The Digestion of the Unpleasant
A concordance between 3 different traditions
Being a perennialist is so damn cool. A perennialist is one who believes that every religion or spiritual tradition has the same truth at its core, and as a perennialist myself, I try to learn from multiple different traditions. I sure have spotted concordances, such as the fact that Jesus' moral teaching was non-duality applied to ethics,1 but the freakiest thing is when you start experiencing things in your life that were mentioned by several different traditions.
For example, recently, I’ve been noticing that I basically can’t spend a night alone in my apartment: if I do that, I am filled with some combination of restless energy and a deep emotional angst, or even pain. It’s rather confusing, and I never experienced anything like that, as I am quite the introvert and have historically found it very easy to spend lots of time alone. Then I realized a Sufi allegorical story I had read talked precisely about this, which also unlocked the realization that I had read about this phenomenon in other traditions too.
The Magic Horse
The Sufi allegorical story is called the Magic Horse. I’m gonna give a summary here, and only up to the relevant part. Idries Shah introduces it thus:
This tale is of great importance because it belongs to an instructional corpus of mystical materials with inner content but – beyond entertainment value – without immediate external significance.
So right away, you’re put on notice that this is an important story. The story starts with a competition between a woodworker and an ironsmith to produce the most amazing artifact in the kingdom. The ironsmith produced:
an immense metallic fish which could, he said, swim in and under the water. It could carry large quantities of freight over the land. It could burrow into the earth; and it could even fly slowly through the air.
The woodworker produced a magic horse. The woodworker said:
It does not look impressive, but it has, as it were, its own inner senses. Unlike the fish, which has to be directed, this horse can interpret the desires of the rider, and carry him wherever he needs to go.
The king had two sons, one who was obsessed with technology, Hoshyar, and another who was a dreamer, Tambal, uninterested in pragmatic things. Accordingly, the first son took to the techno-fishes, while the dreamer took the horse. He discovered the horse could take him to wherever he thought. One day, he had an encounter with his brother:
Hoshyar: ‘Carrying a wooden horse is a fit occupation for such as you. As for me, I am working for the good of all, towards my heart’s desire!’
Tambal thought: ‘I wish I knew what was the good of all. And I wish I could know what my heart’s desire is.’
He wished for the horse to take him to his heart’s desire. The horse took him to a distant kingdom ruled by a magician king. There he met the king’s daughter, a beautiful princess called Precious Pearl and they fell in love. She was imprisoned by her father, and betrothed to a prince in another kingdom for the sake of an advantageous alliance. They could never marry. The prince used the magic horse to enter the magician-king’s palace, hoping to reason with the king. That didn’t work out: not only did he not talk to the king, he lost the horse in the process. He set out alone, on foot, to his kingdom:
His quest for his heart’s desire now seemed almost hopeless. ‘If it takes me the rest of my life,’ he said to himself, ‘I shall come back here, bringing troops to take this kingdom by force. I can only do that by convincing my father that I must have his help to attain my heart’s desire.’
It truly was a hopeless journey. Alone, with no provisions, in an unknown desert. After traveling for what seemed like an eternity, he ran into something that seemed like a mirage, a garden, full of delicious looking fruits. He tasted them and they were indeed delicious. They took away his fear, and his hunger, and his thirst. Sated, he slept under the shade of a huge tree. When he woke up, he felt something was wrong. He went to a pool to look at his reflection. He had become a monster!
‘Whether I live or die,’ he thought, ‘these accursed fruits have finally ruined me. Even with the greatest army of all time, conquest will not help me. Nobody would marry me now, much less the Princess Precious Pearl. And I cannot imagine the beast who would not be terrified at the sight of me – let alone my heart’s desire!’ And he lost consciousness.
When he woke up again, it was dark, but there was a light approaching. The light turned out to be from a lamp being carried by a bearded man. The man was not frightened by his monstrous form. He said he could help him.
‘Help me, father,’ [the prince] said to the sage.
‘If you really want your heart’s desire,’ said the other man, ‘you have only to fix this desire firmly in your mind, not thinking of the fruit. You then have to take up some of the dried fruits, not the fresh, delicious ones, lying at the foot of all these trees, and eat them. Then follow your destiny.’
Under the moonlight, Tambal could see that lying under the trees were piles of dried fruits. He gathered some and quickly ate them. He became a human again.
And this is not the end of the story, but this is were we leave it, because it was at this point that I realized I had encountered this concept before.
Non-dual Shaiva Tantra!
I heard of a pretty interesting guy once. Supposedly, his presence was so intense you could feel it filling the whole room. Like ‘psychic air conditioning’, I believe was the phrase used. It turned out he had written books.
And I read that book. I remember being very impressed at the time. Felt like it was rocket fuel2, and it even made a lot of sense of my awakening experience:
He tells us that this longing [for union with God] grows due to the lasting influence of śaktipāta, a term that denotes the initial awakening to the spiritual path (an awakening that the tradition would soon come to identify with the activation of the kuṇḍalinī-śakti, the innate intelligence of embodied consciousness). This awakening invariably has the effect of, first, opening up the inner realm, and second, making the path of inner growth the primary focus of a person’s life. It is called the ‘Descent of Power’ or the ‘Descent of Grace’ (śaktipāta) because it often feels like a powerful, even life-changing, infusion of energy that was not earned or merited, but ultimately proves to be the greatest of blessings. 3
But then there’s the part that connects to the Sufi story. It’s in a passage about saṃskāra’s, experiences that have not been fully processed. The text claims that both positive and negative experiences that are not fully experienced become fuel for further attraction and aversion: the saṃskāra arises when it encounters a trigger. But you can resolve a saṃskāra.
