Sidecross on American spiritual practice

[daniel]

I wanted to open a discussion on the issues raised in Sidecross's post that was in the Halfglass thread. I felt that it needed a separate topic of its own.

Here is Sidecross's post:

I find it very encouraging that this thread has developed from one mourning and paying respects to a fellow traveller to something calling on the question that i think brought all of us to this place originally: that very sincere search for meaning from inside a culture damn near totally devoid of meaning at all. that no horse shit warriors search for true experience is what has earned most of us on this list the majority of our troubles in this world and also the majority of our accomplishments. Truly that desire for a sense of 'inclusiveness' - or harmony - in the the matrix of meaning surrounding us, creating us, that is us, is something that first makes us an outcast in this culture, but then - if we are fortunate enough to find a nurturing community - makes us the warriors that we can become. but one problem seems to be that this culture has so fallen from it's path that it is hard wired into the dominant dream that this way of real understanding be dangerous if it is to exist. i think this is the instinct of the rock n' roll asthetic and also one of the strongest support means for our robot culture... and the way out is through tieing up this end.
this brings me to my current struggles which i am again so happy to see this community also struggling to make sense of. i have for most of my life been a very extreme person in everything i do. in that sense i am a very american person... i love rich, spicy foods, loud, thumping, clanging complex music, big thick threads on my clothes, the thunder of a large engine, big ass fires, high frequency thoughts and intense confrontations amongst people. i like meat. it's delicious. it's even better raw. i love whiskey. i love to sweat, to build large structures with my friends, and to scream, yes literally scream my world into existence at night. and i also love to whisper, to slowly caress, massage and nurture. i love the poetry of dynamics and that is a damn good thing. i am a materialist in the finest and most austere sense of the word, not the shrill kind of materialist our culture has become.
part of my own personal healing modality that has grown increasingly powerful and increasignly personal (how can the two be separate?) over the past four or so years has been a reimmersion into my body through yoga. kundalini yoga to be specific. and i have coupled that with a study of the kabalah, buddhism, taoism, magick, and poetry for a good dozen years prior. again, every day i feel closer to this system of personal resonance.
but while i've gained an incredible amount of insight into my body and ultimately my existence through yoga and through other tangent disciplines i have recently come back to a perplexing situation... adopting these disciplines from these other at times extremely remote cultures leaves me feeling that i'm doing just that, borrowing from a culture that is not mine, and, in short, pantomiming my experience at best, and being up to my ears in bullshit and even guilt at worst.
kundalini yoga is a powerful system, but it is a system developed in a culture i have no immediate connection to. as with buddhism, as with the kabalah, the practices of the native american church, for that matter christianity. growing up in the united states is, with rare exception, an experience of growing up totally absent of a spiritual legacy and i think so many of us fight that. we are so horrified to look into the abyss of our cultural legacy that we swallow up liek the fat consumerists we're trained to be, every other cultural imprint we can to keep our selves fat and digesting information so much that we don't stop long enough to feel where the actual pang of hunger is coming from. i know i have for so many years under sold my personal experience to the horse shit belief that my own personal experience is not valid because it is mine.
so essentially a very recent truce with myself has come to be made. i'm not going to pretend i want to be a vegetarian, or i even want to be a stable of stillness, or that alcohol and tobacco are things to be avoided or that taboo is a thing outside of myself. i'm going to try and meet myself at the source of my toxicity, the source of my culture and make piece with that chaos and see if through that kind of honesty a new system can be developed. it's a system that needs to have a system of body work a yogic discipline but also one of the heart and coordination, it's a system that should incorporate NLP as that is a very western,very american, very agnostic model of organizing the mind, it's a system that has peace without a muffler, and has stability, has tranquility in the fetid rumble of it's own action. there is an earthy enchantment like voodoo to this system, and a celestial kind of barbarism. it's militant, but only in how it searches for truth.
i'm trying to make sense of this and would love to hear more thoughts on this. really, this is nothing new on this board outside of the formal calling out of people to seek traditions. daniel, you say that people need to connect with a legacy which i agree with, but i think equally important is that we need to take serious our own experiences and realize that if we don't create our own, very new, very unique legacy we will ultimately become something less than what we truly have potential to be.
it's seems like sticky ground... to finally cast yourself out in service of creating a new tradition..but it's also our heritage (sorry but i am limiting my experience to americans, and really just speaking about people i know) for good or ill. we are indeed a sick culture, and we've inherited some spirits that will exacerbate that sickness if we continue to try and hide from them -- it's the corniness of the new age movement and the frustration of the soothing hypnotic voice of the hippie drone. we're so terrified of our demons we're willing to ignore the angels behind them.
there is something great, i feel, a tradition that has to be developed by accepting who and where we are culturally right now - so lost even - in order to make this experience it's most powerful. but how does one do that? how does one come to trust their experience so much that it weaves one's life out before them? how does one take it upon themselves to say no to all the cultural voices demanding devastation and lusting for disaster and finally say fuck all and chart the course that needs to be made?
obviously there are cultural hot spots where this is already developing. but is it possible to cope, to thrive without swallowing up or into another cultural paradigm? to devleop a wholly american and wholly spiritual tradition that is based upon where we've come from and will sustain us for where we need to go?
how do we make spiritual warriors from these piles of bones we're inheriting?

