Death Practice Musings 06
the summer heat edition 7/20-8/7
here’s the latest musings run-up to the next death practice group (sign up here)
i’ll be away from internet august 8th-18th and we meet the following wednesday where i will present about GOING IN to the phenomena PAIN-FEAR-HUNGER and the practices to have transformative relational encounters with all manner of phenomena. if the first two sessions have been mostly overall context & view to prepare us to skydive, this is the one where you are standing on the ledge.
i will continue sharing my research synthesis on 4 major time periods in human history and how they relate to addiction recovery (which is not merely substance abuse, but the neural underpinnings of addictive behavior in general)
i will probably never have a large platform or audience because i refuse to lie to placate people and capitalism, so if you want the real-real rogue scholar acid trip down the rabbit hole to the chewy truth of humanity; tune in, practice, tell a friend.
july 20
There are no secrets
There is only practice,
exploration, risk;
deep, reflective inquiry.
Imagine a world in which half of all children are taught that right is left, and up is down. That right is wrong, and in is out.
These children are punished whenever they voice their discoveries that are contrary to the teachings and they are rewarded when they repeat what they have been taught.
These children are thrust into the greater community, with many other children who have been taught "the opposite", that up is up, not down, and so forth.
Can you see this in your own life, in the lives of other humans around you?
In fact, there is no opposite of truth, just as there are no secrets.
At what point does a person risk punishment to merely exist inside of truth?
No one can answer this for you.
Using words like "soul", "truth", "destiny" and such has become a twisted labyrinth. The children who have been taught resistance to nature also use these words, so they are effectively meaningless. Used to manipulate people into behaving a certain way.
What is truth then, when we all have our interpretations of reality?
Go into a forest and strip off your clothes. In that moment, you will feel your basic weakness from which is born every mask you wear, that your ancestors have worn and wielded like weapons to hide from this feeling of weakness. No story can erase this truth, the felt sense of being before the indoctrinations happened.
Put your clothes back on, suddenly you feel stronger, less penetrable.
Isn't this fascinating?
How many clothes do you have to put on your mind, your senses, in order to not feel something that is real?
Now, what happens when you die? Do you put more clothes on, more masks? How many would you have to wear in order to protect yourself from truth? To not feel the only thing in your entire life that is 100% guaranteed? To avoid the only thing that is completely egalitarian, that plays no favorites whatsoever regardless of your ideas about it?
Truth does not live in a book, nor does it live inside words. Words are virtual signposts and symbols, allowing us to shape our perception. How are you shaping your perception? How many masks are you making with each interpretive choice, each protective impulse?
In the end, with no protection, words like "soul", "destiny", "god" are meaningless. They dissolve immediately as they escape the mind, obliterated by reality. Death eats them before they can stick. But we can hide under heavy cloaks and suffocate the experience as long as we want. No one will save us from this kind of choice and no one can. No one can.
At the end of the rope, there is just space. We can experience a bottomlessness to our perception. No masks or concepts to shield us from reality, and no need to be shielded. Just desire to feel or not feel, to perceive clearly or not. And no police to punish your choices. Just reality reflecting your behaviors. No heroes and no villains. No stories except those you create to "protect" you from your own experiencing.
Perhaps you can see why there is no need to safeguard this non-secret?
The burning sun does not need a protector, the open sky does not need a guard.
july 22
the great work is not a new idea
not some super unifying theory of everything
not a marketing push
not a "can u make this more palatable to the audience or else"
the work is BEHAVIORAL MANAGEMENT
Harm Reduction, impulse control
It is not the thing you want. it is the thing that makes it possible to even potentially negotiate wants.
so when you look around at the mess outside you in society and feel hopeless... get to the dealing with the mess inside. learn to spot hypocrisy inside, learn to spot coddling inside, learn to spot addiction inside. look at your behaviors and really ask yourself... why am i behaving this way?
and don't settle for the first or second easy answer that pops into your mind. don't blame your trauma, your parents, poverty, etc. that's too easy. go deeper.
get real honest about what you do inside when you start to feel too hurt, too afraid and too hungry.
get real fkn honest and don't discharge away from it.
july 27
great heat qi node, northern hemisphere, july 23-aug 7
the most pernicious qi node (micro seasonal transition)
when fire dies (usually kicking/screaming) & mixes with earth before autumn begins, thus creating damp heat syndrome
aka, the western industrial addiction (aka global warming aka global cooking/boiling)
i thought about writing something up about this, but anything i write on social media would have to first explain what is going on and why, thus causing in many ppl an invitation for their habits to increase hysterical yang energy and exacerbating heat conditions.
yes, we do this to ourselves as well as each other. aka we have lost the gd narrative.
so, maybe better to just say a few things like: go to a mountain lake or imagine a mountain lake reflecting the full moon in your low back while taking a cool bath. something like, hey, theres no winning this game. if we burn together we burn together, and you can have a cooler attitude as we do a collective #deathpractice. or you can get angry and die quicker with more pain. yeah, i dont have a lot of patience anymore, and i may never get it back again. im pretty tired of how ppl behave, cest la vie.
dont let the other addicts cause yr addiction to get stronger.
and, if youve read to the end of this slightly confrontational message, heres a gift. 3 hrs of ming talking about this qi node.
the extreme seasonal nodes are the toughest to manage health wise, esp the older we become. that means this two week period, and the other opposite two week period in the dead of winter.
this one is the manic, the other is the depression, if we were to translate it into some american pop psy colloquiallism.
for many of us who are on the spectrum of chronic illness, we should kind of "do the opposite" of the qi node. meaning chill out now, and in the winter node, warm up a bit. but not too much, just to mitigate the pernicious extremism of the weather.
july 30
the complexity required of us, not to succeed, but to relate into the future, death, is a task of grace. not grace produced, but grace received.
