Mind over Mantra

Mind over Mantra

 Certain art and literature keeps surfacing. Something clearly wants my attention. So I do some thinking and some writing.

The Goya etching; El sueno de la razon produce monstruos - (The sleep of reason produces monsters) first came to my attention when teaching Gothic Literature more than a decade ago. In it, a man of his time, of the scientifically minded and cerebral Age of Enlightenment, sleeps in his study. A dark host of ghoulish creatures, bats, owls - a watchful lynx - swarm about him, a metaphor said to sum up the attitude of many Gothic writers. Behind scientific endeavour lies the shadowy reaches that the inquiring light has not managed to quantify, categorise and explain. Who knows what manner or wonderous, magical and powerful aspects of life lie outside of our comprehension?  Reason has its limits- the wild, the archaic, primitive and mysterious remain forever fascinating and forever ready to trip and test the confidence of humankind to measure and chart her world. I remember reading too, of what the drawing had to say of the futility, nay, the danger of repressing unconscious psychic forces. The more you push Jack back into his box, the greater and more forceful will his eventual eruption into the sphere of consciousness be- perhaps with threatening and dangerous consequences - as macabre demons of the depths circle in merry havoc, turning the clear mind black with beating wings. 

For some reason, the etching has sprung back into my mind, although I had not thought of it for years. I studied it with fresh, cynical eyes. Clearly, the drawing suggests that all kinds of superstitious, nightmarish and threatening thoughts possess us when our ability to reason fails. Surely it suggests the folly of superstition which exists outside of the world of logic and knowledge. Historians have shown that outbreaks of social unrest- witch hunting, riots -the outbreak of mob violence that has swept the country this summer - often correlate with cataclysmic environmental disasters - droughts, famines, wars, economic hardship. Superstitious fear erupts when the foolish are threatened. Thus, the supremacy of reason is not called into question, rather the artwork illustrates the chaos that ensues when reason is superseded by a base instinct such as terror.  However, Goya included the following caption to his work; “Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and source of their wonders”.

Click. Bullseye. Eureka! 

Imagination, instinctual drives, the subconscious is not positioned in a direct dichotomy to reason, and therefore to be subordinate and distrusted. Rather, the two aspects of our intelligence united is the source of artistic inspiration, insight and personal actualisation. 

For days, in my dreams, my analysis of visionary ayahuasca journeys, song lyrics, daily events, the sudden re-emergence of memories, artworks, a message has been repetitively chanted. Embrace this inner work, the subconscious has much to teach you! I believe I have been suspicious of inner or visionary knowledge for a life-time, preferring a more materialistic, linguistic and aboveground  perspective; the midday sun shining boldly on the flat, firm ground. But the patterning, the chiming together of ideas, creating resonant, rich sounds and meaningful associations has been so constant and convincing in the last days I am no longer prepared to ignore it. This experience feels mystical. My mind feels alive. I follow the flicker of subconscious ignis fatuus through the mist and find myself not called to folly, but drawn to interconnected flashes of epiphanous truth.

Even now, as I write this, Blake’s painting of Newton springs to mind. The Romantic positions the scientist, a massly square of flesh, twiddling a compass whilst his fanatical eyes burrow in narrow-minded focus into his scroll. The wonders of his body, the infinite mysteries of the sky are lost to him; his purely intellectual pursuit, his earthbound world view render him as lifeless as the rock he appears to grow out of. I remember standing in wonder at the sculpture drawn from this work in the courtyard of the British Library, where Paolozzi’s freestanding artwork deepens Blake’s imagery through the inclusion of eye-glasses. As the Scientist strains to magnify his materialistic worldview, his paradoxical blindness is emphasised. Newton’s alienation from self-hood is rendered through the bolts, plates and rivets forming his machine-like, frankensteinian body. 

And next, a quote recalled from my reading of Jung’s own ‘Memories, Dreams and Reflections’ swims up and waves at me; 

“The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity”

The inexorable downward pressures of gravity, of patriarchy, of 21st century ideology, of materialism, of purely conscious perspectives on the world are losing their absolute hold on me. However, my mind is still battling with the concept of trusting in the power of the subconscious, of intuition, of inner rather than external knowing. Let it. Each skirmish allows inspiration to be sieved through the intellect, guard dog at the gates, and therefore any realisations can stand with surer footing on the other side of the Stygian bank. 

About a week later, my reflections continue. I delve much deeper and excavate further into memory concerning my relationship with ‘spirituality’.

