meditation

Seeking stillness in ecstasy

Verified on Po.et

April 5th 2018, 15:16

We know to seek stillness in the face of adversity and to draw strength from it. Yet many of us forget, or do not even think, to seek stillness also in the face of ecstasy.

Although we seek ecstasy, we fear also its power to overwhelm us. We move its locus into the mind, seeking ways to control it. Our ability to neutralize the power of ecstasy in our lives is extraordinary, and we hardly remark it, so identified are we with suffering and so sure that its transcendence is the path to source. The tantric way, of course, is to seek awareness in the face of all overwhelming emotions and passions, regardless of how they are labeled by our minds.

To my mind, this does not represent a withdrawal from experience or a dilution of ecstasy in an ocean of equanimity. That the meditative state is one of equanimity is a widespread and profound misunderstanding. A state of equanimity can probably be cultivated by prolonged training of the mind, but such mortification of the mind is as far from the core of the mystical experience as any form of “mortification of the flesh” is from somatic trance: they are both comparable asceticisms and both are life-renouncing.

The reason we seek stillness is to allow us to enter into the ecstatic experience more completely: acknowledging that, in fact, we are (or something within us is) ambivalent about union with the divine. We seek stillness in all circumstances of life to set aside fear and to replace illusion with reality; by which I do not mean some sanitized, undifferentiated reality, but the actual expression of spirit in the particulars and peculiarities of our human experience.

If you are anything like me, when you are down and facing challenges you meditate like crazy, you seek the light; yet when the fog starts to lift it’s back to business as usual. If this is so, then it has an important consequence: it means the universe has no way to awaken you other than to send you adversity. A key to cultivating a meditative attitude to all of life and allowing joy, not only adversity, to serve as a messenger is to remember that, however ecstatic the moment may seem, there is more beyond it that we are not experiencing; and we are not experiencing it because we hold back from it out of fear. This fear is not really any different to the fear we experience under circumstances which appear to threaten us: in both cases, it is the ego trying to hold on to the position it has usurped in the flow of our lives, and whether it impedes our enjoyment of life or our serenity in the face of adversity it separates us from the flow of source and the power inherent in it to change and direct our lives. As we become gently aware of this fear, we can begin to unmask it and cultivate pleasure, instead of suffering, as the gateway to ecstasy that it is meant to be.

Why I am not a Buddhist

For most people who have left behind theistic religion, there are only two widely understood alternative contemporary identifications, one being pagan/shamanic and the other Buddhist. Buddhist-derived thought is extremely influential in New Age spirituality, and many people in need of a comprehensible label will loosely describe themselves as Buddhist or Zen. These are rich traditions with many insights into the human condition, but in my opinion Buddhism also commits some ghastly errors to which many of its adherents remain blind.

As I have found an excellent summary of these errors here, I can summarize briefly. Many people loosely assume that by labelling themselves “Buddhist” they have chosen an appellation which does away with the dualist denigration of the body and earthly life which predominates in mainstream Christianity, Judaism and Islam. This is a profound misunderstanding, because Buddhism is closely aligned with other world religions in its promulgation of a belief system which promotes acceptance of the established order. Indeed, Buddhism owes a good part of its secular success to the fact that repressing it is entirely pointless.

Buddhism is a transcendentalist philosophy. This is epitomized in the core notion that desire is the root of suffering, and therefore desire needs to be overcome. Yes, you read that right: there is something wrong with man’s basic drive to achieve or accomplish anything at all. Absolutely everything is illusory; all that “works” is meditation, and a specific kind of meditation which is directed against our biological essence.

In my understanding, any true spiritual path is not transcendental, but restorative. What we are dealing with is not overcoming any inadequacy in our biological nature, but fundamental flaws in our social conditioning. We can trust who we are, and merely need to unlearn who we believe ourselves to be. This process comes completely from within and does not need any external goal to focus on, and certainly not the goal of elimination of desire. On the contrary, we very much need to cultivate desire, which is our life force. Desire, we can say, is the masculine aspect of love, and love is incomplete, indeed inconceivable, without it. This perspective I will continue to call non-duality; it is not Buddhism.

As a Buddhist you cannot live life, you can only renounce it. Sometimes in very subtle ways that may look like they affirm one or other aspect of human existence, but when you take a look under the cover, this is merely instrumental to a transcendent agenda. In a way, these aspects are not affirmed, but only admitted, because they are not important enough to reject, or because the war on biological nature also counts as a desire which undermines the attitude of strict passivity and acceptance. Even if it may be cognitively strained neither to struggle against a force nor its social counterforce.

In opting for a restorationist perspective, I am not of course arguing for a Flintstonian return to Eden. Such a call would be practically useless, but also spiritually flawed. I believe what we need to do to live a good life and heal our planet is to free our biological nature now, and that society is a transpersonal construct which is an inevitable and necessary part of our human existence, which can neither be abandoned nor simply refounded on a utopian (meaning inevitably dystopian) basis. It is clear to me that evolution continues through social institutions, even if it may take wrong paths. But it is also clear to me that nothing intrinsic to our biological nature is hostile to global welfare; on the contrary, it is precisely its repression which is at the root of all neurosis and cruelty. That is to say, society has not changed in ways which are simultaneously functional and to which our ancestral legacy renders us maladapted. This is because society merely reflects the attempt to achieve ancestral drive satisfaction under manufactured environmental conditions. This is all it does; and thus trying to inflect drives is inherently at odds with its purpose. Contemporary social reality is only one, path-dependent solution, and it lies well within the happiness production frontier. In other words, we can do very considerably better.

