IX Personal Ruminations on the Hermit

******** As a child I spent an inordinate amount of time incapacitated by various illnesses.  The walking variety of pneumonia a few times, mono in the fourth grade, strep throat at least once a year until the age of 17, at 7 a joint infection that kept me literally off my feet for several weeks (for fear it would go septic I assume).  At 1, an intestinal parasite that certain evidence indicates may have persisted into adulthood.  Or perhaps two bouts of the same parasite, one defeated at a young age, the other onset at 13.  I have early, clearly amalgamated memories of dire illness, a feeling of wasting in bed, and of giving up hope for normalcy, sometimes life.  I also have memories of playing outside and exploring the woods, forging friendships that persist to this very day.  Somehow I managed to socialize well enough.

I spent much of my time in imaginative distraction.  Solitude suited me.  Sometimes.  What began as another uncomfortable intractable illness would chain me to my bed and slowly close the shutters soothing me with fevered visions and dreams until I no longer knew the outside existed.  My room was an 8' x 5' space crammed with a writing desk, a bed, a small cupboard and a television.  A luxurious hermit's cell.  I have several memories of laying in bed, looking out the shuttered windows and speaking to these bright yellow lights that talked back.  Likely running a high fever.  I went to catholic school for 9 years of my childhood, so it comes as no surprise that these lights identified themselves as angels.

At 13, I became so ill my death seemed certain.  The onset was sudden and it became a long wasting illness that wouldn't be identified until much later.  It wasn't as dire as cancer, but it hit pretty hard.  I was unable to keep food down, then water, then a viscous dark green substance was coming up, then blood.  A few weeks later I'd feel a little better, go to school for a couple days, then descend again.  I dropped weight.  By the middle of my eighth grade year I weighed 85 pounds and people in class would gasp and remark in a hushed whisper at how skinny I had become.  Somehow I lived through months of this, praying for death constantly.  I got close to that grim specter, lost my fear of it.

At 19 I developed pain so bad and so prevalent that everything burned like a great white light.  The summation and culmination of all the evil spirits that attempted to destroy my body throughout the course of my life.  I was prescribed heavy narcotics, and a cocktail of antidepressants.  I went mad.  I withdrew from life again.  This time I fell deep into a dark abyss that threatened to consume me completely.  And it did.  One morning, a year later I began to spastically vomit and, after a couple days, landed in the hospital.  I ran a very high fever, had wild visions and hallucinations, I refused all medication, except what they dripped into my arm.  It was a lot like the movie Jacob's Ladder.  I left, I think, a week later, reasonably recovered.  The demon hiding, not slain.

At 23 the pain returned, but this time I was driven to defeat it squarely and root it out completely.  I hung from a tree every day, practiced difficult and painful yoga practices and meditative visualizations. I directed all obsession (commonly encountered when confronting demons) to compulsively photographing everything and posting it on the internet every night.  I worked by intuition.  Somehow I got past the guardian of the door and into the abyss.  For months I maintained very little contact with the outside world as my body and mind began to heal from not only this intensive bout and confrontation, but also from a lifetime's worth of illness, regret, depression, despair.  By the beginning of my 24th year I only suffered the residual effects of such a terrible passage and began to build a life from the ashes.  I maintained a strict, thrice daily, seated practice until the age of 25.

I still prefer to remain internal, and in solitude.  I resemble the hermit in practice. Now I spend my days practicing the things that helped me gain life and vitality and banish nefarious internal processes.

Investigation and connection

“The mental prostitute, Mrs. Eddy (for example), having invented the idea which ordinary people call ‘God,’ and christened it ‘Mind,’ and then by affirming a set of propositions about ‘Mind,’ which are only true of ‘God’, set all hysterical, dyspeptic, crazy Amurrka by the ears. Personally, I don’t object to people discussing the properties of four-sided triangles; but I draw the line when they use a well-known word, such as pig, or mental healer, or dung heap to denote their paranoiac fetishism.” ~Aliester Crowley, Liber 777, pg. xi I began practicing Raja Yoga without a teacher at the age of 12. The way I practice, how I approach practice and even the philosophopsychological ramifications and underpinnings of practice frequently change (almost monthly lately), keeping it interesting. For many it seems easy to reframe and recontextualize the practice when new external information pushes out old and tired views and opinions.

For this reason I have maintained an almost daily practice since 1992. It maintains its status as the cornerstone of my experiments in altering my consciousness, programming and reprogramming my mind and behavior and healing my body. Over the years I have accrued hundreds of practices in my internal library, running, creating, and altering playlists on the fly. It still surprises me that this results in an ordered and constantly changing practice rather than becoming either boring and horrible, or chaotic and practically useless. I’ve only recently begun to record them. Sandra Anderson of the Himalayan Institute once said something to the effect of (or perhaps I misheard her completely): You won’t feel the effects of yoga practice until a full day has passed. Perhaps because I respect her highly as a teacher this entered my noggin and set up shop there with the effect that I never feel the effects of a yoga practice until a full day has passed.

 I care about the practice of yoga, resulting in a certain human vanity that is directly related to my length of practice, the amount of practices I feel proficient in and the number of books I’ve read and digested on the subject.. I don’t consider myself a yogi, or rather it is one of many personalities that exist inside of me, but it does little to explain the whole of my human process. In the past few years ‘the yogi’ has been integrating himself into the ‘tai-chi/qi-gong man’. The more I practice, the more I draw meaningful and relevant connections between disciplines.

