meditation | The Blog of Baphomet

When my children were very small, they were supplied with a set of cards by a well-meaning relative, of ‘Opposites’. Up Down, In Out, Hot Cold, Dark Light, Soft Hard, etc. The pairs were illustrated so that the concepts could be appreciated by pre-reading minds, and locked together uniquely.

We spent many happy hours with these cards, discussing carefully how they were misleading and that most adjectives/adverbs indicate relative qualities, on a far wider spectrum than could be depicted by two sample points. Take temperature; ‘hot’ was illustrated by a sunny summer day, ‘cold’ by snow. However on a cosmological scale, a sunny day (say 25^oC) and a snowy day (about 0^oC) are incredibly close together, with ‘naturally occurring’ temperature ranging from close to the absolute zero, a nebula at -272^oC, up to 99,999,999,725^oC in the heart of a newly formed neutron star.

Looked at in relation to this scale our instructive ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ examples appear ridiculous.

However!

Please, do not think I mocked the examples given in the set of cards, nor derided their usefulness and practicality. As comparative terms, ‘hot’ and ‘cold’, ‘up’ and ‘down’, ‘in’ and ‘out’ are vital to the functioning vocabulary of a growing child.

My objection was the forcing of these terms into a concept of ‘opposites’.

Of course, when addressing my babies, I used different terminology and examples. They had inadequate knowledge of the universe to talk of neutron stars and nebulae (unlike our far more educated readership here at the Blog).

So, now we have had a nice easy access lead-in story, the moral of this blogpost is, that we have choices we can make when presented with apparent ‘opposites’.

As with the trite example of temperature, we can opt to see things as points on a scale. Degrees of difference. Even adding a third axis of comparison, where the setting of a thing defines how it gets conceptualised; a nice recent example of this comes from marketing research.

This research tells of how people in high arousal states prefer simple, clear messages, presented as statements. “This laundry detergent gets clothes very clean.”

People in states of low arousal were more engaged by messages presented as questions, leaving room for them to add their own thoughts to the product the company wished to sell. “Does your laundry detergent get clothes as clean as this one?”

And thus, we have context dependant meanings of comparatives, which can even reverse their effectiveness under certain circumstances.

In this example, the different methods of addressing the audience are not just different in themselves, but are effective dependent upon the audience’s state. (Which state are you in right now? Would you prefer me to ask you philosophical questions, or give you pre-processed facts and opinions?)

Other emoticons are available

Storytelling, as I began this blogpost, neatly provides us with the option to take either perspective. We can go along with it as ‘fact’, whilst if we have the inclination, we may reflect upon the tale and ponder ‘questions’ it raises within us. Perhaps storytelling points towards another alternative to the binary options of ‘fact vs opinion’?

Moving out of the confines of dualistic binary choice thinking, can result in some wondrous creativity. Try it for yourselves; here are a few starter pairs of words which often get presented as if they are exclusive, oppositional, and/or absolutist:

Me Them

Internal External

Personal Communal

Good Bad

Active Passive

Right Wrong

Happy Sad

WARNING! Listing ‘pairs’ of words like this produces what I shall refer to as the Lévi-Strauss effect (this has nothing to do with jeans, check out Wikipedia if you need to know who Claude L-S was…).

One could argue that listing things, especially visually like this in columns, can create artificial categories, associations, and links in the human mind, which is largely geared towards seeing patterns (even when they don’t really exist). So by placing a certain one of each pair first as we read, we privilege that information, as position implies to our narrative constructor that these ‘first column words’ are in some way similar… and even, more important and therefore valuable.

Meditating upon such matters shows us ways to navigate the simple, childish version of reality we are encouraged to inhabit. It takes time and some effort, as do many worthwhile things. Consider other points on the linear scale that each pair indicates, wonder how the 3D version of comparatives might appear as well. Austin Osman Spare’s exercise which urges one to consider the ‘opposites’ of black and white, to imagine their combination (grey), and then the ‘opposite’/pairing to the combination; this can propel the mind into non-duality quite rapidly. The instruction is then to apply the same methodology to other ‘extremes’, in order to escape standard patterns.

