Tag: kosmos journal

Solidarity, Somatics and Psychosis

The classic design of the vessels transporting the kidnapped, the brutalized and dispossessed, the colonized masses brought from Africa to the New World, endures to this day in the forms and structures of patriarchal capitalism: social stratification, marginalization, income inequality, racism, limited or blocked access to the means of acquiring wealth, property, equal justice or the general benefits of living your own dreams. White people may still enjoy the freshening breezes of the upper deck, but the metaphor still applies to nearly all of us today. It is only a matter of degree.

Yet even in the darkness, the impossibly close quarters and squalor of the lower decks, the light of freedom and joy never died. Dislocation does not extinguish the longing for home, burning to this day in the literature, art, music and poetry of the oppressed. It is in these ceremonial forms of breathing together that solidarity is affirmed. That yearning comes to life in the reverence for the journey, the longing to recover the sacred, to resolve the diaspora with the free and full habitation of a transformed body in a new land, even if that land only exists as an aspiration in the hearts of the wanderers. 

Four hundred years later, it is not only the ones who bore the lash who still cry out for home. Neoliberal economics, by commodification, relentless extraction and by the absence of any loyalty to genuine community and because it refuses to regard the earth as anything other than untapped economic potential, renders all of us landless on the new plantation just as it does in the foreign territories, occupied, re-colonized and subjugated by the weapons of finance and law. If those fail, force is applied.

These conditions, specifically the hierarchies of privilege, the tightening grip on the lash, the systemic racism and the use of money as a bludgeon, the predatory financial order and all the other inequities accompanying its regime, remind us that we can lose anything at any time. And indeed, since our relation to earth is much more than merely to a potential source of revenue, everything is being taken from us, incrementally, every day. Manifest destiny operates upon the collective body now just as it did in centuries past upon the territories of the indigenous.

Modernity is a rationalization of the wild. It is a leveling. Anyone noncompliant; anyone who dances, breaks the rules, bends time, looks beyond the borders, meets with other bodies, dwells outside the boundaries of sanctioned connection, imbibes the nectars of the sacred, seeks wisdom from forbidden sources, cries out for justice or draws outside the lines may be indulged with limited tolerance. Some will be infiltrated, criminalized, surveilled, tracked, deported, bludgeoned, jailed or killed. The rest, at least figuratively, become fugitives.

These and others like them, the restless, underserved, disenfranchised and denied, the ones living outside today’s inverted definitions of “freedom,” and “opportunity,” the ones discarded by the “free market” are the ones deserving of our solidarity. But they’re not the only ones being damaged by the paradigm of dominance and exclusion. However the systems of power continue the privatization and destruction of the commons is our disenfranchisement in real time. 

The Freudian definition of psychotherapy is that in exploring and expanding the psyche we reclaim territory. Our wounds back us into corners and make us small. Our addictions limit our capacity for outreach and connection. All the consciousness work we do is to reclaim territory, to halt the narrowing and to expand our view. Modernity rounds the edges and flattens consciousness, narrowing focus to channel and facilitate the pursuit of illusory solitary happiness. Bayo Akomolafe calls it gentrification. When we open psychic territory, we push past the limits of convention. We enter the wilds, tearing through the fences of what we know. We recover expansion and breath.

As David Abram reminds us, the original meaning of psyche was about breath, the wind or spirit of life. When we (re) occupy the wilds, we are learning to breath again, to fully inhale the spirit of life and the common territory of choice and possibility we all inhabit. Sitting and breathing is the most elementary practice of contemplative traditions. In doing so, we typically only think of ourselves, our solitary and separate bodies and the spirit, or psyche, of our existence. We inhale, filling the self, partaking of the esprit, the ruach, the motivating energy of being, momentarily narrowing our focus to this body, this consciousness, this moment, cyclically relinquishing the territory of awareness we just claimed, releasing into the non-dual self, into the unity of all consciousness, eliminating all boundaries and expanding to occupy all the territory we abandon in our pursuit of Self. We infuse ourselves with psyche. 

