2021-7-26 Divination, Art-making, Healing and Love: Three Ways to Approach the Oracle
An old piece of writing that lays the path for more refinements.
This is an old piece of writing that I am reposting so that I can lay the groundwork for new writing about yijing/divination. It was originally posted on my old site/old blog (bodyaltar). I am leaving it here intact, including various links bibliographies, some of which i do not currently align with, but i believe that archives are important, and this means that you, the reader, need to read with a critical lens, using all of your faculties to discern context. I will admit that in the past few years since this was written, my faith/hope in people has been greatly diminished. please do better and practice.
That being said, here is the old article in its entirety. The post will be cut off if you are reading this via your email. Donations are helpful & necessary: venmo @daresohei or paypal.me/daresohei
This article is part of a package that includes an audio narration/podcast version of this writing with some extra commentary found on youtube here:
and on anchor/spotify here (same content as in the youtube version):
and an Underworld Party interview with Jeremy Johnson found here:
Divination, Art-making, Healing and Love: Three Ways to Approach the Oracle
(or, Trickster Brown & The Case of The Worldview-Consciousness Precondition Issue, part one of three, in which there is choices and damn choices)
Preface & structure:
The inspiration for this article is a passage from the introduction of the book: CHANGING – Zhouyi:: The Heart of the Yijing, Translation + Commentary by Liu Ming, which is essentially a pre-daoist, pre-Confucianist divination text. For more information on Ming and the book, visit Dayuancircle.org
I will only focus on history and backstory if it serves my writing. Suffice to say, Liu Ming was/is my teacher, even though he died before we could formally meet in person. I have benefited greatly from his body of work and am forever grateful to him, his ancestors and his teachers who helped him become his fate and gave so generously. On behalf of all our ancestors and their generosity, may all beings, pastpresentfuture, be well.
This writing will first present an excerpt verbatim, from which I will expand and elaborate and use as a springboard.
This article is being released as a package with an audio version and a podcast conversation with Jeremy Johnson of Nura Learning & Revelore Press. Together, all 3 pieces of media flesh out the ideas presented.
The audio version of this article is presented more like a podcast, allowing for a more conversational or commentary approach.
There is a bibliography at the end of the written text that is not included in the audio version.
A few notes going forward:
The themes and subjects I talk about here can be broadly categorized as Animism, the felt sense (and co-emergent human behaviors) that all matter is alive and animated with spirit, mind, and consciousness. Lately I have been pluralizing the term – “animisms”, as I believe it is more honest and accurate to how Indigenous societies worldwide practice animism differently, yet share foundational principles. My “style” of animism is definitely about finding “the root of the root”, the baselines of reality that all humans share, our commonalities, that have borne all the various religions, philosophies and spiritual practices. I also use the term “mind” many times in the writing. I want to state that my definition of mind might be better described as wholebodyself or whole-self-as-mind, so when you read “mind”, please experience “whole self as mind”.
Divination: Approaching the Oracle (written by Liu Ming)
All human beings have a fundamental interest in living a happy and peaceful life and will do whatever they can to smooth out the unevenness of their environment. Divination and its rituals are certainly some of our oldest tools. There are various levels and approaches that can be taken when practicing divination. It seems worthwhile to consider the possibilities. In my experience, there seems to be three levels or styles of approach.
In the first, and lowest form of divination, the diviners seek solutions to existing problems. This, the Chinese say, is like waiting until you are thirsty to dig a well. Focusing on the “problem” and asking why, we do not ask the central question – who is having the problem. The dogmatic notion that we possess an abiding self is the basis of this life-as-problem approach. This approach to divination has the flavor of desperation, obvious or not, and no self-reflection in it at all. Faith in the text and prayerful devotion to external forces seem required for this approach to work, but hypocrisy often suffices. This is approaching the oracle for problem solving.
In the second, more common or modern form of divination, the diviners accept that divination is an abstract or mathematical act. They do not care where the response comes from because they imagine that the entire universe is a matter related to their self-improvement. These diviners are obsessed with finding and maintaining their sense of personal advantage. This preoccupation with advantage, improvement and perfection is also linked to the dogmatic notion of possessing an abiding self. In this case the diviner imagines a self in need of the high-level maintenance of refined awareness. This approach has the flavor of self-centeredness, obvious or not. Real concentration is applied to the method, but the focus is entirely on self-improvement. This is approaching the oracle for advantage.
The third, and, in many ways, the only true form of divination, sees the percolation of life as Yi – flux. This flux is arising, developing and decaying in a pristine present (devoid of past and future). In this approach, the shuffling of yarrow twigs or tossing of coins is, in many ways, the same as having lunch or weeding a garden. It's ordinary. This un-dogmatic approach is conceptually relaxed. There is no need for a subject or object of focus and no guarantee of advantage. This approach is simply an expression of embracing fate.
The level or approach we take shapes the interpretation of our divination but the material in the text has been the same for 2,500 years. The text does not care what level or approach we take.
No Dogma
It is not the purpose of this introduction to explain the meaning of religion or spirituality, but I think it is valid to say that the Zhouyi, in the Chinese tradition, is a religious text (systematic and scriptural) with spiritual inspiration. Divination itself can and should be a religious act beyond dogma. Non-dogmatic religious experience is central to the Chinese Tradition. There is, in that tradition, a non-dualist sense of religion characteristically non-transcendental, found in both Chinese Daoism and its orphan, Chan Buddhism. If we can relax our own dogmas, we can make venerable use of this book.
What is divination and who responds when we are divining? In the Chinese Tradition, we are having a conversation with a cosmos that is at once abstract, and yet understood as our predecessors – an assembly of ancestors, a group of residual spirits that we will one day rejoin. This cosmos, these predecessors and our own act of divining are synchronized with and summarized by the term Yi. The premise of this text is that the truth (wisdom in the course of action) is naturally what is so-of-itself and therefore always available in the present moment.
I would venture to say that the only way to verify any theory about the text is to use the text as it has been used now for 2,500 years. Divine your answers for yourself. Most scholarly translators and New Age interpreters in the West are Christians or secularists with Christian values. They search for dogma and they find it. I recommend a direct approach and developing your own relationship with the text, keeping in mind that a dogmatic approach is not necessary.
(end Liu Ming’s words)
In reading (and re-reading and re-reading) the above passages, I choose to present them as if they stand alone. This is not accurate, but to replicate the entire body of the book they exist inside of, and the entire body of work the book exists inside of, is a fantasy that produces no fruit.
I can only really share with you how these passages encapsulate and exemplify my own life-work-process of unfolding, by responding to and talking about and around the various ideas the above text elicits in me, aged 41, in the summer of 2021, in the midst of a global pandemic, in a place called Portland, OR, USA, during the overall decline of Christo-American idealisms and Neo-liberal machinations that have brought about the climate crisis, and a global threat paradigm called “free market capitalism”, amongst other entangled contexts such as racism, sexism, and other rampant forms of human violence.
