Stuart Davis

Spoken in English. Their words, as they said them.

Falling snow on the back of a gliding crow.

Of a crow of a crow of a crow More like bread.

As per the normal course of my daily practice, it's just simple intention toward the liberation and freedom and well-being of all sentient beings. And then into the meditation, the invitation and arrival of my ancestors and guides and allies in yours, invited as well in whatever forms and expressions they present for you. And then spending a period of time with those ancestors, guides and allies just placing each being in the center of the circle and surrounding them with an impenetrable sphere of love and protection and then putting them in the circle and bringing someone else in. So that goes on. There's some variation day to day, but there's also a stable of a couple dozen or more. And then the culmination or last phase is going to the temple of Psyche where the goddess Psyche is housed or an inhabitant or prefers to, let's just call it the locus of her work and being. And then going through the recitations and practices with her, today there was two. So typically then it's she and I and her officiant who doesn't often participate but is always there and then she guides me through a series of recitations that she's taught and those are kind of Delphic book of the dead with some tantric elements to them. They involve breathing and energy movements, but also there's actual recitations. It's funny, it's a Delphic temple in a classic sense, but also it's it's located in the subtle realm, basically. And that was repeated multiple times, and then at the end of that, just offering thanks and gratitude and, you know, my expressing to the ancestors, guides and allies and to Psyche and to, to all of them my intention and offering of my life. And then the conclusion of the first portion, which I should have mentioned, is also there's a banishment piece, which is just a simple kind of house cleaning in which the aggregate lineage holders clean the temple of everyone present. That's what those spheres are, and they just sweep, basically. If there is anything to sweep, sometimes there's not. And then they seal them back up and keep a vigil over them. So to a degree, a, you've vetted everyone involved. So this is not like throwing the doors of your house up into whatever strangers walk by. These are the vetted and proven long term relationships in the practice. But inside of the practice, things become more diaphanous and permeable so that they can get in and do what they need to do and pull out whatever needs to be pulled out. And so that, you know, whether it's with the Vanishing or when I'm working with Psyche, so that she can adjust the systems and energies internally to me and create the optimum resonances like a tuning fork, very much like a resonance like a tuning fork, which is also the benefit of it being daily or mostly daily is that just in that way that when you hold a a ringing tuning fork next to a still tuning fork, the still tuning fork begins to resonate in sympathy. And there is a quality of that when I go to be with her each day with, you know, I try to be still and she comes in ringing and then she gets me to ring at the right pitch. And then that reverberates for, through the day and the night until the next sit. But there's also, as long as it's bringing, there's a quality of a continued, continual presence as well.

That that was the content or experience, let's say, the dynamic substance for me. Me. Which gets permeable and much more a vaporous, really, during those sits. It's it's sometimes funny to default to the pronouns and grammar and perspective that we inherit in any language, but in particular in English. So when I say that's that's what it was like for me, outside of those sessions, it's it's more permeable than that. You know, there's the membranes soften and there's more of a diaphanous boundary which allows for the facilitation and conducting of what I had related. The self is this fluxing, ever emergent dynamism that's chief characteristic is perhaps its shifting, unpredictable unfolding. To say what a self is is really a matter of where we decide to drop the bookends of time. The beginning is myself even the same at the end of the day as it was in the beginning.

