We've also talked about escapes from verbal reality: sigils, drugs,
thoughtlessness at orgasm, all of that stuff. How magic often happens
in wordless states.
Well, fuck it, it's time to pony up boys and girls: kill the killer.
Destroy your minds.
You want out of the verbal trap? Take a shotgun and blow your mind
away. And I don't mean for an hour, or a weekend, I mean permanently.
Plot your escape from Verbal Reality and run, flee, into the mystical
silence that produces stillness and the practice of the presence of god.
Yes, dears, we're going to talk about meditation, the ultimate act of
rebellion against society, "the system" and all of those other illusory
things.
Meditation is not just social action: meditation is revolution. To
become free - by any means necessary!
This is not some crummy "meditate so you'll be nicer to people" post.
This isn't "meditate so you'll be calmer" post. This is "meditate so
you can escape verbal confinement and roam free in the universe."
Meditation as revolutionary politics, as anarchy, as Will and Life and
Freedom. You know that your mind is a cage: that other people wrote the
language you think in, that your conceptual frameworks were molded
first by your parents, then by your schools, then by Aleister Crowley,
Bill Burroughs and Swami Shivananada. Everything in words is garbage,
ever more confining and sophisticated traps to keep you in the realm of
experience to which words can meaningfully refer.
Understand? Even the people who seek to set you free in words are liars
and thieves, polluting the human race's cognitive sphere yet further.
All I can do with this trap is to clearly label it: "this is a trap
because it adds words to your world."
If language is a virus from outer space, it's time you cured yourself.
Destroy all thought.
This is not meaningless radical bullshit. Or, if it is, it's at least
real meaningless radical bullshit. About 12 years ago I broke out of
the mental trap, cut through the skein of thoughts and escaped into
internal silence - a persistent state in which, if I am not actively
thinking about something, there is only a silent light inside of my
head, or an occasional AUM.
I credit that experience with saving my life: without the constant
grinding down of language, the chatter, the psychic radio, the roaring
evil nonsense which passes for our consciousness most of the time, it
is possible to see things differently: life is beautiful, people are
by-and-large kind, and most suffering is brief or something people can
accommodate to. To recharge, one simply sits along and plays with the
experience of being alive, makes some tea, has a snack, goes for a
walk, plays with a puppy. Without a mind there to spoil every
experience with it's constant stream of definition, doubt, negativity,
appreciation, discussion - without the constant jump into
meta-psychosis where every experience is rendered meaningless by being
assigned an arbitrary "meaning" - why then, life is profoundly good.
All of it.
Do you understand what I'm saying?
Your mind has most likely trapped you, unless you're one of the free,
and magic is not going to save you. At least, not the kind of magic
you're most likely doing right now.
Setting Goals: Will and Purpose in Meditation
If you meditate to feel nice, odds are you will succeed. Ditto for
becoming calmer, less reactive, wholer. All of those are good,
worthwhile goals. By all means, feel free to deploy the nuclear weapon
to dig trenches or whatever.
Real meditation is about liberation. First target: the tyrant of inner
interruption. Let me make this clear: inside of you, there is a "seer"
- something, which is at the moment implicitly "you" receives or has
your experiences. You prick your finger with a pin, this "you" is what
is aware that there is a feeling of pain. However, this "you" does not
really have any idea of what it is, because it has been surrounded by a
constant chaos for years.
You want an analogy? Imagine growing up for your whole life in a room
with blaring disco music, bright flashing lights, and food which is
randomly flavored with curry spices, tabasco sauce and cloves. Imagine
growing up in that room from the moment of birth, never knowing
stillness, quiet or nature.
That's what it's like to be your soul, born into a body in the culture
of language, and worse, the culture of constant interruption and
entertainment. There is no space to breathe, to be, unless you still
(or kill) the mind that is the Psychic DJ, spinning records of
self-deprication, alienation, and analysis. This is key: because that
damn disco track has been playing since you were aware of being you,
you think it is you. That's "introjection" in gestalt terms - confusing
parts of the environment with parts of yourSELF because they are
constant, and you are also constant. Imagine a world in which every
person slaps themselves in the face, hard, mid way through every word
of every sentence. Imagine the level of discourse, of understanding, in
such a world.
That, my friends, is the world of the untamed mind, and unless you are
liberated from it, this will sound insane.
