Controlled flight into terrain
On the descent into matter; or, my attempt to cultivate spiritual consciousness without going insane.
No time to brace for impact. CFIT is a sincere no bullshit emergency that puts the fear of God into pilots. A distraction factor during a high work-load phase of flight, as minor as misinterpreting ATC instructions and then tuning to the wrong frequency or SID altitude restrictions before an on-course turn can result in a fast hot collision on the side of a mountain, in a body of water or the indifferent earth. The plane fully under pilot control until the last. Crew have no idea what’s coming until it hits.
The Boeing 737 that crashed in Vilnius might have been CFIT or it could have been a Russian bomb. With the accelerating tensions in Ukraine, plane hijacking and nuclear war are hot topics again. My blood ran cold when I heard that the nuclear non-proliferation treaty between Russia and the US expires in 2026. It provided a fresh experience of terror sliced metallic; a feeling almost forgotten, now risen again, required to confront some animal instinct hungover from the last ice age. Once more than hungry and sodden in the snow, darkness downing the fire of the eyes and drawn into the unspeakable by the drive to survive. I remembered my Grandpa describing how he began building a bomb shelter in his back garden in Hyde, Manchester, during the Bay of Pigs incident. As a child of New Labour – things can only get better – I was amused because I never expected an equivalent experience. That night I dreamt that Prince Charles was on television telling the nation we only had food supply sufficient for the next 3 months, but I knew it was AI because he had six fat sausage fingers on each hand. Not long after that, I wrote a press release for an agri-business that explained the European crop yield declined 35% this autumn on previous years, but farmers and crop experts had adapted so the market could feel secure that vegetables were still resilient. I stuck to the brief’s messaging but that’s over a third. The buyers reading this will know that your European vegetable yield is down more than a third.
Technically everything is working fine when the soul descends into matter but the impact still feels catastrophic, making it a classic CFIT scenario. Down here, the soul is like some tiny little songbird skipping off the water as it flies further out to deep sea hoping to find one moment of rest. Sailors look on from 55,000-ton, 800ft ships with hearts as vast and indifferent as the ocean they’re lost to, like, fat chance, pal.
When forcibly propelled from the cabin run aground, the rare few CFIT survivors must immediately get up and out lest they choke on toxic smoke from burning electronics. Wounds are an aspect of the design.
And semi-recovered, I sit at the bar with Ivan Karamazov, again: If the suffering of little children is the necessary sum of suffering for the acquisition of truth, I affirm from now on that truth is not worth such a price! I would persist in my indignation, even if I were wrong!
I always want to hear Ivan’s perspective because he talks with so much passion, but I don’t think I agree with him, now. Although saying that feels like I’m robbing the deprived child inside of one of its last toys.
The indictment to keep your mind focused on the Good as you develop spiritual consciousness is entirely necessary because the descent into matter is weird as fuck. We have our physical body – the oyster body, concealing the pearl – and a couple of other vehicles that carry our consciousness across realms. One of these contains the phantasm – the source of all art, and energetic experiences like kundalini, as well as psychological disturbances. Those with a limited vocabulary/understanding can also consider it simply as the imagination and just read here: we have an imagination. The financial market entirely belongs to the collective phantasm, but anyone is free to create their own world, preferring it to the God given. That world can be so alluring, it can draw a dreamer away from the social and into enrapture with phantasy. The danger exists in believing that the latter is more real than the former as both are simply your own image, love. The Real vastly exceeds both. Dionysius was only lured from his throne on Olympus by the Titans when they showed him a mirror – all other tricks fail. It’s the image that’s engrossing. As long as we’re still trafficking with body, it’s all ocean and we’re all swimming. Maybe there’s a case for getting in to get out, but I’ll tackle that another day as I haven’t read any Iamblichus or Gregory Shaw, yet – that’s on January’s reading list.* Fabrication in the phantasm probably just delays direct confrontation with the karma police. As soon as I withdrew the intensity of my will from obtaining accomplishment, my life began to fall apart, which suggests consequences can be postponed, but not avoided. In The Apology of Plato, Socrates describes his accusers as shadows, who he cannot defend himself against directly. There’s a lot of that in this.
