City of Stillness

I have been meditating for about two years. I had first tried my hand—my mind, rather—at such a thing about twelve years ago by way of a mindfulness app called Headspace.

It didn't take. This is not an indictment; it's merely the truth. I'm sure plenty of people have benefited from such apps. And that's great.

I found my way back to the green pastures of meditation via the complex Jewish mystical practice of Kabbalah. Aryeh Kaplan's Meditation and Kabbalah served as a primer of different techniques to still the mind and then launch it into strange realms by doing oddball things like taking the name of God in Hebrew, YHWH, and permutating its consonants with vowels for countless cycles, writing the vowels in the air with your head. This was a method proposed by 13th-century Spanish rabbi Abraham Abulafia. It appealed to me, but I figured I'd start small and perhaps later work my way up to such holy craziness.

I often get told I'm an old soul. Insult or not, it's likely true. I'm not predisposed to experience great joy, and from early on, I've always had one foot outside this world, not knowing where in the hell the other foot lay.

This has always made for clunky dancing. That's why I enjoy writing fiction and reading the fiction of others. It's also why I've chosen to stride down this lonely path of the mystic these last few years. This has been to the detriment of my writing. I have published a few novels, written countless Substack articles—but these last few months have seen scant offerings. Have I milked my muses dry for life, or has my soul now become a desiccated rind sucked up by an upstart demon throwing a tantrum at Daddy upstairs?

Fed up with a life of increased agoraphobia and restlessness, I decided to lower my caffeine intake and sit the hell still. I eventually learned to sit still in my truck. Shortly after that, I discovered the works of esoteric cartographer David Chaim Smith, whose Black Aether, and The Thirty-Two Keys in particular, taught the reader a three-step process: gaze at Smith's wildly-illustrated cards depicting insane symbolic landscapes that he has summoned from his subconscious, put the cards away and sketch the image into the air before you, then close your eyes and try to think of nothing—all as a twenty-minute daily practice.

It took ten months to get through all thirty-two keys. It was an ontological boot camp that shaped up my wandering mind. My brain might not currently be a navy SEAL, but it can crawl under a hundred yards of barbed wire no problem and probably handle a cargo net without falling.

(Card 27. Smith's bewildering cartography draws from Kabbalah, alchemy, and some Vajrayana Buddhism)

(Card 16. Only when we transcend the various membranes of mentation that for so long restrict our thoughts, can we then be free to live in the present)

After tackling The Thirty-Two Keys, I just sort of forced myself to knock out meditations of any increment that sudden free time allowed for: ten minutes, fifteen minutes, twenty, twenty-five, thirty, forty—this last being a record, only achieved a dozen times. The sweet spot is twenty minutes, enough to wave goodbye to the mundane world, yet not enough to induce a slight brain fog that occurs after the longer sessions.

I go in spurts where I won’t be as consistent as I'd like, but lately I've been obsessed. It's been great, to tell the truth. Rather than shovel precious time down the gaping jaws of the social media Moloch, I'll slap on my sunglasses and set up shop in what I just recently dubbed my Probability Capsule.

T-minus fifteen seconds, the grace period I afford myself to work out any last-second kinks of hyperactivity before committing to not move a single muscle for whatever time stretch I've elected.

Sometimes there are goals. Sometimes there aren't. The point is always to get out of the beta-wave state and get into alpha, where suggestion from the Superconsciousness, if you'll humor me, is much more possible. You let invasive thoughts pass by like clouds trying to choke out the blue sky. You don't judge, just observe. You allow them to disperse. You become hyper-conscious of your own consciousness. When mundane concerns pop up, you return to the breath.

When you finally feel you're plopped deep in the chariot you've been trying to get into, you hold. Hold. There is nothing to accomplish. Just be. There are no other goals beyond this. This is it. Be. Tell the limbic system to stand down. In this sacred space, everything is possible. The probability waves crashing all around you collapse into particles of presence. You are now at the nexus of the cosmos. You are free to go anywhere. Depending on your level of mastery of manifestation or the Law of Attraction, you can now dash the blank canvas of possibility with the vivid pigments of desire. You are now free to go anywhere. True, but why not stay put?

The best sessions of meditation bring about a slow burn of ecstasy when you open your eyes and let the world back in. Everything feels light. Concerns become ho-hum. Mushroom clouds elicit nothing more than a meh. You're like a baseball center fielder, perched in the middle of the outfield, ready to go anywhere the ball tracks toward. You're not necessarily docile; you're adaptable.

An ontological agility seeps in. You remind yourself of this with long exhalations, the very technique that got you here. It's also the technique that keeps you here. Rush hour traffic takes on a trance-like rhythm that asks for silence rather than distracting music or podcasts.

When you have dissolved the ego, you can go in countless directions. As a fan of imaginal literature, I have subconsciously opted to go into the imaginal realm during some meditations.

