Author: garyhorvitz

Inviting the new + invoking the ancient + observing the observer + awakening to what is/is not + dissolving into space = peace now.

The Absolution of the Father

For two decades before his death, he became a study in deepening humility, self-deprecating humor, compassion and generosity, a slow softening process. I don’t know if it was deliberate or if some inexorable conviction took hold of him and he simply released and rode its momentum all the way into shore.

By any measure I grew up in a traditional family—one fully aligned with the context of its time. My father was the sole provider until I entered the final year of college. When it became necessary to pay two college tuitions at the same time, my mother took a US government job not far from home. (We can laugh or cry now, because that was when college was still affordable). My parents were staunch members of the local religious community and I and my siblings were brought up in its cultural practices and traditions. We were educated in its precepts and marked our maturation by the requisite ceremonies.

My father was an academic, a scientist, in what then was a relatively obscure field-statistics. He lived by the rules of what could be seen and proven. He could also be volatile, prone to explode at his children or my mother. He was a disciplinarian, leveling strict rules of behavior and he had no uncertainties about his ethics or what constituted integrity. He served his family, his work and his community. He was a model citizen.  

For all of my youth and well into my adulthood, my mother was a long-suffering passive voice, not totally intimidated by her husband, but not inclined to stand up for herself with any conviction—at least not in front of me. Before I went away to college and then as I disappeared to the far west, confused by slogans and reacting to my own infection of righteousness, driven by spiritual unrest and the emotional fallout and social impact of the Vietnam War, I never knew her to challenge him on principles or his style of interaction. I never saw her put her foot down or ‘win’ an argument. I never saw him back down. But at the time, I no longer cared.

I was intimidated, both silently seething, withdrawing and also identifying with the insults and crude judgments he dished out not only to me on a regular basis, but to my siblings as well. His derogatory characterizations of me echoed endlessly, foretelling my reticence, half-hearted ventures, risk-aversion, fragile self-confidence, confusion and doubt. I’m not sure even now whether I was careful not to venture into anything too challenging because I was certain I would never measure up to his standards or whether I was just determined to stay out of his way. 

Fourteen I was, 
back when time slowed down and I
began to clock the distance between
father and tomorrow.
Took my time to cover my tracks
wrote out the difference between 
school and the random anarchies
fulminating under cover of darkness.
A walking cadaver I was
toe tied to family meals
and algebra into moonrise.
In the mornings 
sliding out from my slab of sleep
the symbols melted all over again.

From a much longer view, our relationship could be understood as a karmic encounter. I, introverted, confused and emotionally blocked, landing in—or choosing–a family that seemed always to bring me face to face with my internal dilemmas, forcing me to choose. Was I to break the spell and become an autonomous being? It took a decade after college before I found my ground enough to pursue a professional objective with confidence. It was the fruit of a long and deliberate progression into somatic therapeutics, all of which was a gradual embodiment as a sensing and whole emotional being with a full array of feelings and innate creative responses to new and uncertain conditions.

In retrospect, my values were largely rooted in my family, my religious community and my father’s view of the world, a world in which justice might have been the single most important value. Identifying that principle as a core value could lead to numerous side conversations here about ethics, hypocrisy, righteousness and equality. After all, he voted for Shirley Chisholm for president. But, never mind. The more immediate point is that while I maintained my distance into my thirties, even as I disguised my antipathy, even to myself, I overruled it for the sake of appearances and conducted my life as if I was an independent being, the certainty of that independence was not as secure as I might have wished. I knew myself as responsible for my own choices, yet I could not make those choices without adhering to some inner voice of caution, confused allegiance to or dependency on the voice of the inner critic–his voice, recapitulating the impossible standards he typically applied to himself.

As I was entering the professional world, something else began to happen. My mother found herself. She shut down the emotional abuse. She spoke up, refusing to stand for his bluster. She entered her own space. Lo and behold, my father began to soften. How these two phenomena interacted exactly I cannot say. My subsequent visits with them as they sailed into retirement began to assume a character of authentic affection and care.

Their children long since launched, they filled their empty nest years with travel, grandchildren and community service. My father received the rewards of his extended professional life. Throughout this process, he continued to soften, as if he was shedding the toughened skin of professional ambition and family responsibilities, being the sole breadwinner and a patriarch to his family and community.

I had grown out of the resistance and resentments, the judgments and recriminations of my younger years, but paradoxically, by transforming himself in the ways that he did, my father was not only coming to terms with his own issues (to the extent that he even regarded them as his issues), but was also helping me address my own issues with him. He was revealing my own work yet undone, giving me permission to re-enter the shuttered chambers of the past and to forgive at deeper and cleaner levels until we gradually settled into a greater peace. From that vantage point, it’s difficult to imagine how hard it is for so many others, growing up in significantly more abusive families, to find true forgiveness for themselves in the absence of any sign of real change by their parent(s).

The truth is, though I can regard myself as fortunate and have long since settled into a deepening field of gratitude for all of it, I can also look back and say we were both scarred by our relationship. He was pursuing his own flawed notions of parenting. As is true in so many families, children are not seen for who they are, but regarded as receptacles of ideas, values and behaviors he himself held close, holding me to the impossible standard to which he always held himself–most likely the standards and expectations of his own father. He was recapitulating his own childhood, exorcising his small-minded resentments against the world as he planted them in the heart-mind of his offspring. I was merely the next generational version of the same dynamic.

Some of this was surely the effect of growing up in the Great Depression. But as he healed his own scars, so I began to heal my own. Even now, just in recounting the tenacity of his buried pain, I could not swear those scars disappeared. And anyway, there’s no magic to be performed upon them. But neither do they remain visible forever. They did not diminish me any more than they diminished him or his fragile journey of turning them into objects of beauty for their own sake. The past can never be cosmetically hidden or fully excised. If we are fortunate, our wounds become portals, beautiful monsters. We may never appear to ourselves wholly unblemished, but we may well become whole, creating our own definition of purity by carrying the past more lightly.

Which brings me to consider the end of life. Yes, I am concerned with uncertainty and the unknown. I can also mollify that uncertainty by seeking the stabilizing effect of visionary perspectives. In this respect I include my father, who for those two decades before his death became a study in deepening humility, self-deprecating humor, compassion and generosity. The heavier his body became, the more lightly he carried it. He entered that slow softening process long before he died and I have no idea what consciousness he had of any of it. I don’t know if it was deliberate or if some inexorable conviction took hold of him and he simply released and rode its momentum all the way into shore. Regardless, even if the terms of that process were left largely unspoken, something important was imparted to me and to others around him.

His journey became a source of nourishment. It remains like a shadow next to me. My younger life with him was no soft ride. I don’t recall any softness in him then, but if I had a framework through which I might nourish myself or others, it would be to recognize that our innermost contemplations about how we lead our lives or the emerging frame of how we approach the end of life is not a property to keep to oneself, but instead a cultivation of what Stephen Jenkinson calls a “village-mindedness.”  We have an opportunity to demonstrate to those close to us a fearless and curious, generous and open-hearted contemplation of the unknown with the intention to offer the same to others as we offer to our selves. If that was to be my intention, then my father’s model is a good place to start.

Love comes in many forms, which can include deliberately or subliminally planting seeds informing others who have yet to consider their own uncertain future. While I would miss something if I neglected such a process, what they would miss becomes part of the equation as well. Those seeds come in the form of carefully chosen actions. Now, more than merely resting in the flow of time, the dream body makes a subtle change to a transitional state of becoming, from discerning what requires focused attention, articulation and expression to bringing the fruits of that attention into the world.

I assume a posture of stillness, cultivating Being like a river trout nosing into the oncoming current with minimal exertion. The trout is not striving, not forcing himself into the world, just waiting as conditions change and become clear, for the instant when a response is required, making the smallest adjustments necessary to exercise one’s agency while remaining unperturbed, steady within the passage of time.

That whole process might ultimately be named, what some might call a good death, even a fortunate death, a conscious transition which can begin at any time, the earlier the better, with neither panic nor anxiety nor fear nor even hope. Yes, there are surely further signposts coming along the way, yet more versions of reality to encounter and digest. I reach into the neglected territories of awareness to make sure all is attended. Whether I anticipate ultimate freedom in this life or in some other time, a certain portion of my attention is devoted to exploring the parameters of completion. And also on what continues beyond.

