Yet There Is A Method

It crept in gradually, over months, maybe seasons--it's unnoticeable, that shift, and I'm talking about from high to low.  And really I don't want to talk about that part of this so much: just what's necessary.  At my best, the world lights up.  Inspiration in every moment.  Often it comes as synchronicity.  It makes me want to jump up and run off into some excitement: it lurks behind any and every corner.  And everything comes so easy.  Brilliance just happens and I'm astounded by the words and the relationships of ideas that somehow appear in my mind, as if I'm a spectator to it all.  It's wonderful.

Then it calms down.  It takes a long time.  Synchronicity turns into coincidence.  Maybe I feel a bit more "balanced".  Because maybe another way to describe that high part I was talking about is to call it mania, and after awhile, I think, Jesus Christ, I need to freaking relax for a little while.  So I do.  Life starts to feel normal, and I'm glad for the break.

But the slope doesn't stop.  It takes a very long time.  Normal becomes dead so slowly that I don't notice it.  It gets hard to imagine a world of synchronicity--coincidences themselves disappear.  It's not a question of a subjective assignation of meaning, because when I get low, there's nothing for me to project anything onto.  The world, myself included, is a set of facts.  Useless, boring.  What you see is what you get, and that's all that you'll get, and that's all that it is: worthless.  Relationships are facts.  Personalities are facts.  Works of art are facts.  Governments are facts.  Wars are facts.  Jobs are facts.  Facts are facts, and no point to any of it.

 So a few months back I bottomed out.  I was desperate.  I tried, but it wasn't the kind of boredom I could shock myself out of.  That's how I knew I was in trouble.  But it was also exhilarating--I'd been there before, I'd learned how to conquer it, and it had led to one of the greatest seasons of my life.  I knew I could do it again.

I knew I had to.

This is my method.

First, strip to the core.

For me, this means go to work during the day.  Otherwise, drop all habits.  It means stop writing, stop reading, stop wondering about whatever obsession has gripped me.  The trick here is to stop following my mind.  I meditate every night for at least an hour.   In my meditations, I don't try to visualize a better life or white light coursing through me or anything like that.  I actively try not to think about anything.  At this point, I know my mind is too far gone to be trusted.  What might appear to me as inspiration is in fact distraction.  It's difficult to train the mind to emptiness.  At first, maybe I catch it for a moment.  With time and practice, I get better.  I can go deeper into it, for longer stretches.

I meditated for a month before I visited Ireland with my mother.  I already felt better by then.  I knew I wasn't done with the process, but I felt good enough to enjoy myself.  It was ok to put things on hold and take a break.  But I will get back into it, training myself to nothingness.  The best adjectives to describe the mind I'll have when this is done are strong and clear.  Figure another month or two of heavy meditation and avoidance of distraction, and then I'll be ready for the next step.

That's where things get interesting.

It's crucial to remember that the process is slow.  For this, I admire the alchemists.  An instantaneous transformation doesn't stick around for long.  If you want to change lead into gold, it'll take time.  They timed the phases of their work by the stars, which mark the seasons.

After the mind is cleared, it is powerful.  I can't predict exactly what I'll do then, because right now my mind is still swimming in distractions.  But, it'll have something to do with filling my imagination.  A clear mind is good for a saint or a philosopher, but I'm more of an artist, so after I get clear, I need to get some raw material so I can exercise my imagination.

There are all sorts of ancient exercises for the imagination.  While I was in Dublin, I visited the W.B. Yeats exhibition at The National Library, and I was very impressed by its presentation of his mystical life.  Yeats worked with Tattva cards, and I'd like to try that.

Symbols work very well at this stage since they are both simple and gripping.  In a sense, they mean nothing in themselves, yet they activate the imagination.  I can't describe what happens.  Perhaps they provoke the imagination to create relationships.  A circle, a triangle, and a square can do very interesting things in a focused imagination.  Squaring the circle, and that sort of thing.

I've also been working with dreams for years.  But dreams can get a bit more complex and unwieldy, and it's best to keep things simple at first.

When I'm ready for it, fiction is both practice and purpose.

Eventually, if you come from the right beginning, and if you do the right work, and if you do it slowly, slowly, then, eventually, with a little luck and a little grace, you can talk with the angels.

At that point, the trick is to write it all down.