Steps

Hey there.

The problem is the existence of belief. I am certain that it is a false construct, or a minor tendency inflated by ... what force? The survival instinct of men alone? Or some dark insidious force that has no problem understanding "humanity" as a mass of energy that can be manipulated for its own benefit? Are they the same thing? Are there others inside us?

I often think about the actual makeup of the human body, as opposed to what we give credence to. I am not interested in arguing, and perhaps that makes me boring. But arguing - who needs it? It betters us as it hones our individuality, our ability to "know ourself" ... but what about all these other forces and energy centers located right with in our skin, sharing our internal space - really, the only property any of us can own (and how briefly). What is this "Actual Makeup"? Well, we house a lot of living things that work within us, machining this body as we machine the earth. General health is determined by how well we can balance our relationships with these little invaders and homesteaders through a daily intake of air, food (nutrient, matter), water (and, perhaps, spirits). And more - who knows how more subliminal intakes steer us? - The scenes that pass over our eyes, words drunk in, sounds and textures.

Another thing I am certain of is that the brain is a major organ, but that we have done an enormous disservice to humanity by disregarding the sophisticated and mysterious ways of our other organs, all operating under the deep cover of permanent blackness, should you be so lucky to never split your skin. Surely strong light permeates and cells drink that vitamin d directly, but always the shadow of the skin. This shadow contains a mighty force, as all shadows do. Maybe shadow is not quite the right word. It is a sealed shadow, a complete shadow, a shadow that contains and protects an unknown quantity. Or maybe it is more like a little self contained ocean.

Anyway - we are only here to navigate the mystery, and that requires admitting that there is a big mystery afoot. The tactics of science are often accurate but contain just as much folly in application as techniques of mystics, magicians, simpletons and guessers alike. Any path can be chosen and executed. Generally the thing to say at this juncture is that true result is gotten foremost by the whims and accuracy of the heart or gut, not the mind - but I don't want to relegate this chunk of words to the new age bin. However, I do stand by it. What is the other conclusion to draw here? Aren't I just poised upon my own preaching pinnacle? This is just some stuff I need to get off my chest. As they say.

Minor Holidays within Santanalia Season

Black Friday
This day is the feast day of Economicus, celebrated by masses of people BUY BUY BUY.

Day of the New Direction (Dill-Day)
This is the first functional day after the New Year. This is preceded by meditation on the Previous Year (new name?). We may notice trends in attempts and failures, emerging concerns, loose ends to solve. Then we may assess potential goals and make plans to court their development. This mental exercise necessarily occurs in the latter days of the Previous Year.
Dill is the herb of the Page of Swords, according to the herbal tarot. The Sword is the suit of mental function and currently/regionally phallic in its symbolism. The phallus may be embraced in the spirit of celebration for its qualities of Active Intent. The page is the youngest of the Hierarchical cards and stands at the fore of all cyclic states. The page is prepubescent, in a graced, genderless state.
Women and men alike are encouraged to initiate the day with a Dildo or Nude Erection, at one’s discretion.

Certainalia
This is an unspecified date in the shopping season of the previous year, in which an individual turns acquisitive efforts towards one’s own needs.

Slothanalia
This set of days occurs at the close of Xmas celebrations. During this time, there is absence of the attempt to produce.

Genitalia
This is December 24th, commemorating the day Santa was conceived.

Solstice
As the darkest stage in the entire year, an unsettling quality is likely to beset. Let this be the culmination of the past year’s miseries, weaknesses, accidents, faults, and pangs as they come to you. This is often experienced as a difficult time when impeded by the popular tradition of Last-Minute Shopping, which tends to intensify anxieties as we consider and procure the proper token to express our relationships with various people.
This stretch naturally comes to a close on December 25th.

