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.11 responses to “Organizing Enlightenment”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
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)?
Great observation Rich. I’m glad you asked this. It’s making me think critically about that belief. What influenced that thought, I believe, was the sheer time Adler spent on Analytical reading in comparison to the other stages of reading. This seems to be a conversation with the author, understanding their terminology, the problems they are attempting to solve, how they solve them, and if so, what of it? He talks about breaking out dictionaries and using context to wrestle with the meaning of words and sentences. Finding the lines that truly hold the meat of what the author is saying. And all of this of course carried over into the syntopical reading. Dallas Willard and C.S. Lewis have also planted this thought in me in reference to rereading literature and reading meditativley.
All that to say, I’m thinking that my initial comment may not completely convey what I believe. As I am going back now and digging into the Adler text, the breadth is as important for different reasons. Mainly, to understand what I want to convey. So the depth vs breadth comment is probably a bit superficial referring a popular opinion to reading for understanding vs reading a bunch of books to share with your audience in December.
Thanks for making me work with this.
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!
Darren, the thing I agree with most here is a system not connecting to who we are. I believe rules and systems are meant to serve purpose not the other way around. (Kind of a reach toward Sabbath made for man kind of thing.)
I’m not sure if there is a universal system for thought organization, but I do belief this Zettelkasten is fluid enough for many different types of personalities to use it fruitfully.
Christian, as a fellow Army veteran, I want to understand how you met your internal “seeker” demands while deployed? I am an old(er) era warfighter who didn’t have access to many materials while in combat theater in Saudi Arabia/Iraq or along the Demilitarized Zone in Korea. My “extras” fit into a 30mm ammo can, including works by Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck. These works often took me away from the immediate and looming concerns and, paired with my faith, gave me hope.
Michael, I have werestled with how to respond to this question about internal seeker demands. I don’t think I understand what you mean here. The way I interpret the question is “How did you have time to engage in spiritual seeking while deployed?” If this is not what you meant please correct me.
If this is close enough, my response would be that my unit only did night-time missions and had a significant amount of space during the day for physical, mental, and spiritual activity. Many guys spent time in the gym, others playing video games, some reading, and very few that I am aware of, seeking enlightenment.
Christian, you are correct. I see you exhibiting a ton of energy and willingness to learn, but I also understand that those environments are limited for activities or diversions. The seeker (in you) would be looking for those moments of rest, prayer, reading, community, etc. Between running missions, I worked out and read the Bible and classical literature. We had no computers, laptops, cell phones, or landlines. Every week, I had a single call for 10 minutes. If we connected, it was great, but it was a 10 minute window in total.
Ha! Christian I resinate with so much you wrote. Reading these books, that I would never have read if it were not assigned to me, I resisted trying to let them tell me anything. I actually enjoy things to be in my head and am content to dwell among my own thoughts. The readings did, though I hate to admit, make me recognize that if I what to actually do something with all the stuff in my brain that I need to learn to synthesize it, form structures, organize and somehow get it to something outside of me. Something that adds to knowledge and community.
I also have high hopes for Obsidian to be a structure that works for me. I have always found it difficult to get things down on paper/computer and any organized way.
Jess, I just feel like you get me. The wording you have here “I need to learn to synthesize it, form structures, organize and somehow get it to something outside of me. Something that adds to knowledge and community.” just feels true. I love that you are always pushing toward communal knowledge. And of course your right. What to do with all this absorption and comprehension. How to mold it into something restorative. I love it. Thanks for the resonnance.
Christian, Great post! My mind has been reeling these past few weeks as I read the first and second week’s assigned books. My favorite of all of them was How to Read a Book. Adler and Van Doren and you, quite frankly, have really hit on something. I think what I have missed in life is the conversational nature of book reading, as pointed out by Adler.
I think it is going to take a while before I get used to the “slip box” system (better translated from the German Zettelkasten as the “notebox” system, but I am willing to give it a try.
I think part of the problem is that I am a verbal thinker. If I can express it verbally, I can easily remember it. As I read your post, my mind was quickened by the ways that I have gotten sloppy over the years. As I am getting older, these kinds of memory and processing devices are of increasing importance. The same scaffolding that allowed me to remember and process is, in some ways, not as sharp as it once was. Learning these tools earlier in life would give you a great advantage later on.
Verbal thinkers unite! I wonder if the mind has way more filters when the thoughts try to go from head to paper than processing out loud. I feel much more comfortable just “talking it out” as a means of my own learning. Otherwise, I try to “talk it out” in my head. And David, it is a mess in there. I thank you for your wisdom and advice to hold onto these structures and frameworks early on. You are the type of elder many wish we had.