The Fire within Being

I recently decided to revisit one of my favorite books ever, The Poetics of Reverie by Gaston Bachelard, and I discovered something that I found remarkable. So obviously I decided to make a post about it!

In the chapter called Reverie and Cosmos, he quotes an extraordinary passage by an obscure French writer named Henri Bosco. Speaking of fires burning in a hearth, he writes:

These fires have such a power over our memory that the immemorial lives dozing beyond the oldest memories waken within us at their flame and reveal to us the furthest countries of our secret soul. Alone, on this side of the time which presides over our existence, they brighten days previous to our days and unknowable thoughts of which our thought is perhaps often only the shadow. In contemplating these fires associated with man by millenia of fire, one loses the feeling of the flight of things; time sinks into absence, and hours leave us with no jolt. What was, what is, and what will be becomes by founding for itself the very presence of being; and nothing else in the enchanted soul distinguishes it from itself except perhaps the infinitely pure sensation of its existence. One affirms in no way that he is; but there still remains a faint gleam that he may be. Would I be? one murmurs to himself, and he no longer holds to the life of this world by anything but this hardly articulated doubt. The only human element that remains within us is warmth; for we no longer see the flame that communicates it. We are ourselves that familiar fire which has been burning at ground level since the dawn of the ages, but from which there always rises a living point above the hearth where the friendship of men keeps watch."

When I read this I was dumbstruck by its beauty. What's more--it makes sense, though I can barely explain why! But I want to try explaining that passage here, even if I don't do it justice.

Sometimes I feel like I'm just the echo of something far more real than I am. I get "glimpses" of that reality, mostly just the hint of a thought that intimates far more than it actually "says." These thoughts paint a picture of a life beyond life, one that is nevertheless nestled within life like a walnut in its shell. And what is this life like? It is warm; it is bright. Like a fire, I get the impression that it sustains life from within, linking things together as they share in its warmth. And I can feel that warmth anywhere. When I read a fiction book, for instance, I get a sense of the characters' presence, a distinct "feel" about them that I can't explain in any meaningful way. It's like the sensation of a color, but more the way the color--or a sound--makes you feel. Maybe I could explain it better by saying that what I feel in these books is their emotions, but it goes even deeper than emotions. I feel what the emotions grow from.

I guess the best way to explain it is to simply say that what I feel is fire--a warmth emanating from within everything: people, animals, books, ideas, or even inanimate objects. It comes through especially strong in scripture, almost as if the words there were an open door to the fire's heart. And I find that if I let this fire "lead" me--that is, letting it teach me where to go by what it shows me--I find the ideas I need to find and meet the people I need to meet. I sometimes wonder if the fire is simply leading me to the parts of my being "scattered" throughout the world, almost as if the fire has been "gathering" me.

And the fire also contains wonders. I get impressions that there are hidden universes dozing in even the most mundane things, that the fire in a book or a flower could open up to worlds beyond worlds, and forever on ad infinitum. And when I lose myself in that book or meditatively contemplate that flower, the fires in our depths meet and mingle; it becomes one flame, one depth.

Then I get a thought: could the fire which "reveals the furthest countries of my secret soul" be something we've all heard of before? Could it be that this flame--concealing worlds within even the most mundane things--is actually what we Mormons call the pre-mortal world? I think there's good reason to think so. I believe that when I gaze into the eyes of a loved one, I see into the deepest parts of their soul. In that warm intimacy, our co-mingling depths experience that which those depths spring from: the being of God Himself, the fire from whom all our flames spring.

And there's lots of precedent for this in the writings of spiritual teachers. Emanuel Swedenborg taught that God appears to the angels in heaven as a bright sun, illuminating that whole spiritual country with its warmth of love and its light of truth. But he also taught that human beings have a microcosmic version of that same sun: the aura:

"The angels went on to say that all angels have this kind of aura around them because the Lord does, and that the aura around the Lord is similarly derived from him. This aura is their sun, or the sun of the spiritual world."

Basically, the physical world shines out from the spiritual world and ultimately from God. From this perspective, auras are just the evidence we feel of that eternal fire's warmth and light of that eternal fire as it shines through the people and things we encounter in the world.

The philosopher-esotericist Rudolf Steiner also said something like this. He writes in his Foundations of Human Experience that what we see through our perception is the "reflection" of life as it was before birth. In other words, the things we see in the world are the evidence of something that existed "prior" to their existence, and he writes that when we see them we're using our will to bring them into the actuality of something "after" our life. Think of that--perception as resurrection!

I guess that if this "fire within being" means anything, it's that we get to our origins not by going into the past but by going into our depths. There is a fire at the heart of being, one which opens up into life before life, life within life. So I think that perhaps the pre-existence didn't happen chronologically before this life; maybe it rather exists within this life as the flame expressing itself through our thoughts, actions, and perceptions, that of which we are perhaps only a shadow.

The Liahona's Second Spindle

I just realized something about the Book of Mormon, and I'd like to share it with y'all. It's about the Liahona, that "round ball of curious workmanship" that guided Lehi's party through the wilderness to the promised land.

