meditation

The Tenth Picture

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A lot of spiritual experiences give you a high. This isn’t a bad thing at all, but too often the sign gets mistaken for the destination

I’m not only talking the high from drugs some people take for spiritual or faux-spiritual reasons. It’s obvious that appropriately used substances, employed by informed people under proper tutelage, can lead to deep spiritual insights. It’s also obvious you can have such deep experiences from breathing, visualization, energy work, etc. These are deep, strange, powerful and also can get you high as hell for that moment.

And that high is not necessarily a bad thing. That is a sign that you’ve gotten something going on. You feel that high of your body relaxing in Quigong, the self-yet-not moment of cyclical breathing, or the psychedelic top-of-your-head-blows off of a drug or visualization trip. Something happened, and you have a powerful experience and often see and feel life differently.

However, I think a lot of people see the high as the goal. They want the sign of enlightenment, of achievement, of spiritual fulfillment – and to them that’s the rush of the therapeutic relaxation or some stunning vision. They want to own it by owning an experience.

I think this is why we see so many people falling under the spells of gurus, grifters, endless substance experiments, and shifting trends. They’re chasing the high or looking for a new one so they can once again “hold” that sense of spiritual enlightenment. But it’s just a senstion.

Spiritual highs are just roadsigns you’re onto something (and, in some cases, just on something even if it’s your own neurotransmitters). Something in your head and personality just shifted, got blown apart, or made connections. But the question is what you do next.

Plenty of seekers’ next step should be to ask if they just deluded themselves. But for many they had some authentic insight and that’s a chance to grow, not just find a new way to get high again.

What did you learn? How can you apply it? Does it help you understand yourself, others, and your teachers better. Where does the spiritual experience send you next? I mean even if you go to conventional therapy, good job, you learned something.

Spiritual experience should help you grow, not become a junkie.

I’m reminded of the famous Ten Ox-Herding pictures of Zen. They’re a lovely metaphor for meditation and spiritual practice based around seeking and taming a recalcitrant bovine. Eventually the trainer – the seeker – returns to society after many insights, helping others. He doesn’t leave the world or stay in his seeking, but returns a better person.

If your spiritual highs don’t help you become better, if they don’t someday lead you back to the bustling marketplace and busy town, then pause and take stock of yourself.

-Xenofact

I Am A Whirling Thing

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My meditative practices mostly come from Taoist, Buddhist, and psychological works. My goal is to sit there with myself, watching in that focused-yet-relaxed state that is hard to describe. Note of course, I do not say I want to reach a checklist of mental states – doing comes first, and I could probably write a lot more on that.

My practice is also simple – sitting cross-legged, back straight, breathing in a slow constant cycle, mind resting on breath. This is advocated in my oft-mentioned The Secret of the Golden Flower, and like that lovely manual it’s simple, yet you could also discuss it at endless length. We humans love words, and we love to use them to describe the hard-to-describe.

You’ll notice despite my love of words, I’m often cagey about discussing these things. However, there is one insight I feel fine holding forth on as it is interesting and won’t put you, my reader, at risk, of trying to force yourself to experience meditative states.

Slow, regular, even breathing is a fascinating thing to watch because it’s a cycle. As I’ve practiced in my return to meditation, I’ve realized that everything is a cycle. Breath meditation isn’t that special, really, which is why it’s so important.

We live in an environment of cycles. The seasons go in their circles, water evaporates then precipitates, animal populations rise and fall. We depend on these great circles to live – and as we have seen, ignore or alter them at our peril.

Our societies and histories are cycles. There are times of taxes and of building, of growth and contraction. Civilizations come and go – often in depressing predictability in hindsight. Humanity’s “journey forward” even seems to be a spiral of repetition, though our ignorance of our environment suggests we’re heading for a nasty swing.

Human relations are cycles. We are born and grow, roles changing and expanding. Students become mentors to other students. Children become citizens. Someone at the height of their achievements will retire (well, if they’re smart).

We ourselves are cycles. Our daily waking and sleeping, eating and digestion, birth and death. Even when we end, other cycles begin – decomposition, and some would believe reincarnation.

I can see the cycles of my life and my behaviors when I pause. There are great circles and spirals of growth. There are predictable life patterns you can see in others. There’s even simple things like foods I like then leave then like again.

Then there’s meditation.

I am a cycle of cycles and part of cycles. I am a whirling thing.

– Xenofact