For awhile now I’ve been grasping to discover some way to articulate exactly what I’ve been struggling with in this whole relating-to-the-world theme. It has been a problem for me, not just in terms of communicating with others about my struggles, but also simply in terms of defining the problem for myself.

In the absence of a vocabulary and language to discuss an issue, all I have is this vague feeling of being too sensitive for a big scary world. That has in many ways been the central theme of this blog.

I think I’ve found an author that begins to teach me that kind of vocabulary — the one I’ve been quoting so much recently, Walter Wink. It’s funny, too, because he comes from a decidedly Christian point of view.

I did try other routes from worldviews that I would have expected more to say about the phenomenologically mystical. A few months ago I had tried picking up occultist Dion Fortune’s book Psychic Self-Defense, feeling intuitively that that was a route my thinking needed to go to define the problem. But it wasn’t quite what I was looking for. Ironically, the book’s focus on the actual existence of negative spirits and psychic attacks distracts from some of the deeper dynamics that underlie the interaction of all beings, natural or “supernatural.”

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let me start by providing an anecdote from Wink’s book, Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces That Determine Human Existence. I feel that this illustrates the elusive and subliminal yet powerful effect that usually-unnoticed things have on us.

Once I was leading Bible study in an exquisite mansion that had been turned into a retreat house. We were sitting in a circle on a twenty-five-thousand-dollar oriental rug, studying the “Rich Young Man.” I began to notice an odd phenomenon. People simply could not believe that Jesus would say that the rich cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. They seemed puzzled, confused, irritated. Gradually I began to realize that it was the rug. The rug was saying, at a subliminal level so that no one was directly aware of it, “Not true.”

To me this describes well my experience that everything speaks.

Here’s Hermetic practitioner Rawn Clark from another perspective, discussing “essential meaning.”

EVERY *form* is a manifest expression of an essential meaning. In other words, *form* communicates something of significance to our perceptual faculties. We are always perceiving essential meaning every time we perceive a form of any kind, be it mental, astral or physical. Ordinarily, this perception is an unconscious experience and consequently, we are seldom aware of the fact that we are perceiving this essential meaning. Yet it informs our every perception in significant ways.

As an experiment to demonstrate my point, I set out several small plastic figures in front of my [visitors]. These were toy caricatures of different dinosaurs, a Godzilla, King Kong, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and so on. Each one of them expressed a unique and easily identifiable “personality”. For example, the little King Kong figure expressed a very gregarious personality, while the Hunchback expressed a hurt innocence.

Each one of these figures communicated something about itself *through* the details of its particular *form*. This ’something’ is its essential meaning. The *voice*, so to speak, of that essential meaning is the form’s personality — i.e., its *emotional tone*.

The personality of each one of these figures is VERY easy to perceive, and because it “speaks” so loudly, it’s also fairly simple to *directly* perceive the underlying essential meaning that their personality communicates.

Having opened their awareness of this level of their own perceptual faculties, I asked my [visitors] to examine the forms of the other objects in the room and try to perceive *their* personalities and underlying essential meanings. Most of the other things in my living room (where we were seated at the time) don’t “speak” themselves as loudly as the plastic figures do, until you get into the groove of this level of perception. But once you do get the grasp of it, EVERY form is expressive of an inner, essential meaning.

Now. What I am beginning to understand, though, is that there’s a difference between the way things speak in Nature, and the way things speak in civilization. Or, rather, there’s a difference in the way we perceive what speaks when we’re out in Nature versus here in civilization.

The difference is this: In civilization, everything lies.

Okay, that’s a bit melodramatic. The truth is that I find that I lie to myself, on a subconscious level, when I open to listen to the things that speak.

What do I mean? Well, when I look down at my desk, I perceive the superficial form of a desk. But underlying that desk is a lot of other stuff. Wood from a hundred places. Whatever chemical or mechanical process it took to form the compressed wood, and the workmanship it took to form it into boards and to paste a natural wood finish on the outside. So much human intervention and intent, and so many voices from a hundred different places. The voices all speak so differently, creating a cacophony. And each voice is the tantalizing end of a thread that leads elsewhere — to where, I don’t know. Was sweatshop labor involved? Were sustainable practices used in harvesting the wood? What chemical toxins were or are present? Who has suffered to bring me this desk?

In order to survive this barrage, I have to shut the door completely and say: It’s just a fucking desk.

In some ways it’s not that different out in Nature, as far as that barrage of information and multiple threads goes. But a tree is a tree; it’s not the nailed-together ground-up body parts of a thousand different trees. It is itself and has a unified spirit. Yes, there are a thousand different exchanges with the environment, with the soil and the ants and the wind and the sun — but all of that is right there, present and observable and part of a cohesive system that exists in the here-and-now.