Here's the verse I'll try to explain my idea from:

"And it came to pass that as my father arose in the morning, and went forth to the tent door, to his great astonishment he beheld upon the ground a round ball of curious workmanship; and it was of fine brass. And within the ball were two spindles; and the one pointed the way whither we should go into the wilderness."(1 Nephi 16:10)

For those who don't know, the Liahona was basically an ancient GPS system. Of the two spindles, one of them pointed the way they should go to get to the better parts of the wilderness on their journey to the land of promise. But reading this verse a few nights ago got me thinking: what about the other spindle? If "the one" pointed whichever way they needed to go, what was the other doing there in the first place? If it didn't move, did it have a function at all?

That's when I remembered the "type" Alma the Younger applied to the Liahona in Alma 37, where he compares the Liahona to God's word:

"For behold, it is as easy to give heed to the word of Christ, which will point to you a straight course to eternal bliss, as it was for our fathers to give heed to this compass, which would point unto them a straight course to the promised land." (Alma 37:44)

The scriptures are like the Liahona in that we can get direction in our lives by consulting them. I've been noticing this a lot lately--by pondering how the chapter I'm reading applies to my life, I'll get a subtle influx of revelation pointing me to where I need to go. But the key is that this revelation isn't in the Book of Mormon itself; it's only what occurs to me when I read the text, what "shines through the pages."

So I thought: could this have something to do with the two spindles? And then it hit me. I realized that if "the one" spindle corresponds to the way scriptures point the way forward in our lives, the stationary one must correspond to the actual, literal text. In that way, the Liahona is a lot like my experience of scripture-reading: two meanings pointing to something else, one that always stays the same (i.e. the literal meaning), and one that changes to fit our needs (the scriptures' meaning as I liken it to my life).

And then I realized something else: if the literal meaning is what stays the same between the many directions/meanings the Book of Mormon gives us, that means that the Book of Mormon's literal meaning is the pattern or archetype for events in human life. I can successfully liken Lehi's flight into the wilderness with my dating life, with family, with my church calling, with temptation, or even with metaphysics; thus the actual story told in the Book of Mormon is what lies in common between these events, their common "form."

So I guess you could say that the Book of Mormon is a collection of archetypes for human events, representations of ways that human behavior unfolds again and again. To paraphrase a description I've heard used for the I Ching, the Book of Mormon is a periodic table of human life. All the elements for our life's story are there. You just have to look closely enough, and you'll see your life in it.

9/11 as a Symbol

Today is September 11th. Fourteen years ago, I woke up to my mom telling me "something terrible has happened," and when I went to my third-grade classroom, the news footage was on the class's TV. I don't remember much from the next little while, except the fact that 9/11 dominated the news channels for the next few weeks.

I think we all struggle to understand 9/11's meaning. Though we know who did it and for what reasons, we still long to know: why? Why did it happen? How does this ultimate tragedy fit in our picture of the world? Though not sufficient to solve that riddle once and for all, I'll try to help answer the question in this post. Specifically, I'll use the writings of psychologist James Hillman to show how 9/11 manifests ancient and long-established archetypal themes. 9/11 isn't a meaningless tragedy--it "shows forth" symbols that have existed since that dawn of time, and, knowing this, we can understand what good can spring and has sprung from its ashes for our culture.

I do this with the utmost respect for the event's solemnity and the lives of those who died there. By re-interpreting it, I don't mean to disrespect them; I want to instead show at least part of what those deaths could mean.

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From the dawn of human history, mankind has built towers. In ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, towers like the ziggurat and the pyramid were representations of "the cosmic mountain," symbols of the human desire to reconnect with heaven on earth. The biblical Book of Genesis, however, warns that these attempts at architectural transcendence are too literal--those who built the Tower of Babel thought that heaven could be reached by their own effort, that only a literal tower made of literal stone could get them high enough to know God. Let's then read the confusion of languages at Babel less as a punishment than as a mercy. God confused their languages to spare them the suffering that inevitably comes from reaching above the mark. Instead of climbing so high on the ladder that you fall, God confused them so they could return to the streets and soil of everyday life. Instead of climbing above the common, God tells us to find Him in it. Immanence takes the place of transcendence. Variety replaces hegemony.

Though likening 9/11 to the Tower of Babel may sound offensive, that comparison can help us understand the deeper meaning of the tragedy. It's a fact that western society tends toward idealizing unity, often to unhealthy levels. James Hillman compares this point to the Tower of Babel story when he writes:

"If, as Genesis eleven says, unity leads to hubris, then we must be wary of all attempts at unification--unified field theory in physics, single explanations of evolution in biochemistry and biotechnology, one true religion and one way to practice it, one interpretation of Holy Texts, one global economic system, one astrophysical explanation of the origins of the cosmos, one definition of democracy or of justice, and above all, one system of measurement by means of numbers for assessing value....Each attempt at unity arises from ambition and results in inflation. The desire for unity expresses the latent hubris of rational anthropocentrism, attempting to conquer with the human mind the powers of the invisible world which the Bible calls 'Heaven.'"