To the point of this practice for about twenty five years or more, my practice was Zen Buddhism. I did a lot of I called myself spiritually promiscuous though because I was always interested in every mystical and spiritual esoteric path. So contemplative Christianity, kashmir shavism, Sufism, whatever, I was always down to flirt. So but a few years ago, yeah, the goddess Psyche showed up in my practice and said, you should you can work with me if you want, and you should. And I said, why? And then she had her reasons, which a lot of a lot of that had to do with me having interactions with nonhuman entities. And in a nutshell, her saying, if you're gonna do that, you really need to lock down the fort and know what you're up to and have and have a have a dimensional deeper register advocate who understands the human condition and the human apparatus and protect and enjoying that with the right team before you go out exploring the ocean or wandering in the forest of the, dimensional populations that are non human. Well, there's a strong book of the dead quality, as I mentioned, which is, you know, her practices also, fall somewhat in line with that Coptic book of the dead, Egyptian book of the dead, Tibetan book of the dead, American book of the dead. There's some of that in there as well. So yeah. She showed up a few years ago. I mean, no one had less interest in the the pantheon. Me, honestly, that was the only thing that I had never demonstrated interest in. So there's a bit of a comedic element in her being the one that I ended up working with, you know, on a daily interval. I loved alchemy, esoterica, the occult, any interior mystical path from the West or the East, I was always interested. And the Greek pantheon really was the one thing that didn't interest me, that I never looked into. I just had no I felt no magnetism there. And to some degree, I still don't. You know, it's really about it's her in particular. She doesn't also seem to care whether I ever familiarize myself with the Greek pantheon.

She simply and she also doesn't wanna be worshipped. It's not like a cult of psyche that she's attempting to construct. It's really pragmatic. Life is an ocean. We fall in. When you hold me, I can swim.

Some of it definitely pertains to, though, the atrophy and diminishment of the goddess and the great imbalance that has been obtained by our utterly bizarre, pathological, fetishist obsession with everything from externalization to objectification to materialism to the flat collapse of things, to artifice, and, you know, there's a whole menu and constellation of how those sicknesses express. But I am convinced that if the goddess or the divine feminine doesn't return to its natural place in the order of what a human being is, we're just profoundly deeply existentially fucked. That is this is not sustainable or workable. So a huge part of her objective as well is to truly come in and restore that balance in an individual or whomever has that interest. She's available to that. And so that's a big part of the practice as well with her.

The very first time I ever practiced with her, which wasn't really even a practice, it was more of an encounter. I found myself in a temple, and I had this interaction with her. And one of my first questions was, what is this? Where am I? Who are you? And, you know, am I making this this whole thing, I'm just making this up. Right? Like at some point I asked you, are you even real? And she she said, that's the only thing you're not allowed to ask me. Which leaving that day, I I wouldn't even say that I thought about that. I felt about that. I felt that ringing in my being, and I what I felt about it was, Wow. What are the implications of you know, language is such a shitty medium for this, but nonetheless, having an exchange about it necessitates it. So I also want to say a little bit of a qualification is that the way that this actually looks and felt for me was more about spending a lot of time in silence physically, somatically, emotionally, subtly ruminating on her saying that's the only question you're not allowed to ask me. And for me, very often language comes last. Just in the in the same sense that the personality is the last to know. Language is like by the time language shows up in my head, like, the thing's done. That's it's cooked. You're taking it out of the oven by the time there's words. And so but suffice to say that that's the only question you're not allowed to ask me. It just really smacked me in a good way, slapped me, and that made me want to come back the next day. So fast forward a year. I I don't ask for that question again. Go on to ask other things and I'm taught other things. I practiced with her for a year. And at the end of that year, I asked one day, am I an adept now? You know, because I had learned this recitation and done, been really faithful and devoted daily practice. And so I said, Am I an ADEPT now? Am I a student? She said, Oh no, did you, you have, we haven't even started. Like we don't there is no real practice. We don't begin until you can reliably show up in a lucid dreaming state. This practice lives in the lucid subtle realms, and you need to have reliable access to that with me. That's where this begins. And I'm the worst lucid dreamer ever. I have lucid dreams where I'm lucid dreaming and I still can't control my lucid dream. I still like, I'll say, I wanna fly, and I can't fly. And I'm like, it's my lucid dream. I wanna fly. Okay. You know, that happens to me over and over. So I wilted, felt crest falling. That was such bad news. I thought, oh my god. And then she was like, and I've only taught you one recitation. There's there's many recitations. You're you're not even ready for the second recitation.

