Reclusland

“When you got really good at being in the mountains, you began practicing the same down at the edge of the water, which was intensely difficult.  Then you did on the water in a canoe, drifting with life’s breezes in lightning storms and so on; then in the water for long hypothermic hours with just your head sticking out.  To focus without focusing, to stay attuned to the surroundings was really difficult there”

“The highest shamanic ability was to keep your nature intact while surrounded by the goings-on of a human village.  The mountain work brought you into the sap of the village of plants and animals, and water into the liquid living village of life.  The human village, however, was the most difficult to be in, as you couldn’t use your quality of being human to merge.  Since it was already effortless to be a human, one could easily function as oneself.  The trick was to not be human, but to be part of nature while among humans.”

“When I’d become proficient enough at both calling and praying, Chiv made me begin to practice becoming what I called.  I failed utterly, which was normal, since the exercise was not designed for one to succeed but, rather, was meant to tune your abilities to be in nature instead of around or drawing in nature – to be nature.  Nature was made of complex inter-relationship of an infinite number of constantly changing “little natures,” and mine was one of them.”

“Out we’d go into the bush, where no human would be likely  to poke his or her curious nose.  Chive would set me up with no water, food, fire, or blanket, and instruct me to stay in one place an hour or so before dawn to wait until the next day’s arrival of our Father the sun.  I was to hear, see, taste on the wind, feel on my skin everything , every sound, every change of heat, humidity, coolness, footsteps, and breezes that went on around me until the next sunrise, without sleeping, drinking, eating, or talking.  Learning how to listen like this was called “being in a place well.”

“You couldn’t think about your life, or the life of others.  There would be plenty of time for that, because to have time and place to just think about this and that is heaven to us.  This exercise, however, was to make sure you didn’t think.  It was not like some Asian meditation where you empty yourself exactly, but was rather where you filled yourself with all the sense, with every cricket chirp and birdsong, every creak, crack, pop, and twitter.  You were not to focus on what happened as an observer, but rather to hear, see, and allow it all to sink into the bottom of your body and bones like silt and seeds dropping into your river of liquid bone from the overhanging trees, while you gazed from the bottom of the water, very still, hardly moving, like an alligator.”

“If I did the exercise right, my soul would begin to merge with my entire diverse surroundings, and the edges of who I was would get increasingly blurred until my mind would jump and snap back like a dog on a leash, scared of how far I might wander, and maybe never come back.  Then I’d calm my mind, send it off and slowly begin to listen and see, until I started to merge again with nature and be snapped back again by my mind.  Each time, however, I’d get a little further into nature and a little better at staying there.”

“A current began to pulse between the mind of self-preservation and the mind of natural instinct to become part of the life around me.  After a year of practice, that pulse became so fast and habitual that it took on the character of a unique “third thing”.  That third thing that appeared was what I would need to have in order to survive my initiation as a shaman.  While immersed in nature, not analyzing, not understanding exactly but becoming nature, one really did begin seeing how vast the human soul can be.  It was this middle place, this third thing, Chiv and I were after, the place of shamans in the middle of the world.”

“Simple example of everyday speech’s poetry:”

“Poq chic rubi nbij rajawal ral rilajj vinaaq, pinaaq, conoy ruchi ctie, rumac poq rie cdta.”

“A great amount of its name it spoke, that one, a woman’s child of the Old Complete Being [Twenty] searching for the mouth of Our Mother, because of the sharpness of Our Father’s Teeth.”

“This translates more or less as follows:”

“A great amount of its name it spoke, means: He made a lot of noise according to his kind.”

“That one, a woman’s child of the Old Complete Being, means: A Jaguar (a Child of Woman Hill, Woman Valley – the Moon).”

“Searching for the mouth of Our Mother translates as: Looking for the lake, water.”

“Because of the sharpness of Our Father’s Teeth is how one says: In this great heat of the sun.”

“Or altogether the meaning is assembled:
The jaguar made a lot of noise, searching for water in his thirst!”

“Cultures who lose this kind of complex poetic respect for what surrounds them are then cursed to try to keep their spirits alive on a bland hollow world full of unconnected things.  Initiation and living well among the Tzutujil and most original tribal peoples depend on a willingness to learn that ancient eloquence.  Though this appears time-consuming and inefficient to people from business-oriented societies, it is the true currency of our indigenous soul, whose stock is measured in the ornate beauty of our conversations with the worlds around us, spiritual and otherwise.”