Another piece of artwork that has been repetitively flashing, like a speck of dust before my inner eye, is the frontispiece to the early printed edition of Christopher Marlowe’s play, Doctor Faustus. The initial reason it impressed itself upon me - though my thinking and personal associations have subsequently burrowed deeper into mind and memory, was due to Jung’s discussion of Goethe’s Faust in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. The precocious little Carl’s reading of this fable had delighted him due to his boyhood dissatisfaction with religious teaching, including his father’s inability to explain the more esoteric mysteries of the Christianity he had hoisted upon his young son. The fable evoked great fascination and sympathy for the little Devil Mephisto in the child. Later, Goethe’s tale, which I have not yet read, was interpreted as a literary exploration of Faust’s attempts to navigate spiritual and psychic waters towards wholeness.  In the climactic redemption of Goethe’s Faust, all live happily ever after. Faust achieves metaphoric integration with the denied and ignored parts of himself (symbolised through his heavenly reunification with his erstwhile girlfriend and Mother Mary to boot). 

Kit Marlowe’s play, however, is a completely different beast - one that refuses to lie down for a tummy tickle or tamely take up its place by the fireside. The tragedy’s conclusion ends not in redemption, but eternal damnation. Not in psychic integration, but bodily mutilation, as some bit-part scholars return to Faustus’ study, where we the audience have just seen the bad Doctor strut and fret through his final hour on earth, before being dragged by fiery hands through hell’s hungry mouth. There they find Faustus’ “mangled limbs” draped across chairs and hanging from olde worlde light fittings, his bones, muscles “All torn asunder” and viscera splashed across his beloved bookshelves. Ironically, while the figure of the Alchemist was a symbol of spiritual transformation for Jung, this scene is based on the fate of the historical Johann Georg Faust, whose alchemic experimentation ended in deadly detonation. An explosive accident scattered his body parts about his rented rooms.  I would hate to be the mop-woman who had to clean up all that hubris of a Monday morning.

My mental tendrils keep reaching back to Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. I read it at A-Level, at sixteen years old and after, relished teaching it to later generations. I was thrilled by this play’s poetry; the pinnacle of earthly achievement in its rendering of the depths of human despair.  Judging by the work he created in his youth, Marlowe may have been greater than Shakespeare, had he not taken a mortal dagger to the eye socket before he reached his third decade.  Rumoured to be a spy, a swaggering boy lover, an acid-tongued atheist, he was to me a literary rock-star, dipping his quill into his heart and scribbling verse across the clouds on his self-destructive flight into the sun.  The other teenagers could have Kurt Cobain - Marlowe was the man for this little dork. 

Marlowe appeared a punk rocker, tearing up the rule book, or indeed, the bible itself. Although more mature study suggests Marlowe’s famous atheism probably equated to unorthodox or so called ‘heretical’, indeed, burn-at-the-stake-able inquisitiveness as opposed to all out disbelief in the divine, I was mesmerised by his venomous Christian-baiting. Salacious contemporary report claims Marlowe stated; "Religion was only to keep men in awe" and "Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest". Even that "St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ”. Was it Marlowe speaking when one of his characters says "I count religion but a childish toy"? Indeed, Faustus’ refusal to bow to the dictates of an oppressive heaven, to “Despair in God and trust in Beelzebub” and subsequent revelry in the blasphemous and profane was read by me as anarchic rage against the ideological prison of religion. Of course Faustus fries for this. But his tragic comeuppance and eternal relegation to the infernal inferno, was seen by me not as the playwright’s moral reassertion of God’s ultimate power, more an ending which satisfied both generic convention and the censors, and vitally, the only one which would allow the wordsmith to quite literally avoid the rack.  

Faustus’ wish to reach the outer limits of human experience, his pledge that “Appetite thou art my god” resonated powerfully.  Having rejected Christianity, adventurous sensation seeking rushed in to fill the vacuum left in my tiny teenage mind and soul. Luckily, unlike Faustus, I did not have to literally sacrifice my eternal jewel as blood-price for my rebellious antics.

I was incandescent with rage at the unjust God of my childhood. Why venerate a god of weaker morality than myself? I had a greater capacity for pity and suffering, and lesser need to be worshipped all of the time.  I found the cosmic sadist’s moral degeneracy nauseating and vowed to plant one on his nose in the unlikely event of ever meeting him. I decided I must sever all remaining ties with the eternal egotist and ‘his’ debauched church, therefore I made the serious decision to seek excommunication. The Catholic Church claims power and relevancy through a register of numbers Christened, as if the poor mites had any say in proceedings! I believed it was politically important to detach yourself from the flock. In days of yore, flaccid, cassocked men would waft their plump gold-ringed hands in the air and with that, condemn political enemies or sexual subversives to eternal damnation. Contrastingly, excommunication must be rigorously pursued in today’s world and involves writing successive letters to one’s bishop detailing your demands. Finally, one will receive an official notice of excommunication, though the downwards pointing thumb and flame emoji appearing as postscript may be a figment of my febrile imagination. It was only picturing the trembling lip on my Irish mammy, during one of her ‘I-know-you’ll-come-back-to-Jesus-one-day’ speeches, that prevented me from acting on my decision. 