It’s honest.

I could go through my entire house and talk about every object this way. I’m not trying to be depressing, or trying to focus on the negative; but rather I’m exploring the experience I’m already having: that everything speaks and I don’t know how to interact with it. And now I’m beginning to understand that one reason that I don’t know is that I already, subconsciously, deny its voice, out of self-preservation. To avoid looking at the ugliness that underlies pleasant exteriors.

And that’s just dealing with inanimate objects.

Here’s another anecdote from Wink’s book, regarding people.

A prosperous church once asked a colleague of mine to lead its governing body in a five-evening exploration of ways to respond to its neighborhood, which was now populated by gays, blacks, Hispanics, and the elderly. For the second session she invited me to do Bible study with them focusing on the nature of their discipleship in that neighborhood. For the first hour I simply floundered. Everyone was perfectly nice. I encountered no overt resistance. Yet each question I asked seemed to be sucked down into a black hole. At the break I whispered to my colleague, “What’s going on? Nothing is happening. Nothing!”

“It’s demons,” she replied, half in jest.

“You’re right,” I answered, shocked at our speaking this way. “But what are they?”

After several weeks of investigation she discovered that the head minister had been there over twenty years and had a physical ailment that would become aggravated under stress. So over that period he had selected a governing board that “knew,” without it ever having been said explicitly, that their job was to keep their minister from being upset. Into that situation we had unwarily come, with the ostensibly task of helping the church launch out into controversial and risky new ministries to a community of gays, blacks, Hispanics, and elderly. That task, which had been set by a new head of their session, was totally at odds with the session’s unspoken job description, and at some deep level they all knew it and responded with passive resistance. They were doing exactly what they were “supposed” to do.

This is quite in line with the idea of the egregore, which is

an occult concept representing a “thoughtform” or “collective group mind”, an autonomous psychic entity made up of, and influencing, the thoughts of a group of people. The symbiotic relationship between an egregore and its group has been compared to the more recent, non-occult concepts of the corporation (as a legal entity) and the meme.

Every relationship is an egregore. My wife and I form an egregore. My family is an egregore. My classmates and I are an egregore. The school I belong to is an egregore, with my class being a sub-egregore. These are, in essence, what Wink is referring to as “angels” or “demons.”

Where egregores get dangerous are when they go unrecognized — when dissociated or disowned parts of the self get shoved out and buried. The egregore will express and manifest it, even if the individuals involved try not to.

The important thing being that not only are there many conscious things going on in the way an individual, or a group, presents itself and interacts, but there are many subconscious and unconscious dynamics that underlie so much of human interaction, many of which are at odds with the conscious and external presentation, whether deliberately or not.

It arrives at the same place: dishonesty. People are dishonest. And I can tell, all the time — I’m just sensitive enough to know that people lie, even to themselves, about a great many things. Of course, there would be chaos if everyone spoke the truth all the time; because of the way societies have set things up, certain things are permissible to express and certain other things are not. Regardless of the particulars that vary with each culture and subculture, the fact that there is so often a divide between what is felt and what is expressed means, in essence, constant lying.

Thus, just as with inanimate objects, I see that everyone speaks and I don’t know how to interact with them, because everyone lies about what they’re actually thinking, feeling, and saying. So, out of self-preservation, I deny their voices, except the one I’m supposed to hear. I do this to avoid looking at the ugliness that underlies pleasant exteriors — ugliness (the dark, the dissociated, the inauthentic) that I usually can do little about anyway.

In so many ways, then, I find myself being lied to and lying to myself. So much so that I cocoon myself behind a wall of relatively rigid boundaries of self, maintaining a certain degree of integrity within my own walls. But what this means is that when I do encounter honesty in perception, I have lost the ability to know what to do with it. To be more precise, I don’t know what to do with pockets of honesty that temporarily arise within a sea of dishonest interactions.

It’s like those guys in prison who eventually tell their wives to stop visiting and writing letters, to forget about them and leave them alone. It’s easier not to be reminded of what you’ve lost.

I’ve got to figure out a way to move among the ordinary, mundane world of human dishonesty and the gloriously authentic world of Nature and the Great Mystery more easily.

In order to do this from where I am, though, I have to start thinking about all of that information, its honesty and dishonesty, in more specific ways.

And so we end where we began. Reading and thinking about these matters means slowly, painfully, developing a vocabulary for them. Hopefully before long I will have a more refined way to speak of these things.