Year Twelve

Aesthetic Exercises to Accept the Soul and Mirror the Soul of the World

Twelfth Year:  Emptiness

We shift from the soul as the reflector of particular emotions which must be negated or fulfilled again and again to the soul as the reflector of the universe only as we experience that each emotion cannot be negated or ever truly fulfilled; each emotion is bottomless.  Instead of I need to satisfy this emotion or I need to eradicate this emotion:  I need to fall into this emotion, into its nature, its complexity, its tentacles which reach out to the world.  When I have fallen to the bottom of that emotion, which is the same moment as when its tentacles have embraced the entire universe, I find that I no longer need to satisfy or eradicate the emotion, for I have become it and in becoming have no need to grasp or remove it externally.   Grasping and removing externally increase one’s dependency on using external means to deal with the continual reflection of the universe and the soul.  Falling into the mirror increases one’s practice in making one’s soul the mirror of the universe, the true function of the soul.  And the soul is uniquely human.  Animals can grasp and remove.  But only the human can refuse to grasp and remove and instead fall.  Only the human can fall to nothing to become everything.  All other sentient and insentient objects are only particular things¾destined to be confined to grasping and removing what they must grasp and remove¾but only humans can use their particularity to become mirrors of the universe.  The collective human project is to become a mirror of the universe, purely reflecting all that is.  Along the way, we reflect particular things, and this particular reflection is the function of technology and art.  The reflection of the universe is the function of God.  So mirrors function within mirrors.  Technology and art mirror each other, and technology/art mirror God.  The soul in its particularity produces technology and art.  The soul in its wholeness and depth produces God.  We are the only species that produce God and this is our ultimate task:  to create God.  Art and technology, in ways that we don’t fully comprehend, help us in this creation, even as we cannot fully comprehend how the specific and the general, the part and the whole, work together.  This mystery is life, for life binds the incomprehensible, and it is this mystery that can never be talked about or drawn or sung or danced, but only lived and pointed to.  But we digress.

The purpose of these Exercises is to create mirrors of the universe¾that is, artists¾and our above digression served two purposes in relation to this:  1) placed art in a broader perspective; 2) pointed to the practice of this year¾emptiness¾which is a falling and a nothingness.  This twelfth year is the practice of God.  While we have just argued that art and technology lead to God, or, from another perspective, art and technology are parallel tracks to the quest for God, each reflecting each other across the veil of flesh, these Exercises are ultimately not concerned with God, but with art.  We do not in these Exercises elevate the soul above other aspects of the person, but place the body, will, mind, soul and judgement as aspects which all need to be fully explored:  equally potent and necessary dimensions in the development of art and the creation of the artist’s creation.  In these Exercises, God is a necessary experience in the development of the artist, and the artist who has not experienced God is as stunted as the artist who has not experienced debauchery or business.

We have spoken of the experience of God elsewhere and do not wish to repeat what we have said with more focus and in more detail here.  Should the initiate require more guidance in the arts of emptiness, let her explore our adventures in Void and Reveries, or in a more metaphysical vein, To Delight in Fire.  Suffice it to say in this space that this year should be devoted to the nothingness at the root of all tentacles of the soul.

Even as we have lost various initiates in progress, whether through the pleasures of the body or through ascetic delights, through business or war, science, philosophy, non-mind or music, so we will lose some initiates in the joys of emptiness.  Let them be lost; they will have found their place and if these Exercises have assisted some in finding their home, some good will have been done, though it be secondary to our purpose here.

We need to make brief mention here of some confusion the reader may experience in conflating the sixth, ninth and twelfth years:  the experience of no-will, no-mind and the emptiness of the soul.  It is true that the three experiences have similarities that, say, war and compassion don’t.  Nevertheless, the perceptive reader will have noted similarities between numerous other years:  war and physical positive excess; war and business¾to name but two.  The similarities in this case arise from the sense of falling and deprivation which have been innate to the closing year of the second, third and fourth phases:  no-will, no-mind and emptiness.  Each year, however, should reveal a new dimension of the world to the initiate, for not only does it come after certain, frequently intense, experiences that the initiate needs to simultaneously reflect on, absorb and purge herself of, but each experience of negation is different in itself, for two reasons.

Firstly, each experience of negation occurs at a different point on the initiate’s spiral into the centre of art.  If you picture each phase of these Exercises as a ring on a spiral, so that there are five rings, all end years of each phase are aligned with each other.  Each reminds of the other, but occurs expanding and subsuming the previous experiences of negation.

Secondly, the initiate must walk along a different path to nothingness for each negation.  To empty the will, to empty the mind, and to empty the soul are all acts of falling, but one falls down a different well in each case, even though the bottom of each well is joined by the same nameless subterranean water.  So in the will, one removes oneself from action and contemplates the root of the actions one desires; in the mind, one removes oneself from thought and contemplates the root of the constructs the mind desires to erect; in the soul, one falls into desire and in the falling becomes it.

Each path to nothingness is a dismantling of structure:  no-will dismantles the will to build structures in the world; no-mind dismantles the desire to build conceptual structures; emptiness dismantles the desire for structures in the heart.  No structure in the world, no structure in the mind, no structure in the heart:  these are the paths to emptiness.  Each is progressively more difficult than the previous, but each is necessary to proceed to the subsequent.  In the end, there is freedom, for all is play, although this end play is play that is intimate with grief.

