Anniversary

The 19th of September is the third anniversary of the day when I began making daily entries in my metaphysics log book. I am almost all the way through my third notebook. I use the spiral bound college rule 150 sheets 9.5 inch X 6 inch style. On the pages of these notebooks I record:

• every meditation
• every prayer
• every ceremony
• every reading in the topics of metaphysics
• every tarot card spread
• a small number of other occasional related items

Almost. I am not obsessive about it. It is probably closer to 90% of my relevant activity that actually ends up getting written down.

This was my the-third-time-is-a-charm try at maintaining a diary of this sort. The first time was shortly after I read Aleister Crowley's Book 4 in 1997 or so where he lays out his system of metaphysics and his slogan "the method of science and the subject of religion". His prescription was identical to those of my freshman chemistry and physics lab teachers who said "if it isn't written down, it didn't happen". If I recall I got about a week into this project back in 1997 before my attention span fizzled out.

Then, I tried again in around 2005. This time I did not get past two pages. I know this for a fact as in 2009 I started up again with the same notebook and tore out the first two sheets so that now it only has 148 sheets in it. Now I am on page 143 of the third notebook so in this time I have steadily filled up 441 pages in 1086 days or around 2 pages every 5 days with my records of meditations, prayers, &c.

One thing has been remarkably constant since even before 1997. My central meditation activity is autogenic training, which I first discovered in the Relaxation and Stress Reduction Workbook by Davis, Eshelman, and McKay (an earlier edition of this book.) It is gratifying to me to look at the Amazon page and see that it has now has 68 five-star reviews. Back in 1997 I had some stress related medical problems and I went to a physician who gave me a photocopy of their chapter 5 and a little hand held thermometer. He told me after a few weeks the temperature measured between my thumb and forefinger would increase a couple degrees and that is how I could be sure the method was working. I went home from the doctor and opened up my copy of Davis and Eshelman and Mckay's book and confirmed my suspicion that he was telling me something I already knew. I had already experimented with the exact prescribed autogenic training technique, among other things in that book. After my first session my fingertip temperature climbed three degrees which was way faster than a few weeks so I skipped going back to that doctor ever again, and have continued to use this method as one of my main meditations.

One thing has changed drastically since the early days of my metaphysics activities. My gateway was Crowley, who I discovered via Jimmy Page. When I was a teenager and a rock music fan my nearly favorite band was Led Zeppelin, just like almost everybody else I knew. One day I heard a fascinating bit of gossip from the fellow in my peer group who seemed to know the most rock arcana and this was that Led Zeppelin was in hiatus because Plant and Page were fighting over Page's occult occupations. Plant had been in a nasty car accident and his young son had died from some freak medical ailment and he thought that Page was bringing bad juju upon the band. I went to the library and looked through every Page mention I could find until I found an article in Rolling Stone that linked him up with the Crowley character who I had never heard of before.

The Crowley books had a big influence upon me. In looking back I think it was the almost endless esoteric data and the stimulus it had on my imagination. It has been a long time since I have taken Crowley seriously, but it did attract me to activity which has been fun and interesting and rewarding that I might not have otherwise found any interest in. A couple years ago I was meeting with an esoteric group near here and the leader asked me how I first became interested. I told her it started with Led Zeppelin and Aleister Crowley and when I first began I wanted to do things like shoot lightning bolts out of my fingertips but I have calmed down a lot since then. That was a bit of an exaggeration but they all seemed to enjoy hearing that.

Back to the notebooks. I have (so far) three years of records for my own method of science on the subject of religion. Much of it is useless. Some of it may be of great value. I haven't spent much time combing through it yet. One thing I did a few months ago was count every single tarot card I have ever drawn in a spread. The one trump I have drawn almost twice as much as any other is the Hierophant. I mentioned this once to a friend of mine and they replied, "of course you are going to draw the Hierophant more than any other."

That statement seemed to make a lot more sense to her than it does to me.

How do you react?

On my last metaphysics post I discussed almost all of my ritual activity for the Spring Equinox. I omitted one item which is complex enough that it may take up a post of its own. On the 21st of March I did a special tarot reading, for that and for the 77 following days. It was the first time I ever did a tarot reading using the whole deck.

Tarot is a useful tool, but I do not usually take it very far. I have only performed a handful of readings for other people in real life. And I am unsophisticated at it, and new enough at it, that on the eleventh of September 2001 I did not even know that this card was in my deck, although I had used it a few dozen times already at that point. One thing which I still have not done is figure out how many shuffles are required to randomize a 78 card tarot deck with two possible orientations for each card. For a 52 card playing deck we have peer reviewed work in Combinatorics which gives the number of shuffles needed: seven. When I shuffle a tarot deck I shuffle it 49 times, with an inversion for around half of those. This is a number I arrived at experimentally when I first bought the deck and it took that many shuffles to convince myself that the factory order had finally been obliterated. More often than not, when somebody asks me to perform a reading for them, they lose interest in the exercise before I finish shuffling.

On the 21st of March I performed my scrupulous 49-times shuffle, read the first ten cards per normal; I then wrote down the first ten and the following 68 for the purpose of a 78 day regimen of studying one card per day, using that card to reflect upon that day, and refine my one-liner representation of the card that I use for readings. Most of my interpretations are based upon Rachel Pollack's book, which has many flaws but which contains mostly great information.

For today, day number 29 in the series, the card is the five cups. My one-liner summary for this card is: "How do you react?" This comes from a man who has nothing to do with tarot that I know of--college football coach Nick Saban. I have written before about my fascination with sports talk radio, but this is an indication of how deep this fascination goes. I do not even like college athletics. There are thousands of professional football and basketball games televised yearly with the most-skilled athletes--far too many to watch it all. It never ceases to amaze me that people have any time at all to attend to college players. In spite of never watching college football, I listened to Nick Saban's radio show when he was coaching at Louisiana State, because he told the most fascinating stories. This is why I love sports talk radio--it has great stories.

I can recall verbatim one time Saban discussing his coaching philosophy and he said:

"Everybody gets hurt. Everybody gets sick. Everybody makes mistakes. It makes all the difference in the world between winning and losing, success and failure: how do you react?"

