Death Practice Dreams 13.3
aka the one before
Death Practice Group #6, The Story That Eats Itself: An Introduction to Non-Conceptual, Sleep & Dream Practices, coming up Weds Nov 16th 2022 4pm PST.
We often categorize our attention in two ways, especially in the age of social media & content creation.
Storytellers & Audience. Celebrities and Fans. Makers and Users. Masters and Slaves.
In the modern or common way, we (constrictively) believe that there are those who are generating the story and those that are consuming the story, and that we are doing one of those actions more than the other at any given time, switching between two settings on a machine called the mind or the self.
In collaborative, improvisational methods such as physical theater and other forms of play, we can re-discover a state that appears to do both at the same time, which is more freeing, more expansive and just feels better, different.
We become both tellers/senders and consumers/receivers - occupying both spaces in the call & response pattern.
This can be pretty worldview shattering to many people and it is wonderful! But it is not the end of the game. There is a “secret third thing” that is possible and that is hardly spoken of this context of meaning-making, sense-making, storytelling, entertainment and culture.
In nondual practice and meditation, we can see the most elaboration on this third thing, but in my perception, there are aspects of this that are not as cross-disciplinary as I know is possible.
During the next few months of death practice group i will be unpacking allll of the various aspects of all the various “modes” that i am hinting at here.
But in this article I will be speaking about a part of the behavioral practice which involves learning how to inoculate yourself from the seductive and narcotic power of stories, of narratives, of words and language and ideas via Practicing. In order to do this, we must get very clear with our reactions and resentments towards the experiences we call Pain, Fear & Hunger.
Clarity & Chill. Tranquilo, tranquilo.
One of my major offerings to the discourse of the “meaning-making crisis” is the reality that the ‘crisis’ is an addiction to meaning-making, believing, “truth”, “sanity”, control, domination.
One way colonial supremacy has ruined our neurology is that we primarily use words, language and narrative to dominate/hoard resources and bodies (self and other) instead of using words to sing, play, tell jokes and dream. We use the deceptive nature of words, the fact they abstract reality into a virtual-imaginal realm, to harm instead of help. Deception need not be such a harmful act if the deception we are playing at helps us to realize the fluid and strange nature of perception itself.
In the past, storytelling was a trickster action - a healing process that shaped and shifted (false, incomplete) beliefs, even for a moment. Telling a new, ‘better’, more clever story about “the way things are” will eventually lead to a liberation that there is no way things are, and that we have always existed in a pre-ethical, pre-narrative reality.
This pre-ethical reality is a Dream, and we visit it again all the time. At night when we dream, but also when we believe stories as true or false, when we ascribe abstract value judgments to anything, when we identify.
But wait Dare, you said pre-ethical and all those examples you gave are forms of ethics - identifications, labels, stories!
Yes, we exist in a pre-ethical reality but we mostly experience and act from this narrative, imaginal, story-based world (post-ethical). We generate and consume simulations. Cultural, personal simulations. Dreams within dreams within dreams.
The side door out of the maze lies within a deep examination and exploration of the generation of perception, the generation of stories, and: what even is a story? Deeper into the maze and deeper out of it, at the same time.
The thing about liberation is that your understanding of what liberation is: interdependence and impermanence — evolves and complexifies the more you really engage with it. The pains, fears and social violence we experience is mainly based on the reality that liberation literally means something different depending on how deep in or out of the maze of perception you have explored and encountered and integrated. We all know this inherently, but the enormity of what this entails is often avoided.
So then, how do we NOT avoid it?
I’m glad you asked. The answer my friends, is to Practice.
The How & What of Practice
Part One of an Undetermined Number
Foundational Principles & Notes on Accessibility, Ableism, Neurodivergence, Marginalization, Classism, etc.
This is very important. I’d love to be able to say this once and keep referring people here instead of repeating it. So I will be as through yet concise as possible.
There are a few main issues:
1- oppressive cultural forces, behaviors and systems that oppress people via material conditions, narrative dominance & economic access/restriction.
2- ignorant and deluded beliefs that people oppress themselves with, often without knowing they are doing so.
3- relational combinations of 1&2 that appears as a “secret third thing” but are actually phantom dreams
Together these cause massive confusions and mis-perceptions about how to practice and what practice actually is.
It’s been my experience that the core concepts and worldviews of various nondual animisms have their roots in the stone age, that is, pre-agricultural egalitarian hunter gatherer bands of about 50-150 people - that were matrifocally “governed” (I use the term very loosely, as it is essentially an animist socialist anarchist governance model) via collective counter-dominance strategies (essentially unions and coalitions) in ways that respected personal autonomy and interdependence simultaneously without contradiction or extreme hierarchy models.
This mode of being and relating has a few qualities that we, today, might find science fictional or fantastical. One among them is the state of pre-ethical perception - a ‘oneness’ with nature that is not constantly thinking & evaluating the world through abstractions such as good/evil, right/wrong. This pre-ethical experience of life is the liberation & freedom spoken of by later people who collected and developed the philosophies of Daoism, Buddhism, Dzogchen, Atiyoga, Trika Saivism amongst many other styles of praxis.
Even in pastoral, post-agricultural peoples there was an understanding that the mindset of increased urbanization, imperialization, land ownership, debt, credit and an increasing resource-gap was changing people’s brains for the worse, not the better.
The solution to these issues was for each individual practitioner to prioritize their own practices, cultural politics be damned, and secondarily, to try and help their neighbors as they were able.
Sound familiar?