[daniel]

first of all i wouldn't see it as "either - or" but "both - and." I think it is getting a bit parochial to consider kundalini yoga or kaballah as being "foriegn," in that increasingly we all live and participate in the same global culture. We are being "oneified" whether we like it or not.

In terms of developing specifically American practices, my own perspective is that the practices we need to develop are not new rituals or bodywork modalities (as those seem to self-organize organically, as for instance Burning Man shows). I think the special American destiny is to integrate and synthesize the spiritual or occult vision with a deeply pragmatic, energetic, and technical orientation towards reality itself- the "can do" frontier spirit of America, which despite all of our incredibly negative manifestations, is a deeply positive thing. It is the vibe you find in Emerson or Whitman or Kerouac -that beautiful openness and attentiveness to personal experience in its full numinousness as well as its transcendent glow.

I think the work as well as art of this time consists in turning these streams towards not personal but social and civilization- and earth-transforming goals. As it says in the Tao, you have become sick of your sickness before you can become well. One element of the sickness in our post-New Age spiritual community is the endless personal searching for "enlightenment" or for some psychic power or physical power or "real" contact with higher forces.

When you become sick of your sickness, you stop striving for personal ends and start striving for impersonal ones.

We are going to have to find the will to utilize all of our cunning and charisma and intelligence for social and global change - for instituting a sustainable world. The tools exist, in advanced and rudimentary forms, to make this happen now.

At this point, I think it would be a much more "spiritual" experience to get New York City to grow rooftop gardens, en masse, than to attain a personal siddhi as described by Patanjali.

One does not have to attain full "enlightenment" to refocus your energies in this more pragmatic direction. What if there is no such thing as "enlightenment" as a personal state or ground of being? What if "enlightenment" - the attainment of nonduality -- is a continual and endless process?

Any temporary personal experience of unity-consciousness - of recognizing that you and the universe are utterly enmeshed in a singular process of conscious evolution - could be enough to change the focus of your attention permanently - especially if the surrounding culture begins to change to accord such experiences the value they deserve.

[sidecross]

Get some rest daniel!

That is not my post. None of posts has ever had a high word count. This is not my point of view!

[ August 12, 2005, 07:50 AM: Message edited by: sidecross ]

[dragonfly]

Daniel, thanks for pulling that post out. (It was actually Sire's). I had begun responding to it because I was bothered by his statement that this culture lacks meaning, but I ran out of time and had to scrap it.

Yes, the shiny commercial aspect of our culture lacks profundity. After all, if you spend too much time thinking, when will you ever get your shopping done? But you don't have to dig far before you find a wellspring of philosophical-spiritual riches right here at home.

My post challenged the idea that yoga et al. are not part of "our" culture. (I'm doing a lot of reading about the gnostics right now and was fascinated to learn that they may have been influenced by Buddhist missionaries to Alexandria. Cultural miscegenation is nothing new.) My post also brought up the transcendentalists. And it ended by urging anyone who feels they're lacking meaning in their life to plant a garden and spend as much time as possible with their hands in the dirt.

[daniel]

dragonfly,

thanks for the Reader's Digest version of the post you didn't send! Still happy to read the whole thing when and if you do post it.

