Spiritual practice doesn’t heal the psyche as far as I’m concerned. Serious spiritual practice is tangential to it. You could still remain an extremely psychologically flawed individual and accomplish quite a great deal in spiritual practice at the same time, without one necessarily affecting the other. There’s a certain gross level in which they overlap, and the really severe distortions do become tempered, but at the subtle level, you can remain, as I did, extremely neurotic while you’re building up the resonance of practice accomplishment. I think that when spiritual practice becomes psychologized, it’s a very poor substitute for therapy, and it’s very poor psychology. It’s a different field. I think that the confusion between the two is largely due to a misreading of certain Jungian ideas, and other early 20th century ideas, that need to be sorted out. And I don’t feel that it is terribly sorted out in the literature. The New Age movement certainly has made matters much worse, where spiritual practice almost becomes synonymous with self-help, and self-healing. And I don’t think that they are. I think spiritual accomplishment has to do with the nature of consciousness and how it “en-worlds” an individual—ultimately, in the mystical sense, how an individual moves beyond the reification and division of a knowing subject and a known object, whatever that object might be.
The basic intention in my own practice, as the basic intention would be in my artwork, is to reach beyond conventional understanding and distill the resonance of that reaching — for no reason whatsoever. There’s a term in kabbalah, it’s a Hebrew term, lishma, which means ‘for its own sake.’ Meaning that something that is truly good, is a good in and of itself. There’s no reason needed. It’s based on its own inherent, innate goodness, which ultimately is the root of beauty. Spiritual aspiration is nothing other than a thirst for this purposeless, inherently beautiful, and inherently good, direction in one’s life. Ultimately, the more one acquires, builds up this resonance, the more one contacts the ultimate sacrament of the mind, which breaks down this dichotomy between the offerer, the practitioner and that which they are offering, which is their time and their effort, and ultimately the illusion that there is a recipient of the offerings that have been made…which in religion, is God. But, I am not a theist. So I don’t posit a creator god. The offering is made just simply based on its own inherent goodness for no reason whatsoever to nothing whatsoever.
One only becomes a practitioner out of love. It is undifferentiated, like the vastness of space, and it embraces everything through the direct recognition of beauty. This is the basis of the gnosis. To make a conceptual object out of that love, even one that encompasses everything within itself, defeats the purpose. It must remain open and pure, so that anything, everything, or nothing at all, can unfold without ever leaving its essence. To dedicate yourself to the pursuit of this requires discipline, clarity, and persistence. The goal is the absorption of the whole of your being, and the enworldment of that being, into the heart of sublime beauty. This is not a thing that can be calculated or reasoned out. It is a wild, crazy way to live. However there are those who have burned down everything else. We can’t live in society anymore, it’s too late. For us, the hardness of these disciplines redeem what would otherwise be total oblivion.
(David Chaim Smith)