Mystery Skool

A Mystery Skool Production

by Female Background

At the core of Ultracultural Others there abides a deep respect for mystery.

This respect is a complicated set of gestures, not passive as one might suspect, but instead it requires a gently observational approach. Not the kind of aggressive apprehension that hopes to soon digest and process information as data for an inevitable narrative, structured and solved, as it were. A respect for mystery brings a meditative mode into the cognitive realm, a true interdisciplinary perspective.

“Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going?“ 

If the focus of Mystery Skool is mystery itself, what are the tools and faculties to cultivate for the mastery and apprehension of such a subject? It would be a mistake to consider solutions, or the pathways leading to those solutions as appropriate subjects of study. After all, once a solution is arrived upon, the mystery is gone. To put a finer point on it, the aim is not to solve mysteries, but rather, to know mystery itself.

“We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it. This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us. The fact that people have in this sense been cowardly has done infinite harm to life; the experiences … that are so closely related to us, have through our daily defensiveness been so entirely pushed out of life that the senses with which we might have been able to grasp them have atrophied. “

This belies an underlying wisdom, that underpinning any systemic truth is faith and that the substrate of faith is mystery.

I have a dear, old friend. He lives underground, like a mole, and in this way he’s also blind and in this way he’s also a seer. He reveals through manifestation the very necessity of that underpinning, that substrate which he calls his “bases”:

“Where are the primary causes on which I can rest, where are my bases? Where am I going to get them? I exercise thinking, and, consequently, for me every primary cause immediately drags with it yet another, still more primary one, and so on ad infinitum. Such is precisely the essence of all consciousness and thought.” 

Should the invocation of the many disciplines protected and disseminated under the Ultracultural aegis (divination, goddess culture, yoga, hip hop, shamanism, social justice, and art, to name just a few) cause one to balk, consider the practice of open awareness meditation. One practices opening the mind to a panoramic awareness without a specific focus, developing the capacity to be present with whatever arises, the mind as a river with objects floating by.

“But the fear of the inexplicable has not only impoverished the reality of the individual; it has also narrowed the relationship between one human being and another, which has as it were been lifted out of the riverbed of infinite possibilities and set down in a fallow place on the bank, where nothing happens.” 

While the capacity to observe whatever arises is akin to living with mystery, it also allows the mind to impact lightly upon its object and reciprocally so. Instead of “lifting” things out of the riverbed, let the paranoid flotsam whispering dilettantism, or worse, appropriation, pass by. Acknowledge it without the imposition of structure or narrative that would place those notions above any other. Intellectual paranoia paradoxically causes self-editing before there is anything there to edit.

“In my soul I have never been a coward, though I constantly turned coward in reality, but-don’t laugh too quickly, there’s an explanation for that; rest assured, I have an explanation for everything.”

I’m on to the next one
On to the next
I’m on to the next one
On to the next
I’m on to the next one
On to the next
I’m on to the next one
On to the next

“Don’t be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen… One must be so careful with names anyway; it is so often the name of an offense that a life shatters upon, not the nameless and personal action itself, which was perhaps a quite definite necessity of that life and could have been absorbed by it without any trouble.” 

The non-hierarchical is a true signpost of the Other, of Goddess culture, of nature.

It’s like this and like that and like this and uh
It’s like that and like this and like that and uh
It’s like this and like that and like this and uh

While these truths have been written for thousands of years they are simply parable to the body’s inimitable wisdom, or else we should have successfully communicated them to one another long ago.

Repetition of the word has always been about the body.

It’s like this and like that and like this and uh
It’s like that and like this and like that and uh
It’s like this and like that and like this and uh