In reading about Chinese history through various sources (I am by no means some exhaustive historian) from the time of around 2000 BC until now, and nested within a much longer pre-historical global human context of spiritual and technological innovations from the neolithic era, I have come to learn about, remember and rediscover certain threads of human behavior. Some might call all of this “evolution”, but for reasons around our misinterpretation of Time itself, which I will get into, I am refraining from using that term because it presupposes that progress is some kind of linear trail that is continually peaking or “improving”. That worldview is also a fantasy.
And worldviews are where we must begin.
In the first part of the text, Ming outlines three styles or levels that people typically use when approaching a divination system. Though his text is “about” the Zhouyi (which many people know as the Yijing or “I Ching”), for my purposes I am widening the scope of the conversation, using Daoism and pre-daoism as one of several orienting touchstones. I contend that divination is a much wider subset of various systems and techniques one might use to try and “predict” outcomes or “gain insight” into circumstances. Tarot, Bibliomancy, Astrology, Astrogeomancy and many more kinds of divination exist and are commonly categorized as divination. However, I see no real difference between divination and many other “kinds” of human practices and relationships, such as Art-making, Healing modalities, and Love, or Intimacy, or just-plain relating.
If we play a game in which we substitute the word divination in Ming's text with some of these other words, we begin to see how easily the text applies.
For instance, here is a rewording of the entire first portion of text, substituting the words “art-making” for “divination”:
“Art-making: Approaching the Oracle
All human beings have a fundamental interest in living a happy and peaceful life and will do whatever they can to smooth out the unevenness of their environment. Art-making and its rituals are certainly some of our oldest tools. There are various levels and approaches that can be taken when practicing art-making. It seems worthwhile to consider the possibilities. In my experience, there seems to be three levels or styles of approach.
In the first, and lowest form of art-making, the artists seek solutions to existing problems. This, the Chinese say, is like waiting until you are thirsty to dig a well. Focusing on the “problem” and asking why, we do not ask the central question – who is having the problem. The dogmatic notion that we possess an abiding self is the basis of this life-as-problem approach. This approach to artistic creation has the flavor of desperation, obvious or not, and no self-reflection in it at all. Faith in the text and prayerful devotion to external forces seem required for this approach to work, but hypocrisy often suffices. This is approaching the oracle for problem solving.
In the second, more common or modern form of art-making, the artists accept that making art is an abstract or mathematical act. They do not care where the response comes from because they imagine that the entire universe is a matter related to their self-improvement. These artists are obsessed with finding and maintaining their sense of personal advantage. This preoccupation with advantage, improvement and perfection is also linked to the dogmatic notion of possessing an abiding self. In this case the artist imagines a self in need of the high-level maintenance of refined awareness. This approach has the flavor of self-centeredness, obvious or not. Real concentration is applied to the method, but the focus is entirely on self-improvement. This is approaching the oracle for advantage.
The third, and, in many ways, the only true form of art-making, sees the percolation of life as Yi – flux. This flux is arising, developing and decaying in a pristine present (devoid of past and future). In this approach, the shuffling of yarrow twigs (painting of canvas) or tossing of coins (choreographing of movements) is, in many ways, the same as having lunch or weeding a garden. It's ordinary. This un-dogmatic approach is conceptually relaxed. There is no need for a subject or object of focus and no guarantee of advantage. This approach is simply an expression of embracing fate.
The level or approach we take shapes the interpretation of our art-making but the material in the text has been the same for 2,500 years. The text does not care what level or approach we take.”
We can further change the text to something like Healing or Love and immediately feel resonance. Example: “In the first, and lowest form of healing, the healers/patients seek solutions to existing problems.” and “In the second, more common or modern form of healing, the healers/patients accept that medicine/healing is an abstract or mathematical act. They do not care where the response comes from because they imagine that the entire universe is a matter related to their self-improvement. These healers/patients are obsessed with finding and maintaining their sense of personal health/advantage.”
If the text is both about and not-about divination, what then? I think Ming knew full well that human actions are all a form of “divination” and that it is mainly our context, worldview and perspective that colors our interpretation of our experiences. He speaks plainly about these 3 worldviews, and that is what I want to unpack now.
I will call the first worldview “problem solving”, the second “self-improvement” and the third “embracing totality”. I choose totality rather than fate, for reasons I will get into later on.
Ming talks about the dogmatic belief of “possessing an abiding self”. First, there is the notion of possessing, next there is the notion of an abiding self. When we believe in both notions our lives are a struggle for possessing “things” or “qualities” which will strengthen, fix or save this “abiding self”. This “abiding self” is a dogmatic concept about our individual personality, our soul or our spirit, take your pick, and it boils down to the same kind of (false and impossible) certainty that:
1) we know who we are or can become clear and certain about who we are and what our true purpose is
and
2) who we are will stay the same forever, even after death.
In both the first and second worldviews, problem solving and self-improvement, we rely on these fundamental concepts in order to make decisions, make sense of our desires, and how and why we react emotionally to events in the world.
In the third worldview, “simply embracing fate”, there is no dogma about an abiding self, we do not know what are truly problems and what are not, and we may not know what we want or why we want it. Whether we do or not, isn't a problem, because we have no abiding self. What we “have”, or more accurately, what we are allowed to be carried around by, is a compound self that is in flux, is constantly changing while also remaining somewhat familiar. Familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.
This is definitely not the American, Western, modern definition of a self or a personality.
In the Western or modern model of human maturation, individuality and individuation, a child is supposed to become separate and discover their special skills and talents, and then use those skills and talents to become as powerful as possible, accumulate resources/security and compete against other individuals in a global marketplace of scarce resources. In this worldview cooperation is merely another technique of competition.
The Western worldview is perfectly compatible with both “problem solving” and “self-improvement”.
The big reveal is that all 3 of Ming's approaches are operating simultaneously in the psyches of most people reading this text, me included. From a spirit-model of animism it absolutely matters which worldview we feed, which worldviews we practice and which worldviews are enacting their belief systems through our actions and behaviors.
I have mentioned the West so far in fairly negative terms, and I will unpack that a bit more.
Westernism as I experience it is a hyper-individualization of being. I believe all being is inter-being. We are our relations and environments, internal and external, micro and macro, human and more than human. The Western model is a move away from more ancient communal and collectivist ways of organizing human society, towards this hyper-individualized way of organizing human societies. I don't believe that all aspects of individuality are harmful (just like all aspects of collectivity aren't necessarily helpful), but that there is a creative tension that must be crafted and tended to, between so called individualism and so called collectivism, neither of which are fixed.