America--with its Manifest Destiny and its "melting pot"--has been teetering on the ladder of literalized unity and transcendence for centuries. Without saying that God caused the crash Himself, let's say that God tried to bring the good out of this tragedy, as He always does: after 9/11 "those exemplars of the top, the big shots, celebrities, executives, professionals, [and] politicians" became less important; attention returned to the common. Focus turned away from our gaze on progress and ascension and turned toward the beauty and love of the everyday. Says Hillman, "the soul of the city emerged, the soul that inhabits the streets, the public servants, the common gritty language, the down-to-earth gravitas of Mayor Giuliani." With 9/11, at least for a while, we stopped climbing. We came together as a people--not through literalized ascension, but by our ties to each other as family, friends, and citizens.

There was fear, of course, and anger. But disorientation and a desire for retribution always follow a "fall." Take the famous "fall of Adam," for instance--when Adam ate the fruit, he blamed Eve, and Eve blamed the serpent. This passing of blame manifests our longing for some kind of explanation, an existential security that would prevent us from further falls. So no wonder the angst after 9/11 turned into vengeful xenophobia--the fall disoriented us, and we turned our confusion into spite for those who brought that angst upon us.

But there is a better way. Because it still lingers in our memory, let's commit to keep remembering 9/11. Let's see Ground Zero as a "wound" in our collective psyche, one that opens up new ways of being. 

Says Hillman,

"A wound is a break through the surface, below superficiality. It is an opening of heightened sensitivity, like an eye that looks and an ear that listens differently, less blithely, more acutely, and like a mouth that speaks the language of vulnerability. The wound at Ground Zero has opened into the depths below usual life."

9/11--though a tragedy--functions as a call to the common, a way by which the luster of everyday life can show through. Wounds check our inflated ambition; they remind us of our limitations and our humanity. So let's make sure the scar in New York never fully heals. While "Ground Zero" means the site of an explosive tragedy, another of its definitions is "the starting point or base for some activity." From that perspective, 9/11 is a purging of our over-ambitious ascensionism; it burns up our transcendent fantasies and gets us to start anew, close to the ground. For, says Hillman, "the devastated earth in the depths of 'lower' Manhattan is the zero Ground of Possibility..."

Keeping the Law of Chastity (Part 3): Practical Tips

For this third and final post in my chastity series, I want to give you all some practical tips. In contrast to the general principles from my alchemy post, these are all things you can do right now to make it easier for you to be chaste:

Cold showers

Cold showers might seem scary at first, but when you get used to them they'll become one of the best parts of your day. It's true that warm showers are comfortable in the same way that a blanket or a hot bath is comfortable, but that kind of comfort lends itself to unchastity. Cold showers do the opposite: at first they make you uncomfortable, but that discomfort becomes a visceral sense of embodiment and physicality. In other words, cold showers have made me feel more physically there, figuratively letting "sulfur" express itself.

After you finish your cold shower (and it doesn't need to be long), you'll feel refreshed, alert, and alive. There are some Redditors on r/NoFap who say that cold showers increase testosterone levels, which both mimics some parts of sexual release and leaves you feeling better and more confident. I'm not sure if that's scientifically true, but I've definitely noticed those effects.

Exercise

Exercise has pretty much the same role as cold showers in fighting the temptation to be unchaste: it physically embodies you and externalizes the "sulfur" that would otherwise get out through bad behaviors. As for the scientific question, I think it's pretty much a given that exercise causes good hormones to be released. So exercise is also one of the best things you can do to be chaste since it simulates the good parts of sexual release while leaving out the inappropriate parts.

When I exercise, I've felt more at peace (more "silvery,") since the sulfur bursting out within me had already "done its thing." I feel less anxiety and have fewer worries. Moreover, it lets me feel more energized, more awake, and more confident in myself.

Mindfulness meditation

I've been doing mindfulness meditation for about a year and a half now, and it can be a wonderful thing to experience. If you just sit and let your attention rest on your breathing, eventually you'll get to the point where any agitated thoughts and feelings calm down. You'll feel like everything is "permeable," as though "airy passages [were] built between all opposed things, light smooth streets [leading] from one pole to the other" (the quote is from Jung's Red Book). More simply, you'll feel at peace--both "brighter" and more calm.

As far as chastity goes, mindfulness meditation trains you so you can recognize impulses to unchastity a mile off. You "step back" enough from your feelings and thoughts to see them clearly, and you can say to an upcoming temptation "I see what you are, and I'm not falling for your tricks."

Kundalini Yoga

Kundalini Yoga is probably the most powerful tool on this list. If you picked a few meditations to do every day--like the Sat Kriya and the Addiction Meditation, for example--you could perhaps get entirely over a porn addiction in a matter of months or even weeks. Kundalini Yoga teacher Felice Austen, whose blog I link to in the sidebar to the right, has seen this happen.

