Meditation

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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The Swaying Inner Serpent

A source of minor frustration to me is how rarely I seem to write for this website. There are so many ideas to be explored, yet so few make it through into print (or pixels, or whatever).

I realized this evening that part of the problem is that, ironically, I impose a lot of rules on myself. Combine that with a very demanding, satisfying job that calls on all of my magical prowess, and other fun creative pursuits, well the written word languishes. That…and what I really want to be writing is material too demanding to be squeezed in around a job, no matter how satisfying that job may be.

When this site first started, I was slamming out the articles, yet my daily life had a lot less satisfaction in it. I never dreamed I would be doing the work I do now. Even if I work in a very mainstream environment and even if my interests and ideas don’t get to often openly show themselves, my creativity and tenacity and weirdness get enough of a workout that they aren’t begging for literary adventures as they once did.

This is a shame because my magical journeys have become richer and richer. Since I did a Vipassana retreat some 3 years ago I have had a most wonderful and potent meditation practice. My voyages into performance art have been giving me rich new opportunities for the veneration of Odin and Loki (and the runes!). I am learning about therapeutic applications of trembling (Jan Fries eat your heart out!) and might even get to study hypnotherapy under the auspices of a fellow Elhaz Ablaze book contributor.

Oh! And our book! What a journey that was. I have more books in me, but for now not the space and resources to realize them. What a conundrum.

Yes, and even as I write this I recognize submerged voices telling me that I’m doing it wrong, no one wants to read this. And that is the fundamental mistake: we must create for the inner serpent, not for the appeasement of a projected audience. So long as I am trying to contort myself into an externally determined form, I am violating the font of my power and inspiration.

“To find me, first lose me and find yourself,” admonished Zarathustra to his disciples as he dismissed them. This website, and our book, is fundamentally about the art of stripping away all the authoritarian introjects, the shoulds, musts, and oughts, so that the inner serpent may sway as she wills. A life of constriction and suppression is worthless. Anarchism is the only viable option in the long run (meant psychologically and spiritually, and who knows, perhaps one day even socially?).

I want to burn myself away in the mirror-flame, the harsh mistress called reflection. I want to know my desire, to become it, to articulate it, to nourish it, to be confronted only with the choice of whim, not the rigidity of doubt. For my only criterion of choice to be my judgment, not my fear.

How do we become strong? We nourish ourselves and we test ourselves. One or the other alone will not suffice. I must feed myself and then stretch myself. On the other side of punitive forcing and lax lassitude there dwells the discipline of kindness, which nourishes the endless thirst for mystery that captivates the swaying inner serpent.

Vipassana has taught me to abandon my fear of pain, discomfort, suffering, to embrace it, which paradoxically grants freedom. Not that there is less pain, discomfort, or suffering, but that they are no longer impediments as they were. “This is better than perfection,” to quote another of my incarnations.

Yet I am still so terribly constricted. Tentacles, inner armor, abound in my psyche, my flesh. I am learning more and more just how damaged I am, how much of a freak I am, and it is by turns exhilarating and devastating. Will you truly court Mystery, Runa? If you truly will, you must be ready to shed your skin.

As authoritarianism becomes progressively more brazen on the world stage, we are called upon to challenge its hold on our internal landscapes. Without that inner work I will never have the strength to defy the tyranny of mediocrity that is so dominating US politics (and other places too). My liberation and collective liberation are admixed. There is no separation, only different perspectives.

Do you crave to run screaming across the astral plane? Ride with the Hunt across storm-tossed skies? Tear yourself to pieces in the calling of rebirth? I want the truth of my nature to be fulfilled as fully as it may.

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Elhaz Ablaze Book is Now Available!

Long awaited, finally here: the very first official Elhaz Ablaze publication, available in both print and ebook editions. You can order the book on Amazon:

Print edition available at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0692984712

Ebook edition available at: https://www.amazon.com/Elhaz-Ablaze-Compendium-Chaos-Heathenry-ebook/dp/B079WCH3RK

Our back-of-title screed:

There are those who hear the phrase “Chaos Heathen” and instinctively know what it means. This book is for you.

There are those who hear the phrase “Chaos Heathen” and do not know what that could mean. This book is for you.

There are those who hear the phrase “Chaos Heathen” and get upset, confused, or angry. This book is for you.

Elhaz Ablaze: A Compendium of Chaos Heathenry dives into the fractal spirals of contemporary magic from a Heathen perspective. Ranging from the bizarrely philosophical to the vigorously practical, the book’s contributors – artistic and literary – dare to dismantle Chaos Magic, Heathenry, and themselves…just in time to serendipitously discover ever more novel, playful, and artful modes of magical and spiritual being.

