If you want to pursue spirituality in any form, I would argue that what you want, in the end, is a felt SENSE of the presence of God, of Spirit, of Light, of inherent Goodness, of Love. Does it not then make the most sense to cultivate the senses? You can’t think your way to a sense of anything, merely to a thought about a sense of something.
I am good and bad about my Kum Nye practice. Some weeks I do it daily, but others I don’t do it at all, because I am doing it ALL DAY. I spend most of the day, every day, alone. If you want to increase your self understanding, I would encourage you to try it. But what I have been doing is allowing feelings to come up, and then expanding them, filling them with light, and letting them be. I stay with feelings, off and on, for hours at a time. As should be obvious, I have very powerful focus and ability to concentrate.
There is a large form of my terror. I was having what I will call traumatic intrusions yesterday, in which my mother tied me to a bed and gagged me, because she “loved” me so much. I share this only because it is actually a sign of sanity, of increasing clarity. The image was always there, just hidden. It was the REALITY when I was a baby. I was fully helpless. I could neither talk nor move, and I lived in terror of her.
But I am increasingly fearless. I went into these sensations, and ballooned them up, filled them with space, and yes I can see this sense, floating massive across the sky. But nothing in it is hard. Nothing in it can hurt me. I am beyond it.
And I feel clearly that learning the PROCESS of doing this is the key to liberating myself from the cage of reflexive reactions, and trapped in cycles of emotion.
With regard to that last term, I was contemplating the time warp in the Rocky Horror Picture Show. That movie is and remains in my view quite emblematic of the nihilism of the 70’s, which has since put on a suit, and is running this country.
The basic plot element that concerns me here is that Dr. Frankenfurter lives in a circle. He does his demonic work of reducing everything to physical sensations–and I would emphasize here that when I use the word “sense” I include far more than merely pleasurable physical sensations–reaches an end point, then goes back in time, in a circle. He only appears to move, but he is in reality stuck.
And I got to thinking about what I might term “Ritual Motion”. The thing about trauma is it encapsulates some part of you in a moment, in a wax museum, in a scene in a horror film that plays over and over and over. But outwardly you move. You go to school, and get a job, maybe you have kids, and buy a house, and water your lawn every Wednesday and Saturday.
Many people never live down their trauma, their horror, their shame. They get on, but they never get over it. Increasingly, I look at everyone on every street as “walking wounded”. The meanest son of a bitch you ever met has a story. The biggest fuck up you ever met has a story.
In terms of its effect on me, my favorite Bruce Springsteen album is his darkest: Darkness on the Edge of Town. He has a line in there that I’ve always liked:
Everybody’s got a secret, Sonny,
Something that they just can’t face,
Some folks spend their whole lives trying to keep it,
They carry it with them every step that they take.
Till some day they just cut it loose
Cut it loose or let it drag ’em down,
Where no one asks any questions,
or looks too long in your face,
In the darkness on the edge of town.
Here’s the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kg0ekQBmzKs
So where the hell was I going? I lit a cigar, so somewhere deep, for me.
In graduate school, I read a lot of the work of a French literary critic/theorist named Rene Girard, who wrote a lot about sacrifice and religious violence. The gist of his ideas was that sacrifice was a way of creating an “outside” within a homogeneous social order. That’s greatly simplified, but let’s run with it.
We all have this existential task of figuring out who we are, and what that implies about what we should do. In terms of what is written in the stars and rocks, there is no instruction manual. I would argue that we can and should use the testimony of those who have died and returned (NDE’s), the testimony of mediums, and the direct information of spirits who manifest in this world. These things are all, I am convinced, quite real. All tell us that love is the answer.
But we are part animal. Some part of us wants to tear things apart and eat them. And true love is an enormously advanced emotion, in terms of psychosocial development. Most people are trapped by one or many traumas, that for most of history could not even be labeled such, at least in civilizations that existed as ritual orders.
