The Art of Being Alone (Pt 7): Spiritual Fantasies & Naughty Role Play
Spiritual Fantasies & Naughty Role Play:
If you are into meditation, religion, or breathe — you are living in a fantasy.
It’s ok, we all are. Like ways of looking, often we are blind to our fantasies. (These fantasies also come from Rob Burbea).
Now before you get defensive, these fantasies don’t mean you’re living a delusional lie, but like mother moon it’s influencing your world you experience and explore, your decisions and moments - all of your sacred spirituality.
They helped me see my own blind spots, I have lived and live in at least 3 fantasies below. What’s your fantasy?
Medical Fantasy:
In Buddhism, this is the classic Medical Fantasy. There is suffering (illness), follow the 4 noble truths (diagnosis and prescription), and you will be liberated (cured). Here we are curing an ailment of delusion (or neuroscience hallucination), thus a lot of purifying talk or overcoming our own animal nature/defilements. Modern secular mindfulness movements have a similar view — we are conquering monkey minds to be more in the present, free of dissatisfaction and stress. Puking your guts out on Ayahuasca? “Purifying” all your emotional trauma.
Religious Fantasy:
With this fantasy the truth is not here and now, but in the past. I am trying to replicate someone else's awakening such as Jesus or the Buddha. Or when you meet people obsessed with sutras or thousand year old holy books, they are looking for the truth in the past. The “truth”, which presumes there is only one, is thousands of years in the past and must be rediscovered Indiana Jones style. This explains the Buddhist infighting of the old school Theravada vs Tibbetan Buddhists. The first written Buddhist text, the Pali Canon, is “older and superior” to any of the alterations/improvements/innovations the Tibetan Buddhists (Mahayana + Vajrayana) made 1,000 years later. I don’t agree, and actually appreciate both, thus the grey sheep, but it helps one understand judgmental Buddhist cat fights.
Artistic Fantasy:
Here the truth is in the present. Unlike the religious fantasy, who is trying to replicate a Michelangelo, here the artist creates their own style like a Jackson Pollock. Absorbing styles and techniques they try to create a “new” or “current” truth that fits their needs (I am guilty as charged). Modern consciousness hackers using neurofeedback tech are playing here (coupled with a little of the next fantasy). I would also say Tibetans were artists rebelling and innovating against 1,000 year old uptight orthodoxy, yet ironically after 1,000 more years some look at them as religious fantasy of superior sacredness of the past).
Researcher Fantasy:
Here the truth (or more of it) is in the future. It’s not simply refuting the past, but like Einstein building on Newtonian physics. There are always new discoveries and more to learn. Like science, often it transcends and includes what came before. It's easy to see how this view and religious fantasies clash, for the latter by definition can not allow any innovation or updating. (also guilty as charged - e.g. hard problem of consciousness, therapeutic entheogens, dharma + psychological integration etc).
Love Fantasy:
Here the truth revolves around loving a who or what. Devotion and duty to something or someone. Bhakti (devotion) yoga, Gaia worldviews or Guru Yoga all snuggle here. This has obvious potential pitfalls of power, sex, and money coupled with psychological transference, projection and hierarchy.
Adventurer Fantasy:
This classic archetype is the wanderer or renunciate of the mainstream. If you want liberation, you must renounce the world and become a monk/nun, wander India, or live in caves Milarepa style. Or a water downed version like myself, a Dharma Nomad.
There are more but hopefully you get the point. The spiritual ground we walk on is filled with fantasy. Deciding not to walk is a fantasy. The fantasies shape the role you play and the steps you take.
Our Shamanic Periscopes shape not only our experience but the entire path of how we go about exploring it (mic drop by Rob Burbea)
THE GREAT LONELY DRIFT
So the spiritual path and all the Dharma Dating isn't just trying out teachers, techniques, and sanghas. It’s not just nit picking because they cool but eat their peas one at a time. Rather, it’s about trying out Shamanic Periscopes — about the world they create.
Offering varying ways of seeing truth and deeper meaning, pulling on fantasies and role play in the spiritual bedroom.
Like dating, there is a way I look at her. A way she looks at me. But also a way WE look out at the world. It’s not just shared values, it’s the world we perceive. The world we create and inhabit together. It’s about ecology and psychology. complexity science and complexities of heart and mind.
And so Eros and I glide along on the bow. Exploring new periscopes and new worlds. Hunting treasure chests of consciousness coins that I can spend not in caves of solitude, but in the marketplace.
Where it goes I don’t know, just knowing knowing we flow. Surfing uncertainty, I am not lost at sea, but I am lost in a metamodern fantasy. Drifting and drifting in nebulous fog— a metamodern current putters along dreaming of Batlantis. My feet are sore (foot rub Eros?) and the journey has been long — and if you came this far — probably a good spanking is called for.
And if I’m lucky, maybe even a naughty threesome between Logos and Eros with the meaning mermaids watching. Ohh Let’s me have it Eros!
Coming Soon: TABA Pt 8 /Conclusion - Metamodern Man’s Search for Reason and Meaning
Let me know what you liked and — and share along if you think someone may enjoy a geek out