Category: Transformation

Growth

The pursuit of growth, the acquisition of more, being determined to grow the ‘success’ of one’s life, whether driven by a sense of inadequacy or realizing most of one’s life is now in the past, chasing certainties in ever more precarious ways, is to never grow old, to remain a prisoner of the cultural definition of success and failure. 

Modern culture is entranced with growth. It’s an addiction that’s completely out of control even though we know the consequences are washing over us like the building tsunami that they are. The growth imperative saturates not only economics and our material aspirations, but also spirituality. 

The sanctity of growth is so pervasive that panic ensues when growth slows down, and especially when growth goes negative. I can’t help noticing my personal inclinations implicated here as well, how devoted I am in my later years to what I name as growth, to whom I can yet be, the deepening of perspective, spiritual comfort, a continuous expansion into an evolving comprehension of life and doing the personal work of becoming worthy of the attribution of human. It’s a combination of learning, knowing, faith and loosely held certainties. Most of all, it’s become an ongoing inquiry into the mysteries of time, duration, the currency of living, aging, and death.

What’s also required in the personal growth space is uncertainty, not only a realization of what little is known, but an accommodation to what little I personally know and how I cling to what I claim to know. It’s a realization that the comfort of certainty, though always appealing, is a false security and that a willingness to continuously parse threads of belief and knowing are the primary components of a sustained orientation to openness. As if I must always leave room in the attic for something new, while also continuously choosing among the certainties I have for what can be re-examined or discarded. And besides, if I was to use the Mahayana as a guiding philosophy, much of what I name as “personal” growth is actually an excavation of our true nature, a mining project to unearth our innermost pristine, indestructible nature.

In the culture at large, a critical corollary of continuous growth is certainty. The culture is steeped in certainty, perpetually reinforcing its mythologies as certainties, hardening now into hyper-polarized camps. Whenever that certainty is threatened, either by scientific data, human experience, faith or religious belief, the response is invariably to arrogantly re-assert the inviolability of the primary mission of culture, the prevailing Story, even though that very certainty is destroying us.    

All around us, there is also the multi-billion-dollar enterprise in the past 50 years, what we know as the Personal Growth Industry. And here, as in the culture at large, are the same elements of the acquisitive orientation. More is better. Stephen Jenkinson and Paul Kingsnorth have each written about the deeply entrenched and unquenchable desire for more. The capitalist impulse is widely present in the monetization of the inner frontiers as in any other sector. And even though the premises of the industry are less certain, there is inherent danger in becoming entrenched in certainties about something as uncertain, as uncharted, as the human psyche. This pitfall is just as dangerous in the world of human improvement as in any other.

Economic growth has always been a form of taking, but has only recently become accumulation for its own sake. The identical character applied to inner journeys is what Chogyam Trungpa coined as spiritual materialism. Exploring at the edges of our inner wilderness is where we are truly tested. We can fall into the same trap of arrogance, applying ever more appealing rationalizations of the mysteries of life for the sake of ego gratification, and if one is sufficiently enterprising, monetize the entire experience as if it’s the most natural exercise one could imagine. This is a form of enclosure, a utilitarian, albeit satisfying, capture of our inner commons in parallel to what we see in the physical commons. This materialist model does penetrate the personal growth industry and some of the results are about as appealing as a strip mall. Or we can approach that wilderness with humility, care and patience, relying on time-tested spiritual sciences. There is immense benefit in shedding light into dark corners, exploring motivations, unconscious beliefs and hidden certainties that cause untold suffering and are driving us to the abyss. 

I’m wondering if how we approach growth is related to how we approach death. The pursuit of growth, the acquisition of more, being determined to grow the ‘success’ of one’s life, to extend one’s relevance, being driven by a sense of inadequacy, or realizing most of one’s life is now in the past, chasing certainties in ever more precarious ways, is to never grow old, to remain a prisoner of the cultural definition of success and failure.  Can the religion of personal and spiritual growth become just another means of paving our own paradise? Yes it can. What are we, as an aging population, not seeing as we pick through the vast buffet of offerings, pursuing the life-extending benefits of personal growth practices while mortality whispers in our ears? Is it that we must relinquish any attachment to growth or that there is nothing aggrandizing about chasing youth at the expense of living in the present?

The theory of steady state economic activity represents death to any capitalist, and to all but a tiny coterie of economists. The catechism “grow or die” demands there be no limits, that the idea of limits violates one of the core myths of humanity—that it is our destiny to continue our ascent to universal abundance, leisure and harmony, i.e. the platonic ideal, the Metaverse, disconnected from either history or nature. Implicit to that ideology is that endings do not occur. Limits are anathema. Have you noticed how many science-fiction depictions of an idyllic future include some form of victory over death? Conquering the wilderness is our destiny. Obstacles are temporary setbacks to be transformed into opportunities to transcend limits, to re-make ourselves and thus continue to fuel the myth. 

Limits are for Luddites, who were, after all, the original adherents to the ideology of steady-state economics. And of course, they were vilified then and continue to be the symbol of ignorant backwardness in the face of anything new, especially the ideology, brought to us by our technology overlords, that everything new is good, including new methods of social control, new weapons or even genetic experimentation. Growth is always better. Limits are for suckers.

Death, being an undeniable and inevitable limit, becomes a failure requiring maximum effort to push it off-stage. The slowing of growth causes gnashing of teeth among mainstream economists, which are all tied to the market, which lives and dies at the altar of growth and the outsourcing of death. And even knowing we are all on the way to death cannot fully cleanse the failure from it. We’re always trying to overcome the impending final failure. We’re trying to grow out of it. Failing to live forever is somewhat assuaged by demonstrating how successful we are at fulfilling our desires for more, by amassing wealth for its own sake. He who dies with the most toys, wins. Accepting failure is to accept the end of growth. 

Enlightenment is the spiritual ideal toward which we ‘grow’. The actual attainment of enlightenment, however unlikely, is depicted as a shedding more than an accumulation. Even so, the ideal symbolizes the end of growth, the end of time, and even the end of death. In this time, to accept failure and the end of growth would be widely regarded as a diminishment. Yet it could also be seen as its own deepening into one’s sacred time, into the truth of one’s life, becoming a model of the acceptance of death and failure as operating principles of life. To fully accept the reality of limits and the life-giving property of uncertainty is to let go of the ethics of More, to transform the profane taking for its own sake into an ethic of giving for its own sake. To deepen into our age, to accept limits, regardless of chronological age, regardless of whether the culture deems that age to be ‘young’ or ‘old,’ is to enter the all-too-rare space of what Stephen Jenkinson would call becoming an elder, becoming an ancestor, he says, worth claiming.

Because it does not retreat from the passage of time and can look with an unflinching gaze at both failure and success, standing on holy ground between the two, elderhood conveys an honest perspective about growth, failure, human agency, limits, and death.

Transraciality

The decolonized body, the intrinsic expression of core relationship & connection, the energetic body of creative awareness, that metabolizes experience continuously without grasping or regret or shame, the expressive body of subjective integrity, is the transracial body.

Anyone taking a serious look at one’s own attitudes about race these days is bound to get into some uncomfortable territory. It’s often said that looking at privilege is not enough or maybe looking at history is not enough. But however we go, we will quickly discover that the story widens far beyond our initial impressions or personal experience. The previous post was a suggestion that a white body is much more than skin deep. Privilege and bias are carried deeply in our ontogenetics, our body imagery, development and movement, the fine tuning of our limbic systems, our internal radar where potential threats and opportunities are processed.

