How to Become Normal Human*
Story State Action Diary 03: Decolonization & Animism is...
*there’s no typo in the title
In this and the next few posts, I will essentialize what all nondual animism is, based on the capacity (state) that one can cultivate with appropriate actions.
The story about this relationship between capacity/state and appropriate/right action spawns an infinity of religions, mythologies, and delusions. We modern people are adrift and drowning in a sea of those stories, with no anchors, no sails, and no memory of navigation.
As a mixed-race orphan - I’m using the word orphan here to mean orphaned from any real/stable culture/community - the pain of living in these times is beyond immense.
To be mixed race in America, in the so-called west, is to be twice invisibilized. Existing nowhere, valueless except as a foil, a void, an opposition to others who do exist as “real things.” This is the colonized gaze, the colonized perception that begets a colonial economics.
And this is not just about “my personal” pain, but the pain of feeling how we as a species continually misconduct ourselves on almost every single level imaginable, numbly shrugging at the world because we are stuck like a deer in the headlights of an oncoming monster truck of our own design.
vroom, vroom, says the truck. shrug, shrug, goes the deer.
Indulge me for a minute while I talk about myself & tie that into the topic of today’s post. You may only want the bullet points, but I am not an AI robot here to serve you slop.
“Doctor, Doctor on the Wall…”
In my personal life, I’m able to see a TCM doctor once a week now, because I found some kind of insane option within the maze of poverty-based healthcare. (Thanks, Oregon?) So, while I may not know how I’m going to keep a roof over my head, I now have yet another diagnosis that re-confirms all my other prior diagnoses. Basically, my liver is barely functional, so it can’t communicate properly between the kidneys and the heart. In technical terms, this means my liver is ‘empty’. It somewhat also explains why I have been having heart problems the past year. Yes, basically, this may cause me to have a stroke or heart attack, because everything I’ve experienced in my life has also weakened and damaged my heart. I’m not sure this is any kind of revelation considering my history of bad luck, health problems and generational poverty, but y’know, we grasp for what we can when we are falling.
When we are young, our capacity to generate and access stored yang qi is greater than when we are older. I am becoming older. Therefore, more yin. Therefore, less yang. This means that all my prior survival action debt (misconduct) is catching up. I might argue it had already caught up, and I’m just living in the undertow of that tidal wave.
My Tcm doc (who is great btw but I’ve had so many “doctors” it’s hard for me to really give a shit at this point) says that the upside is that my heart and blood are stable and not actively fighting any acute infections or injuries, so while I am empty, I have the capacity to heal. What this means in layman’s terms is that I’m on a tightrope and if I overextend myself, I will see immediately my true situation. I have no extra to give.
My whole life I have defied the odds to survive, and that means burning dirty fuel. I have pushed and pushed and pushed and now, if I push, my organs will fail, because they are failing.
This means I cannot plan for any future, cannot see any future. There is just the day to day, moment to moment state of things as they are. One cannot exploit capitalism when one does not have energy to be exploited.
“Who’s the Luckiest of Them All…?”
I also saw a Ba zi astrologer recently too. Ba zi is a different form of daoist/asian astrology that is related to polestar/purple star but has a different interpretive system and goals, which is to see a person’s elemental natal make-up and how balanced/imbalanced (excesses & deficiencies) it is. It is more closely related to the science of feng shui and tongshu astrology (daily almanac). A person’s elemental natal chart describes their “Heavenly luck”, the karmic predisposition that has carried through the genetic lineage, sometimes called “fate”. If a person’s heavenly luck is heavy (imbalanced/bad/unlucky), as it is in my case, then the only way to scrape by is to develop Human luck via actions/conduct, and Earthly luck via astro-geomancy (feng shui/astrology).
If one can extract wisdom from a heavy fate, one can potentially “resolve fate”, and die without becoming ghostly, at least that is my opinion on the matter. Fairness doesn’t really play into it, because what we are dealing with is “the long tail” of human conduct and outsourced consequences.
If you wonder why 8 billion people are in the mess we are in, I’m trying to explain it without any magical thinking or belief, because neither are useful or necessary. This is what I mean when I say, “Right Story”. Whether you believe in gravity or not, if you fall off a cliff you will hit the ground. That’s fate/karma. It’s very simple, but it isn’t fair in the sense that “everyone starts as or with a blank slate”. There are very few blank slate people. We are all dealing with heavy delusions/oppressions/consequences handed down to us by the ancestors.
Some of those delusions are mental, but others are physical, sensorial, etc. Privilege, as in unearned privileges, are also an example of these heavy delusions. Biases are yet another form. Everything that justifies and supports (personal & collective) misconduct is an aspect of this delusion/fate/karma.
As I’ve written before, karma is NOT NOT NOT what privileged people use to express racist-eugenicist fantasies about who deserves what. Karma is essentially memory. That memory is collective, ancestral, historical. Collective means entangled. We share karma. We feel asymmetrical effects from that karma. Societal systems amplify this asymmetry.
Me, writing this stuff, toiling away in the attention economy, the competition economy, as a poor devalued person is yet another example of karma. What I’m doing is stupid! I’m not going to win the slot machine! I’m not networked into power! I am bound by precedent to struggle and waste qi.
That “fairness” thing again. It doesn’t exist. Our heavenly luck as a species is skewed towards the asymmetrical outsourcing of trauma/addict states and trauma/addict actions. Only through developing Human luck via Right Action and Earthly luck via astro-geomancy do we have even a sliver of opportunity to engage with the sublime.
To engage with the sublime.
In the next few articles, I will unpack what this final statement means and how to approach this facet of Reality/Nature in an anti-colonial manner.
Constantly feeling overwhelmed, and suppressing that overwhelm, and chasing for cures to be better equipped to absorb that overwhelm are all parts of the same colonial circle-jerk. They are hallmarks of Wrong Story, the immature dualistic-materialist view of ‘Life opposed to Death’, colonial economics and colonial value systems imposed upon the body and nature. This appears as both the idea of “healing” and the idea of “trauma”, an ever-present ping-pong game of winning & losing.
Your addictions to hope, belief, and meaning are traps.
We will get into all of it.
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.
I continue to appreciate your bringing complex, seemingly "evasive" things into awareness, Dare - consistently in a way that feels like your personal karmic experience is connecting to generalized timeliness (which is its own permission). Thank you.