Like Ming mentions, all existence is Yi – Flux, change, thus even concepts such as individualism and collectivism are in flux. There is more unknown here than we perceive or can perceive, and in that unknown-ness are both freedom(s) and bondage(s), manifesting in unpredictable forms.
The Chinese are not immune to the first and second worldviews either. Most societies are going through multiple millennia-long phases of imperialism, slavery, racism and war. Sages and mystics who did not fall in line with imperial edicts were often banished or worse. Because human nature is both prone to cooperation and competition/extreme violence simultaneously, we must work with reality as-it-is to navigate the tumultuous nature of ourselves and our fellow humans. For even when humans are behaving more peacefully than violently, life can still be very difficult.
The third worldview Ming offers contains within it more details about how to deal with things as they are.
Ming mentions: “Life/Yi/flux is arising, developing and decaying in a pristine present (devoid of past and future).” This might mean that all time exists now, regardless of how we seem to perceive it. If there is technically no past or future (except that which we interpret), how might that change our behaviors for the better? In the Daoist view, Time itself is Qi, the energetic continuum of flow that we are inside of, that never ends, but changes. When we die (rather, when we experience what we consider dying), we change, but do not end. In this model, divination, prayer and ritual are dialogic technologies to help us communicate with and relate with the other aspects of Time/Qi that we are part of, but that we tend to not see or hear. Daoism calls these so-called other aspects “Ancestors”, “Heaven” or simply “Dao”.
Ming also mentions that “in this approach, the shuffling of yarrow twigs or tossing of coins is, in many ways, the same as having lunch or weeding a garden. It's ordinary.” This means that the methods, rituals and choreographies one uses to communicate, whatever the case may be, are simply ordinary aspects of being inside Time/Qi and also being Time/Qi itself. Brushing your hair can be a divinatory ritual. Yawning can be a divinatory ritual. But we must even further break down the conceptual separations we carry by believing we are different, special, abiding selves. When we brush our hair or yawn, who is doing the brushing or yawning?
Ming mentions early on: “Focusing on the “problem” and asking why, we do not ask the central question – who is having the problem. The dogmatic notion that we possess an abiding self is the basis of this life-as-problem approach.”
Who is yawning, who is brushing? Taking this further, the Ancestors are yawning, Heaven is Yawning, Dao is yawning, Time is yawning, Qi is yawning.
Ming writes that “this is ordinary”, that simultaneously being you, not-you, the ancestors, heaven, Dao, Time, Qi, etc is ordinary and relational. Once we dissolve the hardened protections we have been indoctrinated to believe, we recognize that the concept of the abiding self is actually making our lives more difficult, it takes real energy to constantly create and re-create this “abiding self” algorithm and run it 24/7.
Ming says, “This un-dogmatic approach is conceptually relaxed.” and “There is no need for a subject or object of focus and no guarantee of advantage.”
This description sounds a lot like how it is to be in a state of play. Making things up, changing the narratives as new impulses emerge and decay simultaneously, relating and communicating with various shifting subject/object focuses and no predetermined outcomes (no guarantee of advantage, in fact, no idea of even what advantage is or would be).
I want to take a moment to expand on dogma and non-dogma, referencing Ming's second passage of text. Copied again here:
“No Dogma
It is not the purpose of this introduction to explain the meaning of religion or spirituality, but I think it is valid to say that the Zhouyi, in the Chinese tradition, is a religious text (systematic and scriptural) with spiritual inspiration. Divination itself can and should be a religious act beyond dogma. Non-dogmatic religious experience is central to the Chinese Tradition. There is, in that tradition, a non-dualist sense of religion characteristically non-transcendental, found in both Chinese Daoism and its orphan, Chan Buddhism. If we can relax our own dogmas, we can make venerable use of this book.
What is divination and who responds when we are divining? In the Chinese Tradition, we are having a conversation with a cosmos that is at once abstract, and yet understood as our predecessors – an assembly of ancestors, a group of residual spirits that we will one day rejoin. This cosmos, these predecessors and our own act of divining are synchronized with and summarized by the term Yi. The premise of this text is that the truth (wisdom in the course of action) is naturally what is so-of-itself and therefore always available in the present moment.
I would venture to say that the only way to verify any theory about the text is to use the text as it has been used now for 2,500 years. Divine your answers for yourself. Most scholarly translators and New Age interpreters in the West are Christians or secularists with Christian values. They search for dogma and they find it. I recommend a direct approach and developing your own relationship with the text, keeping in mind that a dogmatic approach is not necessary.”
In the West, when we hear words like religion and tradition, we immediately are indoctrinated to associate those terms with dogma and domination, that there are prescriptive behaviors that we must follow, or else. Ming here is elucidating that there is absolutely a non-western approach to religious experience that is both traditional (aka based in ancestral precedence) and also non-dogmatic, non-transcendental, non-salvational, and non-dual.
For a culture of people indoctrinated into dogmatic ways-of-being, dogmatic ways-of-knowing, dogmatic ways-of-sensing, dogmatic ways-of-surviving, dogmatic ways-of-thinking, dogmatic ways-of-feeling... we might have a very strange time of even being able to wrap our minds around what even is non-dogmatic?
Thus we may find ourselves oscillating between all 3 ways of approaching that Ming writes about, or noticing that even when we attempt to approach the oracle, make art, heal or cultivate relational intimacy in this third, non-dogmatic “embracing totality” way, that “problem solver” and “self-improver” crash the party and grab the steering wheel.
It has been my frustrating pleasure to have somehow survived long enough to even be able to hold all 3 of these ways of approaching as both valuable and dangerous. To be able to notice when “problem solver” and “self-improver” make a mess of my embrace of totality. For even they too, are part of the totality, part of fate. They are not, however, the starring roles as much as they act as if they are.
From this growing basis of noticing which worldview is motivating our behaviors, we may choose to explore this un-dogmatic state that is conceptually relaxed, and can directly encounter life as it really is, in all its unpredictable, unknowable, inter-dependent and simultaneous arisings, developings and decayings.
As Ming says: “This approach is simply an expression of embracing fate.”
End Part One
Praxis Towards Mutant Consciousness Embracing Fate
(Gebserian Modes of Consciousness and Daoist Roots in the Stone Age)
(part two of 'Trickster Brown Solves the World' in which TB must traverse the multi-causal realms collecting magic pearls)
Embracing Fate.
Simply.
Simply an expression.
Of embracing.
Fate.
In the Western/Modern worldview, Fate & Destiny are both flavored by Catholic-Christian-Protestant views about the nature of reality. A transcendence-based, salvational worldview that views humans as both sinners (problems needing solutions) and as potential candidates for Heaven (self-improvement). In this Christic worldview, humans must follow strict dogmas in order to solve their sinner problem and improve their celestial ranking in order to not go to Hell when they die. This is slightly different than the Daoist view which does explain that humans sometimes become ghosts when they die and spend some time in purgatory-esque hell realms in their ongoing cycle of incarnation and reincarnation. The Eastern cosmology of “karma” is at play here, but we must be very careful to stop interpreting that term through our Western Christological-imperialist-individualist lens.
