NMR ISSUE 15

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Lizard
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New Age Causalities
On the Will
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The Life and Work of Aleister Crowley
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New Age Casualties

Antero Alli

There are two biases in mysticism: Disembodied and Embodied. The former originated amidst more populated regions of the world (India, China, Japan) partly as a method for personally transcending the crowding problems. Generally speaking, disembodied mysticism initiates neophytes to various degrees of out of body or astral experience while indoctrinating them into a hierarchical psychic caste system" with a lower self" and a morally superior higher self. This is especially true of Hinduism and Christianity, the mix of which produced much of America's current Pop Mysticism and New Ageism. It was around 1890 that people such as Madame Blavatsky, Alice Bailey and Dr. Leadbeater propagated this synthesis for the masses of the Western World.

Embodied mysticism has tended to emerge from far less populated geo-regions such as Native America, Northern Europe, Africa and Australia. They emphasize mystical union in the body. Examples include all Native American Indian tribes, the goddess worshipping pagans of Celtic, Irish and Slavic traditions, the Australian aborigines and much of pre-Christian Africa. Occidental exceptions include the vast array of orthodox and fundamentalist Christian sects that adhere to disembodied metaphysical principles such as the assumption of an afterlife" requiring degrees of martyrdom and self-negation in the current one. These preach evils of the flesh" and other ego-trashing dogmas which define virtue as of the spirit alone." They delegate the realm of the body to hell" and other generally undesirable states.

The danger of engaging any spiritual practice not indigenous to ones own body or spirit (or at least to the spirit of the land of residence) is that foreign metaphysical disciplines may be genetically wired survival devices adjusting people to the conditions of their immediate environment. For example Japan's Zen Buddhism aims towards samadhi via the Gate of the Illuminated Void. At the risk of oversimplification, I'd say its cosmology revolves around the Void as a goal; it's attainment the mark of enlightenment. Devotees practice `being nothing' and learn to respect space as a value, encouraging an ingenious solution to Japanese crowd control. Most Japanese art reflects this value. From Noh theater to flower arrangements to paintings of Mt. Fuji, all share the distinct quality derived from considering space as valuable as the things in the space.

As those who've discovered life after Zen know, the Buddhist path of enforced detachment is not for everyone. Many humans still seem to need someone or something to hold onto in order to feel alive. Here now are several observable, long-term side effects of disembodied pop mysticism, as practiced by certain individuals and groups. They all tend to show symptoms of personal disintegration, real spiritual emergency and or psychic catastrophe from over-exposure to its consequences.

Meditation Monsters

A dead-end street is paved for those who've made a career or religion out of disembodied mysticism without knowing their motivation. Why did they want to vacate their bodies in the first place? Transcendental Meditation, for one, is a highly effective tool when applied to daily relaxation, stress reduction and general peace-of-mind maintenance. Some advanced T.M. practitioners, who have developed their techniques for seven or more years have complained to me of a kind of terminal buoyancy. It seems a disturbing disassociation occurs alongside the more advanced Levitation exercises. These adepts report the disconcerting sensation of their heads disappearing and floating feelings, as if they were suspended above their own bodies. They tell me they are preparing for a higher level of mystical union. I say they are Meditation Monsters suffering from highly disguised and sophisticated death wish.

When identified with completely, any spiritual belief can turn into the absolutism of dogma. Dogma is a powerful drug. We now know that millions have killed and millions have died under the influence. When advanced meditators are irrevocably convinced they will reach their final goal by merging their identity with a disembodied metaphysical principle, they unwittingly start realizing their destiny as a disembodied entity, i.e., a dead person.

Because of our undeniable will to survive, the physical organism automatically experiences this abuse as self-negation and a direct threat to its survival. The body knows it will die someday and it's in no rush to get there. It will produce lower back pains, sacral discomfort, sciatic nerve spasms and other blatant signs to alert the soul in control that it's abandoning its Survival Energy Centers. Sometimes the indoctrinated soul treats these distress signals as just lower self obstacles to over come. Fortunately the organism has a vitalistic link with all living organisms, so its SOS does not go by ignored. However, help may not arrive in the manner most convenient and comfortable for the personality involved.

Kundalini Krackups

T.M. emphasized the activation of the upper energy centers: the sixth (third eye), seventh (crown) and eighth (above the head). Kundalini Yoga, on the other hand, focuses on the first center inside the base of the spinal column. Coiled here, in otherwise useless repose, is the kundalini fire. When activated, the kundalini burns its way up the spine and out the top of the head—if there are no blocks along the way.

If there is a block, the kundalini hits it and bounces down and out the energy center (chakrum) below it. For example, suppose you are not reconciled with power and issues of will. When the activated kundalini move up to the solar plexus (power center), it will bounce down and out the sexual center (just below the navel). As the sexual center blasts open with the force of an emotional atomic bomb, the god of lust unleashes erotic passions on the world around you. If your heart is closed, then the serpent bounces down and screams out the power center arranging our worldview into a nonstop political tour de force.

Kundalini crackups are not funny; often they are painful. The organs connected to each energy center are stressed—occasionally breaking down. Those of us suffering from some form of kundalini crackup can seek occasional relief by finding, or inventing, outlets to express the activity pertaining to the overemphasized chakrum through total commitment to: 1. security (parenting); 2. sex (passion); 3. power (leadership); 4. love (friendship); 5. communication (art); 6. vision (perspective) until our condition eventually restabilizes. If we are creative enough, we get involved with situations that touch and inspire the lives of people around us with the resurrected intensities coursing through our new bodies.

