What can we take from a reading of practices that might help us in dealing with ‘moments of transition’ – not those dictated by communal practice but those points where we are, as individuals, caught up in a logjam, failing to progress, out of balance, overwhelmed by self-imposed or social obligations or, quite simply, bored. Let us start by trying to give an account of simple tantric practice without once using a Sanskrit word and which is adapted to the way we tend to think in the atheistic West - for right or wrong:-
- The simple practice centres on the visualisation of an archetypal figure, using physical objects that represent their meaning or by making use of analogical objects (as attributes) related to each sense: sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, apperception (conduct)
- The visualisation is then related to an externalisation of the image in an object or person using 'mantra' (ritualised sound)
- Objects used by the subject may be transgressional to 'shock' the mind into an altered state and elicit the unconscious will. Indeed, transgressional objects or conduct may often be the most efficacious means of doing this rather than contemplation or analysis.
- Warnings of 'risk' should be taken seriously but only insofar as the subject is intent on narcissism or a performance (that is, demonstrating something to himself or to others) rather than allowing the unconscious to change the state of the underlying mind. Intention and good faith are thus central to the process.
- There is no need to restrict any practice to any elite or small class of persons or assume the necessity of initiation. Only the subject can judge whether they are acting in good faith. Restrictions are merely the attempt by the few to distinguish themselves unwarrantedly from the many.
- Particular minds require particular combinations of objects for contemplation and have particular needs in balancing themselves or extending themselves or removing anxieties from their own consciousness (all three are worthy purposes) so method might be taught but never purpose.
- The next stage is a symbolic driving away of 'obstructive spirits', meaning distractions from the task in hand, often using a space-containing ritual around the object that is assertive, even mildly aggressive.
- Ritualised choices in visualisation are never fixed but only suggestive but they are points, ordered in time, where the mind detaches from the wider world and concentrates on process in order to create effect:
- positioning of the external image;
- welcoming the image into oneself;
- touching as purification or cleansing to separate it from the world;
- grants of things (offerings) that bring the subject's world to the image;
- acts of drinking or eating that bring the image physically into alignment;
- the surrounding of the object with attributes related to each of the senses in order for the subject to build a relationship with it, ending with speaking to it as oneself in the outer world (effectively, externalising 'talking-to-oneself). An honouring of an image is thus an honouring one's own inner unconscious so that it is listened to with respect.
The OCD aspects of transformation may be noted for careful avoidance but it may be that creating a clear area in space and time requires a cleansing of the body and a method of ritually working through the elements of body and mind before coming to a transformational event. An ancient technique is to engage in ‘mindless’ repetition to clear the mind and this may still work for many people. The object here is a reflection of one's hidden other and is likely (though it does not need to be) male to a female and female to a male, especially in cases where balance is sought or a blockage to progress needs to be removed.
There is no reason why techniques such as breathing control, ritual behaviours by the subject or meditation should not be engaged in if that is how the person can detach themselves from the world and come into alignment with their own objectified 'other' but these are means and not ends. Such states are not to be confused with the actual alignment state. The danger is always that some techniques will merely pre-suppose a 'spiritual state' that is not an alignment but an attempted avoidance or escape from inner alignment. Perhaps an Alignment with the Subject-Self is where we are heading against the possibly spurious Enlightenment in the context of an invented Otherness.
Advanced Practice
Physicality of process is suitable for those who have weaker internal visualisation skills. There is nothing in the process we outlined in Part I that cannot be done through imaginative reconstruction rather than physical performance. This is the insight of Western magickal practitioners such as Austin Osman Spare living in the puritanical pseudo-liberal culture of the post-Christian West and with no cultural means of discussing physicality openly and without guilt or shame. Since they do not have to be material in nature, the processes of attribution to the object (now mental) can involve unravelling deeper layers of invented and personal meaning being applied to each attribute so long as the attribution process is still directed at the mental object (one’s inner ‘other’, what we have called the Subject-Self) and not at the attribute per se.
It is at this ‘more advanced’ state that imaginative reconstruction can be embedded in a physical action of the whole body in the world, with the mind objectifying an external material process of the body that can be extended and mentally ritualised. This is where transgressional eating or drinking, personal degradation and sexual practice come in because the ritualised counter-cultural practice itself becomes the transgressional process instead of simply introducing transgressional objects into view or engaging in transgressional thoughts for their transient pleasure or as acts of narcissism. What is transgressional is highly situational (we note that not sacrificing children would be transgressional in Carthage) but whatever the transgressional bodily performance is, it is is offered to the mental object which is the unknown self.