Some of the similarities between both Eastern and Western views of life, death and the afterlife are a kind of perceptual bias that lacks structural analysis. While the Daoist view holds karma to be more of a kind of “everything affects everything” state of inter-being where our ancestral-epigenetic impulses continue on through the generations, we must still recognize that the last 4000 years of Chinese and Asian history is rife with enough war, political machinations and skullduggery to rival any European Feudalist's Right of Kings and Manifest Destinies. We cannot merely imagine some kind of singular magical split between Eastern and Western worldviews, or between Indigenous-Collectivist and Imperial-Individualist cultures.
It is much more complex than that, and in order to perceive and embrace Fate/Totality in a better way, I will attempt to compare Ming's 3 approaches to divination and Jean Gebser's Stages of human consciousness, while admitting that no human mapping of reality can actually be complete or 100% accurate and fantasy-free.
In Gebser's mapping of human consciousness, once upon a time when homo sapiens were very new, their state of mind (consciousness) behaved very differently. Gebser calls this the Archaic model, and states that it was a kind of no-mind emptiness, devoid of subject-object distinction. Humans were much more like primates, spoke in a kind of proto-language using gestures and sounds, and were seamlessly integrated with their ecosystems (i.e. no concept of being “other”).
This state of mind is mirrored in Daoist meditations such as Zuowang, which is translated into “sitting and forgetting” or “sitting in oblivion” - a mind state in which the practitioner enters into a kind of trance that allows for no preferences or thought-desires to manifest in the body-self, thus cultivating a state of “pristine affluence” with simple harmony with life/ecology being at once nourishing and inherently fulfilling, with no imagined rewards to seek and no karmic evils to solve. It is also the roots of the ritual of Zazen sitting meditation. We can trace Zen Buddhism back to Chan Buddhism which folds back into Orthodox or Han Daoism which was codified as a “thing”, a distinct religion in the years between 206 BCE - 220 CE. But Daoism as an eclectic mixture of “other things” has its roots much farther back, at least to 2000 BCE and beyond.
We can suppose that various “shamanic” or “witchcraft” lineages, sects and initiatory technologies existed and informed what we today call Daoism and the many kinds of Buddhism, and that these shamanic practices were context and place specific with many modes of expression, such as we see in worldwide Indigenous magical-religious practices today. All of these ways-of-being existed alongside of the more dominant state-sanctioned religions throughout human existence. There has been no singular arc of evolution that we can trace, and any attempt to do so is primarily a case of supremacist revision.
Gebser then traces a second stage of human consciousness called the Magical, in which humans began to enact symbolic rituals by which they affected themselves and their environments, through the use of drumming and singing/chanting in caves and other sacred sites. In this mind state, human differentiation between themselves and other beings in the environment began to take shape, and humans began developing much of what we consider today to be “shamanism” and “witchcraft” including healing songs, visionary journeys and dream traveling, weather manipulation, long distance perception and more. It was during this phase of humanity that we also began domesticating and being domesticated by, both Fire and Wolves. In the magical state of mind, humans see everything that happens to them as arising from outside of their bodies, and this is a very important distinction for an animal to make. Humans have not yet developed a sense that symbols are “not real”. For this mind state, a circle IS what it represents, whether that is the sun, the moon, the family, etc.
From here, the Magical mind stage begets the Mythical mind stage. They are quite similar, but the Mythical begins to bias language and oral narratives (myths and “just-so” stories), and vast networks of information are orally transmitted in song-stories, which eventually become ballads, fables and epic poems. The mythical gives rise to the written word, further differentiating consciousness as distinct from purely oral communication. This new bias towards the written word begins to further develop visual processing in humans where once audio processing was more heavily biased.
The visual bias co-emerges alongside mathematics and more complex architecture and technology, as well as agriculture, a very distinct movement away from hunter-gatherer lifeways. This entire process is asymmetrical and non-linear globally, developing over thousands of years.
(McLuhan writes that the most important shift from "acoustic man" to "literate man" comes with alphabetic literacy -- Mesopotamia. But then movable type -- Gutenberg, is the next big thrust into the body of acoustic man.)
From the Mythic, emerges the Mental, or Mental-Rational, also called the Perspectival mode of consciousness, which we are firmly embedded in today as the dominant mode. This mode biases visual sight (perspective-spatial-distance), extreme subject-object differentiation (man as separate from nature, mind as separate from body, “i think therefore I am”), the written word and “rational” analysis as the “highest” form of “intelligence”.
Keep in mind that all of these modes of consciousness are present and operating simultaneously, both globally and within each person. The extent to which one mode might dominate is based on a number of complex factors such as personal neurobiology and epigenetics, culture of origin, culture of current habitation, lifestyle choices and more.
And just as the 3 approaches to divination Ming speaks of are all ways-of-being with no better-than or worse-than imposed hierarchy, so too are Gebser's stages of consciousness.
Gebser speaks of one further stage of consciousness he calls Integral, which is a state of mind that encompasses fluid cooperation of all “previous” states, allowing a mind to shift, blend and combine various ways-of-consciousness in any given present moment. Gebser also elaborates that Integral consciousness has and is “Time-Freedom”, a term given much exploration by Dogen, a prominent Zen Buddhist (recall that Daoism begat Chan Buddhism which begat Zen Buddhism) practitioner who speaks of “Time-Being” – briefly: Time as a Being and Being as Time itself, thus 'all Beings are Time Being' and 'all Being is all Times' (past, present and future, or pastpresentfuture as I tend to write it when speaking about this aspect of Time). This way of living both 'inside all Time now' and as 'Time experiencing itself through us', correlates to Ming's description of “This (All Life/Yi) flux is arising, developing and decaying in a pristine present (devoid of past and future).”
Time-Freedom could be considered a spiritual trance state in which one experiences themselves as multiple “selves” (definitely not abiding selves LOL) at any given present moment, while still being rooted in a living human body (non-transcendental). These 'multiple selves' or 'multiple modes of consciousness' would be alive and available to cooperate at various levels of awareness simultaneously, throughout all Time-modes. Since all Time-modes are happening only ever in a present moment that is pregnant with itself and all of time, the present moment would become, as Gebser is wont to say, Diaphanous. That is, luminously transparent and revealing, able to emit from and through all other ways-of-being, ways-of-time, ways-of-being-time and ways-of-time-being. (whew!)
I spoke previously of the Daoist method of meditation called Zuowang which works to stabilize the Archaic mode of consciousness. We can now talk more expansively around these things.
