Organizing Enlightenment
It’s pretty tough to experience astral projection with one eye open.
Just for clarity, astral projection is “a practice in which an individual aims to consciously separate their ‘astral body’ or spirit from their physical body, often to explore non-physical dimensions or realms.”
Afghanistan
It may not surprise you as much as it did me, that my ‘astral’ didn’t make it too far out of the chair I was sitting in. I was seeking enlightenment in a mail room on an Army base in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Maybe it was because I was half-watching for someone to come in looking for their mail, or it could be that I was too self-conscious about being “caught”, (though it seems odd to fear being caught sitting in a chair doing nothing), or perhaps it was just because I am, for this lifetime, fully and unequivocally bound to my body, limited to incarnation, and there’s just nowhere to go.
That attempt at infinity was well over a decade ago. And though I have settled more into the beauty of mystery, I’ve never stopped being a “seeker”. Something in me knows there is more to what I see and experience, and my soul longs to understand and articulate the fullness of it. Whatever “it” is. Ontological, epistemological, philosophical, theological, spiritual – life, reality, truth, purpose, spirit, origin, process, function, quantum, relation, infinity, eternity, blah, blah, blah. Like the universe, my thought life seems to be expanding in every direction, faster than the speed of light. What is propelling it? Where is it going? What do I do with all of this?
Now you may be thinking, “It’s God, that’s what you’re looking for”, and you would be right. But that explanation isn’t sufficient, not for me. In my more contemplative moments, I do drop down into being held in the mystery of divine love and find contentment there. And while that response is my goal, it is certainly not the way I am naturally wired by the Creator. My love for God and humanity and creation is caught up in the pursuit of it all.
Systems and Such..
This week I was stunned to come across a system for harnessing thoughts – capturing, cross-referencing, returning to, and fully developing ideas. It’s called the Zettelkasten (slip-box) system. It was developed in the 1960’s by Niklas Luhmann, a German Sociologist and has now been digitized into popular note-taking apps such as Obsidian. I immediately felt excitement seeing this. A system offering to augment my mind and give it back to me when I’m ready for it. For someone who has tried (and failed at) many systems over the years, I find myself optimistically cautious at the promise of control over my thoughts. I found a strange quote reading about it – “only if you really know that everything will be taken care of, will your brain let go and let you focus on the task at hand”. That sounds a lot like what we promise in spiritual formation. If you can become aware of the presence of God, and allow yourself to be taken care of, you will be freed up to be present to life around you.
There’s another system in a book called ‘How to Read a Book’. Now, full disclosure, had it not been assigned for a doctoral reading list, I doubt the title alone would have enticed me. I mean come on, I know how to read books. I read books. Loads of books. For years. I was a bit nervous that I might find I had been doing the one thing I feel adequate at in life wrong, all this time. Plus it was written in 1940 so surely the material was outdated. It was not. It’s a gold mine.
The bounding mind I described above has an insatiable appetite for information and consumes it voraciously. That doesn’t mean much in the information economy we live in these days. We’ve long traded wisdom for knowledge and now knowledge for information. I’ve consumed loads of disparate, esoteric, scientific, and fringe information for decades with no real which ways about it. The author lays out a systematic process for taking in all the information we are inundated by.
The Reading Life..
How many books are on your want-to-read list? How many sit with introductions read on your side table, idly waiting for lamp-light to grace their pages? How much insight is left on the bookshelf from those abandoned Amazon impulses? What if I told you there is a way to read a book in an hour and know more about the book than if you would have read it from cover to cover? The purist in you is cringing and cynical by this point. I’m here, as a newly enlightened reading evangelist to tell you that there is another way to live your reading life. It doesn’t have to be this way. Inspectional reading, allows you to understand how the book is constructed giving you a much better framework for dealing with its content. But wait, there’s more – Syntopical reading allows you to jettison the author’s desires and concerns and read their work along with many other similar works on your own terms, developing thoughts and concepts independently of how the author intended them. On top of it all you can go deep, and honestly, depth is better than breadth (I’m pretending to believe that). All this to say, if you are settling into a good historical fiction piece as a millennial rebellion against a Netflix binge, this may not be for you. This is not for entertainment, unless of course, your entertainment comes from copious amounts of synthesized knowledge about knowledge. For this goal, “This is the way”.
Make Sure You’re Zoom is Muted
This all sounds unbelievably fruitful. But I am not sure that I’ve solved the bit that I started with about human finitude. These systems will hopefully allow me to gain greater control over my thinking, my reading, and my writing. I need that. I am in higher education for that. But when it comes to humility, dignity, and love, nothing is as powerful as the actual stuff of life – Like today when I was on a Zoom call with a doctoral cohort, picking my nose and yelling at my dog because I thought the video and audio were muted.
About the Author
Christian Swails
Christian is the founder of CoCreation - a Startup Hub for social entrepreneurs in Savannah, Ga. He serves as the Spiritual Director for Wesley Gardens Retreat Center and Wesley Monumental United Methodist Church.2 responses to “Organizing Enlightenment”
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What a gripping opening line. To quote Rene Zellweger, “You had me at hello.” You later drop your own quote from a group of highly disciplined Mandalorians. Reading actively and critically is definitely a discipline.
Can you expand a bit on your assertion that depth is better than breadth (and the accompanying parenthetical statement of disbelief)?
Christian – I, too, am interested in the systems described that may provide “control over thoughts.” Part of me wonders if the failed systems that we experienced in the past were because they did not connect to who we are, lack of discipline, or something else. The thought of a universally effective system seems to make sense when dealing with thoughts and information, yet it seems so elusive. I’m not sure why, but I look forward to exploring it with you!