Nor should it be naively and ignorantly be associated with harm to oneself or others. To oneself it is designed precisely to move on from daily or habitual harms and the 'an harm no one' of the Wiccans (though possibly impossible to act out in the most purest form given the complexity of society and individuals) remain the containment barrier that differentiates the process from the pseudo-existentialism of sociopaths. The will to the good is not platonic or idealist but there is a good in there which liberates the person to liberate all persons.
The point is to fix the mind on an object which is part of the externalised subject – in other words, the creative use of objectification in order to elucidate the true nature of the subject. This suppresses what is blocking the self - we might call this suppressing the neurotic reactions of the mind when it is firing on all cylinders in the wrong direction - in order to get the mind back on track (the progressive view) or into balance. It is different from classical 'spiritual' practice in not seeking to take the mind away from reality, or diminish reality or suppress the Self, all of which are anxiety-driven coping mechanisms for relatively weak minds under pressure.
Having reintroduced a basic moral sense about respect for others, the 'an harm no one' which soon finds itself extending to other forms of life and consciousness and to the environment in which they all live without having to adopt a conservative traditionalism, a note might be made on very extreme transgressional behavior (the ‘corpse-sitting’ model) which, of course, is only extreme because the communal or social has taboos that make it appear extreme. The point has to be made here about narcissism once again but the purpose of such extreme acts is that the log-jam in development is extreme – so extreme situations require extreme solutions.
Assuming no harm to others in a material sense or damage to communal property, then there is no extreme transgressional behavior that is consensual and adult and, above all, where the person involved is prepared to take the communal consequences without whining about ‘rights’, that is not permitted. The consequences have to be accepted as part of the process and this is why social law remains necessary and pure anarchism is dangerous - constraints on radical transgressional behaviour from disturbed individuals harming others (and in very extreme cases, themselves) are necessary. In general, except if genuinely required as a form of conscious madness because a log jam is so great that there is no alternative, such transgressional activity is probably best handled as imaginative acts or as creative-artistic operations or in magical ritualism that operates analogically but there is no ban as such on transgression. On the contrary, transgression of customs and habits is often essential for one's reworking into something greater than you have been formed into by the biological, the familial and the social.
Yantra/Sigil Use
A very advanced technique, requiring some skill, is to embody the process of transformation in a physical and creative act that externalises the process as a diagram. This may have transgressional aspects as to its medium or its own subject matter and which may be of such quality that it may be of use to others, although the creative act is part of the process and this is hard to transfer to others. This is the way of the Yantra or, in the West, the Sigil. The Yantra or Sigil must be directly related not to generalities but to the specific 'other' that is the representation of the subject's unexpressed consciousness. If it is being done for the art market, it is not authentic.
The Yantra/Sigil [Y/S] is a diagrammatic concentration of open-ended meaning, a focusing of will or desire that is generally directed at just one psychic event, is generally an individual creative act and mentally represents some form of enclosing of the event in a particular imaginary space/time. The Y/S is the creative physicalisation of the substrate of the Self, the will or desire imagined as lines and perhaps colours, that are material but are also symbolic of the relationship of will to body. It elicits the Self, invokes it. Y/S and Self together are means and ends where means are also ends and ends include the means.
The ritualisation of Y/S starts with a meditation on the Self which becomes the incorporation of the visualized Y/S into the mental object that stands for that aspect of Self that is of concern. Thought or sound processes invoke the Self into the Y/S and the Self and the Y/S becomes the same thing – the creative act embodied in the Y/S temporarily becomes part of the person that created it not simply as creator but as representative of an attribute of the Self.
Embodiment
Another approach – suitable for some but not all – is to use the body itself as creative act in the same way - in other words to use the body as Y/S. We may call this Y/S[E]. This is the Y/S[E] of ritual performance, posture, dance, psychogeography and sex magick though it can also become dangerously obsessional (to the extent of becoming associated with OCD symptoms) and narcissistic if not managed with right intent. All have in common the use of the material body to distance the Self from the mundane and bring into one of the three modes in reverse order of worth: a) the coping of the Self with overwhelming externalities (re-setting a long way back), b) the restoration of balance (short re-setting); or c) the advancement of the Self along the right path.
The intent is to ensure that the body and the mind are not so much in harmony (which means stasis and is not good except for curative purposes) but are operating in tandem, according to the natural cycles inherent to the bio-genetic base of the organism over time. The central material substrate is the brain but not only the brain. Within the brain are the core processes for dealing with the ego in its relation to the world. So that the perception of the world by the Self means that the world itself matters as does the material substrate of the body outside the brain.