It is only now, through writing about Faustus, that I remember the force of the rage I felt or still feel for the Christian god. Having torn my heart and soul away from the universe-explaining and universe-expanding story of my youth, I realise I stand before the battlefield, jealously guarding the scarred no-mans-land before me. Territory so hard-won must be defended.  

I’ve gained much from exploring Buddhism, but not before establishing that it is not a religion, but rather a philosophy, and rigorously cross-examining a surprised monk or two over the current patriarchal power balance within this school of thought. I’m sick to my soul of seeking spiritual guidance from a hierarchy of men in dresses. But then again, I cannot accept the more mystic tenets. My beliefs cannot embrace reincarnation, and I endorse Thich Nhat Hanh’s practical explanation of karma; “Every act has a result. That is karma. And no act, nothing can be lost. It continues always. The chain of action continues.”

Back to Faustus: and that picture that insistently appears before me. What is my subconscious trying to tell me, or more to the point, where is it trying to lead me when bringing this illustration to mind? Initially, I felt like that man in the magic circle, symbolising the not-very-far-reaching of my rational understanding and spiritual belief.  I am optimistic that the circle may be enlarged through a combination of study and experience, however, I currently resist anything that is peripheral to my familiar island of established fact. The squat demon lingers outside of my comprehension. If the little devil-dog’s presence can be explained satisfactorily by my thinking mind, so be it. If it cannot, I conjure it away and dismiss it, thrusting my head into my hands and waiting for morning. Is this action motivated by impatience, disbelief or fear? With honest self-evaluation, my thoughts surrounding many of the more abstract spiritual concepts are that if I can’t see it, it doesn't exist. Do I tread the same ground as the book-blinded Faustus, who, face to face with a Mephistophiles summoned straight from Hades, declares with audacious stupidity; “I think Hell’s a fable”. I am not unaware that both my and Faustus’ mode of thinking is flawed. Do I have to have directly experienced something, or read about it in all of the societally approved books in order to accept its existence? So called facts are so often called into question as societies flow and ebb. The heart-felt beliefs of dead and dying cultures are held as flawed and primitive in our own. Might future worlds see these centuries of scientific rationalism in the same light? As towers, seemingly reaching the clouds, but built on shifting sands? 

The truth is, when I read or discuss other people’s spiritual and supernatural experiences, my brain simply doesn’t know what to do with them. Some souls are gifted or cursed, depending on the cultural reception of their experiences, with the ability to experience spontaneous visionary states, without the help of medicines swallowed or smoked. Eckhart Tolle’s overnight enlightenment, William Blake’s visionary dreams or Jung’s childhood hallucinations, of course these things make sense. I can appreciate such mystical states or spiritual epiphanies as a chemical change in the gifted brain. But when it comes to certain types of unexplained phenomena, I am silent and solemn. When a blemishless knife split in Jung’s drawer, or a heavy piece of furniture was sundered, for example, I am incredulous. My mind is a fortress of disbelief. If I admire the teller of such events and find them wise, I believe they must be mistaken. There is some other explanation. If I have none, I am stumped. If I think the person is silly, then they are making it up, delusional or attention seeking. 

I am trying, I am really trying - or I am being led to try to destabilise the veneration in which I hold the world of logic and fact.  I tried to read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason - but ironically, only hit the wall of my own mental limitations. My little mind couldn't steer me through the first paragraph.  Indeed, the shortcomings of my intelligence, combined with my attention span, failed to tackle even the Wikipedia summary.  However, perhaps using thought to examine the limitations of thinking in relation to the numinous world is as futile as throwing a bucket of water on a man drowning mid-ocean. Perhaps I need a different way to approach the situation. Sadly, I feel the conceptual framework of my mind has foundations that thrust deep into bedrock. The culture that incubated my mind has no sympathy for the mystical or the magical. 

When people meet Mother Ayahuasca as they follow the white rabbit down the hole of their souls, I don’t quite think they have been conversing with Santa Claus (afterall, when did he deliver me a trove of such sparkling delights?). Part of me clings to the edifice of the power of the mind in explaining this phenomenon. Yet part of me so desperately wishes to believe the contrary, that some fairy godmother exists within a plant, ready to rescue us from the caves of darkness with a wave of her crystal sceptre and a sprinkle of shamanic dust. 

Yes, I have experienced a state of oneness with the universe, where rainbows unfurled themselves from my forehead, softly danced into the sky, into a universe filled with pulsating love. Yes, I have felt a state of love sent by whirring motherships, crafts of iridescent mercury gliding around and through me as the sunset unveiled a divine sky of peach and strawberry and soft as Summer those rays light a world of pure compassion.