In each path of negation, the initiate falls¾falls not to fall, but to become what one falls into.  For in striving, whether this striving be of the will, mind or soul, one never becomes what one strives for, but in the striving may, in part, externalize the striving and so demonstrate to the world what the striving looks like.  But the striver is always separate from his striving.  In falling, the faller does not attempt in any way to externalize the desire, but neither does she attempt to negate it; rather she falls into the desire while not moving the desire into the world and in not moving, she falls into spaces where no one can see but are as real as real.  So striving is two and dual, and falling is one and unity.  But the initiate should know that two is not greater than one nor one than two; both of these errors are errors of those who wish to narrow the world to their tendencies.  Two and one are mirrors of each other; should one fail, both shall fail.  At the root of two and one are zero, but of number and shape we have spoken elsewhere.

So this year the initiate should fall into each tentacle of the soul and become it until she burns, until she burns with the fire at the soul’s dark watery root.

Year Eleven

Aesthetic Exercises to Accept the Soul and Mirror the Soul of the World

Eleventh Year:  Compassion

Humans are born from a void, invisible and restless, to a void, visible and bored, and return to a void, forgetful, grave.  This is their centre, gravity, the moor of their souls.  Each human has the opportunity in his lifetime to walk toward the void, with his brief body of light, and peer over the edge.  Few accept this quiet risky call.  What does one risk?  Death in the walking or peering.  What is one guaranteed?

Transformation through the sight of what surrounds one’s life.  No one can be an artist, though, unless she risks this walk, survives the peering, and is transformed.

What does one see after that arduous reeking walk? What does one see beyond that beckoning precipice?  God?  No, one sees God’s absence.  Does one hear music?  No, one hears only silence.  Does one taste?  If one does, the taste is in the taster’s mouth, not down the chasm¾ no food or substance there.  Indifference and caprice are sensed, but not by any of the body’s senses¾only senses of the soul.

One may be tempted, standing at the edge, drawn to jump and stupidly test one’s powers, to sense compassion; if one does sense such an attribute, it does not arise from the welcoming pit but from within, in response.  So art and compassion are the only two human attributes, drawn in response to the seeing of the void; everything else humans do is done simply aping apes, in excess.

So this eleventh year is devoted to this sight and its response of compassion.  For the initiate must learn compassion before she can create art of any worth.  There are artists who exist, who are talked about in the gabby marketplace, who create with minimal compassion.  But the artists of whom we speak are reflections of the world, and the world¾the human world¾includes tenderness and mercy for our chains.

The initiate should this year walk toward the void, peer into it, survive, be transformed by that sight, or else that sight was not a valid peering, and actively show compassion for the human condition by caring for the dispossessed, the weak, the losers, the mad, the trampled, the retarded¾it must be these, for one cannot feel compassion for the rich and famous, only envy, and the initiate has long since evolved from that adolescent stage.

She should help out in shelters, gutters, food banks¾wherever there is a need, and need is everywhere.  She should know this need and its response as tethers to the void, and the music of this active empathy and silence as an art¾the only other art of any worth.  If she should not complete the Exercises and be waylaid in a year, this would be the place where she should stay.  Yet the reader should note, for both the one waylaid in this year and the one who completes these Exercises know, that there is no hierarchy, although we cannot avoid it in these Exercises.  We are attempting to develop a certain kind of artist, and all our words and methods are constrained by this attempt, even as all attempts must be subject to their particular captivity.

Year Ten

Aesthetic Exercises to Accept the Soul and Mirror the Soul of the World

Presuppositions

Every human has a soul, and the soul is made of fire.  The fire in each individual mirrors the fire of the world and so the world is contained in each person and each person in the world. 

Even as fire manifests itself in respect, reverie, descent, wantonness and deception, so it manifests itself in the opposite of each:  apathy, mundaneness, ascent, purity and clarity; at the core of fire, and so at the core of the soul, are repetition, transformation and contradiction.

The soul is a factory:  its fuel is the darkness of fire, its output is light.  The responsibility of the artist and the person, each living in their respective worlds, is to transform darkness to light.  Since the world can only show light, dark by its definition being incapable of being shown, light is all we see and thus the reader may object that everyone fulfills his responsibility, no dark being shown.  But in each soul is an equal amount of darkness, forged as it is from the same fire, although due to many seemingly random factors, each person does not have equal access to the darkness.  We know that light varies from person to person; this may be, to continue our analogy, because everyone transforms all their available darkness to light but, as we have just argued, available darkness is not distributed equally, or because some souls are more efficient instruments of transformation.

It is also important to distinguish the light which people simply copy from other light, and light that is transformed directly from darkness.  The bulk of the light we see is the former, as people hold their souls as mirrors to the light they see in others; the reader should not assume that this is false light¾all light is light and comes through whatever path from the same dark origin.  However, light is diffused the more it is refracted.  It is very rare that a person depends wholly on the darkness for her light.  When you peer into a person’s soul, if you have such a gift, a rare gift in itself, you see many varieties of distance from darkness.  So, as you peer, not with hope to see or as a charlatan, but prescribed as one to see, receptive, as a child, shades of copied light will impress themselves on the soul of the one who peers.  Many are those whose light is such¾copied endlessly, diffused¾that they no longer have even intimations that light is born from darkness.  As one draws closer to fire’s darkness and its efficient and entire transformation, so the number of people in the more restricted orbit is, naturally, fewer.  Be wary of those who claim to be such ones as those who live in the space of which we speak; the one who knows darkness hints and points and never speaks directly; darkness hides, as it must, being darkness.

