Buddhism

Owls, Wasps, and Vipassana Meditation

About three and a half years ago I had a strange, early-morning encounter. It was about 7am, pitch black winter gloom, and I was walking to work. As I passed by a tree, I looked up and found two gleaming eyes looking back at me.

It was big, and white, and intense. And as the owl stared at me, as I stared at it, a word imposed itself upon my consciousness. “Minerva.”

“Oh, “ I responded, “Minerva, like Athena!”

“NO. MINERVA.”

This bit of insistence on specificity was interesting given how syncretic the Greek and Roman cults were, and given that I was receiving this message from a North American owl that surely didn’t have much of a relationship with ancient Rome.

Ok, well. We stared at each other for a bit longer (it was very close!) and then I continued on my way. Later I found out that there had been a spate of owl attacks on early morning walkers in the area, but not on me. I did spend some time after that researching Minerva, however, and discovered her to be a central goddess for the Romans, ruling over wisdom, social harmony, reflection, even healing. I was jealous of Roman reconstructionist pagans: it seemed like those Roman pagans wrote everything down.

Now. At the time I was experiencing a good bit of psychic turmoil and one day in wrestling with this turmoil it visualized itself for me as a cloud of wasps buzzing about me, stinging me with painful thoughts and feelings. “What can I do about this?” I wondered. Then, an imaginary owl came flying in. “If you do what I instruct, I will drive these wasps away from you. Deal?” Deal.

So the owl came in and swept the wasps away with flaps of her strong pinions. And thus was I obliged. I asked Odin about this odd circumstance of suddenly dealing with an ancient Roman goddess at the behest of a modern North American owl. He could have said, “well I’m an Old Norse god and you’re a modern Australian-American, so what the fuck?” Instead he said, “there is some work you need to do and she is the one to help you do it, so I am stepping back for a little while.”

The first instruction was to write a song in Minerva’s honor. I did that. It is 18 minutes long, very complex and interesting, with lyrics about healing and transformation through radical acceptance. I hope to have a good recording of it by the end of the year. It is fun to perform. People seem to like it.

The second instruction was more challenging: attend a 10-day silent Vipassana retreat as taught by S. N. Goenka. I have wanted to do this for many years, and the stars have never aligned. Now I was instructed. It was a grueling experience, and profoundly transformative. Profoundly. In ways I could never have imagined.

Goenka’s approach to lay Buddhist meditation practice could almost be called Chaos Buddhism: emphasis on traditional structure and philosophy, but only as a means to allow the individual to faithfully and safely articulate their own personal development and realization. No dogma here, just profound discipline (and a lot of physical and emotional pain, the kind that silly Westerners run away from all too readily, not realizing it is the door to healing).

I also discovered that the lyrics for my Owl Song almost exactly paraphrased teachings and technical advice offered in the course of the 10-day retreat. It was as though I had been primed to gain maximum benefit. I was also struck by the many parallels to Jung’s ideas (even though scholars dismiss Jung’s writings on Buddhism, perhaps with reason). The critical advantage of Goenka’s take on Buddhist practice over Jung’s psychology is this insight: the body is the unconscious mind.

(To be fair, I have since noticed that Jung does also say this, but he never decisively knew what to do with it. Undertake a Vipassana retreat and you will know what to do with it).

Since that time I have maintained a strong daily meditation practice. At first 2 hours a day per the course recommendation, but the realities of work, study, family, creative, community responsibilities have meant that I only do an hour a day. Even this has been profoundly beneficial. It is like clearing my path back to the Well of Wyrd each and every day.

My wasps have diminished, but more importantly, I am more indifferent to the pain they cause, yet without having to resort to denial or dissociation. With expanding powers of acceptance come expanding powers of all types. There is nothing passive about the applied technical practice of Buddhism.

Every day, no matter what else happens, I spend an hour listening to the sensations of the body. Gradually stripping more and more layers of conditioning, trauma, amnesia. This is not just “mindfulness of the present moment,” it goes much deeper (though it necessarily builds on that foundation). If you want to really understand meditation you need to go back to the Eastern sources directly. A lot of the Western adaptations, though well-intentioned, are inadequate.

