Fascist tendencies, wrong method, desire and enlightenment.

A while back, in comments here, I said, “Dude I HAVE fascist tendencies, are you kidding me?” It can’t be reconstructed here, but it was funny and informative. Anyway: This morning on the drive in I was thinking about my fascist tendencies, and we have to dip into the “wrong method” to get there, so here we go.

I’ve always had a mystical streak, which from adolescence on, I labeled the desire to be “the witch doctor.” Nomadic tribes, seeking wisdom from the unseeable, chemical intoxication, dances with wavy-bladed knives, face paint, animal totems, wisdom, vision in lightless temples, human sacrifice, all that kind of shit. That’s how a bored suburban kid escapes.

LSD experiences in college showed me that I “bleed out” of my boundaries, into everything else, a mutual permeability. I am the limestone, the grass, the announcer’s tower by the soccer field, all of that. Sexual experiences (which happen beyond college, let’s remember the history) showed me a like permeability: waves crashing on the beach, to and fro, parables about a drop of water and the ocean from which it comes, of which it is. Stuff like that. It was all very psychedelic, and it still is (well, maybe it’ll have changed if it EVER HAPPENS AGAIN, but that’s a tangent).

In Yoga Sutras terms, this unification, this bleeding out and mutual permeability, is “union with Prakriti” and it is a mystical state, to be sure, but it is also “wrong method,” because it doesn’t bring union with the Purusha; it precisely misses this. One doesn’t end up observing Nature and separating from it, but winds up in union with it, very much The Observed, in fact All The Observed.

See how this leads to fascist tendencies? Let me elaborate.

Say you’ve got a handle on a mystical state (as I do). Say you have modes to access it (as I do: chemicals and intense sexual experiences). All you need is some charisma (which I have), some determination to find a site and some advertising, and TA-DA, you’ve got a commune situation into which you can lure the hungry Americans (because all Americans are hungry for something spiritual which they cannot name because commodity culture constantly revs up such desire and always fails to grant the answer; thanks capitalism) and Christianity fails (doubt me? Look for counter-evidence; I fucking DARE you to find any; Owl, you’re excepted from this).

Anyway:

Soon I could become a charismatic semi-mystic, who masters the language and hands down the rituals, and it would become a combination of Charlie Manson and Otto Muehl in no time. We’d all be high as kites and well-shagged in any configuration you could name or wish for, but none of us would be enlightened, and like most religion, it would be a sham for someone’s ego power.

That’s where my fascist tendencies lead.

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So I’m not going to do that.

I am living under fairly intense compression with seventh series, as anyone who reads here even a little bit, knows. At Maehle’s suggestion, I’ve been putting a LOT of sacred texts into my head the last few months, which I think are clarifying my desires and my methods (witness all the writing above).

I’m always drawn to union-with-Nature as a mystical method. It’s my instinctive desire, and so I seek methods that permit it. More understanding about union with the Purusha is growing, but so much of it (especially in Kriyananda’s lingo) is sort of post-body or anti-body that I can’t seem to build a base from which to launch into it.

That’s not quite true: insight meditation asks how we FEEL, and WHAT we feel. Classical Siddhasana (if understood to be about brahmacharya, as my whole fucking life right now is about fucking brahmacharya; oh sorry, did that sound bitter?) is about placing the heel at the base of, essentially, the spongy tissues that so many find to be such fun.

I pulled into a Siddhasana a few days ago and actually enjoyed the lighter-than-you’d-expect sensation. It provided a grounding-ness for my mind, the same way that breath retentions with bandhas do. Sucked the mind right to the site. As long as I have a physical anchor–some sensation to put me on the earth–I can chill, I can try for a concentrative-meditative state. If I’m just sitting and I can’t ground my mind in an earth sensation, I can’t get anywhere.

I think that by the time J comes out of her mommy-brain-work-baby-housework trance and realizes that I exist again, I’ll be busy with the Enlightenment channel.

So be it. I’m ready, man. That relationship is just part of the householding, and in a comical way, householding’s long-duree-hell is what’s driving me to really seek an enlightenment that isn’t my typical (and more familiar, more comfortable) channel.

There is a certain denial of J (and in that, of my frustration and desire) in seeking enlightenment. If I’m seeking my union-with-Prakriti style, I need her; she’s a quintessential part of it, hell she’s part of the doorway itself. But if I’m after involution toward the Purusha, I do *not* need her, and that releases a lot of anger and tension and frustration, or at least it asks me to take back and redirect the energy.

So in a way, my relationship going completely to self-negating hell, is a strange gift. I may lose my climbing practice, my sex life and eventually even my asana practice to seventh series (have practiced once in the past five days), but it’ll crank up my desire to be enlightened; at least it can’t take THAT from me.

I’m trying to turn all of the “me” channels down in things like dishwashing, householding, baby care, the little side trips that J insists on taking “for his development” as she tries both to live up to her ideal parent dream and tries to deal with reality as it is (hint: those two don’t get along) so that daily life can just be a series of movements. Dances and bodies, but no one’s there. The best way to survive all of this negation is to not be there to negate.