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Metapsychosis

Journal of Consciousness, Literature, and Art

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Gonjasufi’s “Vinaigrette” & The Dark Night of the Soul

September 9, 2016 By Marco V Morelli Leave a Comment

Question: The darkness and desolation of Gonjasufi’s new video for the track Vinaigrette is undeniable. It’s eerie and colorless– an isolated figure wondering the lonely Southern California streets plus the feeling of emptiness in the cold environment of a run-down motel room. It makes me think of St. John of the Cross and his writing about “the dark night of the soul.”

Richardson-Borne: Funny, I didn’t find the video dark– quite the opposite. I saw the freedom of the open streets in the early morning and the romance of the street lamps curled with the eerie silence of the city’s expanse. What you call “an isolated figure” makes a left turn into a horizon of pillowy clouds and endures some kind of ecstasy while being alone in a motel room. The film feels alive, present.

The “isolation” you mention reminded me of the seeker’s journey as the path to awakening is learning to be utterly alone. Utterly. Non-separation is a condition where all of humanity exists inside of who you truly are. There is no first to make a second– which means one is always alone but never lonely, never isolated. You know the world as yourself, non-separate and unidentified.

I also heard Gonjasufi sing about “losing innocence,”– something that caught my attention. Awakening to non-separation is losing innocence but gaining Innocence. One loses the innocence of being blinded by separation, but gains the Innocence of knowing that nothing arising in your awareness is your doing.

Q: Speaking of lyrics, they’re short in this song, but have a cryptic power. If I understood him correctly, Gonjasufi says he “fell in love with a silhouette”– I found that part particularly beautiful. Falling in love with a silhouette means it was less about physical attraction and more about a feeling.

R-B: Everything you fall in love with is a silhouette, a reflection of reality. It’s not real. If one is still identified with the body and mind, there is a solidity to existence that is believed in that is not really there. After awakening, this solidity fades into a bigger dream where the fiction of silhouettes is seen through. And as the world of silhouettes continues on just as before, the knowing you have is different, not separate.

Chasing these silhouettes, whether they be people, places, or experiences are all distractions from your true nature. Even the ones that seem transcendent, the ones that seem to exist beyond your everyday experience, if you give them more credence than the next, you’re conning yourself.

Spiritual teacher, Adi Da, called these kinds of experiences “garbage.” Straight up, garbage. But yet we continue to sift through this garbage in hopes that we will find a state of mind or feeling called awakening.

Q: Is that dark night of the soul?

R-B: It can be. Dark night of the soul, as I understand it, usually begins when one gets a brief glimpse of non-separation via a state experience while meditating, doing drugs, having sex, playing sports, wandering in nature, or even while feeling one with the movement of a city. But since these glimpses are not the “real thing,” it leaves a person hungry to re-experience the peace and connectedness of that state (even though state experiences have nothing to do with enlightenment.)

Since the initial taste of non-separation is an impermanent state experience that didn’t stick, one begins to do anything possible to get back to that place, to make sense of it, to apply it in some way. This is when the match of the seeker’s fire is lit and can lead one to an experience of darkness where “normal life” just doesn’t feel the same anymore. One’s meaning system has changed– your old life just isn’t what it once was.

Q: My seeker’s journey started after a major bout with depression. Is the dark night of the soul and depression the same thing?

R-B: Generally no– though they may be connected in some instances. Depression is a physical illness more akin to cancer than to “seeker’s frustration” or a “spiritual crisis”– though this frustration can lead to a situational depression.

Gonjasufi has battled his fair share of demons– but as a self described bodhisattva whose only purpose in life is waking people up to their true self, you notice in the video, moving through what you saw as the darkness still lead to the sun-rise– the beautiful light of a fresh morning. This light, non-separation, is what lives under the dark night of the soul, even if one can’t always see it.

Q: I feel like I have plenty of experience with the darkness. What does the light feel like?

R-B: As do most people. But even what they consider happiness is just another form of darkness as this happiness is connected to a body that doesn’t exist. Happiness is another delusion, a distraction keeping one from taking a real look at their condition– another form of impermanence that creates the need for a merry-go-round of experiences that must be chased to keep one’s self alive in a “happy” existence. People may call it happiness, but it’s just words that agree with a story they’ve learned is supposed to be called happiness.

Happiness doesn’t feel “good,” which is just the opposite of bad. True happiness is non-separation, which includes recognizing the nature of the full range of human emotions.

Seeing enlightenment described as blissful can be misleading (though I guess it’s possible for realization to lead to a permanent elation). But for us mortals, bliss is more generally used to describe the peacefulness that comes with recognizing the “rising sun” of pure consciousness.

