Wilson, Robert Anton

<p>Jul 6, 2008 3:51 PM</p>

<p>

I googled <b>Oceanic Experience</b> and this came up ...

I am a very enthusiastic student of certain varieties of Orien­tal mysticism, some of which seem quite rational to my mind. The purpose of yoga, of what the East calls "ways of libera­tion," is not to sink into a mindless trance like a masturbat­ing tree-sloth, but to <b>become <i>more acutely aware</i> on all levels of the senses, nervous system, and "mind." (A Zen master once summed up Buddhism in the one word, "Attention.")</b>

The first step toward this awareness is to transcend the "muscular armor" which keeps the organism sensitive to those parts and functions it has been told are not "lady-like" or not" gentlemanly. " (Modern psychiatry insists on "abre­action" – as Mencken put it, the patient has to make a jack-ass of himself before he can be cured.)

Michelangelo wrote that "to create, <b>you must first be able to love.</b>" <b>Einstein,</b> more verbosely, said that the drive toward greater knowledge always begins from "<b>an intellectual love of the objects of experience</b>." The greatest artist and the greatest scientist of the Western world are at once in recognizing that their creativity arises from "love"; and Einstein seems to have had in the back of his mind Spinoza's "Intellectual love of a thing means understanding its perfections." Twenty-five hun­dred years ago in China, Confucius wrote in the <i>Shu King</i> that "the dynasty, Y Yin, came in because the folk had achieved a great sensibility. "

All of these expressions (the Zen master's "Attention," Michelangelo's "love," Einstein and Spinoza's "Intellectual love of things," Confucius' "great sensibility," and I could throw in also Blake's remark about "cleansing the doors of per­ception") seem to me<b> attempts to verbalize an experience which, by its nature, cannot be verbalized. One has to ex­perience it.</b> You have to relax your body, so that the hard kinks of prejudice and fear cannot censor your perceptions. You have to<b> look at things without using words inside your mind, look at things as they are originally perceived</b> without shame or "value" or use-consciousness or purpose of any sort. <b>Every thing you look at will then appear to you, as Blake says, infinite.</b>

<b>This is the "oceanic experience"</b> Freud noted at <b>the root of religion</b>. It is also at the roots of science and art. We are all stumbling into this experience constantly, whenever we are completely relaxed and unafraid – Sunday afternoon in the hammock, for instance.

This experience has created a hundred stupid theologies, true; but, it has also created sciences and arts. In the Occident especially, from the troubadours of the 12th century up to D.H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound, this experience has become the ex­clusive property of <b>wild and erotic independent mystics</b>, while the official churchly mystics have sunk deeper and deeper into a miasmal mist.

It is out of this <b>"oceanic experience" that a rational hu­manism can create "positive values"</b> as an alternative to the de­lusional schizophrenias of Judeo-Christian theology. But these values can only be understood by those who are <i><b>aware</b></i><b> on all levels of their being, sensory as well as rational;</b> and the majori­ty of people will never become <i>aware</i> in this way until those institutions are destroyed which teach man to despise his own body and to fear even to speak of it in plain, honest words.</p>