If there is no idea of revolution within a spiritual tradition, it is not human, and it is not fit for purpose. This social bias towards the status quo and the stigmatization of desire is what Bertold Brecht spoke of when he observed that “the rushing stream is called violent, but no-one so speaks of the riverbed which locks it in“. In fact, the embedded violence of social institutions is far greater than the observed violence of those who seek to break free of them. The centrality of embracing desire (Bejahung) also underpins Nietzsche’s philosophy, as for example when he wrote, in the Will to Power, that “if we affirm one moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence… and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.”

It is not that there is no transcendence; there is indeed transcendence but one cannot transcend that which one has not restored. In fact, it is the very restoration which is transcendence because, in that moment, the problem has ceased to be; the faculty is restored and reintegrated and the more complete woman or man is better equipped to find her or his way in the world. The idea of transcendence presupposes something which is lower and problematic; but there is no reason to believe that anything in the human biological constitution (any more than that of any other species) fits this description. I believe that the effort to transcend necessarily ties one into a dualistic samsara. Thus in fact that Buddhism cannot, by its very structure, solve the problem it has posited. Biological energy flows naturally in spiritual directions, but only if it is embraced in its totality, unselectively.

Let us be clear. Human beings are not unhappy solely because they have failed to resign themselves to the circumstances of their lives. They are also unhappy because social institutions frustrate the full expression of their biological nature. Somewhere, each of us has to come to terms with that part of this apparatus of repression which we can at a given moment not change. In this, there is an art, and Buddhist ideas can help us negotiate this path. They should not, for one moment, blind us or make us indifferent to all the horror embedded in our social institutions and all the suffering which they beget.

Neurofeedback

I have not yet any experience with it, so I may come back to this theme, but I have recently been looking into the potential of neurofeedback for spiritual development, in particular for training in meditation and self-hypnosis. Neurofeedback (NFB) consists in monitoring brain activity so that the individual can more easily learn how to influence his or her mental state. As such it is a subdomain of biofeedback, which covers the monitoring of various indices of bodily function (such as cardiac function, respiration, perspiration, muscle tensions etc). Biofeedback in turn, as regards its use by individuals at home, so in non-clinical settings, is a subfield of the growing trend towards what is now known as “quantified self“. Quantified self technologies allow for the capture of data regarding bodily functioning and condition with a view to harnessing the powerful goal-driven behavior of the human brain (well described by behavioral economist Dan Ariely).

In this context, I happened upon (to judge by the comments) a rather controversial post by Dr Christian Jarrett, a British psychologist, on Psychology Today (PT) website. Dr Jarrett writes that “Neurofeedback as a clinical tool definitely has a growing evidence base for a range of conditions. However, its use as a form of lifestyle therapy to achieve calm and enlightenment and good moods remains dubious.”

While I keep an open mind on NFB, I felt I needed to point out in the comments that the use of anything at all to achieve spiritual benefits “remains dubious“, if by “dubious” is meant “not empirically demonstrable”. This is intrinsic to spirituality…

Also, while one may perhaps regret, if it is the case, that some people who might otherwise take NFB seriously for demonstrable conditions do not do so because they perceive it as tainted with mystical associations, looked at from the side of those spending money on methods which might bring them spiritual development and not a solution to a specific underlying condition, NO such methods have demonstrable and indiscriminate efficacy. The choice of a method which at least has some scientific grounding to it, even if unproven, may be better than the choice of any of the many other methods which have none at all. If the author is right to dismiss the “spiritual” source of demand for NFB then essentially he is dismissing, it seems to me, spiritual inquiry itself. But then why be concerned with the futility of NFB for spiritual inquiry specifically, if spiritual inquiry itself is necessarily futile?

It seems to me, therefore, that the incorporation of NFB into spiritual training is at least as legitimate as any other practice in the domain of spiritual training. From the standpoint of a spiritual enquirer, Dr Jarrett’s article really does no more than state the obvious: caveat emptor. Unfortunately, much as I might like to, it is rare that I get to use scientific standards to guide choices of spiritual method. At best science may be suggestive. But spiritual inquiry is imperative and we are constrained to use the tools at hand in our choice of methods. Given this fact, NFB seems to me actually rather interesting.

I will post in the comments any reply I might get over on PT.

On the economics of therapy

The basic elements of effective personal development: bodywork, meditation and support.

In conceiving ones pathway to personal growth and healing, I think it is important to have a proper understanding of the processes involved, an understanding which is frequently lacking.