I have to laugh at how I came to become a Vipassana practitioner, the unlikely confluence of influences. North American owls; Roman goddesses in some sort of alliance with Old Norse gods, all conspiring to get me to study Buddhist meditation of a specific Burmese-Indian strain. Well, ok. Chaos Heathen.

Does it work, though? It works, though. Does it distract me from loving attentiveness to the forms, traditions, and trappings of Heathenry? Not at all, it actually increases my faculties of appreciation. Is this story ridiculous or wonderful? Yes.

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“…Or Something Better:” A Tool to Ensure Infallible Sigil Magic

An element of sigil magic that seems necessary for effective practice is non-attachment. This is may seem paradoxical at first, since if I am indifferent to an outcome why am I bothering to throw magic at it? The answer is that desire and non-attachment can and do pair up nicely in magical practice.

To explain how this could be I would like to take a short detour into considering some aspects of Buddhist philosophy. That done, I’m going to talk about a tool for achieving the kind of non-attachment that helps sigil magic to be effective.

Buddhist philosophy suggests that there are three causes of suffering: desire, aversion, and ignorance. Note that it does not say that any of these three are bad, just that their triad causes suffering.

Desire – wanting what I do not have – and aversion – not wanting what I do have (or fearing to have what I expect I will have) – are inevitable parts of life. They are inescapable. So if you want to break the triad of suffering, you have to address the third side, ignorance, since it is the only thing over which you can exert any kind of influence.

In Buddhist practice, at least as taught by S. N. Goenka, the way to break down ignorance is not to spend a lot of time reading books but to spend a lot of time observing the sensations of the body – Vipassana meditation. Consciousness is an embodied phenomenon, so the systematic and deep observation of the body from the inside enables the mapping and transformation of consciousness.

This reduces the level of ignorance. Desire and aversion lose their rigid grasp as ignorance gives way to self-knowledge, but they do not go away. Rather, their forms of unfolding are changed because as ignorance declines, so does attachment. With non-attachment, desire and aversion cease to be inevitable sources of misery. Enlightenment is a state of simultaneous emptiness and abundance.

This invites consideration of the Hindu distinction between attachment and care. I can be attached yet not truly care, for example when I want to force someone to behave in a fashion that meets the expectations of my egomania. I can be attached and care, as parents often, and very naturally, are for their children, though it can cause problems. I can be neither attached nor caring, which is one definition of depression. I can be caring yet lack attachment, which is a state of free, playful love.

Non-attachment therefore does not mean that I don’t care. It means I have clarified my attachments, my projections, so that I am not unconsciously ruled by my desire and my aversion. And thus, I can use magic to achieve a goal yet at the same time be non-attached to the outcome.

This is an orientation to process, not product, and this orientation is useful in almost any field of activity: if my efforts are not done to a standard then their product, no matter how good looking, are automatically suspect.

Thus, non-attachment facilitates the whole process of sigil magic. The more I lust for a result, the more cramp (Jan Fries) I am likely to burden myself with. If I lack self-knowledge, that is, am ignorant of my own psychological processes, then I am likely to think I just need to try harder to make my magic work. The result of this mistake is the absurd, over-complicated magical prescriptions one finds in ceremonial magic or the writings of Edred Thorsson.

When I work sigil magic from a space of non-attachment I give the seed of my will over to the care of the world in a free and energetic way. And a way to cultivate that non-attachment is through the mantra “does not matter, need not be, that or something better.”

So I identify my magical intention (perhaps using a SMART goals framework). Then I sigilize the intent. Then I fire the sigil. The last step is to establish non-attachment to outcome, and “does not matter, need not be, that or something better” thus offers itself as a concluding statement or mantra for my magic spell.

The statement is handy because any time the outcome for which I enchanted comes to mind, I can just go back to “does not matter, need not be, that or something better,” rather than lose myself in the impossible tangle of fear, doubt, and desire that my human constitution too-easily invokes.

The statement is also handy because it expresses a supreme confidence: “does not matter, need not be, that or something better.” In other words, I am embracing trust in myself and the universe to the point that even this outcome that I desire is not so important that I cannot find some alternative option.

Indeed, it implies that even if the sigil magic fails to produce the intended outcome, it will only do so in order to give me something even better than what I asked for! As such, reciting this mantra at the conclusion of casting a spell has become my favorite part of the process, and almost always brings a smile to my face.

