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.

Imaginal News 7/24/2016: A Wave of Warm Kindness

In addition to the continually increasing heaviness of the human world, there has been an incredible wave of kindness flowing at the more attuned levels of that world. I have found myself compelled to say kind words and offer insights to mere acquaintances or on the Internet, and others have said that those insights were just what they needed at the time. They also helped me by saying so. Others I know have noticed this odd wave of compassion too, for instance saying that someone caught his attention by saying kind words to them that were out of character, and this happened for more than one person. And of course there’s the continual coming-togerher of Pokemon Go. 

But those events are just signs of a deeper imaginal movement happening. This kindness is a marker that a relational “energy” is becoming more aware in and of the world. In a world full of fear, anger, and sharply defined identities (which all play into each other), there can be no kindness or relational energy. But with The Age of Deposition well on its way, those identities are becoming relevant not as something we need to cling to but as something that our deeper nature wants us to lose. We’re like a toddler learning that his poop isn’t a part of his body and that he needs to let it go. And like poop, the energies we build into identities can only temporarily be a part of us and will hurt us if we cling to it. 

The kindness coming into the world last week is a sign that many of those with the right attunement are considering their duties to friends, family, and even strangers to be more important than their own well-being. The space between people is becoming conscious, and people on either side of that space are gradually turning themselves toward it. 

Of course, the deposition of identity is and will continue to be violent. Hence the chaos at the Republican National Convention, shootings, and the coup in Turkey. But even as this continues, it will become more and more normal. We will realize that it is unavoidable and continue our daily lives. But in those daily lives freed from fear by “giving up,” the force of kindness will gradually reach its warm brightness into our lives. And when that happens, the violence in the world will grow less and less prevalent. Maybe not in the news, but in real life. 

So pick up on that current of kindness! Do good deeds; say nice words. By doing those things, you’ll help the world. 

Visionary Activist Principles

I regularly listen to The New School at Commonweal‘s podcast. The host Michael Lerner is one of the wisest, most sober men I have encountered, and the discussions about everything from Jung to Gurdjieff to Rudolf Steiner have illuminated me beyond measure. So I was a bit surprised when the March 20 podcast from last spring featured one Caroline Casey, a self-proclaimed visionary activist and professional astrologer. But when I actually listened to her, I was astounded. She is like a sacred comedian; she runs a website called Coyote Network News, subtitled “a mythological news service for the Trickster-Redeemer within us all,” which demonstrates a bit of her character. She is what she calls “reverently irreverent”: flippant, off-color, and hilarious in a way that brings us closer to the divine. You’d have to hear her to understand what I mean. And lucky for you, you can: she hosts a weekly radio show/podcast called The Visionary Activist Show, a discussion of current events, spirituality, and even astrology, which largely inspired my recent “Imaginal News” series of posts. Check it out.

I have come to adore Caroline so much that I decided to get her book Making the Gods Work For You on Kindle. After reading it, I’ve come to think differently of astrology than I used to, but that’s not the point of this post. Instead, I want to list her seven “visionary activist principles” that she gives at the beginning of her book and comment on them a bit. They’re profound and very needed, so I wanted to bring them to your attention.

PRINCIPLE 0 (ZERO). Believe nothing, entertain possibilities. Therefore everything hereafter is offered playfully. 

This is the crux of the matter, and it’s our culture’s redemption. I realized after reading this that I had thought this way for at least the last few years but that almost no one else does. When you think in terms of what could be instead of what you think actually is, then the world becomes magic. No longer filtered through a fixed set of beliefs, you can meet things on their own terms. Life as a dance, not as an intellectual subjugation of the world.

PRINCIPLE 1. Imagination lays the tracks for the Reality Train to follow.

Imagination is the way the unseen manifests in the seen at all. As Sufi mystics explained, the imagination is a barzakh or medium through which the divine can connect with and inhabit the world of finite matter. As such, any imaginative act is an act of God, a preliminary act of creation. That’s not to say you can’t pervert this ability to your own ends; you can, and that’s what Caroline calls “black magic.” Instead of that, you should channel divine energies toward an end that works for both you and the whole. Instead of subverting a “perpendicular” impulse, you “spiral” it with your own.