Such people, who depend wholly on darkness for their light, are never what are normally called good; rather, they define the good.  Normally, the good are called those who have thrown water on their fire.  Many hundred million human forms will rise and fall and never directly encounter such a one; we have, perhaps in some cases, their words or sounds or colours, and so we can reach through a troubled veil and sense a fire we will never see.  In some cases, we only have intimations of their presence, their never having left a record of their transformations.

Such a person as we describe is the purest artist and such people are to be feared.  It is this purity that is the objective of these Exercises, although we acknowledge that no amount of training, no weight of suffering, no persistency of time, can produce what we aim for.  All such artists of whom we speak are driven into existence by a spark of divine terror¾polished, unnamed, immeasurable¾and flare onto the earth, impossible, unalloyed, absolute, pressed into human form, amoral, a totality of fire.

The initiate should ponder this process, the embedded doubt, and the root futility of the will in all creation.  Creation is not ours to claim, but to receive.  We are receivers and transmitters of forms; we reform the forms, reflect the light, transform darkness, and this is what we do.

The nature of pure artists is not simply what we normally name as artists.  (We have already dispelled the notion that such artists are pure according to societal definitions; such definitions are definitions of refracted light and not of darkness, and only definitions of darkness¾vague, ambiguous, unclear¾are worthy to define:  that is, draw outlines, creating light.)  We repeat:  the purest artist is she who wholly depends on darkness for her light; the materials with which she works, the forms she creates, the imprint she leaves behind, are all immaterial.  If one lives but for 20 years and depends wholly on darkness for her light to live, she is pure, though she never be known.  And she is purer than the greatest name, if that name was alloyed in its making.

Every human has a soul, hidden, muted or mutant though it might be.

The human soul is oriented toward the impossible, always craving what does not exist; this craving can be oriented toward what does not exist in one’s live but exists elsewhere, tangibly, in the world, having substance and overlapping in time, or this craving can be oriented toward what does not exist in one’s live and has existed elsewhere, tangibly, in the world, having substance, but not overlapping in time, or this craving can be oriented toward what does not exist in one’s live and has not existed elsewhere, but might exist in future time, or this craving can be oriented toward what does not exist in one’s live and has never existed and cannot exist.  Inevitably, due to uncertainty being an innate characteristic of the future, the latter two categories cannot be effectively distinguished.  (God may be a function of the fourth category; if so, the maintenance of God in this necrotheoic age can be seen as an essential, thankless task to sustain and grow this aspect of the soul.  The believe and nurturing of what cannot exist is as essential to the health of the soul as the believe and nurturing of what can and does and has.)

So the soul’s fire reaches out in all four directions.  Some, the reader will note, are oriented in a particular direction; some directions are more common than others¾namely, the first.  So the common soul craves what he can grasp and devotes his life to grasping; in this way, he can show success; and, as success is commonly defined by such grasping, as the majority controls the common definitions, he is affirmed in his direction.

The soul is born to seek and be dissatisfied with all it finds, for all it finds it wants to be the calmer of the soul, and it is not.  There is no calmer of the soul.  The soul lives in calm, then storm, then calm, then in-between.  There is no object in the world, no conglomerate of objects, that can change this pelagic perturbation.  For what is there that can dam the sea?  For a moment, maybe, with things physic or divine, the sea will cease and obey.  But soon, it returns to its playful ways:  untrammeled, free.  The binding was but a blink, but because so rare, we tell many stories in its wake.

In the soul all states¾all sorrows, joys, deaths, births, betrayals, surprises, ecstasies, disappointments¾are.  We look for God in the soul and find God by not finding him.  We look for God to rescue us from certain states and to deliver us to others; he does not do this; he is silent.  In his non-action, in his silence, in this bedrock of the soul below the states we wish to be rescued from and delivered to, we find God.  This finding is a not-finding.  We say perhaps ah, this is all God is, the silence below everything.  But this silence is the everything below everything and the only awe that forces us to silence while we still are alive.  In this silent breathing, we combine life and death and so know the universe, the visible mirror of the soul.

The reader should be reminded that we speak of God neither as a substance nor as a definable reality, but as the experience that embraces all experience.  If the reader does not know this experience¾neither a feeling nor a deed, but a lived knowledge¾he is best to discard the word¾for so too this experience discards the word and we use it only with regret:  God, the wordless word. 

But God becomes an almost necessary word in matters of the soul; God is more a product of the soul than any other aspect of the person.  The body acknowledges nothing outside of flesh; the will acknowledges only itself; the mind disputes God; judgement is reserved.  But the soul, given over to itself, yearns, and what it yearns for is God.  The master of the soul knows God cannot be found and knows nothing other than the soul’s yearning for what cannot be found.  God’s presence is found in absence in the soul; elsewhere, God simply isn’t found.