The integration of all these variable factors, some of which are not under our control and others of which are more or less under our control, is what we mean by balancing. The direction of the balanced mind towards increased control of the material world and the material substrate of the mind is what we mean by development. Ecstatic bliss states are actually signs of failure and not success if they are not seen as transformative in this context. To become addicted to ‘bliss states’ is, in effect, to become addicted to the drug used to treat imbalance. Dissolution of the ego into an illusory universal consciousness suggests absolute failure – of nerve and of will.
The process is thus never about purification or ‘sin’ because there is no purity or ‘sin’ in Existence. The process is only about individuation and integration. It is about stripping out inappropriate learned and educated behaviours that were for the benefit of others and not for one’s strengthened Self. What the process is thus about is regeneration. One self-ritual that helps define and enclose the Y/S[E] is to use the senses in turn to re-define the physical thing enclosing the Self as a thing in the world and then turn the senses back on the environment in which this thing in the world exists in a systematic way – articulating the meaning of each sense as part of the body and in understanding the immediate material world rather than the learned responses supplied by history or society.
The identification of the world with the Self and the Self with the world thus ceases to require obfuscatory inherited spiritual languages but only the accumulated blunt business of description of the world that has accrued into meaning, a (reconstructed and perhaps transient in the long run) meaning that should be different after re-set/transformation from meaning before the process.
The danger here is allowing analogical (magical) thinking to become superior to actual description but this can be handled by allowing the analogical thinking that was used in the process, leading up to transformation (see above) as creative action, to be displaced systematically by the articulation of worldliness in words that are exact but may still be poetic in meaning to outsiders and which re-draft reality until the next transformative act. Thus, creative and analogical thought distances us from the world that we wish to leave behind and precise and embodied thought brings us back into the world after the process is completed. The point is that magical and creative thinking are used to re-connect us to our reality in the world and not as ends in themselves but that this form of thinking enables us to see that same functional world as more malleable and potentially contingent than we have been trained to see it before that time.
Anti-Theology
This approach counters most ‘spiritual’ traditions which seem more interested in disconnecting persons from reality or inventing a generalized and universal reality than in managing individual reality. Materiality and the flow of mood and feelings are not seen negatively now but are seen as positive and integral parts of being human that simply need managing - and not denying or decrying. There is no God required here. If the Upanishad says ‘What a man thinks that he becomes’ so, we say, that a man should not become a fiction, certainly not a social fiction, but should ‘think’ so that he may become what he truly is.
A life devoted to religion, transformation or ritual is no life at all. It is a travesty of a life. It is a denial of Life. No text exists that represents the operational Self of any person. A text and its author start to part company as the words are written. The moving finger writes and …. Words may be used not to initiate the process but to conclude it – in exact opposition to the religious impulse where words and texts, the descriptions of things, predict the forms of subsequent transformation. The text dictates action and thought in religious cultures.
What is required instead are ‘things in themselves’ (including actions in the world and guided perceptions) to be used that trigger new forms of words to describe a state that was not predictable when the process started. There is thus no spirit. There is no divine. There is, however, Self and the individuated soul (the operational system of the individual person). Transformation of Being is transformation of thought – again, in exact reversal of the attempt of religions and ideologies to transform thought deliberatively in order to drive Being into a pre-ordained path.
The mind is embedded in matter, indeed is an emergent form of matter, so the processes involved here are manipulations of matter in order to change the quality of mind. At no time do we leave the realm of matter. The ‘Supreme State’ of the Tantrics is reproduced only in that, for perhaps a nano-second, mind perceives itself as so merged with matter, cleansed of detritus, that it is free to choose its own future detritus in the subsequent era of its existence. But the mind is no mind without detritus to work against.
This does suggest an interest in the state of the substrate in which the mind is embedded and that from which it receives its detritus (the world) but there can be no purification process of the body or the world that is any more effective than that brief nano-second of resetting of the mind. Intense body awareness or activist world awareness are thus distractions.The highly regulatory community and health and fitness obsessionalism are excessive reactions equivalent to the attempt to purify the mind through meditation or to reach ego-dissolution through psychedelics.
They are neurotic reactions that are not required – forms of neurotic obsessionalism that say a lot about human anxiety just as communal regulations and health obsessions also arise out of anxiety. What we are trying to do here is not mask anxiety with obsession but face anxiety head on and accept risk so that we can move forward in freedom. Body fascism, political fascism and religion are all evidences of the same neurosis – a fear of individual dynamics.