In a few words, my understanding is as follows. Within the bodymind there are two processes, both of which are needed because they depend on and reinforce each other and the end result is a product of the two. These can be characterized as a feminine and a masculine process. The feminine process involves softening of internal obstacles to the flow of energy, whether these be biophysical obstacles such as muscular hypertonicity or psychic obstacles in the form of existing representations at the conscious or subconscious level – such as the idea that certain behavior is wrong, that one should conform to certain norms, and so on. The masculine process involves increasing the quantitative level of life energy in the body so that these obstacles come under pressure from within, eventually leading to their crumbling or collapse. In terms of this masculine process there is no distinction between the body and the mind.

A simple physical model of this is as follows. We can think of water behind a dam, the release of which can be achieved both by weakening the structure of the dam and by increasing the weight of water bearing down upon it. Or we can think of the process of birth, where hormonal secretions soften the cervix which then opens under the weight of the embryo and the uterine contractions which increase the pressure applied to it.

As energy starts to flow, the process becomes self-reinforcing. We can think of water which, denied its route of least resistance, its natural pathway of flow, by the presence of the dam finds other pathways to bring rainfall to the sea. As the dam weakens, more and more of the rainfall will recommence flowing through its natural channel to the detriment of the diverted routes which had been previously established (this process of diversion is called in Freudian terms displacement).

Our bodies and our minds are always trying to rebuild the dams which we through our therapeutic endeavors wish to weaken. Many factors keep these dams in place. However, all of these factors are themselves due to displacement, because damming vital energy on a long term basis is not natural. (We can indeed restrain our vital energy over the short term by natural processes, under the force of the Reality Principle whereby expression is put off when its immediate expression would have negative consequences. We will also naturally channel that energy in different directions, partly by conscious choice and partly prompted by emotions, so that for example the energy is available to respond to a threat. This ability to control the flow of energy constitutes the biological basis for what is expressed pathologically in neurosis.)

It follows from this that there is always a weakest link in the line of defenses keeping the dams in place. This is the easiest and possibly only route to circumventing the process whereby the body heals breaches in its psychological defenses, and indeed builds stronger defenses if necessary. A direct confrontation of the front line of defense is quite counterproductive, but it may happen that when the underlying restorative mechanisms are weakened sufficiently, the whole edifice is at some point swept away.

At the deepest level, these mechanisms are representational. It is because we believe certain incorrect things about the world that we build inappropriate defenses. Only when we build new representations to replace these beliefs will we stop supplying the neurosis with the energy it needs to resist the energy naturally brought to bear on it by life processes.

All of this implies, I think, that we need to integrate two tracks in our work on ourselves.

Bodywork increases the quantitative level of energy in the body and corresponds to the masculine part of the process. All types of bodywork can help, but the most effective will be that which builds energy and allows it to circulate in the core life centers of the body, namely the pelvis where sexual energy is generated and which is at the crossroads of the flow of energy in the body and therefore the position which most naturally acts as a bottleneck.

Of course by bodywork I do not mean simply any physical practice. The practice must be appropriate, grounded and conscious to avoid being merely a vehicle to reinforce existing tensions. If it is not conscious, it will be manipulated by the mind to this end, or at least rendered inoperative.

The body will always reuse existing scripts if it can. Thus for example while a practice such as running may be marvellously energizing and, aside from its possible opportunity cost, is certainly not to be discouraged, it will not correct disequilibria in the body unless the body has really been deprived of this type of exercise before. Just as there are many ways to skin a cat, there are also many ways to run; the body is always going to use the method it already knows unless this method is not available to it. Thus if the physical movement relies disproportionately on certain muscle groups and inadequately on others, it will continue to do so because this is a perfectly viable, even if not the most natural, way to perform the task in question.

This means that running may be helpful, and there is no doubt that in principle it can lead to increased blood flow in the pelvis, but it is certainly not going directly to the heart of the problem. In order to do this you need to invite your body to do things which, while natural (if perhaps exaggerated for therapeutic purposes), it is not used to doing and therefore has no readily available script to deal with. Consciousness in this process helps to construct new neural pathways which can progressively replace, or remove the excessive strain on, the old.

Whilst bodywork is therefore an indispensable part of an effective therapeutic process, it is important to understand that it is really not adequate alone. I do not believe that bodywork is going to reprogram, in any reasonable span of time, representations in the psyche. Only the psyche itself can do this and in order to do so it needs to be exposed to a reality which is inconsistent with its prior assumptions, in a way which is safe enough to allow it to relax into the invitation which this situation provides to experience new ways of seeing the world.

This is, at a very general level, and as properly understood, the role of meditation. The choice of meditation is, however, hardly to be left to chance. Meditations should be, to a large degree, sexual and embodied. This is for the simple reason that the faulty representations are, to a large degree, sexual and disembodied. Where faulty representations are not directly sexual in nature, they are still sexual at a secondary level. Thus for example we may have a faulty representation of threats to our physical integrity, but as a result of this faulty representation a degree of sexual stasis has also resulted. Moreover, all such representations result in avoidance of behavior which sexual expression calls for, namely contact, intimacy, empathy and so on. I shall have more to say on this in a future post.