To experience all the states of craving of the soul and know that they in their multifarious contradictoriness all are necessary parts of the soul is to know the soul.

The soul, with aid from the mind and will, will attempt to reduce the complexity of the soul to one or more aspects of the soul’s nature.  Lives can be lived this way.  So even civilizations.  But only those whose souls are already a portion of the soul will agree that the soul is such. Despite what the mind defines and the will constructs, the soul is not less than what it is; only definitions and constructions are less than, pointing to, the soul.

Meditations

Meditate on how one creates as pure a channel as possible between soul and word.

Meditate on how one most efficiently can use all the perpetual necessary dross of the world as input to the soul.

Meditate on how the human soul is unique among the world’s machines:  able to transform garbage into tools, yes¾even beauty!

Meditate on the soul’s tendency to harden itself against a truth of the soul, thereby confirming the truth.

Similarly, meditate on the soul’s ability to soften and even dissolve a truth of itself as it softens toward that truth and absorbs it.

Meditate on the relationship between language and soul, focusing on god as the linguistic container of the soul.

Meditate on the soul’s ability to relate relationships.

Meditate on the soul’s relationship to artifacts and to all things concrete.

Rationale

The soul, dark in its god-bowl, silenced under a carousing sky, sings in silence, lighting a flame which only those who too are silenced see.  Dark in its pristine oligarchic pride, subservient to all and nothing, it sings.

Why is it dark?  It has peered at the world and died, died to another life and world.  Only the soul is capable of resurrection.  The mind cannot believe; there is no evidence.  The will¾it strives to deny our fading.  The body lives and through its death is finally generous to the earth.  But the soul knows it is eternal and only changes form.  The soul, unlike the other aspects, does not protest the darkness, but is at home, building, breathing.  Because its habitat is darkness, so its products cannot be seen.

The soul sings and dies and breathes; empty, full, it lives.

Method

As before, we explore the soul through three years:  music, compassion and emptiness.  So the trajectory is from sound to silence and, as with the will and the mind, from action to non-action.

Tenth Year:  Music

The soul’s body is music; if we were just soul, there would just be sound.  The soul takes up its instruments of night and in a dark orchestral pit begins to fumble; but even this fumbling to the soul in the beginning sounds like what we imagine must have been God’s initial rapture, for the sound is light to the soul.  This revelry is unrivalled by the most sophisticated art, for origins are ecstasy and everything subsequent, though perhaps increasing in external beauty, inevitably decreases in internal bliss.  This is the cost of knowledge and art, and the initiate would do well to reflect on the price she has already begun to pay.

In art there are only four manifestations:  sound, image, movement, word.  What appear to be new forms, such as film, are simply combinations of old forms; film, being a technological and social form, integrates, even as language once did some millennia ago.  But language now has entered its disintegration stage, as everything must do, and those who create in word must span in their souls the cycle of language, from birth to death, and so have the unique opportunity to reflect the life of a form.  Those in film are full of ecstasy, being young, discovery still genuine.

The initiate, while not being a musician of any worth, should this year listen to the world’s preeminent music, exposing herself across the surface of sounds to absorb its breadth, but devoting herself to its complexity to absorb its depth.  As with religion, philosophy and literature, she should not study music¾it does not matter to the soul whether a passage is – or --; this only matters to the mind¾or attempt to understand it cognitively; she should absorb it, dance to it (although surely in the privacy of her apartment), become it.  She should map the sounds to the places in the soul they emerge from.

Year Nine

Aesthetic Exercises to Accept the Mind and Mirror the Mind of the World

Ninth Year:  Non-Mind

Mind, in its great two-ness, forces itself to ever-increasing modes of duality, spiraled, vigorous, weary, driving itself to destruction.  Driven to the new, in the end it finds everything old and desires death as the only creation left it.  In this cycle is the mind’s fulfillment and negation; this year in the final phase, mind completes this cycle.

The mind creates in its salacious urge for newness and as its energy diffuses sees its creation from a distance and is repulsed, for the stories it told itself, propelling itself forward, externalizing itself, are lies and all that is true are the stories based on those lies, and as the mind knows this in its geriatric horror it stumbles and breaks a hip and wobbles, drinking, to the grave.

But should it see not simply this, but the energy comprising truth and lies, the rise and fall, pride and shame, that the mind is energy in all its forms, while still subject to changing fortunes, climates, it may also know itself in ways not known before.  Such is this year’s aim.

Every construct raises its opposite.  Each creation dies upon conception.  When mind¾as will¾is taken to its end it cancels itself while still existing.  This cancellation and simultaneous existence is the experience of this ninth year.

So the initiate should not cease raising, but for every raising, also raze.  She should do this without tiring until every edifice is known and destroyed.  During this process, she should not simply construct and deconstruct, but also¾most importantly¾become the process of the mind itself.  In doing so, the construction and deconstruction become not edifices or rubble, although both, but less these than manifestations of the same inexplicable reality we call non-mind, but in being not, more mind than mind.

This energy, this Shiva-circle, is a whirling, fire, water, air, a beginning, end, and all between, the origin of origins, the death of death, the mind in motion even when at rest.

