Imaginal News, August 28th: Vesseling a Water Monster

Islamic Scholar Henry Corbin described the Imaginal World, what the Persians call Na-koja-Abad, as “a climate outside of climates, a place outside of places, outside of where (that Persian name literally means “a land of No-where”). He says “spiritual reality [this world] is not ‘in the where.’ It is the ‘where‘ that is in it. Or rather, it is itself the “where” of all things…” This “Imaginal World” isn’t situated on our maps. It is what situates places on maps in the first place! As such, events happen there before they happen here. They “grow out” from that world like a growing plant.

This is what’s happening there, based on spiritual impressions, meaningful coincidences, and a bit of divination:

Right now the world is getting chased by a monster. This monster is from the water: our unfathomable fears, envies, and lusts. If it had its way, it would drag us under the water of our day-to-day moods and emotions and keep us there just under the surface, blindly suffering from the shifting and ever-changing nature of those moods without ever expending the force of will to put our head above the surface. 

But we’re becoming cunning. Many of us, so close to the surface, can see the monster’s face. And it is afraid. It wants to drown us so we don’t burn it and dry it out with the blazing light and persistent heat of our rational, analytical mind. So it drown that light so we can never use it. It would hold on forever, but it is not the monster that will change, but us. We are learning the Water Monster’s tricks. And because we can thus see it, we move out of the water to meet its monster face to face.

But there’s a dilemma here. Leaving the water, we can move toward dry, sterile analysis and a focus on consciousness as opposed to the unconscious. Or, we can return to the water, only without getting drowned in it. If we do the former, the monster will dry up, and so will we. We will become cold, arrogant, and cynical. But if we put the water in a cup, the (orange) monster will turn into a goldfish and tell us the water’s secrets. This is the way to go.

Getting Your Captors Drunk

The Book of Mormon has a cool story about halfway through. The civilized Nephites in their enclave among the wild and ferocious Lamanites eventually became “bound” and “captive” to their Lamanite hosts. These Nephites are laden with taxes, and they want nothing more than to return home to their own country.

But after a group of scouts sent from their home country finds them, they hatch a brilliant plan to escape:

10 And king Limhi caused that his people should gather their flocks together; and he sent the tribute of wine to the Lamanites; and he also sent more wine, as a present unto them; and they did drink freely of the wine which king Limhi did send unto them.

11 And it came to pass that the people of king Limhi did depart by night into the wilderness with their flocks and their herds, and they went round about the land of Shilom in the wilderness, and bent their course towards the land of Zarahemla, being led by Ammon and his brethren.

12 And they had taken all their gold, and silver, and their precious things, which they could carry, and also their provisions with them, into the wilderness; and they pursued their journey.

13 And after being many days in the wilderness they arrived in the land of Zarahemla, and joined Mosiah’s people, and became his subjects.

14 And it came to pass that Mosiah received them with joy; and he also received their records, and also the records which had been found by the people of Limhi.

This is more than just a history, though it is that. More than an account of events, it’s also a pattern for how one escapes from the captivity brought on by one’s own stupidity and sin. This pattern is simple: get your captivity drunk.

Let’s say you suffer from anger problems. In this story, the Nephites’ captivity is the way you lose control in that anger. Both the Lamanite captors and the Nephite captives are worked into your anger, and the problem isn’t that you have anger, but that you’re unable to distinguish these two parties – captor and captive – within you. For when the Nephites try to fight back, they just make their captivity worse. When captives try to fight captors, both sides are defined by their relation to the other; both are poles of a single archetype called “captivity.” This is always true. But when you break the way the define themselves by the other – that is, when they try to gain freedom by some other way than fighting – then freedom can actually come.

Notice how  the narrator Mormon says this idea in the previous chapter’s text: 

And now all the study of Ammon and his people, and king Limhi and his people, was to deliver themselves out of the hands of the Lamanites and from bondage.