In no way during my explanation yet has there really been any discussion as to how disability, neurodivergence, ableism etc were a non-starter for practice. In fact, I think everybody knew that it was up to each person to figure out how to practice in their particular situation & position. It’s not like any of these practitioners existed in an ideal world without warlords, thieves, bandits, rapists, raiders, famines, plagues, slavery, trafficking, addiction… no, by the time we get to any written accounts of practices these issues are rampant in the ancient world. If we read the written poetic accounts of the first monks and nuns who followed the Buddha’s teachings, we see scores of people who are addicts, sex slaves — ignorant, confused, deluded people actually doing the work and changing their neurology to the degree they are able to using the View & Methods. This was all before Buddhism was a real recognized “religion”. There were no Buddhist temples or monasteries one could go to study and be protected by other students and abbots. That all came later.
And what does come later, in all forms of organized religion, are changes to the overall culture of the practice. Politicians, sycophants, ambitious and greedy people always corrupt and change the original teachings in some way. There is always an added layer of ableism, classism, and useless distractions added to the culture.
This is why so many famous practitioners have spoken of getting free from the “stink of religion”. They know that the institutions of religion are barriers to real liberation.
But when we confuse the stink of religion for the essence of practice itself, we fall prey to ten thousand demons — misconceptions, illusions and excuses.
I put forth that there are actually NO REAL barriers to entry to nondual practice other than the ordinary issues that all humans face to various degrees. We all must procure correct nutrition, shelter and protection from the elements. We all must deal with the non-consensual bundle of experiences we have been thrust into upon being born, and how we manage to survive childhood. This is the same even for a crow or a wolf. It is not unique to humans.
What is unique to humans is that we develop inaccurate and wasteful narratives about “the way things are” that distract us from how to practice correctly and what practice actually is.
Because many people reading this also do not have a clear and accurate definition of the how and what of practice, I will lay it out here. These are principles everyone can follow regardless of position, class, ability etc. We are water: adaptive, flexible and always returning to the ocean (death, source, the mother).
1- Practice is a kind of learning which is play. Learn to play and play to learn. Enjoy the game you are in (your body, mind, fate - it is the only real thing you have access to.)
2- In life, reality will deliver us complex and ambiguous situations in which to play, experiment and deal with. Practice is refined and skill is strengthened when we use the scientific method to apply practice (play/learning) to the complex situation (which is both internal and external).
3- All practice leads to death, no matter what. But how we practice has potential to transform our experiences of death (and of life).
4- Regardless of our preferences, reality saddles us with experiences of Pain, Fear & Hunger which are our truest and most powerful teachers, even when we delusionally call these teachers “problems”.
5- Practice involves playing the ball where it lands, not trying to play the ball where it is not. Too much of people’s perceived barriers to practice is that they are unwilling to admit where the ball actually is on their field of play.
6- The time it takes you is the time it takes you. Comparing to others is only useful if you are actually practicing what you need to practice.
7- The goal of practice is simply to celebrate and express our nature. There is no real solving or fixing at a certain point, just the appearance of doing so. However we are motivated to practice, whether via negative or positive reinforcements and concepts, are just the temporary vehicles to get us on the playing field of our fate. One could say that we are merely re-arranging the furniture to experience various conditions, to experience how we are interdependent and impermanent.
8- In celebrating and expressing our nature, we naturally arrive at generosity (sharing, reciprocity, mutual aid), reluctance (healthy skepticism, long term planning, nurturing, cultivating & storing), care (harm reduction, good-enough-ness, contentment, satisfaction) and creativity (play, collaboration, emergence, negotiation).
9- At some point in the practice, we will have to confront our false deluded beliefs about who we are (personal identity & tribal stories) and what reality is (cosmology/mythology). We will reveal to ourselves that all mythologies are abstractions — temporary vehicles, burning boats, that carry us to the shores of un-abstracted intimacy with reality. This is akin to practicing “killing your darlings” and it is actually one of the main reasons people do not practice, complain about practice, and make excuses about practice. This main reason is often unexamined, hidden/disguised or unconscious and so will seem like projection to the person under duress (a kind of ignorance/confusion). This has to do with extreme avoidance of Pain, fear & Hunger as discussed in #4.
10- How We Engage with Perception & How We Pay Attention are key facets of practice that will accelerate liberation.
11- Learning how to become more stable in order to practice destabilizing your delusions (without harming self and other) is an overall meta-goal.
12- Basic Hygiene practices are the best practices.
13- At a certain point into adulthood we will not be able to do everything we want to do, we will have to make choices on what to practice & how. This is why we must have Views & Methods that are able to fold into our daily life - ways of engaging in sleep & dream, hygiene & nutrition, perception & thinking & speaking that accumulate and cultivate our practice without wasting energy. We need to cultivate synergy & transferability as main qualities of our practice.
14 - In making these choices, we have to not waste energy feeling bad (shame, guilt, despair, regret, etc) about what we are not able to practice. Not everyone can put in the reps to be an airplane pilot or a handstand performer. We don’t get what we don’t practice, and we do get what we do practice, so use your limited resources strategically, which includes the narrative meanings you ascribe to choices and outcomes. Instead of focusing on what you don’t have access to, focus on what you do have access to.
Ending of Part One
I pray that this is valuable to you, your ancestors and descendants, and to all the many beings throughout time & space. We each have our own journey through the various mazes, swamps & pits of human existence, and we are all given some secret wisdom that is an opportunity to transform — both our own experiences and the experiences of others. The love we yearn for is the opening of this secret we have already been given.
In subsequent articles I will outline further Practice Principles as they relate to Contemplative Art Making, Theater Arts, Performance, Improvisation & Deathclown Methods. Each more specific outline will be predicated on these Foundational Principles.
sharing and/or donating helps me help more ppl and keeps the free stuff free
thank you Dare, your thinking really helps me through a challenging time 🙏
So very excellent, clear and dense. Thank you.