The Prison Cell Meditation by Damien Echols
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Damien Echols was wrongfully imprisoned and put on death row for 18 years. He credits dogma-free meditation with helping him stay sane during that difficult time.
Keeping your mind in the present moment requires practice, but mastering meditation of any kind can show clear medical benefits like lowered blood pressure and better sleep.
Damien's meditation technique of choice was Magick, or what he describes as energy circulation via non-religious rituals.
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DAMIEN ECHOLS:
Damien Echols is the author of the New York Times bestseller Life After Death (Plume, 2013), and his new book, HIGH MAGICK: A Guide to the Spiritual Practices That Saved My Life on Death Row. He lives with his wife, Lorri, in Harlem.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Damien Echols: You don't have to believe in it. There's no dogma. Even like I said it uses iconography and symbolism from things like gnostic Christianity and esoteric Judaism, things like that. But it doesn't require you to believe in these things. The reason it uses this symbolism is, for example, in the part of the country that I grew up in there are literally places where you come to a four way stop and there are churches on all four corners. So even if you're completely atheist, even if you're repelled by these things, they are still part of your psyche, still part of our culture. So we on some level respond to those things in some way. That doesn't mean we necessarily have to believe in them for magick to work.
Like I said the people who devise these techniques wanted to know what works, why it works, how it works, and how we can make it work better. You don't have to believe in any of this any more than you have to believe that your muscles are going to get bigger by going to the gym.
The way that I guess one of the things that was so hard about Eastern traditions like Zen was you focus almost entirely on staying in the present moment all the time. That is really, really hard. Once you actually start trying to do that you realize how out of control your thoughts are. Our thoughts chase themselves around like a dog chasing its own tail all the time from the time we get up until the time we go to sleep. And a lot of the Eastern traditions deal with almost wrestling against that. Every time you realize you're doing it, bringing yourself back to the present moment, back to the present moment over and over and over. For me I didn't get a lot of results out of that. I never found myself in the present moment m ore than I was whenever I started the practices. Ceremonial magick on the other hand what it does is it doesn't really address that at all. Instead you're dealing like, for example, on energy circulation practices where you're circulating chi through different parts of your body, you're trying to energize different energy centers. It runs down through your spine. Doing that as a side effect you become more and more present. And I didn't even realize a lot of these practices say, for example, the lesser banishing ritual of the pentagram, when you would learn these things traditionally the organization, the Order, would give you these exercises and they would not tell you what they're going to do. They would not tell you what they're for. They would say "go practice this for a year, come back and talk to us then. And if you're interested in learning more and going forward we'll talk about it then." Whenever you came back they would say "okay, well what did you experience?" That's how they would know if you had actually been practicing them or not. So I would practice these techniques, the middle pillar, the lesser banishing ritual of the pentagram, and one day while I was in prison I bent over to tie my shoes and I realized, without even trying to do so, I was in the present moment. And it was almost like an atomic bomb going off because it was for the very first time in my life I realized "oh my god, I'm completely in the present moment!" Of course the second you think that it's shattered, and you're back to thinking or whatever. But it was even after years of Zen practice it was the first time that I had truly experienced that, and it was due to ceremonial magick.
One of the techniques that I use, you know, the analogy I used earlier about flushing yourself out like a cup of water, this is a technique that flushes our thoughts out. If you have a song going through your head over and over or if you're...
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6 сен 2024