Activated Kundalini does not always occur from practicing Kundalini Yoga. It has erupted spontaneously in those people on the verge of major breakdowns and breakthroughs. Here, enlightenment" is unexpected and simply means you work like a dog (or a god)—harder, longer and deeper that anyone else—just to integrate your hot new metabolism. When your brain is on fire, spiritual discipline emerges from the burning cranial chaos as an absolute necessity. It becomes as much a survival need as eating or seeking shelter from a storm. At this stage, there is no time to ponder the meaning of life or the question of the question of free will. As the central nervous system grows more urgently aware of itself, the soul-in-charge projects its dendritic feelers in all directions seeking vessels willing and able to contain its presence. Sometimes, this is how gurus and disciples find each other.

The Idiot Within

Sometimes, the only antidote for stabilizing the volatile conditions brought on by this kind of spiritual emergency is hard labor, pitting the individual against the tangible resistance of the physical universe. The pragmatic mystic Georges I. Gurdjieff often placed the self-proclaimed spiritually evolved directly to work in the garden. There they would dig ditches and do any other manual physical labor he saw fit for balancing their lopsided, lofty egos. Gurdjieff's assumption was that people are sleep-walking. This somnambulist state would maintain itself by our lack of complete operational functioning, i.e., some people would stay asleep by being conceptually adept but emotionally immobilized. Others, social geniuses but physical idiots. According to Gurdjieff, there are energetic centers within us all at various degrees of functioning; the real work of embodied mysticism begins the moment we confess our area of true ignorance by proclaiming the Idiot Within. He also said that vanity was the most destructive vice he knew of—it keeps people asleep to themselves.

Another remedy for bringing wayward souls back to their rejected, grieving and angry bodies is explaining how they're preparing their own funerals. Sometime this kind of direct approach administers the shock necessary to stop us in our tracks and look at what we have set up for ourselves. Often times when this succeeds, it requires a follow-up of hearty doses of hilarious humor. I'm not talking puns and chuckles here, but gut-busting, belly laughter. It stimulates digestion of the more serious, denser foods like the search for the meaning of life" and other human quandaries. In the words of the iconoclastic poet, Henry Miller: Laughter is the most direct route to God filling our heads with Light as we go? Besides, if something is really true, it's probably going to be funny somewhere.

Another serious side-effect of disembodied spirituality can be seen in the now fading channeling" epidemic. In this, scores of otherwise normal people learned how to throw their power away to the homogenized axioms of disembodied entities. One rather banal reason some of us wish to communicate with the dead is that we don't have any living friends to talk with. Establishing a link with guides" may compensate for the lack of love, good sex and genuine human interaction in our lives. Spooks, like our childhood imaginary" playmates, offer the security, status and strokes missing from our social life. Yet, if ghosts exist, are they any wiser than the living? Is death a Ph.D.?

New Age Cosmic Foo Foo

The socio-politico-economic uncertainty of these times produces, in the New Age Movement, a dangerous tendency to settle for easy answers—dogmas to cling onto and buffers against feeling our helplessness in the wake of relentless change. As New Agers continue over-emphasizing the spiritual and philosophical, they lose the perspective they sought to gain through metaphysics in the first place. When we're genuinely lost and disoriented, feelings of inadequacy are appropriate and real to our human predicament. When they're denied and repressed behind any New Age ideal of divine perfection," we feed the delusion that everything is wonderful and perfect no matter what." Actually, we're just too vain to accept our genuine shortcomings and flaws as they are. How can everything be wonderful and perfect all the time outside of Disneyland? In this way, the New Age is plagued with Cosmic Foo Foo. What's is going to take for us to get off our rear ends? Crystal suppositories?

This disembodied, New Age obsession with Wholeness and Perfection reeks of death and stagnation. At every psychic fair, its neo-Puritan ethics mirror the White Brotherhood of Fundamentalist Christian evangelicals. Its pathetic worship of Clarity, Light and Harmony leaves seekers as transparent and cheerful as crystal skulls. Psst! The New Age is dead. Shhhh! The act is over. A rebellious counter-movement stirs in the wings. They're real, live human dynamos who laugh, cry, inform and entertain a motley, charismatic, yet highly disciplined crew of players fiercely dedicated to navigating the turbulence of the times in silence daring to not sell out. They're not introverts, they're not extroverts; here come the ambiverts! They've been working underground, hidden behind harmless smokescreens of Crystals, Channeling and Cosmic Foo Foo. Play a dirge for the changing of the guard. Enter now the Cyberpunks, Hi-Tech Naturalists, Kamikaze Feminists and Anarcho-Artists who nonchalantly sweep the stage of the limp, cheerful and very perfect corpses of the end of an era.

Antero Alli is a former New Age spokesperson now exploring inter-media performance rituals to express his intentions. He is the author of Angel Tech, All Rites Reversed, The Akashic Record Player and Pregnant Universe (all from Falcon Press). For a free Katalog of his books and services, write to him at P.O. Box 45758, Seattle, WA 98145.