From a magickal perspective there are few other things you can do where you can see such immediate result in trying to change reality in conformity with your will, than working with your own body. A pretention I encounter frequently among American yoga practitioners has it that yoga has a specificity, unfamiliar practices are not yoga. Qi-Gong practitioners on the other hand will tell you that anytime you are moving and breathing or even just breathing you are practicing Qi-Gong. This all-inclusive attitude seems more appropriate to me, and I see it extending to all parts of the common practices of both. Boutique beautiful bodied yoga, very challenging physically, versus qi-gong in a retirement community, a room full of those seated or in wheelchairs with all kinds of ailments.

 The Qi-Gong man and the Yogi have recently made room for another emerging figure. I recently completed a degree in exercise science, and my wife is a physical therapist and self-confessed anatomy nerd. The Scientist, Qi-Gong man and Yogi all sit in the same room and share information, each framing the argument of the other with the intention of coming to some kind of understanding or reaching some kind of conclusion, they seldom do, but their talking occasionally results in some very interesting momentary experiences of satori as some puzzle is completed. 

Pawanmuktasana. Pawan=wind, mukta=liberating, asana=posture. Commonly this posture involves laying on the ground with one leg hugged into the chest to eliminate unwanted gas in the intestines. However, in the Bihar school (Swami Satyananda Saraswati) it is series of subtle movements, that don’t necessarily feel like REAL STRETCHING, whose stated goal: to remove wind from the body thus enabling smooth and unimpeded energy flow (it should be noted that most swamis have a personalized version of these very powerful practices, see: Swami Rama’s Joints and Glands). This smooth energy flow allegedly results in healthy joints, glands, etc. Their manual goes so far as to say the practice of these postures, “should never be ignored and treated casually just because the practices are simple, gentle and comfortable” (Saraswati, pg. 21).

 Ayurveda, an ‘ancient’ system of Indian Medicine (read: life extending alchemy), breaks the human constitution down into 3 elemental groupings, then treats malfunction in these groupings. These groupings are Pitta, which corresponds roughly to fire, Kapha, which corresponds to both earth and water, and Vata, which corresponds to both space and wind. Arthritis and nervous disorders (depression, anxiety, even some schizotypal disorders, as well as chronic flatulence) are caused by an imbalance in the Vata structure (or dosha). The wind in pawanmuktasana and the Vata in Ayurveda now seem intrinsically related.

 Traditional Chinese medicine holds “wind” as being one of the pernicious influences and examines its effects in terms of the organs it interacts with, it enters into the back of the neck (where the spinal cord lies), bringing with it all kinds of pathogenic effects as it distributes itself and its contents in various places in the body. Many medical Qi-Gong practices, with their gentle movements involving contracting and expanding, rolling and circling, have their aim in pushing excess wind out of the body. Qi-Gong and Pawanmuktasana have an inextricable link in my brain due to their startling similarities.

 In practice 3 major factors can prevent the deepening of a stretch. The first: bony or structural interference, this can be solved with radical surgery that may lead to a much shorter and more painful life than anticipated. The second: muscle shortness or stiffness, both of these are soothed and balmed over time with patience and practice. The third: the nerves.

 If you have ever tried to stretch forward and your feet have gotten tingly or you felt a strange pulling in the back of your knee then you have experienced this third limitation. Repetitive strain of nerves can cause adhesions, similar to scars, which can lead to further pain and suffering in the form of “twinges” “pinches” and “numbness”.

 A strand of Western Medicine calls the method for releasing these adhesions and lengthening nerves is called Neural Flossing. The exercises look startlingly similar to Pawanmuktasana and certain Qi-Gong movements. With adhesion released, impulses can travel down the length of the nerve more easily and more consistently. More simply: by practicing Pawanmuktasana or Qi-Gong your energy flow will improve.
Here are some sigils I wrote this week: PAGE 3: which I thought may kill me before its completion, joke's on it!

More focus

I become more focused every day.  Fewer disparate things attract my attention as significant.  Concentrating very hard these days, still failing miserably.








 

  Bread and Puppets Museum: Glover, VT
This place lies in the northeast kingdom, almost 3 hours away. The man who started the phenomenon, Peter Schumann, came from France to New York in the early 60s, started building puppets and making bread. His shamanic vision: "Art should be as basic to life as bread". He would serve the bread to friends and they would eat while he put on puppet shows for them. He continued to build puppets which became more infamous, taking part in anti-war protests and putting on large street performances. By 1974 he moved himself and his puppets to Vermont.

The tone of the farm changed to commune, the performers lived and worked in a closed community, and performed to any who would watch. A yearly, weeklong pageant became the habit of the puppets drawing more and more people every year. By the 1990s, these pageants drew tens of thousands of people to camp near the museum. Increasingly dissipated in focus, the event drew more people until it reached a critical mass in 1998, becoming unmanageable. A fight which resulted in the death of one participant signaled the end of these pageants. Now they put on a weekly sunday show in their "Papier Mache Cathedral" for onlookers, but no one camps there anymore. People attracted by the power of the thing. 

 How could something like that remain pure?

 







Declaration of Intent

The first page, glaring mistakes and all. The thing forms and manifests itself. Ideas continue to seep into my mind from some other place faster than I can pen them down and keep track of them. Whatever is going on is both wonderful and terrifying. Fruits of just a few months hard practice. 

Page 2 sits on my drawing table, almost complete. Page 3 has a refined sketch, waiting for page 2 to be finished. Page 4-10 are rough sketches and outlines of words. 

 How can I just do this? I need more time.

The knight of swords.  I experience great difficulty and discomfort currently, an uncomfortable alchemical experience.  Sir sword wants me to persist, and he will cut through opposition while I plug away and suffer some transformation or the other.