There is a difference between states and stages in Gebser's work, which I interpret as the difference between glimpses/glimmers and stabilized options. Stages are much like developmental growth stages, both in so-called individual persons/plants/animals, and in larger group bodies such as societies and species over and through larger expanses of time. A state, would be something like clouds that come and go, with a lower percentage of being able to call upon the clouds at will. Perhaps the clouds come when a person is happy, but not when they are not happy. Perhaps the clouds come when a person has ingested plant medicines, but not when they ingest a hamburger. A stage would be states that are practiced to the point of becoming stabilized options, that is, able to be summoned at will in a wide variety of circumstances.
My mentor in witchcraft said to me: “A witch is someone who can change their state at will.”
Thus, the adept practitioner works their will in order to first experience various states, and then to integrate those states into ordinary present-time consciousness, thus increasing their personal “menu of options” or “optionality”. The practitioner continually plays with states and stages in an infinite game, testing out different permutations of consciousness in various situations as adaptive responses to Life/Yi/Time, etc. The “conversation with a cosmos that is at once abstract, and yet understood as our predecessors – an assembly of ancestors, a group of residual spirits that we will one day rejoin. This cosmos, these predecessors and our own act of divining are synchronized with and summarized by the term Yi.” that Ming speaks of.
Thus, the practitioner/witch reveals to themselves that all action is divination and all divination is action, regardless of whether that action is internal consciousness phenomena such as racing thoughts, or so-called external phenomena such as walking in a certain direction.
What we can follow here is that the beginning practitioner realizes that there is and always has been a vast ecosystem of actions already operating subliminally or “unconsciously” without their willful enaction or consent. The practitioner works to first notice, then change or stabilize this ecosystem into a cooperative network of various selves or modes-of-mind, thus becoming more “aware” and discovering that this awareness is happening in all directions: the constructed “abiding self” is becoming more aware of what they actually are (definitely not singular, definitely not abiding), and the ecosystemic network of minds is becoming aware of each other, of all the other 'nodes' of mind operating under the surface of ordinary consciousness. Ordinary consciousness begins to become diaphanous to reveal all that is inherent and in continual process of becoming.
This becoming, or 'poiesis' is the totality of ming's statement “flux is arising, developing and decaying in a pristine present (devoid of past and future).” Arising plus developing plus decaying (all simultaneous, all non-linear, all multiple) equals Becoming/Poiesis.
As one works/plays at stabilizing Ming's third approach “simply embracing fate”, as well as Gebser's Integral, one becomes more and more aware of becoming becoming, realizing and expressing the play of Time-Being, Being-Time, throughout our entire interconnected ecosystem of species and matter.
Remember that Gebser's Integral includes Archaic, Magical, Mythic, and Mental modes in their non-competitive cooperative states, and that one might first have to play in each “sandbox” for a while in order to stabilize each as options.
So, we can summarize a bit of the qualities one might notice and cultivate-support in order to stabilize both Ming's third approach and Gebser's Integral:
Non-dogmatic: there are multiple known and unknown ways of being that are all correct. There is no “incorrect”, just far-reaching and myriad consequences. “Consequences” should not induce dread.
Non-transcendental: There are no real endings, ascensions or escapings, merely re-arranging the furniture in the present moment and stabilizing ever-shifting optionalities.
Non-problem solving: We cannot truly know for certain what is a problem or if problems even exist beyond our i-like-it-i-don't-like-it interpretations, but we can gather clues as to the consequences of certain actions and rearrange actions and systems to provide consequences we enjoy and/or agree on.
Non-salvational: There is no salvation except in our mental-emotional interpretations of events. Salvation or “healing” is the distribution of forces (circulation) and resources through a network/ecosystem/body, thus clearing stagnation. A “Flow state” or “relaxed alertness” may come close to what would be considered sustainable salvation/healing in a human person. A network of bodies all in various states of flow and relaxed alertness may come close to what we consider to be “harmony” and “peace”.
Non-self-improvement: If all Being is Inter-being, and all Inter-being is Time and all Time is Being, then we understand there is no real individualism or abiding selfhood beyond fantasies that we project onto reality, thus “self improvement” honestly and naturally becomes mutual aid that is non-salvational.
Non-dual: As Ming states elsewhere, we “accept paradox as an invitation to wisdom, rather than viewing paradox as a problem to be solved.”
Non-Linear: Gebser speaks of Alinearity and Aperspectivity, the A- prefix denoting freedom, as in Time-Freedom. In the current modern era, time is usually felt as a scarce resource creating stress and feelings of imprisonment or not-enoughness. “Time Freedom” is a quality that many people report in flow states.
Non-competitive: biasing cooperation and distributed networks, mutual aid and mutual flourishing (keeping in mind not all aid or flourishing will or should take the same forms)
End Part Two
The Hungry Storms :: Being with a Living-Dying World with Many Desires-Mouths
(A note of what we might have “gained” and “forgotten” as modern, westernized, colonized people under the domination of the Mental-Rational, and how we might move together in better ways, using examples from my own life, art and business. Also ritual sacrifice.)
(part three of 'The Enigmatic Breakdown of Trickster brown and the Polyphonic World' in which Brown and their alter-ego Stab Jackson must reckon with their infinite entanglement)
I mentioned earlier in this writing that many traditional lenses lacked a firm grasp of what I will call “systemic/structural analysis”. I mentioned earlier and alluded to “spirit feeding/offerings”. This section will present further elaboration on these subjects and their realities.
We must first recognize that the dominant mind state of 2021 is the Mental-Rational-Perspectival, and this mind state, like most beings, gods, demi-gods, nature spirits and the like, require a kind of food. Food in this case, as our ancient ancestors realized, was and is, blood. If there is no animal or plant sacrifice (offering), then the living will suffice. Yes, we are definitely in this terrain and we have never left it.
We can rightfully say that this mind state, being fed with so many living bodies, seeks to keep its spot as “king of the mountain”. It trades us one thing for another, in true competitive fashion. Capitalism is this mind state's primary agent in our lives. Under the ambient and constant threat of Capitalism/Poverty as it commonly manifests itself globally and locally, we bargain our way through our life, solving problems and self-improving. We analyze and separate, reduce, argue and ration our way through our time here. In this way Time itself becomes a scarce commodity to be traded, rationed and coveted.
Somewhere along the way on our quest to be all powerful, we may recognize that there actually are other ways-of-being. The Archaic, Magical and Mythical become more obvious in our “rear view mirror”, as we in the Mental-Rational view time as a linear evolutionary arc. We then attempt to “gain skill” in these ways-of-being as a way to become more powerful, solve more problems and self-improve. In this way of remembering our ancestral legacies, the Mental-Rational still acts as God-Overlord.