See also: Genesis 2:19-20

“Every child born into the village has already been born into and passed through the other four layers of creation, one layer at a time.  In each of these consecutive creations, the child received an essential layer of his/her own physical and spiritual composition.  After having received and lived these fur layers of lives, the child was given form and born into this fifth layer of the Earth Fruit, the world of form, this world.  In this way, all of us humans relived the history of the world and actually were diminutive earths walking around in the earth, with everything inside us in miniature that was visible to us on the outside.”

“The first creative was stone and fire; in this layer you received what was hard and hot.  Here you got your bones, your heart, and your gallbladder.  Grandfather Fire lived in your bones and the Mother of Life lived in your heart.  Your personal soul was housed in your gall bladder.  Dreams originated from the gall bladder, and its tenant was called Q’aq’al, or Fire Soul.”

“In the second layer you were given your flesh, because this creation had all the food plants, flowers, and trees.  All Tzutujil people know that flesh comes from eating plants.  In the third creation you acquired the layer of your blood and nerves and all the liquids in your body, because here was the land of waters, rivers, rains, lakes, springs, clouds, mist, and lightning.  In the fourth, a layer of breath, vision, and movement was tied into you, this being the layer of wind and wild animals.  Then you were born into the fifth layer, here to have form, becoming fruit on the branches of the Old Life Tree of the Village.”

See also: “As above, so below” and the mico- and macro-cosmic orbits…

“A functioning community does not need to peer at its members to make sure that they comply with the law.  A functioning community is one that is its own protection.  And one cannot form a community whose goal it is to tear the rest of society apart.  A community that wants to “correct” the current sense of community is not going to survive.”

“In the surface world our ability to make things happen is very limited. This limitation is a reflection of the incompleteness of a world without the spirit realm. So Spirit is our channel through which every gap in life can be filled. But the spirit realm will not take care of these gaps without our conscious participation. Thus our collaboration makes us central to the actual happening of a ritual.” – Malidoma Somé

“There are really only two kinds of people in existence.  There is everyone who has been trained to live either for today or for tomorrow, stuck in the cycles of endless preparations and expectations, dutifully digging holes and falling into them, always busy trying to plant something fresh in the well-worn patterns of the old.  This is called waiting for the new moon.  And then there are those who know how to work in perfect stillness, imperceptibly bringing the future into being.  That is called waiting for the new sun.” – Peter Kingsley

“The modern seeker of ritual primarily acknowledges that he or she is wounded, or hollowed out, or emptied of his or her vital substance to the point that the individual is almost disgusted with the present state of his or her life.”

“These wounds are evidence of the need to enter into a special creative process.  They are the language with which entry into the realm of ritual is possible.  As long as one does not deploy special energy to repress and deny these wounds, but rather, contains them creatively – that is, in ritual – then one is working on oneself as a potential survivor of the holocaust and tyranny of Progress.  I mean to say that the hurt a person feels in the midst of this modern culture should be taken as a language spoken to himself or herself by the body.  And the meaning of such language is found in doing something about the part of oneself that is not acknowledged.”

“Human senses are devices of communication.  Sight is a language, as are pain, touch, smell and taste.  The most powerful among them is the feeling of pain.  For the Dagara elder, pain is the result of resistance to something new – something toward which an old dispensation is at odds.  We are made of layers of situations or experiences.  Each one of them likes to use a specific part of ourselves in which to lodge.  It’s like a territory.  A new experience that does not have a space to sit in within us will have to kick an old one out.  The old one that does not want to leave will resist the new one, and the result is registered by us as pain.  This is why the elders call it Tuo.  It means invasion, hunting, meeting with a violent edge.  It also means boundary.  Pain, therefore, is our body complaining about an intruder.  Body complaint is understood as the soul’s language relayed to us.  A person in pain is being spoken to by that part of himself that knows only how to communicate in this way.”

Kind of gives a new dimension to that whole “1st Noble Truth” thing, eh?

(and a little bonus:)

Tomorrow morning I’m leaving for a week-long retreat, returning home August 2.  Then I’ll be up in Seattle for a wedding until August 12 and will be returning for another wedding here in Oregon the following weekend. Seems everybody’s shacking up these days.  I’m getting to be “that age”, I guess….