For your benefit, here are some video instructions on helpful Kundalini meditations from her YouTube channel:

First, the Sat Kriya, which I personally find the most powerful (it's the one I alluded to in the first post in this series):

Second, the Arcline Meditation, which is designed to--among other things--reduce your susceptibility to anxiety and temptation:

And finally, the Addiction Meditation, which I'm told can work wonders:

Mind hacks

There are a few mental tricks or "mind hacks" you can do to overcome urges and resist the temptation to unchastity.

First, urinate. If you're at the end of your rope, urinating can cause a release that can simulate the experience of sexual release just enough to get you to "hang on." Second, simply imagine sexual release. Oftentimes simply an imagined orgasm can give you enough mental comfort to lessen the urge, or even get rid of it altogether.

Here are some other YouTube videos, this time from the channel "Sacred Sexuality Project," on this topic. Note that he can be a bit candid sometimes, but know that he's a really good guy:

Prayer

Prayer is a subtle but crucial tool in your arsenal against temptation. In the midst of being tempted toward unchastity, try praying to God to ask Him lessen your compulsive feelings. Or even better, try consecrating those feelings to Him, effectively saying "I give this energy to Thee to do with as Thou see fit."

The anonymously written medieval book The Cloud of Unknowing describes another way prayer can help someone who struggles with temptation:

"If it happens that particular sins which you have committed are always inserting themselves in your awareness between you and your God, or any new thought or impulse concerning any other sin is, you are bravely to step above it with a fervent impulse of love and tread it down under your feet. And try to cover them with a thick cloud of forgetting, as though they had never been committed by you or any other man. And if such thoughts often arise, put them down often; in short, as often as they arise, as often put them down."

This works for both new temptations and temptations to despair over past failures. And that brings up a crucial point: always try to fight against temptation as though you're doing it for the first time, "forgetting" any previous failures or triumphs. If you don't do this and instead act from those failures and successes, you'll just go onto a roller-coaster or see-saw between righteousness and sin. Act from God; don't try to reach God as though you were separate from Him.

Conclusion

Well, that's that for my chastity series. I hope I've been able to help people out there; I have an inkling that I have, since these posts in particular have gotten more views in a shorter time than most other posts. Just know that you are loved and that you are worthwhile, whatever your struggles and whatever your past. Sin and subsequent repentance are refining fires, and often you'll emerge better off than you were before the sin.

Thanks for reading!

Keeping the Law of Chastity (Part 2): An Alchemy of Desire

In this next post on chastity, I'm going to connect the experience of sexual feelings to something you might think is odd: alchemy. Alchemy was a medieval practice of manipulating various kinds of matter, one that ultimately morphed into chemistry. But before it was a science (or at least science as we know it today), alchemy was as spiritual and psychological art. The alchemists assumed that something called "the doctrine of correspondences" was true--the idea (which also appears in Swedenborg's writings) that spiritual realities "appeared" in physical things--and so they talked about things like silver, salt, or sulfur as though they were spiritual phenomena. So while the physical side of the alchemists' studies has been disproven, the spiritual or psychological side hasn't. This leaves the field open for any number of psychological interpretations of alchemical texts, which psychologists like Carl Jung and James Hillman have done quite a bit.

In this post, I'll mainly rely on interpretations in two books by Hillman, called Alchemical Psychology and The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, though I'll also borrow some insights from Renaissance thinker Jakob Boehme's Signature of All Things.

Fire and furnaces

What does lust feel like? Experience tells us that it's a kind of heat, or to put it better, a fire. And fire is just what the alchemists would have called that feeling. Fire is "an invisible heat," my inner sense of burning lust for life in all its forms. You can see that fire in any kind of desire: the fires of sexual passion, my compulsion to get some new possession, and even my love for God (a "burning in the bosom") are all ways that I experience that inner flame

But there is a danger with fire--it's easy to lose control of it. From an alchemical perspective, that's why the fire needs a furnace. Furnaces correspond to a system in place that keeps desire under control, that contains that fire and lets it flare up within limits. Says James Hillman, "rules are made to keep the fire in bounds." If you have trouble controlling your desire's fire, ask yourself: do I have a furnace that's designed well enough to keep that fire in check? This means discipline: perhaps following a rigid schedule; controlled ways of letting the fire flare up; or saying "no" to some activities that are too much of a "fire hazard."

But even if this is hard for you, know that one of fire's main alchemical purposes is transmutation. The intensity of desire we feel in this flame is what melts ossified, leaden moods and brings about psychological change. If you feel like you're suffocating in flame, know that that fire is a sure sign that the Opus, or the alchemical work to realize divinity in matter, is well underway.