Sidecross,

M mistake - the post was indeed Sire's. I am truly sorry it caused you consternation. I lick your virtual boot in abject apology.

[sidecross]

I accept daniel’s apology, but I am not into boot lick fetishes virtual or not.

[sire_012]

daniel:

"either - or" but "both - and." I think it is getting a bit parochial to consider kundalini yoga or kaballah as being "foriegn," in that increasingly we all live and participate in the same global culture. We are being "oneified" whether we like it or not.

true, but i'm trying to speak to the fact that to adopt any of these systems, including kundalini yoga and the kaballah, requires an artifice, almost everyone alive in this culture right now was not raised in an environment where these practices were the dominant paradigm. i'm certain there were some small communities based around 3HO groups and esotericsts practising and studying the kabalah, but even in these groups, being totally supported, i think as a child you would learn very quickly that your meme was not the meme that most people were getting. so in this respect, you must step outside of our culture to aquire a system. true we are becoming 'oneified' but i feel the your and my generation are really the first generations to see that.

daniel:

I think the special American destiny is to integrate and synthesize the spiritual or occult vision with a deeply pragmatic, energetic, and technical orientation towards reality itself- the "can do" frontier spirit of America, which despite all of our incredibly negative manifestations, is a deeply positive thing. It is the vibe you find in Emerson or Whitman or Kerouac -that beautiful openness and attentiveness to personal experience in its full numinousness as well as its transcendent glow.

that truly is our greatest inheritance and is almost worth the price of our shadow alone. i couldn't agree more however, i keep coming back to 2 things i remember reading in "Abra Melin the Mage" years and years back. it warned against practising the magic in that book before the age of 28 and it also warned of leaving the spiritual system of your ancestry. When i read that my reaction to both those statements was 'fuck that!', but i was like 20 years old and stupid and that was my reaction to most things that were trying to tell me something other than what i was doing right then. but as i've aged a bit the 28 year old thing seems spot on... it wasn't until then that i felt any kind of solid self to work from, albeit i'm still far from formed. and talking to other people i have seen a similar sentiment. and the second statement about pactising the system of your heritage i have seen to carry more resonance as i've aged as well. it really just seems like good common sense telling you not to waste your time fighting up stream against the most fundamental filters of your consciousness. but the problem with that is for most americans those filters were put in place very haphazardly without a culture to support them and i think that causes a fundamental problem in building willfulness. or perhaps, what will create the greatest willfulness, is so many of us with such peculiarly developed filters, all fairly lost without the community support systems of traditions, giving strength to one another through the multiplicity of systems. but then, shouldn't a system be developed that can nurture that? it's almost as if in this post-modern world where we indulge in the meta-system of everything to a numbing degree, we don't yet have a powerful meta-system to deal with *that*.

daniel:

One element of the sickness in our post-New Age spiritual community is the endless personal searching for "enlightenment" or for some psychic power or physical power or "real" contact with higher forces.

to find the magick of creation in your everyday life, i totally agree.

daniel:

When you become sick of your sickness, you stop striving for personal ends and start striving for impersonal ones.

i feel they are mutually reciperacating. if you can make yourself whole you carry that vibration out to teh world around you. and vise versa. which may be the heart of the matter here. [img]smile.gif[/img] we are resonant beings and if you bring disfunction to the matter that is what you will create or if you bring harmony that is what you will create with much greater ease. if we can each and all wake ourselves up we will literally be waking up the world. so community development is the means to awakening? i think yes, but i do think it is one of several means if not one of the more important all of which need to be integrated, perhaps consciously, developed and sustained in their own right.

daniel:

Any temporary personal experience of unity-consciousness - of recognizing that you and the universe are utterly enmeshed in a singular process of conscious evolution - could be enough to change the focus of your attention permanently - especially if the surrounding culture begins to change to accord such experiences the value they deserve.

fuck yeah! that is what i have been tumbling around with recently and what i'd like to hear other people speak to... is what do people think is needed to create a sustainable tradition, a new supportive system of spiritual being that is developed from our very unique perspective in space and time and how do we integrate those needs into our culture. certainly community development and having a world to exist in is a hell of a start. but there is more too yes?

dragonfly:

My post challenged the idea that yoga et al. are not part of "our" culture. (I'm doing a lot of reading about the gnostics right now and was fascinated to learn that they may have been influenced by Buddhist missionaries to Alexandria. Cultural miscegenation is nothing new.) My post also brought up the transcendentalists.

i think i spoke to this above. it's great to read about history, even early american history, but how much of that effected the generative world of your youth and development. perhaps an ability to read and an openness to ideas was integrated into your consciousness early on which led you to later toy with these ideas in books and on message boards, but what was the basis to read and be open to ideas outside of a general consumerist instinct that drives most of us?

dragonfly:

And it ended by urging anyone who feels they're lacking meaning in their life to plant a garden and spend as much time as possible with their hands in the dirt.

well, that's a leeetle bit condescending dragonfly. [img]smile.gif[/img] but to put your mind at ease i have a big beautiful garden in the back of my apartment that right now is spitting forth gorgeous watermelon, tomatoes, jalapenos, collard greens, cucumbers and a whole bunch more goodies. i water it and weed it and play with it everyday. however, i still feel a bit culturally schilled. [img]smile.gif[/img]

peace.

[Humming]

The discussion of the conditioned apathy and intentional emptiness of our spiritually void culture made me think of this Mars Volta piece, a b-side from their new single. It's very odd and may be difficult to grasp because it is written in coded language, but addresses some of these points, as well as the state of politics and also offers a strange comparison between the ancient diety Baphomet and the masters of the dominator paradigm.

The Mars Volta: "The Bible and the Breathalyzer"

"Among the tattered dwelling of the new found home, in the furthest cramped corner sat the shell of a goat head strangled in copper wire, scraped of its insides, unwashed behind the ears, fuming its crooked names spoken on hinges. To a thinning cowlick's fat his crippled limp, dragging along the hump of the floor. Sobbing from the smacking mouth of the demagogue wells, making wisecracks, spilling from the corners with their pink flinches, second glancing their every move.

It ate pickled nose cartilage that fell from the ceilings, a porkskin drizzle unnerving the humans, while it read aloud from its favorite books in glossolalia slang and hierospecs truths, following a slow and patient wait, a mocking their hair as it was glued to their upper lip combover. Under the wall, the chimps smeared by faithfully talking the magnum fanatics and their bottles of scalp soup. They cooked up a tardis smudge on their eyes, a lunar antidote that powdered underneath the oncoming pestilence of their idling fingers.

It wrote them a seance, penetrated their every dependant desire. It hacked off the central headpiece to the collective. It wrote them a message in the marrow of the knife, with the extension of Baphomet transfusion. Glued to the animals, perversions of their former selves, patiently biting their fingernails looking for a clue.

As soon as it failed to appear, the faithful fell under the spell of public execution. It had been an eternity filled with ritual, and all for nothing, promising salvation, but only flags came swarming around for a better taste. What was left were the scraps: dressed in animal skin, defiled servants holding their breath, fatherless culprits blaming their kin, waiting for an answer.

They thought the day would come, or a giraffe might choke in midair squeal: some sort of indication. Only it was the hands of the followers that had left their markings in neatly packed dunes filled with the decapitated remains, found sealed in sand. It only stained the conscious for a brief moment, then came disgust.

Realizing there was nothing to it, people began collapsing in collective states of drought. Palm-size vents heating in the chest, cluttering the graph, a bladder full of remains. Nothing became of them because nothing was the reason: an apathetic display dripping into vats of obesity. The feud had been sucking teeth for some time now, but the only baggage that paraded about was the curtain epidermis unfolded in an inebriated suit. The fit came suffocating, feathering the boa-constricted paleness, frostbitten, and shovel-faced. It came before them in utter confidence, flares of pink owls in the nest of albino eyelids blinking out chemical obscurities to the blind. It bloomed into a hemmorrhaged contraption that impopulated the disenchanted, one by one.

All the churches were converted into quarantine facilities. Inside them grew bacterial stubble compacted by larvae, contracting and teething, a newborn litter degradively sufficient, running from the horse collarbone, amongst the murmuring femurs wimpering in fractures.