Whiteness isn’t likely to think it needs emancipation from privilege or supremacy any time soon. What we are seeing now is a full-throated backlash against the dismantling of systems of oppression which are essentially class-based. Racist tropes are being used to preserve them. So, on one hand, we can say whiteness is already ‘free’ in some respects while being simultaneously diverted from seeing the class structure of its own oppression. True emancipation must mean emancipation for all, but its connection with race is undeniable. Maybe liberation can be interpreted to indicate the collective beyond racial distinction. Inasmuch as there is a white body, a colonized body, a body conforming to ideology as much as biology, regardless of race/ethnicity, and if we are ready to acknowledge the full implications of it, then liberation is as good a word as any to refer to the deconstruction of systemic oppression, racial or otherwise.

The forces opposing the dismantling of oppression like to say the future of Western Civilization is in the balance, as if that defense overrides any other consideration. I tend to agree. And that’s precisely why we must persist in grinding away at the machinery of narratives, epistemologies and exclusionary tropes of modernity, separating the trash from the recyclable, as it were, the propaganda from the truth. We do that by examining the wide and deep effects of policies, ideologies, social practices. That examination process is what’s being called ‘woke.’ and of course it’s the agents of oppression that hold that term to ridicule.

What’s at stake in this conflict is who gets to decide the nature of truth. How do we avoid following the cycles of the past, ensuring our own collapse on an unprecedented, and possibly terminal, scale? I don’t intend to digress into the origins of Western civilization, but I am reminded that the philosophies, governance, social and mercantile structures of Western Civilization did arise at the edges of desert, spreading to Greece, Rome, northward and and westward from there.

Western (white) thought has brought us modernity, capitalism, systemic exploitation, racism on a global scale, religious oppression, the destruction of the natural world, climate change and is now doubling down on all of it. Among the many effects climate change brings us is the loss of arable land due to desertification as well as what are now also called deserts of the ocean, barren areas of increasing size no longer sustaining thriving ecologies. Dismantling racism is among the reallocation of resources we must accomplish, reclaiming the cognitive desert, before (western) civilization returns to its literal origin.

I previously suggested the cultured body, the colonized body is the objective view, entirely dependent on sustaining the separation of subject and object, perpetuating the Other as a means of cementing identity. Identity is a key feature of the ‘objectivity’ of the colonized body. And to the extent that we continue to think and act according to a reified ‘objective’ view, we sustain our separation from the world as a living, entirely integral, continuously emergent matrix of which we are a (small but powerful) part. As a sustaining principle of the objective view, identity has run its course. I might even say identity, particularly including but not at all limited to white identity, is now an obstacle to our continued survival.

The decolonized body, the intrinsic expression of core relationship/connection, the energetic body of creative awareness, the body that re-members, that metabolizes experience continuously, spontaneously, without grasping or regret or shame, the expressive body of subjective integrity, is the transracial body. This is not the multi-racial body, but something else. The transracial body is a matter of consciousness, not identity, and also not the property of any single race, ethnicity or ideology. The transracial body, a term offered by Bayo Akomolafe, is also not an activist. Transracial awareness, if it can be connected to Liz Koch’s core awareness, is not about doing. It’s also not even really about belonging in the sense it is normally meant.

Unless we are quite clear, the very word ‘belonging’ conjures a binary, defining boundaries, or easily slips into grasping at some distinction between us and them. We ask, to what do we belong? If we see the path as one of returning to subjectivity, then everything, the inanimate, the animate, events, people, thoughts, is us and we are all actors within us no matter what we do or who we are. In this sense, using the word belonging can become an intrinsically flawed linguistic trap. Cultivating the subjective view becomes the portal to the transracial view, collective liberation, belonging to the whole. 

Transracial awareness is not even really about being, not in any fixed sense. But it is about being-with, becoming-with. When we hear indigenous leaders speak, or anyone speaking from the ground of ancient wisdom, when the words resonate somewhere within us other than the thinking mind, when they strike us in the heart or at a level of deep and quiet intuition that still recognizes the truth, when it feels as though the words open up the very earth, it’s because they speak from the subjective view, from a deep and imperturbable (albeit troubled) love as well as an immense heartbreak. Such a person is not an activist in the conventional sense. The indigenous voice, the transracial voice is not the voice of activism as we generally know it. I wouldn’t even say the transracial voice, or the indigenous voice is post-activist in the sense that it is not occupied in opposition to something or someone Out There. 

The indigenous/transracial speaker is not a messenger. They are the message. The transracial voice, the voice of core awareness, is not a teacher or a communicator in any conventional sense. They are the teaching. But those of us who still see the world from the objective view, who still struggle with issues like helplessness, shame, guilt or solidarity, who seek ways to interrupt and dismantle the systemic inertia, those for whom the low-hanging fruit of self-comforting gestures feel discordant, stale and superficial, those of us who have not fully recovered from being captured, conditioned and colonized into objectivity, may regard our recovery as emergence into post-activism. 

The recovery of core awareness and emergence into transracial awareness is accessible to anyone. It is surely more difficult for some than for others to realize, but we don’t have to know our personal lineage or commune with an ancestral group to find it. There may well be right times for allyship or solidarity as we most often think of them. But from the recovery of intrinsic integrity arises an inherent solidarity in the form of recognition beyond color, beyond identity, a resonance with shared reality, shared trauma and shared power. It’s not a tribal thing. It’s a human thing. And your forebears may not have had it. But if they did, or however you discover your own version, the linkage is timeless, unbound by any territory, tribe or cosmology. It is always with us, albeit dormant, because it is our intrinsic nature. It is our birthright. It is what we are indebted to. It is the true seat of agency in this confused and corrupted world. 

What is Psoas?

Psoas is not only a material link between the dense body, instinctual motivations, the limbic system, the sensuous connection between the upper and lower body, but a process linking the animal and the spirit body.

Based on a personal history as a medical professional and somatic practitioner with background in martial and contemplative practices, these comments are long overdue. Liz Koch is bringing fresh clarity and innovation to this tradition as she breaks new ground in understanding integral structure and function: the body as process.

The story of every body is written in an ever-refreshing pixelated environment, an ocean of shifting light and motion, multitudes of biochemical gates constantly opening and closing. There is no permanent story. There is only a whirlwind of accumulation, adaptation and shedding around a seemingly constant and ever-mysterious core of sentience, practice, and belief, processing, light undergoing re-creation, temporarily held in a limbo of semi-existence, and constantly evolving.

Discovering and living in that core intelligence is to live on the ground, I daresay in the ground, to live in oneself in a deeper way than most of us know or imagine. It is also to redefine the meaning of self as well as relationship. There is also a superimposed cultured body, the body shaped not only by ontogeny, physical development and the family milieu, but also by the philosophies, commercial, social and political practices of modernity which objectify the body as we become removed from the fundamental nature of humanity as beings worlding the world.

Being conditioned to cultivate a subjective self while objectifying the body is to become lost, to remain in the world but not of the world. This is an ongoing ‘decontexualization’ separating us from the most intimate internal process, and thus also from the larger milieu, distorting a conscious interactive fluid sense of being and place. To be more precise, real embodiment, according to Koch, is to reconnect with the animal body, animal knowing, the subjective experience of being and becoming ourselves and the world, and of being created by the world. It is to shift from the world as object to the world as subject, which is to approach the dissolution of Other.

For Koch, psoas is a sense organ, though conventional western anatomy considers it a muscle. Its function is a material path to orienting our somato-emotional experience, awakening this subjectivity, which is a deeply enlightening and enlivening path. It is the perceptual vehicle not only of descent into core experience, but of the material connection between the energetics of grounding, our connection to the earth, response-ability to place and self and the felt sense of integrity. It also transmits the ascending character of spontaneous (rather than calculated) presence, the energetics of a whole being responding to gravity in a restorative way and moving from a living center, immersed in a continuous flow of feeling, creativity and intuitive connection to dynamic possibility. Except that arriving at this quality of integrity also undermines our habits of creating and perceiving Others. This is a profoundly awakening experience. 

