I read in Timothy Snider’s work “On Tyranny” that in times when people are being dehumanized and tyranny is approaching, make sure you smile at people, make eye contact and say hello. It’s easier to see people as humans when we greet each other with our heads up, shoulders straight, with an open and friendly demeanor.
Hello.
I’ve been practicing mindful meditation for thirty years and on top of writing about what I think the most central and important political issues of our time are, I have a contribution to the discussion about our religious and spiritual impulses; where we are and where we’re going as societies and as individual humans.
I learned meditation in my late teens doing mindless repetitive work. I was an unloader at a UPS Local Sort in Vancouver in 1991. I moved between 2500 and 3500 parcels a day by hand for almost a year, so I moved something in the neighborhood of half a millions packages.
I was the guy inside the trailers moving pieces up to seventy pounds onto rollers and conveyors. They called it “working in the can.”
Grab package. Put it on rollers. Repeat.
I also planted just shy of 400,000 trees in northern BC over five summers in university.
We tend to associate meditation with what’s known as Za-Zen, or sitting, but Zen, and many other disciplines recognize both, active meditations like walking, and ascetic mediations in the contemplation of personal physical performance, pain and suffering. There’s something that happens to the mind in the package and planting meditation that is the same as people experience as athletes, and that some people call the runners rush or Flow State.
Planters used to say there was four stages of mind we moved through in our planting days: At first, when you’re learning how to plant a tree, all your attention is on the act. Right place, right spacing, right depth, roots straight. Green side up.
Then arises the ability to free the mind from the act of doing allowing the mind to wander and drift. When planting with a buddy, this is where you can have conversations, and tell mom jokes.
Then there is a layer of conscious work on excellence, and technique and speed where one returns their focus to the work, to engage in the act of planting a tree like one would engage in improving a golf swing, or meditating on yoga asanas in practice towards new layers of breath and movement.
The fourth stage happens when striving is left behind and the mind simply falls quite. It happens in small increments at first, a slip into the Flow State as one becomes the movement, the pace and the act. Time disappears. Thoughts arise, as the philosopher Patanjali described in The Sutras, like bubbles from the mud at the bottom of a still pond. Arising as objects in the mind observed as if from an separate place watching them, flittering up into the light and passing on into the planes above.
I was deeply interested in philosophy and comparative religions at the time and found that when I asked questions, doors opened to experience in those meditations and increasingly in my daily life.
I had learned in my meanderings through the liberal arts, how to follow citations and how to get to source materials and I felt compelled for some reason to chase the big questions in life; what is god? What are we? Who am I? What is the nature of the soul? It was probably always in my nature. I had always been a reader. I read the bible when I was in third grade. I read it more than once before I was ten.
Perhaps it was the meditation or maybe the psychedelics, or perhaps the combinations of a seeker’s drive I asked some big questions, I had a couple flashes that William James would have called, Religious Experiences that further shook my model of the world and opened my mind to greater vistas
These moments of inspiration demanded a vocabulary to understand and explain. Raised for half my childhood as an Anglican, and in my teens as a Lutheran I just didn’t have words outside the western Christian Episteme - and so I searched.
Adding to the thousands of hours in meditation that were a byproduct of repetitive work, I learned the basic linguistic frames by taking two survey courses in the religious studies department at UBC. (Eastern Religion and Western Religion).
With the map laid in my broad study of religions, I went on to read most of Jung by my mid-thirties. I had studied Campbell’s “Masks of God” for several years by then. I’d also collected and studied and the major work of the east as well as the esoteric and occult canon of the west.
The body of mystical knowledge in the east is presented on the surface, but in the west, mysticism was buried, rejected and treated as blasphemy for centuries. First, it was a blasphemy rejected by the Roman Catholic Church, which either assimilated and renamed mystical figures and holidays, or paved over as churches were build on the sacred sites of the cultures they absorbed, and then it was a blasphemy rejected as irrational and superstitious in the age of materialism.
As it turns out, records of the kinds of experiences I had as a treeplanter, and the resultant changes in consciousness and perspectives are found in all the religious literature and oral traditions of the world. It is apparent for all who have eyes to see it.
The attainment of the transformative mystical experience (accidental as was my case) is recorded in all languages and all through history. The flash of undisciplined enlightenment is often a tale of the descent into madness, and the tales of disciplined awakenings in the cases of the major traditions like Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, Taoist practice, and Vedanta Yoga is narrated through poetry and verse of the global wisdom traditions which account the stages of sacrifice and suffering required to attain them.