They have given up fighting; they want to slip through their captors’ hands and go to freedom, their former captors be damned. In the anger example, that person has decided that they can’t fight against their anger anymore. It just bottles up the rage and leaves them more prone to losing their temper later. And it is only by giving up the fight like this that we can escape evil’s captivity. Evil -whether anger, hatred, or lust – wants us to fight it. That keeps it alive; it keeps us locked in those twin poles of captivity. By giving up fighting, we no longer define ourselves by our captivity. And this doesn’t mean we give up all efforts toward freedom. We just do it in a much cleverer way.

The key is to define ourselves in a way unrelated to our soon-to-be-former captors. This is what it means to get them drunk. You can do this by saying to the captor that is your anger: “You can have me! Come and get your fill!” You give yourself to the feelings you have tried to push away and immerse yourself in the fury and the rage. But here’s the catch: by doing this, you simply let the anger or whatever feeling do what it will and, crucially, you do it without fighting it or acting it out. This will make the anger acting like a parasite in you get so excited that it will forget your ego entirely. It will just do its thing in your body and get itself drunk on its own feelings. It will then be satisfied and, in the moment where it no longer oppresses you, you slip away. In other words, you let the anger, lust or whatever define itself by its own effects and not by you. It becomes its own captive, so to speak. And when this happens, you’re free to define yourself some other way.

Three notes before I finish: one, this is basically a process that scholars like Henry Corbin, James Hillman, and others call “ta’wil,” “epistrophé,” “psychologizing” or even “seeing-through.” This process involves “returning” each phenomenon to its source in higher worlds and the divine. When you let your anger and your lust get drunk on its own energy, this is what you’re doing: returning the fire of that rage or passion to its source, leaving you out of its way. There are more concrete ways you can do this too. In the book Making the Gods Work For You, author Caroline Casey talks about how you can solve a problem by making that problem bigger…in the form of a ritual:

The Odyssey provides a Neptunian initiation tale. After fighting the Trojan War, Ulysses’ single goal is to reach home. But because Ulysses has angered Neptune by blinding the one-eyed Cyclops, one of Neptune’s children, the sea god sends disorienting winds and extravagant, weird, erotic adventures to distract Ulysses and blow him off course. Who can’t relate? Finally, Ulysses consults Tiresias, the blind Underworld prophet, a kind of Pluto figure, who says, “You have angered Neptune. Here’s the ritual you must perform. Take an oar, a symbol of the sea, and walk it inland. When you get to a place where no one has ever seen the sea, there you must build a temple to the god who has been oppressing you.” So Ulysses does this, walking inland until somebody asks him if the oar is a piece of a windmill, so he knows he has found the right place. He builds a temple to Neptune, the god who has been oppressing him, and it works. In an act of reversal magic, Neptune becomes his ally and sends him sweet winds. Ulysses sails for home, where he reclaims his kingdom. Our task is to reflect upon what it might mean to build a temple to the god who has been oppressing us. What kind of oar do we take inland? The Neptunian part of us says that to liberate ourselves, we must carry our vision inland to where nobody has ever heard of it before, and give our gift there. It is easy to hang out in a homogeneous neighborhood; go somewhere new.

Let your obsession, fear, or anger get drunk on itself as much as you like within a “ritualized container”: maybe set a timer and get as afraid and as angry as you can within that stretch of time. But the key is to do it for the sake of the “god” in the fear or anger, dedicating it to the energetic frequency has staked its claim on you, like it or not. By doing that, you revert the god’s energies to the god himself. You let him get drunk on his own essence.

Second, this principle should work just as well on a large scale. Just as someone can be imprionsed by lust or anger, whole societies can be imprisoned by either unfortunate series of events or unfortunate states of mind, which those events play out. Likewise, the key to solving shootings, racism, or coporate greed isn’t fighting it. That will only make it stronger and more entrenched, which is what has happened again and again. The key is to get those collective events and tendencies drunk on themselves. Like with Caroline Casey’s suggestion, maybe we can try doing what greedy Mylan CEOs or racist Trump supporters are doing, only in a ritualized container. We can honor the god playing out in Trump or mass shootings and thus give the god its fill so we can slip away from its grasp. 