PRINCIPLE 2. Better to create prophecy than to live prediction. What makes us passive is toxic. What makes us active is tonic. This is the difference between predictions, which make us passive, and prophecy, which is active co-creation with the divine.

Swedenborg once wrote that God doesn’t give us much knowledge of the future because that knowledge would make us either passive or paranoid. But you can get to the point where the divine  trusts you with prophecy, not as a guarantee that things will work out no matter what, but as a loosely guiding impulse that you can help direct. When you know the future, it’s much better to work with it than to fight it or slothfully submit to it. Again, a spiral of human and divine.

PRINCIPLE 3. The invisible world would like to help, but spiritual etiquette requires that we ask. Help is always available (operators are standing by).

The world which imagination manifests – the spiritual world, the world of divine love – cannot help us unless we ask. Helping without our asking would violate our free will, and it would also get us to shrink back from the spiritual in fear or annoyance. Prayer is a superlatively effective “asking for help” like this. When you pray, you ask for help from the root of all divinity, and that divinity plants a seed in you that grows into something that will work for both you and Him.

PRINCIPLE 4. The only way the gods know we’re asking for help is ritual.

When Caroline writes the word “ritual,” I take it to mean any physical action that incarnates a divine principle. Prayer is obviously a ritualistic action like this: you have to do something to pray, and the more you make it a physical action, the more powerful it becomes. But you can also use other rituals in tandem with prayer. Anything that symbolically corresponds to a divine quality can be used as a way to focus the light of that quality in your life. For instance, I do this with books: if a book symbolizes something meaningful for me at a certain moment, I’ll put it in my personal sacred space to reinforce the divinity trying to get through in that meaning. By doing that, I work with the god (the divine aspect) working in that situation.

PRINCIPLE 5. If something’s a problem, make it bigger.

This is very counter-intuitive, but it’s a true principle. If you struggle with something, there is something good in you trying to get out through that struggle. Evil is just our denial of the good that, without our help, comes out in ungainly ways. By making the problem bigger, you communicate to that goodness that you are willing to work with it. “Step out into the light,” you tell the good in your struggle. “Let’s see what you have to say.”

PRINCIPLE 6. We only possess the power of an insight when we give it expression.

Truths are great. You can read books for years and years and get lots of them, but it won’t be worth anything if it doesn’t lead to action. Swedenborg also says this. Without expression in “usefulness,” a truth is a dead, or better stillborn, thing. Only actions bring true insights to life.

PRINCIPLE 7. Creativity comes from the wedding of paradox. We aspire to be disciplined wild people who are radical traditionalists.

A huge problem today is that people can only think in extremes. And more specifically, they only identify with one of the extremes. But the issue really comes to light when you ask: “Who decided where to draw the lines in the first place? What makes it so everyone agrees on where the line is?” The reality is that we’ve all been duped. There is no ultimate liberalism or conservativism, no spiritual nor secular: conservatism wasn’t anything until liberalism came along, and neither was spirituality until the first secularists. We rebel against these blind dichotomies by accepting elements from both sides. So doing, we can recreate the vibrant whole that existed before we divvied it up into sides.

That’s that. Practice these principles, and see the amazing things that result.

Imaginal News 7/18/2016: Flickers of Love; Self-Aware Mobs; A New “Weight”

The imaginal world: the world which everything in our world is a symbol for. Here’s what’s happening there: 

There is a timbre of love that wasn’t there a few days ago. I can’t give specific examples, but it is there. People (those with hearts turned the right way) are being kinder. Mercy is being shown to those who need help. 

And yet this is still in the context of a larger struggle. The world remains locked in people’s identification with their roles: man, woman, gay, trans, non-binary, or even a person with a single name and set of traits. But this can’t happen forever. Identities are defined by their edges, and so they must struggle to keep existing. But they’re now locked in their death throes. 

The world is becoming a mob. In Turkey and the Republican National Convention this is very clear, but it’s also apparent in Pokemon Go.However, the mob is going to become conscious of itself; the life that flows between us, between our identities, is beginning to wiggle its fingers and toes after a long sleep. 