It stuck with me enough that I penciled it into my Pollack tarot book right below the five cups. It is fully consistent with Pollack's explanation of the card's meaning, and it is one of the better one-liners I have now for all of the cards in the deck.

Heard from passing renegades Geronimo is dead

On Monday March 21 I performed a ritual to celebrate the Spring Equinox and to invoke aspects of Mars into my living room. I used a recipe very similar to what I did for the three previous holidays, solstices and equinox. (Example here.)

The personality I chose to personify the energy of Mars was Jack LaLanne, the California fitness guru who recently passed on. This was a little different than the personalities I had chosen for the previous rituals, which were real people from my life who most closely personified the planetary / divine aspects. For Mars I had a perfect candidate person, but he is not so remote from my real life as the other three. This person is only twenty years older than I; he only lives a few hundred miles from me at this time; there is a chance I will be seeing him again on this earth, so my only connection to him is not in my own head. Instead of using his character for a ritual, it would probably be a better idea to get in touch with him and personally thank him for being such a positive influence on me. (Martin Seligman calls this a gratitude exercise and recommends it very highly as a mechanism for promoting good mental health.)

Before, I spoke metaphorically of invoking Mary Poppins, or invoking Abraham Lincoln. For this ritual I literally invoked Jack LaLanne. I used the ritual formula from Phil Hine's Prime Chaos.

Three parts:

In the first, the deeds of the figure are given, spoken in the third person. In the second, the qualities of the figure are given, spoken in the second person. In the third, the powers of the figure are given, spoken in the first person.

My ritual preparations began a few days ahead when I looked at the fourmilab sky chart and located where Mars is right now. It is between Venus and the Sun early in the morning. For four consecutive days I got outside before sunrise to look at Mars. For four consecutive days all I saw was complete cloud cover. At least I made the attempt. I did see an amazing "great moon" full moon on Friday night, so I had to make do with that.

This was only a small disappointment. Mars energy is abundant in my world right now, and I do not feel any need to get any kind of a special boost from the Universe. This is in direct contrast to my previous Jupiter and Venus and Saturn rituals, where I really could use a boost and I went all out. On the previous occasions I fasted all day until after the ritual right after sunset. Last Monday I ate three half meals instead of fasting. In other ways, this was a ritual that I invested far less effort into than the other three.

I read aloud the Teth / Strength / 19th pathworking from the Ciceros' book. This is based upon the three guys in the furnace and Daniel in the lion's den from the book of Daniel. It includes the Canticle of Praise, Daniel 3:26ff. I looked up the passage in the King James Bible and it ain't in there! This was new to me as I did not realize the canon-apocrypha-Protestant-Catholic dispute extended to inside the book of Daniel. I also have a Catholic bible and looked it up and it is right there where it was cited to be. This is the prayer the three guys in the furnace say when they are just hanging there, not burning. I have no idea why the Protestants crossed it out.

In addition to this, I also performed a few other assorted prayers and meditations. Prior to doing the Jack LaLanne part, I dressed in nothing but a pair of red running shorts and a rhodolite ring. I constructed a small altar with a candle, a drawing I made based upon the Mantegna Tarocchi Mercurio, and a drawing I made based upon the Coleman-Smith-Rider-Waite Strength card. I used Mercury because this seemed the best place to fold it in, and I don't have much interest in setting aside a ritual day for a planet which is normally obscured in my zip code by human emitted light. Before the invocation I played David Bowie "Heroes". And after the invocation I played Elton John "Indian Sunset", and then I played the whole Bowie CD and the whole Elton John CD. My living room was illuminated by the candle and a red light bulb.

Unlike for the other rituals, I can post the exact script:

"He is Francois Henri LaLanne, inventor of American fitness center industry, doer of record 1033 pushups in 23 minutes at age 42, KGO TV star, owner of honors too numerous to enumerate. You are Francois Henri LaLanne, first fitness superhero, zesty lover of life and joie de vivre, enthusiastic optimist. I am Jack LaLanne, strong and vigorous and appealing!"

Kundalini rising

The physiological process involved in the rising of the Kundalini (natural nervous or even supernatural psychic energy) in devoted and persevering yogis has never been explained any place where I could understand it; it is a mystery. If you have the patience to examine any of the citations on that wikipedia page, perhaps it will make more sense to you. To me the single best resource is The Serpent Power by Arthur Avalon. This book was first published in 1919 when neurology was still a comparatively primitive science. Although it is the single best resource, it is not a good resource. One might describe it as the least terrible resource.

I have used this analogy on my blog once before, but it is so central to my current investigations that I am going to repeat it here. My amateur opinion is that the human nervous system remains an undiscovered country. I believe that our current maps of the human nervous system are little better than the 16th century maps of North America which had major rivers running from Lake Michigan to San Francisco Bay. Perhaps the Kundalini has no more factual basis than the Seven Cities of Gold which a few of the Spanish Conquistadors died searching for. Bernard De Voto has a delightful passage in one of his books describing Coronodo's disappointment at finding nothing but adobe huts when arriving at his furthest destination in what is now New Mexico.

Instead of data, I offer anecdotes. My basic daily meditation regimen (described here) is a series of relaxation auto-suggestions focused upon my own anatomy. One of the most interesting effects of this meditation is seemingly spontaneous activation of reflex movements, such as the extensor digitorum reflex. Some hypnosis manuals consider the extensor digitorum refllex as the sine qua non of the state of hypnosis--a subject is considered hypnotized if and only if such an ideo motor response can be observed.

Many years ago I suffered a back injury playing tennis and was treated by doctors. It was confusing to me, and they were all more confident in the success of my treatment outcome than I was. I expressed some skepticism regarding the diagnosis and one of them said to me:

"Look. I have just given you a complete basic neurological examination. Your function is perfectly fine; in fact, considering your age, it is most excellent. There is absolutely nothing wrong with your spine. Do you want some Prozac?"

In this complete basic neurological examination he did test my extensor digitorum reflex. My experience in doing years of my self-hypnosis meditation leads me to believe that their catalog of reflexes is woefully incomplete. In my neurology textbook the word hypnosis is missing from the index. My psychology textbook is little better. (I have the 5th edition from 2000 so maybe this has improved.) There are five or six references to hypnosis. Gleitman says it is not understood, and he (they) speculates that perhaps the brain is secreting endorphins or similar poorly understood neurotransmitters and this is responsible for the phenomena that we observe in hypnotized subjects. There are also a couple of vague references to the placebo effect. Placebo is another word which is missing from the index in the neurology textbook.

