sdi

ποιμένες ἄγραυλοι, κάκ᾽ ἐλέγχεα, γαστέρες οἶον,
ἴδμεν ψεύδεα πολλὰ λέγειν ἐτύμοισιν ὁμοῖα,
ἴδμεν δ᾽, εὖτ᾽ ἐθέλωμεν, ἀληθέα γηρύσασθαι.

"Boorish shepherds—you disgraceful wretches, nothing but stomachs!—
we know how to say many convincing lies,
but we know also, when we please, how to sing true."

(The Muses of Mount Helikon speaking. Hesiod, Theogony 26–8.)

I have been thinking a lot lately about the spiritual process.

I have studied, and continue to study, a lot—but truth is simplicity itself: ἕν τὸ πᾶν "all is one." The closer one can actualize that notion, the closer to divinity one is. No amount of study can add to that.

And yet the study is not for nothing; one often needs much scaffolding to build a tower, even if it all gets pulled away and torn down thereafter. This was called to mind forcefully today as I began my attempt to reread Hesiod haltingly in Greek and read the above lines. (He's much harder than Homer, since while Homer has an elegance about his speech, Hesiod is coarse and takes, shall we say, tremendous liberties with his grammar to make the verse work. Simonides said that Hesiod was taught by the Muses, while Homer was taught by the Graces, and this seems about right to me.)

Who are Hesiod's Muses? Well, recall our fourfold schemata of consciousness, and note that light is truth. In Air, light is transmitted clearly, so all there is true. In Earth, light is not transmitted and only received, so all there is false. (Indeed, this is why there is no "user manual" for life here in the world of Earth, and why we need to grope about in darkness.) Water is translucent, just as Air is, but unlike Air, the light there can be reflected and refracted: when the Water is calm, the light passes true, but if the Water bends on itself cleverly, it can distort the light in whatever ways it pleases—even seeming true when it is quite false. So the Muses are clearly daimons, beings of Water, shepherding the shepherd—inner-plane initiatrixes, we may say, rather than the guiding angels I am so fond of. (Thus while one may learn from them—and from Hesiod!—great care must be taken, as they can't be trusted to be Good, just as they warn us.)

This identification is very useful, I think, and was effortless to make, but it must be noted that I've studied Empedokles with at least some care for something like six years, ever since I first took up geomancy. It took so much effort and contemplation to finally penetrate the proper simplicity of the model, so that now I can easily use it as a map and identify something from it. Now that I comprehend the model in it's simplicity, a lot of what I studied is now redundant... but it cannot be said to be "wasted," since without the complicated I couldn't have gotten to the simple.

So it is with spirituality. It is perhaps best to just clear the mind and sit in zazen; but without a koan or sutra or some other material for the soul to work on, the leap may never come, just as you may have all the reagent in the world, but without catalyst, the reaction can't occur.

The end may be utter simplicity, but there are long miles of breadcrumbs we must follow that we may appreciate it.

I recently resigned from my tech job with the intention of taking more time to focus on my family and on my spirituality. A friend and co-worker asked me, "When you say 'focus on spirituality,' that can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. What does that mean for you, specifically?"

I thought I might write my answer up here in case it's useful more generally. Please note, however, that I don't consider myself a spiritual teacher or guide—just a student who seems to be making adequate progress! There is perhaps nothing more personal than spirituality, and I'm pretty convinced that there are many heavens and many endpoints we strive towards. The spiritual world is by far more vast than ours! So please do not take any of this as gospel, just as one seeker's experience.

My own spiritual practice is a sort of three-legged stool, where each leg supports the other two. Removing or replacing any one would undermine the entire structure and the whole thing would fall apart. These three are meditation, study, and prayer.

