What Does Spiritual Mean?

luka

Well-known member
I feel like it’s more about a between than a beyond. No one person or perspective or way of thinking can fully encompass or articulate this thing. So a spiritual insight can come through falling through the cracks, collapse and confusion, as well as soaring above or comprehension. If this sounds like total wank it’s because I’ve had a bottle of red wine

Yeah I tend to think of the magic space as being a between certainly. Mr Tea is a proper physicist and he hates it when people misuse this stuff, but I like winding him up, so I will say it is like the moment of quantum indeterminacy. Not yet this or that.
 

luka

Well-known member
Then there's things like trance. There's contact with others, The Instructors. There's the spaces you find yourself, such as The Pink Temple....
 

version

Well-known member
Yeah I tend to think of the magic space as being a between certainly. Mr Tea is a proper physicist and he hates it when people misuse this stuff, but I like winding him up, so I will say it is like the moment of quantum indeterminacy. Not yet this or that.

Liminality.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
The internet, I reckon.

Surface, ego, distraction, gloss.

for a while the subhead of my blog was "very far from grace" - because i felt like every second spent on the internet was taking me further from whatever that state is

(present location excepted of course)

at the same time, I've come to think of some of my favorite music - particularly recent years, with trap etc - as literally godforsaken - with a capital G.
 

luka

Well-known member
I remember spending all night listening to drill on MDMA and feeling it was actually satanic.
 

luka

Well-known member
Its really just a set of experiences which seem more real than real I think. And because they have a heightened reality, because theAy Mark themselves out by their strangeness and intensity, we privilege them, place them on top of a hierarchy. You can have philosophical objections to doing so, but the fact of their difference remains.

Why do you create hierarchies of music with some songs as the best songs? Why do you then conflate those ostensibly aesthetic judgements with some notion of truthfulness? A similar process it think.
 

luka

Well-known member
Two other things spring to mind while I'm here. One is the quality of responsiveness. When reality changes from becoming an inanimate machine working out its cause and effect computations, to becoming something responsive, that communicates with you, plays with you, assumes new guises. The Internet is interesting in this respect, because it often gives people this sensation, in various different ways. I think with the Internet there is always an ambiguity over whether it is God or the Antichrist. Alive or a devious simulation of life.

For me this sense of responsiveness is not ever present, but I only feel half alive in the periods of my life when it's not there.

The other thing is the sense of narrative and I think this is what people mean by initiation. The sense of being inducted into a series of ever grater mysteries. This can have an addictive quality and so be quite dangerous. Always wanting the next thing.
 

luka

Well-known member
The spiritual life, if I can get away with using such a grand term, does come with a whole set of its own dangers. You can crash, and very, very badly. You can end up in in-between worlds, sinister and frightening worlds, and it can take quite a long time to extricate yourself.

You can feel as if you have entered a reward and punishment system that feels like it belongs to another century. It can foster paranoia. You could end up wearing a hair shirt or walking on your knees through broken glass, begging for forgiveness.
 
What isn’t spiritual?

The internet, I reckon.

Surface, ego, distraction, gloss.

Oh and gak. For the same reasons

The internet is an interesting answer if you think about all the utopian hyperconnected ideas at its inception. Erik Davis and that techgnosis book that says it’s spiritual desire and fears that fuels technological progression.

Gak is another interesting answer when thinking about coke addict Freud and psychoanalysis as an anti-spiritual, self-obsessed way to look at the world.

Although Freud did discuss the “oceanic feeling”

“An infant at the breast does not as yet distinguish his ego from the external world as the source of the sensations flowing in upon him … [O]riginally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself.

One comes to learn a procedure by which, through a deliberate direction of one’s sensory activities and through suitable muscular action, one can differentiate between what is internal — what belongs to the ego — and what is external — what emanates from the outer world . . . This differentiation, of course, serves the practical purpose of enabling one to defend oneself . . . “

Put another way, your personality is an architecture you build against spirituality. Which is the exact opposite of gwyneth Paltrow and the wellness industry find yourself spirituality.

To deviate from that damasio definition of a healthy and harmonious alignment and combative stance, I’d say sickness and death can be spiritual. Hunched over the toilet between wretches, willing yourself to vomit but not wanting to, you’re reduced to get-this-out-of-me machine and all other concerns fade away. It’s spiritual. Like a negative meditation.

Going back to kpunk on Spinoza and “pitilessly materialistic spirituality” my favourite answer to the question would be: nothing!
 

luka

Well-known member
Fried discussed the oceanic mostly to say he'd never had it and didn't think it was a strong enough impulse for a religion to have congealed around it!
 

luka

Well-known member
There's the feeling of having burst through normal temporality too. 'The Room Outside of Time.'
 

catalog

Well-known member
The spiritual life, if I can get away with using such a grand term, does come with a whole set of its own dangers. You can crash, and very, very badly. You can end up in in-between worlds, sinister and frightening worlds, and it can take quite a long time to extricate yourself.

You can feel as if you have entered a reward and punishment system that feels like it belongs to another century. It can foster paranoia. You could end up wearing a hair shirt or walking on your knees through broken glass, begging for forgiveness.

I think Alan Moore talks about this in relation to fugue states, how it's like you're on the edge of a building, hanging out the window. You can see a lot more than if you are just looking out the window, you have a greater perspective for what is at the edges, and you realise everything is a lot bigger, but the danger of falling out is also much greater, cos you are half out there.i suppose the metaphor ends at this point cos obviously if you fall out of a window you die or damage yourself physically so you know it, but with this metaphorical window, you don't even know when you're out too far. I think a lot of people who brand themselves as spiritual are probably in this position, where theyve gone too far out themselves, so they've got a different take anyway.
 

luka

Well-known member
Pitilessly materialistic spirituality makes me think of a dichotomy between a kind of earth-mother, nature worship, energy coming up from the ground, warm, enfolding, fuzzy, cannabis, hemp trousers spirituality. Reggae music and home cooked vegetarian food, embodied, loving, anything but pitiless, spirituality on the one hand (Pattycakes and John Eden signify this for me, and I don't mean that as an insult)

And the kind of electric, occult, magical, intellectual, father God, visionary, spirituality on the other. Mark was attuned to the latter and revolted by the former.
 

luka

Well-known member
I'm thinking about immortal threads such as niceness is evil and dope smoking dads.
 

luka

Well-known member
I find the former can act as a corrective to the latter and vice versa. The latter kind can lead a kind of overstretched, shrill quality. The martinet thing you get in the worst of Mark, and some of the sadism and crazed egotism you get when I'm at my worst. A kind of out of balance messianic desire to impose your will.

This needs to be corrected by being brought back into contact with traditional, indispensable, if boring qualities such as humility and compassion.
 

luka

Well-known member
Similarly the other kind can lead to a terrible torpor of the soul, a spiritual slackness and fatalism which Mark has written about and all of us will be familiar with. A lack of intellectual discrimination. Indolence. Lack of clarity and discernment.
 
Fried discussed the oceanic mostly to say he'd never had it and didn't think it was a strong enough impulse for a religion to have congealed around it!

Yes. This would be how he explains that feeling if it exists. It’s from civilisation and its discontents. His idea of a relationship to oneness might be the death drive, wanting return to the inorganic.
 

luka

Well-known member
There's this terrible, thing which happens, this slippage, between, I've got it, and everyone knows I've got it, I'm inspired, every word is true!

To, I've become a cunt and everyone hates me.

It's a bit like when a drug starts coming on in waves, it's there, then it's not, it's there, then it's gone.
 
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