Psychosis names an abnormal state of the psyche, a condition of separation from the essence of being. We become lost to the potential of cyclical expansion and contraction of spirit embedded not only in the simple movement of air, interacting with the flow of breath essential to language. The expression of sound, the original musical intonation of nature, the stops and starts, the shapes of the throat, lips and tongue are rooted in the original sounds and symbols of our relational self. They were orienting, defined community, interspecies dynamics and expressed the ebb and flow of interdependencies upon which group survival depends. To become, over millennia, progressively separated from and to lose all sense of relationship between language and natural world, to permit indigenous languages and their ways of knowing the world to be lost is a mark of the deepening journey into mass psychosis. 

We lose our breath until we can’t breathe at all.

Breaking free of the mass psychosis is not simply a matter of breathing or language. It’s a much deeper process of conspiring to access and know our bodies in relation to earth in a different way. The energetics of reductionism, scientific materialism and neoclassical economics drive a widening gulf between humans and nature, from the full-bodied, erotic conversations between humans and the seasonal textures and interactive exchange of wisdom held in sacred sounds and labels of obscure and unique mind-states for which there may be no equivalent in any other language.

Recovering indigenous history is more than recovering stories. Embodiment includes discovering the architecture of authentic freedom, sharing the history of our bodies, exploring the interpenetration of culture and somatics, coming to our full stature, bringing the diaspora home to place and community, recovering belonging, power and perspective, connecting with ancestral voices bending time and preserving the libraries of wisdom contained in disappearing languages.

As Alnoor Lada declared in a recent issue of Kosmos Journal, solidarity is a direct erosion of the structures of oppression, the powers anchoring domination. Reclaiming the past informs the possibility of changing the present. Acting from a different set of values, breathing together, healing from the mass psychosis by breathing with our ancestors, redefining our identities, reconnecting to deities rendered remote and quiescent is a direct affront to the forces of economic dislocation that would erase the past and reframe history as the solitary pursuit of self-interest.

Kali Takes The World I: Dark Night of the World Soul

By Vera de Chalambert

PUBLISHED IN FALL | WINTER 2017

When in the summer of 2015 I saw the breathtaking image of the goddess Kali, the great Hindu goddess of death, destruction, and liberation, tongue outstretched, third eye blazing, projected onto the top of the Empire State Building for the documentary Racing Extinction, I ranted, “This a sign of the times—Kali takes New York!” A year later, as the shocking 2016 election results were similarly projected onto the top of the Empire State Building and I saw Donald Trump’s smug smirk and sly gaze staring victoriously into the shaken soul of the country, I raved, “This is a sign of the times—Kali takes America!”

kali-1Last month, I picked up the New York Magazine’s infamous “Doomed Earth Catalog” issue and it opened right to the “The Uninhabitable Earth” centerfold. I have certainly not gone unfazed by the realities of climate change, nor escaped its oft-sensationalized overtones. But this article and its striking images, like a skeleton all decked out in Ray-Ban aviator shades melted straight into the concrete and graphic descriptions of being cooked from the inside as the earth temperature rises just a few more degrees, knocked the air right out of my lungs. I suddenly wanted to wail, but no sound came out.

I suddenly wanted to run, but there is nowhere to run from reality.

If you haven’t seen it, this issue is the only tantric iconography of the Great Mother that you will ever need. It does what every statue and image of the Dark Mother was always meant to do—make us unsettled, shake up our false selves and empty certainties, strip us of illusion. The voice roaring ruthlessly from the pages of the magazine was unmistakable. She might as well have been projected again up there on top of the world. This time, in every bone of my being I knew. This is the sign of the times—Kali takes the world!

Kali

In essence, the mythos of Kali is this: apocalypse has arrived. Demons are taking over the world. And, surprise, they can only be conquered by a woman! In desperation, the gods call upon the Devi.

Enter Durga.maadurga5

The Goddess rides in on her pussy-tiger, magnificent and fierce. She fights valiantly, but as she wounds a great demon, with every drop of its blood, a thousand more demons arise. The Mother sees she is losing the battle for the world. “Not on my watch,” she roars.

