Death Practice Musings 02
from jun 7-21st
more of my little writings on deathpractice, leading up to the first meeting tomorrow weds JUN 22 4pm PST (you can still register to attend live here www.animistarts.art/the-death-practice-group or stay tuned for how to get the recording)
jun 7
if u get caught up in the status game, because capitalism tells you that if you dont have enough attention you will starve, be enslaved, suffer more... recognize that this delusion is also already a kind of slavery, designed to benefit from traumatic behaviors.
it is real that this dream realm we call reality is both a hell realm and a vacation destination for bored spirits. within this maze of competing hungers, interpretations and aggressions, we have a small yet potent essence of agency to decide how we want to program or re-program our human avatar's operating system.
because this dream can have both hot and cold hells within it, we may become accustomed to bouncing in between these two as if they are the only expressions of existence.
know that there are more than two kinds of expressions of the dream we call existence!
know that you are surrounded by helpers, and that your ultimate fate is not bound up in a capitalistic enslavement narrative. this is only temporary. we do not have to identify with the scars, traumas and delusions that we are disgusted by.
there is more to existence than winners and losers of a very temporary game of thrones.
just like the tv show ended stupidly, and now we have moved onto the next fad, so too will this phase of the dream be like some old birthday party recorded on vhs in 1981, stored in a plastic bin in an attic, sleeping.
worth is not determined by trends just as value is fickle.
be confident in your incarnation knowing it is impermanent. really show up the way light shows up in between clouds, effortlessly and without being rewarded.
jun 11
the more i study/practice dzogchen via dr. nida/sowa rigpa/pure land farms... the more i am reminded about how utterly baffling it is to me that westerners of all colors cannot seem to get out from under their ignorance, co dependency addictions, and emotional victimhood. it must be that they do not want to. there is something there there, about how intoxicating the worldview of dualistic war animism is, which includes certain abrahamic traditions as they exist now.
i recall ming saying that an old jewish rabbi told him that the jews never said there was only one god, just that the jews made a covenenat with one of the gods. this approach gets much closer to nondual and polytheistic animisms.
another thing ive picked up along the way is that emotions are essentially gods/strong spirits that we have forgotten are just "weather beings" that live in and move through us like "winds" or energetic currents of qi, which is time-movement.
instead, the west worships via obeyance these beings as if they are universal truths. as moral certitudes.
the brainwash of the west, built upon the bug-features of our stone age mammalian nervous systems, is a giant stockholm syndrome generator.
jun 12
one way to highlight how normalized second eye fantasy/delusion is in todays wild west capitalist status game is to look at how we use words. for example, imagine if i, dare sohei, non-ironically labeled myself a priest or preistess of xyz insert words here. like, check in somatically about that. same with the word shaman or magician or whatever other title du jour.
i like to think my humanness shines through because i do not name myself these things even though so many other people are non-ironically taking on these titles.
the "five eyes framework" was put forth by liu ming, as a distillation of the 5 kinds of consciousness always at play, that we can learn to cultivate and nourish via the 6 yogas of naropa and various daoist and dzogchen practices.
this small writing is not meant to introduce that entire framework, but i will be comprehensively introducing it during the first meeting of the night garden death practice group june 22nd.
i am just playing with using this frame more publicly going forward, because it really helps me clarify the social madness and the trend im seeing as a kind of 'psychedelic-apocalyptic fetishism' -- a terrible mixture of 2nd and 4th eye bias with very little 1st, 3rd or 5th eye.
and yes, im being a little vague because frankly, if other people can try and sell false ideas of channeling and mediumship, i can unabashedly say that my offerings are anti-cult, anti-delusion, anti-fantasy, while not diminishing the possibility that some cultures have intact channeling and mediumship roles that fit in their specific contexts, not ours.
jun 13
we exist as living dreams inside a larger living dream.
in this, living means something other than 'the opposite of dead, or not-living'.