"Are you the polaroid shot you thought you were?", it said with a coy smirk. With the position now vacant, it waltzed right in and made itself at home; seduced by the empty nominations at the altar of broken ballot boxes, closer to that nothingness that everyone seemed to embrace. As it pissed all over them, the sigh of relief steamed off the soaking depressants. An impending sleep was on its way."

[ August 13, 2005, 08:40 AM: Message edited by: Humming ]

[sire_012]

that's a wonderful piece of writing, humming thanks. but i don't really see Baphomet as the force of domination and enslavement that is the typical view of him (christian devil) and what seems like they are portrying in the piece of writing you posted. Baphomet - in my understanding and experience - is more of the egregore of the ages of man, or the ages of creation to be more specific. it is the untamed and relentless forces of chaos and growth; the life force given form. he is the anamlistic instinct that has driven us, but also we have in turn pushed away in shame and fear of our essential drive to become. he's a good old chap, really!

[ba caracus]

Trying my first pizza, I took great delight in it, feeling no guilt that my country had no influence on the creation. Even knowing that great effort was put in, in copying it in order to make it palatable for my tastbuds. How have I lived on burgers, eggs chips for so long!! Enjoying it so much, I decided to go to the source of the creation, and when I did, it was like eating a piece of heaven. This heaven may not have been experienced in my country, have nothing to do with my country, but I still enjoyed it just as any local or foreign person on this planet. I know people who are not decendants from the origin of that country, but make a damn fine pizza, even if it is altered a little to their own liking, and made to spread the enjoyment to others, saving us from the mass marketed & produced pizza and made palatable to our bland fat obsessed western tongues. Now I eat it every week, along with a curry here, pasta there. Wonderful.

If I have made a fine pizza point, then enjoy, if I have unfortunately created a mass produced fatty bland pizza, I apoligise, I will continue to work on my recipe. There must be italian blood, past lives or universal connections in me somewhere, oh and my roomates italian.

[snow]

is it more spiritual to get everyone in new york city to grow gardens?

"The jhana-range of a person in jhana [i.e., the range of powers that one may obtain while absorbed in jhana]..."

is one of the Unconjecturable's outlined in the Acintita Sutta.

the effects of one person who attains the concentration stages is beyond quantification.

my bets are on patanjali.

[silentwolf]

You all make some valuable points...America, and most of the modern world these days, does not really have a solid spiritual tradition. Most of the seemingly solid spiritual traditions we come across are foreign...and not just to us, to be honest. Many of these traditions are foreign even now to the regions they sprung from because they belong to a time not our own.

That's why I wrote the guide, which has been published thanks to some advice from Gelfer. It's at www.lulu.com/content/151260

I'm no spiritual master, if even an adept...though I can say that I prefer to draw things from own experience rather than concretely assert the declarations of others, and I much rather hear others speak from their own experiences than reference stories written and told which are not their own. The only thing I can do worthwhile when it comes to assisting others is to encourage them to explore and accept, and trust their own judgement while at the same time questioning it.

A teacher can instruct in nothing if not the desire to learn.

[dragonfly]

Originally posted by sire_012:
it's great to read about history, even early american history, but how much of that effected the generative world of your youth and development. perhaps an ability to read and an openness to ideas was integrated into your consciousness early on which led you to later toy with these ideas in books and on message boards, but what was the basis to read and be open to ideas outside of a general consumerist instinct that drives most of us?

I don't think my upbringing was in any way atypical. I was raised in an ordinary American family of recently immigrated Roman Catholics who lived in humble circumstances in a not-so-well-off community in Appalachian Pennsylvania. I'm sure coming from a family that still had strong ties to what we called "the old country" and having relatives who spoke languages other than English helped open my mind, as did my grandmother's integration of Catholic and pagan Lithuanian beliefs. One of her favorite sayings - an effort to instill religious tolerance in her grandchildren - was, “No religion teaches bad.”

Also, there were lots of immigrants from different spiritual traditions all around me, in my community and my public school - not only Catholics and mainstream Protestants but also Orthodox Christians, Mennonites, Jews, etc. I learned at a young age that there are many paths to spiritual meaning.

Originally posted by sire_012:
well, that's a leeetle bit condescending dragonfly.