In any case, I’ll very likely be incommunicado until after August 13.  Just a heads up so as not to give the impression I’m simply being unresponsive for that long. I do have a bundle of posts lined up and ready to go though, wouldn’t want to deny the world a daily dose of Reclusland goodness!  So stay tuned and stay entertained, kiddies, in what I can only hope is a good a nourishing way.

“I don’t know why people in modern life want to be shamans.  There’s nothing romantic about it.  We just go around capturing monsters, re-sweetening the earth, and making people’s memories taste good again.”

“There is an eloquence to in negativity that quickly becomes evil.  We see evil as a form of negative creativity with a vengeance.  Its parents are simple, natural desires who, because they have gone unfed, become frustrated, unnatural hungers.  These hungers begin to put together things that don’t go together, creating monsters, which are personified unnatural hungers that eat everything and never get full.  This dynamic is identical to the bent way that some modern people breed animals to fit the same distorted and deformed pattern that their own over-domesticated natures may have fallen into.”

(image via here)

“We, the shamans, can be thought of as spirit dogcatchers; the pets we catch are these composite hunger monsters.  Unlike dog pound people who kill what they catch, we shamans break monsters back into their component parts, thus sweetening the earth by allowing each thing to flower back into its own original shape again.”

“True creativity doesn’t just make things; it feeds what feeds life.  In modern culture where people are no longer initiated, the spirit goes unfed.  To be seen, the uninitiated create insane things, some destructive to life, to feel visible and powerful.  These creations are touted as the real world.  They are actually forms of untutored grief signaling a longing for the true reality of village togetherness.”

“The result of this uninitiated approach to life is violence, spiritual and otherwise, where the hoarding of wealth, street violence, the soul-curdling banality of popular television, and the creation of weapons of mass destruction are considered status quo.”

“In the Middle Ages and until the Renaissance, man’s dispute with madness was a dramatic debate in which he confronted the secret powers of the world; the experience of madness was clouded by images of the Fall and the Will of God, of the Beast and the Metamorphosis, and of all the marvelous secrets of Knowledge.  In our era, the experience of madness remains silent in the composure of a knowledge which,  knowing too much about madness, forgets it.” – Michel Foucault (to which I would add quotes around “knowing”, whether Foucault would mean it that way or no)

“It is the reinstatement of the vague and inarticulate to its proper place in our mental life which I am so anxious to press on the attention.” – William James

“All organized religions face a common problem: How do they distinguish hubris from revelation?” – Frank Herbert

Suffering was not the price of living, but a part of the gift of being alive.  Not a big deal, but part of the deal.

The world was such a luscious place as I looked out upon it.  My entire being was a big old tongue floating  in an ocean of honey.  The creation was honey.  Every sense became taste, and that sense was drowning in the very rich sweetness of the honey.  My eyes and ears were taste buds on the tongue of my desire, made to taste to the fullest my immersion into that immense deliciousness.

As I pushed along, the rainforest seemed like the floor of a strange ocean, and enormous body of water trapped in the form of plants.  It was an awe-inspiring woman with a million faces, not all friendly, not all hostile, not all caring, but each of her faces was a distinct species, a living form, and the wild jungle shone in every one of them.  All of them together made her shine as one intense living female being.

To wander in her, for me, an American desert-raised fool, was to journey through caves of chlorophyll, a tangible carnal sea in whose lusty waters I could actually breathe.  The dense exuberance of her body dazzled me.  You could truly hear and see her before your eyes, so present in so many beings…

Simply focusing on the sound and resting one-pointedly on it is shamatha meditation. Recognizing the nature of the sound is vipashyana meditation. Focusing on the sound, looking directly at the nature of the thought apprehending the sound, then letting go and relaxing into the nature of that thought is mahamudra meditation. Resting in a state free from the duality of perceived and perceiver – an object of sound and a thought apprehending – is meditation according to the chittamatra approach. But if you are really skilled, it will become mahamudra meditation. It all depends on your level of skill. If you recognize that sounds, like dreams, are the expressive power of mind’s abiding nature, mahamudra-luminosity, and if you look directly at their nature and relax within it, that is mahamudra meditation.