The Dark Side of Modernity

Modernity constantly encroaches upon and threatens to consume decolonial thinking, diversity, extremity, classifying certain people as outlaws, certain thoughts as unsanctioned and presuming to define normality, centrism and the norms of authentic self-expression. This is modernity cannibalizing itself to sanitize culture for the sake of preserving its own ever-narrowing definition.

For a word being thrown around so casually these days, one may wonder what exactly modernity means. It’s certainly everything we might initially assume it is. But let’s tease that apart. It’s been defined as a historical period that could have started as far back as Medieval times. Sometimes it’s regarded as the light arising from the Enlightenment, or even beginning sometime in the 19th century with the industrial revolution.

The most inclusive definition associates modernity with a number of historical developments: nations, languages, industrialization, mercantilism, capitalism, urbanization, mass literacy, mass media, representative government and mainly also a shift from traditional culture, meaning a proliferation of things we do when we’re not entirely focused on survival, and systems of knowledge, to the triumph of rationalism and scientific materialism. One may include a number of positive aspects to modernity such as secular culture, evolutionary thinking, developments in psychology, medicine, philosophy and emancipation. But especially now, we can’t avoid also associating environmental devastation with modernity, which is now undermining the very stability of culture and modernity itself.

A formal definition of modernity, according to Walter Mignolo’s substantial body of work on the subject, should begin with the Renaissance, coinciding with the intention of Western Europe to embark on the imperial project which had several faces and which was rationalized as bringing civilization to the New World, saving the world for Christianity and which then evolved into what we now call capitalism.

However we paint it, Modernity is synonymous with colonialism and thus, racism is inherent to it. Could the modern world look as it does today with the current economic regimes as if no imperial intentions had ever existed, no massive transport of black bodies from Africa to North and South America, no East India Company, no appropriation of native lands, forced and unpaid labor, the imposition of governance and financial obligations? I think not.

Thus, hidden behind the rhetoric of modernity, economic practices dispensed with human lives, and knowledge justified racism and the inferiority of human lives that were naturally considered dispensable.

—The Darker Side of Western Modenity

Dark bodies weren’t granted full humanity. And white bodies rationalized their moral responsibility as social systems, spiritual practices or bodies of knowledge were systematically destroyed. We continue to feel the effects of the colonial mentality 500 years later not only through globalization and neoliberal economics but through the definition of development itself and the division of the world into so-called developed and less developed cultures. The term ‘Third World’ was a French invention.

Colonialism did not advance solely as a mercantile or as an imperial military adventure. It was a religious and cultural force propagated through the cracking of indigenous linguistic code, the imposition of new languages, geographical mapping, religious indoctrination, economic subjugation, wiping out cultural memory, arbitrarily defining territories according to political or economic expediency, destroying centuries of cultural wealth, appropriating land and vast material wealth, creating a domestic class of proxy colonialists who benefited directly from the economic subjugation of their brethren and generating entrenched bureaucracies to sustain the inertia of political systems primarily serving colonial interests.

Colonialism emerged from and as what we know as western civilization, ultimately defining modernity in terms of politics, economics, religion and culture. The imperial project was to extend the definitions of civilization, language, philosophy, politics and economics to the colonized world. That initially included Latin America and Africa, extending into the Islamic world and South Asia. The definition of development itself was determined by the western colonial enterprise and persists to this day as defined by Wall street, the IMF & the World Bank. It’s primary purveyors are government agencies and diplomacy, clearing the way for multinational corporations backed, in case additional persuasion becomes necessary, by military might. Even as the overt manifestations of European imperialism dissolved in the mid-20th century, the American imperial project in the Western Hemisphere over the past 150 years is well known

Perhaps the greatest impact of colonialism was to control knowledge and especially the definition of knowledge. The definition of knowledge codifies the essential power relations between races, genders and cultures and became encoded in languages, beginning with Spanish, Portuguese, German and French, all rooted in Latin, extending more recently in English. Since knowledge and its definition is held primarily in western hands over the past few centuries, the way we think about problems and their solutions also arises from within that codification.

In that respect, the rhetoric of modernity is a pernicious monoculture of ideas to the extent that now modernity has become hostile to culture. Like the cannibalistic psychosis of Wetiko, it creeps into all aspects of life in the form of social media, advertising, mainstream political discourse. Modernity constantly encroaches upon and threatens to consume decolonial thinking, diversity, extremity, classifying certain people as outlaws, certain thoughts as unsanctioned and presuming to define normality, centrism and the norms of authentic self-expression. This is modernity cannibalizing itself to sanitize culture for the sake of preserving its own ever-narrowing definition.

We are also in the midst of an uprising over who gets to set the terms of discourse, who gets to define and preserve the codification of white innocence, superiority and patriarchal economic hegemony into the political and economic rhetoric set forth over the centuries of the colonial enterprise. The latest skirmish in this ongoing war is about the 1619 Project, which, by unearthing real history and bringing its unsavory truths to the forefront of modern awareness, lays bare the principle that white privilege only lives by keeping its own past buried.

White patriarchy has had the floor for 500 years and now the plantation systems are breaking down everywhere. There are popular movements with a different idea rising in virtually every culture now fighting for survival and presenting a rising threat to the owners and guards of the prison without walls and the prisons with walls. Repression and authoritarianism are the last remaining tools of control. Witness the right-wing backlash against Bolivia’s Evo Moralies, Rafael Correa in Ecuador and the rise of Bolsonaro and the jailing of Lulo De Silva in Brazil, not to mention the increasingly desperate and increasingly lawless measures by the white minority in America to retain minority rule.

What was taken centuries ago cannot be recovered. Inasmuch as we identify with and join the shifting communities of rebellion, art, theater, feminism, resurgent indigenous voices, economic cooperation, the recovery of ancient wisdom, we become fugitives from the plantation to construct a new economy. As decoloniality and the critique of modernity becomes more elaborate and encompassing, it is increasingly clear that we will no longer accept the structures of domination on any level of human activity and relationships, most particularly in regard to the natural world.

The signs of backlash are everywhere. Nikole Hannah-Jones being denied tenure by the University of North Carolina School of Journalism. Republicans voting en bloc against a Black women becoming Director of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. The refusal of Big Pharma to support generic vaccines being distributed to less affluent countries. The sudden reversal of the NFL to now regard the claims of neurological damage by black former players as equal to those of white players. How much more systemic can you get? These are actions and perspectives which all arise from and reveal the vestiges of the racist colonial mindset.

Islands in the Stream

If there is an object of practice, it is to stop trying to be something, to unwrap the most subtle layers, progressively unmasking the operation and direction of the CEO, the games, identities, directives and assumed capacities of ego, until there is nothing left but living in the stream, free of all bardos. Non-meditation.

The bardo teachings of Tibetan Buddhism identify six post-death transitional states: birth, death, meditation, dreams, dharmata and becoming. Likewise, there are six realms of being (gods, jealous gods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts and hell beings) through which, according to karma, we continuously cycle during life. 

The intense experiences we have in life can be connected to one of the six realms, but surprisingly, they may also be connected to one of the six after-death states or bardos. Most accessible to us all in life, the experience of the six realms also contain bardo experiences. In other words, throughout life, we may become entranced or motivated by one of the dominant emotions of the six realms of being (anger/aggression, desire, ignorance, pride, envy or pleasure) and find ourselves encountering such circumstances which can only be considered bardos because of the imperative they present to us by their extreme nature.

The clearest way to describe this condition is to realize that each dominant emotional state of being contains the possibility of bardo experiences within it. We may cycle through realms by a lifetime or by the hour, but most likely we are in one or the other for limited periods except in the most extreme cases when we are truly stuck in a single realm to such an degree that there’s very limited possibility of ever escaping. The paranoia/envy of the jealous god realm (asuras) or the anger/aggression of the hell realm may well become prisons. But we may also be equally blinded by the pride of the human realm.

Each behavior type (realm) is like a station, a home base, a default field of awareness, our personal preoccupation with a way of comprehending our world. The experience of each station is not strictly limited to its intrinsic nature that one could never experience qualities or domains associated with other stations. Your station is determined by karma. Associated domains, the states we venture into away from our default domain, are more transient.  So while we may spend most of our time in one or another realm, we can still have affinities with others. Within our dominant realm, we can—and will–have any type of bardo experience.

The translation of the word bardo refers to being ‘in-between islands.’ These ‘islands’ (call them states of mind or emotions that drive our lives) appear as obstacles, predominant mind-states such as fear or aggression, compassion, or perhaps gross events, life-long dynamics or ‘karmic’ predispositions. Islands become obstacles when we get attached to them, set up residence and interpret the world through their narrow lens.