In esoteric Islam, there are three cities of the imaginal realm—Hurqalya, Jabarsa, and Jabalqa. The first city sits atop the Mountain Qaf, the roof of the world. In Henri Corbin's Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, there is scant instruction on how to get there. The subtle body, a sort of elusive, etheric extension of your physical self, becomes the mode of transport for traversing these worlds. I write about this extensively in my Arabian cyberpunk novel Angels With Engine Failure.

In Hekhalot Jewish mysticism, descending into the chariot/throne, the merkabah, one must go into palaces within palaces, the hekhalot, said to be seven in total, and fend off begrudging angels and walls of water and flame. This is the chariot that the prophet Ezekiel saw in his vision. Wheels within wheels, as well as numerous anthropomorphic heads of God that may or may not involve the zodiac.

The arduous undertaking is made further arduous by the paucity of coordinates given. The only two solutions to the mystery are that there is an ascended master who is meant to guide you, or the signposts present themselves when you happen upon the terrain after a good amount of hours logged in.

These imaginal realms are much like egregores, though forms that have built up convincing force over time from having enough people deposit enough belief into them so that they hold some agency in the mechanistic world we operate in. When you contact an angel, you aren't necessarily contacting a winged being that resides somewhere beyond the thermosphere; you're tapping into an atavistic part of the collective unconscious that is also found deep in the subconscious folds of your own mind. Such collective creations suggest we are all connected on a matrix of consciousness.

I recently just sort of ventured into an imaginal realm I've never read about. Maybe my imagination dredged it up. Maybe others before me laid the bedrock and foundation of this place. The creation didn't feel as if it came from my own imagination. I found myself wandering the streets of the City of Stillness.

In the City of Stillness, the citizens are wraith-like creatures that barely register on the existence scale, but they're there. I run into a few of them every time. They are non-threatening yet entirely unhelpful.

Articulation by way of speech not only doesn't work but also drives these citizens away. They’re like cats, the denizens of this soporific city are; they have to be seduced into communication. It took a few sessions to learn that this is done through the breath.

They appear on the long exhales. The sustained expiration of air from the lungs forces them to emerge from the probability haze, etching themselves into existence from the very substance that the meditator summons in his mind's eye by expelling oxygen borrowed from the world and immediately returned.

(Orfeo trovatore stanco, Giorgio de Chirico--1970)

Of course they go wordless. They have what one would assume to be heads, though no such features as eyes, ears, mouth, nor nose. This is not to say that they could not be beautiful. They can be downright breathtaking—literally so—though they are devoid of any notions of eroticism.

I have been in the dark as to what purpose they serve. Maybe it is overly colonial for me to assume they should serve a purpose. What purpose do I serve, after all? Are they meant to guide wanderers like myself through the treacherous terrain that they inhabit—terrain way beyond the outskirts where I bump into them? Are they warning me to turn back and open my eyes?

Something whispers to me that they are cross-sectional versions of me inhabiting liminal mindspaces—templates of what is possible for me to become, or ideals I can only ever aspire to but never reach, cursed as I am with a meat wagon on this mechanical plane.

If that is the case, then it follows that the City of Stillness is an idealization of the world I wish to one day inhabit—a sprawling metropolis where you are never bothered by small talk, gossip, underhanded compliments, or monologues of oneupsmanship. In such a city, speaking would be extraneous, and communication would be done on vibes extended and felt. Hence the lack of mouths.

This city that appears in some of my meditations is a sheath meant to be pulled over the world I currently reside in. Such pulling over is meant to be cumbersome—and perhaps well-nigh impossible—like the all-encompassing tents that exterminator companies slap over infested houses, the ones you never quite manage to catch them in the act of deploying.

The City of Stillness is an ideal that will never be realized. It is the shadow part of me fooling no one but itself into believing that it's what it wants the world to be. Through all this meditating—along with the fasting and the silence and the self-flagellating—I've been rendered overly sensitive to people's flaws when speaking. This is the opposite of resilience. Too often, I catch myself complaining about others’ desperate need to speak out, to look for validation and approval. I wish everyone to be damn quiet, but do so volubly.

But these are rules I shouldn't expect everyone to play by, because this space from which I send this dispatch isn't the City of Stillness. This space is objective, shared reality. Who am I to impose ground rules on others? Maybe if I keep on meditating, if I keep on vibing with the silent, mouthless denizens that shimmer into existence, I will find that sweet spot between the ability to shut up and the even more magnanimous ability to just listen and not always judge.

The City of Stillness is where I go to make the City of the World tolerable, and dare I say even pleasurable. People who flap their gums overly much mean no harm; they can't help it. And why should I be so damn fragile as to not abide at least a bit of it? Anthropology can be fun, after all.

Thank you for reading Third-Eye LASIK. Check out my novels below:

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