Stop, right now. Do you have clear, unbroken awareness of what it is
within you which receives all of your experiences: the five senses, the
mind, the energy body, the chakras - what it is that turns all of that
stuff into a sense of self, a sense of being? Can you look at the YOU
within all of these things? Can you put your attention squarely on the
Seer inside? The odds are not.
If not, and you want to fix it, here's how.
Sit. Dark, quiet room, or better, a sensory deprivation tank. You'll
see a marked drop-off in sensory phenomena. Sitting still (try yoga as
a preparation) is even better. Just sit. Now begin to catalog
EVERYTHING in your awareness.
My right leg hurts. I'm thinking about my girlfriend.
I'm wondering what this exercise will produce.
What does he mean by "trap"?
There doesn't seem to be anything happening.
I hope my roomies don't come back yet.
This doesn't seem very much like a disco, or constantly slapping myself.
What you are seeing is the torrent of distractions which hides your
true nature from you, and makes you a slave to what distracts you. This
constant stream of stuff is NOT YOU any more than your hair is you. If
you cut your hair, or dye it purple, something about you changes, but
you are still you. So it is with the mind: if you shave it off to two
millimeters long, people will see something has changed, but you will
still be you. But rather than staring at the world through a tangle of
foot-longfringe caked in mud and shit, you'll see the world clearly.
You can cut your hair. You can change it's style, and remain you.
Remember that in this next bit.
In the same way that your visual field becomes quiet when you close
your eyes in a darkened room, you can cause your mind to become quiet.
Combining lowered sensory inputs with lowered mind inputs can provide
an environment suitable for coming to understand the basis of identity
and perception, in the process becoming free.
But first, let's kill the mind, shall we? Tame the lion, bring the
beast under control, sit firmly on the dragon seat.
Stopping the Mind
What if the voices in your head - not the spirit guides, but the ones
you think of as "you" - simply stopped talking?
Think about that for a second (paradox noted). No internal dialog. No
stream of critique. Nothing. You close your eyes, you put your fingers
in your ears, and suddenly there's nothing. Stillness, darkness,
silence, light. Resting serene within yourself, with no distractions.
No sense of the passage of time, just pure being.
The only thing between this and you is your goddamned mind.
Now, do you want to talk about freedom and liberation by killing it?
(rolls up sleeves)
Ok, let's talk tactics.
This mind thing, it's just a bad habit?
Yes.
Try an experiment: poke yourself with something like a pencil, sharp
enough to hurt, but not draw blood. Feel the sensation, then take a
short break and think about how it felt, get some details.
Now try the same thing again, but in response to the pain, mentally
(inwardly) chant "ow ow ow ow ow ow ow" or some other verbalization of
pain. "OW OW OW OW OW."
Most likely you'll notice that the sensation of pain is less bad when
your mind is filled with a symbol for the pain: by removing experience
to the symbolic level, the intensity of the actual negative experience
is reduced. That's the aetiology of the "mind syndrome." We form a
layer between us and our experiences, negative first, but later all of
them, and we call that defensive mechanism "the mind" and identify with
it so completely that we mistake it for us. The noisy room with the
flashing disco lights? We built it to get away from the negative
experiences of childhood, of being a baby, of not having control, of
being slaves to the whims of our parents, however well intentioned.
The mind forms as a defensive layer against real experience.
OK? Now let's try an orgasm. Watch it really closely: odds are that as
you come, you'll enter an entirely non-verbal space for a short time.
Nitrous oxide can do much the same thing.
That's non-verbal experience. Now, imagine being in that state - the
no-internal-chatter experience of life - all of the time, without that
goofy grin and the thrashing about, or the anesthetic effect on the
brain. Note that you are still you at the point of orgasm, or on
nitrous. There's continuity of identity, "little death" or not.
Meditation is a way of permanently delivering yourself into this
wordless state of being.
So, what's the fastest way of getting past a defense mechanism? Some
people will try, endlessly, to pick the locks - dismantle it a layer at
a time, understand it, etc. Workable, but slow.
Why not just do what you're afraid of, realize it's not so bad, and
then allow the defensive mechanism to fall off like a scab or a suit
you no longer wear? A lusty virgin plays all kinds of games, dancing on
the threshold of experience, and perhaps if the programming is bad
enough (think: catholic school girls) becomes partly defined by
defensive mechanisms built around not getting what you actually want
out of life. It's a lot like that too: once you're having sex, you
wonder what on earth you were waiting for, or at least many people do.
Even if the first experience ain't great, crossing the abyss is useful
in it's own right.
