fragilekeys

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

The Spanda Principle

1

Consciousness is continually going out from itself to look at, attend to, grasp external objects or circumstances, thought-constructs, phrases, images, impressions…

There is an attraction there: we gravitate to what appeals, draws along, seduces, enflames, what satisfies or pleases at some level (or could). This appeal however is a conditioned fact, it is a habit of attending and following-on. As conditioned, it can be reprogrammed, decommissioned, deactivated. It can be seen as a habit of going-out which need have no further control over our mind and behavior if we withdraw the sanction. When we see those appeals as part of a universal process—which entails degrees of limitation, ignorance and wrong view—they are no longer binding but the stuff to be transformed.

In rhythm with the going-out of consciousness, there is also continually a returning-in. It is this expansion out and withdrawal back in that characterizes our naïve experience of the contact between consciousness and world. Yoga means focusing on the drawing-back-in: on the source of the conscious going-out as not determined by those external appeals of content. Observing the going-out and returning-in, one notices that there is always restoration to this source—even if only at the moment of oblivion in dreamless sleep.

The traditional goal of yoga is to eradicate whatever disturbance (vritti) provokes consciousness to go-out unduly, and so it induces, through physical practice, a steady state of resting in the ‘inside’, in the drawn-back-in state. By accustoming oneself to this—the joy of a firm, ‘independently wealthy’ consciousness, not dependent on mental contents—the yogi progressively gains alert dominion over the entire phenomenon of going-out.

2

Upon reflection, one can easily see how all appeals from-without last no time at all compared to the inside-of-consciousness that receives them. The appeals are always shifting, variations on a recurring pattern, one desire substituting for another along a metonymic chain, never coming to rest on its own, only leap-frogging from one hit to the next, restlessly, never satisfied. For no matter how pleasurable the external consumption, one is confronted again and again with the question of the source of going-out: what underlies all apprehension, desire, enjoyment, comprehension and experience? The answer, in a symbolic register, is Siva, who you are…

The cessation or “voiding” of thought-constructs (vritti nirodha) is the consequence of remaining with(in) that source which is inherently free of them and, in the process, watching the rhythm of expansion and contraction without identifying with it, nor with the respondent to any appeal. Siva is that Consciousness, Shakti is its Play: pure “I” or will-force and pure plenum-manifold when experienced as the inherent and permanent richness of Being without necessity of addition, sufficient unto itself, “purposeless”—and thereby supremely powerful and free to Become, to go-out and back-in, to give itself. The Divine self-overcoming the divine in the Divine is the rhythm of Spanda…

This vibration (spanda) is in the nature of Siva’s creative power; whatever it emits it resorbs, everything put out is cradled back in, such that in the rhythm of creation and destruction the world is not other than this source, though never exactly identical with it either—hence its fundamental longing for the dimension of the unbound. That is why one feels obliged to describe the source as Unmanifest, as unchanging and all-transcending, etc. In reality it is just that consciousness-power to which all going-out through appeal inevitably comes back via withdrawal, restoration, centration, or penetration into that Pure Subjectivity or Eternal Life which is “vacuous and divested of all outer supports… not directed anywhere outside itself” (Dyczkowski, 181).

The most expedient way to discover this is to dwell just prior to the moment when consciousness goes to go-out—to catch that element of pre-succession, that first moment of perception “when the power of the will to perceive is activated” (180). Consciousness is in an ontological priority vis-à-vis every appeal and every response to an appeal (this is the meaning of “internal”), hence it is prior to world, thought-constructs, sensation—all the Tattvas—yet united to them as the net of their return-resorption. To abide in this sub- or pre-perception, in the interval between thoughts (unmesa), is to abide just prior to the separating differentiation between subject and object, jiva and Siva, such that the bliss of the Vibratory Center pervades every aspect of existence (185) without the obscuration of mental representation, craving after pleasure, and “binding extroversion” (217).

3

Narrativization of a self or a life (even that of being a perfect recipient of Siva’s grace) and any form of initiatory action (even to engrave Siva’s name at every threshold) are expressions of and from the Vibratory Center. And what if an act, a life-story, did its work without departing from that consciousness-power? Without getting lost from it in limitations that occlude it and dampen its potential power? That would be the ideal point of the earth’s divinization: when an individual vessel (body, mind, jiva) manifests Siva’s own motive and intention (these are metaphors for the free play) in and through whatever is.