Call to spirit

SO

I am trying to figure out how to talk about "spirituality". Mostly when I make a stab at one of these bloggys here I am expressing frustration about the way "spiritual" topics have become an object of derision, scorn, neglect, or outright dismissal. It is not strange - it is a cultural phenomena. Sometimes I blame "science", though I am in fact not an enemy of scientific ideals. In fact, many occult (re: New Age) pursuits have sprung out of a thirst to scientifically test, pursue, explore the unseen world. On the other hand, we have "religion", which has become popularly synonymous with "spirituality", providing reams of (sometimes contradictory) dogma, yet excluding whole chunks and fields of possibilities and curiosities.

So we are basically a culture trapped in our own spiritual ignorance. Let us see the range of topics that could fall under "Spirituality", including but not limited to what we might find filed under "New Age" in the bookstore, to try and understand how inadequate and broad our culture is in seriously addressing invisible (occult) experiences.

Afterlife: ghosts, ancestors
Psychic phenomena: Extrasensory perception
Acknowledgment of Consciousness of objects, plants, animals, place, weather, planets &c
Hypnosis
Divination techniques
Healing techniques (the body energetic)
Prayer and Communion
Meditation and Astral Travel (concentration toward spiritual advancement)
Morality
Personified entirety: God(s), Universe
Historical Pantheons
Aliens
Channeling
Contemplative Astronomy based on observation of heavens
Coincidence
Apocalypse
Christian Charity, Love, and cult societies
(Religious Dogmas and Conspiracy Theory)
Occult Study and Practice
Ritual
Magic Powers and Will Working
Miracles
Dreaming
Drugs: (Intoxication), Revelation
Meaning of Life
Creative endeavors, Imagination
Megalithic mysteries
Darkness to Nothingness (the unnameable)
Conjunctions and agreements among world myths
Angels, Fairies, Allies, Demons, Shadows
Contemplation of Inner Earth
Systems of personality inspection and deconstruction
Self-denial and ego abandonment
the Holy, surrender
Virtue
Visions
Vibrations
Pursuits of individuals like Reich, Jodorowsky, &c
Commentary and some philosophical consideration


Whew! I will try to organize this list a little better as time goes on.

Problem #1: "Belief" This is the first block to surpass when trying to forge a dialogue about spirituality. I speculate that EVERY HUMAN has a positive association or conviction with AT LEAST one item on the above list ... but also a bristling irritation with other items, for a variety of reasons. Religion has imposed this false requirement of belief and Science has made it possible to opt out of belief through the finely honed technique of skepticism. So we are left at a crossroads where we are allowed to dismiss and reject anything that is not convincing enough. But here we lose! The invisible world is not here to convince us - the invisible world is perpetually at our fingertips, available for observation.

I am here to say that it is NOT my belief but my real Feeling and my record of experience that causes me to regard all of these topics with a credulous, curious, and open apprehension. I feel it is possible to be credulous without being gullible. I do not blame the derisive spirit that denounces Spirituality on the basis of observed abuses in the name of spirituality - frauds often operate by claiming spiritual facility or authority. But I do struggle against the cumulative result: a "too cool for school" attitude of nihilistic resignation, and a death-averse culture emphasizing "jobs", structures of entrapment and glowing rectangles.

And I do have a suspicion: that the disconnection between humans and their own spiritual potential is no mistake, but an insidious plot meant to distract a man from her own personal power, ability to self-heal, create, and participate in community, for the purpose of providing a pliable work force for corporate interests. I do believe in an enemy, in the soul-suckers, in a zombie apocalypse that is at close range on a daily basis. I don't want this bastard health care of symptom suppression, I don't want this fear of age, of death, of neighbor, this vast programming of self-doubt and face painting. I cannot name the true face of this vast Soul Suck, but I feel it - so pervasive and so contrary to the experience I am having as a human that I imagine it must be in some way conscious, imposed, not accidental. To attempt to name this "conspiracy" plunges us into the world of doubt, disbelief, argument and derision all over again - it is best to stay out of it, looking under rocks of better promise.

More later.