The steam or the river of consciousness is natural mind, a more awakened state. This is a state beyond bardos, existing in the gaps of experience. Since realization is regarded as an unchanging state of infinite space without origin or cessation, that awakened condition (of staying ‘in the stream’) implies an escape from all realms and all bardos. From that point of view, all identification with ego is an island we encounter in the stream. We are constantly running into and climbing about on these ‘islands,’ which are mere appearances in the flow of experience, sometimes for short periods and sometimes with a profoundly anchored grasping nature that makes it extremely difficult to escape…or ever return to the stream.

How we move through realms and bardo states implies we are perpetually jumping from one island to another and completely missing the stream because we are fundamentally misinterpreting our experience and perpetually grasping for antidotes to the flow of extreme emotional or psychic conditions.

If we take into consideration the Dzogchen view of a constantly refreshing arising and disappearance of phenomena, radical impermanence, then every arising of consensus reality is an island and every ‘gap’ between arisings is a ‘window of possibility,’ an opportunity to have an experience of true clarity, which would also be a bardo in that instant. The offer to awaken is always present. Entering that gap may be a momentary escape from a particular realm, but most likely, if karma has anything to say about it, any such ‘glimpse’ will stimulate an immediate descent into yet another antidote.

As markers of ego-identification, ‘islands’ are illusions. We can become entranced by the appearance of any island, such as personality, occupation, lifestyle, personal trauma, and cling to it, set up camp and live there-possibly our entire lives. We have experiences of pleasure and pain there, sometimes even misinterpreting what is pleasure and what is really pain. The way we relate to the islands is an indicator of the dominant realm we are operating in at the time, the way we are manifesting ego-based spiritual materialism. Being open to learning, such as in the human realm, distinguishes us from the animal realm, the jealous gods or the hell beings. But of course it’s all quite tricky. When pride and ego-driven indulgence and pursuit of peak experience and spiritual ‘attainment’ are the primary drivers, we, like religious fanatics, create our own brand of spiritual materialism and can easily imagine ourselves in the god realm. Another illusion.

Meanwhile, the river never stops flowing. Emptiness and impermanence are the only truths. The true nature of mind never changes, whether it is peeking through the gaps between every arising or in between our encounters with the ‘events’ of our lives, our karma or our perpetual wrestling match with ego. 

Although the bardos are primarily described as after-death experiences, the meaning of bardo impacts everyday existence. It’s may seem complicated to understand existence this way, but this view opens a window of possible understanding that was not there previously. The bardo of existence (bardo of everyday life), dreams, the stages of physical dissolution immediately following death, the bardo of dharmata (non-duality) with its many visions, benign or fearful, the transition to the bardo of becoming presaging rebirth, all of it is described as the post-death appearance of islands in the stream and identified primarily with one or another of the six realms.

Going more deeply into the meaning of bardo and in relating the bardos to the six realms is a radically different way of presenting the entire proposition. We begin to understand bardos are falsely regarded as transitions between “permanent” conditions like birth, life, death and rebirth. But no, everything we regard as solid, any demarcation we may identify in life, its beginning, middle or end and all the consciousness along the way, are no more solid than any post-death bardo we care to name. It is always a function of ego to reify any or every aspect of existence. Simply by identifying everything as bardo, it all becomes transitional. Every moment is bardo, infused with the shifting attention of ego trying to make something to latch onto where there is nothing, controlling or clinging to or reacting to the appearance of every island with its various seductive opportunities for the comfort and safety of ego indulgence. 

The Source

Out of nowhere, the mind comes forth
All is returned to you, beyond the cause
And effect: the oak tree
In the garden, chirp of crickets
Inside and out, aching knees
On a dusty mat. Without knowing it
We have wandered into a circle
Of wonder, where our confusion
Shines more
Outside the seeming errors and the search.
Wake up to your sleep
And sleep more wakefully!

—–Zachary Horvitz

From this view, the conception of the dream space of sleep is a metaphor of the waking space, a perpetual navigation of illusion in which, at least in sleep, the mind operates at subliminal levels, throwing images and stories before us and over which, if one seriously pursued dream yoga, one might eventually gain some control. The capacity to ‘awaken’ in the dream and even a capacity to write a new ‘story’ in the dream…or a new story of the dream is not only the story of dream yoga. It’s the reality of our waking condition.

The identity of the dream state, the waking meditative state, the post-meditative state and especially the immediate states upon physical death all present an identical opportunity: to cultivate a possible ‘awakening,’ a capacity to distinguish between illusion and reality, to recognize the activity of ‘mind’ for what it is and to meet every island appearing in the stream as an island without becoming transfixed. This is the context in which these interpretations of bardo imply–or verify, if you prefer– that every act, every moment in life, just as it is depicted in the after-death experience, is an opportunity to realize natural mind, a rehearsal for the post-death experience.

Those who are familiar with bardo teachings or practices or, for that matter, any meditative practice, may take a certain pride in accomplishment as we mark our progress. And we can attain a good deal of pleasure in the course of our practice. The pride of the human realm always sneaks in the side door whenever one believes one has arrived, when one imagines having achieved absorption or true equanimity, even for a moment. That is when one wishes to preserve it, to extend it, to own it or become it. But all of this is about hope and fear, and thus a form of spiritual materialism. In the extreme, this is the realm of the gods, who seek pleasures in every form, like notches on a belt. Sound familiar?

And at some point every edifice of attainment will dissolve into frustration and backsliding, becoming the opposite of pleasure and deconstruct into forms of ego-recrimination. All that attainment is impermanent! Damn! This is the bardo experience. This sort of confusion is identical to the character of post-death experience, perhaps the bardo of death, in which any hint of noticing the Nature of Mind, something that may already have arisen as part of our living practice, turns into such a striving that we instantly fall back into deeper confusion and even anger, the anger of the human realm or even something more toxic, the anger of a hell being. 

So there we are, cycling and recycling in the whirlpool of samsara, confronting our own karma, particularly acute at moments of being so neurotically lost, so swept along in one or the other realm that we become deaf and dumb–we can’t hear or obey anything except ego. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I identify my existence along an axis between the human and the hungry ghost realms. There is certainly a desire to learn, an openness to what is new and even a willingness to let go of the trappings of my ‘personal monastery of achievement.’ I am largely free of the single-minded pursuits of the god realm, the paranoia of the asuras, or the fanaticism and anger of the hell realm, but at times I sense a descent into the hungry ghost realm in which I fail to relinquish anything and nothing is ever quite enough. There is a striving for more, more of something perceived to be absent.

This a form of aggression—an act of aggression upon the self. “I am not enough. I do not have enough. I am not good enough.” Blah, blah, blah. This hungry aggression is fundamentally materialistic, also a powerful and deep and pervasive character of humanity. The evolutionary path of humanity is to realize and confront this aggression and to allow it to die. 

Aggression also operates in meditative practice. There are more different meditation practices than one may count. Many of them are beneficial in uncountable ways because they develop capacities which might otherwise never exist. But at the bottom of all practice, there must be a letting go of the striving, the need to manifest something, to fix something, to find something or even give up something. In life, you can be anything as long as you can also detach from being the one who believes in the need to be something. If there is an object of practice, it is to stop trying to be something, to unwrap the most subtle layers unmasking the operation and direction of the CEO, the games, identities, directives and assumed capacities of ego, until there is nothing left but living in the stream, free of all bardos. Non-meditation.

A Quiet Heart

A quiet heart is a still place within a storm. It is where the voices of ego, judgement, instinctive self-preservation and grasping may penetrate, but to which an aggressive response is not automatic. A quiet heart is not immune to desire or greed, not dissociated from attachment, anger or sadness, confusion or grasping.

Aggression makes itself known in many ways. We usually think of it as gross acts. We can see and name many manifestations of aggression throughout local and global society, none of which seem to change much no matter what we do. On a more personal and interpersonal level, aggression happens within and around us every day in many ways. It could be an impulsive moment of indiscretion while driving, a chance encounter with another person arousing an aggressive response, speaking to customer service. You know what I mean.

