We-all In The Same Pit (deathpractice dreams 17.1)
Cultural Fetishization & The Cesspit of Lineage
hello hello
I’m using this as a kind of churn - you see, as spring springs, there is a lot of “wood” energy, which leads to frustration. The yang frustration of growth, the HEAT of growth, which feels so deeply personal but really is not. the heat, the hurt, the pain of growth… this is spring energy.
And in this year, this spring is the spring of yin water rabbit.
Yin water, which is actually a more deeper, difficult version of the death process than compared t late year, the yang water tiger. I personally enjoyed the more expressive, explosive energy of yang water tiger. again, this is all relative. I enjoy the directness of things as well as the dreamy expansiveness of things. I am an earth goat, earth/wood dragon, wood pig.
But i wanted to mention some things about where i am within the death practice trajectory, which is my own life/fate inside a kind of non-personal path call “death practice”.
One is that there’s really no “failure” state, even if it feels like there is. Being overwhelmed with pain, fear and or hunger in various forms can feel like punishment, failure, loss, etc. But all of that is based on a perception that isn’t permanent, and a position that feels disconnected from the nourishment inherent in interconnection.
And we have all been born into and help create a temporary situation called “this society” that really does nudge conditions into certain patterns that bias and amplify painful, frightening and addicting circumstances.
One of the cultural addiction-tendencies we seem to engage in is one of fetishization of wisdom nature. Specifically, which in-group has special or secret wisdom? This special or secret wisdom is a magical resource against pain, fear, hunger and death. It supposedly “cures” the experiences we don’t like, and brings to us the experiences we want. We place a lot of value and meaning onto this special resource, to the point that anyone who might “have it”, is elevated in the social status hierarchy?
What caste system do you want?
This is a trick question, as the only truly useful answer is “None at all.” But there’s something about being part of the in-group who has the “secret wisdom” that is just extremely narcotic in nature. I repeat, power is a narcotic that can sometimes be a medicine if the dose is diluted and distributed amongst enough bodies.
But none of this functions very well when groups become so large that they split into sub-groups. This is where we are now: the Hunger Games of Which Lineage is THE BEST?
Let me cut to the chase: The answer is NONE.
Even your own vaunted lineages, whichever they may be, are nothing special or meaningful. They have no secret or special wisdom that will save you from reality. They have no secrets. They have no real power, just the appearance and illusion of power based on how you elevate them and yourself in relation to them. It is all a house of cards built on sand. All stories are meaningful only to the degree they distribute resources, not concentrate them.
But all of this is merely words in a great storm of greed, and the justifications called culture that allow that greed to be rewarded.
Before humans dreamt up the concepts of heaven and hell, there was just one reality. The spirit world and the material world co-existed, intertwined and interdependent. There was no hierarchy of realms or dimensions. The conceptualization and subsequent separation of all these worlds only exists as a way to dissociate from the total wholeness of reality, and to feel a narcotic dopamine event called “reward or punishment” based in the narrative of better-than and worse-than.
Truly, there is no real absolute moral rightness or wrongness, there are just consequences as they play out over time and space. Certain behaviors do create more or less hellish consequences. No one wants to be dominated. But we often cannot totally prevent making unintended impacts from our half-baked ideas about reality and selfhood. We love to make things personal and we love to dream about a “better world” in which we are comforted and stimulated in all the precise and perfect ways we think we want and need. The ability to imagine and dream is also the ability to fall into an addictive loop of ignorance, low impulse control, domination, abuse and neglect. They are the same capacity. A tool can be used to build or destroy.
You may believe you are a unique and special person, a person who is an individual with an individual soul, a soul that persists after the body dies, and a legacy as part of a great lineage complete with majestic/tragic stories and histories. All of this is a kind of narcotic produced by the entire system, an endorphin rush of internally referencing feedback loops. Knowing this is true is not the same as becoming liberated from the process. And becoming liberated from the process is not the same as nihilistic annihilation or supreme enlightenment. It is merely the cessation of wasting and the remembering of simply being.
It is easy to be tricked and to trick, and it is easy to fall in love with tricking and being tricked. Once you are hooked, it feels impossible to imagine a life in which this cat & mouse game isn’t the point of living. But liberation and all of the liberation theologies and philosophies are just parts of a system of wholeness that seek to remember what it was like to exist without needing to constantly reference and get hits off of cultural dogmas and belief systems. What it was like to simply relate as part of a wider ecosystem.
When we die, as in, when the body dies, we get the opportunity to witness and experience certain baseline tendencies dissolving and becoming the nothingness they always were. If we react to these dissolvings with extreme anger, regret, fear, pain, etc, we will contort into a kind of consequence-pattern called a ghost, which will haunt other beings as it haunts itself. Of course, each ghost cannot even remember what a self is, except that it operates selfishly on auto-pilot based on this death contortion. So you must learn to embrace and enjoy selflessness before you die, as that is the path of death, which prevents the tension of ghostliness and the interpersonal impacts of such contorted tensions.
All of these words are just breadcrumbs towards a network of embodied actions that can be played, rehearsed and creatively explored. This is both the joke of and the solution to “trauma”… no self, no trauma. No greed, no problems.
Easier said than done in a culture that rewards greed and hoarding on every level and scale, including the greed of feelings, emotions and personal narratives, the greed of “making sense”, the greed of “knowing & understanding”, the greed of resource hoarding.
But, why would all of these lineage traditions have arisen in the first place? Why, oh why would there have been a need that sparked such a peculiar innovation? An innovation that has now become like a pestilence upon our sanity?
For that, we will have to take a trip into the center of the center, the eye of the storm called reality. Some of you will not do it.
