Reiteration

Let me go into more detail here. I dislike mechanics, or ‘cold science’ because it fails to capture the human experience. Just think of the experience of compassion or of conciousness or of love. These very common human experiences aren’t captured at all by the science involved. So naturally I’ve found myself leaning towards mysticism.

The problem is that mysticism starts to have it’s own set of rules. I still like Zen meditation, “mindfulness,” and look back over my blog and I remember I’ve been doing it heavily since late 2004. Everything else becomes a dogma in itself (even mindfulness can become a dogma), so I’ve tried to tread the water of accepting “every religion” insomuch as it provides a connection with the “Divine,” and it has been fun.

However, I was unable to see outside the Dichotomy of mysticism or mechanics. The benefit of me reading and now digesting a solid week of Reich is he provides another alternative, and I like it better. “Fuctionalism,” Reich’s system, is a process ontology, i.e. the truth of things are found in their changing over time.

I like what he said about flying a plane. The truth for the flyer is what allows him to fly and land safely and get where he wanted to go. Mystics would say it’s intuition and his “destiny” to fly the plane, or a loose mystic like me might have said it’s because Divine Providence gave him the brains and opportunity to learn to fly. Mechnical scientists could build the instruments and even dissect his body and examine the muscle systems and the brain that the flyer employed, but the more we break it down that way, the less of a flyer we have. The truth comes in the constant experience of flying the plane.

Back to what I began with. Scientists fail to capture the experience of love when they talk about the chemicals involved in the human physiology. Likewise, compassion and conciousness are difficult to explain with scientific models. Mystics get to shrug and smile, enjoying the experience, while saying, “God made it this way, compassion and love are a reflection of the Divine,” but never take the responsibility and the entirity of the experience as their own. Ultimately, I am the one loving or being compassionate. And in their own ways, both mysticism and mechanistics fail to capture that truth.

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A Confession

The seeds were planted a long time ago. Recently, Miss T, obsessed with “destiny” helped me see how much mysticism helps one to not take responsibility for life. I confess to using it as a tool throughout my life to avoid lonliness. And everyone knows by now that I had little preference which forms I used. Always the problem with mysticism is that the sense of “presence” is always on the outside. The nice part of placing “God” outside is that the mystic is not responsible for the experience. The downside is that union with the divine is never complete.

I knew the seeds were sprouting when I argued with Miss T constantly about our teacher at the temple. I was willing to accept that he might not be anything whatsoever who he said he was, and I never cared because I felt I fit in at the temple, and intellectually I thought that what was being taught was worthwhile. More seeds were sprouting when Tairika helped me see that in the philosophical system I grew up in, where sex was demonized, men were considered the devil. That insight helped me understand why I like gothy dark music and why it can be such a turn on for me. By then I was admitting outright what I had been feeling internally for a long time.

Wilhelm Reich helped me to remove a few weeds from my field and call it a garden. It’s difficult to throw away old clothes sometimes, even when they’ve been threadbare for years, but Reich offered me a new coat that fits. Reich’s grand theory of life unified with physics explains the downfalls of mystical thinking, as well as mechanical (‘scientific’) thinking. The human experience is made more distant by either of those two traps. Life is a constant process that can not be nailed down into the things and data of mechanics. Nor is it appropriate to seperate ourselves from the living of Life by placing the source of our experience outside of us.

Still I crave some of the insulation of mystical thinking. I cannot embrace the coldness of mechanics, so when life feels like a raging bull, I have nothing to distract me from the ride. At the same time, the conclusion having grown inside me like a caterpiller and now coming out of its caccoon feels true and unencumbered. What does the butterfly feel while the sun strikes his wings? The full force of life, of course.

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Good stance…

I helped my roommate get into a good stance last night.

Poor guy almost vomited after two minutes. Still, his stance was nice and the weight was in the right place. Only thing, he kept tightening his bum, I never could get him to relax it at all. “Stand and relax.”

Me, I did stance a bunch yesterday. Keeping focused on my intention and proper breathing is very helpful. Afterwords I did some laying down stance, which is really fun after hard standing.

Somewhere in the midst of all that I had tea with an ex-lover. It was probably the best of that type of meeting I’ve ever had.

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I’ve been trying to get people to play push-hands with me. Most people don’t want to. Obviously I don’t play well and none of them play the game correctly, but I feel like I learn something from their playing and mine. Miss Yoga played with me the other night and she got into a Warrior yoga pose to do it. All her balancing was dependant upon use of force in her upper body. She was flexing and tightening the whole time. Still, she COULD generate a good push hands game against me and I had the nice feeling of learning something from playing with her. She’s competitive enough to make it fun, too ;-).

Next up: Taking stance back to the shooting range. Someone gave me ammo for Christmas… I plan to make good use of it.

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Happy New Year…

The part everyone comprehends is easy. Eating Winter Worm Summer Grass is really exotic and exciting. Drinking wine with a sliced-open Cobra inside is unique and interesting. Drinking ceremonial tea is fun and inviting.

So I tell my friends about all that from training in Michigan with Tairika.

The parts that are harder to describe are where the fun begins. Why am I enjoying Wujifa so much? Especially since it involves simply standing there until I nearly collapse. What is this silkreeeling stuff I keep trying to understand and describe?

Why do I say that I understand science and the universe differently now?

I think I’ll stop trying to explain any of this to anyone, since they appear to think I’m insane.

I’ll just keep practicing…

I understand Hafiz who said, “Just act like God is everywhere but it’s a secret that you can’t tell anyone… and when a dog comes by, whisper in it’s ear that you saw it over there and you can recognize God when you see him… let it be your private joke.”

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Truth

There is only one common rule valid in finding the special truth
valid for you. That is to learn to listen patiently into yourself,
to give yourself a chance to find your own way which is yours and
nobody else’s way. This leads not into chaos and wild anarchism but
ultimately into the realm where the common truth for all is rooted.
The ways of approach are manifold and none alike. The source from
where the sap of truth is streaming is common to all living beings,
far beyond the animal man. This must be so because all truth is a
function of living Life and living Life is basically the same in
everything that moves by way of pulsation. Therefore, the basic
truth in all teachings of mankind are alike and amount to only one
common thing: To find your way to the thing you feel when you love
dearly, or when you create, or when you build your home, or when you
give birth to your children or when you look at the stars at night.

Accordingly, common to all sages who knew the truth or were
searching for the truth, was the expression in their eyes and the
meaning of the alive movement in their faces. It is sad but true
that the great clown in the circus carries this expression behind
his mask. He has touched upon great truths. It is the exact
opposite of the howling of a mob throwing stones into windows. It
is far from the giggle of a coquettish girl who lures men to find
out again and again how dangerous a man could be to her. It is
contrary to the looks of an executioner or the expression in the
face of a dried-up, cruel, cunning, sneaking, hiding, ruthless,
unscrupulous liberator of peoples. Know the faces of the hidden
liberators. Learn to see them wherever they turn up, potential ones
and mature ones. Learn to know the clever bandwagon rider who
cannot look straight into your eyes. And you will know, by
contrast, what the truth looks like.

Truth knows no party lines, nor national boundaries, nor the
difference of the sexes or of ages or of language. It is a way of
being common to all, and potentially ready to act in all. This is
the great hope.

–Wilhelm Reich, _The Murder of Christ_

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