What happened to transcendence?
Dec. 30th, 2017 11:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ecosophiaOkay, it was kind of a long shot, but I was out shopping for groceries today at the yuppie grocery* and picked up the latest monthly free local New Age newsprint adfomercial. I used to read the Seattle example of the species monthly back when I lived there, to keep tabs on what was interesting and what was absurd in the world of alternative popular spirituality -- but that was most of two decades ago and the world was a different place.
The thing that struck me, reading the current issue of the Providence example of the species, is that something that was very much part of the scene a couple of decades ago -- and was one of its saving graces -- seems to have dropped right out of it. Call it transcendence: the sense that entering into relationship with the spiritual realm is about stepping into a wider world, waking up to the things that really matter. Walking through the walls, to borrow a phrase, and into the Fire.
That's gone. As far as I can tell, it's all about soothing your nerves, boosting your health, managing your career and your love life, making your life bland and safe and predictable -- with neat little crystal sparkles on it, sure, but still bland and safe and predictable. Take up meditation, so you can lower your blood pressure and smooth out your wrinkles. Practice t'ai chi -- it's so very relaxing, and it makes your bowels regular! Go listen to a trance channeler to get advice on your relationships and tasty vegetarian recipes you can share with all your friends...
Back in the 1970s, when the New Age movement hadn't yet capitulated entirely to the hucksters -- Gregory Bateson counted as a New Age thinker back then, for heaven's sake! -- and I was scampering around underfoot in it, omnivorously taking in anything even vaguely esoteric I could get, it wasn't like that. There was plenty of nonsense and plenty of chicanery and an immense amount of vacuous babble, but in there with all of that you found a lot of people who wanted to tear open the sky and step into the luminous Beyond. People meditated and did rituals and practiced martial arts and did all sorts of other things to become something more than they were. Even the hucksters gave lip service to that.
Maybe I'm just not cynical enough yet, but it smarts to see something that once, for all its flaws, strove for high goals, reduced to a lifestyle accessory for bored suburbanites. I mourn the death of a dream.
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* our apartment is within an easy walk of three groceries: a delightful little Asian grocery, a standard American working class grocery, and a standard American yuppie grocery -- not Whole Paycheck, there's one of those too but I'd sooner trim my ears with a cheese grater than put up with the pretentious snots who shop there, with their "Out of the way, peasant!" attitudes. I'd probably flee from the yuppie grocery too, except that it has a much better selection of the gluten free products Sara needs, and a few other things we can't get elsewhere.
The thing that struck me, reading the current issue of the Providence example of the species, is that something that was very much part of the scene a couple of decades ago -- and was one of its saving graces -- seems to have dropped right out of it. Call it transcendence: the sense that entering into relationship with the spiritual realm is about stepping into a wider world, waking up to the things that really matter. Walking through the walls, to borrow a phrase, and into the Fire.
That's gone. As far as I can tell, it's all about soothing your nerves, boosting your health, managing your career and your love life, making your life bland and safe and predictable -- with neat little crystal sparkles on it, sure, but still bland and safe and predictable. Take up meditation, so you can lower your blood pressure and smooth out your wrinkles. Practice t'ai chi -- it's so very relaxing, and it makes your bowels regular! Go listen to a trance channeler to get advice on your relationships and tasty vegetarian recipes you can share with all your friends...
Back in the 1970s, when the New Age movement hadn't yet capitulated entirely to the hucksters -- Gregory Bateson counted as a New Age thinker back then, for heaven's sake! -- and I was scampering around underfoot in it, omnivorously taking in anything even vaguely esoteric I could get, it wasn't like that. There was plenty of nonsense and plenty of chicanery and an immense amount of vacuous babble, but in there with all of that you found a lot of people who wanted to tear open the sky and step into the luminous Beyond. People meditated and did rituals and practiced martial arts and did all sorts of other things to become something more than they were. Even the hucksters gave lip service to that.