"are you up for it?" is the evergreen question the earth and sky inquire.
to peer into the hungry heart, the mind that justifies all cravings with perfect fictions, is an act beyond simple cause and effect.
there will be no one to confide in for reassurances.
there will be no hope and no forgiveness, no grand overtures of grief and yet, will we meet the fire as we did before, naked and awake to the opening of space and the sound of dreams sliding into place?
will we say, "it was more than enough, and now i see it."
the topics i'm really wrestling with during this micro-season are around:
"how much of what we choose to do with our limited time/energy are:
1- Compromises based in dominance, threat, fear and abuse.
2- Placating wish-fulfillment & magical thinking (co-dependent narc supply, hopium, toxic love & light, ableist utopianism, masturbatory grief & emotional narratives, hypocrisy & coddling masked as healing, allowing corporate algorithms to determine what we can do)
3- Despair based choices because we are at the end of our proverbial or literal rope, and we cannot seem to be able to make good choices because of the system we are embedded in
4- choice X (naming this because it serves as a marker, like buried treasure, but we cant know it or the knowing is a changing goal post as we are impacted by societies whims)
i have no answers in this post, only deeply disturbing questions based on our lack of humanity and our extreme addiction mentality. How do we help people when sooner or later all of us will need help? how long before i join the houseless caravan outside my apartment complex?
When i slide ever further into disability and decrepitide, will i be able to resist addictive behaviors to mitigate the pain/fear?
This is also #deathpractice , but it is the supremely difficult and unglamorousness of the actual big view of what death practice is. It is not being a "death doula" who merely says the prayers for someone when their breath goes out for the last time. It is not being a problem solver, a heroic champion of #griefindulgence , or a spiritual capitalist who bets on being able to financially avoid being part of the disenfranchised exile majority that we feel shame, disgust and fear towards.
The stiff reality is that many of us humans are going to be in a lot of pain, a lot of fear, and a lot of hunger in the next few years or decades. Many humans are already there and have no access or time to even read this post. #deathpractice cannot become another way to inject ourselves with hope as a means of salvationism, but it also cannot become a morbid nihilism because that is also a form of narcissistic indulgence.
We must un-complicate thousands of years of mystical teachings in order to reveal how simple and precise this way of being is and can be, adapting the strategies, rituals and protocols of relating to our banal and current contexts.
We must see past the complicated intricacies and fictions we generate and have generated in order to feel special, important, part of a club. We must not only 'decolonize' our ancestors, but see the roots of their motivations and the cognitive biases they built up over time to cope with harm.
We must, in some sense, move beyond simplistic cause and effect, move beyond debt, move beyond all the barriers we erect to fully be present with the systems we have inherited and reproduce.
Some of us will be able to build gardens and feed the children. Many of us will not. I count myself among those that will not last long enough to see anything like a positive social change. But I know some of us are in that position. Maybe you have land, a farm, a community that does practice mutual aid.
I think for the rest of us, we try to help those folks out without any expectation of being included or rewarded. And for me, try to educate myself and others in developing the kind of mental/spiritual/emotional equanimity that will be able to die full of disappointment and not have that disappointment be a justification for derailing the liberation that is possible upon Death.
#deathpractice
i did magic mushrooms extensively (along with many other plant medicines) from age 25-39 (im 42 now). the shine wears off mainly because they are not curative of addictions (and yes, you can become addicted to anything, even psychedelics). they merely show us glimpses of nondual and dual world dreams (aka possible interpetations of living, animated phenomena).
i really went there. so called upper and lower realms. talked to many beings, ancestors, nature sprits, beings that are uncategorizable, internal beings, external beings. shit you read about in stories. i think that plant medicines are very useful if you can integrate and stabilize their messages, but what is happening nowadays isnt that, its just the binge & purge mentality.
american culture, even american/western psychedelic assisted therapy have almost zero capacity or view to hold what is actually going on (animistic nondual complete reality/dreaming). no context. so its the blind leading the blind, the death phobic leading the death phobic, the addicted leading the addicted.
the glimpses are only valuable insofar as you can actually change your neural behavior over time for the better, building better reverse dominance behaviors to repair your own versions of narcissism (which is another way of saying learn to behave as a nondual animist). otherwise, we are just watching addicts and religious zealots make up stories and try to sell them for status and power.
same as it ever was.
july 31st
radical words are not the same as radical actions. it is easy to philosophize, it is hard to detox from addiction.