But mostly, the divine nature of matter or heaviness is still on its way to realizing itself in a way unlike anything that has happened yet. The dust of heaviness in the air is beginning to settle, a bit more this week than last. Divine fire is becoming incarnate in matter. 

Look for more large, violent, massive phenomena in the next bit. This is that heaviness trying to incarnate. You can help by letting it incarnate consciously and on human terms rather than with blind elemental force. Consult your own conscience for this. 

The Imaginal News for July 14, 2016

Here’s your imaginal news report: the state of the world as seen from the imaginal world, the place where everything that is seen is real, where being is sight. Hopefully what I mean will become clear. Believe everything; doubt nothing.

The gods up on Mount Olympus are beginning to descend into the world of mortals. Or alternatively, divine fire is taking on the shape of human beings. Or more clearly, the various ways that divine love expresses itself (what Swedenborg called “heavenly communities”) are becoming conscious of themselves on earth in a new way.

This means that things are going to get really intense. Divine fire is descending to earth, and that fire figures that we have enough capacity to “hold” it. And they’re right, even though it may not seem like it at first. We’re being baptized by fire, and when we come out, we’ll realize that we can hold it safely within us

Pokemon GO is a manifestation of this fire. It’s wedding heaven and earth in an unprecedented way as love is manifesting between people of all walks of life trying to catch Pokemon. Friends are being made; people are coming out of their shells and coming into the world’s daylight. Activities before done only on the Internet are now being made in the physical world, meaning that the divine world of love in itself (which the Internet reflects) is coming into reality. More specifically, Pokemon GO is the divine reality of communication and connection coming to earth. Hermes is taking on human flesh.

But the fire also comes through in violent ways. With the shootings happening almost daily, a vengeful force from the imaginal world is trying to force her way through where there is no bridge. The truck that rammed into the crowd today in Nice manifests this literally: where there are no bridges between sides, there can only be collisions. The truck could be seen as a metaphor for the force of this extra-human archetype trying to get into our collective crowd of being.

For it is heaviness that we have yet to wed to the connection displayed in Pokemon GO and elsewhere. The divine fire is descending, but the part of that divine fire having to do with forcefulness and inertia isn’t integrated into that descent. Pokemon are bringing people together, but they are incorporeal and pass through our bodies as we see them on the screen. The violence we see in the world manifests inertia and matter’s attempt to wrest its way into our consciousness. Stuff wants to be seen and felt – the density and heaviness of dirt, flesh, and bark.

What does this look like? I’d say it’s the Devouring Mother, the force of instinctual wisdom and terrible power that we have repressed and kept captive for millennia. She is crying from the dust of our ignorance (ignore-ance), and these outbursts of violence are ways that she forces us to pay attention. She can’t do anything else; since we repress her, she is unconscious, and she cannot reason and plan like a conscious being can. She is the force of matter, the divinity of life in its rhythms and pulsation that we don’t pay attention to, what women know by instinct but is ignored by our masculine culture.

Her anger is only her shadow side, though, the side of her that shows without the light of consciousness. We only see her anger because she doesn’t have the luxury of consciously knowing her own depths. We are the mirror in which she can do that. By listening to the hum of the ground and the the blood in our veins, we can finally begin to give her the consciousness she craves. So doing, the force of matter can burst its way into the world with unprecedented force.

Donald Trump manifests a masculine force fighting from her anger. He’s what Jungians would call the “animus of the anima” a force coming out from the dark cave of the Mother’s hollow body. He’s fighting against what makes sense; he violates all our modern cultural propriety, which of course none of us really have. He, ISIS, and the policemen who shoot unarmed black men are manifesting a very primordial, unconscious rage against rationality and consciousness limited by a defensive ego. When these nonsensical things happen, the Devouring Mother shows us that we all hide an unconscious violence held captive since an earlier age. With her, these repressed unconscious energies can be acted out so we can consciously recognize them. That way the Mother can become conscious.

The Hermes figure manifesting in Pokemon GO and the odd connections happening alongside it can help with this. Maybe if we catch enough Geodudes, he can evolve into something that will help Her rise from the dust…

Anyway, that’s that for the imaginal news report. I’ll try to do these often.

