THE WORLD IS YOURS
Imagine a world, free of whatever it is you don’t want in your life and filled with whatever it is that you do; a world of choices, options, plentiful resources, opportunities for rest – available quietude and plentiful nutrients. Imagine now also a personal zone of mental health and well being, without anxiety or fear, no pain or frustration. Perhaps this world exists in our minds, maybe it is a feeling, an imagined landscape or make believe habitat; a house or a boat, a tropical fantasy, a secret hideout, the memory of a dream.
Imagine a safe zone, more than safe, a place of total comfort and serenity. This place may be actualized to some degree or another in daily life; the meditative potential of a solo car ride- a drive through a quiet city at night with the windows up and the air is conditioned exactly right, pleasing music at an ideal volume. A state of calm, relaxed peace of mind – even bliss. Perhaps if we are lucky, some warm or tingling waves of sensation, a psychological experience is brought forth through physical engagement with a constructed or otherwise achieved, temporary, domestic or geographic space.
Maybe the safe place is another person, a number of people or an animal, animals. Maybe this peacefulness is achieved through psychoactive chemicals; an internal world of desire and fulfillment involving drugs, sex, and a technological interface. Perhaps such an imagined world is part of an active awareness cultivated by a collective consciousness, the idealized vision of a group, or a community formed in the interest of building and sustaining life in a specific and intentional way.
A network of individual safe zones becomes a belief system, becomes a movement. Notions of utopia seem somehow to appear simultaneously as inclusive and as exclusionary. Blocking out unwanted energies while maintaining and ultimately cultivating desirable conditions and experiences. Necessary burdens, bounding concepts and clandestine methods of coded exchange, employed to preserve the peace and quiet, to support the cause, to ensure proliferation.
There seems to be a certain dark energy attached to the project of building utopia. Maybe the thought process by which exclusionary principles are put into action inevitably results in violence. Maybe building a utopia is actually impossible! but the project is nonetheless crucial. Maybe the feeling of inevitable failure produces fearful desperation- people start acting crazy. There is a dark side to the search for personal utopia as well. Brings to mind a story, friend of a friend type anecdote, a fable, maybe.
Meditation is generally thought of as a positive thing, a way of accessing a peaceful inner space, free from the chaotic churning of day-to-day consciousness. The true depths of a transcendentalist practice, true communion with an inner self, visits to guarded realms of the subconscious mind, may actually involve rather terrifying experiences. The story goes like this: A young couple, a painter and a writer; live a relatively stable life in London, more or less working to make ends meet and to some degree, unfulfilled. They have a baby, they continue writing, painting. One of them begins to embrace eastern philosophy, begins a meditation practice.
She commits herself more and more to this practice and experiences real changes in her attitudes and perspectives, all for the better. She, who has a history of depression and anxiety, a person who has a real need for focusing on self-care and attention to emotional health, continues still further and deeper into spiritual development.
During this period of psychic investigation, her relationship with her husband evolves in stride with a psychic shift. Essentially, all appears well and good. Her relationship with meditation seems to positively affect her life in every way. As a romantic partner and a mother, as a creative person, she is thriving. She is invited to attend a retreat a few hours outside of the city. Several days into the program the husband receives a troubling phone call from the retreat organizers expressing concern about his wife’s mental state saying that her behavior has been strange and even alarming to some of the other guests and that they are keeping an eye on her. She is eventually asked to leave, and subsequently admitted to a psychiatric facility for evaluation where it is determined that she had suffered from a kind of psychic rift, a break from reality that had caused severe anxiety and paranoia, the apparent result of a dark encounter with her own metaphysical energies.
The husband and a close friend opened an investigation into the circumstances leading up to this incident at the retreat. They, both artists and intellectuals, begin to research psychosis in connection with meditation practices. They are eventually able to put together a collection of excerpts from Buddhist writings spanning centuries which speak to the psychic and emotional dangers associated with mindfulness, texts which refer to dark energies and the disruptive power of entering into the guarded inner realms of consciousness, perhaps a modernized version of a very old spiritual practice has diluted or obscured the true nature of transcendental experience.
WHITE LIGHT REPLACED BY SUCKING VOID.. The story goes like this