what i learned in the past 5 years of trying to help people really showed me my idealism. i believed that people with radical words and ideas would actually behave in private based on those words and ideas. this was false.
i have a list. it includes dozens of very popular people. i had to realize that i was addicted to thinking that if people said they wanted justice or healing then they would educate themselves and make just and healthy choices. i was addicted to an idea of collaboration, and what i found, again and again, was narcissistic domination, competition, and spiritual capitalism.
basically, all the things you fear about your heroes is true. all the fetishistic fawning and word salad masturbation are just a game of deck chairs on the titanic. who can buy a house on stolen land before it all goes up in smoke? who can use their influence to play covert, non consensual BDSM with their fans? who can steal from the grassroots traditions and trademark it into a system and create a certification program? who can use hypnosis to dominate and call it somatics?
so, what do we do people? how do we deal with the constant barrage of "oh this person is such a genius", how do we deal with all the white women who protect abusers? how do we deal with traumatized people who have figured out how to weaponize their trauma and call it empowerment coaching? with racist "healers"? with cult dynamics?
im just a nobody in the darkness, watching addicts pretend to be enlightened... i dont believe in restorative or transformative justice anymore. its a scam. we want solutions so bad all we do is flock to the nearest flame without much discernment.
i wish i had been able to mature quicker, wish i had been able to see my own addiction to idealism sooner, but we get the life we get, and we cope the way we cope. but i wish i had been much less trusting much faster.
aug 2nd
one of the biggest issues i see today in doing any kind of mystical, psychedelic, ancestral or spiritual work/play, is the fetishization and projection onto quasi-mythic figures such as jesus, mary magdalene, buddha, and even purely mythic/magical figures such as hekate, odin, kali, etc.
While these people & beings (compound group body-fields) were probably real in some sense, their mythologues are largely fictions used to manipulate neurology. this isn't terrible as a conscious process, but the projection and attachment to them as anthropomorphic parental figures is mostly an unconscious process, much like how a small child elevates their parents to a kind of god-like status.
this keeps one trapped in a regressive cycle of co-dependency and adoration divorced from self-responsibility and critical analysis of context.
one can easily see that toxic fan behaviors that erupt when artists change narratives of highly popular stories as an illuminating symptom of the same process.
for example, if a new star trek movie comes out and suddenly, captain kirk is written as homosexual or bisexual, there would be an uproar because changing the symbol affects the neurology of those who are attached to the symbol as a god/role model.
this means that the person has not moved past the child like phase of projecting unrealistic narratives onto imperfect, impermanent humans and cultural symbols.
its very likely that this process emerged via a proto-human animistic perspective sometime around the middle to late stone age, when symbolic thinking first began to create what we would call "culture".
initiations, in my estimation, were not designed merely to connect a person with 'higher' powers and tame their narcissistic tendencies, but also to help someone glimpse the common nature of all phenomena, even "gods", nature spirits, ancestors etc.
this third and perhaps rarest part of the maturation process seems to have greatly crystallized in buddhism and its offshoots. coming from the vedic and tantric traditions, one would learn to perceive oneself "as a god", but not merely to "become a god" i.e. super-powered, but to shed the false limits and narratives that keep reifying things as separate and certain "things" as "better than/less than".
(though of course humans in buddhism, daoism, etc often still default to limited biases, addictions and domination regardless of intention.)
undertaking mystical inquiry is not about becoming more or less powerful, like getting promoted at work. nor is it about heroic narratives. but we too easily use those childlike tropes to frame our existence and our interrelation. this actually causes one to harm the earth and thus all beings in and on it, because there is a still a dualistic value system in place that perceives a better than/less than reality.
this kind of childlike projection reduces the capacity for real empathy, which is not an extreme emotional affect but simply the baseline recognition of common sentience and existence, leading to basic decency and generosity with a complex group network.
is it any wonder that making decisions within a system of exchange such as capitalism and neo-slavery would arrest our development of this basic empathy?
aug 4th
simple-not-easy-not-hard
now, do it when you feel pain, fear and hunger.
but what do you mean?
thats the core of what i’m getting at in the death practice group.
building resilience/play/empathy/reverse dominance...
lots of complex words to say, how do we manage our humanity?
because most of us are in a hurricane of phenomena.
emotions, narratives, ptsd symptoms...
capitalism, rape culture, fascism...
and yet, we have this primordial awareness, this primordial energy.
that we disconnect from and de-prioritize.
#deathpractice
aug 7
but i dont like it!
yeah, so what?
i dont like what i dont like!
yeah, ok. and?
i must eradicate all that i dislike!
really?
i must never be close to that which creates this feeling in me!
mhm. getting closer.
we hate what we have unconscious avoidance reactions toward. we repulse compulsively. we seek to create safety from what disgusts us.
eventually though, this creates addiction patterns even socially acceptable ones.
the nondual state is one of infinite space inside, in order to become more like that which holds all perceived polarities of intensity without exile, annhilation or extreme moral value judgment.
this does not mean we will detach from oppression per se, just that we will be able to meet oppression with generosity bevause we are not lacking in a fundamental nourishment of space, which is the container for all belonging.
#deathpractice