Duncan Trussell: Live in the Mystery

My last post was about David Lynch's speech on the benefits that meditation can bring to creativity. I noticed a bit of backlash from staunch scientific materialists who refuted his "unified field theory" comment as too new-agey. This post comments on Duncan Trussell's description of what it means to live in the mystery and avoid the new-age "slippery slope". I think it seems fitting as a follow-up to the Lynch piece.

"Live in the mystery," said Roshi Joan Halifax. Don't go searching for concrete answers. Nobody's found them yet, so what makes seekers believe they will? Shunryu Suzuki, the Suzuki of lesser fame who started one of the first Zen monasteries in California, said, "If you continue this simple practice [meditation] every day you will obtain a wonderful power. Before you attain it, it is something wonderful, but after you obtain it, it is nothing special. It is just you yourself."

Duncan Trussell goes on to say, "I don't have anything to do with death anymore. I don't understand nothingness...or zero...or any of that stuff...so, uh...I don't know. I have experienced some transcendent force in the universe that just loves anything and isn't really concerned with these little blips in the universe that we call our incarnations.

"I have no proof. I'm only going on hippie instinct."

That's all that anybody has [instinct]. Of course it's not going to be the most precise thing in the world, but nobody's asking for that.

Now you're putting your head in another type of sand. Now you're putting your faith in something not provable. It's a slippery slope."

You can seesaw into another type of faith awfully quickly, a faith in the unknown. That balance between faith and understanding is a test that will last a lifetime. And maybe there's no need for faith. Like Joan Halifax said, just live in the mystery. Theories about hidden meanings are entertaining to think about, but in the end they're just simply not provable.

All of us are jewels in the net of Indra (or the net of consciousnesses). When we shine bright as souls we affect the brightness of the jewels around us, which will create an immediate shift in society...the brightness will amplify and pick up momentum across the universe, like an unstoppable wave. Whether people respond to it [in the way you imagined originally, or in a way you notice explicitly] doesn't matter a bit. It's out of our control how they respond. Maybe they respond subtly, internally, and maybe their response doesn't show itself in the material world for days, months or even years, if ever.

And so it's sometimes an ego-less act to shine our souls, for they may not be recognized as the purveyors of goodwill that we know they are.

There are a few ways you can be a hero and support the Mindloft. Free things you can do: try Audible or AmazonPrime for 30 days, link to us a social network like Twitter, Facebook or Reddit, or download and rate the podcast in iTunes. If you have a little spare money consider these: send a Paypal donation to ajsnookauthor@gmail.com, buy one of AJ's Kindle eBooks, or buy anything on Amazon by going through our site. Thanks so much for your support, AJ

David Lynch Explains How Meditation Can Aid Creativity

The size of your consciousness determines the size of your understanding, awareness, and wakefulness. It could be golf ball size, or it could be much bigger. It all depends on how much work we put into ourselves. This affects creativity, thankfully, because small and contrived thought patterns such as sorrow, anger and depression tend to arise in most people out of the possession of a narrow awareness. They are a poison to the creative mind.

If we meditate, says Mr. Lynch, we can widen our scope of awareness and see the innate falsehood (by definition, the opposite of "truth") in those negative forms of consciousness. In turn, then, the innate truth of the universe is expressed through creativity and love, both acts that most people would agree can only be best expressed through an expanded consciousness.

There is an ocean of consciousness at the base of all of our minds. Through meditation we can dive into that ocean and be one with the Unified Field, the term science uses to explain where all things, including emotions like love and bliss, as well as more concrete things like matter, are born out of.

Enlightenment is the full potential of all human beings and besides being the truth and the common ground of all conscious beings, it also makes us happy (not a goofball happiness but a thick beauty without suffering) and our experiences more interesting. Win, win.

There are a few ways you can be a hero and support the Mindloft. Free things are try Audible or AmazonPrime for 30 days, link to us a social network like Twitter, Facebook or Reddit, or download and rate the podcast in iTunes. If you have a little spare money you can send a Paypal donation to ajsnookauthor@gmail.com, buy one of AJ's Kindle eBooks, or buy anything on Amazon by going through our site. Thanks so much for your support, AJ

Ep13: Peter Joseph, Ram Dass, Into The Wild, And More

In this episode I read some from Ram Dass and ramble a bit about Peter Joseph and The Zeitgeist Movement, along with "Into the Wild". Also, I tried using a new recording App because my Evernote account was almost over the megabyte limit for the month, and I like the quality better. Apologies for the six minutes that sound like I'm recording in the bathroom. Full disclosure: I was! Hope you enjoy.