In the last hour from her third eye, the deepest, darkest, most terrifying form of the feminine rises, and that is Kali. She is the most terrible. Nothing escapes her holy darkness. She licks up the blood of separation before it hits the ground, conquers the demons, and saves the world. Oh yes, then she dances.

“If you expect any benefits from your search, material, mental or spiritual, you have missed the point. Truth gives no advantage. It gives you no higher status, no power over others; all you get is truth and the freedom from the false.” ~                                                 Nisargadatta Maharaj

Even as I write, Hurricane Harvey is still raging. Simultaneously this week, terrible floods in India, Bangladesh and Nepal have killed thousands and left millions homeless. As we stare in disbelief at images of entire neighborhoods swallowed under water, folks wading through the deep with their animals and their kids and their life in a black garbage bag, and thousands crowded into shelters, what is furiously seeping through into our collective psyche is that business as usual is over.

In our hearts we can’t help but intuit that this is only the first taste of such extreme weather cycles, that anyone of us might be next among the throngs of climate refugees, steeped in flood waters, or strung out by some future drought. Slowly, we are meeting the terrible gaze of Kali, her potent shaktipat (in Hinduism, the transmission of spiritual energy upon one person by another) meant to awaken us from our slumber of separation, burn away our prisms of illusion, mature our collective soul.

Stripped of our comforts and certainties and false assumptions about life, now faced with the vulnerability of existence, we come to feel more intimately the hollow of our bones. It is when things fall apart that we meet the un-ruined. To be planted, a seed must turn completely inside out, must break open, the old form utterly destroyed, in order to grow.

To those unfamiliar with the cycles of growth, fertility might look like annihilation. Similarly, those unfamiliar with the cycles of spiritual growth might not be able to recognize that darkening [precedes] illumination, kenosis is a condition for resurrection into divine life. Carl Jung said, “Only that which can destroy itself is fully alive.” Every fate eventually concedes to a dance in the fires of spiritual annihilation. It is important to honor holy darkness as we move through the seasons of our spiritual life. The darkness of the tomb of the ego becomes the gate into the holy darkness of the womb of the Great Mother.

Paradoxically, in spiritual life progress is marked by crisis and the only way towards intimacy with the divine is through entering the crucible again and again. Our spiritual growth is punctuated by dark nights of the soul—periods of difficulty, despair, disillusionment, and disappointment. These dark nights strip the soul of old spiritual ideas and attachments, and through radical spiritual disorientation, abandonment, and finally annihilation, they bring the soul into ultimate union.

This is why the great Mother so often appears wielding weapons, because truth cuts through illusion. Truth weans the soul from spiritual trinkets and false certainties. This is why her form is terrifying, because truth is pure terror—wrathful, uncompromising, ruthless. Truth offers no solace, no protection, yields only disappointment with the false self. This is why she appears naked, because she will strip us of all artificial safety, take away everything we use to hide and save ourselves from the real. She will shatter our most precious plans and rip off the masks we don to stay relevant, before cutting off our head, breaking our heart, and dancing on our ashes. There is no hope of improvement, no chance of resistance, no place to hide, no reason to argue with reality. Our only chance is to lean in for a kiss.

A total solar eclipse just passed across the heavens of North America and so many people looked up and were transfixed by the celestial darkening that traffic on Pornhub and Netflix hit an all-time low. An unprecedented number of Americans abandoned their addictions, gathered together—liberal and conservative alike—shared glasses, and looked up in awe.

Eclipses are oracles of change. Almost universally, eclipses are feared. They are often seen as inauspicious omens; they create terror and confusion; they can blind. In some cultures, folks lock themselves away in their homes; in others, they bang on pots or drums to scare away the demons that have swallowed the sun. And yet, of those who braved the darkness to experience totality, most report feeling profoundly transformed. Many express the sentiment that “It was like seeing the face of God.” This is the power of holy darkness: it disturbs, breeds awe, and reveals the Unseeable.