What Does Spiritual Mean?

[luka]

It's funny that - how some people take acid and it's just (at best) funny and visually stimulating for them, it doesn't have this deeper resonance that terribly special people like me get from it.

Yeah woops on here says it doesn't change his thinking at all. But the world starts looking like a rave flyer.

You've said on here that smoking a spliff gives you profound spiritual experience Corpsey. This is all familiar territory for you. Part of your deep core makeup.

 

[Corpsey]

I've not really been thinking about this stuff lately.

There was a period when I was reading paradise lost and yeats and getting into religious art and had taken acid where I was genuinely beginning to think about becoming a (very strange) sort of Christian. A cultural Christian, or something. It seemed to me that the seriousness you encountered in religious art was preferable to the inanity of much atheistic life.

I could never believe in the literal truth of Christ, but it seems to me a tremendously powerful metaphor and religious belief itself as tapping into a fundamental truth of how everything is made of everything else and the material world is an illusion.

 

[Corpsey]

There are certain aspects of my personality that make me open (or susceptible) to religious belief. Two that come to mind as I wait for this train:

1. Total self-doubt
2. Unbearable horror in the face of death, suffering and meaninglessness

 

[craner]

There are certain aspects of my personality that make me open (or susceptible) to religious belief. Two that come to mind as I wait for this train:

1. Total self-doubt
2. Unbearable horror in the face of death, suffering and meaninglessness

You are teetering on the edge of joining the Hare Krishnas.

 

[Corpsey]

Yeah woops on here says it doesn't change his thinking at all. But the world starts looking like a rave flyer.

You've said on here that smoking a spliff gives you profound spiritual experience Corpsey. This is all familiar territory for you. Part of your deep core makeup.

Yeah again that's another drug that does something different to me to most people I know.

Other people smoke it to relax. They fall asleep easily on it. For me it wakes me up, often intolerably. The up side of this is being totally blown away by paintings. The downside is lying in bed for hours in the dark thinking about death.

 

[Corpsey]

Art and religion are for me very intimately connected because they both celebrate life and seek to deal with death (consoling us for it).

Not all art does this of course, except ... Implicitly? But the most profound (horrible word) art does.

 

[luka]

the Blake exhibition is a prolonged argument in favour of a spiritual understanding of art

 

[Corpsey]

I was reading the wasteland last night and it seems to me that I can't really get as much out of it as I could because I simply don't believe in his miserable vision of life.

But that vision of life (as Helen Gardner argues) was the necessary prelude to Eliot's conversion. He was such a depressed alienated figure that he needed to believe in God to not go absolutely crazy.

I suppose it's still worth reading for the language/technique and also just as an insight into the mind of the profoundly alienated.

 

[luka]

It's not a vision of the whole of life though. It's the wasteland. It's a dimension of life.

 

[luka]

It's part of a mythical arc. It's before the Fisher King is healed and fertility returns to the land.

 

[luka]

It's not saying this is all there is to life. It's saying this is the civilisational phase we are in and also that this is the personal phase I am in.

 

[Corpsey]

It's not saying this is all there is to life. It's saying this is the civilisational phase we are in and also that this is the personal phase I am in.

I dunno I think this is up for debate.

In the ultimate context of his poetry it becomes that - with ash Wednesday and the four quartets.

I thought it was this, but I've read quite convincing analyses that say it's basically a cry of despair. Which would make sense given Eliot's life at the time.

His conversion came later, right?

Falling on his knees in front of la pieta. Bit theatrical.

 

[luka]

It's not up for debate.

 

[Corpsey]

Fascist.

 

[shiels]

The meaning I like is the simple one of awareness of inter-connectedness

I really like a Simone Weil quote: “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”

Spirituality being a practice of choosing what to pay attention to.

And a practice of trying to subvert the illusion of self. That’s why acid helps, as a technology of non-self, as does rave, meditation etc. Also in this sense, Marxism is not opposed to spirituality at all, and class consciousness is a spiritual idea

Any sense of an abstract ‘immaterial’ world doesn’t make any sense to me. Everything is material. This is monism probably. Spinoza.

Kpunk was good on this materialist spirituality:

“Spinoza’s God is beyond even indifference, gloriously, desolately without interests of any kind. Intellectual love of God is effectively an identification with the cosmos as BwO. Spinoza’s conviction that awe, wonder and dread - not worship - are the only appropriate responses to a God that is the Great Zero, means that his thought can offer us a pitilessly materialist spirituality that is as important a legacy as anything else he has left us.”

 

[version]

I've had feelings of interconnectedness and awareness, both on and off acid, but it just felt like "yeah, everything's made of the same stuff, moving around in time and space and corresponding with everything else in various ways". It didn't feel like some ineffable or mystical thing -- just common sense.

 

[Corpsey]

The spiritual step is to recognise (or imagine) that there isn't a thing and another thing interacting, there's only one thing, that is everything.

But then again, I think this is a matter of perspective. In a very real sense I exist and you exist, but in another - "higher" - sense, nether of us really exists as we believe we do. Or rather, we exist in a much wider way than our senses and egos can comprehend.

"Common sense" suggests that this is what everybody knows and feels but I don't think people naturally feel these things and even the cleverest physicist can't possibly get their heads around it.

 

[Corpsey]

I should add that the imagination, which is in a sense immaterial is also completely material, as everything is, so that my imagined image of a dog dancing with a banana exists just as much as the table in front of me does.

 

[Corpsey]

I suppose this sort of insight is what drives a lot of people absolutely crazy on acid. The obliteration of the ego, and with it all 'meaning".

 

[Corpsey]

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.