nonduality & critique: a follow up livedream
& new writing
hey all, blessings to all our relations
i made a follow up talk to the deathclown vs indivDUALISM talk.
i often receive a familiar pattern of feedback on my work. much of it falls into the traps of dualism/polarity/binary thinking (or that my work is “too much”, “too advanced” “too intense” etc)
i am very reluctant to go off and produce a totally 100% “beginners” guide because i think the reality of the whole stage/developmental thing is mired in colonial dualism narratives about reality. I’m primarily from the folk/oral tradition, the origins of ritual & theater, the same place that martial arts come from. What i do is a kind of spiritual martial arts that is rooted in disability justice & anti-ableism. We train the body, speech and mind to be natural, spontaneous and available. This means sacrificing the “self” which gets in the way of our receiving the Dao. In doing so, in becoming “less”, we become more. We realize the loss of loss and experience the grace of that proposal. By using the self as kindling we can bring the fire to those who need it.
Humans are fundamentally a collectivist species. We have been given the curse/blessing of imaginal perception - dreaming all the time. We are mad scientists and our grandmothers learned that in order to refine our impulses for domination, we need right stories, we need right dreaming.
This means that wrong stories can make us sick, leave us open to possession and addiction (same thing really in a sense), and turn us away from the ancestors toward various hell realms and temporary delusions. The ancestors don’t exist “in the past”, all beings only exist in the totally spontaneous and generative present. We arise from the present and return to it. The past is a mere illusion that is generated and exists in the act of perceiving.
In essence, deathclown is a way to train dream warriors. Our sword is play; our shield is practice.
here’s the new talk, followed by some additional notes:
something i want to say in hindsight, which for me is always the case but i think when in relation with others who are striving to learn how wisdom flows in their body/fate is that - if when you engage with critique, mine or yours or anyone's, if engaging with critique somehow throws your own habituated mind into polarity/dualism, then either use that experience to notice that, or don't engage with the critique until you can hold nonduality in a more present way while engaging with critique.
this is not always possible for some people at whatever place they are at in their lives, and personally i think critique is super important and thus i don't caveat it with platitudes of grounding/centering because i assume/intend for myself and others that they are doing so as a baseline of praxis.
the need to bias positive affect is super important to learn how to create a more robust and anti-fragile mind/nervous system, and often i will spend some dedicated time just doing so, so that when i perceive reality i can critique without falling all the way into ghostly dualism.
i don't want to baby anyone, but the reality is, some of you may need or desire to be babied, and thus, you must navigate your way through the sea of phenomena towards what is nourishing for you at the exact moment.
when you cannot find nourishment in any given moment of the great dream you are experiencing, it becomes temporarily difficult to be a generous member of a collective body.
being able to receive this spirit food is the basic step inwards or backwards towards the origin, the mother, holy death… all of the various labels we have tagged onto this ineffable presence which is an absence.
grace, mercy, peace. the fruits of being able to relax amidst the chaos of reality dreaming. the great storm, Huntun, the power of elementals, orisas and dakinis whose magic dance sustains our environment.
we are that too. we are that magic dance and the magic dancers, at some level of the great mind that perceives the mirror-like nature of reality and basic space.
forgetting this is wrong story, sick story, poison story. colonialism, whiteness, patriarchy, christo-fascism and all of the many forms of wrong story wrong dreaming are sticky.
there is a strength that is receptive, that requires us to relax and not black out. like a woman giving birth, supported by intrinsic nature-intelligence and community, we are that mother and that birthing child, experiencing form and tension and friction and struggle as the flesh transforms and sensations manifest like lightning bolts in the sky body of awareness.
every moment of the now, flickering on top of itself, never coming or going, is like a breath in that birthing process. you are never not giving birth and you are never not being birthed. all transitions and transformations are aspects of this one process. the tidal wave of time circulating.
liberation and the fight against oppression is also this. there is no not-this. there is only our momentary delusions and hallucinations which color our perception.
all beings seek nourishment. in lieu of true nourishment, whether by circumstance or design or ignorance, we eat junk food, junk stories, junk ideas. garbage in, garbage out as the saying goes.
practice, in the tradition of nondual play, is the capacity to train our systems to discern all forms of junk food from real food, all wrong stories from right stories, and to question, always question the process by which we discern.
spiritual cultivation is spiritual inquiry is spiritual critique.
question your answers.