But there are other ways of cooperation between the modes of consciousness other than being servants to the Mental-Rational-Perspectival. These other ways usually arise from oppressed and marginalized cultures that have been colonized and assimilated into the imperial body. In the West, the last century has produced many new flavors of analysis that integrate ancestral modes of consciousness that are quite different than the Master-Slave dynamics. The gifts of the marginalized have produced (and this is not an exhaustive list) – necessary structural analysis such as Critical Race Theory, Afrikanist Black Womanism/Feminism, Queer Theory, Indigenous Ecosystemic Models of Ecology, so called alternative non-allopathic systems of healing and more.
These gifts allow the mental-rational to be employed to the benefit of other modes of consciousness and not merely its own way-of-being. Indeed, these 20th and 21st century flourishings are the first glimpses of the Integral mode of consciousness emerging into the culture. And the Integral has always been here latently, albeit in forms seemingly alien to the Mental-Rational, which achieved a kind of selective amnesia on its path of imperial dominance.
Given that we can only ever be in the present, and that the present contains within it all modes, including as yet unknown latent modes even beyond Integral, this offers us a context by which to view our current predicament and the various violences that swirl around and through us.
First, I feel compelled to say that every single mode of consciousness or approach contains efficient and deficient qualities. The Archaic, Magical and Mythic modes were not “better than” or “worse than” what we have now, every era, every mode is a mixed bag of consequences, many we enjoy and many we do not enjoy. This is not a “how-to” in the typical self-improvement model, nor is it an escapist, revisionist fantasia. Humanity has acted the ways it has acted, based on complex interpenetrative factors. We cannot pick apart the soup into its parts. The soup is the soup and we are it and it is us. It includes everything, and this is the paradox we must contend with. There is no not-here. We cannot kill beings and people to “get rid of them”, all legacies continue and every act is entwined legacy. The human story is one of both exploration and redemption, for every step we make into the unknown generates a legion of consequences, some that we only reluctantly acknowledge once their effects prove stronger than our biases. Each story we tell is selective and thus attempts to erase and flatten the complexity of what is and what is yet unknown to us, even as it highlights and amplifies certain facets of reality. There is no fixing any of this, merely navigating with mutual aid and harm reduction as principle ethics.
With that, I will use my life and this writing as examples. I started writing this in the aftermath of a kind of soft-cancelling by so called social justice warriors and the so called wellness, therapy and racial equity industrial complexes.
For those who may not be aware of the political powder-keg in the Western world, in light of the benefit of social media, long-standing dominance patterns of primarily white, primarily male, primarily heterosexual, primarily Christianized people have begun to swing towards the marginalized: people of color, Black & Indigenous, LGBTQ people. Social media gives the marginalized a media visibility that has been primarily controlled by the powers-that-be. In the slow and inevitable collapse of neo-liberal economics, new micro-economies spring up centered around non-dominant groups of people surviving in the decaying carcass of the “American Dream”. Tulsa's Black Wall Street is reborn now as a decentralized network of phoenixes living through and amongst the oppressor class, both physically and virtually.
However, the social-justice and the therapy-healing-wellness industrial complexes have been partially hijacked by traumatized people of all racial, gender and class identities who still use competition as a means to various ends: enacting revenge, attempting to serve justice, and accumulating scarce resources in still all too centralized networks of oppressive hierarchies.
There are no simple ways to reduce consequences to “good” or “bad”, “right” or “wrong”. Suffice to say, many people get unwittingly “thrown under the bus” based on gossip, smear campaigns, cultic group-think, and other un-transparent tactics.
So, in light of many related events that I have spoken openly about elsewhere (see my podcast series Underworld Party episodes 1-5), I stopped seeing private clients for 2 months in early 2021, in order to liberate myself, my work and my business from the misinterpretations that began to cause me great annoyance and distress.
The process is not quick nor is it easy, especially because I am attempting to operate from Ming's third approach as well as Gebser's Integral mind. I have found myself in my life, and still currently (though the ratios are different now) oscillating between the 3 approaches which are all actually true and valid worldviews:
Problem solving: trying to solve the problem of poverty as it is manufactured by structural inequity, Capitalism and the theft/destruction of The Commons. Trying to solve the problems of poor health, restricted access to proper nutrition & medicine, loneliness, violence, racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, and insecure attachment that are part and parcel of the Western world. Running from one disaster to another, trying to solve enough problems so that I can make it to...
Self-improvement: More power, more wealth, more security, more resources, more wisdom, more peace, more sex, more love, more skill, more fitness, more more more. Me, me, me. I need, I need, I need. This Western world is one of orphaned individuals jockeying for position on an ever-shrinking pyramid of gold. I must become “better” so that I can secure my own happiness, my true purpose, and be a hero. I must defend myself from others and compete, or else die poor in the street.
Embracing Everything: I have been “blursed” (blessed-cursed) by having to deal with poverty, disease, Death, and spontaneous altered states of inherent consciousness that have led me to a reflective way-of-being that I pithily call “Death Practice” - that is neither morbid nor nihilistic, and that requires a sensory honesty in the direct encountering of actual animistic reality, that is, staring at the great forces directly and being unwilling and unable to “pretend it's all make-believe”.
Encountering these great spirits, Creator, Goddess, and just breathing into dying in this very moment right now. Can this ecosystem I call my self just inter-be? Can I be as generous as the ancestors? As generous as the great forces? Can I sacrifice, i.e. “make sacred”, without engaging in martyrdom? Can I say Yes to my inherent fate and remediate whatever “karmas” I am carrying with me and that are carrying me?
From this third position, what does capitalist business look like, smell like, move like, breath like, feel like, relate like, create like, craft like, navigate like?
Would this be a trans-contextual meta-animist economics? A spirit-model of economics?
And given that the economics of both approach one and two exist simultaneously and interdependently with all three approaches, how do I relate economically from three, with and through one and two, while also primarily feeding three's coherence?
Since all human actions are in some ways both a divinatory ritual and food/offerings to various spirit forms/elemental forces/energy currents, it behooves me to recognize that all aspects of “my business” are actually blended with my fate and affect and are affected by all my relations.
The reality that all actions are offerings, deserves some more elaboration.
Food is a kind of blood, whether animal or plant. Our bodies will eventually become food for soil (and that eventually is a right-now process as we “shed” matter), which becomes soil. Many of our ancestors performed various levels of blood sacrifice as offerings for their ecosystem, weather entities, and for prosperity of family/clan/tribe. There are ancient, negotiated bargains in place already, whether we “believe” in spirits or not. I personally am still wondering when blood sacrifice (both “animal” and human) exactly began entering into our ancestral ways-of-being.
I tentatively believe that state-sanctioned ritual blood sacrifices (of animals and humans) were normalized post-agriculturally, starting somewhere in the vicinity of 4,000 BCE (Mesopotamian nation-state). Agriculture seems to have developed from 10,000-8,000 BCE, differently in different regions. Before the nation-state or city-state, my tentative theory is that blood sacrifices were done within small bands during religious/shamanic ceremonies.