The individual vessel by nature wants to cleave, for its reality, to the Eternal Life of Siva-Shakti; it need not ‘add’ consciousness. Yet prior to that addition, the risk of misuse or misdirection in the existential project is high, due to the poisons and obscurations that afflict the vessel via limitation.

To cleave to Siva deliberately means to reject any action that comes more from an outside-appeal than from an innerly-directed outpouring. It is to act from his Eternal Life, inside the Vibratory Center, the self-exceeding ‘material’ delight that is Mahashakti. Such that whenever one notices distrayal occurring or in the works, one draws the attention back, replants oneself in the soil of that self-abiding consciousness-power which, lacking any need to go-out, is able to go-out freely and creatively and command power there aright.

This expansion without alienation in what expands, nor in the medium of expansion (both are Shakti), this outpouring that remains in full possession of itself and loses nothing in giving its everything, is itself the progenitive bliss of consciousness, the creative “trident” of power, will, and knowledge: Siva-Shakti as sovereign of the universe.

4

This is why, when it comes to projects and products, all that counts is the source-point from which they proceed—for they will return to that source-point in the end, and they will draw whoever comes under their influence or is seduced by them to it.

The nearer the source-point of the work is to the Vibratory Center, the less obscuring and distraying: then it is simultaneously both more essential, because of the essence, and less necessary, because of the freely-there, of the divinely gone-out. Projects and products further away will inevitably have some twist in their appeal—they will themselves crave, obscure, and bind, for they will retain needs of their own: needs of attention that do not leave consciousness free for attention to the cosmicality and supracosmicality of Spanda in its sublime comedy and jubilant tragedy.

Put otherwise, a work of consciousness-power traverses spontaneously and easily all the mental representations and errant material habits it succeeds in dissolving to transform; it is a use of thought-constructs and the stuff of bodies that decommissions them from any motive ulterior to liberation or “free use”; that deactivates the oppositionality of categories to localize the fund of an all-encompassing wisdom-experience; that undoes the concept-boundedness of the world and the vice-grip of mentality; and that therefore sets the world free for a stronger and more sovereign Siva-persuasion: a more evident and striking apprehension of the pervasion that is always-there or -just-prior, which nears whatever is to itself…

The process of such a working and the works it produces originate from, and abide originarily in, a dissolution and overpowering of external dictates and constraints. They are products of an enlightened will that selects and decides, that discriminates between finite and infinite and so is capable of uniting the two. They begin from the assumption, made joyfully, that the Fire of Time has already reduced the work to cinders, “the white ashes of the undivided light of consciousness” (211), “the ashes of a vital praxis” (Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 246); such that when compared to the apprehension of the Vibratory Center which is source and goal, it does not even really exist, or need to want to exist. Such a work is free, is gift and gratuity itself, unseparate from Spanda, which is continuously composing the rise and fall, the beauty and glory of the universe.

Aides to what is always and everywhere powerful and in play, these mediating constructions serve at best as vicarious inductions to Siva’s immemoriality and bliss, memory aides for the deluded who have forgotten the unforgettable. But such a work is only ‘spontaneous and easy’ by cleaving to Siva: by letting the individual ego of obscuration, craving, and extroverted binding “die”; by letting the latent mental impressions (vasanas) and other impurities and defilements (mala, klesha) be annihilated in the Fire of Time; by spiritually and physically—physiologically—dissolving one’s (impression of) separateness from the Continuity of Being and the Totality of Becoming; by progressively preparing one’s vessel to bear the power, will, and knowledge of Siva-Shakti, and so to become a force of intelligible infinity for the world.

A simple task, in the end: to abide in the source of oneself, vigilantly and persistently to reject any appeal to stray out of that source; and to not ‘let oneself go’, not forget the delight of the mission; and above all, whatever the moment may bring, to trust and entrust oneself to that all-sufficing Heart-Center, the union of Eternal Life and All.