Psoas (I hesitate to objectify it by calling it ‘the’ psoas) is not only a material link between the dense body, instinctual motivations, the limbic system, the sensuous connection between the upper and lower body, but a process linking the animal and the spirit body. Rationality remains an essential function meditating instinctual motivations, functioning to connect the limbic system and the animal brain with the fulfillment of spiritual aspirations, the activity of the cortex, bridging the experience of the world as it is and the motivations and formulations defining the pursuit of a fulfilling path.

In a dry anatomy lab, medical students learn the physical location and quality of psoas as a pair of structures and connective tissues along the back wall of the abdomen arising from and adjacent to the spine, stretching from the lower ribs, traversing the transitional curves of the spine, through the pelvis all the way into the hip. And in that inert context, it mechanical functions can be defined according to its geometry and power dynamics.

But in the living state, the muscular and connective tissue relations of psoas include intimate communication with the rhythmic rising and settling of the diaphragm, the stabilizing fascia of the lower spine, reaching around the abdominal wall to the crest of the pelvis, down through the pelvic organs and through the hammock of muscle stretching across the pelvic floor to finally embed itself as a subtle but powerful primary mobilizer of the hip. Normal psoas is related to the aliveness of the muscular hammock spanning coccyx to pubis, mediating generative relations to the earth and the sky, the gross and the subtle, the energetic, the electro-magnetic, the physical and the metaphysical, taking and giving away, becoming, arising and disappearing.

From an evolutionary view, homo erectus undergoes a lengthening of the psoas to permit a fully upright posture. The unfolding of these events is still fraught with limited or distorted function. Many bodies, formed as they are by culture, bodies of every ethnicity and race, remain in conflict with themselves regarding the interaction of psoas, the abdominal muscles and the powerful erectors of the spine. Distortions of the poses may have antecedents in the earliest experiences of life and trauma of every variety. It’s a delicate balance rendered there, easily descending into either torsion, rigidity or collapse. We’ve all seen it and most of us know it. But in the best of worlds, psoas mediates a responsive attention and motility in a body that doesn’t need to adopt complex compensatory and increasingly rigid patterns to marshal its reserves or experience its own capacities.  

What we know and see and feel in western culture is the image-making apparatus set to convince us of the dominance of more superficial musculature of the trunk: spinal erectors and the abdominal wall. We internalize the messaging of the patriarchy in the ways we present ourselves to others, in how we move and respond to the murmuring of emotion in our social relations, in how we exercise, fortify and protect ourselves against what we perceive as a competitive and even perpetually threatening world. The externalized conflict is expressed as superficiality, as progressive dissociation from lived experience, as the disconnection we have wrought upon ourselves in pursuit of the ideals and ideology of individuation, independence, competition, dominance, and our profoundly mistaken reliance on purely rational approaches to ‘problems.’ 

White privilege is a field of action permitting–even demanding– we get away with denying the wild, the erotic, the darkly and brightly creative, the subtle sensuality and continuous effervescence of the sacred. Re-sacralizing—or restoring a capacity to process experience more fully involves a literal re-centering of our attention to a different locus, a different viewpoint not so much about who we are but what we are. That locus is the energy center known by the Chinese as dantien, by the Japanese as hara, the Hindus as the swadisthana chakra. These words all refer to roughly the same thing: the source of power or intuition, the creative center of subjectivity, Koch’s ‘core awareness,’ a self-balancing, self-generating healing and restorative source, the descent into ancient wisdom, the alchemical cauldron that is the fluid, in its most primal function, keystone of human structure, the sacrum.

The systemic legacy of colonialism is white supremacy. We’ve witnessed the postures and behaviors of white supremacy in the most graphic forms and countless images of people of color being brutalized and killed. But that is a mere whisper of the deep and long history of dominance expressed in the movements, gestures, tonalities and finalities embedded in cultured white and black bodies. The non-verbal micro-rituals defining power, the learned gestures of deference and submission, the careful constraint of expression, the rigid hierarchies deciding who and when one may be permitted to assume one’s full stature, to fully inhabit one’s generative and creative integrity, to give voice to intrinsic intelligence beyond intellect. 

Historically marginalized people who assume their full stature (whether standing or kneeling) may be perceived as a threat to the prevailing power structures. The full access and activation of the muscles connecting the animal body to the soul, one’s relationship to the midline, the feet firmly planted, the unflinching gaze, the voice firm and direct–that quality of definitive physical presence without rigidity, aggression or retreat, unimpeachable moral certitude clearly speaking unassailable truth, that expression of intrinsic power communicates an integrity and expressive capacity that directly threatens the systemic barriers devoted to keeping those qualities of awareness and fearlessness from spilling out into the wilds beyond the limiting corrals of truth defined by whiteness. Those entirely conditioned in the epistemologies of whiteness cannot even comprehend such a thing. It’s immediately triggering to the hyper-defended identity of whiteness. 

Women are particularly subjected to those constraints as Susan Griffin articulates so well in her book of essays, The Eros of Everyday Life. We live under a tyranny of abstract thought at the expense of feminine life force. Women continue to be deemed inferior because they cannot be objective, because they typically live closer to the cycles of life and death than men, because they swim in a hormonal soup of creative eroticism, because they are subject to the turbulent and unpredictable, uncontainable currents of emotion or maybe they live somewhere beyond the fortress of rationality in which white patriarchy hunkers down. Historically, even the inclination of the pelvis was regarded as evidence enough of female inferiority. How much further from an authentic comprehension of biology, sensuality and erotic vitality could that possibly be?

The body is and continues to be a key battleground in this era of late-stage capitalism and the deconstruction of the legacies of modernity, supremacy and domination. It’s a long and complex journey. And we may not have as much time as we think to recover the animal within. But the closer we look, the more we will find our true selves there.

Offering Mandala

Isn’t that the whole point of the mandala offering–to give up everything for the sake of realizing we never had anything in the first place?

The Middle Way pursues the embodiment of wisdom and compassion. The Great Vehicle of these attainments is parsed as a progression toward the fruition of altruistic intent and the transformation of all sentient beings such that consensus reality ultimately dissolves into unwavering non-conceptual blissful awareness: Dzogchen. The Great Perfection.

A tall order, indeed.

Wisdom is a reference to emptiness. To perceive the true nature of phenomena is called pure perception. A Buddha field is a pure realm manifested as a product of pure perception. Such a field would include everything we see, think or know, everything that happens ‘to’ us, everything we ‘have’ or “do.”

From the Vajrayana perspective…the understanding of Buddha fields is a deeper one. The root of the Vajrayana is “pure vision,” or the perception of the perfect purity of all phenomena. To enact this purity of perception, we do not perceive the place where we are now as just an ordinary place; we imagine it to be a celestial Buddha field.”     — Dilgo Kyentse Rinpoche

By offering everything we have to the spiritual home of Buddha, we are affirming it is all Maya, an illusory projection dissolving under the scrutiny of pure vision.

In other words, in Vajrayana, the celestial Buddha field is here & now in this moment. It encompasses everything in every instant. It is our everyday experience illuminated by the Dzogchen vision. The deliberate creation of detailed visualizations to further transformative experience is called Guru Yoga, a cornerstone of Vajrayana practice. Silly rhetorical questions like “where is a Buddha field to be found?” or “how would we know?” carry little weight against the benefits of engaging directly in a personal practice of developing pure vision, creating your own Buddha field, also realizing that the essence nature of everyday experience is already pure and exists whether we deliberately create it or not. 

The offering of mandala is a related practice dating back to the origins of Buddhism whose rituals, detailed in the Kalachakra Tantra, are intended to accumulate personal merit and thus ultimately escape cyclic existence and gain entry into the pure vision of a Buddha realm. The outer form of this practice employs a physical representation of the universe, all its worlds and continents. The universe we know as well as incalculable other universes we don’t know are considered pure lands to be offered.

