What Does Spiritual Mean?
- Thread starter luka
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shiels
_
This is something I’d like to feel but don’t. Don’t know if growing up in Belfast brought out a kind of iconoclasm
sadmanbarty
Well-known member
i remember walking from kenningotn to elephant and caslte listning to harlem spartans once.
i got to the elephant and castle pub which i where uk garage was born and as i did i was hearing all these chopped up vocals they have on harlem spartans. it felt that there was a faint echo of todd edwards in there (i don't remember them having it in american rap) and suddenly seeing the elephant and castle pub as this vibrating, pulsating hub of uk garage, its shockwaves expanding out through time and space. reverberating in kennington.
craner
Beast of Burden
Another aspect is the ever-present prospect of imminent destruction: both cities operate as cults of death in many ways, which fuels their cultural and social vitality as well as their unique spiritual and religious traditions (the cult of San Gennaro is frowned upon by the Vatican; the Mardi Gras and voodoo traditions of New Orleas).
version
Well-known member
One of my favourite details of The Young Pope is that the Cardinal Secretary of State is a huge Napoli fan and obsessed with Maradona, to the point where one of his books has him on the cover in a Napoli kit and he goes mad at someone for saying Maradona's still on drugs.
I think spirituality is about the weak forces connecting things. Not the strong forces, like causation, through which things are related as objects of force, but the weak forces like affinity, association, patterning without an identifiable underlying mechanism. Syntax is a strong force, a law of language; rhyme is a weak force, associating words and phrases on the basis of mostly-accidental resemblance. Mostly but not entirely: the soundings of language aren't completely arbitrary after all, but record traces of etymology ("record" and "accord" both build on "cor", "heart") and the onomatopoeia of a shared sound-world. The spiritual isn't empty vapour, it's an ether through which associations pass. Dense in places, the faintest whisp in others.
In a world with few strong forces, without Newtonian mechanics, the domain of the spiritual is vast, enclosing. In our world, scientific knowledge of physical causation, and techno-scientific organisation of relations of production, mean we are caught in a net of strong forces. The spiritual is fugitive, drifting through the gaps. There is a tremendous desire to escape, somehow, back into its element; to imagine without constraint. But strong forces also bring security, predictability. Immature souls imagine spiritual connections as themselves strong forces, as if mastery of a language of suggestion would grant a measure of defence against contingency. Your horoscope predicts nothing; it is an imaginative probe, not a working model of fate.
In a world with few strong forces, without Newtonian mechanics, the domain of the spiritual is vast, enclosing. In our world, scientific knowledge of physical causation, and techno-scientific organisation of relations of production, mean we are caught in a net of strong forces. The spiritual is fugitive, drifting through the gaps. There is a tremendous desire to escape, somehow, back into its element; to imagine without constraint. But strong forces also bring security, predictability. Immature souls imagine spiritual connections as themselves strong forces, as if mastery of a language of suggestion would grant a measure of defence against contingency. Your horoscope predicts nothing; it is an imaginative probe, not a working model of fate.
shiels
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Puts me in mind of the “still small voice”
You'll find people working with saints on the fringes of chaos magic. Seems like a weird plot twist but makes sense.
Wordsworth would have said yes, but immediately identified the Instructors as avatars of his own creative imagination. Had he encountered the DMT elves I am certain he would have done the same.
luka
Well-known member
I don't have that PKD compulsion to search from an answer. I don't really care. It's pretty much just the communication channel between the I and the Not-I. If you want the Not-I to be the unconscious or some other aspect of the wider self or if you want it to be aliens, or gods. Don't matter does it? Maybe just pick something that a)is not too boring and b) doesn't make you paranoid or afraid.
shiels
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Yes.
I was in a pub in Southend last night speaking to a Christian guy who told me about his religious experiences and I was thinking about this thread. He described a vision where he was instructed by God to set up a charity to solve housing issues in the local area, something he’s apparently making good progress with, and another about demons on his back while he slept that seemed to match the sleep paralysis ‘hag’ phenomena closely.
