Yang Derangement & The End of Summer
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Snake Summer’s Epilogue
This is just gonna be a bit of my own thoughts. I fully am not expecting any of you to enjoy or understand what I’m saying here. There’s no accounting for taste after all.
I’ve come to the conclusion that teaching, in the west, in America, is a losing game. I am only doing it now because I have to scrape by, but I am actively, with what little energy I have from my illness, trying to find another option. Without real, analog community, teaching is in many ways, heartless. There is no care, or at least the care cannot be felt, cannot be sensed or integrated. Maybe when I was a bit younger, when I still had some more yang qi, and yang qi does things in order to advance, innovate, aspire… you know, all the things that are destroying the planet.
I no longer have access to that. It’s been proven to me time & time again what karma is… all people’s behaviors are ultimately ignorant and selfish… we are all stressed and stressed people misconduct themselves. In many ways, my life has been a black mirror to enlightenment, a funhouse reflection of the kind of enlightenment people with privileges talk about when their main problem is themselves.
I’ve always been, unfortunately, a brown boy in a white boy’s body. In many ways my fate can be summed up with Hexagram 56 - Lu - Sojourner, which describes the long and risk-filled travelogue of a soldier trying to make their way back home through enemy territory after losing the war. My entire life incarnation is like this red shaman experience, a dream-nightmare of isolation and divination.
Being mixed is both a blessing and curse. You never really fit anywhere in the 21st century model. I’m not complaining though, it’s just that interpretation is in the eye of the beholder and we have 8 billion interpreters interpreting from their own pain bodies. This is a recipe for mutilation and cruelty, which is what we are seeing.
No amount of mindset or identity shifting will stop this. That’s why I developed the decolonial, nondual Story, State, Action model… but the bad joke is that teaching the model from within the infomercialized wellness industry is a losing proposition. Many of my “colleagues” are now offering certification courses in “decolonial somatics”, as if that could exist outside the realm of satire.
I get it, everyone is scrambling to gain power, resources… to “pay the rent”, when what we really need to be doing is abolishing the idea of land ownership, etc…. but we won’t get there until a massive depopulation event occurs. Yeah, I’m serious. Humans will need to first become clear & obvious victims of their own mass extinction efforts before they find their way back to the Dao of Nature.
Everything I’ve said in all my lectures the past 5+ years has been merely describing what happens when human (mis)conduct creates the very environmental and sociological situations that humans use to justify more misconduct. The hedonic treadmill is a slave camp. Who are the slavers and who are the slaves? Turns out, it’s always been just us. Freedom or Liberation isn’t just a materialist struggle, it’s also the resolution process of our shared karma, our collective projections which instill in us a vampiric hunger that can never be satiated.
In the month of July, in ancient China, the emperor was mandated to fast, both physically (refraining from many foods and drinks and activities like sex, etc.) and spiritually (fasting of the heart mind), in order to purify himself before performing a grand ancestral rite which balanced the forces of the 3 worlds (Heaven/Sky, Earth, and Man - the middle kingdom). July is the middle or center of the year, right after the summer solstice when yang qi is at its most dangerous.
For more on the grand rite, read hexagrams 41, 45, 50, 51, 59.
So, the emperor as a servant-proxy of heaven (yang) actually had to restrain his yang, reduce heat and damp by fasting in all forms, intensely for a period of about ten days prior to this rite. At the same time, a pig (and/or goat) was being prepared to be sacrificed at this rite (read hexagram 33 dun - pig which is the tidal hexagram of the goat moon - july). If all went well, the sacrificial animal was released.
I think it’s safe to say that in the current western imperial situation, all is not going well and there will be many more blood sacrifices - of children, of women, of so-called immigrants, of so-called enemies of the state, of nature and finally, of those people who feel they are powerful. First, they will sacrifice their own soldiers and law enforcement officers, then the ones they deem “weak” and “unworthy” in their own cults and parties, then finally, their own family members.