A more internal intent of the mandala-offering practice is to self-purify by offering all possessions, all property, including one’s pleasant and unpleasant experience, one’s very body, to the pure realm of the Buddha field with a clear altruistic intent.

By the virtue of offering to you… visualized before me,
This mandala…resplendent with flowers,
– my body, wealth and enjoyments–
Adorned with Mount Meru and the four continents,
As well as the sun and the moon,
Without any sense of loss, I offer this collection.
May all sentient beings enjoy this perfect realm….

This shift in perception to recognizing our entire existence is suspended within an omnipresent projection of Buddha-mind, pure and transparent in quality and depth, momentarily breaks the grasp and completely overthrows our limited habitual view. We come into an immediate personal encounter with its illusory nature, which is telling us we don’t truly “have” anything at all.

Isn’t that the whole point of the mandala offering–to give up everything for the sake of realizing we never had anything in the first place?

Seeing everything arising as a Buddha realm renders “being” and “doing” as flawed constructions, relying as they do upon a dualistic view imputing actions and possessions with intrinsic substance. Being, since it implies the existence of non-being, is already an objectification. Doing implies the existence of a doer. The very nature of these references to something that cannot be rationalized or categorized holds us in the sway of illusion. Maya creates the language and language reinforces the illusion that there is any material reality whatsoever to objects, possessions or thought, including every conception about thought, including the very notion of Maya itself!

And yet, at the same time, we live in a world of consciousness and intent. The Two Truths are said to be completely interdependent, inseparable, and timeless, yet even these categorizations are also illusory. The Two Truths, we should recall, convenient though they may be, are neither Two nor “True.” We might even call them the Two Lies, or better yet, The One Lie.

Things, material realities, states of consciousness, arise and cease in every instant. Phenomena are both material and non-material in nature in each moment, like water at precisely 32F—neither solid nor liquid. Arising from a constant and changeless ground, they simultaneously exist and do not exist. They do not conform to any intellectual description. Nor can they be reified as constant states such as is light when we are (or are not) looking. The essence of phenomena is beyond conception, always empty. Materiality exists as an energetic manifestation of emptiness simultaneously and constantly, timelessly, without beginning or end.

Rendering everything–and it must be everything–to a Buddha realm potentially opens the pure vision of a Bodhisattva, the fruition of the Middle Way, the non-binary view in poetic dance, always becoming its opposite, destroying, and reinventing itself continuously in every moment, cause melting into effect and effect into cause.

The one in whom this altruistic intent becomes stabilized is no longer lost in the material view of contaminated Maya, resting instead in a radical openness and supreme unity, yet also finding a bottomless well of compassion for those who do.

The Unmasking Continues

Covid is a warning shot, a harbinger of things to come. If we imagine our response to the pandemic as a practice run for future crises, we are doing rather poorly.

Covid has been referred to as a portal, a re-boot, a mirror, a hoax, a metaphor of everything good, bad or ugly about capitalism and modernity. There’s not really much daylight between many of these interpretations. Another comprehensive and enduring metaphor is that we’re in the midst of an unmasking, which is the definition of apocalypse-a removal of the veils obscuring a clear view of the present reality. As the pretense of stability fractures, we encounter a storm of feeling and response. And as the Delta variant now sweeps through nations, ignoring borders, class and threatening to ignore vaccines, we must ask again what is being revealed.

There are those who believe we will regain momentum on some imagined trajectory to normalcy, reinstating the familiar rules and laws of commerce, that all hierarchies and differential privileges will be retained, boundaries and binaries we take for granted (or don’t even notice) will be restored, the eternal rules of economic gravity will be reinstated, upon which we can return to the serious business of inequality, denial, extraction and ecocide.

Covid is a test. The presumption that modernity can manage it all, the ideologies of sustainability, ‘freedom,’ medicine, the engines of mass communication, public relations, mainstream journalism, public health, the entire narrative of progress, the veneer of corporate social responsibility, equality, even the fantasy of mass spiritual awakening, all of these lie bleeding on the sidewalk, unmasked in a quickening drama of collapse. The airwaves and social media are filled with hollow discourses, dissociation, sophisticated ego-driven delusional schemes by which we entertain ourselves and by which huge sums and resources flow to a minuscule number of individuals, increasingly tired systems of indoctrination, dominance and control. The structures of the dominant paradigm are trembling and the costs some are willing to pay to prop up the game is bleeding into savagery. The empire has no clothes.

Covid is intensifying and accelerating the dialectic. The protestations of those who most closely believe in God’s plan are reaching the level of medieval religious hysteria. Which part of God’s plan is at work here? On the other hand, the media/corporate/public health/medical axis has been desperate to assert control of the narrative, that Covid was an accident (do we really know that?), that following a few basic guidelines will manage and contain the spread of the virus, and primarily that the virus is an enemy to be battled through vaccines, responsible behavior and will be solved by following scientifically validated protocols. Many are drawn to the hygienically rational (unbiased?) legally protected pronouncements from the inner sanctums of Big Pharma.

We are moving so far beyond all of this.

Shunyamurti, 2013:

Is it just that every narrative circles hopelessly around its own apocalyptic core, like the moth spiraling toward the flame? Is the Word no longer God? [Now words eclipse the Word], until the words all begin to implode into nonsense and face us with the falseness of their meanings, the labyrinth of delirious signifiers that have created a sound barrier between consciousness and Truth. 

Driving all of the above is the 40-year advance of the oligarchic agenda promoted by political parties, think tanks, organized religion and mass media attempting to cleanse national security, foreign policy, civil rights, law enforcement, medicine, higher education and the nation state of all but true believers. We are witnessing deepening cracks in the dominant narratives. The timid voices of integrity and credibility are now making space for bad actors to use vast political and media resources to drive sophisticated messaging to trigger fear and anger: bifurcation for its own sake, promoting versions of reality serving their personal, corporate, financial and political benefit. Collective psychosis, brought to you by the neofascist international crime syndicate

The stock market is an apropos example illustrating the increasingly threadbare fabric of economics and culture. We say the market is not the real economy, but such pronouncements don’t penetrate the bastions of the linguistic managers. The message perpetrated by central banks, five or six major investment banks and politicians of both parties is that everything is (or will be) OK. Yet the financial benefits of monetary policies meant to prop up and maintain the facade of growth and prosperity do not reach 80% of the population. It’s mostly gaslighting to protect the investor class. Mainstream economists are trying their best to convince us that risk is diminishing while the moral hazard in the largely opaque shadow markets increases month by month and the remaining measures to sustain the unsustainable shrink to a perilous few. This is a deadly game of musical chairs. The music is getting louder and the song is nearing its end.

Covid is a slowly unfolding series of shocks, revealing the trauma of conventional rationalism upon the collective consciousness. What is unmasked is the spiritual monoculture modernity has become–down to the vacuous micro-level pseudo-authoritative presentations in social media and TV, the tone of voice, the appearance, the time (or character)-limited delivery of information, the rapid segues from ‘bad’ news to ‘good’ news, the sequestration of subjects, the appeal to only a single level of comprehension. This is a continuation of progressive disembodiment that began very early in our lives. It is incremental developmental trauma.

You can avoid reality. But you can’t avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.—Ayn Rand

The combination of manufactured distrust of government combined with actual lying to the public by the government has inflicted cumulative trauma ever since at least the origins of the CIA (and likely well before). The effects of that trauma on civic trust is reaching its apotheosis in the spreading cracks in consensus reality, all of which is producing a culture in which, as James Kunstler has said, ‘anything goes and nothing matters.’

