Focus on the mantra until it you can self sustain it non vocally. Keep it going until it has [...]]]> Adopt a comfortable, meditative position. Close your eyes and start a mantra sequence (For the purposes of this exercise I pick something pretty random, usually a sequence of consonanted sounds; ka da ma ta ha, for example)

Focus on the mantra until it you can self sustain it non vocally. Keep it going until it has a momentum all of it’s own, then dissociate… imagine that you step out of and away from your body so that you can see yourself and hear the mantra coming from the location you see yourself sat in.

Move further backwards and forwards until the volume and feel of the mantra is comfortable for you. In this spot, in imagination, sit down and start a new mantra (we are working simultaneously with a dissociated and associated self representation here). Be aware of the original mantra sequence cycling round as you initiate the new mantra layer. Again, keep it going until it and the original mantra are both self sustaining, then dissociate again…

Repeat

This is a meditation experiment aimed at developing a deep state of trance in which intentionality and volition remain enabled. The exercise is also part of personal research into multiple trance loops… it seems they can be mutiple and parallel, or multiple and embedded. The levels of recursion one is comfortable with grow with practice.

A respected contributor to a Druid forum I participate on wrote of becoming a “soul-in-love-with-all-creation” through a devotional meditation practice and was kind enough to share some of this practice, the Dercad Duthracht. The concept put me in mind of an exercise I have worked with from the field of [...]]]>

In love with all creation

A respected contributor to a Druid forum I participate on wrote of becoming a “soul-in-love-with-all-creation” through a devotional meditation practice and was kind enough to share some of this practice, the Dercad Duthracht. The concept put me in mind of an exercise I have worked with from the field of NLP (neuro-linguistic programming). NLP has fascinated me for many years as an art and science of working with subjective experience, and has informed my spiritual study by virtue of giving me a framework with which I can seek commonalities in spiritual practices from many sources and from them derive experimental transpersonal processes.

This particular exercise was devised by an NLP trainer, Richard Bolstad, and published in the April 2002 edition of Anchorpoint (an NLP magazine). Richard has kindly given me permission to reproduce the exercise for discussion, experimentation and development.

To give some context, I include Richard’s summary of the main points in his article :-

• People interested in their sense of connection to spirituality can benefit from having the flexibility to shift between the immanent (a sense of the power Within) and the transcendent (a sense of the power outside of them).
• Devotion is the emotional or affective expression of the oneness which is central to spiritual life.
• Devotion is closely related to the urge to align one’s life with the highest truth, and this alignment is the true meaning of “surrender.” As in the metaphor of a sailboat aligning with the wind, such alignment may involve a great deal of activity by the sailor. Far from being passive, such “surrender” adds greater power to our activity.

Not everyone who studies NLP is interested in a “spiritual” dimension to life. Furthermore, not everyone who studies NLP and spirituality will be drawn to devotional or Bhakti yoga practices. For, those who are, the above three frames may enable us to live a life of devotion which remains consistent with the presuppositions of NLP

Mandala

To explore the significance of this for yourself, you may enjoy guiding yourself through the following process, which is based on the Tibetan practice called mandala (Trungpa, 1976, pp. 152-156; Evans-Wentz, 1972, pp. 324-325). A mandala is a representation of the integrated nature of the universe, which is ultimately “mentally absorbed” into the artist who creates it. The process of working with a mandala is an act of devotion and adoration. But it also reminds the Tibetan Buddhist practitioner that the universe we imagine (the map of the universe in our minds), including all the imagined external power of God, is one system, and emerges and merges into our own being.

The meditation/process itself is as follows (comments within * * are mine)

1 . Elicit the submodalities (*for non-NLP practitioners, submodalities are the qualities, as opposed to the content, of our internal representations of experience… check out this link for more information*) of your internal representation of someone else, at a time that is powerfully enjoyable to remember, when you had the feeling of being “in love” with them.