In other words, with this mantra I can achieve infallible sigil magic practice. Either I get my stated outcome, or I get something even better than what I thought I wanted and needed. Naturally, such an attitude of abundance is very helpful for releasing into non-attachment. And also, the universe adores an abundant mentality and tends to reward it richly, though rarely through the avenues the ego expects.

Of course “does not matter, need not be, that or something better” can be used in any situation, not just sigil magic. It invites a mindset of determination, confidence, and open-minded yes-saying. These are qualities that have decisive significance for the practice of both magic and life.

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Thoughts on Generosity

img_0612-1Generosity shows up as a central value in the remnant corpus of Old Norse Heathen literature. Whether celebrating the ruler who shares wealth readily, or exhorting the hall to welcome the stranger without hesitation, it is clear that for the old Heathens generosity and hospitality were fundamental practices that benefitted both the individual and the collective. The Gebo rune, and other references in the lore, also suggest the importance of gratitude, an attitude that recent research indicates can physically heal the brain of trauma.

Arguably a component of generosity is acceptance. Acceptance is a stance I can adopt or set aside, and it entails a gift to both myself and my recipient. Naturally, my acceptance of the other provides them the  freedom to set aside armor (literal or psychic) and find either repose or the opportunity for deeper engagement with life. And in accepting the other I free myself from the burden of resisting what wyrd has brought to pass. As such I become more free to respond with creativity and intelligence.

A common mistake one encounters is the confusion of acceptance and acquiescence. The latter refers to a passive submission, often involving allowing another to harm me. This, however, is not acceptance. Acceptance is merely the act of recognizing what is before me. It does not instruct me on any course of action, be it passive or active. It merely instructs me not to waste my energy on phantasms of my own mind and instead attend to what is.

If I were to wax poetic, acceptance is a means of romancing the Norns and the work that they do. It is a form of religious piety; if Heathenry is a this-worldly tradition (in contrast to, say, the otherworldly focus of much of Christianity) then acceptance must be a fundamental Heathen practice.

Acceptance runs both directions when the question of generosity or hospitality arises. Not only is it poor Heathen form to decline to extend the generous hospitality of acceptance, it is also poor form to decline generosity or hospitality when they are offered. The Heathen perspective, being fundamentally practical, sees reality in terms of relationships (this is what Wyrd is, the dynamic unfolding of relationships). It follows that isolationism and autarky are ill practices from a Heathen point of view.

As such, in the practice of generosity we discover that the ancient Heathen customs are designed to break down rigid dualities. This is difficult for modern people to approach because the modern world – rooted in Christian assumptions – is founded on irreconcilable binaries: good and evil; progression and regression; rich and poor; black and white; colonizing and colonized; dominance and submission. Given such a context it is no wonder that people cannot tell the difference between acquiescence and acceptance, seeing as the latter violates the prevalent binary mentality.

Rigid binaries also existed in premodern times and non-Western cultures of course; the difference is that in some times and places, people realized that binary opposition is just one link in the eternal pattern that wyrd weaves, and not the absolute condition of existence. Thus it is that non-dual philosophies exist, and are often misunderstood by those coming from a Western context. Buddhism, for example, has often been called ‘world-denying,’ yet in reality it teaches radical embrace of this reality as it is right now. How ironic projection can be.

Well, the ancient Heathens left many clues for the overcoming of rigid binaries. We modern Heathens have a lot of work ahead of us. The great danger we face is that, lacking perspective on just how deeply binary thinking has been embedded in our bodies and minds, we will anachronistically project dualism onto the Heathen current as we rebuild it.

This is what is happening when we encounter, for example, folkish Heathens who cannot escape the very modern terms of racial categorization (and often too, poisonous and gratuitous narratives of dominance and submission, which are ultimately founded on a very modern autarkism that would not have been well received in Heathen circles).

One generous way to approach Heathenry itself is to treat it like an estranged lover with whom we have just begun to reconnect. We must be tentative. We must reach out from beyond our own assumptions. We must be wary of cutting the Heathen cultural corpus to fit our pre-existing prejudices and perspectives (those who use Heathenry to justify the worst in themselves would be better off removing themselves). If we can resist the lures of disowned projection, we extend hospitality to Heathenry itself. Only then might it begin to enter our halls and enrich them with its songs.