Again, both the problem and its solution are fairly easy to understand. We all know that if we are afraid of something in particular we will normally be able to overcome that fear by approaching the situation and becoming familiar with it, until we realize that our fear was not justified. If necessary, we start with baby steps or we take an indirect route. But eventually we become comfortable in the situation we had feared. Progressively, we change the internal representation that we have of the world, and the old one disappears.

To take a trivial (if for me painful) example, I for a long time was afraid to urinate with someone watching. This impeded my ability to use public urinals and was beyond my conscious power to change. This type of blockage is only going to be released by actually engaging in the activity in question under circumstances which are safe enough to relax and drop the subconscious conditioning at the root of the problem. Even if we frequently avoid doing so, it really is very easy in principle. You just find someone you trust, name the problem (by itself an important step), and ask them if they would be willing to observe you urinating. If it is too hard for you, you could ask them to start by watching from behind a curtain, or using a webcam, or merely be present while looking the other way, or whatever you can think of that is sufficiently below the blocking pain threshold not to activate the unwanted reflex. And you take it from there. To actually do this encounters some psychological resistance, but it is not really difficult if you want to.

This is where the methods of tantra come in. These methods may seem physical, and you may even be tempted to label them bodywork (correctly, of course, for a part of the methods). Yet these methods are really working on our false representations of the world in order to replace them with more flexible psychic structures which allow us to experience the world naturally, whilst still safely, especially in the dimension of sexuality and intimacy. Experience of the world as it really is naturally builds trust in our instinctive nature, because we see that this nature is in fact consistent with possibilities in the outside world, and not, as we had always supposed, inconsistent. This recreates the bridge, which in fact becomes an increasingly permeable membrane, between our inner world and the outer world, so that we can recognize these as two aspects of the same reality and move between them fluidly. In this way we have an embodied presence in the world, and not a disembodied antagonism to it. Our needs for intimacy are met and we become increasingly confident that they will always be met. From this reestablishment of trust is borne compassion.

Therefore I think it is really important to recognize and acknowledge ones needs and blockages in relation to sex and intimacy and of course not to hurtle in to situations which may be retraumatizing, but to find a way back to this source of ones being.

In this process, an exclusive preference for bodywork, which I encounter not infrequently, reveals enduring resistance to psychic change and only underlines the need for a complementary approach targeting the heart, emotions and senses. Bodywork is psychologically easy because it typically confronts nothing in ones relation to the other. It is an individual practice. Meditation can only be relational in nature, because psychic representations are relational in nature. Psychic representations, unlike physical representations, do not concern the organization of our body in its physical autonomy, but rather how we relate to others around us. This framework is largely a sovereign abstraction of the mind. It has some use in regard to real threats, but is dysfunctional in relation to imaginary threats. If we wish to change it, we need to allow ourselves to perceive their imaginary nature and reestablish the trust which we have lost.

As we move, of course, along this path, psychic material which underpins these representations may surface, together with the corresponding emotions (i.e. the affect). I am not trying to suggest that it is easy (or even appropriate) simply to plough ahead at such moments. Special talents are needed to help people safely and quickly through these occurrences. It is important to understand that there is not, as such, any psychic danger from this happening, at least in the vast majority of cases which are short of psychiatric in nature. It is only a question of the rate at which one makes progress, because these are critical moments in which either breakthroughs can be achieved or, conversely, one can slip back and have to start again (not of course from scratch, but the material will recede into the subconscious and this is evidence that it has not been processed and continues to affect the psyche). Whence the benefit of an experienced facilitator, coach or therapist.

So that’s the recipe: conscious bodywork (including breathwork), embodied and sexual meditation (once this type of meditation has reached its goal it can be replaced or complemented by others), plus ideally someone you can rely on to help you through the more challenging moments.

Good luck everyone 🙂

Five Rhythms

I have been dancing the movement practice called “Five Rhythms” on and off for a couple of years now, and am presently in the middle of a series of workshops which are subbranded “Heartbeat”. As far as I can gather from the founder’s website, which is not however very clear on this, this is intended to be the second of five “levels” in the Five Rhythms practice (the subsequent ones are “Cycles”, “Mirrors” and “the Silver Desert” respectively – the site is in Java so there are no hyperlinks to individual pages but look under “The Dancing Path” and “Becoming a Teacher”). (Roth also calls these the “first five levels”; afterwards there is still “Embodiment” and “Expression”). Our teacher says that Heartbeat is “the name for the emotional work in Five Rhythms dance”.

Whilst there is a lot of wisdom in some of what Roth says and has transmitted to other teachers, it is time for a working hypothesis of my own in relation to what this practice is and is not, the claims it makes and the place it might occupy in ones personal development practice portfolio.

I dance Five Rhythms and will probably go on doing so basically because I find it a very good integrative practice, as well as an enjoyable way to practice embodiment and embodied meditation. The wisdom of the body is there to be discovered in the practice. Five Rhythms is very popular in the tantra community for this reason.