So here is the thing: ritual evolved both to centralize and control the impulse to kill and eat, through sacrifice, through ritual violence (which is seen in every religion I have studied and of course central to even Christianity); and to create a sense of motion in a very stable social order in which full emotional freedom of expression was impossible. Holiday=Holy Day.
We do not have true rituals in the modern world. We did not understand their importance, and called them irrational. I think, though, that we could see war as a ritual, and a particularly important one in the cults of Communism and Fascism, where the paradigmatic Communist war is against the citizens, and that of Fascism hated others in other countries. Fascism is much more human than Communism, because at least there is an inside, although of course both are insane, until we understand them as large scale reactions to important and unmet emotional needs.
So someone has this trauma inside them, and no good way to get it out. You can watch horror movies. You can play video games. You can listen to appallingly violent and dissonant music.
The executions in the French–I am going to call it the Confusion–were ritualistic. They were popular. They appealed to the gut sense, the animal instincts. It would not be off to call it mass human sacrifice.
Everywhere you look, there are people who have within them a taste for killing, for death. Just look at what people watch in large numbers on TV every night. It is not just about solving the murders, about appreciating cleverness. It is about watching the murders, and participating vicariously in them.
This is the human condition.
And I continue to have the sense that forms of Satanism appear logically necessary, for people unable to creatively grow beyond these contradictions. In its simplest form, it is nothing more or less than feeding our gut energies as they exist, rather than transforming them by connecting them to higher energies. [have you read about this: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology-science/technology/charlie-charlie-challenge-vatican-exorcist-5783395 . It is kids seeking some transcendent reality, in a world which is focused on the machine-like aspects of our existence, which everywhere tells them that only evanescent pleasures and death are real.]
It must be a circular process. The rituals must be done regularly. You have your outwardly normal life, then a liminal phase preparing for a sacrificial ritual of some sort (and it could be a “sacrifice” of common virtues, common decency, through profanity, blasphemy, use of intoxicants, grotesque sexuality, etc.), then a climax, which releases the pent up energies for a time, then a return.
But there is no true emotional motion. There is and can be no learning, no growth. It merely creates the APPEARANCE of motion, by transiting a circle, and pretending it is a line.
It is a paradox of human nature that we both fear change and fear cages. What is so terrifying about a cage? You cannot move freely. What is so terrifying about change? It CONSISTS in moving freely, in new ways, along unconditioned, newly discovered paths.
I think I have said what I needed to say. I will need to smoke some more on all this. None of these ideas are particularly new to me, but ideas have textures, and soft scents. They have forms which are malleable like mists. They both exist out there, and as watered growths within us. It is good to revisit them and see what is new, what is happening, where they have traveled and what they can tell us.
And it seems obvious to me that humanities task is to evolve a post-Ritual order. The thirst for contained realities and the task of self liberation are at odds. It may be that we devolve into a new ritual order, but my hope is that we can learn enough, fast enough, to avoid that. I will do my part to help in that process. I am one man, but I am one man. There can be no other unit for the New to enter the world.
And to make a practical, concrete suggestion, I will encourage you to go here: http://kumnyeyoga.com/
Start the practices. It is an odd fact of my personal history that I bought the two original books back in the mid-1980’s, and carried them all over in my travels, but never really did anything with them. Only once I started SOMETHING flowing with Holotropic Breathwork was I finally able to start doing that work, and I’ve continued to need alcohol to have the emotional strength to keep doing it. That need is slowly fading, thank God.
Tarthang Tulku rarely appears in public. I suspect even the people who live at the retreat centers rarely if ever see him. He has done his work. He has created bodies of practice which will work on anyone to open them up to the possibility of spiritual growth. Everything he can teach in words is out there. One path forward is an open secret. I do think the whole thing can and should be marketed much more aggressively. I have never met anyone who has heard of it, and have only seen it mentioned once, in Peter Levine’s book. One feels the sense of hope in the books, that if the world only embraced this practice, it would be transformed. But people are stupid.
Try not to be stupid. This might be a good motto for all of us today.