Covid is a warning. If we imagine our response to the pandemic as a practice run for future crises, we are doing rather poorly. Trump’s response to the pandemic in the US will be one huge reason for our failure. And the failure to investigate and prosecute Trump’s response will be another. We have resistance to sharing vaccine technology and we do not have mechanisms to make sure all nations, regardless of economic status, can be included in a global response. We don’t have a public conversation about the long-term trajectory for vaccine research or the implementation of practices that will reduce the likelihood of another virus emerging in the future. Capitalism is proving inadequate to deal with these long-term issues because it’s so focused on short term private profit. In fact, we might even say that capitalism has brought us the virus in the first place. How do we imagine capitalism is the solution to a problem it created?

How is that mask going to ripped off?

Present as Prologue

We are in the midst of an awakening, a rough transition from the dream of modernity and the emerging reality of its failing, if not wholly false, promises of universal prosperity and abundance.

When I think back over the past couple of decades and ask how was it and when my thinking shifted from imagining it was possible to find the political will to confront climate change to realizing social collapse was far more likely, I can point to a number of inflection points. It’s not quite so easy to assign specific turning points, but there are some events marking the passage toward my current position.

In 2012, Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone published a book called Active Hope. The subtitle was ‘How to Face The Mess We Are In Without Going Crazy.’ Segueing from anti-nuclear activism that began in the 80s, Joanna has spent the past forty years helping people access deep feeling for what is being lost and then to watch a fresh and grounded conviction to act emerge. But seeing that particular book appear was a signal to me that she was acknowledging our intensifying circumstances and the increasing difficulty of not only processing all the emotions associated with the incremental decomposition of nature and culture, but also of realizing a positive outcome of The Great Turning. I wondered when active hope or, if you will, radical hope becomes desperation? If we imagined hope as a regenerative resource, is it inexhaustible? When does active hope become hopium– an intoxicating strategy of pacification, helplessness and rising delusion?

To add some context, Obama’s weak stance and the failure of negotiations at COP 15 in Copenhagen in 2009 were also part of my turning, particularly upon learning that the fossil fuel propaganda campaign was deliberately targeting that event. In 2013, I was also collaborating on a political strategy to promote a carbon tax in the USA, submitting it for critique and confronting the obstacles to that effort. Ultimately, I found that process to be deeply dispiriting.

Not too long after that episode was the Paris Agreement of 2015, when the INDCs, Individual National Declared Contributions (to global decarbonization) were declared voluntary. Of course it would be naive of anyone to imagine nations agreeing to self-generated required contributions and submitting to enforcement, whatever that could mean. But voluntary contributions were also guaranteed to expose the entire effort to be more platitude than action, particularly in the case of the biggest polluters, which of course meant the United States. And it was.

These are moments I’m calling inflection points. They all had antecedents, a series of episodes dropping like grains of sand on one side of a scale until suddenly their accumulation shifts the entire balance away from the probability of avoiding systemic collapse to one of guaranteeing it. Accompanying all of this is a process of letting go of hope, similar to the five stages of grief. But I’d be wary of trying to fit myself into boxes that might be too small. Regardless, that negotiation with all the familiar names is about the ultimate acceptance of endings, the contemplation of mysteries we enter most gingerly.

So here we are. As with grief, the entire process is not one of giving up so much as opening to something new, regardless of its mystery. When do we let go of bargaining? When do we loosen our grip on a false future of endless beginnings or, to put it another way, step outside the law and induced conventions sustaining a false future to expose ourselves to the truth (and terror) of something far less familiar, but which is becoming ever more likely? 

And anyway, was that even the future to which we were–or are–clinging? Or was it the past? A past in which the so-called promises of modernity could become ever more inclusive and the fantasy of personal and collective prosperity could continue indefinitely? In those terms, we’ve not been headed into the future at all. Our increasingly desperate grip has always been on the past–the conveniences we enjoy and particularly the ideology of endless growth. The culture war, the current battle of narratives is between those who deny it altogether, those who believe we can manage climate change without really giving up very much, that we can keep most everything we have and still call ourselves ‘sustainable’-and those who believe we must explore and design radically different lifestyles based on a new definition of abundance. What if nature has another agenda entirely?

The real future, if we can stop lying, is so overwhelming we may not fully grasp what is virtually imminent. Thus, we turn our gaze to the past, the recent past, to preserve the fantasy of human omniscience, the fantasy of our unlimited capacity to manage our way through every obstacle, every rising tide, every rapid in the downstream flow of history. Party like it’s 1999! All of this is fueled by vapid pronouncements from the technology sector, the advocates of bioengineering and the offices of politicians bought by fossil fuel interests. In fact, we have no idea precisely what will finally convince us of a collapsing biosphere. But we know the signs are all around us.

Releasing our grip on the future—telling the truth of the moment—is a landmark principle of psycho-logical health—admitting what is—allowing us to deal with ‘reality.’ At the same time, we are also trying to modulate extreme emotional responses, rising solastagia and deepening disorientation, which are negotiated in a specific system of the brain devoted to survival. While we don’t want to trigger impulsive, personally damaging or anti-social behaviors, we do want to retain enough forebrain function to generate positive corrective measures.

We–and by that I mean we in the US–may be a single extreme climate event away from triggering a mass shift in public attitudes about what is on the way (several are already underway), what mass media is still timid (or worse, negligent) about addressing. But this is where we find ourselves wading into a swamp of uncertainty, disagreement and potentially dangerous outcomes that were wholly unanticipated at the beginning. We don’t want panic to become even mildly contagious–like the pandemic. And besides, a significant segment of American culture is already being bombarded with triggering messages generating anti-social behaviors against their own interests, which are also threatening the collective well-being of the nation.

In trying to temper the information flow to avoid elevating mass anxiety, fear or contagious hopelessness, we remain deeply embedded in the territory of complacency. When Greta Thunberg addressed the annual World Economic Forum in Davos in 2019, she said, “I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day, and then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.” 

Meanwhile, managing social behavior, refusing to form a vision of a collective response to the realities upon us or being determined to ‘both sides’ it all is robbing us of the opportunity to convey clearly how fragile our situation really is. Everything matters more than ever if we ever expect to become someone’s ancestor, because everything, the wake-up call and the suffering of the past 18 months, the dislocation, the uncertainty, the disruption of commerce, the loss of stability, the political and economic inequalities, the creative energy and social innovation, the conflicting moralities and the redefinition of community are all just a rehearsal for a rapidly advancing future.

The following is an obscure Facebook post from 2017, written by a nameless founder of the Into The Wild Festival:

And finally the great ancient god of nature, of the wild places, of the muddy-brooks and the golden hills, of the damp forests and the hidden glades, the protector of beasts, of horned and hoofed, he of the wild-lichen eye-brows, musk-eared pungent aromas swelling in through the ether, playing his deep octave of enchantment on his bone flute from beyond the veils, from under the other worlds. He curls his misty eyebrow towards humanity once again, reminding them that their tiny insignificant lives are mere dew-drops on the vast garden of existence. All their self-help seminars and self-important narcissistic endeavors are nothing but the froth of waves under the infinite sun-rays of existence. 

You can wash your hands, but you cannot wash away the wild, the mysterious, ravaging ferocious tenacity of the world. You can try to blame it on 5G or 4G or GG. You can create as many concepts as you like, but in the end, nature will rule with wild and ecstatic bloodthirsty longing to take us all home to where we began, the deep dark emptiness where everything arises and begins, time without end. Pan, the original horned god will once again step out of the shadows with his name on the tongues of all beings, pandemic, pandemonium, panic, panacea, all bursting forth like wild flowers yearning to kiss the sky.

In this realm there is no good or bad, high or low, rich or poor, just the wild abandoned expression of life and death forever dancing in the orgasmic Milky Way of existence, radiant in its potential. So, we are nature in our deepest dreaming, before we civilized ourselves into square boxes of ready meals. We are life and death. We are the earth-woven lovers of the wild. We are that radiant mysterious emptiness. We are Pan. We are all people. Listen to the call of all beings deep in the dark of night, at the cusp of dawn or dusk and you will hear your ancient voice forever singing you back home.