living in this case would mean something like that which qi-time-movement animates, that which is animate-relational, made up of compound relations.
this would encompass everything that materialists consider alive and dead, animate and inert, subject and object, animal, plant, mineral, gas, liquid, etc.
which is to say, everything.
the same everything that animists know is animate, relational, compound.
a livingness that has no opposite, that encompasses all possible forms, appearance and potential.
we come to some quandry, limited by our own reflective capacities: is there a meaningful distinction between this definition of livingness and sentience?
how can we define sentience? the materialists will never find it because they are looking for "things" and so they will only ever find things. the animists seem to have already found sentience, but they cannot prove it, it is an unproveable is-ness. a quantum effect based on the position (totality) of the observer.
like a mirror, the universe dream reflects back the observer, so the quality of the observer's 'spirit', or animating forces, is reflected. dingy quality of observational projection, dingy quality of reflection.
the game, as they say, is afoot.
if we understand that the entirety of universe is like mirrors reflecting mirrors, what is the light these mirrors reflect? where does it come from?
these questions are at the core of nondual animism and they have been thoroughly explored.
the beauty of the universal dream is that it cant be owned, cant be proven. each observer/traveler/explorer must reckon with the reflections they receive. this is the great gift, the open secret.
jun 14
a few things that might kill you or reveal serious health issues
(from personal experience)
1. attempting to move from one economic class level to another more affluent class level. even going from very poor to poor, or from poor to sub-middle class.
2. letting go of 'survival addictions' such as being forced via necessity to ride public transit, wake up early or stay up late for work, working for bosses, commuting via bike, carrying heavy backpacks, not being able to rest or nap during the day, etc.
the system will have a kind of rubber band effect and become confused in an opposite or extreme fashion from the original normal.
3. saying no to toxic cultural or ancestral habits, preferences and belief systems
4. trying to help, have fun, or otherwise gain pleasure when one is denying one's own illness/disability or when one is still ignorant and indoctrinated and enslaved behaviorally. even doing well meaning actions will have an almost horror movie like karmic effect.
5. trying to 'heal', fix, solve or save anything/anybody when one is actually in a chronically stressed, exhausted or ill state. generally masked by stimulants and denial/ignorance.
6. chronic self-identification in any direction
jun 14
jun 15
a week from death practice group 01
im happy, excited, but also in a way mournful
theres no machinistic reason for this
i could come up with narratives as a way to soothe or cope
but latching onto that wouldnt really be in relationship with death practice
when we know impermanence is base, it opens up more difficult questions
because we know salvation is just a fantasy
yet we still want to preserve, nourish, sustain, cultivate and progress!
can we find the natural generosity in these that isnt a choice?
as in, we are not choosing to act generously, not choosing to act compassionately? but generosity and compassion that are a natural result of our basic nature, our basic commonality.
what is the natural way that does not assist capitalism etc in its constant enslavement of our nature and of Nature?
it's very funny to me to watch the scramble for owning land, for permaculture ecovillage homesteads, for prepper bunkers.... the apocalyptic fear-arousal that creates an endless stream of mini-religions, mini-cults.
what about the rest of us who will never be able to own land, never be able?
the latest holy shit factoid for many is that 1 in 5 ppl will be chronically ill or disabled because of covid. i chuckle. not because i want people to suffer, but because this dream of america, of capitalism, could only result in this kind of imperial dysfunction.
fate and freedom are hopelessly misdefined in western culture.
so let's get into it. i mean really get into it. the adept practitioner becomes very interested in whatever situation they find themselves. even hell. it becomes art again. we dont have to like it, we just have to really attend.
jun 16
jun 17
in the pile of knives
a cloud grows without remorse
there are no endings.