This probably sounds critical of Kandel et al, but I do not intend that. The book is 1414 pages long and endlessly rewarding. When medical students study neurology, that is one of the books that they use. The subject is so large that they have to leave things out. Evidence-based medicine leaves out hypnosis because it seems impossible to collect reliable evidence. I once had a neurologist tell me, "I know nothing about hypnosis". Perhaps that was a dishonest conversation stopper to avoid a conversation he wanted to avoid, but if his teachers followed the Kandel book they left hypnosis out. This also is a mystery.

I own Gray's Anatomy, and the Anatomy Coloring Book in addition to Kandel; they contain more accessible information on the human nervous system. The best single document for me is done by an artist, however, not a doctor. It is Sacred Mirrors by Alex Gray. His representation of the human nervous system seems to be at exactly the right level of detail for my purposes, and the beauty of his presentation permits me to really appreciate the wonders of human anatomy. Some of his pictures are physically inaccurate. He has a beautiful picture of the psychic energy centers in the body. There is no scientific evidence for any such thing.

The Walden Pond Isolation Maneuver

Last August 28 I had the opportunity to attend a conference at the University of Saint Thomas, "Religion, Mental Health, and the Search for Meaning: Bridging the Gaps" (previously described here and here). There was one sentence in the conference which has stuck with me for over five months. The speaker was a Catholic priest and he was describing a typical metaphysics problem for one of his church members. This typical church member is exhausted by the never-ending hypocrisy of the faithful and withdraws. The priest encounters the exhaustion when he calls upon people who have been missing and wants to call them back, just like the shepherd fetching his lost sheep in the parable in the bible. The priest maintains that everybody in the church, without exception, is also exhausted by the never-ending hypocrisy; they resolve to endure it, as the least unacceptable alternative. I remember this part verbatim:

"Withdrawing yourself to Walden Pond is not an option."

I almost agree with him. Since I am currently quite withdrawn to my equivalent of Walden Pond I cannot totally agree with him. Perhaps I would insert the word sustainable in between an and option.

The first time I read Walden was in school for a class and I did not enjoy it at all. I did the boy scouts camping and wilderness thing intermittently, but going to the woods to sit was not really one of my ambitions. Perhaps climbing to the top of Mount Everest or surfing the Banzai Pipeline would be worth doing, but the idea of enjoying a transcendent moment listening to the rain falling on the roof of my cabin in the woods was not something I could yet understand.

Thoreu's book is now one of my all-time favorites, and it is an inspiration to one of my major current projects. Here is an excerpt from his book which I am in the process of reproducing for my own situation at this very moment:

    
    Boards..........................           $ 8.03+, mostly shanty boards.
    Refuse shingles for roof sides...            4.00
    Laths............................            1.25
    Two second-hand windows
       with glass....................            2.43
    One thousand old brick...........            4.00
    Two casks of lime................            2.40  That was high.
    Hair.............................            0.31  More than I needed.
    Mantle-tree iron.................            0.15
    Nails............................            3.90
    Hinges and screws................            0.14
    Latch............................            0.10
    Chalk............................            0.01
    Transportation...................            1.40  I carried a good part
                                                       on my back.
        In all...............                  $28.12+

(modified only so very very very slightly.)

This is Thoreau's expense record for construction of his cabin in the woods. I am living in an urban apartment and everything I require for shelter is accounted for in my monthly rent check, but with this small modification I am going through the exact same thing, restricting my expenses mostly to necessities and accounting for every single penny.

The benefit (as Thoreau so eloquently described) is the creation of a clearing in time and space to observe and think about the universe. Here is one small example. Last November when the first cold front blew in from the north the oak trees by my apartment started dropping acorns. This had a strong effect on the neighborhood squirrels. These rare precious tidbits were there for them in a windfall. Their behavior was energized as if they had sprouted wings and they began to fly around like cartoon squirrels, as if they had never once seen an acorn before in their life. The thing which really struck me though, is that surely this happens every November. And even though this surely happens every November, I had not seen it the three previous Novembers (when I was off to my office job every morning) that I lived here. It was only in my new reclusive mode that my mind had the time and space for me to see it and appreciate it.

Now I understand where the priest was coming from. Since he is evaluated by his superiors by how many people are in his pews and how much cash comes into his collection plates, he could hardly advise anything different. If you look in his textbook though, you see that Jesus went out to the desert and you find that Moses went up on the mountain and Elijah went out to the desert. Escaping from the routine of life's cares is an essential part of the tradition, which includes that those men all eventually returned. If the universe zaps me like that I will definitely return. I just might return anyway.

Theory and practice of meditation IV

This is an appendix to what was intended as a triplet of posts on the Theory and Practice of Meditation: I, II, III. The first was my own theory of what meditation is, how to do it in general, and why it might work; the second was a recipe of my primary meditation technique; the third was a recipe of my alternate regular meditation technique. I have tried many others, and I will describe in this post some of the features of these alternate techniques to illustrate the spectrum of available possibilities. None of these techniques is revolutionary, but some are quite far from the mainstream available from practitioners in most American zip codes.

1. A tarot tree of life meditation.

This is very similar to the style described in III, where I visualize pool ball size numbered spheres in a Kabbalah tree of life configuration. For spheres, I substitute tarot trumps. This was my most common meditation for a couple of years. I used (for nodes 1-10): Hermit, Judgment, Temperance, Strength, Magician, Fool, High Priestess, Chariot, Star, and Devil. I still have a poster board in my den with the tree and these ten images on it, but I have not used this meditation in almost a year.