The current polarization plaguing culture is marked by a dangerous increase in obvious aggressive behavior–in all sectors and from all strata of society. When I look at my own behavior, I notice subtle forms of aggression going all the way to the root of suffering. No surprise. Delusion, greed and aggression are regarded as the three primary kleshas, or roots of suffering. Lately we even talk about micro-aggressions, subtle but harmful ways by which structures of domination are reinforced. 

Rather than talk my way through this by focusing on the mind and referring solely to mental behaviors and patterns, adding the somatic experience seems essential. The sum of all the somatic changes we know as aggression is a configuration of stress responses generally regarded as unhealthy—that is, unless they’re accompanied by complete amorality. The resolution of aggressive impulses is what I’m calling a quiet heart. A quiet and open heart is the physiological and mental product of recognizing and letting go of aggression in its many forms. A quiet heart may be another name for equanimity, a heart not so immediately clouded by arousal, confusion, striving or other behaviors generating internal and external conflict. It remains balanced in the face of the shifting weather of emotion and events. 

A quiet heart is a still place within the storm. It is where the voices of ego, judgement, instinctive self-preservation and grasping may penetrate, but to which an aggressive response is not automatic. A quiet heart is not immune to desire or greed, not dissociated from attachment, anger or sadness, confusion or grasping. It is just not reactive to or controlled by any of these.  A quiet heart is a refuge within all of it.

In fact, considering the five kleshas, or fundamental flaws of consciousness, aggression is born of desire and desire is born of attachment. So, the primary klesha is interpreted by some as attachment manifesting in a more extreme form as anger or aggression. But for me, aggression is not only noticeable in its grossest forms. It is deeply connected to many behaviors connecting multiple emotions and motivations in the most subtle ways. 

How does aggression appear in our thoughts or expressions? How can we return to a quiet heart? I’ve come to believe (which in itself might be dangerous) that disquiet, attachment and the more obvious expressions of aggression have something to do with non-existence, or emptiness. The Dzogchen view is that all things, both material things, our physical nature, and also non-material things like thoughts and feelings are both existent and simultaneously non-existent. All of it appears real, yet all of it is manufactured, illusory, non-existent.

Nothing exists independently of anything else. Nothing stands alone. As a commentary on the nature of phenomena, this view can be expressed as Nagarjuna’s (2nd century CE) four-fold negation, a tool used to deconstruct fixed views: phenomena are not solely appearance nor are they solely illusion. Nor are they both appearance and illusion. Nor are they neither appearance nor illusion.

Confused? Yes, confusing. But the point is that in everyday awareness, non-existence, emptiness, is probably the furthest thing from our mind. We either never consider it or lose track of non-existence and fall into the trap of completely believing everything appearing before and within us truly exists. And there, in that karmically-driven deluded certainty, is where aggression rises. There is where relative existence continuously arouses multiple, complex feeling states and dynamics that run from confusing to upsetting, to downright unhealthy. Most of them undermine a quiet heart. The belief in all the behaviors surrounding that certainty about the materiality of everything is how we identify and recreate ourselves. The entire apparatus and mechanics of believing what we consider to be the world out there is a product of aggression. 

Why? Because as soon as we believe all our constructions about the world out there, we are moved to manipulate it, reproduce it, improve it, eliminate it, deny it, claim it and change it in uncountable ways. This is what Lao Tzu might call habitual discrimination—which is slightly different from ordinary discernment. With this in mind, it seems clear that aggression manifests in multiple ways masked as something else.

Anxiety (a combination of fear, helplessness and hope) is a form of aggression. Impatience is aggression. Frustration and resentment are aggression. Jealousy is aggression. Even gossip is aggression because it’s usually about moral superiority. The epidemic of political gaslighting is a form of aggression. These are signs of conflict between wanting to control events and realizing we cannot control them. Enslavement to the notion that we can control events is the engine of aggression. It is anxiety about the future or recrimination of the past. Aggression is the antithesis of surrendering to spaciousness. It is the frantic self-preservation instinct of ego. It is the opposite of surrender. 

Where in this maelstrom is a quiet heart?  Chapter 29 of the Tao Te Ching seems to be about aggression:

“Do you want to improve the world?

I don’t think it can be done.

The world is sacred.

It can’t be improved.

If you tamper with it, you’ll ruin it.

If you treat it like an object, you’ll lose it.

There is a time for being ahead, a time for being behind;

a time for being in motion, a time for being at rest;

a time for being vigorous, a time for being exhausted;

a time for being safe, a time for being in danger.

The Master sees things as they are,

without trying to control them.

She lets them go their own way,

and resides at the center of the circle.”

Aggression may be an attempt to recreate a pleasurable experience; how we become motion when rest is required; how we overestimate our agency in the world. The center of the circle is where the quiet heart may be found. Where no manipulation is necessary, where action arises from non-existence, as much as from materiality, where the appropriate response is not entirely driven by ego.

Chogyam Trungpa says aggression can be very polite, such as in the way we ‘cut the truth into pieces and serve ourselves the tastiest morsal while discarding the rest.’ Much of Buddhist teaching may be about eliminating ego, or as Trungpa says, ‘cutting off its arms and legs.’ But really, if the elimination of ego is a prerequisite for what we imagine is ‘enlightenment,’ how likely is it that we will ever get there? Instead, we will be egotistic. Ego will never completely die, but we can remember it doesn’t truly exist anymore than ego-lessness truly exists. 

Being at the center of the circle means living at the balance point between existence and non-existence, like perpetually sunning ourselves at the beach, becoming lost in the rhythm of the ocean without a care in the world…except for taking care not to get burned. That is where the balance lies between not existing at all and also very much existing. Every venture away from being in the center of our circle, to preserve something, to reify something, every disconnection from earth, from ground, from other people, from the true nature of life is an act of resistance, a resistance to dropping into not-knowing, a refusal to surrender.

The Vajrayana view is that the wrathful guardians of the dharma, the dharmapalas, are always guiding us into deeper realization and away from faulty thinking and action, away from our own aggression, by visiting us with mishaps, obstacles, ruptures, loss and even trauma. If we suddenly find obstacles arising in our path, like the car breaking down on the way to a job interview, or someone you thought of as a friend suddenly turning on you, the dharmapalas are providing an opportunity to address our latest reflexive dive into aggression.

Is pursuit of a goal aggression? That depends. Is righting injustice aggression? It certainly can become so. What does healthy aggression look like? It depends on the quality of energy we put into the process. If it means climbing over someone else, violating basic ethics, operating from a zero-sum view, chances are we will soon be visited by the dharmapalas. Instead, healthy aggression might look like joyous determination, a constant dance with shifting forces in a way that feels more like swimming downstream than fighting the current. All while being mindful of non-existence playing with us as we constantly become attached to our mental constructions.

The quiet heart is a construction of that joyous determination, nurturing the discipline to remain connected at the junction of our true capacities and our true nature. Cultivating the capacity to remain in that quiet center offers a cleaner and more precise view of the many faces of aggression while relieving so much of the stress of becoming attached to the fantasies manufactured by a wild and untamed mind. 

Repose (as in…final)

It seems perfectly logical to say we will all be confronted with a series of moments tightening the grip of death in which we will have to decide what we believe and what our conscious role shall be in attending and adapting to a process that is both in and out of our hands, that is entirely real and entirely illusory.

If one were willing to confront the full impact of all the signs pointing to the future of life on this planet, a confrontation with the prospect of mass death is unavoidable. That prospect is inextricably entwined with the manner in which we hold the prospect of death right now–not in some nebulous future. A culture and economic model of infinite growth, illusions of permanence and control must include a denial of death, distorting the entire idea of what life is and what constitutes living. On the far side of these ramblings about mass death is the scenario of our own personal death.

Such a process might be marked by an inexorable advance into an increasingly evident material dying process, a relentless progression of conditions—or failed interventions into an increasingly complex collection of conditions—that might not rob us of cognitive faculties, but which would nevertheless be an increasingly evident reduction in the physical capacity to sustain life. Meanwhile, mind will observe from a greater distance. I might slowly leave my body as its control, to whatever degree I once had it, is wrestled from my grasp, leaving only Mind—if I’m lucky.

This progression will then likely be complicated by the presence of multiple conditions, each presenting complications for treating the others. The options narrow, for example, to a carefully tailored regime of drugs or perhaps outlandishly risky surgeries. The sense of gradual entrapment by inexorably limiting conditions rises, and the prematurity of it all begins to gain weight. But is it premature? We might reflexively consider every death to be premature, including our own, of course, but what does that really mean? The question is if these conditions ultimately describe the process of my own death, will my own death be premature?