Similarly, there is an absurd belief not only that the mind can be emptied but that the mind should be emptied. This too is neurotic, seeking a conservative stasis that soon becomes sclerosis in a reaction to the vast complexity of the world and of the Self. Instead of managing the Self, the aim seems to be to destroy the Self in a spurious belief that what remains will be pure and real – no, it is simply stunned by technique into a living death of non-stimulation. Embracing mental inputs almost to the point of collapse in itself may even trigger a transformative moment even if the ideal is to pre-empt collapse with a transformational project.
Risk & Community
The process we have discussed deals with anxiety by embracing uncertainty and risk. Traditional modes are false but safe. Transformative processes can meet the three modal needs (as described above) but they can, in vulnerable people, also create crises that are not safe, possibly leading to suicide or madness. There is no ‘moral’ answer to this. You can be true to yourself or not and if you cannot, you have the option of not asking the question of what you are in the first place. This is your right. You can go into religion, psychedelics and semi-psychosis or plod along in the world – that really is the cognitive right of every person.
It is also important to understand that there is no one superiority or inferiority in an ability to undertake such existential transformations. So long as the transformers are sentient and conscious with a mature brain, there are no differences of caste, race or gender (or even formal intelligence) because all mature homo sapiens are effectively similar and because inner lives can never be known except by the individuals themselves. But this is, as we shall see, only a qualified egalitarianism.
This unknowability of persons except to themselves and the similarity of all persons to each other is sufficient to suggest a ‘de facto’ tolerance, libertarianism and egalitarianism even if, in the social world, one has to accept some restrictions and authorities. Each person should be able to rely on the community for the conditions of his or her freedom (of course, they cannot do so through much of the world, thanks to ideology, ignorance, religion and the State) but what is done with that freedom is nobody’s business but that of the subject.
What is shared with some religious traditions is that the conscious mind represented by the claim of pure analytical Reason and apparent self interest, is not necessarily representative of one’s true self interest. This interest is hidden away in the brain as the best regulating system for coping with material and social reality – and the hidden capability is that which can change material and social reality when it is damaging the subject.
Any method that tries to detach mind from ‘worldly desires’ is, however, perverted, the person simply becoming an automaton or Borg within social or communal reality. The weak person either ends up conforming to the general will or finding solace in an illusory will that never speaks to him or her directly. The strong person, however, calibrates their own will against social and material reality and changes themselves and their world where and as they can to achieve a balance that can ensure not merely survival and happiness but also creativity and productivity. Liberation is not from the world but in the world. It also means knowing when to accept one's condition as well as when to fight it. There is no point in starting a slave revolt if you know you are to be crucified at the end of it. Sometimes the world in which one is born into is just evil and one must change what one can under evil conditions.
There is thus no need to worry about restraining natural appetites but only about ensuring that appetites are in accordance with real desire and are not neurotically engendered. The psychopath is thus not a spiritual or religious or moral problem but a problem of public order and, as a matter of public order, is more likely to be effectively contained and managed since, by his nature, the psychopathy is drawn to the manipulation of religions and moralities like a fly to cow dung. There is also no need to be tormented about selfishness but merely a need to think where the neurotic protection of the Self is damaging the ability to engage with and manage the social environment. There is certainly no need to care over-much about the opinions of other people except as practical matters that get in the way of self development. None of what has been written here denies the bonds of love and affection to children, lovers, family or friends - it is just not enthusiastic about bonds to abstract ideas and reifications.
And there is no need at all to contemplate such concepts as ‘sin’ as having validity – there is only what suffers consequences (social organization and material constraints) and what causes harm to oneself (and to others). However, it is true that the processant is likely to require intelligence sufficient to understand what is going on, a strong degree of self control (especially in evaluating when an experience is simply an experience and not a ‘reality’) and to be monist materialist. One needs to be detached to a great degree from the need rather than the desire for sensuality and have something about oneself that requires constant search for sufficient balance in order to become suitably and creatively unbalanced as a condition for personal development. So, it is likely that, though all sentient beings at a certain level of development might theoretically attempt the necessary processes, only a relatively few actually will do so (and some of these few may be as likely in the distant future to be self-correcting artificial intelligences as ourselves). The action in the world of these beings requires a culture of freedom and they place themselves in danger to the degree that they remove themselves from the struggle for personal freedom.
So this is where we have reached - the thrusting away of traditionalism in favour of a responsible libertarianism where analogical technique is a tool for the construction of useful and possibly transient meaning in order to live better and in greater harmony with others on the rather key assumption that we live in a free society that allows us to do this. It is all, in the end, surprisingly simple.
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