The Last Temptation of Modern Life

I just came across this quote in Emanuel Swedenborg‘s Arcana Coelestia, Volume 4. It talks about something called “vastation,” a kind of temptation, which is Swedenborg’s word for the way the contents of our ego get emptied out:

[Vastation] is twofold; of one kind when a church altogether perishes, that is, when there is no longer any charity or faith, and when it is said to be “devastated” or “laid waste”; and of the other kind when they who are of the church are reduced to a state of ignorance, and also of temptation, in order that the evils and falsities with them may be separated and as it were dispersed. They who emerge from this kind of vastation are they who are specifically called the redeemed…

Swedenborg defined a church as any collective state of mind on earth. In that way, not only is Mormonism a church, but so is the New Age movement, atheism, or perhaps even the Doctor Who fandom. So when he says that a church can get “vastated,” he means that these collective ways of relating to the world would get threatened. Remind you of anything?

Today, our modern secular, surface-oriented, self-congratulatory lifestyle (our “church”) is getting vastated. As with all vastations and temptations, it is happening by way of the difficulties placed upon our way of life. Our materialistic lifestyle is getting unsustainable; the political process is deeply broken; violence has run amok. These difficulties are God’s way of getting us to abandon our frankly sinful way of life. Through them, we can get out of that sin and become “the redeemed.”

What is our sin? As with all sin, our transgressions are rooted in our belief that we have power to change things. We see ourselves as potentially all-powerful, and we feel compelled to filibuster, riot, or shoot up a nightclub to help the world become what it needs to be. This prideful attitude comes from something Swedenborg called the proprium, perhaps best translated as “what I call my own.” But in reality, nothing is my own – I am just a site of passage for both the beyond-human forces that pass through me and God, the all-in-all. When we think we can change the world through our rioting or our Facebook ranting, we’re attributing godhood to ourselves. And no matter our intentions in doing so, this is sin.

What does God want us to do? He wants us to stop fighting. He wants us to give up. Moreover, this giving up is inevitable. Like any temptation, the cultural temptation toward oppositional narcissism is put before us in such intensity to make it too painful for anyone to hold onto it. Like the practitioner of Zen meditation in full-lotus position who ends up relaxing her leg muscles out of necessity (I’ve been there), the oppositional nature of today’s culture will eventually be too painful to bear. Enough riots and hatred will have happened that we will abandon our belief that things could ever get better. And it is at this point that the world will start to heal. 

When we give up the fight, we will stop trying to defeat evil and instead start producing good. Instead of ranting against the evils of a church on Facebook, we will offer kind words to those who have been hurt by it. Instead of trying to save the world by refusing to cooperate with our political opponents, we will reach across the aisle. And instead of rioting after a police shooting, we will instead follow the seemingly forgotten pattern of the 1960s civil rights activists and, one by one, say “I love you” to the policemen spraying us with fire hoses.

We need to give up. Then God – who is love – will step in. There is no other way.

The End of Thinghood

I recently got the impression that a bright, divine light is exerting a lot of pressure on the physical world, and I want to explain how that can be true even in this age of shootings, riots, and reality-TV-star presidential candidates.

The physical world is the world of things, and “things” are any real beings that have an identity distinct from other things. You as a person, with a name, birth date, and identity, are a thing. I, as Christian Swenson, am a thing. Everything (or “every thing”) that you can point to in the world is a thing, since by giving it an identity distinct from everything else, you’re separating it from the vast expanse of Being when seen apart from definition.

However, the light that’s putting pressure on the physical world isn’t a thing. It’s what’s real apart from things. This bright light is therefore beyond the world, since the world is a thing, and the light is very literally the absence of things. This doesn’t mean that the light is nothing, at least not in the normal sense of the world. The real nothing is no-thing: not dark but instead overpoweringly bright. It’s bright because, unlike things, its being doesn’t belong to itself, since (as a no-thing) “it” has no “self.” As with all light, it gives without taking; it is giving; it is love.

