ANTI-MYSTICISM
An Appendix to The Spanda Principle

The trouble with “Be Here Now” and other methods of adherence to Presence is that they still suggest the health of our consciousness is tied to something external to it: that the dispersal of the mind in its attachment to objects, to runaway trains of thought, to absent times past and future, should be remedied by focusing on a specific object (breath, body, visual aid, mantra, eucharist, holy text, silence of God, ambient There-Is); or by watching thoughts pass like clouds without following them or tracking them down; or by attending to that Now, by dints eternal and/or impermanent (nunc stans), as the only and final reference of awareness and of heart.

All of that is helpful so far as it goes. But whenever we are called to replace one intentionality of consciousness with another, we can be sure that we have not yet escaped its tendency to egress outward, away from itself, toward something external; we compromise with the mind’s out-spiralling by substituting bad target for better.

These are no doubt helpful individual means (Ānavopāya) for a mind whose outward thrust cannot be restrained or rightly channeled otherwise. Then the only option is indeed to train in one-pointedness, to extend the scope of cognizance to all mental contents and their paths, to foster a preference for stabler, steadier, limpider habits of experience (Sattva) as opposed to the inertial and oblivious (Tamas) or the restless and distressed (Rajas). It is certainly beneficial to set our heart’s intent higher, to reorient our abiding to the divine milieu.

But, at bottom, this training should lead to the evaporation of the illusion of the training wheel. That would be to understand and experience that, no matter where consciousness expands to, there is always a movement of contraction back into itself. If we designate this “Itself” as spaciousness, source, center, or abode of eternal return; or as rigpa; or as pure “I” consciousness; as emptiness of mind or plenitude of Siva; as beatitude or Satchitananda, we speak in metaphors for the sake of bettering our orientation to life. They give to the understanding an idea, image, and ideal to grasp as we strain to reform the waywardness of our graspings.

Likewise if we speak of the divine and empowered means (Sāmbhavopāya, Saktopāya) of effortlessness, spontaneity, pathless path, sudden awakening, satori, absorption in samadhi, cleaving to God in surrender, recitation of primordial mantra, direct insight into the nature of the Real: all of these are but goads and guideposts, inspirations and pointers (perhaps less helpful the more grandiose) for that simplicity (there’s another one!) of consciousness in its expansion out and return back in, this vibration (Spanda) which “is” the Universe and its dissolution in the “Same” (non-aliud).

It is perhaps inherent to the expressiveness of language that we rapture such with a poetry of “states”. And it is surely reasonable that we elaborate methods to more readily conduce the mind to this “staying power”. Nonetheless, we speak falsely if we let these expressions and practices lead us out and astray to some quality to discover or attain, some experience with some specific flavor, some datum of religious inheritance without which we would be lost. For one can hit the target and still be quite far away…

Even being, or being-there, or being-nowhere… even not-being-anywhere, or not-being-at-all… even This or Not-This, the Between, the Suchness, the Unchanging and the Ever-New… even You… all these are metaphors that fit and don’t fit. For it is Playfulness that reigns here. Truth is only ever half-said. Even Unspeakability is not of the essence; for the essence is as near as the unmoved-in-movement, the vibratory “exotude”, the transcendental rhythm of consciousness’s immanence as in-and-out-and-back-in — which, who knows, may never have happened; may never have left stillness.

—June 25, BWI-ATL
—See also Mark Dyczkowski, The Doctrine of Vibration, ch 2