These distinctions between pairs, opposites, comparatives, scalar quality identifiers, are incredibly relevant to our concepts, definitions, and behaviours of self. A basic distinction between the duality of Self and Other is key to most lifeforms, else how would anything know what to eat? Sensorial perception of the external environment tends to go pseudopod in tentacle with a rudimentary mental map, which can model constructs of that environment internally, and base behavioural decisions upon that internal map.

This is not to be confused with self-awareness in the sense of consciousness, btw.

This Self/Other construct is deep. Whatever arbitrary markers we might be provided with in order to distinguish between Them and Us, alters all our emotional (and hence behavioural) responses to those marked.

Within any relationship we tend to define ourselves in contrast to the Other. Ramsey Dukes wrote an excellent essay on this topic in What I Did in My Holidays: Essays on Black Magic, Satanism, Devil Worship and Other Niceties. He uses the way couples tend to split into paired traits/behaviours, so one takes on the fiery more provocative role, while the other is calmer, cooler, and shows restraint instead of rushing into things. Such stereotyping of roles gets enhanced, as each partner acts more extremely in type, one desperate to provoke some, any, kind of reaction, while the other becomes ever more glacial and reasonable in the face of irrational anger.

As Mr Dukes points out, this process is not always helpful to a continuing healthy relationship. Each of us has fiery and icy aspects (as well as others), which need expression to allow for a rounded complex of personalities.

I would suggest, that one could imagine cases where a person stuck feeling mainly one emotion continuously for years is likely to present with health issues, both mental and physical (another ‘pair’ of ‘opposites’, which I like to spend much time and effort blurring the boundaries of in my writings).

A healthier couple then, might deliberately play at switching being the stronger, the desired, the ideas person, the carer; remembering throughout that these too will pass, and that other options (including both acting the same role) are always available.

To sum up; much of magickal thinking/perception relies upon removing received linguistic categorisations from the world, perceiving directly what is there/here (gnosis), and then returning to a state of ‘normality’ slowly enough to reassemble those linguistic categories in a potentially novel way which might allow for fresh emotional responses to existing environments, and hence affect behaviours. Also, magickal thinking allows us to play with altering shifting these concepts along linear or other shapes of scales, within the confines of a smaller area (the magic circle), which we can successfully get our heads around a subset of what the universe has to offer, before trying out such engineering on the wider world.

Using the chaosphere as our scale we can try to expand greatly upon the simplistic duality line, attempting to find eight ways of measuring/comparing e.g. the physical quality of temperature, or moods of various flavours. These could, or could not, correspond to the existing conventional eight colours of magick (which are the conventional planetary groupings). As with many spurs to creative thinking, going beyond a single solution into multiple answers creates further outside-the-box imaginings. (So, eight here is arbitrary, chosen merely for sake of familiarity, and to provide a starting pictorial symbol. You can of course make up your own, which could be 3D in nature, like the tetrahedral arrangement; which for me always brings to mind the ancient defensive weapon, the caltrop.)

Next, I would like to extend the microcosm to the macrocosm, and ask if our tendency to compare and contrast applies on this wider stage. And if so, does that help anyone?

As groups, we identify and think in analogous ways to those described above for an individual person. The process is less localised, and often slower to emerge, but broadly speaking similarities can be observed.

This insight has great power.

Magick, the act of changing the environment in accordance with one’s Will, has no more important aim than this, the amazing ability of our species to be thoroughly self-aware, as individuals, and as groups.

Could magick, the act of changing the environment in accordance with one’s Will, have any more important aim than this, to use the amazing ability of our species to be thoroughly self-aware; both as individuals, and as groups?

Mindfulness is all the rage at the moment. The technique of ‘just sitting’ (observing the breath, noticing that thoughts arise, and gently leading awareness back to an appreciation of the breath) is increasingly being used in a variety of settings. The work of people like Jon Kabat-Zinn and clearly reproducible effects (for reducing physical pain, decreasing anxiety, alleviating depression and other challenges that people face) has made mindfulness a big hit. In my own spiritual practice mindfulness often features and I teach mindfulness in museums, to teachers, older people and others. I’ve got friends who regularly use it in therapeutic settings with people suffering from a variety of problems – and it works. Not only is it effective (in empirical terms) but the basic technique (outlined above) is very simple. Mindfulness does not rely on ‘mastery’ (at least not in the way it is typically presented in secular western settings). It’s all about the practice.