Third, this doesn’t mean that fighting is always bad. Since there are many wars by righteous people in the Book of Mormon, this should be obvious. Instead, fighting is always bad when you’re doing it as a captive, that is, in response to a captor. You’ll notice that there are no revolutions in the Book of Mormon, at least none that lead to anything good. Instead, fighing is always done from a place of freedom and as such is done to preemptively get rid of threats to that freedom. Captain Moroni and his brilliant strategizing is a case in point. In those cases, the fighters are defined by their relationship to the freedom they already possess, not by their antagonism to another group opposing them. To aim at freedom is freedom. To aim at captivity is captivity. And likewise, if we leave it to itself, captivity always drunkenly cleans itself up.

What Spirits Feel Like

I’ve not made it a secret that I love the 18th-century renaissance man and spiritual seer Emanuel Swedenborg. But one thing I’ve not talked about a lot is his doctrine about the correspondence of the human body to heaven. In his spiritual instruction from heaven, he learned that the whole of heaven is in the form  of a “universal human” or Maximus Homo, a body that  angels make up like individual cells. This is both literal and a metaphor. It’s a metaphor because we don’t actually look like white blood cells or neurons in the spiritual world. However, it’s literal in the sense that there is a very strict correspondence between the parts of the human body and the different parts of heaven. For instance, he writes that “People who are in the head in the universal human that is heaven are supremely involved in everything good,” and that “People who are in the feet are in the outmost heaven, which is called ‘natural-spiritual good,'” and even that “People who are in the kidneys are in truth that probes and discriminates and purifies.” Rather than our looking like kidneys, spleens, or eyeballs, Swedenborg says that in heaven, we correspond to those organs by our function. Therefore, the first group I mentioned functions like the head, the second functions like the feet, and the third functions like the kidneys.

But it goes further. Swedenborg writes that each of these “spiritual communities” actually cause influx into the organs in our bodies that they correspond to. Swedenborg explains this idea in a paragraph from Heaven and Hell:

The communities that are in a particular member, then, correspond to the like member in a human being. For example, the ones in the head in heaven correspond to our head, the ones in the chest there correspond to our chest, the ones in the arms correspond to our arms, and so on for the rest.

This thought brings me to this post’s title. For if all the spirits in heaven correspond to different parts of the human body, how would we experience their presence in us? Swedenborg writes that we have at least four spirits with us all the time (two good ones, plus two evil ones to keep us in the balance we need for free will), so how do they manifest? Well, first and foremost, they show up in bodily feeling. For if these spirits correspond to parts of my body, it is only makes sense to say that I would feel some manifestation of their presence in that body part. For instance, think of what Mormons call “the burning in the bosom,” that sweet warmth in the heart that accompanies manifestations of truth and love. Swedenborg would interpret this manifestation as a sign that angels from the inmost heaven (the heaven of the heart) are drawing close to you in spiritual space. In other words, it means that you’re becoming similar enough in kind to those angels that you can open up to the warmth of their love.

This also works for less pleasant spirits. Commenting on these spirits, Swedenborg writes elsewhere in Heaven and Hell:

I have been enabled to learn where we get the anxiety, distress of mind, and inward sadness called depression. There are spirits who are not yet united with hell because they are still in their first state….They love half digested and noxious substances like the foods that are becoming excrement in the stomach, so they attach themselves to the same sort of matter in us, because they find delight in it; and they talk with each other there out of their evil affection.The emotional tone of their conversation flows into us, and since it is contrary to our affection, it brings about a sadness and an anxious depression; while if it agrees with our affection, it brings about a sense of happiness and exhilaration.  These spirits can be seen in the neighborhood of the stomach, some on the left and some on the right, some lower and some higher, nearer or father away – variously depending on the affections they are involved in. A great deal of experience has convinced me that they are the source of our anxiety of spirit. I have seen them, heard them, felt the anxieties that well up from them. I have talked with them, they a have been driven off and the anxiety has ceased, a they have come back and the anxiety has returned, I have observed its increase and decrease as they drew near and moved away. It has become clear to me, then, where that anxiety originates that is blamed on a stomachache by people who do not know what conscience is because they do not have any.