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Returning to Seething

Groa's Incantation By W.G. Collingwood (1854 - 1932)Recently I reactivated my interest in Jan Fries-style seidr – namely the induction of shaking, swaying, and trembling as a healing tool. I’d like here to discuss the background to this technique, draw some parallels with the findings of trauma psychology, and discuss my recent initial foray back into the practice.

First of all, Fries has been criticized by many Heathens for his apparently bogus connection of seidr to “seething,” and thereby to trembling as the basis of Northern trance work. Fries has actually addressed a lot of these criticisms and even pointed out that his ideas were only ever presented as playfully speculative.

I have always maintained that there is nothing wrong with speculative innovation so long as one is transparent that this is what one is doing, so that others can make their own informed choices. Fries, I do not think, has tried to pass off speculation as historical fact. For me, Fries’s notion of seething makes absolutely perfect sense. I do not believe that anyone can really claim to practice “authentic” seidr in this day and age, but seething seems to fill that function for me just marvelously. So there.

More importantly, Fries’ research on traditions of magical trembling seems to indicate that such experiences are common in a vast array of cultures, and symbolically speaking they make sense in a Heathen context too, even if the specific technology of seidr (whatever it even was exactly!) makes no reference to trembling experiences. That said, there are boiling cauldrons and ecstatic furies aplenty, and the magical power of ergi seems very nicely compatible with the flowing vulnerable liminality that trembling can produce – states of healing and sorcery.

As such, I feel confident that in going back to the testimony of my own bodymind, and connecting that to my Heathen practice, I cannot really go too far wrong. I trust the flesh to tell me what is best for it (at least if I know how to listen!). That doesn’t mean I have to sacrifice my keen interest in reconstructionism, it just means I have healthy senses of irony and humor.

In Fries’ book Seidways the theme of healing recurs in his accounts of different seething-type practices from around the world, be they San magic rituals or Mesmerism. My own experience of trembling, shaking, and swaying practices align with his accounts most marvelously; in fact, reading that book was like coming home for me, spiritually speaking. Finally someone had put words to the deep, wordless experiences that I knew and craved.

Indeed, long before I consciously realized the significance of trembling, I had already undergone several powerful healing experiences in which I spontaneously trembled, shook, swayed, or even several such behaviors at once. These movements were automatic, unguided by conscious intention. Since I started consciously seething I found out that these behaviors could move from consciously willed into automatic modes, and that the more this involuntariness suffused them, the deeper the magical effect.

Imagine, therefore, my surprise on reading research on the psychophysiology of trauma. It appears that when a mammal experiences trauma (e.g. almost getting killed by a predator) it first experiences the potent neurophysiological event of the fight-flight-freeze reaction. After the danger has passed, the animal will then tremble and shake. And this behavior releases the body of the traumatic damage done to the nervous system and organs, so that the creature can shortly return to normal life without any chronic harm from its harrowing experience.

Humans, on the other hand, do not listen to our bodies (this comment applies mostly to modern Westernized humans) and so by and large have forgotten how to allow ourselves to tremble after experiencing trauma. This in turn is the root of many chronic problems that can be caused by trauma. It is not necessarily the traumatic event itself that causes the depression or the anxiety; the culprit can also be that the body’s natural mechanism for correcting systemic imbalances (imbalances that are adaptive in the moment of danger but not long term) has been suppressed.

The parallel with seething is significant: what Fries documented in Seidways is nothing less than a catalog of the ways different cultures have sought to ensure that cultural praxis serves the biological and psychological necessity of trembling. More than this! Such practices also marshal the tremendous psychic potency of trembling and, aligned with conscious intent, make it into a powerful engine for the working of magic.

Seething, therefore, is a particularly primal kind of magic, one which activates every layer of the nervous system’s evolutionary strata and brings all that power to bear on the seether’s intent. Yet this is not something that can be mastered overnight. First much self-healing through trembling must be accomplished (meditation, particularly in the Vipassana tradition, which emphasizes the experience of the sensate body, is a valuable adjunct).

This is where I am up to – this process of self healing. It is funny that, even though I have understood the significance of seething for years, I am only now finally taking it to my deepest heart. Well, we each have our journey, our voyage onto the sea of irony and mystery.