Since the light is whatever is real apart from boundaries and definition, when I say that it’s putting pressure on the physical world of things, I mean that every “thing” is engaged in a struggle to maintain its stable identity, its thinghood. The walls around things are heavily cracked, and eventually nothing (no thing) will be able to exist in its own stable sense of self. Speicifically, the light pressing in on the world has been apparent for at least the last fifteen years. 9/11 announced that vertical hierarchies around the world were in the process of crashing down, and the ever-increasing fervor of the gay rights movement brought this collapse even further. A hierarchy is another name for a thing; hierarchies are what “stick out” from the sea of Being by claiming that they own themselves. As such, any claim to autonomy and self-ownership is dying. You saw this first with corporations and governments , but eventually even individual people will look in the mirror and find that they don’t recognize what they see there. None of us will belong to ourselves; there will be no “selves” to belong to.

Another way of explaining my intuition is saying that each “thing” is in the process of unraveling. Every thing is a combination not just of other things, but more importantly of forces that pass like rivers between things. Things are not just made of being; they are more importantly made of becoming. As such, they will never be “finished,” even if things necessarily believe that they are complete in themselves. To say that light is pressing in upon the world is to say that the dynamic forces which compose things are becoming conscious of themselves in a new way. No longer needing the fixed mirror of things to see themselves, those forces will begin recognizing their being in-between things, in the process of movement and relationship itself. 

As such, the world is bound to divide into two camps: those who embrace their no-thing-ness and those who stubbornly cling to their thinghood. The more the no-thing camp is true to its own position, the more it will seem naive, open-minded, and odd all at once. On the other hand, those in the “thing” camp will give off an air of arrogance, certainty, and condescension. The forerunners of the former camp, the camp of no-thing-ness, already exist in a place you may not expect: pop culture fandoms. Fandoms, whether of Doctor Who, Sherlock, or Supernatural, are hints of what religion may become in the coming generations. Members of these fandoms devote much of their time to media franchises, even though they know that their franchise isn’t “real.” And yet, Doctor Who is unreal only because it isn’t a real “thing.” However, Doctor Who is a real force, since it produces effects in people’s minds from entertainment to amusement to suicide prevention. To devote one’s time to one of these fandoms is to devote one’s time to its reality as a no-thing, as light. So as the light presses upon the world of things, you’ll get people taking the world less and less seriously. 

However, those who cling to the world of things will become more and more embittered in response to the influx of no-thing-ness’s light. People will spout hatred on social media more and more, and public shootings will continue to increase. However, these flashes of hatred are signs that the world is getting better, not worse. The thing-camp, whether in ISIS, Black Lives Matter, or gridlocked political leaders, are responding to the light’s threat. Thinghood is dying, and things are giving all their ammunition to defend their way of being. They will make it seem as though the world is decaying, but really it’s only the world of things that’s decaying, and they’re trying to reproduce in you some of the fear they feel themselves. Don’t fall for it; they won’t succeed. Eventually, the thing-camp will become so absurdly critical and bombastic that anyone selfless won’t be afraid but, instead, get amused.

You can see the contrast between these two camps even in last week’s events. Within a single week, we’ve had two major cultural events: Philando Castlile’s and Alton Sterling’s death by shooting and the subsequent outrage, and the release of Pokemon GO. It sounds insensitive to imply that these two events are comparably important, but that’s only because we don’t yet have enough perspective to see the effect Pokemon GO will have on the world of culture. With this simple video game, the world of forces or no-thing-ness and the world of things marry themselves in our cultural perception for the very first time. Though Pokemon aren’t real things, Pokemon GO lays the tracks for a way of being that doesn’t care about things’ reality. Instead, we have begun seeing the physical world only as a metaphor for the forces that can (only) manifest through it. Catching a Charmander in my driveway sets the light loose, since by doing so I see through the physical world to the forces of becoming that act through it. In other words, catching Pokemon is  a way to act without re-acting to world of things. However, the reactions to the aforementioned shootings are reactive to the extreme. Both sides fearfully see the other side as a thing, but by doing so they both unknowingly bring through forces of fear and hatred. The way forward is to simply leave the fray and turn the other cheek. The exodus from things has begun, and you can either walk safely amid the no-thing’s forces or get drowned by them.

If you believe me, you shouldn’t. Don’t take this post as gospel, but instead as an impulse to thought. Don’t look at it as a thing; look to the forces within it and follow them to where they want to go. In fact, do that with everything. So doing, you’ll help the light break through even more.