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The Mindloft in iTunes

There are a few ways you can be a hero and support the Mindloft. Free things are try Audible or AmazonPrime for 30 days, link to us a social network like Twitter, Facebook or Reddit, or download and rate the podcast in iTunes. If you have a little spare money laying around you can send a Paypal donation to ajsnookauthor@gmail.com, buy one of AJ's Kindle eBooks, or buy anything on Amazon by going through our site. Thanks so much for your support, AJ

My Collection of Short Fiction

I've finally gotten around to publishing a collection of my work on Amazon. It's $2.99 (or free in the lending library). Any interest shown (including positive reviews) would be greatly appreciated.

Discreet Spiritual Agenda

I have a group of old friends who live on the other side of the earth. They're awesome guys: smart, loyal, funny, witty, successful, lively and kind. I hope they are well and I hope to stay their friend until the day I die. We were open minded about many issues growing up: race, class and the label of religion. But we were closed minded about others: political viewpoint (anything other than center-left liberal was unacceptable) and talking about religion (call yourself a Christian or Jew, just don't talk about the details of either over a beer or you'll clear the room). We never used to discuss spiritual matters at all. I didn't hear about Terence McKenna or Ram Dass until I was 26. I thought meditation was only done at the end of yoga classes. Weed and shrooms were escape hatches from the pressures of school, sports and general expectations rather than doorways to unknown and magical realms of the mind. In fact, for a bunch of jam-band loving, dope smoking, free love wheeling young dudes, we were rather spiritually phobic, gnostically bigoted, even.

You see, I've lived overseas for a total of five or six years with no immediate plans of moving back. And while here in Japan I have had a lot more independence of consciousness. There has been room for my spirit to stretch its legs, to poke its head over the hills out yonder. Just because there are temples and shrines dotted across every town and city nearby isn't the reason I have grown spiritually either (Disclosure: I still have a long way to go, and  always will). From what I can tell, the main reason I have grown to be a modestly spiritual person is because my conscious mind has been isolated, broken free from cliques and peer pressure, however subtle and warm they once were, and I have been able to explore my inner self while riding on the trains, while meditating in the one room apartments, while hiking through the low-lying mountains, and while jogging through the emerald green rice fields. I have been able to see the world through foreign eyes and have come out on the other side a completely different person than the success-driven suburbanite I once was.

The dilemma I'm in now has to do with the discreet spiritual agenda that my mind has in tow. Consciously, at the surface, I have no agenda and I will keep practicing for myself and I will tell myself that the fruits of my practice will nourish those I come in contact with every day, however subtly, affecting real change however slowly. Subconsciously, though, my conscience is screaming at me to reveal my awakening, however slight, to those friends over there on the other side of the earth, those friends embedded in new cliques like fossils deep underneath calcified layers of bedrock.

But I will not evangelize. I will not preach for I know the effect that will have. I'll be no different than the Mormon missionaries that come rapping on my door. My friends will close the metaphorical curtains when they see me coming down the block. One forward of an Alan Watts clip will have the opposite reaction than intended, pushing them away from the mystic, inching them closer to the atheist fundamentalism that is growing larger and larger in mainstream society. I've asked myself what to do over and over again and a voice from deep within me has repeatedly told me to stop ruminating over it and to get creative.

But get creative how? The only way I know how to be creative is to write. I will write fiction faceted with jewels of spiritual wonder and beauty. My discreet spiritual agenda will manifest itself in the pages that trickle out of my imagination. And when I have mastered my craft maybe then I will affect real change in the ones I love, the ones whose hearts have been connected to mine by impervious invisible strings, over vast distances, for all these years.






If you're interested in creativity and secular spiritual practice, check out AJ Snook's Mindloft Podcast (also available in iTunes). This music by Steven Halpern  also works for me.

AJ Snook's Mindloft Podcast Now in iTunes!