We are all Pan, as god, as archetype, as a voice of the irrational. Pan travels deep in our psychic underworld. Nature is Pan, both beautiful and treacherous. By exiling him from our natural terrain, by dislocating or repressing the divine Pan from the pantheon of gods, we are dishonored. We lose ourselves. Eventually we suffer the consequences of that repression in the form of emerging tortuous pathologies.

We are in the midst of an awakening, a rough transition from the dream of modernity and the emerging reality of our failing, if not wholly false, promises of universal prosperity and abundance. That was never really part of the deal and now, with all the Pan-words dancing before us, the true costs are mounting.

How will it all Pan out?

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. 

Embodiment: The New Economy

Embodiment is being fully connected, fundamentally related to each other and to the natural world. We come home to the sacred dimension of life, to our Greater Self, to a dynamic equilibrium of inner mechanical, cognitive and sensory forces interacting with memory and feeling. We name such experience ‘Wholeness.’

The experience of physicality is the full habitation of our sensory and emotional space. There is no thought, or at least no need for thought, no need for interpretation. In its full depth, embodiment is a  sense of reality as physical nature itself, distinct from a larger container of mind or heart.

Does the mind shape the body or the reverse? Does the mind exist independently of the body? Sixty years ago, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (The Phenomenology of Perception) decided, in direct contradiction to Cartesian dualism, that we perceive and conceptualize everything somatically: processing, referencing, interpreting and responding to a continuous flow of physical sensation and perception. With this in mind, it’s easy to say consciousness itself arises in the body directly from intrinsic biochemical activity. The term infers the subjective experience arising in the body, the experience of the body…and the body of experience, are unitary, non-dual, in which all experience is subjective. There is no Other.

Embodiment also has meaning because it refers to our intrinsic familiarity with something. Knowing something “without words” implies comprehension of our experience at a feeling and image level. We ‘know’ at a sensory level where movement and memory overlap, before interpretation or any belief can occur. Prior to any specific mental awareness or conscious brain function, ‘knowing’ is differentiated from any intellectual or cognitive awareness. Our subjectivity is incarnate. We ‘know’ that we can ‘know. ’This is also a key principle of non-duality.

In the fully embodied state, the distinctions between mind and emotion become blurred. We enter the domain of the feeling mind,  a realization of presence. The immediacy of the present moment opens space for dispassionate observation, also known as mindfulness. If such awareness arises from within, then becoming embodied means we are more conscious of our consciousness, more aware of Awareness. We realize ourselves in a place, in a nearly timeless moment, apart from the past or the future. We are not distracted by habitually reformulating the past to satisfy an old need or to avoid an old memory. Nor are we attempting to manipulate the present to perpetuate a limiting belief about the future. We are simply here in the economy of the moment, where we may fully realize the abundance of meaningful relations.

Embodiment is the experience of being fully connected. We are fundamentally related to each other and to the natural world. In the broadest sense we come home to the sacred dimension of life, to our Greater Self, to a dynamic equilibrium of inner mechanical, cognitive and sensory forces interacting with memory and feeling. We name such experience ‘Wholeness.’

Can this experience be cultivated? Yes, of course. It has been the subject of countless practices for millennia. We experience the fullness of embodiment in peak moments of sustained physical exertion. We experience complete immersion into a felt sense of wholeness in lovemaking, deep contemplation or in moments of deeply loving and spiritual connections with others. We experience embodiment in dance and in structured movement such as yoga, Tai Chi, Chi Gung and many other practices.

Meditation is an embodiment practice because in its most elementary form we deliberately attend to the biology of the moment, the movement of breath, the settling into a comforting physical ease while quieting the mind. More advanced practice intends to bring the discursive mind into higher relief, bringing our inner process into consciousness. Awakening from this semi-conscious dream state, the random dance of continuous and habitual mental activity is to bring us closer to being fully present and more fully embodied.

This is a revolutionary act because we live in a time in which our attention is a commodity to be exploited, colonized and harvested for profit. This is the business model of the global tech giants.  The logical conclusion of this continuous assault on our capacity for focused presence is the clinical description of ADD. Attention deficit is pandemic. Losing the capacity to swim in the sublime inner worlds of feeling and imagination generates distorted, disconnected and addictive behaviors.

Taking the time to go into silence is a process of reclaiming the inner space where we reflect on and connect to the sacred domain of the inner commons, where our resources may be buried, but not tarnished. It is only by regenerating a capacity for calm uncluttered presence of mind that we can even begin to access our relationship to the vitality of life.

Fortunately, our attention is not something to be permanently extracted from us like a vein of raw material. It is a renewable resource. We have the capacity to access and explore and regenerate the inner commons and connect to the depth of existence, which is the birthright of being human, where all we know becomes a springboard to all we can imagine. We must renew it on a regular basis or we will lose capacity for imagination and creativity.

Instead of mindlessly operating on automatic pilot, we become mindful, developing and deepening the capacity for observation without reflexive engagement or reactivity. We meet ourselves as we are, with all the wounds and pain and flawed operating systems perpetuating our suffering, our grasping and adorning our identities and all the other accessory behaviors of a life we imagine will bring us happiness.

More importantly, nurturing the capacity to release ourselves from intellect, we immerse ourselves in the feeling space of our physical presence and venture into the heart of a Greater Self, an integral version of somatic experience, economics, politics and spirituality. We deliberately become available for manifesting an exchange of value that has nothing to do with money and everything to do with wealth. In finding our selves in the fullness of subjectivity, we find our personal economy, our true nature and the source of all natural capital. We enter the journey of exploring communion and learning how to manage our place, our home, our community, our planet.

Occupying our fullness and developing relational skills in every interactive dimension of life is to enter a transformative process of becoming a living embodied system consciously connected to the larger whole of Life and therefore directly influencing political and economic relations of the whole from a deeply grounded dimension. Reforming a system that is only becoming increasingly corrupt is not the answer, of course. What we are looking for is becoming a ‘living’ economy, nested in a layered living system. That includes the use of art, satire, humor, all the weirdness, perversity and raw authenticity, whatever it turns out to be.

These principles require structural change of our current economy toward equitable allocation of resources, benefitting the greatest number of people without sacrificing the ecosystem, democracy or personal fulfillment. Whether one is indicting the phantom wealth of the Wall Street casino or aligning with a sacred economy, all agree the current macro structure and operational rules of our political economy guarantee radical wealth inequity, environmental degradation, spiritual malaise and bizarre insulated tribal enclaves of increasingly aberrant behavior, divorced from any semblance of ethics or morality. The plainly antihuman nature of the old and dying economy as well as its bad actors and apologists is a by-product of warped individualism and the hyper-competitive pursuit of narrow self-interest essential to the perpetual growth imperative.

What is required of the individual who ushers in a different paradigm? The nested systems of the biological world mimicking the same operational principles at all levels are useful as a metaphor of a transformational process occurring intra- and inter-personally to vitalize the change we seek. In other words, aside from wishing to see large-scale changes in the way we relate to money and wealth, we might well ask what are the transformative changes bringing us closer to embodying the new economy within ourselves?

Coming fully into our form of life as human, dropping the vestiges of human superiority, reinterpreting our place in the natural world, we enter a realm of knowledge long abandoned by scientific materialism. We redefine the meaning of wealth. It no longer has anything to do with the exploitive, inequitable, artificial and profoundly distorted derivative world of energetic exchange we call money. It has everything to do with an entirely different metric of value: our communion with others and all life.