However, whilst it does not appear to eschew portraying itself as such, which I find very regrettable, Five Rhythms is not a transformative or complete practice, and certainly not a rapid and/or deep one. In my opinion Roth, like so many others, has succumbed to commercial temptation and erected her system into a clumsy systematic “theology” of branded personal growth which is as unconvincing as it is inoperative and unnecessary. Just as access to the Godhead is mediated through layers of priesthood in the folk practice of the church (not in its mystical tradition), so layers of practice are interpolated between the practitioner and his or her full embodied expression in Roth’s schema, and the more there are, the more profitable it is. This is not a new strategy. It has been the strategy of religion through the ages.

I am not of course saying that there is no role for trajectories in such practices at all. But all they are is practices. They are not paths. Roth loses sight of this by pushing her initially perfectly valid observations and frameworks into overarching metaphors which are presented as a kind of key to unlock the secrets of the heart and of being human, but which are no such thing.

As any theory which is helpful enough in terms of what it is designed to explain, its reckless extension by analogy produces only increasing distorsion. Roth’s pentateuchal fetishism in these successive layers of practice reaches levels which evoke the spirit of Pythagorean mysticism. What is to be discovered is no longer innate but increasingly arcane. This strikes me as a dance of the mind, fully disconnected from reality, ungrounded and hopeless.

Let me illustrate. A (supposedly positive) review of Roth’s autobiographical handbook Sweat your Prayers on amazon.de states that as a result of movement work with Fritz Perls (the founder of Gestalt therapy), Roth “came to isolate five rhythms related to five archetypes or states of being“. Now, the description of these as “rhythms” is itself strange, as they of course are not; they are something more like “musical moods”. That there are exactly five such “moods” (flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical and stillness) is hardly a taxonomy which exists naturally and objectively. Rather there is an infinitive variety of musical moods, which fade indistinctly into each other. Thus Roth has at the outset chosen what can only be reasonably considered a metaphor, and goes on to overapply this metaphor to everything that comes within her sight.

The same source goes on to say that “Roth claims that even terminally inhibited people can learn to enter these rhythms and sense how it feels to inhabit ‘mother, mistress, madonna, father, son and holy spirit.’ The three feminine archetypes follow a flowing rhythm, according to Roth, while the energy of the masculine archetypes corresponds to a staccato rhythm. Roth discovered that when the masculine and feminine fuse, a rhythm of fertile chaos results, as in acts of artistic creation or love. The resolution of chaos is the lightness and liberation of a lyrical rhythm, while stillness is the most profound rhythm of all.”

This is once again a fully extraordinary statement. Firstly, the identification of the Christian trinity as a trinitarian aspect of the masculine akin to the three feminine aspects embodied in the ancient European triple Goddess representation is to my knowledge unprecedented and very odd. Although there is a superficial similarity (the number three), the feminine trinity represents the three phases of the moon and of adult womanhood; the “masculine trinity” (the Christian one at least) represents no such thing. Furthermore, the Christian doctrine of the trinity as such is a late innovation which in no way can be or ever was designed to supplant the cult of the triple goddess. The subjugation of female by male deities had been complete millennia earlier. Thus the two have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.

The inherent counter-intuitive and speculative nature of the “discovery” of the fusion of masculine and feminine into “chaos” and the rest of the ontogenesis of the Rothian pentateuch (which looks like a discovery of three additional genders) I leave as an exercise to the reader…

In the workshops we have been invited to experience more exotic combinations of the “rhythms”. The “five” emotions (which is Roth’s own and certainly not a canonical list) of fear, anger, sadness, joy and compassion are paired with each of the “rhythms” in a way which is not really obvious, nor consistent with the characterization in Roth’s own book Maps to Ecstasy of some of these rhythms as “masculine” and others “feminine”, and the proposition of a fivefold classification of character (with no theoretical or experimental basis at all) corresponding to each of the five “rhythms”. In my view this is absolutely no reasonable basis for a scientific psychotherapy. It is basically, as another reviewer on Amazon characterized it, “cumbersome and tiresome psychobabble”.

We are then invited to experience one rhythm within another, the rhythm with and without the corresponding emotion, lightness within each of them … an utterly confusing attempt at embodied “visualizations” which sollicited the head far too much for a technique supposed to be centered in the body.

The workshops have primarily involved actual dance, but there have also been some exercises, mostly with no particular power to them compared to what I have found in pretty well every tantra workshop I have attended. I have found that in Five Rhythms it is very easy to avoid contact with the other dancers and this is what most people in fact do – contact is only fleeting and never to the point of discomfort which might prompt psychosomatic response. I see no real reason why the practice, relying as I said on “embodied visualizations”, should reorganize the psychic armoring. In my view this is a secondary phenomenon in the workshops which mainly draws on experiences outside of them. When a psychosomatic response does occur, it is not built upon to the benefit of the group – the workshop leader does nothing with it, certainly at group level.

This is why I characterize the practice as “integrative”. The best experiences I have had dancing Five Rhythms have been when I entered the room with a quantity of open psychic material, as a result of life events or of other workshops. I have felt it has an ability to “sew me back together”. But not to rip me apart. Of course to some degree it might if the very fact of engaging in such a practice is challenging for the practitioner. But this strikes me as a relatively low bar to clear. Most people will be well able to engage in the practice without troubling their resistances.