The records of these flights to the supernal layers of consciousness are now part of our public discourse. Jimmy Hendrix asked, “Are you Experienced?” and Joe Rogan asks, “yeah, but have you tried DMT?”
We are rediscovering Awakening and Enlightenment experiences in the west. We are remembering the earth medicines which connect us to a transpersonal domain of nature energies and spirits, and archetypes rooted in the body and the biosphere, like mother ayahuasca; and we are remembering a vocabulary for journeys into the high country of the mind, the ecstatic states of cessation and Samadhi, the higher dimensions of Isness and Unity and Liberation.
These connections to spirit have been lost to us for centuries in the west and even though we all navigate an immaterial plane of an existence in the streams and torrents of data online from which we build imaginal, intangible worlds; we reject the psychic landscapes and the soul maps we’ve accumulated over centuries as not real because we can’t measure them or reduce them to material properties. We reject senses that connect us to our bodies, to the earth, to the elements, to the seasons, and to our souls.
When we rediscover some of those connections in our lives, its becomes easier to find a sense of meaning and in spite of the growing tide of dangerous ideologies and proliferating cults, we once again have meaning frameworks available to us that have been occluded from us for centuries. I for one feel compelled to speak of them.
I see people drawn into domains of utopian ideals, and fantasies about their own natures and when someone tries to penetrate the spells that are woven around them, they are repelled by psychic defenses. It’s like they’re lost in the mystical labyrinth stuck in the same loop, returning again and again to the same problem. Their own wayward egos keeping them stuck and cut off from the source of life at the center.
Amazing thinkers like James Lindsay and so many others are doing the detailed and thorough job of analyzing the wokeness problem and developing an understanding of the mechanism and processes that are used to proliferate it - but few are speaking to open people to the possibilities of our birthright connections to our true Selves.
With the reality distortions we’re seeing and the exploding variations of major reality tunnels (epistemic frames) like Q-Anon and Trumpism, and Transgenderism and Anti-Racism; with the overlay of legacy media that no longer holds the human plot faithfully on either the left or the right, we are moving farther and farther from our natures and the consequences of this are dire.
The proliferation of competing cults in a society is an indication of impending disaster and collapse. We commonly understand that the principal problem Emperor Constantine and the Council of Nicaea faced 1700 years ago was the unmanageable outcomes of dozens of cults and tribal groups competing for influence and the loyalty of citizens.
In the late 1800s in the period in which Nietzsche cried that God is Dead, meaning the grip that the church had had on society for centuries was collapsing, there was an an explosion of new religious energy in society. The occult revival gave us Madam Helena Blavatsky, the Theosophical Society, Alistair Crowley, the modern Tarot, the Order of the Golden Dawn and the Order of the Rose and Cross. It gave us Mormonism, American Spiritualism and Jehovah’s Witnesses and many many more.
That period also gave us the theoretical foundations of Liberalism, Communism and Fascism and the disasters resultant to the wide adoption of ideologies incompatible with the ancient ideas of human collaboration, favoring primitive tribal comforts and terrors over stable society. We are seeing the same type of proliferation of cults and sects in our age today, and dangerous models of the world are gathering strength are attaining coherence at scale in this rapidly evolving age.
We are seeing secular institutions captured and corrupted by some of these cults and we face soon a crisis where we will experience real world disaster as a consequence of these toxic ideologies.
I feel compelled to point to something that exists out there in the field of meaning. There is something more. There is something Sacred. There is a universal human experience of transcendence and unity that is beyond the kinds of states of consciousness we travel through on a day-to-day basis. Its an experience that orients us within the field of meaning. Its a threshold that, once crossed, enables adepts to take a larger view of existence and aligns them with a sense of direction, purpose and drive.
It resolves the crisis of meaning and the attendant experiences of anger, injustice, fear, frustration, guilt, sadness and suffering and it is available to everyone.
I also believe that it is imperative in considering the causes of our broad societal problems, to provide a replacement narrative for the future and a touchstone of values that integrates us as citizens of communities, societies and the world.
It is insufficient to simply defeat the forces of growing evil in our society. We have learned these Truths through the chaotic trials of history and we need to elevate and center the values we learned along the way. The answers lie in the lessons of the great teachers and mystics of history and we must speak of them, and act them out if we want to dampen the coming chaos and if we want create a better world.