Into Mysterium II: Trust
Trust, Control, Discernment
From September 25 to October 9, I’ll be running Mysterium at Casa Tilo in Barcelona. I’ve described it as a “pop-up mystery school”, but I could just as easily call it a 2-week long casual ritual, a shamanic hang-out, an art space where we nudge the gods awake… more than anything it’s a space set aside for deep play with the Mystery, and with other folks who love the Mystery and want to set up a playground at the edge of it.
You can find more info on it here, and apply to join here. Below, I’ll look at one of the themes that feels most alive to explore at Mysterium.
TL;DR: at Mysterium, we’re going to explore the relationship between Trust, Control, and Discernment — between surrendering to what wants to happen, and acknowledging that our own thoughts and feelings and actions are a necessary part of what wants to happen.
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Paradox has snagged me lately. A certain style of embodied paradoxes — they often feel like an internal knot, or a catch 22. Sometimes they just feel like opposing pulls.
The broadest one I’ve been in is something between “masculine” and “feminine.” I’m a man, and earlier this year I became aware of both a deep desire to be more fully in my masculine, and a desire to open up more fully into my feminine.
A more personal paradox lately has been shaped by “Freedom” at one end, and “Integrity” at the other. This sense that I want to be more free, but that doing so risks my sense of integrity — and that I want to be higher integrity, but doing so limits my freedom.
There are a few more of these — ones I’ve felt in myself, and ones that I’ve been helping clients through — and what I’ve mainly learned is that when it comes to paradoxes, one side tends to open the other.
When I allowed myself to unapologetically open into more feminine expression, it opened up a lot of room to expland into more masculine presence. When I opened into more masculine presence, it opened up a lot of room to expand into more feminine expression.
When I allow myself to move through the discomfort of being increasingly Free, I find myself in deeper clarity about my own Integrity. When I let myself stand firm in clearer integrity, it allows me to move with deeper Freedom.
Back and forth we go, back and forth we go.
And when both sides of a paradox open — at a certain point, they open up beyond paradox, into an obvious and unproblematic unity.
One of the core themes of my work — and thus of the Mysterium gathering in September — comes out of the space between the following phrases:
We’re here to renew the sacred.
We’re here to wake the gods.
We’re here to make whole the Goddess.
I’m gonna be totally real with you here, I’m really not sure what those mean most days. Sometimes they clarify in specific situations, showing me very clearly where the work is — other times I just stare at the words and they feel too huge to grip anything.
But one thing that’s become clear over and over again is that this kind of work only takes place inside a field of deep, deep trust.
It’s on me to trust what’s unfolding, to trust the timing, trust my patience, trust my urgency, trust my intuitions and my skepticisms and my sense that even if I’m frustrated and impatient, if it doesn’t feel like the right time then it doesn’t feel like the right time.
The opposite of trust is control. We live in a world that’s heavy on control, malnourished on trust. All of our cultural values revolve around keeping things under control, at every layer of life. Air conditioning to control the climate in our homes; clocks and calendars to control our time; infrastructure to control our access to water, electricity, shelter; monetary systems to control… well, kind of everything; schools and research institutions to get more knowledge so we can get more control; social expectations to control the flow of intimacy and threat; legal codes to control acceptable and unaccepable behaviors; fake buttons at crosswalks to give us a sense of control over when the light turns green.
If our society worships a god, that god is Control — along with its children, Comfort and Convenience.
There’s nothing especially wrong with control, comfort, or convenience — just like there’s nothing wrong with deer or elk. But when an ecosystem gets imbalanced, when the wolves disappear, when the deer start breeding out of control, eating all the shrubs, destroying the ecosystems of smaller mammals and insects, starting a cascade of effects that denude the whole area… then yeah, there’s a problem.
The psychic ecosystem of our world is imbalanced, overrun with an endless drive for Control. Even most of the plans to change, improve, or fix it — to usher in a new golden age — they mostly center on controlling things better or figuring out which new things to control.
When [the Left Hemisphere, the part of us that seeks control] is presented with evidence that what it is doing is not working, its invariable response is first to deny that there is a problem, but, if pushed, to respond not that we have done too much of something that is ineffective, but that we simply need to do more of it.
— Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things
There’s a fear most of us have about trust, a fear that to trust is to be naive or dumb or undiscerning. A fear that to trust means to be passive, to accept whatever happens to us, to let the world walk all over us while we try to convince ourselves it’s fine.
This vision of trust is a distortion at best — it’s how trust appears when looked at through a lens of control; the same way that the bright and starry night sky looks like a dozen or so faint dots of light when looked at through an atmosphere of chemical and visual pollution.
Real trust includes, by definition, self-trust.
Trust God, trust the universe, trust the unfolding currents of the Dao, trust the ground of Being — and don’t forget that this divine fabric of existence includes you and your knowledge and skills and failures and intuitions and needs and foibles and skepticisms. Trust doesn’t just mean lying down and letting the tide take you out to sea — it means assessing and honing the trustworthiness of your own being.
At Mysterium, I don’t have a program or a schedule or a curriculum, just some rough guides. And one of the guiding principles is to trust what comes out of the group, and the individuals that comprise it. To trust the desires and suspicions and intuitions and tensions and the energetic Fuck Yeses that come out of the specific group of humans and their specific human senses and relationships, in concert with the deeper trust in existence itself, and what it throws at us.
If you want to explore that trust with us for a couple weeks in Barcelona, you can find more info here, and apply to join here.
Hiya River. I've included a link to this lovely article in my collection of quotes about faith, which a man named Jay Gaskill described as "a critical but curious mind’s readiness to adopt a reality model (even if provisionally) for which there is less than absolute, empirical proof". Here's the URL in case you want to take a look: https://jackmartinleith.com/quotes-about-faith/ (scroll down almost to the bottom). Warm wishes from Bristol, UK.