In short, I still like the practice notwithstanding its quasi-metaphysical psychobabble and I have certainly also drawn benefit from it, some of which I will hopefully describe in future posts. However, I think it would be far purer and more useful in a form freed from the oppression of the omnipresent pentateuchal metaphysic, and less comfortably solipsistic. There is a place, undeniably, for gentle approaches which are accessible to a wider audience, and for restorative methods, not only the deconstruction of defenses; but these approaches should be honest about what they can and cannot achieve.

With the kisses of his mouth

I just finished reading Monique Roffey’s “With the Kisses of his Mouth”, an astonishingly forthright – if frustratingly incomplete – account of the author’s exploration of her sexuality following her breakup from her former husband, through casual sex dating, swinging, tantra and new age practices.

The book is so personal that I have hesitated in how to review it. It feels like I have become a party to confidences which normally stay safely confined in workshop spaces, as if a private diary had been left on a train and discovered by me inadvertently. In short, it seems indecent to respond publicly, and even more so in a critical, if I hope sympathetic tone. On the other hand, the decision to publish so uncensored an account belongs to the author, and puts her views on record. By virtue of this it makes a leap from subjectivity to intersubjectivity, occupying a shared space which is also mine. I also get a sense that part of the author’s purpose is to invite readers to react. So here goes with my thoughts.

There are already several reviews out there. Julie Myerson’s in The Guardian is excellent and I largely share it. The book has an engaging character despite its literary flaws, and this is essentially because, at all times, one senses the author is being breathtakingly honest – to the point, indeed, of a degree of dullness at times. Literary critique should however be carefully distinguished from the slutshaming disguised as esthetics that has evidently motivated a number of her reviewers, and which I feel no obligation to reproduce.

As I have some familiarity with the settings portrayed in the book as well as with the quest that underlies it – and care about it also – my own review is from a different angle.

There is no denying this is a courageous book. It captures a lot of the flavor of tantra in the UK, and also of the other places the author visits and discusses, insofar as I am familiar with them – Cap d’Agde for instance. I am glad she is proud of her sexual quest and willing to say so. This is a major contribution to creating a sex-positive climate for her peers, from which we can all only benefit. However, I do find the book, as an account of a quest which is ultimately and obviously spiritual – as the title of the book, taken from the Biblical Song of Songs implies – painfully self-absorbed.

Moved by the author’s predicament, one reads on hoping at some point she will transcend the limitations of her own tragic discourse on love and achieve a new triumphant synthesis; and yet ultimately this is not so. This gives the book a feeling of incompleteness and anticlimax which I found frustrating. The attempt at a synthesis at the end feels little like one, and more, in fact, like a distraction from the themes discussed throughout the book.

Viewed from Europe, with most of my experiences in Osho-related and German milieu, which stress humanistic psychology and meditation rather than sex and esotericism (much less BDSM), the UK tantra scene the author describes – accurately I believe – looks erratic, veering off into new age meanders the purpose of which can only be to escape the path inward. Roffey’s book is absorbed with the question of who she is: but not yet really as a spiritual enquiry; it comes across still primarily as an attempt to salvage the ego. The author’s journey – perhaps also her decision to publish the book – appears as a quest for an intellectual and/or relational refuge which would finally allow her to affirm that how she is, is actually OK. This quest, by its very existence, however, is evidence she is still consumed by doubts on this score. Her inner dialectic between salvation and self-doubt is markedly narcissistic and ultimately, I found, also became for this reason tedious in the retelling (scarcely a word attempts to establish a bridge between writer and reader; all this is left to intuition). Yet there seems to be little or no awareness of this indelicate degree of self-centeredness. It would have been the job of her spiritual teachers to point this out; I am a little disappointed if they have not. (Astonishingly, Osho is dismissed in the book as “much vilified”; in my view there is no more profound and practical teacher, and it sounds like Roffey knows him only at second hand).

The dilettantism of the author’s quest is illustrated especially by her discussion, in the closing pages, of Quodoushka and her valedictory declaration that she has discovered herself to be “monogamous”.

Now Quodoushka, apart from being hilariously funny (and hard to spell), has little else going for it. It is a patent and unimaginative fraud, as the link to the Wikipedia article makes amply evident, best known for (and in Roffey’s account largely limited to) a somewhat bizarre character typology based on genital types. In contrast, however, to the Reichian analysis of character, or the one offered by the enneagram (discussed by me here and here) – the purpose of which is to uncover and deconstruct patterns of childhood conditioning and to return to essence – the Quodoushka typology relies on allegedly objective anatomical features to categorize people into categories which they then can hide behind, but never change.

Conceivably there might be elements of truth in this typology, though I highly doubt this given how ridiculous it is. But in any case the spiritual point of this – other than the convenience of escapism – eludes me. Ultimately we are one; it cannot be that acquired character traits have in fact some indelible nature. And more particularly, it cannot be that some of us are “monogamous” and others not, or suffice for our salvation that we accept such a conclusion and move on. It can only be, as I have argued time and again on this blog, that those who stress monogamy have sensed certain truths but missed others, and those who stress polyamory may have lofty ideals but still often fail to engage with the challenge of unconditional love for actual real people because it is too painful a mirror of themselves.