Think of what anxiety feels like. If common metaphors are anything to go by, it feels like a “sickness” or a “knot” in “the pit of my stomach.” Swedenborg says that this isn’t just an accident of langauge: evil spirits associated with the stomach and its functions are  flowing into you at that moment and causing you distress. More specifically, the distress you feel is because you don’t agree with their affections (their evil emotional state, basically), which results in a painful battle of wills. So some good news for those with chronic anxiety: the fact that you feel worried all the time is evidence that the goodness in you is putting up a fight and won’t give up!

But the feelings of anxiety, depression, or even anger can be unpleasant. As such, I’ve found a book that describes a way to actually deal with these feelings in a way that more or less agrees with Swedenborg’s interpretation of them. It’s called Embrace of the Daimon: Healing through the Subtle Energy Body: Jungian Psychology & the Dark Feminine. Noting that a “daimon” is not a demon but instead an intermediary between the divine and human beings, the author Sandra Lee Dennis explains that these daimons manifest divine attributes in mental and bodily states. Speaking of these “daimonic images” that manifest in our thoughts and our bodily feelings, she writes:

A daimonic image weds instinct with its guiding image. It lives in us as a guide, a direction, a creative muse….when image meets body with respectful regard, the psyche opens to the subtle body, the visionary realms connect. The two sides meet in our most satisfying experiences: in inspired creative work, connected relationship or those embodied contemplative moments that bring us to the the shores of vision where daimons reside.

Each daimon or daimonic image we encounter manifests with a desire to incarnate in our lives and, more importantly, our body. When I and it connect, I experience it as delight and embodied satisfaction. However, if we fight these energies, we will only make any pain we feel worse. Sandra Lee Dennis suggest that we work to incorporate those daimonic energies into our lives in a healthy way. Swedenborg, in his own way, also suggested this. He writes that every part of the body has both a good and an evil correspondence, implying that any negativity we feel in the body also has a “good” version.  

Keeping Swedenborg’s teachings in mind, how does this work? Sandra Lee Dennis says that the key would be to “transmute” both those energies and my own in a way where they can unite. And luckily for us, she describes how to do this in a seven-step method she calls “bodily immersion”:

1. Attend to the predominant sensation of the moment. Often this will be a sensation we normally avoid, some unpleasant feeling, hiding just beneath numbness, disorientation, or restlessness, revealed by focused attention.
2. Let the sensation expand to fill the whole body.
3. Open to any imagery that forms in relation to the sensation. Ask, for instance, the sensation to speak or show more: “What are you trying to tell me?”
4. Once an image forms (it can be a sight, sound or smell), permit amplification of the sensation from the impact of the image [bascially “daydream from” the sensation as freely as you can], allowing a delicate titration from image back to sensation.
5. Attend mainly to the sensation, holding the image lightly, and detect the slightest pleasant sensation amid any discomfort, revulsion, or pain.
6. Shift focus, “identity” to the pleasurable sensation (despite the pull back into the habitual identification with, or numbing to, the predominant discomfort).
7. Finally, allow the pleasant, expansive aspect of the phenomenon to grow and to carry the image and identity along with it.

I’ve tried this technique, and let me tell you, it works wonders. I’ve carried tension in my body for a lot of my life, and while meditation and mindfulness have been helping me get rid of it, this technique went leaps and bounds beyond anything I’d tried before. It was as if the tension in my jaw or my stomach were released, like a “knot” being untied, and a wave of pleasant energy then washed through my body. I realized that this pleasant energy had been trapped in those places of tension for years, since I had found it scary or unacceptable, but now I experienced it full on as something wonderful and frankly blissful.

In Swedenborgian terms, this means that I was beginning to access the good parts of those spiritual organs, accessing heaven in my stomach or my jaw instead of hell. I was connecting with heaven in a new way, through a new part of my body, meaning that those angels there were manifesting in my body in a way more delightful than most experiences of my life.

(As a note before I finish, porn addicts should take note, since I suspect this technique also works for the lust after pornography. I can say for myself that these ecstatic unions with “daimons” or angels are some of the most joyous, spirit-filled, yet viscerally embodied experiences of my life.)

