to dull the pain, and heroism, hope, and dreams to mend the weary. But it’s about opening up to find the better ways, to create satisfying, inspiring realities to live.
The only viable option is to go outside the box/forget about the box and wing it with as yet unknown options, to throw out the Piscean paradigm and open up to unbound creativity. The only way out is through, but we need to believe in our ability to cut our own path with the tools we create from whatever is at hand.
The old forms, the old rules, the new rules evolved from the old, are about restriction, poverty, pain and fear. They are about wanting a powerful ally in the sky to smite our enemies, as we smite those who make us uncomfortable. The old rules say that the way to make up for our lack of vision is to denigrate those who can see. Even more, they say that destruction is the just response to destruction; hate for hate; pain for pain; buy low, sell high and keep labor as cheap and downtrodden as possible.
There is energy in chaos; there is the possibility of order, a new order, an order made to order. If our godly creative core is allowed to fly free, who knows where it may take us. Do we fear too greatly the possibilities to allow ourselves to soar? The dizzying heights? The new worlds, not to conquer, to find mutually beneficial arrangements, partnerships, inspiration, creative enterprise, is this what we fear? Because the unknown is fearful; but, then, so is the known.
I don’t know where I’m going. I’m trying to allow the magic to find me.
I’ve been feeling a transition into a more magickal realm that I have been aware of always in some unconscious understanding, but it is becoming more evident, more relevant, more insistent.
Getting in touch with the personally meaningful because that whole “real world” (yeah, like the tv show) American values of self and everyone else destruction just turned into a cartoon feature not amusing enough to pay for.
Where is reality? Is it something we can cage and observe? Why are some stories we tell ourselves “real” and others fantasy or even lies? Is magick real, is it a valid, authentic, varifiable way of life? Can we live as on a parallel road, seeing the deadening horror of a whole stream of lived experience as a passing train on a parallel track? Can we devise alternate and wondrous transportation that takes us along a shining, winding, path of beauty and serene sanity that we know is real? How tell the mad from the merely awakening? Which is stress relieving dream; which is real?
Philosophy is the love of truth. But is it only truth because we love it into being? Can we create our own ideal truths, our own ideal lifestreams, the reality that we find most ecstatically resonant with our truest selves, by simply (or not so simply) loving it into being? What are we to make of that other reality, the one that sucks? Has it been loved into being as well? Can we safely leave it to those who love it, and wonder off their path onto our own?
Peace,
Laurie