Why I am abandoning ‘Esotericism’ (pt 1)
Well here is the start of my promised series of rants though I’m not sure how long I can belabour the point. Still, give it a go eh? First though, some caveats:
I am writing this for myself - to draw a line under some things as it were and tie up some loose ends and thought processes. I do not intend to convince anyone of anything, argue against anyone or any teaching or get into any brawling.
Further, this decision is the direct result of studying esotericism for a long time. We are all (more or less) the product of our experiences and in my case these have revolved around the sort of spirituality regular readers will be familiar with me wittering on about. So it’s a paradox: I am rejecting it because it has developed my understanding to the stage where I realize this is the thing to do at this point. Now for the justifications - or the first one anyway:
Mind Games: the old familiar staple of gurus, hucksters and snake-oil salesman everywhere. And yes, I finally don’t want to play. One always knows it’s a game - because one loves to play it. Well, I fell out of love and want to get a bit more real.
I saw a programme on TV about the execrable ‘Da Vinci Code’ recently and there was a priest (a very interesting one) interviewed who described the Church’s particular brand of mind control. Basically it goes like this: you tell the aspirant something unbelievable (God had a son say, or a man rose from the dead/died for our sins etc) and then - and this is the important bit - you place the onus totally on them to accept it. You don’t have to explain it, rationalize it or do anything. Just say ‘here it is’. If they accept it they have to make their own rationalizations and then (the priest’s words) you have them for life.
In my experience (other’s may well be different), the majority of the ‘teachings’ and ‘teachers’ I have encountered use a variant of this. They place the onus on you to justify them. But surely the onus is on them to show they have what you are looking for?
Interested parties can check this process for themselves by visiting ‘Sufi’ message boards - epicentres of personal opinion projected on to something that may or may not bear any resemblance to reality. Essentially just production-lines for the inculcation of belief and conditioning. And who can blame them? In may ways that is all there is.
I had quite forgotten my state of mind when I first started ‘seeking the truth’ (yes I know, it sucks - live with it!) but recently I have been reminded of it and that’s the thing: it was much better! In fact I was a better person all round in some ways. Somewhere along the line I turned into the sort of weirdo I rail against (no brainer I know but I didn’t see it). I’ve been reading again some of the things I read then and been thinking YES!. Last night I was reading Colin Wilson in The Occult and he sums up my feelings from that time exactly:
...I understood Ouspensky’s feeling of nausea at the prospect of writing on the Hague Conference, and also that craving for another world of deeper meaning, represented by books on the Occult. There is a passage in Louis-Ferdinand Céline that describes the world as rotten with lies, rotten to the point of collapse and disintegration. I had only to look at the advertisements in the London tube, or the headlines of the daily paper, to see that it was obviously true. Lies, stupidity, weakness and mediocrity - a civilization without ideals.
That was why I read Ouspensky and all the other books on magic and mysticism that I could find in the local libraries: not only because they were an escape from the world of factories and neurotic landladies, but because they confirmed my intuition of another order of reality, an intenser and more powerful form of consciousness than the kind I seemed to share with eight million other Londoners.
So that was the starting point. from there began a searching - but the search led away from that initial impetus and led far in another direction. A direction that did not ever supply what it promised - or perhaps I misread the signs. Or am unsuitable in some key way. it doesn’t matter. Rather than try to change myself as I have been trying (and failing) to do for a long, long time, I have realized there is another way: accept myself for what I am.
More later.