Anyway, that’s that. Try this and tell me what you think. Cheerio, and God bless!

Donald Trump the God

The current Republican candidate for president Donald Trump isn’t a human being. To be human is to be just human: not a god, not a savior, but an ordinary, average mix and match of personality traits. For this reason, human beings are the envy of the gods. The psychologist James Hillman once said that the divine actually wants to become human (since infinity lacks finitude):

Why do we believe angels prefer angelic persons? Why assume that the genius wants only to be with geniuses? Maybe the invisibles are interested in our lives for the sake of their realization and as such are inherently democratic. Anyone will do. Maybe they do not recognize the concept “mediocre.” The daimon gives importance to each, not just to the Important…the angel has no way of descent in to the streets of the public common except via our lives.

Your everyday welder, housewife, or even homeless person may be more divine than a senator or a preacher. Divinity wants humanity; the doctrine of the Incarnation says this clearly. Knowing that, Donald Trump is not a human being – he is a god, an archetype, an angel. He has resisted the pull to incarnate in the human world of limitation, dirt, and sweat, and as a result he is inhuman. He has no identity of his own; he is just a vessel for these divine forces to come through. And that’s scary, not just because he therefore becomes an object of worship.

For human beings temper the gods. Gods on their own are what the psychologist Carl Jung called amoral – not immoral, but lacking the common sense that only comes from being human. Like a child playing with a delicate chemistry set, they don’t have the worldly know-how to direct their transcendent energies. Donald Trump is also amoral – he famously “shoots his mouth off” because his mouth has no “lid;” he has no humanity to vessel his divinity. He says whatever the god in him wants to say. He has no edit button, since editing is a function of the human.

But what god is Trump? What kind of divine energy goes through him? Well, he’s obviously a manifestation of what Jung would call the “shadow” of our collective ego – the parts of us we’ve repressed coming out of hiding. Hence, his appeal to many is that he says things  many people were afraid to say. He “gives permission,” and by doing this he sets free a whole bunch of energy that was pent-up before. This energy is playful, boisterous, and rude. He is like Shakespeare’s Falstaff, Dostoyevsky’s character Fyodor Karamazov, or even your standard court jester. He takes nothing seriously; he says whatever comes to his mind; and he becomes immensely popular for this reason.

This energy of playful, rude boisterousness is important. It’s a central part of the American psyche, whether you see it in Mark Twain or Stephen Colbert. But the problem is, like I said before, that Trump only serves this divine energy blindly. He’s completely possessed by its god, and he can’t temper it at all. The only thing we can do, then, is to integrate it into ourselves: to take that boisterous divine energy and consciously incarnate it in a way that makes its work with Donald Trump unnecessary. Donald Trump, more than anything, is a call to consciousness. Let’s pray that we hear it.

Pornography Addiction’s Deeper Meaning

(Disclaimer: This post is shamelessly biased toward men and their problems with porn, and it’s written with that context in mind. Sorry about that, ladies.)

While praying this morning, I got the impression that I needed to write a post about pornography addiction. In Kundalini Yoga teacher Felice Austen’s words “The Church is getting its butt kicked by pornography.” It’s a real problem. In that light, I wanted to help people suffering with pornography addiction by giving them new ways to think about pornography. I don’t want to condone it by any means. Instead, I want to help those people re-interpret it so that they can better know how to heal their addictions.

These insights will come from my all-time favorite thinker: Emanuel Swedenborg, the eighteenth-century Swedish renaissance man who was so spiritually attuned that he could see angels and even heaven in his day-to-do life. Specifically, I’m going to use the book Conjugial Love, his treatise on the nature of love in marriage and the perversion of that love in “promiscuous love.”

The first thing to realize about pornography use is that it’s different in character from what Swedenborg would call “the delights of marriage.” This is true for a few reasons. First, pornography use can only ever be “external:” the warmth of love you feel in pornography use is only external, in the genitals, and you never feel love in internal parts like the heart and lungs. In Swedenborg’s own words, when speaking of unrestrained lust in his own day:

For immoderate and inordinate fornications are as flaming fires that spring up from the ultimates and consume the body, parch its fibers, defile the blood, and vitiate the rationals of the mind; for they burst forth as a flame from the foundation of the house and burn up the whole.