However, when something that has been internally deposited in this way, or even something that is actually being experienced now, becomes one with the Fire of Consciousness through the process of ‘sudden digestion’ (haṭha-pāka), also known as the method of ‘total devouring’ (alaṅgrāsa), then it is said to be graced, because it has been integrated into the state of complete fullness (pūrṇatā).
Then there is a description of how you accomplish this ‘total devouring’.
When the energy contained within the saṃskāra arises, we can choose to simply be fully present with it, relax into it, and even embrace it (without identifying with it and without making a story about it), and in this way we open the door to experiencing it as a form of divine Consciousness. Why use the term ‘digestion’, though? Because the energy of the saṃskāra, which had been partitioned off within one’s being, now merges with the greater whole. Since the saṃskāra was deposited due to nonacceptance of reality, when its energy is fully accepted, it releases that energy and your whole being is subtly enhanced and magnified by it. If you are in a process of digesting a lot of saṃskāras, as happens at a certain stage of the spiritual life, then you can palpably feel the enlargement and enhancement of your energetic being.
Isn’t it incredible? That certain stage in the spiritual life is the point at which our prince found himself, having to eat the dried fruit. Which hints at what I think that story is about. But I felt I needed better instructions on how to accomplish this devouring.
Tantric Buddhism!
In Vajrayana, they joke Buddhism is the working man’s religion: in the other religions, if you want something, you will be petitioning some supernatural entity or other. In Buddhism, if you want something, you have to get it yourself.
And I remembered that in a book of Tantric Vajrayana practices, I had encountered concrete instructions on how to devour saṃskāras. The book was called Spectrum of Ecstasy, and here are the instructions:
You stare into the face of the arising emotion. In order to do this it is necessary to relinquish intellectual analysis. You have to abandon intellect as soon as you recognise the emotional pattern. It is enough to recognise the pattern; there is no need to dwell on intellectual analysis once that faculty has performed its useful task. The intellect is valuable within the sphere of intellect. But outside that, it becomes increasingly useless. Intellect is a valuable tool; but unless we learn when to use it and when not to use it, the view with which we have familiarised ourselves will just become another unhelpful addition to the giddying whirlpool of our conditioned responses. To relinquish analysis allows you to stare directly into the face of an emotion. You can accomplish this by focusing on the physical sensation of the emotion as the subject/object of meditation. Your whole field of attention needs to be immersed in the wordless sensation of the emotion as it manifests in the body. If the emotion you are trying to embrace is one of sorrow, you will tend to feel this as a very real and uncomfortable sensation just beneath the rib-cage. This is what is commonly known as ‘heartache’. But if you are able to surrender the words – the conceptual scaffolding – then the sensation ceases to manifest as pain. If you can then maintain the presence of your wordless gaze, the emotion becomes a free energy.
And there is my instruction on precisely how to eat my dried fruit. It’s so interesting that the emotion Ngakpa Chogyam, the author of this book, went for in this example, is precisely the sensation I encounter if I simply stay in my home at night. Heartache, huh?
This week I was running an experiment: I completely canceled my activities and my social life in favor of spending all my evenings at home. And I sure encountered this heartache. But with that instruction I was able to face it directly, and I did see it become a free energy that then dissipated. I finally regained the ability to sit still in my room.
And I think this is the meaning of eating the dried fruits. I think the Sufi story of The Magic Horse is really a story of the spiritual path, the ‘inner content’ Shah alludes too. Encountering the Princess Precious Pearl is what in non-dual Shaiva Tantra appears as śaktipāta, the initial spiritual awakening. 4
The part where the prince turns into a monster is the part in the seeker’s path where lots of saṃskāras are popping up. There is nothing to do but to eat the dried fruit, the way to do that being most clearly elucidated in tantric Vajrayana Buddhism.
However, it’s also interesting the details the different traditions add. In Sufism, apparently the problem is caused due to an addiction to positive experience (eating the juicy fruits). However, both in Shaiva and Vajrayana Tantra the problem is both attraction to positive experience and aversion to negative experience. The Sufis seem to think that the problem of addiction to positive experience can be healed by confronting negative experience head on.5
Many dried fruit await me: there is also a roiling malaise that people can trigger in me, that hasn’t been digested. That one can be trickier too, because it happens when I’m in the middle of socializing. As I go back into the world, that’s definitely the next one to digest.
That perhaps is worthy of an essay.
Definitely communicates the tantric view very well.
He even mentions somewhere in the book that after śaktipāta seekers can for a time become very judgmental of the spiritual paths of others. Damn, I even became judgmental of not just others, but of Jesus, Buddha, and Muhammad. Great things must be in store for me!
There is a gnostic story called the Hymn of the Pearl, which is also a story of a prince far away from his land, sent to retrieve a pearl. Shah knows of this story, and notes the connection.
Definitely a connection here to What a Bird Should Look Like