The book explores diverse themes including rune magic; meditation; mystical interpretation of Norse mythology and deities (Odin, Thor, etc.); sigil magic; trance work; alchemy; the ideas of Aleister Crowley, C. G. Jung, and others; historical martial arts and fitness; and the philosophy of the occult.

Created by authors and friends of the notorious Elhaz Ablaze website, and lavishly illustrated, Elhaz Ablaze: A Compendium of Chaos Heathenry promises to smash a Mandelbrot set’s worth of paradigms, all the while artfully romancing the mysteries of Heathen spirituality.

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What are You Willing to Do to Make Yourself More Free?

We know there is no system of social organization that can reliably facilitate individual freedom, because systems are forged from people and people are fallible. Certainly there are better and worse systems – the farce of US ‘democracy’ being a nice example of a rapidly disintegrating system that was never that great in the first place – but the best system in the world is still fallible.

(This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t care about what system of social organization we adopt, more on that later).

Since systems are fallible it follows that I might be curious about the fallible humans that make them so. Why are we fallible? Other than the fact that there is a vicious cycle such that a bad system creates more fallible humans, who in turn make for a worse system.

Hmm – a vicious cycle. Perhaps the nature of a circle is that it matters not where we choose to puncture the circumference, so long as we do.

Two significant factors that affect the question of freedom suggest themselves: imagination and fear.

If I lack the time, space, and wit to imagine possibilities for myself I am unlikely to explore them. Tunnel vision is devastating for the possibility that I can exercise my freedom. If I have internalized a thin narrative to the effect that my possibilities are few and rigidly defined, then I again find myself in a vicious cycle. The less I can imagine possibilities, the less I am likely to explore them, the more the story of my limited nature seems compelling.

Authorities sustain their power and domination through constricting our sense of possibilities, our ability to imagine ourselves into multiplicity. To the extent that we base our sense of self on the framework of external authorities we run the risk of choking ourselves. If my self-image is little more than a tangle of (possibly malevolent, at least arbitrary) introjects, then how can I know myself? If I do not know myself, in what sense can my thoughts, feelings, or actions be considered free?

A major mechanism by which authorities impose introjects is fear. Fear that I am doing something wrong. Fear that I will be punished for some shortcoming or other. Fear chokes my capacity for spontaneity. It sets chains of judgment on the bare facts of my experiencing myself. It introduces the burden of better and worse, right and wrong, valid and invalid. These are external values shoehorned onto my experience of myself.

I have to learn how to be myself, and this is a process of identifying and discarding the introjects of control that authority has imposed upon me from birth. Every single narrative of identity needs to be discerned, evaluated, possibly discarded. I must use these constrictions as opportunities to encounter myself. Reflexivity, reflection, are the means by which internalized judgment can be held out and defanged.

Nothing is wasted and there is no need to resent authorities for their imposition of fear. The need lies rather in the process of reflection so that a less mangled relationship with self is possible. Indeed, if we waste time on resentment then we remain entangled with authoritarian, judgmental introjects (this is yet another tactic that authorities use, turning our instinct for courageous freedom against us).

My preferred mechanisms for free-making reflection are meditation and psychotherapy.

Meditation is the patient sitting with my own experience regardless of whether I like it or not. Over time I begin to build an immediate and direct knowledge of my thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations. This is a language of self-understanding that no authority can ever claim. As this deepens, a growing immunity to fear emerges. As I know myself better, I shed layers of attachment to the illusions of my palimpsest sense of self.

This is a slow process. It works. Quick fixes fade all too swiftly by comparison. A year’s worth of meditation will grant far more progress than a year’s worth of desperate, insecure, flamboyant magicking.

Psychotherapy is an opportunity to utilize a relationship as a territory for testing one’s permission to be oneself. As the connection strengthens, safety increases and the pressure to conform to the introjects of society, family, and institutions can wither away. Thus the imagination can begin to flower into a strange and savage new garden.

The process of self-transformation can facilitate increasing compassion, generosity, and sense of humor. As I begin to nourish myself through building an irreducible relationship to self (meditation), through softening the grip of fear (through meditation again), I no longer need to ape the noxious authorities that would have me believe that only through introjected judgment can I be strong or safe.

As my courage to be myself flourishes, perhaps I begin to find ways to play a role in changing or dismantling institutions of authority. If I want to change the systems for the better, and I do not in parallel work to shed my personal fear and poverty of imagination, then it is likely that the best I will do is play a role in exchanging one noxious system for another. This is perhaps part of why revolutions have often replaced one authoritarian regime with another.

Learning love for oneself is a decisive political act that provides a deep basis for, in turn, transforming systems toward permissiveness, curiosity, trust in human spontaneity. It takes courage and a Quixotic sensibility to begin the hunt for freedom. Break the seamless surface of the circle’s skin. The circumference is everywhere and nowhere.

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Odin Says: “Shut it!”