So the initiate, having known the great creations of the mind in the first two years of this phase, knows this final year the great destruction, so to know anew creation, so she can create from the creation below creation, the creation that destroys itself.  Only here, in elemental space, can despair not disappear but ride, proud and skeletal, on the steed circling on the carnal carousel, from which we now do not attempt escape but rather laugh to its endless music and motion.

Some readers will have heard of those who advocate a clearing of the mind, a kind of mental sweeping of all thought debris.  But we view this advocacy as sterile and ineffective; one does not clear the mind unless one desires to be a zombie, a limping rag, a citizen.  One rather accelerates the mind to fill itself with itself and in this filling increases the pressure within the small cranial container of that sarcous skull until it bursts and pyrogenically is itself and moves beyond.  In such a state, the initiate is ready to migrate to the soul.

Year Eight

Aesthetic Exercises to Accept the Mind and Mirror the Mind of the World

Eight Year:  Technology and Science

Technology, despite the commonplaces surrounding it, is historically and ontologically prior to science, in the same way as religion is historically and ontologically prior to philosophy and literature.  We are in awe (or surprise, anger, fear, ecstasy) before we think or write about our awe, and certainly before we feel ironic about our experience.

Technology precedes science because feeling and touch precede thought and abstraction, because the body precedes mind.  The initiate should not forget this relationship and dependency, for, although our Exercises are founded on it, the bias of the world around may be so against it, in denial, rebellion and hubris, that she forgets the very structure of her development and, indeed, her very person.

Technology is the human attempt to extend, first, the power of our bodies and, second, the power of our minds.  Science is our attempt to generalize about these experiences of extension and, in turn, further extend our power through applying its generalizations.  It is this latter process that leads to the perception that science is the foundation of technology.

In contrast to the development of religion to literature, which begins with the unseen and explodes into artifacts, our present category begins with the seen¾the body and its tools¾and evolves into unseen abstraction of number.  It is at the intersection of the end of religion and the beginning of technology that the initiate should look for spiritual and aesthetic fecundity; there, in the chaos of number and the coffin of God, angels and demons copulate; should the initiate train herself properly, she may be able to see the products of their stormy and fortuitous union.

In this eighth year, the initiate should come to know the foundations of technology and science, these disciplines of extension.  Because of the nature of science, it may be difficult for the initiate to avoid the academy as she must do in the seventh year if she is to achieve a primary vision and not one tainted by secondary constructs¾for the paid purveyors of knowledge are cheapened by their comforts and are lovers of wind incarceration.

To know technology, the initiate should deconstruct and construct technology, understanding how it works.  She should invent things.  She should work with a variety of technologists, on a volunteer basis if necessary, to learn how technology is thought about, created, acted upon, and acts.  She should immerse herself in the three core areas of technology:  machine technology, computer technology and language technology, gaining access both to the brightest minds in each area and those minds which are mediocre, but nevertheless highly instructive for their commonality, and in their commonality indicative of how technology acts.

To know science, the initiate should expose herself to its fundamentals:  mathematics, physics, biology and astronomy.  Nothing should be assumed.  All should be explored.  The code of nature should be unraveled, dissected, mapped, and applied to the creation of a new world.  The initiate should befriend scientists and explore their international codes, instruments, mores and language.  She should take nothing for granted.  All should be translated into method and rigor.  All should be risked for the sake of number and formulae.

Through this year’s explorations, the initiate should take care to observe the relationships between technology and science, and each of these and the human.  She should reflect on the relationships between them and the explorations of the past year:  religion, philosophy and literature.  She should not shy away from reflections that are not commonplace.  She should become as much as possible as a number or machine, giving up her identity to the extension of human power through the creation of the new.  For to be a technologist or scientist of any merit, one must believe in creation, that creation continues to take place, that one is contributing to it, in however small a way, and that this creation that one partakes in has, even inexplicably, more positive than negative effect on something the scientist values.

In rare cases, the technologist or scientist performs his operations not from the above beliefs or values but because he is driven to do so by an inner necessity and does not associate what he does in any way with creation, progress or individual effect; such a one has achieved an exuberant melancholy on par with the universe and is a particular kind of artist, though not the kind of which we speak, that the initiate should seek out and study.  Such people are pure and in their purity are amoral and indifferent to their fate and the fate of all.  But most are not of this type; most are common.

Year Seven

Aesthetic Exercises to Accept the Mind and Mirror the Mind of the World

Presuppositions

The mind is the extension of the body.  Many errors have arisen from the basic errors that the mind is something separate from the body and in its separation can break through the body’s parameters.  The latter error has been accentuated through our actually having extended the body’s powers using our minds; this extension is, most generally, called technology.  By extending the body’s powers to the extent that humans now primarily live in the extension rather than the body itself, we are prone to the impression that we have broken or can yet break free from the basic limitations of the body:  sex, death, suffering, particularity. 

We are prone to this impression not due to the evidence, but to our hubris, which continually objects to the reality that we are the subjects of the universe more than its masters.

This objection rouses the mind against nature and the body, even as the requirements of the body force us to fulfill its dictates.  This antagonism, combined with inevitable compliance, forms a base schizophrenia in the human soul, a schizophrenia now characteristic of humanity collectively.  Few are the souls who can maintain their fire through a deeper tension, and unite their mind and body according to the body’s principles.  Those who unite mind and body through the mind’s principles have not really unified the two, for the mind’s unity is always a false unity, being less than one, being representative of a part.