I'm sorry, Sire, I didn't mean to be condescending. I felt I was doing the opposite (conascending?) - reaching up to you from this humble place where I itch with dirt and sweat from picking okra and field peas and catching errant chickens to suggest that when meaning's hard to find it might be because we're looking in the wrong place. Actually, I think your idea of drinking whiskey and eating meat (especially if you distill and hunt it yourself!) is right on target. Tantra, American-style, if you will.

Originally posted by sire_012:
but to put your mind at ease i have a big beautiful garden in the back of my apartment that right now is spitting forth gorgeous watermelon, tomatoes, jalapenos, collard greens, cucumbers and a whole bunch more goodies. i water it and weed it and play with it everyday. however, i still feel a bit culturally schilled.

You say you water your garden and weed it and play with it, but do you worship it?

Originally posted by silentwolfxvx:
America ... does not really have a solid spiritual tradition.

What is a "solid" spiritual tradition? What about American spiritual traditions such as Unitarianism, Quakerism, the African-American church, the Native American church, the Catholic Worker movement, Church of the Brethren, Transcendentalism, Evangelical Protestantism, Reform Judaism, Wicca, etc.? Why don't they count?

[Agent Smith]

oh sadly beknighted sinners... Earth time grows short, when oh when will those of you genetically capable realize your true Yeti heritage, take up the banner of the Furious Furry Sasquasnatch, and join the legions of the shock troops of "Bob" cleansing this Earth of all that imperils it against the true holy apostacy of Sub-Geniism?

[Darryl]

Wasn't it the eminent novelist James Joyce who said, "You spoof of visibility in a freakfog" when he referred to History? Maybe this is why Global Culture is so disheveled? We're psychic bodies making spoofs out of ourselves in a material paradigm controlled by our "freakfogs". What is a "freakfog" (?) we must ask ourselves. Anyone have a clue?

In a recent psychedelic voyage, I received a transmission from a voice that sounded like Terence McKenna. It was very terse and oscillating in obscure phasing pitches; but the Terence McKenna like voice said, "the laws of physics don't apply." Before I could even respond, the transmission was gone in the worbly, visual ambrosia of my mushroom intoxication. Nonetheless, it was an interesting esoteric sentiment.

I think "Global Culture" is being pulled towards a higher function. Old paradigms, myths, delusions and barbarous activities are being mitigated by the complexification of our transrational minds. At least I feel this is the case. So, the most important thing may not be to abandon Culture, but rather, assimilate it with a type of rational mysticism. This way we can transcend in a worldcentric fashion.

[sidecross]

“In realism you are down to facts on which the world is based: that sudden reality which smashes romanticism into a pulp. What makes most people’s lives unhappy is some disappointed romanticism, some unrealizable or misconceived ideal. In fact you may say idealism is the ruin of man, and if we lived down to fact, as primitive man had to do, we should be better off. That is what we were made for. Nature is quite unromantic. It is we who put romance into her, which is a false attitude, an egotism, absurd like all egotisms. In Ulysses I tried to keep close to fact.”

James Joyce to Arthur Power.

[sire_012]

daryl:

So, the most important thing may not be to abandon Culture, but rather, assimilate it with a type of rational mysticism. This way we can transcend in a worldcentric fashion.

this is precisely what i'm talking about. but how would you personally go about doing that? i would love to read specifics.

dragonfly:

I'm sorry, Sire, I didn't mean to be condescending.

my bad, i must have misunderstood. i've been drinking a lot of coffee lately and i'm a bit jumpy. [img]smile.gif[/img]

dragonfly:

Actually, I think your idea of drinking whiskey and eating meat (especially if you distill and hunt it yourself!) is right on target. Tantra, American-style, if you will.

rightio!

dragonfly:

You say you water your garden and weed it and play with it, but do you worship it?

what else could you be doing when you're out there primming and scrubbing that big ol beast.

dragonfly:

What is a "solid" spiritual tradition? What about American spiritual traditions such as Unitarianism, Quakerism, the African-American church, the Native American church, the Catholic Worker movement, Church of the Brethren, Transcendentalism, Evangelical Protestantism, Reform Judaism, Wicca, etc.? Why don't they count?

i think being raised in any of those traditions would be an exception to the rule. i certainly don't fall under any of those and i don't know anybody who does either. and, not to be too blunt, but Wicca?

[Darryl]

Sire 2012:

"This is precisely what i'm talking about. but how would you personally go about doing that? i would love to read specifics."