Constant ontological status checking with the objective reality of our native environments and the animating presences with which we share this planet and these realms, our constant habitual reflexive checking of that ontological status is fucking killing us. It's exsanguinating our reality to get back to the fact that we live in an enchanted, animated, fully presenced world, which has no deficiencies and does not need us to continually draw these compartmentalized separations of this is real because it's material and I can throw a rock at it, and this is not because it emerged from the imaginal. That is a sickness. And so my you know, even after twenty five years of meditation, the fact that I even asked her that question is pretty grotesque. It indicates and underlines how embroiled I remain with that habituated set of illnesses, which are really bringing us to our knees.

That doesn't necessarily mean ushering in a millennia of matriarchy in a literalist fashion, although maybe that is something that happens. I don't know. I don't really have a horse in that race, so to speak. But the work that she's doing is to return that balance internally to each individual so that our native endowment as expressions and manifestations of the divine feminine are equally healthy and restored as our our masculine endowments as children of the origin and source. We need both to be healthy and both to be in concert. A funny component of that balancing is that Zen and some of those practices that I were was anchored in for those twenty five years in the beginning are so much about emptiness and so much when I say emptiness, I mean the void from which all manifestation emerges moment to moment spontaneously really has a lot to do with that something from nothing and the mysterious fashion in which creativity, effulgence, and the numinous surprise just emerges moment to moment, planetarily, individually, cosmically. So emptiness is a bit of a misnomer from an English modern perspective. It's more of that pregnant, ever gestating void, which is limitlessly creative. However, that emptiness, that void is in great contrast to the fullness and incarnated embodied presence that happens in the psyche practice. And I don't really feel, you know, one threshold or demarcation, let's say, for me in the practice and then coming into daily practice with psyche was this personal recognition, like, I don't need any more emptiness. That's always already there. That's for free. I don't have to cultivate that anymore. It's always been easy to get there. The hard part for me has always been the incarnation. It's always been the blood and the guts and the shit and the noise and the material and the manifest and making my way through the corporeal labyrinth of life as a citizen, a father, a husband, a son, and the realities of being the mediating point between, yes, the divine, but also we're really in the muck here in Samsara. Earth is such a seriously dense incarnational locus of experience and that, again, to return to her, that's a lot of her point. How to equip human beings to really become the balanced, officiant, and acolytes in a sense of both the nadir of as muddy and shitty as it gets and exalted and divine and numinous as it gets because both of those are perfectly complementarities in our very own nature. But the emphasis just radically shifted to no, you actually need to you don't need any more void. You need the fullness, and you need to support and manage your own circulatory system, be it blood, be it energy, magnetism, the soul, the breath as the great you know, of course, psyche is the goddess of the breath, and respiration goes all the way from our inhalations and exhalations within the human body to the inhalations and exhalations of a universe, the big bang as an exhalation, a great collapse as an inhalation over unimaginable trans temporal cycles beyond and even outside of time. So there's that there's that complementarity in the correspondence between the way that humans breathe, inhale and exhale, in which that is part of the permeability with our entire environment. We literally are in constant fusion. It's impossible to not be one with your environment actually physically as a human being. We breathe in all the atoms around us all the time. We're like, we're there's trillions of living entities inside us. I mean, we're constituted of living beings and permeable relationship to everything just like the cosmos, just like the universe. So Psyche is the goddess of respiration, in my view and experience, ends up being a perfect facilitator of exactly that practice because she is the goddess of respiration. Breath is her medium. It is her native domain and realm of command, let's say. And that's why that's useful in a nutshell, to me at least.

Yeah. Part of what my journey has been, which is not unique at all. I've seen and felt this among many in our integral community and just the broader spiritual inner path. Some of it being really perennial and age old. Some of it being quite crackly and new and kinetic and part of the this generation of integral. So there's a both and there. And one of the things that I think is going on that's interesting is, for me, the way that I would frame is frame it up is that initially when a lot of us get into integral, and I definitely was guilty of this, as we obtain a felt sense of the vertical dimension of our human unfolding, and we can feel through let's use the spectrum as an example and just say we can feel our way through the altitudinal spectral unfolding of our being through red, purple, amber, green, however you wanna characterize all of that. One of the things that happened is that there was kind of a justified but partial pejorative framing of purple or magic, the magic band of our human heritage. And one of the things that I've been noticing occurring is that as we stretch our tendrils into turquoise, I can sense recapturing and a reintegration and a new expression from a much more full vertical, horizontal, multi dimensional fashion. The reintegration of that purple into this new turquoise. And that to me has been very beautiful and wonderful and includes to a great degree animism, the recognition that there are no interiors, excuse me, there are no exteriors without interiors, that truly the cosmos is animated in a very holarchical, nesstical but nonetheless mysterious and enigmatic fashion that we really do not even have a hint of apprehending in its fullness.