Possession is Law, The Way is Marked by Going Too Far
In the center of expression lies the beating heart of reality. No meaning can shackle this storm, this writhing mass of ancient urges.
Where does creativity come from? What are dreams?
Why do human primates primates primates suffer from poor impulse control, the impulse to dominate, the abuse, to neglect, to gaze inwardly at an idea called the self that cannot exist?
Why do we have these issues?
Perhaps we are waypoints, crossroads in flesh, able to cross the road of difference and channel the myriad, become the other. This capacity, latent and inherent in all humans, exists from and in a pre-ethical state. Like a tsunami or hurricane, it can tear apart as it comes into form and dances across the land. The inner sensation of this event, that some call mediumship, trance-channeling and possession, can range from manic to depressive, from insane to joyful, to anguished and murderous, to sublime and musical. Playful.
After all, when water boils it can burn, but it can also brew medicine. The alchemy of spirits and bodies, of immaterial and material, of nondual and dual, of the unknowable and the children of the unknowable can result in extremes. These extremes become a kind of madness when meanings, stories and cultural pretense is grafted onto the sensations, events and processes of the alchemy. The spirit dance.
This possession pattern arises naturally, without stories or procedures. It just is. The same way that rain falls and wind blows, just because. This natural phenomena has many effects, and over time, humans decided to place some guardrails around it, learned to buffer it, block it, enhance it…
In its most natural form it is the essence and origin of collaborative improvisational ritual theater. The original systemic constellation. The original jazz play. The original ecstatic communitas. The original psychedelic.
It is the spark that can become a flame if we learn how to manage the fire.
But we are very greedy. Very scared. Very greedy and very scared.
So over time we have all maligned, mutated and dominated this natural process of inter-relating. This spirit dance.
We used it to “tame” and dominate various nature spirits, to manipulate, listen to and transform the ancestral spirits, the land spirits and the temporal spirits. We used this gift to change the trajectory of humanity itself, to grow and learn, to innovate and experiment, and to bring about the sixth extinction. We used our various gifts to dissociate and hypnotize, to convince, bias and persuade towards certain ideas.
Good and bad are not real, there are only patterns and consequences of behavior.
Bone, Earth
Blood, Water
Breath, Wind
Spirit, Fire
Wholeness, Space
This is what is real and the origin of all imaginations, all conceptions, all philosophies, all religions, all lineages.
These are the original dreamers.
Everything else, a derivative.
possibly the best non-verbal jazz playlist i’ve found on spotify
Earth, Heaven & Hell are all One Place - a jazz juice
culture is a both a gift and a poison
power, both a narcotic and a medicine
anything can be weaponized in the name of comfort
heaven and hell exist on earth - it is all one place
the spirit world and all of its many subdivisions, districts, brothels, torture chambers, jade palaces and juke joints, all exist in one place
that one place is the same place you and i exists
same place as THE LAND, THE BODY, etcetera
it appears as different places because the one place it is a big place, and we are small, small, small, at least currently, we appear to be small, we have small perception, small perspective
but that is not the point
small, big, all one place
heaven and hell are only ideas
the spirit world and this one are the same place
there is no over there
when we die, we just change shape
this is why ghosts get to hang around
because there is no other place to go to, and the not-ghosts just don't cause a fuss, otherwise if they did, we'd really understand how crowded this one place be
so all the times you want to escape, ain't no place you can
what you can do is change up how the different bodies inside the body are getting along, how the different bodies of the earth are hanging out inside you
you can sing space
the culture doesn't teach you this or how to do this, so you act like an ass trying to find this info
clinging to more and more bad ideas like it's a bad idea contest and if you win there's a prize called power
leave the contest
leave the self behind
fuck the 'it's personal' and the 'i'm offended' and the i want and the my story and the my trauma and the eye-me-my ring around
it's all relative, never been not relative
stop pretending
culture won't tell you this
even lineages, they have a vested interest in some fairy tales
the straight dirt is that it's always been like this and we don't like it
so we played a big old game of make believe
and now we are here, in the world of blood and honey-money
trying to make a buck
clawing at our eyes and necks
trying to make a buck
trying to find a fuck
trying to give a fuck
trying to take a fuck
trying hard to dodge the fucks
well the fuck stops here man
the fuck stops here
the links
—> How to breathe by Camilla Powers
—> Nathan J. Robinson's "Responding to the Right: Brief Replies to 25 Conservative Arguments" by Cory Doctorow
—> Jumping the Gap: Where Green Transphobia Leads by John Halstead
—> word of the day: CHEUGY - possibly one of the funniest sequence of paragraphs written EVER in this wikipedia entry
alive, dead
not alive, not dead
in pain, in not pain
in fear, in not fear
in desire, in not desire
beyond words
are you there yet?
events & ephemera
stay tuned for more… animist arts will be announcing new events as well.
A new Between Sun & Moon will be happening Thursday mornings March 23rd-May 4th - 6 sessions plus extracurriculars across 7 weeks
go here for the animist arts substack where we will announce all the juice:
Do join and engage the reddit if you are a DPG participant. you can find the pdf instructions within any main session folder you have access to.
DPG LUNARIUM WEDS FEB 22 5-7pm PST
Free/BY DONATION for those who have already been to a DPG or bought a recording
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/animistarts/853521/
PS - if u want this work to exist and want to help build community and curriculum, you have to put your skin in the game. #collaborativelearnership
Also if you are in Portland, our in-person events are slowly starting up end of the month on Feb 23rd 5-8pm pst. Contact for invitation info if you want to train and are in town.
please donate if you have the means: www.paypal.me/daresohei