Yes, there may be moments of fear along an uneven path of tests and treatments, appointments, the carefully modulated conversations. I listen as my body drops into a minor key, openly gazing inward and outward at whoever delivers the news and feeling that news reverberating—reconciling all the other factors impinging on life along the way. All of this depends on whether some other conditions come galloping along to raise my level of risk even further, limiting my capacities, adding variety and velocity to the drama, chasing a runaway herd of questions requiring answers with further complications. 

One’s sense of time contracts. That is the inescapable message. I become the primary character in a movie depicting this inexorable process. I am driving a car downhill on a winding mountain road, on one side is a vast and unobstructed cloud-free view, with the mountain rising sharply on the other. In the gathering darkness, suddenly there is something amiss with the vehicle. It’s becoming difficult to control, swerving momentarily toward the precipice until I regain control in the nick of time. Then, further down the mountain, the brakes unexpectedly disappear; and then further on, the windshield is suddenly covered with dust. Now, the lights don’t come on. I am blind and helpless. Either I am engulfed in terror–or something else happens.

What is that exactly? What happens next? I cannot stop. I cannot depart the vehicle. What else is there? I let go. I no longer attempt to control anything. I am no longer driving. I don’t even see the road anymore. What is taking me down? Where is the bottom? Does it even matter?

It is in that moment when the most important decisions are made. I transition from realizing my time is shortening to a practice of collapsing into the timeless present–simply allowing this body to dissolve into the soil of countless other bodies nourishing and sustaining all else as we careen down the mountain together. One makes a conscious transition from abstract knowing one is going to die to comprehending being on a direct course of dying now. Prematurity no longer exists. I am on a course less and less under my control. Its conclusions are not up to me. We are capable of understanding we will die at any time. But that very understanding is itself an objectification–as if something will happen in the future, but perhaps not to me. And anyway, we don’t want to think about it. In the meantime, we will exercise whatever agency we can muster to forestall the inevitable. 

It seems perfectly logical to say we will all be confronted with a series of moments tightening the grip of death in which we will have to decide what we believe and what our conscious role shall be in attending and adapting to a process that is both in and out of our hands, that is entirely real and entirely illusory. As we are living and dying in every moment, we are both separate from and in union with everything and everyone. Each one of these moments will be an increasingly intimate encounter, but at some point one will surely enter a dying process–one by which, if we are fortunate, we will recall that union.

The dying process may be described in detail by the medical professions, but for most of us, I suspect the process begins well before the rapid decline of cognitive function. As such, it is really an awakening process. We will discover whether animal survival mechanisms will leap over all the fences of containment and rationalization by higher brain functions and run wild, derailing us from refuge practices we’ve spent decades refining to restore and sustain equanimity, let alone what one could call resting in the vast and empty nature of mind. Or, perhaps we will comprehend the true nature of our relationship with existence in ways we never imagined possible.

Fear and anxiety may be expected, but not guaranteed, just as pain can be guaranteed, while suffering remains optional. I am steeped in a finely cultivated and detailed view of reality, life, suffering and death, developing confidence in the capacity to meet whatever arises. I’ve received the gift of gnosis, looking directly into the heart of existence, a view of emptiness, openness, inclusion and unity. The question becoming more present is whether I will continue to rely on these practices when they count the most, whether I’m going to plant my flag in that mountain of belief no matter what comes.

On the other hand, a significant part of these practices and preparations both implicit and explicit in the range and flow of Buddhist teachings; indeed, the orientation of all organized religious belief is to the existence of a soul or not, to an afterlife or not, interpreting death and preparing the believer for what is beyond life. Whether some part of us endures beyond this life, whether it’s eternal life inseparable from the divine, eternal damnation, rebirth or none of the above, true believers prepare (or hope) for whatever they long to encounter. What is sold as insurance guaranteeing the desired outcome is an unshakeable belief in what happens after death.

We stake our lives and our deaths on those beliefs. In whatever way we approach dying, particularly when we’re aware of what’s happening, no matter how much we might deny it, we cling to a belief in what happens next and mentally prepare for something like everlasting glory, perpetual luminosity or perhaps one of several intermediate states preceding rebirth into an endless repeating cycle. Such beliefs suggest there is consciousness beyond life and that steps can be taken here in the bardo of everyday life that will have a bearing on the condition of one’s rebirth. 

It’s amazing to imagine navigating bardo states in the first place. Am I going to stake whatever remaining time I have on the details of how I might respond to a nebulous and fleeting dream state? Or will I focus on the dream state of this minute? Even considering sustained moments of absolute clarity about the true nature of mind, do I imagine those are a ticket to the bardo of becoming preceding rebirth? What if I decided to be satisfied with the effort I’ve already expended? What if every moment of this life is a rehearsal for and an investment in what happens after this life? What if that is precisely and only what this life is?

That could easily sound very Christian, but it’s also an unavoidable interpretation of Tibetan Buddhist bardo teachings. A preoccupation with whatever happens after death can become what Stephen Jenkinson calls an addiction to competence, getting it right. It’s really just another way of clinging to life, to the identity we’ve spent our entire lives crafting and convincing ourselves truly exists. It’s an artifact of hope, which in the final stages of life becomes another way of not being present for what is. Chögyam Trungpa would surely call that spiritual materialism. 

Realizing I may come to a state of terminal disease or to an increasingly fragile condition sooner than I might have expected, I have to wonder if reifying such imaginings, diverting my attention to teasing apart nuanced states of post-death possibilities, imagining the exercise of intention even after the final breath has been taken, learning to recognize the signs described by centuries of teachers, exploring the likelihood of a continuation of consciousness after that final breath is the best use of my time. Staking my present life on what happens after death and exercising rituals of preparation is a preoccupation with the future, not an engagement with the unfolding present. I have to ask, holding back the guffaws, what I would think if I discovered I’d been misled?

This is a process of exploring and enacting personal justice, reconciling myself, balancing the scales, as it were, between what I wish to invest in the future when there is such abundance right here in the present. Whatever I have been taught, whatever I have sampled or believed in, the time I’ve spent assimilating it, exploring all the views and prescriptions about preparing for one’s own death have been an indescribable blessing. But there is really only one choice in this moment: to be present for whatever is here and not to worry about what comes later. This is always the Dzogchen teaching anyway. The Great Perfection is the recognition that we already exist as the seamless nature of reality. There is no creating that reality. It is already created…and in perpetual creation. There is no waiting for it, no hope of attaining it. It is always already here. We can’t ignore it or get more of it or find it or lose it.

And yet, I make no claim to any truth. I make no claim on the future. I plant no flag of belief. I anticipate nothing. I reject nothing. I renounce nothing. I simply put it all away and remain as open as possible. There is no other place or way to be. This was the primary prescription all along. There is no bridge to suchness.  Whatever rituals we repeat, whatever antidotes to samsaric mentality we adopt, we are already there.

I am already enough now. I have always been enough. Whatever comes, I will be enough. All the self-examination, evaluation, climbing some stairway to heaven or belief in anything beyond this life falls away. If there is anything that does more to make peace with all circumstances we encounter, it is simply to be with what is, to walk and talk the knowing that we are already there. It is to be giving thanks in every moment for what we are given, to live within an aura of gratitude for every breath, every encounter, every emotion, every difficulty, every teaching, every suffering and every moment of celebration. Whether this is the only life we will ever have or whether it’s just one of an uncounted number of flashes in an endless unfolding of numberless kalpas, nothing can take its place.  To live in this way is to balance the scales for whatever remaining life we are given.

Remembering & Relationship

Being in an increasingly delicate and uncertain state for the past year for multiple reasons, it’s time to reassemble the elements of one’s known and unknown universe, the pieces scattered over a troubled and troubling landscape, to rediscover–or recover–one’s place in relationship to the ones close at hand and the ones far from view.

Being in an increasingly delicate and uncertain state for the past year for multiple reasons, it’s time to reassemble the elements of one’s known and unknown universe, the pieces scattered over a troubled and troubling landscape, to rediscover–or recover–one’s place in relationship to the ones close at hand and the ones far from view. To a degree, we are each disassembling the flawed model of life on earth like a toy we have outgrown, this suddenly foreign image of a pyramid with humans at the top. Others are insisting it’s the only toy in the sandbox and we must continue to regard it as worthy of our attention as if it represents normal.