2. My rock 'em sock 'em tree of life meditation.

This one also is very similar to the style described in III, and I believe it is my own invention. The objects of visualization are National Football League jerseys in the color of the sephiroth with the number of the breath on the jersey, exactly as a professional football player would wear. For example, sephiroth five is traditionally red, so for breath 5, 15, 25, 35, etc, I visualize a red San Francisco 49'ers jersey with this number. When I was a child I was a devoted fan of televised NFL games so it is very easy for me to close my eyes and see these images. This is a principle which may have many other applications. If you have difficulty visualizing, it may be helpful to visualize something that you imagined often as a child, when your powers of imagination had not yet been dulled by participating in the demanding and often cruel realities of life.

3. Zen.

I was a member of a Zen temple for almost a year. Zen meditation the way we did it also was breath based, with a priority on postural rigor and staring at nothing but a blank wall and thinking about nothing but breath. Sessions were long and supervised. The supervisor came around and whacked everybody two times on the top of their trapezius muscles, left and right, with a stick. (The last part was technically optional but very few people opted out.)

4. My golf course meditation and memory theater.

When I first moved to New Orleans I played golf all the time, on one course, 18 holes and par of 72. This is another breath based meditation. For each breath I visualize one of the 72 regulation strokes on that golf course. The first breath is the first tee shot on the first hole, and I then just move sequentially through 72 imagined regulation shots, ending with a final putt on the 18th hole for the 72nd breath. I have also done a number of experiments using this as a memory theater for a method of loci memorization regimen. This is a technique of memorization which is older than history--some of the oldest recorded feats of memorization are based upon this technique, where one associates each unique item in a list of memory targets to a unique physical location in space. I can get up to 72 items linked to unique locations on this golf course in my memory. This is how I memorized the 72 word name of God in Hebrew, the Shemhamphorasch.

5. Shemhamphorasch meditation.

This is another breath based meditation. Each of the 72 breaths corresponds to one of the 72 word names of God. According to modern Kabbalah researchers such as Gershem Scholem and Aryeh Kaplan, meditation upon the Shemhamphorasch was one of the most valued meditation techniques of the medieval Kabbalists by which they attained their deepest and most ecstatic states. I haven't found it of any such special value, but I was quite gratified when I had succeeded in memorizing the 72 triplets of Hebrew letters.

6. Transcendental meditation.

This was the first technique I learned. I learned it long ago when I was a freshman in college after paying $60 to the local Maharishi Yogi franchise. It was the only meditation technique I knew for many years when I would meditate for a few months, quit meditating for a couple years, meditate again for a few months, quit again over and over. It involves concentrating on an inner spoken mantra. They did not teach me anything about breath control for $60, although they might have gotten to that quickly if I had bought one of the following courses they were eager to sell me. I still occasionally do Transcendental meditation, but when I do it now I make an inner spoken mantra one time for one breath; this works much better than not anchoring it to the breath for me.

7. Time regression meditation.

This one can be a little bit bizarre. It is described in Aleister Crowley's Magick Without Tears, and he explains it in the context of accessing our previous incarnations. I do not go that far. What you do is start in the present, that would be 2011. Then you breathe slow and, for each breath, you visualize something in your past--a home, a job, a lover, whatever--that you can get a decent internal visual representation on, one breath and one image for each year. I never go back before my birth year, and I usually stop around puberty.

One thing which can be accessed by this method is feelings toward faith or family or country, which may have been pure and innocent long ago. For example, if you once had a very strong faith in God which has since waned, you can do this meditation and anchor your psyche back to that time and say an old prayer that you have not said in many years. I find this can have very interesting effects. That girl who broke your heart when you were 22? This is a way that you can again experience those feelings you had for her before that happened if you are so inclined.

None of these are techniques which I regularly do or which I consider important, but I thought I would put them down here just to give a little more variety and to provide suggestions for others to invent and explore for themselves.
____________________________________

One last thing. There was a buzz this week (at Hacker News and at the New York Times) about recent lab results showing neurological changes in meditators eight weeks after starting from scratch. I am very skeptical about this work. Brain maps are as confusing as anything; sometimes I think our current map of human brain function is about as accurate as those 17th century maps of North America that had a large river running from Lake Michigan to San Francisco Bay. The latest reported result directly contradicts my own experience, which is that the first twelve weeks or so of a new meditation regimen produces little to no effect. I do not think a person can dabble in meditating, as one can dabble in wine-tasting or table tennis or horseback riding. The canonical brain imaging studies of meditators at the University of Wisconsin used subjects who had already logged 10 000 hours of practice. My own results from meditation at week thirteen or week fourteen were nothing like the results that I obtained last week.

Invoking Abraham Lincoln

On the 20th of December I performed an invocation of Saturn in celebration of the Winter Solstice. It was similar in form to the rituals I recently performed for the Autumn Equinox and for the Summer Solstice. On the 20th we had a full moon, and with a potential spectacular added twist: a total lunar eclipse.

I found out about the eclipse a week ahead of time; I was planning on doing a solstice ritual, but the eclipse finding fixed the date and time of my ritual for the evening of the 20th. I did a couple of other preparations ahead of time. The first was finding and sighting the actual planet Saturn in the sky. I thought I saw it just before dawn a couple days ahead of time, but I was not positive so I loaded the fourmilab sky map to make sure. The next morning before dawn I knew exactly where to look and confirmed it was so, only a few degrees separated from the much brighter Venus. It was a little confusing because at this time of year the ecliptic is maximally oblique to straight east west across the sky, which is what confused me the morning before. I had not expected to see Saturn almost due north of Venus.

The other preparation I did was a selection for a character for the invocation. For the sake of simplicity I shall call him Abraham Lincoln. The man I chose was not actually Abraham Lincoln, but in the pantheon of common cultural characters this is a close comparison. He was a very wise man who I had the good fortune to work with closely when I was younger, and he even had a small physical resemblance to the picture of Lincoln which has come down to us.

Saturn is a complex and not completely benevolent spirit--in the Greek mythology he consumed his own children. In the Mantegna Tarocci he is depicted with a grim reaper's scythe, killing and eating small children. Tradition associates Saturn with black magic, and in Peter Carroll's essay on magic in eight colors he describes the greatest utility of black magic as "avoidance of premature death". Abraham Lincoln was murdered long before he had lived out his natural span, and sadly, my real life character also succumbed to a similarly unfortunate fate.

So, with the time of the eclipse, a sighting of Saturn, and an invocation subject and script prepared, I was ready for my ritual on the 20th of December. I fasted all day until after completing the ritual in the evening. I performed a number of meditations. I donned all black clothing. I did a short Gestalt two chair exercise, in which I expressed gratitude to the real man whose spirit I would shortly be invoking. I read aloud the Ciceros' path number 16, the Hierophant, which included some great stuff:

"in order to hear what is taught, you must listen with the ears of the heart. Be still and listen. The teacher is within you, he is a part of you. Know that the voice within was, is, and always will be your initiator." (They did not write this part, but copied it from the Book of Enoch.)

I played the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" quite loud on my stereo. And then I read my invocation of (sort of) Abraham Lincoln. Then after, I finally ate some food and I drank a lot of wine and I waited for the total lunar eclipse to show up. Alas, the total lunar eclipse was eclipsed by total cloud cover--so then I drank a lot more wine and my Winter Solstice celebration was all over with.

Theory and practice of meditation III

This is part 3 of 3; part 1 is theory of how it works and why you might like to do it; part 2 is an explanation of my short daily meditation practice. Today I will describe a longer meditation practice which I cannot always fit into a daily schedule. This one takes me about forty minutes.

Step one is to sit still in a comfortable position with eyes closed. Breathe slowly and count, one count for each breath to one hundred. For each breath, I visualize a sphere which looks like, or almost like a billiard ball, with the number of the breath inside the little white circle area (like on a standard billiard ball that is numbered one to eight.) The spheres alternate on a period of ten in color and in spatial position. This sequence is patterned after a common representation of the Kabbalah Tree of Life.

1, 11, 21, 31, &c are a white sphere on the crown of my head;
2, 12, 22, 32, &c are a gray sphere on my right shoulder;
3, 13, 23, 33, &c are a black sphere on my left shoulder;
4, 14, 24, &c are a blue sphere on my right elbow;
5, 15, 25, &c are a red sphere on my left elbow;
6, 16, 26 &c are a yellow sphere on my crotch;
7, 17, 27, &c are a green sphere on my right fingertips;
8, 18, 28, &c are an orange sphere on my left fingertips;
9, 19, 29, &c are a purple sphere between my knees;
10, 20, &c are a brown sphere between my feet.

I used to play a lot of billiards so visualizing billiard balls is quite easy for me. A million other things do cross my mind during this forty or so minutes of meditation, but I try and hold my attention as closely as possible to my breath and to the billiard ball images. After, I make a note of how many minutes (37 - 51 is the range in recent memory), if I lost count at any point (if I lose the count, I just guess where I was and start forward from there--this is an excellent marker for me on how well I am attending to the meditation), if I had a hiccup or a cough or a saliva swallow or a saliva drool (I prefer not to, and sometimes I will stop meditating if any of these occur.)

Sometimes I will try and extend this to an even longer meditation. About once a month I will go for 200 breaths, and about once a year I will go for 300. 300 breaths is the longest I have ever gone. If I am going for a long meditation, I always stop if I lose count or if I hiccup or if I drool or if anything is not perfect.

Theory and practice of meditation II

This post is the second of three parts on meditation, theory and practice, which I began with Part I on Nov. 9. Part III is to follow; this post will be a description of the shorter one of my two regular meditation routines. It is adapted from a self-hypnosis relaxation script I obtained from the book Mind-Body Therapy: Methods of Ideodynamic Healing in Hypnosis, by Ernest Rossi and David Cheek. I call my variation the homunculus meditation. The name is taken from a neuroscience figure, a homunculus, which is made by inflating anatomical parts in proportion to the amount of the somatic sensory cortex which are involved in our sense of touch for the particular anatomical part.

The script is very simple. You sit quietly in a relaxing posture and invite yourself to sequentially relax different portions of your body. There are thousands and thousands of terms which pertain to various anatomical structures, so you cannot name them all in one single meditation (or self-hypnosis) session. The ones I routinely use are (in order): eyes, optic nerves, visual cortex, cerebral cortex, limbic lobes, hindbrain, throat, spine, median nerves, fingertips, (back up to) limbic lobes, hindbrain, throat, spine, sciatic nerves, toe tips, foot soles, ankles, calves, ankles, shins, ankles, fibulas, knees, hamstrings, knees, quadriceps, knees, femurs, glans, testicles, anus, lumbars, navel, seventh thoracic vertebrae, nipples, seventh cervical vertebrae, shoulders, elbows, thumbs, index fingers, middle fingers, ring fingers, little fingers, elbows, wrists, thumbs, index fingers, middle fingers, ring fingers, little fingers, wrists, fingertips, wrists, elbows, shoulders, seventh cervical vertebrae, nipples, seventh thoracic vertebrae, navel, lumbars, anus, testicles, glans, testicles, anus, lumbars, navel, seventh thoracic vertebrae, nipples, seventh cervical vertebrae, spine, throat, tongue, palate, gums, lips, nostrils, nasal cavities, sinuses, eyes, temples, ears, eustachian tubes, ears, temples, eyes, forehead.

On average this takes about twenty minutes to work all the way down and back up through these features of my anatomy. There are three additional important details:

1.) In the Rossi-Cheek recipe they instruct us to instruct ourselves "Relax eyes, &c." There is an old philosophical conundrum here regarding who is talking to who when we are talking to ourselves. When you sink a long basket and you say to yourself "Good shot!", who is talking to who there? There is some implicit dissociative model like perhaps Freud's--and perhaps it is your superego talking to your ego, or something similar to that. Anyway, what I do instead of commanding myself to relax, is to invite myself to relax. I substitute "I may relax my eyes, &c." for the literal instruction provided in the Rossi-Cheek recipe.

2.) A few of these invitations are repeated, sometimes over and over. Roughly, I devote the proportion of the session along the proportions in the homunculus diagram, hence my name of homunculus meditation. I invite my fingers and my lips and my tongue to relax far more than I invite any other portion of my anatomy to do so.

3.) The other weighting is toward the eyes and ears; a large fraction of our brain is allocated to the processing of visual and audio sense information. By concentrating on the parts of the body that involve the largest brain fractions, the given twenty minutes (or whatever) of meditation can have the largest total brain footprint! That is one theory.

I have been using this meditation (or one close to it) on a nearly daily basis since 1997, since I first read Rossi and Cheek's book. I will be using it for the foreseeable future.

Theory and practice of meditation I

On the third of October Luke Grecki posted a writeup of his experience with vipassana meditation on LessWrong which received a large amount of interest and comments. I posted some spontaneous comments myself, but after giving it some thought I have decided to write a little more systematically on the topic.

There will be three parts: one theory and one each on descriptions of the two techniques in my current practice.

I have been meditating daily for over thirteen years and did it sporadically for fifteen years or so prior to that. My menu of tried protocols is wide: vipassana, zen, transcendental, Gurdjieff self-remembering, Jung active-imagination, Erickson self-hypnosis, Loyola spiritual exercises, and probably a couple others I have totally forgotten about. The common thread through all of these techniques is mental health benefit, or spiritual benefit, or stress relief through calming mental processes. It is a purging of obsession and compulsion and anxiety and worry. Don Juan advises Carlos Castaneda the way to become a sorcerer is to learn to make one's mind perfectly still. (Castaneda's regimen may be the only one that I have heard about that I have not tried--I have seen people under the influence of deliriants and that is definitely not for me.)

There is modern scientific research in support of this, most notably in the work of the psychologist Albert Ellis and the psychiatrist Aaron Beck. Their therapy techniques are based upon the idea that our problems of mental life are twofold: first there are the human stressors which plague all of us to one extent or another--family problems, relationship problems, money problems, diseases--what Zorba called the full catastrophe; second there is the stuff which we tell ourselves on top of these typical and normal human stressors.

"This always happens to me."

"Nobody loves me."

"I am a freak; I am a loser; &c."

We could make a very long list. Ellis and Beck say you may be unable to eliminate the family problems and whatnot at the source of your grief, but you surely can quit telling yourself the exaggerated and goofy crap you pile up on top of it. Their experience (and a large amount of subsequent clinical experience) is that modifying the self-descriptions will benefit mental health. This can involve work, and sometimes a lot of it. This is the scientific research behind the psychobabble in the self-help books regarding being a friend to your self.

Meditation provides the ancient path towards quieting these activities of our minds which can be such a burden. There are two basic techniques: a technique of concentration and a technique of emptying. In the technique of concentration you focus your awareness as completely as possible on one stimulus. It can be listening to a mantra as in the example of the hare krishnas or the transcendental meditation. It can be staring at a mandala or a crystal ball or a blue vase or a saucer of ink. It can be saying a rosary. In the technique of emptying you focus your awareness as completely as possible on the minimum possible field of concentration; this is usually the breath. You simply follow only your breathing as purely as possible for a period of a few minutes. A hybrid of the two is use of the minimum possible sense stimulus, the mantra Aum.

In this attention to nothing, or attention to as little as possible, time and space is provided for the mental burdens of anxiety and such to run their course and escape from our attention center. This is the process by which meditation leads to better mental health. This apparently is not the intent the innovators who developed these procedures were going for, however. They were aiming at something much more profound.

If you participate in meditation practice for a very long time (like, thousands and thousands of hours), you may have an opportunity to attain a state of being where you are connected link-pow-one-with-the-universe. Samadhi. You attain Samadhi, and presumably you never again need care about all the girls thinking you are too short.

How to learn Kabbalah easy and fast

I have been a student of Kabbalah for approximately ten years. My favorite authors are Gershem Scholem and Aryeh Kaplan; I own a number of their books. Some of them are challenging. Those two fellows, in particular, show that it is easy for a gifted scholar to spend an entire career studying the various topics within this vast subject area.

If you know nothing about Kabbalah and are curious, I have good news for you. It is easy to sit down and learn enough to converse intelligently with just about any adept. You may be able to do so after you spend ten minutes reading this post.

The central ideas in Kabbalah are summarized on a diagram called the Tree of Life. It has ten nodes and twenty-two line segments connecting various pairs of nodes. The ten nodes are named (in English, in order): crown, wisdom, understanding, mercy, strength, beauty, victory, glory, foundation, kingdom. These are ten common words, but they are not ordinary words. They are extraordinary words.

You can prove this to yourself in five minutes. Look up these ten words in a Biblical Concordance. You will immediately see that these are ten of the most prominent words in the good book. And you may have all of the information you will need to quickly teach yourself most of the important lessons in all of Kabbalah for you.

One qualification is needed; you must first have a basic Jewish or Christian education. There are tens of millions of such fully qualified people in the United States. If you went to church and Sunday school for a period of a few years, you have all the background needed.

Assuming you fulfill this small prerequisite, here is my recipe for teaching yourself Kabbalah easy and fast. To be more exact, what you will be teaching yourself are the most salient points of Kabbalah that apply to your own life. Take the ten concordance entries for crown, wisdom, &c. For each entry, look at the dozens of scripture verses listed and see what stands out for you. Verses you recognize, stories you recognize, books that are your personal favorite. It would take a long time to examine every entry, but it may take a very short time for you to gather an important and personal connection for each of the ten words. When you have finished this, you are done. You are a Kabbalist. You may not be an adept, but you may have a better Kabbalah education than Madonna. For sure you will have as good a Kabbalah education as Britney Spears.

I will finish with an example. The most often recited passage in the entire Bible from the compiling of the book through all recorded history and onward through all conceivable human life going forward is the Lord's prayer from the book of Matthew. The last line goes like this:

"Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever."

Kingdom is node 10 on the Tree of Life. Glory is node 8. Power (strength) is node 5. Thirty percent of your work is now done for you. When I said this is easy and fast, I meant this is easy and fast.

Were they raving loons?

On the 28th of August I had the opportunity to attend a conference at the University of Saint Thomas, "Religion, Mental Health, and the Search for Meaning: Bridging the Gaps". The bulk of the morning was a presentation by William Parsons, a professor of Religious Studies at Rice University. Part of his discussion was on the subject of the states of consciousness experienced by our foremost religious teachers, including Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed, at the time of their personal conversion experiences. He said they were in highly altered states of consciousness; "they were almost raving loons."

This is not the first time I have seen this correlation amongs the most popular religions. In The Perennial Philosophy, for example, Aldous Huxley considers the mysticism of the most important participants in the various faiths precisely what is most perennial about them. The prototype for academic objective examination of these theological technicalities is William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience. William James was most impressed by the testimony of mystical experience, including those of his contemporaries, such as Richard Bucke. I admire James' book greatly, but feel it has been supplanted as the chief source on altered states by the work of Charles Tart, particularly his books Transpersonal Psychologies and Altered States of Consciousness.

My copy of Altered States of Consciousness has the most delightful blurb on the front cover: "The book to read if you're doing anything with meditation, dope, hypnosis, dreams, subjective exploration of any kind." --The Last Whole Earth Catalog. The blurb just about covers the entire depth that I will be able to explore regarding consciousness and altered states of consciousness in one blog post. It is a universe, and nearly entirely unexplored. I sometimes liken our map of human consciousness to those maps of North America from the seventeenth century where they had a river running from Lake Michigan to the San Francisco Bay. What we do not even know that we do not know is probably just about everything.

Having covered in ridiculous brevity what I think about altered states of consciousness, let us look at a few important cases.

I. Moses

Moses' conversion experience is recorded in the book of Exodus. He had a visitation from Yahweh, or a vision or a hallucination of the same, in the form of a burning bush. There are no historical or archaeological records of this. I assume that there was a real human event which is the origin of this story. And my most likely explanation includes a person we might as well call Moses in an altered state of consciousness. This is hardly a deduction. I am a fan of Charles Peirce and his process of abduction, or reasoning to the most likely explanation.

II. Buddha

Buddha's conversion experience is documented at great length in Buddhist texts, although the standards of peer review in ancient India are not quite as rigorous as modern science. In his case, lengthy meditations and mortifications (such as fasting) were involved over the course of years in his pursuit of enlightenment. He is reported to have experienced a vision of every single thing that had occurred in his experience over the course of several eons of different incarnations. Since Buddha was born into royalty, the documentation of his adventures is as substantial as for any of our subjects. They may even be more reliable. The idea that he would abandon his wife and just-born child to go off on religious quest is suspicious. Nevertheless, I have no problem concluding that a highly altered state of consciousness was involved in Buddha's conversion experience and the beginning of the tradition of Buddhism.

III. Jesus

Jesus' conversion experience is described in the gospels as also occurring on retreat. He went out into the desert to pray and to fast and there had a vision of Satan and three temptations. This marks the beginning of his career as a full-time preacher and prophet and healer. I enjoyed Martin Scorsese's take on this in his film The Last Temptation of Christ. Unlike many artists who have depicted Jesus, Scorsese (and his actor William Defoe) make no compromises on their interpretation of the culture and the people to make them familiar to the audience. This Jesus is an extremely foreign guy living in an extremely foreign culture. This world is so foreign one gets the impression the default mode of many was more altered states of consciousness than unaltered states of consciousness. Scorsese and Defoe's Jesus is hallucinating in the first frames of the film.

IV. Paul

Paul's conversion experience is described in the book of Acts as an interruption in his daily affairs as a soldier. He was traveling, on horseback, and had an overwhelming vision of sight and sound that left him incapacitated and blind for a period of days. The book of Acts says the soldiers on patrol with him heard the sounds but did not see the visions. There is a literature describing Paul as an epileptic and his conversion experience as an epileptic seizure. He was a Jew, but there are no reports of him performing extensive meditative or devotional acts which would be preparatory to proper trance preparation. I do not know what to make of all this, although by any description hallucinations of this magnitude are an altered state of consciousness.

V. Mohammed

Mohammed was meditating in a cave on Mount Hira for weeks when he received his vision of the angel Gabriel. This is closely parallel to the cases of Jesus and Buddha. An individual with a devotional bent and long meditations and presumably an altered state of consciousness at the time of his conversion experience.

Could you say they were raving loons? I would not, but the coincidence of altered states of consciousness and religious innovation seems fairly conclusive, at least from what we know of our most popular religions. The odd man out in this story is Paul, who unlike the others, was not searching at the time of his spiritual emergency. Perhaps this gives motivation for the people who argue for the epilepsy explanation.

Invoking Mary Poppins

For the Autumn Equinox, I am planning a ritual celebration which follows the same format I used for the Summer Solstice. There will be prayers, meditations, a pathworking, &c. This time I am going for an invocation of Venus energy, or you maybe could say I am invoking Mary Poppins.

Neither is exactly correct. The energy I am trying to invoke into my life belonged to a person I knew when I was a child that I had the opportunity to spend much time with. She is much older than I (if she is still alive) and thousands of miles away and I have not seen her in over twenty years; I will almost certainly never see her again, so for all my practical purposes she is now only in my own mind. If you were so inclined, you could describe her as an occupant of my astral realm. My skeptical friends do not believe in any such thing as an astral realm.

The strict scientific facts are not relevant. I could use more of her positive qualities in the conduct of my own life, so I am going to devote a couple hours on the Autumn equinox to formally invoking her nature into my living room. The formula I use comes from the book Prime Chaos by Phil Hine.

, , , three distinct parts . . .

In the first, the deeds of the figure are given, spoken in the third person. In the second, the qualities of the figure are given, spoken in the second person. In the third, the powers of the figure are given, spoken in the first person.

So, say I am invoking Mary Poppins. (The actual name is different, but the deeds and the qualities and powers differ only in degree, not in kind.) The invocation portion of the script will go something like: "she is Mary Poppins, who teaches that great manners and great fun belong together; you are Mary Poppins, beautiful and talented and whimsical and energetic and magical; I am Mary Poppins, possessing the power to keep a tidy house filled with happy people."

Confidently declaring these three sentences is the central event in the ritual. All of the other elements of the ritual are merely priming of the energy in the environment to permit this idea to anchor into my subconscious. There will be music: soundtracks to Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music. I will read aloud William Blake's To the Evening Star. I will read aloud the pathworking number fourteen (the daleth path, the Empress path) from Garden of Pomegranates. Some of the paths in that book are poor, but the Empress one is splendid. On the equinox ritual day, that will be my fourth or fifth run through that pathworking. I have already done it a couple of times for preparation.

A strange thing about their empress path is it contains almost the entirety of Saint Paul's lesson on love from I Corinthians 13. A pagan ritual recipe book seems an odd place to find this, but it shows up in all sorts of odd places. The title of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly is a tribute to Paul's metaphor of seeing into a glass darkly from verse 12 of that chapter, and looking into dark mirrors is about the oldest scrying technique that we know of, so we see a common thread running through the two traditions.

There are a few other details already planned, such as I will be wearing green clothes, my green alexandrite ring, and illuminating the room with a green light bulb. And I am thinking of other things in my lead-in time to the equinox, but not a large quantity of additional details; there are only a couple weeks remaining before Autumn (on the calendar) is here. Since I live in Houston, there are several more weeks of summer weather to enjoy.

The Fall

In his book Waking Up, which is his interpretation of George Gurdjieff's spiritual and psychological work, Charles Tart has a repeating proverb which he stumbled upon in his Gurdjieff studies:

There is no God but Reality
To seek Him elsewhere
Is the action of the Fall.

The Fall is an origin myth, which may be found in a wide variety of traditions. In modern Western Civilization, we have the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The ancient Greeks had Prometheus and Pandora. In India we are in the age of the Kali Yuga. Fallen. The story is so common that it was a foundation for Carl Jung in his theory of the Collective Unconscious.

I have been writing some Artificial Neural Network software, and I realized I know very little about human brains, human organs, animal physiology, cells. So, I have been on a remedial Biology study course. This has taken a couple odd turns. One of them ended up on a theory of the origin of these Fall legends. Through the mechanism of hyperlink clicking I journeyed from Biology to Evolution to Evolutionary Psychology to its critics. This explanation of The Fall is very simple, so for now I am going to tentatively accept it as very probably the truth.

We know from Anthropology and Sociology that a stable network of closely associated humans has a maximum number of 150. Field workers find that simple forager tribes will divide into two when they grow to near that number. The Sociologist Nan Lin has spent his career trying to quantify social capital and studied a number of human networks and records a similar finding. Attention is a limited resource, and humans just cannot keep close track of more than 150 family and friends and neighbors and co-workers.

The most popular family in the United States of America just married off Chelsea Clinton. I did not read much about it, but I did see in the New York Times there were 600 guests at her wedding. Assuming Chelsea invited 150, the groom invited 150, her parents invited 150, and his parents invited 150, there is yet another instance of our familiar number showing up.

The first tribe of foragers that approached 150 and broke up a million years ago (or whenever) would be the original Fall event. And after that it happened thousands and tens thousands and hundreds thousands times on every continent except Antarctica, implanting some form of the myth into nearly every tradition. There is even one academic who thinks labeling the previous condition "paradise" is not too far off:

The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race by Jared Diamond.

One of my favorite treatments is the short novel by Albert Camus, The Fall. The main character Clemence is one of the best examples in literature of the fellow who stoops in order to conquer. It is a pitiful position, and Camus tells it well in a modern version. Clemence's fall is from the upper rungs of his society's status ladder. He retains his dignity with a perverse attitude. He cannot make you love him, but he does have the power to make you hate him. It is pretty sick but it is not illogical.

my first pagan supper

Lammas is the first of August. If you know nothing about the pagan holiday calendar, it is almost the simplest possible system. There are four major holidays: the two solstices summer and winter; the two equinoxes spring and fall. There are four minor holidays which are almost exactly in the middle of the four equally spaced main ones. Everybody knows about Halloween and May Day, but the other two are a little more obscure. The other two go by different names; I use Candlemas for the one around 1 February and Lammas for the one around the 1 August.

Candlemas might with a small amount of distortion masquerade as Saint Valentine's Day. My calculation would place it 45 days after the winter solstice so for 2010 that would be 21 December + 45 days = 5 Feb 2010. The current imbolc wikipedia page has 2 Feb as the day, which is very close, but 14 Feb is not so close. Lammas has nothing close to it at all in mainstream culture. I would offer that it is the most obscure of the pagan holidays.

The first time I attended a pagan holiday celebration, it was Lammas. I had no idea what I was agreeing to. It was a friend of a friend invitation deal. He was my friend as well, but not close. I was close friends with Ann and she was close friends with this fellow Bill, who I knew and did not dislike at all; but we really did not have much in common. I rated an invitation to the holiday dinner at his parents' house because I had a car, and I could transport Ann. Dinner was scheduled for 9:00 p.m. which is a little late, but the sun sets after 8:00 p.m. on the first of August and that is when his parents scheduled it.

We set out from New Orleans to Mandeville around 8:00. It was myself, Ann, and Ann's sister Jamie. It is amusing in retrospect that Bill had a crush on Ann, Ann had a crush on me, and I had a crush on Jamie. All of these feelings were unreturned, at least on that night. The sun was setting when we arrived at Bill's parents' house. At the house were Bill, his parents, his sister, and one other dinner guest. She was a pagan priestess and friend of the family. They all greeted us real friendly and said some brief informal friendship blessing with a sincerity which was closer to incomprehensible than it was to touching. It was confusing.

We had dinner on their back deck next to their swimming pool. They brought out huge platters of food--jambalaya, beef stir-fry, beans, other vegetables, salads--there was enough food to feed thirty people easy. Bill's mom lit candles around the edge of the deck and the priestess said some foreign prayer while holding a carved malachite knife over a big mug of mead. I would guess the prayer was in Gaelic. Then they passed the mug of mead around and everybody took a sip out of the mug. They served many bottles of wine with the dinner.

After awhile I had to use the restroom. The priestess was disturbed that I was "breaking the circle" but Bill's mom insisted this was not a problem and she quickly hushed. We did not discuss pagan religion much, or if we did I do not remember that part. The food was very good. Other than the short prayer and the circle of candles business, I don't recall anything that was different from a typical dinner party.

On the wikipedia Lammas page they have the following Shakespeare Romeo and Juliet quotation: "Come Lammas Eve at night shall she [Juliet] be fourteen."

That was the only Lammas celebration I have ever participated in. I have a friend who considers it a big deal. She calls it Lughnasa (just like in the movie, Dancing at -) and every year she goes to a large group camp where they burn bonfires and dance naked and sacrifice a goat. For all I know she is totally making up the parts about the nudity and animal sacrifices.