When Swedenborg talk about “flaming fires that spring up from the ultimates,” the word “ultimates” means the external parts of the human mind: thoughts and fantasies that aren’t reflected on, the sensory input of a pornography video, the flesh of a porn star. This is one of the evils of pornography: it doesn’t see the “internals” of whatever it lusts after (the feelings written in a loved one’s face, the warmth of the heart around her, etc.) but only the external sensory data. Instead of a living embodiment of divine love, the person gets seen as a titillating bag of meat, an object.

The other evil of pornography is that it indulges in something Swedenborg called “the lust for variety.” Speaking on this lust, he writes:

This lust instills itself with the those who in youth have loosed the restraints of modesty, and with whom there have not been wanting plenty of courtesans, especially if there was no lack of means to meet their demands. They implanted and inrooted the lust within themselves by inordinate and unlimited promiscuity, by shameless thoughts about the love of the female sex, and by confirmations that adulteries are not at all sins. As it goes on, the lust so increases in them that they desire the women of all the world, and would have a troupe, a new one every day. Since this lust casts itself out from the common love of the sex implanted in every man, and altogether from the love of one of the sex, which is conjugial love, and casts itself into the exteriors of the heart as the delight of all love apart from them and yet of them, therefore it is so inrooted inwardly in the cuticles that it remains in the touch after the bodily powers have become languid. 

The paragraph describes the evils of porn use and the suffering of porn addiction to a T. Those who are addicted to pornography were those who a) loosed their modesty enough to try it and b) who had enough virtual “courtesans” to have a troupe of women with a new one to enjoy every day. Swedenborg goes on to describe how “this lust is love and at the same time loathing of the sex,” since it loves women when it hasn’t yet “had” her, but hates her when it has “had its fill” with her. He describes this evocatively:

Place on the left hand a company of those that they have enjoyed, and on the right a company of those whom they have not enjoyed. Would they not look upon the latter with love and upon the former with loathing? 

The lust of variety is the biggest evil of porn use, since it takes the warm delight of conjugial love (the delight of gazing into your beloved’s eyes, the happiness of making them happy, the warmth of touch meant to show love) and “as it were grinds it to dust and thus annihilates it.” Swedenborg explains how conjugial love, more than just the love between  married partners, is the love at the inmost level of our being. At our innermost levels, we are a marriage with all its delights. As such, when those with the lust for variety are let into themselves, they are inwardly empty, trying desperately to find that inner warmth the only way they know how: the flesh of yet another porn star.

Finally, porn use can actually cause a loss of sexual potency and other aspects of virility, which people talk about today but which Swedenborg knew very well: 

[With purposed and confirmed adulterers] the faculty and virtue which is called manly become enfeebled even to none; and after that also begins coldness toward the sex; and then follows disdain which leads to loathing. 

Porn use actually kills the heart of divine sexuality in you, which will make you more lustful but less able to consummate that lust. Moreover, the opposite is true for conjugial love: with it, men become more and more potent, virile, and confident. 

So what is a porn addict to do? If they’re trying to find the warmth of love but have dissipated that love by focusing on purely external things, how can they get it back? I’ll offer a few suggestions, all using Swedenborigan terminology.

First, do useful things. In Swedenborg’s system, “use” describes what happens when you put good intentions and true thoughts into action. When I don’t just want to help people but, instead, actually clean the kitchen or say a kind word to another, I make love real, since love in the mind doesn’t fully become itself until it enters physical action. And the love that comes through in good deeds is conjugial love or the love of marriage, since in it good and truth wed themselves to produce something that contains both of their essences. In Swedenborg’s own words:

…every angel is an angel according to his use. The enjoyment of use carries him along as a favoring current does a ship, and causes him to be in eternal peace, and in the rest of peace. This is meant by eternal rest from labors. That an angel is alive according to the eagerness of his mind from use, is very plain from the fact that every angel has conjugial love, with its virtue, its potency, and it’s delights, according to his eager application to the genuine use in which he is.

