Stop Writing the Mechanical Bull, and Don't Leave Any Sacred Cowpies!

This is a continuation of whenever it was that we were discussing MotT and the Magician:

Now, the magician is the master archetype for our journey into the rest of the symbols -- the symbols themselves representing a kind of mirror of the totality of the Great Interior situated just over the egoic horizon.

Why is the magician the would-be spiritual knowa's archetype? Because he is the symbol of what we must become if we are to have a fruitful journey through the rest of this symbolically resonant world. We must become this magician. And what does this magician represent?

Well, among other things, he embodies the principle of Slack, in that we must leave the field of profane time behind, and become attuned to a more subtle music that has its own rhythms and harmelodies. Here is how UF formulates it:

Learn at first concentration without effort; transform work into play; make every yoke that you have accepted easy and every burden that you carry light!

The first of these prescriptions has to do with what we call the principle of Higher Non-doodling, which in turn is similar to the wu wei of Taoism. It also shares psimilarities with what Sri Aurobindo calls the attainment of the "silent mind," which is well explained in chapter 4 of The Adventure of Consciousness.

In fact, we may discern a convergence of the Christian and neo-Vedantic approaches, as Satprem writes that "the major task that opens the door to many realizations is to silence the mind.... Clearly, if we want to discover a new country within us, we must leave the old one behind -- everything depends on our determination to take this first step."

Part of this is in order to excape our existing container (♀) in order to assimilate the new content (♂) of the inscape. In other words, we need to somehow get beyond or behind or above or before our surface ego, or local self (•).

And why is that? Because "In a certain sense," writes Aurobindo, "we are nothing but a complex mass of mental, nervous and physical habits held together [read: contained, ♀] by a few ruling ideas, desires and associations -- an amalgam of many small, self-repeating forces with a few major vibrations."

Ouch!

This outward and external container becomes thicker and more dense, until we are "confined in a construction," which becomes a kind of pseudo-center by virtue of its rigidity and predictability. No more (♂). Your fortress against reality -- against the flow of interior novelty -- is complete.

This is why -- in a manner of speaking -- we might say that the first half of life involves learning, while the second half involves unLearning; or, we must be reborn as little children, who are so full of uncontainable and irrepressible (♂).

This requires not only a leap of but into faith (o), which Aurobindo describes as "an intuition not only waiting for experience to justify it, but leading toward experience." In other words, faith isn't just content but a mode of spiritual cognition, which brings new content into view. This content cannot be directly perceived by the ego.

Here again, UF agrees that we must achieve calm (---) and silence (o) "at the expense of the automatism of thought and imagination" (the bad kind -- more on which later). Only in so doing are we capable of authoritatively "speaking" of these matters, instead of merely being our own auto-copilot.

A Raccoon must never speak of spiritual matters in the predictable manner of writing the mechanical bull, for doing so results in the sacred cowpies of a Deepak. I suppose doing so has its place, but such familiar pneumababble is ultimately "by the dead and for the tenured," not for us.

One reason why silence is so critical -- shut up while I'm speaking! -- is that it is only in silence that we become "one" (anxiety always fragments and dissipates). And as UF writes, we must first become one in ourselves if we are to become one with the spiritual world. Unity is as unity does.

It's just common nonsense, isn't it? Without unity, there can be no knowledge of any kind. For example, the only reason we may possess scientific knowledge is because a primordial unity subtends the division of subject and object, knower and known.

However, that is the world of horizontal quantities, whereas the spiritual world is one of vertical qualities. Thus, the next step, according to UF, is to understand the Law of Analogy that governs the qualitative world of the vertical. This, of course, is why Jesus spoke in parables that are full of richly resonant symbolism with which we must "play" again as little children.

Well, playtime is almost over, but I'd like to conclude with some observations by Peter Kreeft from his highly effective mental disinfectant, Summa Philosophica. Chapter VIII article 3 considers Whether leisure is as necessary for man as work?

It IS, because allows us to BE: it "is not a practical means to a further end but exists for its own sake, like play. And since the end is of higher value and more necessary than the means, leisure is of higher value and more necessary than work....

"[L]eisure is not merely the absence of work but the presence of the higher ends which work makes possible, such as the understanding of truth, the love of goodness, and the enjoyment of beauty."

So if you're not playing, you're wrong