I was pleased to discover recently that one of the students, from a meditation group I had been teaching, had been so inspired by their experiences with mindfulness, that they had started sharing the technique in the educational setting in which they taught. They had started an opportunity for mindfulness practice for teachers and also, in a wonderfully accessible way, for students as a voluntary course of study. This included an opportunity for students to explore mindfulness technique as way of supporting them as they faced examinations.

Mindfulness is certainly helpful when we are ‘sitting with’ anxiety and that is bound to be a feeling which may be difficult to manage when facing an academic test. However the vogue for mindfulness in medical, psychological, corporate and even military settings is not without its problems. As recent articles have pointed out, for some people mindfulness can throw up some difficult situations. Problems that arise for practitioner can include feelings of ennui and emptiness, disconnection and even fear. These reactions are ones that therapeutic practitioners are increasingly aware of. This is important news since, if you’re diagnosed with a ‘medicalised’ experience of depression in Britain, and many other western countries, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy is something you’re likely to be offered as a treatment.

freaky anorexic rich kid

There are also voices being raised about the political implications of mindfulness. Mindfulness practice can be imagined as something that locates ‘the problem‘ in the mind of the individual, and as such may ignore the social dimension. The anxiety or depression is our, internal, problem. However, what we feel emerges not from our own isolated neurochemistry, but through the relationship between us and the world in which we find ourselves.

The point here is that mindfulness is a tactic and a process. It’s an approach to help us manage our anxiety, for instance when facing an examination. It’s also a process which, when considered in the light of the huge corpus of Buddhist texts which describe it, can create a wide variety of states of awareness. For instance mindfulness can generate weird sensations of heat or cold in the body. It can also generate optical phenomena and occasionally experiences that are perhaps best described as ‘spiritual visions’. What we might describe as ‘breaks’ in attention are perhaps the result of the mind looking for something to do. Consciousness craves stimulation and when we reduce the input (closing our eyes and focusing on the breath) it is prepared to create all kinds of odd feelings and ideation to get our attention. Typically the advice, especially in spiritual traditions that use mindfulness, is to concentrate on the breath, notice those feelings, and let them pass. The problem is that encounters with these phenomena sit outside of the simplistic utilitarian view of mindfulness as a cheap and easy way to stop employees going off sick with mental illness.

Again, this is an example of using a one-size-fits all approach to the world rather than appreciating mindfulness, and other ways of thinking, as tactics. Mindfulness certainly has benefits in situations where we cannot do much to change things (eg when we are registered to take an exam). Never-the-less there are times when we should be angry and distressed, and determined to change things. Trying to paper over the cracks in situations where inequality, oppression, alienation and other difficulties face us, with what amouts to an injunction to ‘stop thinking about it’, is not much better than using repressive psychopharmacology to restrain us. As they say, ‘calm down dear!‘

The way to address these problems is to see mindfulness as part of a repertoire of techniques for living. Sometimes it’s helpful but at other times it may be disempowering, and certainly it can be deployed in a one-dimensional way to keep people isolated, passive and compliant. If we are to mine techniques from Buddhist culture it would be interesting to see other methods being imported into the west. These could include the art of debate as practiced in the Tibetan traditions. In this method, a rapid fire technique of question and answer is used between two or more people, to explore what is truth.

If mindfulness is a method for addressing our suffering, and perhaps enhancing our lives, it must be balanced with methods that do this in the social sphere as well. Moreover the range, depth and meaning of experiences we may encounter using when using this technique need to be fully appreciated (especially by those teaching this tactic).

When I lead a mindfulness group I generally finish the practice of just sitting by thanking everyone around me for their practice. Although this perhaps seems like a quaint flourish it is very important. This act is a way of acknowledging that the exploration of who we are, in this instance by meditation, is a social act. I thank my students for engaging with this technique because their work affects me and all of us. We are not isolated meditators but a sangha, a community of practice, where what we do is a shared experience. We all share the limitations, the challenges and difficulties, as well as the benefits, that mindfulness practice offers us.