I finally figured out how to upload my episodes onto iTunes. It's not as hard as I thought, and I did it all for free. Click on the link below to download the episodes. If you ever need any help getting started let me know and I can walk you through it. Thanks, AJ

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/aj-snooks-mindloft/id678068286

Podcast Episode 12: Flow State

In this episode I discuss what I have learned from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi about the nature of the flow state and now we can achieve it in our daily lives. He posits the question, "Are people who experience flow state more often happier?" I sure learned a lot and hope you are able to listen.






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Psychedelic Salon: Shonagh, Medicine Woman

Shonagh is an author (Love and Spirit Medicine and Ix Chel Wisdom: 7 Teachings from the Mayan Sacred Feminine), shaman and spell breaker, who takes her students beyond the cultural mass-trance and into the territory of the sacred. In the Pacific Northwest she teaches workshops that are deeply transformative, helping people to release from old behavior patterns and access a wealth of inner resources. She says about herself, “I think of myself as a spiritual warrior, and a spiritual warrior seeks to know, they are on a quest to know.”

I listened to Lorenzo's Psychedelic Salon today on my long walk home. It was extremely hot and humid and I wasn't sure if I should walk, but thanks to Shonagh (and Lorenzo) I was glad that I did. She said she is 50 years old and without an extensive drug history. She never smokes weed and confesses that "running around Burning Man naked, high on LSD, with a tiara on" is not her scene. However, something called her one day not too long ago. It pulled on her and beckoned her to begin living a life dedicated to consciousness and awareness. 

Shonagh went down to the Yukatan and learned to take a mushroom sacrament from medicine women shamans and found her calling late in life. The most striking thing to her about the current state of society was that it is an altered state of consciousness, and nobody ever brings that up. Society, with its borders, symbols, specific names and, particularly, its commerce driven nature, drops a veil in front of our eyes and makes us think that all of it is truth. Shonagh points out that if we just stop and think about history, and think about the propaganda that we eat up every day, we will quickly realize the ruse. 

Thankfully, however, she also says that it's not all hopeless. She has seen beings of another nature, she has talked to them, and they tell her that we are way too obsessed with this reality as being the ultimate. I say that just because we can't measure other realities doesn't mean that we can't perceive them (either with the tools that Mother Earth sprouts newly each day, or with the imaginative minds we were born with). The beings also tell her that we decided to come to these lives, we decided to "play" here, so we might as well enjoy it, and we might as well experience this life honestly, lovingly, compassionately, and engagingly.

Give the episode a listen if you have time. She's delivering the speech from a bookshop in Seattle promoting her new book.

Podcast Episode 11: Creativity Show

In this episode I talk about three interesting perspectives on creativity, one from Joe Rogan and Duncan Trussell, a second from Elizabeth Gilbert, and a third from Jason Silva. To cap off the show I read a fabulous essay by George Orwell called "Why I Write". Hope you enjoy.  Thanks, AJ



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Undoctored Imagination

This article was inspired by this video by Jason Silva about creativity and imagination and inspiration. Pretty much all of his videos are about that but you get my drift. 

Psychedelics as a player in instilling awe in others?

“We need to pull ourselves out of context in order to gawk in amazement at the wonders of the world” - Tom Robbins.

He was talking about pyschedelics. They decondition our thinking. [They pull us out of ruts.] Take a trip. See the world differently. Jump into a new culture [see Pico Iyer's TED Talk “Where is Home”] They needed to be treated with respect. [The Muse, Daemon and Genius needs to be treated as a partner and not a tool. We shouldn't use her but we should merge with Her, have sex with Her, allow ourselves to be enveloped by Her.] Weed increases synaptic priming. And Google literalizes the concept that we are all one. In another video he also says that the goal of imagination is to pull the present to meet that imagination. [I don't always agree with this. Everything shouldn't be about engineering physical representations of our imagination. I think that imagination has intrinsic value, that images in the mind are rich and valuable just as they are, they are part of the universe in its entirety. We don't have to debase them by trying to replicate them, by trying to dub them in the physical world. We all remember what happened when we tried to tub a cassette tape: its quality got weaker. I believe that this weakening effect is intensified when it comes to imagination. Not to mention the possibility for corruption and loss of purity. To be implemented physically, most ideas have to be put through the bureaucratic and capitalistic ringer that is society and business. Maybe, just maybe, some of our ideas can stay pure in their original form, as masterpieces undoctored and unedited and untinkered with.]