One may, perhaps, accept that one is conditioned in a certain way and likely to remain so conditioned; but then ones spiritual quest is at an end. And this is not the kind of end to which, in my eyes, such a book should point.

I in no way want to denigrate what the author means by identifying as “monogamous”, but her adoption of this label seems to preclude further enquiry and, against the backdrop of a hoped-for epiphany, is wildly disappointing.

Roffey uses the term “monogamous” as if she knows what it is. But she, and we, do not know what it is, at all. We have no idea, or rather a wealth of conflicting ideas. “Monogamy”, as uncountable studies show, is an essentially contested concept. The behavior she recounts in the book moreover – with, if I am not wrong, some pride and satisfaction – is hardly “monogamous” in any identifiable sense, past or present. She seems simply to conclude that it lacks something and remains unsatisfying – and thereby prepares the bed for her inane critics and the chorus of self-justifying I-told-you-so’s.

This “something missing” she leaves, in line with the dominant social mythology, to serendipity, to the future, to a force outside of herself. The hackneyed, and overbearingly dehumanizing, “knight in shining armor” projection which so disappoints in every encounter man has with woman: that moment of realization that it will never be you that is object of love, but only ever a distorted representation of you.

It must be obvious, and it is obvious to all true spiritual teachers, that this claimed contingency of self-realization is only ever a sign of resistance to self-knowledge. What Roffey seeks is what we all seek, and few of us, whatever our relationship status or history, ever actually find, namely the ability to utterly abandon ourselves and to dance in love among the stars. But, to this end, members of the opposite sex, and relationships, are merely vehicles. The turgid institution we call monogamy is antithetical to the desire for transcendence in most cases, and tangential to it at best. Marriage simply is not the logical consequence of the numinous rapture we call “falling in love” which it purports to be. In self-identifying as “monogamous”, Roffey makes an ersatz projection which at the same time precludes what she is looking for – unimpaired and ecstatic love.

My advice to the reader is to reach beyond this well-disguised counsel of despair. Love where love is – as Roffey has been doing in practice – and become aware and compassionate towards the feelings of incompleteness which result, because they are a guide. Monogamy is not a precondition of plenitude. Pace Aristophanes and his drunken nonsense, there is nothing out there for you to find in order to become complete, but only things inside of you, negative self-judgments, to drop. Sex has no importance at all, it is just a celebration of what is. It only becomes important because it is so problematic: the barriers we put in place to our sexual expression tell us almost everything about our conditioned selves and our inability to love. The monogamy fixation, by abandoning the moment and subordinating it to expectations and unmet needs, voids sexual experience of its essence, voids it in fact of what we sense is there and some of us imagine to imply monogamous pre-eminence. Monogamy clutches at stars, for fear they will elude us. But they will not elude us; it suffices to open our heart and they are always there.

Life may certainly be lived in such a way as to be marked by deep union with just one soul. There is no reason why not. However, there is equally no need to choose this or to accord it preference, and still less normative status, blindly unaware of the mixture of motivations that contribute to the moment of rapture and the meaning given to it. By projecting on a man the burden of impossible roles to play, a woman can only estrange herself – and her partner – from self-realization and numinosity.

Porn as meditation

In which I blast my blog into the outer reaches of cyberspace. Well, we’ll see. There is no intention to court controversy, but, as always, there are some things I just have to say.

Google these two words – porn and meditation – together, and what you’ll get is mostly links to pseudo-oriental “treatments” for (so-called) “porn addiction”. Although many people enjoy (so-called) porn, and sex-positive activists have generally embraced its production and consumption, at least within certain limits/genres, it seems that it has yet to make its way into the mainstream, or even any sidestream, of new spirituality. Continue reading “Porn as meditation”

Humanity’s one sole moral imperative

I am not someone who uses the word “morality” with any degree of comfort. Nietzsche is my hero, and Nietzsche believed that all that was good proceeded from vitality, not moralistic prescriptions.

However, I have recently discovered that I have, and believe in, one true moral imperative, one thing that is forever, irreducibly, beyond esthetics.

That thing is, simply put, meditation.

Up until now, I guess I had been working with the assumption that the spiritual path, the path of healing and self-discovery, was a sort of optional extra for people thus inclined. Not really indispensable. Nothing I could really exhort others to follow, however much I believe in and value it myself.

I now see that this is not so.

Indeed, evil and suffering have, it seems to me, only one source: our eternal propensity to flee our inner conflicts by projecting them on other people. And thus self-examination is the sole moral imperative to which the human race is called, the sole choice which is not purely esthetic.

This has, I guess, a worthy pedigree in moral philosophy, from Socrates’ exhortation to “know thyself” through Kierkegaard’s fevered piety to the esthetics of the post-structuralists. This notwithstanding, meditation has somehow, for me at least, stayed off the map. Perhaps it is the immobilism of the hierarchical cultures – India, Japan, China – which give most place to meditation in their spiritual practices which explains this unhelpful connotation. And yet, meditation responds most holistically to the Socratic call – not through the sole medium of the mind which the Greeks elevated out of all proportion, but through the media of the body, spirit and soul, the instincts, longings and pleasures which inhabit them, and the quintessential encounter with the other. Indeed, it is not only a question of knowing oneself, in some abstract and theoretical way, but of truly becoming oneself.