He was doing the “you think I’m mad don’t you” thing, and taking a kind of pleasure in it. I said that I might not name these demons the same ways he does, I might not explain them in the same way, or react to their presence in the same way, but I’m not claiming they aren’t real, or that he’s lying or necessarily ill.
For whatever reason he experienced a ‘more real than real’ thing. A temporary break in the perceive boundary between outside and inside, and it seems the instenity of the breakdown leads to a manic effort to conceptualise it and restabilise. there’s a lot of creativity that goes on after the event, people will draw on whatever cultural material is available to make sense again, and they might also use it to their advantage. There can be a narcissistic willingness to ascribe spirituality to traumas or inexplicable experiences, a pride in being the one who was visited, was chosen. And more generally people learn to take pride in the bad or weird things that happen to them. Part of the path to healing from trauma seems to be rewriting the story with you as a hero. And then there’s that idea of god being created as we became aware of our mortality.
And maybe there’s something about the ego imposing itself again, after a temporary obliteration the pendulum swings back, the ego takes its revenge. At its most intense that’s messiah complex, where the visionary energy erupts through narcissistic will to power. and in these states the idea of what the spiritual ‘means’ is most forcibly codified and imposed on others, coming down from the mountain with your commandments.
I was in a pub in Southend last night speaking to a Christian guy who told me about his religious experiences and I was thinking about this thread. He described a vision where he was instructed by God to set up a charity to solve housing issues in the local area, something he’s apparently making good progress with, and another about demons on his back while he slept that seemed to match the sleep paralysis ‘hag’ phenomena closely.
He was doing the “you think I’m mad don’t you” thing, and taking a kind of pleasure in it. I said that I might not name these demons the same ways he does, I might not explain them in the same way, or react to their presence in the same way, but I’m not claiming they aren’t real, or that he’s lying or necessarily ill.
For whatever reason he experienced a ‘more real than real’ thing. A temporary break in the perceive boundary between outside and inside, and it seems the instenity of the breakdown leads to a manic effort to conceptualise it and restabilise. there’s a lot of creativity that goes on after the event, people will draw on whatever cultural material is available to make sense again, and they might also use it to their advantage. There can be a narcissistic willingness to ascribe spirituality to traumas or inexplicable experiences, a pride in being the one who was visited, was chosen. And more generally people learn to take pride in the bad or weird things that happen to them. Part of the path to healing from trauma seems to be rewriting the story with you as a hero. And then there’s that idea of god being created as we became aware of our mortality.
And maybe there’s something about the ego imposing itself again, after a temporary obliteration the pendulum swings back, the ego takes its revenge. At its most intense that’s messiah complex, where the visionary energy erupts through narcissistic will to power. and in these states the idea of what the spiritual ‘means’ is most forcibly codified and imposed on others, coming down from the mountain with your commandments.
Just to butt in:
The spiritual/psychedelic experience must always include an element of what you might call trauma, as it always requires the crossing of some kind of line/boundary, outside of everyday/routine experience. Some kind of conversion must occur, which by its nature means some kind of distress, at least for a small part of the journey across. It's a leap of faith.
The spiritual/psychedelic experience must always include an element of what you might call trauma, as it always requires the crossing of some kind of line/boundary, outside of everyday/routine experience. Some kind of conversion must occur, which by its nature means some kind of distress, at least for a small part of the journey across. It's a leap of faith.
I think it's true that spirituality often, and perhaps always eventually, involves encounters with Figures - persons or personified forces - whether they're ancestors or the spirits of trees and rivers or the presiding genii of places, or (in my case) the Electric Ghost who hovered in the darkness at the top of the stairs when I was four years old. So it's not all numinous and wafty. You meet with personae, which might be fragments of your own personality, or take that form because that is the only form in which you can apprehend them. You enter into colloquy with them (in the best case), or are terrorized by them (in the worst). Perhaps eventually you integrate them back into yourself, or in any case learn what they have to teach you.
pattycakes_
Can turn naughty
Tell us more about the electric ghost. Mine was a native American chief