Dude It Gets Old

I want to talk about cynicism. I am a lady of certain age, a dude from a time, and that time is the 90's - one of the most disillusioned, skeptical, jaded generations there is. Many of my contemporaries are aging out. I mean, you can always find a '76er out there somewhere, but the field of dudes just gets younger and younger.

Youth is fine - there is a time for everything. But recently I turned a certain age and it came heavy upon me. There is a magical book in my possession called "Seven Gothic Tales", and in the story "The Old Chevalier" I read this:

"I was so young then that I could no more than other young people give up the deep faith in my own star, in a power that loved me and looked after me in preference to all other human beings. ... It is when this faith begins to wear out, and when you conceive the possibility of being in the same position as other people, that youth is really over."

This book is magical in my life because it is so often timely, and no less here: I had known exactly the privilege of youth and the arrogance that comes with it ... but right around my birthday, I started to know collapse, failure, vulnerability ... in some ways more definite than others, but in general a pervasive feeling of doom, of a universe that had stopped smiling down on me, fallen from grace, retracted blessing. It is beyond attitude - sudden body failure is an intimate revolt, this thing that you are on the earth in sudden disagreement with the self that resides inside it. It is a hard time to maintain a positive attitude.

But more than "getting older" - cynicism has been a part of me at every stage. High school, duh. First college year, my closest friend and I promoted and exemplified such dismal qualities that it spawned the acronym SCEB - we made a temple to Sarcasm, Cynicism, Exaggeration, and Bitterness. In later years I had to consciously work to discover more positive attitudes, less hate, simply to start functioning in the world, instead of just making fun of it all the time, dwelling in psychic drag. But the tendency is hardwired.

So it is interesting to me to note a very real generational difference. The young ones of these days seem often shot through with pervasive positivity, diy ingenuity, a seriousness and sense of self-importance. Is it the very real result of guidance counselors hammering "You can do anything!" into young brains? In some ways it is difficult to tell which qualities belong to the generation, and which are only borrowed from youth, time will tell ... but I feel oddly positioned, in contrast. I focus on complaints not because nothing is ever good enough but because things can be improved if problems are openly recognized. But to express my critical observations in these youth pools casts me as an outsider, an adult, or just some kind of jerk unable to enjoy the gifts of nature and bent on disturbing everyone else's experience too. Even on a casual level - a contemporary encountering them noted "They don't have jokes." My running commentary is incisive, cutting, rarely cruel but consistently irreverent, it jabs and produces a particular kind of laughter - yes, "jokes".

Well, I like it! I mean, recent exposure to the reality of aging hasn't been totally pleasant, but that's just a thing, planets passing, and I needed a change anyway. I enjoy grappling with the intimate difficulties and personal transformation. And part of that is the creation of a relationship to positivity, which I think I maintain, though outwardly it may appear not so. The positivism associated with the New Age is often a disgusting distortion, but the initial principle of intention is real and powerful. I love that I have been able to encounter this principle on my own terms, as a balance to more negative forces, and I am incredibly skeptical of those who are hardwired with this assumption. Who I am must critique who they are - not just the youth but any consumers of wholesale feelgood philosophies - holiness is not so simple, and dabbling in all that light encourages blindness.

And poor culture! getting all gobbed up with earnest, mediocre efforts about personal transformation. "Why are they always hatching from eggs?" Inspired by the graces, it is celebration of life processes and self-absorbed obsession with personal experience - seemingly reasonable subjects for "art", except that the world we live in is so densely complicated with ambiguities and darkness and mystery that I begin to curse this diy movement, these energized fanatics trying to cram us with "beauty".

To all my aging brothers and sisters, I have never lost reverence for aged or the elderly. But in youth I imagined the trick to lifetime well-being was to maintain that grace of youth through the passing years. Now that I have crossed a time line that sentiment sounds like denial. In the real scenario, there is struggle, and it can be liked! I am positive of that!