Loose Musings on Writing as Spiritual Practice

So I'm wondering about the raw versus the cooked blog and thought expression here on Evolver- the culture and etiquette of our writing and how to move out into and inhabit this space- claim this space by finding my own resonance. I see the Evolver writing mirror itself in the expository pieces found on Reality Sandwich, and I welcome the opportunity to delve into and digest this writing. In turn, I also think about how I want to put my finger on the pulse of the raw, inhabit the space of process, witness these thoughts evolve...

I've been thinking a lot about writing as spiritual practice the last number of weeks, and I've been working with the idea of being a Lookout.

For a theatric poetry performance that my friends and I put on the other week, I wrote a poem called "East Village Song" that was really my attempt to walk in Philip Whalen's footsteps of "Sourdough Mountain Lookout"- observe the reflection of NYC in my mind as I followed the reflection of Sourdough Mountain in Whalen’s mind. Integrate quotes from the Beats as he integrated quotes from the Greeks. Learn to move in language like a mobile, orbit ideas, glide and create resonance in the space between words. I think there's a lot to be learned from walking in another writer's footsteps. But this idea of being a Lookout, I find is central to my Buddhist practice. A Lookout is someone who watches his or her thoughts, watches the world, sometimes watches the world watch her. It is the black Eye of Horus-like marks on a white birch tree in Boulder; it is the redness of soil, the slice of light that cuts its path beneath your bedroom door reminding that you occupy a space between hypnagogic and hypnapompic frames of dream.

It begins with minutia, the tiniest detail, leveling your awareness to the animism in all things. Hear the world that is the word spoken. Think of listening to Bjork's Vespertine. Her self-described cocoon and it is that, but it's also the tiniest epiphany, the smallest vesper and attention to detail. I often think about leveling my view of the world to create a flat plane. It's often my goal in writing to give equal weight to a beetle, or a bowl, a bear head or a tattoo, as to a person- breaking up the hierarchy from which this world is often perceived. (The subject/object relationship of Western thought) It is awakening to the interdependent and transitory nature of phenomena. This is my Buddhist sensibility but now most recently, I've also been realizing that this awareness of animism is also linked to the role of the Shaman.

Let me backtrack. Two years ago, I took ayahuasca with Santo Daime in Japan on Christmas Eve. It was my intention to approach the experience from a Buddhist perspective as I watched others ascend to ecstatic states. But I didn't want the ecstatic state for myself, my focus was on watching, witnessing, witnessing the heaviness of my stomach, witnessing the rapture of others and their disbelief as I managed to dance for three hours in their tightly enforced lines of channeled energy before finally puking purple into fallen leaves during a break, splattering the edges of my white skirt. I remember the infinite geometry of nature (all so familiar during a trip), the strange and bizarre pinkishness of skin, the rolling wood grains inside a log cabin. Inside this log cabin during a break, an older woman with her Daime star came up to me and asked how I was doing. I told the the woman the wood grains were rolling and she said, “Yes, they have a tendency to do that.” I told her that everything was beautiful and that it was only life. She was shocked. How can you know that? I don’t remember. I don’t remember what I said, but I knew that I was only seeing what was already there to see, like the heavy saturation of awareness in my childhood, and how the world buzzed with being. I believe that if you pay enough attention wood grains also roll (though differently) when you’re not tripping. I told my friend that the enlightenment was that there was no enlightenment. The perfect gold light in that open stone church of our ceremony was the same before and after the journey. Ayahuasca told me that I did not need ayahuasca that I was already tripping all the time. I believe that all hallucinogens tell us what we already know as they heighten the bandwidth of our direct perception. But I'm contemplating going to Daime again here in the States. I've been thinking about Daniel's ideas about interspecies communication with entheogens. I received one specific message from ayahuasca when I had one specific intent in mind, but I’m wondering what else this vine may tell me if open myself up as an intermediary between worlds.

I think if writing as a Buddhist is awakening to the transitory nature of phenomena, then Shamanic writing is navigation, the translation of the in between states from the physical to the spiritual, gaining knowledge in all the liminal states between. It’s linked to the “sitting” nature of mind but maybe it’s more of a “singing”. I think Buddhism is disappearance (we are here to disappear) and Shamanism is song, this is the life dance (we are). Interestingly, I think reading Daniel’s work has made me more aware beyond "disappear," "dissolve" to also "embrace," "we are". Hmm, I’ve been wrestling with Buddhist practice for the last 8 years- believing it may be the ultimate reality but then rejecting the ultimate view. Life may be the dream but “I” am both the dream and dreamer. Everything is and is not.

I had a dream back in the September, shortly after Burning Man of a golden hour gymnasium full of tattooed burners on roller skates, skating to Radiohead’s “Reckoner” (for me this is life-pulse-song). From an aerial view a pair of little maroon socks fell from the ceiling. It was comic, my discovery of these little booties, as I and others looked up and up. Finally above everyone, perched in a throne-like highchair a Tibetan baby jumped and fell into our arms. The message seemed to be not that he was our child but that we were his children engaged in the dance of life. I think this may be the overlap between Buddhism and Shamanism for me.

(mmm, and rambling now) I also think of Breaking Open the Head as a psychotropic parallel to On the Road, the journey that is the destination in the rocketing realization that boundaries are arbitrary, space/moment is ultimately expansive, though existence may be lonely. I think about how I believe that in life we are already tripping, but sometimes simultaneously, I would also like to make these radical journeys myself. (A little like the difference between being Jack Kerouac vs. Carolyn Cassady) Imbibe, without fear or hesitation whatever drug possesses the possibility to crack me open. I hover with tension. My mother's schizophrenia is also the latent gene within me. From talking to the staff when my mother was temporarily committed to Spring Grove State Mental Hospital in 1994, to speaking to one of the researchers conducting psilocybin research at Johns Hopkins last year, I've been told to be careful with my use of hallucinogens. Part of me wants to conquer this inhibition and throw caution to the wind, follow my friend Gavin into his 30 liquid hits of acid trip, and the other part of desperately wants to return to a familiar Robin that I knew before the trip. My ultimate attachment in life may be to my sanity. But I’m wondering what crazy wisdom can teach me. Thinking on this now, there may be a connection that the lama who I took refuge with was of the Nyingma, crazy wisdom lineage. I remember now the stories of him meditating in a cave with his hair tethered to a cave wall. There’s also a connection with having chosen Naropa as my graduate school, Naropa also being the outrider tradition of crazy wisdom lineage. I'm working on sitting in both minds with this- being the one that assumes more responsibilities with my mother’s medical care as well as sitting in the space of being the Evolver, witnessing my mind, witness itself in the curvature of my seismograph writing- learning to be both the Buddhist and Shaman Lookout intermediary between worlds and word.