I have been developing a somewhat noxious habit recently. You see, years ago, after my last acid trip led me to a psychosis that landed me in the psych ward, along with federal charges pressed against me (psychosis and airplanes really don’t mix!), I haven’t really had opportunity to experience the psychedelic state again, as it would be obviously too dangerous. But I had noticed that my brain is so… different now, that a mild dose of alcohol, enough to give me a buzz, also landed me in a properly psychedelic state.
So once a week I’ve been going to the corner pub, to get that buzz. Sometimes I mix it up by getting a bottle of wine instead.
One evening, I had drank a tall glass of wine, but it really hadn’t given me that buzz. It’s worrisome how much I wanted the buzz. It feels like I understand how someone can become an alcoholic now. Nevertheless, I went ahead and poured myself another tall glass of wine, meaning I would drink about 4/5 of the bottle on that single night.
I looked at that glass on the counter. Then I suddenly got the urge to tip its entire contents into the sink.
I paused. Where did that come from? I ruminated. I told myself how much I would enjoy drinking this, being all cozy and buzzed in my bed. Suddenly, the part of me saying that started sounding like Gríma Wormtongue whispering in my ear. And I realized that the urge to dump the wine more specifically felt like a pull, a pull upwards inside of me, a pull towards something that shines. And the urge to drink it also felt like a pull, a pull downwards, into darkness.
I let myself be pulled upwards. I grabbed the glass and emptied it entirely. And I was rewarded! Doing this instantly gave me a buzz that lasted a good long while, one not tainted by the dullness of alcohol.
And I realized this was not the first time I had felt the upwards pull. It’s what made me start going to the gym. What made me read Plato, and the Bhagavad Gita, and René Guénon.
Nor the first time I had felt the downwards pull. It’s what made me overeat. To meander on the internet. To isolate myself instead of striving to connect with other people.
Calling these things ‘upwards pull’ and ‘downwards pull’ is gonna get old fast. Since the first one I noticed is the upwards pull, let’s just call it ‘the pull’. The other one is also a pull, but it could also be fairly called ‘the slack’, as it opposes the pull, and slack really is its final destination.
But it’s not so simple as the pull being all good. Or the slack being all bad.
Some time after that I was lying in bed, reminiscing about a video game. I do so love video games. Then the pull yanked me again, the urge this time being to go into my living room in that instant and destroy my PS4. I suppose I didn’t feel the slack that time, unless it is that I didn’t notice it because I instinctively went with it. Maybe Wormtongue seduced me.
Another time, I had really got it into my head that I must go and watch John Wick 4. Even went out on a very rainy night to do so. At one point in the movie, a woman gets killed. That didn’t sit right with me, and I started looking at the movie in a much more dim light. What am I even doing? Is watching this shit really different from going to the Colosseum? And I felt the pull, this time telling me that I should stand up and leave, right now. This time, I also felt the slack: just sink into your seat, it was hard enough getting here, you want to get your money’s worth right? I went with the slack, which led to a very interesting experience with the movie. It was like I saw mankind rising against Ṛta in some kind of planet-wide rock concert mixed with a Brazilian carnival. Presumably, I would have seen something different had I left, something completely the opposite.
The pull is good in a way: it really was the right call to ditch that wine. But it’s also an all-consuming conflagration. It wants you to sacrifice all that isn’t it. It was the pull that made Abraham attempt to sacrifice Isaac, and it was the slack that made him change his mind. It was the pull that made the Aztecs sacrifice around 250,000 people per year.
The pull is yang and the slack is yin. When Jesus said:
And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.
maybe he was saying to kill yin? Well, yin, the dark side, doesn’t actually stand for evil. And there is this book called Christ, the Eternal Tao, which I haven’t read, but its mere existence is quite the statement.
And yet, what were the yin aspects of Jesus? He seems pure yang, the light side, which means he was imbalanced, which is ironically as close to a definition of evil as Taoism gets.
But, potentially, Jesus knew this. He did ask, 'Why do you call me good?’, which leads one to wonder what could be wrong about him that he had to reject the label ‘good’. Maybe he dimly sensed it was wrong to say things like ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’, which is very un-taoist, what with its ideal of leading by not-leading (I have no idea what Christ, the Eternal Tao is on about).
That one really was a hell of a saying of Jesus. Can you imagine a guy looking you in the eye and saying that one to you? It’s honestly a legitimate miracle that he did that and at least some bought it. I wonder if I would’ve bought it. Would you have done so?
The pull and the slack map more cleanly into the Hindu guṇas, which are the 3 essential qualities of everything in existence. These are:
Sattva, the ascending tendency, representing balance and harmony and all things good. It’s associated with the color white.
Rajas, the horizontal tendency, representing passion, which is neither good nor bad. Associated with red.