During nation/city-states, the power of life and death (and fear) as granted by warrior-king-priest-shamans and the nascent beginnings of what we call religion today, but then was a seamless mixture of religion, science, art, philosophy, math, hunting/gathering/agriculture and medicine.
I am still unsure if or how ritual blood sacrifices and offerings were part of ancestral lifeways pre 10,000 BCE, and from that date until 4000 BCE. Blood sacrifice might be taboo conversational topics in the modern era where we are supposedly “civilized”, but I contend that state-sanctioned mass scale blood sacrifice is ongoing in the West and takes the form of systemic murders of Black & Indigenous peoples (lynchings are RITUAL murders), including murders enacted by the police and military, the school-to-prison pipeline, racialized slavery and rape, to name but a few ways that ritual blood sacrifice is alive and well in the modern era. A friend also reminded me that mining for ore (iron and otherwise, as far back as 3,000 BCE) might demand some recompense - iron for iron, blood for blood.
(There is a path we can trace from the Paleolithic (roughly 2.5 million years ago to 10,000 BCE.) to the Mesolithic (10,000 BCE to 8,000 BCE) to the Neolithic (8,000–4,500 BCE) to the Chalcolithic/Copper age (mid-5th millennium BCE, and ends with the beginning of the Bronze Age proper, in the late 4th to 3rd millennium BCE) to the Bronze (roughly 3,000 BCE to 1,200 BCE or 2,000 BCE to 800 BCE) to the Iron Age and all the subsequent modern ages.
See this link for detailed global age timelines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_archaeological_periods)
Obviously condemning those oppressive forms of ritual sacrifice, many pagans and animists practice offering various foods to various spirit entities and forces, including the Ancestors. Cross culturally there are also numerous ways to incorporate money into ritual offerings. Keeping in mind foodstuffs were/are the original “money”, and that from the magical mind-state, what a “thing” represents is what a thing “is”, meaning, if for instance money represents power, then money IS power in a magical context.
Paleolithic cave paintings/etchings were imagistic initiatory experiences for learning how to (ritually) hunt, to move through timespace and begin to “see” what was once hidden. Overlapping images represented movement/time, as well as possibly half-human half-animal beings, perhaps as depictions of the ritual theater of initiations that took place there with humans dressing up as beasts.
To draw an animal is part of the process to become the animal, control the animal, call the animal. Remember that this was quite probably before humans separated themselves conceptually from “animals”, so the very real felt sense of animal hunting was more like engaging with self, with clan, with relation, with cousin, with home.
I have also had real experiences offering ephemeral experiences as “food” to spirits, such as song, dance, prayer, tears, jokes and various emotions such as grief, rage, sexual arousal, etc. Of course, all of these so-called intangible offerings require the body as prima materia, the body as the vessel, the source and the fruit of the offering – in other words, REAL MATTER, another form of “blood sacrifice”, the body-as-earth enacting a form of self-sacrifice in a relational-transactional ritual encounter of inter-penetration. This can look like mediumship, possession, inspired ecstatic theater or many other permutations of intimate connection with the field of inter-being.
It must be said that many spirits might have wildly different appetites than we do, or than what we think we do. Some spirits can for instance, eat cancer, eat disease, eat depression, etc. We need to be careful though, because we do not want to condition ourselves to keep producing certain foods within us that other spirits and beings might want to eat ongoingly. Beings such as intestinal parasites and candida come to mind here, in more conventionally understood ways, that hijack our systems as their own food source, influencing our behaviors and sensations to their own ends.
In more esoteric terms, I once witnessed, walking down the street in the direct aftermath of Barack Obama being elected president, streams of bright energy being sucked into the sky, the exhilarated peak experiences and expressive whoops of people in bars and restaurants being drawn out of their bodies by unknown forces. This experience left a lasting impression on me that has come to inform my personal hygiene.
I also contend that we also eat, derive nourishment from so-called non-food matter. We ingest media. We ingest relational intimacy. We ingest experiences. We absorb nutrients via the skin, we can witness this using herbal infused oils or soaking in medicinal baths, and so we also become nourished through touch and sex. We ingest via the senses, they are at least two-way streets if not more.
In many ways, this writing is a ritual offering, as well as a kind of divinatory prayer. I am attempting to be as generous as possible while not depleting myself. A regenerative sacrificial action that produces fertility outweighing the energy that could be measured going into it. A prayer for and to abundant reciprocity themselves. Bless me and all my relations with exactly what we need to become our fate, to spread joy and creativity in whatever ways that is most in service to all beings. Thank you for the experiences I have been given even as I curse some of them.
We sit at a real precipice. Right now, where I am in so-called Portland, Oregon, Chinook lands, record heat waves are at play in late June. Human narcissism and excess have led to scientific predictions that the next few decades will be significantly more uninhabitable. We may not exist as a species for much longer, our modern way of life will definitely not be tenable even if we as a species persist. Humans have endured two waves of Ice Ages, global floods and various meteoric encounters, but none of those were direct consequences of our own actions.
It may be that our current way of life is the long tail of the ramifications of our anger and sense of betrayal around those natural events so long ago, a species-level PTSD from our anthropic loss of innocence and naivety about how we think we should be treated by the universe. We “invented” magic and ritual to influence our survival, and then into agriculture and the domestication of nature we turned basic survival into dominance and resource hoarding, we sought to become like the god-forces we envisioned and that came to us in dreams across the great sea of time-being.
In my own little corner of the sea, I grew up in systemic poverty, that poverty became disease in my late twenties, and I've spent the time since trying to avoid becoming a ghost when I die, attempting to remediate whatever behavioral and karmic patterns I inherited, endeavoring to figure out what-human-is in order to become generous. Some days I cannot discern if I am just blowing smoke up my own ass to feel better about my complicity as an American with systemic privileges that harm other people I will never meet in person, but whose spirits will absolutely be in attendance upon my death.
With this, I have been using my business as an art project in service of all our relations. I cannot pretend to know if I have been or am being “successful”. Some people have said that I have helped them live better lives, relate better with loved ones, with nature, with Death herself. Others have said I am a scourge. Indeed, in my own lifetime I have behaved in ways I would never condone today, but as a poor mixed-race kid born with a penis, I have witnessed the terrible realities of many of my brothers, fathers, uncles, grandfathers... If there is no chance for redemption from our indoctrinated ignorances and systemic brainwashings, then in my estimation we cannot claim to be human. Even egregious actions such as murder and rape must be reconcilable, even if that is on a very large collective scale. Redemption in my mind is not the same as forgiveness, but merely the opportunity to become generous and to behave in ways that benefit the inter-connected liberation of all beings.
