10 Deep Dives You May Have Missed on Medium
Deep Dives Vol. III: Sacred darkness, skeletal art, All is Nothing!, panpsychism, happiness as project, happiness as projection, dreaming together and more. Add these recent stories to your reading list. You’ll be glad you did!
The Dark Heart of Winter Solstice, by Kelley Harrell, M.Div.
All of the holidays clustered around the Winter Solstice in their own way celebrate “the return of the light.” But what of Winter’s darkness? We evolved in a world of natural light/dark cycles. If we revere the light and spurn the darkness, we are out of balance. What would it mean to reclaim the Sacred Dark?
Graffiti These Bones: Horror in the Daylight, by Justin Lee
The cemetery of the Capuchin monastery in Rome holds the remains of 3,700 monks, dating back to the 15th Century. Each crypt is a room-sized work of art, with the dead arranged in living scenes –
“In every niche and under every arch there are well-preserved skeletons placed in various poses, some recumbent, some preaching and some in prayer. All these skeletons are dressed in the Capuchin habit and some have beards. I have never seen anything more striking.”
This essay is a moving rumination on death, beauty, art, and our common human need to defy mortality.
We Can Make Friends with the Wilder Parts of our Mind, by Jules Evans
Religious experiences, spiritual experiences, peak experiences. Call them what you will, transformative states of ecstatic self-transcendence are universally human, occurring across all times and cultures among 10% or more of the populace. But in our excessively-rational 21st Century Western world, we’ve come to fear ecstasy, even to label it “pathological.” We pay a price for that, as individuals and as a society. Is there a better way?
What I didn’t inherit: Spook, by Adriana Palanca
What is “spook?”
“My mother has it, and so does her sister. Le streghette — as they are called — or the witches. Their childhood stories include late-night encounters with the spectres of dead ancestors on moon-lit paths, and houses where the spirits made too much clatter and kept everyone up all night…”
Magic is all around us. Within us, too. Even if we fail to inherit ancestral magic, we can always make our own.
My Own Personal Happiness Project, by Alecia Kennedy
If we want to be happy, we must be willing to pursue happiness as a goal. That seems obvious, but how many of us actually do it? The truth is we mostly invest our lives in every other goal under the sun (money, love, fame, security), then wonder why we’re miserable. Is it okay to “just want to be happy?” If so, how’s that done?
Dan Dennett is a Panpsychist, by Tam Hunt
Scientific Materialists like Daniel Dennett (along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, the “Four Horsemen of the New Atheism”) believe that only what is physical is real, and that consciousness, therefore, is simply “something that physical brains do.” They believe brains generate consciousness.
Panpsychists, on the other hand, a group of thinkers that includes Spinoza, Schopenhauer, William James, Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, Teilhard de Chardin, J.B.S. Haldane, David Bohm, Galen Strawson, and many others, believe consciousness is an inherent quality of matter, all the way down to the subatomic level. Everything is to some degree conscious, and the more complex a structure becomes (like the incredibly complex eighty-six-billion-neuroned human brain), the more conscious it becomes, as well. Rather than generating consciousness, our brains are as much made of consciousness as they are of cells and molecules and atoms. On the grand scale, a quark might be just a little bit conscious, while the Universe may be infinitely conscious, with humans somewhere in between.
In this essay, Tam Hunt does a brilliant job of demonstrating that the theories of curmudgeonly Materialists like Dennett, when taken to their logical ends, also lead inevitably to Panpsychism, whether the “Horsemen” want to admit it or not.
Playing With The Realization That Nothingness Is The Truth Of What Is, by Cool1
“Thus, all objects exist as mental constructs. We live and move in a world that is like The Matrix. In order to know that an object is ‘out there’ or ‘in here’ one has to perceive it as such. But the perception of an object out there is not the object. And the thought of an object in one’s mind is also not that object.”
Read this essay slowly, and let it sink in. Your entire experience of reality is a mental construct in your brain. Neuroscience has proven this beyond any reasonable doubt. But guess what? Your brain is part of that mental model, too. You can no more “really” experience yourself — not your brain, not your body, not your thoughts — than you can the world “out there.” So what’s real? No-Thing…
The Tower of Happiness: How your self-projection determines your happiness level at any point in life, by Vincenzo Elifani
You continually project an “ideal you” into the world and strive to live up to it. You project a “future you” and stretch to achieve it. You project a “someday” ideal state of happiness, and sacrifice today in order to reach it. All of this has dire consequences for your ability to be happy now, even if you reach your goals. This is a very user friendly breakdown of how it all works, illustrated with charming stick-figures.
Shared Dream Experiment, by Tantra Bensko
This is not fiction. It’s the true story of a group of people who came together for an evening, and agreed to behave together as if they were dreaming. They experimented with psychically influencing the dreams of anyone who actually fell asleep, but that, to me, is not the most interesting part their story. I love the conscious intention, as a group, to blur the edges of reason and propriety, to cross together the boundary between social convention and… magic?
Tantra Bensko’s Shared Dream Experiment engagingly illustrates what Irish poet and Golden Dawn ceremonial magician William Butler Yeats labeled the first “foundation of nearly all magical practices”:
“That the borders of our minds are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy.” — W. B. Yeats
Three Hits Of DMT: A Guide To Awaking Presently, by Matt Symonds
In the 21st Century pop-economy of mindfulness, we’ve cheapened “living in the NOW” to basically being alert to what’s going on, paying attention to the person in front of us, savoring our sandwich at lunch, focusing on a project. If Matt Symonds is right, that’s all abstraction. The real “NOW,” revealed by DMT:
“…feels as though you’ve snapped out of a trance. There is this awe, wonder, and bewilderment as you become so presently aware of a newly discovered axial depth of ‘now’, that time and death literally become meaningless.”
This essay is a love letter to the “Spirit Molecule” DMT, and to the experience of waking up in the vast, incomprehensible moment.