Maybe I'm just not cynical enough yet, but it smarts to see something that once, for all its flaws, strove for high goals, reduced to a lifestyle accessory for bored suburbanites. I mourn the death of a dream.
---------------------
* our apartment is within an easy walk of three groceries: a delightful little Asian grocery, a standard American working class grocery, and a standard American yuppie grocery -- not Whole Paycheck, there's one of those too but I'd sooner trim my ears with a cheese grater than put up with the pretentious snots who shop there, with their "Out of the way, peasant!" attitudes. I'd probably flee from the yuppie grocery too, except that it has a much better selection of the gluten free products Sara needs, and a few other things we can't get elsewhere.
What happened to transcendence
Date: 2018-01-02 11:38 am (UTC)Suddenly more people wanted to represent this guy, but as we had been the first, they had to work with us - what happened was that the new people came to us and asked us to put up our prices (double or triple), we had been reluctant but what was said stays with me still, the new teachers told us:
"...but one rich person is worth ten poor people."
We decided to withdraw into the background shortly after that.
On zen sickness, when we were running workshops (1988/89) we got a lot of practitioners coming along - I don't remember reiki from then, but the most grounded people (and I generalise) were those doing Alexander technique. The least grounded were the Shiatsu people, who we cruelly described as 'space cadets'.
We also used to get what were called 'kundalini casualties', looking for practices to ground themselves rather than frying their brains.
But, re zen sickness and this mindfulness palaver, I have ended up being puzzled as to what is going on. The meditation techniques (taoist related) were always about doing something, not sitting there blissed out with an empty head. Whether engaged in sitting or standing meditation or movement, to be mindful was to be aware of what you were doing and to pay attention to the process you were working on and to let distractions drop away, not to have an empty mind.
An inherent part of practice was to understand that the practice would in all likelihood bring up hidden/repressed emotional energy because once you start working with the subtle energy systems, that is what happens. It is not a bug, but a feature and it was important for people to know what to do.
Things surfacing could be mental or physical, but it was important to have things to use to handle stuff like that.
Perhaps similar in a way to a term we didn't learn until recently 'trauma splitting', where energy is stored away but is still there. Inner aspects of yourself can be cut-off and locked away as a survival mechanism, but that really isn't the end of the matter.
Internal practices are going to result in changes - allowing that process to unfold with an empty mind seems like a recipe for trouble.
[earthworm]
Re: What happened to transcendence
Date: 2018-01-03 12:25 am (UTC)If this wisdom has been buried by the current crop of teachers, where is the best place to "plant a shovel", as it were?
Re: What happened to transcendence
Date: 2018-01-04 12:10 am (UTC)Exercises of both physical and internal practice can cause effects.
Primary aim was to ensure an energy channel to help balance energy.
Baseline practice included:
1. Gaining awareness and the ability to relax.
2. Using sound/vocalisation to gain awareness of organs/emotional states and cleanse/strengthen them.
3. Using focussed meditation to work on the dantain (below navel) and from there, parts of the Ren and Du meridians (essentially up the back and down the front). Also called the microcosmic orbit.
4. Using the five elemental processes to gain an understanding/feeling for emotional energy and then, with focussed awareness, cause changes to emotional state.
Essentially, rather than being driven by emotions, you choose how to act by creating a dynamic tension/equilibrium by paying attention and manipulating emotional states.
It is not a matter of becoming emotionless, rather, you actively express emotion how you want rather than just reacting to deep limbic responses.
The issues we came across fitted into three broad categories:
Physical
Mental
Energetic
These could overlap, but to generalise:-
Physical: could be as simple as overdoing exercises and associated physical reactions, aches and pains, sleepiness, or some other manifestation.
Mental: starts to get more complex because it seemed to be emotionally related and that can manifest in many ways. The mental stuff is often the result of 'buried emotions' that are released through practice. The practice aimed to provide the tools (open the microcosmic orbit, use the five elemental processes to 'manage the farm').