When you serve others from a place of love, you cultivate that love and its fire until it overwhelms you with something porn could never come close to. Porn addiction is but a poor substitute.

Second, don’t insist that you’re the only one who can beat porn addiction. Because you can’t do anything on your own; only God can save you. In fact, the more you insist that you’re the “hero” who’s going to slay the porn monster, the worse it’s going to get. Only action prompted by God, or more specifically, from His love present in you, will help. Swedenborg describes the importance of this “passivity” to God in his other work True Christianity:

In the case of charity and faith, the Lord acts and the person acts in response to the Lord, for the Lord’s activity lies within the person’s passivity. Therefore the ability to act aright is for the Lord.

That’s not to say that you should do nothing. That’s the furthest thing from Swedenborg’s intent. Instead, he means that you should be passive to the impulses for goodness within you, never being concerned about whether those good actions will be received well by another person or if they will have an effect. To worry about the effects of good deeds is to not follow Jesus’ counsel to “take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on.” You should instead always “take no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.” So doing, the good deeds that cultivate conjugial love within you will grow warm and bright much faster than if you tried to smother it with anxieties that, since they don’t trust in the infinite but instead the finite. are ultimately self-centered.

Finally, you can’t overemphasize the power of practices like meditation, Kundalini Yoga, or even exercise. Kundalini Yoga especially is a very effective way to free promiscuous love “trapped” in the lower chakras by transmitting it into higher, more pure conjugial love. Here’s a video to get you started: 

Instructions for the Sat Kriya

Keep trusting God. Even something as evil as pornography can be a mercy, since, as Swedenborg often said, evil can only ever be removed if it’s first expressed. So when you’re ready, use these tools to help remove it. God bless you – and He certainly loves you more than you know. 

The Book of Mormon’s Call to Consciousness

1 Nephi 1 is the first chapter of the Book of Mormon, a sacred text in the Latter-day Saint religion which I belong to. It’s pretty famous for us Mormons – most of us know the first sentence from memory, and we probably know it better than any other chapter just because we’ve read it the most (thanks to any aborted read-throughs). But this chapter is important, and not because of its placement in the book. Rather, it’s important because it shows what Mormonism is about. And Mormonism is about freedom from captivity.

But before we get to that, let’s read the chapter. The first part of the chapter I want to talk about goes like this:

4 For it came to pass in the commencement of the first year of the reign of Zedekiah, king of Judah, (my father, Lehi, having dwelt at Jerusalem in all his days); and in that same year there came many prophets, prophesying unto the people that they must repent, or the great city Jerusalem must be destroyed.

5 Wherefore it came to pass that my father, Lehi, as he went forth prayed unto the Lord, yea, even with all his heart, in behalf of his people.

6 And it came to pass as he prayed unto the Lord, there came a pillar of fire and dwelt upon a rock before him; and he saw and heard much; and because of the things which he saw and heard he did quake and tremble exceedingly.

If you’re a Mormon, it’s easy to skim over these verses just because they’re so familiar. But if you look with fresh eyes, you can notice some interesting things. First, notice that Lehi prays in behalf of his people. This means that when  Lehi prays for his people, he’s doing something that no one else in Jerusalem could do: not only distinguishing himself from the sinful, but also showing compassion on the sinful he separated himself from. To separate yourself from the attitude of the masses and their “peer pressure” is a very difficult task, and it involves having enough perspective to see the way things really are. This is what some psychologists call “consciousness”: the awareness of emotional processes going on, which can only happen by disinguishing your sense of self from it. Moreover, consciousness is often compared to a light, while unconsciousness (psychologically speaking) is compared to darkness. So when Lehi sees a bright fire on a rock, that fire is God symbolically showing him what had come alive in his heart: a bright, compassionate awareness of the suffering happening in Jerusalem at the time. Now, remember what was about to happen: Jerusalem was going to be sacked by the Babylonians and its people brought into a centuries-long captivity. Considering this historical reality, what we see in Lehi’s first vision is a contrast between light and darkness: the light of consciousness and  darkness of unconsciousness; or what says the same thing, the light of freedom and the darkness of captivity. 