But ain't it just the drugs? When they're gone, it's gone. Leaving not a rack behind…except perhaps a dry mouthed longing and a shade of a shade of a shade of that feeling of gentle dissipation into the warm soup of creation. But then it's back to earth with you little mortal. Bump. 

When we see the way the brain responds to psychedelics, the interplay and connectedness elicited by the medicine-molecules, the sensual explosion, the thousand-fold increase in activity, like a motor engine on rocket-fuel, should we be surprised that we can trace the clouds and shoot into the stars aided by this seemingly extraterrestrial process? This is not to say that the lessons do not hold sacred gravity. The mental shackles hammered in the furnace of societal laws and childhood conditioning can fall away, leaving us feather light, flexible and ready to run, climb and dance where we will.  This still seems like a miracle to me. 

But doubt pulls at my collar, growls in my ear. What if you are missing out on magic and meaning, the marrow of existence, through an inability to embrace a sense of transcendence? What if this spiritual detachment is blocking your relationship with the full potentialities of the medicine? A wild and wise friend of mine, much admired, suggested that my cynicism to the spiritual qualities of the medicine may be an exertion of control. An inability to let go. A refusal to entirely freedive into the dark-depths of being. Perhaps then, I am like Jung’s tadpoles basking in shallow waters, unaware of the sun’s heat and the imminent danger of becoming stranded on the barren terra firma. 

Most insistently, I wonder whether religious or spiritual belief is a vital lie. A half-truth without which we cannot thrive. An aspect of human existence which is essential but unreal. The jewel encrusted cup of meaning lifted to parched lips. If I believed I sang the sun up every morning, and my dancing feet called down the rain, if I believed my existence was interwoven with the rhythms of the universe and my prayers were answered by winking stars then the lamp of my soul would be lit. 

But how can you make yourself believe? The awareness that you are willing yourself to believe in the conjurer's trick undermines the magic, and the bunny pulled from the hat elicits nothing more than a slow hand clap. 

I would dearly like to redraw my map of belief. But I don’t know how. Maybe a stronger dose of medicine will do it, or maybe the experiential pearls I find in the fathomless depths will simply be classified, analysed, filed or hidden by a cynicism which feels simultaneously like a factual boundary of reality and barrier to the seductive wilds.

Finally, I read this poem yesterday and put it aside. Was it meant to fall into my hands? Or is finding interesting things simply the nature of algorithms created when browsing the internet? Do they feel particularly resonant because of the chemical effects of the medicine on my brain, or is a synchronicity at play?  The final lines resonate with deep truth.

When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer

                               By Walt Whitman

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

I quickly analyse the poem in light of my thoughts at this moment. The world of noise, egoic striving for “applause”, renown, logic, learning and science makes the speaker “tired and sick”. The subject leaves the claustrophobia of the “lecture-room” where peers, culture, and conditioning oppress. Even this act gives him grace and life. He is evolving or “rising” and “gliding”. His new found freedom is expressed as he “wander’d” and his embracing of self-generated meaning can be seen by the fact he is finally “by myself” rather than in a world where he has “heard” and “been shown” the exhaustive “proofs”, “figures” and “diagrams” of man-made reality. He finds himself in the evocative “mystical-moist” air. Not only is the reference to mysticism antithetical to the stifling, queasy world inside the academic room, but perhaps the moisture calls forth an image of fertility or rebirth, a world in which we may flourish and grow. The “perfect silence” he experiences here feeds his soul as he connects with the universe in veneration and wonderment, a place where the busy clamour of the world fades away and becomes transient nonsense. His silence suggests he is enraptured by what he sees - an infinitude of shining beauty that the astronomer, for all his mental burrowing into dogmatic calculations has missed. Paradoxically, there is an ineffable, unquantifiable truth which the astronomer can never know - indeed his very act of grasping for knowledge has eclipsed this truth under sheaves of musty “calculations” and “columns”. The speaker has left the world of knowledge and gently surrendered to the majestic void of the night sky in all of its majesty and mystery. The stars shrink us. They remind us of the smallness of the worlds we exist in within our human skulls as limitless universes stretch away from us through space and uncountable millennia. Perhaps the poet is saying that we overload our minds with our attempts to understand the dark and light mysteries of the universe which will ever elude us. So perhaps we need to accept and stand open jawed and humbled before the sheer shadowy beauty of it all, with a fire in our hearts to mirror, in our best but humble way, the vast fire of the stars. 

Perhaps I would do well to remember, in relation to my cynical materialism, that when Faustus declares “hell’s a fable”, Mephistopheles replies, 

“Ay, think so still, till experience change thy mind”.