There is, frankly, no hope of re-visioning and becoming the post-sandbox human without acknowledging the mycelial model of relationship with all the more-than-human planetary life. A select few of us have dabbled beyond the confines of our sacred comfort for a long time, surely, but now COVID has redefined normal and obliterated the boundaries of the sandbox entirely. Conception has given way to material reality coming home in the most personal ways. Enacting a different view of living involving a great deal more listening and far less speaking, creating a much larger circle of care is the only defense against being thrown out of The Garden entirely.

Moreover, essential to changing the Story will be to dissolve the boundaries between subject and object, remembering reality is all subject. We are in porous connection with all that is. The notion that we are all distinct and separate souls on individual journeys is a dangerous corruption of the true journey. We are not here to be found in some homogenized mystical way. We are here to find and lose ourselves.

If you have been fortunate as I have to be offered imperturbable unconditional love at the most intimate level, consistent, unaltered humility and steadfast adherence to truth and consistent values, then you may count these blessings daily. While I crack open my own heart, awakening and encountering new veils, there is no going to sleep anymore. Allowing the armor to crack is like cleansing the windshield. 

This is really the only thing worth doing now. I am drawing inward and simultaneously expanding outward, interpreting the arc of these events. I am being drawn to remember, to mourn and welcome the dying of the old world, to forgive the ways I have been corrupted, not believed in myself or tried to be someone I am not. There’s a great deal of striving and programming to address there.

The practice of remembering isn’t possible every moment of every day, or even daily, but it’s worthy of regular attention. It is a ritual of unwrapping the baggage of a day, a month, a decade, affirming somatic truth, the migration of spirit, giving just regard to the vulnerabilities and messiness at the heart of existence. It can be a return to the unobstructed primal territory of the heart, beyond individuality, beyond the stories we tell, beyond all the supposedly impermeable ideological, emotional or even biological boundaries. 

The implication of remembering is that we can put ourselves back together, revise our agendas and strategies, re-evaluate what’s important. That will be different from one to another. But for me, remembering is to return to the physical, to emotion, to the currents of feeling, the sensations of relationship, to the one I left behind in the perpetual reaching for more—more information, more creativity, more awareness, more perspective, more knowledge and the urgency of purposeful action.

Planting one’s feet back on the earth in this way, one also remembers one’s place. This is the most difficult and unlikely remembering. I have been too much a nomad recently to fully relate to a place. And even now I’m not truly of this geographical place despite the family history. It was mostly others’ history, not my own. I’ve learned to take the trappings of place with me, that all places and people are essentially the same. 

Except that now, having been here a year and a half, I already have a different perspective. This is a place I left behind long ago. It did not then suit the yearnings of a youthful soul seeking a much larger view. I did find other places and felt as much, if not more, kinship with California than I did here in the east, but there is a calming and satisfying softening happening here. The pace and the density have a subtle effect. Or maybe it’s only my lifestyle. Yet it’s also here and in the letting go that the widest view of all takes shape.

Reconciliation

Reconciliation carries an implication of justice, a balancing of accounts. In this case it’s an honest discovery of others’ suffering while realizing our own mortality, complicity and limitations.

Reconciliation carries an implication of justice, a balancing of accounts. In this case it’s an honest discovery of others’ suffering while realizing our own mortality, complicity and limitations. Reconciliation is a great humbling because intimacy with suffering is also a coming to terms with one’s own death. Most of the time we operate as if we cannot permit the intrusion of death into our view or conduct in life. Denying, misunderstanding or misrepresenting life or death to oneself at some point becomes another miscarriage of justice. This is happening at a cultural level and is an integral part of why we have gone so wrong on our environment.

I seek balance by looking at my assumptions and beliefs, whatever unconsciously corrals, misdirects and exhausts me of wildness, causes me to lose contact with the inexplicable essence of life, the spontaneity and unity of everything and especially my capacity for stillness. Narrow assumptions establish imbalance. They arise from a resistance to breakdown, an illusion of stability and a compulsion to preserve that illusion. In modern culture, instability is regarded as failure; yet ironically, that very stability is itself a distortion of reality. I have set limits on the degree, pace and character of change, all of which may interfere with or rob me of the benefit of failure, vision, connection or satisfaction. It is by failure that I discover balance. No imbalance, no homeostasis; only a brittle, narrow comprehension of complexity.

For more than 18 months I’ve been engaged in a close encounter with a physiological disorder, a rare condition, which coincidentally, like climate change, is 100% fatal if left untreated. It arises in the deepest realms of my physiology, where life itself is produced in its most elemental form. This non-malignant dysfunction is instability personified, inexplicable to the layman, buried in background assumptions about how life is supported. And though it can be understood and explained in modern medical terminology, it cannot be adequately addressed according to these limited terms. They are just concepts, equally applicable to your car or your computer. It has emerged as my personal monster. It cannot be smothered by knowledge, technicalities or reason. There is no certainty or way of turning it into a monument sitting on a shelf. It’s an outlier at the frontier of medicine. It’s marvelous in that respect, transformative, daunting, life threatening and mysterious. Reductionist framing can’t possibly tell the full story.

Likewise, the marvel of climate change can be explained in the same reductionist terms, which don’t—and can’t—plumb the depths of the behavioral dysfunctions, the flawed outlook, the mechanisms of denial at the heart of such a condition, except perhaps by applying the analogy of autoimmunity: we are attacking ourselves, making a seemingly inexorable series of self-destructive decisions. Or worse, life is threatening itself with extinction, promising to change, failing to change, repeating the cycle, carrying immense guilt and then sloughing it off by dissociating. These are the behaviors of an addict. Not all of humanity is addicted, but the addicted are leading the rest of us into the abyss.

The term ‘climate’ should be applied to the context of all life including the social, not solely to atmospheric/oceanic conditions or the many thousands of biological effects. The climate of earth is deteriorating, but this is so in every sense of the term, not merely the weather. If we traced the acceleration of the global warming effect, the loss of ice, the acidifying oceans, the pending collapse of the food chain, the Sixth Great Extinction, all are paralleled by the massive concentration of wealth at the top, the degradation of civil discourse, the corruption of democratic norms, the influence of money in politics, pollution on an unprecedented scale, feudalization of the economy and the degradation of all forms of capital. None of us can breathe. Indeed, deep in the center of the earth economy, the engine of true vitality is being silenced. If we addressed the social and economic context of earth adequately, emissions would likely fall greatly, whereas focusing on driving down emissions alone is clearly not working fast enough.

I’m not an addict, though I surely am complicit. I could (by some sideways logic) relate to COVID-19 as a random invader, an alien agent, a force to be reflexively resisted as if it has no intelligence. We can track its adaptive capacities, disassemble it and understand its transport and replication systems. It has no mind, yet it has intelligence. 

Beyond all that, I regard my personal disorder as an expression of consciousness. Which is to say it did not come from nowhere. I cannot extract myself from my environment or, as a Buddhist might say, extract myself from my karma, my spiritual continuum. There are known environmental (karmic?) factors linked to this disorder and perhaps unknown factors as well. I can’t be positive it’s unrelated to one of these. But regardless, it now functions as a self-generating disorder, an error in genetic logic. And since our entanglement with the environment is total, how can I ignore the possibility that not only was an environmental factor involved in my contract with this condition, but that I was complicit by contributing to the creation of that factor?

The dysfunction at the heart of this matter may be considered a corruption of purpose, an aberration, a crossing of elementary signals at an intra-cellular or genetic level. My immune system has turned against me, becoming a termite of my own construction, undermining the foundation of my life. Termites seek life or sustenance without consideration for any other life form or for the integrity of the host. They live as if there’s an endless supply of their prime resource. Does that sound a little too much like the human presence on this planet? 

There is no such thing as a termite regulating its appetites to ensure the sustainability of its host. Such an invader would be called a parasite. Given a choice, I would rather be a parasite than a termite. Unlike the virus, the guest in my body is not some alien presence. And my encounter with it is not accidental. It is Being delivering a message to this being. I did not ‘catch’ it at the grocery store. Although, considering the massive overuse of fertilizers, food additives, preservatives, considering nearly everything in most grocery stores is either genetically modified or sprayed by carcinogens, is full of either simple sugar or modified protein, maybe the grocery store has finally caught up with me. 

If I were to fully regard this disturbance as an emanation of self rather than as Other, I could regard it as a disturbance in my energy body, a gradual and unconscious—or worse–a careless failure to attend to my personal integrity. Current scientific knowledge may explain some of the mechanisms, but it cannot explain how it came to be and the prevailing treatments are not guaranteed to reverse it. 