Energetic: for practitioners following the system, an example of this could be too much energy at the heart or head (crown/third eye) and this could usually be resolved by shifting concentration to the dantian or, grounding out through the kidney points on the feet.
(aside – too much energy at the heart could occur through chi kung practice and actually manifest a physical response).
For those not practising the system who had been working with chakras rather than meridians and had too much energy at a particular centre, learning to allow energy to flow could often help.
All practices ended with storing energy at the dantian (or if too intense, out into the earth).
For a place to start, I have always been impressed with Wong Kiew Kit's explanation of the Five Elemental Processes (emphasis on processes), but any system worth its salt should have things in place to deal with this sort of thing. The taoist system I first studied, just baked the tools into the process cake. I'm sure others will have valuable ideas of where to look.
Of course, this is just a personal opinion, I've been messing around with stuff for a while and am probably more of a mongrel than a practitioner of any particular system. Mr Greer is very correct though, be very careful about hybridizing systems – I've been lucky, but mileage may vary!
[earthworm]
Re: What happened to transcendence
Date: 2018-01-05 09:51 am (UTC)For example, going on a retreat where many hours a day are spent in some sort of practice could could be troublesome if there isn't a solid foundation on which to work? By foundation I do not mean 'knowing of practices' but actually having done work in gradual steps.
The stuff I have studied has never claimed to be the be all and end all of things, quite the opposite, that people need to find things (system/method) that suit them. What was there was a gradual progression, each stage building on the previous ones and 'baking things into the process cake' was not so much about the detail of the practices as providing something that functioned like a mechanic learning to use tools… i.e. a new mechanic doesn't begin by trying to take the entire engine apart on the first day etc
Since everyone perceives and experiences things through their own lense, a careful and steady approach seems prudent – putting a toe gently onto the accelerator with the gears in neutral to get a feel for the things rather than smacking it straight into gear and trying to accelerate the vehicle up to 100mph in X seconds.
In a culture that promotes instant gratification, 'look at me', and consumerism in relationship to internal practices like meditation, it is actually surprising that more and ever more people haven't lost the plot…. Uhm… too difficult to generalise perhaps. I need to think more on this.
[earthworm]
Re: What happened to transcendence
Date: 2018-01-06 03:58 am (UTC)Would it be fair to say that if your instructor can't answer some of these
questions it should be a red flag to look elsewhere?
Re: What happened to transcendence
Date: 2018-01-06 11:20 am (UTC)Also, the terminology and jargon from one system may not be immediately obvious to someone from another system.
People often put the 'plus points' out as as part of the sales pitch, maybe asking about pitfalls and side effects might be one approach? Even then the person being asked may genuinely not know.
Of course it may depend on how far people get into practicing.
Our host here has previously touched on issues between magical practices and oriental practices; I haven't had experience of that; but to my mind it is a subject that bears closer examination.
I mean. okay, all these different teachers and masters have developed their arts based on their own perception and empirical practice; but ultimately since we are all humans (hahaha), is it a mistake for one to expect the fundamentals of energy to be the same?
Perhaps it is something along the lines of 'always add the acid to the water; never add the water to the acid'.
i.e. systems might be working with the (ultimately) similar fundamentals, but how those ingredients go together determines whether you achieve the aim of lowering the pH or get covered in acid!
As I say, I need to think about this some more. Maybe JMG and others have some thoughts?
[earthworm]
Re: What happened to transcendence
Date: 2018-01-06 01:27 pm (UTC)Simplistic and maybe stretching the use of metaphor too far, but here goes; recipes & cooking:-
Random hybridizing of systems:
Putting on a blindfold and selecting ingredients with the desire that it will taste good.
Zen sickness and empty-mind mindfulness:
Ingredients might be good, but you've used too much, put them all in the pot, turned the heat up to full and left the kitchen for an extended vacation.
Finding a teacher / system:
Picking up an over-packaged, mega-processed, industrial ready meal where the dojo is a microwave
vs
Asking an experienced cook to take you through the steps of cooking from scratch and building an earth oven
[earthworm]