MELLIN(1850)_p1.156_ODENOf his wit hath need       who widely fareth
a dull wit will do at home
A laughingstock he          who lacketh words
among smart wits when he sits.
–Havamal, st. 5

It has long been my observation that bigotry is stupid and hackneyed. When one looks back at, say, racist humor from the 1970s, one marvels at how anyone ever found the old jokes funny (though sadly it remains the case that there are still plenty of souls who would).

From the vantage point of how public discourse has improved, getting rid of racist humor has raised the quality of comic performance. This is marvelously ironic, since we’ve been assured time and again that “political correctness” would be the death of humor. Perhaps the folks preaching that line never noticed the observation I described above, namely that bigotry is stupid and hackneyed. Indeed, as comedians set bigotry aside they found their creativity flowed more powerfully.

One of the motifs of the Old Norse poem Havamal is its repeated admonishments to silence. There are two general aspects to this advice. The first is that even if you really are possessed of wisdom, it is still best to be cautious in speaking, to present oneself as “middle wise.” In Old Norse times, impression management was a matter of dignity, and being impressive had little to do with having a big mouth.

The second general aspect to the Havamal’s advice is that even a fool can pass without censure if that fool at least has the sense to keep quiet. Apparently there were a lot of loud mouths in Heathen times that needed to be told to hush themselves up.

(Which goes to show that the endless hordes of loud mouthed contemporary Heathens are probably more faithfully engaged in reconstructive Heathenry that they get credit for, though it is unfortunate that they are reviving aspects of former times that even the original Heathens would have preferred to do without).

You can almost imagine Odin (Havamal’s  author by reputation) as trying to shut down some foolish interlocutor, perhaps at an important social function. “Shut it!” Cries Odin. “But –” says the fool. “Shut it!” Roars Odin. “How about if –” says the fool. “Shut it!” Shrieks Odin. And so on. Actually, if one were to substitute “back to the breath” for “shut it” one would have a pretty good approximation of anapana meditation. Maybe Havamal can also be read as a handy guide to technologies of enlightenment (well we knew that anyway). But I digress.

The point is, fools wag their tongues and do so thoughtlessly. Whereas the wise are considered in their choices of speech – not that they never say anything, but that their communication is deliberate and thoughtful. And also, if the foolish were to stay silent – well they might learn and grow and become better people.

Now let us return to my observation that bigotry is hackneyed and stupid and uncreative. Is it possible to be any of these things while also possessing wisdom? Probably not. We must conclude therefore that bigotry is part of the language of the fool, the language that Odin repeatedly silences in the stanzas of Havamal.

My (not entirely tongue in cheek) conclusion is that we have a clear reconstructionist mandate for telling bigoted Heathens to shut their mouths. And indeed, I think we probably have a responsibility to do so if we want to have a happy, healthy Heathen community; if we want a Heathen community that has maximum access to positive, creative (divine? Odinnic?) energy.

Your choice: be a hackneyed bigot, or be a conduit for the gods, spirits, and ancestors. Hmm, that’s a hard one (and surprisingly, for some people it really is…makes you wonder why they think they want to be Heathen).

If getting rid of bigotry makes for better comedy, I think it reasonable to expect the same holds for Heathenry. Certainly in my observation the shallowest, silliest antics in modern Heathenry come from groups like the AFA (anyone remember their hilarious space program?) rather than from the more serious, focused groups like The Troth. (And that’s before we even touch the new AFA leader’s all-but-card-carrying-neo-Nazi statements from last year).

Anyway, right now the political tide is bursting with stupid, petty hatred. Scumbags who want to tear down the very institutions and communities they have claimed leadership over will try to ooze their poison into every little corner of the world, including Heathenry. That’s not something to which we should acquiesce.

And those Heathens who were already on board the poison ooze parade need, more than ever, to know that they are being stupid, boorish, and hackneyed. If they won’t divest themselves of their stupid bigotries then I think the rest of us can assume that they have burning desires to be made laughingstocks (we have it on Odin’s authority, after all), and respond accordingly. Just as we must respond to that fragile little ego in the White House and his nasty little cronies…and then some.

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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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Loki: Strife as the Harbinger of Love

Faroe_stamp_498_Djurhuus_poems_-_Loki_Laufey's_SonLoki confronts us with the inevitability of loss. The awesome tragedy that each of us confronts every day. Loki is an advocate for the gravity of grief in our lives; for without gravity, how would there be life on earth? How would the planets orbit the sun? The very structure of our cosmos would be as nothing without gravity; so too the very structure of our consciousness would be nothing without grief and loss.

Sometimes Loki is the catalyst of loss; sometimes he is merely its herald, even its scapegoat. Many times, he serves as the gods’ wild card: get out of loss free. His manipulations, for example, ensure that the gods get walls built around Asgard at no cost; they drive a bargain with a giant to do the work, yet on seeing that he will meet their deadline and collect his payment (Freya, no less!), the gods enlist Loki to sabotage the process. And he does, most assuredly.