I have undergone the standard protocols. But again, this doesn’t come close to addressing its true nature. It is buried and then covered over, like ripping out offending weeds in a garden, but not quite extracting the roots, followed by planting new seeds and expecting proper germination. And later, if and when the condition again crawls out of its confinement, we have other measures at the ready to suppress it again. I submitted to a second round of the treatment protocol because blood markers clearly indicated a regression. I gamed out the consequences of failure, the probabilities for dancing again toward the edge of viability, a subtraction from previous estimates of my life expectancy, the extent of interventions necessary to sustain life and the possibility of my body rejecting those interventions, all the way to the ultimate conditions of my demise.

As I delve deeply into the energetic realm, the interactive and potential counter-intentions reflected in successive or persistent manifestations, I am mindful of the different realms of knowledge expressed as its tenacity and my responses to it, continuing to be a drag on my wellbeing. I am reminded of the declarations I made at the time of my original diagnosis, the doorways of consciousness it opened, the fresh awareness, even agency relative to the quiet and not-so-quiet suffering around me every day, the purity of intention necessary to meet this disorder, to re-focus and get on with my life: the continuous inquiry required to unearth what Being is attempting to deliver to me or elicit from me.

I even sensed one of those imperatives was, at least partially, a consuming attention to personal happiness altering processes at the heart of this condition, deep in my bones. Indeed, an imperfect affair of the heart. I’m not fully clear whether the inner messaging is in opposition to this condition or the result of a direct encounter with it. Am I fighting it or becoming friends with myself? Am I reflexively opposing it or becoming more acquainted with its nature? Is this merely the only way I can digest the discord all around me in the world? Have I unwittingly invited this? Most likely, all of the above are true to a degree, as merely approaching the object of inquiry, whether as self or as Other, inevitably changes our view of it. In other words, there’s no such thing as objectivity.

Some of this reflective process is itself a symptom of the human disease, our belief in intellectual primacy, human centrality, the inviolability of science, an infatuation with our reflective capacities, all exercises assuming there isobjectivity. In the ancient world and now as we reactivate and interpret that wisdom, it is said that every culture, to accompany the thinkers and doers, must have its mentors and guides, the ones we call dreamers and mystics, the keepers of gnosis, retainers of the collective raison d’etre, the guardians of tribal history. I envision myself as a product of both, perhaps a flawed hybrid, perhaps entirely presumptuous. But nonetheless, pressing on to my own version of reconciliation.

Reciprocity

True reciprocity, or what we could call emergence, is an omni-variant, non-linear dynamic beyond our feeble attempts to determine chronology, origins, directions or destinations.

Reciprocity is a word we could use for the rhizomatic nature of life, or perhaps paradoxically, the social mechanics of earth. We are undeniably entangled in perpetual subliminal conversations and exchange with each other and the natural world. Reciprocity expresses our interdependence, whether conscious or not. The limits of that reciprocal relationship likely extend beyond any rational definition we might rely on. We can see ourselves in a new light, not as a single central species mastering life, but as just one species (the youngest species) sharing a vast web of life. We are learning this the hard way. 

Reciprocity, or what might well be called emergence, is an omni-variant, non-linear dynamic beyond our feeble attempts to determine chronology, origins or destinations. Much as we might wish to, or to be tied to the habit of gazing into a rainforest noticing only the layered canopy, the explosion of color, the cacophony of voices or the humidity, we cannot see the whole unless we also notice what is underfoot, buried in the rotting vegetation, the decomposing bodies, the leaf molds, the micro-organisms, the mycelium, the death amidst all that life. In fact, the death is giving rise to life. Without these, there is no rainforest, no reciprocity. Some relationships are visible, some invisible. Everything we are and all we do is part of that entanglement. 

In a culture that teaches and so efficiently reinforces separation for so long, we as individuals are reduced to atomized centers of resources to be mined and harvested. We have reached a point at which even our autonomy of thought and action are under threat. It is critical to disengage from the machine of Progress to discover and enact a new way of living closer to the reality of our place in the web of life. We are being called upon by unparalleled change to engage all our faculties, our vision and intuition, the ears and eyes, the sensations we have forgotten to notice and the capacities we use to listen for foreign and fugitive guidance to recover or discover for the first time the basis of our relations with each other and the more-then-human world.

We have to search our histories, poking around in the ashes, into the sources of imagery, before memory, before place, before blood, before nations, to the tribal, to the bones of our original values, to the individual cells of community where life is incubated and regenerated, where our relationships were not things to cultivate, where we watched each other grow and participated in the lives and transitions of everyone we knew. Somewhere in our past, even if only in our genetic memory, we have all known deprivation, displacement and domination. All is embedded in the epigenetics of the human story. More recently we have come to know the soulless commodification of fellow human beings. We have moved beyond some or all of these to be where we are and to carry that knowing with us. That is the common legacy of our time. 

The lifestyle I enjoy was built on the contributions of a billion partners, both human and non-human. For 200 years, capitalism has depended on the establishment of unequal relationships, hierarchies of privilege among all those partners. The unraveling we see around us is the legacy of that inequality, including the racism perpetuating them. We have all become complicit along the way, with colonialism and slavery, with those hierarchies of privilege, with entitlement and subjugation. We are the benefactors of exploitation and violence and we live in a nation built upon that violence and which continues to thrive on the suffering of others every day. 

The bill is coming due. I have a deep grief, emptiness and sickening feeling as I ponder all of this. But feeling guilty is also a perversion, an inversion of victimhood. It can be immobilizing, but it’s time to put it away and name and claim a different way. 

Revelation & Recovery

The appeal of post-activism–a walk into the desert beyond the last swimming pool, is an escape from human centrality, an intention to tend the wounds we have inflicted on our world, on ourselves, by presuming humans alone are the drivers of social change.

Deep Adaptation was a welcome revelation. I was suddenly relieved of pushing the rock uphill. I was diverted to more productive activity: facing unmediated and unfiltered reality and acting accordingly. These urgent times require that we slow down. I could put my full attention on the inner work of resilience and restoration, taking a slower and deeper journey into its meaning, simplifying and carefully extending myself to live a version of small-scale sustainability. Under current circumstances, as I’ve said, this seemed to be imperative.

Deep Adaptation has been criticized as a regression into despair, doom and disengagement. But I’ve never seen it as refuge of defeatism, more like a dispassionate assessment of reality. Parallel to this shift in attention, is the appeal of post-activism— a walk into the desert beyond the last swimming pool. It’s a cognitive jailbreak from a belief in objective reality. It’s an escape from human centrality, an intention to tend the wounds we have inflicted on our world, on ourselves, by presuming humans alone are the drivers of social change. It’s a turn toward recovering and redefining community away from the parameters of Progress. Conventional activism is an attempt to escape the prison (a diffractive prism?) of prevailing conditions. How is it that despite all our efforts, we largely remain in that prison, redefining ourselves over and over according to terms we can barely grasp. We are like fish trying to find water, immersed in it so deeply, so completely that we can only speculate about its nature. Post-activism is somewhere beyond all of that.

At the same time, as my health drives my attention inward, my sense of conventional (inner or outer) agency ebbs. To a degree, my definition of agency still resides in the conventional realm. If I tried to unravel this mystery, I could easily turn to despair and fatalism. As my world shrinks, I recall the vast spaciousness of mind, allow the boundaries of ego to expand and loosen, reconsidering influences steering life far beyond any imagined boundaries I might normally contemplate. I puzzle over whether and how the entire course of life has prepared me for its closing chapters. Or whether, more likely, there is no such thing as preparation, only incrementally deepening encounters with the reality of our material limitations. Clearly, there are still revelations to be had. That, revelation, if I could name a clear intention governing all of it, is what it shall be for me.

Upon arriving in Durham in October 2019, I was pressed to make my housing choices quickly, taking my health into consideration. I chose easy, low maintenance, self-contained and accessible. Any possibility of participating in building much resilience into my community or immediate surroundings was marginalized. Taking a wider view, making a commitment to a slower, smaller lifestyle requires opening to revelation from sources not previously considered. I have found these in familiar sources as well as in new voices now propagating via online communities connecting in ways we might not have explored if Covid had not come along. 

