Kimberly Steele

Thinking Like a Mage series:

https://kimberlysteele.dreamwidth.org/tag/thinking+like+a+mage

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a symbol is worth a thousand pictures. Symbols occur to us in obvious ways all the time: the red cross that means first aid or health care, the color green on a traffic light that tells us Go, and the very alphabet letters of this sentence, which your human brain miraculously puts together and deciphers a message from me to you.

The human brain is wired to unpack symbols. For this reason, one of the great tragedies of our time was the hobbling of the Christian tradition of discursive meditation. Discursive meditation, once common practice, was nearly done away with during the twentieth century. Personally, I was shamefully ignorant of discursive meditation until well after my college years, and that’s too bad, because I would have been a much happier, smarter, more well-adjusted person had I discovered it sooner.

What Is Discursive Meditation?

Discursive meditation is a procedural method of thinking where one severely limits ones thoughts to a narrow focus and then deeply explores the object of that focus. Discursive meditation is one of the great traditions of the West. European Medieval monks codified exercises of prayer, discursive meditation, and mysticism, commonly using individual Bible topics or passages as meditation subjects. Only in the 20th century did the practice become nearly extinct among regular people. My friend’s father, who is now near the age of 80, was taught Catholic discursive meditation when he studied to become a priest (he obviously decided against becoming a priest).

The picture below is an Orthodox depiction of Saint Benedict of Nursia, a 6th century monk who is considered founding father of discursive meditation.  


If you want to try discursive meditation for yourself, all you have to do is pick an object, find a chair, plant yourself in it, and go into anywhere from five to thirty minutes of intense thought about that object. For instance, as I write this, there is a pencil sitting to the right of my right hand. The pencil was most likely made in China as it was part of a Dollar Tree pack of Halloween-themed pencils. It is about seven years old. It is made of soft wood and its writing tip is made of graphite. The pencil was invented by a blind-in-one-eye scientist named Nicholas-Jacques Conte serving in Napoleon’s army. The etymology of the word pencil means “little tail”, which evokes images of the delicate brushes used to illuminate medieval manuscripts. Writing itself was most likely invented in ancient India, though some speculate it was simultaneously invented in China and Sumeria. From what we can tell, only humans engage in it. I can also relate to pencils personally: in the opening scene of my first novel, two characters earn a high school detention because one borrows the other’s pencil. I could go on at length, but I hope you’ve understood that a pencil isn’t just a pencil. With discursive meditation, a mere pencil becomes a treasure trove full of information to be discovered and explored.

When Westerners threw out discursive meditation for the plethora of garbage that replaced it, our ability to communicate and negotiate with each other also went down the toilet. I don’t entirely blame myself for the disaster my brain became as a young person. Television displaced reading as a popular habit in the 1950s and I grew up in a household that was obsessed with it. Nowadays, internet/smart phones are displacing television. In effect, most people born after 1940 became consumerist zombie victims of Madison Avenue and I was as bad as any.

One predicament of the human mind is our tendency to free-associate and daisy chain our thoughts whether we try to do so consciously or not. A simpler of saying this is “we tend to jump to conclusions”. The less disciplined our minds are, the quicker we are to make snap judgements and rash decisions because of the daisy-chains that are always going on in our mental-emotional backgrounds. Discursive meditation is an excellent way of grasping the reins of the subconscious and bringing it into the light of understanding.

There is so much in our rich, weird world to meditate upon.  No single human mind could ever get to it all.  I recently commented to my atheist, rationalist husband that one could spend an entire lifetime in discursive meditation on a single tarot card.  If the tarot card is a trump, one could spend several lifetimes!

Eastern meditation, where one deliberately empties one’s mind, can easily become poisonous and destructive. Used improperly and without the context of traditional co-disciplines, various Hindu and Buddhist meditation techniques decimate rational thought processes and provide a convenient vacuum where ill-intentioned gurus, advertisers, and corporate interests can implant their programming.

Bastardized, out-of-context Buddhist and Hindu meditation of the kind taught in American yoga studios and corporate retreats represses the thought process and prevents it from exploring the potentials of the object by shoving it all neatly back under the surface. The result: The subconscious mind remains a hot mess. Despite frantic efforts to supplant the Christian traditions with Eastern ones, is it any wonder we have four generations since the invention of television who are tormented by depression, anger, greed, and materialism? One way or the other, we have been taught and encouraged to empty our minds. Driven by subconscious urges placed in us by the heads of large corporations and sociopathic mainstream media, we desperately seek refuge in religion, including the godless religion of atheism/Progress.  Most religion is eager to tell us that all of our materialistic wishes will come true if we simply believe.

Discursive meditation easily reveals nefarious agendas and renders the forces behind them powerless, so it is no wonder the powers that be have no interest in letting people know about it!