This process of ritual murder will continue as they/we seek to outrun the effects of their/our own misconduct. Nature will reciprocate by amplifying climate crisis and ultimately, a mass depopulation event will occur. Birthrates will drop, famine and epidemics of disease and disability will be inevitable, the modern supply chains will crumble, and humans will have to encounter the wisdom of deathpractice. I predict this will all happen within the next 75 years at an increasing rate.
But how do we encounter the present moment?
First is that we must detox from our own constant striving hunger for more. This is an addiction rehab protocol that overlaps with ritual fasting.
We must practice:
a decolonial disability somatics (ideas include but are not limited to: functional neurology plus nondual animism methods like meditation, neigong, neidan, qi gong, etc plus biomechanical efficiency patterns like weck method)
combined with increased fuel efficiency from proper nutrition & fasting, bathing, breathing, sleeping, etc, (the involuntaries)
and to cap it all off, a rigorous, complete and through method of engaging with the sublime such as:
non-religious daoist/tibetan dream practice,
non-religious dzogchen practice,
non-religious trika shaivist practices,
devotional beauty making (singing, dancing, drumming, disability justice accessibility practices, creative artmaking focused on process, contemplation and reflection rather than product, status, etc.)
All of these combine to create a “Dream Warrior” which is the cultivation of radiance of the heart-mind (an integrated and nondual connection between the upper and lower centers of the body). A dream warrior perceives all reality as a dream, with no preferences between heaven or hell realms - all realms are practice realms, all realms are bardo realms (transitory states), and all incarnations are temporary manifestations of universal fate/karma expressing “itself” as a mirror does. This is not nihilism, but it is also not emotional addiction or excess. It is not a “wish fulfillment protocol” in which humans “transcend” to “godhood”.
The Daoist conception of immortality is NOT NOT NOT a fetish for unending vitality in a human form, but instead a recognition of Nature’s inherent basic ordinary continuity which cannot be destroyed because it was never “initiated” by any being or event. Achieving “enlightenment” or “awakening” or “rainbow body” is not the point whatsoever and is an inherently ableist and fear-based delusion which misappropriates our shared wisdom teachers into “exceptional” beings. Seeking “exception” is the very basis of misconduct itself.
From a Dream Warrior’s perception & perspective, being sent to a hell realm is not a punishment or indictment of oneself or behavior, but merely an opportunity to celebrate and/or practice as the inherent playful expression of reality which is dreaming itself.
Trauma is merely a label applied to the asymmetrical (chaotic - as in, patterns that are inconceivable as patterns to the observer’s limited and/or current capacity) creativity of Fate.
You have not ever truly been traumatized, broken or destroyed. You have not ever actually experienced loss of any kind. This is what a Dream Warrior knows, and what they train their soma to embody.
This knowledge is what all my teachers shared with me (the first being my Grandpa Roger Schmidt as he lay dying at age 50 of emphysema), and what I am still working on embodying because I am just a normal human with normal human issues. But I have been given a glimpse, totally and unequivocally of this “other world” which is actually this world seen through non-human, nondual vision.
There is no salvation of any kind, and that in itself, when fully realized, is a kind of salvation! At least, it is the kindness, grace, mercy and dignity we are seeking when we seek salvation.
We need no leaders or owners; we need no exceptional people whatsoever. But we may not recognize this until we are at the threshold of death. There have never been any gurus, just people who have sought the truth and in various ways attempted to share that with others: No one wins and no one loses. But in the meantime, we have the apparent choice of cruelty or mercy, of addiction or dignity. This choice is our very nature reflecting through us as some kind of externalized binary option. In the throes of pain, we still have the possibility of experiencing pain as a luminous dream which allows us to practice and/or celebrate. The same with fear and the same with hunger/desire. We are constantly given opportunities for liberation from our own identities, and we are constantly avoiding them.
We are constantly obsessed with being understood, validated, loved, comforted, pleasured, stimulated and productive.
We are constantly avoiding feeling confused, weak, small, lonely, hungry, stupid, annoyed…
It is within this absurd push-pull of preferences that we walk the plank of our own misconduct and blame everything and everyone else for our downfall.
A Dream Warrior does a backflip off the plank shouting hallelujah.
Housekeeping
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