It is not simply that the mind generally is an extension of the body, but that every idea is an extension of the body.  Every belief, principle, dogma, notion, system, idea, is a desire of the body codified into language by the mind.  Even the most honed philosophy emerges from a particular desire of the body:  for order, for example, or escape from the body’s tortures.  For even the body tires of itself.

The body wants contradictory things, but not at the same time.  One moment the body wants to be left alone, the next it wants to be touched; one moment the body wants to be touched gently, the next it wants to be ravaged.  One moment the body wants to be tender, the next cruel; one moment weak, the next strong; weeping, laughing; fragmented, whole.  The mind naturally wants to contain this unpredictable beast, and by saying that the mind emerges from the body, we are not saying that one should allow the body, being foundational, to rule.  The reader should remember that the initiate must proceed through body, will, mind, soul and judgement, and know each equally; as we will come to see, each of these spheres rules, but only in its own sphere.  Each wants to claim the others for itself, but each claim is false.

Each idea we have supports either a specific physical urge, or, if the idea is less transient, our own temperament embedded in our body.  These Exercises are designed, to the extent possible, to enlarge the artist so that she, or at least her art, is greater than any specific idea she has, greater than the idea or collection of ideas embodied in her.  Only by mirroring the body of the universe, and so its mind, can the artist produce art worthy of its name.

Ideas the artist has should be treated no differently by her than the emotions she has:  with indifference and curiosity initially, followed by an attempt to transform that emotion or idea into art.  But we are getting ahead of ourselves; this transformative process should be integrated and natural by the end of the Exercises; it is too early to expect it to occur now.  Yet it may be helpful to give the initiate occasional glimpses of what she may expect after her preparatory years, if only to provide some perspective beyond the immediate concerns.

To accept the mind is to accept the myriad contradictoriness of the mind and the mind’s habitation and grounding in the body.

Meditations

Meditate on the mind’s desire for control of the body and how this desire is itself an ambivalent emotion and enterprise.

Meditate on how the mind, in discovering the basic building blocks of the body, thinks that in this discovery it has superseded the body.  To what extent is this thinking true?  To what extent is it false?

Meditate on the mind’s purity.

Meditate on the mind’s desire to be the world.

Meditate on the mind’s playfulness.

Meditate on the mind’s cruelty.

Meditate on how each of the mind’s tendencies (its purity, unity, caprice and cruelty) surpasses the same tendencies in the body.  To what extent does this surpassing increase the same tendencies in the body?  To what extent can this surpassing stay wholly or in part in the mind?  Explore the myriad effects of this surpassing on the body and the world.  Further explore the nature of these effects¾their limitations and freedoms.  Explore how this surpassing may simply be a function of the mind.

Meditate on the mind’s tendency to unify and divide, and its equal tendency to transform its unities and divisions into edifices.

Meditate on the mind’s orientation toward pleasure and power.  How are these two orientations in conflict? How are they compatible?

Meditate on the source of this tendency to turn the mind’s products into edifices.  Must these products be transformed? Can they be transformed into other things?

Meditate on the mind’s ability to create a world parallel to the world of the body, a world that reflects the body’s world but does not emulate it.  Does our ability to reflect on reflection originate from the same mirror as the original reflection or does it create another mirror? If the latter, in what position does this mirror stand in relation to the first mirror?

Meditate on the reality of and method by which a few minds subsume many minds.  How is this relationship related to the relationship of the general and the specific? Nature and society?

Rationale

As the body lusts for the pleasure and procreation of bodies, so the mind lusts for the pleasure and procreation of the mind.  But whereas a body cannot be all bodies¾all bodies, despite their different shapes and sizes are still largely the same size¾a mind can come close to being all minds¾to use the physical world as an analogy, mind sizes vary from mites to mountains.

We expose ourselves to the common simply by living; we are surrounded by repetitions of the same.  But the mind in its power¾and the mind desires to extend power¾is about breaking these repetitions (although the large mind will see that even these breakings occur within a larger repetition) and so we explore by the mind by travelling to its frontiers, for we find with the mind that all places not at its frontiers are simply lesser versions of what are at its frontiers. 

The mind in itself creates two kinds of entities:  the first, in their purity, are kept within the mind; the second use the body to attempt to show themselves in the world.  The first are known only by individual, internal experience, for as soon as they are communicated, the body is used.  Thus we know no entity of the first type other than through ourselves; this is our reflection that only we see.  It is our desire¾it is each of our desires¾that this first type can and will be communicated, and our desire is so strong that the second entity is created, although these latter entities vary in purity¾from the simplest (use of oral language) to the most complex (at the limen of present capability and experience).

By purity we are not attempting to establish a hierarchy of good and evil, better and lesser; we simply refer to our mental experience that the mind’s processes are in themselves pure and that the body’s processes in themselves contain impurity, and that in channeling the former through the latter, the former inevitably become impure.  We do not decry this process; we simply acknowledge it.