• Even though I'm not a Buddhist, I practice what I suppose is Zen-style meditation, following the instructions I picked up from one or another of Alan Watts' books years and years ago. What this does is peel back the constructed layers of experience that we all build up around ourselves. Most people identify closely with their bodies and sensory experiences, but in reality this is only the outermost layer of the thing that you really are: the first goal of meditation is to bypass the senses to get to the part of you that lies beyond them. Once you've quieted the senses, you experience the mind and it's incessant, chattering thoughts and ideas. Some people, like intellectuals or the infirm, identify with this part of themselves—once you've experienced this, your body seems superflous and the mind essential; but again, it's only a shell around your true self: the second goal of meditation is to bypass the thoughts. Once you've quieted the thoughts, you experience a pinpoint center of awareness or consciousness that does not sense or does not think, rather it experiences and knows. Once you've experienced this, it is hard to think of your mind or personality as "you," and the notion of reincarnation starts to seem obvious. This is as far as I've gotten, but twice I've brushed up against the level beyond it, though I haven't yet properly broken through. Nonetheless, by practicing meditation regularly, it gets easier and easier to peel these layers back, and gain perspective on who (or what) you really are, and free yourself from the confines of a petty society's herd mentality.

• Study, of course, exists in order to allow you to benefit from the experiences of others. The need for this is apparent even in the material world which we all readily and easily experience, so how much more is it necessary with spiritual worlds, which most of us have only very dim experience of, if any! So by studying, one can train their mind, learn to double-check one's experiences to see if they are real or imagined, and gain useful models by which to contextualize their experiences. I have pretty severe insomnia and read a lot, but if I had to pick the texts that have been most valuable to me to date, they would be:

  • Laozi's Tao Te Ching
  • The Zhuangzi
  • Nyogen Senzaki's and Paul Reps' Zen Flesh, Zen Bones
  • Plotinus' Enneads
  • Porphyry's Sentences

  I encountered the the Taoists in 2009, the Zennists in 2011, and the Neoplatonists in 2022. In my experience they all agree exactly, though they have different emphasis. I warn you, of course, that these are not for everybody! They're just what has proved valuable to me.

• If one is exploring a foreign country, it is useful and appropriate to have a guide to show you around. This is no less true for the spiritual realms, since while you are technically a native of those places, you've been in exile so long that you've forgotten the customs and ways. So it is very good to pray for guidance and help in finding your way! Many people have many preferences on who to pray to, and appropriately so; personally, I spend most of my time with my "genius" or "guardian angel," who finally managed to consciously get in touch with me after many years of meditation (though, of course, they were always unconsciously available), and I recommend the practice, but your mileage may vary!

And as I have said, each of these reinforces the others:

• Meditation has a tendency to empty the mind, and just like a freshly-cleaned table has a static charge and tends to attract dust, a freshly-cleaned mind tends to attract ideas and thoughts. Study improves meditation by making the void more likely to be filled by something worthwhile. Prayer improves meditation by moving your mind to a cleaner space: there is less "dust" near divinity, keeping your mind clearer for longer before it needs cleaning again.

• Study is only as valuable as what you study. Meditation improves study by helping you focus and decide on what is what is really important to you. Prayer improves study because divinities know what is good for you and can lead you to material worth your time. I have also found that study can help you to make sense of the sometimes-strange experiences one has in meditation and prayer.

• Prayer is usually considered to be a one-way phenomenon, where one speaks but doesn't get a response, but this is not my experience at all. Usually, however, we humans are so invested in our sensory and mental experiences that we are unable to hear divinity over all the noise! Meditation improves prayer by clearing out the noise so that the signal comes through easier. Study improves prayer by expanding one's perspective so that one has useful things to pray about.

It is important to note that one doesn't shift gears all at once: you can't simply magically become excellent at meditation, or just force yourself to study the best material, or instantly connect with a deity in prayer. Rather, I tend to think of all of this as a gradual ripening process: by simply engaging with the practices, all these things naturally come about, little by little. It is said that "what you contemplate, you imitate:" so if you want to be more loving, don't force yourself into lots of various activities or try to make intense promises at the altar of Aphrodite or whatever; rather, simply take such steps as are around you, and the little things will become second nature, and when you no longer have to think about the little things, the bigger things will develop all on their own.