One wonders, therefore, whether the embrace of loss is the antidote to loss. Our fear and loathing of loss: perhaps this is the opening through which loss seeps its cold and deadly waters into our soft and vulnerable hearts. Loki challenges us to have a more conscious relationship to loss; our vilification of him as a symbol of the inevitability of loss is merely a function of our own lack of character.

In meditation we find it helpful to learn to observe the phenomena of our experience without indulging in the habit of attaching our identity to them. Not “my breath,” or “my sensations.” No, rather it is the breath, the sensations to which we turn the lens of our awareness. The self begins to wash away, yet nothing is lost but the illusion of the same. We find ourselves instead to be integral threads in the infinite tapestry of Wyrd – and nothing more. Yet…this is everything, for that is what we are.

Ah, so then Loki is a god of meditation, awareness, enlightenment, the sacred oneness and difference of all things. Perhaps in this light he is enlightenment’s ardent advocate, its patient and persistent provocateur. Enlightenment not in the misunderstood notion of somehow shedding the physical. No, enlightenment in a more true sense, the shedding of the illusions held about the physical, and about the beholder of the physical.

In the window of enlightenment there is a knowing and loving embrace of that which is – known in the perfect and irrefutable medium of direct personal experience. When we come to separate the carapace of ego from the endlessly flowing experience of sensation that is the body, we find that we begin to release ourselves from reactivity. We begin to respond to the flowing current of temporality. As such, in stepping back, we step forward and live with unprecedented fullness.

It is this fullness to which Loki wishes to seduce us. Yet we cannot achieve it so long as we are ruled by our fear of loss. So Loki goes to work, admittedly with a toolkit of strategies that shows mixed effectiveness. And he is stigmatized, hated, scapegoated for it. We believe we must protect ourselves from him; yet ultimately what are we protecting but the illusion of control? The illusion of knowledge? The illusion of certainty? The illusory notion that we can have honesty without a sense of irony woven through it?

Yet I would not dream of trivializing loss. It is a profound doorway for Mystery – for Runa meant in the fullest, broadest sense – to announce herself in our lives. And as such, it’s means are often profoundly hurtful. We have to be kind to ourselves first and foremost, for if we are infinite we are also crushingly finite. Those of us who truly know loss know that some wounds can never be healed; we can only learn to live with them, in an armistice that we can never entirely trust. And yet just as there is no limit to attachment, there is also no limit to liberation.

As such, to sit in judgment over those who judge Loki is itself a denial of loss, a denigration of human vulnerability. Which would stand against all that Loki is; would stand against the central column of Odin’s mysticism too, the embrace of vulnerability ,of death, on the tree of the world. To sit in judgment on the judgers is to become one of them. If we sit in judgment in Loki’s name then so much the worse – now we are not only hypocrites, we are mired in unconscious irony, an almost unpardonable sin.

What could be possible if we were to gently come to know Loki? Not back him into the corner of cruel retorts and spiteful war. What if we were willing to experience ourselves as embodied beings without resentment, without distrust? We can enter into ourselves gradually, after all. The fear of Loki is the fear of being thrust too quickly into the eye of mystery, of Runa. It hardly seems fair to blame him for our own shortcomings, our own projections, our own self-doubt. Why resent ourselves for our finitude? Our frail mortality is the best and only door into all of Being.

Adherence to dogma, authoritarianism, and absolutes seems to be grounded in denial of the body. Loki wants you to live in your flesh, as it is. He want you to do it right now; not in the ruminative past or the illusory future(s). He wants you to find your way, through letting go of effort, into being both masterful and unattached to that mastery. To have a light touch that can yet bear more weight than the heaviest grasp.

Those who refuse to let the mystery of loss into their lives – who ward it off with whatever kind of psychological chicanery they can afford themselves – will ultimately be defined by that very mystery. They will hand it only the most narrow, barren blueprint for their existence. And yet they blame the loss, the inevitable price that life exacts, for their woe. And they will blame Loki, the scion of loss, just as readily.

What of those who can learn to accept loss? Who can allow themselves to sit in its suffering, its agony, its discomfort, its sheer, threatening novelty? These will become free in their relationship to mystery. They will not become superhuman, or immortal, or exalted. They will achieve something far greater: they will become themselves.

Nietzsche has Zarathustra declare to his pupils: “to find me, first lose me and find yourself.” Odin gave himself to himself as he embraced Runa on the gallows. Loki, Odin’s Blood Brother, summons strife into the world so that we might know loss and – if we are fortunate enough – step through its uncanny door and into the very heart of our own living beingness. Loki: strife as the harbinger of love. And let us not forget that Loki experiences at least his own fair share of suffering. He asks nothing of us that he will not himself endure.

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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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