What is the currency of an embodied living economy? The answer should be obvious. The currency is relationship. It is authenticity itself. The currency at the heart of an emerging medium of transformational human exchange has to be rooted in our true nature and capacities. That can only occur through an unrelenting and uncompromising process of unwrapping and interactive discovery. Such an inquiry into both our unique essence and our interdependence incrementally strips away the false currencies that have grown up around us.

We thought the old economy was about money—having it, getting more and keeping it. We are learning that it was really about our relationship to money, not the money itself. And lately, let’s say particularly in the last 60-70 years, that relationship has become a perverted expression of both the best and the worst of the complicated ways we use it to express ourselves.

The enduring currency, the only reality we have to exchange with each other is ourselves. Money may be a symbol of who we are, but as is so often said: it is the map, not the territory. We can reinvent ourselves according to a different set of criteria: the authenticity of our purpose and the manner in which we serve our selves and others. In redefining the true currency of human exchange, we also redefine wealth, generosity, income and human value.

Is there something about all of this that can be measured? In what sense can we say that one person “has” more, or is embodying a new economy more than another? Not directly. The true currency of this economy is not a material thing. Its transactions cannot be registered in goods or services. Its growth cannot be directly measured against that of last year or last decade. What can be measured are the artifacts of its existence.

Those artifacts may not be obvious. But to those within a circle of authenticity and generosity, within a transformed economy embodying a new definition of wholeness, its parameters are obvious.

Notes On This Body

The story of this body is written in an ever-refreshing pixilated environment, an ocean of shifting light, multitudes of biochemical gates constantly opening and closing. There is no permanent story.

There are a thousand doors to presence. We may ask penetrating questions, risky and ambiguous, provocative, even dangerous. Or we may simply inquire into the workings of the mind and the emotional body evoking the most sublime or painful material.

One of these ways has been to journey into the body itself, to perform a deliberate inventory of physical reality, into what we take for granted most of the time. There are many different internal landscapes: the feeling world of instantaneous response, the intellect assessing and planning, the influence of history, habit, biological imperatives, learned behaviors, the open gates of ease, others long closed, all changing in every moment. The inner imagery is a constant kaleidoscope of light and sensation, color and function, pleasure and pain, conflict and resolution, excitement and calm, space and fullness. And always seeking comfort.

We distinguish ourselves from others by both instinct and conditioning. My personal habit of attention will go to the establishment of safe boundaries. My default focus is on feeling and sense perception. Setting myself at an appropriate distance is completely automatic. I barely think about it; but when I do, I am usually horrified by how absent I can be at times and at the superficiality of habitual distancing—marking space. The more closely I investigate, the less sure I am of a true boundary between what is and is not my body. In practical terms, I will immediately attempt to differentiate what is and is not me.

Science does inform this view, but only in a limited way. But taking the science seriously renders the entire question of what is and is not me into a radically different light. The more influence given to scientific reality versus popular assumptions, the more accustomed we can become to a different view that feels more accurate.

This body is a ‘thing’–what we are and also what we are not, both foreign and intimately familiar. Divergent energies operate in every moment as polarities holding the world together by separating everything from everything. The story of this body is written in an ever-refreshing pixelated environment, an ocean of shifting light, multitudes of biochemical gates constantly opening and closing. There is no permanent story. There is only a whirlwind of accumulation and shedding around a seemingly constant and ever-mysterious core of sentience, practice and belief, light undergoing re-creation, temporarily held in a limbo of semi-existence.

The relations of inner space are as parts, a multitude of languages decoded and interpreted by a central governing force and reinterpreted for assimilation by the various “nations” that we are. I am a united nation of diversity, the instability of an old knee injury, the quietly desiccating column of intervertebral discs; declining sight not seeing the fine print clearly, random and accumulating restrictions of motion, and an ever-advancing weakness and loss of stamina.

I live in an inner space somewhere between the roof of my mouth, the center of my cranium, relaxing in the bony four-poster bed of the pineal gland. I am also a nuisance of the winged sacrum, my diaphragm a parachute, rhythmically lifting and settling. I rest in the muscular hammock spanning coccyx to pubis, mediating generative relations to the earth and the sky, the gross and the subtle, the energetic, the electro-magnetic, the phenomenal and the metaphysical, taking and giving away, becoming and dissolving, arising and disappearing.

I am consciousness as structure, this structure, in one moment creating a towering edifice of ‘self’ and in the next, collapsing in abject surrender. I am the spontaneous execution of learned motor tasks, symphonies of coordination, millions of motor neurons singing in distinct and unique patterns as if nothing else exists. I continue to swim through this world, forever modulating timing, length, effort, relaxation, rotation, drift and unrestrained falling.

All these domains operate at once, the microbes in my gut, the transformation of water and food into consciousness, of breath into presence, of gravity into movement, conflict into work, of rest into gnosis. The outside is turned inside, the inside turned into a dynamic exchange with everything, the formless giving back in form. Sometimes a shout within, contorted by the implied fullness of a thwarted explosion, touches the pink-orange sky at dusk to salve some old wound. At times a seeming stillness on the outside hides the teeming beneath, nourished by and dying into all that surrounds me.

When I gaze into the dying light of this Balinese sky, the vitality of an ongoing massive emergence lurks just beneath awareness. Birds, geckos, bats on automatic pilot make impossible course adjustments in a constant search for dinner, not unlike the random maintenance-level neural activity of discursive thought. The silence beneath houses a quiet beyond all quiet, a vast uninterrupted place of no time, no beginning and no end. To suggest this body is no more than a spontaneous construction beyond conception, ineffable, measured against the felt sense of my reality, is an impenetrable paradox, whose unwinding forever occupies great minds.

I undergo the common physical changes associated with aging. Holding a self-image as a model of attainment is a form of vanity, but it’s not entirely driven by cultural standards as it is also by standards of personal comfort. Thus, I resist the physical changes of aging, though not compulsively. I am accustomed to a level of vitality regularly rejuvenated by active and passive practices. Am I attached to that self-image? Well, yes. Sometimes a bit too much. Yet that too is softening with time.

This is also “my” body, after all: the complexity of unique signal interpretation, response, inhibition, reasoning, resolution, intention and action. The body is indeed illusory, a vehicle of the greatest sense pleasures and the greatest pain, heaven or hell, sooner or later. But like the durian fruit so plentiful in some parts of the world, at once hell and paradise, the skin and the flesh are inseparable, sometimes indistinguishable, different sides of the same face. There are days when I must overcome the repulsive odor, the teeth of this demon life, before I can experience the incomparable succulence of its inner sweetness.

This is also my body, the one having no substantial boundary. Separation from the elements is indeed illusion. Connection arrives as a heron dive-bombing for frogs in the rice paddy, as the setting sun filters through the Maya trees or as grandmothers pass by, bravely riding side saddle on the back of a motorbike.

I have spent most of my life creating and cementing boundaries with the world and other people, differentiating the individual identity and the trajectory of a chosen life. Having been released from most of the common imperatives, realizing entropy and mortality, I am spending the remainder loosening my grip, allowing those boundaries to dissolve. As intimate as that day at the Mount Madonna Center, overlooking Corralitos, California, if I’m lucky, when I die there will be nothing left besides devotion, generosity and compassion, a celebration of impermanence. Every act is potentially a step toward realizing our true condition, a rehearsal for that moment.  Authentic compassion requires unflinching presence.

Beyond this, I listen to the unending internal conversations between disparate territories. They speak to each other quietly at all times of the day and night in language I may not always comprehend, requiring adjustment, refreshing attention to position, alignment and breath, continuously attending to the structure and energetics of presence. They drift across my awareness like distant strains of devotional music, hammered strings and practiced voices wafting across the paddy outside my window each morning at sunrise. They are a waking and an awakening ritual, the heartbeat of community, invoking spirit in the language of both gods and demons. Beneath all the conventions, the programming and the colonization of modernity, this flesh is vast.  That is the reality of every moment. Insofar as I may live in this awareness, I am more vitally engaged with the truth of what this body really is: a vehicle of both time-bound and timeless relationship.