Sulfur's extraversion

The flammable chemical called "sulfur" was very important to the alchemists, as it--with salt and mercury--made up the alchemical trinity of primary substances. They thought of sulfur as the life-principle of all things, what caused the fire of life to erupt in anything and everything. Jakob Boehme writes that "[Sulfur] is the [will to manifestation] of the Light, or the Liberty, which longs to Manifestation, and it cannot otherwise be effected but through Fire," implying that sulfur is the way the invisible "freedom" at the heart of Being becomes manifest, or the means by which the invisible becomes visible at all. Sulfur is what gives things "body;" it moves "outward" into the world so it can more fully manifest the spiritual in physical things.

So when you "burn with desire" for a person or a thing, the alchemists would say that the sulfur in you is drawing you outward to the world through that desire. As sulfur is flammable, it ignites desire's fire to get you to make the internal external, to "extravert" yourself. So another piece of advice the alchemists can give us is that--as sulfur has an innate extraversum or outward-turning--a way to stop that sulfur flaring up against my will is to let it flare up willingly, in a way that goes with my values. So, get out into the world! Exercise, socialize, take risks; by thus extraverting myself, I let the the sulfur of my innate tendency toward bodily manifestation "get out." As Hillman writes, "compulsion becomes will through courage."

Sulfur and silver

The alchemists thought of silver as the metal of Luna, the moon. As such, it had a traditionally feminine association: passivity, the internal, and self-repose are all its correspondences. Like mirrors made out of silver, silver also corresponds to reflection--it acts like a mirror removed enough from the physical world to reflect that world into itself, to internalize coarse, literal matter as it becomes subtle matter. If you read my post on Kundalini Yoga, you'll know what I mean when I say that silver corresponds to visuddha or the throat chakra--a state of being where everything physical is seen as spiritual, where all things get etherealized into image and word. As such, silver has an important role in the alchemical Opus, since the operation called the Albedo that "whitened" other things into silver purified them of coarse imperfections so as to become more of a subtle matter.

You'll recognize silver in self-content daydreams, in meditation's peace of mind, and in the still peace of mind that comes when reading poetry or literature. I myself am particularly prone to "silvered" moods. But as anyone who's tried to pick up a fried egg with a silver spoon knows, silver gets easily scorched by sulfur. In other words, those light, airy moments of peace and well-being have an innate tendency toward sulfuric passion in them, and if that dichotomy between heat and coolness is left alone, you'll enter a seesaw between the two. What do the alchemists suggest as a remedy? That silver and sulfur temper each other, to where silver becomes "hotter" and sulfur becomes more reflective. This means, first, seeing my desires (i.e. the fire from sulfur) as images and thus taking them not literally but imaginatively. Second, it means letting my airy reflection harbor passion and heat without getting out of hand. So don't be afraid of your fantasies, even if they are "racy." Take them as images, ways that sulfur can embody itself in silver's "white earth" and not in the coarse earth of literal matter.

Sulfur and salt

As any cook knows, salt brings out the flavor of whatever you sprinkle it on. Salt thus corresponds to the principle that reveals the specific, particular natures of things--showing us the nuances of ways in which things are different. Moreover, it gives things "fixity"--it makes things "sharper," more definite, more real. When we say that you should "take something with a grain of salt," we mean to use the salt of your common sense to discriminate the real nature of the thing. When we say that you're "worth your salt," we perhaps mean that you're living up to the essential nature that salt lets us see.

But salt, as the essence of experience, isn't experienced as pleasant. Like the principle of Necessity in my tabletop role playing post, salt shows us things "that are what they are," which comes as a stinging awareness of my world's and my life's necessary limitation. You taste salt when you see yourself in your true colors and no longer hidden behind pretensions, as you do when you say "oh gosh, I really was that stupid, wasn't I?"

But salt's stinging realization has a really positive purpose: it kills sulfur's fire. Just as salt can't catch fire, the bitter taste of regret and harsh reality is immune to desire's compulsion. So if you find yourself about to do something stupid (i.e. be unchaste), pull out some salt. Get an awareness of what it is you're really doing; remember the suffering you felt in similar past situations, and imagine how you'll feel when the unchastity is done. By adding salt to the situation in this way, you add salt to your own being. Thus, you yourself become more "essential," as you get more of a sense of "you-ness" of "how it feels to be you." Salt builds mental body.

Anyway, that's about it for this post. Check back soon for part 3!

Keeping the Law of Chastity (Part 1): Why be Chaste?

A few months ago I was called as an Elder's Quorum instructor in my singles ward. Because people have told me they like my lessons, I've decided to make at least one blog post here for each one, this month on the lesson "Keeping the Law of Chastity" in the Ezra Taft Benson manual. Honestly, there aren't many subjects I consider more important. Chastity is one of the most crucial yet least understood parts of the spiritual life, so I think it's my duty to give you all my perspective on the topic.

This post will be split into three parts. This first post, called "Why be Chaste?" goes into the reasons behind the law of chastity--both why we keep it and why we are tempted not to keep it. The second post will be called "An Alchemy of Desire," and it will use psychological writings on alchemy (a spiritual, pre-scientific ancestor of chemistry) to metaphorically describe sexual feelings and common problems that come up in that area. The third post will be titled "Practical Tips," and I'll use it to describe ways to cope with sexual feelings that I've discovered online, in books, and from personal experience.