Projecting the will to control earthly experience runs the risk of miasma, or spiritual pollution. My friend Jeremy and I discussed the opposite, the withdrawal of the will, through the framework of revolutionary defeatism. Accepting defeat can be more impactful than perpetuating imperialist violence; accepting death can have more honour than inflicting harm on another. We also discussed the moment when Christ is on the road to Calgary and Peter rebukes him for accepting the cross; he doesn’t understand why the Messiah, He who is so powerful, would. And Jesus interprets Peter’s words as those of the devil, tempting Him toward disobedience, because, as an advanced yogi, Christ understood that divine mind is higher than earthy mind, that the heavens are higher than earth, and the will of God should rule. One really has to abandon our own projections to gain higher truth, it seems. That’s why the indictment is to keep our mind heavenward and to know ourselves through devotion. God is the cleanest mirror we can use to understand who we are as all else are smeared with our own mucky fingerprints.
Not going to lie, my flying saucer eyes really fell for the hype that I was some unique and special snowflake experiencing something hitherto fore undiscovered when a blossoming spiritual consciousness began to refashion me from the inside out, but I was totally misguided in that. Pure spiritual ego. Spiritual ego is the worst because the consequences are so repulsive. Since I’ve been in spiritual circles, I’ve encountered some astonishingly kind, bright and switched-on people. But I’ve also met adults who express love for you as soon as they meet you, completely exposed and insisting you exposure yourself too, as though entitled to love and be loved in returned by a fucking stranger, as well as people spouting nonsense, like there’s a satellite over the earth called Shambhala where divine beings rule, with way too much confidence and not enough self awareness. Sorry to be rude, but these people have fucking lost it. They have completely misinterpreted their world for the world, and think that strength of belief in the former will insulate them from the latter’s effects. And while we’re all God’s children, Self-actualising is integral to the philosophic process. As far as I’m aware, the idea is that first you become responsible for yourself and then the whole cosmos.
I think if anyone spent long enough looking within, they’d find God or the devil, their eudaimon or kakodaimon, and most likely both, and more. There will be dancing and jumpscares. It’s not a big hoo-ha. With hindsight, it was a classic rookie error assuming that because I felt like I’d been manoeuvred into Platonic philosophy seemingly apropos of nothing, my art was going to save the west or something. Really thought I was Pico della Mirandola pre-Savonarolan self-loathing for a minute. Took a while for it to really sink in that numerous the thyrsus-bearers have been, but few the Bacchus. Many are called, few chosen. C’est la vie. The only honourable thing now is to face my mistake and misstep and live the consequences through. Yeah, it’s as embarrassing to have been an egomaniac as a drug addict, but at least I’m in recovery!
The last time I had some feeling of the forces at work in this incarnation I was twenty-two and involuntarily detained, but I’m pretty confident they’re not going to catch me this time. I’ve decided we can turn this thing up but it can’t go down. Now, rather than be forcibly medicated, I expect to be the hero of my story because I’m finding my comfort in being both annoying and boring.
My 2025 vibe – that I’ve begun to tentatively establish – will involve cultivating sophrosyne, a Greek virtue that evades exact translation, but is something like common sense or soundness of mind. Sophrosyne involves developing self-discipline grounded in a realistic appraisal of self and a greater understanding of what I know (jack shit) and what I don’t (anything). Temperance will replace impatience, self-control will be prioritised above self-confidence and calm will eclipse resentment. Unlike Christian or Hindu ascetism, practicing sophrosyne requires cultivating knowledge of the harmony between rational and irrational parts, allowing a philosopher to navigate indulgence and abstinence appropriately. As a result, I’ll persist in the disciplined and lonely work of scholarship (embracing my fate as a Capricorn to work myself to death), and love the divine in every soul while observing the reality of human behaviour; but I also intend to infrequently drink too much and dance on tables with my best friends, as well as kiss boys who are too young and men who are too unavailable. The negotiation of accepting the inevitable deprivation and decay that’s inherent to the design of the material realm, while cultivating the inner stability not to be overwhelmed, seems to me it for achieving spiritual maturation as a pagan woman. Having surveyed the crash site, it seems like this thing still has wings and we might make our destination, after all. Flight crew should prepare for lift off.
[*] This piece is a product of my personal experience this month and my reading, which included: The Apology by Plato, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture by Agamben, The First Alcibiades by Plato, The Psychic Life of Power by Judith Butler, I-III of Proclus’ Ten Doubts Concerning Providence, The First Alciabides by Plato and some of Psychology and Alchemy by Carl. G Jung.
Wow! thanks so much. Yes I resonate all this, as you so extraordinarily described. Crashed and burned. Yet another philosophic death. Finding wings.