Still from Gonjasufi's "Vinaigrette"

Still from Gonjasufi’s “Vinaigrette”

Originally published on RichardsonBorne.com

Filed Under: Culture (Transformation), Film/Music, Microdoses

Coda – A Short Film of Life and Death

July 22, 2016 By Jeremy 3 Comments

I found this beautiful animated gem as a randomly generated suggestion for my Youtube account. The Irish have always had a unique, thoughtful, and sometimes humorous relationship with death, so it comes as no surprise that this portrait of the psychopomp comes from artists from the Emerald Isle. Many of us never feel as if our time here is enough. What would you wish for more of in your last moments?


 

Filed Under: Film/Music, Microdoses Tagged With: CODA

“To Thee Homage”: Planetary Intensification

July 21, 2016 By Jeremy Leave a Comment

Philip K. Dick remarked that the right series of words could destroy you [1]. It’s also true, I feel, that the right combination of light, sound and vision could recreate you. In the electronic surround of social media, the right link could function as a portal—a virtual hierophany—breaking through slogging clickbait to confront you with an encounter with the bonafide Other. This video, “To Thee Homage,” is one such slipstream. It pulls at you with its felt presence. Perhaps it’s the subject matter, that is the “Matrimandir” or “Universal Mother”; a building that functions as the “soul” of the budding city called Auroville [2], intended to be a “living laboratory” for the esoteric experiment of Sri Aurobindo and Mirra Alfassa. They called their spiritual practice “Integral Yoga” and intended it to be something other than religion as we know it.

So, what is it about this video? I have never visited Auroville, located in Pondicherry, India, but I intuit the sense from this and other images that Matrimandir isn’t just some strange architecture that catches the eye, merely a distraction from the digital mundane, but an interruption from the conception of human culture as we have known it. The philosophical and spiritual message of Sri Aurobindo’s work had been about latency; about unfolding futures and the planetization of human consciousness. Places that explore this future function are “living laboratories”, what William Irwin Thompson called “planetary demes”. Mutational spaces where innovation and social intensification could take place. These demes, according to Thompson, extended beyond Auroville to be bound up with Findhorn, Esalen Institute, the Lindisfarne Association and many others to do the messy, laborious work involved in imagining something beyond civilization. In Darkness and Scattered Light, Thompson refers to these kind of places as meta-industrial villages:

The metaindustrial village is such a deme; it is a place in which the four cultural forces are completely expressed. [The planetization of nations, the decentralization of cities, the miniaturization of technology, the interiorization of consciousness.] The metaindustrial village is a turn on the spiral back toward the preindustrial village, but it is not the preindustrial village; for with electronics, complex informational flow on a global level, and higher states of consciousness from a contemplative education, it is not a return to the “idiocy of rural life.” [3]

I could argue these mutational wellsprings are needed more than ever in our time. They take on a new form, presently—sublimated into distributed efforts, much like the structure of the web itself. This is an intensification. Most important for this phase of experimental culture building is the necessity to interiorize these ideas and bring them with us into our networks. Into the multitudes that make up the body of a world bursting at the seams and breaking open at the edges of the Anthropocene. Maybe through watching this video—uncanny iconography for our LCD screens— we can take something back into our hearts that just might evoke the spirit of Matrimandir, to allow us to relate to each other differently in our local, global, planetary efforts.

Do you feel it? Does this video pull at something hidden within you?

Notes:

[1] See Philip K. Dick, VALIS.

[2] See “Building Matrimandir, a labor of love”

[3] See William Irwin Thompson, Darkness and Scattered Light

[4] Check out the wonderful documentary on Auroville, “Journey to the City of Dawn“

Filed Under: Film/Music, Microdoses, Noetics (Mind/Spirit), Society (Multitudes) Tagged With: auroville, planetary culture, Sri Aurobindo, the mother, William Irwin Thompson

Metapsychosis is a project of Cosmos Cooperative, a creative co-op for people with "visionary tendencies." Learn more at Cosmos.coop »

Unless otherwise noted, all rights are reserved by the individual authors. Other website content is licensed under Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

  • Podcasts
    • Chthonia – Worlds of the Dark Feminine
    • Writing Off the Deep End
  • Events
  • Groups
    • Visionary Voices: Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri
    • Synthesis of Yoga Practicum
  • Meta
    • About
    • Authors
    • Submissions
    • Contact
    • Donate

Metapsychosis is a project of Cosmos Cooperative, a creative co-op for people with "visionary tendencies." Learn more at Cosmos.coop »

  • Cosmos Cooperative
  • Earth
  • Journal
  • Conversations
  • Join the Co-op

Metapsychosis is a project of Cosmos Cooperative, a creative co-op for people with "visionary tendencies." Learn more at Cosmos.coop »

Unless otherwise noted, all rights are reserved by the individual authors. Other website content is licensed under Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)