(mainly for all my Buddhist folks out there)

The other day I came home from a grocery run, opened the door (somehow), arms full of bags, and was hit by a subtle scent of rot.  Seems the garbage was in need of taking out.  How had I missed that before leaving earlier?  The rot must have somehow gone deeper while I was out. No big deal, let me put these groceries down, and then away, and pour myself a glass of this newly-purchased milk, sit down to check the mail, first the snail variety and then the electronic kind, then all sorts of wandering of the electronic variety, then suddenly hours have gone by and its time to go out and meet friends for diner.  Coming back from diner, I once again notice the smell.  Why had I forgotten about it when I’d been home before?  How could I have missed that stench?  This time, I tie up the bag and leave it by the door to take with me the next time I leave the house.  I also open up a few windows.  The air is fresh and clean, and the source of the rot set up for removal.

What’s been happening with my meditation practice lately (and, to be truthful, is my usual base-level meditation experience) is that I’ll sit for the allotted time, watching my breath, or opening to the unknown moment of now, following my thoughts as they flow along, watching-accepting-releasing bodily tension.  And that’s it.  Nothing arises, nothing seems to want to present itself to my attention, nothing demands that my focus turn toward it.  Just is-ness doing its thing, in this little section of timespace that this body/mind/nervous-system I seem to be inhabiting has the honor and responsibility of experiencing properly.  Then, I get up from the cushion and go about my day.  And minutes, hours, sometimes even a day or two later, something does come up.  My conditioned existence jostles a bit of garbage loose from the tightly gripping mindhand and there’s that sudden subtle shift.  Rot is released for removal, and the fresh air pouring in the windows is free to enter the space newly emptied.

So, I guess what I take away from this is that sometimes we need to simply get out of the house so we can re-attune our senses to notice just where that garbage that needs to be tied up and put out for disposal.  Both need not happen together.  By leaving our house behind, we we return, we can notice stenches previously ignored.

“(W)hen someone uses the word ‘esoterism’ and does not hesitate to imprint black on white, and claims this to be an ‘esoteric interpretation,’ there is such a contradiction in the usage of this word that the logic and comprehension of the author become, at least for me, suspect”

from Daumal’s review of a certain translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead

I had a thought recently that all mythology can be thought of as a sort of Iron Chef battle.  On the show, different chefs have access to the same pool of ingredients and must make a series of dishes using these ingredients to be placed before the show’s judges.  By the end of the show, the dishes prepared by each chef are widely different, despite the fact that they start with the same initial ingredients.

Similarly, any mythological system is taking the same basic ingredients, the human body, mind, heart, nervous system, and everything else that contributes to our subjective experience, and is trying to make a story out of it.  Originally, we all started out with basically the same thing.  Knowledge of the basics is often similar culture to culture, and while the basics can be quite powerful, they are often thought of as somehow “below” or “lesser” than more further developed systems.  And just as often ignored, to the detriment of those who do so.  One cannot remove the roots from a tree…

As these sort of “primitive” mythologies were further developed by different cultures, they became more and more complex and idiosyncratic.  Each culture developed their own distinctive mythological framework, and while certain myths are more readily comparable, this is only due to the fact that the respective cultures were already somewhat in tune with each other, having been acted upon by similar cultural and natural forces.

And from there, each mythic system breaks down further and further as time goes by, fragmenting and splintering, creating nooks and crannies, like some sort of fractal pattern.  And as Jospeh Campbell pointed out, all religions, all spiritual teachings, can be thought of as myths.  And so, by extension, all spiritual teachers can be thought of as myth-makers.   And we find ourselves right back at our original Iron Chef premise.  Each teacher takes the wealth of mythological systems accumulated over the centuries that humanity has been making such systems, and tries to prepare a dish that best pleases the palate of the modern spiritual seeker.  Except that, instead of just having their palates pleased, the best dishes are those that help the student to become a mythmaker themself.  And, at the ultimate end of the pattern of fractal splintering, we have each person, creating their own individual mythic structure with which to understand their life, and we trade different pieces back and forth between ourselves, each furthering the others development.

“And all cosmic truths become known to everyone on those planets because those beings who by their conscious efforts learn some truth or other share it with others, and in this way, little by little, all cosmic truths become known to all the beings of that planet, whatever may be their aspirations and degree of self-perfecting.” – Beelzebub’s Tales

Hope everyone who gets it enjoys the holiday weekend! Independence, the Pursuit of Happiness, Freedom of Religion, Press, and Speech… We’ve got a lot of good stuff going on here, despite whatever else might have snuck in along with it.