And it occurred to me that you have to break your own rhythm from time to time. It is no good doing the same meditations, the same practices, over and over in more or less the same way across a lifetime. The spiritual path is not straight. If it were, everyone who followed the rules would invariably become wise, and that is plainly not the case. There is precious little wisdom in the world today, that I see.
The Tantrics have a ceremony called many things, but called Tsog in the book I recently listened to. You eat forbidden foods, and do forbidden things. The book I was listening to made a case that it would be logically appropriate to literally eat shit, although he certainly was not counseling it. I had reached a similar conclusion independently some time ago. It would not be inappropriate to put shit on your altar. Not as an act of sacrilege, but to indicate that the whole of the universe is holy. All of it.
And as I’ve indicated from time to time, I make some effort to take a day of rest on Saturdays. To just do everything a bit differently. To give myself plenty of time for nothing.
It seems to me this is how you make progress. So many of us want to create lines in life, to perform some sort of math once, then stick to it indefinitely. For physical goals–like career success, physical health, and an organized living space–this is suitable. For wisdom, it is not. You have to throw yourself open over and over, without having any plan or any idea at all what may come floating in.
And it occurred to me that the idea offered in, of all things, the movie World War Z, about the Israeli Tenth Man, whose job it is to disagree with everyone else on everything, to live in a world of the counter-narrative. We all need an internalized Tenth Man. It keeps people who do that from getting too hard. If you ever get too far from being a cloud, you will drop like a brick. Your mind will die, and your spirit will be chained to it.
This, at any rate, is my view, and certainly what I do. I leave you to judge my success, much of which I post here, but certainly not all.