Recently I undertook a session of seething for the first time in many years. Since that session I have been astounded at the loosening of certain very persistent and difficult psychological fetters. I find myself more able to become conscious of the ways in which unconscious, emotional forces hiddenly direct conscious thought into flights of justification, attempts to pass off as rational what are really courses of action that have been shaped by unresolved trauma in the bodymind. Deep shifts are occurring in the tectonics of my psyche. I can intuit that if I keep up with this practice, then this profound shifting will get progressively more potent.

So what does my seething practice look like? I run from Jan Fries’ directions in Seidways pretty much as written (admittedly he allows plenty of latitude for individual preference). I find low light with candles to be helpful; I put a randomized iTunes playlist of Dead Can Dance on softly in the background, and I open the rite with the invocation of runes for protection.

But most importantly – and this is a detail that in earlier years I neglected to my cost – I am sure to ask, rather than tell, the deep mind/spirits/gods/whatever for what I would like to experience. I am humble and respectful and invite its/their instruction, rather than thinking I have to be the “master magician” in control at all times. No, such an ego-centered attitude runs utterly contrary to the sympathetic and autonomic spirit of seething, which loves to undermine the illusion of the ego’s supremacy.

As I shake, sway, tremble, and seeth, I sometimes chant, moan, sing, and laugh. My mind wanders and then returns. I am sometimes vigorous in my movements, sometimes subtle. There is little about this that is intellectual, formalized, or precise. I turn again and again to accepting what the body wishes to share, seeking to cultivate trust in that deep self from which all spontaneity and magic flows.

I call out to Odin and Loki mostly, and they are helpful, though each embodies seething in a different way. My recent Loki-themed articles reflect the building unconscious anticipation that was leading me to return to seething; if Loki is the body, then seething is worshipping Loki. It is restoring to the body recognition of its innate beauty, just as it is.

I have never loved my body. I have never trusted it. I have hated it, circumscribed it, battered it, despised it, treated it with contempt. I have been learning in recent years to nourish it, to be kind to it, to embrace it. Ill health and emotional struggles forced me to do so. Now I wonder if this whole journey were not a prelude to my decision to reintroduce seething into my life.

I am ready for this now as I never have been before. I am grounded in a vigorous meditation practice, and this seems crucial. I encourage anyone reading this article to stop now, and instead get stuck into active, practical magic, in whatever way you see fit. Magic is meaningless if it is not actively practiced. Perhaps I’ll see you in one of the worlds that only the trembling seethers may enter…

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My Bookshelf

Next to my computer on my desk I keep a small selection of essential texts for my Chaos Heathen proclivities. These are the books that I find myself referring to in casual conversation about myth or history or nutrition or healing. I’m sure everyone has their favourite reference texts (and I’d love to hear what they are): here are mine.

The Art of Simple Food, Alice Waters
Nourishing Traditions, Sally Fallon
The Fourfold Path to Healing, Thomas Cowan

First stop: nutrition and food. I am a huge aficionado of the traditional cuisine movement. Returning to traditional cuisine has almost totally cured my once utterly crippling allergies; it has also gone a long way to improving my fitness, mental health, and immune system. It has also taught me how to love food, to really savour it, to deeply appreciate the pleasure of eating in a way that all the production line rubbish I used to eat never did.

I haven’t talked about it for a while, but I remain convinced that if you are serious about spirituality, magic, growth, healing, Heathenry, or whatever…then you have to get serious about food: its history, its ecology, the experience of eating it, the nutritional science of it. NOT out of some punitive, sin-based body-hatred or pleasure-hatred (neither of which are a part of traditional cuisine); but out of the binary joys of gustatory sensuality and making oneself more whole, more powerful, more buoyant.

This isn’t to say that I always stick to my own culinary principles, of course, but mostly I do, and I’ve never been fitter or healthier or enjoyed cooking, eating, and even the washing up so much. All of these things help me integrate myself into the flow of the waters of life (Bil Linzie) that runs throughout the roots and branches of the World Tree.

If you give a stuff about the environment or the principle that what goes around comes around then traditional cuisine is even more important…and I’d like to think that anyone interested in Chaos Heathenism would be at least curious to know what they can do to preserve the precarious equilibrium of this fragile planet.

Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales
Prose Edda, Snorri Sturluson
The Poetic Edda, trans. Lee Hollander
Dictionary of Northern Mythology, Rudolph Simek

While personal gnosis is awesome, I believe that when we closely research historical belief and practice it often turns out to be far more subtle, inventive, and just plain fun than the half-baked ideas that modern folk turn out and pass off as spiritual or magical. This is no fault of ours: traditions that have had centuries to ferment, passed from hands to hands, are almost certainly going to outstrip our raw and hastily conceived insights.

Grimm’s Tales I use for divination purposes, as I’ve previously documented. It’s a font of endless free association and symbolic hilarity, often with blatant Heathen motifs and stories writhing just below a wafer-thin veneer (and just to upset the Heathen dogmatists out there [yeah, like those jerks would ever threaten their puny minds by reading Elhaz Ablaze articles]: the Christianly ones are good too).

The two Eddas are of course extremely valuable. Dipping randomly into the Poetic Edda is always fun and rewarding – not unlike the Bible, it’s actually a really weird collection of tales. When I read these texts I can’t help but think that once upon a time the only kind of Heathen around was the Chaos Heathen kind.

And finally, Simek. I bless a trillion times the day I bought this book. What an indispensable gem! Getting nastily out of date now, but still the ultimate starting place when you want to know anything about Northern mythology (and much more besides).

People think the Internet has made knowledge much more accessible, but only someone who doesn’t read books could possibly be convinced of this mediocrity-inducing illusion, which merely panders to our laziness and our vanity. If you are even marginally interested in anything even vaguely related to Heathenry…then go buy Simek right now.

Visual Magick, Jan Fries
The Rune Primer, Sweyn Plowright

Visual Magick is Jan’s first book, and I swear by it. It is so fun, inspiring, profound, playful, self-satirical…just what magic should be. It’s a slender volume, yet it contains ten to the power of infinity more wisdom and knowledge than just about any other book on magic ever written (I don’t know how he crammed it all in there, but he did). If you want to know about anything related to anything to do with the stuff we talk about on Elhaz Ablaze then this is the book.

That said…I actually like his Seidways even more, but it’s a little more specific; and his Helrunar is the best book on esoteric runes ever. No contest. I know lots of Heathens don’t like him because he isn’t Heathen, but that just underscores the point: this guy understands runes better than the best esoteric Heathen authorities and he isn’t even a Heathen. Sock that to the ideologues, dogmatists, and Master-of-the-Universe-type cult leader blow-hards.

Sweyn is of course part of the Elhaz Fellowship, so in celebrating his book I’m completely guilty of nepotism and all the rest. But the fact is, this is the best point of departure there is. His translations of the rune poems are absolutely perfect (much better, I must say, than Thorsson’s or Fries’), and the supporting documentation is extremely valuable for getting your brain sorted out before you do anything runic. Indispensable reference? Tick!

Everyday Tao, Deng Ming-Dao
The Places That Scare You, Pema Chodron

Many Westerners don’t know anything about Eastern religion except that “uh, isn’t it, like, life-denying?” No, actually it isn’t: if you bothered to actually pay attention you’d realise it is all about being radically present, and the otherworldly stuff circles back into that.

Take Buddhism, for example. What’s the highest deed you can do? Escape Samsara, achieve oneness…then become a Bodhisattva and come back to the physical world even though you don’t have to in order to help the healing of others. It’s easy to be world-affirming when your dogma doesn’t really give you a choice anyway, but these guys want to be here even once they’ve overcome the bloody place!

And when we all get to Nirvana? Holy cow, who even knows how hilarious that’ll be?! One thing is for sure, and this is presaged by some recent comments on other Elhaz posts: Woden is one of those utterly furious Bodhisattva types, I’m almost certain of it.

Uh, anyway, so yeah. Pema’s book is all about having the courage to do the things that scare you, to commit to your integrity, your spirit. It’s a great tonic and soul-nourisher. Enough said.

Everyday Tao is a book that has saved my brain many times. When I am stuck, blocked, down, whatever, I open it at a random page and invariably it blows away all fetters. Deng Ming-Dao is a genius. And there are patterns in the things I get; I can’t tell you how many times that book has told me in moments of self-doubt: “we have to stick to our perceptions and our feelings.” I dare you, go on, be stupid enough to call that sentiment life-denying.

