Beyond Belief, The Sublime. Beyond Hope, Dignity.
Story, State, Action Diary 07
Today we will continue the conversation from Diary 05, the preview of which I copied below
Because this article was a super punch to the western mind, let me give you a preview of the next articles.
In the next articles I will outline the Story, State, Action roadmap in terms of:
States —> Thinking/Thoughts —> Actions/Behaviors.
and
Why/How the “Belief in Beliefs” is holding western culture back from healing and transforming its violent actions and illness symptoms.
The entire series and related media are now here:
https://thenightgarden.substack.com/p/story-state-action
FUN-da-mental?
Here In the heart of empire, each week feels like a year, doesn’t it? How many new (or old) magic bullets did you reach for between now and the last time you dared read one of my articles? How much of the last article did you skip over?
I’d like to trust you, but at this point in my life, I have no reason to. I can barely trust “myself”. (As if there is a self to trust in the first place)
Other than the fact that I assume you actually want to feel better, have better relationships, and generally be able to live with yourself as various addicts and fascists decide which group is next to be labeled seditious terrorists.
Maybe I’m next! Wouldn’t that be a nice relief to be done with this chunk of collective karma.
But until they murder me in one way or another, I will leave some chicken scratches on this digital bathroom stall.
I understand that there is generally a long education gap between what I want to be saying and what readers are capable of comprehending, given the uneven educational system here, so bear with me. I may jump ahead, relative to your comprehension, but I promise I will try to eventually fill in all the gaps someday. (the best way to learn this fully isn’t via reading btw)
Some of those gaps you will have to fill yourself, through research, exposure, conversations and discerning actions. Not everyone may feel like they have the time or resources to be able to learn, which is to say, to be able to decolonize and unlearn colonial mind-patterns, but there are plenty of us alive right now, and who have been alive in the recent past, who are rooting for you and leaving breadcrumbs.
I may not be the person who is best suited to talking to someone in the early stages of their journey, when they are still obsessed over their personal pains, fears and desires. This is why we need each other, because everyone has different capacities and skillsets. I make no excuses for my impatience and utter boredom. I’m only doing what I have to to get through this bardo, I don’t want a participation trophy.
I’d like to share with you a very good 3-hour video that might help you understand the foundational basis for what I’m wanting to say, to teach.
You can watch that first or keep reading and then watch that to perhaps feel better about what I’m going to say.
In any event, within this article and the next few, one of my goals is to give you a brief synopsis of what I’m teaching with my Story, State, Action model as I develop the curriculum.
ONWARD.
The Primary Feedback Loop of Relationality
I use Story as an over-arching process by which to dismantle the hold story has on us. Not to abandon story, but to utilize and relate with it properly. Especially the reality that behind story is no-story, aka the real story.
But just working with story, especially in the west, tends to lead to a conceptual circle jerk. A dis-embodied, dissociated and decontextualized abstraction leading to more relational harm
Information-porn addiction.
It won’t get you what you really want.
So, we have to delve into the bio-physical mechanisms by which a human mammal:
processes stimuli via their senses,
interprets it via their nervous system and cognition,
and expresses those signals and interpretations as actions and behaviors.
This is the primary feedback loop of embodied beings.
Our karmic rigidity comes into play when that initial feedback loop is explained, described and turned into a linguistic-socio-behavioral story which alters, manages and obfuscates the entire process.
Right Story produces harm reduction and dignity in relationship.
Wrong Story produces harm amplification and trauma/abuse/addiction in relationship.
So what happens in a society where there is no Right Story? Where the capacity to recognize Right Story, the trustworthy relationships, do not exist in abundance?
This is why I developed this model. (Not because I wanted to mind you.)
Westerners cannot/shouldn’t operate primarily on the level of Story because when they do, they produce Wrong Story more often than not.
So, we have to work with the primary feedback loop, specifically the inter-relation between States and Actions.
States are produced by sensory inputs, and expressed as nervous system states, emotional tones, and early cognitive processes.