That idea may seem alien to you. But it is true: the more psychologically unconscious you are, the more you fall prey to your whims, projections, and compulsions. With no reflection, you aren’t able to switch tracks, so to speak. To see this in action  think of mindless eating or your friend that has an annoying tic that he’s completely unaware of. If you don’t stand back from what you’re doing, you won’t know that you’re doing it. This was a big topic for spiritual teacher G. I. Gurdjieff. He explained that a human being is by default more of a machine than a living thing. Made up of countless “I’s,” we naturally just obey whatever “I” happens to be in charge at the moment and don’t give it a second thought. This isn’t freedom but slavery. As philosopher and Gurdjieff fan Jacob Needleman puts it in his philosophical dialogue I am Not I: “Only fools imagine that freedom means getting what one happens to desire.” You can only really be free when you’re conscious, and you can only be conscious by wresting yourself away from the unconscious “I” you happen to have at this moment. By doing this, you don’t repress that “I” but instead start to see it. Only differentiated things can see each other.

This is what Lehi does. He is a bit of Jerusalem that has fled from it in order to see it rightly. And what he sees isn’t pretty. Jerusalem is held captive by what Gudjieff calls “It”: the unconsciousness in the human psyche that mindlessly obeys whatever It happens to want. In order for the Jewish nation to become conscious, It must endure suffering as a wake up call. But Lehi is brilliant in that he faces the darkness consciously instead of having to be forced to do it through disaster. In other words, Lehi deliberately faces the darkness instead of It exploding on him unawares. For the darkness in us has to be known in order to be healed; if we turn away from It, It will build up until it reaches a breaking point. And that isn’t fun.

Which brings me back to my main point. When Lehi turns away from darkness to see it clearly, he’s repeating what Mormons do whenever they commit to the Church: our world is wrapped in unconscious darkness, and when we try to keep the commandments, we are forced to face It. For being in the Church isn’t easy. Many struggle to keep the commandments, and some are even pushed to the brink of despair because of it, but I’ll suggest that the struggle and despair are the point. Struggle within oneself is a fight of “I’s” with each other to separate themselves out. And this struggle, this separation, is what we Mormons do when we resist the ways of the world either in our struggles with sexuality, peer pressure, or what have you. We’re wresting consciousness from the pitch-black mass of unconsciousness that is our culture. The point isn’t that we become perfect, because perfection could very well be unconscious of itself. The point is to become conscious of our imperfection, since consciousness is what ultimately matters.

However, unconsciousness resents consciousness. So this is exactly what you see played out on the world stage: people hate and criticize the church for not sanctioning the ability of people to do what they want to do. This sounds like the progressive ring of freedom, but it is actually a cleverly disguised call back into unconscious captivity. The unconscious darkness  of humanity doesn’t want us to resist desire, since without a struggle, It can compel us to do whatever It wants as long as we naively believe that Its suggestions are my own desires. My desires are really mine only if I’m conscious of them. And that can only happen with outward restrictions to wake us up from our complacent, unconscious sleep.

Of course, “It,” the massive pit of unconsciousness, has a purpose too. Its purpose is, actually, to self destruct. That’s all it can do, since unconscious desires left without a check will eventually show their real nature as self-destructive. This is what you’re seeing today with all the shootings and the modern  ridiculousness of politics. Everything we’re unconscious of is demanding our attention in a catastrophic way: the darkness will out. Only those of us who consciously face the darkness can help make this process easier on us.

This is what 1 Nephi 1 tells us. Jerusalem is the America of Donald Trumps, violent protests, shootings, and the oppositional tone you find everywhere. Lehi is the LDS Church, or more correctly, those in it and elsewhere who face the the ugliness of the upcoming destruction by becoming conscious of it in themselves. Jerusalem as unconsciousness will be violently destroyed, but Lehi as consciousness will be saved. And that is the way it has to be.