Elizabeth Gilbert's Take on Creativity

Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love, TED Talk

I wrote this while listening to the above TED Talk. My own thoughts are in brackets. I hope it sheds some light on creativity and why it's important to put your ideas out there into the global consciousness. I believe that if they aren't shared, then they barely exist. Yes, they'll change who you are and, in turn, change the collective indirectly, but they won't nearly have the same effect as publishing them and changing a person's mind directly. Ideas change minds.

Aren't you afraid of never succeeding again? Aren't you afraid of succeeding in the first place? Yes, I'm afraid. What is it about creativity that makes us worry about others' mental health? [does creativity make us crazy? Because we put ourselves out there. Because we open our souls to be seen by others. Doesn't that say that others are hiding something. Should we trust non-creative people?] Mailer said that every one of his books has killed him a little more. [My idea that every moment of compassion is a small Jesus moment, a small death or self-sacrifice, might hold true for some. The question becomes how can we continue being creative after our past successes? [This seems a bit pretentious but I'll continue listening.] Other societies? How did they deal with it? Ancient Greece and Rome. People didn't believe it came from humans. They believed in the muse, the divine spirit, or daemons. The Romans called that spirit a Genius. They didn't think it was a clever person but an alien entity. They would shape the outcome of the work and protect you from your own results. [The outcome wasn't your fault. If it was good, your Genius was awesome. If it bombed, your Genius was lame.] Telling someone that they embody the beauty of the universe is like asking them to swallow the sun...too much responsibility. And it's killing the number of creative people over the years. Ruth Stone, the poet, said that she could feel poems rushing at her like thunderous air, and she would run home and grab a pen and write it down before the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and the poem would look for another poet. She would even catch it by the tail sometimes and pull it back but the words would come out backwards [awkward]. [We have all been there.] Tom Waits caught a melody out of thin air while driving. He didn't want to lose it and looked up at the sky and said, “Excuse me, can't you see that I'm driving?” She then talked to the Thing, the Muse, the Genius, and told it that it needs to also show up because she's showing up everyday and trying to make it work. Sometimes performers become transcendent, sometimes everything aligns, we become lit from within, on fire with divinity, people called it by its name: God. [No wonder I'm a creative type and no wonder I've made creativity my religion since I've realized organized religion is lacking something. Rigidity stagnates flow. Religion is rigid and the opposite of tapping into God.] Don't be afraid, don't be daunted, just do your job. [We all die one day. We all start over. So we must give it our best try now before we have to start over again. We must give it our best try now, while we're still here. That is what creativity is to me. That is what I think of when I think of inspiration. Even if there isn't some Daemon out there acting as our training wheels, who cares? Something is there! No, something is here! We are godly in our core. When we get all spiritual, when we meditate or read Eastern philosophy, we can see this point. We can see that the individual is just the whole in a very good disguise. The single part is camouflaged so well that he has forgotten that he is really the whole. He has forgotten that he is really God. He taps into creative genius and he thinks it's a gift from an Other, but in actuality it's really a gift from Himself.]

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

Podcast Episode 10: The Noosphere

This episode is a little more on the fringe but Roger Nelson makes some very compelling arguments, and any time that spirituality and science begin to merge is very exciting. Check out the Global Consciousness Project for more info and to read some of Dr. Nelson's work. Hope you enjoy the podcast. Thanks, AJ



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Podcast Episode 9: Emerson's "The Over-soul"

I've fallen in love with Emerson and the transcendentalist movement yet again. This essay has blown my mind. Ralph speaks of the flow of truth and love that makes up all existence, its intelligence, and its impermanence. I've picked out my highlights and talked a bit about them at the end. Hope you enjoy. Here's the whole MP3 if you'd prefer. Thanks, AJ



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Podcast Episode 8: Kodo Sawaki's 34 Tips

I really enjoyed making this one. Sawaki's words were extremely wise and poignant. I hope you find them as interesting as I did. You can check out the manuscript here. Download the whole podcast for free through the link on the player above and if you have time write a comment below or on the r/mindloft sub-Reddit. Thanks, AJ



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Podcast Episode 7: Drugs and the Meaning of Life by Sam Harris

Highlights of, and commentary on, Sam Harris' marvelous essay about psychedelics and the transcendental experience. Feel free to download the episode for free using the link in the player. His popular book, Free Will, can be found here. Thanks, AJ



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Podcast Episode 6: 2 Short Stories

In this episode I read two of my short stories: 1) "A Historic Act Worth Repeating" and 2) "The Vision". Hope you enjoy. Please leave a comment if you have time and download the file for free through the link on the player. Thanks, AJ



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Podcast Episode 5: The Path of No Path

In this episode I talk about the concept of "The Path of No Path" that was taught by Zen Master Mazu. You can download the episode through the link in the player. Enjoy.