I would like to think that the intellectual and imaginative dyad inherent in everyone is capable of defining new cultural frontiers. I read somewhere on this messageboard a point Daniel made about "anti-intellectualism", which as far as I am concerned is a dangerous meme. If a culture is opposed to "intellectualism", we will never find a way out, because we will always resort to our regressions (animism, myths, and other silly things). There seems to be fallacy in assuming that intellectualism means "pompousness", when in reality, it is something I call "Meta-Rationalism". When someone is well developed in contemplative, theoretical, and behavioral know-how, they must be a well tuned nexus of insight. Which is what a "Meta-Rationalist" would be: a person capable of turning information into insight, and insight into information. I think this is what Global Culture needs to be striving for. An enlightenment through "Interior Intellectual Insight" (III). Sorry I didn't mean to throw my own terms into my explanation.

Are you aware of the "Holonic principle" set forth by Jean Gebser, or the work being done by Howard Bloom or Don Beck? These three individuals all say our rational faculties need to be trained in order to properly understand the way information, language, and energy travels.

[Agent Smith]

daryl- animism, and myth silly?

the only proper response to that is 'nuh-uh'

[ August 15, 2005, 06:53 PM: Message edited by: Agent Smith ]

[Darryl]

Silly in a lighthearted way. I suppose I shouldn't have said "animism." I really meant paleolithic primalism and the myths which ran juxtaposed with it. I am aware "animism" implies "soul", and I am aware Jung uses "anima" to describe the Female soul in the Male. In conclusion, I whimsically change "animism" to "paleolithic primalism."

I use "myth" not necessarily in a Cambellian sense, which would imply that myths are used to explicate the interconnectedness of the animal, plant, and mortal realms. I use "myth" in the sense that the beloved Peking Man type archetype couldn't possibly understand form and content, exteriority and interiority, and wave and particle. As a result, the Peking Man type archetype lived in a dreadful and naive world of myths, brutish behavior, and all other things necessary for survival (so I could be here today to use the word "animism" inappropriately).

[sire_012]

daryl:

Which is what a "Meta-Rationalist" would be: a person capable of turning information into insight, and insight into information. I think this is what Global Culture needs to be striving for.

i don't think intellect should be held to so high of an ideal either personally as it seems, in some situations, to create more noise in its attempts to appear to be organizing.

[dragonfly]

Originally posted by sire_012:
i certainly don't fall under any of those and i don't know anybody who does either.

You don't know anyone who is any of those things? Not a single Evangelical, or Quaker, or Reform Jew? Wow. I don't think I've ever known anyone so spiritually isolated. Fortunately, it's never too late to explore the rich traditions all around us.

Originally posted by sire_012:
and, not to be too blunt, but Wicca?

The problem with Wicca is ...? If you're interested in a tradition that emphasizes direct contact with the divine (especially the divine in nature), you could do a lot worse.

[sidecross]

dragonfly would be a gem if given another name.

[sire_012]

dragonfly:

You don't know anyone who is any of those things? Not a single Evangelical, or Quaker, or Reform Jew? Wow. I don't think I've ever known anyone so spiritually isolated. Fortunately, it's never too late to explore the rich traditions all around us.

i know a couple kids who were raised evangelical christian though i would hardly call that a rich tradition or even spiritual for the matter. that's about one of the most dipshit backwoods collection of oppressive superstitions that have rolled down the pipeway. i would call that more of a rampant disease that is spreading at an alarming rate. the evangelical epidemic? yes, having lived in the south for some time i am familiar.

yeah, i suppose i am spiritually isolated. but none of the traditions you've listed comes anywhere near lighting a spark in me let alone do i think it has much hope of igniting a spiritual rennaisance in the west or anywhere else.

dragonfly:

The problem with Wicca is ...? If you're interested in a tradition that emphasizes direct contact with the divine (especially the divine in nature), you could do a lot worse.

i suppose you could do worse. i've just found Wicca, in it's 50 year history, to be fairly hokey, a bit light on impact despite all it's heavy hands.

but arguing for or against the validity of different organized religions was not my hope with this thread when i tossed it out there. my interest was to hear ideas from individuals about how they have personally created means to engage in their world in a way that is spiritual (for lack of a better term) - or full of their being - and then maybe step back and grok on where this might be going.

so dragonfly, how do you personally worship your life? i get the impression your engaged deeply in what you do, so how do you fully dress yourself in your experiences?