Tamas, the descending tendency, representing imbalance and chaos and all things bad. It’s color is black.
The pull is sattva and the slack is tamas, and it’s pretty neat that I independently confirmed the existence of these things, because it was only later that I learned sattva is an ascending tendency and tamas a descending one.
I haven’t really described rajas, because most things are rajas, at least in my life. Honestly, I would even file masturbation under that one, as I don’t really feel a descent there, and as it turns out, masturbation is not a big deal in Hinduism, it being seen as a very minor infraction even for people who have taken a vow of chastity.
An interesting thing about the guṇas, is that all three need to be present for there to be a manifestation, that is, a universe, at all: there couldn’t be such a thing as a purely sattvic, or tamasic, world. It would be like positing a one-note melody.
So yin-yang is an incomplete symbol. But it does highlight that interesting feature of yang having a dot of yin, and yin of yang: there is no such thing as all-yang or all-yin. If your right hand offends thee, what you really need is a dose of Taoism! (and maybe some Haldol).
We come back to the fact that, ultimately, pouring that wine down the sink was the right call. Would thrashing my PS4 had been the right call also? The third (and I know, final) time I was in the psych ward, I met a very devout, smiling Christian there. He even got other patients to kneel and pray with him. From interacting with him, it wasn’t clear why he ended up warded, but someone later told me that he had started thrashing all the electronics in his house, and when I asked him about it, he said there were demons in there. I shared that intuition for an instant then, and it’s pretty interesting that there’s this environmentalist Christian named Paul Kingsnorth whose work is all about how techno-capitalist civilization is this machine, the Machine, that we have enthroned as God and is in the process of devouring God’s creation, and the only way out is to renounce technology as best as you can and RETVRN TO TRADITION, though he doesn’t go quite that far with that last part (at least right now) being a former leftist and having a well-educated wife that I imagine would never go along with it.
Paul Kingsnorth is doing a more high-brow version of the behavior that got that Christian warded, and looking at it from another angle, the vibe worshipers over on That Part Of Twitter (better known as tpot) have said that AI art gives them bad vibes, and basically, are you down with this video?
Or do you want Kalki avatar to come, burn everything down, and restore Satya Yuga? Surely one must pick, it’s all so boring if we get Eternal Y2K.
Sattva and tamas, the pull and the slack. It pays to be aware of these things, because ultimately, even though the unbridled pull just leads to insanity, the fruit of the slack, tamas, can be seen in the homeless drug addicts which I see everyday. I don’t believe in a yin-yang balance between these things: it is better to have an overall sattvic tendency, to the degree one can manage it. I don’t believe it’s a matter of submitting to some rules. Someone once told me that true brahmins don’t indulge not because they are suppressing their desires, but because they are truly revolted by the things we would call indulging. I can’t say I yearn for such a state, but should I land in it, I don’t think I would resist it.
You have a knack for getting replies out of me that are basically essays in themselves...
Very well expressed. The 'slack' reminds me of what Trungpa calls the 'setting sun' world. I associate it with aversion, depression, overwhelm and laziness (and what is laziness but aversion and overwhelm?). The 'pull' is what forces us to transcend ourselves and try to leave the world better than we found it, one tiny decision at a time.
Once again I'm impressed by your honesty - you're saying what you really think here rather than parroting the typical wisdom in spiritual circles. Some people teach that you should only ever seek out the pull, and others say life's about a balance between pull and slack, but you're right: for most of us the first is inauthentic and monomaniacal (even Jesus wasn't above feasting, drinking and having a good time!), while the second is off-base too: a world with just as much slack as pull is one of enormous waste and suffering.
We seem to be caught in the middle of some process we don't understand, in both physical and spiritual terms.
Physically, we're here because of natural selection, which advances via genetic competition and fitness (i.e. immense bloodshed and suffering) - but as cooperative groups outcompete purely selfish, individualistic ones, also encourages cooperation and bonding (i.e. what makes life meaningful and sweet). So darkness-reaching-towards-light is baked into the nature of things - and now that our species is capable of making conscious decisions, we can choose to maximise the sweet and fight against the sour.
And spiritually, we're supposed to advance towards the light, while acknowledging our darkness and accepting the existence of evil and suffering in the world. So many things are terrible, and yet everything is in its right place. A very delicate balancing act.
It's sort of like a TV show that has a ton of bad things happening to the characters, then ends on a dramatically satisfying finale where everything comes right in the end. In a sense the final episode is the best one because it's what the rest were building towards, but it's equally true that it would have no impact without their lead-up - they need it, and it needs them. The whole show is "good", even the bits where what's happening isn't good at all.
It seems that the universe requires drama in the same way TV shows do, the destination giving meaning to the journey, the journey giving meaning to the destination. Zoom out far enough, and it's all happening at the same moment, a single moment in which all of us are being remorselessly pulled upwards.