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Reply to a Fan from Steinbeck

I love this. It makes the writing seem so human and carefree. Steinbeck doesn't want to write a masterpiece. He just wants to connect with his audience. The critics feel the need to demand a masterpiece from the writer, but the writer doesn't care about the critics. He cares infinitely more about the appreciative reader.

 
By John Steinbeck
Dear Mr. Sturz:
I have your letter and critique for which I thank you. It is a patient and an honest job.
I think it would be unnatural if I were not pleased. So many literary conventions have grown up in the last fifty years. The process of acceptance-rejection is not unlike the lone dance of the fiddler crab. A man writes a book -why? - Because he wants to. His impulse is probably the same one that makes him sing or try to go to bed with all beautiful ladies. Its a kind of outpouring. And there's his book - somehow naked and cold standing up while the well clothed mock at it. Usually they are angry with it before they start. Now the purpose of a book I suppose is to amuse, interest, instruct but its warmer purpose is just to associate with the reader. You use symbols he can understand so that the two of you can be together. The circle is not closed until the trinity is present - the writer, the book, and the reader. And this works with everyone but critics (all under graduates are critics). Critics dare you to be ''great.'' But this is all after the fact. You didn't want to be great. You just wanted to write a book and have people read it. I have had some very strange criticism.
Let's take the inner chapters of the Grapes of Wrath. They have been pommelled. You are the first critical person who seems to have suspected that they had a purpose. The reader in general accepted them for what they were. A writer who spends that much time on a book usually knows what he is doing and why. Critics refuse to believe this.
You say the inner chapters were counterpoint and so they were - that they were pace changers and they were that too but the basic purpose was to hit the reader below the belt. With the rhythms and symbols of poetry one can get into a reader - open him up and while he is open introduce - things on a intellectual level which he would not or could not receive unless he were opened up. It is a psychological trick if you wish but all techniques of writing are psychological tricks. Perspective in painting is a trick, word sounds are tricks, even arrangement and form are tricks. And a trick is only good if it is effective. The writer never knows whether his trick is going to work until he has a reader. Since the Grapes of Wrath seems to have had an impact on a large number of readers I must believe that the tricks worked. My last book East of Eden makes use of a whole series of different tricks. As usual the critics have rejected but the readers seem to be absorbing.
It has become a convention, probably a good one -never to answer or explain. Poor old Leo Tolstoy used to spend all his time answering critics - when his answers were inherent in his work.
The cultist seem to have a curious view of writing. They see a writer fumbling up the steps of immortality. There is a very curious ego maniac attitude. Most good writers I know have no time for immortality. The concentration required to write the book at all, knocks such considerations out. Besides the pure horror of the job - the fantastic problems of language and form and content make the writer humble. No one has to make him humble. And there is a further thing which I think has never been mentioned about criticism. The process of writing a book is the process of outgrowing it. Disciplinary criticism comes too late. You aren't going to write that one again anyway. When you start another - the horizons have receded and you are just as cold and frightened as you were with the first one.
Another thing has not been said about critics -they are professionals interested in their own careers. The book they criticize is the material for their own successes or failures and it is of secondary importance to them. I know critics who, thinking up a wise crack - wait happily for a book to come along to apply it to. This is creativeness - not criticism.
I don't think I am ill tempered about adverse criticism. It does seem kind of meaningless. But, do you know, you never get over the ability to have your feelings hurt by deliberately cruel and destructive attacks. Even if you know why the attack was made, it still hurts.
I have run on at this length, I suppose, because I liked getting your letter and the piece about G.O.W. Thank you for sending it.

Podcast Episode 1

This was my first attempt at a podcast. Topics include technology as a prison, Alan Watts, being present, and the NSA scandal. Feel free to download it through the link on the player above. Thanks, AJ



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