Becoming a conduit for wealth, money and material resources is one way to express this. But money and the power it is and represents can just as easily turn one into more of a ghost, less responsible to the collective and less generous. So as I experiment transparently, with no expectation or guarantee of a more financially rich experience, I hope these ramblings enliven the kinds of relational principles that would help us all live the remainder of our time here in ways that are fun, consensual, mutually interesting and catalytic.
In my experiences with spirits that could rip my head off, I have found that only a very few qualities actually matter. High level skill and expertise are not required. Neither are past accomplishments or future hopes. What seems to matter to spirits, gods, demons, ancestors, ghosts, Dao is just this: sincerity, humility and a willingness to encounter exactly who and what is arising. Humor and playfulness also go a long way to having a good time dealing with Death and all her various children. The gods love a good effort, a good connection, a moment where all beings (them and us) can become surprised together.
Will more money help with that? Maybe. Can a poor, naked child do this work? Yes, possibly to a greater efficacy than a wealthy adult can. Will my words convince a wealthy adult to become more honest, more generous, more able to be with Death in a loving way? Only time will tell.
As I've been reformatting my art-business model, I've come to some real stagnation in terms of how and what to offer people that ISN'T operating from “problem solving” and “self-improvement”. When many people come to a counselor, healer, witch or otherwise, it is usually to solve a problem (poverty, sickness, trauma, etc) or to self-improve (become a 6-figure coach, learn to become a certified xyz person). Because of that, much advice on the subject of ethical marketing includes giving clear guarantees about what you are offering. Well, if we are coming from the 3rd approach “embracing fate/totality” then we can see plainly that communicating such guarantees, certainties and specific outcomes is “selling products for/to neurotics” as Ming says.
From the 3rd approach, healing is about becoming more coherent even as things happen that you don't like, maybe even Death. It's a real possibility that someone's inherent fate plus their lived behaviors and cultural conditions until this point have created conditions for things-we-don't-want to happen and that those things-we-don't-want are natural and also fate-as-it-is. A real Integral healer/witch/shaman would be working to help the person take responsibility for their total relational context, regardless of threats or impending dooms. In modern individualist salvational society, not many people would trade money for someone to help them really be with that. And yet, as we burn the planet from the inside, I don't see any other ethical or responsible way to proceed. As an artist, my art may never become “published”, I may never get hired to give lectures at academic institutions. Many of my “colleagues” have smeared me already at this point. I can't really bring myself to create multi-thousand dollar coaching courses that promise people to heal their PTSD in 6 weeks or charge folks thousands for coaching packages that enmesh us deeper in western supremacist ideology and relational violence. The real world on the actual ground is beautifully ordinary and naturally uncertain, there is no way that individual empowerment will change that, or improve our collective, more-than-human wellbeing.
And yet I am a practitioner that plays seriously with cultivating creativity and indigenous-spiritual skill. But I do not work from the worldview that this skill will save me or save anyone, merely that I want to experience life honestly and increase my sense of optionality in any given moment, even if that moment is death. That this melange of viewpoints I have spoken of in this article, and the various practices informed by these views, have blessed me with greater sanity, peace and real love, real dynamic secure attachment with my Body, with Earth, with Death, with my Ancestors and with Time. I also do not get involved with humans in as many enmeshed and traumatizing ways as I did before, though the jury is still out on whether anyone else thinks that's accurate. I keep learning, I'm not an “expert” or “master”, I'm never “finished” and I must do my part within the storm of violence wrought by us upon the entire world and all the children being born whose fate will be to sit with what we all have done, what we all are doing. I hope I survive long enough to sit with them and support their ingenuity and blessings.
This concludes part 3. In further writings I will elaborate on various topics such as the pros and cons of social hypnosis and somatic dominance, and advance a praxis of using language poietically, that is language-as-becoming, using language to promote emergence, inter-being and neuro-genesis rather than using language to reinforce rigid trauma behaviors and cultures as english language is commonly used.
If there is enough interest, I will host a webinar or class series around this writing, answering questions and discussing nuances of how to switch mind-states/contexts/approaches. Donations are happily received at paypal.me/daresohei and we have a patreon with exclusive patron content at patreon.com/animistarts , and this writing and audio narration is part of my animist variety show/podcast UNDERWORLDPARTY which can be found at my website, bodyaltar.org/underworldparty .
There is a secret world
which contains secret worlds
and I must move.
-Trickster Brown
Fueled by Black Tea and Bad Dreams,
Dare Sohei
Summer 2021 CE, Chinook Lands, Turtle Island
aka Portland, OR, USA
A Very Brief Bibliography:
Tyson Yunkaporta's Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World
https://books.google.com/books/about/Sand_Talk.html?id=_WTBzQEACAAJ&source=kp_author_description
Liu Ming, Daoist Priest
CHANGING Zhouyi: The Heart of the Yijing
https://www.dayuancircle.org/changing-zhouyi-2/
Jeremy Johnson, Integral Scholar
Seeing Through The World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness
https://revelore.press/product/seeing-through-the-world/
more on Gebser: https://www.gaiamind.org/Gebser.html
Livia Kohn, Daoist Scholar
Pristine Affluence: Daoist Roots in the Stone Age
https://threepinespress.com/2020/07/25/pristine-affluence-daoist-roots-in-the-stone-age/
Andreas Weber
Sharing Life: The Eco-politics of reciprocity
https://in.boell.org/en/2020/09/10/sharing-life-ecopolitics-reciprocity
Alternative Worldviews: A space for inquiry into an alternative ecology of knowledges and practices
Ritual Offerings by Aaron Leitch
https://www.amazon.com/Ritual-Offerings-Aaron-Leitch
The New Axial Age by Nathan Gardels
https://www.noemamag.com/the-new-axial-age/
The First Picture Show: Cinematic Aspects of Cave Art by Edward Wachtel
https://vdocuments.mx/edward-wachtel-the-first-picture-show.html
What The Hand Dare Seize The Fire by Matthew Stillman
Kevin Behan, Willem Larsen & Thermodynamics of Emotion/Constructal Law Resources
https://thermodynamicsofemotion.squarespace.com/resources
I recorded my process in these writings:
(these pages are no longer relevant as my old site has been closed and archived)
https://bodyaltar.org/journal/2021/2/13/january-2021-update
https://bodyaltar.org/journal/2021/2/13/spring-update-feb-2021
https://bodyaltar.org/journal/2021/3/2/march-rambles
https://bodyaltar.org/journal/2021/3/18/the-end-of-ritual-as-justice-school
https://bodyaltar.org/journal/2021/5/4/new-statement-for-prospective-clients
My podcasts & videos: YOUTUBE, INSTAGRAM
& a special thanks to Nora Bateson’s Warm Data Labs which is bringing forward many useful terms such as transcontextuality, aphanipoiesis, symmathesy and more, on how living systems co-emerge and co-transform together.