It has an equally worthy pedigree in sociology and social theory, with its roots in Marx, Durkheim, Freud and Reich, developed in the psychology of Erich Fromm, and is discussed in extenso in the present day discipline of psychohistory – the study of how childhood trauma relates to war and social upheaval. And indeed it has long been clear to me that I had no choice than to pursue my spiritual path because I owed it to my children. Still, I was reluctant to prescribe it to others.

No longer, then.

If you are reading this, know: your sole moral imperative on this earth is self-examination and meditation.

The tao of parenting

By putting the words tantra and parenting together in the same sentence, I thought I should stand a pretty good chance of being top of the Google search rankings for that particular combination 🙂 But actually there’s a rather nice site at www.tantricparenting.org (though it does need to move to WordPress 😉 ). I can recommend it to tantric parents and parents-to-be.

Although I (militantly) support enlightened parenting, it isn’t, though, exactly what moved me to write this article. Rather, I wanted to say what being a father now means to me, spiritually, and how my children don’t just bring me endless joy but also help me on the road (if I am on that road) to enlightenment.

On the whole, we live in a very selfish world, and spirituality is frequently its mirror. This of course makes no logical sense whatsoever when it comes to oriental spirituality, which teaches transcendence of the ego, but that fact alone does not seem in any way to have prevented its being treated in the West as a consumer good, and often even as a fashion accessory.

Whilst appreciating the appositeness of the question, I have frequently been irked by people suggesting their children were an obstacle to their spiritual practice. In the case of tantra, the complaints are not limited to having no time for yoga and meditation but also one frequently hears that children are the alleged source of diminished sexual drive and lack of intimate space between the partners.

There are a number of objections to this point of view, several of which are, I hope, sufficiently obvious that I can skip them here. Let me just focus on two ideas which I feel especially strongly about.

Firstly, there is no excuse for not creating an intimate space which includes your children, and especially if they are the children of both partners because then they are the very fruit of this intimacy.

Because what is intimacy? It means sensitivity to the other and the creation of an environment in which the senses are heightened, there is more awareness, more attention to detail: to form, design, tastes, scents, music… in which we behave naturally, in opposition to the sterile patterns of behavior that mark contemporary relationships and the contemporary world.

In this intimate world, we are loved, listened to and taken care of. Whether as children, or as lovers, what is the difference?

(Yes, of course I mean what is the spiritual difference? It pains me to state the obvious but at the risk of being otherwise misunderstood by random surfers I will do so: of course the forms that behavior naturally takes with an adult lover are not the forms that it takes with children. Not at all. But the attentiveness, the care and the love are the same, they proceed from the same basis and have the same preconditions. I do not need to tell you what form behavior should take because I have no pretence to formulating an ethical code, even less to imposing it on anyone else, and because these differences are natural, innate and obvious to any healthy individual.)

And secondly, because just as your partner is the mirror of your soul and of your ego, so too are your children; they show you what is beautiful and they show you what is ugly. With this difference: in the case of children it is often a much less distorted image that you receive.

My children are not “just” kids. I try to treat them with as much tenderness and as much understanding as I try to treat my partner and (these days, finally) I probably succeed much better with them than with her, just because it is really much easier, because no one in anything approaching their right mind can really believe that their kids are the source of their problems and that they are a legitimate screen on which to project their own childhood traumas, a realization which, with ones partner, requires an additional level of self-awareness (and whilst it is equally true of ones partner in the final analysis, it is nonetheless so that your partner may be, if not the source of your problems, nonetheless at least not the person most suited to your own spiritual growth; whilst this is never so for your children).

In my encounters with my children, I feel I touch deep truths and deep levels of spiritual awareness; deeper than in most other ways, and certainly more easily and more quickly.

They are not an obstacle to my personal growth. They are very much a major strand within it.

I am wondering whether this is one of the most uselessly misleading words in the English language.

Latin meditari comes from the PIE root med-/mod- meaning to measure, limit or consider (German messen, Dutch meten, cognate with meter), with, for good measure, the Latin frequentative infix -t-

Much more active, mental and ego-driven than this it doesn’t come.

Yet what we mean by meditation is nothing like this at all. This is such a widespread misconception that I really wonder whether this word is actually useful at all, or whether we should not abandon it and find another one.

Although this is true enough of meditation in any spiritual sense, the Osho so-called “active” meditations are particularly obviously nothing to do with measuring, limiting or considering anything whatsoever.

What is a meditation? It seems to me that the Osho meditations are something like a physical embodiment of the Zen koan, a little trick, a seeming paradox to short-circuit the mind and realize a gestalt switch, a momentary discontinuity in the fabric of the personality through which the force of nature can reconfigure it.

Doesn’t anyone have a better word for this than “meditation”?