Despite the reality that those whom we in our collective experience elevate to the highest stratospheres of divinity are those who diligently and consistently practice the most minimum translation from the first to the second entity, we still en masse devote our lives to translating as much as possible.  This is both because we have an overwhelming urge to move the mind through the body and translate the first entity into the second entity, and because we would never glimpse the first entity but for the second.  We also intuitively sense and historically know that the, beyond the risk of utter eternal anonymity, of burying greatness selfishly within the mound of one’s mind, the human species tends to resent those who do not follow its common practice and continually attempt to move the mind through the body.  But these tendencies¾to move the mind through the body and to restrain the mind within itself¾are utterly different actions and are reflected in the structure of these Exercises by our having included both motions of active climbing and of falling.

Because of the risks involved in keeping the mind close to itself, few attempt it, and because of society’s inevitable perspective (the inevitability of this perspective the initiate should reflect on) on those who do so and the constructs of interpretation that are erected in relation to such people, we have come to know that the boundary between madness and genius is thin and sometimes non-existent.  This, then, is a third risk for those who take such an approach, for the constructs of the world may very well hammer the flaming nail of genius into the permanent hole of madness, and it is true that the world’s constructs are well honed to do so.

Yet while many are trapped in their minds without anything to say, it is also true that the greatest among us are always those who take this risk.

So the products of the mind move from within itself through language, sound, image and movement into the world and are turned into stone and eventually are destroyed or crumble.

So we explore the primary products of the mind:  religion, philosophy, literature, technology and science; all mind activities and products are of these five categories.

The reader may object that technology, science, and particularly literature, philosophy and religion, are less products of the mind than products of the soul¾at least any of these worthy of its name:  that which leaps forth as fire, destroying and creating.  True.  But, as we shall see in the subsequent phase, while the soul is involved in these mind products, even as the body, will and judgement are, all five of these categories are created by virtue of the mind’s drive toward pleasure and power.

The greater objection is that these categories spring not from any single area¾body, will, mind, soul or judgement¾but from the fiery cooperation of all five.  This objection has more merit and we will return to it in our closing comments; meanwhile, for practice purposes however, we must explore these five categories and it seems in our humble judgement that the mind is the best, albeit not perfect, habitat for them.

Method

As with the body and the will, the mind’s exercises are divided into three years:  religion, philosophy and literature; technology and science; and non-mind.  As with the will, there is a qualitative divide between the first two years, which focus on the two primary products or outputs of the mind, and the third year, which focuses on the fulfillment of the mind through its negation.

Seventh Year:  Religion, Philosophy and Literature

Literature, philosophy and religion are primarily the invisible products of the mind¾philosophy being the most invisible, following by literature, then religion.  We will speak more of this factor of visibility later.

Much has been written about the historical relation and progression of these three aspects of the mind; we are thinking of the primacy of religion, the rise of philosophy, the slow weakening of religion and philosophy, and the gradual rise and dominance of literature.  We are not in disagreement with this perspective, but prefer to think of philosophy and religion as being perpetual products of the mind and thus see them not as weakening, but as being subsumed under the canopy of literature.  Relations and definitions change, and for those many who observe relatively superficial changes, these changes are substantive; but there are certain tendencies of the human spirit that are natural and persistent¾philosophy and religion are among these.  Thus the place to look when relations and definitions are changing is not at the past relations and definitions but under them.  Many observers fail because their prepositions are incorrect.

Religion and philosophy are seen to be diminishing because they were viewed as solids, and if one is committed to viewing them as solids, then they indeed are failing; however, if one views them as changing substance¾from solid to liquid or even solid to gas¾then one sees them as being transformed but not necessarily diminished¾they may in fact be strengthening.  For water and wind beat down the rock, but the rock defeats neither water nor the wind.

Furthermore, philosophy and religion begin as spirit or wind, and those who require rocks because their souls are full of them prefer to change the wind to stone.  But philosophy and religion laugh and dance behind the stone’s back; they frolic under, toppling monuments.  They delight in the cracking of edifice.

So literature, although there are vast industries devoted to turning it to stone, is now the paragon of invisible nimbleness.  And for religion and philosophy to thrive, they must hide in literature’s laughing mouth.  This must be the stratagem of those who work on the religious and philosophical frontier; all others are journalists and historians.

Periodically, after long preparation in the tectonic depths, demanded by bodies as they increase their relations, taxonomies of knowledge change.

The initiate must begin at the root of these products of the mind, and climb laboriously to the tree’s ever-sprouting branches, watching always for giant carnivorous spiders, for they are many.  Many are the spiders, many are their names.  How we would like to give a course to the initiate on the genealogy of spiders and their instincts, but it would be best if she learns these on her own.  May she be bitten, but may she not die.

The initiate should master the masterpieces and forms of the three outputs under discussion.  This is difficult but possible in a year, assuming that she stays far away from secondary sources¾oral and written¾of which the academy is the ever-churning factory, and its charred workers, whom society politely calls professors and pays well for their obedience, the operators and machines.

She should begin with religion, focusing on the primary sacred texts of Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, Confucianism and Islam.  She should read less to absorb the content¾such is for the devotee or priest¾and more to absorb the form.  What is distinctive about religion’s form?  Among religious forms?  Why, compared to philosophy and religion, have so few religious texts been written?  What difference does the elemental change we spoke of earlier make to the religious text?  What effect might it have on its form? Its content? The number of members in its set?  How does one write a sacred text from wind rather than stone?  From under literature’s weighty and capricious umbrella, protecting its creators from the acid debris of those who love stones?