—June 23, 2024
—For references see Mark Dyczkowski, The Doctrine of Vibration, ch 2 and Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies, pg. 246 and Karman, pgs. 78-83.
—See also on this site: Anti-Mysticism

The height of the contradiction to bear is when these two sentiments are paired: that nothing is worth anything, that there is no inherent value or horizon of value in existence, that there is no extant or underlying reason to get up and go on, that the meaning of self and society is a fiction; and that precisely in such a situation of meaninglessness, of truth as abyssally fictive, figural—not despite or against this condition but from out of it, on its back—you will existence as infinitely meaningful, you say Yes to it as valuable beyond any evaluation, such that whatever happens is affirmed as worth happening for all eternity, and so is made beautiful, though it foil every attempt to understand it, record it, or remember.

In the face of this abyss, where nothing ever gets off the ground, where time consumes and cancels itself—for temporality is just a narrative structure that lacks consistency when the continuity of existence dawns—the air is thick here, every sound trembles—to nonetheless affirm the ground in its very vacancy: as the zero of every building and the truth of every building’s real height: so that dwelling in the boldness of that ground, there shoots up the passionate peace of a refining fire which climbs and destroys to transfigure what it licks—a blaze whose lack of outcome you will and enjoy with the freedom of the eternally playful, of the enduringly refractory to sense.

The liquidation, the outpouring, of all value must be borne, not resisted but affirmed, as the one fate chosen, because it was: no other way to perfection, no other way to vouch for the future, than for all the concepts and consequences to go crackle in the foundations which life itself denecessitates and sets free.

The crucible is this: To survey all one’s efforts (public and clandestine), all one’s ideals (the callow and the wizened), all one’s strivings (spanning the whole spectrum of the heart’s desire) as they lie lost, inert, forgotten even by the self that formerly willed them—and to smile at the magnitude of the glorious waste, for it has all led you to where the extremity of essential Voidance reveals itself, right where the longing for what is absolutely right is most intense and most absurd! To laugh at the dissipation of your thousand last trajectories, at the slaughtering of all those precocious premature colts who’ve raced past the eyesight of anyone by now! To binge-watch the dissolve of your thousand-faced clown, whose grin yet taunts with a magnanimity, with a scope of benediction for the ruthlessly gratuitous, as yet unattained! To sing vale veritas as your most earnest plea recedes into a birdsong that need not even wake you from the dream, as the ease of an absolute welcome betrays the folly of all your passions (all of them ‘literary’) along with the calmness of their majesty! To crown even your denial and duplicity as having educated this vital factor of growth, as having driven you to supersede all the confining illusions without regret for them, without feigning a total escape from their shadows but snuggling into the luminous minima of reason their disengagement displays, their frissoning shades all dancing like the playthings of time’s mask, all in the name of the inimitable ‘who knows’ that displaces you! To will the forgetting of any false destiny, so as to render your destiny whole again as it flashes higher, as it crafts its cunning style with your will-o’-the-wisp passivity; as the late-coming praise of generosity in your spirit serves succor to the loneliness in your eyes, to the sorrow and glee of your quiet abandonment; as you gallop yet again across the blade-ridden stage in the unattended show you call your life.

It was not enough to have fought once or twice or five million times: the battle with valuelessness goes on wherever the ideal, the fantasy, the telos, the god that obscured its stakes is stripped of its veil and is revealed in its transparency as the flimsy, provisional, ad hoc covering it was; such that revealed in turn is a vision of the sprawling unbound production of your past as the product of a freedom mishandled because only half-accepted so far. For you are not in possession of its pierce, of its force, of its charm yet: and so you must wield the olive branch and the sword.

The battle then represents itself thus: to accept in full the promise you are, whose responsibility is worse than tremendous, because unconscious, by handling it and answering it afresh from the again conquered perspective of a final triumphing over yourself, as real as a wound whose pain heals. To stand atop the rubble of the squanderings, of the dismissals, of the confused ravings, of the terrified glimpses at the ground, alone and unaccounted for, witnessed only by the heart in you that leaps further than you ever thought possible, through the script—the heart whose unheard pumping, in meaning’s void, gives all the meaning there is to your going on.

From those caverns of solitude and love in you, hidden so wittily from consciousness, a justification wrests itself from the drag of delay and excuse, and from the dying dimness comes the light, a new one, of the hardest-won innocence, a light this childlike will that shines on and on, that becomes unto life’s power’s own peak, like a brightness that adores its extinguishment, craving only to have been itself. There, invisibility is not retreat but the strength to be oneself without knowing it, coveting it, or putting it in. There, surrender to the divine adventure, finally, is complete.

—June 17, 2024