I’ve spent a good amount of time in the last few years doing “nothing.”

By doing “nothing,” I mean contributing nothing to the gross national product, creating no goods to sell, rendering no services for hire, and being singularly unproductive to the society at large.

On one hand, this has caused me to feel some guilt. Nobody likes to think of himself as lazy and useless.

On the other hand, I consider all of my past experiences when being “useful” and “productive” was at odds with my natural impulse to stop, to rest, to play, to be creative, to experience life on my own terms.

It started in school.

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Recently, in preparing for our move to Florida, my wife and I have started to get rid of a few things. Some of them are rather unusual items — for instance, three bags of organic long grain rice with dead grain beetles in them, and a non-functioning full spectrum floor lamp. Both of these things have some potential uses; we would keep and eat the rice ourselves if we still ate rice (but we just stopped, due to the recent discovery that we’re both hypoglycemic), and we’d fix the lamp if we had the tools, the expertise, and the need (but we got a new one for free).

So I offered them on craigslist. I got a few harsh responses. One person told me that I had way too much time on my hands. Another person wrote, “Throw it in the trash, sport.”

I got angry. I could understand if no one actually wanted the items, but why did people have to go out of their way to be mean and degrading? And, more to the point, why did it bother people that I was trying to see if anyone could use things that were ostensibly useless?

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I am a mystic by nature. To me that means that I tend to be more focused on my own personal realization of the Divine on an inner plane than on expressing or enacting it in any outward form.

Christian thinker Paul Tillich describes these two dimensions of spirituality as being “vertical” and “horizontal.” The vertical is Spirit: the mystical path of direct insight and revelation; it points to eternal meaning. The horizontal is the World: the exoteric path of relationship and interaction; it points to the temporal manifestation of eternal meaning. Both are important.

When I say that much of the sense of the sacred has been lost these days, it’s not because I agree with those who think we should go back to a more rigid sense of morality. It’s that I believe we’re missing a sense of the vertical dimension. We are like marionettes who have forgotten that we are indeed only constructs on a stage, powered by a Divine force deeper than ourselves. The joy of this dimension involves rediscovering our connection with that force.

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Sometimes when I recall my time in the woods at Teaching Drum, I feel profound gratitude.

These are often times when it’s cold, windy, and rainy outside, when I’m sitting inside my apartment, lounging on my futon or the carpeted floor, warm and dry, eating hot, tasty food, and reading or enjoying simple conversation with my wife. Sometimes in these moments, I contrast my life the way it is now with the way it was then.

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The term occult means “hidden” or those things or teachings that are “unknown” or secret. So, the occult is the seeking after knowledge of unknown information, knowledge that is gained beyond the five senses. Therefore, knowledge is received by some supernatural involvement or connection.

- Russ Wise in “Satan and the World of the Occult”

Speaking of a mythology of violence based on and “justified” by spiritual alienation, let’s talk about the “occult.”

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The condemnation of “idolatry” in the Christian religion is really an injunction against giving value to inauthentic things. In this sense, “idols” are the same as what Karl Marx called “commodity fetishism,” what primitive skills teacher Tom Brown, Jr., calls the “false gods of the flesh.”

Spiritually, this is, in essence, a call to recognize the illusory nature of the world, the illusory nature of the spiritual entities of institution we trap ourselves with.

Part of our “fallen” or alienated nature is that we have forgotten our true existence as enlightened beings.

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I’m no Christian, but there are some aspects of Christianity I admire, particularly the actual message of Jesus — i.e. engaged love and compassion for others (although many self-professed Christians don’t seem to exhibit those traits). So Walter Wink’s exegesis of the Bible vis a vis the culture of violence is extremely fascinating to me, as a juxtaposition of the positive qualities I see in Christianity with the ideas within primitive anarchy.

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The world is such-and-such or so-and-so only because we tell ourselves that that is the way it is. If we stop telling ourselves that the world is so-and-so, the world will stop being so-and-so. You must start slowly to undo the world.

Your problem is that you confuse the world with what people do. The things people do are the shields against the forces that surround us; what we do as people gives us comfort and makes us feel safe; what people do is rightfully very important, but only as a shield. We never learn that the things we do as people are only shields and we let them dominate and topple our lives. In fact I could say that for mankind, what people do is greater and more important than the world itself.

- don Juan, from A Separate Reality by Carlos Castaneda

An idea that is common in some religious and spiritual circles is that we are surrounded by “beings,” though beliefs differ on whether they are “angels” or “demons” or both.

However, in a clear, practical sense, we are constantly surrounded by, and constantly create and maintain, “entities” that have semi-independent realities. They are simply natural consequences of our mental actions and our social instincts, the externalizations of inner experience.

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Just something for a change of pace:

My struggles to understand the relationship between violence and the martial arts have led me to explore the general context of violence in our civilization.

According to Christian theologian Walter Wink in Engaging the Powers, violence is not merely a social matter, it is a profoundly spiritual one.

Violence is the ethos of our time. It is the spirituality of the modern world. It has been accorded the status of a religion, demanding from its devotees an absolute obedience to death. Its followers are not aware, however, that the devotion they pay to violence is a form of religious piety. Violence is so successful as a myth precisely because it does not seem to be mythic in the least. Violence simply appears to be the nature of things. It is what works. It is inevitable, the last and, often, the first resort in conflicts. It is embraced with equal alacrity by people on the left and on the right, by religious liberals as well as religious conservatives. The threat of violence, it is believed, is alone to deter aggressors. It secured us forty-five years of a balance of terror. We learned to trust the Bomb to grant us peace.

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