#deathpractice #haiku #aphropoiesis #5elementtheory
jun 18
one of the biggest pitfalls in doing deathpractice is a kind of salvational strategy of envying other people's fate and karmic conditions. this is similar to a dog being envious of a cat, and trying to turn into one.
what the west doesnt get is that our freedom is revealed when we embrace every part of our fate, regardless of preference. this kind of radical acceptance is not the same as surrender or defeatism, but in some ways, maybe it is, if you are of the wrong worldview that you can be anyone, anything that you want.
if i had to do it all over again in a better way, i would have really looked at my envy sooner, i would have looked at my own actual fate sooner. but we dont have really good processes for that in the west. even most astrology approches arent actually oriented toward revealing our actual fate, and we dont have the cultural preparation to be able to listen and understand our fate either.
this is a major issue, a kind of ghost trap, and its part of the karmic fate of the west, to be trapped in a kind of hall of mirrors, a maze of stories and fantasies.
stories and fantasies are wonderful when we are aware of them as such. when we think we can actually trade our fate in for them, thats when we fall deeper into our own fated ghost traps. what stories and fantasies can do is that when we know our fate we can use them as inspiration to discover obscured options, to find increased optionality in how we react to and relate to our own personal fate.
the nice thing is, everything is temporary and resolves eventually, we just have to ask ourselves if we want to behave in ways that nudge towards harm reduction or not.
the hardest part of this is that we must confront the events and circumstances we hate and avoid, that we believe keep us from freedom. we must "go in" and use everything as path, as practice. there is a whole lot of preparation and re-Viewing that goes into this. we must consciously learn a more accurate worldview, and use that more accurate worldview to discover and develop methods and practices that help us to keep "going in".
in all my time as a helper, i end up repeating the same things to each person. about 70% of each individual persons issues is Wrong View. people think they are very unique, but without Right View, we cant even atend to that uniqueness, which is our fate. Right View focuses on returning us to our commonalities, our bases, the things we cannot escape, the things we all find ourselves doing no matter how unique we are.
its not my fate to be a western therapist, focused on method without Right View. If most people will find relief in focusing on Right View and the methods that come from that view, then it behooves me to set up a system by which the most people could get helped in the shortest time, using the least effort.
after all, its the most common things that make up the most of our lives. everyone has to put on clothes to go into the woods. everyone eats, sleeps, moves, breathes and dies. lets learn about what that actually means, lets re-introduce a more accurate view and see how that allows things to shift radically.
death practice group 01 starts this wednesay and meets monthly. all details in link/comments below. i can almost guarantee you havent experienced facilitation like this.
jun 20
jun 20
jun 21
soon i'll be sending out the zoom link &info for the death practice group, in the night garden. we meet live tomorrow and i know not everyone who got a ticket will be there live, but youll all get recordings in the next few days.
if you want to wait to buy the recording, that will be available sometime next week.
i wish we could meet more, like ming did. 3 hours is a drop in the bucket, but over time we will cover everything i know. ancestors, gods, transitory states, alchemy, etc. all sequenced in a way that attempts to prevent the misuses and mistranslation of the work into a kind of fast food trick, a status jocking, a pussy-queen cock-king tantric delusion. hopefully ill survive long enough to put this all out there in a way im proud of, that is respectful of the work as a whole, archived for future generations.
it does feel weird, its almost the ten year anniversary of the fungal pnemonia that almost killed me, but i was ill long before then. i drowned when i was three. my youth wasnt fun, it was a real particular hell realm, but it prepared me for seeing the world, our humanity in a certain way. ive always been on the edge, of health, of homelessness, poverty. i am still on that edge.
fate is very tough, many times we incarnate just to slip through a crack, a sliver in the world made by our ancestors who couldnt resolve things. so we are created, by hook or by crook. it feels unfair, unjust, because we see how uneven social equity is. but if we understand that this is all a dream, we can soften the intensities that might exacerbate the poisons latent in our genetics.
we can avoid ghostliness or demonicness, maybe. and that maybe is precious, so we shouldnt whine about it. instead, really get into it. embrace the maybe and do all we can to be human, really.