But that is such a crucial critical piece, the re enchantment of the cosmos, which is happening through this purple reentering through the turquoise into our new expressions and to some degree, perhaps nascent maturities in in a new fashion, which are also immaturities to other emergence. But that re enchantment I feel is really important. And the universe is magical and that altitude had a lot right. And we went through a period of amnesia that again I feel like if we don't have an amnesia to counter and reintegrate that we're going to be fucked because we actually do live in an enchanted cosmos. There is an interior to all exteriors and when we can re when we can reconnect with that and interact with the personhood of that which our environment is, The personhood of a forest, the personhood of a river, the personhood of my dog, the personhood of our mutuality. An entirely new set of possibilities arises and Psyche has dealt with that a lot as well. She knows and has roots in that original strata and is helping and working with me at least now to re enchant my experience of reality in that fashion.

Everyone's carrying everyone. You know, the ancestors, guides, and allies, they're carrying each other. Psyche carries me. Sometimes I carry them in this realm. It's important to not also merely project our higher selves onto these entities. That also is a fatal short sighted move. We have a Higher Self. It also is not deficient. There is a relational quality. Psyche wants a relationship with me. My ancestors, guides, and allies want a relationship with me.

There are beautiful miracles about being an incarnated bipedal hominid on this corporeal realm which causes angelic entities to be envious. That's a fact. There are things about human beings that are profoundly valuable and miraculous and they beguile and confound nonhuman entities. So there's a big confusion also that needs to be teased out which is just because some non human entity shows up and presents itself to you and is possessed of exotic capacities does not necessarily make that being a higher being. We don't necessarily have to drop in meek deference to everything that comes through the door. I really also believe in long term relationships, just like human relationships, that are vetted, confirmed, and deepened over time through just as my daughters know me because they've been with me day to day for fourteen to seventeen years and you know my wife for twenty and they know my flaws, shortcomings and my gifts and it's the same way with any relationship. So I think it's a ill advised to merely pause in the presence of non human entities, which is easy to do because they're quite exotic. They they come with all kinds of, perks and perquisites that we don't have. But the inverse is true as well. Like, look, they want relationships with humans for a reason. So I do think that it is it does need to be a relationship, not just us down here and them up there, if that makes sense as well.

But, yeah, in general, I'm just like, hey, if it's Christian contemplative practice for you, wonderful. If it's Kashmir Shaivism, wonderful. If it's some agnostic spontaneous practice that arises for you. Wonderful if I just think the beauty is the flexibility. Human beings are flexible, creative, spontaneous. We inherit the sum total of the cosmos in a pretty real sense. And so I always just try to listen. I think also each human being natively comes possessed of the solutions to their own knots and puzzles. And its main thing is just listening.

John, let's also make sure we throw out, mad props and recognition to JF Martell and Phil Ford as well. I feel like, certainly for me, they've been so important. Not only weird studies, which has become such an anchor in my life and in the lives of so many artists and spiritual practitioners, I feel like they've become a cultural force that's critical. Janoff's book, Reclaiming Art is pivotal work within our lifetimes and I recommend it to everyone that I know. And yeah, they've just been so central and such an axle in the mix of all of that and really grateful for them. I've been wondering two things, with Weird Studies, which is when are they gonna cover Reclaiming Art? And then second, which I have prodded them on many times is when the fuck are you guys doing Finnegan's Wake? Come on. You gotta do Finnegan's Wake.