Delusion

It is so painful that now, given the helplessness of it all, whatever humor there may once have been in the infinite variety of human foibles is subsumed by the poignancy and terror, the desperation and bewildered hatred at the heart of mass delusion.

One of the things meditation can be is a discovery of what about us doesn’t change and releasing identification with everything else, freeing oneself of all obstacles to becoming anything other than vast space.  This means dis-identifying with form: sensation, feeling, structure, any imperatives including body, time, desires, mental journeys, memory, gender…even meditation itself. For me, that especially includes impatience. To whatever degree I may approach such a condition, the practice becomes non-meditation.  Non-meditation is the essence of Dzogchen. 

Gazing is an auxiliary practice of expansion, the elimination of distraction and finding what I have come to call integrity. Exploring what integrity means is to approach wholeness not only mentally, but also to explore its physical components. Coming into full stature in the practice of gazing is to embody a physical architecture of integrity, which is not separate from the integrity of mind. Opening to compassion is the point. Approaching integrity of the body is to create space for breath, rising into a connecting and expansive heart-space, expanding into fullness. 

Premature dis-identification with feeling or ignoring the presence of unresolved conflict (by-passing) will always get in the way of the integrity we seek. The presence of strong feelings will hinder the longer-term clarification process. There are plenty of ways to work with feeling, but however one addresses that process during or in post-meditation, it will benefit quality of life and practice. Ignoring incomplete emotional clearing will obstruct the benefits of time spent in practice. Not that practice must be interrupted or delayed, just that a short and long-term emotional clearing process belongs as a part of practice. Either succumbing to by-passing or imagining the emotional work ceases at some point is a form of delusion and will undermine our capacity to inhabit our full stature and reap the benefits of sustained and careful attention to the full expression of integrity.

Assuming the emotional and physical architecture of integrity becomes a natural platform and a capacity to cultivate compassion, from which we may even sense the massive field of human karma, from those closest to us to the most remote strangers. Becoming permeable to and connecting with karma that is not our own, to witness and hold it without being affected or thrown off balance, remaining on one’s perch, as it were, is only sustainable if it’s  based on authentic compassion, which is itself an intrinsic quality of integrity. This is the achitecture of freedom.

From this stance, Bodhicitta and Compassion become identical. They can only come from full integrity anyway. Not immobile or rigid, merely steadfast. From this platform of integrity, compassion and bodhicitta become one as they are expressions of the same thing: the mind of enlightenment. 

Gazing into the ocean of human karma, the delusions overtaking a large portion of humanity become manifestly clear. In the grip of delusion, so many are stuck, trapped in an uninterrupted and tortuous cycle of wandering, being whiplashed back and forth between the first two Noble Truths, the truth of suffering and the root of suffering. It is so painful that now, given the helplessness of it all, whatever humor there may once have been in the infinite variety of human foibles is subsumed by the poignancy and terror, the desperation and bewildering hatred at the heart of mass delusion. 

Take Trump himself for a moment. His delusion has always been apparent. And if one could momentarily set aside the wreckage left by his personal delusion, the naked and lost nature of this profoundly damaged being, he could even become an object of pity. But at some point, not only have his delusional transgressions become criminal as the relative legal world would define them, but he has dragged many millions into his orbit of self-serving chaos. How is this possible?

I think of Trump followers as those whose lives were already being lived at the edge of delusion. Inside their anxiety, resentment, victimhood and self-pity was a simmering anger with no socially sanctioned outlet. For Trump himself, seeing none of the familiar limits that most others see, the outlet has always been to push the envelope of propriety with a combination of entitlement and victimhood perpetually skirting the edges of lawlessness. Why, after all, shouldn’t he have whatever he wants? And anyway, who’s going to stop him? Who has the nerve to stand up against his audacity?

The American Dream has not been working for his people. For them, it crashed long ago. It was being systematically undermined by the plutocrats, bankers, politicians on the take, CEOs and various other capitalists (AKA sociopaths) in positions of authority. Those whom I regard as deeply lost in this cycle of hunger, resentment and rage were ready for the plucking. Yes, they’ve been exploited and played by the relentless and sophisticated divisive messaging and legislative agenda of the Republican Party for decades while simultaneously being misunderstood and abandoned by the Democrats. All it took was certainty, a certain braggadocio, someone who not only gave voice to their seething anger but who resonated with and could embody their own simplistic, zero-sum view. 

From a distance, it’s all profoundly painful. That doesn’t mean I forgive or appease them or don’t resist them, because what they’re doing is trying to draw everyone else into their world while also destroying any alternative to their view, while Trump plants his delusions deeper into their receptive brains, by any means necessary. They cannot be permitted to succeed. But at the same time, the rest of us have to create a world that demonstrates the misguided futility of their quest.

The Leftist reality is more nuanced, less black and white. Of course, it is. And that’s why it’s been under attack for so long. The world view of the Left could never appeal to or alter the mass delusion of Trump world. It’s not selfish enough. There’s even speculation now that direct economic benefits will not break through the Trumpian hive-mind. It’s not a zero-sum vision. What passes for the inner sanctums of the Democratic Party in America may be equally deluded with some of its own toxic certainties, confusion about whiteness, their corporate view. And also similar to the right-wing is their steadfast belief that they are absolutely not deluded. Their submission to neocolonial capitalism is more subtle. The forms of grasping and exploitation are less overt, remaining in constant tension with forces of generosity and mutual dependence. In Trump world, no such tensions exist.

Referring back to personal practice, just because of what it already is, I’m being as deliberate as possible about dissolving every boundary between self and not-self, between external and internal. For brief moments I may skirt the edges of non-duality. In other words, leaping over physicality or presence into what is nothing but space, softening materiality, feels like a recapitulation of the dissolution of death itself. In fact, every instruction, every sitting, every incremental step toward realizing self-knowing Awareness is a practice for the end of life. Every sitting is an encounter with my own death as if my sole concern is noticing the Nature of Mind, noticing all phenomena as the natural emanations of Mind, empty in nature. 

This is precisely a rehearsal for the bardo experience. This is the space of death, the journey through the bardos, of being finely tuned to the signs and signals of that journey, not skipping over or impulsively mis-interpreting anything, not being distracted, frightened, grasping, descending into desire, mentally chasing after every shiny object nor being afraid of any appearance that may arise. This is also a metaphor of this American moment. We are traversing the bardos, facing the conditions of our death and next life, defining the terms of a national rebirth.

The act of accessing the three kayas of Vajrayana, empty essence, lucidity and compassionate energy, realizing their inseparability, is also the personal journey into the three bardos happening every time your ass hits the cushion. Well, America’s ass is on the cushion. Our national karma and transition are playing out daily before our eyes. We’re being bombarded by demons, black arts, wrathful deities, apparitions, deniers and false prophets, the viral hallucinations of Trumpism dressed up as public discourse. But let us not be fooled. Let us remain focused and steadfast in our integrity, determined to remain in our dignity and full stature.

One important question continues to poke its nose into my space. We live within the machine, the zombie machine defined by and driven by late-stage capitalism, fundamentalism and whiteness determined to emerge triumphant and unscarred from the death throes of the Enlightenment. The machine has always offered the illusion of control. We may be able to personally or even in ephemeral enclaves or in our brief sitting time reject the machine, believing we can temporarily overcome its influence or live (or imagine we are living) outside its control and we may thoroughly reject the illusion of control. But if we are not also dismantling the machine, pointing out delusion, naming its impotence and offering an alternative, what are we doing? Practicing for our death while watching America meet its demons in this transitional time while standing for the terms of our rebirth is the only game in town.