Unchastity can only give transitory pleasure

The most obvious reason I can give for why we should be chaste is that unchastity's pleasure--whether it happens as masturbation, pornography use, or premarital sex--can only ever be short-lived. If I get on a porn website and leer at graphic videos, I'm definitely not concerned about how I'm going to feel when I'm done. If I were, I'd remember that porn is always a letdown--it seems to give ecstasy and intimacy but only offers its empty shell. Pornography and masturbation are frauds in that sense because they promise something they can't deliver.

That brings up a crucial point: in contrast to how most people think of it, pornography isn't appealing to its users because of its promise of physiological sexual release. Instead, it offers something almost religious in nature, though perverted beyond recognition--the light of meaning as it's made flesh in human bodies. What the addict looks for in porn isn't physical sexual release but an experience of divinity he can't find anywhere else. Pornography promises something that--at least on the surface--looks like a spiritual experience: physical things (in this case naked bodies) holding meaning that goes beyond their physicality, transcendent connection, and the experience of otherness. But porn is a fraud because that ecstasy only lasts for a few moments. The porn user is left afterward feeling empty, spent, and even more alone than he was before.

Masturbation without pornography is sinful for the same reason, although it is less of a sin than pornography use. For although it avoids objectifying literal people (which I'll get to later on), masturbation still involves sacrificing long-term well-being for short-term pleasure. There are a few reasons this is true: first, masturbation empties one of energy. Redditors on the subreddit r/nofap talk about this a great deal, often posting about how frequent masturbation saps them of confidence and willpower to do things. I'm not sure what "the science" is behind this, but most of the users there aren't religious and don't think it's a bad thing to have premarital sex, even though they frown on masturbation. A part of me thinks: why would they think that if it there wasn't some truth behind what they're saying? They would have no reason to do so, all other things being equal.

Moreover, kundalini yoga (which I wrote about in this post) also extensively deals with this principle. According to the ideas behind it, there is a symbolic serpent called Kundalini located at the base of the spine, one which represents the "energy" mentioned above. If you masturbate, the energy simply gets expelled out the genitals and you're left feeling empty. However, the exercises of kundalini yoga are designed to raise kundalini energy up the spine until it reaches the head, where the snake can finally "come out" in a way that leaves you still feeling "full." I've done kundalini yoga for a few months, and the times when I've experienced something like that were incredible. Waves of pleasurable warmth (similar to those of sexual release) flooded through my whole body (including my head, my back, and my arms) and didn't dissipate at all quickly. It was also comparable to what a "burning in the bosom" feels like, except, again, it wasn't just in the bosom.

So one reason "why you should be chaste" is that chastity is a long-term investment. It not only avoids the rollercoaster of lustful expectation and the disappointment that follows, but it preserves spiritual energy that is better used elsewhere. Psychologist Wilson Van Dusen probably puts it best when he says:

"One of the quickest and surest ways to awaken the inner life is to deny bodily pleasure. This is probably why visions are rare these days."

He wrote this in his book on Emanuel Swedenborg, who had problems with chastity for a lot of his early life. We know from his private journals that it was actually his meditative efforts to control his sexuality (in a similar way to kundalini yoga) that gave Swedenborg enough spiritual energy to experience his incredible visions of higher worlds. And this brings up another point, which I also alluded to in my essay on kundalini yoga: if you have a problem controlling your sexuality, don't think yourself cursed. Instead, consider whether the energy struggling to get out through masturbation or pornography might be so powerful that it will take you a while to figure out how to contain it. Psychologist James Hillman even reports that an early sign of a call to Shamanism among the Mohave Native Americans is childhood masturbation. So while I'll get to practical tips mainly in the last post, know that a tendency toward unchastity might actually be the sign of a greater calling.

Unchastity objectifies

When someone isn't chaste, it's always because he doesn't value the object of his pleasure as a person. Whether a fantasy in masturbation, a porn actress, or my partner in casual sex, he can only ever see that person as an object, a thing-like tool he's using to give himself pleasure. In contrast, loving marital partners have intercourse not to take but to give pleasure. Sex then becomes a manifestation of the highest and deepest eternal patterns, where both partners give and both partners receive--an image of losing myself so as to find myself. In masturbation and pornography, the focus can only ever be on taking. Even in casual sex, an image of someone "good in bed" evaporates when the intimacy you shared reveals itself as something transitory and ultimately finite; because there's no further commitment, it was nothing more than an exchange of economic interests--buying pleasure with pleasure.

To be chaste means to recognize the innate human worth of everyone, especially the person whom you decide and commit to be intimate with. It means seeing not only the titillating surfaces of human flesh but looking deeper into the soul and the divine light shining from within it. Chastity means respecting the other's divinity, to treat them as ends and not as means.

That's that for part one. Check back soon for part 2!