"The Mind" exists to attenuate our experience of being alive. Getting
rid of "The Mind" is done fastest by allowing ourselves to acclimatize
to having full-strength experiences, removing the fear which produces
"The Mind."
Lose the mind, become more alive. Become more alive, lose the mind.
As a magician, this is the angle to work.
Slip into the gap between thoughts.
As a last aside, before we discuss practical technique, let's just note
that between these words, there is a space. If you read them aloud,
there is a gap between words. You could make a silent track, a 4'33" by
taking an audio recording of speech and recording all the silence
between the words. That's true for your mind too: there's an implicit
gap between the words in the stream of thought. The normal experience
is that the words are "figure" and the silence is "ground" - if this
position is inverted, so that you are aware of silence as the primary
experience, and words as the secondary experience, you're already most
of the way there, even if there's still a lot of verbal junk.
The Three Point Exploding Head Technique
Three practices combined will produce faster, better results than any
one alone.
The first is Mantra meditation: you can read a book about this, but in
a nutshell, pick a word (like "calm") and say it over and over again in
your mind, to the exclusion of all other thoughts and phenomena. You'll
find that things keep pulling you off course, so you're like "calm calm
calm calm calm where's my cat? is that it throwing up? calm calm" and
so on. This practice does two things:
1. It builds the "muscle" of returning your awareness
to the place you want it: the mantra.
2. It builds the awareness of how your awareness is
not under your control: you feel the pull towards distractions. You get
to know it.
The second technique is described in "Meditation, Tantra and Magic."
You just sit. With your thoughts. With your emotions. It's like mantra
meditation without the mantra. Just sit and have awareness of what is
going on.
A typical interplay between these two techniques is thus:
"I keep having these thoughts, and they're all in the emotional
register of anxiety. I think I'd better take a look at that!"
[long period of sitting with pure awareness of the anxiety]
[insight: perhaps this isn't so important after all? - remember things
like holotropic breathing can help trigger these insights too, indeed,
that's why they exist - you can do this quiet awareness thing while
doing techniques like that and it works really well]
This approach - switching periodically to directly face obstacles to
your mind's annihilation - appears to work much better and faster than
straight mantra meditation in terms of really getting to the core of
the issue. It won't make you placid and peaceful as quickly, but it'll
expose you to what the hell is really going on inside of you a hell of
a lot faster. Try at least fifteen solid minutes of mantras before
switching over and doing just-sitting. Then try flipping back and
forth. Eventually, just drop the mantras completely. It's tough going
if you're doing it right!
The third technique is sensory focus: sitting, or doing an activity,
and treating your entire sensory field as a single unit. See, hear,
feel, smell, taste, feel your muscles and skeleton, the pressure of the
seat, all of it. A simple way to get started it to sit, and try and
broaden your visual focus so you are aware of your entire visual field
as a single piece, at once. Like having all peripheral vision, without
the focal point darting from object to object. This kind of sensory
broadening can be carried right across the senses too: first the whole
visual field, then visual and audio as a single system, then take in
the body too. But start with your strongest sense, either sight or
sound for most people, usually sight. Or try and feel your whole body
at once. Get away from the discrete and into the continuous.
These three approaches, taken together and practiced in cycles can
rapidly result in access to breaks from the stream of thought,
resulting in periods of internal silence, free from the yattering of
the mind.
The big breakthrough: when your sense of identity shifts from the
stream of words ("I am my thoughts") to the internal perceiver, the
silent indweller ("I hear my thoughts sometimes").
Let me know if you get there :-)
Postscript
How long, and how much effort this takes or is worth is an individual
thing. I had not yet discovered Just Sitting when I made this
transition, and my primary working tools were psychotherapy, gestalt
psychology and mantra meditation. It took about six years of an hour a
day, and the final insight was made during a full-out acid ritual. That
insight "talking is the volume control on my reality" resulted in a
permanent transition to the wordless state, and that has been durable
ever since. Your milage may vary: I think with better technique, and a
pre-existing magical practice, as little of six months to two years of
work ought to produce some really tangible results, with every step
along that path resulting in a greater understanding of self, greater
freedom from personal emotional problems, greater responsiveness. The
process itself is valuable, but don't think there is a quick fix for
the human condition. This is work, and looks like it!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. That means you are able
to do things like reproduce it unchanged for personal purposes.
You should also consider buying Eternalicious as a book. It costs
around $12 and is available from
http://cafepress.com/naths/.