So there you have it – the indispensable books I always keep in easy reach. What are yours?

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What is Nirvana?

I found this nice explanation of Nirvana (see link below) by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk, teacher and peace activist from Vietnam. As I already stated in my last post Nirvana has nothing to do with “fading away.” It’s a state of consciousness, where “there is neither coming nor going, neither birthing nor dying,” neither being nor non-being. As a chaos mystic I neither believe that Nirvana is the pre-determined endpoint of enlightenment nor that such a state of consciousness is proof for metaphysical realities. BUT: As a chaos mystic I also put the emphasis on experience. So I will tell you what I think about all that after I’ve been there. I haven’t yet. (On the other hand it’s said that Nirvana is not where you will go, but where you have always been.) Once when Clint and I talked about the Eastern teachings and our fascination with certain aspects of them, we both came to the conclusion that we are some kind of “Satanic Daoists.” Of course that was a joke, but one that contains a grain of truth. The point is that each of us values things that Buddhism and Asian spiritual philosophies in general often seem to neglect. I mean things like individualism, personal freedom, personal achievement, warriorship and the body / pleasure. (I mean, probably all Elhaz Fellows do value these things, but I had that particular conversation with Clint some months ago.) Mystics all over the world often value enlightenment over ordinary, embodied life.  As a Chaos Heathen and an Initiate on the Left-Hand Path I embrace joyously the embodied life and I strive to use magic to make it better, not to look for escape roots from this world. To return from mystical peak experiences to embodied life, to use them for self-empowerment, joy and inner freedom seems to me to be the hallmark of a truely Heathen attitude. That kind of stance doesn’t really make you predisposed for becoming a Buddhist. (I’ve been there in my early twenties, but my magical interests have been too strong and I didn’t like the idea that sitting at the feet of some guru would somehow help you to improve yourself.) I am also very sceptical of Europeans that claim they are Buddhists (I have a few friends who are). Even the Dalai Lama said that we (the Westerners) have our own spiritual traditions. Certainly he mostly thought of Christianity, but we can also dig deeper to all kind of occult philosophies, alchemy, the Orphic Mysteries and, of course, the Runes. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t learn from the wise men of the East, as Godwin has put it. The meditative techniques developed in Buddhism (especially Vipassana) are very useful tools for developing the “Watcher of the watcher,” the “inner witness” or “Fourth Room, ” as deRopp called it. This is basically the ability to practise “observer consciousness,” to develop an inner observer that doesn’t become lost in one’s own thoughts, feelings and desires. It’s a kind of meta-level, a calm centre, untouched by the inconsistent, impermanent nature of the mind, a “fluid, mercurial point of view that is still there in some form, even when the sense of mundane selfhood is dismantled.” (Dave Lee, pers. comm.) Without developing that capability nothing really useful can be achieved in spiritual matters. One needs years, even decades to get there. Even then you can still loose awareness easily in certain situations. This is a constant process of self-remembering, as the mystic and spiritual teacher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff has called it.

It’s interesting to note that the Buddha attained enlightenment under a Tree. Our God of the Runes instead is Hangatýr, the God of the Hanged, as He has hung upon a Tree when He reached illumination. I come to believe that Eihwaz is the Rune of “psychological death.” Its number is 13 (a number often associated with bad luck now). Eihwaz is a very powerful Rune that I also consider to be the Rune of Enlightenment and Immortality. The Eihwaz-Rune represents the Tree, Yggdrasil, where Óðinn has won the Runes – His symbolic code that leads to enlightenment. And as I said once in a ritual I called the Elhaz Ablaze Rite: “The Tree is the World. The World is the Supreme Self. This Self is me. I Am the Tree. Tat tvam Asi.“

However, here is the link to the video where Thich Nhat Hanh explains the nature of Nirvana. Notice his calmness and clarity. Most interesting are the parts, where he explains the aim of meditative practice that is “non-fear.” I enjoyed a lot his way of looking at death, namely that death does not exist. A cloud does not die, it just changes its state of being, but it does not become nothing. Words of wisdom. Heed them well. Click here to watch the movie.

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