Everyday Phenomenology: Tabletop Role Playing

For the next post in my series on phenomenology, I want to analyze what it's like to play tabletop role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons.

For anybody who isn't familiar with games like "D&D," I'll explain what goes in a typical play session. A group of players sit around a table where each member of the group has a set of dice like the ones pictured above, and they all try to tell a story together using those dice. Someone called the GM or "Game Master" (DM or Dungeon Master in Dungeons and Dragons) helps the game work by coming up with a setting, a story, and characters. If you've heard of video games like The Elder Scrolls series--where a person "levels up" a character after getting experience points--know that the ideas behind that kind of gameplay came directly from D&D and other tabletop RPGs. All video game RPGs owe them a debt.

If you're interested in some of my role-playing exploits, in the sidebar to the right there's a link to one of my other blogs, where I try to record the RPG campaigns I've been a part of. In the most recent one, I'm the GM!

The dice as Necessity

I'll begin my analysis by pointing out that tabletop role playing is only fun because there are dice. Without the chance and risk of failure they give, things would fall apart in one of two ways: first, it could put pressure on the GM to decide who succeeds or fails, and second, it could make everything too safe and easy. In the first case, hostility could easily break out between the players and the GM because they think she's either playing favorites or being too cruel. In the second, the story is way too bland; my character succeeds at everything he does, leaving the players with something not much better than a half-rate improv game.

The dice avoid both these possible issues by bringing risk and honesty to the game. But I'd say that "risk" and "honesty" are actually two sides of the same coin (or die?) and suggest that they're both aspects of something I'll call "Necessity." The word "Necessity" comes from a combination of the Latin words "ne- " (as in "not") and "cedere," which means "to yield." Essentially, what is necessary doesn't yield to my whims or ambitions, because "it is what it is." The Greek word for Necessity is ananke, also the name for its personification as a goddess, and has a few other nuances of meaning. For instance, Plato writes in his Timaeus that Nous, a personification of reason or mind, co-created the universe with Ananke:

This ordered world is of mixed birth: it is the offspring of a union between Necessity [Ananke] and Intellect [Nous]. Intellect prevailed over Necessity by persuading it to direct most of the things that come to be toward what is best, and the result of this subjugation of Necessity to wise persuasion was the initial formation of the universe.

From this point of view, everything in the universe is a "mix" between Intellect, Necessity, and the many ways they appear in tandem: order and chaos, mind and matter, meaning and absurdity, etc. The first one is what's under our control, what we can influence by our thoughts and deliberate actions; the second one is what escapes our control, what happens despite our intentions and best-laid plans. What's interesting is that this dichotomy between Intellect and Necessity essentially reintroduces the close relationship between player and dice in RPGs. Like life's Necessity, the dice lend a lack of control to the game by giving obstacles and challenges the players didn't choose. And like Intellect (at least the way Plato thinks of it), my will as a player lets me decide what actions or skill rolls I want to try, even if Necessity's dice don't let me succeed at it.

There's a further parallel in Plato's famous "Myth of Er," a story about an ancient soldier's near-death experience. Near the end of the tale, he writes about Er's experience watching departed souls get to "pick" which life they would live next in their cycle of reincarnation. Each of these souls has a "lot" given to them by Necessity--one that somehow both determines and is determined by their character on earth--which gives them their choice of "lives" to pick from. When each soul had picked a single life to live for their next pass through the world, each of the Fates (Necessity's daughters) does her part to make its choice fixed and irreversible.

What amazes me here is the similarity this process has to the way I've made characters in tabletop RPGs: I go to the Game Master beforehand and use a few dice rolls to determine my character's "stats" (numbers representing things like Intelligence, Strength, and Charisma) much in the same way that a soul coming to the world gets to choose from its lot of lives. If I get seven numbers with seven rolls, I could assign any of those numbers to any "stat:" I could have an 18 in Intelligence and a 3 in Strength just as much as I could have a 3 in Intelligence and an 18 in Strength. But even when we've begun the game (by parallel, when the Fates have already made my choice "necessary" or permanent), many of my actions depend on those stats for a good chance of success. In other words, Necessity has a big role to play the whole way through. Because she determines my traits and whether I succeed or fail at any given action, you could say that Ananke is actually the patron goddess of the role-playing game.

The dice as my limitations

But apart from our mythical digression, what does this mean phenomenologically? I'd suggest that when we play tabletop RPGs, we're recreating essential features of human life as we experience it. What I called Necessity is the part of my life I don't choose--what Adam S. Miller identifies with grace and what Heidegger might have called "facticity": things like my race, sex, personality, or even things like my test scores, choice in partners, etc. The crucial role dice play in role-playing games like D&D shows the importance Necessity has in our lives. If I got to choose the outcome for every action I undertake, life would quickly become dull and lose its meaning. Even if I got to choose my "stats" at the beginning of life (without Necessity limiting my "lot," that is), a world full of Albert Einsteins and Michael Jordans would lose its appeal just as quickly as one without in-the-moment surprise. Tabletop RPGs remind us that the parts of life we didn't choose are as important--if not more so--than the parts we do; without Necessity's apparently meaningless restrictions, meaning itself wouldn't have the contrast it needs to appear.

