Chaos, Our True Home.
Story, State, Action Diary 06
Here is a Reference table for previous chapters in this series:
Introduction to the model: The Story, State, Action Model
Story, State, Action Diary series
Diary 02: How Your Senses Have Been Colonized
Diary 03: How to Become Normal Human*
Diary 04: Normal Human = Sublime
Diary 05: Normal is not Normalized, Normalized is not Normal.
I’m writing this on Sunday May 18th, my goal is to just put something out, as numerous other drafts require more tending than I have time.
I’m prepping for the week: cooking, cleaning, organizing, laying out the laundry, so that when i have very little time during the week, I can cut down on decision fatigue and anxiety. Having access to an oven and a fridge and a small functional kitchen with many useful appliances is a godsend at this age in my life. It’s only been about 5 years since I ever had these things to myself, didn’t have to crawl over strangers and roommates in order to function.
We live in hell, most of us. The privileged cannot see that hell, but it is hungry for them too. The fire unchained and unchecked licks their heels as much as it sucks on our toes.
I am grateful for this recent and temporary grace period in this life. At 45 the wheels on the bus go womp womp waa, rather than round and round. Middle age humbles you, shows you what Time really is.
Time and time
On Friday I gave a workshop on my Story State Action Model to a group of somatic practitioners. It was entitled “New Ways to Play Your Story” and it gave me the much-needed push to make some slides and refine how to teach this model from the ground up. I will be showing that work in some form in a bit, as a work on a short course to teach this model in a semi-complete way.
But what i’m drawn to talk about now is the lived experience of Karma and how the narratives around that word have been co-opted and misused by our love for stupidity.
Karma is currently conceived as a personal, individualized list of powers and problems, blessings and curses. A heroic uniqueness that each person carries with them and that competes, compares and bounces off of everyone else’s version of karma. It is a very modern, very western approach to seeing reality. It is quite a terrifying cosmological view, one that has been baked into our economics, our educational system, politics and relationships. It pervades and persists, much like an addiction, much like a chronic infection.
This personal idea of karma works very well with our post-modern, Protestant/Abrahamic view of personal aspiration and personal salvation, which always arises with personal damnation, personal judgment. The myth of meritocracy and its blighted shadow, the eugenics-prison-industrial complex.
We grow up in this fetid soil, drinking the alcoholic ferment of this lie.
It denies us the reality that somewhere, deep down, we know to be true and that we never truly lost or forgot.
This truth is not the glorious, transcendent, ascendant deification fetish of many world religions, including the religion of corporate capitalism, the religion of positive psychology, the religion of atheism, the religion of mythopoetic power.
The truth of Karma is far more harrowing and far more liberating.
Karma is Nature. Nature is Fate and Freedom Together.
Fate can be considered Yin, form, space, matter. It is the memory pattern that replicates structures. Boundaries. Constraints. Limits. Karma as Fate is the aspect that we recognize as karmic “knots”, obstructions, haunted memories of the ancestors, and the asymmetrical luck and randomness of nature that we do not prefer.
Freedom can be considered Yang, formlessness, Time, movement. It is the capacity for transformation, growth and decline, death. It is movement itself; the part of the patterns that makes things change spontaneously and inherently. Karma as Freedom is the aspect that we recognize as “free will”, agency, blessings/privileges of the ancestors and the asymmetrical luck and randomness of nature that we prefer.
If we are to understand Nature and cast off our stupidity, we must begin seeing all things as Nature, which is to say, all things as an expression of Fate & Freedom entwined. In doing so, in seeing reality this way, we must also rid ourselves of the pernicious folly of belief and of believing that “we have personal free will” or that “we have personal fate”. Even as we contend with the appearance of these “personal” aspects as being apparently true, we must also decolonize that narrative and see Karma as Collective Karma which distributes amongst the collective in asymmetrical and disorderly ways. This disorder is the true order. This disorder is the chaos that is the heart and whole of reality which we humans cannot fully comprehend with our given physiological structures and cognitions.
This disorder is liberation itself, because this Chaos of Nothingness creates somethingness as a reflection of itself. It creates the appearance of separateness and differentiation in order to sense its own unmitigated undifferentiated-ness.
In resting as close as possible to this Huntun, Huracan, Juracán, Ọya — such as in meditation practices, trance or death experiences — we are better able to acclimate to the nondual, undifferentiated nature of nature, the un-place that gives rise to the oscillatory transforming process of yinyang.
Returning to Huntun, the great storm, the great tornado made of 9 tornados, stirs up our agitation at this perceived “disorder”. Our agitation creates in us the myriad “problems” that we resist and that we then “believe” are evil, wrong and should be tamed, subjugated.
Resting close to huntun, darkness, brings out the dualistic paradoxes of karma which we intensify, amplify and dis-tolerate. It is in this process of ramping up that we have an opportunity to release into freedom, or create more fate via our actions, states and stories.
Because Nature is Chaos and Nature is Nothing and Nature is Fate AND Freedom, we are continually and perpetually-without-final-endings given opportunities for the kind of radical reflection which proves the self to be false and proves the collective to be real.
In this close-in resting-in-darkness we can “touch” the collectivity of karma and the asymmetrical distribution of it. We can “feel” the true “group body” that is beyond our dualistic, preferential, religious and oppositional attempts to describe it, control it, understand it, and in other ways defeat or cure our fear of it. We can sense the sameness of diversity, while also appreciate difference, because all difference “comes from the same kitchen”. The kitchen of undifferentiated chaos.
Therefore, the “cure” to our ills is in the full relating to nature itself, which requires us to relate to the various expressions of agitation that arise in our bodies and minds, in the bodies and minds of the group, the ancestors, the culture, etc.
Relating directly with this stirred-up dust of agitation is how we learn to rest-in-darkness, as darkness, with darkness, through darkness. This “darknessing” is not antithetical to light but is recognized as the “mother of light”, and that light is another appearance of darkness. If we are to really liberate the collective, we must follow, listen and shape, guide, from this position of closeness to chaos and closeness to the stirred-up agitations of our karma.
This brings up one of the primary skills that must be honed via right method and right action: the capacity to relate with intensity itself, regardless of the specific type of preferred or unpreferred feeling or state.
If you are interested in decolonizing your own practices, I offer Daoist astrological and divinatory sessions, as well as classes on this substack and patreon. If you would like to participate in reciprocity for my work, donations are accepted at paypal.me/daresohei and venmo at dare-sohei.
Introduction to the model: The Story, State, Action Model
Story, State, Action Diary series
Diary 01: Dying on that hill, Falling on that sword
Diary 02: How Your Senses Have Been Colonized
Diary 03: How to Become Normal Human*
Diary 04: Normal Human = Sublime
Diary 05: Normal is not Normalized, Normalized is not Normal.
Diary 06: Chaos, Our True Home.