Babbling vs. being

I just did one of those wild-goose-chases through Wikipedia; it started with voodoo (a student in my poetics class is doing a paper on voodoo incantations) and covered all the ground between that and Yoga, Wicca, trance, grimoires, and Hildegard von Bingen. Plus I recently read an article about the importance of daydreaming aka letting your mind wander. Which leaves me wondering about spirituality and mysticism in general and in particular. t., I am making the following an "instead" for your account of the Buddhist monk retreat. ;) A self-centered hyperactive modern-day intellectual control-freak's troubles, mostly plaintain leaves, but perhaps someone has something to say on this.

***

Meditative states of mind, mysticism, and such, are a modality of perception, experience or just "being" that I am totally missing out on. I feel bad about this, not only because I crave experience and knowledge and am annoyed at not having all possible means of seeing the world at my disposal, but also because I know that this mode of experience is supposedly beneficial to one's "inner peace", and that is a thing I am really lacking too. Mind you, I'm not talking abouts standard piety or institutionalized religion, that doesn't even map via the opium metaphor, but about personal spiritual experience in its various shades. States of meditation, states of prayer, states of "flow" when doing creative work. 

I recall some approximation to these from my earlier life, though hardly in a traditional religious context - most of my devoutly Catholic prayers were just babbling to an assumed listener who never got a chance to answer, and most of my faith consisted of imposing rules on my mind and feeling bad for being unable to obey them. But I did have these blissful moments (please, nobody pull a mercutioesque joke on that...) on lonely walks through nature, when I was not forced to think or fulfill any tasks, just enjoying the sunlight and feeling connected to the assumed whatever there is beyond. Gothic cathedrals, I must admit, managed to produce such an effect too. Then there was the way I let my mind wander when practicing the clarinet, or drawing, or composing, or making jewelry out of those tiny little beads of which you need several hundred for a single necklace - I hardly do any of these pastimes regularly nowadays, I have neither time nor patience for finishing any long-term creative projects. Then there's the rush of inspiration that produces cryptic poetry and lyrical prose, but that's known to have been painful and obsessive at times, and while it leaves me feeling accomplished, it also exhausts me. 

Nowadays, I am either too busy figuring out intellectual academic stuff, or I fill up my spare time with said "research" odysseys, crawling anything from livejournal poetry communities to fashion blogs (horribly superficial, I don't really know why I am doing this) to newspaper websites to Wikipedia, going where my interest leads me. Of course this is partly a good thing - exploring, collecting knowledge, randomly wandering, and most of all, finding out about things which I would earlier on have forbidden myself to explore because wanting to know about them contradicted my religious, or educational, or general self-miserablifying convictions. So I've freed my intellect, fine. Yet it remains my intellect alone that is free, and it is kept occupied by constantly having to process informative input. 

When I do calm down, it is usually so late and I am usually so tired that I go to sleep immediately. When I end up praying out of habit for some reason or other, it's the old babbling thing all over again. I hardly ever switch off my internal monologue, judgement, evaluation, my hyperactive intellect. 

Of course I know it's not only lack of time and abundance of distraction that are keeping me from that famous "letting go". It is also, to speak bluntly, the fear of insanity that has accompanied hyper-sensitive, poetic, overly associative me for most of my life. If I switch off my judgement, if I just drift off, wander away, let go of my "I" (or was that the "self"? The "me"? Can't tell them apart...) - and just experience, just exist, how do I know that I will be able to come back? How do I know that the things I experience are not "unreal", sickening, hallucinative, dangerous? How do I know that I am "me" if I let go of my internal judge? 

I have the intuition that it would be good for me to do so once in a while, that spirituality in the sense of calming down, taking a break, opening up and listening, would be inspiring, healing, etcetera etcetera (babbling again...). But I know that while I strive to attain it because my intellectual reasoning tells me it is good, or even because I emotionally crave for it, I won't obtain it. 

Some people use drugs, but that's clearly hazardous to health. 

Some people become followers of one definitive religion, but again, my intellect tells me that, with all of them being mostly man-made, none of them presents the ultimate road to truth (is there an ultimate truth?). I am fascinated by the multitude of traditions, rituals, folk-lore stories there are in connection with various religions, but I have no cultural connection to most of them, and the one I might still have an affinity to because I was brought up in it has proved to make me miserable (also, I don't agree with the Vatican on the usual list of things). 

Some people pay loads of money for yoga classes or hypnosis. I'm not sure I have that money.

Worst of all, I want a recipe, and I want results fast, because I am so accustomed to achieving goals fast. Bnaaaaa.