After religion, the initiate should migrate to philosophy.  In the West, this early on became separate from religion, whereas in the East they remained intertwined.

She should focus on Heraclitus, Plato, Augustine, Kant and Nietzsche, reading Pythagoras, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel, Schopenaheur, Kierkegaard and Heidegger if she has time.

Some mystics should also be read, although they do not fit easily into any category:  not religion, for religion is suspicious of their orthodoxy; not philosophy, for philosophy is suspicious of their rigor; and not literature, for literature has not typically been the mystic’s aim and frequently the mystic writes competently at best.  The initiate should read Eckhart, Jabes and Weil and perhaps St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila.

The reader may wonder whether the psychologists should be read, particularly the founders:  Freud and Jung.  But the psychologists teach us little that is not found in religion and philosophy; all they do is transfer the content of religion (the divine) into the content of psychology (the human); this was a necessary task, but largely a utilitarian one.  While translators can bring art to life and the best are artists of a sort, they are not primary artists and in themselves are worthy of study among cloistered academics and the masses greedy for spiritual bonbons. 

In literature, the initiate should minimally read The Iliad, the Odyssey, the Greek tragedians, The Metamorphoses, Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Baudelaire, Moby Dick, Ulysses, Kafka, Auden and Blood Meridian.  From there she should expand outward to the likes of Sappho, Beowulf, Goethe’s Faust, Blake, Dostoevsky, and George and T.S. Eliot.  Some works, such as The Aeneid and Proust, are famous and may contain curiosities, but are not great.  As a rule, the initiate should avoid reading anybody not dead for at least fifty years; she should keep in mind that perhaps only one or two books from her generation will be of any worth when weighed on time’s indifferent scales and almost everything¾if not all¾that is contained in the torrential downpour of current books is as well absorbed¾if not better¾by living in the present rather than by reading about it.  By the end of these Exercises, the initiate will have lived.

Throughout these readings in religion, mysticism, philosophy and literature, the initiate should be considering distinctions and evolution of shape, absorbing technique rather than intellectualizing it, and pondering on the relationship between the common themes these areas address and the particular ways they address them.  When the initiate has completed these Exercises¾assuming she has neither died nor found her place in one of the many attractions along the way¾and is no longer an initiate but an artist, she will devote the remainder of her life to creating a work or works of art that too will address these same common themes¾for these are the world through human eyes¾but using content¾and more importantly¾in a style distinctly hers; during these years of development¾and during this seventh year of immersing herself in the world’s primary art¾she is absorbing the world through her eyes and this combination of world and self¾common, unique, traditional, unsettling¾she will give birth to an inner vision¾at first dark, chaotic¾which will in turn, in time, give birth through a mirror to an external correlate of that vision.

If the initiate is chosen, she will this year be reading her peers in the ancient royal house of style and vision.

Year Six

Aesthetic Exercises to Accept the Will and Mirror the Will of the World

Sixth Year:  Non-Will

In this final year of the second phase, the initiate reverses the will’s direction.  It is not as if the will disappears, as even the title of this section suggests and some so-called sages write, but that the will becomes extended to its limitations and when it reaches its limitations it goes beyond and in going beyond it changes its nature and by changing its nature it fulfills itself.  The will, beginning with the body and its individual common urges, reaching beyond the body to land, beyond land to social structures and symbols, beyond social structures and symbols to the species as a whole, finds beyond all its questing the universe¾an entity beyond its grasp, an entity that stands outside and subverts all the products of the will.  This thing, this ever-changing constant whole, this shape-shifting blackness with random transient points of light, becomes the object of the will in this sixth year and in becoming brings the will into itself and this bringing within is what we call non-will.

It is not a non-will that removes the will, but places the will within non-will.  When the will is brought within non-will, the assertions and structures of the questing will are not negated but subsumed.

The non-will that is greater than the will that the will can place itself within without losing itself and by so doing become itself is what once was called by some God. 

Let us speak more of the stretching of the will from its beginnings in the body to its fulfillment in the limits of the universe, which is to say in the centre of itself.

When the will begins stretching itself past the glory of the species to which it belongs, itself not an easy boundary to surpass, it finds itself in a moor of dark tractless space without a moor, and this displacement¾even but an intuition of it¾is frequently enough to drive the one who contains that will back to familiar space.  If, however, this one should stay¾and this is precisely what we require the initiate to do this year¾the will continues stretching, falling, into the seething blackness of space where not only the individual and species will, but all the manifestations of will between, are but specks among countless other wills.  As the initiate experiences this, and does not look away, and continues to experience, and does not look away, her will begins, as it reaches the outer reaches of the universe, to curve, and this curvature alters the form of the will so that it is more itself than itself.

As this year is devoted to an inner experience, the initiate cannot do anything to aid this experience.  She should live so as to sustain herself, but devote all available strength to the experience we have described, allowing as few distractions as possible and engaging active will as minimally as possible.  Because there is nothing for the initiate to do, there is also little to say.  Yet the initiate who truly experiences what we have described, who does not shrink from the stretching, will find that the world at the limits of will is vibrant and full of life.