Hic sunt Dracones.

Towards a Contemplative Dragonology.

The heart itself is but a small vessel, yet dragons are there, and there are also lions; there are poisonous beasts and all the treasures of evil. But there too is God, the angels, the life and the kingdom, the light and the apostles, the heavenly cities and the treasuries of grace—all things are there.

—St. Macarius.

There is the music of Heaven in all things.

― St. Hildegard of Bingen

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As a teenager, somehow I got it into my head to explore my unconscious mind. I would guess now that this was prompted by a High School Social Studies¹ discussion on Sigmund Freud and Psychoanalysis. I had also become aware of various 20th-century avant-garde movements that had been influenced by Psychoanalysis such as Dada and Surrealism. Adding to the allure were the lyrics of early R.E.M. which also took inspiration from these movements. Even back then I had a sense of life gone awry and that real human life was not at all what people said it was. Yes, it was an affected teenage version of this same enduring impulse. Looking back now it is clear I was at least sincerely trying to look sincere².

Initially, this simply took the form of adolescent experiments in automatic writing. Poetry, I called it. Additionally, I was a guitarist in an aspiring high school rock band. Though we mostly did covers³ we also occasionally tried our hand at writing original songs⁴. To mixed results, to be sure. It wasn't until my freshman year of college that I actually tried to put this exploration of the unconscious into actual practice. The method I choose was simple enough. I would just stop repressing my thoughts. And therefore let anything and everything arise without interference. As if one's freshman year in college isn't dislocating and kaleidoscopic enough, off I went naively into the wilderness of my own mind.

This turned out to be something quite other than a good idea. The problem with this exploration is that it actually worked. I was suddenly flooded with thoughts, memories, and ideas the like of which I had never experienced and had little inkling were contained within me. And before these could even pass away, it seemed even more troubling thoughts were waiting to emerge. As if they had been only waiting for their moment, fully ready to engage in cognitive one-upmanship. This astonished me further still. With virtually no one resembling adult authority paying attention to what I was doing or giving me any guidance, I slipped unnoticed into what might be likened to a spiritual crevasse. I had no idea how to get out or even whether I should. I was stunned and overwhelmed by what had arisen in me. This had negative real-world effects. It was also another step in seeing that the ostensibly ordered world of human endeavor was anything but the whole story. To my young and now somewhat addled mind, I felt I had been lied to and deceived. I was now determined to find the truth.

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In Western Mythology a Dragon guards the treasure we seek. Somehow this dragon must be vanquished, or at least tricked, for us to achieve our goal and acquire the treasure, be it gold or the love of a princess, etc. This idea is laid out schematically by Joseph Campbell in his A Hero with a Thousand Faces and was popularized for my generation, and those subsequent, in the original Star Wars Trilogy⁵. This particular framing of the quest narrative certainly informed my own attempt to explore the unconscious⁶.

Now that I am much older I am seeing the dangerous flaw in this approach. By turning our interior dragons into implacable enemies, ones which we need to overcome or perhaps even destroy, we set up an inevitable, and unwinnable conflict both within and against ourselves. This can only exacerbate our alienation from our inner life, which is the opposite of what we were hoping to attain. Though, paradoxically, it may very well be a recipe for worldly achievement--maybe even a kind of greatness--it is also a recipe for personal misery and a broken relationship with the world and the people around us.

One may seek to overcome and vanquish the Dragon of failure, for example, once and for all. Instead, the more you fight this Dragon the stronger it gets. Driven by trying overcome failure, the more successful you become the more of a failure you tend to suspect that you are. You may become a complete fraud in your own eyes. It is a shadow that is difficult, maybe even impossible, to get out from underneath. This has driven the Western Faustian Man⁷ into the Devil's Bargain that has been playing out before our eyes, now and for centuries. We don't seem to know how to do otherwise.

So how else should one respond to our interior dragons? Particularly, when what we symbolically call a Dragon is nothing less than what represents something painful in us. Something which we are loathed to accept in ourselves, let alone make peace with. I don’t have a complete answer to that. Yet the outlines of a different, and actually very ancient way may be slowly becoming clearer to me.

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At first glance, what I am calling the Arsenios Option may look like primarily advice about real estate and getting out of the world of striving. Honestly, this is a primary aspect of it. But since most of us have nowhere else to go there is a more important and relevant sense of what the Arsenios Option might mean. This different sense forms a very simple, and direct approach to dealing with the difficulties that arise in any contemplative practice.

1. Flee the World of Distraction, Ambition, and Noise.

   We can do this almost no matter where we are. But given the structure of postmodern life, it is wise to acknowledge this is surprisingly difficult to do even under good circumstances. Worldly distractions are so alluring⁸. No sooner has one type of diversion been tamped down than another one arises somewhere else to take its place. We are far from helpless in this. But it is wise to see just how powerful these distractions can be and have become. We seek them out and get attached to our distractions. Distraction is a dragon. One we cannot vanquish by sheer willpower.

2. Be Silent. Be in Silence.

   This is also not easy to find. But it is possible. There are still zones of quiet even in noisy cities. One just has to find them and make them a priority. Getting out of the human world and into nature, if possible, is also a way. Though a good start, physical quiet is not enough. Silence is something other than what can be measured on a sound meter. I am told that noise or quiet shouldn’t matter, and this is surely true. But to start we need quiet. In this, we can begin or deepen a practice of silence.