This entirety of states, how they are made and developed in the body-mind system, results in actions — behaviors and expressions. In turn, these Actions alter States, for better or for worse.
The intermediary between States and Actions can be generalized as Thinking.
This thinking is not only the kind of top-down cognition that westerners revere, but all the many kinds of “thinking” that the body/mind/system produce as ongoing processes to mediate the internal and external environments.
This mediation is relationality, it is communication, it is Nature relating with nature.
We can think of this Thinking as tiny proto-stories, rushing back and forth between the nervous-emotional system and the sensory-motor systems.
When enough of these proto-stories are repeated, larger karmic Stories develop inside the system as beliefs, delusions, memory, bias, prejudice, blindspots, phobias, traumas, myths, metaphors, etc. All the ways we have learned to defend from pain, fear and hunger.
But if we enact agency at the level of States and Actions, we can slow down, untangle, remix and have choice as to what Story we accept, what Story we reject, and educate our appetites appropriately. We then relate with the Storying aspect of our systems through our developed agency of State and Action.
Thinking precedes actions, but states precede thinking.
Your system is always thinking, in multiple ways, but those thoughts are reflections and interpretations of your state.
If you change your state, you change your thinking and you change the action expressions of your body. Thats how behavior changes can work.
#un-colonized strategies for wellbeing beyond the indoctrination of belief and trauma.
Today’s Story, State, Action Game:
Beyond Belief!
Belief in the Power of Beliefs is a major impediment to decolonizing senses and perception.
You see this everywhere in western ideology, from religious theology to the new theologies of scientism, neuroscientism, positive psychologism, etc. The pervasive Belief that beliefs are the key to every issue you have. That it’s your “limiting beliefs” that hold you back, and that by replacing bad beliefs with good ones, you will achieve your personal promised land.
The belief in beliefs is a recursive nightmare which only results in passive individuals easily controlled by state and corporate forces. The trick is that these believers feel that they are active free thinkers!
Think of this: do you need to believe in gravity to experience the relational effects of gravity? Does your belief actually change how you are affected by gravity’s process? (Flat-earthers are not floating off into space.)
So, belief is merely a defense mechanism of missionaries preying on human fear. Even the modern ideas of belief which claim to be secular are still steeped in this individualism honey trap of fear and exclusion.
You don’t need to believe in anything to live a life of dignity, integrity, courage, beauty and appreciation.
A far better option is to recognize fear and relate with it, and say something like this:
“I may think x is impossible for me, but it may be possible, and that’s good enough.”
All creative actions can be understood as experiments in shifting the probability of an outcome.
What seems impossible is merely improbable in a certain context with a certain set of skills and resources.
The “limiting factor” is how you manage and relate with your fear and pain. These are states that determine your thoughts and behaviors.
From a place of animistic relating, one can open up like a flower into the present moment where small, immediate actions can bring us insight, pleasure, rest, connection and/or curiosity.
It is only through these small, present moment actions that are enacted WITH our states and feelings that we can move towards our aspirations and appetites without dissociating and harming ourselves and others.
From this living relating, belief is useless and damaging.
“I believe…” changes into “I feel & act with dignity in relationships, in this present moment.”
Try it out for yourself. Use the words (Story) as a way to shift your States and Actions towards a non-belief coalition.
Housekeeping
There are two by donation workshops this June:
You can join my patreon for a growing library of recorded and live workshops on daoist dream practice, and Story, State, Action modules.
If you don’t want to subscribe, some of them are for sale at the patreon shop.
Donations are helpful (because let’s be real, I’m going to die and also this will all be over very very soon)
Donation Links
venmo at dare-sohei
I’ve been giving most of my work away for free for the past 5 years. This society and its madness are collapsing in on itself. I’ve cut away 80% of relationships, maybe you have too. I am working on ending this whole shebang somehow some way. I am extremely under-joyed with how it’s all turned out. The truth won’t set you free unless you use it to dismantle individualistic capitalism and the warring identitarian ideologies. Good luck out there — I pray you burn all your ancestral karma in this one incarnation.