We are entering territory never previously occupied by humans—of multiple catastrophic events (Covid, climate change and Trump) arresting, rupturing and reversing the entire course of human progress, stopping us in our tracks—like a massive volcano erupting and darkening the global sky, like Nuclear Winter. This is the precipice of Peak Humanity. In some ways we’re already on the downside, heading south. The possibility of arresting the inertia of the Industrial Growth Machine is a small sliver of light barely escaping the massive black hole of Business-As-Usual.

There’s further revelation—and recovery—in realizing the depth and nature of our entanglements with the natural world and each other. We are arrested by boundaries suddenly becoming much softer than we normally realize. They are mutable and transient, more like filters, permeable and highly specific, both protective and yet facilitating communication. Less foreboding. COVID is a messenger of our porosity, a call to examine our intimate relations with the micro-biome, with ecologies interrupted, sundered and thrown into chaos. 

In this respect, COVID is also more of a revelation than any previous fugitive organism leaping across the boundaries of its normal habitat because of its deadly nature and global impact. It’s bringing us crashing back to earth from our drunken binge of extraction, acquisition and destruction. Investors and futurists may call it a Black Swan, but it’s more than that. It’s the latest event piercing the myth of separation. A more significant event propagating greater collapse-awareness could not have been engineered by any deliberate effort. We are now glimpsing a version of the future and being clearly shown what measures will be necessary to respond to similar events in addition to whatever the climate has in store for us.

To enter any recovery, all of these revelations must be digested. Also revealed are our capacities of trust, compassion, courage and a new purpose.  It’s time to recover, dust off and refurbish these exiled capacities to embody our reliance on each other, to remember we do not exist outside of relationship. Nothing is itself, by itself. As Zach Bush mentioned in a recent interview, COVID has awakened and spurred us to move from an adrenaline society to an oxytocin society, restoring the inner landscape, awakening to reciprocity. This is what we are finding in the streets, online, in wider collaborative initiatives. Every awakening is a recovery, stimulating a desire for more.

Rage & Resignation

I’ve been in a rage since before the financial collapse of 2008. Well, actually, a good deal longer than that. Perhaps since Bush v Gore. OK, let’s say I was tuned into the truth about Bill Clinton before it became patently obvious: a neoliberal excuse-maker, prevaricator, manipulator, triangulator, blah, blah, blah. There was a reason he was called “slick Willie.” I’m not even mentioning Vietnam, Nixon, Kissinger, and the thieves and sociopaths of the GOP operating ever since the early 80s, 9/11, the Patriot Act, the Iraq War. 

Plenty of reasons to be in a rage. But never mind. If I just picked 2008 as a base, it was the bailout and Obama’s (or should I say Eric Holder’s) failure to stand up for the rule of law by never prosecuting or even stepping on the toes of the financial elites. Not one. That was when “too big to fail,” was unveiled. An amazing piece of PR. Now we’re pondering whether humanity is too big to fail. Spoiler alert: nope.

Over the past 10 years, this rage alternately morphed into despair, denial, resignation and dropout about the climate issue as we’ve witnessed one failure after another, one milquetoast policy after another and terminal prevarication. I even had some words for Obama (2012) about his pursuit of America’s endless foreign wars:

your words fall
like an avalanche of dry bones
once resounding against the sky
now empty echoing in our foundations
once the sinuous awakening curvatures 
of smothered and gasping values
now falling into an abyss 
of conflict and easy temptation
stunted flowers becoming bitter fruit 
they fall away from your stunned mouth
knitting together only shame and excuses
for all the death they foretell

I couldn’t have said so at the time, but about 2014, I reached the end of my rope when I went to congress to lobby for a carbon tax. If that’s not enough to pull the rug out from under any remaining spark of inspiration one might have, nothing is. It is and always was Kabuki, steeped in an august veneer of propriety, sanctimonious deliberation, the worship of barnacle-encrusted tradition, self-serving appropriation of mythology and rhetorical sleight of tongue. Dishonesty, thy name is Congress.

For a good while now we’ve been able to name the entire criminal gang, the ones most responsible for our predicament. We know what they knew and when they knew it. We know their tactics. We know who sold out humanity for profit, who has lied, deliberately and expertly clouded the issue and mounted massive misinformation campaigns. We know their henchmen and how they obstructed popular sentiment, cherry-picked and distorted climate data, attacked experts, threw faux experts into our path, sentenced billions of earth’s most vulnerable beings to deluge, displacement, deprivation and death. All expendable. The greatest crimes against humanity, bar none. The Holocaust times 10,000. Species-suicide promulgated by sociopaths. Not one of them has been seen or is ever likely to be seen in the familiar orange jumpsuit. 

But then, parallel to the rage, coexisting in strange symbiotic temperance, is my denial, my rage about having to be angry about any of this in the first place and my cynical desire to run in the opposite direction and live a life of careless oblivion—which at times gets the better of me. Resignation. And why shouldn’t it? I’m entitled to do that simply based on the fact that I’ve already lived most of my life, a simple life as it is now. I’m not wealthy enough to afford a real high emission lifestyle. Well, except air travel. There’s that. At the same time, living that smaller footprint life, I remain complicit. 

Even though my personal mitigating measures are so miniscule as to not even register on a lifetime scorecard, I fall back into my cultural upbringing commanding me to repair the world (tikkun olam), even though not making any mitigating gestures makes about as much negative difference as any positive difference I could measure by making such gestures. Perhaps these are the terms of a new post-activism. But post-activism cannot make promises. It can only expand to define the problem. And even that is a risky proposition. The dilemma lingers—believing we can individually make a difference, which allows us to feel good–without really making any real difference whatsoever?

Which brings me closer to the present moment. Having realized some years ago we are heading toward, or have already passed, critical tipping points guaranteeing the worst climate impacts and having exhausted my taste for barking up the same old trees and being painfully aware, despite all the promise of zero-emission technology (which was not catching up to fossil fuels fast enough until the appearance of COVID), of the nature and power of the fossil fuel lobby and the sociopaths of Wall Street driving the economic machine inexorably killing us, I stumbled upon Deep Adaptation, which doesn’t quibble about our remaining chances to throw any serious wrenches into the gears of Business As Usual or place false hope in persuasion by rational argument. 

Instead, Deep Adaptation names the Anthropocene as already an era of failure, a colossal crashing to earth. It could also be named the era of The Planet Striking Back. Unfortunately, our dithering miscalculations now threaten human viability. On some world which remains foreign to me, it may suffice to burrow deeper into Buddhist practice to discover non-confrontational or non-aggressive ways to address these issues, and they may well exist, but most of the time I lean more toward channeling rage into creative pursuits–and this is not a time to drop out. Fortunately, a significant cadre separating itself from the homo sapiens death cult realizes the only sensible response to climate impacts we’ve been failing to forestall for 40 years is by utterly re-shaping the ethos of human presence. 

Not that Deep Adaptation is a pioneering idea in this respect. There are collapse-aware people all over the world, still massively outnumbered by the oblivious, but nevertheless creating new institutions, small and large-scale adaptive and resilient communities everywhere and propagating new thought. Technology provides the means to accelerate these ideas as never before. Unfortunately, it also provides the same benefit to counter-narratives. But while those local actions and personal transformative ideologies are taking hold, the mass resistance and uprising necessary to slow down the carbon emission juggernaut had never fully made itself known until the twin conditions of the pandemic and mass resistance to systemic racism became the means to realize in a new way how one condition is all conditions and that justice for some cannot be separated from justice for all. 

Rather than an invading alien, Covid-19 has proved to be the monster under the bed, a goblin from our past and a message from the future, humanity’s zombie rejected Other. We are impossibly entangled with the biological world, having corrupted ecological codes to such a degree the system is coming back upon us. Covid has put us on pause, mirroring our failure, hubris, ignorance, arrogance and the inequality on which they all depend. And how do we respond? Reflexively, automatically, identically to the medical approach, pitting humans against all invasive organisms, the easy way, the only way we know: War! Demanding a reinforcement of human centrality and control.

‘All we know’ is a perfect example of how our responses to problems perpetuate the problem: War against the virus (social distancing and other measures) followed by a popular uprising against the measures taken to defeat the virus. To view the virus in this way is bring us even closer to the next pandemic…or at least a perpetuation of this one. We have no idea how to do with-nessing, stepping all the way back from our imagined control and being with, quietly enough, even if only for a moment, to realize we are the source of our deepening agonies and that the conventional model of responding is only making things worse. These are moments when resignation overtakes me.