3. Dwell in Stillness.

   This is the crucial component of the question at hand. Once we have (somewhat) put our distractions aside. And once we have found a certain measure of quiet, we can take the most important step. We can simply be still. This is meant quite literally, at least at first. We practice remaining physically still so that our minds can learn to be still. This is not easy. Even more so than our bodies, our minds are restless. Trying to force our minds to still tend to only increase the chatter and noise. Instead, we can do nothing. We stop fighting. We simply rest. We dwell in stillness. We realize there is nothing for us to achieve and let things be. This is an assent to let silence do its work in us. When we find we have been caught up in our thoughts we simply return. To our breath, to a prayer word, etc. Or in simply noting that we have been caught up, we have already returned. There is nothing to vanquish, nothing to achieve and there is no way to fail.

To be fair, this isn’t exactly an easy choice to make. As it will put you on what is often an excruciatingly painful path. But not choosing this path is worse by far. It is perilous enough to suffer the consequences of riding the Dragon. It is instead a complete disaster when you let the Dragon ride you.

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I am not saying anything new here. Thank God for that. Many of you already have a longstanding spiritual practice and all I say here is merely pointing out the obvious. Still, I think it is all worth pointing this out again, be it obvious or not. The question of how to respond to our disturbing times is a very real one. In the confusion and atomization of the technological age, it is very easy to turn those who disagree with us into Dragons to be vanquished and usually ones of the most sinister kind. I see this happening all around and on all the various sides of the ideological spectrum. I see this, first and foremost quite clearly in myself⁹. I also see efforts by powerful forces in government and media and popular culture¹⁰ to stoke this tendency in us. For reasons of their own, it seems they want us at each other throats. This is a disturbing trend, to say the least.

The hope is that in the Arsenios Option in either its exterior form of relocation or its interior form in contemplation,¹¹ we can begin to live differently than how we are being told. That we don't have to live as victims of our own disordered inner lives, nor of the external disorder that seems to be increasingly all around us. We can begin to formulate a new/old Dragonology to form an entirely different culture and a very different way of being in the world. To do so we must learn to be at peace with the Dragons we find all around us, but more importantly the ones within our own hearts.

Maybe then we can let go of trying to vanquish all our Dragons—which are nothing other than the disowned parts of our own broken self—and therefore find rest. Maybe then we can start, as St. Hildegard tells us, to hear the Music of Heaven in all things—even in the worst of our Dragons.

Or rather, especially there.

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Visiting the Temple of Accumulated Frangrance

Not knowing the way
To the temple,
I enter serveral miles
into cloudy peaks

Ancient trees, 
A deserted path--
Deep in the mountains
Somewhere a bell.

The sound of a spring
Choked by towering rocks
The color of sunlight
Chilled by green pines

Near evening
At the corner of an empty pool,
Calm meditation
Subdues the poison dragons
of the mind.

--Wang Wei
Tang Dynasty
Around 750 A.D.

(Greg Whincup translation)

1. “Social Studies” was the unfortunate name they gave to what is otherwise known as History class. I wonder what they call it now?

2. As always, this reminds me of the old George Burns gag, “In Hollywood, the most important thing is to be sincere. Once you’ve learned to fake that, you’ve got it made.” Similarly, I recognized, as many teenagers do, the insincerity of suburban life. My response was probably equally so. It is probably the best most of us can do.

3. Ah, the Eighties. The Eighties…

4. This even prompted something of a split in the band as the bassist and I favored the more surreal approach which was unpalatable to the keyboardist. The keyboardist was quite popular with the ladies. So despite his obviously reactionary position, his opinion had weight. Alas.

5. It is still a popular conception of life. A good portion of the products of pop culture hew to this view. It is still doing brisk business by likes of Jordan Peterson, etc.

6. Later, I would use the conception laid out in the Divine Comedy to try and enlarge my view of this quest. This adds one crucial detail. You need a guide, or otherwise, you will get lost. Our society not only lacks guides and mentors it is almost anathema to try and be one. Liberalism is the ideology of abandonment. It is considered presumptuous to try and “tell someone what to do”. Hence, the mess we’re in. Then again, there may be a shortage of mentors because nobody knows what to do. A terrifying thought.

7. From Wikipedia: According to Spengler, the Faustian culture began in Western Europe around the 10th century, and had such expansionary power that by the 20th century it was covering the entire earth, with only a few regions where Islam provided an alternative worldview. He described it as having a world feeling inspired by the concept of infinitely wide and profound space, the yearning towards distance and infinity. The term "Faustian" refers to Goethe's Faust (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had a massive effect on Spengler), in which a dissatisfied Intellectual is willing to make a pact with the Devil in return for unlimited knowledge. Spengler believed that this represented the Western Man's limitless metaphysic, unrestricted thirst for knowledge, and constant confrontation with the Infinite.

8. And like this very post, can distract us by telling us how distracted we are. If they weren’t alluring, though, everyone would leave the world of ambition. But we don’t.

9. Though I always do find new and clever ways to hide this fact from myself.

10. Again, Popular Culture is neither. It is neither of the people nor anything but an anticulture. It is one manufactured for us by large corporations.

11. Or preferably, both.