[sire_012]

manning i don't disagree with what you've written.

would you be open to sharing what your practice is or involves?

[dragonfly]

Originally posted by sire_012:
yeah, i suppose i am spiritually isolated. but none of the traditions you've listed comes anywhere near lighting a spark in me let alone do i think it has much hope of igniting a spiritual rennaisance in the west or anywhere else.

How could you know whether they light a spark in you (an interesting formulation from a Quaker perspective, BTW!) if you're unfamiliar with them?

Please know I'm not trying to sell you on any of these traditions to fill your meaning void. My original comment was simply a challenge to silentwolf's assertion that American lacks a "solid" spiritual tradition. In truth, I think America's variety of spiritual traditions is its great spiritual tradition. We're largely a nation of immigrants and mutts - shouldn't our spiritual tradition reflect that?

Originally posted by sire_012:
so dragonfly, how do you personally worship … ?

Exactly! I worship personally.

My spirituality has been shaped by all the experiences I've been lucky to have in my life, including but not limited to: growing up Catholic, having a grandmother whose spirituality was a syncretism of Catholicism and Lithuanian paganism, college classes on James and Jung and Frankl and such, working for a Quaker organization, being an anarchist, dabbling in neo-paganism (though I must confess I did once get booted out of a Starhawk-led ritual for my "skeptical" vibe - props to her for detecting it!), studying Lithuanian paganism, readings in Gnosticism/paganism/indigenous American spiritual traditions/Bon shamanism/Tibetan Buddhism/Taoism, interacting with my agnostic husband and atheist mother-in-law, serving as the sounding board for my mother's spiritual doubt, my father's long sickness and difficult death, etc. And of course my experiences with entheogens, which enabled me to experience in a deeply personal way the deeper truths that organized religions hint at. If pressed to label my spirituality these days, I simply called it "earth-based" and let it go at that. But no label can really capture it. Furthermore, I imagine it will be different a year from now, depending on what I learn in the meantime (this board and all of you here being a very important part of my learning process).

As far as how I worship … I worship all the time, but the people around me don't necessarily know when I'm doing it. I worship washing dishes, cleaning the toilet, tending the garden, playing guitar, walking the dogs, making love, lying in bed listening to my loved ones breathe…

What's the nature of my practice? In some ways it resembles naikan, a Japanese word that means "introspection" or "seeing oneself with the mind's eye." Others have referred to this as the "revolutionary practice of gratitude," which works just fine for me.

[silentwolf]

What I meant when I said that America lacks a solid spiritual tradition is just that; its spiritual traditions lack both solidity and fluidity.

Thank you for the endorsement Manning, and the congratulations, it means a lot to me. And I do practice the same thing you do, to be honest...it's the only way I've found that I can be, and still be acceptant of who I am. (Even when I can't accept it, lol, if that makes sense.)

Throwing off all those different names of traditions points not at the tradition and its base, but to the idea of what those traditions are in the mind of the observer. None of those are solid, or pliable, or anywhere near their beginnings, or in what those who began the tradition would consider to be a state of healthy growth. Decay is still growth, but of a different kind.

[JCCamp007]

Yeah.I'm noticing it in my teeth melonhead.

[silentwolf]

rofl

[Giselle62]

Rambling on:
America is a land of many cultures and heritages, so I don't see how it could be inconsistent with our character to explore ideas from all over the place; it ain't pretty but the exploitative character is also our heritage, hence the feeling that Sire has, and that many people have, about the "ripping-off" of said cultures.

I don't know why, exactly, but I'm really digging the invocation of the "pioneer spirit" in what Daniel said at the beginning of this thread.
That's a positive archetype,(except for their killing of the brown peoples, of course.)
Little girls (of which I am one)love, love, love "Little House on the Prairie" books.

Hey, I'll bring the pragmatism:
I mean, no matter what gobbledy-gook the shamans are spouting the meal has to be prepared, dishes need to be done. This is why I am somtimes impatient with spiritual ideas. They only seem really attractive when there is no work to be done (as in, being unemployed.)