*A submodality is the how of your internal representation, rather than the what… so when looking to the submodalities we are interested in things like: is the internal representation visual? if so, where in the visual field is it? is it near or far away? is it bright or dark? colour or black and white? still or moving? Flat or 3D? Bordered or panoramic? is there sound? if so is it noisy or quiet? rhythmic? where does the sound come from? Are there kinesthetic/feeling aspects to the representation? if so, are they soft/hard? warm/cool? and so on*

2. Check ecology. Would it be okay for you to feel this way (“in love”) about life in general (or about God, or however else you conceptualise the ultimate oneness) If not, consider other examples of times you were in love, or other qualities of love (such as the love you feel for your family, or the love you feel for your homeland).

3. Ask your unconscious mind to choose a symbol (at least visually; ideally with auditory and kinesthetic attributes) for, the ultimate oneness and create that internal representation in the submodalities of “in love”. Check that it has at least the same emotional feeling as the original. Experimentally adjust the submodalities to see if it is appropriate to intensify the feeling (check the ecology carefully -is it okay for you to live life with this intensity of feeling?)

4. Create an external representation of that image (an art form). Experience this art form and ask your unconscious mind to learn from it whatever it is appropriate to learn.

5. Ask yourself if there is any part of you that would object to you experiencing your unity with the oneness you have represented. If there is, check its higher positive intention and notice that anything less than fully living with oneness is not totally enabling you to reach that intention.

6. Draw the internal representation into your heart and feel that you are one with it; it has always been within you and you have always been within it.

7. See yourself in the future, interacting in several different situations where this representation within your heart inspires a new quality of response. Understand that this is the true art form that you are creating. The previous, external art form may no longer have significance.

The Tale of the Sands is a Sufi teaching tale which I retold some years ago for submission to an online competition. The voice tone has a trance-voice quality (intended) and the story explores age old themes of identity and impermanence from, [...]]]> This is a slightly experimental post using WordPress’s podcasting plug-in for the first time.

The Tale of the Sands is a Sufi teaching tale which I retold some years ago for submission to an online competition. The voice tone has a trance-voice quality (intended) and the story explores age old themes of identity and impermanence from, I believe, an animistic perspective, although clearly anthropomorphising the protagonists for the purposes of the story.

In the future, I shall want to explore all those things that enable a story to trigger such [...]]]> In a previous post I wrote about stories as triggers for spiritual growth, as catalysts. But what is it that allows a story to act as such a catalyst? By what virtue does a tale stimulate psycho-spiritual development?

In the future, I shall want to explore all those things that enable a story to trigger such initiatic events, the way in which a story can strike at many levels, from emotion, belief, worldview through to the transpersonal. I would like to examine strategies for creating such tales and the context within which they work their magic. For now, however, I want to consider something most simple, and yet sharing in the real mystery. The spirit of the story.

The story is alive. The story partakes of that rich web of causal feedback loops that is the manifestation of consciousness and sentience at all levels of existence. And it does so at very intimate levels.

The universe is made of stories not atoms.
Muriel Rukeyser, poet

I made reference to a Hasidic theory of the spiritual power of stories in my previous post. In a nutshell, this theory suggests that tales have been in existence since creation and have undergone a process of ruination that parallels the catastrophe that occurred at creation known as “the breaking of vessels”. A holy man can take and restructure those stories, “repairing” them to their proper order and thus paralleling the process of the achievement of universal perfection. In this process, the stories become powerful spiritual entities, tools for that process of redeeming creation.

It’s not my belief, but it does make for a powerful story in its own right. In the description, I do recognise the recognition of divinity of the story, of it’s sacredness, and if one was to approach the story from an animist perspective we can see that

a) the story has soul

b) the story has a relationship with its creator and with the listener, and

b) the story has a relationship with the rest of existence

So every story ever told, creates and recreates part of existence each time it is told. And if a part of existence is recreated, the whole of existence is recreated.

One after the other, each ‘owner’ would then sing his stretch of the Ancestor’s footprints. Always in the correct sequence.

“To sing a verse out of order”, Flynn said sombrely, “was a crime. Usually meant the death penalty.”

“I can see that,” I said. “It’d be the musical equivalent of an earthquake.”

“Worse,” he scowled. “It would be to un-create the Creation.”

Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (p58)

Many cultures share a process of facilitating spiritual growth through story. Most of us are familiar with koans, stories from the Japanese Zen Buddhist tradition that require the listener to suspend the usual ability to process narrative, to confound rational [...]]]>

“The shortest distance between truth and a human being, is a story.”
Anthony de Mello, Jesuit Priest

Many cultures share a process of facilitating spiritual growth through story. Most of us are familiar with koans, stories from the Japanese Zen Buddhist tradition that require the listener to suspend the usual ability to process narrative, to confound rational or discursive thought and provoke the listener into a state of awareness. Not so familiar to some might be the teaching tales of the Sufis, adherents of the Islamic (some would argue pre-Islamic) mystical tradition.

Idries Shah, in his preface to his “Tales of the Dervishes”, says that “In Sufi circles, it is customary for students to soak themselves in stories set for their study, so that internal dimensions may be unlocked by their teaching master as and when the candidate is judged ready for the experience which they bring”.

Many, though by no means all, of the Dervish tales have a koan quality. The classic examples of this are demonstrated in that corpus of story that relate the exploits of the Mullah Nasruddin. The Mullah Nasruddin is both at once a fool, the butt of jokes, and a wise man who demonstrates his wisdom in naiveté and innocence. Idries Shah once again says it best “The Nasruddin stories, known throughout the Middle East, constitute one of the strangest achievements in the history of metaphysics. Superficially, most of the Nasruddin stories may be used as jokes. They are told and retold endlessly in the teahouses and caravanserais, in the homes and on the radio waves, of Asia. But it is inherent in the Nasruddin story that it may be understood at any of many depths. There is the joke, the moral – and the little extra which brings the consciousness of the potential mystic a little further on the way to realization.” (The Sufis)

Nasruddin’s morals are never explicit. They are inherent in the story structure. And his wisdom is never narrated. The fool slips by the mental defenses, and delivers the wisdom with a surgical precision that at once delights and confounds.

Key to the Sufi use of tales is this “soaking”, this immersion in the stories that Idries Shah refers to, along with the precise use of such tales by a Sufi master to trigger the student’s advancement at certain key stages along his path.

Similar stories are told within Jewish communities by Rabbi’s. Doug Lipman says “Hasidic stories are, intrinsically, healing stories. From the eighteenth-century beginning of this Jewish mystical sect, stories have been a key way to pass on the spiritual and emotional teachings of the movement’s masters.” (http://www.hasidicstories.com/Articles/Learning_From_Stories/wrestling.html) Indeed, in some strands of the Hasidic tradition, the stories are deemed to have the spiritual power to change the universe. “The tales have a specific therapeutic, cosmic function: They redeem souls from the empty space.”  (Arnold J. Band, http://www.hasidicstories.com/Articles/Hasidic_Theories/bratslav.html)

Are you sitting comfortably?

I once heard a story about a man who found a book that had been hidden by a messenger. From where this messenger came, and from whom, I do not know, although I have my thoughts. But she left this book for the man to find, and find it he did.

Now, this was no normal book. For one thing, it only had two pages. And each page was woven tightly out of wicker, in complex and intricate patterns. Somehow the man knew that there was something special about the book, but he didn’t know how he knew, and he didn’t know what.

For many months the man puzzled over the book. He began to notice that, as he puzzled, he felt the patterns with his fingers and knew somehow that they had meaning. He came to notice subtle intricacies of shade and shadow within the book and as his fingers ran lightly over the knots and weave he would hear gentle sounds.

Long days and long nights he studied. At night, he noticed that the use of different senses in still new ways of making sense seemed to allow him to understand different meaning. By day, he noticed he could look at the book in a new light.

Gradually he noticed a change. He noticed that his sense of touch had become more delicate and more discriminating. He noticed new patterns each time he read the book with his fingers. He became aware of a rhythm and a pattern to the sound of his fingers lightly brushing the pages and he discovered a depth and variety of colour he had not before known. And he noticed a change in himself.

He noticed how his life touched the lives of others in different ways, and how others touched his own life. He became aware of smaller and smaller changes, ever further away, still felt deep within. And he didn’t know how much of these changes came from the reading of the book, or simply from the action of learning to read the book. When asked, he would smile, and quietly say that it simply didn’t matter any more.

to be continued…