For example, I implied in a recent post on my blog "Introspecting Autism" that I'm at least partially defined by my limitations as someone with high-functioning autism. If I didn't have the problems with social skills and connection it gave me, I couldn't have become the thinker I am today simply because I wouldn't have had any "food" to feed my intellectual imagination. To put it a different way, the weaknesses I had as a high-functioning autistic gave me something to "work with," and that "something" led me to places I wouldn't have gone if the "material" I worked on had been different. This material is my Necessity; it's what life gave to me from the very start, and though I can't get rid of that Necessity, the greatest parts of my life grow out of it. I guess you could say that my autism is like a "stat" I rolled before my life's RPG campaign started. Despite my handicap, my life's story wouldn't have the same without it.

The Game Master as an "opening"

But the players and the dice aren't the only two elements present in a game session--the GM or Game Master has just an important part to play. If I played an RPG by myself, I might have the dice to work against me as a foil, but it still wouldn't be interesting. The GM gives the RPG campaign a place for the dice and the players to meaningfully interact, since if she isn't present, there isn't any context for the risk of failure that the dice can give. Context is the key word here. Without a context, the players and the dice butt heads directly, and there isn't anything there to make it seem like there's something more there than just players and dice, to suspend their disbelief.

The GM brings about a "separation" between players and dice by making a fictional world that acts as a contextual backdrop for my skill rolls. While I'm still there on the table playing with dice, the GM makes it so I can pretend I'm somewhere else, that I'm, say, a gnome bard and that the dice are just the way the universe works. To put it visually, imagine that the dice and the player are naturally together at the table, but that the GM inserts the game world as a wide space or opening between the two. This lets me forget that I'm so-and-so person playing such-and-such game, at least in a sense. The GM, therefore, does magic, in a way: like Moses parting the Red Sea, she forces apart the dice and the player so that I can enjoy the world in the space he opened up.

But what is this "opening," really? It's what lets the player and the dice interact in a way that I can forget the player is a player and the dice are dice. It's what must exist in order for there to be an in-game world because without it I can't suspend my disbelief enough to forget the physical room I'm in. You could thus say that the in-game world springs into life between the player and the dice. Moreover, the in-game world can only come to life in that way if the GM facilitates it. The GM is the "opener;" she expands the gaming table into a whole world and makes me into a rogue "bibliomancer" or a fast-talking detective.

To put it in still another way, the GM puts a veil between the player and the dice. But this veil and the in-game world aren't different: the world is the veil. But isn't it weird that the image of a "veil" and an "opening" work just as well to describe the GM's role, even though one reveals and the other conceals? Actually, the GM reveals by concealing; by pointing my attention away from the physical game room, she points it to the in-game world.

This has a parallel in the philosopher Martin Heidegger's writings. Pointing out that the Greek word for truth aletheia really means "un-" ("a-") "-covering" ("-letheia"), he teaches that truth isn't just a correct idea of things as they are, but the revelation of Being. Truth takes what is there but still concealed and "shows" it, letting it reveal itself to itself. He also writes that the aletheia of truth rests upon the lethe of "concealment," meaning that truth as revelation relies on what is concealed as its "earth" or ground.

Rolling the dice as consulting NecessityIn gaming terms, aletheia is the GM's opening, because it reveals the game's world to the players who had the raw material to bring that world about. As that opening gives the context for the in-game world to appear, no one can know the physical world without truth or aletheia. And just as aletheia can't exist without the concealment of lethe, the game world can't exist without "normal" physical people and physical dice.

If the dice correspond to life's Necessity and the Game Master corresponds to the "opening" that lets life appear to me in the first place, what does roll the dice correspond to? From what I've said so far, it follows that it represents my conscious will "checking" with my Necessity to see if I can succeed at a given task. Let's say I try my best on a standardized test. Will I succeed at it? Using the RPG as a lens to "read" that situation, you could say that it depends on what Necessity--or the dice--have in mind. Though I have a "stat" that makes me good at tests, Necessity could give me a number that makes it so I fail. Or vice versa: even if I didn't study at all, I could get really lucky. In any scenario where something is up to "chance" (which is pretty much everything), you could say that my will (me as a player) is asking Necessity if I'll succeed (rolling the dice). And though it's really this interaction between Intellect and Necessity or Nous and Ananke going on, the world's opening (the GM) gives me enough context to see that supernatural meeting in terms of everyday life.

In a way I guess you could say that the dice give us the game's story. We go to the dice like diviners using the I Ching or consulting tea leaves, asking them what will happen. But instead of using them to figure out what will happen, we use the dice to make it happen. Perhaps this way of looking at the world is the true meaning behind the Greek philosopher Heraclitus's enigmatic saying:

"Time is a game played beautifully by children."

Anyway, that about wraps up what I have to say. Thanks for reading!