You have to kind of melt into it, or wade into it like it’s the Gulf of Mexico from the Quintana Roo side. A salty lake with gently lapping mini-waves.
Either way you have to merge without the help (or really the hindrance) of all your acquired mental tools and skills and disciplines. You need to put aside the rational and in some cases judgmental constructs that you’ve been assembling for so many decades — all of those structural towers of intellectual, influential, scholastic, explorational and experience-based building blocks of your identity.
Attaining satori isn’t really about therapy or psychology (sorry, Cary) or this or that terra firma, furrowed-brow examination or rumination. It’s about stepping off a kind of misty, moss-covered cliff or, if you will, deciding that the rules, restrictions and governances that you’ve been living by are just obstructions, and that a blue-sky realm awaits.
You can’t really embrace satori without letting all that other stuff go…all of that material you’ve been accumulating and evaluating and sifting through since your early teens. None of that stuff really matters in the realm of the mystical.
What is the opposite of satori? Easy — just read the Hollywood Elsewhere comment threads any day of the week. 93% of what is posted in these oppressive threads represent an immersion into resplendent piss pools…they own these pools…a kind of snippy, dart-throwing, walnut-brained nowheresville, liquified and lemon-yellow. I realize that for some HE is a “hate read” and that’s fine, but I’m not a hater per se….I am (or am trying to be each day) an honest illuminator.
Tom Wolfe, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test“, pages 139 thru 142:
